Дэймон Найт - Orbit 5

Axt had sent notice of his coming, of course, by instantaneous transmitter twenty-four years ago, or seventeen hours ago depending on how you look at it; and Powers and Aides of the Ekumen were on hand to meet him. Pawns did not go unnoticed by those players of the great game, and this man who had come into their hands was not a pawn. One of them had spent some months of the twenty-four years in learning Karhidish, so that Argaven could speak to someone. His first speech was a question: “What news from Karhide?”

“Mr. Mobile Axt and his successor have sent regular summaries of events, and certain private messages for you; you’ll find all the material in your quarters, Mr. Harge. Very briefly, the Regency was uneventful, after a depression in the early years. Your Arctic settlements were abandoned then, but Orgoreyn has recently begun such an experiment on the south polar continent. Your son was enthroned at eighteen, so he has ruled now for seven years.”

“Yes, I see,” said the man who had kissed that year-old son last night.

“I am to tell you, Mr. Harge, that whenever you see fit, the specialists at our Institute over in Belxit—”

“As you wish,” said Mr. Harge.

They went into his mind very gently, very subtly, opening doors. For locked doors they had delicate machines, that always found the combination. They found the man in black, who was not Gerer, and compassionate Rebade, who was not compassionate; they stood on the Palace balcony with him, and climbed the crevasses of nightmare with him up to the room in the tower; and at last he who was to have been first, the man in red and white, approached him saying, “Sir! a plot against your life—” And Mr. Harge screamed in abject terror, and woke up.

“Well! That was the trigger, I think. The signal to begin tripping off the other instructions and determine the course of your phobia. An induced paranoia. Really beautifully induced, I must say. Here, drink this, Mr. Harge. No, it’s just water. You might well have become a remarkably vicious ruler, more and more obsessed by fear of plots and subversions, more and more disaffected from your people. Not overnight, of course. It would have taken several years for you to become really intolerably tyrannic; though they no doubt planned some boosts along the way. Well, well, I see why Karhide is well spoken of, over at the Clearinghouse. If you’ll pardon my objectivity, this kind of skill and patience is quite rare. . . So the doctor, the mindmender, the hairy greenish-black man from some Cetian world, went rambling on while the patient recovered himself.

“Then I did right,” said Mr. Harge at last.

“You did. Suicide, abdication, or escape were the only acts of major consequence which you could have committed of your own volition. They counted on your moral veto forbidding you suicide, and the Council’s veto forbidding you abdication. But being possessed with ambition themselves they discounted the possibility of abnegation; and left one door open for you. Only a strong-minded man (if you’ll pardon my literalness) could have availed himself of that one alternative, as you did. . . . Well, I expect they’ll be wanting you to look in at the Clearinghouse soon, to discuss your future, now that we’ve put your past back where it belongs—eh?”

“As you wish,” said Mr. Harge.

He talked with certain personages there in the Clearinghouse of the Ekumen for the West Worlds; and when they suggested that he go to school, he assented readily. For among those mild persons whose chief quality seemed a cool, profound sadness indistinguishable from a warm, profound hilarity—among them, the ex-king of Karhide knew himself a barbarian, unlearned and unwise.

He attended Ekumenical School. He lived with other onworlders and aliens in barracks near the Clearinghouse in Vaxtsit City. Never having owned much that was his only, and never having had any privacy at all, he did not mind barracks life. He did not mind anything much, getting through the works and days with vigor and competence but always a certain heedlessness. The only discomfort he noticed as such was the heat, the awful heat of Ollul that rose to 85° F. sometimes in those blazing interminable seasons when no snow fell for two hundred days on end. Even when winter came he still sweated, for it never got below 20° or so outside, and the barracks were kept sweltering at forty degrees above that. He slept on top of his bed, naked and thrashing, and dreamed of the snows of the Kargav, the ice in Old Harbor, the ice scumming one’s ale on cool mornings in the Palace, the cold, the dear and bitter cold of Winter.

He learned a great deal. He had already learned in his first few days on Ollul that the Earth was, here, called Winter, and Ollul was the Earth: one of those facts which turn the universe inside out like a sock. He had learned that fish were not necessarily warm-blooded, that it is better not to accept the loan of a Perifthenian’s spouse, that a meat diet causes diarrhea in the unaccustomed gut, and that when he pronounced Ollul as Orrur some people laughed. He tried also to unlearn that he was a king. Once the Powers of the Ekumen took him in hand, he learned and unlearned much more. He was led, by all the machines and devices and experiences and (simplest and most demanding) words that the Ekumen had to use, into an intimation of what it might be to understand the nature and the history of a kingdom that was a million years old and thousands of millions of miles across. When he had begun to guess the immensity of this kingdom of men and the durable pain and monotonous waste of its history, he began also to see what lay beyond its borders in space and time, and among naked rocks and furnacesuns and the shining desolation that goes on and on, he glimpsed the sources of hilarity and serenity, the inexhaustible springs. He learned a great many facts, numbers, myths, epics, proportions, relationships, and so forth, and saw beyond the borders of what he had learned the unknown again, a splendid immensity. In this augmentation of his mind and being there was great satisfaction; yet he was unsatisfied. Nor did they always let him go on as far as he would have liked into certain fields, mathematics and the physical sciences for instance. “You started late, Mr. Harge,” they said, “we must build on the foundations laid earlier. You weren’t formed to be a student, but a doer, and we want to keep you in subjects which you can put to use.”

“What use?”

They—the ethnographer Mr. Mobile Gist represented Them at the moment, across a library table—looked at him sardonically. “Do you consider yourself to be of no further use, Mr. Harge?”

Mr. Harge, who was generally reserved, spoke with sudden fury: “I do, Mr. Gist.”

“A king without a country,” said Gist in his heavy Terran accent, “self-exiled, believed dead by spouse and son and all his people, I suppose might feel himself a trifle superfluous. . . . But then why do you think we’re bothering with you?”

“Out of kindness,” said the young man.

“Oh, kindness . . . However kind we are, we can give you nothing that would make you happy, Mr. Harge, except . . . Well. Waste is a pity. You were indubitably the right king for Winter, for Karhide, for the purposes of the Ekumen. You have a sense of equilibrium. You would probably have unified the planet, and you certainly wouldn’t have regimented your local state, as your son seems to be doing. However, no unweaving that web. Only consider our hopes and needs, Mr. Harge, and your qualifications, before you despair of your life. Fifty, sixty more years of it you have to get through. . .

A last snapshot taken by alien sunlight: erect, in a Hainish-style cloak of grey, a handsome man of thirtyodd stands, sweating profusely, on a green lawn beside the chief Power of the Ekumen in the West Worlds, the Stabile, Mr. Hoalans of Alb, who can change and to some extent control the destinies of forty-two worlds.