Skeen's Search (23 page)

Zelzony stared at her, shivered. “I can't see how you could live like that.”

“Nice to have a choice.”

“Forgive me, fer Skeen, consider it ignorance speaking. Then you don't have any suggestions for me beyond what I've already done.”

“I wouldn't say that. I'm no good. But it's not me you should be talking to, it's Picarefy. Come out to Workhorse with me. Uh, the ship.”

“Picarefy?” She followed Skeen across the grass. “Another member of your crew?”

“No. The ship. Not this one. The starship up there.” She waved a long arm at a sky thick with dark clouds threatening rain.

“What?”

“Oh, you have a treat ahead of you, my friend. My Picarefy is something else, though don't tell her I said so. She's already too conceited.”

The lift carried them smoothly to the airlock. Zelzony followed the tall, thin alien inside. Even the round surfaces in this thing seemed harsher, more rigid than the plastics, plants and cultures she was accustomed to considering technology. There was an odd cool smell around her that wasn't unpleasant, just unfamiliar. It seemed to Zelzony to hold some essence of the alien and her way of life.

Zelzony settled in the padded chair that was almost as comfortable for her as it was for the alien; she watched with a twinge of envy and desire as Skeen's long, rather bony fingers moved with swift assurance over the console.

A face bloomed in the oversize screen.

“Eh, Tibo,” Skeen said, then said more in a rapid patter of words that Zelzony couldn't follow. She was startled by how frustrated this made her feel; she wasn't accustomed to dealing with strange tongues, even the few dialects that had developed in the more widely separated Gurns were quickly comprehensible to one who took a moment's thought and listened carefully. Ykx were conservative by nature, literate, and no group had ever been totally cut off from another so any changes in the language made their way swiftly around Rallen. She had a sudden vision of herself lost in a sea of meaningless sounds and it frightened her more than anything, even these murderous cretins she was trying to locate and the fear that they were a portent of Rallen's future. In a moment of panic she wanted to run from the place and tell the Kinravaly she hadn't the courage to leave Rallen and plunge into that kind of uncertainty.

The alien in the screen grinned suddenly and stopped talking. Another voice came through the speakers, using Rallyx smoothly with a subtle blend of accents. “How goes the bargaining, oh, Partner and Friend? Please may I send you these ants in my belly? Tibo and Rostico Burn aren't meant to be soulmates.”

“You've been taking language lessons,” Skeen said, laughter in her voice.

“Self-defense, I swear it.”

“Live with them till tomorrow like we planned. Pic, I've got a sweet little problem for you to play around your circuits. That's Rallen's head cop you see there.” She chuckled. “Quite a change from the usual scenario, isn't it.” More soberly, she went on, “Help her all you can, Pic, it's a mean one. She'll give you the layout. Um, she's called Zelzony.” Skeen swung round to face Zelzony. “Just talk, the sensors will catch your voice and send it up. Her name is Picarefy, please use it when you speak to her.”

Feeling odd talking to a mechanical thing (though it helped that the other alien, Tibo, continued to watch from the screen, giving her the comforting illusion she was talking to him), Zelzony repeated once more the list of deaths and what she'd done to discover the authors of them. It was not easy, baring Rallen's troubles like this to strangers who had no stake in them, but she was at the end of her resources and she kept seeing the mutilated cub. She finished, swallowed a sigh, waited for some response.

“I am going to ask questions which you might find irrelevant and even embarrassing,” Picarefy said. Her voice was a lovely thing, warm and friendly, a blend of alto and tenor Zelzony found soothing to ears and spirit. It struck her as odd, another odd thing to add to the many she was accumulating as she associated with these people, that this voice moved her almost as much as Zuistro's did, yet it came from a machine. The voice made it easy to forget she was talking to a machine. She accepted that gratefully and relaxed yet more. “Some questions you will think unnecessary because I must already have the answers from Lipitero and the flakes she has allowed me to read. Please answer them nonetheless. Rallykx are omnivorous?”

Zelzony opened her eyes wide, then smiled and settled herself for a long chat. “Yes.”

“What about the Old Ykx?”

“As far as we know, yes.”

“On Ysterai were there predators large enough to threaten an adult?”

“That's a bit hard to answer. Have you been told about the accident that brought us here?”

“Yes.”

“Ahh, yes. Piktar packs. There's a lot about them in children's cautionary tales.
The Piktars will get you if you don't watch out. So don't you go out alone, you fidgety cub
. A Piktar was small enough to hold in one hand.” Zelzony held out a cupped hand, cupped the other over it. “Like that. But they ran in packs of fifty or more. Sometimes several hundred, if the food supply permitted it. Adults could outrun them or soar away from them, especially the latter, since Piktars never gave up on a meat trail. They generally went after children, especially cubs before they could soar, got round them and overran them. Some of the best stories are about summercubs who vanished down the gullets of the swarm.”

“How did you get the meat you ate?”

“Nets. Soar over a herd, pick your beast, preferably one on the outside, spook the rest into running off, cut the throat, bleed the beast, butcher it on the spot and distribute the sections to the hunting party. The most dangerous part of the hunt was getting the meat back to the Gather. Cutting the carcass up reduced the weight enough so the band could fly it back. If possible they hunted around escarpments or gullha trees so they would have a height to launch themselves from.”

“Before you had nets?”

“I really don't see the point, never mind, it's all speculation anyway. Story goes this way. One day a swarm of Piktars stampeded a herd over a cliff and a wandering band of Ykx got there first. The Ykx had a wily old female for their point. She decided she liked fresh meat better than carrion and put her mind to getting it.”

“Ah. Male, female, how were the roles distributed?”

“Who knows. Listen, I'll tell you what happens now. A female Ykx bears alive. During the later part of her pregnancy, she is too heavy to soar, so I suppose back then that meant she couldn't hunt during those months. Once the child is born, the male feeds it from blood nipples he develops when he lets the cub lick and suck at him. You see what that means. Males and females trade responsibilities; in early times they probably took turns doing the hunting. A female Ykx tends to be larger than a male, she needs the mass to provide for the fetus; what happens is females tend to do the heavy work, ah, and I suppose most of those old hunting bands had female points, while males did more of the fine work; from the old tales, they did the courting, preened like bright birds and fought a lot, being, as a whole, more aggressive than females. Now, the fertile period in females is short, just six years, and the maximum number of children she can produce is three. Male fertility lasts longer. Do you want to know about copulation? It starts a few years before either sex is fully fertile and continues a long time beyond the child-getting and bearing years. A bonding mechanism, our students of custom tell us in their dry, cold way. You talk of sex roles, do you understand how fuzzy the edges are for us? We Ykx spend the greater part of our lives as not-parents. So gestation and suckling mean rather less to us than to other species. You see me? I used up my patience raising my youngest brother, my mother died when he was born. My own children, well, I had my three as soon as I could and left them with their father to raise; to speak honestly, they bored and irritated me; not him, he liked holding and tending them. Sometimes it happens that way, sometimes the mother takes over after weaning, sometimes the parents share the raising. It depends on temperament not custom.”

“I see. The roles are diffuse, but family bonding is strong; I understand that your Gathers are actually clan holdings, one large extended family.”

“It's rather more complicated than that. Still, I suppose all of the Ykx in a Gather are connected one way or another to a smallish family grouping among the original settlers.”

“Lifespan?”

“A healthy female Ykx can expect to see her Four-hundred. Male lifespan is somewhat shorter. They have more complicated metabolisms, burn up faster.”

“Local years?”

“I don't …” She stopped, blinked. “I never thought that years would have different lengths. It depends on how far you are from the sun, doesn't it. How strange. If someone says I'll see you two years from now, how do you know when to meet? I suppose you have some sort of standard time length you refer to. Never mind explaining now, we can talk about that later. Local years, yes.” She looked doubtful. “Do you need some sort of measuring guide to tell how long that is? Our years are a fraction over three hundred ninety-eight days.”

“Thank you. From what I have seen of Rallen, your ties to Gather and Gurn are very strong, much stronger than other species I have observed. Yes. Your technology forces you to be less flexible than you were in earlier times, you have less freedom to express your idiosyncracies. Your classes are shut within boundaries without the elasticity they once had, too many possibilities are foreclosed. No, Zelzony, don't protest. I'm not saying you've a society that grinds its people into faceless clones. You don't. I know a number of people who'd say you've done very well indeed for yourselves. I am saying that there is less looseness in the mix. With some notable exceptions, you Rallykx can't shake time loose from the demands of work and Gather to fool around with unstructured nonsense. You've codified dutychoice and joychoice and work hard at both and in a sense you've squeezed the juice out of your lives. I know, yes, I know that's overstating the case, you have your poets and singers, your thinkers and your seekers, those folk who ignore the pressures I'm talking about because they've got something that they are so passionate about nothing else has much reality for them. What percentage of the population are they? Listen, this is what I'm telling you. You Rallyx have developed your technology and the work structures created by it to the point where they are beginning to overload your institutions and suck the life out of your traditions. Add to this the oppressive effect of the Firestreaks coming visibly closer year on year with no way to escape them. Add again the deeply driven need of your species to soar, actually and figuratively. Add the impact of Rostico Burn's arrival, the reminder of the vast spaces beyond the Fire, spaces forever locked away from them, as far as they know. You tell me that suicides have increased ninehundredfold since Burn's appearance; tell me this, isn't suicide violence against the self? Your murderers have turned outward when others have gone in. Well, none of this is particularly helpful for finding them. Yes. Before the arrival of Rostico Burn, were there any suspicious deaths?”

“No.”

“You say that with certainty.”

“Too much certainty?” Zelzony shook her head. “I could be wrong, but I don't think so.” Se picked at the chair arm with the tips of her claws, frowned unseeing at the screen. “Each suicide had a history of depression and growing disturbance. There were witnesses registered to swear to the circumstances of each death. The first mutilated bodies were found some considerable time after Burn's departure. Rather ineptly camouflaged as Burn-deaths.”

A long silence. Then Picarefy said quietly, “Do you have a list of witnesses at that first Burndeath and the genuine suicides of all types after that?”

“I could get some part of the names; you should understand, circumstances make it difficult to get data out of Marrallat and Urolol. Why do you want those names?”

“In the long ago on Ysterai a hunter acquired a taste for fresh meat and arranged to get more of it. Some of your Rallykx have acquired a taste for death. In the beginning it's likely they sought out suicides to indulge this craving. Because they didn't know what they were going to be doing, they wouldn't bother hiding their presence, why should they; in appearance, they were there like all the others to urge the suicide to change his mind. Who could read their hearts and know they were really there to feast on death? So they wouldn't hide their traces like they did later. Look for witnesses that show up on several lists. Look for names that don't fit, strangers from other Gurns. All you really need is one name, the end of a thread you can pull to unravel the camouflage over them all.”

“I am a fool! Why didn't I see that? Something so obvious, so simple?”

“Not so simple as all that. You were concentrating on the victims.”

“Yes. And there was nothing to point to the killers. They were chosen by chance, no more.”

“Um, I doubt if it was wholly chance; I think you'll find that your hunters observed their prey for some time before they snagged it. The lack of clues is a clue in itself. You told me not one of the dead was reported missing less than fifteen days after his or her disappearance. Everyone of these youngsters was expected to be gone for a fortn't or longer. Even that last cub, she was traveling with an older cousin to visit her father's kin on one of the resort islands, travel time a minimum of ten days. They weren't listed as missing until they were five days late. From what you say, no one has reported strangers asking questions about any of the victims. How do the killers know which travelers are going where and how long they will be gone? Are there expeditions of a solitary nature that require licensing or offices where the victims would report the intended absence from their home Gathers? Who would have licit or illicit access to such reports? The descriptions you have given me of the condition of the bodies indicates a certain delicacy of touch, as it were, suggesting a being adult enough to savor his or her pleasures, postponing ultimate gratification as long as possible. In eight of the nine cases, the victims were raped with traces of semen present, though, unfortunately, too much time had elapsed for typing, so at least one of the killers is a sexually active male. And finally, what individuals of working age could disappear for five to seven days without causing comment? Answer these questions and compare them with the lists of witnesses, then you might have an individual or two you can concentrate on.”