Rogue Dragon (18 page)

He settled into the drive-seat with a grateful groan of relief. He took the craft up and then he radioed in to ConfedBase, down on the underside of the Earth in a small continent which the Kar-chees had raised up around what had once been the Andaman Islands, and had ConfedBase connect him to Delegate Anse.

“How are you? Where are you? How have you been? Why did you go away from the hospital?” the questions came pouring out.

Jon-Joras said, “I’m in a stolen flyer up at 30,000 feet. I am very tired, but otherwise well. One group of men tried to kill me early this morning. Another group of them—or maybe just another group—tried to kill me late this afternoon. I have a Kar-chee with me, and—”

“You have a what?” Anse interrupted, in a low voice.

“A Kar-chee, he’s injured, but I don’t know how much or how seriously. Where should we meet you? Sir? Delegate? Are you—”

“I’m here, yes. I’m just thinking. I’m afraid that you’re still quite ill. The best thing would be for you to put down in the nearest place you can. Would that be Peramis?”

Jon-Joras later found it easier to see things as Anse had seen them, but at that exact moment he saw nothing incredible in his own report. He did not make things any better by shouting that nothing would persuade him to go anywhere near any of the four city-states or, for that matter, anywhere near any place where dragon hunts were conducted. “Think fast,” he wound up. “They may be monitoring this call right now. They may try to bring me down.”

“Oh, dear,” said Anse. “Oh, oh, oh… Hold on. Hold on.”

Later, too, Jon-Joras realized that the anxiety was not at all occasioned by belief, but entirely by disbelief. At the moment, though, he found it somewhat gratifying. Anse came back in a moment, asked him how his fuel was, gave him a course to set, and informed him that a special fast-flyer was being sent out and would pick him up in as little time as possible and bring him down to ConfedBase. And this it did. That is, it did not so much pick him up as scoop him up. Then it went down a great ways and leveled out to allow him to transfer. Part of the crew were Prime Worlders, and promptly went into something approaching hysteria when they saw the Kar-chee. But the others had seen enough of aliens even more uncanny-looking than the Kar-chee, and, moreover, had no backlog of almost hereditary fear and hatred concerning Prime World’s former conquerors. They even made educated guesses as to what it would eat and drink, and although it did not do much of either, it did enough of both to relieve Jon-Joras’s mind. He reproached himself for not having thought of this, and was engaged in formulating a useless and incomprehensible apology when he fell asleep sitting up.

The sun was shining when he awoke, and, not reflecting that it was in the nature of things sun-time at ConfedBase when it was night-time on the other side of the world, he thought he had had a good night’s rest. He nodded amiably at the immense avenues of gorgeous flowering trees through which they passed, and, his memory of having seen them at the time of his arrival here on Prime World becoming confused with his seeing them now, he passed into a state where he was not very far from dreaming, and thought of what he recalled having been through as being but singularly vivid visions seen along the roads of sleep. He was in fact thoroughly asleep in a very few minutes, and so he remained for hours yet to come. At one point or at several points he heard familiar voices and this comforted him and it was of no matter to him at the moment if they were dream-voices or real-voices or what they were.

“I was certain that he was feverish or hallucinating or something of that sort—result, you know, Confidential Chief, of his previous illness.”

“Were you?” said the other voice, the voice which pleased him most to hear, although the voice itself seemed not pleased at all.

There was a short pause; the first voice said, “You know that we have little investigatory apparatus here. There has never been any need for it. I saw him briefly when he came through here to make arrangements for you and he said nothing of your special status then—”

“He didn’t know anything about it. Go on—”

“I heard nothing further from him. Then your communication arrived, and I wondered that I’d heard nothing. I sent word out and was told of his being missing after attending an impromptu hunt which had evidently been attacked by a rogue dragon. So many had been killed… I offered a reward… But still nothing turned up. Then came his radio message and his, well, rather wild-sounding story. The physician said he was certainly ill. Then he vanished, as you know, from the physician’s care. And when he said that he had been attacked twice yesterday and had stolen a flyer and had a Kar-chee on board with him—Now, would you not, in my place, have thought—”

And the second voice said, “I am not in your place, Delegate. Nor are you in mine.” Then it asked, “What do you think of his story now? Of all of it, I mean?”

“A living Kar-chee? Here? After all these centuries? A living dodo or dinosaur would be less of a marvel. Much less. If that much of his story is true—and it obviously is!—then all the rest of it could be true, too. And what it all means, is more than I can guess.—You?”

“Me? I have neither need to nor intention of guessing. When my boy wakes up he will tell me. He looks so thin and worn. And so young, so young, so very young…”

The voices fell away. And the young, young, very young man slept on and on. Now it seemed to him that he was aware that he was sleeping and this was pleasant. Somewhere outside was danger. Inside all was safe. The Kar-chee was at the head of his bed and the dragon was at the foot of it and Por-Paulo sat beside it, on the right, the side of honor, which was proper. For he was the proper man, the
proper
proper man. It was a pity that no one could tell this to the Kar-chee. But perhaps he knew it anyway.

“In a way, old Ma’am Anna was right,” Jon-Joras explained over a long and leisurely breakfast, after having slept the clock around. “Because, in a way, the dragons
did
turn into Kar-chees. And, in another way, Hue was also right. Because, in a way, the dragons
were
Kar-chee. Neither was altogether right nor altogether wrong. I think that the truth—as nearly as we can arrive at it—lies somewhere in between. And I think that it goes a long way towards explaining the whole history and mystique of the dragon hunts. Where to start?”

Well-rested, well-washed, well- and cleanly-clothed once again, in slow contented process of becoming well-fed, and two exceedingly important older men listening intently to his every spoken word—Jon-Joras had reason to be as well-pleased with his present situation as, indeed, he was. He had surprises to spring… but then, surprises had been sprung on him as well. And on an empty stomach, too.

Delegate Anse, a small, thin and precise man whose pale hair was cut in the tonsure customary to his native continent, had registered a very mild note of complaint on one of these latter matters. “I don’t recall your telling me,” he had said, “that besides being the private man of Elected King Por-Paulo, you were also his free-born son.”

“He didn’t know it, Delegate,” Por-Paulo said. He was a big man, grayhaired, prominent of nose and jaw. “I very much wanted to marry his mother, but she had—and hasher own ideas on this, as on many subjects. She not only refused me, she chose to reserve the information. And according to our hegemonial laws I could not reveal it myself. But—” his eyes, uplifted for a brief, gleaming instant, “they don’t apply here…”

Unspoken but understood was the intimation that this was at the least one of the reasons for his sending Jon-Joras to Prime World. And following after him. And Jon-Joras had only repeated, bewildered, but never in the least displeased, “I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I always wondered. But I didn’t know…”

The delegate dismissed the matter, as far as he himself was concerned, with a brisk nod, and, “He being free-born, the Nepotism Acts do not apply…” then continued, “You seem to have really done a quite good job, Private Man. I commend you for it—and I commend you, Confidential Chief, for your choice.”

Por-Paulo nodded rather absently, and continued to regard his natural son with the affection he had previously been unable to express openly in his closely, intensely regulated native hegemony. For Jon-Joras, however, it had been another by no means unpleasant shock.
Confidential Chief!
Not only was Por-Paulo his father—and it might be years before he could fully adjust to this: in the past, though father had been inhibited, son had been totally ignorant—but he was one of the one hundred “shadow rulers” of the Confederation, chosen by lot from among the thousands of paramount executives!

Jon-Joras hoped, and rather expected that he would be able to digest both surprises as well as his breakfast. “Where to begin?” he repeated, now. “I wish the Old Man were still alive. Then we’d be able to speak to the Kar-chee, and check my guesses against its own knowledge.”

Anse said, “It might just be possible. It seems to me that Dr. Cannatin has arrived. Let’s have him in.”

The egg-round, egg-bald archaeologist was not in the best of humors at having been abruptly removed from his dig and flown down to ConfedBase. “Three pot-shards and half a glass medicine-bottle may not seem like much to you,” he protested, “considering the time I’ve spent. But I can assure you of the value and significance of the—”

“I have no doubt—” Anse had begun.

“Not that the medicine-bottle is of a particularly rare type,” Cannatin swept on along. “No, on the contrary, it’s found with sufficient frequency to justify dating other artifacts by its presence in a given stratum. We are, however, still not certain what the name of the medicine was. Hrospard Uu—you’ve of course read his monumental
Tentative Glottochronology of the Ichthyopophagous Peoples of Alghol—”

“Dr. Cannatin, we—”

“—Uu claims it was called
colacola.
Dr. Pix, the labial surd chap, on the other hand, insists that
cococo
is the proper form. I should like an explanation of why I was bundled up and hustled down here, if you please. Well?”

His annoyance vanished quickly enough on hearing the explanation. For, like all archaeologists of his time, Cannatin was also a linguist. And, as Delegate Anse, who had examined his records on his arrival on Prime World, knew, the scholar had at one time done excavations on the non-affiliated world of Laralpersis, off in the Lace Pattern.

“Wasn’t there—isn’t there—” Anse asked, “a colony of Kar-chee in that place?”

Cannatin nodded, then at once shook his head. “Kar-chee-
like,”
he corrected. “Smaller. Gray. Not the same. Similar. I did some work among—Why do you ask? Dare I hope that at last I’m to be allowed to try my hand on Kar-chee sites? I’ve always wanted to, but there were always obstructions put in my way. Nothing can really be done here, as I’m sure you know, without the cooperation of the Hunt Company. And the Hunt Company, for some reason… Well, I suppose they’re not interested in anything but hunting. Eh?”

He was incredulous when they told him that a living Kar-chee was present there at ConfedBase, that the physicians were doing their best to treat its injuries, and that anything he knew or could surmise about its morphology or habits or language—in short, anything about it—based on his knowledge of a kindred species, would probably be of considerable help.

“In-
cred
-ible!” he exclaimed. “Wonderful! Yes. Yes, yes, of course. I do know something of the subject. We used a little mechanical device to communicate with them, electronic, similar—or, at least, not grossly dissimilar—to the ancient telegraph instrument. And not utterly, remote, either, to various drum-systems of reproducing certain languages. I’m sure I could rig one up with a little help. Mind you, it’s no magical-telepathic gadget, it won’t teach me their talkee-talkee. But… on the basis of what I know about a presumably cognate type of language, plus what we all know, all we linguists, I mean, on the question of general communications between intelligent species: I should be able to manage something. It will be fine fun to try, and, meanwhile, well, my pot-shards and medicine-bottles will stay and wait for me. Nobody else wants them.

“Take me to your Kar-chee,” he wound up. “And,” to Jon-Joras, “I’ll be sure to mention you, with full credits, young man, in the paper I mean to write about this.”

Jon-Joras, mouth full of marmalade, gestured to him to stay a second more. Hastily swallowed. Asked, “Did the ones on Laralpersis give the appearance of living in symbiosis with another form of life?”

Cannatin frowned. “Hadn’t thought of it in those terms,” he said, after a moment. “Symbiosis, commensality… There was a fuzzy little nothing of a creature that all the Kishchefs seemed fond of—in fact, we were told it was as much as our life was worth to tamper with one of those fuzz-balls. Why? Well, I’ll ask you later. Duty, duty.”

It fit in, it all fit in.
I must consult with my other self.
In the past, among men, the possession by one entity of more than one ego had been regarded with, generally, fear and terror. They had spoken of demoniac indwelling, of satanic possession, multiple personality. Victims had been exorcized, lobotomized, mulcted, hospitalized, incarcerated—If the Kar-chees, and their cognates, the Kish-chefs, had ever in an earlier stage or age of their species, undergone similar experiences, could not be said. What could be said, though—and Jon-Joras said it clearly—was this:

“There seems to me to be three things certain. One, is that every member of this species has at least two egos… selves… personalities. Maybe some have more, I don’t know, the only one I spoke to mentioned only one other self. Two, that they solved the problem, if indeed it ever was a problem to them, by finding another life-form to serve as host to the other personality. This other life-form was, had to be, one whose own intelligence—or should I say, intelligence-ego?—was sufficiently feeble to present no obstacle. In the case of the Kish-chefs, this ‘mount’ was what he calls the ‘fuzzy balls of nothing.’ And this brings us to number three: The ‘mount’ used by the Kar-chee was the creature we call
the dragon.