Robert Silverberg - Nightwings

At length the Sentinel turned in distaste to Gormon and said, “What kind of thing are you?”

“Guildless, your mercy,” Gormon said in sharp tones. “The humble and worthless product of teratogenesis, and yet nevertheless a free man who desires entry to Roum.”

“Do we need more monsters here?”

“I eat little and work hard.”

“You’d work harder still, if you were neutered,” said the Sentinel.

Gormon glowered. I said, “May we have entry?”

“A moment.” The Sentinel donned his thinking cap and narrowed his eyes as he transmitted a message to the memory tanks. His face tensed with the effort; then it went slack, and moments later came the reply. We could not hear the transaction at all; but from his disappointed look, it appeared evident that no reason had been found to refuse us admission to Roum.

“Go on in,” he said. “The three of you. Quickly!”

We passed beyond the gate.

Gormon said, “I could have split him open with a blow.”

“And be neutered by nightfall. A little patience, and we’ve come into Roum.”

“The way he handled her—!”

“You take a very possessive attitude toward Avluela,” I said. “Remember that she’s a Flier, and not sexually available to the guildless.”

Gormon ignored my thrust. “She arouses me no more than you do, Watcher. But it pains me to see her treated that way. I would have killed him if you hadn’t held me back.”

Avluela said, “Where shall we stay, now that we’re in Roum?”

“First let me find the headquarters of my guild,” I said. “I’ll register at the Watchers’ Inn. After that, perhaps we’ll hunt up the Fliers’ Lodge for a meal.”

“And then,” said Gormon drily, “we’ll go to the Guildless Gutter and beg for coppers.”

“I pity you because you are a Changeling,” I told him, “but I find it ungraceful of you to pity yourself. Come.”

We walked up a cobbled, winding street away from the gate and into Roum itself. We were in the outer ring of the city, a residential section of low, squat houses topped by the unwieldy bulk of defense installations. Within lay the shining towers we had seen from the fields the night before; the remnant of ancient Roum carefully preserved across ten thousand years or more; the market, the factory zone, the communications hump, the temples of the Will, the memory tanks, the sleepers’ refuges, the outworlders’ brothels, the government buildings, the headquarters of the various guilds.

At the corner, beside a Second Cycle building with walls of rubbery texture, I found a public thinking cap and slipped it on my forehead. At once my thoughts raced down the conduit until they came to the interface that gave them access to one of the storage brains of a memory tank. I pierced the interface and saw the wrinkled brain itself, pale gray against the deep green of its housing. A Rememberer once told me that, in cycles past, men built machines to do their thinking for them, although these machines were hellishly expensive and required vast amounts of space and drank power gluttonously. That was not the worst of our forefathers’ follies; but why build artificial brains when death each day liberates scores of splendid natural ones to hook into the memory tanks? Was it that they lacked the knowledge to use them? I find that hard to believe.

I gave the brain my guild identification and asked the coordinates of our inn. Instantly I received them, and we set out, Avluela on one side of me, Gormon on the other, myself wheeling, as always, the cart in which my instruments resided.

The city was crowded. I had not seen such throngs in sleepy, heat-fevered Agupt, nor at any other point on my northward journey. The streets were full of Pilgrims, secretive and masked. Jostling through them went busy Rememberers and glum Merchants and now and then the litter of a Master. Avluela saw a number of Fliers, but was barred by the tenets of her guild from greeting them until she had undergone her ritual purification. I regret to say that I spied many Watchers, all of whom looked upon me disdainfully and without welcome. I noted a good many Defenders and ample representation of such lesser guilds as Vendors, Servitors, Manufactories, Scribes, Communicants, and Transporters. Naturally, a host of neuters went silently about their humble business, and numerous outworlders of all descriptions flocked the streets, most of them probably tourists, some here to do what business could be done with the sullen, poverty-blighted people of Earth. I noticed many Changelings limping furtively through the crowd, not one of them as proud of bearing as Gormon beside me. He was unique among his kind; the others, dappled and piebald and asymmetrical, limbless or overlimbed, deformed in a thousand imaginative and artistic ways, were slinkers, squinters, shufflers, hissers, creepers; they were cutpurses, brain-drainers, organ-peddlers, repentance-mongers, gleam-buyers, but none held himself upright as though he thought he were a man.

The guidance of the brain was exact, and in less than an hour of walking we arrived at the Watchers’ Inn. I left Gormon and Avluela outside and wheeled my cart within.

Perhaps a dozen members of my guild lounged in the main hall. I gave them the customary sign, and they returned it languidly. Were these the guardians on whom Earth’s safety depended? Simpletons and weaklings!

“Where may I register?” I asked.

“New? Where from?”

“Agupt was my last place of registry.”

“Should have stayed there. No need of Watchers here.”

“Where may I register?” I asked again.

A foppish youngster indicated a screen in the rear of the great room. I went to it, pressed my fingertips against it, was interrogated, and gave my name, which a Watcher may utter only to another Watcher and only within the precincts of an inn. A panel shot open, and a puffy-eyed man who wore the Watcher emblem on his right cheek and not on the left, signifying his high rank in the guild, spoke my name and said, “You should have known better than to come to Roum. We’re over our quota.”

“I claim lodging and employment nonetheless.”

“A man with your sense of humor should have been born into the guild of Clowns,” he said.

“I see no joke.”

“Under laws promulgated by our guild in the most recent session, an inn is under no obligation to take new lodgers once it has reached its assigned capacity. We are at our assigned capacity. Farewell, my friend.”

I was aghast. “I know of no such regulation! This is incredible! For a guild to turn away a member from its own inn—when he arrives footsore and numb! A man of my age, having crossed Land Bridge out of Agupt, here as a Stranger and hungry in Roum—”

“Why did you not check with us first?”

“I had no idea it would be necessary.”

“May the Will shrivel the new regulations!” I shouted. “I demand lodging! To turn away one who has Watched since before you were born—”

“Easy, brother, easy.”

“Surely you have some corner where I can sleep—some crumbs to let me eat—”

Even as my tone had changed from bluster to supplication, his expression softened from indifference to mere disdain. “We have no room. We have no food. These are hard times for our guild, you know. There is talk that we will be disbanded altogether, as a useless luxury, a drain upon the Will’s resources. We are very limited in our abilities. Because Roum has a surplus of Watchers, we all are on short rations as it is, and if we admit you our rations will be all the shorter.”

“But where will I go? What shall I do?” “I advise you,” he said blandly, “to throw yourself upon the mercy of the Prince of Roum.”

Outside, I told that to Gormon, and he doubled with laughter, guffawing so furiously that the striations on his lean cheeks blazed like bloody stripes. “The mercy of the Prince of Roum!” he repeated. “The mercy—of the Prince of Roum—”