Startled from his apathy, Ivar regarded the Ythrian almost as sharply as Riho Mea did. He met their gazes in turn—theirs were the eyes which dropped—and let time go by before he said with no particular inflection: “Perhaps I should keep my discovery for the Intelligence service of the Domain. However, it is of marginal use to us, whereas Aeneans will find it a claw struck into their backs.”
The captain chewed her cigar before she answered: “You mean you will tell me if I let you stay aboard.” Erannath didn’t bother to speak his response. “How do I know—” She caught herself. “Please to pardon this person. I wonder what evidence you have for whatever you will say.”
“None,” he admitted. “Once given the clue, you humans can confirm the statement.”
“Say on.”
“If I do, you will convey us, and ask no further questions?”
“I will judge you by your story.”
Erannath studied her. At length he said: “Very well, for I hear your deathpride.” He was still during a heartbeat. “The breath of tineran life is that creature they call the luck, keeping at least one in every wagon. We call it the slinker.”
“Hoy,” broke from Ivar, “how would you know—?”
“Ythrians have found the three-eyed beasts on a number of planets.” Erannath did not keep the wish to kill out of his voice; and his feathers began to stand erect. “Not on our home. God did not lay that particular snare for us. But on several worlds like it, which naturally we investigated more thoroughly than your race normally does—the lesser terrestroid globes. Always slinkers are associated with fragments of an earlier civilization, such as Aeneas has. We suspect they were spread by that civilization, whether deliberately, accidentally, or through their own design. Some of us theorize that they caused its downfall.”
“Wait a minute,” Ivar protested. “Why have we humans never heard of them?”
“You have, on this world,” Erannath replied. “Probably elsewhere too, but quite incidentally, notes buried in your data banks, because you are more interested in larger and moister planets. And for our part, we have had no special reason to tell you. We learned what slinkers are early in our starfaring, when first we had scant contact with Terrans, afterward hostile contact. We developed means to eradicate them. They long ago ceased to be a problem in the Domain, and no doubt few Ythrians, even, have heard of them nowadays.”
Too much information, too big a universe, passed through Ivar.
“Besides,” Erannath went on, “it seems humans are more susceptible than Ythrians. Our two brain-types are rather differently organized, and the slinkers’ resonate better with yours.”
“Resonate?” Captain Riho scowled.
“The slinker nervous system is an extraordinarily well-developed telepathic transceiver,” Erannath said. “Not of thoughts. We really don’t know what level of reasoning ability the little abominations possess. Nor do we care, in the way that human scientists might. When we had established what they do, our overwhelming desire was merely to slay them.”
“What do they do, then?” Ivar asked around a lump of nausea.
“They violate the innermost self. In effect, they receive emotions and feed these back; they act as amplifiers.” It was terrifying to see Erannath where he crouched. His dry phrases ripped forth. “Perhaps those intelligences you call the Builders developed them as pets, pleasure sources. The Builders may have had cooler spirits than you or we do. Or perhaps they degenerated from the effects, and died.
“I said that the resonance with us Ythrians is weak. Nonetheless we found explorers and colonists showing ugly behavior. It would start as bad dreams, go on to murderously short temper, to year-around ovulation, to— Enough. We tracked down the cause and destroyed it.
“You humans are more vulnerable, it appears. You are lucky that slinkers prefer the deserts. Otherwise all Aeneans might be addicted.
“Yes, addiction. They don’t realize it themselves, they think they keep these pets merely because of custom, but the tinerans are a nation of addicts. Every emotion they begin to feel is fed back into them, amplified, radiated, reamplified, to the limit of what the organism can generate. Do you marvel that they act like constitutional psychopaths? That they touch no drugs in their caravans, but require drugs when away, and cannot survive being away very long?