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  Ken telepathically ordered her to wait, then started back along the bank. Careful to make no noise, he let the night creatures mask his approach with their cheepings and rustlings in the willows.

  The guard was using a torch pole staked down into the stream bank. He wasn’t lucky enough to have an alien woman with cat vision to warn him of dangers.

  Plainly the man had been on duty a long time. He was growing bored, inattentive, and eager to change watches and get back to the village. He probably assumed all the excitement was taking place in the valley and longed to join the search for Eads’ enemies. The guard idly smacked a club into a cupped palm.

  Ken slipped out from beneath the willows and stood an arm’s-length from the guard. The man’s back was to him.

  Balancing lightly on the balls of his feet, Ken tapped the man’s right shoulder.

  “What the —?”

  As anticipated, the man swung, backhanding the club in a wild arc. Ken ducked and drove a one-two punch into the man’s middle. It took away both the man’s fight and the breath he might have used to yell for reinforcements. Ken chopped down on the man’s wrist, jolting the club loose. Then he brought his locked fists down on the guard’s shoulder blades, collapsing the man into the grass.

  There was no further movement. The man breathed deeply, evenly, but he was unconscious.

  Well-satisfied, Ken tossed the club into the bushes nearby. One guard down, and no need for bloodshed. The man would come to with a sore stomach and an aching neck but no serious damage was done.

  Ken had been tempted, though. He had recognized the face — one of the men who’d jumped his trio that afternoon. But he was not the man who’d struck Thayenta.

  Thayenta was crying, like an abandoned kitten.

  He tensed, looked downstream, on the alert. No one had heard his struggle with the guard. No one seemed to hear Thayenta. Ken hurried to her side, concerned.

  She was crouched at the stream’s bank, holding something … a piece of white … raft. There were a lot of other pieces of the same stuff, scattered along the reeds and under the willows.

  No single piece was larger than Ken’s hand. The thing had been battered to pieces. Eads’ men, venting their spleen, had smashed the raft, reducing it to tiny fragments.

  How would he and Thayenta get back to M’Nae headquarters now? Without the raft, it would take hours to trek upstream.

  Then Thayenta’s weeping hit him. These were not a human woman’s tears. Deeper, they wrenched at Ken as if he himself were suffering some terrible, unbearable grief.

  She rocked back and forth, cuddling the broken pieces of the raft. Whimpering. “Juissa. Juissa. Lao … lao … ”

  Her anguish ripped at Ken. He felt the pain of loss, as real as if he shared the horror Thayenta would have felt had she found one of her people lying dead beside the river.

  Ken’s thought hit him like a physical blow. Dead. The raft was dead, and Thayenta was mourning it! How often he had puzzled over those M’Nae garments, wall surfaces and rafts, saying to himself, “The damned stuff acts like it’s alive!”

  It was!

  Thayenta made her garments out of living things. All the M’Nae formed garments of natural objects, forming and reforming them, but never cutting or destroying.

  They used willows or moss or something that became white plastic and undulated and breathed like living tissue.

  In the harsh, wavering light of the torch, Thayenta’s tears were diamonds, sparkling on the long lashes framing those space-black eyes. She looked up at Ken, and there was mingled rage and horror in her piquant face. By now she had learned quite a bit of Ken’s language. The words that came at him were Terran, undiluted by the impersonality of the translator. “Kill! Death bringers. They kill! Again!”

  CHAPTER 11

  This was far more than a woman’s grief over a slaughtered pet. Ken pulled Thayenta close, soothing her, empathizing with her torment.

  She hammered small fists against his chest. Brokenly, she sobbed over and over, “Death bringers, death bringers …”

  The awful paradox twisted at Ken. There was Eads, whose philosophy demanded that man work hand in hand with nature, scorning technology, demanding a return to mankind’s primitive days. On the other hand, the M’Nae — Eads’ enemies, by the sheerest of accidents — were living hand in hand with nature, without any apparent technology, using the very stuff of the planet for their clothing and transportation.

  “Thayenta, easy,” Ken whispered. Even in this emotional turmoil, her cries were soft, unlikely to carry far in this damp air. There was no danger that the guards downstream might hear her. Ken let her cry it out, angry that she should have such pain, wishing he could explain human motives. The men who had “killed” the raft hadn’t meant to be cruel, hadn’t realized it was a living object.

  Gradually, her weeping died, and Thayenta pushed away from Ken, staring at him with a bright, angry gaze. Fragile, and alien, she had never appeared so unhuman. The fury in her face startled him. “Kill. They always kill.”

  He had to bring the truth to her. “But the M’Nae have killed too, Thayenta. They’ve killed Terrans.”

  She gasped, her eyes widening. “M’Nae do not —”

  “Yes, they do, not intentionally, but they do. Some of Eads’ colonists died when the ship crashed and the ship crashed because of the M’Nae,” Ken explained as simply as possible. “The Gera-ana, the shadow of the Iontran … whatever you call that place with the prism kills men. From space it’s a blurry area, a gigantic gravity vortex, a trap that sucks Terran ships right out of space — and kills us. We can’t warn our home world. More humans will come, searching for us. More humans will die — because of the M’Nae.”

  Tears dried on her pale cheeks and Thayenta nibbled her lip. He was asking much, begging her to span the vast gap separating their species. Too often Ken had ignored that gap, tempted to think of Thayenta as merely a lovely human woman with somewhat strange coloring, forgetting she was an alien, a telepath, that her motives might be very different from his.

  It was time for truth-facing all around.

  Her fingers caressed his cheek. “Ken … pain. Thayenta pain. Ken knows.” She reacted to his sympathy for the “dead” raft, ready to forgive his species much because of one little emotion.

  “That’s right. When you hurt, I hurt. Humans aren’t necessarily evil, Thayenta. We can learn from our mistakes. Give us a chance.” Ken bent his head and peered at her closely. “Thayenta, I’ve got to talk to Briv. I’ve got to make him understand. He stopped Eads once without hurting him. If he can do it again —”

  “Raft …” She waved helplessly at the broken pieces.

  “Teleportation,” Ken insisted. He gripped her shoulders and pressed for a confession. “That way’s faster, and I think you know how it’s done. Don’t you? I can’t read your mind, but I get “vibes.” You haven’t told me the full story, have you?”

  Thayenta looked at him anxiously, and Ken felt her tiptoeing through his brain. You think?

  “I think that you’re quite capable of teleporting humans, if you want to, and maybe yourself as well. Oh, it might take Briv’s help, but you have the ability. When we were first captured, the M’Nae teleported R.C. and me. And you …” He stared at her intently. “When you first showed up by the shipwreck, I thought you’d walked there, out of the mist. Now I’m not sure. If you could project your image thousands of kilometers into space, what else can you do?”

  She darted a pink tongue between small teeth, licking her lips. Ken saw the two of them cagily circling each other, mentally.

  “Thayenta, level with me,” he pleaded. “Time is precious. Lives are at stake … Terran lives and M’Nae lives.”

  And at last she admitted, “It is … difficult. Must … cooperate.’"

  “R.C. and I weren’t cooperating when you teleported us,” Ken argued. “But we weren’t in any condition to resist, certainly. What about your ambassador? Why didn’t he teleport
to safety?”

  “Too … fast,” Thayenta said. “Happened too fast.”

  Ken nodded. That made sense. “The M’Nae didn’t know about needlers, didn’t realize Eads and his people were edgy, panicky because they were breaking laws. And we don’t know much more about you, do we?” He took Thayenta’s hands. They were cold. He gently chafed her skin, attempting to call back warmth. “Thayenta, it’s got to stop. There must be no more killing on either side.”

  Her eyes were fathomless. As the torchlight flickered, Ken caught glimpses of her pupils shimmering in the blackness. She was an alien. Yet they could touch minds and hearts.

  “You can teleport, can’t you?” he said softly.

  With obvious shame, Thayenta bowed her head. “I can … accept, or not.”

  “You mean Briv’s been trying to teleport you out of this mess all along? And you’ve resisted him, refused to let him?” Ken exclaimed. He was shaken. He hadn’t known she possessed that much strength. What were her motives?

  She caressed his cheek again. A human gesture, but done with a M’Nae grace. “I wanted to stay with Ken.” He didn’t have any words. He was touched and moved and appalled at the risks she had taken on his behalf. Now she stood up, abandoning the pieces of raft. “I will accept. Now, I must. Briv is not pleased.”

  “I’ll bet he isn’t, and I’m not sure I am, either,” Ken said. An apprentice in a rigid, telepathic society, she’d disobeyed orders because of Ken. It was a serious offense.

  “Must go,” and Thayenta pointed upstream.

  “To the place where the mist begins? Why? Can’t we teleport from here?” Ken asked. There was no answer — more M’Nae protocol.

  She ran lightly along the bank, Ken following her. He squished through reedy low spots and irritably knocked aside low hanging willow branches. Ken lengthened his stride to match hers as she loped easily through this wet, dark world.

  Only when he began floundering — beyond the light of the torch, blind in the night — did Thayenta pause. The clouds parted overhead, and the triple shadows of NE 592’s moons played across her pale face eerily. Purple mist rose from the stream, from the banks, floating toward the two of them.

  Here.

  Did she say that, or think it to him? Quite without willing it, Ken was slipping more and more into telepathic patterns, sending and receiving mental messages. Each time he and Thayenta touched minds, it was easier. With some training, he might develop into an imitation M’Nae, though he’d probably always remain on a quite juvenile level!

  But could he ever learn to develop a telepathic shield?

  He touched her shoulder, orienting himself to that single lovely form in this purple mist.

  A wave of vertigo struck Ken, twisting his gut.

  *

  Suddenly, it wasn’t dark any more. The world around him dissolved into light — a brilliant, corruscating rainbow of light.

  He was in the aliens’ council chamber. As if he’d sucked it along with him as he’d stepped through a doorway, a few wisps of purplish fog wafted about Ken’s ankles. It formed the doorway from the real world to the M’Nae fortress.

  The prismatic device stood a few meters away, and beside it stood Briv. Beyond Briv, the M’Nae waited. Ken tensed. There were no longer just ten M’Nae. Now there were at least twenty aliens, a semi-circle of jewel-skinned people, spreading out behind the constantly shifting prism shape.

  More of them had come through the alien matter transmitter. At this rate, their numbers would soon match that of Eads’ colonists.

  Thayenta sidled close to Ken and he inhaled her scent of fear. His arm swept protectively about her. Whatever happened, they would face it together.

  There had been some changes, and not just in the number of M’Nae. Briv was wearing a translator — a twin to Thayenta’s. He must have transmitted it from the M’Nae home planet. The device clung to mossy green threads on the chest of Briv’s clothing. He crossed the chamber with long, heavy strides.

  “Brace yourself, Thayenta,” Ken said softly. “A hell of a lot is riding on the next few minutes.”

  The alien leader clamped a muffling hand over his translator and spewed a stream of M’Nae profanity at Thayenta. She trembled and Ken snapped, “Leave her alone. She did the right thing. She stuck to her job until she had all the facts. Or do the M’Nae really want to kill more and more humans? Do you want to drag spaceship after spaceship down by that thing?” Ken pointed accusingly at the pulsating prism.

  Briv’s baleful stare shifted from Thayenta to Ken. “This world is M’Nae.”

  Ken thrust Thayenta behind him and advanced to confront the alien leader. “As long as we’re discussing land rights, it was a Terran who first landed on this world, Briv, a man named Noland Eads. He was here a long time ago, long before you came here with your Gera-ana.”

  His counterattack made Briv pause. The aliens flanking the prism were silent, expressionless, waiting for the man in charge to hand out orders.

  Ken’s attitude took a slight directional shift. Briv reminded him of R.C. and Eads. He was strong, even ruthless, because he had to be, carrying the weight of responsibility for so many lives. Now Ken had added more lives, Terran lives, to Briv’s burden.

  Ken envisioned a massed bank of telepathic claws, waiting to rake his mind to ribbons. Yes, Briv could do that, but would he?

  “Try it, and I get mad,” Ken said coldly. “Thayenta didn’t detect those guards along the trail. Their mental level was too basic, wasn’t it? And when I wanted to tear you to pieces, you didn’t handle that too well, did you?”

  “I controlled the chief death-bringer in his anger.” Briv dropped the reminder like a bomb.

  Ken tensed, thought hard. “His rage was distracted by R.C. That left him wide open. The man’s not in his right mind, anyway —”

  “You have your death weapon.”

  He had almost forgotten the weight sagging his pocket. Ken pulled out the needler, held it on his palm, considering options. How could he persuade the M’Nae of his sincerity? He felt waves of tension from the aliens watching him.

  Very deliberately, Ken tossed the needler away, skittering it across the undulating white floor into the shadows, out of his reach.

  The silence in the chamber was awesome. Ken waited, hardly daring to breathe. It was a big gamble. He had risked everything he had on one throw of the dice. He had risked his own life, Thayenta’s, R.C.’s and Eads’ and the lives of all the colonists. All hung in the balance, now that Ken had thrown away his one Terran weapon.

  Briv’s bony face took on a peculiar expression. If the M’Nae were human, Ken would have called it mischievous. Briv sidled another step forward, within arm’s length of Ken. His full lips were pulled back in a grimace. The M’Nae version of a smile? If so, it was a nasty one, and one very suited to Briv.

  Without a word, Briv swung a clumsy punch at Ken’s head. He was not accustomed to this style of fighting yet he stepped into a physical world and left himself wide open for a counter punch.

  Ken parried the blow and closed his hand over Briv’s fist. His muscles strained to hold the attack in check. Briv was strong, as Ken had known from the first.

  For several long moments they wrestled silently, Briv’s fist in Ken’s hand.

  Finally, Briv drew back, let his hand fall. Ken’s breath whistled out and he mopped sweat from his face and neck. He hoped this wasn’t merely the first round!

  Thayenta ran to Ken, slipped her small hands around his arm, clinging to him. Her elation washed against his mind. Apparently Ken had scored a telling point and had not violated the rules of the game.

  Briv gestured to the prism. “Gera-ana.”

  “I see,” Ken said, employing Briv’s ritual phrase. “Your matter transmitter from your home world. How did you get it to this planet?”

  Briv frowned and closed his eyes. Images rushed at Ken. He let them in. His practice with Thayenta made it easier to erase the last traces of resistance to telepathic comm
unication. At one with Briv’s mind, Ken was on another world, far from NE 592, far from any solar system yet known to Earth.

  *

  It was a world of purple mists and moonlight, and of a darkening, rapidly dying sun.

  Ken was a spectator on that other world, watching Briv and many other M’Nae deep in concentration,

  Space Trap combining their telepathic powers for a gigantic effort beyond any single M’Nae. They were … moving the Gera-ana, the matter transmitter prism, moving it off their world and into space!

  They sent the object through the void, across incredible gulfs, until it came to a hospitable world, a resting place suitable for M’Nae colonization.

  It landed here — on NE 592.

  The image shifted. Ken was back on the M’Nae’s home world again. All those many aliens who had stood beside Briv, helping move the prism, all but two lay limp and still and dead on the earth.

  They had died, their minds destroyed in the act of teleporting that transmitter to another planet. They had sacrificed their lives for the welfare of their people.

  *

  The vision faded, and Ken shook himself back to present reality. “You had to leave your home world?”

  Briv imitated a human nod, his strong jaw nudging toward his chest. “In four hundred valia our sun will grow cold forever. We must leave. There is only one Gera-ana. It was bought with much blood and life over the long times. And it is here.”

  “And the force that could move it to still another planet is depleted,” Ken said, remembering the dead M’Nae. The cost was higher than the aliens could bear. They had drained their strongest and finest telepathic abilities to transport the object. This had to be it for the M’Nae. There was no other choice remaining to them.

  Of course, there were variations in abilities among them, just as there were among humans. Ken thought of the difference between a Zachary or an Eads and one of those club wielding goons. If the M’Nae operated like every other intelligent species, they would send their brightest and best through the transmitter first, making sure some of their species escaped the death of their home world.