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. 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
“Oh my father was the keeper of the Eddystone light,
He slept with a mermaid one fine night.
From this union there came three:
A porpoise, a porgy and me.
“Oh, for the life on the rolling sea.”
—OLD CHANTY
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 patronlevel peers, the Tandu are masters of the art of uplift. In their pre-sentient form, on their fallow homeworld, 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: EPISIARCH-cl-82f49; ACCEPTOR-cl-82f50) totally dependent instruments of their love of the hunt …”
Nice people, these Tandu, Gillian thought, putting the flat reading plate down beside the tree where she sat. She had allotted herself an hour for reading this morning, but had covered only 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 lives.
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