The priestess said they were staged every year.
‘May anything but a shubshub enter for them?’
A study of criminal punishment throughout the galaxy yields much interest. On Globadan, according to the priestess, it was the tradition to release certain more harmless criminals and let them enter for the shubshub races with the promise of liberty if they won. Some tried hard and died of heart-failure on the course. This custom added a spice of humour to the day’s events.
‘Has any human ever won?’ pressed the king.
‘As I said, it would be impossible,’ said the priestess, adding somewhat illogically: ‘Certainly nobody did it in my time. But you must remember that Globadan is out on the rim of the galaxy, and I have been away on missionary work since I was virtually a child. Can’t you imagine just how excited I am to think I’m on my way back there tomorrow?’
‘But nobody could beat a shubshub,’ pressed the king.
‘Nobody could beat a shubshub,’ agreed the priestess.
‘Nobody could beat a shubshub,’ Swap told them.
They had it straight. All three returned to their separate beds. King Horace spent a restless night, Swap slept deeply, Priestess Shawl was gone by morning.
The malady which was never far from the king returned that day and laid him low. He lay and sweated with a body full of cramp, while in his mind he ran in infinitely slow motion through cotton wool mists across an endless plain: in King Horace’s deliriums the time was always out of joint. The elderly nurses had a field day.
When he returned to something like his senses, he insisted that they moved to the space port without delay, catching the next ship home. This they did, the king consequently leaving Upotia in worse condition than when he arrived there.
Swap, who was disgusted by illness in any form, took to his berth and avoided his sovereign. But on the second day of the voyage the king burst in on him.
‘I have solved another link in our problem,’ he exclaimed without preamble.
‘Our problem?’ Swap inquired.
‘Listen, man – I was a fool not to think of it sooner. It was something the Priestess Shawl said – I’ve just been talking it over with the captain. He has confirmed the point …’
He stopped for breath, sitting down abruptly on Swap’s bed and passing a hand over his brow. Then he explained carefully how the priestess had mentioned that Globadan was on the rim of the galaxy: as he knew and the captain confirmed, the lines of space and time stretch thin on the edge of the great star wheels, just as they are condensed towards the hub. This phenomenon was known even before the age of space travel, and christened – I believe I recall the name correctly – the Döppler effect; although an entirely erroneous construction was put on the facts: some improbable affair about the universe expanding, I believe.
However, to travel outwards is to have one’s entire metabolism, physical and psychological, slowed – just as to travel in towards the centre suns is to have it speeded. This effect, since it operates uniformly through all living tissue, is not discernible by human senses. Only instruments can detect the slowing or acceleration.
‘Well?’ asked Swap.
The king sighed and explained condescendingly: ‘Don’t you see? If I could somehow be on Globadan with my present metabolism rate, I should be living faster than the creatures of Globadan: I might even be fast enough to win the shubshub race!’
‘Yes … And if you’d got a good enough refrigerator suit you could mine hydrogen off the sun.’
King Horace flung himself out of Swap’s cabin in disgust – straight into the bony arms of the two elderly nurses, who commenced to lead him back to bed. He cursed them silently and swore to himself he would resolve the oracle’s words sooner or later, for the more baffling that sentence became the stronger became his faith that within it lay his cure.
The nurses tucked him between the sheets and retired to play cards with two elderly ship’s stokers.
‘On Globadan I won the shubshub race,’ King Horace muttered to himself: ‘On Globadan I … zzzzzz.’ He fell into a light doze, snored and woke himself … ‘… won the’ – wait! It is obvious I must win the shubshub race, but how did the oracle win the shubshub race? He was a short, heavy man who could hardly have won a tortoise race.’
The agitation of pondering this fresh aspect of the puzzle propelled him again from his bed. Slipping on a robe over his sleeping suit, he paced up and down the narrow, curving corridor of the first class promenade. However much spaceships have changed between those days and the present, the passengers at least are unaltered: King Horace received frosty looks from the well-dressed women and snorts from the impeccable men, as they eyed his dressing-gown.
‘A fig for the lot of you!’ he thought, but noticing among the array of tailored façades the eldest princeling of one of his neighbouring kings, he decided to retire to a place where he would be less conspicuous, and descended to the tourist class deck.
As he stepped off the escalator, he caught sight of a short, heavy figure in a strange habit … It went into cabin 12. Had it been – could it have been – ?
‘I got to mop here.’
He stepped automatically out of the way of the robot menial who had spoken and took up a position where he could watch cabin 12. He was sure he had just seen the oracle! That figure was almost unmistakable. The passage swarmed with people and children, but they took little notice of the king.
After an hour, when the king was feeling faint with standing, the stocky figure re-emerged from cabin 12 and clomped away down the corridor. It looked like the oracle, although the king had never seen the oracle’s face. Pulses beating madly, he hurried over and tried the door with 12 on it. It was not locked! Daring greatly, he slipped in.
The interior was so bleak he paused astonished. Of course, many of these alien races had odd ideas of comfort, but everything here had been rendered as bleak as possible. Even the foamattress had been stripped from the bunk. Decorations had been removed from the walls, the magnapile rug had been taken off the floor. Yet everything was as neat as a card index, folded and packed and filed out of sight, no easy job in a tourist class cabin.
King Horace shrugged. All he was really interested in was finding his stick. If he could find that, it proved the stocky little man was his oracle. He searched feverishly in a palsy of sick agitation, throwing everything out onto the floor as he worked. But the stick was not hidden. When he opened the guardrobe, there it lay, in full view on a lower shelf. He seized it in ecstasy.
At that exact second he felt the ray gun in the small of his back.
‘Ugh!’ he gulped.
‘Turn around slowly!’ said a voice like a car crash.
The king turned slowly, raising his hands trembling above his head. He was confronted by a ship’s guard whose face made him long to turn back again.
‘I spotted you loitering about in the passage,’ the forces of justice snarled. ‘Now you can come on down to the lock-up.’
‘But please. … I’m King Able Harkon Horace.’
‘Oh, are you? And I’m Queen of all the Fairies. Now just you come on smartly, in case this gun goes off.’ And for emphasis he jabbed the king in the kidney and prodded him fiercely from the cabin.
‘If you require proof of my identity, ask my two elderly nurses – ’
‘I’m the only nurse you got now, bud. Come on!’
The bowels of a spaceship … hot, noisy, oppressive. And most oppressive of all is the brig, which in the SS Potent was situated next to the refuse and sewage disposal plant. King Horace was pushed, fuming, into a narrow cell. Yet as the tall, barred door clicked into place, in his mind an irrelevant item clicked into place, and he was suddenly calm.
He held the whole secret of the oracle!
That mysterious sentence, ‘In Globadan I won the shubshub race,’ was a mystery no longer: but now that he was at liberty to act upon its advice – he was no longer at liberty!
For several hours h
e rested on a narrow bench in his cell, enduring the heat and ignoring the noise. Then a guard appeared, ushering him into a grey steel office to stand before a guard sergeant who had taken charge of the matter and was preparing the evidence. He wrote down without comment the king’s name, and the names of Swap and the elderly nurses who would vouch for him.
‘Very good,’ said the sergeant, ‘ – or perhaps I should say very bad. You understand this is a serious charge brought against you?’
‘Who is bringing it?’
‘The occupant of cabin 12, of course, Klaeber Ap-Eye.’
‘I swear to you, officer, I was not going to steal the stick – I was just seeing if it was there.’
‘A likely tale! A very likely tale! Take his statement, Corporal Binnith.’
Back in his cell, the king’s outlook on life became very gloomy indeed. He resented intensely the indignity and the likely effect on his health. … Not that for one moment he doubted the outcome of this silly business. Directly word got to Swap, he would be freed. And then the ship’s lawyer arrived at the cell.
Lawyer Lymune was a quart; roughly humanoid in shape, he had a swivel head like a gun turret with five different sorts of eyes and two mouths – the latter a great asset in his profession, enabling him in court to address the judge while conferring with his client. He made it clear to King Horace at once that things were not going to be as easy as expected. Swap and the elderly nurses had denied that he was of the Royal House of Harkon.
‘What treachery is this?’ gasped the king. ‘Anyhow – all my credentials are in a strong-box in my cabin.’
‘I took the precaution of looking in your cabin,’ said Lymune, using both mouths for emphasis. ‘And there are no credentials in there now – if there ever have been.’
‘The – the captain!’ said King Horace wildly. ‘I spoke to him. He can’t have been got at! He’ll identify me.’
‘He may possibly identify you as a man who said he was King Horace. Beyond that I fail to see he could possibly go …’
‘Are you meant to be defending or offending me? I’ll have you executed along with the rest of them!’
‘Delusions of grandeur …’ the lawyer commented. ‘Hm – you might plead insanity.’
When, after this unsatisfactory interview, the king was once more left alone, he fell into the most lugubrious of meditations. The familiar sensation of time delayed overcame him, he clutched at his shirt and groaned. He fully recognised that as we are none of us free from Original Sin, so a time comes in even the most sheltered of lives when circumstances arise like an angry sea to overwhelm us.
Until now he had seen himself as an austerely solitary figure, separated from the rest of humankind by reason of his royal blood, and swept by the winds of mortality which blew illness upon him. Now he realised how illusory that figure was; his royalty was in grave doubt, and he was fit enough to stand trial for theft.
What could have induced Swap to turn against him, King Horace could not guess. Finding no particular motive, he could only ascribe the act to a general human baseness.
His melancholy was interrupted by a visitor whom the guards thrust unceremoniously into his cell. He looked up dazedly in the half-light to see a short, clumsy figure standing before him.
‘The oracle!’ he breathed, sitting slowly up.
‘Yes, it is I – Klaeber Ap-Eye. Odd, is it not, that we should meet again like this?’
‘Listen – I meant to do you no harm by ferreting in your cabin. I was only looking for the stick to find if you were the oracle. You’ve got to get me out of here!’
‘That, my friend, is what I came to talk to you about.’ He squatted on his haunches. ‘I have you bottled up in a tight spot, my friend, so you had better listen closely to me, see?’
The king wearily nodded agreement, for though he knew more than the oracle credited him with, he wished to hear what the other had to say. Ap-Eye began quietly by commenting on their both being on the SS Potent together. When he had delivered the oracle to the king, he said, he had not known of the latter’s forthcoming visit to Upotia and had expected him to journey at once to Globadan. Meanwhile, he (Ap-Eye) disappeared on other business and had been – until the king was apprehended in his cabin – on his way back to Earth, expecting to find the kingdom without a king.
‘Why?’ demanded King Horace.
Ap-Eye spread wide hands. ‘I have my own ideas on who should be king …’
‘So! Ah, I see it all now … I was a fool to hope – Then you are just a simple usurper!’ He buried his weary face in his hands.
The other touched his shoulder. ‘I am not simple, my friend. Nor am I the usurper. Nor were you a fool to hope. I am – call me the hand of justice. In my own way, my friend, I am dedicated to unravelling past wrongs.’
‘Never mind past ones: get me out of this present one.’
‘That I cannot do. You should have gone to Globadan, then this would not have happened; when this chance came along – well, my friend, I had to take it. It is more convenient to have you here.’
Feebly, but with dignity, the king rose, towering over this strange creature in the twilight.
‘Then I will force you to help me. For I have discovered what you are – you are a pseudo-man!’
For a space of seconds Ap-Eye crouched where he was. Expelling his breath in a rush he stood up and inquired softly: ‘Well, my friend?’
‘If I called to that guard down there that I had a pseudo-man in here with me, they would take you out and throw you through the airlock immediately.’
‘And merely because man made my kind with more powers than man himself – and then became frightened … Man has never ceased to regret that experiment, has he? It was too successful, eh?’
‘We were lenient – you were not exterminated. But you were confined to Alpha Centauri II, and for you to leave there is to court a death sentence,’ the king said sternly.
‘Don’t talk to me of that dreary world – ’
‘You deny nothing, Ap-Eye. Do I call the guard?’
The other faced the king’s gaze without flinching, letting the light fall on his plain, open countenance: there was little inhuman there. After a moment he chuckled.
‘We’d better come to an agreement, my friend. I’ll visit you again in the morning.’
‘Oh no you don’t. Settle this here and now. Call the guard and tell him who I am, or I’ll call him and tell him who you are!’
‘No.’ He shook his square head in regret. ‘The matter is more complicated than you imagine, my friend. But I’ll be back in the morning.’
‘How do I know?’ Even as the king asked, his eyes met the full force of the other’s: large eyes, implacable and inhuman, yet with something in them never entirely to be found in human eyes. Justice perhaps.
‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ he said huskily, answering himself.
Ap-Eye nodded casually and whistled the guard.
‘By the by,’ he asked as that dignitary was lumbering over, ‘how did you guess – about what I am?’
‘Partly the way your cabin was: disregard of comfort, phenomenal neatness.’
‘I must be more careful!’ Ap-Eye exclaimed.
‘And then I realised – a pseudo-man has the electronic consciousness of an instrument, which would function at one basic rate anywhere in the galaxy. For instance, such a being from Alpha Centauri II could win a shubshub race …’
SS Potent sped on through the eternal interstellar night. Inside the tiny space of its hull, a hundred human beings went through the cosy pretence of day and night, and when their chronometers said day again Ap-Eye returned to the prisoner in the brig.
Not, however, before Lawyer Lymune had called. He announced cheerfully that the court hearing was to follow ship’s rounds, in three hours’ time. The king wearily refused to plead insanity and dismissed the man. He could conduct his own defence; surely they would see he was speaking the truth.
Ap-Eye, when he arri
ved, was brisk, brief and business-like.
‘You’re all settled, my friend,’ he said. ‘I’ve got all your official papers and credentials, of course – I took care of them directly I heard the guards had taken care of you.
‘Now listen, if you just sign this document I have here, my friend, I’ll take you in psi to Globadan. It is not what I intended, but it can’t be helped. You know what I mean by taking you in psi?’
King Horace nodded gravely. The pseudo-men had been created originally without the alluvial brain layer – what was once called ‘the subconscious’. They had been provided instead, with a second upper brain, which was capable of willing the transference into itself of the entire contents of a man’s brain.
‘I know you have strange powers,’ he said submissively.
‘No stranger than some of yours, my friend.’
‘What can man do that you can’t?’ the king asked.
Ap-Eye leant forward and said a word in his ear. King Horace smiled feebly and suggested the oracle consulted Swap about that.
‘It’s for Swap I wish you to sign this,’ the pseudo-man said abruptly, jumping up, clapping his hands briskly and thrusting forward the document under his arm. Wondering what he was going to read, King Horace took it gingerly over to the dim illumination and scanned it.
It declared in florid terms that the undersigned, King Able Harkon Horace, wished to abdicate from the throne of his country, surrendering every claim thereto for himself and his heirs and assigns for ever. He furthermore adjured his court and ministers, as the final prerogative of his reign, that his place as ruler of his aforesaid country be ceded to his companion bearing the distinguishing nomenclature of Swap –
‘So Swap’s behind all this!’ exploded the king.
‘Of course not – I thought you were a judge of character? Swap does what I tell him. Now hurry up and sign.’
‘I can’t – ’
But there was a firm hand on his elbow and the grating voice of Ap-Eye whispering urgently: ‘Sign, you sick fool, sign and let’s be away!’
The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 41