Three days later, when the world of Karres swung peacefully in orbit around a hitherto planetless star some few days from Uldune, Pausert sat with his Great Uncle Threbus on the porch and discussed the things men sitting on a porch do: the destruction of worlds, star-spanning conquerors and how to stop them; and, greatest problem of all, the female of the species.
"We've more or less worked out the entire sequence of events," said Threbus. "Vatches, it appears, are quite involved in various dimensions. And have complex 'games' in them. The Chaladoor was part of her game."
"So the little vatch was manipulating things. Right under our noses."
"Well, you know how they like to watch. And set their dream things problems."
"They do indeed," said Pausert wryly. "But I hope she never planned on me being part of the mother-plant."
"No cravings to return to the plant?" asked Threbus cautiously.
Pausert shuddered. "The addiction? No, not so far as I've noticed. Look, Mebeckey had it in him for years—and I gather that being part of the plant was the first time in his life he felt he belonged to anything. That he wasn't racked with guilt about killing his first employer. It made him feel good. Look at the other victims. Many of them are criminals—and yet some are desperately trying to rehabilitate themselves now. It didn't affect everyone in the same way."
Threbus sucked on his pipe. "Well, it's true that even Mebeckey is cooperating to the absolute fullest. We've had truth-speakers listen to his testimony. He's barely strayed from the absolute truth, at least as far as he knows it."
"That's always the problem, isn't it!" said Pausert. "As far as he knows it."
"Yes," admitted Threbus. "But we've been able to cross-corroborate parts of it. I'm afraid, grand-nephew, that I was partly to blame with that expedition into the Chaladoor in '008. For a trip into dangerous territory, it was an uneventful one. I didn't realize what seed of future problems we'd brought back."
The Venture brought back various relics from that trip, most of which were sold to help pay for it. It hadn't been a very profitable voyage. That included the seedling drip-irrigators, thought to be goblets, that eventually found their way, along with the log of the Derehn Oph—one of the first ships to have stumbled on the cinder-homeworld of the Melchin—to the dealer Mebeckey's illegal antiquities sales.
"We didn't take very much off Derehn Oph—it was too much like a graveyard. But I did take a couple of those goblets."
"Drip-irrigators."
"Yes. Leaky goblets. And that box that turned out to be the map-device. The curious thing is that I'd read that log. The ship was centuries dead and all the next-of-kin must have been too. So we left it there. We did visit the world Mebeckey tracked down. We'd tried digging down to the signal with our nova guns. Got nowhere. The Derehn Oph had tried too, and picked over the various wrecks. They'd left after collecting some loot from the various wrecked ships—including the Illtraming flagship—that had crashed almost intact, as it was heavily armored, and they had taken what was described as the Illtraming map."
"So . . . why didn't the Illtraming stop the Derehn Oph—and yourselves—from going to the Melchin motherworld?" asked Pausert thoughtfully. "The Nuris and Moander?"
"Yes," said Threbus, grimacing. "They'd already begun infesting the area around Megair, and the world was dead. Except that the stasis box had some kind of detector on it, and it began broadcasting when sensors detected something other than a Melchin/Illtraming drive. It was intended as a trap."
"And it succeeded!" said Pausert.
"Yes, in a way it did. But the mother-plant had expected to emerge to a galaxy full of Illtraming. To having no problems finding its host species. Instead it came out to a universe populated by humans—useless to it for breeding purposes. The persona of the xenoarcheologist suited it while it hunted for traces of the Illtraming. But of course it found none. Until it happened on the Melchin relics and the log of the Derehn Oph, which mentioned the sheet of metal that they had taken from the wrecked ship, and of course the goblets, which the mother-plant recognized as plant-feeders. When one of those turned up from Nikkeldepain, the mother-plant was on the trail."
Goth came in. She'd kept her hair the way Vala had worn it. "Are you two finished talking yet?" she asked. "Because you promised to take me out, Pausert."
Threbus raised an eyebrow at his daughter. "She's growing up fast, Captain Pausert!"