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SIXTY-TWO Councils of War

"Boss?"

The familiar voice, sourceless and inaudible to the unaided ear, echoed within Eichra Oren's skull.

The Antarctican moral debt assessor had just returned to his office and living quarters, built in the forest between the American encampment and the Elders' settlement. Now he shrugged out of his transparent filmsuit and stepped into the shower. The suit had protected him from the flame and smoke of the fire and had dealt in its own way with the sweat and grime of his exertions, but he still needed hot, soapy water running over his body in order to feel clean.

He also needed to speak aloud, although it wasn't technically necessary. "What's up, Sam?"

"I hate to disturb your privacy, Boss, but we wondered if we could have a word with you."

The debt assessor's house drew its water supply directly from the veins of the great tree it was attached to. Even the energy required to heat the water had first fallen on a billion leaves as sunlight. Eichra Oren ducked his head under the shower tap, briefly enjoying the warm, gentle drumming on his scalp. " `We'?"

"Mister Thoggosh and I. For reasons he'll explain when I give him a chance, he's sitting in a quiet corner of Nellus Glaser's greasy spoon at the moment, having nine or twelve beers and feeling extremely pissed off about being kicked out of his own office. I'm hanging out wherever the little dot goes when you turn off the TV. Boss, there's a pattern starting to take shape that neither of us likes very much. We thought you'd better know about it as soon as possible."

Eichra Oren finished rinsing, willed the water off, and stepped out of the spiral shower enclosure—an idea he'd swiped from the Americans' most famous science-fiction writer—which made a door or curtain unnecessary. Currents of warm air sucked moisture out of the enclosure and would have dried his body if he'd let them, but he also needed the feel of a rough towel on his skin. He'd rubbed his face dry and was starting on his thick, wavy hair before he replied.

"One incident, however spectacular and disastrous, hardly constitutes a pattern, does it?"

"Why, Boss! I wouldn't have believed it possible, but I think you've hurt my feelings!"

Another familiar voice, equally sourceless, amplified Sam's complaint. "Three incidents, my young friend. First came the `accident' that happened to Oasam, then the shuttle fire. Afterward, when I returned to my quarters, the fluorocarbon there had been contaminated with a deadly poison. I'm gratified to say that I discovered this act of sabotage before I removed my protective clothing."

"Otherwise we'd both be communicating with you from electric limbo. Or is it purgatory? Anyway, who'd have guessed there'd be a digital afterlife? Ain't seance wonderful?"

Despite his present fire-blackened mood, Eichra Oren chuckled to himself. He'd discussed all of the philosophical ramifications with Mister Thoggosh, Dlee Raftan Saon, and Rosalind until he was tired of thinking about them. Nobody would convince him that this wasn't his old friend, but only a clever copy, talking inside his head.

Tossing his damp towel at a rack that would clean and dry it, he strode from the bath into the bedroom where a closet operating on similar principles had already cleaned and pressed his clothing. For the moment, he felt a great reluctance to resume one of the Hawaiian shirts and the faded Levis he'd worn since coming to 5023 Eris. Originally selected to help the Americans accept his presence here more readily, they remained as alien-feeling to him as, say, Gutierrez might have felt in one of Raftan's "ghillie" suits of multicolored fabric strips.

Instead, he chose a lightweight, knee-length tunic from his native Elder-influenced Antarctican culture, although he did slip his feet into a pair of comfortable Japanese running shoes, sitting on the edge of the bed to tie them and thinking about the power laces he'd seen in one of the American movies Sam had come to love. Another thought passed through his mind—untransmitted to the beings he was conversing with—that he'd been on this asteroid too long and that it was past time to go home.

"All right, granted," he told them at last. "Three incidents does point to a pattern of some kind, and I don't like it any better than you do. We no sooner deal with one set of problems, culminating in the defeat of a military invasion, when somebody tries to cause us even more grief. What do you two suggest?"

"Aside from my own determination, becoming manifest even as we speak, to combine the surviving structural elements of the three American shuttles into one undamaged, `Elder-enhanced' spacecraft," Mister Thoggosh replied, obviously pausing to take a sip of beer, "I understand that you're already trying to find out precisely what happened to Sam, at the request of Model 17, is that correct?"

"Danny Gutierrez." The man nodded, then realized that the gesture would go unperceived, since he was unwilling to pass along everything he might be feeling at the moment, even to Sam. "Once I got my emotions untangled and my thought processes straightened out, I realized I'd be doing exactly that, even if nobody had asked me to. Not just what happened to Sam, but who did it and why. I haven't had time to make much of a start yet. And I'm going to need Sam's help."

"Just what I always wanted!" groaned the former dog, his tone only half serious. "Oh well, on the other hand, I guess it isn't everybody who gets to investigate his own murder!"

"No, it isn't."

Grinning, Eichra Oren took his sword of office from the bed where he'd tossed it, pulled it from its scabbard, and peered critically down each of its edges in turn, looking carefully for small nicks and scratches. The alloy the weapon was composed of lay far beyond the metallurgical abilities of the Soviet Americans, but their spacecraft had been constructed of an aggregate of rather odd materials and there was no telling what damage they might have done to his blade.

Satisfied that his weapon was intact, he nevertheless slipped a small white ceramic hone from a pocket on the back of the scabbard, sat cross-legged on the bed with the sword across one knee, and gently stroked its already gleaming edges, a gesture as unnecessary—and yet somehow needful—as his shower and rough toweling.

It seemed to be his day, he thought, for that sort of useless, necessary gesture, all around.

After a few minutes of this, he spoke again. "Very well, here's your pattern, gentlebeings. And after sufficient reflection, it becomes a reasonably obvious one. Somebody is trying to set the Americans against us, and vice versa."

"Again," Sam added.

"I was very much afraid you'd say that." Mister Thoggosh gave forth with one of his counterfeit electronic sighs. "That was my thought, as well. You both know these Americans much better than I do. Politically speaking, how effective are their memories? Is it too much to hope that both parties have been through enough together by now, not to be manipulated again in such a manner?"

"Why don't you tell us?" Sam demanded. "You're supposed to be the wise and ancient being here."

"Then I greatly fear, Otusam, that it is my considered opinion as the wise and ancient being in residence here, that unless we discover who's really doing all these terrible things—and stop him cold, or her—precisely the same tensions and mistrust which threatened to destroy us all once before will return. To that end—discovering and stopping this culprit, I mean—I should like to assign the task to you, Eichra Oren. That is, if you're willing."

Eichra Oren experienced a transitory glimpse through Mister Thoggosh's eyes, of the interior of the restaurant he'd taken refuge in while his quarters were decontaminating themselves. He wondered briefly what he'd see if he looked through Sam's "eyes." So far he hadn't asked. He surprised himself, replying without hesitation.

"I'm willing, right enough, Mister Thoggosh, provided Sam is, too. And I suspect that we've already been presented with a clue of sorts. Our `culprit' has to be somebody unattached to either group, human or nautiloid."

The giant mollusc made a sort of hiccuping noise of startled objection. "That's rather a leap, even for you, my young friend. How did you arrive at this conclusion?"

"Yeah," Sam asked, "and who the hell does it leave?"

"Excuse me, I probably should have said ex-Soviet American, rather than human, but even that doesn't say it quite right. I intended to exclude any of Horatio Gutierrez's people, even the former KGB agents among them. Whoever he or she happens to be, our villain has to be one of the most recent newcomers—Chinese, Russian, or American—not to have known about Mister Thoggosh's filmsuit, and that it would function as a layer of emergency protection against any poison."

The Proprietor took a moment to mull it over. "It may be more a measure of my desperation than of objective reality, but that sounds reasonable to me. You're suggesting it's some straggling survivor of the recent battle, someone who didn't get rounded up by Tl*m*nch*l's security people or Colonel Tai's Extra-Special Forces?"

Eichra Oren shook his head. "I don't know exactly what I'm suggesting, Mister Thoggosh, except that everyone who was already here—including members of Gutierrez's party—knows all about filmsuits and would probably choose some other way."

"The trouble with your beautiful theory, Boss," Sam pointed out, "is that they have to be ignorant about filmsuits—and at the same time know how to manipulate the mechanisms down below that got me." Somehow, Eichra Oren felt Sam shudder at the memory.

The nautiloid agreed with the dog. "Yes, not to mention how neatly they defeated my security precautions. Yet another trouble with the idea is that the saboteur might well have counted on my removing my filmsuit before I noticed the poison. That's very nearly what happened, you know. If it hadn't been for my poor—"

Mister Thoggosh was cut off as Eichra Oren gave him the cerebrocortical equivalent of a suddenly upthrust hand. Someone—it could only have been one of the Americans, of course, since anybody else would have simply "rung the doorbell" via implant—was outside shouting, pounding frantically on his front door.

Cautious in light of recent events, the moral debt assessor slipped the tiny silver-colored plasma pistol he always carried out of his tunic pocket. Although it weighed less than a quarter of a kilogram, it may have represented the most powerful type of personal weapon on the asteroid and was a popular choice, especially with many of the smaller sapients. Concealing it in his palm, he rose from the bed, mentally allowing the door to dilate slowly as he approached it.

Empleado paced up and down on the balcony outside, looking pale and shaken. "Eichra Oren! There's something—somebody lying over there in the trees! I mean a dead body! It's one of the . . . the sea-scorpions with its head all bashed in like—" Abruptly, the former KGB agent turned, bent over the rail of the balcony as if someone had punched him in the stomach, and vomited onto the ground below.

"KGB agent," observed Sam, watching through the assessor's eyes, "tough guy."

Without comment, Eichra Oren went back into the house for a fresh towel and moistened it. He returned to the balcony and handed it to Empleado, who was still bent over the rail making futile, retching noises. Eyes streaming, the former KGB man finally straightened, accepted the towel, and pointed a shaky finger at the base of one of the trees perhaps a hundred meters from the house.

Eichra Oren nodded, descended the short flight of stairs, and crossed the leaf-littered forest floor, headed in the indicated direction. The dead body Empleado had discovered wasn't hard at all to find—but it was impossible to identify.

For a long while, the assessor knelt beside the corpse, lifting various portions of it with a telescoping stylus from his tunic pocket and peering down at it with much the same expression he'd displayed earlier, examining the edges of his sword.

"Well, here's a fourth incident for you," he muttered under his breath, addressing Sam and Mister Thoggosh, "to add to your pattern. I don't have any idea who it is, but from his weapon—and the fact that he was caught with it buttoned up under his filmsuit—I'll bet it isn't Tl*m*nch*l or any of his people."

Sam agreed. Both he and the Proprietor were observing the scene relayed by Eichra Oren's implant. "They're a wholesomely paranoid bunch, all right. And our late friend here is living proof—or at least recently deceased—that paranoids live longer."

"If it isn't one of Tl*m*nch*l's," Mister Thoggosh declared, "then there's only one other individual it could be. S*bb*ts*rrh, our Small Artifactologist. Dlee Raftan Saon will be able to confirm that through external stimulation of his cerebrocortical implant, of course, and perhaps even get a picture of the killer. By why in an infinite number of universes would anyone wish to kill such a charming, harmless—?"

"That's the really nasty part, I suspect." Eichra Oren was disgusted. "I don't think it mattered who got killed, as long as the body was found halfway between—"

A footfall on the dried leaves behind him made Eichra Oren stand up from where he'd been kneeling beside the body and turn, plasma pistol ready in his hand and pointed. Adjusted properly, the little fusion-powered weapon was capable of blasting man-sized holes in solid rock, and the Antarctican had it turned up all the way.

But it was only Empleado, walking a bit unsteadily and still dabbing at his mouth with the towel. Still preoccupied with the shock of his discovery, he didn't even seem to see the pistol pointed at him. "Do you know who it is, Eichra Oren?"

"Maybe." The p'Nan moral debt assessor pocketed his weapon. "We were discussing that."

"We?" Empleado repeated, glancing around.

"Mister Thoggosh, Sam, and I, via cerebrocortical implant. Let me ask you something which you may recognize from your own experience as professional routine: after you found it, did you move this body or disturb it in any way, Mr. Empleado?"

Looking bewildered, the man shook his head vigorously. "Arthur, please. No, I didn't. I don't think I could have . . . Eichra Oren, I've got to admit something to you. To somebody. I never really thought of these things—all of the Elders' people, I mean, except for you and maybe Sam—as real people before this. If anyone had told me that I'd react this way to seeing one of them killed . . ."

At least partly sincere, the debt assessor placed a sympathetic hand on the man's shoulder. "I'm sorry it had to happen this way, Arthur, but it's a good thing to hear, nonetheless. It means you're growing up in a way your own culture never allowed you to. To answer your question, we're not absolutely certain, but we think it's one of the archaeology staff, an individual named S*bb*ts*rrh."

Apparently it was too much all at once. Empleado reeled with shock. "But . . . I was speaking with him only a few hours ago! We had an argument, a loud one in front of his subordinates. He—" The former KGB man shut up suddenly, displaying the reflex his people had to look around for anyone who happened to be listening.

Less sympathetic now, the Antarctican tightened his grip on the man's shoulder. "He what?"

"He insulted me, Eichra Oren, he really insulted me, in several different languages, I think, in front of witnesses!" Empleado took a deep, shuddering breath and let it out. "His clerical staff or whatever. Which makes me the principal suspect."

Eichra Oren released Empleado's shoulder with a vague look of negation. "Arthur, everybody on this asteroid is a suspect until I get a chance to begin eliminating them one by one. Anyway, as I say, we're not yet completely certain that it's S*bb*ts*rrh . . ." He paused, listening. "Although Mister Thoggosh informs me that S*bb*ts*rrh was the only sea- scorpionoid on 5023 Eris not associated with Tl*m*nch*l's security group. I'll have to call on Dlee Raftan Saon before we can—"

"That won't be necessary." A voice came from the depths of the forest, followed by the sound of feet wading through dried leaves and other woodland debris. Before either man could respond, the aged insectoid physician emerged from the trees, dapper for one of his kind in the suit of long, multicolored strips Eichra Oren had imagined Gutierrez trying on. "I happened to be on my way to see you."

Dlee Raftan Saon stopped beside the sea-scorpionoid's body, hunkered down as close as his rigid arthropodic anatomy would permit, and began rummaging through the small black medical bag he always carried. Some things were the same in any universe. "Now where did I put that—ah, here it is! This will only take a moment."

"And it won't hurt a bit," added Sam, speaking sarcastically from recent experience.

Ignoring the dog's remarks, as he often did, the physician had removed a black-enameled metal object shaped like a small flashlight from his bag and was applying one end of it to the ruins of the sea-scorpionoid's chitinous skull. After a few suspenseful seconds, the object chirruped at him and Dlee Raftan Saon looked up, consulting information the device had just transmitted to his implant.

"It's S*bb*ts*rrh, all right," read the insect-being, "age: 323—too young to die, but then aren't we all? Current occupation: Small Artifactologist, originally with the University of H*rr*s*nf*rd where he had taught for—"

"That will do, Doctor," Mister Thoggosh interrupted. "I have all of that information here. Thank you for identifying the remains—er, he is dead, isn't he?"

The insect-being chuckled grimly. "I, physician Dlee Raftan Saon, do hereby attest and certify that our friend S*bb*ts*rrh is a former Small Artifactologist—if that's what you meant. Somebody did a pretty brutal job on him." Suddenly he leaped up and confronted Empleado. "Was it you, Mister Secret Policeman?"

Empleado took a startled step backward. "My God, no! I never . . . I mean I couldn't—" Again the physician chuckled, more good-naturedly this time, and his compound eyes, the size of grapefruit, glittered at the American. "Forgive me, Arthur, I've always wanted to try that, just once. Didn't work worth a dither, did it?"

"But I didn't have anything against him!" Empleado wasn't listening. "We only disagreed about the importance of preserving antiquities in their undisturbed—"

"We'll get to that in a minute," Eichra Oren told the man. "I'm not sure I believe you really care about the preservation of antiquities. I think you've been—but we'll see." He turned to Dlee Raftan Saon. "What are the chances of an image of the killer having been recorded in the victim's implant?"

Dlee Raftan Saon inspected the readouts on his instrument and imitated human head-shaking. "Not good. It was rather badly damaged, I'm afraid."

"All right, then." Eichra Oren nodded. "What brought you out here in the first place, Doctor?"

Air rushed in and out of the row of spiracles along Dlee Raftan Saon's abdomen in the insect version of a sigh. "Rosalind Nguyen brings me, Eichra Oren. I've been taking care of minor casualties from the shuttle fire all day, and was looking for a little help. I started inquiring around about her—I do wish she'd have an implant installed—and apparently she can't be found anywhere.

"She seems to have disappeared!"

 

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