He said into her unvoiced but unmistakable scorn: “You disbelieve? You consider Merseia a mere bogeyman? Please listen. A special agent of theirs is loose on Aeneas. No common spy or troublemaker. A creature of unique abilities; so important that, for the sake of his mission, a whole nonexistent planet was smuggled into the data files at Catawrayannis; so able—including fantastic telepathic feats—that all by himself he easily, almost teasingly escaped our precautions and disappeared into the wilds. Prosser Thane, Merseia is risking more than this one individual. It’s giving away to us the fact that the Roidhunate includes such a species, putting us on our guard against more like him. No competent Intelligence service would allow that for anything less than the highest stakes.
“Do you see what a net your betrothed could get tangled in?”
Have I registered? Her face has gone utterly blank.
After a minute, she said: “I’ll have to think on that, Commissioner. Your fears may be exaggerated. Let’s stay with practicalities tonight. You were wonderin’ about Ivar and this companion of his … who suggests Ythri may also be stickin’ claws into our pot, right? Before I can suggest anything, you’d better tell me what else you know.”
Desai armored himself in dryness. “Presumably they took refuge in the Orcan country,” he said. “I’ve just had a report from a troop dispatched there to search for them. After several days of intensive effort, including depth quizzing of numerous people who might be suspected of knowledge, they have drawn blank. I can’t leave them tied down, futile except for fueling hatred of us by their presence: not when sedition, sabotage, and violence are growing so fast across the whole planet. We need them to patrol the streets of, say, Nova Roma.”
“Maybe Ivar didn’t make for Orcus,” Tatiana suggested.
“Maybe. But it would be logical, no?”
She uttered a third “Maybe,” and then surprised him: “Did your men quiz that new prophet of theirs?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. No result. He gave off weird quasi-religious ideas that we already know a little about; they’re anti-Imperial, but it seems better to let him vent pressure on behalf of his followers than to make a martyr of him. No, he revealed no knowledge of our Firstling. Nor did such as we could find among those persons who’ve constituted themselves an inner band of apostles.”
It was clear that Tatiana stayed impersonal only by an effort. Her whole self must be churning about her sweetheart. “I’m astonished you got away with layin’ hands on him or them. You could’ve touched off full-dress revolt, from all I’ve heard.”
“I did issue instructions to handle cult leaders with micromanipulators. But after the search had gone on for a while, this … Jaan … voluntarily offered to undergo narco with his men, to end suspicion and, as he put it, leave the Terrans no further reason to remain. A shrewd move, if what he wanted was to get rid of them. After that big a concession from his side, they could scarcely do less than withdraw.”
“Well,” she challenged, “has it occurred to you that Ivar may not be in yon area?”
“Certainly. Although … the lead technician of the quiz team reported Jaan showed an encephalogram not quite like any ever recorded before. As if his claim were true, that—what is it?—he is possessed by some kind of spirit. Oh, his body is normal-human. There’s no reason to suppose the drug didn’t suppress his capacity to lie, as it would for anyone else. But—”
“Mutation, I’d guess, would account for brain waves. They’re odd and inbred folk, in environment our species never was evolved for.”
“Probably. I’d have liked to borrow a Ryellian telepath from the governor’s staff—considered it seriously, but decided that the Merseian agent, with the powers and knowledge he must have, would know how to guard against that, if he were involved. If I had a million skilled investigators, to study every aspect of this planet and its different peoples for a hundred intensive years—”
Desai abandoned his daydream. “We don’t escape the possibility that Ivar and the Ythrian are in that region, unbeknownst to the prophet,” he said. “A separate group could have smuggled them in. I understand Mount Cronos is riddled with tunnels and vaults, dug by the Elder race and never fully explored by men.”