TWELVE

Memor watched the primate scream. She tried to lunge out of the beam and tripped. Sprawled. Gasped. The armaments team dutifully tracked her as the poor dim creature scrambled to crawl away. She kept up the sobbing little shrieks as the weapons crew tuned their large antennas further. It went on until Memor waved an impatient fan-display and the team cut off the pain beam.

The team was pleased, their feathers fluttering with joy, though they kept discipline and said nothing. They had correctly adjusted their weaponry and hit the right resonance for nerve stimulation in the alien.

“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.