"I've been higher than thIS," Reille y Sanchez told him, "on Earth, in the Rockies and Sierras, and here on 5023 Eris. But I don't think I remember being more intimidated by the height."
Eichra Oren nodded. They stood alone together on a balcony of the plastic-covered mesh the Elders seemed to use for everything here, half a kilometer from the surface. It was attached to the massive trunk of one of the giant trees which had created and held up the canopy.
Below, in the gathering twilight, they could see the site Mister Thoggosh wouldn't tell her about, laid out like a miniature model. Whatever adjustment had been made to the atmosphere, following the disturbance of his arrival, it had been correct. The air around them was warm for this late in the day, drier than it had been, she said, since the Soviet American expedition had landed. And at this altitude, there was a fair breeze which, he observed with interest, put color in her face and ruffled her thick auburn hair.
"I've heard it said heights aren't impressive unless something in your field of visionlike this treeestablishes an unbroken perspective, from bottom to top." He didn't relish standing close to the flimsy-looking rail himself, although he thought it unlikely that a fall of that distance, in this gravity, would injure. "But you didn't climb up here to discuss the weather or the altitude. Sam mentioned you'd been talking to Mister Thoggosh and Aelbraugh Pritsch about the Great Restitution."
"Sam told me how to find you. I thought you two were in constant touch. It's that radio thing the Elders do, isn't it?" She turned from the dizzying view to face him. "I didn't climb up here to talk about that, either. I'm trying to figure out what makes them tick. One minute I think I understand them, and the next, somebody throws something at me that confuses me all over again." She indicated the broad-bladed sword with its wire-wrapped handle and heavy brass-colored pommel and guard, leaning in its scabbard beside him. "You're human, but you also know the nautiloid culture. I decided to ask you why all those scientists killed themselves."
"I see." He turnedfinding it hard to look into her eyes and think at the same timeto gaze out at the darkening landscape. "It might help to tell you about others, perhaps objectively less guilty, who didn't kill themselves. In a way, it was much harder for them. They'd supported the research, benefitted from the knowledge it produced, so they felt a measure of responsibility."
"What did they do?"
"To most of the Elders, the beings they called `Appropriated Persons' were alien, repugnant creatures. Nevertheless, and although they had no moral obligation in my opinionsupposedly that of an expertthousands personally adopted nonnautiloid sapients with the objective of bringing them fully into the culture. Appropriated Persons would enjoy exactly the same status as the Elders themselves. It couldn't have been easy, not after two hundred million years of being the only people they knew about. As I say, it may have been harder than for those who took an easier way out. Even so, it happened faster than anyone, including the Elders, expected. The process was already well underway by the time the decision was arrived at formally."
She stepped closer. "I don't think I follow you."
He turned back, equally unable to keep his eyes off her. "Well, it may be significant to you that the complete nonexistence of anything resembling politics helped in a major way. There wasn't anything to interfere with what would have been a complicated process to planone that happened anyway, without anyone planning it. For example, they spoke of providing collectees with an education in any one of thousands of different fields. By the time anybody got around to it, they discovered the opportunity was already being provided by private parties through the market process."
"But why? I mean, aside from the restitution we've been talking about, why would anybody want to do something like that?"
He shrugged. "Why not? If you're an Elder, and you've a job that can be done better by a human or an avian or a sea-scorpion than another Elder, that's who you hire. If they need education first, technical or academic, you provide it if you want the job done badly enough. One way or another, the Elders were making their former `victims' a remarkable, openhanded gift, giving away everything it had taken them millions of years to learn. But they didn't look at it that way. Once the decision was made, once it was discovered that the decision was irrelevant, many said special care should be exercised to avoid injuring the beneficiaries inadvertently."
Her eyes widened, and she spread her hands, palms up. "Now I'm really lost. Injuring them? By educating them, giving them work?"
"Your culture has an expression about killing with kindness. The Elders were worried that Appropriated Persons might become helpless, dependent welfare recipients. Remember, they had a long history, during which they'd made every possible mistake a people can make and live to tell about it. So they concocted all sorts of complicated plans. An Appropriated Person's education, they decided, should be as self-directed as possible. Productive employment should be offered as soon as Appropriated Persons qualified for it. Under their voluntaristwhat you call `laissez-faire'economy, these measures, they felt, would prevent a welfare mentality."
She opened her mouth and closed it again. He was aware that, from her Marxist viewpoint, there were so many things wrong with what he'd said she didn't know where to begin answering it. He laughed. "Before any of it was thought out, it was already done, out of self-interest. Cortical implants, keyed to the Elders' frequencies, allowed others to share the `telepathy.' Soon, other life-forms acquired the artificial equivalent of separable tentacles, a convenience as necessary as clothing in your culture. In my case, it's an energetic, long-haired dog with a lopsided grin, the remote I'd have if I'd been born a thinking mollusc, instead of a nakedSam says, sometimes thinkingape. The integration of Appropriated Persons into the Elders' world was swifter and smoother than anybody expected and, in time, they simply became persons."
"Okay." Reille y Sanchez nodded. "That explains something Aelbraugh Pritsch said about the nautiloids benefitting as much as those they were trying to recompense. In the end, their economy wound up with more manpowerbeingpowerand more consumers."
He shook his head. "There's more. In addition to whatever culture Appropriated Persons brought with themplenty, even if they were less advanced than the Eldersthe climate encouraged cross-fertilization. New ideas, inventions, businesses sprang up overnight. The stubbornest Elder came to see that civilization had becomestagnant isn't the wordsluggish, before the `victims' arrived.
"In the endif such processes ever truly endthe Elders never abandoned p'Na. They'd learned the hard way, over a span of five hundred million years, and it was p'Na that had made everything else possible. But in other ways, they soon found themselves strangers in their own land, in as much need of reeducation as the adoptees, and surprised to be exploring a brand-new culture they'd all built together quite by accident."
She raised her eyebrows. "And none of this violated the p'Nan principle of the Forge of Adversity?"
"On the contrary," he explained, "to the Elders it represented payment of a vast and terrible debt, to people they saw as having been brutally kidnaped. Which, of course, is why the scientists killed themselves. Do you have any more questions, Col. Reille y Sanchez?"
She ran a self-conscious thumb around the top of her pistol belt before resting her palm on the pommel of her knife, "You could call me Estrellita. And since you invite it, this may be a minor mystery on the grand scale, but it's irritating. I'd resolved to speak with you or Sam about it, anyway."
"And what might that be . . . Estrellita?" He wondered whether she knew how beautiful her name was. Or how beautiful she was, for that matter.
"Well," she began, "you call him `Oasam' sometimes, or often just `Sam.' "
He nodded. "And sometimes `Otusam,' as well."
"Okay, that raises a couple of questions. It must only be coincidence that he resembles the Samoyed breed you may not even be familiar with. After all, his name's a word in Antarctican or some other language unknown today on Earth. My Earth, anyway. I don't understand why or how everybody gives him three different names, and I don't know whether I'll ever have the chance to acquire sufficient vocabulary in your native language to . . ."
She stopped, apparently embarrassed. He smiled. "And it never occurred to you, in this connection, to make count of the various names and titles by which different people address you in different contexts, former Major and now Colonel Estrellita Reille y Sanchez?"
She smiled back at him. "I've noticed that, on principle, he's as disrespectful as he can possibly be to the Elders. The Proprietor, however, appears to have a well-developed sense of humor, and as a consequence"
"Mister Thoggosh enjoys Sam's sassiness. Sam's especially merciless with Aelbraugh Pritsch, often referring to him as the Proprietor's spare separable tentacle. The fellow can be pretty humorless, and more than a little pompous, even if he's harmless. Aelbraugh Pritsch enjoys it less than Mister Thoggosh, who encourages it because he thinks it's healthy. Sam"
"Aha! That's why my ears were burning!" They turned to the spiral stairs wrapped around the tree, now almost lost in the dimness, by way of which they'd each climbed here in the first place. "Despite the beautiful Estrellita's undisguised astonishmentas well as her initial scornful disbeliefregarding talking dogs, I can speak as well for myself as any beneficiary of cortical augmentation, thank you, ma'am."
Eichra Oren laughed. Reille y Sanchez frowned. "Cortical augmentation? You started to say something about that."
He nodded. "A sophisticated surgical process performed in utero, common in our society. I also meant to tell you, when you mentioned Samoyeds, that Sam's descended from animals aboard the Antarctican refugee ship you were told about when it departed the Lost Continent. Your Samoyeds probably descend from the ones who weren't Appropriated. In his case, augmentation had the effect of enhancing a suitable brain with the aid of electronics, until it was raised to the qualitative level of human sapience."
"Hell of a mouthful, right?" Sam grinned up at her. "Looked at differently, I'm a powerful cybernetic system riding around inside a doggy's body. Not too bad a deal, let me tell you, for either the computer or the doggy. Do you know what a gentleman's gentleman is?"
She put her fingers to her temples. "You make my head ache, both of you. Do you know how deep a person has to reach for vocabulary as illegal as that and almost two centuries out of date? `A gentleman's gentleman.' That's a butler or a valet, isn't it? So what?"
"So I'm a sapient's sapient. Look, Boss, she's still thinking, can she really be talking to, and getting answers from, a hound? If this poochie's as Elderblessedly brilliant as he sounds, why is he content to act as a lowly, if rather insubordinate, servant? And she's thinking, how can such a thing be possible in a civilization founded on self-interest?"
She dropped her hands and laughed. "Wrong. I'm thinking I now have you in a logical trap. What I ask is, if you're a sapient being yourself, where the hell's your separable tentacle?"
Eichra Oren folded his arms and leaned against the trunk, grinning in the shadows. Sam sat and panted. It had been a long climb, even for him. "You'll be surprised to learn that I wonder about that myself, at what you might call a philosophical level. I'm considered an independent being by the Elders, who define that status, somewhat circularly, in terms of possession of sapience itself. What troubles me more is whether my intelligence is real or artificial and, in my more ironic moments, whether it makes any difference."
"I don't know what you mean," Reille y Sanchez admitted.
"If he means anything at all," suggested Eichra Oren. "This is his poor, confused little canine genius routine. He's extremely fond of human females, and it nearly always gets to them."
"Boss, this is serious! And before she gets the wrong idea, you'd better explain that I like human females because, back home, they always have canine female companions. What I wonder is if I'd be a different individual if my cybernetic component had been implanted, say, in the nervous system of that little blue-green lizard Aelbraugh Pritsch carries with him."
"I suspect," Reille y Sanchez looked at Eichra Oren, "what he wonders about is why, regardless of his status as independent sapient, he feels most comfortable as your companion. I'll bet he even feels a little lost on those occasions when you're not together. Most of all, he wonders how much of his contentment with his lot is real, and how much was programmed into him."
"Watch out," warned Eichra Oren, "I think she's got you, Sam."
Sam sighed. "I've looked through all the programming and every one of my circuit diagrams myself, many times. I've never found a satisfactory answer to any of those questions."
"Meanwhile," she went on, "regardless of the reason, he remains fondly loyal to you, a noble individual he feels deserving of nothing but fond loyalty. He sees himself, possibly with justification, as squire to a famous and formidable knight, although, talking to him, it sometimes seems he thinks of you as his appendage, rather than the other way around. Maybe that's the secret of his peculiar contentment. What do you think, Mr. Famous p'Nan Debt Assessorwhatever that title actually means?"
"I think," Eichra Oren pushed himself from the tree and stood erect, "I'm not the only one who's formidable, and that whoever killed your friend Kamanov is in a great deal of trouble."
"I think," Sam added, "that it's getting late and I'd better get back to the surface and finish my errands. If you two can get along without me." He started down the stairs. "Don't do anything I wouldn't!"
Eichra Oren ignored the dog's advice and took a step closer to her. It was nearly dark. "As for my title, as close as English gets to the concept, I'm simply a kind of ethical bill collector."
She took a step closer to him. "Meaning you collect bills ethically, or you collect ethical bills?"
"Emphasis on the latter." He closed all but the last centimeters of distance between them. "I'm a debt assessor, employed most of the time by the parties I end up collecting from. I provide logical answers to questions regarding what you might call the balance of moral accounts. It usually comes down to a simple matter of settling honest disputes of fact or intention between individuals of good will. On occasion, clients want to be certain of the proper course ahead of time, before they act; I'll admit I've a good deal fewer clients of that sort than I might wish. In any case, once the equation's calculated, I prescribe a course of action to restore the balance, and sometimes act directly to restore it, myself."
"Pretty words." Reille y Sanchez cast a significant glance toward the sword, its handle gleaming in the day's last light where it leaned against the rail. The expression on her face wasn't revulsion. "Which mean you function as judge, jury, and executioner."
"Does spreading the responsibility," he countered, shrugging, "really lessen it?" Although there wasn't enough light to see her clearly by, he turned to face her directly, seized her by the upper arms, pulling her close against him. She, with more training in martial arts than the art of love, raised her forearms reflexively, trying to break the hold.
Before her body knew she wasn't being attacked, he'd released her shoulders, taking her by the wrists instead, bending her arms, not roughly, behind her back where he held them crossed and pinned as he kissed her in the warm dark. It wasn't a thing commonly done among his people. He'd studied it for this assignment and was curious. After a startled instant of resistance, her mouth softened under his and opened. She closed her eyeshe could feel her lashes on his cheekand relaxed against his arms.
Nighttime had come to Eris once again.