“Tananareve,” Memor in her best learned accent, trying to address the primate by name in its own awkward tongue, “you can survive this level of agony for, you would say, how long?”
Free of agony, the primate leaped to her feet. Eyes narrow, mouth tight, voice high. “You torture me like a lab animal!”
“A legitimate use,” Memor said mildly, “in warfare.”
“War? We landed on your world-thing, tried to open negotiations—”
“No use to revisit the past, little one. We are on to other matters, and this experiment was useful to us.”
“How?” The primate sagged to her knees, than sat, wiping sweat from her forehead. “How can slamming me with that damn fire-beam help?”
“We need to know how to … negotiate … with those of your kind.”
“You mean fight them.”
“The opening struggle comes first, of course.”
Tananareve’s face took on an expression Memor had learned to interpret: cautious calculation. These primates managed to convey emotion through small moves of mouth, eyes, chin. They had evolved on some flat plain, apparently, without benefit of the wide range of expression that feathers conferred. Tananareve said slowly, “I’m very glad they’re still free. It means you don’t know how to deal with them.”
Memor disliked the sliding logic of this creature, but knew she had to get around it. “We need the means to bring them to order. Inflicting pain is much more … virtuous … than simply killing them, I think you will agree?”
Tananareve shot back, “Do you have anything you would die for? Your freedom to make your own way, for example?”
“No, dying seems pointless. If you die, you cannot make use of the outcome of the act.”
“Die to save others? Or for a belief?”
“I certainly would not die for my beliefs. I could be wrong.”
Tananareve shook her head, which seemed to be how these creatures implied rejection. “So you experiment on me, to see what power level of your beam works best?”
“That, and tunable frequency. How else are we to know?”
Thin lips, narrowed eyes. Anger, yes; Memor was getting used to their ways. “Don’t do it again.”
“I see no need to. You obviously felt a great terrible agony. That will suffice.”
“I need … sleep.”
“That I can grant.” In truth, Memor was tired of this exercise. She did not like to inflict stinging hurt. Yet her superior, Asenath, had commanded that a fresh weapon be developed, capable of delivering sudden sharp pain. The customary such radiator, which worked well on the Sil, had failed in the first, clumsy battle. Memor did not like to think of that engagement, which had killed the skyfish she rode in. Her escape pod had lingered long enough to witness the giant, buoyant beast writhe in air, its hydrogen chambers breached by rattling shots from the ground cannon below. Then the hydrogen ignited in angry orange fireballs and the skyfish gave a long, rolling bass note of agony. The mournful cry did not end until its huge cylindrical body crumpled, crackling with flames, against a hillside. What a fiasco!
Now Memor had to redeem herself. She could do so by developing and delivering quickly a pain projector, one that could damage the primates without overloading their nervous systems, and thus killing them. And now she had. Further, at the insistence of the weapons shops, Memor’s stroke of insight had been to carry out earlier testing on small tree-dweller primates, gathered from the Citadel Gardens for the purpose. They seemed to have similar neurological systems and vulnerabilities, and so were the optimal path to this success.
Memor swelled with pride. The trials on the Sil city had been preliminary, and it was difficult from the skyfish to discern if humans had been affected at all. But these tunings made that probable. The Sil had needed discipline, and the possibility of death-stinging the humans hiding among them was a bonus, of course.
“We will speak later,” she told the primate. “I have more interesting experiments in mind for us to work upon together.”
The primate made a noise of deep tones—nothing more than grunts, really—perhaps some symptom of a residual pain. Memor thought it best not to notice this as she departed, her small attendants and the weapons team following dutifully.
THIRTEEN
Memor hated when her insides wanted to be her outsides.
She did not like the testing of new weapons upon her charge, the primate. To do so made her nauseated, her acids run sour. Yet Asenath had ordered quick results quite clearly, and to preserve her position Memor had to comply. She accepted the logic, however distasteful the experience.
Looked at another way, the slap of pain did not merely withhold: the slap imparted. It conveyed precisely the knowledge of greater power withheld. In that knowledge lay the genius of using, the deep humiliation it imposed. It invited the victim to accept a punishment in pursuit of a larger purpose, one that might have been worse—that would in fact be worse if the use wasn’t accepted. The pain-slap required that the higher goal be understood.
Of course, the primates could not understand this, but in time with their Adoption that would come. If they could not be so opened, then they would have to be extinguished, well before their vagrant abilities could be a threat.
Memor relaxed a bit by regarding the aged wonders nearby as she passed down corridors and through yawning archways. The teeth of time wore long on the Bowl. By its nature it must run steadily. Engineer species must fix problems without the luxury of trial and error experimenting. That meant engineer teams relied on memory, not ingenuity. Intelligence was less vital than ready response to situations that had occurred before, and so were lodged in cultural recollection. Species had their mental abilities shaped to do this. It was the Way.
Memor thought on this as she watched some mutants being culled. They were small variants on the repair snakes, long ago acquired from a world with rapid tectonics. They had evolved swift, acute responses to those treacherous lands, a driver of their crafty intelligence. Memor had witnessed the underground cities this kind built, when allowed, in the underskin of the Bowl—labyrinths of elegance and deft taste she had been much impressed by. Memor remained surprised that these snakes had subsections of their genome that made them resist the nirvana of the Bowl. Surely here they should be endlessly joyful, for they were free of the frightening ground-quakes, foul volcanoes, and hammering ocean waves that often dashed their hopes and their subsurface homes to oblivion?
These, however, had a touch too much of their crafty independence. They were in a nearby chamber with transparent walls, where another research team had tried to correct the mental errors in the snakes. Apparently, this corrective experiment had failed. The researchers were exterminating them by gas, and Memor paused to watch the agonies of these smart serpents, who under duress flung themselves into twisting knots. It was revolting, writhing bodies and pain-stretched mouths. At least she could not hear them, as she had Tananareve’s shrieks. Gazing through the wall at this, she could not help but reflect upon the fate of the primates, should they continue to provoke.
They would face the fate of the Sil, whose rebellion had united with the renegade primates and brought down Memor’s skyfish. That had made the reprisal destruction of the Sil city inevitable—though it came first as an idea sprung from the slim though weighty head of Asenath, the reigning Chief of Wisdom.
Memor sighed and trudged on, putting the image of the snake agonies behind her. Now she must go to Asenath and confer, though she sorely disliked and feared the Chief of Wisdom, who was known to be capricious.
An oddity of long history had placed the confinement and punishment chambers together with ancient honoring sites. They were all now encased in a great Citadel that loomed above the lush green landscapes here. She lumbered past large, luxuriant stone structures of vast age, moss clinging to the doorways of crypts polished by time. Some bore blemishes of tomb raiders, but even those harsh, jagged edges had smoothed. These chambers held ancient dead who had been allowed burial, in a far-distant time when that was possible, and before the realization that all mass and vital elements must be reprocessed. Surely that was the highest honor, to be part of life eternally, not a mere oxidized relic. The bodies inside had long returned to the air, of course, with only shriveled bones remaining as a small, unharvested calcium deposit. No doubt the grave goods—ornaments and valuable family remembrance-coffers that some added to the sepulchers of that age—had disappeared long ago, at the hands of vagrant intruders. The past was the easiest venue to rob, after all.