Wolfling

Chapter 2

The driver of the vehicle was a staff member of the Earth Trade Delegation, which, with the trade delegations from two other Empire-inhabited solar systems, had combined with the Alpha Centaurans of this planet to put on various local-culture shows for the visiting High-born. It was always the hope of those putting on such shows that the result would be some form of preference by the High-born visitors. Earth had stood the best chance of arousing interest, being, in theory, a newly rediscovered part of the Empire, and now its show of the art of bullfighting was being carried back by the visitors to the Throne World to amuse the Emperor.

The driver took Jim and his luggage through the surrounding city and out to the open spaceport, an endless stretch of brownish, cementlike material. In one area of this, all by itself, sat a huge ovoid that was the ship of the High-born. The driver drove Jim up to this ship and stopped.

“Want me to wait?” asked the driver.

Jim shook his head. He took the two suitcases out of the vehicle and watched as the driver put it in motion and drove off, dwindling to toy size in the distance across the spaceport area.

Jim set his suitcases down and turned to look at the ship. From the outside it seemed perfectly featureless. There were no ports, no airlocks, no signs of apertures or entrances to the interior. Nor did anyone aboard the huge vessel seem to be aware that Jim was there.

He sat down on one of his suitcases and began to wait.

For a little over an hour nothing happened. Then, abruptly, while he was still sitting on his suitcase, he was no longer on the spaceport concrete, but with both bags in what appeared to be a green-walled, egg-shaped room with some sort of darker green carpet underfoot and cushions of all colors and sizes, from six inches in diameter to something like six feet, furnishing it.

“Were you waiting long, Wolfling?” asked a girl’s voice. “I’m sorry. I was busy taking care of the other pets.”

He stood up and turned about from his suitcase; and he saw her then. By the standards of the High-born, she was short—probably no more than five feet, ten inches in height. Also her skin, although it approached the onyx-white of the Princess Afuan and the others, had a brownish tinge, like a pale shadow of the brownishness of an American Indian. The brownishness extended to her eyes, which were rather a dark gold, flecked with little sparkles of red highlights—not like the lemon yellow Jim had seen in Afuan. Her face was less long than Afuan’s, and more rounded of jaw. She smiled in a way that was very unlike the inscrutability of the High-born princess; and when she smiled, the ghosts of a small cloud of something like freckles appeared across her nose and up her cheeks. Finally, her hair, though she let it hang straight down her back, as had the other High-born females Jim had seen in the arena, was plainly yellow-blond rather than white, and it did not hang as straight as Afuan’s, but had a perceptible wave and thickness to it.

Her smile vanished and her face darkened suddenly with an abrupt flood of blood below the skin. It was a literal flush—the last thing Jim had expected to discover upon the face of one of the High-born.

“That’s right, stare at me!” she said spiritedly. “I’m not ashamed of it!”

“Ashamed of what?” asked Jim.

“Why—” She broke off suddenly. Her blush fled, and she looked at him contritely. “I’m sorry. Of course—you’re a Wolfling. You wouldn’t even know the difference, would you?”

“Evidently not,” said Jim. “Because I don’t seem to understand what you’re talking about.”

She laughed—but a little sadly, it seemed to him; and patted his arm unexpectedly, with a light, consoling touch.

“You’ll learn soon enough,” she said, “even if you are a Wolfling. I’m a throwback, you see. Something in my gene pattern was atavistic. Oh, my father and mother were as High-born as anyone outside the Main Royal Line; and Afuan will never dismiss me from her household. But, on the other hand, she can hardly show me off. So I’m left with doing things like taking care of the pets for her. That was why I was the one who brought you on board just now.”

She glanced down at his two cases.

“Is that your equipment there?” she asked. “I’ll put it away for you.”

Instantly the two pieces of luggage vanished.

“Just a minute,” said Jim.

She looked up at him, a little puzzled.

“Didn’t you want them put away just yet?” she asked. Instantly the bags were back at their feet.

“No,” answered Jim. “It’s just that there are other things to bring aboard. I told your Princess Afuan that I’d need the bulls—the creatures I work with when I put on my show. I’ve got six more of them in cryogenic storage back in the city. She said I could bring them along, and to tell whoever brought me aboard the ship that she said it was all right.”

“Oh!” said the girl thoughtfully. “No—don’t try to tell me. Just think about where they are in the city.”

Jim obliged by summoning up a mental picture of the refrigerated warehouse behind the compound housing the Earth Trade Delegation, where his bulls were stored. He felt a curious light touch in his mind—a sort of passing sensation, as if his naked brain had been lightly brushed by a feather. Abruptly he and the girl were standing in the refrigerated warehouse, before the stack of six huge cases, each with the frozen body of a fighting bull in suspended animation within it.

“Yes,” said the girl thoughtfully. Abruptly they were someplace else.

This new place was a large, metal-walled chamber with a small assortment of cases and other objects arranged in neat piles at intervals about its floor. The stack of cases containing the frozen bulls was now here also. Jim frowned. The temperature of the room was clearly in the comfortable seventy-degree range.

“These animals are frozen,” he told the girl. “And they have to stay frozen—”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” she interrupted; and then smiled at him, half in cheerfulness, half, it seemed, in apology for interrupting him. “Nothing about their condition will change. I’ve left orders with the ship’s controls to see to that.”

Her smile widened.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Put your hand out and feel for yourself.”

Jim reached out his hand toward the side of the nearest case. There was no change in temperature until his fingertips came within an inch or two of the surface of the case—then they suddenly encountered bone-chilling atmosphere. The cold, he knew, could not come from the cases, since these were superbly insulated. He withdrew his hand.

“I see,” he said. “All right. I won’t worry about my bulls.”

“Good,” she answered.

Instantly they were elsewhere. Not back in the egg-shaped room but in another, a long room, one side of which appeared to be glass looking out on a strip of beach and the surf of an ocean shore—the shore of an ocean aboard a spaceship was no less startling than the other things to be seen within the rectangular, glass-walled room itself.

These were a variety of creatures, running from something like a small, purple-furred squirrel to a creature farther down the room who was tall and covered with black fur—more than apelike, but still less than human.

“These are my other pets,” he heard the girl saying at his elbow, and looked down into her smiling face. “I mean—they’re really Afuan’s pets. The ones I take care of for her. This one—”

She stopped to pet the small, purple-furred squirrel, which arched itself like a satisfied cat under her hand. Neither it nor any of the others seemed to be chained or restrained in any way. Yet they all stayed some little distance from one another.

“This one,” the girl repeated, “is Ifny—”

She stopped suddenly, jumping to her feet.

“I’m sorry, Wolfling,” she said. “You must have a name too. What is it?”

“James Keil,” he answered her. “Call me Jim.”

“Jim,” she echoed, trying it out, with her head cocked on one side. In her Empire accent, the ‘m’ sound was prolonged, so that the short, familiar form of James came out sounding more musical than it might have in English.

“And your name?” Jim asked her.

She started, and looked at him almost in shock.

“But you should call me High-born!” she said a little stiffly. But the next moment the stiffness had melted, as if her interior warmth of character would not endure it. “But I do have a name, of course. I have several dozens of them, in fact. But you know we all go by one name familiarly. My normally used name is Ro.”

Jim inclined his head.

“Thank you, High-born,” he said.

“Oh, call me Ro—” she broke off, as if a little frightened at what she was saying. “When we’re alone, anyway. After all, you are human, even if you are a Wolfling, Jim.”

“That’s something else you can tell me, then, Ro,” said Jim. “What is this ‘Wolfling’ that everyone calls me?”

She stared at him for a moment, almost blankly.

“But you—no, of course, you’d be the very one who wouldn’t know!” she said. Once more she blushed in that remarkable fashion he had noticed earlier. Plainly it was the lightness of her skin, for all its brown tint, that caused the sudden rush of blood to her features to be seen. But it was unusual to Jim to see such a marked reaction in any adult woman. “It’s… not a very nice name for you, I’m afraid. It means—it means something like… you’re a human being, all right, but one who’s been lost in the woods and brought up by animals, so that you don’t have any idea of what it’s really like to be a human.”

Her blush flared again.

“I’m sorry…” she said, looking down. “I shouldn’t have called you that myself. But I didn’t think. I’ll always call you Jim, from now on.”

Jim smiled. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“Yes, it does!” she said fiercely, looking up at him abruptly. “I know what it’s like to be called names. I never let anybody call any of my—Afuan’s—pets names. And I’m not going to let anybody call you names if I can help it.”

“Well, thank you, then,” said Jim gently. She patted his arm again soothingly.

“Come meet my other pets,” she said, moving down the line.

He went with her. The creatures in the room seemed free to wander about the room, but at the same time enclosed and protected by an invisible barrier that kept them from coming any closer than four or five feet to one of the other creatures. They were plainly all animals. Curiously, also, they all appeared to resemble, at least to some extent, an animal type that either was on Earth or had been at some period in its geologic history. This, in itself, was interesting. It seemed to substantiate the Empire’s assumption that the people of Earth were part of its own basic stock—lost, only to be found again when they ventured by their own scientific powers back in as far as Alpha Centauri. The alternative was to assume that human-habitable planets had evolutionary parallels to an extremely remarkable degree.

Still, even this could be; a parallelism among fauna on various worlds did not absolutely prove a common ancestry for its dominant species.

Jim noticed something also that was very interesting about Ro herself. Most of the animals responded happily when she spoke to them or petted them. Even those who did not—and she handled even the fiercest of them without hesitation—showed absolutely no hostility. The farthest they got from expressions of happiness at her attention was something like a lazy indifference.

Such as in the case of one large catlike creature—easily as big as a South American jaguar and somewhat resembling the jaguar in its spotted coat, although a heavy, horselike head spoiled the general picture. This catlike creature yawned and allowed itself to be petted but made no great effort to respond to Ro’s caresses. The apelike creature in the black hair, in contrast, sadly clung to her hand and gazed into her face as she spoke to it and stroked its head; but it made no other response.

Letting go of its hand at last—pulling away, in fact—Ro turned finally to Jim.

“Now you’ve seen them,” she said. “Maybe you’ll help me take care of them sometimes. They really should have more attention than I give them alone. Afuan forgets she has them for months on end… Oh, that won’t happen to you—” She interrupted herself suddenly. “You understand? You’re to perform for the Emperor when we get back to the Throne World. And as I say, you’re not an animal.”

“Thank you,” said Jim gravely.

She looked surprised, then laughed. She patted his arm in the gesture he was beginning to find customary on her part.

“Now,” she said, “you’ll want to get to your own quarters.”

Instantly they were in a room that they had not been in before. Like the room containing the pets, it had a glass wall window looking out on the beach and the ocean beyond, which, whether illusion or reality, rolled its surf within thirty feet of the glass wall itself.

“These will be your quarters,” said Ro. Jim looked around him. There was no sign of a door in any of the walls.

“Don’t you suppose,” he said, “you’d better tell this Wolfling how to get around from one room to the next?”

“To the next?” she echoed with a puzzled frown, and suddenly he realized that she had taken him literally. His mind seized on the implications of that.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I simply meant from this room to any other room. But—just for the fun of it—what is the room that’s just beyond that wall there?”

He pointed to the blank wall of the room opposite the one of glass overlooking the beach and the ocean.

She stared at the wall, frowned again, and finally shook her head.

“Why… I don’t know,” she said. “But what difference does it make? You go to all rooms the same way. So there’s really no difference. It doesn’t matter where in the ship they are.”

Jim filed this information mentally for future reference. “I should know how to get myself from room to room, though, shouldn’t I?” he asked.

“Oh,” she said, “I’m sorry. Of course, you don’t know. The ship runs everything. You have to tune in to the ship; then it’ll do anything you want.”

She lit up suddenly.

“Would you like to see what the rest of the ship looks like?” she asked. “I’ll take you around. Why don’t you get yourself settled in here, or unpack, or whatever you want to do; and I’ll come back in a little while. How soon should I come back?”

Jim mentioned a time in Empire units that was roughly the equivalent of fifteen minutes.

“Fine,” Ro said, smiling at him. “I’ll be right back when the time’s up.”

She vanished.

Left alone, Jim examined the room, which was furnished with hassocks and pillows of all size—much as the first room he had seen aboard ship, where he had met Ro. The one very large hassock, some four feet thick and eight feet in diameter, at one end of the room, he took to be the bed. At first there seemed nothing in the shape of a bathroom. But the moment this thought occurred to him a section of the wall obediently slid aside, and he found himself looking into a smaller room fitted out with a complete assortment of recognizable lavatory facilities, up to and including a swimming pool—and with several other articles of plumbing which seemed to make little sense. For example, there was one shallow, completely dry basin large enough for him to stretch out in.

He turned back to his main room and with a corner of his eye saw the door to the bathroom slide shut behind him. He picked up his two suitcases, put them on the bedlike hassock, and opened them. No sooner had he done so than another section of the wall opened, and he found himself looking into what might have been the closet if there had been any pole or clothes hangers in it.

Experimentally—he was beginning to get the hang of things aboard ship now—he tried to imagine his clothes as being hung up in the closet.

Obligingly, they were suddenly there—the only unusual part of their appearance and situation being that they hung as he had imagined them, but without any visible means of support, suspended vertically in midair as if held by invisible hangers from an invisible rod.

Jim nodded. He was about to think the closet closed again, when a second thought made him take the Scottish costume, complete with kilt and knife, from where it hung unsupported in midair, and change into it, placing his suit of lights in the closet in its place, where it hung invisibly supported with the rest of his clothes.

The closet closed, and Jim was just turning away from it when a visitor materialized in the center of his room. But it was not Ro. Instead, it was one of the male High-born—a man with onyx-white skin, at least seven feet tall.

“There you are, Wolfling,” the High-born said. “Come along. Mekon wants to see you.”

They were suddenly in a room which Jim had not been in before. It was rectangular and long, and they stood in about the middle of it. There were no other humans in the room. But at the far end, on a sort of pillow-strewn dais, there lay curled a feline similar in every respect to the one among Ro’s pets. It lifted its horse’s head at the sight of them in the room, and its eyes fastened upon Jim.

“Wait here,” said the High-born who had brought him. “Mekon will be with you in just a moment.”

The tall man vanished. Jim found himself left alone with the feline beast, which was now lazily rising to its feet, staring down the room at him.

Jim stood still, staring back.

The animal made a curious, whining sound—a sound almost ridiculously small to come from something obviously so physically powerful. Its short stub of a tufted tail began to jerk vertically up and down, stiffly. Its heavy head lowered until its lower jaw almost touched the floor of the dias, and its mouth gradually opened to reveal heavy, carnivorous teeth.

Still whining, it began slowly to move. Softly, almost delicately, it put one front paw down from the dais; and then the other. Slowly it began to move toward him, crouching and whining as it did. Its teeth were fully visible now, and as it approached, its whine grew in volume, until it was a sort of singing threat.

Jim waited, moving neither backward nor forward.

The animal came on. About a dozen yards from him it stopped and gradually crouched. Its tail was jerking like a metronome now, and the singing whine that came from its throat was filling the whole room.

For what seemed a long time, it crouched there, jaw hung open, whining. Then, without warning, the whining stopped, and it launched itself through the air at Jim’s throat.