Frank Herbert - The Godmakers

“That… that word told you where the Delphinus was?”

“No, but it fitted the creature pattern of the Gienahns. I’d felt from our first contact that the Gienahns might have a culture similar to that of the Indians on ancient Terra.”

“You mean with castes and devil worship, that sort of thing?”

“Not those Indians. The Amerinds, the aborigines of wilderness America.”

“What made you suspect this?”

“They came at me like a primitive raiding party. The leader dropped right onto the rotor hood of my sled. It was an act of bravery, nothing less than counting coup.”

“Counting what?”

“Challenging me in a way that put the challenger in immediate peril. Making me look silly.”

“I’m not tracking on this, Orne.”

“Be patient; we’ll get there.”

“To how you learned where they secreted the Delphinus ?”

“Of course. You see, this leader, this Tanub, identified himself immediately as High Path Chief. That wasn’t on our translation list either. But it was easy: Raider Chief . There’s a word in almost every language in our history to mean ‘raider’ and deriving from a word for road or path or highway.”

“Highwayman,” Stetson said.

“‘Raid’ itself,” Orne said. “It’s a corruption of an ancient human word for road.”

“Yeah, yeah, but where’d all this…”

“We’re almost home, Stet. Now, what’d we know about them at this point? Glassblowing culture. Everything pointed to the assumption that they were recently emerged from the primitive. They played into our hands then by telling us how vulnerable their species survival was—dependent upon the high city in the sunlight.”

“Yeah, we got that up here. It meant we could control them.”

“Control’s a bad word, Stet. But we’ll skip it for now. You want to know about the clues in their animal shape, their language and all the rest of it. Very well,” Tanub said their moon was Chiranachuruso . Translation: ‘The Limb of Victory.’ When I had that, it all fell into place.”

“I don’t see how.”

“The vertical slit pupils of their eyes.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means night-hunting predator accustomed to dropping upon its prey from above. No other type of creature has ever had the vertical slit in its light sensors. And Tanub said the Delphinus was hidden in the best place in all of their history. For that to track, the hiding place had to be somewhere high, very high. Likewise, dark. Put it together: a high place on the dark side of Chiranachuruso , on ‘The Limb of Victory.’”

“I’m a pie-eyed greepus,” Stetson whispered.

Orne grinned at him. “I won’t agree with you… sir. The way I feel right now, if I said it, you might turn into a greepus. I’ve had enough nonhuman associates for a while.”

They called it the Sheleb Incident, Stetson noted, and were happy that the I-A suffered only one casualty. He thought of this as his scout cruiser brought the casualty back to Marak. A conversation with the casualty kept coming back to him.

“Senior fieldmen last about half as long as the juniors. Very high mortality.”

Stetson uttered a convoluted Prjado curse.

The medics said there was no hope of saving the field agent rescued from Sheleb. The man was alive only by an extremely limited definition. The life and the definition depended entirely upon the womblike crechepod which had taken over most of his vital functions.

Stetson’s ship stood starkly in the morning light of Marak Central/Medical Receiving, the casualty still aboard waiting for hospital pickup. A label on the crechepod identified the disrupted flesh inside as having belonged to an identity called Lewis Orne. His picture in the attached folder showed a blocky, heavy-muscled redhead with off-center features and the hard flesh of a heavy planet native. The flesh in the pod bore little resemblance to the photo, but even in the flaccid repose of demideath, Orne’s unguent-smeared body radiated a bizarre aura.

Whenever he moved close to the pod, Stetson sensed power within it and cursed himself for going soft and metaphysical. He had no theory system to explain the feeling, thus dismissed it with a notation in his mind to consult the Psi Branch of the I-A just in case . Likely nothing in it… but just in case .

There’d be a Psi officer at the medical center.

A crew from the medical center took delivery on the crechepod and Orne as soon as they got port clearance. Stetson, moving in his own shock and grief, resented the way the medical crew worked with such casual and cold efficiency. They obviously accepted the patient more as a curiosity than anything else. The crew chief, signing the manifest, noted that Orne had lost one eye, all the hair on that side of his head—the left side as noted in the pod manifest—had suffered complete loss of lung function, kidney function, five inches of the right femur, three fingers of the left hand, about one hundred square centimeters of skin on back and thigh, the entire left kneecap and a section of jawbone and teeth on the left side.

The pod instruments showed that Orne had been in terminal shock for a bit over one hundred and ninety elapsed hours.

“Why’d you bother with the pod?” a medic asked.

“Because he’s alive!”

The medic pointed to an indicator on the pod. “This patient’s vital tone is too low to permit operative replacement of damaged organs or the energy drain for regrowth. He’ll live for a while because of the pod, but…” And the medic shrugged.

“But he is alive,” Stetson insisted.

“And we can always pray for a miracle,” the medic said.

Stetson glared at the man, wondering if that had been a sneering remark, but the medic was staring into the pod through the tiny observation port.

The medic straightened presently, shook his head. “We’ll do what we can, of course,” he said.

They shifted the pod to a hospital flitter then and skimmed off toward one of the gray monoliths which ringed the field.

Stetson returned to his cruiser’s office, an added droop to his shoulders that accentuated his usual slouching stance. His overlarge features were drawn into ridges of sorrow. He slumped into his desk chair, looked out the open port beside him. Some four hundred meters below, the scurrying beetlelike activity of the main port sent up discordant roarings and clatterings. Two rows of other scout cruisers stood in lines just outside the medical receiving area—gleaming red and black needles. Part of the buzzing activity down there would be ground control getting ready to shift his cruiser into that waiting array of ships.

How many of them stopped first in this area to offload casualties? Stetson wondered.

It bothered him that he didn’t possess this information. He stared at the other ships without really seeing them, seeing only the dangling flesh, the red gaps in Orne’s body as it had been when they transferred him from Sheleb’s battered soil to the crechepod.

He thought: It always happens on some routine assignment. We had nothing but a casual suspicion about Sheleb—the fact that only women held high office. A simple, unexplained fact and I lose one of my best agents.

He sighed, turned to his desk and began composing the report: “The militant core on the planet Sheleb has been eliminated. (Bloody mess, that!) Occupation force on the ground. (Orne’s right about occupation forces: For every good they do, they create an evil!) No further danger to Galactic peace expected from this source. (What can a shattered and demoralized population do?)