Дэймон Найт - Orbit 5

He was striding beside the Plenipotentiary up the long, immensely high room toward the dais and chairs at the far end. The windows were little more than slits, as usual on this cold world; fulvous strips of sunlight fell from them diagonally to the red-paved floor, dusk and dazzle in Axt’s eyes. He looked up at the young king’s face in that somber, shifting radiance. “Who then?”

“I did.”

“When, my lord, and why?”

“When they had me, when they were remaking me to fit their mold and play their game. Why? So that I can’t fit their mold and play their game! Listen, Lord Axt, if they wanted me dead they’d have killed me: they want me to live, to rule, to govern, to be king. As such I am to follow the orders imprinted in my brain, gain their ends for them. I am their tool: ignorant, but ready to use. Why else should they have let me live?”

All this came hard and fast on Axt’s understanding, but he was quick of understanding, that being a minimal qualification of a Mobile of the Ekumen; besides, the affairs of Karhide, the stresses and seditions of that lively kingdom, were well known to him. Remote and provincial though Winter was, its dominant nation, Karhide, was as large as any Aliy nation of the Ekumen in these disjointed times, and more vigorous than many. Axt’s reports were discussed in the central Councils of the Ekumen eighty light-years away; the equilibrium of the Whole rests in all its parts. Thus Axt understood and thought quickly, and he said, as they sat down in the great stiff chairs on the dais, “In order—perhaps—for you to abdicate?”

“Leaving my son as heir, and a Regent of my own choice? They would not gain much from that.”

“Your son is an infant, and you are a very strong king. . . . Whom would you name as Regent?”

The king frowned. In a rather hoarse voice he said, “Gerer.”

Axt nodded. “He is no faction’s tool, certainly.”

“No. He is not,” Argaven replied, though with no warmth. A pause. “Is it true that the . . . science of your worlds might undo what was done to me, Lord Axt?”

“Possibly. In the Institute on Olull. But if I sent for a specialist tonight, he’d get here twenty-four years from now. . . . You’re not aware of a change in any specific attitude—” But a lad, coming in a side door behind them, set a small table by the Plenipotentiary’s chair and loaded it with dishes of fruit, sliced bread-apple, a silver tankard of ale. Argaven had noticed that his guest had missed his breakfast. Though the fare on Winter, mostly vegetable and that mostly uncooked, was dull stuff to Axt’s taste, he set to gratefully; and as serious talk was unseemly over food, Argaven shifted to generalities. “Once you said something, Lord Axt, which seemed to imply that all men on all worlds are blood kin. Did I mistake your meaning?”

“Well, so far as we know, which is a tiny bit of dusty space under the rafters of the Universe, all the men we’ve run into are in fact men. But the kinship goes back some five hundred and fifty thousand years, to the Fore-Eras of Hain. The ancient Hainish settled a hundred worlds.”

Argaven laughed, delighted. “My Harge dynasty has ruled Karhide for seven hundred years now. We call the times before that ‘ancient.’ ”

“So we call the Age of the Enemy ‘ancient,’ and that was less than six hundred years ago. Time stretches and shrinks; changes with the eye, with the age, with the star; does all except reverse itself—or repeat.”

“The Powers of the Ekumen dream, then, of restoring that truly ancient empire of Hain; of regathering all the worlds of men, the lost worlds?”

Axt nodded, chewing bread-apple. “Of weaving some harmony among them, at least. Life loves to know itself, out to its farthest limits. To embrace complexity is its delight. All these worlds and the various forms and ways of the minds and lives on them: together they would make a really splendid harmony.”

“No harmony endures,” said the young king.

“None has ever been achieved,” said the Plenipotentiary. “The pleasure is in trying.” He drained his tankard, wiped his fingers on the woven-grass napkin.

“That was my pleasure as king,” said Argaven. “It is over.”

“Sir—”

“It is finished. Believe me. I will keep you here, Lord Axt, until you believe me. I need your help. I must not rule this country. I cannot abdicate against the will of the Council. They will vote against me. If you cannot help me, then I will have to kill myself.” He said it reasonably, but Axt well knew that in Karhide suicide was held to be the ultimately contemptible act, inexcusable, beneath pity.

“One way or another,” said the young king.

The Plenipotentiary pulled his heavy cloak closer round him; he was cold; he had been cold for seven years, since he came to Winter. “My lord,” he said, “I am an alien on your world, with a handful of aides, and a little device with which I can hold conversations with other aliens on remote worlds. I represent power, but have none, despite my title. How can I help you?”

“You have a ship on Horden Island.”

“Ah, I was afraid of that,” said the Plenipotentiary, imperturbable. “My lord, that ship is set for Ollul, twenty-four light-years away. Do you know what that means?”

“My escape from my time, in which I have become an instrument of evil.”

“Escape—there’s no escape,” said Axt, his imperturbability giving way a bit. “No, my lord. Forgive me. Absolutely not—I could not consent to this—”

Icy rain of spring rattled on the stones of the tower, wind whined at the angles and finials of the roof. Inside it was quiet, shadowy. One small shielded light burned outside the door. The nurse lay snoring mildly in her bed, the baby head down and rump up in his crib. The father stood beside the crib. He looked around the room, or rather saw it without looking, knowing it utterly even in the dark; he too had slept here as a little child, it had been his first domain. Then cautiously, slipping his broad hand under, he lifted up the small downy head and put over it a chain on which hung a massive ring carved with the tokens and signs of the Lords of Harge. The chain was far too long, and Argaven knotted it shorter, thinking that it might twist and choke the baby. So obeying that small anxiety he tried to allay the great fear and wretchedness that filled him. He put his face against the baby’s cheek, whispering, “O my son, live long, rule well. . . .” Then he turned and quietly left the tower room, the heart of a lost kingdom.

He knew several ways of getting out of the Palace unperceived. He took the surest, and then made for the New Harbor through the bright-lit, sleet-lashed streets of Erhenrang, alone.

Now there is no seeing him. With what eye will you watch a process that is one hundred millionth percent slower than the speed of light? He is not now a king, nor a man; he is translated; you can scarcely call fellow-mortal one whose time passes seventy thousand times slower than yours. He is incalculably isolate. It seems that he is not, any more than an uncommunicated thought is; that he goes nowhere, any more than a thought goes. And yet, at very nearly but never quite the speed of light, he voyages. He is the voyage. Quick as thought. He has doubled his age when he arrives, less than a day older, in the portion of space curved about a dust-mote, Ollul by name, the fourth planet of a yellowish sun. And all this has passed in utter silence.

With noise now, and fire and meteoric fury enough to satisfy a Karhider’s lust for splendor, the clever ship makes earthfall, setting down in flame in the precise spot it left some fifty-five years ago; and presently, visible, unmassive, uncertain, he emerges from it, and stands a moment in the exitway shielding his eyes from the light of a hot, strange sun.