Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (233 page)

“And how would I do that?”

“Use me,” I said. “I’ve got a pipeline to the political group the assassins represent. Let me go to them as your representative and outbid Jamethon. You can offer them recognition by the present government, now. Padma and the present St. Marie government heads would have to back you up if you could clean the planet of Friendlies that easily.”

He looked at me with no expression at all.

“And what would I be supposed to buy with this?”

he said.

“Sworn testimony they’d been hired to assassinate you. As many of them as needed could testify.”

“No Court of Interplanetary Inquiry would believe people like that,” Kensie said.

“Ah,” I said, and I could not help smiling. “But they’d believe me as a News Network Representative when I backed up every word that was said.”

There was a new silence. His face had no expression at all.

“I see,” he said.

He walked past me into the salon. I followed him. He went to his phone, put his finger on a stud and spoke into an imageless, gray screen.

“Janol,” he said.

He turned away from the screen, crossed the room to an arms cabinet and began putting on his battle harness. He moved deliberately and neither looked nor spoke in my direction. After a few long minutes, the building entrance slid aside and Janol stepped in.

“Sir?” said the Freilander officer.

“Mr. Olyn stays here until further orders.”

“Yes sir,” said Janol.

Graeme went out.

I stood numb, staring at the entrance through which he had left. I could not believe that he would violate the Conventions so far himself as not only to disregard me, but to put me essentially under arrest to keep me from doing anything further about the situation.

I turned to Janol. He was looking at me with a sort of wry sympathy on his long, brown face.

“Is the OutBond here in camp?” I asked him.

“No.” He came up to me. “He’s back in the Exotic Embassy in Blauvain. Be a good fella now and sit down, why don’t you? We might as well kill the next few hours pleasantly.”

We were standing face to face; I hit him in the stomach.

I had done a little boxing as an undergraduate on the college level. I mention this not to make myself out a sort of muscular hero, but to explain why I had sense enough not to try for his jaw. Graeme could probably have found the knockout point there without even thinking, but I was no Dorsai. The area below a man’s breastbone is relatively large, soft, handy and generally just fine for amateurs. And I did know something about how to punch.

For all that, Janol was not knocked out. He went over on the floor and lay there doubled up with his eyes still open. But he was not ready to get up right away. I turned and went quickly out of the building.

The camp was busy. Nobody stopped me. I got back into my car, and five minutes later I was free on the darkening road for Blauvain.

V

From New San Marcos to Blauvain and Padma’s Embassy was fourteen hundred kilometers. I should have made it in six hours, but a bridge was washed out and I took fourteen.

It was after eight the following morning when I burst into the half-park, half-building that was the embassy.

“Padma—” I said. “Is he still—”

“Yes, Mr. Olyn,” said the girl receptionist. “He’s expecting you.”

She smiled above her purple robe. I did not mind. I was too busy being glad Padma had not already taken off for the fringe areas of the conflict.

She took me down and around a corner and turned me over to a young male Exotic, who introduced himself as one of Padma’s secretaries. He took me a short distance and introduced me to another secretary, a middle-aged man this time, who led me through several rooms and then directed me down a long corridor and around a corner, beyond which he said was the entrance to the office area where Padma worked at the moment. Then he left me.

I followed his direction. But when I stepped through that entrance it was not into a room, but into a further short corridor. And I checked, stopping myself dead. For what I suddenly thought I saw coming at me was Kensie Graeme—Kensie with murder on his mind.

But the man who looked like Kensie merely glanced at me and dismissed me, continuing to come on. Then I knew.

Of course, he was not Kensie. He was Kensie’s twin brother, Ian, commander of Garrison Forces for the Exotics, here in Blauvain. He strode on toward me; and I began once more to walk toward him, but the shock stayed with me until we had passed one another.

I do not think anyone could have come on him like that, in my position and not been hit the same way. From Janol, at different times, I had gathered how Ian was the converse of Kensie. Not in a military sense—they were both magnificent specimens of Dorsai officers—but in the matter of their individual natures.

Kensie had had a profound effect on me from the first moment, with his cheerful nature and the warmth of being that at times obscured the very fact that he was a Dorsai. When the pressure of military affairs was not directly on him he seemed all sunshine; you could warm yourself in his presence as you might in the sun. Ian, his physical duplicate, striding toward me like some two-eyed Odin, was all shadow.

Here at last was the Dorsai legend come to life. Here was the grim man with the iron heart and the dark and solitary soul. In the powerful fortress of his body, what was essentially Ian dwelt as isolated as a hermit on a mountain. He was the fierce and lonely Highlandman of his distant ancestry, come to life again.

Not law, not ethics, but the trust of the given word, clan-loyalty and the duty of the blood feud held sway in Ian. He was a man who would cross hell to pay a debt for good or ill; and in that moment when I saw him coming toward me and recognized him at last, I suddenly thanked whatever gods were left, that he had no debt with me.

* * * *

Then we had passed each other, and he was gone around a corner.

Rumor had it, I remembered then, that the blackness around him never lightened except in Kensie’s presence. That he was truly his twin brother’s other half. And that if he should ever lose the light that Kensie’s bright presence shed on him, he would be doomed to his own light-lessness forever.

It was a statement I was to remember at a later time, as I was to remember seeing him come toward me in that moment.

But now I forgot him as I went forward through another entrance into what looked like a small conservatory and saw the gentle face and short-cropped white hair of Padma, the OutBond, wearing a pale yellow robe.

“Come in, Mr. Olyn,” he said, getting up. “And come along with me.”

He turned and walked out through an archway of purple clematis blooms. I followed him, and found a small courtyard, all but filled with the ellipitical shape of a sedan aircar. Padma was already climbing into one of the seats facing the controls. He held the door for me.

“Where are we going?” I asked as I got in.

He touched the autopilot panel; the ship rose in the air. He left it to its own navigation, and pivoted his chair about to face me.

“To Commander Graeme’s headquarters in the field,” he answered.

His eyes were a light hazel color, but they seemed to catch and swim with the sunlight striking through the transparent top of the aircar, as we reached altitude and began to move horizontally. I could not read them, or the expression on his face.

“I see,” I said. “Of course, I know a call from Graeme’s HQ could get to you much faster than I could by groundcar from the same spot. But I hope you aren’t thinking of having him kidnap me or something like that. I have Credentials of Impartiality protecting me as a Newsman, as well as authorizations from both the Friendly and the Exotic worlds. And I don’t intend to be held responsible for any conclusions drawn by Graeme after the conversation the two of us had earlier this morning—
alone.”

Padma sat still in his aircar seat, facing me. His hands were folded in his lap together, pale against the yellow robe, but with strong sinews showing under the skin of their backs.

“You’re coming with me now by my decision, not Kensie Graeme’s.”

“I want to know why,” I said tensely.

“Because,” he said slowly, “you are very dangerous.” And he sat still, looking at me with unwavering eyes.

I waited for him to go on, but he did not. “Dangerous?” I said. “Dangerous to who?”

“To the future of all of us.”

I stared at him, then I laughed. I was angry.

“Cut it out!” I said.

He shook his head slowly, his eyes never leaving my face. I was baffled by those eyes. Innocent and open as a child’s, but I could not see through them into the man himself.

“All right,” I said. “Tell me, why am I dangerous?”

“Because you want to destroy a race of people. And you know how.”

* * * *

There was a short silence. The aircar fled on through the skies without a sound.

“Now that’s an odd notion,” I said slowly and calmly. “I wonder where you got it?”

“From our ontogenic calculations,” said Padma, as calmly as I had spoken. “And it’s not a notion, Tam. As you know yourself.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Ontogenics. I was going to look that up.”

“You did look it up, didn’t you, Tam?”

“Did I?” I said. “I guess I did, at that. It didn’t seem very clear to me, though, as I remember. Something about evolution.”

“Ontogenics,” said Padma, “is the study of the effect of evolution upon the interacting forces of human society.”

“Am I an interacting force?”

“At the moment and for the past several years, yes,” said Padma. “And possibly for some years into the future. But possibly not.”

“That sounds almost like a threat.”

“In a sense it is.” Padma’s eyes caught the light as I watched them. “You’re capable of destroying yourself as well as others.”

“I’d hate to do that.”

“Then,” said Padma, “you’d better listen to me.”

“Why, of course,” I said. “That’s my business, listening. Tell me all about ontogenics—and myself.”

He made an adjustment in the controls, then swung his seat back to face mine once more.

“The human race,” said Padma, “broke up in an evolutionary explosion at the moment in history when interstellar colonization became practical.” He sat watching me. I kept my face attentive. “This happened for reasons stemming from racial instinct which we haven’t completely charted yet, but which was essentially self-protective in nature.” I reached into my jacket pocket. “Perhaps I’d better take a few notes,” I said.

“If you want to,” said Padma, unperturbed. “Out of that explosion came cultures individually devoted to single facets of the human personality. The fighting, combative facet became the Dorsai. The facet which surrendered the individual wholly to some faith or other became the Friendly. The philosophical facet created the Exotic culture to which I belong. We call these Splinter Cultures.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “I know about Splinter Cultures.”

“You know about them, Tam, but you don’t know them.”

“I don’t?”

“No,” said Padma, “because you, like all our ancestors, are from Earth. You’re old, full-spectrum man. The Splinter peoples are evolutionarily advanced over you.”

I felt a little twist of bitter anger knot suddenly inside me. “Oh? I’m afraid I don’t see that.”

“Because you don’t want to,” said Padma. “If you did, you’d have to admit that they were different from you, and had to be judged by different standards.”

“Different? How?”

“Different in a sense that all Splinter people, including myself, understand instinctively, but full-spectrum man has to extrapolate to imagine.” Padma shifted a little in his seat. “You’ll get some idea, Tam, if you imagine a member of a Splinter culture to be a man like yourself, only with a monomania that shoves him wholly toward being one type of person. But with this difference: Instead of all parts of his mental and physical self outside the limits of that monomania being ignored and atrophied as, they would be with you—”

* * * *

I interrupted, “Why specifically with me?”

“With any full-spectrum man, then,” said Padma calmly. “These parts, instead of being atrophied, are altered to agree with and support the monomania, so that we don’t have a sick man—but a healthy, different one.”

“Healthy?” I said, seeing the Friendly non-com on New Earth again in my mind’s eye.

“Healthy as a culture. Not as occasional crippled individuals of that culture. But as a culture.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t believe it.”

“But you do, Tam,” said Padma, softly. “Unconsciously you do. Because you’re planning to take advantage of the weakness such a culture must have to destroy it.”

“And what weakness is that?”

“The obvious weakness that’s the converse of any strength,” said Padma. “The Splinter Cultures are not viable.”

I must have blinked. I was honestly bewildered.

“Not viable? You mean they can’t live on their own?”

“Of course not,” said Padma. “Faced with an expansion into space, the human race reacted to the challenge of a different environment by trying to adapt to it. It adapted by trying out separately all the elements of its personality, to see which could survive best. Now that all elements —the Splinter Cultures—have survived and adapted, it’s time for them to breed back into each other again, to produce a more hardy, universe-oriented human.”