Wolfling

Chapter 4

Jim went to the girl. She was not aware of his presence until he had reached down and put his arms around her. She looked up, startled and suddenly stiff; but then, when she saw who it was, she clung to him.

“You’re all right. At least, you’re all right…” she managed to get out.

“Where did this come from?” asked Jim, pointing down at the dead feline.

The question triggered off a new burst of emotion. But gradually the story began to come out. She had raised this feline, as she had raised the other one that was one of the pets. This feline had been given to Mekon by Afuan some time back, and Mekon had taught it to attack on command.

“But it was all right when I saw it last,” said Jim. “How did this happen to it?”

She drew back a little from him and stared at him, shakily and with surprise.

“Didn’t you hear?” she asked. “Afuan left it up to Galyan to fine Mekon for what he’d done. And Galyan decided that the fine would be…” She choked and could not go on, pointing at the animal.

“It’s a strange sort of fine,” he said slowly.

“Strange?” She looked up at him puzzledly. “But it’s just the sort of fine that Galyan would exact. He’s a demon, Jim. Where somebody else, operating on the Princess’ orders, might have fined Mekon one of his favorite servants, or something else he valued, Galyan chose this poor animal instead—because along with losing it, of course, Mekon’s going to lose a point. Oh, not a Lifetime Point. Galyan’s too clever to be that hard on someone like Mekon. But it’ll be at least a One-Year Point. And Mekon has enough points against him already, Lifetime and otherwise, so that he can seriously worry from time to time about some kind of an accident that might bring him up to the level of banishment.”

“Banishment?” asked Jim.

“Why, of course. Banishment from the Throne World—” Ro caught herself suddenly, and wiped her eyes. She stood up straight and looked down at the body of the dead animal at her feet. Immediately it vanished.

“I keep forgetting you don’t understand things,” she said, turning to Jim. “There’s so much I’m going to have to teach you. All the High-born play points. It’s one game that even the Emperor can’t overrule; and too many points means you have to leave the Throne World forever. But I’ll explain it all to you a little later. Right now I’d better begin teaching you how to move from room to room—”

But Ro’s words had woken a new train of thought in Jim’s mind.

“Just a second,” he said. “Tell me something, Ro. If I wanted to step back into the city right now on an errand before the ship leaves, could I do it?”

“Oh!” she shook her head sadly at him. “I thought you at least knew that. The ship left that outworld world we were on some time ago. We’ll be at the Throne World in three ship’s-days.”

“I see,” said Jim grimly.

Her face paled abruptly, and she caught his arms with her hands, as if to keep him from stepping backward from her.

“Don’t look like that!” she said. “Whatever it is, you shouldn’t look like that!”

Jim forced his face to smooth out. He put away the sudden fury that had exploded inside him. He forced himself to smile down at Ro.

“All right,” he said. “I promise you I won’t look like that.”

Ro still held him by the arms.

“You’re so strange,” she said, looking up at him. “So strange, in every way. What made you look like that?”

“Something Galyan said to me,” he answered. “Something to the effect that I could never go back home again.”

“But—you aren’t going to want to go back home!” said Ro, a little wonderingly. “You’ve never seen the Throne World, so of course you don’t know. But no one ever wants to leave it. And the only ones who can stay are the High-born who can keep their point levels down in the Game, and their servants and their possessions. Not even the Governors of the Colony Worlds can do more than visit the Throne World for short periods of time. When their time is up, they have to leave. But the High-born and people like you and me—we can stay.”

“I see,” he said.

She frowned down at his arms, which she still held. Her fingers were feeling them through the sleeves of his jacket.

“You’re as hard-muscled as a Starkien,” she said puzzledly. “And you’re so tall for someone who’s not High-born. Was it natural for you to be this tall back on that wild world you came from?”

Jim laughed a little shortly.

“I was this tall when I was ten years old,” he said. The look of slight incomprehension on her face made him add, “That’s halfway through my normal growing period.”

“And you stopped growing then?” Ro asked.

“I was stopped,” he said a little grimly. “Some of our medical practitioners ran a lot of tests on me because I was so big for my age. They couldn’t find anything wrong, but they put me on an extract of the pituitary gland to curb my growing. And it worked. I stopped growing—physically. But I went on growing otherwise.”

Jim interrupted himself abruptly. “Never mind that,” he said. “You were going to show me how to move around the ship, from room to room.”

“That—and other things!” Suddenly she seemed to grow several inches in front of him, and something came into her that was like the cold imperiousness of Princess Afuan. “They can take my animals and give them away or kill them. But they’re not going to hurt you. When I get through with you, you’ll know more than enough to survive. I may be a throwback, but I’m as High-born as any of them. The Emperor himself can’t dismiss me, without cause, from the Throne World; and everything that is High-born’s, by right is mine! Come along, and I’ll begin to show you what it’s like to live among the High-born and be a citizen of the society of the Throne World!”

She took him first to a section of the ship he had not yet visited. It consisted of a large, high-ceilinged, metal-walled room, with one wall covered with the rays of blinking lights of various colors. Tending this wall was one of the short brown men with long hair down his back. He was, Jim discovered, all that the ship possessed in the way of a crew—in fact, he was not even that. In actuality, he was nothing more than a standby engineer, on hand in case of the unlikely chance that some small repair or adjustment needed to be made to the ship’s mechanism.

The ship, in fact, ran itself. It not only ran itself, it supplied the motive power for all the transfers of people between rooms, and everything else in the way of visible and invisible equipment aboard. Like some huge robot dog, it responded immediately to the mental whims of the Princess Afuan; and, to a lesser extent, it stood ready to accommodate the whims of everyone else aboard.

“Now,” Ro instructed Jim, “simply stand here and relax. Let it make contact with you.”

“Make contact with me?” Jim echoed. He assumed that she was talking about something like telepathy, and tried to say so—but found he had no word for it in the Empire language. Ro, however, understood him, and to his considerable surprise, launched into a complete and highly technical explanation of how the ship worked. In brief, it was simply that the ship studied the electrical activity of an individual brain and from this drew up what amounted to an individual electrical code for whatever the person was thinking or doing. Thoughts which were visualized clearly enough, Ro explained, triggered off motor subactivity in the body—in short, the body physically responded at a very low level to the scene it was imagining, as if that scene were real. The ship then matched these responses with the proper scene, and shifted the person to the scene by literally disassembling him at his present position and reassembling him at the location of the imagined scene.

The process by which the ship crossed light-years of empty space was the same method of dissassembly and reassembly, only on a larger scale. That is, the whole ship and its contents were disassembled and reassembled farther along its line of passage. There was a certain limitation to the distance over which one of these shifts could take place, but since each shift took place at computer speeds, the effect was exactly like that of trans-light velocities, without effort.

“…Actually,” wound up Ro, “the ship really never moves at all. It simply changes the coordinates of its position…” And she went off into an explanation too technical for Jim to follow.

Nonetheless, after a little practice at visualization, Jim felt that same sensation—like that of a feather tickling the surface of his mind—that he had felt when Ro had asked him to visualize the warehouse in which his frozen bulls were stored. The first time it happened, he moved from one end of the room he was in to the other. But within minutes after that, he had mastered the knack and was easily shifting from room to room about the ship, although he was restricted to those rooms that he had once seen.

Ro took him back to her quarters, and the social aspects of his education began. The achievements of the few days before they landed on the Throne World surprised both of them. Jim was startled to discover that Ro, like all of the High-born, possessed vast stores of education covering both the scientific and the social aspects of every facet of her ordinary life. It was like her knowledge about the ship. Never in her life would she be called upon to do so much as pay attention to the pattern of winking lights on a ship’s control board. But if necessary, she could have built the vessel from scratch, given the necessary tools and materials. Ro, on the other hand, was amazed to discover that she had to tell Jim things only once.

“…But are you sure you remember that?” she kept interrupting herself to ask Jim. “I never heard of anybody but a High-born who didn’t have to work to remember things.”

Jim would respond by quoting the last few paragraphs she had said word for word. Reassured, but not really convinced, she would plunge into further detail; and Jim would continue to soak up knowledge about the Throne World, the society of the High-born, and the Empire which Throne World and High-born together ruled.

The picture of it all was beginning to click together for him, as a coherent shape finally emerges after a certain critical number of the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle have been put together. Curiously, the High-born were not direct descendants of those natives of the Throne World who had gone out to colonize the other inhabited worlds of the Empire. They, who were now not merely but in theory rulers of the Empire, had actually come into that position of authority by being weak rather than strong.

It was true that in the beginning the Throne World had tried to keep control of the other worlds it had colonized. But this attempt was soon defeated by the time and space intervening between it and them. Very quickly the newer worlds became autonomous; and by the time, several thousand years later, that the Empire had pushed outward in all directions, until it came to areas where there were no stars with habitable planets within any further reasonable distance, the Throne World had been all but forgotten, except as a birthplace of the human expansion among the stars.

However, even before that expansion had reached its limits, the older colonized worlds had begun to see the advantage of some general organization, some nominal authority and center point which could act as a clearing house for scientific and other developments achieved on other worlds than their own. The Throne World had therefore been revived by common consent and set up as a sort of worldwide combination library and information center. That—though no one knew it at the time—was the beginning of the High-born.

To the Throne World, in its new role, drifted inevitably the better academic and inventive minds of the Colony Worlds. Here was the intellectual hub of the human universe. Here, therefore, it was most profitable to live—not only in terms of practical reward for intellectual labors, but in the matter of intellectual companionship and access to new information in one field as well.

During the next few thousand years this immigration reached the point that it had to be restricted by the Throne World itself. Meanwhile, the Throne World, by virtue of being the source of supply for most technological advances, had become both rich and powerful in comparison to the Colony Worlds. Its intellectual population was already developing into an elite, added to only sparingly by the best minds of the Colony Worlds and eagerly served by inhabitants of the Colony Worlds who were not qualified to join the elite but greatly desired to live among the mighty.

Eventually, during the last ten thousand years or so, during which the Empire not only had remained static but had indeed shrunk its borders slightly, the Throne World elite had indeed become High-born—with special breeding controls which gave them the physical marks of their aristocracy. The onyx-white skin, the lemon-yellow eyes, the white hair and eyebrows and eyelashes—all these, Jim learned, were not developed out of any other necessity than to place the badge of superiority upon those who ruled the Empire from the Throne World. Instead of badges or escutcheons to mark their aristocracy, they had given themselves outsize bodies and minds, at the same time ensuring that none who did not belong to their elite could compete with them as individuals. They still gleaned the geniuses and the unusually capable from among what they called the lesser races of man, but that gleaning was highly selective now, and those gleaned did not so much enter the elite themselves as acquire the chance that through inbreeding their great-grandchildren would be one of the tall, white-haired, onyx-skinned masters of the Empire.

“…You see,” Ro said at last to Jim, when they had finally reached the Throne World and were preparing to leave the ship, “there’s a chance—even for a Wolfling like you. Oh, they’ll try to tear you down, all of the High-born, once they begin to suspect that you want to become one of them. But if you’re educated and ready, they won’t be able to do it. And with my help, we’ll see they won’t!”

Her eyes gleamed with triumph. Jim smiled at her and turned the topic of conversation to what he might expect next, once they had left the ship.

She looked suddenly sober.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Afuan doesn’t tell me. Of course, she’ll want to show you off to the Emperor as soon as possible.”

With this answer in mind, he was consequently at least partly prepared when, an hour or so after the ship had landed on the Throne World, his own room aboard it suddenly vanished around him and he found himself standing in an arena. His luggage was at his feet, and facing him was a complete cuadrilla—banderilleros and picadors, with costumes and horses and all—an exact duplicate of the cuadrilla he had used back on Alpha Centauri III, with the exception that the men in the costumes were all of the breed of short brown men with long, straight hair down their backs.

“These beasts are artificial,” said a voice beside him. He turned and saw Afuan standing a few feet from him. “That will include the bull with which you’ll be practicing. Both the artificial beast and the men have been set to repeat exactly what you did the time we watched you once before. Simply keep them doing it until they learn how.”

The Princess vanished. Apparently she considered that she had said all that needed to be said.

Left alone with his imitation cuadrilla and their mechanical horses, Jim looked around him. The arena was an exact duplicate of the huge arena in which he had fought the two bulls on Alpha Centauri III—except that it had been cleaned up to an almost ridiculous degree.

The stands of the arena, which on Alpha Centauri III had been of some brown, concretelike material, seemed here to be made of white marble. Everything was white, everywhere—even the sand on the floor of the arena was as white as snow.

Jim bent down, opened one of his luggage cases, and took out the large cape, the small cape, and the sword. He did not bother to take out his costume. He closed the luggage cases and put them behind one of the barreras. Music suddenly began, emanating from some unknown source. It was the right music, and moving with it, Jim lined up before his cuadrilla and began the slow walk across the ring toward a section of seats outlined in red that was plainly the Imperial box.

From Jim’s standpoint, it was almost eerie. The longhaired little brown men moved through their motions, not only with professional certainty but also in exact imitation of the men he had left behind on Alpha Centauri III. Even small, useless, personal actions were copied. Evidently all these had been remembered by either Afuan or someone else of the High-born and faithfully fed into whatever programming was controlling the men who were now playing their parts with the bull. Where a man had leaned upon a barrera during an inactive moment, his duplicate here on the Throne World copied the pose exactly, on the equivalent barrera, and to an inch of the spot equivalent to where the original had placed his elbows. But the eerieness of duplication grew even stronger when Jim went out to work the bull himself with the large cape. For the duplication was doubled. There was even a sort of wry humor to it, thought Jim. The High-born had produced an imitation bull, programmed to follow exactly the motions of a live bull they had watched, but which they did not know had also been programmed by the biological sciences of Earth to go through exactly those same motions.

They carried through the whole business to the moment of the kill. When Jim’s sword went in, the mechanical creature obediently collapsed, exactly as the real one had done back on Alpha Centauri III. Jim looked around at his pupils, wondering if it was time to stop; but they seemed quite rested and evidently were expecting to continue.

It was the second time through the whole pantomime that Jim began to spare attention from his own work with the imitation animal to study the actions of the men he was training. For the first time, he noticed that although they moved with a great deal of sureness, there was a certain amount of clumsiness in their efforts. It was not a clumsiness of the mind as much as the muscles. These men were doing what they had been programmed or instructed to do—doing it promptly and well. But the instinctive responses of their bodies were not yet there.

Jim ran through the complete performance two more times before calling it a day. By that time, although his own responses to the artificial animal had become automatic and without tension, he himself was thoroughly tired. Still, on the succeeding four days he continued to run through the bullfight as it had happened on Alpha Centauri III, until the responses of the small men with the long hair began to be not so much a matter of programming as of experience and natural reflex.

It was somewhere along in this period that he discovered that he could vary the actions of the bull by the same sort of deliberate mental imagery that Ro had taught him to use aboard the ship. Somewhere aboard the Throne World there was a master power source performing the same function for him with regard to the bullring that its counterpart had provided aboard the ship. Therefore, on the sixth day, he introduced his new cuadrilla to a different version of a bullfight.

The truth of the matter was, each of the bulls in cryogenic storage that he had brought with him had been programmed differently—just in case it should be suspected that they had been programmed at all. Jim himself had rehearsed each set of programming. Now he put his new assistants to work in the pattern they would encounter with the last bull in cryogenic storage. He used the last bull advisedly, hoping either that he would never have to use it in actuality or that his makeshift cuadrilla would have forgotten its specific and unvarying actions if he did have to use it.

During all these days he had discovered that he had what appeared to be a suite of rooms in some endless, one-story structure. Unlike the rooms aboard ship, the rooms here on the Throne World had doors and corridors; moreover, he seemed free to wander about at will, which he did. But though he explored outward from his rooms through a number of other parts of the building, across an open courtyard and through gardens, he encountered no High-born and only a few other men and women of what were clearly the lesser races—obviously servants here on the Throne World.

Ro had not come near him. On the other hand, Afuan had appeared several times, inquired briefly as to how the training sessions were coming along, and disappeared again. She showed neither pleasure nor impatience with the time he was taking; but when the day finally came that he told her he judged his trainees were ready, her reaction was prompt.

“Excellent!” she said. “You’ll put on a show for the Emperor, then—within the next day or two.”

She disappeared, to return briefly the following morning and announce that the bullfight would take place in the arena within a certain span of the Imperial time scale roughly equivalent to about forty minutes.

“I can’t get one of my bulls thawed and revived that quickly,” Jim said.

“That’s already been taken care of,” Afuan answered, and disappeared again. Jim began rather hastily to get into his suit of lights. Theoretically, he should have had an assistant help him to dress; but there was no chance for it. He had managed to struggle into about half the costume when the humor of it struck him. He laughed out loud.

“Where are you when I need you, Ro?” he asked the bare white walls of his room humorously. To his utter astonishment, Ro suddenly materialized before him as if she had been a genie summoned from a bottle.

“What do you want me to do?” she demanded.

He stared at her for a second, then laughed again.

“Don’t tell me you heard what I said?” he asked her.

“Why, yes,” she answered, looking a little surprised. “I set up a notice to let me know if you ever called for me. But you never did.”

He laughed again. “I’d have called you before this,” he said, “if I knew that was all I had to do to get hold of you.”

He was treated to the sight of one of her astonishing blushes.

“But I want to help you!” she said. “Only—you didn’t seem to be needing any help.”

At that he sobered.

“I’m afraid I’m not in the habit of asking for it, usually,” he said.

“Well, never mind now!” she said energetically. “What do you want me to do?”

“Help me into these clothes,” he said. Unexpectedly, she giggled; and he stared at her in puzzlement.

“No, no. It’s all right,” she said. “It’s just that that’s the sort of thing a servant, a human of one of the lesser races, is supposed to do for a High-born. Not the other way around.”

She picked up his hat.

“Where does this go?” she asked.

“It doesn’t go—not yet. That’s the last item,” he told her. Obediently she put it down, and under his instructions began to help him into the rest of the costume.

When he was fully dressed, she looked at him with interest.

“You look strange—but good,” she said.

“Didn’t you see me in the arena at Alpha Centauri III?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“I was busy on the ship—and I really didn’t expect it to be too interesting.” She stared at him with interest as he took his two capes and sword from the larger luggage case. “What’re those for?”

“The pieces of cloth,” he said, “are to attract the attention of the bull. The sword”—he pulled it a little way out of its scabbard to show her its blade—“is to kill him, at the end.”

Her hand flew to her mouth. She paled and stepped backward. Her eyes were enormous.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

She tried to say something, but the only sound that came from her throat was more of a little cry than an understandable word. He frowned sharply.

“What is it?” he demanded. “What’s wrong?”

“You didn’t tell me…” The words came out of her, finally, in a sort of wail. “You didn’t tell me you were going to kill him!”

She choked, whirled about, and disappeared. He stood staring at the space where she had been. Behind him a woman’s voice spoke unexpectedly.

“Yes,” it said. It was the voice of Princess Afuan, and he himself turned sharply, to find her standing there looking at him. “It seems that even a Wolfling like you can make mistakes. I’d have thought you’d have learned by this time that Ro has a soft spot in her for all animals.”

He looked at her coldly.

“You’re right,” he said flatly, “I should’ve remembered that.”

“Unless,” she said, then paused, watching him with her lemon-yellow eyes, “that is, you had some reason for deliberately wanting to upset her. You’ve made quite a marked impression for a Wolfling, in such a short time. You not only made a friend of little Ro, but you made an enemy of Mekon, and interested not only Slothiel, but Galyan himself.”

She considered him for a second with a close gaze that seemed to have something hidden in it.

“Do you see me?”

“Of course,” he said. And then he stiffened internally, although he was careful to keep his face and body noncommittal.

For, before his eyes Afuan suddenly changed. It was a strange changing, because no single thing about her that he could see altered in any way. Even the expression on her face was the same. But suddenly she was entirely different.

Suddenly, tall, onyx-skinned, yellow-eyed, white-haired as she was, she became attractive. No—not merely attractive—voluptuous to an almost overwhelming degree. It was more than merely a sensual attraction she projected. Her demand upon his capability of desire was almost hypnotic.

Only the long, solitary years of internal isolation and growth allowed him to resist the fascination Afuan was now exerting upon him. Only the fact that he realized the lust she was trying to awaken in him meant an abandonment of all that he had searched for and won by lonely journeys of the mind and soul, where the mind and soul of man had never searched before—only this allowed him to stand still, relaxed and calm, unresponsive.

Abruptly, again without any physical sign of change, Afuan was back as she had always been. Cold and remote in appearance, striking, but not necessarily attractive by the human standards of Earth.

“Amazing,” she said a little softly, gazing at him through eyes which—though they were not slitted—gave the impression of being slitted. “Totally amazing, particularly for a Wolfling. But I think I understand you now, wild man. Something in you, at some time, has made you ambitious with an ambition larger than the universe.”

After a second Jim performed the mental exercise that transferred him to the arena.

When he appeared there, the stands were already full of the white-clothed High-born. Not only that, but within the red-bordered area that was plainly the Imperial box was a party of six men and four women. The music had already begun, and Jim formed up with his cuadrilla for the walk across the white sand toward the Imperial box. As he got close, he saw that Afuan was one of the people in the box, seated to the left of someone who seemed to be Galyan, who was occupying the center seat, with an unusually broad-bodied, older-looking High-born man to his right, who had slightly yellowed eyebrows.

When Jim got close to the box, however, he saw that the man who resembled Galyan was not Galyan. Still, the resemblance was striking, and Jim suddenly remembered Galyan’s comment about the Emperor being his first cousin. This, plainly, was the Emperor.

If anything, he was taller than Galyan himself. He lounged in his seat more casually than the other High-born seated around him, and there was something—for a High-born—unusually frank and open and intelligent about his gaze. He smiled down at Jim as he gave permission for the bullfight to commence. Afuan’s eyes looked coldly down at Jim meanwhile.

Jim had eliminated the procedure of dedicating the bull to someone in the audience, and he did not revive the practice now. He returned with his cuadrilla across the ring and went directly into the bullfight. His men did well with the different behavior of the bull, which Afuan or someone else among the High-born had apparently chosen to revive at random from among the six in cryogenic storage. Luckily, each bull was a little different, and Jim recognized the differences, so that he was able to adjust himself to the bull’s pattern of behavior the minute he saw it come charging into the ring.

Still, he had his hands full with it, as he had had his hands full in the arena on Alpha Centauri III. Moreover, what little space for thought he had was taken up with Afuan’s comment about his ambition. Clearly the Princess possessed a sense of perception that was very nearly deadly.

The bullfight continued, and drew eventually to its closing moments. This bull, unlike the one on Alpha Centauri III, remained strong right up to the predicted point in its programming. Jim finally went in over the horns with his sword for the kill, almost directly in front of the Imperial box. Then, withdrawing his sword, he turned and took a few steps to confront the Emperor—as much from his own sense of interest in how the Emperor would respond to the spectacle as for the reason that on the ship Ro had told him that approaching the Emperor afterward would be expected of him. He walked up to the barrier itself and looked upward at a slant into the face of the Emperor, less than a dozen feet away. The Emperor smiled down. His eyes seemed to shine with an unusual brightness—although suddenly Jim noticed there was something almost unfocused about them.

The Emperor’s smile broadened. A small trickle of saliva ran down from one corner of his mouth. He opened his lips and spoke to Jim.

“Waw,” he said, smiling all the while and staring directly through Jim. “Waw…”