Free Bloodhype by Alan Dean Foster Page B

actions at any time. Yet I would tend to believe we may have pulled its spines. Its intelligence remains an unknown—the most important one, I should think.”
    “You believe it is of a high enough order to learn from its experience, then?”
    “Its present lack of action might be read as such. But I hesitate to ascribe intelligence to an action which may be dictated solely by bodily demands and be thereby entirely involuntary. I don’t think in any case that it will risk another encounter with Pyorn’s electric charges. Not when it has been so obviously damaged by the first.” The xenobiologist scratched his leathery hide with one claw. “With your permission, Commander, I’d like to be about our schedule of experimentation. Suitable precautions will be observed.”
    “I should expect so. Yes, certainly. Begin at once.” Parquit caught sight of Carmot standing off to one side and walked over. The Observer was careful to avoid contact with the monster.
    “You’ve been very quiet, Observer. What do you observe?”
    Carmot turned a drawn face to the Commander. “I observe that an appalling display of force resulting in destruction and fatalities is insufficient to install suspicion in the nye. We all underestimate this unspeakable mass of alien obscenity.”
    He returned his gaze to the thing in question. “The display of electronic destruction put on by our engineers was quite impressive. It is possible that we may have exhausted the thing’s resources that its moment of terror was a last desperate attempt to avoid imprisonment and perhaps dissection.” He looked at Parquit evenly. “But I would not bet a
southing
on it.”
    Carmot’s pessimism did not overly bother Parquit. Rather, it was the Observer’s unflattering intimations of ignorance on the part of the AAnn. Not fitting for one in the service of the Emperor.
    “You would have us attempt to destroy it now, after the nye it has cost?” Parquit said sharply.
    “Yes!” the Observer replied, with more violence than the Commander had ever seen him express. “Now, immediately! Before it regains the strength it showed. And for the very reason you yourself just said!”
    Parquit was taken aback. “I said?”
    “Truly! ‘Attempt to destroy it,’ you said. You cannot even conceal your own uncertainties, Commander.”
    “That may be,” replied Parquit quietly. “But it is also for that very reason that we must continue to study it. Its ability to survive extraordinary assaults demands that we try to learn how this is accomplished. It promises us secrets to be learned nowhere else. I will not surrender these prospects to insubstantialities and personal fears.”
    Carmot sighed. “Let us hope they remain only that.” The diminutive Observer turned back to his inspection of the dull hulk. Instinct betrays one, he thought perversely as he wildly wondered what the thing’s flesh would taste like. The oddest thoughts occurred to one at the oddest times.
    His nursery was light-years and real years away. He wished he were in it.
     
    The Vom rested quietly. It was aware of the small army of intelligences poking and prodding at it. It was aware of instruments sending questing energies throughout its structure and it did not resist, although certain information was allowed to be picked up subtly changed, carefully mottled. It did not even resist when one cluster of figures set about removing a small section of physical self, an unforgivable insult. In time past the very thought would have meant slow death for the thinker. Now, the Vom did not react. It could do penance.
    The mistake it had just made required a good deal of it.
    Very well, it would continue to present an aspect of docility that bordered on death. Also, it had much thinking to do.
    So, and so. It had underjudged its captors. It reminded itself that under certain conditions a large number of small intelligences could act as efficiently as a single great one. Demonstrably, they could sometimes