The fifth Hound nodded.
Bleys looked at their faces. They were all different. About the only similarity between the five of them, was that they were all brunettes. Aside from that they had no real similarities. Their faces in particular were all individually different, ranging from round to angular. Nonetheless, he could not escape the feeling that they were all identical, all as closely like each other as brothers, all cut from the same piece of cloth.
"All right," he said, "if you have any questions, ask them now."
He waited. But none of them asked him anything.
"Very well. Remember, those of you who are coming in from the ends are to stay behind the bushes and out of sight until you see me on the patio. You, the one who is going to follow me, also stay out of sight until I'm out on the patio. All right, here we go."
He turned, for all practical purposes putting the other five out of his mind. There was really only one person he could depend on here; and that was himself. This, in spite of the fact that he was not armed and they were. It had been impossible, of course, for them to bring weapons onto Earth. All the planets had very strict laws about any attempt to carry weapons onto them from another planet. Anyone found trying to do that was immediately deported back to the planet he had come from.
To make sure the deportation occurred, the planets had jointly made the spaceship companies themselves responsible. The spaceship companies, in turn and in self-protection, had required that all passengers—such as Bleys and these five had been—pay double fares when they left Association. Double fares were the rule. The one-way passenger got back the unused part of his fare from the spaceship company, in whatever currency it had originally been paid, after the passenger had passed all custom checks on the world of destination.
Dahno, however, had produced five void pistols for the Hounds in the Shadow Hotel. He had not explained, to them or to Bleys, where he got them; and Bleys had not been interested in asking. If it had been up to him, the Hounds would have carried either no weapons, or else imitation or unloaded ones. It made no difference. He wanted to handle this without anyone getting hurt.
Once the Hounds had vanished noiselessly right and left among the trees, he went forward himself to the back of the house; and, standing a little to one side, glanced in the window next to the door there. He saw that the room the door opened into was empty. Still, he was cautious as he turned the knob and opened it with as little noise as possible.
He had stepped into what was evidently a sort of mud room—a place where outdoor clothes that would track dirt into the house were taken off, hung up, put on racks, or otherwise left while the person involved changed into something that would bring less dirt further inside. There was nothing on Bleys' shoes, however, but pine needles, he noted.
He peered through the partially-opened door within, to a sort of corridor that led to the right to a kitchen and to the left to several closed doors, which could be bedrooms or something else. Guessing that with the two outside that he had seen from the air, the chances were that the house was not over-full, he went silently in the direction of the kitchen, found it empty as well, and passed through it into a dining room.
From the dining room he moved into a large lounge; and, still moving in the same direction as when he had entered the back door, into a room that was obviously a library. Its walls were twelve feet high and its shelves were loaded with books. Overwhelmingly, not modern books which required being stuck into a player to read, but ancient artifacts of covers and printed pages.
In spite of himself Bleys took time out to wander up and down the shelves and see what was there. He ran into innumerable classics in a number of different languages, and found himself becoming half-intoxicated by the scent of leather and paper. This was the kind of room which touched off the fascination he had found in the arts of literature. He found himself caught up in elegance and perfection that were between the stiff old covers on the shelves. He could have spent a great deal of time here, if it had been reasonable to do so. He would, he thought, probably have spent most of his time in this room until he had read everything that was here.
By the time he had approached the french windows on the far side of the wall, which could be opened out into the patio, he had come to the section on poetry. In a padded armchair float, closed, but with a bookmark marking a place in it, was a thick, brown leather-covered book. Out of sheer curiosity he picked it up and opened it to the bookmark to see what it was.
It was apparently an anthology of poetry by Alfred Noyes, in twentieth-century English. Noyes, a poet with his roots in the nineteenth century, had fallen almost completely out of sight, but had been rehabilitated in the twenty-first century and recognized for the artist that he was. A brown leather bookmark lay against a page of the poetic play of Robin Hood. The central diamond of the bookmark touched a speech that Oberon, King of the Fairies, was making to one of his retainers, telling them about Robin, who had once rescued one of them.
Bleys was about to lay it down again where he had found it, when, through the glass of the patio, he saw two old men, one very white and sturdy, the other wearing the robes of an Exotic, but also very old and with the almost lineless, but ancient, face that was common in some very aged Exotics.
Recognizing the Exotic made the connection in his brain. The other must be a Dorsai; in fact, looking at him now through the french window, Bleys told himself that he should have recognized him as a Dorsai at first glance, though the man was well past the age of any military usefulness. These must be two of the three tutors for the boy. He moved close to the french windows on that side of the room. He could hear them speaking now, if he listened closely.
CHAPTER 39
"I don't know," the Exotic was saying. He lifted what looked like a two-inch-square cube from his robe and showed it. "All I know is I've had this warning."
"More of your Exotic hocus-pocus," growled the Dorsai. But the growl was only half disdainful. "I'll go warn Obadiah."
"There's no time." The Exotic's slim and slightly knobby hand reached out and stopped the other. "Obadiah's been ready to meet that personal God of his for years now, and any minute we're liable to have eyes watching what we do. The less we seem to be expecting anything, the better Hal's chance to get away."
Hal Mayne, thought Bleys; of course they would think of the boy first.
The Dorsai looked about in silence for a moment, and then the Exotic said something softly, which Bleys did not catch.
"He'll stay," said the Dorsai grimly. "He's not a lad now, but a man. You and Obadiah keep forgetting that."
"A man, at sixteen?" said the Exotic. "So soon?" "Man enough," grunted the Dorsai. "Who's coming? Or what?"
"I don't know," answered the Exotic. "What I showed you was just a device to warn of a sharp pressure increase of the ontogenetic energies moving in on us. You remember I told you one of the last things I was able to have them do on Mara was run calculations on the boy; and the calculations indicated high probability of his intersection with a pressure-climax of the current historical forces before his seventeenth year."
The words historical forces jolted Bleys almost like a solid thing. It was the historical forces that were his concern in the long run. He had thought his understanding of them to be something unique and personal. He had known—as everyone did—that the Exotics at one time had a remarkable interstellar information service; but he assumed it had ceased to be anything important long ago. How could they be so informed on the historical forces, which he, himself, had deduced only from bits and pieces of information in his reading?
He turned his attention once more to the patio. He had missed part of what the Dorsai had just said.
"Don't fool yourself!" the Exotic was answering him, almost sharply for one of his birth and upbringing. "There'll be men or things to manifest its effect when it gets here, just as a tornado manifests a sudden drop in air pressure. Perhaps—" He broke off. The Dorsai's gaze had moved away from the Exotic. "What is it?"<
br />
""Others, perhaps," said the Dorsai, quietly.
Bleys was once again jolted. Dahno's practice had been not to hide the name of the Others, but to make no particular show of them. There had been no branch of the organization attempted on either Kultis or Mara, the two Exotic worlds, for the simple reason that it would not have worked there. Why, then, should this Dorsai even mention them, now, let alone be concerned about them? His face raised, as if he were testing the cooling air of the late afternoon.
"Why do you say that?" The Exotic glanced around him as if he expected to see Others rise up around them out of the patio pavement.
"I'm not sure. A hunch," said the Dorsai. The Exotic's face crumpled.
He murmured something in so low a voice that Bleys could not hear it.
"Why?" snapped the Dorsai.
The response was also so low Bleys could not hear it. He moved forward toward the windows.
"The Others aren't 'devils'!" snapped the Dorsai in answer, not bothering to keep his voice down. "Mix your blood and mine, and Obadiah's in with it—mix together blood of all the Splinter Cultures if you want to and you still get men and women. Men make men—nothing else. You don't get anything out of a pot you don't put into it."
"Other men and women. Hybrids," the Exotic said. "People with half a dozen talents in one skin."
Bleys let the words echo sardonically in his own mind. If only the trainees that Dahno had turned out had anything like two or three, let alone half a dozen, talents in them. The potential for those talents was there, but few of them had begun to show themselves.
He grew suddenly thoughtful. Perhaps when these trainees had moved into sub-organizations on other worlds, some of the capabilities within them had begun to flourish. He would have to look into it. If so -.
"What of it?" the Dorsai was growling beyond the patio door. "A man lives, a man dies. If he lives well and dies well, what difference does it make what kills him?"
"But this is our Hal—"
"Who has to die someday, like everyone else. Straighten up!" muttered the Dorsai. "Don't they grow any backbones on the Exotics?"
The Exotic took a deep breath and straightened up. He stood tall, breathed deeply and in a way that Bleys had only seen one Exotic do before in his life, put on an air of peace that could almost be seen.
"You're right," he said. "At least Hal's had all we could give him, the three of us, in skill and knowledge. And he's got the creativity to be a great poet, if he lives."
"Poet!" said the Dorsai. "There's a few thousand more useful things he could do with his life. Poets—"
He broke off suddenly; and in a moment the Exotic folded his hands in the wide sleeves of his blue robe.
"But poets are men, too," the Exotic went on, as if in the middle of some cheerful academic discussion. "That's why, for example, I think so highly of Alfred Noyes, among the nineteenth-century poets. You know Noyes, don't you?"
Bleys was instantly alert. The Exotic, somehow, had sensed the presence of Bleys and the Hounds.
"Should I?" The Dorsai was saying now.
"I think so," said the Exotic. "Of course, I grant you no one remembers anything but The Highwayman, out of all his poems, nowadays. But Tales of a Mermaid Tavern, and that other long poem of his—Sherwood—they've both got genius in them. You know, there's that part where Oberon, the king of elves and fairies, is telling his retainers about the fact Robin Hood is going to die, and explaining why the fairies owe Robin a debt—"
"Never read it," grunted the Dorsai.
"Then I'll quote it for you," said the Exotic. "Oberon is talking to his own kind and he tells about one of them whom Robin once rescued from what he thought was nothing worse than a spider's web. And what Noyes had Oberon say is—listen to this now—
"'. . . He saved her from the clutches of that Wizard,
'That Cruel thing, that dark old Mystery,
'Whom ye all know and shrink from . . . !' "
The Exotic broke off. Through the french window Bleys saw him looking at a Hound, in his dark business suit and holding his void pistol, who had stepped from the lilac bushes behind the Dorsai. A moment later the other Hound emerged to stand beside the first; and then two more appeared from the bushes at the far end of the terrace. Four pistols covered the two old men.
Through the patio windows Bleys had seen them, too, and a cold anger was suddenly born in him. It was too late now to overhear any more; but perhaps he could salvage something of what could have been a civilized capture. He stepped through the french window, speaking:
"'. . . Plucked her forth, so gently that not one bright rainbow gleam upon her wings was clouded . . .'"
He finished the Exotic's quotation in his most vibrant, impressive voice. He was still carrying the book he had found, with one finger lodged in the pages.
"... But you see," he continued, addressing the Exotic, "how it goes downhill, gets to be merely pretty and ornate, after that first burst of strength you quoted? Now, if you'd chosen instead the song of Blondin the Minstrel, from that same poem—"
He raised his voice and pitched it upward, almost singing.
"Knight on the narrow way,
Where wouldst thou ride?
'Onward,' I heard him say,
'Love, to thy side!'
"... then I'd have had to agree with you," he finished.
The Exotic bent his head a little, politely; and Bleys thought he had touched the other. An Exotic, trained through a lifetime to respond to every subtleness, must surely feel as much or more than Bleys himself did, of the genius behind the words. And Bleys knew he, himself, was creating, with words and voice—with his very appearance—high drama.
"I don't think we know you," was all the other said, however.
"Ahrens is my name. Bleys Ahrens," he answered. "And you needn't be worried. No one's going to be hurt. We'd just like to use this estate of yours for a short meeting during the next day or two."
He smiled at the Exotic. He was focusing all his power to be likable on the two old men; in voice and smile and body language. Neither showed any response; but the pale-faced young Hounds watched him worshipfully.
"We?" asked the Exotic.
"Oh, a club of sorts. To tell you the truth, you'd do better not to worry about the matter at all." He looked about at the lake and the woods near it.
"There ought to be two more of you here, shouldn't there?" he said, turning back again. "Another tutor your own age; and your ward, the boy named Hal Mayne? Where would they be, now?"
The Exotic shook his head, looking baffled. Bleys turned to the Dorsai, who looked indifferently back at him.
"Well, we'll find them," said Bleys in a confident tone. He looked once more at the Exotic.
"You know," he went on, and though his voice did not betray it, there was a wistfulness in him behind the question, "I'd like to meet that boy. He'd be . . . what? Sixteen now?"
The Exotic nodded.
"Fourteen years since he was found ..." Bleys paused. "He must have some unusual qualities. He'd have had to have them—to stay alive, as a child barely able to walk, alone on a wrecked ship, drifting in space for who-knows-how-long. Who were his parents—did they ever find out?"
"No," said the Exotic. "The log aboard showed only the boy's name."
"A remarkable boy ..." said Bleys. He looked about beyond the terrace. "You say you're sure you don't know where he is now?"
"No," answered the Exotic.
Bleys glanced at the Dorsai, inquiringly.
"Commandant?"
The Dorsai snorted contemptuously.
Bleys smiled, but the Dorsai remained unchanged, unchangeable, before him. Bleys dropped the attempt.
"You don't approve of Other Men like me, do you?" he said. "But times have changed, Commandant."
"Too bad," said the Dorsai; and Bleys felt the dry contempt behind the words like a sharp point.
"But too true," he said. "Did it ever occur to you your boy might be one of us? N
o? Well, suppose we talk about other things, if that suggestion bothers you. I don't suppose you share your fellow tutor's taste for poetry? Say, for something like Tennyson's Idylls of the King—a piece of poetry about men and war?"
"I know it," said the Dorsai. "It's good enough."
"Then you ought to remember what King Arthur has to say in it about changing times," said Bleys. "You remember— when Arthur and Sir Bedivere are left alone at the end and Sir Bedivere asks the King what will happen now, with all the companionship of the Round Table dissolved, and Arthur himself leaving for Avalon. Do you remember how Arthur answers, then?"
"No," the Dorsai said.
"He answers—" and he made his voice ring with its power again,
"The old order changeth, giving place to new . . ."
Bleys paused and looked at the old ex-soldier to see if he had made his point.
"—And God fulfills himself in many ways—lest one good custom should corrupt the world’ interrupted a harsh voice from the side.
All of them turned, to see a thin, elderly—even ancient— Friendly being herded out through the french window at the point of a void pistol held by the fifth young gunman.
"You forgot to finish the quotation," he rasped at Bleys. "And it applies to your kind too, Other Man. In God's eye you, also, are no more than a drift of smoke and the lost note of a cymbal. You, too, are doomed at His will—like that!"
He had come on while they all watched, until suddenly he snapped his bony fingers with that last word, under Bleys' nose. Bleys found himself laughing, and realized that he was on the edge of losing control. The knowledge startled him.
"Posts!" he snapped.
The Hounds read their error in his voice—of the four already there, three had left off covering the Exotic and the Dorsai to aim at the Friendly, as he snapped his fingers; only one still covered the Dorsai. Almost cowering at the tone of Bleys' voice, they pulled their weapons back to their original targets.
Young Bleys - Childe Cycle 09 Page 42