Vestiges of Time (4 page)

of his own social rank: odd—“though we will do so if necessary. We would prefer your cooperation, and I suspect that once you know who we are and what we are doing, and once you have seen the rewards we have to offer you”—he paused in mid-sentence and smiled—“and once you have forgiven us for the deception we played on you, we think you will be very willing to cooperate.”

I was already, I thought, but I’d want to know more very soon. Addressing him as an equal, I said, “Master AkweNema, this hasn’t been a very pleasant welcome you’ve given me, and I’d like to know what you’re up to. Right now all I can feel is cheated and used.” “Very shortly we will explain it all to you, I promise,” AkweNema replied in a conciliatory tone. “If you will give us your word, for the time being, that you will attempt neither to escape nor to use violence against any of us, we will allow you a certain limited freedom under your own recognizance.”

“For how long?” I asked.

“Until you have let us speak our piece and we have made you an offer,” the big, red-haired man said. “And if I refuse your offer?”

“I doubt that you will,” he said.

“We shall speak of that later, Master HarkosNor,” said the lord DessaTyso, using the condescending address of a superior to his social inferior.

“Come,” AkweNema said in a jovial tone of voice, “I am certain that this place is as unpleasant to you as it is to us. Let us go to a place where we can relax and have a cup of wine.”

I shrugged.

“Then you will give us your word?” the lord DessaTyso asked.

“Yeah,” I said, and grunted, giving his rank no recognition, “What have I got to lose?”

Lord DessaTyso gave me a crooked smile but didn’t speak.

“RyoNa, you may go,” AkweNema said. “We will contact you when we need you.”

“Very good, sir,” RyoNa said, using the address one would use to a social superior, though not quite as honorable an address as the one he might have used toward the lord DessaTyso. Then he turned to face me. “You’ll think better of me when these gentlemen have had their say, Harkos.”

I just looked at him without speaking.

With a shrug toward me and a bow toward the others, he turned and left, and as he did I thought I could hear the jingle of platinum bars in a leather sack he carried under his robe. A good day’s pay for services rendered.

“You are excused as well,” AkweNema said to the guards at the door, who gave me unfriendly looks as they left the room. They seemed not to think as highly of me as AkweNema did. “And now, gentlemen and sire, to my suite, if you will.”

AkweNema led us from the room, with Professor KaphNo directly behind him. Lord DessaTyso was careful to stay at my side. I wondered if he was armed. I suspected so.

The first part of the journey was through what must have been some very old underground service tunnels, no longer in use, saved from total decay by the efforts of AkweNema’s people. The tunnels had been cleaned up and buttressed to prevent their collapse and had been provided with illumination strips sufficient for safe passage through the tunnels. But this wasn’t where the bulk of their efforts had been exerted.

We had gone perhaps half a mile through the underground passages when we came to a metal wall that blocked the tunnel from floor to ceiling, and through which passed a pair of heavy metal doors, which were guarded by two burly, black-cla4 men carrying automatic pistols and with what might have been gas grenades clipped to their belts.

AkweNema spoke a greeting to them, to which they responded by opening the doors, allowing us to pass into another section of the Underground. The guards eyed me with suspicion, but, unlike their fellows, not with open hatred. They hadn’t been among the bunch on the surface.

Once we were through the metal doorway I saw that here a great deal more than simple cleaning and bracing of the tunnel walls had been done. Bright parallel strips of illumination, like glowing railroad tracks, dwindled in the distance of the long, long corridors. The walls had been smoothed and painted or paneled and were decorated with bright photographs of outdoor scenes of the world above and with vividly graphic posters that said such things as
the world is AWAITING OUR COMING
and
THE FUTURE RESTS IN THE HANDS OF THE BRATHELLANZA
and
THE CHILDREN OF

tomorrow will be ours.
Carpeting had been laid across the floor, soft and cushiony. Doors led off from the tunnel into other chambers cut into the earth and stone. Far ahead I could hear voices and the movement of men and machinery.

Just inside the metal doorway an attractive young woman in a bright blue gown sat behind a desk, and to each of
_N
us she handed a yellow disk, which we fixed to the fronts of our robes. AkweNema, making no introductions, asked her, “Is my suite ready?”

The girl smiled, nodded, and said, “Yes, sir, it is.” “Please have food and drink delivered there. We are not to be disturbed until you are notified.”

“Yes, sir,” the girl said again. “But, ah, sir, the lady OrDjina has been asking about his lordship.” DessaTyso shot a quick glance at AkweNema, who nodded in return. “I don’t suppose her being there would create any problem.” To the girl: “Inform Lady OrDjina that she is more than welcome.”

“Very good, sir.”

And with that AkweNema led us on again, a hun

dred yards or so down the brightly lighted tunnel, to a large wooden door before which stood an elderly man in a simple blue uniform. Without speaking, the man bowed and opened the door for AkweNema.

“Food is coming,” AkweNema said to the blue-clad servant. “Please see to it.”

“Very good, sire.” The servant used a higher form of address than had the girl at the desk; he hung from lower rungs of the social ladder.

The lord DessaTyso and I followed AkweNema and KaphNo through the doorway.

A series of lavish rooms lay beyond the wooden door, though at first I saw only one of them, the first and largest, something that could almost have been out of
The Arabian Nights:
plush carpets and great down-filled cushions in place of chairs; tables on which sat beautifully detailed vases and tall, elaborate lamps; wall hangings and tapestries of the richest materials, the most complex of designs (made by hand or by computer-directed looms? I wondered); in the middle of the room stood a marble sculpture of a mermaid rising from the sea; in the background, a beautiful if esoteric music played.

“Sit down, gentlemen and my lord. Refreshments should be arriving soon,” AkweNema said. “I trust that you could do with food and drink, Master Harkos- Nor.”

“I could,” I admitted.

As we sat down on the cushions, again DessaTyso looked me over carefully, coldly, as if inspecting a horse someone had offered to sell him—or a slave. I didn’t care much for his appraisal and I tried to tell him so with a cold, hard look of my own. He must have caught my meaning, for he smiled crookedly and looked away without speaking.

“We must wait a bit more, HarkosNor,” AkweNema said. “It would be inhospitable on my part to begin our talk without offering you refreshment.”

I nodded and continued to look around the room, trying to estimate, in terms of some monetary system, the cost of the items that filled the apartment. A fortune, easily, but exactly how great a fortune I couldn’t guess.

The lord DessaTyso appeared to be on the verge of speaking when there came a rap on the door, gentle, servile, but clearly audible, and then the door opened to allow the blue-clad steward to enter, pushing a great wheeled cart that looked too big for him, and which was laden with bottles and goblets and dishes and covered bowls. As he entered and was about to close the door behind him, another person appeared and was framed for a moment in the open doorway.

“OrDjina,” DessaTyso called out, half rising to his feet and gesturing for the newcomer to enter. “Please come in.”

“Yes, please do, my lady,” AkweNema said, also rising halfway and getting oil an awkward little bow.

I figured I might as well rise too, as the others had done.

Old KaphNo, silent and perhaps brooding, made no effort to rise.

The woman, who brushed around the steward and came into the room, was almost enough to make me catch my breath in my throat. To say that she was beautiful is hardly adequate.

Perhaps in her early thirties, mature and fully in possession of herself, she was tall, nearly six feet I would have guessed, and beautifully proportioned. She wore a dark, clinging gown that molded itself to the contours of her body, revealing and yet hiding each line and curve of her torso and legs; her arms were bare except for silvery bracelets on her forearms and dazzling rings on her fingers.

She had dark, dusky skin the color of an old and highly polished piece of prized oak, and long black hair that trailed down her back to below her shoulder

blades; tiny gems, like stars, twinkled in her hair. Her eyes were large, black, bright, intelligent; her lips, very full, covered perfect, bright white teeth that showed as she now smiled at us, as she entered the room and closed the door behind her.

It was only later that I realized that there were no badges of rank and caste on her breast, and wondered why.

“Thank you, AkweNema,” she said, equal-to-equal, briefly offering the man her hand. Her voice was melodious and rich, a slightly husky alto. She could have had a great career as a singer or an actress, I thought.

She nodded to KaphNo and spoke his name, but she seemed to expect no reply other than the upward glance that came from under his bushy eyebrows. Then her gaze came to me.

“And you must be the barbarian warrior Harkos- Nor,” she said, offering her hand, which I briefly clasped as AkweNema had done. I could detect no condescension in her voice.

“I am HarkosNor,” I replied.

When she had retrieved her hand, perhaps pleased that all the fingers were still there, she went on past me to where the lord DessaTyso again sat on the cushioned floor, there to sit down beside him and take one of his hands fondly between both of hers.

Yes, I told myself, the Jord DessaTyso is still very much the spoiled princeling.

By this time the steward thought it safe to move again, and rolled the food-and-wine-laden cart into the middle of the room, up next to the mermaid sculpture.

“Shall I serve you now, sire?” he asked of AkweNema in a servile tone of voice.

“No, no,” AkweNema said, dismissing him with a wave of his fat hand. “We can serve ourselves. You may go.”

“Thank you, sire.” The blue-clad man then quietly vanished.

“Then let us eat,” AkweNema said, rising again and crossing to the cart the steward had brought in. “Then we may talk.”

While we ate, and while I glanced in OrDjina’s direction whenever the conversation would decently allow—a conversation of small talk that~T could barely follow, talk of palace intrigues among the higher castes of VarKhohs, of hinted scandals, of corrupted bureaucracy burdened almost to the point of self-destruction by its own complexities—I wondered just what it was that AkweNema and his friends would have to say when the time for serious talk finally arrived.

And I remembered again the Shadowy Man’s most recent advice. His advice had served me well in the past, though some of the things he had led me into hadn’t always been of the most pleasant nature.

How would this one turn out? I wondered.

The BrathelLanza's Proposal

“Master HarkosNor,” AkweNema began over tall goblets of white wine after the meal was finished, a “snack,” he had said, which had consisted of several courses of fish and fowl and flesh, “we know that you are a stranger in our land and have been among our people for only a short while, and we know that you have come here in the hope of gaining for yourself one of the so-called time machines that our technicians supposedly have built and are testing.”

“Chronal-displacement devices,” KaphNo threw in, his voice a bitter grumbling. I think it was the first time he’d spoken since we’d arrived in AkweNema’s suite.
~

“I stand corrected,” AkweNema said, smiling. “Chronal-displacement devices.” The smile went away. “And for what purpose you wish one we do not know. It is no concern of ours.” His face said differently; and I wondered what he thought a barbarian warrior like HarkosNor wanted with a time machine—to go back into time to save his people from the humiliation of subjugation, or merely to get away to a simpler world where a warrior stood in higher honor? “But we may be able to help you get one, since that is your wish,” he was saying.

“I thought that was what RyoNa was in the process of doing fearlier today,” I said, letting my voice sound as bitter and angry as I dared.

“I can understand your feelings,” AkweNema said, “and I understand your anger at us. Your anger may seem justified to you now, but please hold it in abey-

ance for a while.” He paused, sighed, then continued: “I am afraid that RyoNa lied to you in several respects. There is no time—no chronal-displacement device in all of NakrehVatee, nor in all the world, that is not under the heaviest of guard. There are, in fact, only four of them in existence, and they do not work nearly as well as the popular imagination would lead you to believe, and may never—and, in addition, it would be impossible for you to gain one of them, imperfect as they are, without the aid of an army, or without the aid of a new government in power in NakrehVatee.”

I gave him back stare for stare but didn’t speak.

“Which brings me to my point,” he said. “With
your
aid, we can provide you with both—an army
and
a new government.

“As a newcomer to our land, you may be ignorant of the many injustices that now exist in our nation. We may be the greatest power on Earth today, but as things stand now our society is rotten to the core. Over the years the caste system, which has many good and truly admirable points, has been abused by certain groups in positions of power. The castes themselves have multiplied and subdivided to such an extent that the whole system has become unwieldy and at times even self-destructive.

“New castes have been formed as offshoots of older castes to serve new functions as society has developed, which is well and good; but older castes whose functions have ceased to be of value continue to exist, and those born into them, some of the lower ones, have no way out of them, save through death and hopefully a better change during their next reincarnation, if they as individuals have earned the karma for another chance at life.”

The eyes of the others in the room were more on me than on AkweNema. I hoped my face looked as noncommittal as I was trying to make it look.