"Well, it wouldn't feel like him anyway. Do you remember how you felt at twenty hours night before last?"
"At twenty? Let me see." She closed her eyes. "Wasn't I asleep…? Oh. Something woke me up and I couldn't go back to sleep. I had the feeling that something was terribly wrong. Monsters in the shadows. I was right, wasn't I?"
"Yes. Especially if it was Larry's mind you felt." He gave that a moment to sink in. "And since then?"
"Nothing." Her small hand tapped rhythmically on the chair arm. "Nothing! Except that I want to find him. Find him! That's all I've wanted since he took the ship! Find him before he…"
Find it! But there was no question of finding it, he told himself for the hundredth time. He had to find it first! He had to find it before Kzanol, the real Kzanol, did. And for the hundredth time he wondered if he could.
The Earth had been invisible for hours. Kzanol/Greenberg and Masney sat speechless in the control bubble, speechless and motionless. The control bubble was three quarters of the ship's living space. One could stand upright only in the airlock.
There weren't many distractions for Kzanol/Greenberg. True, he had to keep an eye on Masney. He had to do more than that. He had to know when Masney was uncomfortable, and he had to know it before Masney knew it. If Masney ever came out of hypnosis it might be difficult to get him back. So Kzanol/Greenberg had to send Masney to the lavatory; had to give him water before he was thirsty; had to exercise him before his muscles could cramp from sitting. Masney was not like the usual slave, who could take care of himself when not needed.
Other than that, the self-styled ptavv was dead weight. He spent hours at a time just sitting and thinking. Not planning, for there was nothing to plan. He either reached the eighth planet first, or he didn't. Either he put on the amplifier helmet, or the real Kzanol did, and then there would be no more planning, ever. No mind shield could face an amplifier helmet. On the other hand, the helmet would make him Kzanol's master. Using an amplifier on a thrint was illegal, but he was hardly in danger of Thrintun law.
(Would an amplifier boost the Power of a slave brain? He pushed the thought aside again.)
The far future was bleak at best. He was the last thrint; he couldn't even breed the real Kzanol to get more. Yes, he would be master of an asteroid belt and a heavily populated slave world; yes, he would be richer than even Grandfather Racarliw. But Grandfather had had hundreds of wives, a thousand children!
Kzanol/Greenberg's hundreds of wives would be human slaves, as would his thousand children. Lower-than-ptavvs, every one.
Would he find «women» beautiful? Could he mate with them? Probably. He would have to try it; but his glands were emphatically not Kzanol's glands. In any case he would choose his women by Larry Greenberg's standards of beauty- yes, Greenberg's, regardless of how he felt, for much of the glory in being rich is showing it off, and he would have nobody to impress but slaves.
A dismal prospect.
He would have liked to lose himself in memories, but something held him back. One barrier was that he knew he would nevermore see Thrintun the homeworld, nor Kzathit where he was born, nor Racarliwun, the world he had found and named. He would never look at the world through his own eye; he would see himself only from outside, if ever. This was his own body, his fleshly tomb, now and forever.
There was another barrier, a seemingly trivial matter. Several times Kzanol/Greenberg had closed his eyes and deliberately tried to visualize the happy past; and always what came to mind were whitefoods.
He believed Garner, believed him implicitly. Those films could not have been faked. Copying an ancient tnuctip inscription would not have been enough to perpetrate such a fraud. Garner would have had to compose in tnuctip!
Then the bandersnatchi were intelligent; and the bandersnatchi were undeniably whitefoods. Whitefoods were intelligent, and always had been.
It was as if some basic belief had been shattered. The whitefoods were in all his memories. Whitefoods drifting like sixty-ton white clouds over the estates of Kzathit Stage Logs, and over the green-and-silver fields of other estates when little Kzanol was taken visiting. Whitefood meat in a dozen different forms, on the family table and in every restaurant waiter's memorized menu. A whitefood skeleton over every landowner's guest gate, a great archway of clean polished white bone. Why, the thrint hadn't been born who didn't dream of his own whitefood herd! The whitefood gate meant «landowner» as surely as the sunflower border.
Kzanol/Greenberg cocked his head; his lips pursed slightly, and the skin puckered between his eyebrows. Judy would have recognized the gesture. He had suddenly realized what made the intelligent whitefood so terrible.
A thiint was master over every intelligent beast. This was the Powergiver's primal decree, made before he made the stars. So said all of the twelve Thrintun religions, though they fought insanely over other matters. But if the whitefood was intelligent, then it was immune to the Power. The tnuctipun had done what the Power-giver had forbade!
If the tnuctipun were stronger than the Powergiver, and the Thrintun were stronger than the tnuctipun, and the Powergiver were stronger than the Thrintun-
Then all priests were charlatans, and the Powergiver was a folk myth.
A sentient whitefood was blasphemy.
It was also very damned peculiar.
Why would the tnuctipun have made an intelligent food animal? The phrase had an innocuous sound, like «overkill» or "euthanasia," but if you thought about it-
Thrintun were not a squeamish race. Power, no! But-
An intelligent food animal! Hitler would have fled, retching.
The tnuctipun had never been squeamish, either. The lovely simplicity of their mutated racing viprin was typical of the way they worked. Already the natural animal had been the fastest alive; there was little the tnuctipun could do in the way of redesigning. They had narrowed the animal's head and brought the nose to a point, leaving the nostril like a single jet nacelle, and they had made the skin almost microscopically smooth against wind resistance, but this had not satisfied them. So they had removed several pounds of excess weight and replaced it with extra muscle and extra lung tissue. The weight removed had been all of the digestive organs. A mutated racing viprin had a streamlined sucker of a mouth which opened directly into the bloodstream to admit predigested pap.
The tnuctipun were always efficient, but never cruel.
Why make the whitefood intelligent? To increase the size of the brain, as ordered? But why make it immune to the Power?
And he had eaten whitefood meat.
Kzanol/Greenberg shook his head hard. Masney needed attention, and he had planning to do. Didn't he?
Planning, or mere worrying?
Would the amplifier work on a human brain? Could he find the suit in time?
"'Find him, " Garner quoted. "That could fit. He's looking for something he believes he needs badly."
"But you already knew that. It doesn't help."
"Mrs. Greenberg, what I really came for is to find out everything you can tell me about your husband."
"Then you'd better talk to Dale Snyder. He got here this morning. Want his number?"
"Thanks, I've got it. He called me too. You know him well?"
"Very."
"I'll also want a chance to talk to Charley, the dolphin anthropologist. But let's start with you."
Judy looked unhappy. "I don't know where to start."
"Anywhere."
"Okay. He's got three testicles."
"I'll be damned. That's fairly rare, isn't it?"
"And sometimes troublesome, medically, but Larry never had any problems. We used to call it 'that little extra something about him. Is this the kind of thing you're after?"
"Sure." Luke didn't know. He remembered that the better he knew the man he was chasing, the more likely he was to catch him. It had worked when he was a cop, decades ago. It ought to work now. He let her talk, interrupting very rarely.
"I never noticed what a practical joker he was until after he began working with dolphins, but he's told me some of the things he pulled at college. He must have been a real terror. He was terrible at team athletics, but he plays fair squash and demon tennis…" She needed no prompting now. Her life came out in a stream of words. Her life with Larry Greenberg.
"… must have known a lot of women before he met me. And vice versa, I might add. Neither of us has ever tried adultery. I mean, we have an arrangement that we can, but we've never used it."