Free The Tar-aiym Krang by Alan Dean Foster

a simple and straightforward one. The plague worked as the leadership had hoped, to the extent of utterly wiping out the Tar-Aiym enemies. It also set about totally eliminating the Tar-Aiym themselves and most of the intelligent and semi-intelligent life in that huge sector of space we know today as the Blight. You know it, Flinx?”
    “Sure. It’s a big section between here and the center. Hundreds of worlds on which nothing intelligent lives. They’ll be filled again someday.”
    “No doubt. For now, though, they are filled only with the lower animals and the wreckage of past civilizations. Fortunately the surviving space-traversing worlds were informed of the nature of the plague by the last remnants of the dying Tar-Aiym. A strict quarantine must have been put into effect, because for centuries it appears that nothing was permitted in or out of the Blight. Otherwise it is probable that none of us would be sitting here now. It is only in recent times that the systems of the Blight have been rediscovered and somewhat hesitantly explored.”
    “The taboo lingers even if the reason behind it has gone,” said Malaika quietly.
    “Yes. Well, some of the quarantined races on the fringe of the epidemic died out rather slowly. By means of interspace relay or some similar device they managed to pass out some threads of fact describing the Armaggedon. Innocent and guilty alike died as the plague burned itself out. Thank Hive that all traces of the germ have long since departed the cycle of things!”
    “Amen,” murmured Malaika surprisingly. Then, louder, “But please, gentlesirs, to the point. And the point is—credit”
    Tse-Mallory took over again. “Malaika, have you ever heard of the Krang?”
    “
Nini?
No, I . . . no, wait a minute.” The trader’s thick brows furrowed in thought. “Yes. Yes, I believe I have. It forms part of the mythology of the, uh, the Branner folk, doesn’t it?”
    Tse-Mallory nodded approval. “That’s right. The Branner, as you may or may not recall, occupy three star systems on the periphery of the Blight, facing Moth. According to a folk-legend of theirs passed down from the cataclysm, even though the Tar-Aiym were hard pressed to find a solution to the threat from the center, they had not yet given up all forms of nonmilitary development and experimentation. As we now know for a fact, the Tar-Aiym were inordinately fond of music.”
    “Marches, no doubt,” murmured Truzenzuzex.
    “Perhaps. Anyway, one of the last great works of artistic merit that their culture was supposed to have produced was a great musical instrument called the Krang. It was theoretically completed in the waning days of the Empire, just as the plague was beginning to make itself known on Empire planets as well as those of the enemy.”
    “
Ili?”
said Malaika. “So?”
    “On the side of the Blight almost one hundred and fifty parsecs from Branner lies the home world of a primitive race of hominids, little visited by the rest of the galaxy. They are far off the main trade routes and have little to offer in the way of value, either in produce or culture. They are pleasant, pastoral, and nonaggressive. Seemingly they once possessed star travel, but sank back into a preatomic civilization and are only just now beginning to show signs of a scientific renaissance. Interestingly enough, they also have a legend concerning something called the Krang. Only in their version it is not an artistic device, but a weapon of war. One which the Tar-Aiym scientists were developing parallel with the plague, before the latter was put into widespread use. According to the legend it was intended to be primarily a defensive and not an offensive weapon. If so, it would be the first time in the literature that the Tar-Aiym had been reduced to building a device for defensive purposes. This runs contrary to all we know of Tar-Aiym psychology and shows how severely they believed themselves pressed by their new