The new food was an improvement, and so was the picture bowl. That looked like a spy’s dream of a bonanza: I figured I could roam around the channels and learn everything there was to know about the Horch. That was borrowing a page from Dopey’s book; it was just what he had done about the Earth when he was monitoring all of our broadcasts from Starlab.
That had worked out for Dopey. It didn’t for me. I managed to work the controls with a toothpick-sized scrap of ceramic Pirraghiz found for me. I picked channels more or less at random, not knowing any other way to do it. Most of them were incomprehensible to me. There were a lot of what I supposed were the entertainments of the Horch, something like choir singing, something like No plays. They didn’t entertain me. There were scenes of what probably were a number of different planets, or different parts of the same planet. Those had voice-over commentaries, all right, and those might have given me a lot of information if I could have understood them. I couldn’t. They were in the high-pitched and totally incomprehensible language of the Docs.
There was certainly data to be got from the bowl. I just didn’t know how to go about getting it. And then, while I was scowling at a particularly uninformative view-a pair of Horch were silently playing some sort of board game-the picture bowl beeped at me. The game-players disappeared, and another Horch was staring out of the bowl at me. “Hello, Dan,” he said, and I realized it was my friend-or my captor-or, actually, my savior- the one named Djabeertapritch.
Evidently the picture bowl doubled as some kind of communications device. I said guardedly, “Hello, Beert.”
If he detected anything in my tone, he didn’t show it. He said, “I am sorry I have not been able to visit you in person, Dan. There is much I am trying to learn from our Horch cousins, so 1 must spend much time with them. Also with some projects of my own. We will have more time together when you come to our nest.”
It was the first I had heard that he planned to move me again. “When will that be?”
“When you are fully recovered. Are you feeling better now, Dan?”
“Quite a lot,” I admitted.
“That is good,” he said, sounding as though his mind was elsewhere. “Now there is someone I wish you to meet,” he added more briskly, getting to the point. “I have a reason for this. Go outside now. Pirraghiz is waiting to take you to him. Good-by.”
That was the end of the conversation. Beert disappeared, and 1 was looking at the Horch game-players again.
When I had turned off the picture howl and climbed down the stairs, Pirraghiz was hurrying toward me. “It is a Wet One, Dannerman,” she told me, taking my arm to speed me along. “He has language, so you can speak to him. Come, he is in the creek.”
Perhaps that should have warned me. It didn’t. We were almost to the stream when I saw that someone was half submerged in the water.
Only it wasn’t a someone. It was a slate-gray creature the size of a hippopotamus. It had a writhing Medusa mustache of tentacles around its mouth, and it wore a collar. I knew it well. I tugged myself free of Pirraghiz’s arm and walked away, shaking. I couldn’t help it.
Pirraghiz came after me, put one hand worriedly on my throat, bent to peer into my face. The great pale face was puzzled. “You are upset, Dannerman. What is wrong?”
I pointed to the amphibian. “That’s wrong. Those things murdered a friend of mine. Her name was Patsy, and she’s the one who is buried next to the other one of me. She was bathing. She didn’t even know there were any of those things in the water, but there was a scuffle and they electrocuted her.”
She stood for a moment, looking from me to the amphibian. “So you won’t even talk to this Wet One?”
I won t.
“Djabeertapritch wishes it,” she wheedled.
“No.”
She sighed. “This episode was certainly unfortunate,” she said reasonably, “but it is an event in the past. It is true that the Wet Ones use an electric charge for defense, but only when they feel threatened. This one will not attack you, Dannerman.”
“I won’t give it the chance.”
She stood there, looking down at me. “You cannot forgive that incident?”
I shook my head. “Forget it, never. Forgive it-maybe later. But not now.”
She was silent for a moment. Then she said sadly, “Then can you forgive me, Dannerman?”
I stared at her. “For what?”
She seemed reluctant to speak, but she sighed again and went on. “You know that there were other copies of yourself and your comrades, and that they were examined physically?”
I did know. I knew what those physical examinations were like, too, because Pat Five had gone through them and she told me. I felt a flush of remembered rage. “You mean they were vivisected,” I said.
“Yes, that is true,” she said, her tone mournful. “What is also true is that I was one of the ones who did the vivisection, Dannerman.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Was I angry at Pirraghiz? You bet I was. In fact, “angry” wasn’t a strong enough word; I was seething with rage. My nursemaid and pal was one of the torturers who had cut up the helpless bodies of my living, screaming friends. The first thing I thought of doing was to find the nearest rock and pound her head bloody with it.
I didn’t exactly do that. I did pick up a rock, but I didn’t attack Pirraghiz with it. I threw it as hard as I could at the nearest tree, and then I stalked away, leaving her gazing unhappily at my back.
I didn’t look back. I kept right on walking, right out of the compound along one of the ancient trails that wound through the woods. It had rained during the night, and the footing was still a little slippery. I suspected Pirraghiz was trailing after me, but I didn’t turn around. I didn’t want to talk to one of the creatures who had carved up my friends-and me!-bit by bit, while they were wide-awake and screaming, just to see what made them tick. As you might do with an unfamiliar machine, and with no more regard for the machine’s feelings. What I had gone through with the Christmas trees’ helmet didn’t compare to their ordeal. It didn’t bear thinking about.
So I did my best not to think about it. It didn’t matter. What mattered was getting out of there, and there was only one way to do that. The transit machine was obviously still working-the Horch machines had used it to make me. My job was to get back to it, and away.
But I couldn’t do it without help. And the only help around was the person who was silently following along the trail, no more than eight or ten meters behind.
So I turned around and beckoned to Pirraghiz. “I’m sorry,” I told her as she approached. “I overreacted. It was a shock to me, that’s all. I understand that you couldn’t help yourself.”
She looked at me warily. “Do you understand, Dannerman?” she asked.
I patted her great upper arm. “I do, Pirraghiz. You had a control implanted in your brain, and you had to do whatever the Beloved Leaders wanted.”
“Yes, but do you understand? Do you know what it is like to be owned?”
There was an expression on Pirraghiz’s face that I had never seen there before; I couldn’t tell whether it was sorrow or implacable anger. “Well-maybe not, exactly.”
“But you should know, Dannerman,” she told me sternly. “What happened to us may happen to your own people, in exactly the same way. We were not always slaves of the Beloved Leaders. We had our own lives, on our own planet-that was many eights of eights of generations ago, and we have only stories to remind us of what it was like. But it was a good life-I think-and then the Beloved Leaders came, and they saw a use for us. We were a clever people. We still are.”
She paused to give me a challenging look. I said, “Of course you are. I know that.”
“But do you also know what it is like to be clever, and to be owned? Under the Beloved Leaders we could do almost nothing they did not order us to do. Most of the time we could not even speak to each other, only when we were very young, or when we were permitted to breed.”
That surprised me. “Breed? I didn’t know-“
“No, Dannerman, you didn’t know. I did once bear a litter of three after I was bred to the male, Perjowlsti, but I was allowed to keep them with me only until they were half grown. Then I watched while another Doc implanted them with controllers.