Gordon R. Dickson (12 page)

He had made only slight progress, however, within the next week. He gave it up entirely and spent the last few days before the party lounging around the underground servants’ area with Adok, observing the Silent Language in use about him. He had become fluent in understanding it now, but, wearyingly, most of what he absorbed was the hand-signaled equivalent of gossip. Nonetheless, gossip could be useful if properly sifted and interpreted.

Jim returned from the last of these expeditions just an hour or so before the party, to find Lorava waiting for him in the main room of his quarters.

“Vhotan wants to see you,” said Lorava abruptly as Jim appeared.

No more notice than that. Jim found himself standing beside Lorava in a room he had not been in before. Adok was on the other side of him, so evidently the invitation had included the Starkien as well.

Vhotan was seated on a hassock before a flat surface suspended in midair with its top covered with what looked like several different studs of various shapes and colors. He was turning or depressing these studs in what appeared to be a random pattern, but with a seriousness and intensity that suggested his actions were far from unimportant. Nonetheless, he broke off at the sight of them, rose from his hassock, and came over to face Jim.

“I’ll call for you a little later, Lorava!” he said.

The thin young Highborn vanished.

“Wolfling,” said Vhotan to Jim, his yellowish brows drawing together, “the Emperor is going to attend this party of yours.”

“I don’t believe it’s my party,” answered Jim. “I think it’s Slothiel’s party.”

Vhotan brushed the objection aside with a short wave of one long hand.

“You’re the reason for it,” he said. “And you’re the reason for the Emperor being at it. He wants to talk to you again.”

“Naturally,” said Jim. “I can come anytime the Emperor wants to summon me. It needn’t be at the party.”

“He’s at his best in public!” said Vhotan sharply. “Never mind that. The point is, at the party the Emperor will want to talk to you. He’ll take you off to one side and undoubtedly ask you a lot of questions.”

Vhotan hesitated.

“I’ll be glad to answer any of the Emperor’s questions,” said Jim.

“Yes … you do exactly that,” said Vhotan gruffly. “Whatever questions he asks you, answer them fully. You understand? He’s the Emperor, and even if he doesn’t seem to be paying you complete attention, I want you to go right on answering until he asks you another question or tells you to stop. Do you understand?”

“Fully,” said Jim. His eyes met the lemon-yellow eyes of the older, Highborn man.

“Yes. Well,” said Vhotan, turning abruptly, walking back to his console of studs, and sitting down before it once again.

“That’s all. You can go back to your quarters now.”

His fingers began to move over the studs. Jim touched Adok on the arm and shifted back to the main room of his own apartment.

“What do you make of that?” he asked Adok.

“Make of it?” Adok repeated slowly.

“Yes,” said Jim. He eyed the Starkien keenly. “Didn’t you think that some of what he said was a little strange?”

Adok’s face was completely without expression.

“Nothing dealing with the Emperor can be strange,” he said. His voice was strangely remote. “The Highborn Vhotan told you to answer fully to the questions of the Emperor. That is all. There could not be any more than that.”

“Yes,” said Jim. “Adok, you’ve been lent to me to be my substitute. But you still belong to the Emperor, don’t you?”

“As I told you, Jim,” said Adok, still in the same expressionless, remote voice. “All Starkiens always belong to the Emperor, no matter where they are or what they’re doing.”

“I remember,” said Jim.

He turned away and went to get out of the Starkien straps and belts he had been wearing, into the white costume like that of all the male Highborn, but without insignia, which he had chosen to wear for the occasion.

He was barely dressed when Ro appeared. In fact, she materialized so suspiciously close upon the end of his dressing that once more he wondered whether he was not under surveillance—by others as well as Ro—more than he thought. But he had no chance to speculate upon this now.

“Here,” she said a little breathlessly, “put this on.”

He saw she was holding out to him what seemed to be something like a narrow band of white satin. When he hesitated, she picked up his left arm and wrapped it around his wrist, without waiting for his approval.

“Now,” she said, “touch mine.” She held up her own left wrist, around which was already wrapped—and clinging as if through some inner life of its own—a similar piece of white cloth. It was the only piece of clothlike material that she was wearing. Otherwise, she was clothed from shoulders to ankles in that same filmy, cloudlike stuff that he had seen Afuan and the other Highborn women wearing at the bullfight on Alpha Centauri III.

She picked Jim’s wrist up and touched his band to hers.

“What’s this?” asked Jim.

“Oh—of course you don’t know,” she said. “At a party, particularly a big one like this, people move around so much that you can’t keep track of where someone is if you want to find them. But now that we’ve checked our sensors with each other, all you have to do is visualize me, and you’ll automatically come to whatever part of the Great Gathering Room I’m in. You’ll see.” She laughed a little. To his surprise, she was more than a little bright-eyed and excited. “Everything’s always very mixed up on occasions like this!”

When they, with Adok, moved to the Great Gathering Room forty minutes or so later, Jim immediately saw what she had meant. The Great Gathering Room was a wall-less, pillared, and roofed area like the learning center he had visited, only much larger. Clearly its polished floor of utter black, upon which the white pillars seemed to float, was at least several square miles in area. On that floor groups of male and female Highborn, in their usual white costume, stood talking, while servants moved among them carrying trays of various edibles and drinkables.

At first sight, except for the appearance of the Highborn and the size of it all, the gathering looked ordinary enough. But as he gazed, Jim became aware that not only Highborn individuals themselves, but the servants, were appearing and disappearing continuously all over the place. For a moment, even to Jim, the size and movement of the crowd was slightly dizzying.

Then he did what he had always done when faced with a situation that threatened a temporary mental or emotional overload. He filed what he could not handle in the back of his mind and concentrated on what he could.

“Adok,” he said, turning to the Starkien, “I want you to circulate. Try to locate for me a particular servant. I don’t know what he’ll look like, but he’ll be a little different from all the rest, in that he will, first, have a fixed position in the room someplace; second, it will be a fairly secluded position, from which only one other servant in the hall at any time will be able to see him. He may be watched by any number of other servants in succession, but there will never be more than one watching him at a time, and he will always be under surveillance by the other servant observing him at the time. Will you get busy about that right away?”

“Yes, Jim,” said Adok. He vanished.

“Why did you ask him to do that?” asked Ro in a low, puzzled voice, pressing close to him.

“I’ll tell you later,” said Jim.

He saw by her attitude that she would like to ask him more questions, in spite of this answer of his. She might indeed have done so, but at that moment Vhotan and the Emperor appeared beside them.

“There he is—my Wolfling!” said the Emperor cheerfully. “Come and talk to me, Wolfling!”

Instantly, with his words, Ro vanished. Also, all the other Highborn nearby began to disappear, until Jim, Vhotan, and the Emperor were surrounded by an open space perhaps fifty feet in diameter, within which they could talk in casual tones without anyone else being near enough to overhear. The Emperor turned his gaze on the older Highborn.

“Go on,” he said, “enjoy yourself for once, Vhotan. I’ll be all right.”

Vhotan hesitated a moment, then winked out of sight.

The Emperor turned back to Jim.

“I like you—what is your name, Wolfling?” he asked.

“Jim, Oran,” answered Jim.

“I like you, Jim.” The Emperor leaned down, stooping a little from his more than seven feet of height, and laid a long hand on Jim’s shoulder, resting part of his weight on Jim like a tired man. Slowly he began to pace idly up and down. Jim kept level with him, held by the shoulder.

“It’s a wild world you come from, Jim?” Oran asked.

“Up until about half a century ago,” said Jim. “Very wild.”

They had gone perhaps half a dozen steps in one direction. The Emperor turned them about, and they began to pace back again. All the while they talked, they continued this movement—half a dozen paces one way, half a dozen paces back again, turn and return.

“You mean, in only fifty years you people tamed this world of yours?” asked the Emperor.

“No, Oran,” said Jim. “We tamed the world sometime before that. It’s just that fifty years ago we finally succeeded in taming ourselves.”

Oran nodded, his gaze not on Jim, but fixed on the floor a little ahead of them as they moved.

“Yes, that’s the human part of it. The self-taming is always the hardest,” he said, almost as if to himself. “You know, my cousin Galyan, looking at you, would think immediately, what marvelous servants these people would make. And perhaps he’s right. Perhaps he’s right … but”—they turned about at the end of one of their short distances of pacing, and the Emperor for a moment looked from the floor up and over at Jim with a friendly smile—“I don’t think so. We’ve had too many servants.”

The smile faded. For a moment they paced in silence.

“You have your own language?” murmured the Emperor in Jim’s ear, once more gazing at the floor as they went. “Your own art and music and history and legend?”

“Yes, Oran,” said Jim.

“Then you deserve better than to be servants. At least”—once more the Emperor flashed one of his quick, brief, friendly smiles at Jim before returning his eyes to the floor ahead of them—“I know that you, at least, deserve better. You know, I shouldn’t be surprised if someday I really do approve your adoption, so that you become technically one of us.”

Jim said nothing. After a second, and after they had completed another turn, the Emperor looked sideways at him.

“Would you like that, Jim?” Oran said.

“I don’t know yet, Oran,” said Jim.

“An honest answer …” murmured the Emperor. “An honest answer … You know how they tell us, Jim, in probability, all events must sooner or later occur?”

“In probability?” Jim asked. But the Emperor went on as if he had not heard.

“Somewhere,” said the Emperor, “there must be a probability in which you, Jim, were the Emperor, and all the people of your world were Highborn. And I was a Wolfling, who was brought there to show off some barbaric skill to you and your court… .”

The grip on Jim’s shoulder had tightened. Glancing up and sideways, Jim saw that the Emperor’s eyes had become abstracted and seemingly out of focus. Though he continued to push Jim forward with his grip on Jim’s shoulder, it was now as if he were blind and letting Jim find the path for him, so that he followed Jim, instead of leading him, as he had at the beginning of their pacing.

“Have you ever heard of a Blue Beast, Jim?” he murmured.

“No, Oran,” said Jim.

“No… .” muttered the Emperor. “No, and neither have I. Also, I looked through all our records of all the human legends on all the worlds—and nowhere was there a Blue Beast. If there never was such a thing as a Blue Beast, why should I see one, Jim?”

The grip on Jim’s shoulder was like a vise now. Still, the Emperor’s voice was murmurous and soft, almost idle, as if he were daydreaming out loud. To any of the Highborn watching from the edges of the circle surrounding them, it must look as if the two of them were in perfectly sensible, though low-voiced conversation.

“I don’t know, Oran,” answered Jim.

“Neither do I, Jim,” said the Emperor. “That’s what makes it so strange. Three times I’ve seen it now, and always in a doorway ahead of me, as if it was barring my path. You know, Jim … sometimes I’m just like all the rest of the Highborn. But there are other times in which my mind becomes very clear … and I see things, and understand them, much better than any of these around us. That’s why I know you’re different, Jim. When I first saw you after the bullfight, I was looking at you … and all of a sudden it was as if you were at the other end of the telescope—very small, but very sharp. And I saw many very small, very sharp details about you that none of the rest of us had seen. You can be a Highborn or not, Jim. Just as you like. Because it doesn’t matter … I saw that in you. It doesn’t matter.”

The Emperor’s voice stopped. But he continued to urge Jim on, pacing blindly alongside him.

“That’s the way it is with me, Jim …” he began again after a moment. “Sometimes I see things small and clear. Then I realize that I’m half a step beyond the rest of the Highborn. And it’s strange—I’m what we’ve been working for down all these generations—that one step further on. But it’s a step that we aren’t built to take, Jim … do you understand me?”

“I think so, Oran,” answered Jim.

” … But at other times,” went on the Emperor. Jim could not tell whether Oran had noted his answer or not. ” … But at other times, things only start to get sharp and clear—and when I try to look more closely, they go very fuzzy, and out of focus, and large. And I lose that sense of extra, inner sharp sight that I had to begin with. Then I have bad dreams for a while— dreams, awake and asleep. It’s in dreams like that, that I’ve seen the Blue Beast, three times now… .”

The Emperor’s voice trailed off again, and Jim thought that they had come merely to another temporary pause in the conversation. But abruptly the Emperor’s hand fell from his shoulder.

Jim stopped and turned. He found Oran looking down at him, smiling, clear-eyed and cheerful.