Avram Davidson - Rogue Dragon

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.

“No wonder it seemed ‘that the dragons were the Kar-chee’s dogs.’ The Kar-chee could be in one place and one of his selves in the Kar-chee body in that place; meanwhile, the other self was in the dragon body, hunting down the comparatively feeble human. As long as the dragon body was being ‘mounted’ by a Kar-chee ego, it was capable of acting intelligently. The moment it ceased to be occupied, or, as I’ve been saying, ‘mounted’, by a Kar-chee ego, it had nothing in charge of it but its own low-grade, feeble intelligence. Which wasn’t interested in humans, generally speaking. See how all the fragments fit together. Before the era of the Kar-chee: no dragons. After the Kar-chee reign: lots of dragons. And a tradition which absolutely associated the dragons with the Kar-chee but which, through ignorance, was utterly confused as to what that relationship was.