Kinsey almost choked. “Uh—well, yes. In fact, I remember telling President Stockwell how essential it was to avoid any Black Hole of Calcutta.”
“Essential indeed, Professor. The Narvo would have responded far more savagely than the British. Though, to be sure, they would not have thought of such grotesque twists as blowing humans out of cannons. Or wrapping their corpses in the skin of—what is that beast? Swine, I believe?”
Mutely, Kinsey nodded.
“You do, I trust, agree with me that there are at least some aspects in which Jao share few of your human vices. Whatever vices we may have of our own.”
“More than a few, being honest. There’s no equivalent in your history, so far as I can determine, of such things as the Nazis or the Khmer Rouge or the Taliban. Jao just don’t seem to descend to the level of sheer mania of which humans are capable. Well, except for Oppuk.”
“Yes, Oppuk. A great pity. He was once a very impressive namth camiti, as difficult as you may find that to believe. That was our most unpleasant decision, we of the Bond, and one taken only with great reluctance.”
* * *
Kinsey grew still. Still as a mouse. Absentminded professor or not, he was a student of human history. Just so, he was quite sure, did a man feel when Caesare Borgia was about to draw him into confidence.
“Oh, shit,” he couldn’t help but murmur.
Under his breath, he thought, forgetting the preternatural Jao sense of hearing.
“Not a bad expression. ‘Shit,’ indeed. But great dangers—just as great opportunities—sometimes require hard decisions to be made. Decisions which, as you say, are malodorous in the extreme.”
The Preceptor leaned back still further, as though to distance himself as much as possible from a bad smell. “It was my decision, in the end, and I made it. Reluctantly, but I could see no other way to bring the Terran situation to a speedy enough conclusion. So, yes, I ordered Oppuk driven mad.”
It seemed fitting, somehow, that he followed that with another human shrug. “It was not difficult, given Oppuk’s natural temperament and his increasing frustration—and his increasingly obsessive use of pools. A matter, merely, of properly tampering with the salts. Easy enough, especially as Oppuk’s unsanity grew, since he paid little attention to the doings of his servitors.”
“Rough on the servitors, I would think,” Kinsey commented, “given Oppuk’s temper.”
“Rough, indeed. Three of our agents were badly beaten by him. And the last, slain.”
“Ullwa,” Kinsey whispered. “That’s how Wrot knew to challenge Oppuk over her whereabouts. You told him.”
“Did more than tell him. We showed him. As I will now show you. By the end, we had surveillance devices on him everywhere, his ship as well as his palace. Nothing he did was a secret from us.”
The Preceptor picked up a small device lying on a table next to him. Kinsey had noticed it, when he sat down, but thought nothing of the matter. A Jao control device of some sort, which they always had lying about.
A holographic image appeared to one side. “Watch, Professor Kinsey,” the Preceptor commanded. “I will want your opinion afterward.”
Ullwa’s murder was brutal and horrible to watch; but, thankfully, over soon enough. And by the time it was, many things had fallen into place for Kinsey.
Oppuk had almost seemed to be raping Ullwa, as impossible as that crime was for a Jao, not just killing her. And Kinsey remembered, now, what Caitlin had told him after Oppuk was finally dead. Of the one frightening instance where he had made her posture before him, almost like a human despot might force a slave girl to dance. And the other time, even more disturbing, when he had summoned her and subjected her to bizarre questioning—which even Banle, afterward, had clearly been shaken by.
“That’s the secret to your breeding, isn’t it? The right chemical combination in your pools. You drove Oppuk mad by constantly stimulating him sexually—when he had no outlet for the stimulation. Probably didn’t even realize what it was in the first place.”
“Did not realize it at all. One of the characteristics—a particularly stupid one—of the great kochan is that they insist on surrounding all matters involving sex with great mystery. Never explaining anything to their offspring, until and unless one of them is summoned to become a pool-parent.” Ronz lowered the control device back to the table. “The lesser, more provincial kochan, are not so obsessive about the matter. But Oppuk . . . I come myself, Professor, from one of the great kochan. I can assure you that Oppuk never had the slightest idea why his moods had become so turbulent and unstable.”