The nose was only the beginning. Following behind it, its owner, then the Proprietor, entered the office, halting on the landing above the lounging area where Aelbraugh Pritsch and Reille y Sanchez had been talking for the past half hour. A damp, cold draft and a wisp of fog sneaked in with them before they shut the door.
"I expect," the Elder told the colonel, "lest you give up on us as hopelessly barbaric, that Oasam's remark may require as radical a readjustment as we've just performed on our atmosphere. With your assistance, gentlebeings?"
The Proprietor dragged himself perilously close to the edge of the steps, rising on the ends of his tentacles as on tiptoe. Aelbraugh Pritsch thought he resembled a grotesque spider, but his employer was never conscious of his dignity when he wanted something concrete accomplished, preferring to leave such aesthetic considerations to others. Reille y Sanchez hurried to help while his assistant assisted from behind, straining under the rough-surfaced, massive shell. It would have been an impossible task on Earth, given the mollusc's enormous weight. Here on the asteroid, half-floating the bulky Elder down a narrow flight of stairs was much like handling a fiber carton greater than one's own height and width, but empty.
Acting as host, the avian started another pot of coffee brewing and resumed the perch he'd occupied. Reille y Sanchez went back to the padded swing, Sam lying on the floor at her knee.
The Proprietor trundled into place between them. "Given the broad individual variation inevitablyand happilyfound among all sapients," he continued for the human female's benefit, "I suspect that some few among your number, Colonel, would perceive nothing untoward in seeking reproductive converse with a parent"
"Mister Thoggosh!"
"Aha! Enlighten me, then: does the shocked disgust in which you audibly and visibly regard such a proposition represent an instinctive reaction on your part, indelibly imprinted on your genetic material?"
She didn't answer. Aelbraugh Pritsch gave puzzled thought to what his own answer might have been, grateful he hadn't been asked. Had he been capable, he might have blushed as furiously as she was doing now.
The Proprietor supplied his own reply. "I suspect the contrary. As my assistant indicated, it's something else, is it not? Something very powerful which must be reckoned with, ifas all reflective beings mustwe aspire to know ourselves and act in accordance with our natures?"
"Alternatively," offered Aelbraugh Pritsch, "whenever one believes it necessary or advantageous to act against his nature, it's prudent, to say the least, to do so advisedly."
"If I follow you," Reille y Sanchez frowned, "you're saying this p'Na business isn't instinctive, as I suggested, but, like the human distaste for incest, merely a longstanding social prohibition?"
The nautiloid waved a tentacle in a negative gesture. "The word `merely' doesn't enter into it. All sapient species, even your own, have a distaste for incest, grounded not in instinct, but in experience at a level of reality so fundamental it can't be denied without terrible consequences."
"And p'Na?"
"Your species hasn't had the equivalent experience, yet, in those areas of reality which bear on it. It took mine millions of years to reach our present level of understanding. But given timeprovided you manage to live through the terrible consequences you now suffer out of ignoranceyou, too, will create a concept so like p'Na as to be indistinguishable from it. It's a necessity for survival, both for individuals and whole species."
"Then maybe what I'm trying to do here isn't a total loss," she replied, "though it's a strange way to investigate a murder. The general maintains that the key to understanding you peoplewhich he regards as a necessity for our survivalis through your most fundamental beliefs. That's why I started with basic biology."
At a signal from the heating element in the kitchen, Aelbraugh Pritsch got up to pour coffee for himself, his symbiote, Oasam, and the ProprietorReille y Sanchez having turned him down againbringing it to the nautiloid in a wide-bottomed flask with a long, flexible sipping tube. Sam, as he recalled, preferred his coffee in a shallow bowl or saucer, with milk. He set it on the floor beside the dog. Mammals.
"The general," Mister Thoggosh told her, "is an astute individual, Colonel. It's exactly what Eichra Oren's doing with your party now, examining your most fundamental beliefs. Very well, let's discuss mine. Although customarily derived from first principles, for your purposes the first tenet is this: if, for whatever reason, one of us should injure another, the p'Nan system requires that he make appropriate restitution to the victim of his act." He glanced at Aelbraugh Pritsch and Sam. "Would you say that sums it up?"
"Why, yes, sir." The avian nodded.
The dog yawned. "I hear enough of this stuff at home."
The human shrugged. "It seems straightforward and comprehensible. Human ethics say the same thing: `An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' "
"But you only have so much jaw-room," Sam sat up, "and did you ever ask yourself what you'd do with a spare eye?"
"Oasam, don't confuse her." The Elder smiled at her, although Aelbraugh Pritsch knew she might not have been aware of it. "Estrellita, I speak of a thing distinct from Biblical retribution. Its opposite, in fact. The next logical, customary step may not be quite so comprehensible. If restitution can't possibly be made, our sense of justiceand, in a manner you may find difficult to appreciate, our sense of humordemands that, in its place, the responsible party offer up his one irreplaceable asset."
"His life, of course. It still sounds pretty Biblical to me."
"I believe we'll eventually persuade you of the difference. Although, of course, it may come to his life, in the end. If, for example, he's caused a wrongful death, or otherwise created an unpayable moral debt. Rather than payment, think of it as a token of acknowledgement of that debt."
"Mister Thoggosh, that isn't quite as incomprehensible as you may think it is," she replied. "Aside from what you said about your sense of humorwhich I admit I didn't get at all, and which I won't ask you to explain just nowin some ways it resembles the Japanese custom of seppuku, with which I'm reasonably familiar."
"Ah, the picturesque intestine-cutting ceremony. The spectacular rending of viscera." He raised a tentacle. "I trust you won't be too disappointed with us to learn that our custom is to avoid gratuitous suffering, where possible. And there are significant differences on our part regarding motivation. The samurai strives to meet what he imagines are the expectations of his ancestors. Unlike him, or your advocates of capital punishment for that matter, we're all too well aware that our deadly ritual restores nothing owed the damaged party. We recognize that it doesn'tthat it can'tever put back what was lost or damaged."
"That's the point," added Aelbraugh Pritsch. "It's an unpayable debt, and only an unpayable debt, which can create this rare and peculiar situation. I spoke of the importance to the Elders, as well as those they've influenced, of self-esteem. We speak now of an attempt to regain or repair it, before the end, through an ultimate display, on the part of those who create unpayable moral debts, of a willingness to make up for such mistakes, were it logically possiblewhich, in these circumstances, it isn't."
"Well." Reille y Sanchez shook her head in confusion. "That certainly muddies things up nicely."
At her feet, Sam permitted himself an undoglike chuckle.
"I'll try again," the Proprietor told her, interrupting whatever reply Aelbraugh Pritsch intended making. "Although this dramatic phenomenon is often referred to as the ultimate restitution, it's never actually considered to be the restitution itself, which, in cases like this, is acknowledged by everyone to be impossible by its very nature."
"So why," asked the colonel, "try?"
"Well, in a sense, the individual in question is concerned with payment of a debt which he also believes he owes himself. In that sense, his death represents a place-holder, a token, a customarily- accepted substitute, however unsatisfactory, for the more desirable restitution which could be made in less restrictive circumstances. Moreover, most individuals, however culpable, recognize the importance of not creating yet another debt by imposing the burden of doing the right thing on another being."
"What?"
"Please understand, Colonel," Aelbraugh Pritsch leaned forward on his perch and spread his hands to her, "that this is much more than mere lofty theorizing. You wished to know about our culture, and such considerations have previously been known"
"On more than one occasion," the Proprietor interposed.
"to have interrupted the otherwise stately progress of the Elders' cultural history." The avian glanced at his employer, then back at Reille y Sanchez. "Given current events, a notorious example arises in the mind."
"Here it comes," warned Sam.
"Yes," Mister Thoggosh agreed. "It seems that certain scientists among usperhaps `natural philosophers' is a better translationdevised a novel and intriguing application for the then newly invented and otherwise useless curiosity of dimensional translation."
The human female nodded. "So I've been told."
Aelbraugh Pritsch turned to the Proprietor. "I mentioned this to her already, sir, since it was during the period which happened to coincide with the Antarctican disaster. She knows they'd begun collecting life-forms from divergent branches of history."
"I see," the mollusc answered with a hint of annoyance before continuing. "Now here's something you've not been told, for I don't believe my assistant is aware of this detail. It's well known that many nonsapient species, what you call pack rats, for example, and several bright species of squid, like collecting colorful, shiny objects. Natural philosophers had long known that virtually all creatures advanced beyond the gobble-it-raw-before-it-can-gobble-you stage appear to be partial to such objects, as well, although they tend to carry the fascination further than nonsapients."
"Diamonds are a girl's best friend." She smiled.
"You'll be gratified to know," the Proprietor replied, "that the same is true of females of my species. Now, as luck would have it, the deliberate cutting or faceting of certain brilliantly colorful artificial gemstones creates a brief but unmistakable, very subtle and complex piezoelectric impulse in certain radio frequencies. It happens, as you know, that we're natural transmitters and receivers of such waves. Thus we were sensitive to these piezoelectric gem-cutting impulses."
"Hold on," she asked, "you mean you could actually `hear' these things being cut? From a distance?"
"In fact," he answered with an affirmative gesture of a tentacle, "their generation for pleasure was something of a musical art early in our history. The philosophers, remembering that, reasoned that such gemstones might be deliberately scattered to good effect throughout an area about to be studied. The effort, however, would aid scientific, rather than aesthetic values."
"I get it." The colonel grinned. "It might safely be assumed that any resulting electronic impulses would signify the presence of sapient life-forms, since nonsapients which found the gemstones would merely collect them, not cut them. Pretty neat."
The Proprietor chuckled. "As you say, pretty neat, indeed. With relatively little effort, the philosophers could reliably detect the presence of tool-making species in virtually any of the many universes of alternative probability which they purposed exploring. And it was in this way that, not just human beings, but many other intelligent species were discovered and subsequently `sampled' by our dimensional translators."
"Including," Aelbraugh Pritsch nodded, "my own."
Sam lifted his head. "And that, lovely Estrellita, was only the beginning of the bad news."
"Oh?"
"Oasam's quite correct," Mister Thoggosh told her. "All good things have finite limits. There immediately ensued a prolonged and general debate, lasting hundreds of years, concerning the nature of what had been done and the fate of those it had been done to. At times, it came close to splitting our ancient culture down the middle."
"Like one of the gems," she suggested.
"Yes, but one would scarcely have termed it musical."
"During this time, as you may imagine," added Aelbraugh Pritsch, "every effort was expended to extend the lives of the individuals under debate."
"Yes," finished the Proprietor, "and, in the end, after much searching, they arrived at an answer which, however unpleasant its implications, they all agreed was preferable to the ongoing argument. It was decided that the tenets and precepts of p'Na were supreme. It was agreedfor reasons I shan't elaboratethat, according to those tenets and precepts, all rights derive from sapience. Despite their unenviably primitive estate, the collected beings`Appropriated Persons' as they came to be calledwere nonetheless sapient. That was the reason they'd been collected in the first place."
She nodded, "I take it this was bad news for the scientists?"
"You take it correctly," the Proprietor confirmed. "p'Na had to be applied equally to `savage' sapients as well as civilized molluscs. This being so, their involuntary collection had been a forbidden act, constituting the grossest possible violation of an intelligent life-form's rights. Given universal recognition of the `Forge of Adversity' concept, this was true even when it happened to save their lives, as it may have with the Antarctican humans my assistant told you about. The result was the unintentional creation of an enormous and so far unpaid debt."
Mister Thoggosh fell silent. As it became apparent he was through talking for the moment, Aelbraugh Pritsch took up the story. "This dismayingand retroactively obviousrealization on their part resulted in unprecedented trauma, a fatal discontinuity in the lives of a normally placid and far-seeing people. At stake was their ancient civilization, everything it stood for, their leisurely view of things. To this day, that discontinuity and its astonishing aftermath are an embarrassment. To many, being the long-lived species they are, it is recent history, but history they feel uncomfortable remembering, despite its generally beneficial outcome."
The human female set her feet on the floor and leaned forward, directing a gently toned question at the Proprietor, who still seemed lost in memory or contemplation. "How was the debt paid?"
Mister Thoggosh blinked and looked back at her. "Owing to the amount of time that had passed, as well as the immense difficulty and danger of interdimensional travel, the philosophers were physically unable to replace their living `samples.' That, of course, did nothing to remove the burden of obligation from their figurative shoulders. There could be no statute of limitations on seeing that right was done. And this time, given the circumstances, expense didn't come into the picture."
"I see. And?"
"Nor were any other potentially negative effects on our society to be taken into account. At the time, it was generally predicted that the slow, inexorable progress of science might be measurably retarded. Nevertheless, such an irreplaceable loss of talent all at once was an unavoidable price that had to be paid."
"I think you lost me somewhere. What loss of talent? What happened?"
"Why, what else? In the most ancient and honored tradition of p'Na, those individuals who considered themselves most responsible for the ethical travesty, the physicists, specimen collectors, and their various associates, all suicided honorably."