Into the Slave Nebula (7 page)

“Well, probably a good few of them are, but not by any means all. We ship eight hundred at a time, every thirty days or so. They don’t come from Newholme, of course—they just transship ’em here. They’re made further out. Lygos way, I believe, or Creew ’n Dith.”

So the
cachet
of owning Rowl, an imported android, was all illusory! Horn almost laughed, then realized that perhaps thirty years ago this hadn’t been the case. After all, it would make sense in view of the extremely high cost of employing trained Earthside technicians to set up android factories on less expensive planets. The raw materials could be had cheaply on any Earth-like world.

There was a pause. Dize broke the silence with a cough. “Well, if you’re planning to stay on Newholme for a while, I guess it’s up to us to show you around. Like to ride into town with me and let me acquaint you with a few people?”

“That’d be great! Just let me check I have everything, then.” Horn glanced into the locker and under the bunk, made sure his cash was safe in his pocket, and finally took out the little grey woven-metal wallet containing Talibrand’s certificate, to reassure himself it really existed.
He was about to pocket that also when Dize’s hand closed on his wrist with an iron grip.

“What the hell are you doing with one of those?” the spaceman rasped.
“You
never did anything that could earn you this, you—you lousy Earthside impostor!”

T
ENSION FROZE THE AIR,
like a crumb of ice dropped into supercooled water. Horn forced a nervous grin.

“Why not look inside?” he suggested. “It’s not mine, and I’m not trying to pretend it is.”

Suspiciously Dize drew out the booklet, opened it, and saw the greyness of the dead solido picture. He read the various certificates, thumbed through the pages and pages of exit and entry stamps, and finally returned his hard gaze to Horn’s face.

“So how did you come by it? And what happened to the man it belonged to?”

“He was killed in the hotel I was staying at, the first night of carnival week. He’d given that to the manager’s secretary—an android. And because I found the body, the android gave it to me.” Horn hesitated. “And … well, I guess I didn’t tell you the whole of the truth about why I left Earth. I was just so sick of the—the pointlessness of my existence back there, that when I saw this certificate of Talibrand’s I thought somebody ought to go back along the line he’d followed, and maybe bring the news of his death, and … oh, I don’t know. I had this half-baked notion somebody ought to pick up his work where he left off.”

“You?” Dize said.

“I …” Horn had to swallow very hard. “I seem to have been sort of elected. I mean, someone tried to kill me the next morning, simply because I’d taken too much interest in Talibrand’s murder. At least I can’t imagine any other reason.”

“So what happened to this man who tried to kill you?”

“I killed him.”

“Did you now?” Dize said thoughtfully.

“Oh, quite legally!” Horn hastened to assure him. “He challenged me to a duel without finding out beforehand that I’d won an award for my swordplay.”

“Now there’s another way in which we outworlders differ from you on Earth. We got enough risk in our daily lives without having to provide the artificial excitement of dueling to add a bit of spice. Newholme’s a long-settled planet, but it’s not nearly as—as
domesticated
as Earth is.” He hesitated. “Are you serious about this, Horn?”

“I wish I knew,” Horn confessed miserably. “You see, I’d never even heard of these ‘citizens of the galaxy’ before. I don’t know what they do, I don’t know what kind of people they are—except obviously that they’re exceptional types. Look, you recognized this certificate the moment you set eyes on it! Had you seen one before?”

“Only in pictures.” Dize closed the booklet, hesitated, returned it to its wallet and handed it back. “All right, I believe you. And I guess Earth can’t be as bad as I always imagined, seeing a person like you can feel this strongly about someone from another planet. So what do you want to be told about the citizens of the galaxy?”

“Everything. What they do, who they are—everything!”

“What they do,” Dize said musingly, “is more than the rest of us put together and slightly better. Who they are—well, I can tell you about a couple of them, I guess. Right now there are three altogether. Correction: two, if Lars Talibrand is dead. So that was his name, was it? Talibrand! Sorry, that must sound pretty strange to you. You see, we heard a few years ago that another citizen of the galaxy had been nominated, but his identity was never published, because they said if the word got around it would handicap whatever he was doing. So the honor can’t have been of much practical use to him.
Damnation! This is bad news, Horn—you’ve no idea just
how
bad!

“But as for the others … Well, Gayk on Vernier is a biologist. He synthesized some kind of bacteriophage which he claimed would deal with half a dozen diseases nobody had ever managed to cure before. He infected himself with all of them at once—refused to try it on volunteers in case it didn’t work.”

“And it did?”

“Sure. But it was himself he tried it on first.”

“He sounds like a brave man,” Horn said inanely. “How about the other one?”

“A spaceman from Arthworld, called Yugus. There was a star due to go nova out that way. They’d never managed to monitor the full spectroscopic output of a nova before. They planted a whole townful of equipment on its inmost planet to signal back data. Turned out the noise from the star was making nonsense of the information. But they wanted the records pretty bad. So Yugus came up with a crazy scheme to go in and get them and let the radiation-pressure from the actual explosion blow him away. And he managed it. He was crippled for four-five years afterwards, but because of what he did every inhabited planet can monitor its primary and be sure that it’s not going to nova without warning and burn them to a crisp. Which fitted the qualification for galactic citizenship.”

“That being—?”

“You have to do something which benefits the entire population of more than one planet”

That almost made Horn feel giddy. It was a long while before he could ask, “And you don’t know about Talibrand’s work, you say?”

“Nope.” Dize shrugged. “There are lots of rumors, naturally. Some people say he stumbled across a medical blackmail ring—that’s when someone gets a corner
on the cure for an endemic disease, and hoists the price knowing that sick people will pay anything, or waters the drug down so they’ll go on being sick instead of recovering completely.”

“Would they hate him so much they’d hunt him clear to Earth and have him killed?”

“It’s possible. I guess now he’s dead they may announce what he was up to. Or maybe they won’t, because he didn’t finish the job and would have wanted someone to take over.” Dize hesitated. “Well, what’s your reaction to what I’ve been telling you?”

“I’m scared,” Horn said abruptly. “But …”

“But what?”

“But someone who could earn one of these”—he hefted the certificate in its wallet—“deserves to have someone fit for the job take over from him. And the place they’re likeliest to know about who that person is I imagine must be the world he himself hailed from: Creew ’n Dith. So I’ll see if I can make my way there.”

“You only need to walk into a government office right here on Newholme, show that certificate and say you discovered Talibrand’s body, and you’ll be given a free flight there on a luxury liner.”

Horn thought that over, and finally shook his head. “I guess maybe it would be better if I didn’t,” he said. “It’d attract new coverage and all sorts of publicity. No, if I have to I can probably pay my way. Or work my passage.”

Dize tapped out his pipe on the washbowl and rinsed away the dottle. “I like the way you think, Horn,” he said, and there was no trace of his former patronizing tone. “Come on—let’s take that ride into town and find ourselves a drink.”

Now the sensation of being elsewhere than on Earth really started to assail him. Superficialities, first: the different
materials used to pave the roads, the different layout of the houses, smaller but not so closely packed together. There were hardly any private helis—though big public hundred-seater models lined the edge of the spaceport. Most of the traffic consisted of groundcars that hummed and crackled as they passed, running, so Dize told him, on solar conversion batteries at present because it was local summer, but in winter using broadcast power.

After the differences, the identities. The streets of the town they traveled to, aboard a public groundcar seating sixty which they caught at the exit from the spaceport, were lined with men and women of the same species as on Earth—their clothing strange, their average complexion significantly paler because so much more emigration had taken place from rich countries than poor ones during the great phase of human colonisation, and perhaps half a head shorter on average than their Earthside cousins. But still they were human beings.

Poorer
human beings. That was a point. Their bus was controlled by a human driver; on Earth, of course, all public transport no matter how short the distance it operated over was in the care of unwearying automatics. It struck Horn that a reliable index of living standard must be the number of repetitive tasks still assigned to human beings.

Surely, though, merely plying a bus back and forth over a fixed route was something an android could have done just as well as a man, without wasting the man’s special talents? He mentioned this point to Dize, who gave a dry laugh.

“How many androids have you seen since you landed?”

Horn hesitated. “Well—ah …”

“Any at all? Thought not! Man, androids
cost!
You can go weeks at a time on Newholme, even in a big city, and not see one of them. Ninety per cent of the androids here
at any given moment are in transit to Earth. We pass ’em on, and in exchange we get robots. Androids we can manage without, robots not.”

“Don’t you build robots on Newholme?”

“Sure, but they’re not in the same class with the ones your grandad makes.”

“Even so, running a bus—”

“Watch the driver for a while. He knows his regular passengers, doesn’t he? Chats with them friendly! We like that, here on Newholme. Oh, sure we’re gong to go automatic eventually, but right now we’re still scraping the surface of our planetary resources. We need the advanced robots we can build or buy for the dangerous jobs where you wouldn’t risk a human life—mining, working under the oceans, clearing the straits between islands of the rocks which get in the way of our submarines. Get the picture? Ah, here we are—this is my stop!”

Obediently Horn followed him to the exit, and found himself in a quiet residential street with native trees shading long one-story houses. Dize flung open the gate of the nearest and two boys of about eight and ten came clamoring to greet him.

Horn hung back in slight embarrassment. He hadn’t realized that Dize proposed to take him home. But, picking up one of his sons on each arm, the spaceman called for him to come on in. At the door they were met by a pretty little woman with long fair hair of a shade seldom seen on Earth nowadays unless it was dyed, and Dize introduced her as his wife Maj-Brith.

“This is Derry Horn,” he added. “Shipped with us this trip. He’s from Earth, but he’s all right.”

That was a backhanded compliment
, Horn thought, but he controlled his reaction and smilingly shook his hostess’s hand.

For a while thereafter, as Dize reported to his sons on
the trip just past, he was left by himself at the side of a large living-room full of solid furniture in native woods and what he took to be real animal hide. Maj-Brith brought big pottery mugs containing a dark drink—a local beer, Horn judged—which he tasted and found rather sour. He sat cradling the mug in both hands and mentally comparing the decor with the lightness and in-substantiality of a typical Earthly home.

At length Dize told the boys to run along and turned to his guest.

“Sorry about that, but unless I get my trip-report over with there’s no peace in the house! Well, anyhow, there was something I guess maybe I should have warned you about before now, but it’s not too late. Reason I brought you home with me, in fact.”

He leaned forward, holding out his mug for Maj-Brith to refill.

“Look, if you just start marching around Newholme, or any other of the outworlds, you’re going to attract attention like a fire-heli or a parade band! I don’t care how quickly that beard of yours grows—it’s not going to disguise the fact that you’re from Earth. So you go buy a suit of Newholmer clothes: that doesn’t fix it either, because every time you open your mouth either your accent or what you say will mark you out. If I’m to believe what you told me just before we quit the ship, someone tried to have you killed. That kind of someone won’t be put off very easily. Am I right?”

“I would expect him to be pretty persistent,” Horn agreed. His voice was calm and level, but deep inside he was very frightened at the thought of what he had committed himself to do.

“So okay,” Dize continued. “I’ve been doing some thinking. I assume this ‘someone’ has been, too. Now if he learned that young Derry Horn, of the family of Horn & Horn Robots, had gone off Earth so quickly after being
involved in the aftermath of Talibrand’s murder, would he also hear about your row with your grandad?”

Horn shook his head. “We like to keep our—ah—family differences private.”

“Right. So if he discovered you’d come to Newholme, he’d go checking luxury hotels and resorts, sounding out the agents who represent Horn & Horn products here, and all like that. It might take him a few days to realize you weren’t in any of the proper places. You’d damned well better not be, then! In fact, you’d better stay here—no, don’t interrupt!” He raised a broad palm to forestall objections. “I got a few days’ layover to waste before we load our next cargo. And you learn pretty quick; I’ve seen that for myself. I can’t turn you into any specific kind of outworlder, but I can at least show you the things that set you off particularly as an Earthman, which is the rarest of all kinds of foreigner on every single other planet. Meanwhile, I’ll check at the port and see when there’s a convenient ship bound for Creew ’n Dith. Since that’s the planet which issued Talibrand’s certificate in the first place, I can’t imagine anywhere that you’d be safer.”

He brushed aside Horn’s profuse thanks, holding out his mug for yet another refill, and began to stuff his pipe.

“All the thanks I need is for you to stick at what you’ve started,” he said. “I don’t have the faintest idea what it is, but if a citizen of the galaxy was involved, it absolutely
has
to be important.”