Wolfling

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “The High-born is quite right,” said Adok I. He had a deep, flat, emotionless voice. “Award Commissions are usually given to those who are not Starkien by birth and training. In such cases a substitute is always provided.”

  “A substitute is, is he?” said Jim. “In that case, what do they call you officially, in the records?”

  “Officially, as I said, I’m you,” answered Adok I.

  “Officially, my name is James Keil. I am a Wolfling from a world that calls itself”—the Starkien’s tongue stumbled a little with the pronunciation of the unknown word—“Earth.”

  “I thought you told me that you were Adok I,” Jim said. The extreme seriousness of the Starkien was tempting him to smile, but an instinct kept the smile hidden within him and off his face.

  “Unofficially, to you, Jim,” said the other man, “I am Adok I. Your intimates, like the High-born lady here, may call me either Adok I or Jim Keil—it makes no difference.”

  “I’ll call you Adok I,” said Ro. “And you can call me Ro.”

  “I’ll do that, Ro,” said Adok I in a tone of voice as if he were repeating an order he had just been given, and affirming his willingness and ability to execute it.

  Jim shook his head, amused and intrigued by the combination of characteristics the Starkien was exhibiting. The man seemed humorless to the point of woodenness, obedient to the point of servility, and in conjunction with these things, evidently considered it the best possible manners to address Jim by the familiar short form of Jim’s first name. Moreover, beyond this, Adok I seemed to assume a strange mixture of superiority and inferiority toward Jim at the same time. Clearly the Starkien did not for a moment appear to consider that Jim had the capabilities to perform the tasks that Adok I was himself fitted to perform. On the other hand, plainly he considered himself completely a creature of Jim’s will—at Jim’s beck and call. However, thought Jim abruptly, investigation of Adok’s character could come later. There was a more immediate question.

  “Well,” Jim said, “now that I’ve got you, what am I supposed to do with you?”

  “We should begin with my doing things with you, Jim,” said Adok I. He looked over at Ro. “If Ro will excuse us, I should immediately begin instructing you in the necessities and duties of being a unit officer—over and above those in which I can substitute for you.”

  “I’ve got to get back to my pets anyway,” said Ro. “I’ll come and find you later, Jim.”

  She touched him lightly on the arm and disappeared.

  “All right, Adok,” said Jim, turning back to the Starkien, “what do we do first?”

  “We should begin with a visit to the quarters of your unit,” Adok said. “If you will allow me to show you the way, Jim—”

  “Go ahead,” said Jim, and immediately found himself with Adok in what seemed to be an enormous, windowless, high-ceilinged room. In spite of all that space, however, something within Jim felt the sensation of closeness, an oppression as of confinement.

  “Where are we?” he asked Adok, for the polished floor stretching away from them was empty in all directions for large distances, except for a few distant moving figures almost lost in the dimness and distance.

  “We’re at the parade ground.” Adok’s head came around to gaze at Jim with the first faint sign of emotion the Starkien had yet shown. After a second Jim realized Adok was registering surprise. “We are also below ground.” Adok gave their depth in Empire terms, which translated to something like half a mile down from the surface of the planet. “Does it disturb you? It disturbs the High-born, but only a few of the servants are disturbed by it.”

  “No, I’m not disturbed,” Jim said. “I felt something, though.”

  “If you are disturbed, you should admit it to me,” said Adok. “If you are ever afraid or disturbed, you should tell me, even if you tell no one else. No one else but I need to know. But it is necessary for me to know when you are emotionally weakened, so that I can take measures to protect you from such weakness and hide the fact from others.”

  Jim chuckled, and the sound echoed eerily away into the distances around them. It was an odd moment and place for humor, but Jim was finding Adok I strangely likeable.

  “Don’t worry,” he told the Starkien. “I don’t usually feel emotionally weakened. But if I ever do, I promise to let you know.”

  “Good,” said Adok seriously. “Now I brought you first to this point on the parade ground because one of the things I cannot do for you is stand certain parades with the unit. At some parades we both must be present. Now that you have been brought to this spot, you can instantly return to it on your own in case something may have made you a little late in showing up for the parade. Now, let’s go to the armory, and we’ll draw your weapons and accouterments while you memorize that destination also.”

  The next room they appeared in was more brightly lit and a very great deal smaller than the parade ground. It was a long narrow room, both long walls of which seemed to be divided into compartments holding the leather straps and the bands of silver stuff such as those which encircled the legs, arms, and body of Adok, as well as those of the Starkiens in the room with the Emperor and Vhotan. Adok led Jim directly to several of the compartments and collected an assortment of the straps and silver bands. He did not, however, suggest that Jim put them on at this time. Instead, Adok himself carried them, while he transported Jim in quick succession to the barracks, or living quarters, of the Starkiens in Jim’s unit—these were suites of rooms not unlike those that Jim himself had been given, except that they were smaller and in this below-ground location; a gymnasium; a dining hall; a sort of underground park, with grass and trees flourishing under an artificial sun; and finally to a sort of amusement and shopping center, where many Starkiens mingled with many times more their own number of other servants of the lesser races.

  Finally Adok concluded the quick shift about these various locations by bringing Jim to a large room fitted out somewhat like the room in which Jim had encountered the Emperor and Vhotan. Not only was it large and well furnished, but Jim instantly felt a lightening of the sensation within him that had warned him before that he was below ground. Apparently this room, whatever it was, was above ground.

  “Who—” he began to Adok, and then found his question answered before he could enunciate it. The olive-skinned man called Melness materialized in front of them and looked, not at Jim, but at Adok.

  “I have taken him around the places concerned with his unit,” Adok said to the Master Servant of the Throne World, “and brought him here finally to you, as you asked, Melness.”

  “Good,” said Melness in his sharp tenor. His black eyes flicked to Jim’s face. “The sponsorship for your adoption has been accepted by the Emperor.”

  “Thanks for telling me,” said Jim.

  “I’m not telling you for your benefit,” said Melness, “but because it’s necessary for me to make your situation clear to you. As a candidate for adoption, you are in theory a probationary High-born, who is superior to me, as to all servants. On the other hand, as an officer of the Starkiens below the rank of a Ten-unit Commander, as well as because you were born among one of the lesser races of man, you are under my orders.”

  Jim nodded.

  “I see,” he said.

  “I hope you do!” said Melness sharply. “We have a contradiction; and the way such contradictions are resolved is to accord you with two official personalities. That is, any activity, occupation, or duty which you deal with in your capacity as a candidate for adoption invokes your personality as a probationary High-born, and my personal superior. On the other hand, any activity which deals with your duties as an officer of the Starkiens invokes your servant personality; and you are my inferior in everything connected with that. In any activities that deal with neither personality officially, you can choose which position you want to occupy—High-born or servant. I don’t imagine you’ll want to choose the servant often.”

  “I don’t supp
ose so,” said Jim, watching the smaller man calmly. The black eyes flickered upon him like dark flashes of lightning.

  “Because of the conflict of personalities,” said Melness, “I have no physical authority over you. But if necessary, I can suspend you from duty with your Starkien unit and enter a formal complaint to the Emperor about you. Don’t let yourself be misled by any foolish notion that the Emperor will not act upon any complaint I make to him.”

  “I won’t,” said Jim softly. Melness looked at him for a moment more, then disappeared.

  “Now, Jim,” Adok said at his elbow, “if you like, we can return to your quarters; and I will show you the use of your weapons and accouterments.”

  “Fine,” said Jim.

  They transported themselves back to Jim’s quarters. There Adok fitted Jim out with the straps and belts he had brought from the armory.

  “There are two classes of weaponry,” said Adok, once Jim was outfitted. “This”—he tapped the small black rod he had inserted in the loops of the belt attached to Jim’s loin strap—“is independently powered and is all that is normally used for duty upon the Throne World.”

  He paused and then reached out softly to touch a silver band encircling the biceps of Jim’s upper left arm.

  “These, however,” said Adok, “are part of the weaponry of the second class. They are completely useless at the moment, because they must be energized by a broadcast power source. Each of them is both a weapon and an enabler at the same time.”

  “Enabler?” Jim asked.

  “Yes,” said Adok. “They increase your reflex time, by causing you to react physically at a certain set speed—which in the case of anyone not High-born is considerably above his natural speed of reflex. Later on, we’ll be working out with the enabler function of the second-class weaponry. And eventually, perhaps you can get permission to go to the testing area, which is at a good distance below the surface of the Throne World, and gain some actual experience with the weapons themselves.”

  “I see,” said Jim, examining the silver bands. “I take it, then, that they’re fairly powerful?”

  “A trained Starkien,” said Adok, “under full control of effective second-class weaponry, should be the equivalent of two to six units of fully armed men from the Colony Worlds.”

  “The Colony Worlds don’t have Starkiens of their own, then?” asked Jim.

  For a second time Adok managed to register a mildly visible emotion. This time the emotion seemed to be shock.

  “The Starkiens serve the Emperor—and only the Emperor!” he said.

  “Oh?” said Jim. “On the ship that brought me to the Throne World, I had a talk with a High-born named Galyan. And Galyan had a Starkien—or somebody who looked exactly like a Starkien—bodyguarding him.”

  “There’s nothing strange in that, Jim,” said Adok. “The Emperor lends his Starkiens to the other High-born when the other High-born need them. But they are only lent. They still remain servants of the Emperor, and in the final essential their commands come only from the Emperor.”

  Jim nodded. Adok’s words rang an echo off the remembered words of Melness a short time before. Jim’s thoughts ran on ahead with the connection.

  “The underground area on the Throne World is occupied only by the servants, is that right, Adok?” he asked.

  “That’s right, Jim,” said Adok.

  “As long as I’m going to be going down there as a matter of duty from now on,” said Jim, “I think I’d like to see some more of it. How large an area is it?”

  “There are as many rooms below grounds,” said Adok, “as there are above. In fact, there may be more, because I don’t know them all.”

  “Who does?” asked Jim.

  Adok looked for a second as though he would have shrugged. But the gesture was evidently too marked a one for him to make.

  “I don’t know, Jim,” he said. “Perhaps… Melness.”

  “Yes,” said Jim thoughtfully. “Of course, if anyone would know, it would be Melness.”

  During the next few weeks Jim found himself involved in several parades down on the parade grounds. He discovered that his duties on these occasions were nothing more than to get dressed and to stand before his unit, which consisted of seventy-eight Starkiens, a noncommissioned Starkien officer, Adok, and himself.

  But the first parade he witnessed, it came as a shock to him to see that vast space underground completely filled with rank upon rank of the impassive, bald-headed, short, and massive-boned men who were the Starkiens. Jim had assumed that the Throne World was a full-sized planetary body, that there would be a large number of servants and all types, and that the Starkiens should be a fair proportion of these. But he had not realized, until he saw it with his own eyes, how many Starkiens there were. A little calculation afterward based upon what Adok could tell him of the floor space of the parade ground area led him to estimate that he must have seen at least twenty thousand men under arms in that space.

  If it was indeed true, what Adok said, that each Starkien was the equivalent of four to five times a unit of eighty soldiers from the Colony Worlds, then what he had seen gathered there had been the equivalent of between half and three-quarters of a million men. And Adok had told him that this parade ground was only one of fifty spaced about the Throne World, underground.

  Perhaps it was not so surprising that the High-born of the Throne World considered themselves above any threat that could be posed by any Colony World or combination of Colony Worlds.

  Outside the parades, Jim found that his only duties during the first few weeks consisted of a session in the gymnasium every other day with Adok, wearing the second-class weaponry.

  The silver bands that represented the second-class weaponry were still not energized as weapons, but within the confines of the gymnasium they became active in their capacity as enablers. The exercises that Jim was put through by Adok, therefore, consisted merely of running, jumping, and climbing over various obstacles, with the enablers assisting. After the first session of this exercise, which Adok permitted to go on only for some twelve minutes, the Starkien took Jim almost tenderly back to his own quarters and had Jim lie down on the oversized hassock that served as a bed there, while Adok gently removed the class-two weaponry bands.

  “Now,” said Adok, “you must rest for at least three hours.”

  “Why?” Jim asked, curiously gazing up at the stocky figure standing over him.

  “Because the first effects of wearing the enablers is not appreciated by the body immediately,” said Adok. “Remember, your muscles have been forced to move faster than your nature intended them to. You may think that you feel stiff and sore now. But what you feel now is nothing to what you will feel in about three hours’ time. The best way of minimizing the stiffness and soreness when you first begin to use the enablers is to remain as still as possible for the three hours immediately following exercise. As you become hardened to their use, your body will actually adapt to being pushed at faster than its normal speed of reflex. Eventually you won’t become stiff unless you really overextend yourself, and you won’t need to rest after each exercise.”

  Jim kept his face impassive, and Adok vanished, considerately dimming the lights of the room before he went. In the dimness Jim looked thoughtfully at the white ceiling overhead.

  He felt no stiffness or soreness of his muscles whatever. But, as Adok had said, possibly the maximum effect would not be appreciated until about three hours from now. Conscientiously, therefore, he waited those three hours without moving from the bed.

  But at the end of that time, he found no difference in himself. He was not sore, and he was not stiff. He filed that piece of information with the gradually accumulating store of knowledge about the Throne World and its inhabitants in the back of his mind.

  It did not immediately fit with the other pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that was forming in his mind. But one of the things that had helped him, from that day when as a boy he had at last faced the fact tha
t he had no choice but to bear the loneliness of his life in silence, was the capacity in him for an almost infinite patience. The picture forming in his mind was not yet readable. But it would be. Until then… Adok had assumed that at the end of three hours the stiffness and soreness of Jim’s body would have effectively immobilized him. Since he had never been able to discover if he might be under surveillance—and to this he had added lately the possibility of surveillance not only by High-born, for their own reasons, but also by servants, for their own reasons—he resigned himself to staying as he was.

  Stretched out on his hassocklike bed, he willed himself to sleep.

  When he woke up, it was because Ro was shaking him gently. She stood in the dimness of the room beside his bed.

  “There’s someone Galyan wants you to meet,” she said. “He sent word through Afuan. It’s the Governor of the Colony Worlds of Alpha Centauri.”

  He blinked at her for a moment sleepily. Then wakefulness sprang upon him, as the implications of what she had said woke inside him.

  “Why would I want to meet the Governor of the worlds of Alpha Centauri?” he asked, sitting abruptly upon the hassock-bed.

  “But he’s your Governor!” Ro said. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you, Jim? Any new Colony World is first assigned to the nearest Governor.”

  “No,” said Jim, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed and getting to his feet. “No one ever did tell me. Does this mean I have some sort of obligation to this Governor?”

  “Well…” Ro hesitated. “In theory, he can take you away from the Throne World right now, since you’re under his authority. But, on the other hand, the sponsorship for your adoption has been entered. In practice, he would find this out and would know better than to try to do anything that might interfere with any possible future High-born. Remember, his worlds will gain a lot of prestige if anyone under their authority becomes at least a probationary High-born. In other words, he can’t really do you any harm; but you can hardly, politely, turn down the chance to visit with him, now that he’s here.”