Anywhen (2 page)

"I commend them," Simon said; and then added sourly, "it is well for a man to have a belief he can cling to."

"The point is well taken," said the vombis. "Yet the pride of Boadacea springs from disloyalty, in the last analysis. The people believe it was the first colony to break with Old Earth, back in the first days of the Imaginary Drive. It is a breach they mean to see remains unhealed."

"Why not?" Simon said, shrugging. "I'm told also that Boadacea is very wealthy."

"Oh, excessively; it was once a great temptation to raiders, but the nations banded together against them with great success. Yet surely wealth does not interest you, reverend sir?"

"Marginally, yes. I am seeking some quiet country in which to settle and study. Naturally, I should prefer to find myself a patron."

"Naturally. I would suggest, then, that you try the domain of the Rood-Prince. It is small and stable, the climate is said to be clement, and he has a famous library." The creature arose. "For your purposes I would avoid Druidsfall; life there, as in most large cities, might prove rather turbulent for a scholar. I wish you success, reverend sir."

Placing its hand formally upon the jewelled shiv, the creature bowed slightly and left. Simon remained staring down at his cards, thinking icily but at speed.

What had all that meant? First of all, that his cover had been broken? Simon doubted that, but in any event it mattered little, since he would go almost into the open directly after landing. Assuming that it had, then, what had the creature been trying to convey? Surely not simply that life in Druidsfall would be even more turbulent for a traitor than for a lapsed divine. Naturally, it would expect Simon to know that; after all, Druidsfall was the center of the treason industry on Boadacea—that was why Simon was going there.

Or was it that Boadacea would be difficult for an ordinary traitor to buy, or was not for sale at all? But that might be said of any worthwhile planet, and no professional would let such a reputation pass without testing it, certainly not on the unsupported word of a stranger.

Besides, Simon was after all no ordinary traitor, nor even the usual kind of double agent. His task was to buy Boadacea while seeming to sell High Earth, but beyond that, there was a grander treason in the making for which the combined Traitors' Guilds of both planets might only barely be sufficient: the toppling of the Green Exarch,
under whose subtle, nonhuman yoke half of humanity's worlds had not even the latter-day good sense to groan. For such a project, the wealth of Boadacea was a prerequisite, for the Green Exarch drew tithes from six fallen empires older than man—the wealth of Boadacea, and its reputation, which the vombis had invoked, as the first colony to have broken with Old Earth.

And such a project would necessarily be of prime interest to a creature of the Exarch. Yet security on it could not possibly have been broken. Simon knew well that men had died horribly for travelling under such assumptions in the past; nevertheless, he was sure of it. Then what—?

A steward walked slowly through the salon, beating a gong, and Simon put the problem aside for the moment and gathered up his cards.

"Druidsfall. One hour to Druidsfall. All passengers for the Flos Campi system please prepare for departure. Druidsfall in one hour; next port of call is Fleurety."

The Fool, he thought, has come to the Broken Tower. The next card to turn might well be the Hanged Man.

CHAPTER TWO

Boadacea proved indeed to be an interesting world, and despite all of Simon's preliminary reading and conditioning, quite as unsettling as the vombis had predicted.

Its sun, Flos Campi, was a ninety-minute microvariable, twinned at a distance of one light-year with a blue-white, Rigellike star which stood—or had stood throughout historical times—in high southern latitudes. This meant that every spot on the planet had a different cycle of day and night. Druidsfall, for example, had only four consecutive hours of quasi-darkness at a time, and even during this period the sky was indigo rather than black at its deepest—and more often than not flaring with auroras, thanks to the almost incessant solar storms.

Everything in the city, as everywhere on Boadacea, bespoke the crucial importance of fugitive light, and the fade-out-fade-in weather that went with it, all very strange after the desert glare of High Earth. The day after the
Karas
had fluttered down had dawned in mist, which cold gales had torn away into slowly pulsating sunlight; then had come clouds and needlelike rain which had turned to snow and then to sleet—more weather in a day than the minarets of Jiddah, Simon's registered home town, saw in a six-month. The fluctuating light and wetness was reflected most startlingly by its gardens, which sprang up when one's back was turned and did not need so much to be weeded as actually fought. They were constantly in motion to the ninetyminute solar cycle, battering their elaborate flowerheads against back walls which were everywhere crumbling after centuries of such soft, implacable impacts. Half the buildings in Druidsfall glistened with their leaves, which were scaled with so much soft gold that they stuck to anything they were blown against—the wealth of Boadacea was based anciently in the vast amounts of uranium and other power-metals in its soil, from which the plants extracted the inevitable associated gold as radiation shielding for their spuriously tender genes. Everyone one saw in the streets of Druids-fall, or any other such city, was a mutation of some sort—if he was not an outworlder—but after a few days in the winds they were all half yellow, for the gold scales smeared off the flying leaves like butter. Everyone was painted with meaningless riches—the very bedsheets glittered ineradicably with flakes of it; and brunettes—especially among the elaborate hair styles of the men—were at a premium.

Druidsfall proper was the usual low jumble of decayed masonry, slightly less ancient slums, and blank-faced offices, but the fact that it was also the home city of the Guild—hence wholly convenient, if not congenial, for Simon—gave it character. The traitors had an architectural style of their own, characterized by structures put together mostly of fragmented statues and petrified bodies fitted to each other like puzzle pieces or maps. Traitors on Boadacea had belonged to an honored social class for seven hundred years, and their edifices made it known.

So did their style of dealing. Simon attended upon the planet's Traitor-in-Chief with all due promptness, wearing the clasp which showed him to be a brother, though an outworlder, and made himself and his errand known with almost complete truthfulness—certainly much more than custom would have demanded. His opposite number, Valkol "the Polite," a portly, jowly man in a black abah decorated only with the clasp, with a kindly and humorous expression into which were set eyes like two bites of an iceberg, turned him out of the Guildhall with only as much courtesy as fraternal protocol strictly required—that is, twelve days to get off the planet.

Thus far, at least, the vombis had proven to be right about the Boadaceans, to the letter. The spirit remained to be tested.

Simon found an inn in which to lick his wounds and prepare for departure, as was permitted. Of course he had no intention of leaving; he was simply preparing to go to ground. Nevertheless, he had wounds to lick: After only four clockless days on Boadacea, he had already been driven into changing his residence, his methods, and his identity. It was a humiliating beginning.

CHAPTER THREE

Methods next. Listening automatically for the first sound of possible interruption, Simon emptied his little poisons into the catch basin in his new room, and ironically watched the wisps of wine-colored smoke rise from the corroded maw of the drain. He was sorry to see them go; they were old, though venomous, friends; but a man's methods can be as telltale as a thumbprint, and now it would have to be assumed that Valkol had sent for, and would soon receive, some sort of dossier on Simon. The dossier would be wrong, but there was no predicting
wherein
it would be wrong; hence, out with the poisons, and all their cousins among Simon's apparatus. When assuming a new identity, the very first rule is:
Strip!

The almost worn-away maker's legend on the catch basin read:
Julius, Boadacea.
Things made on this planet were usually labelled that generally, as though any place in the world were like any other, but this was both true and not true. Druidsfall was unmistakably Boadacean, but as the central city of the traitors it was also distinctively itself. Those buildings with their curtain walls of petrified corpses, for instance . . .

Luckily, custom now allowed Simon to stay clear of those grim monuments, now that the first, disastrous formalities were over, and seek his own bed and breakfast. In the old, disinterestedly friendly inns of Druidsfall, the anonymous thumps and foreign outcries of the transients —in death, love, or trade—are said to make the regular lodgers start in their beds with their resident guilts. Of course all inns are like that, but nevertheless, that was why traitors liked to quarter there rather than in the Traitors' Halls run by the fraternity: It guaranteed them privacy, and at the same time helped them to feel alive. There is undoubtedly something inhibiting about trying to deal within walls pieced together of broken stone limbs, heads, and torsos, some of which had clearly been alive when the foundations were being dug and the scaffolding bolted together.

Thus, here in The Skopolamander, Simon could comfortably await his next contact, now that he had dumped his poisons. This—if there was to be one—would of course have to come about before the end of his immunity period. "Quarantine" was perhaps a more appropriate term.

No, the immunity was real, however limited, for as a traitor to High Earth he had special status. High Earth, the Boadaceans thought, was not necessarily Old Earth—but not necessarily
not,
either. For the rest of his twelve days, Simon would not be killed out of sheer conservatism, at least, though nobody official would attempt to deal with him, either.

He had eight of those days still to run—a dull prospect, since he had already completed every possible preliminary to going to ground, and spiced only by the fact that he had yet to figure out how long a day might officially be. The rhythms of Flos Campi offered no reliable clues his Sol-tuned diurnalism could read. At the moment there was nothing lighting the window of the room but an aurora, looking like a curtain of orange and hazy blue fire licking upward along a bone trestle. Radio around here, and probably even electrical power, must be knocked out as much as half the time, with so much stray magnetism washing back and forth. That might prove useful; he filed the thought.

In the meantime, there went the last of the poisons. Simon poured water from an amphora into the catch basin, which promptly hissed like a dragon just out of the egg and blurted a mushroom of cold blue steam which made
him cough.
Careful!
he thought; acid after water, never water after acid—I am forgetting the most elementary lessons. I should have used wine. Time for a drink, in Gro's name!

He caught up his cloak and went out, not bothering to lock the door. He had nothing worth stealing but his honor, which was in his right hip pocket. Oh, and of course, High Earth—that was in his left. Besides, Boadacea was rich: One could hardly turn around without knocking over some heap of treasures, artifacts of a millennium which nobody had sorted for a century, or even wanted to be bothered to sort. Nobody would think to steal from a poor traitor any object smaller than a king, or, preferably, a planet.

In the tavern below, Simon was joined at once by a playwoman.

"Are you buying tonight, excellence?"

"Why not?" And in fact he was glad to see her. She was blond and ample, a relief from the sketchy women of the Respectables, whom fashion made look as though they suffered from some nervous disease that robbed them of appetite. Besides, she would exempt him from the normal sort of Boadacean polite conversation, which consisted chiefly of elaborately involuted jokes at which it was considered gauche to laugh. The whole style of Boadacean conversation, for that matter, was intended to be ignored; gambits were a high art, but end games were a lost one. Simon sighed and signalled for beakers.

"You wear the traitors' clasp," she said, sitting across from him, "but not much tree gold. Have you come to sell us High Earth?"

Simon did not even blink; he knew the query to be a
standard opening with any outworlder of his profession. "Perhaps. But I'm not on business at the moment." "Of course not," the girl said gravely, her fingers playing continuously with a sort of rosary tasselled with two silver phalluses. "Yet I hope you prosper. My half-brother is a traitor, but he can find only small secrets to sell—how to make bombs, and the like. It's a thin life; I prefer mine."

"Perhaps he should swear by another country."

"Oh, his country is well worth selling, but his custom is poor. Neither buyer nor seller trusts him very far—a matter of style, I suppose. He'll probably wind up betraying some colony for a thousand beans and a fishball."

"You dislike the man—or is it the trade?" Simon said. "It seems not unlike your own, after all: One sells something one never really owned, and yet one still has it when the transaction is over, as long as both parties keep silent."

"You dislike women," the girl said, tranquilly, as a simple observation, not a challenge. "But all things are loans —not just chastity and trust. Why be miserly? To 'possess' wealth is as illusory as to 'possess' honor or a woman, and much less gratifying. Spending is better than saving."

"But there are rank orders in all things, too," Simon said, lighting a kief stick. He was intrigued in spite of himself. Hedonism was the commonest of philosophies in the civilized galaxy, but it was piquant to hear a playwoman trotting out the moldy cliches with such fierce solemnity. "Otherwise we should never know the good from the bad, or care."

"Do you like boys?"