Chapter 3

Rynason continued to smile at her for several seconds, until her words penetrated. Then he abruptly sat up and steadied himself with one hand against the edge of the table.

“Can you get one for me?”

She gave a reluctant shrug. “If you insist, and if Manning okays it. But is it a good idea? Direct contact with a mind so alien?”

As a matter of fact, now that he was faced with the actual possibility of it, he wasn’t so sure. But he said, “We’ll only know once we’ve tried it.”

Mara dropped her eyes and swirled her drink, watching the tiny red spots form inside the glass and rise to the surface. There was a brief silence between them.

“Repent, Lee Rynason!” The words burst upon his ears over the waves of sound that filled the room. He turned, half-rising, to find Rene Malhomme hovering over him, his wide grin showing a tooth missing in the bottom row.

Rynason settled back into his chair. “Don’t shout. I’m going to have a headache soon enough.”

Malhomme took the chair which Manning had vacated and sat in it heavily. He set his hand-lettered placard against the edge of the table and leaned forward, waving a thick finger.

“You consort with men who would enslave the pure in heart!” he rumbled, but Rynason didn’t miss the laughter in his eye.

“Manning?” he nodded. “He’d enslave every pure heart on this planet, if he could find one. As a matter of fact, I think he’s already working on Mara here.”

Malhomme turned to her and sat back, appraising her boldly. Mara met his gaze calmly, raising her eyebrows slightly as she waited for his verdict.

Malhomme shook his head. “If she’s pure, then it’s a sin,” he said. “A thrice-damned sin, Lee. Have I ever expostulated to you upon the Janus-coin that is good and evil?”

“Often,” Rynason said.

Malhomme shrugged and turned again to the girl. “Nevertheless,” he said, “I greet you with pleasure.”

“Mara, this is Rene Malhomme,” Rynason said wearily. “He imagines that we’re friends, and I’m afraid he’s right.”

Malhomme dipped his shaggy head. “The name is from the Old French of Earth--badman. I have a long and dishonorable family history, but the earliest of my ancestors whom I’ve been able to trace had the same name. Apparently there were too many Smiths, Carpenters, Bakers and Priests on that world--the time was ripe for a Malhomme. My first name would have been pronounced Reh-nay before the language reform dropped all accent marks from Earth tongues.”

“Considering your background,” Mara smiled, “you’re in good company out here.”

“Good company!” Malhomme cried. “I’m not looking for good company! My work, my mission calls me to where men’s hearts are the blackest, where repentance and redemption are needed--and so I come to the Edge.”

“You’re religious?” she asked.

“Who is religious in these days?” Malhomme asked, shrugging. “Religion is of the past; it is dead. It is nearly forgotten, and one hears God’s name spoken now in anger. God damn you, cry the masses! That is our modern religion!”

“Rene wanders around shouting about sin,” Rynason explained, “so that he can take up collections to buy himself more to drink.”

Malhomme chuckled. “Ah, Lee, you’re shortsighted. I’m an unbeliever, and a black rogue, but at least I have a mission. Our scientific advance has destroyed religion; we’ve penetrated to the heavens, and found no God. But science has not disproved Him, either, and people forget that. I speak with the voice of the forgotten; I remind people of God, to even the scales.” He stopped talking long enough to grab the arm of a passing waiter and order a drink. Then he turned back to them. “Nothing says I have to believe in religion. If that were necessary, no one would preach it.”

“Have you been preaching to the Hirlaji?” Rynason asked.

“An admirable idea!” Malhomme said. “Do they have souls?”

“They have a god, at least. Or used to, anyway. Fellow named Kor, who was god, essence, knowledge, and several other things all rolled into one.”

“Return to Kor!” Malhomme said. “Perhaps it will be my next mission.”

“What’s your mission now?” Mara asked, smiling in spite of herself. “Besides your apparently lifelong study and participation in sin, I mean.”

Malhomme sighed and sat back as his drink arrived. He dug into the pouch strung from his waist and flipped a coin to the waiter. “Believe it or not, I have one,” he said, and his voice was now low and serious. “I’m not just a lounger, a drifter.”

“What are you?”

“I am a spy,” he said, and raised his glass to drain half of it with one swallow.

Mara smiled again, but he didn’t return it. He sat forward and turned to Rynason. “Manning has been busily wrapping up the appointment for the governorship here,” he said. “You probably know that.”

Rynason nodded. The headache he had been expecting was already starting.

“Did you also know that he’s been buying men here to stand with him in case someone else is appointed?” He glanced at Mara. “I go among the men every day, talking, and I hear a lot. Manning will end up in control here, one way or another, unless he’s stopped.”

“Buying men is nothing new,” Rynason said. “In any case, is there a better man on the planet?”

Malhomme shook his head. “I don’t know; sometimes I give up on the human race. Manning at least has a little culture in him--but he’s more vicious than he seems, nevertheless. If he gets control here...”

“It will be no worse than any of the other planets out here,” Rynason concluded for him.

“Except for one thing, perhaps--the Hirlaji. I don’t have much against men killing each other ... that’s their own business. But unless we get somebody better than Manning governing here, the Hirlaji will be wiped out. The men here are already talking ... they’re afraid of them.”

“Why? The Hirlaji are harmless.”

“Because of their size, and because we don’t know anything about them. Because they’re intelligent--any uneducated man is afraid of intelligence, and when it’s an alien...” He shook his head. “Manning isn’t helping the situation.”

“What do you mean by that?” Mara asked.

Malhomme’s frown deepened, creasing the dark lines of his forehead into furrows. “He’s using the Hirlaji as bogey-men. Says he’s the only man on the planet who knows how to deal with them safely. Oh, you should hear him when he moves among his people ... I envy his ability to control them with words. A little backslapping, a joke or two--most of them I was telling last year--and he talks to them man to man, very friendly.” He shook his head again. “Manning is so friendly with this scum that his attitude is nothing short of patronizing.”

Rynason smiled wearily at Malhomme; for all the man’s wildness, he couldn’t help liking him. It had been like this every time he had run into him, on a dozen of the Edge-worlds. Malhomme, dirty and cynical, moved among the dregs of the stars preaching religion and fighting the corporations, the opportunists, the phony rebels who wanted nothing for anyone but themselves. He had been known to break heads together with his huge fists, and he had no qualms about stealing or even killing when his anger was aroused. Yet there was a peculiar honesty about him.

“You always have to have a cause, don’t you, Rene?”

The greying giant shrugged. “It makes life interesting, and it makes me feel good sometimes. But I don’t overestimate myself: I’m scum, like the rest of them. The only difference is that I know it; I’m just one man, with no more rights than anyone else, except those I can take.” He held up his large knuckled hands and turned them in front of his face. “I’ve got broken bones in both of them. I wonder if the Buddha or the Christ ever hit a man. The books on religion that are left in the repositories don’t say.”

“Would it make any difference if they hadn’t?” Rynason asked.

“Hell, no! I’m just curious.” Malhomme stood up, hefting his repentance sign in the crook of one big arm. His face again took on its arched look as he said, “My duty calls me elsewhere. But I leave you with a message from the scriptures, and it has been my guiding light. ‘Resist not evil, ‘ my children. Resist not evil.”

“Who said that?” Rynason asked.

Malhomme shook his head. “Damned if I know,” he muttered, and went away.

After a moment Rynason turned back to the girl; she was still watching Malhomme thread his way through the men on his way to the door.

“So now you’ve met my spiritual father,” he said.

Her deep brown eyes flickered back to his. “I wish I could use a telepather on him. I’d like to know how he really thinks.”

“He thinks exactly as he speaks,” Rynason said. “At least, at the moment he says something, he believes in it.”

She smiled. “I suppose that’s the only possible explanation for him.” She was silent for a moment, her face thoughtful. Then she said, “He didn’t finish his drink.”

“You’re all hooked up,” the girl said. “Nod or something when you’re ready.” She was bent over the telepather, double checking the connectives and the blinking meters. Rynason and Horng sat opposite each other, the huge dark mound of the alien looming silently over the Earthman.

He never seemed upset, Rynason thought, looking up at him. Except for that one time when they’d run into the stone wall of the block on Tebron, Horng had displayed a completely even temperament--unruffled, calm, almost disinterested. But of course if the aliens had been completely uninterested in the Earthmen’s probings at their history they would never have cooperated so readily; the Hirlaji were not animals to be ordered about by the Earthmen. Probably the codification of their history would prove useful to the aliens too; they had never arranged the race memory into a very coherent order themselves.

Not that that was surprising, Rynason decided. The Hirlaji had no written language--their telepathic abilities had made that unnecessary--and organization of material into neatly outlined form was a characteristic as much of the Earth languages as of Terran mentality. Such organization was not a Hirlaji trait apparently, at least not now in the twilight of their civilization. The huge aliens lived dimly through these centuries, dreaming in their own way of the past ... and their way was not the Earthmen’s.

So if they cooperated with the survey team on codifying and recording their history, who was the servant?

Well, with the direct linkage of minds the work should go faster. Rynason looked up at Mara and nodded, and she flicked the connection on the telepather.

Suddenly, like being overwhelmed by a breaking wave of seawater, Rynason felt Horng’s mind envelope him. A torrent of thoughts, memories, pictures and concepts poured over him in a jumble; the sensory sensations of the alien came to him sharply, and memories that were strange, ideas that were incomprehensible, all in a sudden rush upon his mind. He fought down the fear that had leapt in him, gritted his teeth and waited for the wave to subside.

It did not subside; it settled. As the two minds, Earthman and Hirlaji, met in direct linkage they became almost one. Gradually Rynason could begin to see some pattern to the impressions of the alien. The picture of himself came first: he was small and angular, sitting several feet below Horng’s--or his own--eyes; but more than that, he was not merely light, but pallid, not merely small, but fragile. The alien’s view of reality, even through his direct sensations, was not merely visual or tactile but interpreted automatically in his own terms.

The odor of the hall in which they sat was different, the very temperature warmer. Rynason could see himself reeling on the stone bench where he sat, and Mara, strangely distorted, put out a hand to steady him. At the same time he was seeing through his own eyes, feeling her hand on his shoulder. But the alien sensations were stronger; their very strangeness commanded the attention of his mind.