Part 6

Joris looked at Shairn and roared. "Missed your guess, didn't you?" He got up. "All right, Trehearne, I'll let you know. And now let's see what we can do in the way of a celebration!"

They went. But for the next hour or so Shairn was inclined to be sulky, and was all the more so because Trehearne seemed to have forgotten her existence.

Resplendent in black and silver supplied for him out of Edri's wardrobe, free, accepted, and with a future ahead, Trehearne walked the streets of the city, drunk with color and sound and movement, dazed with the incredible size and the utter strangeness of the greatest metropolis in the galaxy. It surged magnificently, crowded, thriving, beautiful, drenched in the wealth and inventiveness of a thousand far-flung cultures, Mecca for all the peoples of Aldebaran's seven inhabited planets. And its beauty was honest. There were no dark and evil places hidden behind the splendid buildings, no slums, no poverty, no ugliness. The Vardda had travelled widely, and seen much, and they had learned from others. From a vantage point given to no other people in history, they had studied and compared the inceptions, growths, and collapses of more empires, races, and cultures than a man could count in a year, and the work still went on under the direction of their best minds, correlating and compiling, examining causes and evolving from the mass of evidence ways and means to keep the Vardda empire healthy. They had managed well for a thousand years, and Trehearne felt a tremendous admiration for them, laboring as they did under the extra handicap of an essentially inbred society. Their government was elective, and they kept it clean. Their laws were relatively few and simple, and they were obeyed. They oppressed nobody, and saw to it that their non-Vardda neighbors benefited heavily from the Vardda trade.

"It's not at all," Edri had told him once, "that we're so much more bloody noble than anybody else. Matter of fact, we're probably unrivalled in our basic selfishness. It's good business, you see. Keep everybody as happy as possible, deal as fairly as you can, make 'em all rich, and you don't have trouble, which is bad for trade. The non-Vardda races may not love us, but they're not inclined to try getting along without us. As for domestic politics and administration, it's simple self-preservation to keep them sound. We're not Utopians, to use one of your favorite Earthly terms, we just try to make sense."

Looking at the city, Trehearne thought they had done a remarkably good job. Actually, few of the Vardda were urbanites. Llyrdis was essentially a world of estates and small communities. The Vardda sociologists had not been blind to that final corrosive stage of civilization that Spengler called Megalopolis. The city was not a place in which great mobs of people spent their lives. It was a clearing house, a warehouse, an office, a factory, devoted entirely to business. The population was chiefly non-Vardda, and they only stayed there during their employment. Their homes were on their own worlds. They inhabited the city without being trapped in it.

As for Trehearne, it seemed to him that night that he could spend a lifetime there and never tire of it. The little ships that tramped the narrow planetary roads set down beside the scornful giants of the star-trails and poured into the metropolis a never-ending tide of visitors, come to touch the fringes of a glory they could never grasp themselves, to revel in alien pleasures and barter for the gems and spices and the spider-woven silks of worlds that they would never see. Most of them were human or nearly so, their skins a variety of tints, their costumes outlandish or sober according to their native custom. Some were not human at all, except in intelligence and pride of bearing.

"See those black-skinned, hawk-nosed chaps with the bronze wings?" Edri's hand guided Trehearne's wondering gaze. "They're from Suumis. And the three silvery ones over there with the bright crests and the crimson robes. They're the dominant race on the second world sunward, and proud as Lucifer for all they've got scales instead of skin. That little bluish fellow is a merchant-prince from Zaard, the outermost planet. See his diamond caste-mark?"

Trehearne saw. He mazed his brain with seeing, with hearing and feeling--the pulse and rush of the city, the kaleidoscopic multitudes, the companies of lordly Vardda like peacocks in their jewels and brilliant tunics, the babel of outworld tongues, the drifting sound of music, strange and sweet. From place to place the four of them drifted, in no hurry, wandering as the mood took them, drinking the dark wine of Antares, the pungent snow-white brew of Fomalhaut, endless wines of many colors from the worlds of many stars. Shairn forgot to sulk. To Trehearne she seemed to float in moonlight and laughter, bewitching and unattainable as a creature seen in dreams. The wine mounted to his head. The excitement, the strangeness, the wild joy of release put a kind of fever in him, and his surroundings lost reality, whirling ever faster and in brighter colors round him, visions painted on a blowing mist. Faces, human, half-human, unhuman, beautiful, grotesque, ludicrous. Carnival masks, reeling, dancing. Vardda women lovely as sin, dressed in a thousand fashions from a thousand worlds, smiling with red mouths. Music throbbing, beating, wailing, unknown melodies plucked from unknown strings, passionate, soft, mingling with the smell of wine and perfume and the sharp sea-wind. Dancing girls with emerald skins, outlandish beasts that capered with an eerie cleverness, a spinning whirl of pleasure-palaces, terraces, gardens, parks and squares, nameless trees blowing under the triple moons, Shairn's laughing face, Joris flushed and jovial, a grey-polled ox on holiday, Edri....

There was something wrong with Edri. Perhaps the wine had given Trehearne a sharper insight, or perhaps it was only that the outside stimuli had grown so bewildering that he fled from them at last, unconsciously, by turning to the familiar as personified by his friends. At any rate, he emerged a little from his daze and realized that while he and Shairn and Joris had been growing gayer Edri had grown steadily more solemn and withdrawn. Sobriety was not habitual with him, but Trehearne had never seen him really drunk. He was drunk now, and he was continuing to drink as though there was not enough wine on Llyrdis to fill him, sitting silently, his eyes fixed on some inner distance, a brooding look on his ugly face. Trehearne spoke to him, and he answered, but it was only a mechanical reflex, a sound without meaning.

They were in a place of trees and crystal columns, with bowers drowned in bloom and the open sky above. Trehearne looked at the others. They were happy, without a care in the world. Then he saw Edri's face again, bleak and sad and seeing nothing, and he frowned. He was fond of Edri. It came over him in a rush how fond he was of him. He leaned forward and said, "What is it, Edri? What's wrong?"

"He's sober," Joris said. "He needs more wine." He reached over and poured a ruby liquid into Edri's glass. Abruptly Edri shook his head and pushed the goblet away. He was looking now at something behind Trehearne. "No," he said. "I'm going home."

"There's no hurry, Edri. Stay a while." It was Kerrel's voice. Startled, Trehearne turned his head and saw him standing there, as though he had been standing for a long time. Now he came forward and sat down with them. Trehearne could not tell what he was thinking. He did not like a man whose thoughts he could not even guess at.

"Congratulations," Kerrel said. "I don't believe a word of it, of course, but that history of Trehearne was a fine piece of strategy."

Joris laughed. "The Council believed it. Furthermore, I believe it, Shairn believes it--even Trehearne believes it, don't you, Trehearne?"

"Of course."

"Well, it's done now," Kerrel said, as though it had ceased to matter.

Shairn picked up one of the musky flowers and tossed it into Kerrel's lap. "Have you forgotten me?" she asked him, with a curious edged sweetness. "I know you. You're a bad loser, and it's no use pretending you're not. Besides, I've seen you this way before. Just what are you meditating in your little mind?"

"Nothing at all, but the usual broad speculations on life. Curious what twists and turns it has. Take today. One man escapes banishment and another, a respected member of our community, incurs it."

"Who?" said Joris, peering sharply at Kerrel as through a fog.

"Arrin."

There was a small silence. Then Shairn said, "But I met him once. He's nice. You can't send him to Thuvis."

"I'm afraid there's no doubt about it. He's one of the Orthist leaders--you didn't know that, did you?" His question was addressed to no one in particular. "We've suspected him for some time, and today he was caught. Odd thing, though. They couldn't find any of his papers." He turned casually to Edri. "Arrin's a friend of yours, isn't he?"

"I know him."

"Oh, come now! You've known him for years."

Edri said nastily, "I've known you for a long time too. Don't cat-and-mouse with me, Kerrel. If you have something to say, say it."

Kerrel shrugged. "I was only thinking that a man can have too many unfortunate friendships."

"Does that include me?" said Trehearne, getting up.

"Oh, the hell with him," said Edri. He lurched to his feet, giving Kerrel one smouldering look, but it was Trehearne he spoke to. "He's a tireless and worthy investigator, a good cop as you would say on Earth. But he enjoys his work too much. I'm leaving."

He walked away, staggering a bit but holding himself rigidly erect. Trehearne watched the solitary figure moving down an avenue of trees, splashed with shadows and golden light. He hesitated, and then followed.

Edri stopped when he felt Trehearne's hand touch him. He looked at him in a curious way, almost as though he had never seen him before. And now that he was here, Trehearne did not know what to say. Rather awkwardly, he asked, "Can I do anything?"

"No. Thanks."

"I'm sorry about your friend."

"Why should you be? He's an Orthist, a traitor. He deserves to be sent to Thuvis."

Remembering the desolate picture he had seen of that world at the end of the galaxy, and his own so narrow escape from it, Trehearne shivered. "I don't care. It doesn't seem right to send anybody to rot forever in that boneyard. Besides, I can't see that the Orthists are so bad."

Edri reached out and took hold of Trehearne's shoulders. "Hate them," he said earnestly. "Hate them with everything you've got."

He turned away, and Trehearne said with a certain exasperation, "Hate 'em or not, I don't see why they're such a danger."

"There was a message, Trehearne. Long after Orthis disappeared, one of the life-skiffs of his ship was picked up in space. There was nothing in it but a message, painted in big letters on the walls. It was addressed to his enemies, and it said, 'You have not destroyed me. The peoples of the Galaxy will yet be given the freedom of the stars.' You understand? There was still hope, from the Orthist point of view."

He went on, a drunken man, not talking to Trehearne now but to himself, to the wind and the casual moons and a world that had turned bitter around him. "Arrin worked. All his life he worked, like a lot of men before him. He searched the records, the closed files that nobody is allowed to look at, and then they caught him. He never found what he was looking for, but he might have. A little more time, and he might have!" He looked up into the sky, the empty sky that stretched away to the rim of the universe. "Somewhere out there Orthis sits in his ship and waits--waits to be found again. But where? That's it, the question no one has answered in a thousand years. Where?"

He turned aside and was abruptly, violently sick. Trehearne waited. After Edri muttered, "It's curious, the things a man will say when he's drunk."

"I don't know," Trehearne said. "I didn't hear anything."

"Don't ever hear anything, for your sake as well as mine." He managed a smile. "Thanks. I'm all right now. I'm going on home."

He walked away slowly, and Trehearne went back to the others. He had sobered up a bit himself, and some of the magic had gone out of the evening. He was worried about Edri.

Shairn looked up at him, heavy-eyed. "You were gone so long, Michael."

"Holding Edri's head." Kerrel was still there. A sour mood seemed to have come over everyone. Joris sat with his head hanging forward. His eyes were open, staring moodily into the spilled wine, but he was obviously on the verge of passing out. Shairn had torn to bits the pale flowers in her lap, scattering them on the grass. No one was talking. Kerrel had not touched the wine. He was looking at Shairn, just sitting still and looking at her. Trehearne said to him, "You haven't given up, have you?"

"No."

"He only thinks he hasn't," Shairn said angrily. She rose and stood in front of Kerrel. "What is it you just can't bear to give up--me, or my thirty ships?"

Kerrel got up. He lifted his hand and slapped her hard across the cheek. There was a second when no one moved, when Shairn's eyes blazed wider and wider, and then Trehearne thrust her aside and moved in. Kerrel was stony sober and his reflexes were fast. The next thing Trehearne saw, through a ringing haze, was Kerrel walking away, leaving small sharp scars in the turf where his heels had cut in.

"No," said Shairn. "Not this time, Michael. Let him go."

His head hurt. The wine was turning on him, and he felt ashamed. He wanted to kill Kerrel, and he couldn't.

Shairn said uneasily, "I'm not mad. That's funny, Michael. I'm not mad at all, I'm scared."

"Why?"

"Him." She nodded after the dark figure receding among the trees.

"He'd never hurt you."

"Not directly. It's you I'm thinking of. He won't let you go. He was warning me. He can't let you go, and it isn't only because of me, or his pride. I've left him before, but this is different. You're different. He knows we lied to the Council."

"What can he do?"

"You saw him go after Edri. I don't know, Michael, but be careful. Don't give him even the hint of a chance at you." She shook her head. "I've changed my mind. I'm glad you're going voyaging. And meanwhile, you'd better not see much of Edri."

"You love me, Shairn?"

"I should think I'd done enough to prove it!"

"Don't get your back up. I was only wondering. Would you really have gone to the Orthists to help me?"

She laughed. "It was a safe threat to make. I knew Joris would never call it."

As though the sound of his name had decided him, Joris fell quietly sideways and began to snore. Trehearne bent over him, and he thought he saw in the moonlight a curious thing. He thought he saw tears on the old man's cheeks. He decided he must be very drunk indeed.

Shairn touched his arm. "Come, Michael."

"Where?"

"The home of my family, the Silver Tower. There's so little time to be happy in, before you go."

Two weeks later, dressed in the black and scarlet of the Vardda spacemen, Trehearne left Llyrdis behind him for the starship _Saarga_, outbound for Hercules.

TEN

The _Saarga_ was not like the ship that had brought Trehearne from Earth. She was older and shabbier and clumsier, a great lumbering beldame of a ship, with enormous capacity for cargo and no space at all for passengers. Officers and crew were cramped into quarters functionally reduced to the absolute minimum, and there were no such luxuries as lounges and observation domes. But to Trehearne she was a thing of beauty, of miracle and wonder. Every dent and scar on her unlovely bulk-heads recorded a voyage to a nameless sun. The crammed and odorous vaults of her belly were storehouses of exotic riches. She was outbound for Hercules, and he was part of her. He was no longer merely a hungry onlooker. He belonged. He worshipped her.

He saw her first lying hugely in the dock, her scored and pitted hull-plates giving back a dull glint from the sun. He looked up at her, and then around him at the tremendous clamor of the port, and then he strode down along the walkway feeling ten feet high and happy as a kid at a carnival. He reported aboard, was duly checked in and assigned to quarters in a very small cabin with four very narrow bunks, where he good-naturedly allowed himself to be elbowed into the least desirable upper. His cabin-mates were all younger than he, but they were veterans, and he was forced to admit that this was his first professional voyage.

"Trehearne," said the dark-haired youngster in Lower Two, turning the name over on his tongue and frowning. "Funny sort of name--I've heard it somewhere."

The copper-haired youngster--the youngest--in Upper One, said, "I know. My uncle was talking about him. He's the fellow they found on Earth. Aren't you, Trehearne?"

"Yes."

The dark-haired youngster whistled. "Were you in luck! It was a million-to-one chance you'd ever even meet another Vardda. What's it like on Earth? I've never been there."

"It's all right," Trehearne said, "for Earthmen."

The first of the warning bells rang for take-off. They settled themselves in the padded bunks, and the long, lean, cheerful-looking man in Lower One, whose youth was already overlaid with many kinds of experience, glanced up at Trehearne and said, "You're not used to this, are you?"

"No." Trehearne's belly had contracted suddenly into a hard knot, and his skin was cold with a clammy sweat. The agonies of that first take-off returned to him full force. He knew this one would not be as bad. Once the adjustment was made, you were all right. Everybody said so. It didn't make any difference. He was scared.

The man in Lower One said quietly, "Just take it easy. By the way, my name is Yann. Radar crew."

"Hello."

The second warning sounded. Trehearne's teeth shut together with a snap and his jaw muscles stood out in ridges.

Red-head in Upper One said, "I'm Perri. Low man in the generator room."

Trehearne grunted.

The voice of Lower Two, directly beneath him, said, "If you fall through, I'll catch you. I'm Astrogation-Computer Technician, Second Class. A big mouth-filling title, but all I do is punch keys. They call me Rohan."

Trehearne said painfully, "On Earth there was a Cardinal...."

Third warning. Silence. A drawing-in, a throb, a quiver, and then a leap....

"Trehearne? Trehearne, are you still there?"

"Yes--" _Crushed, weighted, stupefied, but it isn't so bad, it isn't nearly so bad, not much worse than pulling out of a dive. And she's going up, oh God she's going up!_

The air-shriek died. The soundlessness of space was wrapped around the hull outside, and within there was the soft and mighty beating of that pulse that Trehearne remembered, going faster, going higher. A sigh escaped him, and his body relaxed. He smiled. He was where he wanted to be.

The long haul out to Hercules was uneventful, and the others found it dull. But for Trehearne, every minute of it was charged with magic. He was called up once before the skipper, who looked hard at him and said, "Joris told me to see that you worked. There's more to being a starman than lounging around in your bunk, and you'll be wanting to take examinations for some kind of a rating sooner or later. Here, study these. And in your spare time, learn all you can about the ship."

"These" proved to be texts on the Vardda Trade Laws, manuals on the rules and regulations governing relations with other races, and a history in many microvolumes of the trans-galactic expansion of the Vardda race in its thousand years of existence. He knew that Joris must have supplied the books and he was glad to get them. The trade codes, like laws anywhere, were pretty dull stuff and interesting only because of the fantastically broad field they dealt with. The manuals were better, because they were full of references to alien and frequently non-human races, with fascinating glimpses, into the damndest customs and psychologies Trehearne had ever heard of. But the history held him spellbound.

It began with a foreword on what the Vardda had been like in the millenniums before Orthis, when they were simply the people of Llyrdis. It seemed to Trehearne that they were not too different from the people of Earth. They had had their ages of barbarism and change and growth, and their homogeneity had not been achieved without pain. However, they had achieved it, and at an earlier period in their world-culture than that in which his native planet now was. He thought perhaps the task had been easier for the Llyrdians because there were fewer geographic barriers to the free mingling of peoples in their nomadic phase. The oceans were land-locked and the mountain ranges were broken by traversable passes. No primitive tribe had grown to statehood in even partial isolation, and the cultural streams had flowed strongly in all directions, losing their narrow intensity and broadening out into what eventually became one universal lake. It made for dulness in the world picture, perhaps, because of a sameness in dress and language and custom, but it was steady, and it led to a conception of the individual as a world-citizen instead of a nationalist, which cut down rapidly on wars. Scientific progress seemed to have gone on with only normal hitches, without any Dark Ages to set it back, and at a time when the people of Earth were sunk in their blackest pit of ignorance since the Stone Age, Llyrdis had atomic power, an established commerce with her neighbor planets, and was building and launching the first starship, which brought the history to its initial chapter, and Orthis.

"_It is difficult for us now to realize what that first epic flight of man between the suns was like._..."

Not as it was now, swift and easy, far outrunning the velocity of light. Science had the techniques even then to build and power the fast ships, but they were useless. Man could not survive the ultra-speeds. They had to go as they went between the planets, slowly. Four generations lived and died within the close confines of that first feeble forerunner of the Vardda fleets, men and women dedicated in themselves and their children to the conquest of the greatest barrier humanity had ever crossed. And they crossed it. Slowly, painfully, exposed to all the dangers of unknown radiations and unexplored, uncharted wilderness in its most ultimate sense, exposed to the most terrible loneliness and isolation that living beings had ever endured, they toiled their way to a landing on the world of another star and then--and this, to Trehearne, seemed the most incredible bravery of all--they took off again for Llyrdis, which to this intermediate generation was only a name and a tradition, and which they knew they would never live to see. Orthis was born during this return voyage, twenty-two years out from the planet he was taught to regard as home, though he had no knowledge of planets, nor of any life except that of the ship that moved apparently forever through the night of deep space. His ears must have been attuned only to that outer silence, his sight to the darkness and the far-off stars. To wind and rain, to sunlight and warm grass, to beasts and birds and the faces of many people, he was a stranger.

And a stranger he remained. "He could not endure to be planet-bound, after living all his life in space. He built his laboratory ship and worked in it, cruising where he wished and almost alone, for another fifteen years. Then, when he was thirty-seven, he announced his discovery--the birth of Galactic Man, the inception of the Vardda.