“Those clouds, Adok,” he said, softly. “Take them away.”
There were five or six short, whistling noises—again like mighty sounds cut so short that the human ear did not suffer from hearing them.
The sky was clear.
Jim turned back to face the table on the raised platform. Slowly he raised his arm and pointed at the Governor of Alpha Centauri III.
“Adok—” he began. The squat brown figure came hurdling over the table before him, down off the platform, and across the table to Jim himself, reaching out his hands supplicatingly.
“No, no, High-born!” cried the Governor in the language of the Empire. Then, desperately, he switched to English.
“No!” he shouted, twisting his head sideways to look back over his shoulder at the members of the Committee. His voice in its thickly accented speech rang wildly against the silence of the room. “I was wrong! Wrong! He is High-born. I tell you, he is!”
The Governor’s voice rose frantically, for Heinman and the other Committee members were staring at him with expressions of mixed horror and disbelief. He twisted around on the tabletop to confront them.
“No, no!” he cried thickly. “I don’t say that because he pointed at me. No! It’s because of the Starkien! You don’t understand! The Starkiens obey nobody but the Emperor and those other High-born the Emperor tells the Starkiens to obey. The Starkien couldn’t obey like that for anybody but a High-born! It’s true! He is High-born, and I was wrong! I was wrong! You have to treat him like a High-born! Because he is!”
The Governor collapsed into a fit of hysterical weeping, huddled up on the tabletop. Jim felt a hand slide into his own, and looking down, saw that Ro had come from her seat to stand at his side.
“Yes, indeed,” Ro said slowly in careful but unpracticed English, to Heinman. “I am a High-born, and I tell you that Jim is one too. The Emperor adopted him as one, but even the Emperor said that he was giving Jim nothing Jim did not already have. Jim risked his life for all of you, and he brought me and Adok back to make you a people who will someday inherit the Empire.”
She stopped and turned to point to the sobbing Governor.
“This man,” she said, “must have been one of the colonials in Galyan’s plot. He sent a stone from Earth in Jim’s name. Only it was not a stone, but a device to project a blue, distorting light over Vhotan; and when it did this, the poor Emperor thought he saw the Blue Beast of his nightmares, and was so afraid that he ordered Vhotan killed, just as Galyan had planned. Wasn’t it this man who suggested you should try Jim for treason?”
“I lied. I told them the Princess Afuan would shortly remove the High-born Slothiel, and then she would seek payment from Earth for what Jim had done,” moaned the Governor, swaying on the table with his face hid in his hands. “But I was wrong— wrong! He is High-born. Not just by adoption, but by birth. I was wrong, wrong…”
On Heinman’s face there was a war of expressions, but gradually dominating them all came the look of a man who had just emerged from many miles of dark tunnels to find a daylight so much brighter than he had expected that it was almost too painful to bear.
Jim looked at him, then nodded down at the weeping Governor before returning his eyes grimly to Heinman once more.
“Yes,” Jim said. “So now you understand… And you can also understand why the Empire was something to be kept from Earth, at any cost.”
FB2 document info
Document ID: d4524085-7d09-4d13-944e-3a5b51bb6273
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 13.02.2011
Created using: Fiction Book Designer, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6 software
Document authors :
Verdi1
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Wolfling Page 18