"So," the older man began casually, "it seems you insist that you are not responsible for the deaths of several thousand innocent citizens."
"I"ve never killed a single person or had one killed." The ship leader sounded embittered by his
204 .
sour luck. He threw a surrept.i.tious glance at his former captives. "I confess that might have changed if your whales had not arrived when they did." He shrugged. "Who knows? Perhaps it"s better this way.
I had no wish to harm anyone."
"Or to save anyone," Cora snapped at him. "H you
had no wish to do so? ..."
"I told you why. For the chance to be wealthy. For the chance to sell this thin-seamed ship and get off this sweaty, salt-stink of a world!" He glared across at Hwoshien, the two men regarding each other like a couple of irritated banty roosters. "If I"m guilty of anything, it"s withholding information. You can"t even accuse us of not aiding survivors, because we never
found any."
"We have only your word for that," Hwoshien re- plied ominously. "You were about to dispose of these good people to protect your activities. I wonder how many other inconvenient citizens you had to dispose
of."
"None, dammit!"
"We"ll find out when we question your crewfolk."
"Go ahead." Hazaribagh appeared unconcerned.
"They have no reason to lie. And we still have the laws of salvage on our side."
"If you had adhered to them properly, you would,"
Hwoshien said. "But you did not report what you re- covered for recording purposes. And salvage does not apply to, for example, personal effects, which are to be turned over to surviving relatives and which, I sus- pect, you have also heartlessly marketed."
"You can"t prove any of that."
"We will. You just admitted that your people have no reason to lie."
Hazaribagh"s defiance leaked away like sand through
a sieve.
"You still insist you had nothing to do with the
cetacean attacks?"
205.
"Yes," he murmured. He looked toward Mataro- reva, found no sympathy there. "I"ve already told him that. We"re victims of circ.u.mstance."
"Victims of greed. You might have prevented the deaths of many people. What"s done with you will be up to the courts, but they"ll hear no cries of mitigating circ.u.mstances from me." Hwoshien turned to one of the nearby peaceforcers. "Put him on the other catcherfoil, together with any manifests or chip re- cords you can find."
"What happens to my ship?"
"Nothing yet, though if you have so low an opinion of it, I wonder that you care. It will be sailed back to Mou"anui by your crew, under peaceforcer supervi- sion. The courts will decide what to do with it as well as with its crew." Hazaribagh and the tall man guard- ing him started for the side.
"Just a minute." The downcast ship manager and his watchful attendant halted. "If you could give us some insight, if you have any idea what is causing the baleens to act in this inexplicably belligerent fashion, that might be a contribution in your favor the courts would recognize."
Hazaribagh"s humorless laughter echoed across the deck. "If I knew that and admitted it, that would make me at least partly guilty of what you"ve first accused me of, wouldn"t it? A neat trick." He coughed, said harshly, "I"ve not the slightest idea. My fishing experts have no idea. Ma.s.s insanity that comes and goes, manifests itself as rage against humanity?
Who knows? Perhaps they are at last sick of man- kind"s presence in their ocean."
Cora felt disappointed. She hadn"t expected any revelations from Hazaribagh, but she had bad hopes.
The ship manager was led down a boarding ladder to the suprafoil below. Hwoshien rejoined the others.
"Something else doesn"t make sense," Cora told him.
206 CACHALOT.
"I seek clarification, not additional confusion," he
muttered.
"In the attack we witnessed," she pressed on, "we saw two kinds of baleens-blues and humpbacks.
Latehoht and Wenkoseemansa were chased by rights and worried about the presence of fins. Now, these are all plankton-eaters, but as far as I"ve read, they never school together. Joint schooling of, for example, , humpbacks and seis is unknown. I realize that studies of Cachalot cetacean society are limited, but in all the preparation I did before we came here I didn"t come across a single example of joint schooling."
"That"s right," Dawn said excitedly. "Not only are they functioning as a group, the attacks involve mixed species."
"We"ve tried for weeks to find a purely scientific explanation," Merced said. They all turned to look at him. "Maybe we"re going about this the wrong way."
"How do you mean?" Rachael asked respectfully, cuddling her neurophon. She had already been badger- ing the crew of the peaceforcer suprafoil for replace- ment modules for the instrument.
Merced appeared embarra.s.sed, as he always did when everyone else"s attention was focused on him.
"We"ve been trying to find a biological explanation for the attacks. Now we intend to concentrate on the cetaceans. If we throw out the insanity explanation and a.s.sume there is some kind of intelligence at work behind all this, how would we go about determining the ultimate cause?"
"I"m not sure I follow you," Cora said.
"That"s because you"re still thinking in terms of cetaceans. We all are. Let"s use the more obvious a.n.a.logies rather than the less so. If a group of humans attacked a town but insisted they didn"t know what they were doing, how would we begin to go about find- ing out the cause?"
"Capture one of them and question him or her."
207.
Mataroreva looked at the little scientist approvingly.
Merced nodded.
"That"s impossible," Cora said immediately. "You can"t restrain a blue whale without using something more than words. Even the use of a temporarily de- bilitating narcotic drug could be interpreted by the Cetacea as the use of violence. That would shatter the human-cetacean peace you"re always telling us about.
Anything milder than that, like a large net enclosure, would probably be torn apart."
"There must be some way," Dawn murmured.
Mataroreva looked at them thoughtfully. "There may be. You can"t compel seventy tons or more of whale, but you may be able to convince it."