Gordon R. Dickson (5 page)

“I see,” said Jim grimly.

Her face paled abruptly, and she caught his arms with her hands, as if to keep him from stepping backward from her.

“Don’t look like that!” she said. “Whatever it is, you shouldn’t look like that!”

Jim forced his face to smooth out. He put away the sudden fury that had exploded inside him. He forced himself to smile down at Ro.

“All right,” he said. “I promise you I won’t look like that.”

Ro still held him by the arms.

“You’re so strange,” she said, looking up at him. “So strange, in every way. What made you look like that?”

“Something Galyan said to me,” he answered. “Something to the effect that I could never go back home again.”

“But—you aren’t going to want to go back home!” said Ro, a little wonderingly. “You’ve never seen the Throne World, so of course you don’t know. But no one ever wants to leave it. And the only ones who can stay are the Highborn who can keep their point levels down in the Game, and their servants and their possessions. Not even the Governors of the Colony Worlds can do more than visit the Throne World for short periods of time. When their time is up, they have to leave. But the Highborn and people like you and me—we can stay.”

“I see,” he said.

She frowned down at his arms, which she still held. Her fingers were feeling them through the sleeves of his jacket.

“You’re as hard-muscled as a Starkien,” she said puzzledly. “And you’re so tall for someone who’s not Highborn. Was it natural for you to be this tall back on that wild world you came from?”

Jim laughed a little shortly.

“I was this tall when I was ten years old,” he said. The look of slight incomprehension on her face made him add, “That’s halfway through my normal growing period.”

“And you stopped growing then?” Ro asked.

“I was stopped,” he said a little grimly. “Some of our medical practitioners ran a lot of tests on me because I was so big for my age. They couldn’t find anything wrong, but they put me on an extract of the pituitary gland to curb my growing. And it worked. I stopped growing—physically. But I went on growing otherwise.”

Jim interrupted himself abruptly. “Never mind that,” he said. “You were going to show me how to move around the ship, from room to room.”

“That—and other things!” Suddenly she seemed to grow several inches in front of him, and something came into her that was like the cold imperiousness of Princess Afuan. “They can take my animals and give them away or kill them. But they’re not going to hurt you. When I get through with you, you’ll know more than enough to survive. I may be a throwback, but I’m as Highborn as any of them. The Emperor himself can’t dismiss me, without cause, from the Throne World; and everything that is Highborn’s, by right is mine! Come along, and I’ll begin to show you what it’s like to live among the Highborn and be a citizen of the society of the Throne World!”

She took him first to a section of the ship he had not yet visited. It consisted of a large, high-ceilinged, metal-walled room, with one wall covered with the rays of blinking lights of various colors. Tending this wall was one of the short brown men with long hair down his back. He was, Jim discovered, all that the ship possessed in the way of a crew—in fact, he was not even that. In actuality, he was nothing more than a standby engineer, on hand in case of the unlikely chance that some small repair or adjustment needed to be made to the ship’s mechanism.

The ship, in fact, ran itself. It not only ran itself, it supplied the motive power for all the transfers of people between rooms, and everything else in the way of visible and invisible equipment aboard. Like some huge robot dog, it responded immediately to the mental whims of the Princess Afuan; and, to a lesser extent, it stood ready to accommodate the whims of everyone else aboard.

“Now,” Ro instructed Jim, “simply stand here and relax. Let it make contact with you.”

“Make contact with me?” Jim echoed. He assumed that she was talking about something like telepathy, and tried to say so—but found he had no word for it in the Empire language. Ro, however, understood him, and to his considerable surprise, launched into a complete and highly technical explanation of how the ship worked. In brief, it was simply that the ship studied the electrical activity of an individual brain and from this drew up what amounted to an individual electrical code for whatever the person was thinking or doing. Thoughts which were visualized clearly enough, Ro explained, triggered off motor subactivity in the body—in short, the body physically responded at a very low level to the scene it was imagining, as if that scene were real. The ship then matched these responses with the proper scene, and shifted the person to the scene by literally disassembling him at his present position and reassembling him at the location of the imagined scene.

The process by which the ship crossed light-years of empty space was the same method of dissassembly and reassembly, only on a larger scale. That is, the whole ship and its contents were disassembled and reassembled farther along its line of passage. There was a certain limitation to the distance over which one of these shifts could take place, but since each shift took place at computer speeds, the effect was exactly like that of trans-light velocities, without effort.

” … Actually,” wound up Ro, “the ship really never moves at all. It simply changes the coordinates of its position… .” And she went off into an explanation too technical for Jim to follow.

Nonetheless, after a little practice at visualization, Jim felt that same sensation—like that of a feather tickling the surface of his mind—that he had felt when Ro had asked him to visualize the warehouse in which his frozen bulls were stored. The first time it happened, he moved from one end of the room he was in to the other. But within minutes after that, he had mastered the knack and was easily shifting from room to room about the ship, although he was restricted to those rooms that he had once seen.

Ro took him back to her quarters, and the social aspects of his education began. The achievements of the few days before they landed on the Throne World surprised both of them. Jim was startled to discover that Ro, like all of the Highborn, possessed vast stores of education covering both the scientific and the social aspects of every facet of her ordinary life. It was like her knowledge about the ship. Never in her life would she be called upon to do so much as pay attention to the pattern of winking lights on a ship’s control board. But if necessary, she could have built the vessel from scratch, given the necessary tools and materials. Ro, on the other hand, was amazed to discover that she had to tell Jim things only once.

” … But are you sure you remember that?” she kept interrupting herself to ask Jim. “I never heard of anybody but a Highborn who didn’t have to work to remember things.”

Jim would respond by quoting the last few paragraphs she had said word for word. Reassured, but not really convinced, she would plunge into further detail; and Jim would continue to soak up knowledge about the Throne World, the society of the Highborn, and the Empire which Throne World and Highborn together ruled.

The picture of it all was beginning to click together for him, as a coherent shape finally emerges after a certain critical number of the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle have been put together. Curiously, the Highborn were not direct descendants of those natives of the Throne World who had gone out to colonize the other inhabited worlds of the Empire. They, who were now not merely but in theory rulers of the Empire, had actually come into that position of authority by being weak rather than strong.

It was true that in the beginning the Throne World had tried to keep control of the other worlds it had colonized. But this attempt was soon defeated by the time and space intervening between it and them. Very quickly the newer worlds became autonomous; and by the time, several thousand years later, that the Empire had pushed outward in all directions, until it came to areas where there were no stars with habitable planets within any further reasonable distance, the Throne World had been all but forgotten, except as a birthplace of the human expansion among the stars.

However, even before that expansion had reached its limits, the older colonized worlds had begun to see the advantage of some general organization, some nominal authority and center point which could act as a clearing house for scientific and other developments achieved on other worlds than their own. The Throne World had therefore been revived by common consent and set up as a sort of worldwide combination library and information center. That—though no one knew it at the time—was the beginning of the Highborn.

To the Throne World, in its new role, drifted inevitably the better academic and inventive minds of the Colony Worlds. Here was the intellectual hub of the human universe. Here, therefore, it was most profitable to live—not only in terms of practical reward for intellectual labors, but in the matter of intellectual companionship and access to new information in one field as well.

During the next few thousand years this immigration reached the point that it had to be restricted by the Throne World itself. Meanwhile, the Throne World, by virtue of being the source of supply for most technological advances, had become both rich and powerful in comparison to the Colony Worlds. Its intellectual population was already developing into an elite, added to only sparingly by the best minds of the Colony Worlds and eagerly served by inhabitants of the Colony Worlds who were not qualified to join the elite but greatly desired to live among the mighty.

Eventually, during the last ten thousand years or so, during which the Empire not only had remained static but had indeed shrunk its borders slightly, the Throne World elite had indeed become Highborn—with special breeding controls which gave them the physical marks of their aristocracy. The onyx-white skin, the lemon-yellow eyes, the white hair and eyebrows and eyelashes—all these, Jim learned, were not developed out of any other necessity than to place the badge of superiority upon those who ruled the Empire from the Throne World. Instead of badges or escutcheons to mark their aristocracy, they had given themselves outsize bodies and minds, at the same time ensuring that none who did not belong to their elite could compete with them as individuals. They still gleaned the geniuses and the unusually capable from among what they called the lesser races of man, but that gleaning was highly selective now, and those gleaned did not so much enter the elite themselves as acquire the chance that through inbreeding their great-grandchildren would be one of the tall, white-haired, onyx-skinned masters of the Empire.

” … You see,” Ro said at last to Jim, when they had finally reached the Throne World and were preparing to leave the ship, “there’s a chance—even for a Wolfling like you. Oh, they’ll try to tear you down, all of the Highborn, once they begin to suspect that you want to become one of them. But if you’re educated and ready, they won’t be able to do it. And with my help, we’ll see they won’t!”

Her eyes gleamed with triumph. Jim smiled at her and turned the topic of conversation to what he might expect next, once they had left the ship.

She looked suddenly sober.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Afuan doesn’t tell me. Of course, she’ll want to show you off to the Emperor as soon as possible.”

With this answer in mind, he was consequently at least partly prepared when, an hour or so after the ship had landed on the Throne World, his own room aboard it suddenly vanished around him and he found himself standing in an arena. His luggage was at his feet, and facing him was a complete cuadrilla—banderilleros and picadors, with costumes and horses and all—an exact duplicate of the cuadrilla he had used back on Alpha Centauri III, with the exception that the men in the costumes were all of the breed of short brown men with long, straight hair down their backs.

“These beasts are artificial,” said a voice beside him. He turned and saw Afuan standing a few feet from him. “That will include the bull with which you’ll be practicing. Both the artificial beast and the men have been set to repeat exactly what you did the time we watched you once before. Simply keep them doing it until they learn how.”

The Princess vanished. Apparently she considered that she had said all that needed to be said.

Left alone with his imitation cuadrilla and their mechanical horses, Jim looked around him. The arena was an exact duplicate of the huge arena in which he had fought the two bulls on Alpha Centauri III—except that it had been cleaned up to an almost ridiculous degree.

The stands of the arena, which on Alpha Centauri III had been of some brown, concretelike material, seemed here to be made of white marble. Everything was white, everywhere—even the sand on the floor of the arena was as white as snow.

Jim bent down, opened one of his luggage cases, and took out the large cape, the small cape, and the sword. He did not bother to take out his costume. He closed the luggage cases and put them behind one of the barreras. Music suddenly began, emanating from some unknown source. It was the right music, and moving with it, Jim lined up before his cuadrilla and began the slow walk across the ring toward a section of seats outlined in red that was plainly the Imperial box.

From Jim’s standpoint, it was almost eerie. The longhaired little brown men moved through their motions, not only with professional certainty but also in exact imitation of the men he had left behind on Alpha Centauri III. Even small, useless, personal actions were copied. Evidently all these had been remembered by either Afuan or someone else of the Highborn and faithfully fed into whatever programming was controlling the men who were now playing their parts with the bull. Where a man had leaned upon a barrera during an inactive moment, his duplicate here on the Throne World copied the pose exactly, on the equivalent barrera, and to an inch of the spot equivalent to where the original had placed his elbows. But the eerieness of duplication grew even stronger when Jim went out to work the bull himself with the large cape. For the duplication was doubled. There was even a sort of wry humor to it, thought Jim. The Highborn had produced an imitation bull, programmed to follow exactly the motions of a live bull they had watched, but which they did not know had also been programmed by the biological sciences of Earth to go through exactly those same motions.