“He’s one of Onidi Louchard’s shipmates,” Bunny said. “I think he’s still working with them to loot Petaybee.”
“Frag! We gotta warn the others!”
“Shh,” Iva Connelly said. “You’re not going anyplace till I bandage your wounds. You, too, young lady.”
Diego and Bunny insisted on leading the curlies back down to the village. Meanwhile Krisuk and some of the others returned, empty-handed.
“Satok got away. Kev Nyukchuk and his sons are trying to trace Satok by the tracks and blood in the dark,” Krisuk told them.
“Where’s your father?” Iva asked.
“He stayed to feed the dogs. You remember Satok taking Tarka’s pups?”
“Yes.”
“They’re half-starved and mean now, but Da recognized them and he’s going to try to tame them again. The curlies were in bad shape, too, and we found more cat skulls …”
The next morning at first light, Bunny and Diego, carrying a carefully bandaged and bundled Dinah, were back out on the trail away from the river, the Petaybean wind at their backs, pushing them toward the Fjord.
Matthew Luzon was as amused as he was capable of being that Marmion Algemeine thought she was controlling him by contradicting his theories, cultivating the enemies of the company, and trying to seduce his staff away from him. Of course, she was incapable of understanding a man like him. She was nothing but an over aged debutante whose inherited greed made her good at acquiring more wealth. She couldn’t begin to understand someone like him, someone motivated not by money or personal aggrandizement, but by a strong, totally altruistic commitment to truth and the scientific process.
Others laughed when he called himself a scientist, but Matthew was devoted to science in a way that few were. A literal-minded man, he was nevertheless fascinated by the lies people were fond of telling themselves about the universe in which they lived, despite all of the evidence pointing to the fact that the average human being was powered by electro-chemical impulses in the same way that computers were powered by electronic ones, and the universe itself was a large, marvelous accident.
Most of the scientists and troops within the company believed as Matthew did, but few had his zeal not only for believing the truth, but for exposing the lies and self-deceptions that weakened the sentient mind, every inhabited sector of the universe, and the company, as well.
There was a sort of brain fever that people contracted once they left civilization. Matthew had seen it again and again, not just among the inhabitants of colonial outposts like this, but also on space stations and ships too long away from port. People encountered a few mysteries that had not yet been properly investigated, and they suddenly decided that even the things they understood had some sort of strange causation. They started believing in myths, anthropomorphized machinery, and nonsentient life-forms; they talked to plants and animals. Ridiculous, but there it was. Matthew considered himself to be something of a deprogrammer/reformer/reformationist.
Usually, he had found, there was a ringleader, or maybe more accurately, an opinion maker, generally someone suffering from the borderline schizophrenia that passed for “creativity.” These people had to be stabilized and adjusted, or eliminated. Elimination was not the preferred option, simply because one such person would invariably be replaced by another leader, whereas if one used the power they had already built up among their fellows for one’s own purposes, results were much quicker.
As an anthropologist, he had made a particular study of the sort of beliefs people were apt to indulge in, and from what he’d heard of Petaybee, their mass illusion was not an especially unusual one.
They thought their planet was sentient. Quite likely all these seemingly remarkable incidents of meteorological and geological shifting were merely coincidental, possibly a delayed reaction to the TerraB processand he faulted Whittaker Fiske for not remarking on that probability. Certainly these natural occurrences should not be attributed to some gigantic powers or some sort of immense alien life-form, dabbling in so-called adaptive changes.
He was no fool. He had studied the autopsies and all of the Kilcoole group’s other “evidence.” He was more inclined to think that the claims were more in the nature of a local belief than a planet wide one. The “adaptive changes,” which bordered on extremes, were no doubt mutations from some latent toxins contained by this world which had previously gone undetected. They would, of course, need to be eliminatedor the inhabitants removed, which would suit Intergal’s purposes quite well.