Killer

light that illuminated the atmosphere bubble pierced the sea of methane adequately for RyRelee to glimpse the Coran, but he suspected that such lighting was for his benefit alone. The Coran itself seemed to shift colors constantly as it swam above the bubble. RyRelee understood that the Cora communicated through such subtly changing veils of color; such a medium was far beyond the capabilities of his eyes to translate.

The communications node affixed behind the external tendrils of his ears began to transmit in the colloquialism of his homeworld. If RyRelee chose to relax-which he did not-he might pretend he was listening to the actual speech of some congenial high official of his own race-which of course he was not.

'We Cora thank you for answering our summons so promptly once again, RyRelee.' The counterfeit voice even managed to convey an official tone of impersonal politeness. 'We have a problem beyond our own physical capacities-one which is serious enough to force us to require the special talents of an emissary such as yourself.'

'I have always considered it my privilege to be able to serve the Cora,' said RyRelee formally, covering his surprise. While he suspected that the courtesy invariably shown by the Cora in fact masked a sneer toward the lesser races, nevertheless the galactic rulers did not indulge in sadistic jokes. If the Cora had indeed known what RyRelee had assumed they knew, they would not toy with him now. RyRelee would have been formally charged, found guilty, sentenced, and the sentence carried out-hardly a minute needed, all told.

'But you do not merely serve the Cora, RyRelee,' the Coran chided gently. 'Perhaps the Cora are first among equals, but we all must remember that we are parts of a confederation of equals.'

After a moment's pause, the Coran resumed in a less avuncular tone. 'You know, of course, that blood sports and the traffic in subjects for such perversions are a continuing stain on the civilization of our galaxy. On several occasions it has been necessary for you yourself to act as our agent in punishing those involved in fostering this disgusting practice.'

RyRelee found that he was more comfortable if he focused his eyes directly ahead, than if he tried to follow the drifting majesty of the Coran itself. 'Some of the so-called intelligent races of our confederation have been unable to shrug off the trappings of barbarism,' he said carefully, still on dangerous ground. 'Like slavery, or the use of violent force to seize power, such antisocial behavioral patterns are difficult to eradicate among certain cultures.' His own, for example, RyRelee did not add.

'We can only remain firm in our resolve,' said the Coran brusquely. 'And vigilant. We were pursuing a vessel which we suspected was smuggling beasts-certainly destined for blood sports in the arena. It attempted to escape by diving into the gravity well of an oxygen world-a proscribed world in Class 6.'

RyRelee thought carefully before asking: 'You say, they attempted escape? One assumes they were therefore either captured or destroyed.'

'Utterly destroyed,' the Coran said. 'They attempted to land using their stardrive, and the result was the predictable catastrophic failure.'

There was a power in the universe greater than the Cora after all, thought RyRelee, and it had just preserved him. 'I could not wish for fellow citizens of the Federation to be vaporized, of course,' he temporized. 'But in this case, the accidental result may have been that of justice. You perhaps would like me to make a reconnaissance of the devastated area-to ensure that no artifacts survived that might interfere in the development of a proscribed world?'

'Actually, we've taken care of that sufficiently, RyRelee,' said the Cora. 'As you will see.'

RyRelee did see the events recorded next, but the images were received directly by the visual centers of his brain without being transmitted through his eyes. A landing shuttle spiraled out of a bay in the starship's hull. The image was superimposed upon that of the chamber in which he stood. It was not a purely visual effect-a hologram projected across the chamber. The blue light and the rippling Coran were no less clear than before, but the outlines of the shuttle were a stronger presence. The scenes were in his mind-a recording transmitted directly through the communications nodes affixed to his skull. RyRelee stood very still as images tumbled and the Coran waited for him to assimilate the data.

It was a blue world, a water world, he saw as the shuttle approached, passing over the oceans to focus on an arid landscape. Abruptly the image concentrated on an area of limestone hillside. The russet stone was blackened and fused to chert in a long scar whose outlines blurred like those of a rope of seaweed. The point of view held at a constant but indeterminable height as it followed the line of destruction. RyRelee had no certain scale, but they must have tracked the scar for at least a mile. Plants with fleshy, dust- colored leaves were shriveled to either side of the blackened stone, and there were occasional highlights where molten metal had splashed and coated the rock, leaving a shallow depression in the hillside. There was no sign of any artifact. The point of view rose, panning more and more of the barren landscape. Even when the full course of the smuggler's desperate attempt to land was visible as a tortured black ribbon, there was no hint of anything but total catastrophe.

'Their stardrive envelope began to collapse from the stern forward.' RyRelee spoke in part to organize events in his own mind, and in part to reconstruct the situation that he sincerely desired to have transpired. 'Friction eroded the hull and everything within it. They could not possibly have launched a lifeboat under those circumstances.'

He paused to clear his throat before he concluded: 'There is nothing here to affect the development of a world without stardrive. In fact, I don't suppose you yourselves can be sure of the identity-for that matter, of what race the smugglers were.' His lips sucked in in a gesture that he would have suppressed had he been aware of it.

'Only in the second assumption are you correct,' said the Coran. Its voice was made dreamlike by the other events going on in RyRelee's mind. 'We did proceed to determine the opinion of the local inhabitants about the event. One cannot be too careful with a Class 6 world. But there was a delay, of course. A delay in deploying the atmosphere shuttle in the first place, a further delay in disrupting the locality ourselves except to the extent necessary. The delays proved to be unfortunate.'

The images the emissary saw this time were kaleidoscopic. They were still fully comprehensible, but muted through the sensory media of another organism. RyRelee recognized this as a recording derived through a memory scan of a living creature-presumably that of one of the planet's autochthones.

It was night. A drystone hut huddled on the plain. It was a windowless dome with its low doorway closed by a bundle of thorny brush. The corral appended to the hut was also of stones laid without mortar. More brush raised the corral wall and threatened the belly of anything attempting to leap it, herd animal or predator alike. In the near distance sprawled the ridge along which the smuggler's vessel had disintegrated.

The creatures within the hut were bipedal, half a dozen of them. They stirred like a spaded-up nest of rodents when the hut lifted into the air in a single piece. It was through the biped's eyes that RyRelee saw who the Cora had sent to make the initial survey: eight-limbed crewmen like the one who had led him into the Coran's presence.

The hive of natives collapsed in thrashing confusion. One of the crewmen had calibrated the precise setting needed to disconnect motor control without doing permanent harm to the subjects. The aborigines were not stunned, but they had no conscious control of their movements. They watched themselves being loaded onto the antigravity sled with the unceremonious care given valuable objects. The images were faultlessly accurate, though doubtless the conscious portions of the natives' minds interpreted the event as an episode of hopeless madness.

'You freed these aborigines after you had examined them?' he asked. He kept his voice as perfectly neutral as he could. There was no evidence that the Cora were aware of the inflectional subtexts of spoken words-but RyRelee did not dare chance accusing his masters of either ruthlessness or stupidity.

'Yes, although of course we wiped their memories,' the Coran agreed easily. 'We kept guard on the dwelling and herd for the few hours we were forced to hold the aborigines. We landed, after all, to eliminate disruption to the Class 6 natives, not to cause it.'

'Yes, of course,' RyRelee quickly agreed. He recalled the summons that had snatched him from his palace and brought him here-to death or torture, for all he had known. Class 6 natives were to be protected, but he himself-he was merely a catspaw to be used by the Cora, to carry out their clandestine