by John Brunner
see if you look at that specimen over there. They’re fit to be servants and laborers, like the Lubarrians and the Alchmids and, come to that, the Glaithes. One thing I can appreciate about the Glaithes: They’re honest enough to admit that they couldn’t have built Waystation.”
Vykor was aware of an itching desire in his right foot. He wanted to bring his boot up—very hard—against the Pag’s shapely posterior as she leaned on the back of Lang’s chair and expounded her race’s official propaganda. As she was standing, her thigh-boots and tunic afforded her no protection in that area.
But Pags could insult him till doomsday, and it would be no skin off his nose. They had the Alchmids to lord it over. It was the Cathrodynes that Vykor and all Majkos hated; Pags were incidental.
"All right,” the Pag went on. “Rule out all these; rule ’em out on self-evident facts. Who does that leave? The ancestral Pag strain!” She straightened triumphantly. “Clear?”
By some remarkable trick that Vykor could not follow, Lang managed to give Ferenc a deprecating smile—to show that he had not swallowed the Pag’s nonsense—without letting the Pag see it. There was a pause. Then Lang asked Ligmer again, “And archeologically, does that ring true?” “Hah!” said the Pag. “Catch a Cathrodyne archeologist admitting to the truth even when his nose is rubbed in it!” Ligmer glanced at her. “One of these days, madam, I hope someone will succeed in explaining the scientific method to you. I abide by it. Therefore I will say that it is a possibility-”
Ferenc almost exploded, and Ligmer gave him a pleading glance.
“A possibility,” he emphasized. “It’s true—so I’m told, because the authorities on Pagr won’t allow Cathrodyne students to inspect the relics—”
“And quite right, too. They’d take it as an excuse for wholesale spying operations,” the Pag officer declared.
“Please!” cried Ligmer. “I’m trying to explain this to our distinguished traveling companion.”
Lang blinked and waved a hand. “Distinguished?” he murmured. “Really?”
"Oh yes!” said Ferenc. “You’re from out of eye-range, aren’t you? The chief mate said you were.”
“Eye-range?"
“Yes; you’re out of sight of your home sun, isn’t that so?” Lang laughed. “Well, as a matter of fact I am, and have been for some time. But I don’t see that that’s any special mark of distinction. Is it?”
“It only makes you unique among this ship’s passengers; in eighteen hundred trips they’ve never had anyone on board who was out of eye-range.”
“You don’t say,” murmured Lang, and stroked the back of the little black-furred animal that dozed in his lap. “Well, well—but you were kindly explaining about. . .?”
“Oh, yes.” Ligmer gathered his thoughts with a frown. “I was saying that there are relics on Pagr which indicate a space-flying culture there some ten thousand years ago, but it isn’t clear why such a culture—if it was capable of building Waystation, as the Pags claim—should have decayed again to a pre-spaceflight level. It must have done so, for by the time Pag ships came out again to Waystation, the Glaithes had been in occupation for twenty-odd years, and had succeeded in reactivating practically all of it.”
“What happened to bring us down from our former glory is well attested by our legends and traditions,” said the Pag. “Decadent men were our leaders then, and their grip was too weak to hold what they grasped. It was not until women established a firm rule that it proved possible to contain the vaulting Pag spirit.”
“And the Cathrodynes?” Lang asked gently. “Do they not have legends?”
“Everyone along the Arm has legends about star-traveling gods,” shrugged Ligmer. “This is why reputable archeologists disregard all claims to a final solution of the enigma.”
“Noble dames and sirs!” said Vykor, clearing his throat loudly. “Please return to your cabins during the period when we match Velocities with Waystation. Disembarkation may commence as soon after matching as you desire.”
Mrs. Iquida leapt to her feet and hurried back to her cabin. The priest, Dardaino, who had been sitting aside from the discussion with a disdainful expression (the origin of Waystation, of course, was explained beyond question in the mythology of his cult), followed her, more slowly because of his greater bulk.
The Pag had remained frozen for a long time after what Ligmer had implied about her race’s archeologists. Now she began to raise a bony fist, glaring down into Ligmer’s face, her own lips drawn back snarlingly.
Ferenc got to his feet and darted to her side. Tall as he was, he was ^overtopped by inches when he stood there. "Be careful,” he said warningly. “You will have me to answer to.” White-faced, Ligmer was shaping his mouth to speak, when Lang’s velvet voice once more stroked their ears.
“Please!” he said. “Accept my apologies, and excuse me— I am after all an ignorant stranger, unaware of your local susceptibilities. It was unforgivable of me, of course, but if I might nonetheless beg your pardons . . .?”
Puzzled, the Pag and Ferenc both turned their stares on him. He smiled, and rose to his feet with a little bow, cradling his black-furred pet in the crook of one arm. Automatically, the others moved forward toward the door with him, and he bowed and gestured for them to precede him. They did so quietly.
Lang hesitated a moment when they had gone into the corridor, his eyes hinting at mystification. Before he himself followed them, he turned and beckoned to Vykor.
“Steward! Are they permitted to settle this argument by force when they get aboard Waystation?”
"No, distinguished sir,” said Vykor. “The peace of Waystation has to be preserved by every possible means. Oh, I’m not saying that they might not reserve a wrestling-room for a couple of hours. But they wouldn’t be allowed to duel with weapons. If the Glaithes permitted that, the life-expectancy of either Pags or Cathrodynes aboard Waystation would be only a day or two. They hate each other’s guts; they insult each other as readily as breathe, and if they were kept in constant friction and allowed to slaughter each other, the result would be chaos.”
“So the Glaithes keep order between them, do they? I’d have thought it was a tough job.”
“Yes, distinguished sir. It is.” Vykor had a powerful respect for Glaithes; so did all the three subject races out along the Arm. “Frankly,” he added after a pause, “I’d give them, if anyone, credit for building Waystation. Since they manage to keep it a neutral world, I wouldn’t put the rest of the job past them either.”
III
Keeping Waystation neutral in this tense situation was a triumph of delicate balance—like trying to land a ship on manual on an airless world. There had to be rules, inflexible rules; likewise, there had to be means of making the rules bend a little when necessary.
Captain Raige had served with the Waystation staff longer than all but a half-dozen other members of the personnel; she had become a past master ait the essential techniques, including the use of unofficial channels of information. As always, she supervised the disembarkation of the passengers from the newly arrived ship; she scrutinized these, however, more carefully than usual. She couldn’t have said why. It was simply because the atmosphere seemed tense, as though a storm were brewing.
Waystation was neutral in every sense—medically as well as politically, for example. Disembarkation, therefore, was not complicated by quarantine inspections, and the customs examinations were perfunctory. It was the fault of the Pags or the Cathrodynes—so the Glaithes reasoned—if illegal merchandise got off or on to one of their worlds; what .happened at Waystation was none of their business.
Within a very short while of the ship’s docking, therefore, the passengers would be free to mingle with the rest of Waystation’s million-odd population—half of it the Glaithe staff, the rest transient. It was Captain Raige’s job to know about all of them.
Down the null-grav funnel from the ship they came one by one, to emerge blinking into the bright light of the main re- cep
tior hall, to stare at the ranked doors of the elevator system, the long chains of chairs on the horizontal conveyers, the steel and plastic and mineraloid interior of the most fantastic artificial construction they had ever seen.
They had questions: accommodation, transhipment dates, refreshments, local time, necessities and luxuries. The staff of receptionists—little sloe-eyed Glaithe girls in plain rust colored overalls—equipped them with maps, currency scrip, directions, tickets. Standing aside inconspicuously, Captain Raige watched them with her face composed and her hands folded out of sight in the loose full sleeves of her gown. Only her eyes moved noticeably, but her fingers were also busy, stroking memoranda into the touch-react keys of a tiny recorder covered by her sleeves.
The Lubarrian woman was the first to pass through reception. Raige had received special instructions about her. She was a factor in a complex profit-and-loss account, kept by the Glaithes at Waystation. Currently the Pags were smarting about some trouble that the Glaithes had put them to—a smack on the hand, so to speak, for attempting to interfere in the administration of Waystation. Accordingly, with scrupulous neutrality, the Glaithes had decided to put the Cathro- dynes to similar inconvenience, making them bring this Mrs. Iquida out to Waystation first class on a Cathrodyne ship— almost unheard of, for a member of a subject race!
There would have to be another flea-bite to irritate the Pags again shortly. Raige sighed. One day she would be able to retire, and bring up the children that were waiting for her in the ovum blank on Glai—deposited there when she was first drafted for service in space. But it would be a good few years before that happened.
Meantime, there was a lot in common between bringing up children and keeping the peace between the two irascible “master races” of the Arm.
There was a priest—a Cathrodyne of the Lubarrian church. The name would be Dardaino; Raige didn’t have to see his papers to know that. He was the replacement for the Waystation chaplain, who had died the other month. Someone would have to go and have a quiet discussion with him before he began throwing his weight around, if he proved to be more Cathrodyne than priest.
Two officers: a Pag returning from a tour with her embassy on Cathrodyne, and a Cathrodyne, formerly on the staff here but whose declared purpose now was to take a furlough, and who was almost certainly a spy. They ostentatiously avoided each other, going to reception desks at opposite ends of the hall.
A Cathrodyne archeologist, who had been here before as a young student. And a stranger, about whom nothing more than his name was known—Lang. With a small pet animal of some species which Raige had never even seen in pictures.
She kept her face stone-still, but she wished intensely that she could let her feelings show. There was nothing obvious to justify her apprehension; indeed, this was a routine kind of cargo, except for this stranger Lang. Yet. . .
Well, maybe Vykor would be able to clarify matters. She shut off her recorder with a determined gesture, and watched the last of the first-class passengers disappear toward their transit accommodation. The stewards would not be free for an hour or more yet, and there were steerage-class passengers also to be discharged here for temporary revivification and feeding up to normal. That too was her job. She moved noiselessly across the hall on sandaled feet toward the revival rooms.
For some reason, Vykor found himself in a frenzy of impatience as he went through the routine of clearing up after docking. Usually he managed to concentrate on what he had to do; this time; it irked him insupportably to have to clear the cabins out, see to the discharge of baggage, report to the purser and have him inspect the cabins, collect his currency scrip. . . .
And at last he was in his own cabin, stripping off his uniform and hurrying into the undress wear of a Majko liner employee. On Waystation, in theory, he was free from the overlordship of the Cathrodynes; in practice, though, any of the easily recognizable curly-black-haired Majkos who tried to assert their privilege found themselves marked down and repaid for their arrogance when they were back in Cathrodyne jurisdiction.
So he put on the drab shirt and breeches resignedly, finding—as always—that after his fine purple uniform it was depressing to look at himself in the glass.
Then he made haste off the ship, winking at a pretty Glaithe receptionist as she put away her dossiers, waving at a Lubarrian engineer off a sister ship to his own liner, respectfully saluting an officer of the Glaithe staff, and reluctantly making a token bow to a Cathrodyne grand-dame in a cripple-walker—a mechanically-propelled pair of artificial legs designed to restore the tone of muscles long unused. There were many such old women—and men also—who came to Waystation in the vain hope of finding the secret of eternal youth among the vast stores of knowledge in the master memory banks. Charlatans made a good living off such people—but only the Glaithes knew Waystation’s secrets.
Some few, they parted with. At a price.
Vykor had to saunter across the reception hall, judging the moment of his arrival at the elevators. He had to take a particular car, and he had to be alone when he took it. A sudden influx of laughing children—Glaithes, on an educational trip—compelled him to dawdle at a sweetmeat automat, pretending to choose between the charms of crystallized mutches and weerwil steeped in honey.
When he got his chance, he slipped by himself into the car and glanced down the row of level-buttons he could press. These elevators were as complex as a subway system in a city planetside, but of uniform pattern because they followed geodesics of the artificial gravity field. Only sometimes they didn’t—not exactly. This was one of the secrets that the Glaithes had entrusted to a few people, of whom Vykor was one.
It was simple, really. A matter of pressing two of the buttons simultaneously.
Vykor had never been able to make up his mind where the elevator actually took him when he did this. At first, he had assumed that it let him out between two levels, in a concealed space. Then he had gone to the level above and descended by the ordinary staircase to the one below, and then climbed up again. That had convinced him that there was no room for an extra concealed level between them. The elevator went somewhere else, then.
Some time he would stay at this level after seeing Captain Raige, and make his way out on foot, thus establishing once for all where he was. But not yet. He had too much to gain from the privilege he enjoyed to risk losing it.
The elevator stopped, and the doors slid back to reveal the same rather narrow, dark passage he had seen before, on other trips. It ran twenty paces in either direction, bathed in a dull orange-red glow from neon strip lighting, and then was blocked off by a T-junction. He had never been in either direction along either of the further passages; he was permitted to cross the passage in which he found himself after leaving the elevator car, press the admission button on the door opposite, and report to Raige. That was all.
Lately, he had been more and more tempted to hesitate and turn right or left and at least glance down the passages he had never yet seen. Now he told himself yet once more —with even greater reluctance—Next time!
And his thumb was on the admission button of the office; the door was purring back in its sliding grooves.
He was always a little bit afraid of Raige. She was a small woman, as all her people were small, and came no higher than Vykor’s elbow. Her face was smooth-skinned and youthful, with large oval dark eyes under neatly braided black hair. But in some way—perhaps it was the absolute calm of her expression—she managed to appear master of all imaginable situations.
She sat in a low, round chair, reading back a pattern of flickering symbols projected by her personal recorder on to the smooth cream-painted bulkhead to the right of the door. Vykor glanced at the symbols and then away again; he knew better than to waste his time trying to read them. That was a code the Glaithes had adapted from the memory bank records of Waystation, and no one else had ever gained access to the key.
“Welcome, Vykor,” said Raige, not taking her sloe-dark eyes from the shifting, f
lickering pattern on the wall. "I will only detain you a few moments—therel” She shut off the recorder’s tiny, brilliant projector light, and slipped the whole machine away in the shrouding recess of her sleeve. A halfsmile seemed to light up her whole face.
“Please be seated. It is good to see you again.”
“And I am delighted to see you, Captain Raige.” Vykor put enthusiasm into his voice—rather, could not keep it out. To him, Raige was an altogether amazing and wonderful person; he would say the same of almost any Glaithe, and had in fact said so to Lang before disembarking, but in his mind Raige was very special indeed.
A flicker of something crossed Raige’s smooth, unwrinkled face. “You have the dispatches?” she said after a short pause, and Vykor nodded. A tiny roll of microfilm was hard in his left shoe; he raised his foot and took the roll out and passed it to Raige.
“Thank you. I will see you again before you leave; there may well be an answer.”
“I ... I have a further message which the group asked me to deliver personally,” Vykor ventured, and Raige nodded, waiting. “It is to say—to say how much the oppressed multitudes of Majkosi value the aid they receive from Glaithe sources, how heartening it is to know that the people of Glai sympathize, and how much we admire the achievement of your people in remaining independent of either Pag or Cathrodyne rule.”
His hands were clenched a little, and his fingers ached in tension. He had not been asked to deliver any message verbally; the clandestine group whom he served as courier never transmitted anything except in code—and if the Cathrodynes learned that the Glaithes were helping subject races surreptitiously under cover of their famous neutrality, perhaps not even the greedy desire they felt for Waystation would hold them back from war.
But, he told himself rebelliously, that was what the group felt. Or ought to feel.
Anyway, it was certainly what he felt himself.
And this was the only way he could convey it to Raige. He had to say it, somehow, because he wanted to so badly, and he couldn’t step out of his role as an impersonal courier. He waited for her answer in agonized suspense, and sighed with relief when she inclined her head gracefully, smiling.