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 assignments, and if he were to be killed during his task, he would simply be replaced by a more efficient tool. In theory the Cora only acted for the general best interests of the galaxy. Such doubts as he cherished, RyRelee kept to himself. The Cora paid well.
“We took the precaution of obtaining memory scans of these and other subjects to ascertain how those aborigines who might have witnessed the starship’s crash would have interpreted the event,” the Coran continued. “As it happened, their intellects were too primitive to have made any technological interpretations. To them, it was simply another natural catastrophe or an act of their gods—incomprehensible in either case. It was, however, exceedingly fortunate that we made so thorough an examination of the site, as you will perceive from these next recordings.”
A new series of images played through his communications nodes. This time RyRelee failed to repress a hiss of consternation—one which he hoped would be interpreted as only natural dismay. The reassurance he had only moments ago dared to hope for now melted away.
It was the same arid landscape, but something walked across it now that should never have been there. The creature was in riveted irons that must have weighed as much as the blue-scaled biped did itself—and then were only marginally adequate, RyRelee knew well.
“There was a phile on board,” a voice murmured, and RyRelee could not be sure whether the Coran had spoken or whether the words came from his own throat.
RyRelee’s tongues were too dry for ready speech, but he was now in conscious control again. “But, of course, that’s impossible. You must be misinterpreting what the aborigines saw. It’s some native species that only resembles a phile.”
The clarity of the continuing series of images of the phile gave the lie to RyRelee’s statement. The creature was part of a long line of native animals, forty or more of them. The phile was shackled between a pair of them—great beasts that dwarfed it and their aboriginal handlers. Hunching against the mass of its chains, the phile took three of its quick strides for every one of those of the beasts to which it was fastened. Its movements were hobbled, but it managed to keep up.