Into the Slave Nebula (9 page)

“N
O
, I
WILL NOT
tell you our reason for nominating Talibrand to this honor,” said Hereditary Councillor Braithwin coldly. “But before you leave this hall I shall require to know
your
reason for asking such a stupid question!”

He was a man of medium height and great girth, with an aggressive lower lip and full rubicund cheeks. He sat in a throne-like chair of black and yellow native woods, padded with what looked like unprocessed animal furs, and he wore a black tunic and full black breeches with a gold-plated belt and soft leather calf-high boots. His Anglic was virtually perfect, displaying hardly a trace of the thick accent that obscured Shembo’s speech.

Horn felt himself flushing under the accusing stare of the hereditary councillor. He was totally at a loss. He had been feeling like that ever since his arrival on Creew ’n Dith. Newholme, for all its superficial differences, might as well have been a regional backwater of Earth. But this!

He struggled to maintain his composure as he glanced around the hall, noting the women in long soft white dresses, many of them pretty, the men all in variants of the costume worn by Braithwin and somehow seeming more masculine than he was in his fashionable Earthside clothing; the low ceiling with its exposed timber beams, the walls of dressed stone with narrow windows climaxing in a point as abrupt as an arrowhead’s, the succession of furs spread out on the tiled floor between the entrance and the spot where he stood facing Braithwin.

Mustering all his courage, he raised his voice to make
certain everyone in the long hall heard him, looked the councillor straight in the eye, and demanded, “Is it not important to know for what reason a citizen of the galaxy was
kitted?”

“What?” Braithwin seized the arms of his chair and pulled his body forward from the waist, glaring at Horn. At the same moment a rustling cry of dismay ran through the assembly, followed by a buzz of talk as those who spoke Anglic translated for those who did not, and another outburst of cries which Braithwin silenced with a glare.

“Killed?” he rasped. “Lars Talibrand killed? Proof, I say!”

“I came from Earth to Newholme because Talibrand went from Newholme to Earth,” Horn answered deliberately. “From Newholme I came to Creew ’n Dith because Talibrand went from Creew ’n Dith to Newholme. I know because I have—this!”

He whipped out Talibrand’s certificate, held it up for everyone to see, and tossed it into Braithwin’s lap.

“And carrying it,” he finished, “I have been kept kicking my heels at your door because you would not admit me to an audience!”

Braithwin’s burning eyes fixed him for a long moment. Then he uttered a curt sentence in Creewndithian. Horn had picked up enough odd words from Shembo during his voyage from Newholme to realize that it constituted a relatively polite order to the crowd to get the hell out, and he waited until he was alone with the councillor in the great echoing hall.

“You’re no more’n a boy,” Braithwin said at lat, tapping the wallet on the back of his hand. “Spite of that beard you wear.”

Horn didn’t attempt to dispute the remark. The older man got to his feet and descended the steps of the dais from which he had presided over the assembly. He
fell to absentminded pacing on the bare tiles, five steps one way, five another.

“So he’s dead,” he muttered almost inaudibly. “Rest him well. … But you, Horn! You have only yourself to blame for being kept kicking your heels at my door, haven’t you?
You
put it about that you’d come to pry into the use we make of the robots we buy from Earth. I’ve got more important things to do with my time than answer a lot of empty-headed questions! This world’s a sight different from yours, you know. Yours practically runs itself, I hear, what with your machines, your robots and androids and all. Here
we
look after the planet—we humans! We don’t leave everything up to cogs and circuits and blue-skinned artificial men!”

He swung to face Horn directly, thrusting out the hand which held Talibrands wallet so that one corner pointed at the younger man’s heart. “Why the blazes didn’t you say what you’d really come here for?”

“Because Talibrand was killed!” Horn flared. “Because whoever he was up against was able to try and have me killed in a duel on Earth, and later kidnap me on Newholme! Because Talibrand died with his work unfinished! What ought I to have done when I learned I’d got here ahead of the news from Earth—go out and shout from the rooftops?”

Braithwin drew his beetling brows together and studied Horn thoughtfully for a long while. Abruptly he said, “Let’s get out of this drafty hall. I’ve held a long enough audience for today, anyhow. Come into my study and sit down.”

He pushed open a heavy wooden door behind the dais and led Horn into a small room with the same stone walk as the main hall, furnished with a rough wooden trestle table and half a dozen canvas-seated chairs. There were books, many of them from Earth, on shelves attached to the wall by pegs. A bellow materialized a brown-haired
girl in the universal floor-length white dress, who carried a pottery jug and some mugs on a tray.

“Sit down and try the drink that’s made us what we are,” Braithwin grunted. “Creewndithian beer is rough and sour, but if you stick with it it won’t betray you the morning after.
Hael!
”

They drank, Horn barely taking a sip of his—he had tried this beer aboard Shembo’s ship and concluded that it must be an acquired taste. Then Braithwin sank into a chair facing him and crossed his legs.

“The whole story!” he commanded. “And don’t make it too fancy, hear?”

“Why Earth?” Braithwin muttered when Horn had finished. “Why
Earth
, of all the planets in the galaxy? If someone was hunting him, he could have been safe here, where he could have had a hundred armed men to watch him day and night—just by asking for them! But of course he was not the man to set overmuch store by simple safety. …”

“You knew him personally?” ventured Horn. “I wish I had done.”

“He was a cousin of mine—he and his brother Jan. I have sent for his brother; it will be well that he is told of his brother’s death by me, before news gets to him by road of gossip. A freshener for your beer?”

Horn hastily covered his mug with his palm and shook his head. The girl poured for Braithwin and he drank as though trying to put out a fire in his belly.

“There must have been a reason for him going to Earth,” he muttered as he set the mug aside, empty again. “There must have been a reason! You, Horn—do you know what it might have been?”

“Hardly,” Horn said with a grimace. “So far, nobody’s even told me what Talibrand was up to! A spaceman on Newholme—Dize, the one I mentioned as having helped
me—he said if his identity had been known it would have handicapped his work, but as for what that work was …” He shrugged. “I was hoping you would tell me.”

“Without asking leave of the Hereditary Council, I can’t,” Braithwin sighed. “I can only tell you what it was that made us propose him for citizenship of the galaxy. Your Newholmer friend was quite right—he was at first reluctant to accept the honor we pressed on him, because he said to be famous would hamstring his future plans. Then at last he agreed it would be a convenience to have the status of a citizen of the galaxy, with all the attendant power to draw upon in case of need, but insisted we withhold his name and appearance from the people and say merely that there was now a third citizen, beside Gayk and Yugus, so that if he was forced to reveal himself he would not be treated as an impostor.”

Horn risked a further swig of his beer, found it much less unpleasant than at first, and took a healthy draft. “You were going to tell me what he did to secure the nomination,” he prompted.

“Ah yes!” Braithwin held out his mug to the girl again, and she emptied the jug into it before departing in search of a fresh supply. “Well, he brought me proof that the eldest son of one of our noble families had been stolen away by a vicious and unmanly relative. He set out to trace the boy, and found him, and in the doing discovered that others had been taken, too: commoners’ children, kidnapped by unscrupulous traders out of space. And they’d been taken out beyond Arthworld somewhere, transshipped, dyed blue—”

“Conditioned, and used to swell the supply of androids for Earth?” Horn leaned forward breathlessly.

“Precisely!” Braithwin rumbled. “But Lars did not rest satisfied with that one success. He determined to follow the whole terrible matter to its end. He uncovered
other such happenings on half a dozen worlds, and in some cases was even able to restore the children to their families. So much did his discoveries revolt our council that we came close to barring the android traders altogether from Creew ’n Dith—for how could we ever know which of their androids might be a human child? But Jan Talibrand argued against this, saying it was the reverse of a tribute to his brother’s work and would imply that he had not fully succeeded in his task, so we let things go on as before. We depend much on the tax we levy on the trade, of course, though I for one like it little and will have no androids in my employ. Still, you’re from Earth, and doubtless you feel differently.”

Horn shook his head. “In my family’s household there is only one android, and he’s been a sort of third parent to me since my birth. And, as I told you, I was started on my journey by androids. Well! What you’ve told me makes many things clear that baffled me, but I still find it hard to believe that even a few children could have—ah—vanished without causing a tremendous outcry.”

Braithwin gave a mirthless chuckle. “To you from the tame planet Earth, doubtless it does seem strange. But here …” He reached to the floor beside his chair and lifted up a skull, ivory-yellow, its cruelly fanged jaws open in a dead snarl. From crown to snout it was fully the length of his forearm.

“I shot that beast on my own estate two years past, not a mile from where we’re sitting. It had taken the daughter of one of my retainers, a girl aged twelve. Ours is a wild world, Horn, even after centuries of occupation.”

“So those missing children could have been assumed victims of a killer beast. I follow you.” Horn frowned. “And am I right to think that androids in general must have heard of what Lars had done?”

“Most certainly. Lars himself informed us that many had risked their lives to help him in the dim hope that
they too might be found to have been stolen from human parents and not concocted in some chemical stew.”

“Where
are
the androids made that are shipped through here?”

“On Arthworld, I suppose, or maybe further out. I told you, the less I have to do with android traders the better I’m pleased, and to me it’s all one on what world they’ve set up their infernal cookery.”

Horn said, fumbling, “I don’t understand why androids should be shipped from so far away! I can understand it being very expensive to manufacture them on Earth, but I’d have thought the cost of transporting them all the way from Arthworld, or wherever, would have canceled the advantage out. There must be plenty of the requisite technicians on Vernier, for example. Or they could be recruited right here on Creew ’n Dith!”

“Unlikely,” Braithwin grunted. “Some term it superstition, but to me and many other folk of this world there’s something you might call
unnatural
about men breathing, eating, sleeping, prone to our diseases, capable of speech, yet spawned of some artificial process. They’re so nearly human, and yet they’ve been robbed of so much by their conditioning that they’ve been made empty. If I want something calm and rational, I’ll settle for a machine. A man should enjoy a bit of healthy lust. He should be capable of love and hate! Though I suppose you think that’s a barbaric attitude.”

Horn chose his words with care. “Perhaps on your world you have a purpose to which such impulses can be put. On Earth they’ve turned inwards and gone sour. When I compare Dordy, the android, with a man like Coolin I can’t help feeling that what the former lacks is mainly the capacity for self-indulgence which in the latter came out as vicious cruelty.”

“Maybe,” Braithwin shrugged. “Still, to us it was the most heartbreaking thing of all about those children
Lars Talibrand rescued—to find that the devils who kidnapped them had made them as sterile and passionless as any android. Think of the hurt that caused to one man I know crippled in an accident—paralyzed—whose only son was returned to him and proved to lack the ability to carry on the line! I found him a brave youth to adopt, an orphan from among my own retinue, but it’s not the same. Yes?”—this last to the girl who had served their beer, who during the conversation had reentered the room.

She said something in Creewndithian which Horn failed to catch, and Braithwin rose briskly.

“Jan Talibrand is here. He came at once to meet you when he heard the news.”

Horn likewise stood up, just in time to confront the new arrival—a man so unlike him who had lain on Earth with a knife in his chest it was hard to credit that the two were brothers.

T
HIS WAS A LONG MAN
—long of face, with dark eyes set close together beneath thin black brows; long of limb and body, long of hand and foot. Carefully dressed dark hair curled on his head. He wore clothes of the same style as did Braithwin, but elaborately embroidered with gold thread, and his belt was studded with jewels. He had a ring on his left thumb and jeweled buckles on his low shoes.

Removing a pair of large soft gloves, he offered Horn a hand that was very slightly damp with sweat. His voice was low, and his command of Anglic as good as Braithwin’s, though less colloquial.

“So you, sir, are the Earthman who cared enough about the fate of my unfortunate brother to bring news of him all the way from your home. My thanks, my sincere thanks—although the shock, of course, is terrible.”

Horn stared him squarely in the face. After a moment he dropped his eyes and added, as though aware that he neither looked nor sounded like a man who had just been cut to the quick, “Though I must grant I had been steeling myself to hear he had risked his life once too often ever since he set about his foolhardy quest.”

“Sit down and have some beer,” Braithwin grunted. Talibrand complied, accepted a mug and held it while it was filled. He raised it in a ritual gesture.

“Lars Talibrand! Though he has departed may his honor remain!”

Horn seized his own mug, found it half-full, and drained it in the same toast, receiving a cordial nod from Braithwin. But there was something perfunctory about
the sip which Talibrand took, and he immediately set his mug aside.

“Tell me how it happened, Mr. Horn!”

Horn complied, giving a much balder recital of the facts than he had given Braithwin, and at the end Talibrand shook his head and sighed.

“I warned him, over and over! Had he only listened to me he might have been alive and happy on our own estate—
”

“Alive perhaps,” Braithwin cut in with an edge of sarcasm. Horn had the distinct impression that he didn’t like Jan Talibrand much. “But happy, no. He was only happy when searching out this evil he had stumbled on.”

Talibrand didn’t answer. Horn, studying his long pale face in an attempt to discern his real feelings, reflected that it must be embarrassing to be the brother of a citizen of the galaxy.

“Mr. Talibrand—” he began, and got no further.

“I beg your pardon,” Talibrand said frostily. “My correct styling is not ‘mister’—it is councillor. Hereditary Councillor.”

Horn flushed and muttered something inaudible. A further point occurred to him. If primogeniture was the rule here, then presumably Lars Talibrand had been Jan’s younger brother, an additional cause for resentment. Before he could say anything else, Talibrand was speaking again.

“Well, tomorrow I must hold the proper obsequies for my late brother. You are obviously unfamiliar with our customs,
Mr
. Horn”—he stressed the title heavily and scowled—“so I should explain that it is usual to hold a feast to honor the memory of the departed, at which only the family and those friends whom the deceased personally selected are ordinarily present. My brother of course left no directions more recent than his last departure from
Creew ’n Dith, but I am sure he would have wished you to be added to the company had he been able to know of your existence.” His dark eyes smoldered distantly.

Horn glanced at Braithwin, who gave him no clue. Well, it would be churlish to refuse, he supposed. He got to his feet and gave a half-bow.

“It will be an honor.” he declared, and caught a tiny nod of approval from Braithwin at the corner of his eye.

“My home is at your disposal tonight and as long as you care to remain,” Jan Talibrand had said, and taken his guest’s consent for granted. He had ordered two of his retainers to bring Horn’s belongings from the inn where he had been staying and load them into his lavishly appointed groundcar. It was a model that had been popular on Earth not more than two years before; Horn had seen nothing else to compare with it on Creew ’n Dith, and the cost of shipping it by interstellar freight must have been astronomical.

He had seized the moment when Talibrand was instructing his servants abut the baggage to take his leave of Braithwin and put a question relevant to that groundcar. “I take it
Councillor
Talibrand is not poor?” he had suggested, and a twinkle in Braithwin’s eye had greeted the stress on the honorific.

“He has not perhaps the largest estate on Creew ’n Dith,” was the reply. “But his great-grandfather had the foresight to inaugurate a well-appointed spaceport on his grounds and to leave much room for expansion. Consequently, though not richest in land, this family is the wealthiest in terms of currency.”

That accounted for a great deal.

The groundcar ran smoothly humming through the streets of the town—though it was one of the most populous on the planet, Horn could hardly bring himself to term it a city. They skirted the spaceport, where a consignment
of androids was being discharged from a newly arrived vessel bearing an Arthworld registration. Watching them march across the port in groups of twenty on their way to confinement in a pen similar to the ones he had seen on Newholme, Horn wondered how many of them might be human beings disguised.

The idea revolted him. No wonder Lars Talibrand had been nominated to his high distinction for uncovering the ghastly secret!

“I gather, Councillor, that the port is part of your family estate?” he ventured. Talibrand, beside him on the soft long back seat of the car, nodded.

“This is the furthest corner of it from my residence. It does not disturb our peace and comfort.”

Even if the Talibrand estate was not the largest here, it was impressive enough; the Horn family’s estate, back on Earth, was a pocket handkerchief by comparison. They ran for miles over rough roads that tried the suspension of their vehicle, through woods, between fields in which tenant farmers labored behind draft animals for their own benefit—Horn had already found out about this system—while in others expensive robot farming machinery prepared the grounds for Talibrand’s own crops.

Dusk was falling as they approached the house, or, as the local usage preferred, the hall: a long rambling structure of stone roofed with timber, like Braithwin’s in the town they had left behind. There were gardens before it, lawns of a soft green native moss, arbors, statues and fountains.

“We dine an hour past dark,” Talibrand told him as they parted at the entrance of the house. “My retainers will escort you to your lodging. Anything you find in your room is at your disposal.”

Horn found a great deal in his room, which was far
more lavishly appointed than he would have expected from the outside appearance of the house or the long chilly echoing passages down which he had been led to it. Among other things there was a range of Creewndithian clothing in various sizes, and he gladly changed into the suit which fitted him best, recalling Dize’s remark about an Earthman in the outworlds attracting as much attention as a parade band. He had just finished dressing when there was a timid tap at the door.

Assuming that one of the servants must be coming to call him to dinner, he drew back the bolt. A woman—no, a mere girl—slipped through the opening, shut the door promptly and leaned back against it, breathing hard as though recovering from tremendous effort. She was slim but shapely, as the belting of her white gown revealed; her long brown hair was caught up on her head by a gold clasp.

Horn was too surprised to speak, but in a moment she had mastered herself.

“Please forgive my intrusion!” she said in Anglic, her words fluent but strongly accented. “I will not detain you long—I dare not, for if Jan learns that I have shown myself to a stranger before putting on mourning garb …! I am Moda Talibrand. Quickly, please, the truth: is Lars indeed dead?”

Horn swallowed hard. “I—I’m afraid so. I found him on Earth with a knife in his heart.”

She closed her eyes and swayed. Prepared to catch her should she faint, Horn went on randomly, “Ah … Moda Talibrand? Are you his sister, then?”

“No!” Her eyes snapped open. “I’m—” Her voice broke. “I’m his widow!”

She spun on her heel and ran from the room, Horn stretching out a vain hand to stop her.

He did not see her again until the following day; she
was absent from dinner the same evening. But at the feast which was held at noon of the morrow she presided from one end of the immensely long table in the Great Hall, wearing a black gown with her hair in a tight black snood, toying with her food and every now and then raising her eyes to stare at the chair which stood empty at the other end with a black wreath on it framing a broken sword.

Horn barely had more appetite than she; stuffing one’s belly and swilling gallons of the sour Creewndithian beer hardly struck him as an appropriate way to honor the memory of a dead hero. Granted, Jan Talibrand had opened the proceedings with a speech extolling his late brother’s virtues, but it had the ring of something learned by rote and repeated parrot-fashion rather than a tribute from the heart. Later, Braithwin had also spoken, but at too great length for his audience, who grew restless and fidgeted. They consisted mainly of brawny men of young to middle age, a few elderly folk, and a great many matronly women in widows’ weeds who sobbed loudly at intervals and then sought consolation in the beer-jugs.

Without warning, the youth whom Braithwin had pointed out to Horn as the adopted son of the paralyzed man they had spoken of the day before—presumably personally chosen by Lars Talibrand to attend his funeral feast—whose face had been growing darker and darker as the meal progressed, leapt to his feet and swept a space of ten feet clear of dishes, mugs and cutlery with a scabbarded sword before clambering on to the table and stamping towards the empty chair at its head.

“Lars Talibrand!” he roared. “If no one else will speak better of you than these drunken sots, then I must in the place of my crippled father whom you helped! Here they sit guzzling your beer and chomping joints of your meat, and they’re forgetting what they came here for!”

Horn, whose ear was barely as yet attuned to the
Creewndithian speech, turned to Braithwin in the next chair, who told him in low tones what the youth was saying. Meantime, Jan Talibrand thrust back his chair, his brow like thunder.

“Whose
beer?” he snapped.
“Whose
meat?
Whose
house and hospitality are you abusing?”

Horn needed no translation of that—the meaning was all too obvious.

“I’d get out of here if I were you,” Braithwin said very softly. “There’s going to be a fight, and—and I feel ashamed for my kinfolk!”

Indeed, Talibrand was shouting at his retainers, and one of them was running to fetch a sword. Some of the company, their food forgotten, were cheering and laughing drunkenly, while Moda Talibrand was leaning forward and her parted lips were moving, as though expressing a silent wish that all this could be a dream.

Braithwin thrust back his chair and rose, framing a scornful condemnation of such behavior, but it was too late. With a cry of fury, the youth had leapt from the table and confronted Talibrand, and up and down the table there was an unholy racket, as women rose and headed for the door and men argued unsoberly about the rights and wrongs of the contestants. When he saw that other swords had been drawn, Horn decided that Braithwin’s advice was correct and slipped away, shaking from head to foot. The noise of the growing brawl followed him down the corridors to his room.

“Lars Talibrand!” he whispered to the air. “Whoever’s fit to follow in your footsteps, it doesn’t seem to be one of your own family!”

He thrust open his door and checked in mid-stride, thinking he must have made a mistake, for the room was not empty. A bent figure in a drab gown was sitting on the edge of one of the chairs. He apologized and made to withdraw.

“I beg forgiveness, Mr. Horn!” the stranger wheezed—an old woman. Very,
very
old! Horn halted, marveling; he had never seen anyone on Earth so bent and fragile. “But I had to speak to you about my son Lars—Lars who I’m told is dead!”

She struggled to stand up and finally succeeded. For the first time the light fell on her face, and with shattering amazement Horn saw that the face of Lars Talibrand’s mother—was blue.