Gordon R. Dickson (9 page)

“Who—” he began to Adok, and then found his question answered before he could enunciate it. The olive-skinned man called Melness materialized in front of them and looked, not at Jim, but at Adok.

“I have taken him around the places concerned with his unit,” Adok said to the Master Servant of the Throne World, “and brought him here finally to you, as you asked, Melness.”

“Good,” said Melness in his sharp tenor. His black eyes flicked to Jim’s face. “The sponsorship for your adoption has been accepted by the Emperor.”

“Thanks for telling me,” said Jim.

“I’m not telling you for your benefit,” said Melness, “but because it’s necessary for me to make your situation clear to you. As a candidate for adoption, you are in theory a probationary Highborn, who is superior to me, as to all servants. On the other hand, as an officer of the Starkiens below the rank of a Ten-unit Commander, as well as because you were born among one of the lesser races of man, you are under my orders.”

Jim nodded.

“I see,” he said.

“I hope you do!” said Melness sharply. “We have a contradiction; and the way such contradictions are resolved is to accord you with two official personalities. That is, any activity, occupation, or duty which you deal with in your capacity as a candidate for adoption invokes your personality as a probationary Highborn, and my personal superior. On the other hand, any activity which deals with your duties as an officer of the Starkiens invokes your servant personality; and you are my inferior in everything connected with that. In any activities that deal with neither personality officially, you can choose which position you want to occupy—Highborn or servant. I don’t imagine you’ll want to choose the servant often.”

“I don’t suppose so,” said Jim, watching the smaller man calmly. The black eyes flickered upon him like dark flashes of lightning.

“Because of the conflict of personalities,” said Melness, “I have no physical authority over you. But if necessary, I can suspend you from duty with your Starkien unit and enter a formal complaint to the Emperor about you. Don’t let yourself be misled by any foolish notion that the Emperor will not act upon any complaint I make to him.”

“I won’t,” said Jim softly. Melness looked at him for a moment more, then disappeared.

“Now, Jim,” Adok said at his elbow, “if you like, we can return to your quarters; and I will show you the use of your weapons and accouterments.”

“Fine,” said Jim.

They transported themselves back to Jim’s quarters. There Adok fitted Jim out with the straps and belts he had brought from the armory.

“There are two classes of weaponry,” said Adok, once Jim was outfitted. “This”—he tapped the small black rod he had inserted in the loops of the belt attached to Jim’s loin strap—“is independently powered and is all that is normally used for duty upon the Throne World.”

He paused and then reached out softly to touch a silver band encircling the biceps of Jim’s upper left arm.

“These, however,” said Adok, “are part of the weaponry of the second class. They are completely useless at the moment, because they must be energized by a broadcast power source. Each of them is both a weapon and an enabler at the same time.”

“Enabler?” Jim asked.

“Yes,” said Adok. “They increase your reflex time, by causing you to react physically at a certain set speed—which in the case of anyone not Highborn is considerably above his natural speed of reflex. Later on, we’ll be working out with the enabler function of the second-class weaponry. And eventually, perhaps you can get permission to go to the testing area, which is at a good distance below the surface of the Throne World, and gain some actual experience with the weapons themselves.”

“I see,” said Jim, examining the silver bands. “I take it, then, that they’re fairly powerful?”

“A trained Starkien,” said Adok, “under full control of effective second-class weaponry, should be the equivalent of two to six units of fully armed men from the Colony Worlds.”

“The Colony Worlds don’t have Starkiens of their own, then?” asked Jim.

For a second time Adok managed to register a mildly visible emotion. This time the emotion seemed to be shock.

“The Starkiens serve the Emperor—and only the Emperor!” he said.

“Oh?” said Jim. “On the ship that brought me to the Throne World, I had a talk with a Highborn named Galyan. And Galyan had a Starkien—or somebody who looked exactly like a Starkien—bodyguarding him.”

“There’s nothing strange in that, Jim,” said Adok. “The Emperor lends his Starkiens to the other Highborn when the other Highborn need them. But they are only lent. They still remain servants of the Emperor, and in the final essential their commands come only from the Emperor.”

Jim nodded. Adok’s words rang an echo off the remembered words of Melness a short time before. Jim’s thoughts ran on ahead with the connection.

“The underground area on the Throne World is occupied only by the servants, is that right, Adok?” he asked.

“That’s right, Jim,” said Adok.

“As long as I’m going to be going down there as a matter of duty from now on,” said Jim, “I think I’d like to see some more of it. How large an area is it?”

“There are as many rooms below grounds,” said Adok, “as there are above. In fact, there may be more, because I don’t know them all.”

“Who does?” asked Jim.

Adok looked for a second as though he would have shrugged. But the gesture was evidently too marked a one for him to make.

“I don’t know, Jim,” he said. “Perhaps … Melness.”

“Yes,” said Jim thoughtfully. “Of course, if anyone would know, it would be Melness.”

During the next few weeks Jim found himself involved in several parades down on the parade grounds. He discovered that his duties on these occasions were nothing more than to get dressed and to stand before his unit, which consisted of seventy-eight Starkiens, a noncommissioned Starkien officer, Adok, and himself.

But the first parade he witnessed, it came as a shock to him to see that vast space underground completely filled with rank upon rank of the impassive, bald-headed, short, and massive-boned men who were the Starkiens. Jim had assumed that the Throne World was a full-sized planetary body, that there would be a large number of servants and all types, and that the Starkiens should be a fair proportion of these. But he had not realized, until he saw it with his own eyes, how many Starkiens there were. A little calculation afterward based upon what Adok could tell him of the floor space of the parade ground area led him to estimate that he must have seen at least twenty thousand men under arms in that space.

If it was indeed true, what Adok said, that each Starkien was the equivalent of four to five times a unit of eighty soldiers from the Colony Worlds, then what he had seen gathered there had been the equivalent of between half and three-quarters of a million men. And Adok had told him that this parade ground was only one of fifty spaced about the Throne World, underground.

Perhaps it was not so surprising that the Highborn of the Throne World considered themselves above any threat that could be posed by any Colony World or combination of Colony Worlds.

Outside the parades, Jim found that his only duties during the first few weeks consisted of a session in the gymnasium every other day with Adok, wearing the second-class weaponry.

The silver bands that represented the second-class weaponry were still not energized as weapons, but within the confines of the gymnasium they became active in their capacity as enablers. The exercises that Jim was put through by Adok, therefore, consisted merely of running, jumping, and climbing over various obstacles, with the enablers assisting. After the first session of this exercise, which Adok permitted to go on only for some twelve minutes, the Starkien took Jim almost tenderly back to his own quarters and had Jim lie down on the oversized hassock that served as a bed there, while Adok gently removed the class-two weaponry bands.

“Now,” said Adok, “you must rest for at least three hours.”

“Why?” Jim asked, curiously gazing up at the stocky figure standing over him.

“Because the first effects of wearing the enablers is not appreciated by the body immediately,” said Adok. “Remember, your muscles have been forced to move faster than your nature intended them to. You may think that you feel stiff and sore now. But what you feel now is nothing to what you will feel in about three hours’ time. The best way of minimizing the stiffness and soreness when you first begin to use the enablers is to remain as still as possible for the three hours immediately following exercise. As you become hardened to their use, your body will actually adapt to being pushed at faster than its normal speed of reflex. Eventually you won’t become stiff unless you really overextend yourself, and you won’t need to rest after each exercise.”

Jim kept his face impassive, and Adok vanished, considerately dimming the lights of the room before he went. In the dimness Jim looked thoughtfully at the white ceiling overhead.

He felt no stiffness or soreness of his muscles whatever. But, as Adok had said, possibly the maximum effect would not be appreciated until about three hours from now. Conscientiously, therefore, he waited those three hours without moving from the bed.

But at the end of that time, he found no difference in himself. He was not sore, and he was not stiff. He filed that piece of information with the gradually accumulating store of knowledge about the Throne World and its inhabitants in the back of his mind.

It did not immediately fit with the other pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that was forming in his mind. But one of the things that had helped him, from that day when as a boy he had at last faced the fact that he had no choice but to bear the loneliness of his life in silence, was the capacity in him for an almost infinite patience. The picture forming in his mind was not yet readable. But it would be. Until then … Adok had assumed that at the end of three hours the stiffness and soreness of Jim’s body would have effectively immobilized him. Since he had never been able to discover if he might be under surveillance—and to this he had added lately the possibility of surveillance not only by Highborn, for their own reasons, but also by servants, for their own reasons—he resigned himself to staying as he was.

Stretched out on his hassocklike bed, he willed himself to sleep.

When he woke up, it was because Ro was shaking him gently. She stood in the dimness of the room beside his bed.

“There’s someone Galyan wants you to meet,” she said. “He sent word through Afuan. It’s the Governor of the Colony Worlds of Alpha Centauri.”

He blinked at her for a moment sleepily. Then wakefulness sprang upon him, as the implications of what she had said woke inside him.

“Why would I want to meet the Governor of the worlds of Alpha Centauri?” he asked, sitting abruptly upon the hassock-bed.

“But he’s your Governor!” Ro said. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you, Jim? Any new Colony World is first assigned to the nearest Governor.”

“No,” said Jim, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed and getting to his feet. “No one ever did tell me. Does this mean I have some sort of obligation to this Governor?”

“Well …” Ro hesitated. “In theory, he can take you away from the Throne World right now, since you’re under his authority. But, on the other hand, the sponsorship for your adoption has been entered. In practice, he would find this out and would know better than to try to do anything that might interfere with any possible future Highborn. Remember, his worlds will gain a lot of prestige if anyone under their authority becomes at least a probationary Highborn. In other words, he can’t really do you any harm; but you can hardly, politely, turn down the chance to visit with him, now that he’s here.”

“I see,” said Jim grimly. “They sent you to bring me?”

Ro nodded. He reached out his hand, and she took it in one of hers. It was an easy, shorthand way of taking somebody else where they had never been before. It required a certain mental effort, Jim had been told, to transport someone to a place unknown to him but known to his guide, without this physical contact. Adok, of course, as with Ro earlier, had done it the polite way. But now Ro customarily reached out and took hold of him when she wished to take him anyplace.

Immediately they were in a relatively small room—a room, however, which in the number of writing surfaces standing flatly suspended in midair, and the relative scarcity of sitting hassocks, bespoke the utilitarian kind of office-type room that Galyan had brought Jim to aboard the ship.

Present in the room were the usual workers and the single Starkien bodyguard. Present also was Galyan, and with him a man with the American Indian-like coloring of the Alpha Centaurans. But this man was almost five-ten, a good three or four inches taller than most of the Alpha Centaurans Jim had met when he had been on Alpha Centauri III.

“There you are, Jim—and you too, Ro,” said Galyan, turning softly to face them as they appeared. “Jim, I thought you might like to meet your regional overlord—Wyk Ben of Alpha Centauri III. Wyk Ben, this is Jim Keil, sponsorship of whom has been offered here on the Throne World.”

“Yeth,” agreed Wyk Ben, turning quickly to face Jim and smiling. In contrast to the hissing accent of the Highborn, which had come to sound almost natural to Jim by this time, the Governor of Alpha Centauri lisped slightly in his speech.

“I just wanted to see you for a moment, Jim, to wish you luck. Here, your world’s just come under our Governorship … and, well, I’m very proud!”

Wky Ben smiled happily at Jim, apparently unaware that of the three other people concerned in the conversation, there was a slight frown of foreboding on the face of Ro, a touch of sardonic humor in the lemon-yellow eyes of Galyan, and a detachment and reserve about Jim.

“Well … I just wanted to tell you. I won’t take up any more of your time,” said Wyk Ben eagerly.

Jim stared down at him. He was absurdly like a puppy wagging its tail in eagerness and pride, coupled with a sort of innocence about the Throne World in general. Jim could not understand why Galyan should have wanted him to meet this man. But he filed the fact that Galyan had wanted him to meet the Alpha Centauran Governor, for future reference.