Chapter 2
The Galactic Index stood at 434,671. Another intelligent race had been discovered.
# # # # #
Randolph Tarney. Asher had never called him that; it had always been “Ran.” He had been Asher’s first friend among the Thieves—sometimes roommate, sometimes partner. Asher could see with the vividness of a vision the round, smiling face, the immense, isometrically trained muscles, the friendliness and candor of the man. And above all, Ran had been a superb warrior. It was difficult to believe that someone could have blindsided him.
The Bodyguards held a memorial assembly, after their fashion. Ran had been a full-fledged member of the Bodyguard Guild, as all the “vocational school’’ teachers were, and the Guild gave two things to his memory. One was this testimonial, in which the Nin herself spoke about him, the image broadcast to hundreds of thousands of worlds via tachyonic holography. The other was imbedded in the Code of the Guild itself: no Bodyguard was ever killed without the Guild discovering why. Sometimes it happened in the normal course of protecting some dignitary that had contracted with them. Rarely, it was capricious, because of some other factor. In the latter cases, the Guild delivered its second tribute:
Revenge.
# # # # #
The Guild of Personal Protectors had been in disarray following the disappearance of its top leadership during the October incident nearly two years before. Now the members saw the new Leader, and in watching her, knew why she had risen and prevailed.
“He was a Bodyguard like any other,” the Nin Tova said, speaking quietly in the great stadium, the on-planet members of the Guild in the seats around her, a holographic transmitter before her. Quiet though it was, her voice penetrated the innermost consciousnesses of the Bodyguards as they watched on the myriad of human worlds. “And he pursued his duty like any other, with skill and determination and intelligence and strength.”
She paused. All of the watchers could see the emotion in her, but they could also see that it was controlled, an integral part of the woman who faced them.
“All men die eventually,” the Nin said. “They die of old age, of disease, of accident, of violence. Our job is to minimize the number of violent deaths by protecting those who contract with us. Our Guild of Personal Protectors was hired by powerful families in the Castor/Pollux Sector to protect the Sector itself. He failed, and we don’t know why he failed. But we do know one thing: he was the best. The best! Many of you would have failed in his place. But I hope that many of you would have succeeded.” The “powerful families” was a myth, but only the Nin knew that.
Asher watched her from a hundred yards away in the massive stadium at the outskirts of the city that housed the vocational school. Emotions flooded within him. Clemmy was at his side, tear-streaks creasing her cheeks, watching the Nin with shining eyes. Around them were hundreds of Bodyguards, and the students of the school as well.
“Violent death is a matter of chance,” the Nin said, her blonde/brown hair moving with her head, her gestures at a minimum, but somehow the more controlled and powerful for all that. “The chance of the enemy encounter. The battle. The attack from the rear. The defense. Slippage. Third parties. Equipment failure. Exhaustion. Overwhelming odds. Many things determine a battle, and many of them are beyond the control of the warrior. We Bodyguards train ourselves to minimize the chance elements of a battle, but no matter how hard we train, random events surround us, inhibit us, and sometimes overcome us, as they overcame Randolph Tarney. He died in our service, and we miss him, and praise him, and mourn him. And, if necessary, we will avenge him.”
There was no cheering. The Bodyguards knew when to speak and when to keep silent. But the tension in the stadium was almost tangible, caressing the bodies of everyone there, and of the watchers around the galaxy, too.
# # # # #
“I want to see Ran’s body,” Asher told the Nin. Hours had passed. Once again Asher was in the Nin’s private office; this time he was certain that it was an amalgam that he faced.
“Why?” she asked. Then she said: “You will not like what you see, Asher. He was shot through the heart from behind with a needler.”
But finally, Asher found himself looking down at the still husk of what had been Ran, his friend. The body was naked, stretched out on a slab of metal in a Bodyguard morgue.
The mark of the needler was clear enough. The tiny stream of coherent light had entered his back and cut through, wavering with the hand of the attacker, emerging in a ragged pattern from his dark chest. Bleeding had been slight.
The real Nin stood with Asher, looking down. And reluctantly, Asher reached out with his mind.
It was ghastly, this probing of the cold and dead flesh of the one who had been his friend. But there was in Asher a hidden fear, and to erase it or crystallize it he had to undertake this examination, looking for signs that automeds would always miss, for no automed had ever been among wizards as Asher Tye once had been.
It was entirely in Ran Tarney’s brain that Asher moved, ignoring the rest of the body, for it was in the brain that the evidence would be found, or not found.
There were no traces of thought remaining in that dead brain, of course. There was nothing at all left of the entity that had been Randolph Tarney. All intercellular electrical activity had long since ended, potentials discharged, negatives having satisfied the positives now that life was no longer there to stop it.
At last Asher shuddered and pulled away. He felt permeated with cold, drained of heat to the innermost recesses of his soul.
“It was not a needler that killed him,” Asher said hoarsely. The Nin started.
“Automeds have inspected him a dozen times,” she said, looking sharply at Asher. “Cause of death was heart failure caused by the destruction of the heart muscle.”
“Cause of death was ‘heart failure,’ all right,” Asher said grimly. “But the heart failed because his brain failed; the muscle damage was later. Believe me, Nin; I see the destruction in his brain, the Skill-induced destruction of the protein barriers between the cells.”
“The medicos said that that was a result of the heart stoppage,” the Nin murmured.
“No. The other way around,” Asher said. “I have seen this before. This is the result of a mental attack.”
The Nin looked at him fixedly. “Do you know what you’re saying? You and I both saw October driven from the galaxy.”
“Aye,” Asher said. “And now we see death brought by the likes of October, or some new Power with the same abilities. But what is to be believed? The October One herself canvassed the known human universe without finding any trace of such systematic use of Power. Does such use emerge now? Or is October somehow still among us?”
The Nin was silent. She was thinking of a long-ago time when an emissary of the destroyed October Guild had come into her native solar system and had killed her mother and father.
“If this is so,” she said at last, “and I believe you, Asher Tye, then only another wizard can locate and fight on an equal basis with the attackers of Randolph Tarney.”
“Aye,” Asher said grimly. “And the Bodyguard Guild has only one wizard.”
“Yes,” the Nin said. Then: “I think it time for your first mission, Asher Tye.”
# # # # #
“You,” the Nin said to the little group in private conference, “have been selected because, among your many skills, you hold the best mental Shields of all the warriors. You will need that Skill as you find out why Randolph Tarney died. Trace down the drug problem if you can, but above all find out who killed the Bodyguard and why. And unless the ‘why’ compels you otherwise, avenge the Guild—and avenge it with such decisiveness that no observer would ever again feel the slightest temptation to challenge it.
“You three humans will take on the appearance of spoiled aristocrats, rich kids with nothing to do but party and travel and play. The others will carry diplomatic pouches, and pose as bureaucrats exploring interplanetary trading compacts. You will travel always on the same ships—the three humans ‘accidentally’ together, the rest of you separately. You will not go to Surcease directly, but will pass from starship to starship as you penetrate the Sector, and ferret out anything about the region that seems unusual or threatening. Then, when you land on Surcease, you will know where to look and what to look for. And when you find out the truth, you will take whatever action is appropriate: from nothing, to the killing of the murderer of Randolph Tarney, to whatever your judgment dictates.”
Asher stood before her. Beside him were Clemmy and four other warriors. One of them had known Ran in the old days: Dov—red haired and gangling, but lightning quick and loyal to a fault. The other three were aliens. All were warriors.
One was a Ghiuliduc called Spimmon. He was a foot high, spindly, and looked something like the base of an old-fashioned radio tower—a stick man without a perceptible head on top, a jumble of rods as black as cast iron. To Asher’s hypersensitive Skill, Spimmon’s brain seemed a pool of turgid water, sometimes still, sometimes in motion.
The second was a Therd, a ghastly ochre-and-yellow being shaped something like a thickened and knobby cone, with writhing blue veins in the ochre areas, and three feet that retracted on demand. Its name was Adio-Gabutti, and Asher could not read its mind at all. That was its strength—that, and a certain obscure wisdom that escaped Asher most of the time. Sometimes Asher suspected that the Therd had come among the Bodyguards in order to write a Ph.D. dissertation or its equivalent; later, when he finally had a chance to study the Therd entry in the Galactic Encyclopedia, he found out that he had probably been right.
And the last was a humanoid. Nisha Scalli had a long, prehensile tail, but he stood on two feet, and his face had two eyes and a nose and a mouth in the right places, even if his ears were invisible and his head was a distinct downward-pointed triangle—wide mouth over abruptly squared chin. He was an Ekans, and was a shade taller than Asher himself. His hairless skin had an olive drab quality, but it was shiny and sleek with body oil. To Asher’s mental probing, Nisha’s mind seemed to be as clear as Clemmy’s; if anything, it was even more transparent to Asher’s scrutiny than human minds. For generally he could not read thoughts as logical verbal paragraphs unless the other was Skilled, too; rather, he had to piece together flows of emotion and scattered visual impressions when he moved inside an untrained mind. The comparison made Nisha’s mind seem a model of clarity, although there were underlying currents that the Ekans seemed able to keep completely hidden.
The Ekans were a newly discovered race that had only just discovered interspatial drive, somewhere in an upper dusting of stars farther along the spiral arm near which the human worlds were centered. The Ekans were said to be pathologically aggressive among themselves, and the presence of Nisha Scalli here was something of an oddity: he had apparently journeyed alone for hundreds of light years solely to join the Bodyguards. But why? He seemed to need little training if he intended to offer his services in the protection of humans, for only the most advanced of the human Bodyguards might be able to take him oneon-one.
But his presence had led to an unexpected result, for there was something about the Ekans that excited a mental resonance with the little Ghiuliduc. Asher had never seen anything like it on the October World, where there had been no aliens other than the October One herself. For the result of the Ekans and Ghiuliduc interaction was a dual Shield far greater than either could raise alone—so intense that even Asher could not break through. He had only recently discovered the anomaly, and had reported it to the Nin immediately. The fit with the present mission appeared almost miraculous.
But there was also something in the Ekans that caused Asher to frown. For Nisha knew, knew, with the absolute certainty of experience coupled with racial awareness, that he was faster and stronger than any human warrior anywhere. Even than the Nin herself.
Why this human as a leader, Nisha was thinking even now, when I could kill him with a flick of my tail. And that I will do ... But how to deal with the Skill? Perhaps the Ghiuliduc and I ...
Asher shot a glance at Nisha. Was there hatred here for some unknown reason? The Ekans had a trick of hiding his underlying intentions beneath surface prattle that confused rather than revealed. I will have to watch this one, Asher thought.
“You will learn the Sector language,” the Nin was saying, “for Ran Tarney was a native speaker and you do not have that advantage. And on your way there you can study the social system and general layout of Surcease itself.”
“It will look suspicious,” Dov said to the Nin, “for rich kids to be able to speak a language like Surceasean. Rich kids only know Basic; they carry a translator unit for everything else.”
The Nin looked annoyed. One of the things she tried to pound into her trainees was to reason things out for themselves.
“Clemmy,” she said. “You answer that.”
Clemmy’s narrow face flushed. Her crown of mahogany hair bowed as she focused inward, and then, almost immediately, she looked up again.
“We won’t actually use it,” she said, not looking at Dov. “It will be something we can take advantage of if translators are stripped away from us. The enemy will not suspect we have such knowledge behind us. We may learn something that might save our lives.”
Dov’s face was suddenly as bright as his hair, but he was not angry. Dov was often sarcastic, often willful and impulsive, but almost never angry, and that was one of his greatest assets as a Bodyguard/warrior/thief.
“You will leave in one week’s time,” the Nin said.
# # # # #
Two days into that week, Asher knew that he had a problem with Nisha Scalli. The alien took his direction readily enough, for that was expected of a warrior. But in subtle ways he made his contempt for the rest of them felt. And indeed, Asher was forced to admit that Nisha moved with a fluidity and speed that no human being could match. He himself avoided a one-on-one with the alien, for he sensed that undercurrent of hatred in Nisha’ s mind. He could not probe deeper for the cause, for the alien would have sensed it and resisted. Nevertheless, Asher decided, he could not allow the underlying attitude to continue.
They spent mornings working on the intellectual side of the mission. Language training is not difficult once fear is set aside and time devoted to it. The online encyclopedia offered a few million languages, and one of them was Surceasean. They captured it in molecular storage and subjected it to a training overlay; and from the moment they began training, they spoke nothing else.
At nights they went to bed with subliminal sleep training all around them. The humans gathered in morning classes and relaxed on couches while measured music played in their ears, attuned to the rhythm of the human body and mind, while instruction intertwined with and followed the beat, one beat per second.
The aliens did something similar with their own biological rhythms. By the end of the week, the words were coming easily to all of them, human and alien alike.
Afternoons, they continued their Guild training; they had all turned their “vocational” teaching duties over to others. Now weaponry, hand-to-hand, aerobic endurance, stick fighting, and concentration were pursued.
Adio-Gabutti, the Therd, could not move rapidly on his feet, and nothing he did could be called running, but he seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of tentacular arms that would shoot out of his body when least expected, as well as a stinging spray he could loose at will. The spindly little Ghiuliduc named Spimmon, only a foot high, could beat all three humans in short-distance runs, and when under attack, never seemed to be where the attacker expected.
Nisha Scalli could beat all of them in short- and longdistance runs, and, it seemed, any other physical contest.
Asher decided to bring it to a head one afternoon near the end of the week. All but the Therd had taken off on a fifteen miler, Spimmon after a short time riding on Clemmy’s shoulder. Within the first mile Nisha had disappeared in the distance. When they reached their goal, a grassy knoll in a park-like area on the edge of the city, they found the humanoid sitting on his tail as if it were a stool, arms crossed, waiting for them.
None of the humans were breathing particularly heavily, for this sort of run was routine. They stretched out the kinks caused by thousands of foot impacts, and as they did so, Asher caught the thread of the humanoid’s thoughts: “Slow, sluglike beings,” he was thinking, “with minds just as slow. Any three-year-old Ekans could dangle them from his tail without working up-a sweat.”
“’Shun!” Asher shouted. The humans and aliens looked surprised, but Asher was the mission leader, and at once, an arrow-straight line formed in front of him, Nisha on the right, followed by Clemmy, Dov, and the Ghiuliduc Spimmon.
“Combat,” Asher roared. “Spimmon. Nisha.”
The two came out of line. It looked ridiculous, the whipsaw, olive-colored Ekans towering over the foot-high, spindly Ghiuliduc. They faced one another, the Ekans’ threefingered fists tightly closed and hanging at his sides, tail thumping softly, and the little Ghiuliduc immobile, looking like nothing more than a structure of black tinker toys.
Asher sensed the Ekans’ opinions rattling around contemptuously in his brain. Yes, he and this Ghiuliduc together could raise a diamond-hard mental Shield, and that was a matter for respect. But as a warrior, the Ghiuliduc was excrescence, not fit to share the same mat with Nisha Scalli. But there was, of course, the other thing ...
“Attack on count of three,” Asher said savagely. “And ... full contact!”
Dov and Clemmy shot a horrified glance at Asher, but such was the discipline of training that they brought their eyes back under control and said nothing. Full contact? The Ekans would crush the little Ghiuliduc like a pile of straw.
Nisha’s eyes flickered at Asher, and in that brief contact Asher sensed a dilution in the other’s confidence. What was this? Did the human want the Ghiuliduc dead for some reason? And might I kill him, even by accident, in a warrior-heightened state of no-mind?
Asher felt something erupt suddenly in Nisha Scalli, and it just didn’t make sense. For it was fear, and he had never associated tenderheartedness with Nisha Scalli before.
“Raise Shields!” Asher roared. Shields went up in Nisha’s and Spimmon’s minds, and the resonance took hold between them. Both they and Asher now knew that Asher could not interfere in the fight about to take place, even if he wanted to or decided to. Touching the Shields with his mind, Asher felt the ghosts of thoughts and emotions he could not now affect. In the Ghiuliduc he felt an intense awareness, but no fear, and that was what Asher was counting on, for he had seen the Nin working with this Ghiuliduc a dozen times, and hoped that what he had seen could prevail here.
In the Ekans, Asher felt desperation. If full contact the human wanted, and the Ghiuliduc dies, how then can I come against ...
Asher probed at the ghosts, unable to pierce through into clarity, feeling that amazing hardness that could resist any of the various forms of mental attack. The two combatants would know with certainty that Asher could not in any way interfere with the upcoming combat.
“One ...” Asher said. No movement from anybody. “Two ... Three!”
The Ekans shot forward as if from a gun, step, step, then a foot lashing out in blinding swiftness ...
The Ghiuliduc had moved backward, and the foot struck empty air.
Then the tail came, and again the Ghiuliduc seemed to quiver backward. But as the lashing whip of the tail reached its apex, Spimmon suddenly reached out and had hold of it, and as the Ekans followed through on his motion and shot the appendage behind him again, the Ghiuliduc was hanging on like a light bulb from a wire.
Nisha’s other foot was already shooting toward where the Ghiuliduc had been, before what had happened sank in. With an animal snarl, he whirled, whipping the tail upward to smash the Ghiuliduc against the ground.
But at the apex of the whip, the Ghiuliduc let go and, driven by the force of the tail itself, hurled against the Ekans’ face, pointy arms outstretched.
The Ekans howled and threw his hands upward to his eyes, and like a giant black spider, the Ghiuliduc flowed over his head to the back of his neck. Nisha’s eyes were streaming tears and tightly shut, for Spimmon had poked them savagely. For the moment, the Ekans was blind.
Again, the tail. It shot up to grab Spimmon off his perch as the little black arms hammered into Nisha’s ears, but again the Ghiuliduc was too fast for it. He slipped down Nisha’s suddenly sweat-covered olive skin like a skier down a mountain, the whipping tail missing him by inches, and all at once he was on the ground away from the Ekans, and the lashing tail could not find him.
Asher felt the Shield dissolving from Nisha Scalli’s mind. He did not enter the mind of the tortured alien, but kept it in view just as he kept its body in view with his eyes.
For Nisha was in pain: wracking, mind-numbing pain. Those dart-line hammers into the ears had destroyed his balance, shot agony through his head, rattled his thoughts and destroyed his battle no-mind. He found himself suddenly on the grass, one arm and tail holding him upright, streaming eyes trying to locate the Ghiuliduc.
And the Ghiuliduc was moving in ...
“Stop!” Asher growled. “End of match. Bow.”
Weaving, the Ekans reached his feet with an intense effort, and would have fallen but for the support of his tail. Finally, his eyes cleared enough to find the Ghiuliduc, standing before him like a glassy black statue.
They bowed. It was what they did at the end of a match.
But Nisha Scalli was never quite the same again.
“You fought well,” Spimmon piped hesitantly. The Ekans grinned and hissed, and the grin clearly had more in common with a tiger than a man. The Ekans was enraged, Asher thought.
“I had to stop it,” Asher said gratuitously, “to protect Nisha.” The hiss became a steam-whistle roar.
Then Asher did something which surprised even him. He suddenly reached forward and thrust a red-hot mental poker into the still water of the Ghiuliduc’s mind. The little alien collapsed as if life had been taken from him.
Nisha saw him fall through streaming eyes. His rage evaporated and his mind said: “I need him!” Enigmatic, Asher thought. He slammed down on Nisha Scalli’s mind too, then, and the Ekans fell like a tree, toppling off its stump.
Clemmy looked at Asher as if she were seeing him for the first time.
“So they won’t get cocky,” Asher said roughly. Then he thought that he shouldn’t have said anything at all.
It didn’t compute, Asher thought. The Ekans seemed to fear that harm might come to Spimmon, whom he had known for scarcely two weeks, but when in a formal match, it had looked as if he would have killed him if he had been able.
Respect? Toward Spimmon, perhaps. But not toward Asher, who cheated with his mind.