Joris laughed. Edri said, "We haven't told him anything. We left that
for you." He found glasses and poured wine. Joris settled heavily into
a chair, full of an honest pride in his own cleverness, beaming with
it. Shairn curled up near him on a wide couch and sipped her wine. "Go
on," she said. "We're waiting."
"It took a lot of juggling," Joris said, "and more than a little
downright forgery, but it worked. You see, Trehearne, a full record
of all voyages is kept at Port Administration. I went back between
thirty and forty years and managed to supply you with a pretty good
background." He leaned forward. "You get this into your head, and
keep it there. You were born on Earth thirty-four years ago of Vardda
parents then engaged in trading activities on that planet. Your mother
died in childbirth and your father was forced to abandon you, since
even a Vardda infant cannot endure interstellar flight. The people who
brought you up, and whom you had assumed to be your parents, merely
fostered you." He paused, searching through his trouser pockets until
he found a slip of paper, which he handed to Trehearne. "Here are the
names of your real parents. Memorize them. Your father has since been
killed in a wreck off Orion Nebula and you have no brothers or sisters.
Incidentally, you have no inheritance either, since according to law
your father's estate was divided upon his death. From now on, this is
your only history. Don't forget it. And don't talk about any of it more
than you're forced to."
Trehearne stared at the paper and the two names that were written
there. "I didn't think it could be done--But what did Kerrel say about
this? He surely didn't believe the story."
"He couldn't prove it wasn't so. And I produced such convincing records
that the evidence was overwhelming." He laughed. "Matter of fact, I cut
the ground right out from under him."
"He didn't like it," Shairn said. "But there was nothing he could
do, and there never will be anything he can do. Joris and I managed
to persuade the Council not to have you appear for questioning,
Michael--on the very good grounds that the less said about it the
better. The hearing was closed, with the news-services barred out.
Joris' records, and your Vardda characteristics were sufficiently
convincing. They passed their resolution in less than thirty minutes,
and then followed it by another to tighten the laws against Vardda
children being born on any world but Llyrdis!"
Trehearne put the piece of paper in his pocket. "There's a lot of
things I want to say, but--" He broke off, and Edri shoved a glass
in his hand. "Don't try," he said. "Just tell us honestly that we're
wonderful, and we'll be satisfied. Incidentally, don't ever make me out
a liar. I reported the most interesting statements from you concerning
your unhappy childhood as a foundling."
Trehearne grinned. He looked from one to the other, and finally his
gaze centered on Joris. "There's one thing I don't understand. Why did
you do this for me?"
"Don't ever question a man's reasons, as long as they're good,
Trehearne. And now you're a Vardda, stamped and sealed, you've got
another problem ahead of you. You have to make a living. Do you still
want to fly the stars?" He saw the look on Trehearne's face, and
smiled. "I need a supercargo on my ship _Saarga_, outbound in two weeks
for trade in the Hercules Cluster. Officers and crew fly on shares and
it's a rich voyage. Even a supercargo should do well."
Edri said, "I ought to warn you, Trehearne. The Hercules run is one of
the toughest in the galaxy."
"That's why it pays so well," said Joris. "Well?"
Before Trehearne could answer, Shairn laid her hand lazily on his
shoulder and said, "Nonsense, Joris. He doesn't have to take on
anything like that. I can find a better opening in my fleet and he
won't starve until I do."
Trehearne's face tightened. He said quietly, "I seem to have heard,
Shairn, that you're quite well off."
"Oh, quite! Thirty ships to Joris' two. My father was smart, and I was
lucky enough to be his only heir. Oh, the devil with it--who wants to
talk business! Come on, Michael, we'll show you the city."
"In a minute." Joris was looking at him with an odd expression, and
Trehearne's mouth tightened another notch. He said, "When shall I
report aboard the _Saarga_?"
Edri leaned over Shairn's shoulder and whispered, "I think you've got
our Michael angry."
Joris looked at Shairn and roared. "Missed your guess, didn't you?" He
got up. "All right, Trehearne, I'll let you know. And now let's see
what we can do in the way of a celebration!"
They went. But for the next hour or so Shairn was inclined to be sulky,
and was all the more so because Trehearne seemed to have forgotten her
existence.
Resplendent in black and silver supplied for him out of Edri's
wardrobe, free, accepted, and with a future ahead, Trehearne walked the
streets of the city, drunk with color and sound and movement, dazed
with the incredible size and the utter strangeness of the greatest
metropolis in the galaxy. It surged magnificently, crowded, thriving,
beautiful, drenched in the wealth and inventiveness of a thousand
far-flung cultures, Mecca for all the peoples of Aldebaran's seven
inhabited planets. And its beauty was honest. There were no dark and
evil places hidden behind the splendid buildings, no slums, no poverty,
no ugliness. The Vardda had travelled widely, and seen much, and they
had learned from others. From a vantage point given to no other people
in history, they had studied and compared the inceptions, growths, and
collapses of more empires, races, and cultures than a man could count
in a year, and the work still went on under the direction of their
best minds, correlating and compiling, examining causes and evolving
from the mass of evidence ways and means to keep the Vardda empire
healthy. They had managed well for a thousand years, and Trehearne
felt a tremendous admiration for them, laboring as they did under the
extra handicap of an essentially inbred society. Their government was
elective, and they kept it clean. Their laws were relatively few and
simple, and they were obeyed. They oppressed nobody, and saw to it that
their non-Vardda neighbors benefited heavily from the Vardda trade.
"It's not at all," Edri had told him once, "that we're so much more
bloody noble than anybody else. Matter of fact, we're probably
unrivalled in our basic selfishness. It's good business, you see.
Keep everybody as happy as possible, deal as fairly as you can, make
'em all rich, and you don't have trouble, which is bad for trade. The
non-Vardda races may not love us, but they're not inclined to try
getting along without us. As for domestic politics and administration,
it's simple self-preservation to keep them sound. We're not Utopians,
to use one of your favorite Earthly terms, we just try to make sense."
Looking at the city, Trehearne thought they had done a remarkably
good job. Actually, few of the Vardda were urbanites. Llyrdis was
essentially a world of estates and small communities. The Vardda
sociologists had not been blind to that final corrosive stage of
civilization that Spengler called Megalopolis. The city was not a place
in which great mobs of people spent their lives. It was a clearing
house, a warehouse, an office, a factory, devoted entirely to business.
The population was chiefly non-Vardda, and they only stayed there
during their employment. Their homes were on their own worlds. They
inhabited the city without being trapped in it.
As for Trehearne, it seemed to him that night that he could spend a
lifetime there and never tire of it. The little ships that tramped
the narrow planetary roads set down beside the scornful giants of the
star-trails and poured into the metropolis a never-ending tide of
visitors, come to touch the fringes of a glory they could never grasp
themselves, to revel in alien pleasures and barter for the gems and
spices and the spider-woven silks of worlds that they would never see.
Most of them were human or nearly so, their skins a variety of tints,
their costumes outlandish or sober according to their native custom.
Some were not human at all, except in intelligence and pride of bearing.
"See those black-skinned, hawk-nosed chaps with the bronze wings?"
Edri's hand guided Trehearne's wondering gaze. "They're from Suumis.
And the three silvery ones over there with the bright crests and the
crimson robes. They're the dominant race on the second world sunward,
and proud as Lucifer for all they've got scales instead of skin. That
little bluish fellow is a merchant-prince from Zaard, the outermost
planet. See his diamond caste-mark?"
Trehearne saw. He mazed his brain with seeing, with hearing and
feeling--the pulse and rush of the city, the kaleidoscopic multitudes,
the companies of lordly Vardda like peacocks in their jewels and
brilliant tunics, the babel of outworld tongues, the drifting sound of
music, strange and sweet. From place to place the four of them drifted,
in no hurry, wandering as the mood took them, drinking the dark wine
of Antares, the pungent snow-white brew of Fomalhaut, endless wines of
many colors from the worlds of many stars. Shairn forgot to sulk. To
Trehearne she seemed to float in moonlight and laughter, bewitching
and unattainable as a creature seen in dreams. The wine mounted to his
head. The excitement, the strangeness, the wild joy of release put
a kind of fever in him, and his surroundings lost reality, whirling
ever faster and in brighter colors round him, visions painted on a
blowing mist. Faces, human, half-human, unhuman, beautiful, grotesque,
ludicrous. Carnival masks, reeling, dancing. Vardda women lovely as
sin, dressed in a thousand fashions from a thousand worlds, smiling
with red mouths. Music throbbing, beating, wailing, unknown melodies
plucked from unknown strings, passionate, soft, mingling with the
smell of wine and perfume and the sharp sea-wind. Dancing girls with
emerald skins, outlandish beasts that capered with an eerie cleverness,
a spinning whirl of pleasure-palaces, terraces, gardens, parks and
squares, nameless trees blowing under the triple moons, Shairn's
laughing face, Joris flushed and jovial, a grey-polled ox on holiday,
Edri....
There was something wrong with Edri. Perhaps the wine had given
Trehearne a sharper insight, or perhaps it was only that the outside
stimuli had grown so bewildering that he fled from them at last,
unconsciously, by turning to the familiar as personified by his
friends. At any rate, he emerged a little from his daze and realized
that while he and Shairn and Joris had been growing gayer Edri had
grown steadily more solemn and withdrawn. Sobriety was not habitual
with him, but Trehearne had never seen him really drunk. He was drunk
now, and he was continuing to drink as though there was not enough wine
on Llyrdis to fill him, sitting silently, his eyes fixed on some inner
distance, a brooding look on his ugly face. Trehearne spoke to him,
and he answered, but it was only a mechanical reflex, a sound without
meaning.
They were in a place of trees and crystal columns, with bowers drowned
in bloom and the open sky above. Trehearne looked at the others. They
were happy, without a care in the world. Then he saw Edri's face again,
bleak and sad and seeing nothing, and he frowned. He was fond of Edri.
It came over him in a rush how fond he was of him. He leaned forward
and said, "What is it, Edri? What's wrong?"
"He's sober," Joris said. "He needs more wine." He reached over and
poured a ruby liquid into Edri's glass. Abruptly Edri shook his head
and pushed the goblet away. He was looking now at something behind
Trehearne. "No," he said. "I'm going home."
"There's no hurry, Edri. Stay a while." It was Kerrel's voice.
Startled, Trehearne turned his head and saw him standing there, as
though he had been standing for a long time. Now he came forward and
sat down with them. Trehearne could not tell what he was thinking. He
did not like a man whose thoughts he could not even guess at.
"Congratulations," Kerrel said. "I don't believe a word of it, of
course, but that history of Trehearne was a fine piece of strategy."
Joris laughed. "The Council believed it. Furthermore, I believe it,
Shairn believes it--even Trehearne believes it, don't you, Trehearne?"
"Of course."
"Well, it's done now," Kerrel said, as though it had ceased to matter.
Shairn picked up one of the musky flowers and tossed it into Kerrel's
lap. "Have you forgotten me?" she asked him, with a curious edged
sweetness. "I know you. You're a bad loser, and it's no use pretending
you're not. Besides, I've seen you this way before. Just what are you
meditating in your little mind?"
"Nothing at all, but the usual broad speculations on life. Curious what
twists and turns it has. Take today. One man escapes banishment and
another, a respected member of our community, incurs it."
"Who?" said Joris, peering sharply at Kerrel as through a fog.
"Arrin."
There was a small silence. Then Shairn said, "But I met him once. He's
nice. You can't send him to Thuvis."
"I'm afraid there's no doubt about it. He's one of the Orthist
leaders--you didn't know that, did you?" His question was addressed to
no one in particular. "We've suspected him for some time, and today he
was caught. Odd thing, though. They couldn't find any of his papers."
He turned casually to Edri. "Arrin's a friend of yours, isn't he?"
"I know him."
"Oh, come now! You've known him for years."
Edri said nastily, "I've known you for a long time too. Don't
cat-and-mouse with me, Kerrel. If you have something to say, say it."
Kerrel shrugged. "I was only thinking that a man can have too many
unfortunate friendships."
"Does that include me?" said Trehearne, getting up.
"Oh, the hell with him," said Edri. He lurched to his feet, giving
Kerrel one smouldering look, but it was Trehearne he spoke to. "He's a
tireless and worthy investigator, a good cop as you would say on Earth.
But he enjoys his work too much. I'm leaving."
He walked away, staggering a bit but holding himself rigidly erect.
Trehearne watched the solitary figure moving down an avenue of trees,
splashed with shadows and golden light. He hesitated, and then followed.
Edri stopped when he felt Trehearne's hand touch him. He looked at
him in a curious way, almost as though he had never seen him before.
And now that he was here, Trehearne did not know what to say. Rather
awkwardly, he asked, "Can I do anything?"
"No. Thanks."
"I'm sorry about your friend."
"Why should you be? He's an Orthist, a traitor. He deserves to be sent
to Thuvis."
Remembering the desolate picture he had seen of that world at the
end of the galaxy, and his own so narrow escape from it, Trehearne
shivered. "I don't care. It doesn't seem right to send anybody to rot
forever in that boneyard. Besides, I can't see that the Orthists are so
bad."
Edri reached out and took hold of Trehearne's shoulders. "Hate them,"
he said earnestly. "Hate them with everything you've got."
He turned away, and Trehearne said with a certain exasperation, "Hate
'em or not, I don't see why they're such a danger."
"There was a message, Trehearne. Long after Orthis disappeared, one of
the life-skiffs of his ship was picked up in space. There was nothing
in it but a message, painted in big letters on the walls. It was
addressed to his enemies, and it said, 'You have not destroyed me. The
peoples of the Galaxy will yet be given the freedom of the stars.' You
understand? There was still hope, from the Orthist point of view."
He went on, a drunken man, not talking to Trehearne now but to himself,
to the wind and the casual moons and a world that had turned bitter
around him. "Arrin worked. All his life he worked, like a lot of men
before him. He searched the records, the closed files that nobody is
allowed to look at, and then they caught him. He never found what he
was looking for, but he might have. A little more time, and he might
have!" He looked up into the sky, the empty sky that stretched away to
the rim of the universe. "Somewhere out there Orthis sits in his ship
and waits--waits to be found again. But where? That's it, the question
no one has answered in a thousand years. Where?"
He turned aside and was abruptly, violently sick. Trehearne waited.
After Edri muttered, "It's curious, the things a man will say when he's
drunk."
"I don't know," Trehearne said. "I didn't hear anything."
"Don't ever hear anything, for your sake as well as mine." He managed a
smile. "Thanks. I'm all right now. I'm going on home."
He walked away slowly, and Trehearne went back to the others. He had
sobered up a bit himself, and some of the magic had gone out of the
evening. He was worried about Edri.