Authors: James Blish
Anywhen (5 page)
Valkol the Polite—or the Exarch's agent, it hardly mattered which—did not waste any time. From a vantage point high up on the Principate's only suitable mountain, Simon watched their style of warfare with appreciation and some wonder.
Actually, in the maneuvering itself the hand of the Exarchy did not show, and did not need to; for the whole campaign would have seemed a token display, like a tournament, had it not been for a few score of casualties which seemed inflicted almost inadvertently. Even among these there were not many deaths, as far as Simon could tell—at least, not by the standards of battle to which he was accustomed.
Clearly, nobody who mattered got killed, on either side. It all reminded Simon of medieval warfare, in which the nearly naked kerns and gallowglasses were thrust into the front ranks to slaughter one another, while the heavily armored knights kept their valuable persons well to the rear—except that here there was a good deal more trum
pet blowing than there was slaughter. The Rood-Prince, in an exhibition of bravado more garish than sensible, deployed on the plain before his city several thousand pennon-bearing mounted troopers who had nobody to fight but a rabble of foot soldiers which Druidsfall obviously—at least, to Simon's eye—did not intend to be taken seriously; whereupon, the city was taken from the Gulf side, by a squadron of flying submarines which broke from the surface of the sea on four buzzing wings like so many dragonflies. The effect was like a raid by the twenty-fifth century upon the thirteenth, as imagined by someone in the twentieth—a truly dreamlike sensation.
The submarines particularly interested Simon. Some Boadaceous genius, unknown to the rest of the known galaxy, had solved the ornithopter problem—though the wings of the devices were membranous rather than feathered. Hovering, the machines thrummed their wings through a phase shift of a full hundred and eighty degrees, but when they swooped, the wings moved in a horizontal figure eight, lifting with a forward-and-down stroke, and propelling with the back stroke. A long, fishlike tail gave stability, and doubtless had other uses under water.
After the mock battle, the 'thopters landed and the troops withdrew; and then matters took a more sinister turn, manifested by thumping explosions and curls of smoke from inside the Rood palace. Evidently, a search was being made for the supposedly hidden documents Simon was thought to have sold, and it was not going well. The sounds of demolition, and the occasional public hangings, could only mean that a maximum interrogation of the Rood-Prince had failed to produce any papers, or any clues to them.
This Simon regretted, as he did the elimination of Da-Ud. He was not normally so ruthless—an outside expert would have called his workmanship in this affair perilously close to being sloppy—but the confusion caused by the transduction serum, now rapidly rising as it approached term, had prevented him from manipulating every factor as subtly as he had originally hoped to do. Only the grand design was still intact now: It would now be assumed that Boadacea had clumsily betrayed the Exarchy, leaving the Guild no way out but to capitulate utterly to Simon, with whatever additional humiliations he judged might not jeopardize the mission, for Jillith's sake—
Something abruptly cut off his view of the palace. He snatched his binoculars away from his eyes in alarm.
The object that had come between him and the Gulf was a mounted man—or rather, the idiot-headed apteryx the man was sitting on. Simon was surrounded by a ring of them, their lance points aimed at his chest, pennons trailing in the dusty viol grass. Some one of Simon's
personae
remembered that the function of a pennon is to prevent the lance from running all the way through the body, so that the weapon can be pulled out easily and used again, but Simon had more immediate terrors to engross him.
The pennons bore the device of the Rood-Prince; but every lancer in the force was a vombis.
Simon arose resignedly, with a token snarl intended more for himself than for the impassive protean creatures and their fat birds. He wondered why it had never occurred to him before that the vombis might be as sensitive to him as he was to them.
But the answer to that no longer mattered. Sloppiness was about to win its long-postponed reward.
They put him naked into a wet cell: a narrow closet completely clad in yellowed alabaster, down the sides of which water oozed and beaded all day long, running out into gutters at the edges. He was able to judge when it was day, because there were clouded bull's-eye lenses in each of the four walls which waxed and waned at him with any outside light. By the pattern of its fluctuation he could have figured out to a nicety just where on Boadacea he was, had he been in the least doubt that he was in Druidsfall. The wet cell was a sort of inverted oubliette, thrust high up into Boadacea's air, probably a hypertrophied merlon on one of the towers of the Traitors' Hall. At night, a fifth lens, backed by a sodium vapor lamp, glared down from the ceiling, surrounded by a faint haze of steam where the dew tried to condense on it.
Escape was a useless fantasy. Erected into the sky as it was, the wet cell did not even partake of the usual character of the building's walls, except for one stain in the alabaster which might have been the underside of a child's footprint; otherwise, the veinings were mockingly meaningless. The only exit was down, an orifice through which they had inserted him as though he were being born, and now plugged like the bottom of a stopped toilet. Could he have broken through one of the lenses with his bare hands, he would have found himself naked and torn on the highest point in Druidsfall, with no place to go.
Naked he was. Not only had they pulled all his teeth in search of more poisons, but of course they had also taken his clasp. He hoped they would fool with the clasp—it would make a clean death for everybody—but doubtless they had better sense. As for the teeth, they
would regrow if he lived, that was one of the few posi
tive advantages of the transduction serum, but in the
meantime his bare jaws ached abominably.
They had missed the antidote, which was in a tiny gel capsule in his left earlobe, masquerading as a sebaceous cyst—left, because it is automatic to neglect that side of
a man, as though it were only a mirror image of the
examiner's right—and that was some comfort. In a few
more days now, the gel would dissolve, he would lose
his multiple disguise, and then he would have to con
fess, but in the meantime he could manage to be content
despite the slimy, glaring cold of the cell.
And in the meantime, he practiced making virtues of
deficiencies: in this instance, calling upon his only inner resources—the diverting mutterings of his other person
alities—and trying to guess what they might once have
meant.
Some said:
"But I mean, like, you know—"
"Wheah they goin'?"
"Yeah."
"Led's gehdahda heah—he-he-he!"
"Wheah?"
"So anyway, so uh."
Others:
"It's hard not to recognize a pigeon."
"But Mother's birthday is July 20."
"So he knew that the inevitable might happen—"
"It made my scalp creak and my blood curl."
"Where do you get those crazy ideas?"
And others:
"Acquit Socrates."
"Back when she was sane she was married to a win
dow washer."
"I don't know what you've got under your skirt, but
it's wearing white socks."
"And then she made a noise like a spindizzy going sour."
And others:
"Pepe Satan, pepe Satan aleppe."
"Why, so might any man."
"EVACUATE MARS!"
"And then she sez to me, she sez—"
. . . if he would abandon his mind to it."
"With all of love."
And . . .
but at that point the plug began to unscrew,
and from the spargers above him which formerly had kept the dampness running, a heavy gas began to curl. They had tired of waiting for him to weary of himself, and the second phase of his questioning was about to begin.
They questioned him, dressed in a hospital gown so worn that it was more starch than fabric, in the Traitor-in-Chief's private office to begin with—a deceptively bluff, hearty, leather-and-piperacks sort of room, which might have been reassuring to a novice. There were only two of them: Valkol in his usual abah, and the "slave," now dressed as a Charioteer of the high blood. It was a curious choice of costume, since Charioteers were supposed to be free, leaving it uncertain which was truly master and which slave; Simon did not think it could have been Valkol's idea. The vombis, he also noticed, still had not bothered to change its face from the one it had been wearing aboard the
Karas,
implying an utter confidence which Simon could only hope would prove to be unjustified.
Noting the direction of his glance, Valkol said, "I asked this gentleman to join me to assure you, should you be in any doubt, that this interview is serious. I presume you know who he is."
"I don't know who 'he' is," Simon said, with the faintest of emphasis. "But it must be representing the Green Ex-arch, since it's a vombis."
The Traitor-in-Chief's lips whitened slightly. Aha, then he hadn't known that! "Prove it," he said.
"My dear Valkol," the creature interposed. "Pray don't let him distract us over trifles. Such a thing could not be proved without the most elaborate of laboratory tests, as we all know. And the accusation shows what we wish to know, i.e., that he is aware of who I am—otherwise, why try to make such an inflammatory charge?"
"Your master's voice," Simon said. "Let us by all means proceed—this gown is chilly."
"This gentleman," Valkol said, exactly as if he had not heard any of the four preceding speeches, "is Chag Sharanee of the Exarchy. Not from the Embassy, but directly from the Court—he is His Majesty's Deputy Fomentor."
"Appropriate," Simon murmured.
"We know you now style yourself 'Simon de Kuyl,' but what is more to the point, that you claim yourself the Traitor-in-Chief of High Earth. Documents now in my possession persuade me that if you are not in fact that officer, you are so close to being he as makes no difference. Possibly the man you replaced, the amateur with the absurd belt of poison shells, was actually he. In any event, you are the man we want."
"Flattering of you."
"Not at all," said Valkol the Polite. "We simply want the remainder of those documents, for which we paid. Where are they?"
"I sold them to the Rood-Prince."
"He had them not, nor could he be persuaded to remember any such transaction."
"Of course not," Simon said with a smile. "I sold them for twenty riyals; do you think the Rood-Prince would recall any such piddling exchange? I appeared as a bookseller, and sold them to his librarian. I suppose you burned the library—barbarians always do."
Valkol looked at the vombis. "The price agrees with the, uh, testimony of Da-Ud tam Altair. Do you think—?"
"It is possible. But we should take no chances; e.g., such a search would be time consuming."
The glitter in Valkol's eyes grew brighter and colder. "True. Perhaps the quickest course would be to give him over to the Sodality."
Simon snorted. The Sodality was a lay organization to which Guilds classically entrusted certain functions the Guild lacked time and manpower to undertake, chiefly crude physical torture.
"If I'm really who you think I am," he said, "such a course would win you nothing but an unattractive cadaver—not even suitable for masonry repair."
"True," Valkol said reluctantly. "I don't suppose you could be induced—politely—to deal fairly with us at this late date? After all, we did pay for the documents in question, and not any mere twenty riyals."
"I haven't the money yet."
"Naturally not, since the unfortunate Da-Ud was held here with it until we decided he no longer had any use for it. However, if upon the proper oaths—"
"High Earth is the oldest oath-breaker of them all," the Fomentor said. "We—viz., the Exarchy—have no more time for such trials. The question must be put."
"So it would seem. Though I hate to handle a colleague thus—"
"You fear High Earth," the vombis said. "My dear Valkol, may I remind you—"
"Yes, yes, the Exarch's guarantee—I know all that," Valkol snapped, to Simon's surprise. "Nevertheless—Mr. De Kuyl, are you
sure
we have no recourse but to send you to the Babble Room?"
"Why not?" Simon said. "I rather enjoy hearing myself think. In fact, that's what I was doing when your guards interrupted me."
Simon was, naturally, far from feeling all the bravado he had voiced, but he had no choice left but to trust to the transduction serum, which now had his mind on the shuddering, giddy verge of depriving all three of them of what they each most wanted. Only Simon, of course, could know this; and only he could also know something much worse—that insofar as his increasingly distorted time sense could calculate, the antidote was due to be released into his blood stream at best in another six hours, at worst within only a few minutes. After that, the Exarchy's creature would be the only victor—and the only survivor.
And when he saw the Guild's toposcope laboratory, he wondered if even the serum would be enough to protect him. There was nothing in the least outmoded about it; Simon had never encountered it’s like even on High Earth. Exarchy equipment, all too probably.
Nor did the apparatus disappoint him. It drove directly down into his subconscious with the resistless unconcern of a spike penetrating a toy balloon. Immediately, a set of loudspeakers above his supine body burst into multi-voiced life:
