Troy stood quietly as his employer patted cov-aid dressing along the line of the burn. “Just grazed you.” Kyger retopped the container. “You were lucky.”
“It was dark and he was off orbit.”
But Kyger was watching him with an intent stare as if he could see straight into Troy’s memory and pick out the events as they had really happened—the incredible fact that a warning had struck from an animal’s mind to his.
“He must have been badly jigged,” Kyger commented. “So much so that I wonder. A sleeper makes this a Guild job—and I have one or two unfriends around here who might just employ such means to make trouble for me.” He was frowning a little. “Only Guild men do not get jigged—“
“A novice might.”
Kyger spread both hands on the top of his desk. “A novice? What do you know about this, Horan?”
“I noticed a new buy-in man at the warehouse before they tried to lift us on the street.” Troy trusted now to Kyger’s own background. To a merchant-born he would not have made such an admission, unless the matter had proved far more serious than it was. But to a spacer who had himself lived by a more flexible code of ethics—or rather, a different code of ethics—he could confess that much.
“A proving job for a novice.” Kyger considered that. “Might fit this flight pattern, at that. This buy-in man knows you?”
“He saw me at the warehouse—just as I saw him.”
“Any challenge between you two?”
“If you mean was this personal—no. He was Dipple and I knew him by name, but we never messed together.”
“Silly jig, hitting here. Unless it was just for nuisance value. There is nothing he could pick up to trot to the pass-boys.”
Troy wondered about that himself. Portable property was to be had for the ingenious lifts of the Guild anywhere in Tikil, where theft had become both a business and a fine art. Why would anyone try to lift living creatures, most of which required special food and attention? There was only one possibility.
“Some one-of-a-kind already promised?” he hazarded, knowing Kyger’s promises to his elite customers. A unique pet, certified to the the only one of its kind on Korwar, might be an inducement.
“No profit in that. It would have to be kept under cover.” Kyger put his finger on the weakness in that. Yes, the value of such a pet to the vain owner would be largely in its display before the envious.
“To keep someone else from having it?”
Again that disconcerting stare from Kyger. Troy thought he had found another small piece in this match puzzle. That had hit, if not straight to the heart of the target, reasonably near.
“Might be. That makes a spot more sense. You can bunk in. I might cover the rest of the night watch.”
That was straight dismissal. Troy went back to his bunk, this time easing out of his clothes. The dressing had taken most of the smart out of his burn. But his mind was active and he did not feel in the least inclined to sleep. He closed his eyes, trying to will relaxation.
Instead, as if some tenuous circle of thought had coiled out into the air—as Lang Horan’s rupan rope had done so accurately years before to catch and hold a twisting, bucking quarry—Troy’s heightened sensitivity touched and held something never intended to join more than one pair of minds under that roof this night.
“He died quick. No time to see the report before put away—“
“Must return!” That was an order, final and harsh. “Not so. No good. Man saw Shang look for report. Was suspicious!”
“There must be no suspicion!” Again the harshness. And now there was no more protest in words, rather a thread of fear, a thread that grew into a choking rope. Troy’s eyes opened. He sat up on the bunk, alive and vibrating to that fear as if its force raged in him also.
But if there was fear in that band of communication, there was also something else he recognized—a determination to fight. And to that his sympathy responded. “If there is suspicion, there will be questions.”
Silence from the harsh one. Was that marking thoughtful consideration of the argument? Or rejection of its validity? Troy’s hands were sweat-wet and now his fingers clenched into fists. If what he suspected was true— The kinkajou and Kyger? But why? How? Terran animals able to communicate being used for a set purpose? Yet Kyger was no Terran—or was he? Troy himself was too ignorant of other worlds, except for the people of the Dipple, to make a positive identification. He remembered Kyger’s own questions about his past on the day he had been hired.
Terra was the center of the Confederation—or had been before the war. But she had not come out well at the end of that conflict; too many of her allies had gone down to defeat. From the dominant voice she had sunk to a second-rate, even third-rate, power at the conference tables. The Council and the Octed of the Rim maneuvered for first power, while the old Confederation had fractured into at least three collections of smaller rulerships. His thoughts were broken once more by that unidentifiable thought stream—again the master voice: “Who came tonight?”
“One who knew nothing. He was an enemy outside the scheme. There was no touch.”
“Yet he could have been hired by another. Traps need bait.”
Troy read the thought behind that last. So—if he were right and it was the kinkajou and Kyger who were talking so—then such an animal might well be stolen to serve as bait for its master.
But why had not the animal reported Troy’s ability to receive the mind touch, if not with the ease and clarity of this exchange, then after a fashion? Or did the kinkajou, fearing its master, hold Troy in reserve as a possible escape, as he had been for it at the Di villa?
“An enemy outside the scheme!” The master voice picked that up now. “Against me?”
“Against you,” the kinkajou (if it was that) agreed. “He was paid to cause trouble, bring you into the shop that he might kill—“
“Kill.” That word throbbed in Troy’s head. He strained to catch an answer. But there was no more that night. At last he slept fitfully, awaking now and then to lie silent, listening not only with his ears but with the portion of his brain that had tapped the exchange. But save for the sound of the birds and animals coming out of the daze of the sleeper to their normal nocturnal restlessness, he heard nothing on either plane of the senses.
In the morning, after the general round of cage tending and feeding was over, Kyger summoned Troy to the fussel hawk. The big bird was definitely emerging from its sullenness of the landing. It held its crested head high, turned it alertly from side to side. Still young enough to have some of its adolescent tail plumage, it was yet a strikingly beautiful bird with its brilliant, iridescent-black rakish crest above its bright golden head, back-patched by warrior scarlet. The golden glow of breast and the scarlet of back were blended on the strongly pinioned wings to a warm orange beneath which the darker tail and black legs again made contrast. But it was not for beauty alone that the fussel was esteemed.
On countless worlds—human, humanoid, and even nonhuman—intelligences had trained birds of falcon and hawklike strains to be hunter-companions. And now when the highly civilized were returning to more primitive skills and amusements for pleasure, hunting —not with high-power kill weapons, but with hawk or other trained birds and animals—was well established. The fussel—with its intelligence, its ability to be easily trained through the right handling, and its power to capture rather than kill a quarry upon demand—was a highly valued item of sale for any trainer.
Now, seeing the stance of the bird, Troy drew his fingers slowly, enticingly, across the front of the cage.
Unlike its attitude of only two days earlier, it made no lighning stab to punish such impudence. Instead, deep in its throat, the bird gave a sound of interested inquiry and moved along the perch toward the door opening of the cage as if awaiting release.
“Shall I man him?” Troy asked.
Kyger snapped his fingers at the opposite side of the cage. That act, which had brought the fussel into raging battle before, now only led it to turn its head. Then it looked back again expectantly at the cage door.
“Here.” Kyger tossed the hawker’s glove to Troy. As the latter drew it on, the fussel uttered its soft cry, this time with a half-coaxing note.
Horan loosened the door, extended protected hand and wrist into the cage. The fussel ducked its head, not to stab, but to draw its curved beak along the tough fabric of the glove. Then sedately it moved from perch to wrist, and Troy carefully lifted the bird out into the open of the corridor into which they had moved the cage for this experiment.