"You always have to have a cause, don't you, Rene?"
The greying giant shrugged. "It makes life interesting, and it makes me feel good sometimes. But I don't overestimate myself: I'm scum, like the rest of them. The only difference is that I know it; I'm just one man, with no more rights than anyone else, except those I can take." He held up his large knuckled hands and turned them in front of his face. "I've got broken bones in both of them. I wonder if the Buddha or the Christ ever hit a man. The books on religion that are left in the repositories don't say."
"Would it make any difference if they hadn't?" Rynason asked.
"Hell, no! I'm just curious." Malhomme stood up, hefting his repentance sign in the crook of one big arm. His face again took on its arched look as he said, "My duty calls me elsewhere. But I leave you with a message from the scriptures, and it has been my guiding light. 'Resist not evil,' my children. Resist not evil."
Malhomme shook his head. "Damned if I know," he muttered, and went away.
After a moment Rynason turned back to the girl; she was still watching Malhomme thread his way through the men on his way to the door.
"So now you've met my spiritual father," he said.
Her deep brown eyes flickered back to his. "I wish I could use a telepather on him. I'd like to know how he really thinks."
"He thinks exactly as he speaks," Rynason said. "At least, at the moment he says something, he believes in it."
She smiled. "I suppose that's the only possible explanation for him." She was silent for a moment, her face thoughtful. Then she said, "He didn't finish his drink."
"You're all hooked up," the girl said. "Nod or something when you're ready." She was bent over the telepather, double checking the connectives and the blinking meters. Rynason and Horng sat opposite each other, the huge dark mound of the alien looming silently over the Earthman.
He never seemed upset, Rynason thought, looking up at him. Except for that one time when they'd run into the stone wall of the block on Tebron, Horng had displayed a completely even temperament--unruffled, calm, almost disinterested. But of course if the aliens had been completely uninterested in the Earthmen's probings at their history they would never have cooperated so readily; the Hirlaji were not animals to be ordered about by the Earthmen. Probably the codification of their history would prove useful to the aliens too; they had never arranged the race memory into a very coherent order themselves.