by James Blish
The submarines particularly interested Simon. Some Boadaceous genius, unknown to the rest of the known galaxy, had solved the ornithopter problem—though the wings of the devices were membranous rather than feathered. Hovering, the machines thrummed their wings through a phase shift of a full hundred and eighty degrees, but when they swooped, the wings moved in a horizontal figure eight, lifting with a forward-and-down stroke, and propelling with the back stroke. A long, fishlike tail gave stability, and doubtless had other uses under water.
After the mock battle, the 'thopters landed and the troops withdrew; and then matters took a more sinister turn, manifested by thumping explosions and curls of smoke from inside the Rood palace. Evidently, a search was being made for the supposedly hidden documents Simon was thought to have sold, and it was not going well. The sounds of demolition, and the occasional public hangings, could only mean that a maximum interrogation of the Rood-Prince had failed to produce any papers, or any clues to them.
This Simon regretted, as he did the elimination of Da-Ud. He was not normally so ruthless—an outside expert would have called his workmanship in this affair perilously close to being sloppy—but the confusion caused by the transduction serum, now rapidly rising as it approached term, had prevented him from manipulating every factor as subtly as he had originally hoped to do. Only the grand design was still intact now: It would now be assumed that Boadacea had clumsily betrayed the Exarchy, leaving the Guild no way out but to capitulate utterly to Simon, with whatever additional humiliations he judged might not jeopardize the mission, for Jillith's sake—
Something abruptly cut off his view of the palace. He snatched his binoculars away from his eyes in alarm.
The object that had come between him and the Gulf was a mounted man—or rather, the idiot-headed apteryx the man was sitting on. Simon was surrounded by a ring of them, their lance points aimed at his chest, pennons trailing in the dusty viol grass. Some one of Simon's personae remembered that the function of a pennon is to prevent the lance from running all the way through the body, so that the weapon can be pulled out easily and used again, but Simon had more immediate terrors to engross him.
The pennons bore the device of the Rood-Prince; but every lancer in the force was a vombis.
Simon arose resignedly, with a token snarl intended more for himself than for the impassive protean creatures and their fat birds. He wondered why it had never occurred to him before that the vombis might be as sensitive to him as he was to them.
But the answer to that no longer mattered. Sloppiness was about to win its long-postponed reward.
CHAPTER EIGHT
They put him naked into a wet cell: a narrow closet completely clad in yellowed alabaster, down the sides of which water oozed and beaded all day long, running out into gutters at the edges. He was able to judge when it was day, because there were clouded bull's-eye lenses in each of the four walls which waxed and waned at him with any outside light. By the pattern of its fluctuation he could have figured out to a nicety just where on Boadacea he was, had he been in the least doubt that he was in Druidsfall. The wet cell was a sort of inverted oubliette, thrust high up into Boadacea's air, probably a hypertrophied merlon on one of the towers of the Traitors' Hall. At night, a fifth lens, backed by a sodium vapor lamp, glared down from the ceiling, surrounded by a faint haze of steam where the dew tried to condense on it.
Escape was a useless fantasy. Erected into the sky as it was, the wet cell did not even partake of the usual character of the building's walls, except for one stain in the alabaster which might have been the underside of a child's footprint; otherwise, the veinings were mockingly meaningless. The only exit was down, an orifice through which they had inserted him as though he were being born, and now plugged like the bottom of a stopped toilet. Could he have broken through one of the lenses with his bare hands, he would have found himself naked and torn on the highest point in Druidsfall, with no place to go.
Naked he was. Not only had they pulled all his teeth in search of more poisons, but of course they had also taken his clasp. He hoped they would fool with the clasp—it would make a clean death for everybody—but doubtless they had better sense. As for the teeth, they would regrow if he lived, that was one of the few positive advantages of the transduction serum, but in the meantime his bare jaws ached abominably.
They had missed the antidote, which was in a tiny gel capsule in his left earlobe, masquerading as a sebaceous cyst—left, because it is automatic to neglect that side of a man, as though it were only a mirror image of the examiner's right—and that was some comfort. In a few more days now, the gel would dissolve, he would lose his multiple disguise, and then he would have to confess, but in the meantime he could manage to be content despite the slimy, glaring cold of the cell.
And in the meantime, he practiced making virtues of deficiencies: in this instance, calling upon his only inner resources—the diverting mutterings of his other personalities—and trying to guess what they might once have meant.
Some said:
"But I mean, like, you know—"
"Wheah they goin'?"
"Yeah."
"Led's gehdahda heah—he-he-he!"
"Wheah?"
"So anyway, so uh."
Others:
"It's hard not to recognize a pigeon."
"But Mother's birthday is July 20."
"So he knew that the inevitable might happen—"
"It made my scalp creak and my blood curl."
"Where do you get those crazy ideas?"
And others:
"Acquit Socrates."
"Back when she was sane she was married to a window washer."
"I don't know what you've got under your skirt, but it's wearing white socks."
"And then she made a noise like a spindizzy going sour."
And others:
"Pepe Satan, pepe Satan aleppe."
"Why, so might any man."
"EVACUATE MARS!"
"And then she sez to me, she sez—"
. . . if he would abandon his mind to it."
"With all of love."
And . . . but at that point the plug began to unscrew,
and from the spargers above him which formerly had kept the dampness running, a heavy gas began to curl. They had tired of waiting for him to weary of himself, and the second phase of his questioning was about to begin.
CHAPTER NINE
They questioned him, dressed in a hospital gown so worn that it was more starch than fabric, in the Traitor-in-Chief's private office to begin with—a deceptively bluff, hearty, leather-and-piperacks sort of room, which might have been reassuring to a novice. There were only two of them: Valkol in his usual abah, and the "slave," now dressed as a Charioteer of the high blood. It was a curious choice of costume, since Charioteers were supposed to be free, leaving it uncertain which was truly master and which slave; Simon did not think it could have been Valkol's idea. The vombis, he also noticed, still had not bothered to change its face from the one it had been wearing aboard the Karas, implying an utter confidence which Simon could only hope would prove to be unjustified.
Noting the direction of his glance, Valkol said, "I asked this gentleman to join me to assure you, should you be in any doubt, that this interview is serious. I presume you know who he is."
"I don't know who 'he' is," Simon said, with the faintest of emphasis. "But it must be representing the Green Ex-arch, since it's a vombis."
The Traitor-in-Chief's lips whitened slightly. Aha, then he hadn't known that! "Prove it," he said.
"My dear Valkol," the creature interposed. "Pray don't let him distract us over trifles. Such a thing could not be proved without the most elaborate of laboratory tests, as we all know. And the accusation shows what we wish to know, i.e., that he is aware of who I am—otherwise, why try to make such an inflammatory charge?"
"Your master's voice," Simon said. "Let us by all means proceed—this gown is c
hilly."
"This gentleman," Valkol said, exactly as if he had not heard any of the four preceding speeches, "is Chag Sharanee of the Exarchy. Not from the Embassy, but directly from the Court—he is His Majesty's Deputy Fomentor."
"Appropriate," Simon murmured.
"We know you now style yourself 'Simon de Kuyl,' but what is more to the point, that you claim yourself the Traitor-in-Chief of High Earth. Documents now in my possession persuade me that if you are not in fact that officer, you are so close to being he as makes no difference. Possibly the man you replaced, the amateur with the absurd belt of poison shells, was actually he. In any event, you are the man we want."
"Flattering of you."
"Not at all," said Valkol the Polite. "We simply want the remainder of those documents, for which we paid. Where are they?"
"I sold them to the Rood-Prince."
"He had them not, nor could he be persuaded to remember any such transaction."
"Of course not," Simon said with a smile. "I sold them for twenty riyals; do you think the Rood-Prince would recall any such piddling exchange? I appeared as a bookseller, and sold them to his librarian. I suppose you burned the library—barbarians always do."
Valkol looked at the vombis. "The price agrees with the, uh, testimony of Da-Ud tam Altair. Do you think—?"
"It is possible. But we should take no chances; e.g., such a search would be time consuming."
The glitter in Valkol's eyes grew brighter and colder. "True. Perhaps the quickest course would be to give him over to the Sodality."
Simon snorted. The Sodality was a lay organization to which Guilds classically entrusted certain functions the Guild lacked time and manpower to undertake, chiefly crude physical torture.
"If I'm really who you think I am," he said, "such a course would win you nothing but an unattractive cadaver—not even suitable for masonry repair."
"True," Valkol said reluctantly. "I don't suppose you could be induced—politely—to deal fairly with us at this late date? After all, we did pay for the documents in question, and not any mere twenty riyals."
"I haven't the money yet."
"Naturally not, since the unfortunate Da-Ud was held here with it until we decided he no longer had any use for it. However, if upon the proper oaths—"
"High Earth is the oldest oath-breaker of them all," the Fomentor said. "We—viz., the Exarchy—have no more time for such trials. The question must be put."
"So it would seem. Though I hate to handle a colleague thus—"
"You fear High Earth," the vombis said. "My dear Valkol, may I remind you—"
"Yes, yes, the Exarch's guarantee—I know all that," Valkol snapped, to Simon's surprise. "Nevertheless—Mr. De Kuyl, are you sure we have no recourse but to send you to the Babble Room?"
"Why not?" Simon said. "I rather enjoy hearing myself think. In fact, that's what I was doing when your guards interrupted me."
CHAPTER TEN
Simon was, naturally, far from feeling all the bravado he had voiced, but he had no choice left but to trust to the transduction serum, which now had his mind on the shuddering, giddy verge of depriving all three of them of what they each most wanted. Only Simon, of course, could know this; and only he could also know something much worse—that insofar as his increasingly distorted time sense could calculate, the antidote was due to be released into his blood stream at best in another six hours, at worst within only a few minutes. After that, the Exarchy's creature would be the only victor—and the only survivor.
And when he saw the Guild's toposcope laboratory, he wondered if even the serum would be enough to protect him. There was nothing in the least outmoded about it; Simon had never encountered it’s like even on High Earth. Exarchy equipment, all too probably.
Nor did the apparatus disappoint him. It drove directly down into his subconscious with the resistless unconcern of a spike penetrating a toy balloon. Immediately, a set of loudspeakers above his supine body burst into multi-voiced life:
"Is this some trick? No one but Berentz had a translation permit—"
"Now the overdrive my-other must woo and win me—" "Wie schaffen Sie es, solche Entfernungen bei Unterlichtgeschwindigkeit zurueckzulegen?"
"REMEMBER THOR FIVE!"
"Pok. Pok. Pok."
"We're so tired of wading in blood, so tired of drinking blood, so tired of dreaming about blood—"
The last voice rose to a scream, and all the loudspeakers cut off abruptly. Valkol's face, baffled but not yet worried, hovered over Simon's, peering into his eyes.
"We're not going to get anything out of that," he told some invisible technician. "You must have gone too deep; those are the archetypes you're getting, obviously."
"Nonsense." The voice was the Fomentor's. "The archetypes sound nothing like that—for which you should be grateful. In any event, we have barely gone beneath the surface of the cortex; see for yourself."
Valkol's face withdrew. "Hmm. Well, something's wrong. Maybe your probe is too broad. Try it again."
The spike drove home, and the loudspeakers resumed their mixed chorus.
"Nausentampen. Eddettompic. Berobsilom. Aimkaksetchoc. Sanbetogmow—"
"Dites-lui que nous lui ordonnons de revenir, en vertu de la Loi du Grand Tout."
"Perhaps he should swear by another country." "Can't Mommy ladder spaceship think for bye-bye-see-you two windy Daddy bottle seconds straight—" "Nansima macamba yonso cakosilisa."
"Stars don't have points. They're round, like balls." The sound clicked off again. Valkol said fretfully:
"He can't be resisting. You've got to be doing something wrong, that's all."
Though the operative part of his statement was untrue, it was apparently also inarguable to the Fomentor. There was quite a long silence, broken only occasionally by small hums and clinks.
While he waited, Simon suddenly felt the beginnings of a slow sense of relief in his left earlobe, as though a tiny but unnatural pressure he had long learned to live with had decided to give way—precisely, in fact, like the opening of a cyst.
That was the end. Now he had but fifteen minutes more in which the toposcope would continue to vomit forth its confusion—its steadily diminishing confusion—and only an hour before even his physical appearance would reorganize, though that would no longer matter in the least.
It was time to exercise the last option—now, before the probe could bypass his cortex and again prevent him
from speaking his own, fully conscious mind. He said: "Never mind, Valkol. I'll give you what you want." "What? By Gro, I'm not going to give you—"
"You don't have to give me anything; I'm not selling anything. You see for yourself that you can't get to the material with that machine. Nor with any other like it, I may add. But I exercise my option to turn my coat, under Guild laws; that gives me safe conduct, and that's sufficient."
"No," the Fomentor's voice said. "It is incredible—he is in no pain and has frustrated the machine; why should he yield? Besides, the secret of his resistance—"
"Hush," Valkol said. "I am moved to ask if you are a vombis; doubtless, the machine would tell us that much. Mr. De Kuyl, I respect the option, but I am not convinced yet. The motive, please?"
"High Earth is not enough," Simon said. "Remember Ezra-Tse? 'The last temptation is the final treason . . . to do the right thing for the wrong reason.' I would rather deal fairly with you, and then begin the long task of becoming honest with myself. But with you only, Valkol—not the Exarchy. I sold the Green Exarch nothing."
"I see. A most interesting arrangement, I agree. What will you require?"
"Perhaps three hours to get myself unscrambled from the effects of fighting your examination. Then I'll dictate the missing material. At the moment it's quite inaccessible."
"I believe that, too," Valkol said ruefully. "Very well—" "It is not very well," the vombis said, almost squalling. "The arrangement is a complete violation of—"<
br />
Valkol turned and looked at the creature so hard that it stopped talking of its own accord. Suddenly Simon was sure Valkol no longer needed tests to make up his mind what the Fomentor was.
"I would not expect you to understand it," Valkol said in a very soft voice indeed. "It is a matter of style."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Simon was moved to a comfortable apartment and left alone, for well more than the three hours he had asked for. By that time, his bodily reorganization was complete, though it would take at least a day for all the residual mental effects of the serum to vanish. When the Traitor-in-Chief finally admitted himself to the apartment, he made no attempt to disguise either his amazement or his admiration.
"The poison man! High Earth is still a world of miracles. Would it be fair to ask what you did with your, uh, overpopulated associate?"
"I disposed of him," Simon said. "We have traitors enough already. There is your document; I wrote it out by hand, but you can have toposcope confirmation whenever you like now."
"As soon as my technicians master the new equipment —we shot the monster, of course, though I don't doubt the Exarch will resent it."
"When you see the rest of the material, you may not care what the Exarch thinks," Simon said. "You will find that I've brought you a high alliance—though it was Gro's own horns getting it to you."
"I had begun to suspect as much. Mr. De Kuyl—I must assume you are still he, for sanity's sake—that act of surrender was the most elegant gesture I have ever seen. That alone convinced me that you were indeed the Traitor-in-Chief of High Earth, and no other."
"Why, so I was," Simon said. "But if you will excuse me now, I think I am about to become somebody else."