Free The Cause of Death by Roger MacBride Allen Page B

that suggestion to Marta again. Allabex--ten times Marta's size, twenty times her weight, all but indestructible, all but immortal, felt greatly intimidated by Marta's temper, her outbursts, her passionate anger .
    "Moira!" Marta called out. "Settle down! And don't get so far ahead." Moira was her usual fifty meters in front, and showing no more signs than usual of needing to settle down. It had not taken Allabex long to note that Marta tended to speak harshly to her child whenever she herself was upset.
    "She'll be all right," Allabex said reassuringly. "There is nothing dangerous up ahead."
    "That's not the point," Marta said. "She needs to know to obey me, for when there is something dangerous."
    Why should Moira rely on the danger-sensing skill of a being that has gotten her into a situation this perilous ? Allabex asked herself.
    Moira turned around and raced back toward them. The little girl laughed as she ran, but even someone as nonhuman as Allabex could tell there was something forced about the laughter.
    She pitied Moira, and even felt something approaching empathy for the little girl. From her studies, she knew that human children, given the chance, were herd animals. But Moira Hertzmann had grown up shuttling from one off-planet project to another, on worlds at the far fringes of human civilization, with almost no human contact beyond her parents, let alone with any other children.
    Her loneliness even drove her to try to recruit Allabex, of all beings, as a playmate. It had been humbling indeed to discover that thousands of years of personal and stored experience, effortless access to infinities of information, left Allabex wholly incompetent to manage imaginary tea parties or travel via nonexistent propulsion systems to entirely notional planets where events that contravened physical law were easily accommodated as being caused by magic.
    Moira stopped a meter or two in front of her mother and Allabex and stood up straight, holding her hands behind her back. "Can I saddle up, Allabex?" Moira asked. "Please?"
    "Not again, Moira," her mother protested, with a sidelong glance at Allabex.
    "It's all right, Marta," the Stannlar said. It was one of her best child-entertaining tricks. She lowered her body to the ground, and set one section of exomuscle shifting, rippling, re-forming itself into a set of child-sized steps, leading to a newly created saddle-shaped depression about midway along Allabex's length. She extruded two knoblike handles, just forward of the saddle, for the little girl to hold on to. Moira scrambled up and plopped herself down into the saddle almost before it had finished forming.
    "Now Allabex and I were just going for a nice, quiet walk," said Marta. "Don't start wheedling for her to gallop with you or anything. Just a nice, gentle ride this time, all right?"
    "All right, Mother," said Moira, a hint of disappointment in her voice.
    It occurred to Allabex that Marta was more likely to control her temper with Moira close enough to listen. Allabex decided to take advantage of the girl's presence and risk returning to the subject at hand.
    "Getting back to what we were discussing," she said, "we are agreed that things cannot stay as they are, that the Thelm's people are not going to alter the situation, and that it is therefore up to us to alter it."
    "I suppose that's all true," Marta conceded, with none too good a grace.
    "Then the only issue is how we are to change things. Perhaps merely shifting location would be something useful." In other words, it would be a very fine idea to get yourself and your child off-planet before things go utterly wrong .
    "We're staying here," Marta said, her voice hard and flat, ending all possible discussion. "We are going to go on with our work."
    "It is impossible for us to go on with our work with Georg in his current situation," Allabex replied, trying to make her voice just as firm. "Leaving aside the fact that, should he gain power, the High Thelek would like