Wolfling

Chapter 7

Slothiel’s tall body stiffened.

“All right, Wolfling!” he snapped. “We’ve had enough question-and-answer games!”

“Jim—” began Ro warningly.

“I’m sorry,” said Jim, looking steadily at the taller man. “The explanation doesn’t concern me—it concerns the Emperor. So I’m not going to give it to you. And you’re not going to force me to give it. In the first place, you can’t. And in the second place, it would be impolitic of you to try, since you’re the one who’s sponsoring me for adoption.”

Slothiel stood perfectly still.

“Believe me,” said Jim, this time persuasively, “if I was free to answer you, I would. Let me make you a promise. If by the time the party is over you haven’t had an assurance either from the Emperor or from Vhotan that I had good reason not to tell you, then I’ll answer any question you have about the whole thing. All right?”

For a long second longer Slothiel remained rigid, his eyes burning down at Jim. Then, abruptly, the tension leaked out of him, and he smiled his old, lazy smile.

“You know, you have me there, Jim,” he drawled. “I can hardly forcibly question the very lesser human I’m sponsoring for adoption, can I? Particularly since it would be impossible to keep the fact quiet. You’ll make a good man at wagering for points, if by some freak chance you ever should happen to get adopted, Jim. All right, keep your secret—for now.”

He disappeared.

“Jim,” said Ro, “I worry about you.”

For some reason, the words rang with unusual importance in his mind. He looked about at her sharply and saw why they had. She was looking at him with concern, but it was a different sort of concern from that which she lavished on all her pets and which she had heretofore lavished on him. And the tone of her voice had conveyed a difference to match.

He was suddenly, unexpectedly, and deeply touched. No one, man or woman, had worried about him for a very very long time.

“Can’t you at least tell me why you say Galyan’s suggesting the party because Melness is a very clever man?” Ro asked. “It sounds as if you’re saying that there’s some connection between Galyan and Melness. But that can’t be between a High-born and one of the lesser races.”

“How about you and me,” said Jim, remembering that new note in her voice.

She blushed, but this, as he had come to learn, did not mean as much with her as it might have with another woman.

“I’m different!” she said. “But Galyan isn’t. He’s one of the highest of High-born. Not just by birth—by attitude, too.”

“But he’s always made it a point to make a good deal of use of men of the lesser races.”

“That’s true…” She became thoughtful. Then she looked back up at him. “But you still haven’t explained…”

“There’s nothing much to explain,” said Jim, “except for that part that I say is really a matter belonging to the Emperor rather than to me. I said what I did about Melness being a clever man because men can make mistakes out of their own cleverness, as well as out of foolishness. They can try too hard to cover something up. In Melness’ case, when Adok first took me to meet him, Melness went to a great deal of trouble to make it look as if he resented my being placed under his responsibility.”

Ro frowned.

“But why should he resent…”

“There could be a number of reasons, of course,” said Jim. “For one—and the easiest answer—the fact that he resented a Wolfling like myself being sponsored for adoption when a man like him stands no chance of such sponsorship, just because he is so useful in his capacity as a servant. But, by the same token, Melness should have been too clever to let me know that resentment, particularly when there was a possibility that I might end up as a High-born myself, in a position to resent him in return.”

“Then why did he do it?” asked Ro.

“Possibly because he thought I might be a spy sent by the High-born to investigate the world of servants,” said Jim, “and he wanted to set up a reason for harassing or observing me while I was underground that would not lead me to suspect that he suspected I was a spy.”

“But what would you be spying on him for?” asked Ro.

“That, I don’t know yet,” said Jim.

“But you think it has something to do with the Emperor and with Galyan. Why?” Ro said.

Jim smiled down at her.

“You want to know too much too quickly,” he said. “In fact, you want to know more than I know yet. You see why I didn’t want to get into questions and answers on this with Slothiel?”

Slowly she nodded. Then she gazed at him with concern again.

“Jim—” she said unexpectedly. “What did you do? I mean, besides bullfighting, when you were back on your own world among your own people?”

“I was an anthropologist,” he told her. “Bullfighting was—a late avocation with me.”

She frowned puzzledly. For to his knowledge, the word did not exist in the Empire tongue, and so he had simply translated it literally from the Latin root—“man-science.”

“I studied the primitive background of man,” said Jim. “Particularly the roots of culture—all cultures—in the basic nature of humankind.”

He could almost see the lightning search she was making through that massive High-born memory of hers. Her face lit up.

“Oh, you mean— anthropology!” She gave him the Empire word he had needed. Then her face softened, and she touched his arm. “Jim! Poor Jim—no wonder!”

Once again—as he so often found it necessary to do—he had to restrain the impulse to smile at her. He had thought of himself in many terms during his lifetime so far. But to date he had never had occasion to think of himself as “poor”—in any sense of the word.

“No wonder?” he echoed.

“I mean, no wonder you always seem so cold and distant to anyone High-born,” she said. “Oh, I don’t mean me! I mean the others. But, no wonder you’re that way. Finding out about us and the Empire put an end to everything you’d studied, didn’t it? You had to face the fact that you weren’t evolved from the ape-men and prehumans of your own world. It meant all the work you’d ever done had to be thrown out.”

“Not exactly,” said Jim.

“Jim, let me tell you something,” she said, “the same thing happened to us, you know. I mean us—the High-born. Some thousands of years ago the early High-born used to think that they were evolved from the prehumans on this one Throne World. But finally they had to admit that not even that was true. The animal forms were too much the same on all the worlds like this one that our people settled. Finally, even we had to face the fact that all these worlds had evidently been stocked with the common ancestors of their present flora and fauna by some intelligent race that existed even long before our time. And the evidence is pretty overwhelming that the ancestors with which this world was stocked were probably a strain pointing toward a superior type of premen then were planted elsewhere. So, you see, we had to face the fact that we weren’t the first thinking beings in the universe, too.”

This time Jim let himself smile.

“Don’t worry,” he told her. “Whatever shock there was to me on learning the Empire existed has evaporated by this time.”

She was, he thought, reassured.

The party celebrating Slothiel’s sponsorhip of him for adoption, it turned out, was to be held in just under three weeks. Jim spent the time learning Starkien ways and warfare from Adok, putting in the few nominal appearances that duty required of him with that military caste and studying in the Files section to which Adok had introduced him underground.

In between times, he moved about the servants’ areas underground, observing any hand signal that was made and committing it to memory. In his spare time he tried to catalog and arrange these signals into some kind of coherent form that would allow him to begin to interpret them.

Two things were in his favor. In the first place, as an anthropologist, he was aware that any sign language derived from primitive, common basics in human nature. As one of the early explorers had said about his experiences in that regard while living with the North American Eskimo, you did not need anyone to teach you the basic signs of communication. You already knew them. The threatening gesture; the come-here gesture; the I-am-hungry gestures, such as pointing to the mouth and then rubbing the stomach—all these, and a large handful more, came instinctively to the mind of any man trying to communicate by hand or body movements.

In the second place, a language mainly of hand signals was necessarily limited. The messages conveyed by such a language necessarily had to depend a great deal upon the context in which the gestures were made. Therefore, the same signal was bound to reappear frequently before any observer watching over a period of time.

Jim therefore assumed success. And, in fact, it was only a little more than two weeks before he identified the recognition signal—that hand movement that was equivalent to a greeting and a recognition signal among users of the Silent Language. It consisted of nothing more than the tapping of the right thumbtip against the side of the adjacent forefinger. From that point on, the various signals began to reveal their meaning to him rapidly.

His search in the Files to discover whether an expedition from the Throne World—or, for that matter, from one of the then-existing Colony Worlds—had set out in the direction of the solar system containing Earth was meeting with no similar success. Perhaps records of such an expedition were there in the Files. Perhaps they were not. The point was, the records that Jim himself had to examine to eliminate all the possibilities were too multitudinous. The job was equivalent, in fact, to his reading through the entire contents of a small public library.

“And besides,” said Adok when Jim finally one day mentioned this problem to the Starkien, “you have to remember that you could go all through the records you’re permitted to see and still not know of such an expedition, even if record of it was there.”

They had been strolling through the underground park. Jim stopped suddenly and turned to face Adok, who automatically stopped also and turned to face Jim.

“What’s this?” demanded Jim. “You said something about my being permitted to see only part of the records?”

“Forgive me, Jim,” said Adok. “I don’t know, of course, if any of the records of such trips are secret. But the point is, how can you be sure some are not? And further, how can you be sure that if some are secret, the one you’re looking for is not among them?”

“I can’t. Naturally,” said Jim. “What bothers me is that I never stopped to think that any of the history of this planet might not be fully available.” He thought for a second. “Who gets to see secret information in the Files, anyway?”

“Why,” answered Adok with the faint note of surprise in his voice that was the ultimate in his reaction that way, “all the High-born see all the information, of course. In fact, since you are as free to move around above ground as below, all you need to do is to go to one of the learning centers for the High-born children—”

He broke off suddenly.

“No,” he said in a lower tone of voice. “I was forgetting. You can go to one of the learning centers, of course. But it won’t do you any good.”

“You mean the High-born won’t let me use the learning center?” asked Jim. He was watching Adok closely. Nothing on the Throne World could be taken for granted, even the transparent honesty in someone like Adok. If Adok was going to tell him that there was some kind of a rule against his using the learning center, it would be only the second outright prohibition he had encountered above ground on this singularly prohibitionless planet. The first, of course, being the rule against anyone approaching the Emperor without being directly summoned. But Adok was shaking his head.

“No,” Adok said. “I don’t think anyone would stop you. It’s just that you wouldn’t be able to use the reading machines above ground. You see, they’re set for use by the young High-born, and they read too fast for the ordinary men to follow.”

“You’ve seen me read,” said Jim. “They read faster than that?”

“Much faster,” said Adok. He shook his head again. “Much, much faster.”

“That’s all right,” said Jim. “Take me to one of these learning centers.”

Adok did not shrug—in fact, it was a question whether his shoulders were not too heavily muscled for such a gesture, even if his nature permitted it. Instantly they were above ground in a large structure like an enormous loggia—or rather, like one of the Grecian temples, consisting of roof and pillars and floor, but without any obvious outside walls. Through the nearby pillars green lawn and blue sky showed. About on the floor, scattered at intervals, seated or curled up on hassocks, were children obviously of the High-born, and of all ages. Each of them was gazing at a screen that floated at an angle in the air before them, and moved about to stay before them as they altered position on the hassock, always maintaining roughly the same forty-five-degree reading angle Jim had found in the carrels of the Files below ground.

None of the children, even the few who paused to glance at Jim and Adok, paid more than a second’s attention to the newcomers. Clearly, Jim decided, the fact that neither he nor Adok was a High-born rendered them for practical purposes invisible, unless needed, by these High-born children.

Jim moved over to stand closely behind one of them—a boy as tall as Jim himself, though extremely thin of limb and with the face of a ten- or twelve-year-old. The same running line of symbols to which Jim had grown accustomed below ground was running in front of the youngster. Jim looked at that line.

It was blurring by at a tremendous rate. Jim frowned, staring at it, trying to match his perception to its movement, to change it from a streak of spiky, wavy blackness to readable symbols.

Astonishingly, he could not.

He felt a sudden shock through him internally of something very like anger. He had never yet found anything that anyone else could do that he was not capable of matching within the limits of his own physical resources. Moreover, he was perfectly sure that the problem was not with his vision. His eyes should be as capable of resolving the blurred line into symbols as any High-born eye. The problem was in his brain, which was refusing to accept the readable information at the rate at which it was being offered.

He made a grim internal effort. Around him, glimpses of sunlight and lawn, pillars, ceiling, floor—even the boy himself, unheedingly reading—were blanked out. Jim’s concentration focused down upon the line of reading—the line alone. The pressure of his efforts to resolve it was like a cord twisted tight around the temples of his head. Tighter, and tighter…

Almost, for a second, he made it. For a second it seemed as if the line was beginning to break apart into readable symbols, and he gathered that the text had something to do with the organization of the Starkiens themselves. Then his efforts broke—out of sheer physical inability of his body to sustain it any longer. He swayed a little, and vision of the rest of the universe, including pillars, walls, and ceiling, opened out about him once more.

He was suddenly aware that the boy on the hassock had noticed him finally. The High-born child had stopped reading and was staring at Jim himself with a plain expression of astonishment.

“Who are you—?” the boy began in a reedy voice. But Jim, without answering, touched Adok on the arm and translated them both back to Jim’s quarters before the question could be completed.

Back in the familiar room, Jim breathed deeply for a second and then sat down on one of the hassocks. He motioned Adok to sit down likewise, and the Starkien obeyed. After a moment Jim’s deep breathing slowed, and he smiled slightly. He looked across at Adok.

“You don’t say, ‘I told you so!’ ” said Jim.

Adok shook his head in a gesture that clearly conveyed that it was not his place to say such things.

“Well, you were right,” said Jim. He became thoughtful. “But not for the reasons you think. What stopped me just then was the fact that I hadn’t been born to this language of yours. If that writing had been in my own native tongue, I could’ve read it.”

He turned his head abruptly away from Adok and spoke to the empty air.

“Ro?” he asked.

He and Adok both waited. But there was no answer, and Ro did not materialize. This was not surprising. Ro was a High-born and had her own occupations and duties, unlike Adok, whose single duty was to await, and wait upon, Jim’s call.

Jim shifted himself to Ro’s apartment, found it empty, and left a note asking her to contact him as soon as she came in. It was about two and a half hours later that she suddenly appeared beside Adok and him in the main room of Jim’s quarters.

“It’s going to be a big party,” she said without preamble. “Everybody’s going to be there. They’ll have to use the Great Gathering Room. The word must’ve gotten out somehow that there’s something special about this celebration—” She broke off suddenly. “I’m forgetting. You wanted to see me about something, Jim?”

“Oh,” said Jim, “could you get one of those reading screens from the learning centers set up in your apartment?”

“Why—of course!” said Ro. “Do you want to use one, Jim? Why don’t I just have one set up for you here?”

Jim shook his head.

“I’d rather not have it generally known that I was using it,” Jim said. “I take it that it isn’t too unusual a thing for someone like you to want one where she lives?”

“Not unusual. No…” said Ro. “And of course if you want it that way, that’s the way I can do it. But what’s this all about?”

Jim told her about his attempt to try to read at the same speed as that of the young High-born he had stood behind in the learning center.

“You think study will speed up your reading comprehension?” asked Ro. She frowned. “Maybe you shouldn’t get your hopes too high—”

“I won’t,” said Jim.

Within a few hours the screen was set up, floating in a corner of one of the less-used rooms of Ro’s apartment. From then on, Jim spent the time he had spent in the Files underground in Ro’s apartment room instead.

He had made only slight progress, however, within the next week. He gave it up entirely and spent the last few days before the party lounging around the underground servants’ area with Adok, observing the Silent Language in use about him. He had become fluent in understanding it now, but, wearyingly, most of what he absorbed was the hand-signaled equivalent of gossip. Nonetheless, gossip could be useful if properly sifted and interpreted.

Jim returned from the last of these expeditions just an hour or so before the party, to find Lorava waiting for him in the main room of his quarters.

“Vhotan wants to see you,” said Lorava abruptly as Jim appeared.

No more notice than that. Jim found himself standing beside Lorava in a room he had not been in before. Adok was on the other side of him, so evidently the invitation had included the Starkien as well.

Vhotan was seated on a hassock before a flat surface suspended in midair with its top covered with what looked like several different studs of various shapes and colors. He was turning or depressing these studs in what appeared to be a random pattern, but with a seriousness and intensity that suggested his actions were far from unimportant. Nonetheless, he broke off at the sight of them, rose from his hassock, and came over to face Jim.

“I’ll call for you a little later, Lorava!” he said.

The thin young High-born vanished.

“Wolfling,” said Vhotan to Jim, his yellowish brows drawing together, “the Emperor is going to attend this party of yours.”

“I don’t believe it’s my party,” answered Jim. “I think it’s Slothiel’s party.”

Vhotan brushed the objection aside with a short wave of one long hand.

“You’re the reason for it,” he said. “And you’re the reason for the Emperor being at it. He wants to talk to you again.”

“Naturally,” said Jim. “I can come anytime the Emperor wants to summon me. It needn’t be at the party.”

“He’s at his best in public!” said Vhotan sharply. “Never mind that. The point is, at the party the Emperor will want to talk to you. He’ll take you off to one side and undoubtedly ask you a lot of questions.”

Vhotan hesitated.

“I’ll be glad to answer any of the Emperor’s questions,” said Jim.

“Yes… you do exactly that,” said Vhotan gruffly. “Whatever questions he asks you, answer them fully. You understand? He’s the Emperor, and even if he doesn’t seem to be paying you complete attention, I want you to go right on answering until he asks you another question or tells you to stop. Do you understand?”

“Fully,” said Jim. His eyes met the lemon-yellow eyes of the older, High-born man.

“Yes. Well,” said Vhotan, turning abruptly, walking back to his console of studs, and sitting down before it once again.

“That’s all. You can go back to your quarters now.”

His fingers began to move over the studs. Jim touched Adok on the arm and shifted back to the main room of his own apartment.

“What do you make of that?” he asked Adok.

“Make of it?” Adok repeated slowly.

“Yes,” said Jim. He eyed the Starkien keenly. “Didn’t you think that some of what he said was a little strange?”

Adok’s face was completely without expression.

“Nothing dealing with the Emperor can be strange,” he said. His voice was strangely remote. “The High-born Vhotan told you to answer fully to the questions of the Emperor. That is all. There could not be any more than that.”

“Yes,” said Jim. “Adok, you’ve been lent to me to be my substitute. But you still belong to the Emperor, don’t you?”

“As I told you, Jim,” said Adok, still in the same expressionless, remote voice. “All Starkiens always belong to the Emperor, no matter where they are or what they’re doing.”

“I remember,” said Jim.

He turned away and went to get out of the Starkien straps and belts he had been wearing, into the white costume like that of all the male High-born, but without insignia, which he had chosen to wear for the occasion.

He was barely dressed when Ro appeared. In fact, she materialized so suspiciously close upon the end of his dressing that once more he wondered whether he was not under surveillance—by others as well as Ro—more than he thought. But he had no chance to speculate upon this now.

“Here,” she said a little breathlessly, “put this on.”

He saw she was holding out to him what seemed to be something like a narrow band of white satin. When he hesitated, she picked up his left arm and wrapped it around his wrist, without waiting for his approval.

“Now,” she said, “touch mine.” She held up her own left wrist, around which was already wrapped—and clinging as if through some inner life of its own—a similar piece of white cloth. It was the only piece of clothlike material that she was wearing. Otherwise, she was clothed from shoulders to ankles in that same filmy, cloudlike stuff that he had seen Afuan and the other Highborn women wearing at the bullfight on Alpha Centauri III.

She picked Jim’s wrist up and touched his band to hers.

“What’s this?” asked Jim.

“Oh—of course you don’t know,” she said. “At a party, particularly a big one like this, people move around so much that you can’t keep track of where someone is if you want to find them. But now that we’ve checked our sensors with each other, all you have to do is visualize me, and you’ll automatically come to whatever part of the Great Gathering Room I’m in. You’ll see.” She laughed a little. To his surprise, she was more than a little bright-eyed and excited. “Everything’s always very mixed up on occasions like this!”

When they, with Adok, moved to the Great Gathering Room forty minutes or so later, Jim immediately saw what she had meant. The Great Gathering Room was a wall-less, pillared, and roofed area like the learning center he had visited, only much larger. Clearly its polished floor of utter black, upon which the white pillars seemed to float, was at least several square miles in area. On that floor groups of male and female High-born, in their usual white costume, stood talking, while servants moved among them carrying trays of various edibles and drinkables.

At first sight, except for the appearance of the High-born and the size of it all, the gathering looked ordinary enough. But as he gazed, Jim became aware that not only High-born individuals themselves, but the servants, were appearing and disappearing continuously all over the place. For a moment, even to Jim, the size and movement of the crowd was slightly dizzying.

Then he did what he had always done when faced with a situation that threatened a temporary mental or emotional overload. He filed what he could not handle in the back of his mind and concentrated on what he could.

“Adok,” he said, turning to the Starkien, “I want you to circulate. Try to locate for me a particular servant. I don’t know what he’ll look like, but he’ll be a little different from all the rest, in that he will, first, have a fixed position in the room someplace; second, it will be a fairly secluded position, from which only one other servant in the hall at any time will be able to see him. He may be watched by any number of other servants in succession, but there will never be more than one watching him at a time, and he will always be under surveillance by the other servant observing him at the time. Will you get busy about that right away?”

“Yes, Jim,” said Adok. He vanished.

“Why did you ask him to do that?” asked Ro in a low, puzzled voice, pressing close to him.

“I’ll tell you later,” said Jim.

He saw by her attitude that she would like to ask him more questions, in spite of this answer of his. She might indeed have done so, but at that moment Vhotan and the Emperor appeared beside them.

“There he is—my Wolfling!” said the Emperor cheerfully. “Come and talk to me, Wolfling!”

Instantly, with his words, Ro vanished. Also, all the other High-born nearby began to disappear, until Jim, Vhotan, and the Emperor were surrounded by an open space perhaps fifty feet in diameter, within which they could talk in casual tones without anyone else being near enough to overhear. The Emperor turned his gaze on the older High-born.

“Go on,” he said, “enjoy yourself for once, Vhotan. I’ll be all right.”

Vhotan hesitated a moment, then winked out of sight.

The Emperor turned back to Jim.

“I like you—what is your name, Wolfling?” he asked.

“Jim, Oran,” answered Jim.

“I like you, Jim.” The Emperor leaned down, stooping a little from his more than seven feet of height, and laid a long hand on Jim’s shoulder, resting part of his weight on Jim like a tired man. Slowly he began to pace idly up and down. Jim kept level with him, held by the shoulder.

“It’s a wild world you come from, Jim?” Oran asked.

“Up until about half a century ago,” said Jim. “Very wild.”

They had gone perhaps half a dozen steps in one direction. The Emperor turned them about, and they began to pace back again. All the while they talked, they continued this movement—half a dozen paces one way, half a dozen paces back again, turn and return.

“You mean, in only fifty years you people tamed this world of yours?” asked the Emperor.

“No, Oran,” said Jim. “We tamed the world sometime before that. It’s just that fifty years ago we finally succeeded in taming ourselves.”

Oran nodded, his gaze not on Jim, but fixed on the floor a little ahead of them as they moved.

“Yes, that’s the human part of it. The self-taming is always the hardest,” he said, almost as if to himself. “You know, my cousin Galyan, looking at you, would think immediately, what marvelous servants these people would make. And perhaps he’s right. Perhaps he’s right… but”—they turned about at the end of one of their short distances of pacing, and the Emperor for a moment looked from the floor up and over at Jim with a friendly smile—“I don’t think so. We’ve had too many servants.”

The smile faded. For a moment they paced in silence.

“You have your own language?” murmured the Emperor in Jim’s ear, once more gazing at the floor as they went. “Your own art and music and history and legend?”

“Yes, Oran,” said Jim.

“Then you deserve better than to be servants. At least”—once more the Emperor flashed one of his quick, brief, friendly smiles at Jim before returning his eyes to the floor ahead of them—“I know that you, at least, deserve better. You know, I shouldn’t be surprised if someday I really do approve your adoption, so that you become technically one of us.”

Jim said nothing. After a second, and after they had completed another turn, the Emperor looked sideways at him.

“Would you like that, Jim?” Oran said.

“I don’t know yet, Oran,” said Jim.

“An honest answer…” murmured the Emperor. “An honest answer… You know how they tell us, Jim, in probability, all events must sooner or later occur?”

“In probability?” Jim asked. But the Emperor went on as if he had not heard.

“Somewhere,” said the Emperor, “there must be a probability in which you, Jim, were the Emperor, and all the people of your world were High-born. And I was a Wolfling, who was brought there to show off some barbaric skill to you and your court…”

The grip on Jim’s shoulder had tightened. Glancing up and sideways, Jim saw that the Emperor’s eyes had become abstracted and seemingly out of focus. Though he continued to push Jim forward with his grip on Jim’s shoulder, it was now as if he were blind and letting Jim find the path for him, so that he followed Jim, instead of leading him, as he had at the beginning of their pacing.

“Have you ever heard of a Blue Beast, Jim?” he murmured.

“No, Oran,” said Jim.

“No…” muttered the Emperor. “No, and neither have I. Also, I looked through all our records of all the human legends on all the worlds—and nowhere was there a Blue Beast. If there never was such a thing as a Blue Beast, why should I see one, Jim?”

The grip on Jim’s shoulder was like a vise now. Still, the Emperor’s voice was murmurous and soft, almost idle, as if he were daydreaming out loud. To any of the High-born watching from the edges of the circle surrounding them, it must look as if the two of them were in perfectly sensible, though low-voiced conversation.

“I don’t know, Oran,” answered Jim.

“Neither do I, Jim,” said the Emperor. “That’s what makes it so strange. Three times I’ve seen it now, and always in a doorway ahead of me, as if it was barring my path. You know, Jim… sometimes I’m just like all the rest of the High-born. But there are other times in which my mind becomes very clear… and I see things, and understand them, much better than any of these around us. That’s why I know you’re different, Jim. When I first saw you after the bullfight, I was looking at you… and all of a sudden it was as if you were at the other end of the telescope—very small, but very sharp. And I saw many very small, very sharp details about you that none of the rest of us had seen. You can be a High-born or not, Jim. Just as you like. Because it doesn’t matter… I saw that in you. It doesn’t matter.”

The Emperor’s voice stopped. But he continued to urge Jim on, pacing blindly alongside him.

“That’s the way it is with me, Jim…” he began again after a moment. “Sometimes I see things small and clear. Then I realize that I’m half a step beyond the rest of the High-born. And it’s strange—I’m what we’ve been working for down all these generations—that one step further on. But it’s a step that we aren’t built to take, Jim… do you understand me?”

“I think so, Oran,” answered Jim.

“…But at other times,” went on the Emperor. Jim could not tell whether Oran had noted his answer or not. “… But at other times, things only start to get sharp and clear—and when I try to look more closely, they go very fuzzy, and out of focus, and large. And I lose that sense of extra, inner sharp sight that I had to begin with. Then I have bad dreams for a while— dreams, awake and asleep. It’s in dreams like that, that I’ve seen the Blue Beast, three times now…”

The Emperor’s voice trailed off again, and Jim thought that they had come merely to another temporary pause in the conversation. But abruptly the Emperor’s hand fell from his shoulder.

Jim stopped and turned. He found Oran looking down at him, smiling, clear-eyed and cheerful.

“Well, I mustn’t keep you, Jim,” said Oran in a thoroughly normal, conversational voice. “This will be your first party—and after all, you’re practically the guest of honor. Why don’t you circulate and meet people. I’ve got to go find Vhotan. He worries too much when I’m away from him.”

The Emperor vanished. Jim stood still, and the cleared circle of floor began to fill in around him, as those on the outskirts drifted inward, and new arrivals began to appear. He looked about for Ro but could not see her.

“Adok!” he said in a low voice.

The Starkien appeared beside him.

“Forgive me, Jim,” said Adok. “I didn’t know that the Emperor was through talking to you. I found the servant you sent me to find.”

“Take me where I can see him but he can’t see me,” said Jim.

Abruptly they were in a narrow, shadowy place between two pillars, looking toward a further area where a cluster of close pillars enclosed a small open space, where a large number of trays loaded with food and drink stood neatly racked in the empty air, one above another. Standing amidst these trays was a servant, one of the short brown men with the long hair. Jim and Adok stood behind him, and looking past him, they could see out to where another servant was circulating within view with a tray of food.

“Good,” said Jim.

He memorized the location and shifted both himself and Adok back to where he had been standing when the Emperor had left him.

“Adok,” he said softly, “I’m going to try to stay continuously within sight of the Emperor. I’d like you to stay within sight of me, but not exactly with me. Keep your eyes on me, and when I disappear, I want you to go to Vhotan, who’ll be with the Emperor, and tell him I want him to be a witness to something. Then bring him to the place where that servant is. You understand?”

“Yes, Jim,” said Adok unemotionally.

“Now,” said Jim. “How do I find the Emperor?”

“I can take you to him,” said Adok. “All Starkiens can always find the Emperor, at any time. It’s in case one of us should be needed.”

They were suddenly elsewhere in the Great Gathering Room. Jim looked about and from a distance of a couple of dozen feet saw the Emperor—this time without a circle of privacy around him, talking and laughing with several other High-born. Vhotan, his yellowish brows knitted, was at the younger man’s elbow.

Jim looked around him again and discovered Adok looking at him from perhaps twenty feet away. Jim nodded and drifted off at an angle that would keep him moving through the crowd, but at about always the same distance from the Emperor.

Twice the Emperor shifted position suddenly. Twice Jim found himself shifted by Adok to a new position within sight of the High-born ruler. Surprisingly, through all this, none of the High-born around Jim paid particular attention to him. They seemed to have no eagerness to see the Wolfling in whose honor the party was being given, and if their eyes rested on him unknowingly, they evidently took him for simply one more of the servants.

Time stretched out. Nearly an hour had gone by, and Jim was almost beginning to doubt his earlier certainties, when abruptly he saw what he had been waiting for.

At first glance, it was nothing much. The Emperor was half-turned away from Jim, and all that betrayed his change in condition was a slight stiffening of his tall figure. He had become somewhat immobile, somewhat rigid.

Jim hastily took two steps to the left so that he could catch sight of the man’s face. Oran was staring through and past the other High-born man he had been talking to. His gaze was fixed; his smile was fixed; and as at the bullfight, there was a little trickle of moisture shining at the corner of his mouth.

None of those around him appeared to be in the least aware of this. But Jim wasted no time watching them. Instead, he turned to look about for servants. He had made less than a half-turn before he saw the first man, a thin black-haired member of the lesser races, carrying a silver tray of what looked like small cakes.

The man was not moving. He was stopped, still, as frozen in position as the Emperor.

Jim hastily completed his turn. He saw three more servants, all of them rigid, all of them unmoving as statues. Even as he looked, the High-born around them began to take notice of this strange lack of activity in their midst. But Jim did not wait to see how their reaction would develop. Instantly he transferred himself to the shadowy area behind the servant with the trays—to that place where Adok had earlier taken him.

The man with the trays was standing, looking. But he was not rigid—as was the servant who could be seen a couple of dozen yards beyond him, surrounded by High-born.

Jim bent nearly double and ran forward swiftly and silently behind the trays until he came up with the servant who was looking out. At once he caught the man from behind with both hands. One hand taking him at the top and back of the neck just under the overhang of the skull, the other hand caught hold of the left armpit from behind, with the thumb resting over a pressure point just to the left of the shoulderblade.

“Move,” whispered Jim swiftly, “and I’ll break your neck.”

The man stiffened. But he made no sound, and he did not move.

“Now,” whispered Jim again. “Do exactly as I tell you—”

He paused to glance around behind him. There, in the shadows, he saw the stocky form of Adok, and with Adok a towering High-born shape that would be Vhotan. Jim turned back to the servant.

“Put the two first fingers of your right hand across the biceps of your left arm,” Jim whispered to the man.

The other did not move. Still keeping himself crouched low and hidden behind the servant’s form, Jim pushed his thumb in again against the pressure point.

For a long moment the man resisted. Then, jerkily, almost like a robot, he moved his right hand up, up, and laid the forefingers of it, extended in V form, across the biceps of his left arm.

Outside, the immobile servant in sight suddenly began to move, as if nothing had happened, trailed by a small cloud of puzzled and interested High-born. Jim quickly clapped a hand over the mouth of the man he was holding, and half-lifted, half-dragged him back into the shadows.

Vhotan and Adok came forward to face down at the man.

“Now—” began Vhotan grimly. But at that moment the servant made an odd, small noise and suddenly slumped, heavy in Jim’s grasp.

“Yes,” said Vhotan, as if Jim’s laying the man down had been a comment in words, “whoever planned this wouldn’t have taken any chances on leaving him alive for us to question. Even the brain structure will be destroyed, no doubt.”

He raised his eyes and looked across the dead body to Jim. His High-born mind had plainly already deduced much of what Jim had brought him here to see. But Vhotan’s eyes retained a bit of their chill, nonetheless.

“Do you know who’s behind all this?” he asked Jim.

Jim shook his head.

“But you clearly expected it to happen,” said Vhotan. “You expected it enough to send your Starkien to bring me here. Why me?”

Jim looked unstaringly at him.

“Because I decided you were the one man among the High-born who had to admit to yourself, consciously, that the Emperor’s mind is not all it should be—or perhaps,” said Jim, for a second remembering their talk, his and the Emperor’s, as they walked up and down the polished floor, “his mind is a little too much more than it should be.”

A faint click seemed to come from the throat of Vhotan. It was several long seconds before he said anything; and when he did speak, it was on another topic.

“How did you find out about this—this, that the servants had planned?” Vhotan asked.

“I didn’t find out, to the point where I was absolutely sure it would happen,” said Jim. “But I taught myself the Silent Language of the servants underground and learned that something was in the wind. Putting that together with this party, and the Emperor’s known frailty, gave me an idea of what to look for. So when I got here, I sent Adok around to look for it; and when he found it, I acted as you’ve just seen.”

Vhotan had stiffened again at the coupling of the words “Emperor” and “frailty.” But he relaxed as Jim finished talking, and nodded.

“You’ve done a good job, Wolfling,” he said; and the words were plain enough, even though the tone was grudging. “From this point on, I’ll handle it. But we’d better get you off the Throne World for a while, sponsored for adoption or not sponsored for adoption.”

He stood and thought for a second.

“I think the Emperor will promote you,” he said finally. “As a rank more commensurate with your effective High-born status as someone sponsored for adoption, he’ll promote you to a Starkien Commander of Ten-units and send you off on some military-police job on one of the Colony Worlds.”

He turned away from Jim, Adok, and the dead servant, as if about to disappear. Then, apparently changing his mind, he swung back to look at Jim again.

“What’s your name?” he said sharply.

“Jim,” answered Jim.

“Jim. Well, you did a good job, Jim,” said Vhotan grimly. “The Emperor appreciates it. And—so do I.”

With that, he did disappear.