Дэймон Найт - Orbit 5

“I will— I will ab- abdicate—”

“No,” Rebade said calmly. “That is not right. What will you do now?”

The young king stood silent, shaking. Rebade helped him sit down on his iron cot, for the walls had darkened as they often did and drawn in all about him to a little cell. “Call—?”

“Call up the Palace Guards. Have them shoot into the crowd. Shoot to kill. They must be taught a lesson.” The young king spoke rapidly and distinctly in a loud, high voice. Rebade said, “Good, my lord, a wise decision! Right. We shall come out all right: you’ll see. Trust me, my lord.”

“I do. I trust you. Get me out of here,” the young king whispered, seizing Rebade’s arm: but his friend frowned. That was not right. He had driven Rebade and hope away again. Rebade was leaving now, calm and regretful, although the young king begged him to stop, to come back, for the noise was softly beginning again, the whining hum that tore his mind to pieces, and already the man in red and white was approaching across a red, interminable floor. “Sir! a plot against your life has been discovered in the Artisan School—”

Down Old Harbor Street clear to the water’s edge the streetlamps burned cavernously bright. Guardsman Pepenerer on his rounds glanced down that empty, slanting vault of light expecting nothing, and saw a creature staggering up it toward him. Pepenerer did not believe in porngropes, but he now saw a porngrope, sea-beslimed, staggering on thin webbed feet, gasping dry air—he could hear it gasping. . . . Old sailors’ tales slid out of mind and he saw a man, sick or drunk or drugged, and he ran down Old Harbor Street between the blank grey warehouse walls, calling, “Now then! Hold on there!”

It was a tall young fellow, half naked and crazy-looking. Even as he gasped, “Help me,” and the Guardsman reached a hand out to him, he lost his nerve, dodged away in rabid terror, and ran. He ran a few steps, stumbled, and pitched down slithering in the frost-slicked stones of the street. Pepenerer got out his gun and gave him .14 seconds of stun, just enough to keep him from thrashing about; then squatted down by him, palmed his radio and called the West Ward for a car. The fellow lay sprawled out meek as a corpse, eyes and mouth half open, arms flung wide as he had fallen. Both arms on the biceps and inner forearm were blotched with injection-marks. Pepenerer took a whiff of his breath, but got no resinous scent of orgrevy; likely he was not on a bender but had been drugged. Thieves, or a ritual clan-revenge. Thieves would not have left the gold ring on his forefinger: a massive thing, carved, as wide almost as the finger-joint. Pepenerer crouched forward to look at it, and then he turned his head and looked at the beaten, blank face in profile against the paving-stones, hard hit by the glare of the streetlamps. Pepenerer got a new quarter-crown piece out of his pouch and looked at the left profile stamped on the bright tin, and back at the right profile stamped in light and shadow and cold stone; then hearing the purr of the electric car turning down from the Longway into Old Harbor Street he hastily put the coin away, muttering, “Damn fool.”

King Argaven was off hunting in the mountains, anyhow, and had been for a couple of weeks; it had been in all the bulletins.

“You see,” said Hoge the physician, “we can assume that he was mindformed; but that gives us almost nothing to go on. There are too many people in Karhide, and in Orgoreyn, for that matter, who are expert mindformers. Not criminals whom the police might have a lead on, but respectable teachers or physicians. And the drugs are available to any physician. As for getting anything from him, if they had any skill at all they will have blocked everything they did to rational access. All clues will be buried, the trigger-suggestions hidden, and we simply cannot guess what questions to ask. There is no way, short of brain-destruction, of going through everything in his mind; and even under hypnosis and deep drugging, which are dangerous, there would be no way now to distinguish implanted ideas or emotions from his own autonomous ones. Perhaps the Aliens could do something, though I doubt their mindscience is all they boast of; at any rate it’s out of reach. We have only one real hope.”

“Which is?” Lord Gerer asked, stolidly.

“The king is a quick and resolute man. At the beginning, before they broke him, he may have known what they were doing to him, and so put up some block or resistance, left himself some escape route. . . .”

Hoge’s low voice lost confidence as he spoke, and trailed off in the silence of the high, red, dusky room. He drew no response from the old man who stood, blackclad, before the fire.

The temperature of that room in the King’s Palace of Erhenrang was 54° F. where. Lord Gerer stood, and 38° midway between the two big fireplaces; outside it was snowing lightly, a mild 22°. Spring had come to Winter. The fires at either end of the room roared red and gold, devouring thigh-thick logs. Magnificence, a harsh luxury, a wasteful splendor, fireplace, fireworks, lightning, meteor, volcano, such things satisfied the men of Karhide on the world Winter. But, except in Arctic colonies above the 35th parallel, they had never installed central heating in any building in the fifteen hundred years of their Age of Invention. Comfort came to them rare, welcome, and unsought: an accident, like joy.

Korgry, sitting beside the bed, turned glancing a moment at the physician and the Lord Councillor, though he did not speak. Both at once crossed the room to him. The broad, hard bed, high on gilt pillars, heavy with a finery of red cloaks and coverlets, bore up the king’s body level with their eyes. To Gerer it appeared a ship breasting, motionless, a swift vast flood of dark, carrying the young king into shadows, terrors, years. Then with terror of his own the old lord saw that Argaven’s eyes were open, staring out a half-curtained, narrow window at the stars.

Gerer feared lunacy; idiocy; he did not know what he feared. Hoge had warned him: “He will not ‘be himself,’ Lord Gerer. He has suffered thirteen days of torment, intimidation, exhaustion, and mindhandling. There may be brain damage, there certainly will be side- and aftereffects of several drugs.” Neither fear nor warning parried the shock. Argaven’s bright, weary eyes turned to Gerer and paused on him blankly a moment: then saw him. And Gerer, though he could not see the black mask reflected, saw the hate, the horror, saw his-young king, infinitely beloved, gasping in imbecile terror and struggling with Korgry, with Hoge, with his own weakness in the effort to get away, to get away from Gerer.

Standing in the cold midst of the room where the tall prowlike head of the bedstead hid him from the king, the old lord heard them pacify Argaven and settle him down again. Argaven’s voice sounded reedy, childishly plaintive. So the Old King, Emran, had spoken in his madness with a child’s voice. Then silence, and the great fires burned.

Korgry the king’s bodyservant yawned and rubbed his eyes. Hoge measured something from a vial into a hypodermic. Gerer stood in despair. My son, my son, my king, what have they done to you? So great a trust, so fair a promise, lost, lost ... So the one who looked like a lump of half-carved black rock, a heavy, prudent, rude old man, grieved and was passion-racked, his love and service of the young king being the world’s one worth to him.

Argaven spoke aloud: “My son—”

Gerer winced, feeling the words torn out of his own mind; but Hoge, untroubled by love, comprehended and said softly to Argaven, “The prince is well, sir. He and his mother are at Warlever Castle. We are in constant communication with the party by radio. The last time was a couple of hours ago. All well there.”