Gordon R. Dickson (13 page)

“Well, I mustn’t keep you, Jim,” said Oran in a thoroughly normal, conversational voice. “This will be your first party—and after all, you’re practically the guest of honor. Why don’t you circulate and meet people. I’ve got to go find Vhotan. He worries too much when I’m away from him.”

The Emperor vanished. Jim stood still, and the cleared circle of floor began to fill in around him, as those on the outskirts drifted inward, and new arrivals began to appear. He looked about for Ro but could not see her.

“Adok!” he said in a low voice.

The Starkien appeared beside him.

“Forgive me, Jim,” said Adok. “I didn’t know that the Emperor was through talking to you. I found the servant you sent me to find.”

“Take me where I can see him but he can’t see me,” said Jim.

Abruptly they were in a narrow, shadowy place between two pillars, looking toward a further area where a cluster of close pillars enclosed a small open space, where a large number of trays loaded with food and drink stood neatly racked in the empty air, one above another. Standing amidst these trays was a servant, one of the short brown men with the long hair. Jim and Adok stood behind him, and looking past him, they could see out to where another servant was circulating within view with a tray of food.

“Good,” said Jim.

He memorized the location and shifted both himself and Adok back to where he had been standing when the Emperor had left him.

“Adok,” he said softly, “I’m going to try to stay continuously within sight of the Emperor. I’d like you to stay within sight of me, but not exactly with me. Keep your eyes on me, and when I disappear, I want you to go to Vhotan, who’ll be with the Emperor, and tell him I want him to be a witness to something. Then bring him to the place where that servant is. You understand?”

“Yes, Jim,” said Adok unemotionally.

“Now,” said Jim. “How do I find the Emperor?”

“I can take you to him,” said Adok. “All Starkiens can always find the Emperor, at any time. It’s in case one of us should be needed.”

They were suddenly elsewhere in the Great Gathering Room. Jim looked about and from a distance of a couple of dozen feet saw the Emperor—this time without a circle of privacy around him, talking and laughing with several other Highborn. Vhotan, his yellowish brows knitted, was at the younger man’s elbow.

Jim looked around him again and discovered Adok looking at him from perhaps twenty feet away. Jim nodded and drifted off at an angle that would keep him moving through the crowd, but at about always the same distance from the Emperor.

Twice the Emperor shifted position suddenly. Twice Jim found himself shifted by Adok to a new position within sight of the Highborn ruler. Surprisingly, through all this, none of the Highborn around Jim paid particular attention to him. They seemed to have no eagerness to see the Wolfling in whose honor the party was being given, and if their eyes rested on him unknowingly, they evidently took him for simply one more of the servants.

Time stretched out. Nearly an hour had gone by, and Jim was almost beginning to doubt his earlier certainties, when abruptly he saw what he had been waiting for.

At first glance, it was nothing much. The Emperor was half-turned away from Jim, and all that betrayed his change in condition was a slight stiffening of his tall figure. He had become somewhat immobile, somewhat rigid.

Jim hastily took two steps to the left so that he could catch sight of the man’s face. Oran was staring through and past the other Highborn man he had been talking to. His gaze was fixed; his smile was fixed; and as at the bullfight, there was a little trickle of moisture shining at the corner of his mouth.

None of those around him appeared to be in the least aware of this. But Jim wasted no time watching them. Instead, he turned to look about for servants. He had made less than a half-turn before he saw the first man, a thin black-haired member of the lesser races, carrying a silver tray of what looked like small cakes.

The man was not moving. He was stopped, still, as frozen in position as the Emperor.

Jim hastily completed his turn. He saw three more servants, all of them rigid, all of them unmoving as statues. Even as he looked, the Highborn around them began to take notice of this strange lack of activity in their midst. But Jim did not wait to see how their reaction would develop. Instantly he transferred himself to the shadowy area behind the servant with the trays—to that place where Adok had earlier taken him.

The man with the trays was standing, looking. But he was not rigid—as was the servant who could be seen a couple of dozen yards beyond him, surrounded by Highborn.

Jim bent nearly double and ran forward swiftly and silently behind the trays until he came up with the servant who was looking out. At once he caught the man from behind with both hands. One hand taking him at the top and back of the neck just under the overhang of the skull, the other hand caught hold of the left armpit from behind, with the thumb resting over a pressure point just to the left of the shoulderblade.

“Move,” whispered Jim swiftly, “and I’ll break your neck.”

The man stiffened. But he made no sound, and he did not move.

“Now,” whispered Jim again. “Do exactly as I tell you—”

He paused to glance around behind him. There, in the shadows, he saw the stocky form of Adok, and with Adok a towering Highborn shape that would be Vhotan. Jim turned back to the servant.

“Put the two first fingers of your right hand across the biceps of your left arm,” Jim whispered to the man.

The other did not move. Still keeping himself crouched low and hidden behind the servant’s form, Jim pushed his thumb in again against the pressure point.

For a long moment the man resisted. Then, jerkily, almost like a robot, he moved his right hand up, up, and laid the forefingers of it, extended in V form, across the biceps of his left arm.

Outside, the immobile servant in sight suddenly began to move, as if nothing had happened, trailed by a small cloud of puzzled and interested Highborn. Jim quickly clapped a hand over the mouth of the man he was holding, and half-lifted, half-dragged him back into the shadows.

Vhotan and Adok came forward to face down at the man.

“Now—” began Vhotan grimly. But at that moment the servant made an odd, small noise and suddenly slumped, heavy in Jim’s grasp.

“Yes,” said Vhotan, as if Jim’s laying the man down had been a comment in words, “whoever planned this wouldn’t have taken any chances on leaving him alive for us to question. Even the brain structure will be destroyed, no doubt.”

He raised his eyes and looked across the dead body to Jim. His Highborn mind had plainly already deduced much of what Jim had brought him here to see. But Vhotan’s eyes retained a bit of their chill, nonetheless.

“Do you know who’s behind all this?” he asked Jim.

Jim shook his head.

“But you clearly expected it to happen,” said Vhotan. “You expected it enough to send your Starkien to bring me here. Why me?”

Jim looked unstaringly at him.

“Because I decided you were the one man among the Highborn who had to admit to yourself, consciously, that the Emperor’s mind is not all it should be—or perhaps,” said Jim, for a second remembering their talk, his and the Emperor’s, as they walked up and down the polished floor, “his mind is a little too much more than it should be.”

A faint click seemed to come from the throat of Vhotan. It was several long seconds before he said anything; and when he did speak, it was on another topic.

“How did you find out about this—this, that the servants had planned?” Vhotan asked.

“I didn’t find out, to the point where I was absolutely sure it would happen,” said Jim. “But I taught myself the Silent Language of the servants underground and learned that something was in the wind. Putting that together with this party, and the Emperor’s known frailty, gave me an idea of what to look for. So when I got here, I sent Adok around to look for it; and when he found it, I acted as you’ve just seen.”

Vhotan had stiffened again at the coupling of the words “Emperor” and “frailty.” But he relaxed as Jim finished talking, and nodded.

“You’ve done a good job, Wolfling,” he said; and the words were plain enough, even though the tone was grudging. “From this point on, I’ll handle it. But we’d better get you off the Throne World for a while, sponsored for adoption or not sponsored for adoption.”

He stood and thought for a second.

“I think the Emperor will promote you,” he said finally. “As a rank more commensurate with your effective Highborn status as someone sponsored for adoption, he’ll promote you to a Starkien Commander of Ten-units and send you off on some military-police job on one of the Colony Worlds.”

He turned away from Jim, Adok, and the dead servant, as if about to disappear. Then, apparently changing his mind, he swung back to look at Jim again.

“What’s your name?” he said sharply.

“Jim,” answered Jim.

“Jim. Well, you did a good job, Jim,” said Vhotan grimly. “The Emperor appreciates it. And—so do I.”

With that, he did disappear.

The planet Athiya to which Jim was sent with his Ten-units of Starkien, Adok, and Harn II—who was the Ten-units’ original commander but now acting-adjutant to Jim—was one of the many worlds populated by the small brown men with long, straight hair hanging down their back. The Governor, a burly little chestnut of a man, avoided all references to the uprising, to put down which he had asked the Highborn to send him Starkien help. He insisted that they go through a large and formal welcoming ceremony, during which he avoided all references to the uprising and any questions about it made to him by Jim.

However, explanations could not be put off forever. Jim, Harn II, Adok, and the Governor all ended up at last in the Governor’s private office of the capital city of Athiya. The Governor attempted to fuss around getting them hassocks and refreshments, but Jim cut him short.

“Never mind that,” said Jim. “We don’t want food and drink. We want to know about this uprising—where is it, how many people are involved, and what kind of weapons have they?”

The Governor sat down on one of the Hassocks and abruptly burst into tears.

For a moment Jim was dumbfounded. Then knowledge that had its roots not in what he had learned on the Throne World as much as what he had learned back in his anthropological studies on Earth reassured him with the obvious deduction that the Governor belonged to a culture in which it was not unusual for the males to cry—even as publicly and noisily as the Governor was doing now.

Jim waited, therefore, until the Governor had gotten rid of his first explosion of emotion, and then put his question again.

Snuffling, the Governor wiped tears from his eyes and tried to answer. “I never thought they wouldn’t send me a Highborn in command of the Starkiens!” he said thickly to Jim. “I was going to throw myself on his mercy … but you’re not a Highborn—”

His tears threatened to flood his explanations once again. Jim spoke sharply to him, to bring him out of it.

“Stand up!” Jim snapped. Reflexively, the Governor obeyed. “As a matter of fact, I’ve been sponsored for adoption into the Highborn. But that’s beside the point. Whatever the Emperor sent you is what your situation deserves.”

“But it isn’t!” choked the Governor. “I—I lied. It isn’t just an uprising. It’s a revolution! All the other families on the planet have joined together—even my cousin Cluth is with them. In fact, he’s the head of it all. They’ve all banded together to kill me and put Cluth here in my place!”

“What’s this?” demanded Jim. He was aware that the Colony Worlds of the empire had their miniature courts, modeled on the Throne World’s. These courts consisted of the noble families of the Colony World, headed up by the family and person of the Governor, who was a small Emperor locally, in his own right.

“Why did you let it get this far?” put in Harn II. “Why didn’t you use your colonial troops earlier to put it down?”

“I—I—” The Governor wrung his hands, obviously incapable of speech.

Watching him, Jim had no doubt what had happened. His studies of the past few weeks, both underground and at the learning-center screen in Ro’s apartment, once he had trained himself to read at the rapid Highborn rate, had given him a good insight not merely into Throne World society but into the society of these Colony Worlds. Undoubtedly the Governor had let things get this far out of hand because he had been confident of his own ability until recently to bargain with the dissident elements of his world. Evidently he had underrated his opposition.

Then, having let things get out of hand, he had been afraid to admit the fact to the Throne World and had put in a request for much less in the way of Starkien troops than he needed to control the situation, possibly imagining he could use the Starkiens coming as a threat and still make a deal with the rebels.

However, understanding this was no help now. The Throne World was committed to backing up the Governors, who were allowed to hold power on the Colony Worlds.

“Sir,” said Harn II, tapping Jim on the elbow. He beckoned to Jim, and they walked aside, where they could talk privately at the far end of the room. Adok followed them, leaving the Governor standing, a lonely little brown figure surrounded by hassocks and floating table surfaces.

“Sir,” said Harn II in a low voice, once they had stopped at the far end of the room, “I strongly suggest that we stay put here and send a message back to the Throne World for additional Starkiens. If half what that man there says is true, those who are against him will already have control of most of the colonial armed forces. A Ten-units of Starkiens can do a lot, but they can’t be expected to defeat armies. There’s no reason we should lose men just because of his blunder.”

“No,” said Jim. “Of course not. On the other hand, I think I’d like to look into the situation a little further and see for ourselves what we’re up against before shouting for help. So far the only account of things is what we’ve gotten from the Governor. Things may be a great deal different from what he thinks, even if everything he’s afraid of is true.”