by James Blish
So did their style of dealing. Simon attended upon the planet's Traitor-in-Chief with all due promptness, wearing the clasp which showed him to be a brother, though an outworlder, and made himself and his errand known with almost complete truthfulness—certainly much more than custom would have demanded. His opposite number, Valkol "the Polite," a portly, jowly man in a black abah decorated only with the clasp, with a kindly and humorous expression into which were set eyes like two bites of an iceberg, turned him out of the Guildhall with only as much courtesy as fraternal protocol strictly required—that is, twelve days to get off the planet.
Thus far, at least, the vombis had proven to be right about the Boadaceans, to the letter. The spirit remained to be tested.
Simon found an inn in which to lick his wounds and prepare for departure, as was permitted. Of course he had no intention of leaving; he was simply preparing to go to ground. Nevertheless, he had wounds to lick: After only four clockless days on Boadacea, he had already been driven into changing his residence, his methods, and his identity. It was a humiliating beginning.
CHAPTER THREE
Methods next. Listening automatically for the first sound of possible interruption, Simon emptied his little poisons into the catch basin in his new room, and ironically watched the wisps of wine-colored smoke rise from the corroded maw of the drain. He was sorry to see them go; they were old, though venomous, friends; but a man's methods can be as telltale as a thumbprint, and now it would have to be assumed that Valkol had sent for, and would soon receive, some sort of dossier on Simon. The dossier would be wrong, but there was no predicting wherein it would be wrong; hence, out with the poisons, and all their cousins among Simon's apparatus. When assuming a new identity, the very first rule is: Strip!
The almost worn-away maker's legend on the catch basin read: Julius, Boadacea. Things made on this planet were usually labelled that generally, as though any place in the world were like any other, but this was both true and not true. Druidsfall was unmistakably Boadacean, but as the central city of the traitors it was also distinctively itself. Those buildings with their curtain walls of petrified corpses, for instance . . .
Luckily, custom now allowed Simon to stay clear of those grim monuments, now that the first, disastrous formalities were over, and seek his own bed and breakfast. In the old, disinterestedly friendly inns of Druidsfall, the anonymous thumps and foreign outcries of the transients —in death, love, or trade—are said to make the regular lodgers start in their beds with their resident guilts. Of course all inns are like that, but nevertheless, that was why traitors liked to quarter there rather than in the Traitors' Halls run by the fraternity: It guaranteed them privacy, and at the same time helped them to feel alive. There is undoubtedly something inhibiting about trying to deal within walls pieced together of broken stone limbs, heads, and torsos, some of which had clearly been alive when the foundations were being dug and the scaffolding bolted together.
Thus, here in The Skopolamander, Simon could comfortably await his next contact, now that he had dumped his poisons. This—if there was to be one—would of course have to come about before the end of his immunity period. "Quarantine" was perhaps a more appropriate term.
No, the immunity was real, however limited, for as a traitor to High Earth he had special status. High Earth, the Boadaceans thought, was not necessarily Old Earth—but not necessarily not, either. For the rest of his twelve days, Simon would not be killed out of sheer conservatism, at least, though nobody official would attempt to deal with him, either.
He had eight of those days still to run—a dull prospect, since he had already completed every possible preliminary to going to ground, and spiced only by the fact that he had yet to figure out how long a day might officially be. The rhythms of Flos Campi offered no reliable clues his Sol-tuned diurnalism could read. At the moment there was nothing lighting the window of the room but an aurora, looking like a curtain of orange and hazy blue fire licking upward along a bone trestle. Radio around here, and probably even electrical power, must be knocked out as much as half the time, with so much stray magnetism washing back and forth. That might prove useful; he filed the thought.
In the meantime, there went the last of the poisons. Simon poured water from an amphora into the catch basin, which promptly hissed like a dragon just out of the egg and blurted a mushroom of cold blue steam which made him cough. Careful! he thought; acid after water, never water after acid—I am forgetting the most elementary lessons. I should have used wine. Time for a drink, in Gro's name!
He caught up his cloak and went out, not bothering to lock the door. He had nothing worth stealing but his honor, which was in his right hip pocket. Oh, and of course, High Earth—that was in his left. Besides, Boadacea was rich: One could hardly turn around without knocking over some heap of treasures, artifacts of a millennium which nobody had sorted for a century, or even wanted to be bothered to sort. Nobody would think to steal from a poor traitor any object smaller than a king, or, preferably, a planet.
In the tavern below, Simon was joined at once by a playwoman.
"Are you buying tonight, excellence?"
"Why not?" And in fact he was glad to see her. She was blond and ample, a relief from the sketchy women of the Respectables, whom fashion made look as though they suffered from some nervous disease that robbed them of appetite. Besides, she would exempt him from the normal sort of Boadacean polite conversation, which consisted chiefly of elaborately involuted jokes at which it was considered gauche to laugh. The whole style of Boadacean conversation, for that matter, was intended to be ignored; gambits were a high art, but end games were a lost one. Simon sighed and signalled for beakers.
"You wear the traitors' clasp," she said, sitting across from him, "but not much tree gold. Have you come to sell us High Earth?"
Simon did not even blink; he knew the query to be a standard opening with any outworlder of his profession. "Perhaps. But I'm not on business at the moment." "Of course not," the girl said gravely, her fingers playing continuously with a sort of rosary tasselled with two silver phalluses. "Yet I hope you prosper. My half-brother is a traitor, but he can find only small secrets to sell—how to make bombs, and the like. It's a thin life; I prefer mine."
"Perhaps he should swear by another country."
"Oh, his country is well worth selling, but his custom is poor. Neither buyer nor seller trusts him very far—a matter of style, I suppose. He'll probably wind up betraying some colony for a thousand beans and a fishball."
"You dislike the man—or is it the trade?" Simon said. "It seems not unlike your own, after all: One sells something one never really owned, and yet one still has it when the transaction is over, as long as both parties keep silent."
"You dislike women," the girl said, tranquilly, as a simple observation, not a challenge. "But all things are loans —not just chastity and trust. Why be miserly? To 'possess' wealth is as illusory as to 'possess' honor or a woman, and much less gratifying. Spending is better than saving."
"But there are rank orders in all things, too," Simon said, lighting a kief stick. He was intrigued in spite of himself. Hedonism was the commonest of philosophies in the civilized galaxy, but it was piquant to hear a playwoman trotting out the moldy cliches with such fierce solemnity. "Otherwise we should never know the good from the bad, or care."
"Do you like boys?"
"No, that's not one of my tastes. Ah, you will say that I don't condemn boy-lovers, and that values are in the end only preferences? I think not. In morals, empathy enters in, eventually."
"So, you wouldn't corrupt children, and torture revolts you. But you were made that way. Some men are not so handicapped. I meet them now and then." The hand holding the looped beads made a small, unconscious gesture of revulsion.
"I think they are the handicapped, not I—most planets hang their moral imbeciles, sooner or later. But what about treason? You didn't answer that question."
"My throat was
dry . . . thank you. Treason, well—it's an art; hence, again, a domain of taste or preference. Style is everything; that's why my half-brother is so inept. If tastes changed he might prosper, as I might had I been born with blue hair."
"You could dye it."
"What, like the Respectables?" She laughed, briefly but unaffectedly. "I am what I am; disguises don't become me. Skills, yes—those are another matter. I'll show you, when you like. But no masks."
Skills can betray you too, Simon thought, remembering that moment at the Traitors' Guild when his proud sash of poison shells, offered in service, had lost him in an instant every inch of altitude over the local professionals that he had hoped to trade on. But he only said again, "Why not?" It would be as good a way as any to wile away the time; and once his immunity had expired, he could never again trust a playwoman on Boadacea.
She proved, indeed, very skillful, and the time passed . . . but the irregular pseudo-days—the clock in the tavern was on a different time than the one in his room, and neither even faintly agreed with his High Earth-based chronometer and metabolism—betrayed him. He awoke one morning/noon/night to find the girl turning slowly black beside him, in the last embrace of a fungal toxin he would have reserved for the Emperor of Canes Venatici, or the worst criminal in human history.
His immunity period was up, and war had been declared. He had been notified that if he still wanted to sell High Earth, he would first have to show his skill at staying alive against the whole cold malice of all the Traitors of Boadacea.
CHAPTER FOUR
How the Exarchy or the prehuman interstellar empires were held together is unknown, but in human history, at least, the bureaucratic problems of managing large stellar holdings from a single center of government have proven to be insoluble. Neither the ultraphone nor the Imaginary Drive permitted the extension of human hegemony over a radius of more than ten light-years, a fact the colonies outside this sphere were not slow to appreciate and put to use. Luckily, a roughly uniform interstellar economy was maintained by tacit agreement after the political separations, since it was not widely recognized then —or now—that this much older invention can enforce a more thorough rule than can any personal or party autocracy.
In this connection, one often hears laymen ask, Why do the various worlds and nations employ professional traitors when it is known that they are traitors? Why would they confide to the traitors any secret valuable enough to be sold to a third party? The answer is the same, and the weapon is the same: money. The traitors act as brokers in a continuous interstellar bourse on which each planet seeks to gain a financial advantage over the other. Thus the novice should not imagine that any secret put into his hands is exactly what it is said to be, particularly when its primary value purports to be military. He should also be wary of the ruler who seeks to subvert him into personal loyalty, which tears the economic tissue and hence should be left in the domain of untrained persons. For the professional, loyalty is a tool, not a value.
The typical layman's question cited above should of course never be answered.
—"Lord Gro": The Discourses, Bk. I, Ch. LVII
Simon holed up quickly and drastically, beginning with a shot of transduction serum—an almost insanely dangerous expedient, for the stuff not only altered his appearance but his very heredity, leaving his head humming with false memories and false traces of character, derived from the unknowable donors of the serum, which conflicted not only with his purposes but even with his tastes and motives.
Under interrogation, he would break down into a babbling crowd of random voices, as bafflingly scrambled as his karyotypes, blood groups, and retina- and fingerprints. To the eye, his gross physical appearance would be a vague, characterless blur of many roles—some of them derived from the DNA of persons who had died a hundred years ago and at least that many parsecs away in space.
But unless he got the antiserum within fifteen High Earth days, he would forget first his mission, then his skills, and at last his very identity. Nevertheless, he judged that the risk had to be taken; for effete though some of the local traitors (always excepting Valkol the Polite) seemed to be, they were obviously quite capable of penetrating any lesser cover—and equally obviously, they meant business.
The next problem was how to complete the mission it-self—it would not be enough just to stay alive. High Earth did not petrify failed traitors and mortar them into walls, but it had its own ways of showing displeasure. Moreover, Simon felt to High Earth a certain obligation—not loyalty, Gro forbid, but, well, call it professional pride—which would not let him be retired from the field by a backwater like Boadacea. Besides, finally, he had old reasons for hating the Exarchy; and hatred, unaccountably, Gro had forgotten to forbid.
No: It was not up to Simon to escape the Boadaceans. He had come here to gull them, whatever they might currently think of such a project.
And therein lay the difficulty; for Boadacea, beyond all other colony worlds, had fallen into a kind of autumn cannibalism. In defiance of that saying of Ezra-Tse, the edge was attempting to eat the center. It was this worship of independence, or rather, of autonomy, which had not only made treason respectable, but had come nigh on to ennobling it . . . and was now imperceptibly emasculating it, like the statues one saw everywhere in Druidsfall which had been defaced and sexually mutilated by the grey disease of time and the weather.
Today, though all the Boadaceans proper were colonials in ancestry, they were snobs about their planet's prehuman history, as though they had not nearly exterminated the aborigines themselves but were their inheritors. The few shambling Charioteers who still lived stumbled through the streets of Druidsfall loaded with ritual honors, carefully shorn of real power but ostentatiously deferred to on the slightest occasion which might be noticed by anyone from High Earth. In the meantime, the Boadaceans sold each other out with delicate enthusiasm, but against High Earth—which was not necessarily Old Earth, but not necessarily not, either—all gates were formally locked.
Formally only, Simon and High Earth were sure, for the hunger of treason, like lechery, tends to grow with what it feeds on, and to lose discrimination in the process. Boadacea, like all forbidden fruits, should be ripe for the plucking, for the man with the proper key to its neglected garden.
The key that Simon had brought with him, that enormous bribe which should have unlocked Valkol the Polite like a child's bank, was temporarily useless. He would have to forge another, with whatever crude tools could be made to fall to hand. The only one accessible to Simon at the moment was the dead playwoman's gently despised half-brother.
His name, Simon had found out from her easily enough, was currently Da-Ud tam Altair, and he was Court Traitor to a small religious principate on the Gulf of the Rood, on the InContinent, half the world away from Druidsfall. Remembering what the vombis aboard the Karas had said about the library of the Rood-Prince, Simon again assumed the robes of a worn-out Sagittarian divine in search of a patron, confident that his face, voice, stance, and manner were otherwise utterly unlike his shipboard persona, and boarded the flyer to the InContinent prepared to enjoy the trip.
There was much to enjoy. Boadacea was a good-sized world, nearly ten thousand miles in diameter, and it was rich in more than money. Ages of weathering and vulcanism had broken it into many ecological enclaves, further diversified by the point-by-point uniqueness of climate contributed to each by the rhythmic inconstancies of Flos Campi and the fixity of Flos Campi's companion sun among the other fixed stars—and by the customs and colors of many waves of pioneers who had settled in those enclaves and sought to re-establish their private visions of the earthly paradise. It was an entirely beautiful world, could one but forget one's personal troubles long enough to really look at it; and the flyer flew low and slow, a procedure Simon approved despite the urgency the transduction serum was imposing upon the back of his mind.
Once landed by the Gulf, however, Simon again changed his plans and his outermost dis
guise; for inquiry revealed that one of the duties of the Court Traitor here was that of singing the Rood-Prince to sleep to the accompaniment of the sareh, a sort of gleeman's harp—actually a Charioteer instrument, ill-adapted to human fingers, which Da-Ud played worse than most of the Boadaceans who affected it. Simon therefore appeared at the vaguely bird-shaped palace of the Rood-Prince in the guise of a ballad merchant, and as such was enthusiastically received, and invited to catalogue the library; Da-Ud, the Rood-Prince said, would help him, at least with the music.
Simon was promptly able to sell Da-Ud twelve-and-a-tilly of ancient High Earth songs Simon had made up overnight—faking folk songs is not much of a talent—and had Da-Ud's confidence within an hour; it was as easy as giving Turkish Delight to a baby. He cinched the matter by throwing in free lessons on the traditional way to sing them.
After the last mangled chord had died, Simon asked Da-Ud quietly:
"By the way . . . (well sung, excellence) . . . did you know that the Guild has murdered your half-sister?"
Da-Ud dropped the imitation Charioteer harp with a noise like a spring-driven toy coming unwound.
"Jillith? But she was only a playwoman! Why, in Gro's name—
Then Da-Ud caught himself and stared at Simon with sudden, belated suspicion. Simon looked back, waiting.
"Who told you that? Damn you—are you a Torturer? I'm not—I've done nothing to merit--
"I'm not a Torturer, and nobody told me," Simon said. "She died in my bed, as a warning to me."
He removed his clasp from under the shoulder of his cloak and clicked it. The little machine flowered briefly into a dazzling actinic glare, and then closed again. While Da-Ud was still covering his streaming eyes, Simon said softly: