Anywhen (3 page)

"No, that's not one of my tastes. Ah, you will say that I don't condemn boy-lovers, and that values are in the end only preferences? I think not. In morals, empathy enters in, eventually."

"So, you wouldn't corrupt children, and torture revolts you. But you were made that way. Some men are not so handicapped. I meet them now and then." The hand holding the looped beads made a small, unconscious gesture of revulsion.

"I think
they
are the handicapped, not
I—most
planets hang their moral imbeciles, sooner or later. But what about treason? You didn't answer that question."

"My throat was dry . . . thank you. Treason, well—it's an art; hence, again, a domain of taste or preference. Style is everything; that's why my half-brother is so inept. If tastes changed he might prosper, as I might had I been born with blue hair."

"You could dye it."

"What, like the Respectables?" She laughed, briefly but unaffectedly. "I am what I am; disguises don't become me. Skills, yes—those are another matter. I'll show you, when you like. But no masks."

Skills can betray you too, Simon thought, remembering that moment at the Traitors' Guild when his proud sash of poison shells, offered in service, had lost him in an instant every inch of altitude over the local professionals that he had hoped to trade on. But he only said again, "Why not?" It would be as good a way as any to wile away the time; and once his immunity had expired, he could never again trust a playwoman on Boadacea.

She proved, indeed, very skillful, and the time passed . . . but the irregular pseudo-days—the clock in the tavern was on a different time than the one in his room, and neither even faintly agreed with his High Earth-based chronometer and metabolism—betrayed him. He awoke one morning/noon/night to find the girl turning slowly black beside him, in the last embrace of a fungal toxin he would have reserved for the Emperor of Canes Venatici, or the worst criminal in human history.

His immunity period was up, and war had been declared. He had been notified that if he still wanted to sell High Earth, he would first have to show his skill at staying alive against the whole cold malice of all the Traitors of Boadacea.

CHAPTER FOUR

How the Exarchy or the prehuman interstellar empires were held together is unknown, but in human history, at least, the bureaucratic problems of managing large stellar holdings from a single center of government have proven to be insoluble. Neither the ultraphone nor the Imaginary Drive permitted the extension of human hegemony over a radius of more than ten light-years, a fact the colonies outside this sphere were not slow to appreciate and put to use. Luckily, a roughly uniform interstellar economy was maintained by tacit agreement after the political separations, since it was not widely recognized then —or now—that this much older invention can enforce a more thorough rule than can any personal or party autocracy.

In this connection, one often hears laymen ask, Why do the various worlds and nations employ professional traitors when it is known that they are traitors? Why would they confide to the traitors any secret valuable enough to be sold to a third party? The answer is the same, and the weapon is the same: money. The traitors act as brokers in a continuous interstellar bourse on which each planet seeks to gain a
financial
advantage over the other. Thus the novice should not imagine that any secret put into his hands is exactly what it is said to be, particularly when its primary value purports to be military. He should also be wary of the ruler who seeks to subvert him into
personal loyalty, which tears the economic tissue and hence should be left in the domain of untrained persons. For the professional, loyalty is a tool, not a value.

The typical layman's question cited above should of course never be answered.

—"Lord Gro":
The Discourses,
Bk. I, Ch. LVII

Simon holed up quickly and drastically, beginning with a shot of transduction serum—an almost insanely dangerous expedient, for the stuff not only altered his appearance but his very heredity, leaving his head humming with false memories and false traces of character, derived from the unknowable donors of the serum, which conflicted not only with his purposes but even with his tastes and motives.

Under interrogation, he would break down into a babbling crowd of random voices, as bafflingly scrambled as his karyotypes, blood groups, and retina- and fingerprints. To the eye, his gross physical appearance would be a vague, characterless blur of many roles—some of them derived from the DNA of persons who had died a hundred years ago and at least that many parsecs away in space.

But unless he got the antiserum within fifteen High Earth days, he would forget first his mission, then his skills, and at last his very identity. Nevertheless, he judged that the risk had to be taken; for effete though some of the local traitors (always excepting Valkol the Polite) seemed to be, they were obviously quite capable of penetrating any lesser cover—and equally obviously, they meant business.

The next problem was how to complete the mission it-self—it would not be enough just to stay alive. High Earth did not petrify failed traitors and mortar them into walls,
but it had its own ways of showing displeasure. Moreover, Simon felt to High Earth a certain obligation—not loyalty, Gro forbid, but, well, call it professional pride—which would not let him be retired from the field by a backwater like Boadacea. Besides, finally, he had old reasons for hating the Exarchy; and hatred, unaccountably, Gro had forgotten to forbid.

No: It was not up to Simon to escape the Boadaceans. He had come here to gull them, whatever they might currently think of such a project.

And therein lay the difficulty; for Boadacea, beyond all other colony worlds, had fallen into a kind of autumn cannibalism. In defiance of that saying of Ezra-Tse, the edge was attempting to eat the center. It was this worship of independence, or rather, of autonomy, which had not only made treason respectable, but had come nigh on to ennobling it . . . and was now imperceptibly emasculating it, like the statues one saw everywhere in Druidsfall which had been defaced and sexually mutilated by the grey disease of time and the weather.

Today, though all the Boadaceans proper were colonials in ancestry, they were snobs about their planet's prehuman history, as though they had not nearly exterminated the aborigines themselves but were their inheritors. The few shambling Charioteers who still lived stumbled through the streets of Druidsfall loaded with ritual honors, carefully shorn of real power but ostentatiously deferred to on the slightest occasion which might be noticed by anyone from High Earth. In the meantime, the Boadaceans sold each other out with delicate enthusiasm, but against High Earth—which was not necessarily Old Earth, but not necessarily
not,
either—all gates were formally locked.

Formally only, Simon and High Earth were sure, for the
hunger of treason, like lechery, tends to grow with what it feeds on, and to lose discrimination in the process. Boadacea, like all forbidden fruits, should be ripe for the plucking, for the man with the proper key to its neglected garden.

The key that Simon had brought with him, that enormous bribe which should have unlocked Valkol the Polite like a child's bank, was temporarily useless. He would have to forge another, with whatever crude tools could be made to fall to hand. The only one accessible to Simon at the moment was the dead playwoman's gently despised half-brother.

His name, Simon had found out from her easily enough, was currently Da-Ud tam Altair, and he was Court Traitor to a small religious principate on the Gulf of the Rood, on the InContinent, half the world away from Druidsfall. Remembering what the vombis aboard the
Karas
had said about the library of the Rood-Prince, Simon again assumed the robes of a worn-out Sagittarian divine in search of a patron, confident that his face, voice, stance, and manner were otherwise utterly unlike his shipboard
persona,
and boarded the flyer to the InContinent prepared to enjoy the trip.

There was much to enjoy. Boadacea was a good-sized world, nearly ten thousand miles in diameter, and it was rich in more than money. Ages of weathering and vulcanism had broken it into many ecological enclaves, further diversified by the point-by-point uniqueness of climate contributed to each by the rhythmic inconstancies of Flos Campi and the fixity of Flos Campi's companion sun among the other fixed stars—and by the customs and colors of many waves of pioneers who had settled in those enclaves and sought to re-establish their private visions of the earthly paradise. It was an entirely beautiful world,
could one but forget one's personal troubles long enough to really look at it; and the flyer flew low and slow, a procedure Simon approved despite the urgency the transduction serum was imposing upon the back of his mind.

Once landed by the Gulf, however, Simon again changed his plans and his outermost disguise; for inquiry revealed that one of the duties of the Court Traitor here was that of singing the Rood-Prince to sleep to the accompaniment of the sareh, a sort of gleeman's harp—actually a Charioteer instrument, ill-adapted to human fingers, which Da-Ud played worse than most of the Boadaceans who affected it. Simon
therefore appeared at the vaguely bird-shaped palace of the Rood-Prince in the guise of a ballad merchant, and as such was enthusiastically received, and invited to catalogue the library; Da-Ud, the Rood-Prince said, would help him, at least with the music.

Simon was promptly able to sell Da-Ud twelve-and-a-tilly of ancient High Earth songs Simon had made up overnight—faking folk songs is not much of a talent—and had Da-Ud's confidence within an hour; it was as easy as giving Turkish Delight to a baby. He cinched the matter by throwing in free lessons on the traditional way to sing them.

After the last mangled chord had died, Simon asked Da-Ud quietly:

"By the way . . . (well sung, excellence) . . . did you know that the Guild has murdered your half-sister?"

Da-Ud dropped the imitation Charioteer harp with a noise like a spring-driven toy coming unwound.

"Jillith? But she was only a playwoman! Why, in Gro's name—

Then Da-Ud caught himself and stared at Simon with sudden, belated suspicion. Simon looked back, waiting.

"Who told you that? Damn you—are you a Torturer? I'm not—I've done nothing to merit-
^-

"I'm not a Torturer, and nobody told me," Simon said. "She died in my bed, as a warning to me."

He removed his clasp from under the shoulder of his cloak and clicked it. The little machine flowered briefly into a dazzling actinic glare, and then closed again. While Da-Ud was still covering his streaming eyes, Simon said softly:

"I am the Traitor-in-Chief of High Earth."

It was not the flash of the badge that was dazzling Da-Ud now. He lowered his hands. His whole narrow body was trembling with hate and eagerness.

"What—what do you want of me, excellence? I have nothing to sell but the Rood-Prince . . . and a poor stick he is. Surely you would not sell me High Earth; I am a poor stick myself."

"I would sell you High Earth for twenty riyals."

"You mock met"

"No, Da-Ud. I came here to deal with the Guild, but they killed Jillith—and that, as far as I'm concerned, disqualified them from being treated as civilized professionals, or as human beings at all. She was pleasant and intelligent, and I was fond of her—and besides, while I'm perfectly willing to kill under some conditions, I don't hold with throwing away an innocent life for some footling dramatic gesture."

"I wholly agree," Da-Ud said. His indignation seemed to be at least half real. "But what will you do? What
can
you do?"

"I have to fulfil my mission, any way short of my own death—if I die, nobody will be left to get it done. But I'd most dearly love to cheat, dismay, disgrace the Guild in the process, if it could possibly be managed. I'll need your help. If we live through it, I'll
see
to it that you'll turn a profit, too; money isn't my first goal here, or even my second now."

"I'll tackle it," Da-Ud said at once, though he was obviously apprehensive, as was only sensible. "What, precisely, do you propose?"

"First of all, I'll supply you with papers indicating that I've sold you a part—not all—of the major thing I have to sell, which gives any man who holds it a lever in the State Ministry of High Earth. They show that High Earth has been conspiring against several major powers, all human, for purposes of gaining altitude with the Green Exarch. They won't tell you precisely which worlds, but there will be sufficient information there so that the Exarchy would pay a heavy purse for them—and High Earth, an even heavier one to get them back. It will be your understanding that the missing information is also for sale, but you haven't got the price."

"Suppose the Guild doesn't believe that?"

"They'll never believe—excuse me, I must be blunt—that you could have afforded the whole thing; they'll know I sold you
this
much of it only because I have a grudge, and you can tell them so—though I wouldn't expose the nature of the grudge, if I were you. Were you unknown to them, they might assume that you were me in disguise, but luckily they know you, and, ah, probably tend rather to underestimate you."

"Kindly put," Da-Ud said with a grin. "But that won't prevent them from assuming that I know your whereabouts, or have some way of reaching you. They'll interrogate for that, and of course I'll tell them. I know them, too; it would be impossible not to, and I prefer to save myself needless pain."

"Of course—don't risk interrogation at all, tell them you want to sell me out, as well as the secret. That will make sense to them, and I think they must have rules against interrogating a member who offers to sell; most Traitors' Guilds do."