Read The Tatja Grimm's World for Free Online Page B

some, fear and despair in others.
    “You’re looking bad. Can you talk?” It was the woman who had pulled him from the pond. She was in her late fifties, an Osterlai by her accent. Her clothes were neat but stained. There was a matter-of-fact friendliness in her voice. In a moment he would remember who she was.
    “Y-yes,” he croaked. “What happened?”
    The woman gave a short laugh. “You tell us. Five minutes ago it just started raining people. Looks like the Termite Folk have found new blasphemers.”
    Rey swallowed. “You’re right.” And it was his fault.
    Most of his companions were in worse shape than he. The Science prisoners were trying to help, but two of the Tarulle people looked freshly dead. Nowhere did he see Brailly Tounse. He glanced at the Osterlai woman and made a wan smile. “We came to rescue you.” He gave his captive audience a brief account of the sales landing. “Everything was going fine. I was beginning to think they might listen to us, that we’d at least learn more about your situation. Then they found the mirror from my telescope. How could they know what it was, much less …” He noticed the look on the woman’s face.
    “And how do you think we got in trouble, my sir? We thought to do some observing from the peaks Inland. We had a twenty-inch mirror; the Seraph-seeing should be better here than—” She broke off in surprise. “Why you’re Rey Guille!”
    Rey nodded, and she continued, “So I don’t have to tell you
the details; you’ve written enough about the idea … . I’m Janna Kats, Seraphist at Bergenton; we met once a couple years back.” She waved a hand as recognition slowly dawned on Rey. “Anyway. We dragged that mirror ashore, gave the Termiters a look. They thought it was great stuff, till they learned what we wanted to look at.” She laughed, but it was not a happy sound. “Lots of religions worship Seraph. You know: home o’ the gods and such garbage. Turns out the Termiters think Seraph is something like the gods’ bedroom—and mortals mustn’t peep!”
    So that was how they learned what the parts of a telescope look like. “It still doesn’t make sense,” Rey said. “In everything else, they seem to be ancestor worshipers; I’ve sold them dozens of Interior fantasies. How did Seraphidolatry get mixed in?”
    The question brought a fit of coughing from the little man sitting beside Kats. “I can answer that.” The words were broken by more rasping coughs. The fellow’s face seemed shrunken, collapsed; Rey wondered that he could talk at all. “The Termite Folk are intellectual pack rats. For three hundred years they’ve been here, picking up a little of this, a little of that—from whoever was passing through.” More coughing. “I should have seen through ’em right off; I’ve spent my whole life studying coastal barbarians, learning Hurdic. But these folks are so secretive, I didn’t understand what was driving them … till it was too late.” A smile. twisted his thin face. “I could get a nice research paper out of what we’ve learned here. Too bad we gotta die first.”
    Rey Guille had years of experience finding loopholes in impossible situations—on paper. “Maybe we don’t have to die. I never thought the Termiters were killers. If their religion is such a
hodgepodge, they can’t take the taboos too seriously. You’ve been here for several days. Maybe they just want a graceful way out.” It really made sense. Then he remembered Brailly’s bomb, and continued more quietly, “If there’s anything they’d kill for, I think it would be what my people did to the Village Hall.”
    “You don’t understand, fellow,” a third Science person spoke, a sharp edge in his voice. “Knocking over a termite mound is a peccadillo in their eyes, compared to invading the gods’ privacy. They’ve kept us alive this long because they’re having trouble devising a torture-death appropriate to our crime!”
    “How can you know