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get used to, but rather that something was missing from Vulture. The old
spark, the total self-confidence, the feeling of omnipotence, of "can't fail,"
just wasn't there anymore.
"Clayben and Star Eagle briefed me," Vulture told him. "They've been down only
two weeks, right?"
Hawks nodded. "We have small tracers embedded in them that we can follow by a
water probe floating on the surface. It's burned into a rock jutting just out
of the water so it's not likely to be found, and if
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triggered it gives us information on their general location. We also have
communicators embedded in the tikis on the cultivated islands, on the theory
that at least one of them will be able to get to one of those spots if they
must or if they have the ring or if they are convinced that we blew it."
"Uh uh. I think the ring's there, and so do you. And it took a year for my
team, with the old me included, to nab the one on Chanchuk, so two weeks is
nothing. That's not what's bothering you. Is it
Savaphoong?"
"Not really. Right now Savaphoong is unaware of his own name and can't even
conceive of outer space.
It's a deep mindprint. And what can he do? Master System won't reward him if
he betrays us it will just take all he knows and then convert him to one of
its own. When his old personality is triggered he won't find staying there
tempting for two reasons. First, real power down there is gained by fanatical
bravery or by heredity and he has neither. Second, the ring's no good to him
without theother four and we have three of them. No, it's not that. We heard
from Matriyeh."
Vulture was suddenly very interested. "Yes?"
"Ikira passed muster, even though it was a close thing. They sent a real Val
down along with two technicians from races she had never seen before."
"And she fooled a
Val
?"
"We did a good job analyzing the remains of the original goddess. The
structure was particularly interesting and synthetic, you know. That was how
we could add so much mass to her tiny frame within the transmuter's limitation
against addition of mass to a living creature. They landed in a remote section
and took that magnetic train to the holy place. They were hardly interested in
her except as a guide. She wouldn't stand a real inspection and full-scale
analysis aboard a command ship, of course, but the original was never intended
to be more than a guard and caretaker making sure things functioned correctly
down there the one who alone knew the truth but who, being so singular and
synthetic, had no interest in any role beyond the one assigned."
"So? What did they do?" .
"Just what I should have thought of, and what Raven's hitting himself over the
head for not thinking of.
They installed hypnocasters. A variety of them."
Vulture nodded. "Yeah, sure. I told you Chi was bright and dangerous."
"Ikira is immune, of course, but she's the only one who is. She's going nuts
trying to deal with it. She has an internal one, remember they replaced it as
well. The new one's on all the time, and in addition it reinforces the others
they fixed all over the mountain region. Come within range and you forget all
about rings and Master System and any other nonnative ideas. Get this it
enhances any mindprint to a tremendous degree while suppressing literally
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everything else from your consciousmind. Anything not applying to living a
perfect Matriyehan life and attaining spiritual perfection is shut out. It's
in about forty different languages but not Matriyehan, so it has literally no
effect on any natives. Only impostors will get creamed if they know any of the
languages covered, and it's unlikely they wouldn't know at least one."
"Clever. On a primitive world like Matriyeh the closer you got, the more
effect it would have. If an imposter got close enough to get a full or maybe
multiple doses, he'd vanish into the priesthood or a tribe and never be seen
or heard from again. Even after it had worn off, the life in the tribal
culture would reinforce it."
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"Not just on Matriyeh. Hypnocasters also work in water. Star Eagle offered
that with the report. Below ten, maybe fifteen meters they are killers. They
don't have the range underwater that they do in air, but they have far greater
intensity. The SPF was down there for nine days. That's long enough to plant
them throughout that whole underwater city. Ten, twenty who knows how many?
All nicely arranged, I bet, so they focus their maximum power on the temple or
palace, whichever has the ring. I know what one of those things did to me with
just a barrier exposure. Constant exposure, day in, day out, for weeks,
months... The odds are that even now our four are effectively neutralized.
They have become those people they were intended to imitate, we're out four
people and back to square one."
7. THE RING OF RINGS
WATER SPLASHED ALL ABOUT.
"Which one we got?" Raven asked impatiently.
Clayben shrugged. "Who knows? They all look equally ugly to me. Probably
Takya. This one looks older, and Makoa would be the logical one to lead a
party on land again. We must hurry. We don't have the luxury of several days
this time. If sundown comes down there and the others dig themselves out,
they'll find Makoa gone and then we're in trouble."
The mindprinting device was ready, taking a readout in less than half an hour,
limiting it to conscious thoughts and memories and comparing it to past prints
of both the original Makoa and each of the four who'd been sent down.
"It's bad," Star Eagle reported. "Real bad. It's Takya, all right, only it
isn't. There isn't a single bit of
Takya in the readout. None. The face-off with our fake tiki and what happened
until they returned to harvest the nuts and go back home is very vague, like
he just shut it out and doesn't think of it. Everything else is Makoa and only
Makoa. There is no way around it. I will have to usethe mindprint we took of
Takya before the transmutation and restore her to that point. It might bring
the original forth, or replace it."
"Go ahead," Clayben ordered. "We're very short on time and there is much to
do."
It was now five months since the quartet had infiltrated Alititi, five months
of sweat and frustration. Now they had mere hours to do what they could to
counter Brigadier Chi's brilliant and evidently all-too-effective trap. It was
still better than an hour before Takya's original personality was restored and
she was lucid, and even then it wasn't much help.
"I I have the memories of Makoa going back and the time there, but nothing of
myself," the agent said.
"It is incredible."
"Focused hypnocasters," Clayben told her. "We blew it. Now we're going to have
to reprogram you with a softer, more dangerous print."
"You can neutralize the hypnocasters?"
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"Now that we know what we're dealing with, and by a back-door method as it
were, yes. Fortunately, the 'casters are language specific to avoid disrupting
the locals. We can process you, eliminating the languages you know except, of
course, for Alititian, and cross-index the others into a single support
language called Maurog."
"Maurog? What is that?"
"Artificial. It's an intermediate language used by humanoid robots. A version
of it is used in all Vals. I
have it because it was the base language used by Vulture in his original form.
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