by Colin Kapp
A door opened and a tall Ahhn nurse began deftly to remove the electrodes taped to his wrists and chest and forehead.
‘Welcome back to the land of the living, Agent Ren. How are you feeling?’
In an agony of apprehension Ren began to explore himself. A wave of immense relief brought an incredulous smile to his lips.
‘I—I’m still complete?’ It was a statement us much as a question.
She looked at him sagely. ‘You’ve lost a bit of weight, but you’ll soon get that back with exercise. You can start getting out of bed today.’
‘You mean I’m healed?’ Ren’s voice ran high.
By way of answer she whipped the sheeting from the bed and left him naked to judge for himself. Deep and unfamiliar scars showed just how extensive had been the surgery, yet the flesh was already whole and firm and without unfamiliar sensation except for a slight tingle at the scar-tissue sites.
‘You were lucky,’ she said. ‘No great internal complications. Your hip bone’s partly plastics now, but I doubt if you’d ever have known if you’d not been told.’
‘But—how long have I been here?’
‘A little over a month.’ She was amused at his consternation. ‘You’ve been kept in medicon-suspension. The healing rate is increased by not having the body constantly in conflict with the psyche. And with a rest from life of that duration, you’ll be amazed at how simple your problems have become.’
Ren had heard of the technique of this medicon-suspension. Computer-aided instrumentation would have taken over control of his subconscious body processes, and his brain would have been allowed to rest. With the computer-enhanced control of his body, a surgeon could promote healing and regrowth at rates otherwise not possible. His body, too, would not have suffered atrophy due to prolonged disuse. The method came from the forefront of medical research on the prime worlds—even there it was available only to the very few who could afford it.
Ren felt good. For the first time in his life he felt completely rested and able to encounter whatever might come with a rational and unclouded approach. As the nurse had said, it was amazing how simple his problems had become. He felt as if he were born anew.
‘Where am I?’ he asked. He knew the answer but wanted confirmation.
‘In Magda, of course.’ The nurse had a way of speaking which reminded him of Zinder.
He watched her carefully. She was an example of pure Ahhn stock, yet fully reconciled to the levels of an outworld technology. The result was impressive. Added to her native attributes were a confidence and a competence which foreshadowed a proud and sane mastery of the future. Ren caught her arm lightly as she reached to disconnect equipment and turned her wrist towards him to see the Magda slave-mark indelibly written in her fine skin. But a greater truth was also written there. Dion-daizan’s wizardry was a far more potent force than magic.
Now he thought about it, his repair and skilled recovery could only have been due to the resources of the man he had set out that night to attack. On all Roget only Dion-daizan could conceivably have installed such a facility. The notion made Ren feel slightly sick with himself. Love thine enemy was an old creed to which Ren had not strongly subscribed. Nurse thine enemy back to health with dexterous and expensive skills was a modern extension of the idea and one that made Ren, the recipient, feel very humble indeed.
Dion could have left the gates of Magda closed and left his enemy to die on the cold cobblestones of Thirdhill. No one would have thought worse of the Imaizfor it. Yet some humanitarian instinct must have prompted Dion to take Ren in and give him a degree of medical attention unobtainable elsewhere in this sector of the galaxy. By this action Dion had revealed his true stature.
Thanks to the effectiveness of his subconscious rehabilitation, Ren felt very little discomfort when he first attempted to get out of the bed. He found his balance lacking, but was able to stand and walk without much difficulty. Considering the extent of the injuries which had brought him down, he knew he had been incredibly lucky.
The Ahhn nurse was patient but firm. After a couple of hours of tests and exercises she declared herself satisfied with his recovery.
‘You may dress in your own clothes now, Agent Ren. Later Dion-daizan wants to see you.’
‘I wish to see him, too,’ said Ren. ‘I owe him a great deal. But for being admitted here, I should probably have died.’
She did not contest the statement, but busied herself in an anteroom dismantling and cleaning the equipment.
‘I take it my attack on Magda was a failure?’
‘Failure!’ Her amusement carried even though he could not see her. ‘You never stood a chance. We had a ring of anti-personnel mines out there that could have destroyed every man you had. And we’ve everything here from laser rifles to high-velocity flame throwers. But you had organized a peasants’ attack, so Dion followed suit. A few things rolled down a hill were all that was necessary to contain you. Take my advice, Agent Ren, and stick to trade. It’ll be a long time before there’s a force on Roget able to better Dion in a fight of any kind.’
Ren dressed, walked to the window and found himself looking out from a position high on Magda’s edge. The view ran straight down the valley that divided Firsthill from Secondhill. Small ships were passing through the shipping lanes to and from the great Aprillo river. From this point of vantage Ren’s trader’s eye could appreciate the vast potential of Anharitte as a landport and as a galactic trading center. In his imagination he rebuilt the already insufficient dock basin and planned a city more modern but just as picturesque and even more colorful on Firsthill.
Almost without knowing it he had begun to identify himself with Anharitte and its inhabitants. Local idiosyncrasies were becoming a secret source of pride to him. It was the one place in the universe he wanted to think of as home. He wondered if Dion-daizan had looked from a similar window and reached a similar respect for this city built on the three hills.
Ren’s resolution was simple now. He was too much in sympathy with Dion’s objectives to oppose the wizard further. He was determined to resign from the Company and remain in Anharitte. This need not affect his future too much. There were freelance trading prospects on Roget whose potential had scarcely been touched. And if these failed he might even seek employment with Dion himself.
His only fear was that the Imaiz might not feel disposed to give him the opportunity to remain. Obviously, from the medical care which had been lavished on him, Dion was not going to exercise his rights over the vanquished and have him executed. But Ren realized he had been a considerable nuisance to the Imaiz and he doubted that Dion would suffer him to remain on the planet.
‘Agent Ren, the Imaiz will see you now.’
The nurse had returned and was waiting to escort him. Somehow the slave mark on her wrist no longer seemed incongruous. He saw it now more as a symbol of application and dedication. Dedication to what? The future,” perhaps. But training her to such a pitch was no ordinary achievement. It was a measure of Dion’s genius. Nobody had ever acquired skills like hers under the coercion of a whip.
He followed her, hoping to get a glimpse of more of Magda’s secrets. He was not disappointed. In the corridor he passed the doors of two more hospital rooms and what appeared to be a biomedical laboratory, all staffed with Ahhn nurses and technicians. The end of the corridor brought him back into what was recognizably part of the old castle. The sudden transition from the aseptically clinical to the dark medieval was only a foretaste of the metamorphoses to come.
Dion’s hospital had been established high in one of the great flanking towers of Magda. Ren descended some stairs and each level he came to presented to him a tantalizing glimpse of some different technological microcosm. He could hear machine rooms and catch occasional snatches of electronic noise or the smell of chemicals, perhaps from a laboratory. The complexity of pipes and power cables accommodated in the stairwell emphasized just how certainly he had underestimated Dion’s potential. Ren was seeing a
technical and industrial complex built in miniature, but having manufacturing scope probably unequaled outside of one of the prime worlds.
As he passed along the lower corridors a suspicion grew in Ren’s mind. His guide was surely giving him a brief tour of selected parts of the establishment. He surmised that its purpose was to provide him with a more realistic idea of what he would be facing should he again take up arms against the House of Magda—it was also a possible prelude to his pending interview with Dion himself.
Ren took the lesson to heart and found a logical extension. These hand-picked and educated slaves of Magda were the new heirs of Anharitte.
They would be the spearhead of a cultural revolution so formidable that the slave system, the societies—and even Di Irons and the City Fathers—were already anachronisms. The marvelous thing about the whole affair was the care that had been taken not to let the old institutions know that they were already dead.
The real question at issue was: how bloody would Dion-daizan allow his revolution to become? Knowledge was power, and Dion seemed to be a specialist in imparting knowledge. Was he also a specialist in controlling this new force he had created? At the moment he was working with a close-knit team and his control of the situation was absolute. But when a wider dissemination of the knowledge came about, as inevitably it must, was Dion big enough still to hold the reins of power?
If he were not, then what would be the cost in terms of loss of life and damage to the essential character of Anharitte?
Magda was built with an outer ward and an inner one containing the great keep. The keep was lower but considerably more massive than the towers of any of the other castles on the three hills. As he crossed the inner ward Ren was interested to note many signs of burning and explosion—these must have been the result of his own recent activities. In a way he was gratified to find that his excursion into improvised weaponry had had such a powerful result. He had obviously stood no chance against Dion-daizan, but had he attacked Di Guaard, for instance, he would probably have won. The notion amused him and he immediately began to feel better about the coming interview.
On the ground floor of the keep he passed through a communications center. In it was a powerful FTL communicator, many times the size of the limited spaceport equipment. The FTL set was probably capable of making direct contact with Terra itself. Suddenly it was no mystery to Ren as to what had happened to the Rance ships. Direct intervention by the forces of the Galactic Federation had stopped them in midflight. Doubtless here was the instrument that had broadcast the alarm.
This consideration placed the galactic standing of the Imaiz in a new light. Only prime world governments could afford to build FTL communications equipment and these units were leased only to those—like space transportation companies—who had good claim to on-line communication links across the distances of space. Dion’s acquisition of such an instrument as this suggested the involvement of outworld planetary governments in the affairs of Magda. Rather than being an adventurer, there was a strong implication that Dion-daizan was an agent for the Galactic Federation itself.
Ren’s previous misjudgment of the situation had been so absolute that he was now incapable of being surprised further. Catuul’s attempts to disrupt the Imaiz’s estates were made pathetic by radio-telephone links extending widely over provincial Magda. On-line data links coupled to a powerful computer registered and monitored every aspect of the estates’ growing and marketing activities. Even the farm-stock prices in the capital city of Gaillen were automatically updated every second.
Dion’s knowledge of the overall picture of Roget’s out-space commerce was also something that would have made Ren scream in his sleep had he known of it previously. All transactions made through the spaceport communications terminal received an immediate printout in Magda. There still existed an on-line access to all the information contained in the spaceport data banks. A further display of commercial and technological prowess was a broad screen for viewing ship movements on Firstwater—the image of every vessel moved across the screen, accompanied by computer-generated comment on the origin, destination, value and nature of its cargo.
Dion-daizan’s chambers were high up in the keep. Ren knocked and was bidden to enter. The chamber into which he came was large and nearly circular, occupying almost the whole area of the level of the keep. The walls from ceiling to floor were lined with books and broken only by narrow windows. Furnishings were sparse and consisted mainly of low wooden stools and the broad desk at which sat the wizard of Anharitte.
‘Come in, Agent Ren—be seated. They tell me your recovery is going well.’
‘Miraculous is the word,’ said Ren, ‘I can’t thank you enough. But for you and whoever did the surgery I would certainly have died.’
‘The surgeon, yes—’ Dion’s eyes twinkled with humor. ‘He’s aged twenty-two and is a native of Anharitte. I bought him as a lad for four barrs. His price was cheap because he wasn’t strong enough to carry wood. Still I think it was I who gained the bargain.’
‘You don’t need to spell it out,’ said Ren, ‘I was convinced of the effectiveness of your policy the first day I saw Zinder in the market.’
‘Yet you continued to oppose me?’
‘I did. The liberalization of Anharitte appeared inconsistent with the principles of Free Trade. As an agent of the Company I was committed to uphold the Free Trade principle.’
Dion-daizan sat back in his chair and interleaved his fingers. Clad in a simple white gown, he might have been the high-priest of a half-hundred religions. But the quiet certainty in his eyes belonged to no fanatic.
‘You’re a man both of perception and principle,’ said Dion. ‘I like that.’ He leaned over to a communicator on the desk. ‘Ask Director Vestevaal to join us.’
‘The director is here?’
‘Certainly he’s. here. He and I have been working while you’ve been sleeping these several weeks. We’ve been hammering out a formula to solve our mutual problems.’
Magno Vestevaal was in fine form. He greeted Ren jubilantly, inquired about his injuries, then turned back to Dion-daizan.
‘Well, Dion, what do you think of him?’
‘Much as before,’ said Dion. ‘After all, our dossier on him was pretty complete from the moment he was assigned to Roget, The only thing we missed was his profound talent for destruction. Since his coming Anharitte has never been quite the same.’
‘What’s going on?’ demanded Ren, looking from the director to the Imaiz and back again.
The director eased himself on to a comer of the Imaiz’s desk and turned to Ren confidentially.
‘It was the ancient problem, Tito. The irresistible force versus the immovable object: Dion’s irresistible climate of social change versus our intractable need for a free port in this sector of the galaxy.’
‘I’m familiar with the problem,’ said Ren guardedly. ‘But it doesn’t have a solution.’
‘It does, Tito—and I’ve found it. A stroke of commercial genius even if I say it myself. I’d like you to meet a new director of the Company—Dion-daizan.’
‘A director?’
‘Dion’s now a major shareholder in the Company and he has been appointed director of sector operations. Don’t you see the beauty of it. What he does with his social revolution is no longer our concern. Dion himself is now committed to the principle of maintaining free trade in Anharitte.’
Ren felt suddenly bitter. ‘I can see where the Company stands to gain, but I never thought Dion would sell out the Ahhn for money—’ He turned to the Imaiz accusingly.
‘Peace, Tito!’ Dion-daizan held up a cautioning hand. ‘Your emotions do you credit, but there’s been no sell-out. Freedom and Free Trade are merely different aspects of the same idea of liberty. To assume that they’re opposed is a political artifice. It’s a fallacy adopted’ by inept governments to secure an income to which they have no moral title. I always intended the free trade principle to apply to Anharitte. As I re
call, it was you who invented the schism.’
‘I?’
‘And think—if I had been genuinely opposed to free trade, do you suppose I would not have removed you as expeditiously as I dispatched the Butcher of Turais?’
‘So you think you can integrate the two?’ asked Ren. Here were new possibilities for his mind to explore. ‘On many levels I can see how it would work—but there could be a few fundamental obstacles. For a start I don’t see where the societies would fit into the pattern.’
‘The societies will have to adapt—but then, they’re very good at adaptation. They already provide a nucleus of social services, which happily can be expanded. And insurance is an untapped field on Roget. I could almost envy the societies their future.’ Dion’s air of authority was pervasive. He spoke as if the future were under his control.
‘Who are you?’ asked Ren suddenly.
Dion-daizan grinned broadly. ‘The wizard of Anharitte, of course.’
‘He’s pulling your leg,’ said Vestevaal. ‘He’s a Terran sociological engineer provided by the Galactic Federation at the request of the planetary government of Roget. His job is to nurse an essentially feudal society through five hundred years of technological backlog—without its blowing apart or losing its identity.’
Ren considered this in silence for a long time, then: ‘When did you find this out, Director?’
‘Unfortunately not till I’d returned from Terra with the Imaiz’s contract already signed in my pocket. Dion actually let me conclude the deal before he admitted that what I was buying would have been given freely anyway. In short, he’s an even bigger rogue than I. It’s a good thing he’s now on our side. We didn’t do so well with him in opposition.’
‘And where does this place me?’ asked Ren finally. ‘With Dion in this theater, the Company scarcely needs an agent here.’
‘My thoughts entirely,’ said Vestevaal. ‘In fact I welcomed the chance to take you to Free Trade Central. I wanted to initiate you into the intrigues necessary to maintain a seat on the council. However, Dion has another proposition. He wants you to remain in Anharitte as his personal assistant.’