by John Brunner
There was a dead pause. Then: “What in the galaxy are you talking about?” demanded Hector Ducci.
Chevsky favoured him with a withering glare. “You know damned well what I mean—Sidonie and your wife are thick as thieves! You know Sid’s been going behind my back to talk to this shrivelled bag of bones, gabbing about things that ought to be personal between husband and wife! So don’t try and convince me it wasn’t due to him that she left me asleep when everyone else knew Chart had arrived! Don’t tell me it was an accident that the warden was the last to know we had such a distinguished visitor, and this scarecrow Lem was the first to be invited aboard his ship!”
“And don’t try getting back at the warden here for what he did to Sidonie, either!” Dellian Smith interjected. “If I’d been in his shoes I’d have done the same.”
“Quite right too!” his wife said with asperity.
A period of hostile silence. During it, quite distinctly, Dr Lem heard Toshi’s teeth chattering.
At length he said, having honed the words, “Well, it wouldn’t have made too good an impression if the first man Chart met here was staggering drunk.”
The time for delicacy was over. There had to be axes as well as scalpels.
Chevsky turned purple. Before he could speak, though, Dr Lem hurried on. “No one who wasn’t intoxicated could have slept through what happened last night! Pedro?”
“Right,” the merchant said, taking his stand at Dr Lem’s side. “He bought six litres of assorted liquors from me last time he called by.”
“And he’s my biggest client for the kind of minor analgesics and stomach-pills you need to take care of the morning after,” Harriet said, having finally replaced everything in her medical kit and come around to take the corresponding place on Dr Lem’s other side. In her haste, she almost trod on Pompy, and had to apologise and pet her—an impulse she regretted, because the chubble was still in defensive mode and her fur was sharp.
“Doesn’t a man with a wife like Sid have the right to drown his sorrows now and then?” Dellian Smith countered. But his heart wasn’t in it; the words rang false. In any case Chevsky had decided not to let himself be baited.
“Shut up!” he said, jabbing Smith in the ribs. “I didn’t come here to talk about that. Even if Sid does gossip about it to this bastard Lem, I think my private life is my affair! I’m not proud of the way that woman acts, but it’s up to me to take care of it as I see fit. Marital discord isn’t grounds to impeach me, you know that, and if I drink now and then, so what? Doesn’t interfere with my duties!”
He glared at the trio facing him: the psychologist, the merchant and the medical doctor. At their backs Ducci was hovering, uncertain whether he should declare his sympathies or whether, as technical supervisor of the enclave, he was better advised to remain neutral. Dr Lem hoped fervently he would choose the latter course.
“No, what’s really important right now,” Chevsky continued, “is something else. It’s this impression everyone has that there’s a self-appointed caucus which wants to prevent Chart from performing here.”
Vigorous nods from the Smiths and those beside them. It wasn’t hard to deduce who “everyone” must be.
Chevsky set his shoulders back and jutted his jaw aggressively. “Now I admit right away I never saw Chart working! But I have been talking with a lot of people who did—your wife among them, Ducci!” With a scowl. “I don’t have to be a genius to realise his work is epoch-making. Having Chart perform on your planet is—well, it’s kind of a landmark. A historical event! And I can judge the feeling in the enclave when it comes to something big, something important. So I’m here to tell you straight out: if you try and obstruct Chart, prevent him from performing here, you’re going to find every last mother’s son on the other side from you—you self-important prigs!”
The Smiths nodded again, and so did his other companions. They put on expressions which apparently were attempts to duplicate Chevsky’s, and waited for a response.
“But he doesn’t have the least intention of performing for us,” Dr Lem said after the lapse of a few seconds.
“What?” Chevsky took half a pace forward.
“What makes you think he’d regard three hundred people as worth his trouble? Would you expect him to, when he performs for continents, for whole planets?”
“You mean—” Chevsky began, but Smith shouldered past him.
“You mean the bastard wants to mount a show for the apes?” His tone was wringing wet with disgust and horror.
As though intended to answer precisely that question, once again Chart’s voice rang out from the ship.
“It has been perceived that three most distinguished members of the Yannish community of Prell are present, Speaker Kaydad, Hrath Vetcho and Hrath Goydel!”
“Does he even speak Yannish?” Harriet muttered under her breath.
“You’d expect him to bone up on everything about this planet before coming here, wouldn’t you?” Phillips answered equally softly.
“Should it be the desire of these gentlemen to enter the ship, it will delight Gregory Chart to entertain them on board!”
“Hey!” Ducci started. “What about showing advanced technology to non-humans…?” His voice trailed away. He knew, as well as anyone else in earshot, that raising a trivial charge like that against Chart was a waste of time. This man had been writing his own laws for well over half a century.
He lifted his binox and peered through them. After a moment he said, “Yes, there they go.”
Chevsky, the Smiths and their companions, exchanged looks of amazement and dismay.
“Well, we’ll see about that!” the warden exclaimed at length, and stormed away.
“But it isn’t really Chart we have to worry about,” Dr Lem said at last.
“What?” Harriet glanced from one to another of their uniformly depressed faces.
“Morag Feng’s on board,” Phillips said. “She’s Chart’s mistress now.”
“Oh, no!” Harriet’s square, sensible face paled, and she let her medical kit fall to the full stretch of her arm.
“What the hell is all this about Morag Feng?” Ducci demanded. “I have this vague idea I heard the name, but…”
“It would have been just before your time,” Dr Lem said wearily, passing his hand through his shock of hair. “I’d been here for—let me see—yes, about fourteen years, so that would make it eighteen years ago. But you knew her, Pedro, didn’t you?”
The merchant gave an emphatic nod. “She wandered across the board to Yan the summer after I brought the family here. I remember her very well.”
“And about two months before Alice came,” Harriet supplied in a tight voice.
“My—no!” Ducci clenched his fists. “She’s never the woman Alice stole Rayvor from?”
“She is indeed,” Dr Lem said sadly. “And she hasn’t grown out of her hatred, either. I’m sure of that.”
Fool! Idiot! Cretin! Self-directed insults marked time with Erik’s footsteps as he plodded back the way he had come into the town, stooped under the weight of his pack. Of course he ought to have recognised the name Chart—instantly! He ought to have taken personal credit for identifying him to the news-machine, and then he could have lodged a fee-claim at the local informat, and, assuming Chart was really as newsworthy as the encyclopedia had indicated, he’d have had credit in store to get him off Yan if he drew a blank as far as drugs were concerned.
Imbecile!
He stopped dead in his tracks. While he was using the communet in that house where he’d taken the food, why had he not dialled the article on the drug he was investigating? It would have saved him an immense amount of trouble. There was a limit to the amount of off-planet information one could store in an encyclopedia; there were strict conditions regulating the priority accorded to types of data, as a result, so back where Erik had come from on Ilium, there had been one reference to the sheyashrim drug, and that merely in passing, during a description of one o
f these sadistic orgies, or whatever, in which so many of the Yanfolk apparently got killed. There were plenty of planets where sadistic orgies were in vogue, and most of them were more than averagely wealthy. Hence his visit.
And obviously, right here on Yan, there ought to be a higher priority assigned to local information than—
He was on the point of turning around and heading straight back for the nearest empty human house, to consult the communet again. Up ahead, though, he suddenly realised there were loud voices—human—raised in excited conversation. He blinked. Five or six people were approaching, and at their head, the same warden he’d woken up without planning to.
“Hey!” the warden shouted, spotting him. “Hey, look there! That’s the guy who did me the good turn, woke me and told me Chart was here when Sid had sneaked off and left me! Say, feller!”
Beaming, he advanced with an air of forced joviality. Erik sighed, let his pack slide to the ground, and offered his hand.
“Morag Feng,” Ducci said, twisting his mouth around the name as though it were bitter. “I did hear about her… but it was a long time ago.” And he added to Giuseppe, “You were just a baby, then!”
“But I heard the name too,” his son countered. “I get this idea she caused a considerable ruction, right?”
“I remember all the details,” Dr Lem said quietly. “In a way, possibly some of what happened was my fault. Shall I tell you what I recall?”
“Please!” Ducci said. The others agreed, and Harriet appended a comment of her own.
“It’s not the sort of data you can consult the communet for, is it?”
“I guess not,” Dr Lem admitted, giving a skeletal smile at the black humour of the remark. “Well… Well, basically it happened this way. The enclave was relatively new, then—I myself came in with the second wave after it was set up, as you know, and it was still making occasional news: the first-ever human settlement on a planet dominated by another species. And, of course, our sexual compatibility was bringing in all kinds of disturbed persons, who caused terrible trouble. Didn’t they, Harriet?”
The medical doctor snorted loudly.
“This Morag Feng was not a kink, really, but not very stable, either. She had theories about the dramaturges, the ancient Yannish civilisation, and the rest of it, and she was determined to prove herself right. She arrived, she declined to live among the people of the enclave, and she took a Yannish lover. Rayvor. In fact it was from her he learned the name Harry which he uses now.
“And then Alice Ming turned up—who did want to live in the enclave, who also wanted a Yannish lover, but preferred him to be…” Dr Lem hesitated. “Subservient? I think that’s about right.
“Morag—I know this, because I was her confidant, and I guess I was more than a little in love with her myself… Morag wanted to find out, right away, what if anything the truth was behind the Mutine Epics, the wats and mandalas and so forth. So she went off and lay on the floor of the Mutine Mandala during the Flash.”
A moment’s silence. Ducci said at length, “The way Marc Simon did, the other year?”
“Yes. And you know what it did to him—drove him crazy for about three weeks, didn’t it? He said it was like compressing a lifetime of psychedelic experience into thirty seconds.”
“And he got terrible sunburn,” Harriet muttered.
“But Morag’s tall, muscular,” Dr Lem said. “Alice is thin and delicate. More to Yannish taste. Alice saw her chance, and took Rayvor away while Morag was wandering around the Plateau of Blaw, gibbering to herself and screaming if anybody came near. When she recovered, she came and stayed with me for a while, needing a shoulder to weep on, and I persuaded her to go back across the board to some other world. And she did. And now she’s back. And she’s brought Gregory Chart with her. I repeat that, I emphasise that: this is the woman who has brought Gregory Chart to Yan!”
XI
“Gregory’s engaged with a delegation of Yanfolk,” Morag whispered as she and Marc drew closer to the ship. “I’ll take you aboard anyway.”
She had turned her anti-see unit back on and put her arm around his waist to ensure that its field would envelop them both.
With half of his mind, Marc wanted to run like hell. With the other, and dominant, half, he wanted to meet Chart. He wanted—needed—to hear someone famous for his artistic brilliance compliment him on the work he had done on Yan. The natives didn’t go in for fulsome compliments; at most, they sighed, or smiled, or arranged that the next time an especially successful poet—artist—musician—talker appeared at a soirée, the audience was slightly larger.
It was slim rations for a human being.
But on the way back to where the ship rested, he had begun to hear the faint bells of memory rung by his companion’s name echo louder and louder, and—just about at the point where the ship was clearly visible—he had identified the mental reference. Harriet Pokorod was talking as she dressed the sunburn, untended for almost three weeks, on his arms and legs and face. And she was saying that the last time she had a similar case…
Yes, he had recalled correctly. Morag Feng was the name of the woman who had come to Yan more than ten years before his own arrival, perhaps twelve years earlier, and lived among the Yanfolk and tried to experience the impact of the Mutine Flash.
His own head reeled when he merely thought of the single time he himself had undergone that terrifying ordeal. When the sun was at a certain angle relative to the mandala’s crystal shafts, something happened. A resonance was set up, so to speak. From a distance, what one saw was a play of light and colour, dazzling but enjoyable. From within the structure itself…
Indescribable. But so devastating, his subconscious had undermined his long-standing plan to accustom himself to it slowly, returning day after day and each time witnessing the Flash from a closer spot until he was able to re-enter the mandala and comprehend what the sunlight was doing. Until today he had nearly forgotten he had ever so intended.
A hundred times, as he walked at her side, he formed the question on his lips: “Are you the Morag Feng who…?”
And a hundred times, he abandoned it, afraid.
As when Marc had wandered off, most of the sightseers were congregated around the far side of the ship. She led him straight up to its hull, and through it. He winced as he entered. He had been so long here on Yan, he had almost forgotten about interpenetration doors. There was a corridor beyond, plain and white like the hull, elegantly proportioned but featureless.
“Gregory!” Morag said to the air.
The air answered. “Mr Chart is engaged with the Yanfolk still. However, it is projected that he will only be in conference for another four to six minutes. Phrases associated with leave-taking have been detected in the conversation.”
“Fine. Then take us up to the main gallery, will you?”
The corridor instantly became an ascensor, and Marc felt the disturbing tug of a transversal gravity field. He was impressed. The equipment of this vessel was fantastic.
“Was that the—uh—the ship you were talking to?” he ventured after a moment.
“Hm? Oh, yes. Of course, Gregory had it specially built on Tubalcain.”
Another few seconds, and they emerged on to a silver-railed gallery overlooking the huge central volume of the ship—although that was a mere fraction of its total bulk, the rest doubtless being taken up with the drive, the life-support systems, and the machinery required by Chart’s profession. On the floor below, beyond a swirling one-way sound and vision screen, Marc saw a perfect simulation of a Yannish mansion-hall, in which a human—logically, Chart—sat talking with…
Marc blinked in amazement. He had fully intended to gaze fixedly at Chart, taking the greatest possible advantage of his first sight of this galaxy-famous artist who made him feel small, terribly young, and more than somewhat frightened.
But Chart wasn’t just talking to “a Yannish delegation”.
He was talking to THE Yannish delegation. He w
as talking to Speaker Kaydad, and to Vetcho, and to Goydel. Marc would have recognised them anywhere.
Morag did something he didn’t see, and voices came to his ears: Chart, and Kaydad, exchanging compliments as the visitors rose. It was a long moment before he realised that the words were in Yannish.
“Does Chart speak Yannish?” he demanded.
“That? Oh, of course not!” Morag answered impatiently. “The ship translates for him.” She relented slightly, and turned her burning gaze directly on him.
“Much of the vocabulary bank was primed from your translations,” she said. “You should be proud.”
Then, about three or four minutes later, she said, “Okay, they’re on their way. Take us down.”
With a stomach-churning lurch—which was actually perfectly smooth, only Marc was not prepared for it—the entire gallery descended to the main floor. The vision of the Yannish mansion dissolved at the same time, as Chart was escorting his visitors to the door, and by the time he turned back and noticed that Marc and Morag were present, it had turned into a pleasant glade carpeted with highly convincing grass and ringed with trees.
“You must be Marc Simon.”
An—ordinary voice. Not quite the echoing, god-like thunder he had been half-imagining. He found himself offering his hand in return for Chart’s, found himself establishing that the great man’s grip was bony and rather weak, that his smile was skeletal and his whole body was thin to the point of being scrawny.
But a fire glazed behind his eyes. The second Marc met his gaze, he knew why this man was great.
A caress on Morag’s bare forearm, and then: “Sit down! Some refreshment! Morag no doubt told you, this is a great pleasure for me, that I’ve long been looking forward to!”
Chairs sprang from nowhere, rustic in style to match the glade, and a table with a jug of chilled wine and several mugs.