by John Brunner
She shrugged and went on walking away.
KRAMER. ARCANE LORE.
I looked at the hand-painted sign swinging from an iron peg driven into the wall of the house. That was the place all right. But—arcane lore?
Frowning, I pushed open the rickety door and found myself in a dark waiting room, stinking of some sort of incense and fit with candles in glass chimneys. Their flickering glow showed me cushions on the floor, heaped up in untidy piles, skin rugs, whitish squares pinned to the walls. I went to examine one of these squares more closely, It was a chart of part of the Vorrish night-sky, the constellations represented by dabs of red ink and the paths of the local planets indicated by dotted black lines. There were Vorrish inscriptions against some of the star groups: fortune, malevolence, health, rivalry.
There was a creaking noise behind me. I started and swung round. A doorway—a vague yellowness in the murk-had appeared in the far wall. Something huge and humped and black moved indistinctly in the frame of twilight.
In perfect Vorrish a booming voice asked me my business.
“I-I’m Gareth Shaw,” I said. The Under-lady Shavarri sent me.”
“Earthman?” the booming voice demanded. “Yes!”
“Oh, that’s all right then. We needn’t waste time on the mumbo-jumbo. Come on through to the back.” The boom had gone from the voice, as though an echo chamber had been switched out of circuit. Perhaps it had.
Because when I went through the doorway I found myself in a perfectly ordinary room, the walls lined with tables on which were stacked cans, jars and jugs capped with plastic membranes. There was a thick animal smell which I couldn’t identify.
“I’m Hans Kramer,” the humped shape said, shrugging off a black cape from his head and shoulders and revealing a round face, pasty in complexion, with eyes in it like currants stuck in a bun. “What can I do for you? Shavarril Isn’t she one of the Pwill wives?”
He suddenly quickened with interest. I nodded.
“Did you have anything to do with organizing this?” he pressed me.
“No, I’m afraid not. I don’t even know what it’s all about.” “Hrm! I wonder who fixed it, then. Well, never mind. I suppose you’re in a hurry?”
Before I could answer, there was a faint moan from a room beyond the one in which we stood. Kramer’s face showed alarm. “Hope that isn’t bad,” he murmured.
“Uh—do you want to go see? I can hang on if you like.”
“Can you?” He sounded grateful. “Well, why not come through? Do her good, maybe—see a strange face.” He pushed aside a thick drape and led me into the third room.
Here a woman lay ill. She was very much like Kramer to look at—plump, round-faced—except that her cheeks were wasted and beginning to be hollow, and her skin gleamed with sweat.
“Liebchen, are you all right?” Kramer demanded. “I heard you moaning.”
With lackluster eyes the woman regarded him. Seeming to come back from a great distance, she answered in a whisper. “I’m sorry, Hans. Sometimes the fever makes my mind wander. I hope you did not have a client—” She realized that I was present, and broke off.
“Only a new friend, an Earthly friend!” Kramer exclaimed with false heartiness. “Friend Shaw—my wife, of course.”
I nodded and licked my lips, not knowing what to say. Kramer went to the side of his wife’s couch, felt her hot face with light fingertips, and frowned. He poured a little more water from a jug into a cup on a low table beside her, and then apparently could do no more.
“Don’t worry with me,” his wife said faintly. “See to your business. I shall be well soon.”
So we returned to the room with the stacks of cans and Jars.
As the drape fell behind Kramer, I said, nodding past him, “What is it?”
“The sickness? Oh, the usual mixture.” He sounded bitter. “A mutated germ, plus impure water, plus trace-element deficiencies, plus allergy to Vorrish food, plus simple weariness. What’s to be done? We aren’t the first to be troubled, nor will we be the last. Your business, then!”
His tone warned me not to ask any more questions. I simply recited the message Shavarri had given me to bring here. It made very little sense. In actual fact, I’d wondered at first if I was bringing a kind of coded message to a lover of hers, before I noticed that I was bound for the Acre.
“Does she now!” Kramer said, apparently understanding what I had said better than I did. “Well, that’ll be five platina. Does she know that?”
Guiltily I produced the four I had brought with me. “IH dig the other one out of her before I hand over,” I improvised.
“Yes, do that,” Kramer agreed, unsuspecting. He clinked the coins together. “Cash on the nail is our inflexible rule. Still, she’s a new customer—I’d dearly like to know who put her on to us! Try and find out, will you?”
“It’d be easier,” I ventured, “if I knew what I was taking her.”
“Don’t you already?” He regarded me with astonishment, before reaching for a pound-size can without a label from one of the stacks beside him. “A love potion, of course! Here you are. And here”—he felt in his pocket and produced a slip of rather tattered paper—”are the directions for use. You might as well read them yourself before handing over.”
“I’ll have to read them anyway,” I said. “I don’t think she knows how.”
Love potion? Arcane lore? What in—?
“Look,” I said, “is this serious? About a love potion, I mean?”
“Where’ve you been since coming to Qallavarra?” Kramer demanded. “I thought everyone knew about—’
And I saw the darkening of suspicion in his eyes. Hastily I interrupted,” I’m sorry, I haven’t been here long.”
Then, by a miracle, the outer door was opened again. Kramer pointed curtly. “Out the other way!” he whispered. “And quickly!” Meantime he was grabbing his black cape again.
As I departed through the back entrance, I faintly heard him demanding, in Vorrish, the new customer’s business.
CHAPTER VI
I MADE A SORT of pouch out of my cloak and slung it over my shoulder with the can and my house shield in it, and got out of the Acre without further trouble. But I waited till I was well outside the boundary before I put my shield back on, and both before and after I was careful to imitate the Vorra in head angle, walk and position of my fingers.
I got my return bus safely. Once in the back seat, with a journey of almost an hour before me, I was able to start thinking over what had happened.
The most extraordinary thing out of a lot of extraordinary things was this. Why—being as far as I knew a loyal Earth-man—why hadn’t I actually taken advantage of my privileged position the way I’d given Marijane to understand I did?
It was never advertised, but everyone understood that there was one single reason for taking up a chance to go to Qallavarra. That was to get our own back on the Vorra.
You didn’t have to say it aloud. You just realized that the people in the Acre weren’t there for the fun of it, or to make their fortunes before going back to Earth. They spent their time figuring out ways of getting at the conquerors and bringing them down. How well they’d succeeded already I’d seen for myself.—Pwill of the House of Pwill, Himself, leaving Olafsson’s office in a towering rage because, presumably, one of his demands had been refused.
How could a handful of Earthmen exploit the weakness of the Vorra? I hadn’t seen it at the time, but once I could reflect about it I realized I’d just had firsthand experience of one possible technique: Kramer’s.
I weighed the can of “love potion” in the folded cloak.
Not to put a fine point on it, Shavarri was ignorant. She couldn’t read and write her own language, let alone an Earthly one. She was probably superstitious too. The Vorra went into battle with chants, charms and rituals; there were a dozen conflicting cults that claimed the loyalty of the tenants on the Pwill estate, as I myself had seen. Swallo, the gatekeeper, bel
onged to one of them and claimed it had save his life during the Battle of Fourth Orbit.
The high-ranking nobles pooh-poohed such beliefs. Nonetheless, they might well be a trifle hesitant about dismissing them altogether. And their wives, far less educated and far less exposed to the outside world, had certainly heard of the indefinable regard their menfolk had for Earth and things Earthly—especially in the House of Pwill, whose head was so convinced that Earth held some secret he might use himself.
I almost fell off the seat in my excitement. Fortunately, no one took notice of my start. Why, there were hundreds of ways you could exploit the superstitious attitude of a noble ladyl And indirectly that would work on her husband and his kinfolk; junior wives might not have much official status, but they undoubtedly had some influence.
And here I was taking a ‘love potion” to Shavarri! For whom did she intend it? For some lover around the estate, a space crew officer perhaps? Or for Pwill himself? That wasn’t inconceivable; an ambitious younger wife, jealous of her longer-established sister-wives, might well try using a potion to make her husband lavish more attention on her.
The more I thought of it, the more likely that seemed. It was quite a hobby of the junior wives to have lovers; only Llaq herself was able to travel about with her husband and have much to do with affairs of the world, whereas the rest, except when they were permitted to visit other houses, which was not often, generally remained at home in the seraglio and quarreled with each other to pass the time.
No, it wasn’t likely that Shavarri would have to employ a drug to persuade a man she fancied to become her lover. She was youngest but one and by Vorrish standards one of the more attractive of the Pwill under-ladies. (In my Earthly view she was far and away the most attractive, but Vorrish tastes preferred the moon-faced type also favored by many harem cultures on Earth in the past; for the Vorra, Shavarri was too thin-featured, although shapely otherwise.)
My wandering mind passed from Shavarri to Marijane, and a new peculiarity struck me. Marijane—and her brother and Gustav, for that matter—had been vehement in their disgust at people like myself in cushy jobs with the houses, calling us serfs and insulting us. How had that been back home? I frowned as I tried to recollect. Put it this way: I was a normal man as far as I knew—certainly normal enough to have had my imagination set working by Marijane after not seeing an Earthly woman since reaching Qallavarra. So presumably I’d not been completely celibate during the five years I’d spent as tutor with the Pwill family on Earth. I must have had friends and social contacts…?
And yes, there they were, distinct in my memory.
Surely, though, back on Earth where the passage of two generations hadn’t sufficed to wipe out the scars of defeat, a person like myself in a privileged position living as the Vorra did off the fat of the planet, would have been hated still more vigorously and decried as a traitor?
Yet as far as I could remember no one had ever accused me like that. I’d enjoyed my five years as a tutor, setting aside the sheer impossibility of ramming sense into the solid bone head of young Pwill.
Paradox. I couldn’t resolve it. I gave up after a moment and let my mind wander on, still at random.
Marijane. Shavarri. The whole question of women. It seemed like a long time since it last bothered me. I pictured Shavarri to myself and gave a critical nod. Yes, she was definitely pretty by anyone’s standrds. Purely as a matter of interest, I reminded myself, there was no physical reason why Vorra and Earthfolk shouldn’t make love together. There was more difference between the males than the females, but the essential functions were the same. Mark you, I went on informing myself, you couldn’t mistake one race for the other without clothing, and a union couldn’t be fertile, and actually humans didn’t find Vorra stimulating because they lacked some skin-secretion with a particular scent which formed part of normal human stimulus patterns. But Vorrish soldiers were much like any other soldier, and during the years directly after the armistice when Earth was heavily garrisoned and no such luxuries as camp-followers of their own race were permitted they’d established the physical feasibility of it beyond doubt—
I checked myself and began to chuckle. The story I had spun to Marijane to calm her down was working altogether too fast on my imagination. Here I was seriously considering the possibility of seducing Shavarri in order to make use of her to foist my ideas on Pwilll This was ludicrous, mainly because I hadn’t any ideas worth foisting.
At once I was grave again. Why not? Why was I wasting an irreplaceable opportunity like the one I had? I was an outpost of Earth in the very heart of Qallavarra, in the second most powerful great house—likely soon to be the first, if the schemes Pwill was now weaving came off.
As soon as possible, then, I was going to have to return to the Acre. I’d seek out Olafsson, put it to him frankly that I realized I’d been neglecting my duty as an Earthman, and ask what use I could be.
To be going on with, anyway, I could improvise something along the lines Kramer had shown me. I could make myself appear more of the “mysterious Earthman;” I could invent a few mystic powers to impress—well, Shavarri to begin with, because I knew she was already hooked; then some of the other wives and perhaps senior officers and retainers among my colleagues. And finally Llaq herself?
I grunted. That would take a lot of work. Old Llaq was probably the hardest-headed woman on the planet. I was sure half her husband’s advancement was due to her initiative.
But I didn’t have to begin with Llaq.
Plans began to blossom in my mind, as though they had been waiting in my subconscious and needed only the right stimulus to develop.
I walked up the road towards the house, admiring the way its glass domes and windows caught the slanting afternoon sun. It was quite an achievement in its way; all the houses were, especially compared to the slapdash overgrown villages which here substituted for cities. A house was a complex of barracks, factories, recreation facilities, palace, every kind of service from food and clothing to education and medicine—what there was of it on this planet! From a distance it gave the clear impression of being a united, organized whole dedicated to an important purpose.
That made it all the more remarkable and dismaying to think I had been inside this fortress for so long without exploiting my advantage.
I came up to the gate and knew I had already been spotted by Swallo through his system of spy mirrors, for when I was still twenty paces away title great double doors creaked a yard apart in the center and made room for me to pass between. I didn’t continue directly across the main yard to my quarters in the family’s block, of course, but turned into Swallo’s office.
I knew at once something was badly wrong. For Swallo had taken out the misshapen talisman from under his table—the one he claimed had saved him at the Battle of Fourth Orbit—and set it in plain view in front of him. He only did that when there was trouble.
He gazed at me stonily. “You’ve been a nuisance,” he said without rancor. “If you’d been here, things would have been a lot quieter.”
“Why? What’s happened?”
“Pwill came back in a boiling temper from the city and sent for you. And today of all days you choose not to be present.”
My heart sank. “Where is he JIOW?” I demanded.
“Storming in the Grand Terrace,” Swallo answered shortly. “Or was at last report. If you see anyone going around like a kicked cur, that’ll be why.”
“He wasn’t due back till an hour before sunset!” I said.
“Pwill doesn’t take much account of clocks,” Swallo answered.
I hefted the weight of the can in my bundled-up cloak. It would be safer with Swallo than anyone, I thought. I handed it through the window of his office.
“Guard this till I come back,” I requested. “I think it best to go and face Himself at once.”
Swallo shrugged and took the cloak, feeling the weight in its folds but not asking questions. I was sure he would look when I had gone
, but the can was unlabeled and short of opening it he would learn nothing. I wasn’t even sure that opening it would tell him anything, unless he sampled the contents and suddenly found himself irresistible to all the women on the estate, perhaps.
I departed at a run.
All the way across the main yard, along the corridors, up the stairs to the upper floor where the Grand Terrace was set to face the afternoon sun, people with faces as miserable as Swallo had warned me to expect kept recognizing me and throwing their hands up in gestures of relief. Some of them barked at me, demanding where I’d been all this time. I didn’t answer, and they didn’t try to stop me. Assuming he had come straight back here from his unsuccessful interview with Olafsson, Pwill Himself had had about two hours in which to make his entire retinue and probably some of the less fortunate of his tenants feel the lash of his wrath.
Yesterday, it occurred to me, I would have gone quaking to face him in a mood like this; he was seldom really angry, though for show and to impress his inferiors he sometimes feigned rage. But today, having seen him come away from Olafsson’s as I had—defeated, on some small matter possibly, but defeated, by an Earthman—I felt a buoyant confidence. I was prepared to outface him, outwit him and, if I had to, outshout him.
When I came to the doors of the Grand Terrace the guards on duty there practically fell over each other with eagerness to let me by and take away the source of Himself’s anger.
CHAPTER VII
ALTHOUGH IT WAS also an earsplitting bellow, the tone in which the nomenclator the other side of the terrace door announced my name and office was by way of a sigh of relief. Himself, pacing the white-tiled floor and snapping the heads off pot-plants with a swagger stick, halted and spun on his heel to look at me. In the long moment before he decided what first to blister my ears with, I saw that Over-lady Llaq was seated in one of the ornate chairs along the banquette of the terrace—her round, heavily lined face severe above her gorgeous robe of brocade—with three maids-in-waiting on cushions at her feet. Their faces were nervous, although they were trying desperately to smile. I also saw Pwill Heir Apparent.