Read Marune: Alastor 933 for Free Online Page B

agricultural tracts to the south and west. There are no Rhunes in attendance at the college.”
    Pardero asked Ollave, “And why is that?”
    “The Rhunes prefer their own educational processes.”
    “They seem an unusual people.”
    “In many respects.”
    “And I am one of these remarkable persons.”
    “So it would seem. Let us look into the Mountain Realms.” Ollave consulted an index. “First I’ll show you one of the autochthones: the Fwai-chi, as they are called.” He touched a button, to reveal a high mountainside patched with snow and sparsely forested with gnarled black trees. The view expanded toward one of these trees, to center upon the rugose brown-black trunk, which stirred and moved. Away from the tree shambled a bulky brown-black biped with a loose pelt, all shags and tatters. The commentator spoke: “Here you see a Fwai-chi. These creatures, after their own fashion, are intelligent, and as such they are protected by the Connatic. The shags of its skin are not merely camouflage against the snow bears; they are organs for the production of hormones and the reproductive stimule. Occasionally the Fwai-chi will be seen nibbling each other; they are ingesting a stuff which reacts with a bud on the wall of their stomachs. The bud develops into an infant, which in due course is vomited into the world. Along the trailing fringes of other shags other semivital stimules are produced.
    “The Fwai-chi are placid, but not helpless if provoked too far; indeed they are said to possess important parapsychic competence, and no one dares molest them.”
     
    The view shifted, down the mountainside to the valley floor. A village of fifty stone houses occupied a meadow beside the river; from a bluff a tall mansion, or castle, overlooked the valley. To Kolodin’s eye, the mansion, or castle, evinced an archaic overelaboration of shape and detail; additionally the proportions appeared cramped, the construction disproportionately heavy, the windows too few, too tall and narrow. He put to Pardero a question: “What do you think of this?”
    “I don’t remember it.” Pardero raised his hands to his temples, pressed and rubbed. “I feel pressure; I want to see no more.”
    “Certainly not,” declared Ollave jauntily. “We’ll go at once.” And he added: “Come up to my office; I’ll pour you a sedative, and you’ll feel less perturbation.”
    Returning to the Connatic’s Hospital, Pardero sat silently for most of the trip.
    At last he asked Kolodin: “How soon can I go to Marune?”
    “Whenever you like,” said, Kolodin, and then added, in the tentative voice of a person hoping to persuade a captious child: “But why hurry? Is the hospital so dreary? Take a few weeks to study and learn, and to make some careful plans.”
    “I want to learn two names: my own and that of my enemy.”
    Kolodin blinked. He had miscalculated the intensity of Pardero’s emotions.
    “Perhaps no enemy exists,” stated Kolodin somewhat ponderously. “He is not absolutely necessary to your condition.”
    Pardero managed a small sour smile. “When I arrived at the Carfaunge spaceport, my hair had been hacked short. I considered it a mystery until I saw the simulated Rhune eiodark. Did you notice his hair?”
    “It was combed straight over the scalp and down across the neck.”
    “And this is a distinctive style?”
    “Well - it’s hardly common, though not bizarre or unique. It is distinctive enough to facilitate identification.”
    Pardero nodded gloomily. “My enemy intended that no one should identify me as a Rhune. He cut my hair, dressed me in a clown’s suit, then put me on a spaceship and sent me across the Cluster, hoping I would never return.”
    “So it would seem. Still, why did he not simply kill you and roll you into a ditch? How much more decisive!”
    “Rhunes fear killing, except in war: this I have learned from Ollave.”
    Kolodin surreptitiously studied Pardero who sat brooding across the