“Come along,” said Slyne. He bent and began to cast back and forth. And then he set out, following his amplified senses down the hill.
McBe took a deep breath, and followed after Slyne. The pain in his stomach was only sharp for a time, and then it grew numb. He held his breath as long as he could, and when at last he had to, let it go.
To his real surprise, he did not die.
2
In these days when any man can comfortably dance naked in a snowstorm (Imagine careening down a long and leaning hillside, knee-high in snow, free flakes swirling about you shank to thatch. You kick and scatter the snow, start slides, throw it over your shoulders in scattering double handfuls, hop and caper in the gray and white twilight.) it remains true that the general run of mankind is sufficiently attached to their clothing to forego the opportunity. Theirs be the loss—I am assured by those who know that it is an uncommonly rewarding experience.
Some—simple folk, mostly—plead the need for pockets. If they must carry their trinkets and knickknacks about, even in the midst of an uncommonly rewarding experience, one would think they could wear a pack, or carry a poke, or hang a little bag around their neck. But they say it’s not the same, and pass snowstorms by.
For many, clothing is style. Clothing is taste. Clothing is breeding, intelligence, pursuit, ambition. Place. Clothing defines, letting us know who and what a person is. But one naked man in a snowstorm is much like another, and these people are incapable of baring their anonymity.
And for others, clothing is identity. Without their single well-worn suit, they would have no idea of who they were. Naked in a snowstorm, they know they would be invisible and become lost. There are many people like this, most of them very much in need of an uncommonly rewarding experience, but limited and fettered by their clothing.
Even more limited and fettered by the fact that they have stuck staunchly by the very first suit of clothes they ever tried on. If you are going to be what you wear, you should try more than one style before you settle.
As an experiment, try on something strange and wild. What sweet whirling thoughts unsettle the mind? Think about them. Now, who are you?
* * *
The house was familiar to Villiers though he had never been on Delbalso before. The extended family of Mr. Jules Parini was much given to travel, and wherever they owned houses, which was widely, the houses were cut to this single pattern. They felt it lent a happy continuous thread to their otherwise discontinuous lives.
The house was in a state of disarray. Parini was being forced to leave both it and Delbalso by the Winter-Summer Laws. He had not left thus far because he lacked the money. Don’t think for a minute that he was a bad provider. However, a tuition payment of no less than thirty-five royals—a figure of which Parini was secretly proud—to Miss McBurney’s Justly Famous Seminary and Finishing School on Nashua on behalf of his elder daughter Louisa had left him with minimal resources.
“I didn’t expect to see you,” he said. “I left word.”
“I received it,” said Villiers. “As it happened, I had other cause to visit Delbalso. I stopped on the chance that you had not left. I count myself fortunate to find you still here.”
Jules Parini wore the clothes of a rug salesman. They were far from the first suit he had tried on, but he looked in character as a rug salesman, and it suited him to look in character. Anything else might require subtlety and subtlety was not his. Louisa was at Miss McBurney’s to learn subtlety.
For the most part, he was a rug salesman, ornamental. His real profession was ornamental, too. He was a con man.
The techniques of con men vary. Parini depended on brute force. He was so domineering, so inevitable, so sure, that most of the people he did business with simply let him have his way to be shut of him. He sold rugs in exactly the same way.
“I’m a pragmaticist,” he would say, meaning that he had no education and he was selective about his principles.
“Let’s step out on the patio,” he said. Parini houses always had patios. What they grew in them varied from one planet to the next, but they had a lettuce bed and a patch of fennel when they could.
Parini looked about him, and spied his younger daughter. She was four and her name was Anne. Wondrous is the way of an eagle in the air, and a serpent upon the rock, but even more wondrous is the way of a four-year-old with a room of boxes full and empty. She made a caret, feet on the floor and head in a box. She was wearing rompers. She fished with her right hand and in her left she held a cloth doll by the foot and swung it for balance.
Parini put an arm about her middle and lifted her out of the box and set her on her feet. She immediately took a second grip farther down the doll’s leg with her right hand.
Parini pointed to his vid service. Calling around, knowing what was going on, being in touch—these were the heart of his business. “Keep an eye on the service while we are on the patio,” Parini said.
She said, very definitely, “I’m s’posed to be going to bed.”
“Never you mind that,” her father said sharply. “Just watch the service.”
She said, “But Mommy will be mad at me.”
“I don’t care. Do as I tell you.”
She trembled on the edge of tears, and then didn’t cry, but did continue to tremble.
Parini led Villiers to the patio, the darkling sky open above them. “You have to be firm with children,” he said. “If you want them to do as you say, you have to make them mind from the beginning. . . . I can’t put my finger on it, but something about you is different.”
There was a major difference. Villiers was nearly five years older. Villiers put his finger on the difference.
“Yes,” he said. “I like to think I make a different order of mistake these days.”
In their previous dealings, Villiers had come away poorer in pocket, not unreasonable when you realize that Parini had a living to make. Business, after all, is business, and to Parini life was business.
“Your errors were errors of youth,” said Parini, without irony. Irony was another thing Louisa was supposed to learn from Miss McBurney. “In any case, shall I say it’s good to see you again, Villiers? I’m not sure I approve of your methods or your companions, but nonetheless, you did see to my daughter’s safety. I owe you a favor for that.”
Villiers ceased to stroke his mustache. At times he would tug it on the left, but he kept the trim in balance by occasionally chewing it on the right. “Well, I’m all the more pleased to have found you, then. Do you have the papers for the Trog?”
“Why do you travel with such a chancy creature, Villiers? I’m not sure I’m doing the right thing. If this Trog deserved to travel, I’m sure the Empire would have issued it with proper papers.”
“That’s a considerable argument coming from your lips,” said Villiers. “While I will admit that I don’t understand the Trog, he makes a very comfortable traveling companion. Have you the papers yet?”
Light flashed through the garden with the opening of a door. It was Anne in her blue rompers, still clutching the leg of the cloth doll in both hands.
“Atensi, par,” she said. “Vow tendi a vizeer.”
“Ah, Annie. Come here!”
The little girl approached slowly.
“Now present yourself. Villiers, this is my daughter Anne. Annie, this is Mr. Villiers.”
“Oh!” she said, but her father made nothing of it.
She made a very good dip for a four-year-old, particularly for one whose father has to dress like a rug salesman to feel really comfortable. Villiers returned the honor.
“A good learner, wouldn’t you say? I have no doubt that when the time comes I can pass her into Miss McBurney’s after Louisa. Now, Annie, take Mr. Villiers inside. I’ll be a few minutes, Villiers.” He put his hands together. “Calling around,” he said, locking them, backing away. He opened his hands again, turned and disappeared inside the house.
“Boro Dad!” Annie said pensively. She
didn’t know what it meant exactly. It was an expression she had picked up from the neighbors.
Annie said, “Are you really Mr. Villiers?”
* * *
It had been five years and he was disguised behind a heavy brown mustache, but Miriam Parini recognized Anthony Villiers as soon as her daughter led him into the room. His walk and bearing were still the same.
Annie said, “He says he’s Mr. Villiers.”
“Tony!” she said. “How long have you been in the house?”
She was a pleasant woman with exophthalmic eyes that rescued her from simple plainness. She was devoted to her husband’s interests. The formal charge is Aiding and Abetting.
“Not long,” he said. “We passed before but you were busy and didn’t see us. I certainly wouldn’t have left without saying hello.”
“I should hope not!” she said.
She was standing in an obstacle course of boxes. She had been making decisions. Even at the best of times, housekeeping skills were not her strongest suit, and she tended to let work accumulate until it became visible, or even necessary. Now it was acutely necessary and she was busy.
Annie said, “Is he the one?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Parini.
“Oh!” said Annie.
“Oh, Annie, you should be in bed,” said her mother. “Didn’t I tell you to go to bed!”
Villiers said, “I could put Annie to bed, if that would help.”
“Oh, it would,” said her mother.
“Annie, would you like to hear a bedtime story?”
“Oh, that’s good,” said Mrs. Parini. “That will give me time to straighten a bit, and then we can talk.”
Annie considered the matter. It was possible, after all, that Villiers was an inexpert storyteller, in which case she could be letting herself in for all sorts of tedium.
“I guess,” she said.
“She’s all ready to be tucked in,” her mother said.
When she was tucked, which took yet a few minutes, four-year-olds being what they are and this one having her own thoughts on her mind and her own slow way of exposing them, and when she was settled and shushed, which took one or two minutes more, Villiers told her a story. The story was called “The Hobyahs.”
“Once,” he said, “there was an old man and a woman and a little girl, and they all lived in a house made of hempstalks. Now the old man had a little dog named Turpie; and one night the Hobyahs came and said, ‘Hobyah! Hobyah! Hobyah! Tear down the hempstalks, eat up the old man and woman, and carry off the little girl!’ But little dog Turpie barked so that the Hobyahs ran off.”
That was the beginning. The ending was, “The next night the Hobyahs took down the bag and knocked on the top of it, and said, ‘Look me! Look me!’ and when they opened the bag—the big dog jumped out and ate them all up: so there are no Hobyahs now.”
It was a good story, showing blatant favoritism for little girls above all the other creatures of the earth. Villiers told it well, with considerable animation and a variety of voices. He was very good at “Look me! Look me!”
However, at the conclusion of the story, instead of applauding Villiers or telling him that it was a good story, which indeed she had thought it was, Annie said, “I saw a dog once.”
And she said, “I think they were mean to little dog Turpie.”
But she still had her own thoughts on her mind, and so she said, “When you marry my sister, can I carry flowers?”
“Of course,” said Villiers, ever the gentleman.
She said, “Can I come live with you?”
It is perfectly reasonable that with a father who dressed like a rug salesman, and moreover yelled, she might wish to leave home, but Villiers was finding his sudden promotion to brother-in-law premature at the least.
Gently he said, “Why do you think that your sister and I will marry?”
“Well, she says she’s going to marry you.”
“Oh,” said Villiers. Then, “Did she say when?”
“No.”
“Annie, do you know where Louisa is right now?”
“Uh, she’s away at school.”
“Yes,” said Villiers. “She’s at school to learn. The schools are full of books, Annie, and in those books are everything that people have learned through all the thousands of years of history. In those books it says things that your sister doesn’t know, things like: ‘A man who is vulgar or fallen from social position and much given to travel does not deserve a wife; and the same is true of the man who having a wife and children spends all his time at sports and rarely comes home to his family.’ ”
“Do you have a wife and children?”
“No,” said Villiers. “But I do spend too much time in sport and travel. Once your sister has done her reading, you can be sure that she won’t have any part of me.”
“But those are old books,” said Annie. She hadn’t been around for long, but she had been around long enough to know that whatever things may have been like once, in these days they were very different.
“I like to travel,” she said. “I like to play.”
Villiers shook his head solemnly. “You should be aware then that you compromise your chances of making a successful marriage.”
Hopefully, she said, “I don’t think Louisa reads much.”
She was finally convinced to settle for a firm promise about the flowers, and a conditional promise on living arrangements.
* * *
“I was in such terror when I heard that Louisa had been involved with a Trog,” said Mrs. Parini. “But I was relieved as soon as Pavel said that you were there. I knew you wouldn’t allow harm to come to Louisa.”
“It would have been poor payment for your hospitality,” said Villiers.
“But who knows what a Trog will do?”
“It is certain that I don’t,” said Villiers, “but still we must judge by result, and Louisa did come to no harm. By the way, are you aware of her designs?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, “but don’t speak loudly. Jules doesn’t know.”
“He wouldn’t like the idea?”
“Well, no,” she said. “I’m not sure he’d approve. After all, he has his plans. It wouldn’t do for Louisa to marry just anyone, even you, Tony. But I think she’ll get over it before long. Does she know of your mustache yet?”
“We exchange only random letters and I haven’t mentioned it,” said Villiers. “She’s unlikely to know unless she has it from a third source.”
“She never liked mustaches,” said Mrs. Parini.
“Perhaps I should reconsider mine, then,” said Villiers.
“Don’t,” said Mrs. Parini. “I think your mustache is very becoming.”
Parini returned by way of the patio, bringing with him a trace of cooler air and the sound of a slow and deeply tolling bell. Villiers cocked his head at the sound.
Parini said, “We have unusual neighbors. The bell belongs to a Christian. It is one of a set he rings at peculiar hours and seasons. There is a Monist House just down the street. There used to be gypsies in the neighborhood, but they anticipated the Winter-Summer Laws and left Delbalso months ago.”
His mood was notably improved, which shows what a session of calling around can do for a man who thrives upon it.
“And just as well,” said Mrs. Parini. “They were a bad influence on Annie. She picked up some unfortunate phrases from them.”
Parini was smiling broadly and clearly feeling good. “I have some particular news for you, Villiers. Your little affair on Star Well gave me some leverage on Nicholas Zvegintzov. His sources on Livermore may be able to produce the name you’ve been seeking these past months.”
“Who are his sources?”
“The Red-Headed Bunny and the Black Buck.”
“Well, then I am impressed. I attempted to hire their resources without success. What do you feel the information will be worth?”
“What did you offer for the information?”
“Twenty
royals.”
“Well, that will be a figure to talk from,” Parini said.
“Fine,” said Villiers. “Shall we talk about the papers again?”
“Oh,” said Parini, “I’m sorry to say but they have not yet arrived. I was saying to Miriam last morning that I held greater expectations of seeing the papers than of seeing you. Did I not, Miriam?”
“Oh, yes,” she said.
He continued, “Jack the Hand sent them on their way direct. He swears they will stand any scrutiny. There’s a mail yet to arrive from Duden tonight. I have no doubt it will be here then. There’s a scheduled delivery around peelgrunt.”
“In that case, let me go and return again,” Villiers said. “I have other business here on Delbalso. I’ll return after peelgrunt.”
When Villiers had gone, shown to the door and into the night, Mrs. Parini said behind the closing door, “He’s really quite nice.”
“Villiers?”
“And you always make money from him.”
“Twice.”
“I don’t know why you don’t like him better.”
“Who said I didn’t like him?” said Parini. “He just isn’t our sort of people. You can’t really say so, can you? Now that he’s grown past the stage where he will believe everything you tell him, the best policy is to keep things friendly, but distant. Businesslike.”
“Well, I suppose,” Mrs. Parini said.
“Of course I’m right.”
“Yes, of course,” she said.
“I have news,” he said. “There was good word. It’s definite that Treleaven is not leaving Delbalso. The flam is still codger. We’ll strip him bare and be gone before morning.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful,” she said.
* * *
Night had firm possession of the quiet tree-lined streets as Villiers set out for the closest flitter central. There was a faint underlying chill in the air. There were no pedestrians on the street, and Villiers only saw a single City Car slide by on its overhead rail. People were locking themselves into their houses and tucking up, even though the night was not far advanced.
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