The files were all older than four hundred years.

“Records of file authors,” he requested.

All author records deleted.

That was highly unusual. Only a president or presiding minister could approve of deletion of authors or originators from file records in libraries or city memory storage; and even then, only for the most pressing reasons. Anonymity was not an approved concept in Hexamon history; too many of the Death’s perpetrators had hidden themselves away from responsibility before and after the holocaust.

“Description of files.”

All are brief reports, in words only.

The time had come. Olmy was surprised to realize his reluctance. The truth might be worse than what he had imagined.

“Show me the files in chronological order,” he said.

It was worse.

When he had finished and stored all the files in implant memory to mull over at leisure, he gave the tracer its reward—the free run of a simulated grassy field on Earth—and released the meager cloud of pseudo-Talsit into the room again.

His decision was made infinitely more difficult by what the tracer had retrieved.

Reading between the lines—the whole story was by no means contained in the files, which were adjunct files only, bare scraps left over after some hasty and none-too-thorough purge—Olmy put together his half-educated surmise.

A living Jart had been captured some five centuries before, under what circumstances there was no knowing. It had died before being returned to Thistledown and its body had been preserved after its mentality was crudely downloaded. Not knowing Jart psychology or physiology, the downloading had been only partly successful. How integrated the Jart mentality was, how true to its original, not even its captors had known. They had even suspected the body; several researchers felt that Jarts, like humans, could adapt their biological forms and even their genetic makeup to fit the circumstances. Hence, the Jart’s physiology had been studied, but the studies were inconclusive; they had not been passed on to military commanders or other researchers.

At first, the investigations into the downloaded mentality had been conducted in secure but relatively open situations, with perhaps ten or fifteen individual researchers. Nine had died in the process, two irretrievably—their implants hopelessly scrambled. Direct or indirect mental links with the downloaded personality had been forbidden at that point. Research, so encumbered, came almost to a halt.

Even then, Olmy knew, indirect examination of mentalities had been a highly developed art. He found it difficult to believe that a Jart, fragmented or whole, could injure investigators in such circumstances. And yet, Beni had been killed and Mar Kellen damaged…

Olmy controlled another hormonal surge. Were he not so altered and augmented, the surge would indicate a condition called fear.