'Where there is mind, there is always solution,' Keneenk taught. All problems contained the elements of their answer.
He commanded his manipulator arms to reach out and grab the access panel to the buoy.
If the buoy was in good order, he would find a way to praise Takkata-Jim. There would be a key to reach the lieutenant, to pull him back into the ship's community and break his vicious cycle of isolation. 'Where there is mind…'
It would only take a few minutes to find out if it was in I working order. Creideiki plugged an extension from his neural socket into the buoy's computer. He commanded the machine to report its status.
A brilliant arc of electric discharge flashed in front of him. Creideiki screamed as the shock blew out the motors of his harness and seared the skin around his neural tap.
A penetrator bolt! Creideiki realized in stunned rigidity.
How…?
He felt it all in slow motion. The current fought with the protective diodes of his nerve amplifier. The main circuit breaker threw, but the insulation almost immediately buckled under backlash.
Paralyzed, Creideiki seemed to hear a voice in the pulsing, battling fields, a voice taunting him.
# Where there is mind — is mind,
is — also deception
# Deception — is, there is #
In a body-arching squeal of agony, Creideiki screamed one undisciplined cry in Primal, the first of his adult life. Then he rolled belly-up, to drift in a blackness deeper than night.
PART FOUR
Leviathan
35 ::: Gillian
'Like most species derived from wholly carnivorous forebears, the Tandu were difficult clients. They had cannibalistic tendencies, and attacks on individuals of their patron race, the Nght6, weren't unheard of early in their uplift.
'The Tandu have remarkably low empathy for other sapient life forms. They are members of a pseudo-religious alignment whose tenets propose the eventual extermination of species judged 'unworthy.' While they observe the codes of the Galactic Institutes, the Tandu make no secret of their desire for a less crowded universe, or their eagerness for the day when all laws are swept aside by a higher power.'
'According to followers of their 'Inheritor' alignment, this will happen when the Progenitors return to the Five Galaxies. The Tandu assume that they will be chosen, come that day, to hunt down the unworthy.
'While waiting for this millennium, the Tandu keep in practice by indulging in countless minor skirmishes and battles of honor. They join in any war of enforcement declared by the Galactic Institutes, whatever the cause, and are often cited for use of excess force. 'Accidental extinction' of at least three spacefaring species has been attributed to them.
'Although the race has little empathy for their patron level peers, the Tandu are masters of the art of uplift. In their pre-sentient form, on their fallow home world, they had already tamed several local species for use as hunting animals: the equivalent of tracking dogs on Earth. Since release from indenture, the Tandu have acquired and adapted two of the most powerful psychic adepts of the recent crop of clients. The Tandu are under long-term investigation for excessive genetic manipulation in making the two.
(See references:
EPI SIARCH-cl-82f49; ACCEPTOR-cl-82J 50) totally dependent instruments of their love of the hunt…'
Nice people, these Tandu, Gillian thought.
She put the flat reading plate down beside the tree where she sat. She had allotted herself an hour for reading this morning. It was almost over. She had covered another two hundred thousand words or so.
This entry on the Tandu had come over the cable from Streaker last night. Apparently the Niss machine was already accomplishing things with the mini-Library Tom had retrieved from the Thennanin wreck. This report read too clearly, and came to the point too directly to have come straight from the English translation software of Streaker's own pathetic little micro-branch.
Of course, Gillian already knew some things about the Tandu. All Terragens agents were taught about these secretive, brutal enemies of Mankind.
This report only reinforced her feeling that there was something terribly wrong with a universe that had such monsters in it. Gillian had once spent a summer reading ancient space-romances from pre-Contact days. How open and friendly those old-time fictional universes had seemed! Even the rare 'pessimistic' ones hadn't come close to the closed, confined, dangerous reality.
Thinking about the Tandu put her in a melodramatic mind to carry around a dirk, and to exercise a woman's ancient last prerogative should those murderous creatures ever capture her.
The thick, organic smell of humus overwhelmed the metallic tang that permeated everywhere near the water. The aroma was fresh after last night's storm. Green fronds waved slowly under gentle buffeting from Kithrup's incessant tradewinds.
Tom must have found his island crucible by now, she thought, and begun preparing his experiment.
If he still lived.
This morning, for the first time, she felt uncertain about that. She had been so sure she would know it, if he died, wherever or whenever it happened. Yet now she felt confused. Her mind was muddied, and all she could tell for certain was that terrible things had happened last night.
First, around sunset, had come a crawling premonition that something had happened to Tom. She couldn't pin the feeling down, but it disturbed her.
Then, late last night, she had had a series of dreams.
There had been faces. Galactic faces, leathern and feathered and scaled, toothed and mandibled. They yammered and howled, but she, in spite of all her expensive training, couldn't understand a single word or sense-glyph. A few of the jumbled faces she had recognized in her sleep — a pair of Xappish spacemen, dying as their ship was torn apart — a Jophur, howling through smoke at the bleeding stump of its arm — a Synthian, listening to whale songs while she waited impatiently behind a vacuum-cold lump of stone.
In her sleep Gillian had been helpless to keep them out.
She had awakened suddenly, in the middle of the night, to a tremor that plucked her spine like a bowstring. Breathing heavily in the darkness, she sensed a kindred consciousness writhe in agony at the limit of her range. In spite of the distance, Gillian caught a mixed flavor in the fleeting psychic glyph. It felt too human to have been only a fin, too cetacean to have been merely a man.
Then it ceased. The psychic onslaught was over.
She didn't know what to make of any of it. What use was psi, if its messages were too opaque to be deciphered? Her genetically enhanced intuition now seemed a cruel deception. Worse than useless.
She had a few moments left to her hour. She spent them with her eyes closed, listening to the rise and fall of sound, as the breakers fought their endless battle with the western shoreline. Tree limbs brushed and swayed with the wind.
Interleaved with the creakings of trunk and branch, Gillian could hear the high chittering squeaks of the aboriginal pre-sentients — the Kiqui. From time to time, she made out the voice of Dennie Sudman, speaking into a machine that translated her words into the high-frequency Kiqui dialect.
Though she was working twelve hours a day, helping Dennie with the Kiqui, Gillian couldn't help feeling guiltily that she was taking a vacation. She reminded herself that the little natives were extremely important, and that she had just been spinning her wheels back at the ship.
