The score of research workers sitting at the long table were doing their best not to stare—and failing. Darya could easily put herself in their shoes. They saw a small, thin man in his late thirties, dressed in a patched and dingy uniform. His head appeared a fraction too big for his body, and his bony face was disfigured by a dozen scars, the most noticeable of them running in a double line from his left temple to the point of his jaw.
Darya knew how her colleagues were feeling. She had experienced an identical reaction when she first met Hans Rebka. Courage and skill were invisible; it took time to learn that he had both.
She glanced down the table. Professor Merada had made one of his rare excursions from the den of his study to the senior dining room, while across from him at the far end Carmina Gold sat peering thoughtfully at her fingernails. Darya knew both of them well, and fully appreciated what they could do. If someone was needed to perform an excruciatingly detailed and encyclopedic survey of any element of spiral arm history, flagging every tiny inconsistency of data or missing reference, then the thoughtful, humorless Merada could not be surpassed; if someone was needed who could follow and tease out the most convoluted train of logic, simplify it to essentials, and present so that a child—or a councilor!—could grasp it, then Carmina Gold, moody and childish herself, was the absolute best.
But if you found yourself in deep trouble, without any hope of escape and so close to Death that you could smell his breath in your own terrified sweat . . . well, then you closed your eyes tight and prayed for Hans Rebka.
But none of that
showed
. To the eye of anyone from a rich world of the Fourth Alliance, the newcomer was nothing but an ill-dressed hick from the back of nowhere. He fitted not at all into the genteel, leisurely, and cultured frame of an Institute dinner.
The others at the table were at least making an effort at politeness.
"You were recently on Miranda?" the woman next to Rebka said as he sat down. She was Glenna Omar, one of the senior information-systems specialists and in Darya's view quite unnecessarily beautiful. "I've never been there, although I suppose that I should have, since it's the headquarters for the Fourth Alliance. What did you think of Miranda, Captain?"
Rebka stared blank-faced down at his plate while Darya, sitting opposite him, waited anxiously. If he was going to be rude or sullen or outrageous, here in her own home . . . there had been no time to brief him, only to give him a hug and a hurried greeting, after he had been decanted from the subluminal delivery craft and before the Immigration officials were ushering them into the dining room to meet her colleagues.
"Paradise," Rebka said suddenly. He turned to Glenna Omar and gave her an admiring smile packed with sexual overtones. "I'm from Teufel, of course, where the best road you can find is said to be any road that takes you somewhere else; so some might argue that I'm easily impressed. But I thought that Miranda was wonderful, my idea of paradise—until I landed here on Sentinel Gate, and learned that I was wrong.
This
has to be the most beautiful planet in the whole Fourth Alliance—in the whole spiral arm."
Darya took a deep breath and relaxed—for half a second. Hans was on his best behavior, but Glenna Omar's response was a good deal too warm.
"Oh, you're just being nice to us, Captain," she was saying. "Of course, I've never been to any of the worlds of your Phemus Circle, either. How would you describe
them
to me?"
Dingy, dirty, dismal, and dangerous, Darya thought. Remote, impoverished, brutish, backward, and barbaric. And all the men are sex-mad.
"I haven't been to
all
the worlds of the Phemus Circle," Rebka was replying. "But I can tell you what they say in the Circle about my home world, Teufel: 'What sins must a man commit, in how many past lives, to be born on Teufel?'"
"Oh, come now. It can't really be that bad."
"It's worse."
"The most awful planet in the whole Phemus Circle?"
"I never said that. Scaldworld is probably as bad, and people from Styx say that they go to Teufel for vacations."
"Now I'm
sure
you're joking. If the whole Phemus Circle is as horrible as you say, no one would stay there. What job do you have, when you're back home?"
"I guess you could call me a traveling troubleshooter. One thing the Phemus Circle is never short of, that's trouble. That's how Professor Lang"—he nodded to Darya—"and I met. We ran into a spot of bother together on Quake, one component of a double planet in the Mandel system."
"And she brought you back here, to the Fourth Alliance? Wise Darya." But Glenna did not take her eyes off Rebka.
"Not right away." Rebka paused, with an expression on his face that Darya recognized. He was about to take some major step. "We did a few other things first. We and a few others—humans and aliens, plus an Alliance councilor and an embodied computer—went to one of the Mandel system's gas-giant planets, Gargantua, where we found an artificial planetoid. We flew through a bunch of wild Phages to get there, and rescued some of us from a Lotus field. Then a sentient Builder construct put our party through a Builder transportation system, thirty thousand light-years out of the spiral arm, to a free-space extragalactic Builder facility called Serenity. When we arrived there, Professor Lang and I—"
He was going to tell it all!
Everything!
All the facts that the whole party had agreed must remain dead secret until a high-level approval to discuss them had been granted. Darya tried to kick Rebka's leg under the table and hit nothing but empty air.
"We found a small group of Zardalu—" He was grinding on.
"You mean, you found people from the territory of the Zardalu Communion?" Glenna Omar was smiling with delight. Darya was sure that she thought Rebka was making up the whole thing for her benefit.
"No. I mean what I said. We found
Zardalu
, the original land-cephalopods."
"But they've been extinct for ten thousand years!"
"Most have. But we found fourteen living ones—"
"Eleven thousand years." Merada's high-pitched voice from the end of the table told Darya that everyone in the dining room was listening.
Bang went a lifetime's reputation for serious and sober research work! Darya kicked again at Rebka's leg under the table, only to be rewarded with a pained and outraged cry from Glenna Omar.
"Or rather more than eleven thousand," Merada went on. "As nearly as I can judge, it has been eleven thousand four hundred and—"
"—Zardalu who had been held in a stasis field since the time of the Great Rising, when the rest of the species were killed off. But the ones we met were very much alive, and
nasty
—"
"But this is disgraceful!" Carmina Gold had awakened from her dormouse trance and was scowling down the table at Darya. "You must know of the fearsome reputation of the Zardalu—"
"Not just the reputation." Darya gave up the attempt to stay out of it. "I know them from
personal experience
. They're worse than their reputation."
"—we managed to send them back to the spiral arm." Rebka had his hand on Glenna Omar's elbow and seemed to be ignoring the uproar rising from all parts of the long table. "And later we returned from Serenity ourselves, except for a Cecropian, Atvar H'sial, and an augmented Karelian human from the Zardalu Communion, Louis Nenda, who remained there to—"
"—a dating based on admittedly incomplete, subjective, and unreliable reference sources," Merada said loudly, "such as Hymenopt race memories, and the files of—"
"—living Zardalu should
certainly
have been reported to the Alliance Council!" Carmina Gold was standing up. "At once. I will do it now, even if you will not."
"We already did that!" Darya stood up, too. Everyone seemed to be saying "Zardalu!" at once, and the group sounded like a swarm of angry bees. She did not think Carmina Gold could even hear her. "What do you think that Captain Rebka was doing on Miranda before he came here?" she shouted along the table. "Sunbathing?"
"—about four meters tall." Rebka had his head close to Glenna Omar's. "An adult specimen, standing erect, with a midnight-blue torso supported on thick blue tentacles—"
"—
living
Zardalu—"
"My
God
!" Merada's piercing tenor cut through the hubbub. His worries over the dating of Zardalu extinctions had apparently been replaced by a much more urgent one. He turned to Darya. "Wild Phages, and an Alliance councilor, and an embodied computer. Professor Lang, those entries for the fifth edition of the catalog, the ones for which you promised to provide the references.
Are you telling me that the only reference sources you will offer me are—
"
There was a loud crash. Carmina Gold, hurrying out of the dining room but turning to glare back at Darya, had collided with a squat robot carrying a big tureen of hot soup. Scalding liquid jetted across the room and splashed onto the back of Glenna Omar's graceful bare neck. She screamed like a mortally wounded pig.
Darya sat down again and closed her eyes. With or without soup, it was unlikely to be one of the Institute's most relaxing dinners.
"I thought I handled things rather well." Hans Rebka was lying flat on the thick carpet in the living room of Darya's private quarters. He claimed that it was softer than his bed on Teufel. "You have to understand, Darya, I said all those things about the Builders and the Zardalu
on purpose
."
"I'm sure you did—after we all agreed to reveal absolutely nothing to anyone about them!
You
agreed to it, yourself."
"I did. Graves proposed it, but we all agreed we should keep everything to ourselves until the formal briefing to the Council. The last thing we wanted was to throw the spiral arm into a panic because there are live Zardalu on the loose."
"And panic is just what you started at dinner. Why did you all of a sudden do the exact opposite of what we said we'd do?"
"I told you, the briefing to the Council was an absolute
fiasco
. We
need
to get people worked up about the Zardalu now. Not one Council member would believe a word of what we had to say!"
"But Julius Graves
is
a Council member—he's one of them, an insider."
"He is, and yet he isn't.
He
was elected one of them, but of course his interior mnemonic twin,
Steven
Graves, as someone pointed out early in the hearing, was never elected to
anything
. No one expected a simple memory extension device to develop self-awareness, and that happened
after
Julius was elected to the Council. The integration of the personalities of Julius and Steven seems to be complete now—the composite calls himself
Julian
, and gets upset if you forget and still call him Julius or Steven. But there were more than a few hints by other councilors that the development of Steven had sent Julius off his head while the integration was going on. You can see their point: although councilors do not lie or fabricate events,
Julian
Graves is not, and never was, a councilor."
"But what about E.C. Tally? A computer, even an embodied computer, can't lie. He should have had more to say than anyone—his original body was torn to bits by the Zardalu."
"Try and prove that, when you don't have one tangible scrap of evidence that all the Zardalu didn't become extinct eleven thousand years ago, and stay extinct. A computer can't lie, true enough—but it can sure as hell be reprogrammed with a false set of memories."
"Why would anyone want to do that?"
"That's not the Council's worry. And old E.C. didn't help
his
case at all. Halfway through his testimony he started to lecture the Council about the inadequacies of the Fourth Alliance central data banks, and the nonsense that had been pumped into him from those banks about the other clades of the spiral arm before he was sent to the Phemus Circle. The Council data specialist interrupted E.C. to say that was ridiculous, her data banks contained nothing but accurate data. She insisted on doing a high-level correlation between E.C.'s brain and what's in the central banks. That's what convinced the Council that Tally's brain had been tampered with. His memory bank shows that Cecropians believe themselves superior to humans and all other species, and that a Lo'tfian interpreter for a Cecropian can when necessary operate quite independently of his Cecropian dominatrix. It shows that Hymenopts are intelligent too—probably more intelligent than humans. It shows that there exist sentient Builder constructs, millions of years old but able to communicate with humans. It shows that instantaneous travel is possible, even without the use of the Bose Network."
"But that's true—we did it, when we traveled to Serenity. It's
all
true. Every one of the statements you just made is accurate!"
"Not according to your great and wonderful Alliance Council." Rebka's voice was bitter. "According to them, Serenity doesn't even exist, because it's not in their data banks. The information there is holy writ, something you just don't argue with, and what's not there isn't knowledge. It's the same problem I've suffered all my life: somebody a hundred or a thousand light-years from the problem thinks they can have better facts than the workers on the spot. But they can't, and they don't."
"But didn't you
say
all that to them?"
"Me say it? Who am I? According to the Alliance Council, I'm a nobody, from a nowhere little region called the Phemus Circle, not big or important enough to have clout with either the human or the interspecies Council. They took less notice of me than they did of E.C. Tally. I began to describe the Zardalu's physical strength, and their phenomenal breeding rate. Do you know what they said? They explained to me that the Zardalu are long-extinct, because if that were not the case, then certainly their presence would have been reported
somewhere
, in the Fourth Alliance, or the Cecropian Federation, or the Zardalu Communion. Then they mentioned that the Fourth Alliance has evolved techniques unknown in the Phemus Circle 'for dealing with mental disorders,' and if I behaved myself they might be able to arrange for some kind of treatment. That's when Graves lost his temper."