They had reached the forward end of the corridor. There was a narrow circular stairway leading up. Edri stood back and motioned Trehearne to climb it. He did, fighting down another attack of the shakes on the way—you couldn't take it all in, you couldn't get used to it all at once, the strangeness, the utter separation from everything that had been, the headlong plunge into alien horizons, for a long time you were going to get panicky when you thought about it. He emerged into a round observation dome of immensely heavy quartz. He didn't know what he had expected to see, but he was disappointed. There was nothing to be seen at all but darkness, streaked with creeping lines of light.
"Those are stars," said Edri, who had come up behind him. "Or rather, the radiation patterns of stars. At our present velocity we're overtaking the lines of luminous energy they have left behind them. Star-tracks, we call them."
He closed a switch, and the thick quartzite became suffused with a pallid, milky glow. Edri consulted a master dial, and made adjustments.
"Watch the dome," he said. "It's triple thickness, of a special molecular composition, each plane laid at a different oblique angle. I've switched high-frequency electronic current into hair-line grids between the three planes and all sorts of interesting and complicated things are happening in the molecular structure of the quartzite."
Trehearne watched. His heart was beating hard.
"Behold," said Edri, "the light-impulses of the star-tracks are caught, stepped up, wrenched about, and finally held on the inner lens."
Trehearne beheld, and beholding, he forgot Edri and the ship and himself. He forgot Earth, the past, and the future. He forgot almost to breathe.
Edri's voice came to him softly. "You may see this often, Trehearne, but never again for the first time."
Trehearne barely heard him. The ship had fallen away beneath him, leaving him suspended in the plunging gulfs that lie between the island stars, and he looked awestruck into the dark and splendid loneliness of space.
Through the magic of that quartzite dome he saw the great suns march in flame and thunder on their way around the ouroboros curve of infinity. Some were solitary hunters, others were joined together in companies of stars. He saw their cosmic pageant of life and death, the young suns blazing with a blue-white strength, the golden suns, the old red suns, the dead suns black with funeral ash. He saw the far-off galaxies, the coiling fires of the nebulae, the wonderful terrifying nations of the Milky Way streaming along the rim of creation. And as he looked the last of thought and feeling went from him and he was like a child still dazed from birthing.
Some of the stars, perhaps, he recognized—Algol beating like a bloody heart, the splintered glory of Sirius. Orion strode gigantic across the gulfs, girded with suns, and dead ahead, tipping the far-flung Hyades, Aldebaran burned in sullen splendor.
Aldebaran. Another sun. Other worlds, other peoples, other ways of life. He was going there, a stranger.
A deep tremor shook him. Time went by, but he took no notice of it. He was a man lost, sunk and drowned in infinity. Edri watched him, with a certain sadness. After a while he pulled the switch again, and the dome went blank, showing only the flat darkness and the crawling streaks of light. Trehearne sighed, but he did not move. Edri smiled, and shook him. Trehearne turned slowly, and when Edri led the way back down the stair he followed, but without knowing where he was going or why.
The passageway was empty. Edri stopped and waited until Trehearne's eyes focussed on him with some semblance of understanding.
"I'm going," he said, "to break a life-long habit and say something important. Are you listening?"
Trehearne nodded.
"You'll be spending a lot of time with the others, which will inevitably mean with Shairn. Keep away from her, Trehearne. No matter whether you love her or hate her, stay away."
Trehearne smiled. His head was ringing with stars, his vision was dazzled by the blaze of nebulae.
"Shairn doesn't look to me like much of a permanent deal for anybody."
"That's the trouble. Kerrel talked her into this flying jaunt around with him to break up the games she was playing with somebody else on Llyrdis. He's put up with an awful lot from her, and he's not the type at all—which makes people wonder."
"What?"
"Well, Kerrel's an agent of the Council, highly respected, got a lot of influence and so on, but we Vardda count our wealth in ships, and Kerrel's poor. Shairn inherited thirty, the fourth largest fleet in space. In other words, he's got more than Shairn to lose."
"He can keep her," Trehearne said. "And her ships."
"You don't know the lady. I do. And I can tell you that staying away from her is no easy job when she doesn't want to be stayed away from."
"Oh, the heck with her," said Trehearne impatiently. It was a long way down from the stars to petty gossip, and it annoyed him. "I don't see what it's got to do with me, anyway."
"I told you, I know the lady. And I know Kerrel. He's your enemy already—"
Trehearne was amazed. "Why?"
"Because it's his duty to be. Because the whole structure of the Vardda society, which he is sworn to protect, is based on a few ironclad rules, and you're liable to break every one of them. Oh, it isn't just you. There are larger issues involved—I'll explain them, but that'll take time—and you're sort of automatically mixed up with them. Kerrel is a just man as he sees it, but his justice is not tempered with mercy. I've seen him in action too often, Trehearne. You'll have trouble enough. Don't give him a personal motive, too."
Edri's manner was so serious that Trehearne began to feel uneasy. A great blank wall rose up before him, behind which lay the life and complexities, the politics and philosophies and contentions of the Vardda state, and he couldn't see through it or over it. He said, "I've got an awful lot to learn. It scares me, how much. You and Kerrel don't exactly love each other, do you?"
Edri shrugged. "He suspects me of harboring ideas not in agreement with his own. On Llyrdis as it is on Earth, Trehearne, beware of a man with a belief." Suddenly he laughed. "Well, that's enough of that. As you just remarked, you have a lot to learn. We might as well get started."
Trehearne followed him obediently, to begin his re-education as a Vardda.
SEVEN
It was amazing how quickly Earth, with all its habits and memories, slipped away from Trehearne. The pangs and wrenchings of homesickness still came to him now and then, mostly when he lay alone in his bunk, just before sleep. But they were less and less violent. He began to have for his native world the nostalgic affection one has for a foster-parent far less than perfect, but all the same a part of one's life—a part done with now, but with its bright and kindly interludes to look back upon. He was not sorry that he had left it. By a freak of genetics he had been born an alien, and he had never fitted there. Now, rapidly and easily, he was finding himself.
At first there were periods when he felt that he was dreaming, that the ship and all within it would disappear and he would waken. But as his mind readjusted itself, shaking free from the narrow horizons where it had been prisoned, ancestral pride and ancestral longing began to stir. And with that stirring came an insatiable hunger for knowledge.
Edri was his chief teacher. For some reason, the ugly man with the unhappy eyes and unfailing cheerfulness of speech had taken a liking to him, and Trehearne was glad of it. He needed friends. But there were others, too. Men and women, mostly young, healthy and full of themselves, loving the life they lived and enjoying to the hilt his own wide-eyed reactions to it. For a while they regarded him very much as he would have regarded an animal that had suddenly learned to talk and do sums, but they got used to him, and there was never any malice in their conduct. He liked them. They were his kind of people. Theywerehis people.
Kerrel remained civil, but aloof. Shairn spoke to him when she felt like it, as casually as though they had known each other all their lives and nothing of interest had ever happened between them. But sometimes he thought she looked at him in a way that was not casual at all, and he could not tell what she was thinking. He played along. It was hard, when he got to remembering things. But he did it. And he had enough to do to keep his mind off women. There weren't hours enough in the ship's day to supply him.
He learned the Vardda tongue. He learned the rudiments of Vardda history and the outlines of their social structure. But most of all, with an inborn sureness, he learned the Vardda mind, the Vardda point of view, and his own character expanded, having found a meaning for itself. He was a Vardda, and they were the Starmen—Galactic Man, as Edri had put it once, a unique species, specialized and fitted for the most splendid work of all, the conquest of the stars.
The power, the magnificence of that voyaging! No wonder the little ships and little skies of Earth had seemed so futile. This was his heritage, the freedom of the stars, the long, long roads of outer space, the swift ships plying between the island continents of suns, the windless, timeless, boundless gulf that washed the shores of a galaxy.
He haunted the ship's bridge, studying the intricate controls and cracking his brain over the staggering complexities of astrogation. In the generator rooms he learned by heart the pulse of the ship, listening to the silence of free flight after acceleration was complete. He deviled the engineers, the pilots, the technicians, with questions, understanding less than half of what they told him but always avid for more. He learned much, and yet it was nothing, and he was mad for learning, mad to hold under his own hands one of these proud giants of the starways.
The Vardda understood him. His hunger was their own, but they had not been barred from satisfaction. They accepted him. They loved to talk, and Trehearne had no lack of language teachers. His head spun to the tales they told him, of travels around the galaxy, of foreign worlds and happenings in far-off clusters of suns, of dead stars wheeling forever dark through darkness with their frozen worlds, of the sudden dreadful flaring of the novae, of what happens when a ship collides with a rogue star at many times the speed of light.
Trehearne was happy. He was living again as a child lives, in a world of wonders, where everything was new and bright and as yet untarnished. But one dark cloud hung over him—the threat of Vardda law and the Council. They might still take away from him all he had found. That threat got bigger and blacker the closer he came to the end of the voyage, and by the time the ship actually went into deceleration it had grown until it blotted out the whole horizon.
He had learned more now. He understood how the whole vast structure of Vardda economy rested on the unassailable position of the Starmen themselves and their unique ability to endure interstellar velocities. In this case, the blood, the race, was everything. There could not be any compromises, there could not be any challenges of that superiority. And here was he, Earth-born of Earth stock, with only a set of bastard genes to link him with the Vardda, a compromise and a challenge in himself.
"But damn it," he said furiously to Edri, "they can't refuse me now! And why, when you come right down to it, would one Vardda more or less make that much difference? The mutation process has been lost anyway, I certainly can't infect anybody else with it, and I don't see what they're afraid of."
Edri gave him a sombre look. "Listen, Trehearne, I haven't helped myself any by being friendly to you, as it is, and I'm not going to make matters worse for both of us by talking treason into the bargain. If you want the full, official answer to that question, go ask Kerrel."
"I will."
He found Kerrel in the lounge, engaged with Shairn and several other people in the complicated game that seemed to serve the Vardda in the place of bridge. Inside a gigantic crystal globe were suspended a number of little solar systems. Activated by magnetic currents, the tiny suns wheeled along and their planets spun in orbits around them, and it was a dizzying thing to look at. Within this microcosm were a dozen or so tiny ships, operated by the players by remote control, and for hazards there were miniature nebulae, dark clouds, and tiny comets. The object was to move the ships about without losing any, one team racing the opposing team's fleet to a selected destination. Trehearne had played a few times, but with no success whatever.
"I want to talk to you," he said, and Kerrel motioned him to wait. Very rapidly and skillfully he pressed a series of buttons on the control board in front of him. Inside the globe a ship depressed its arc, allowing a sparkling comet to pass safely above it, skirted the edge of a dark nebula, shifted course thirty-five degrees and made a perfect landing on a flying worldlet no larger than a pebble. At the top of Kerrel's panel a signal light glowed green.
Beside him Shairn lost two ships in collision and got two red lights for her pains, the "wrecks" being automatically retired out of play. Shairn wasn't watching the globe. She was watching Trehearne, and her eyes were very bright.
Kerrel turned over his place to another man and stood up. "The library's quiet," he said. "We can talk there." He went away with Trehearne. Behind them, Shairn gave up her board and followed.
The ship's library was small, with microbooks racked on the walls. They were mostly technical books, and Trehearne hadn't been able to get much out of them. He had struggled with a few on the theory and practical operation of starships, but it was a hopeless job and he hadn't pursued it. His vocabulary was still limited, and even if it hadn't been the technology involved was miles over his head.
Now he faced Kerrel and said, "I asked Edri a question, and he referred me to you. So I'll ask it again. Why would the Vardda Council be afraid to accept me?"
Kerrel put his hands on the back of a chair and thought a minute. "You understand the Vardda position among all the other races of the galaxy."
"Yes. And I don't see how I could possibly alter it."
"Then your understanding isn't complete. There are many worlds in space, Trehearne. Countless millions of people live on them. Do you know how they feel about us?"
"I hadn't thought."
"They hate us. They envy us. It's natural enough. They're prisoned in their own solar systems, forced to watch strangers carry on all their commerce with other stars. But natural or not, it's a factor we have to reckon with."
Trehearne said impatiently, "What can they do about it? They can't mutate, and they can't even try to force you to share the process with them. The thing was lost a thousand years ago. You're safe."
"There are still Orthists."
"Who are they?"
Kerrel looked mildly surprised. "I thought Edri would have told you. No? But you have, of course, heard of Orthis, the discoverer of the mutational process. He was a great man, Trehearne. A brilliant man, a genius, the founder of our race. But he was not a practical man. He lived alone too much in space, worked alone too long in his laboratory ship. He didn't know human beings, he didn't understand the hard grimy necessities of life, the law of self-preservation. He wanted to give the mutation—and the freedom of the stars—to everyone."
He paused, as though he were waiting for Trehearne to speak. But Trehearne, though he was thinking hard, kept his mouth shut.
"Orthis," Kerrel said, "was not able to see what, fortunately, others did see—that giving the mutation to all the races of the galaxy would mean wars and conflicts of such staggering dimensions that whole solar systems, including ours, might very well be destroyed. He clung stubbornly to his views and eventually fled from Llyrdis in defiance of the government, determined to have his own way. He was pursued, of course, and driven away from his objective, so that his attempt failed, but he was never captured. He vanished far out on the rim of the galaxy, and the process went with him. And that's where the trouble is, Trehearne. Some time later Orthis sent back a certain message, which gave his adherents hope that his ship had not been destroyed, that it was, in fact, waiting somewhere to be found again, and the process with it. Now, after a thousand years, they still hope."
Trehearne shook his head. "I certainly can't tell them where the ship is. So how does it affect me?"
"Don't you see how you could be used? An alien, a mongrel, but able to fly the stars—the effect on the Orthist movement would be tremendous, and not only on Llyrdis. People all over the galaxy, wanting what we have, would take you up as a symbol of what they consider their emancipation. I have a lively imagination, but it balks at trying to conceive all the trouble that could breed out of that situation."
A cold sensation was creeping over Trehearne, centering in the pit of his stomach. What Kerrel said made sense. He hated to admit it, but it made sense. He said harshly, "All right, but there must be a way around it. Around me, I mean. I take it that the Vardda Council is made up of politicians, and a politician can get around anything he wants to."
"They can," said Shairn from the doorway. "Particularly when the right people convince them they should."
Both men swung around, surprised. She strolled in, smiling at them impartially. Trehearne made nothing out of it but a smile, but Kerrel's face went suddenly hard.
"I don't know," she said to Trehearne, "whether anyone has mentioned it, but I'm quite an influential person on Llyrdis."
Kerrel said, "Would you mind very much leaving us alone?"
"Yes. You see, Kerrel, I feel rather possessive about him. It's my fault in a way he's here, and I'm going to look out for him, whether he likes it or not."
"That's fine," Trehearne said. "That puts me right in the middle."
"You're there anyway. Isn't he, Kerrel?"
"Shairn, I don't wish to quarrel with you here—"
"I'm not going to quarrel. I'm only stating a fact. Michael has developed into a very proper Vardda, and I don't intend to have him tucked away on Thuvis until he's done something to warrant it."
Kerrel said, as though it were a statement and not a question, "You're going to make an issue of this."
"I'm going to fight you for him. You need to be fought with, Kerrel. You're getting too sure of practically everything."
He moved until he stood in front of her. Trehearne had never seen anyone so angry, and so thoroughly under control. In that moment he began to understand that Kerrel was a dangerous man. Shairn drew a deep breath and threw her head back, and Trehearne knew that she had thought about this for a long time, planning it, working it out, waiting for the chance, and that she was happy about it. It wasn't himself and whether he lived or died. He was only the convenient peg. This was Kerrel and Shairn and a long situation.
Kerrel said, "I've taken a great deal from you, Shairn, but there's a limit. I've reached it."
"I hoped you'd feel that way."
He stood looking at her, and she did not speak, meeting his gaze steadily and with a queer kind of amusement. Finally Kerrel said, "I wish you hadn't done it this way. Not for him. Not for a—"
"But Kerrel," she told him gently, "it had to be something like this, or you wouldn't take no for an answer. I know. I've been trying for the longest time."
Kerrel turned and went out. He said nothing more, and he did not even glance at Trehearne as he passed him. Trehearne looked after him and shivered.
"You've been a great help to me," he said bitterly to Shairn. "The first time you didn't quite get me killed, but I believe now you're going to make it."
"Kerrel isn't that important. All he can do is recommend, and he'd have recommended Thuvis anyway." She laughed. "I feel wonderful. He was really beginning to weigh on me."
"Congratulations. And what is Thuvis?"
"I'll show you." She searched along the wall racks until she found the spool she wanted and clipped it into a viewer. "This is the astro-manual for a sector of space that is fortunately very little used. Here, have a look."
Trehearne bent over the magnilens. Equations were gliding slowly across it to the whirring of the unwinding spool, coordinates of a position in space.
"We have no capital punishment on Llyrdis," she said. "Matter of fact, we have very few criminals. But such as there are are sent into permanent exile, here."
She pressed a stud, and the whirring stopped. On the lens was the picture of a dim red sun lost in a dark wilderness, with hardly a distant star to break the desolation. Around it circled one lonely planet, grey, forlorn, and hopeless.
After a long while Trehearne said, "But I'm not a criminal. They couldn't—"
"They could judge you a danger to society, as they judge the Orthists. Kerrel will do his best to put you there—as a matter of principle."
Dying star, and dying world, alone on the edge of nothing. Trehearne looked at it. "What do they do there?"
"Nothing. They just wait."
"For what?"
He knew the answer before she told him. No more ships, no more voyaging, nothing to look forward to but the only release there was. Trehearne drew back from the viewer. Shairn smiled.
"Afraid?"
"Yes."
"I'm on your side."
"Are you? Or are you just using me to punish Kerrel, because he bores you?"
"Don't you trust me?"
"No!"
"But there isn't much you can do about it, is there?"
"I guess not."
"Then you might as well make the best of it."
EIGHT
The long arc of deceleration was completed. The starship was cruising now at planetary speed. Aldebaran had grown from a remote point of fire to a giant sun, terrifyingly near at hand. The small companion was visible only as a faint disc above the upper limb, its bluish light drowned out in the flooding ruddy blaze of the larger star.
The Vardda had crowded up into the observation dome, eager for the first glimpse of home. A heavy shield now covered the dome to sunward and in its shadow the returning travellers pressed and chattered. Trehearne stood among them, listening to their excitement and feeling at a loss in it. Their talk was the talk of strangers, full of names and references that were meaningless to him, strident with a joy he could not share. They were coming home, and he was homeless, the loneliest man in the galaxy. Before him loomed the imagined faces of the Vardda Council, passing judgment, and beyond them in the desolate wastes of space the dying world of Thuvis waited.
Shairn tugged at his sleeve. "There!" she cried. "There it is, Michael. Llyrdis!"
He followed her pointing hand, squinting against the tawny glare, and saw a golden planet wheeling toward them, bright and beautiful, with a trio of circling moons. Suddenly the majesty and splendor of this landing out of space swept over him, and drove away his fears. It was an awesome, a godlike thing, to come into a solar system from outside, drenched in the naked blazing of a foreign sun, and see the planets from far off, no bigger than a child's ball, circling the parent star in their slow eternal orbits. He became as excited as the Vardda, but for a different reason. Presently he would stand on the soil of a strange world, in the light of an alien sun, and the winds that blew would come from far peaks nameless to him, and off of unknown oceans. He watched with the others, as tensely as they.
Edri looked at his face, and smiled. "Mirris is on the other side of the sun, but if you'll look hard off there to your right you'll see Suumis, the outer one of our two immediate neighbors."
Suumis appeared against the farther reaches of space like a little red apple, accompanied by a throng of sparkling motes that Trehearne knew must be moons. He stared at it, trying to realize that the little red apple was a world as big as Earth, gave it up, and turned back again to Llyrdis. It had grown. It fairly leaped toward them as the ship swept in upon it, and Trehearne began to make out misty continents and the shadow-forms of oceans, wrapped in a cloud-shot atmosphere that burned a reddish gold in Aldebaran's light. Then it was closer still, it filled the sky, it spread out monstrously and began to fall....
Edri laughed. "Optical illusion. But a striking one, isn't it?"
Trehearne braced his knees and said it was. His heart was in his throat, the rest of his insides had fallen away somewhere, and the ship was plunging at a terrible speed to meet the toppling planet. It touched the atmosphere, and went into it as into a bath of fire. Down it went, rushing, tearing down with a long triumphant scream, and in the lower air the clouds rolled and whipped in golden fury where the dark hull clove them. Trehearne shut his eyes. When he opened them again the ship was sweeping low over an ocean the color of hammered brass, and at length he saw ahead a low shore, and beyond it a rolling plain girdled with tall mountains. On that plain he made out the gleaming vastness of a city that made New York a village.
"There it is," said Edri. "The hub and center of the galaxy."
Trehearne only shook his head. By this time he had no words. He watched the boundaries of the city widen, he watched the towers of its buildings lift and rise until they seemed to bear the sky upon them, and he was silent. Still dropping, but slowly now in a soundless glide, the ship bore to the southward. Here for miles the spaceport ran, the great docks that cradled the giants of the stars. Here was an ordered, ceaseless, swarming chaos of men and machines, seen from Trehearne's position now as a sort of yeasty ferment lapping around and over the apparently endless rows of titanic docks. The sheer size of it was crushing.
The warning bells rang. Trehearne came partly out of his daze and went below with the others to await the landing. Seconds ticked by, and the blood was hammering in his temples, and his muscles twitched with a nervous excitement. Landing. Landing on a strange world, under a strange new sun....
Smoothly, softly, the great keel touched down, home again from the edges of the universe.
Trehearne stood up. The others were already moving, pouring into the corridor, laughing, talking, eager for the opened lock and home. Trehearne would have followed them, but Edri's hand was on him, and Kerrel was in front of him.
"You'll wait," said Kerrel. "Edri, you're responsible for him. See that he doesn't leave the ship."
He went out, and suddenly, for Trehearne, that keen fine edge of wonder was all gone. Shairn came up and gave him a reassuring smile. "Don't worry, Michael. Old Joris is a friend of mine." She went out, too, and Trehearne said to Edri, "Who is Joris?"
"The Coordinator of the Port. In his younger days he flew for Shairn's father." Edri sank down into a chair again. "Might as well take it easy. Kerrel's gone to make his report to Joris in person. This isn't the sort of thing you want too widely broadcast."
"Why Joris? I thought Kerrel worked for the Council."
"He does. But everything that goes in or out of this port has to clear through the Coordinator's office. Sit down, Trehearne, you make me nervous."
"Do you think she'll be able to do anything?"
"I hope so. Damn it, sit down!"
He sat. There were noises in the ship, but they were unfamiliar ones, the impersonal clangings and boomings of freight hatches, machinery, the invading boots and unknown voices of dockside men. The sounds of the port outside came to him muffled and subdued, like the ceaseless roll of thunder a long way off. There was a feeling of cessation. The voyage was over. Out there a new sun was shining, there was air unbreathed by any man of Earth and a whole wide world waiting, a Vardda world, his as much as theirs, but he was barred from it, he was kept under hatches like a criminal, unable even to speak while strangers decided his fate. It scared him, and it angered him, and the more he felt trapped and helpless the more furious he got. His body would not stay still. He sprang up and began to stride the floor, and Edri watched him speculatively.
"Get good and mad," he said. "You can't fight unless you're mad."
"I'll fight."
"You know the line to take. Don't be afraid to let 'em have it."
"I won't."
Time passed. Edri sat and smoked. Trehearne paced, sat down, and paced again. A year went by, and then another, and then a young man, very brisk, very efficient, very self-assured, came in and looked at them.
"You're to come to the Coordinator's office," he said, and stared with frank curiosity at Trehearne. Then he turned to Edri. "Helooksall right. Is this story really true?"
"Never mind," said Edri. "Come on, Trehearne."
He followed them, down the long corridor and into the lock chamber, leaving the ship as he had first entered it so long ago, so far away. He stepped out onto the open dock, and the full roaring, thundering impact of the biggest spaceport in the galaxy hit him like an explosion.
Row upon row, and on all sides, the towering docks stretched to the end of his seeing and beyond. Ships lay in most of them, recumbent monsters taking their ease, while men and machines in vast numbers and great complexity waited on their needs. The ringing air was heavy with smells, strange spices and subtle unidentifiable things mingling with the reek of oil and hot metal, cargoes of unimagined riches from unimaginable worlds. Trehearne stood, feeling the tremendous pulse beat through him, hardly aware for the moment that Edri was trying to steer him to a kiosk at the end of the dock, or that the young Vardda was amused at his wide-eyed astonishment.
In endless hordes, men swarmed upon the looming hulls and went busily along the docks, testing, checking, guiding and managing the machines. They were not Vardda men. They were men from the other worlds, who could not fly the stars. A lot of them—and here Trehearne's eyes opened even wider, because even though he had been told, seeing is another thing—were not at all what he would have called human. But in spite of their strangeness, they seemed familiar. They were like any of the cheerful, hard-handed, competent men to be seen around any port of Earth, serving the ships and the planes. The incessant noise was deafening. Gigantic cranes moved ponderously on their tracks, shifting cargoes between strings of carriers and the gaping holds. Small trams weaved in and out of the confusion. At intervals between the docks were lines of shops, where atomic-powered forges shaped new parts, new plates and housings. Here a crew worked on a hull with flaring welders, and there a great bow section was lowered slowly into place with an ear-shattering clang.
Edri's voice reached him, thin and faint. "Big business, Trehearne. The biggest in the galaxy. Impressive, isn't it?"
He urged Trehearne along, toward the kiosk that was still some way ahead. They walked in a railed-off path, and in a moment Trehearne saw coming toward them on the other side of the rail a large and very involved piece of machinery that seemed to be walking slowly the length of the ship's hull, guided by one small human attendant and bearing in its belly another one who sat surrounded by dials and counters and little screens.
"That's an X-ray scanner," Edri told him. "They get first crack at every ship that lands. These ultra-speeds have effects on metals in time. The scanners test the structure of the metals for crystallization, or any abnormal molecular shift. The ships become unsafe after a certain period of service—usually a fairly long one—and they're watched very closely. It's no fun having a hull fall apart on you in the middle of nowhere."
He pushed Trehearne on, into the kiosk. The young Vardda was still amused. Edri said, "There's a lift here. We go down."
Trehearne stepped in, and turned. Just before the door closed smoothly in his face, he caught a glimpse of a tall white pylon in the distance, dominating the whole field, and knew without being told that it housed Port Administration and his immediate destiny. Once more the sense of wonder was stripped away. The lift dropped and his heart dropped with it, swiftly down.
The trip was short. The lift set them in a passageway far underground, and the passageway led to a tube, all very quiet after the roaring of the port. A small monorail car took them in a handful of minutes to the levels underneath the pylon, and then there was another lift, a private one this time, going up. There was a bitter taste in Trehearne's mouth, and the palms of his hands were sweating.
He thought the lift would never stop, but it did, on the highest level. The brisk young man motioned them out, and there was an office, bare and spacious, with window walls that looked on all sides across the spaceport. Trehearne thought fleetingly that it was less like an office than the bridge of a starship, pathetically shackled to the soil.
Shairn was there, and Kerrel, standing far apart and very stiff, their faces set and stubborn. Kerrel did not turn, but Shairn came to Trehearne and took his hand defiantly. Off at one side a second brisk young man presided over some sort of a recording device. There seemed to be a good deal of silence in the place, brought on, perhaps, by the arrival of the lift, for no one was in a silent mood—least of all the man who faced them from the other side of a massive table. Trehearne saw a grizzled, heavy-shouldered giant who was never designed to occupy an office. The walls cramped him, even such walls as these, because they were bounded by horizons. His large scarred hands rested uneasily on the polished wood, impatient of the papers that were stacked there, and his eyes seemed better used to watching stars than men. Those eyes, pale blue as winter ice, sought out Trehearne and did not waver until they had cut from him every bit of knowledge to be had.
"I didn't believe it," Joris said, "but I can see now why you didn't like the idea of killing him. Too much like one of us. But damn it!—Kerrel, you of all people should have remembered the law. No non-Vardda personnel under any circumstances to board any craft designed for interstellar flight. What got into you?"
Before Kerrel could answer, Shairn spoke for him. "A certain squeamishness," she said, "and a doubt. I think he regrets them both, now. You see, Joris, there was a legal doubt. Looking at Trehearne, could you tell he was non-Vardda?"
"But you knew it...."
"Oh no," said Edri pointedly, "we didn't. We didn't know at all until he survived the take-off, and then he couldn't very well be classified as non-Vardda—could he, Joris?"
Joris moved his huge bulk uncomfortably. "A freak," he said. "A mongrel. You didn't do him any kindness to bring him here. Shairn, I get a feeling that you had a hand in this. In fact, knowing you...."
Shairn snapped, "What I do is my own business. And as for Michael, he's as good a Vardda as you are. You haven't answered my question yet. Will you let him stay in my custody until the Council meets?"
"No! And that's final."
"But Joris...."
"You're a trouble-maker, Shairn. You have been since the day you were born. But I'm damned if you'll make trouble for me!"
"And I thought you were my friend. Joris, you ought to remember...."
"I took orders from your father when I flew his ships, but you're not the man he was! And furthermore, I'm not working for you now, I'm working for the government. Is that clear?"
"Perfectly." She added, in a tone of admiration, "Anyway, you haven't forgotten how to roar."
Surprisingly, Joris laughed. "No," he said, "no more than you've learned manners." He glanced from Shairn to the stony-faced Kerrel, who was still standing like a ramrod and saying nothing—Trehearne gathered that he had already said everything he considered necessary—and then back to Edri and the Earthman. "I'll admit this is one hell of a queer mess, and I'm glad I don't have to decide the final outcome. As I see it, my duty now is to keep him in custody like any other undesirable, until the Council takes him off my hands." He looked hard at Shairn. "That's the law, and that's the way it's going to be."
Kerrel spoke at last. "Good. That's what I wanted to be sure of."
Joris glowered at him. "I'm considered fairly reliable in the performance of my office." He nodded to the brisk young man who had brought Trehearne and Edri from the ship. "Make out the usual interim commitment form for suspected persons under the Port Authority Code, Section C...."
Trehearne said, "Just a minute." He stepped forward until he was facing Joris across the table. "You have no authority to imprison me."
Joris stared at him. Then he shook his head irritably as though he thought his ears must be playing him tricks, and stared again. His jowls took on a tinge of red. Trehearne went on. The time had come to let his temper go, and he turned it loose of all restraint.
"Unless he is formally accused of a crime, no Vardda may be detained by anyone against his will. I have committed no crime, and I have not been accused of any."
It took Joris some time to recover his voice. When he did, it fairly rattled the windows. "You arenota Vardda!"
"No? Think a minute. What is the one distinguishing quality of a Vardda that marks him as different from all other men?"
"All right, I'll answer that! By some freak or other you managed to survive the flight. But that doesn't change the fact that you're an Earthman, born and bred, and therefore not a Vardda!"
Trehearne's eyes had acquired a hard glitter. "Then suppose," he said, "that you imprison me—an Earthman who has crossed the galaxy from Sol to Aldebaran, and lived. That'll make quite an uproar, won't it? All the non-Vardda peoples will be much interested. So will the Orthist party. I don't doubt they'll spread the news all over the galaxy—the Vardda have admitted that they're not the only ones who can fly interstellar space!"
Shairn said, "That's it, Michael! Go it!" Edri had drawn back a little. His eyes were sober and intent. Kerrel spoke, and his voice was sharp. "You've had bad advice, Trehearne. That kind of talk won't help you."
Joris motioned him to silence. To Trehearne he said, "What do you know about the Orthist party?"
"Enough to know that they could make a great deal of trouble. Either I'm Vardda or I'm not. And if I'm not, I could be the start of a whole new movement. The first non-Vardda to fly the stars, the first crack in the monopoly."
Joris shook his head. "You can be put away so quickly and quietly that no one will ever hear of you."
"Good," said Trehearne. "Put me away. Put away all the officers of the ship. Put away all the passengers. Put away all the crew. That's a lot of people to keep quiet."
Shairn broke in triumphantly. "Yes, Joris! How are you going to silence me?"
"And," said Edri, "me."
Joris looked from one to the other and back again, his brows drawn angrily together. But he said nothing. Kerrel leaned over the table.
"Joris," he said, "do you understand? The man is trying to blackmail you with an open threat of treason."
"Yes," said Trehearne, "I am." His voice was suddenly very quiet, and he spoke straight to Joris. "When I made that flight and lived I won my right to the freedom of the stars. I won my right to fly deep space, and I will use any weapons I can get my hands on against any man who tries to keep me from it."
Then, for quite a long while, no one spoke.
"By God," said Joris slowly, "I take it back. There can't be any mongrel blood in you. Only a Vardda could have that kind of insolence." He got up and came round the table. "You, Shairn. In spite of your political views, you'll back him up in this?"
"I will. And it's probably the only real accomplishment the Orthists will ever make."
"And you, Edri?"
"All the way."
Kerrel swore. It was the first time Trehearne had ever heard him do it, and it was aimed directly at Shairn. "For God's sake, watch what you're saying! Joris, she doesn't mean it, and she won't do it. I know her feelings on the subject too well for that."
Shairn said, "Try me."
Joris had become very thoughtful. "You know," he said to Kerrel, "whether she does or not, there's a great deal of truth in what the Earthman says. Far too much, I'm afraid, to be overlooked."
"Bluff," said Kerrel. "Look here, Joris, if you turn this man loose, I'll have to report...."
"Oh, report and be damned! The law says I have to shut him up, and shut him up I will, and there my duty ends. And I don't need you to tell me my business." He went to the recorder, took out the spool, dropped it on the floor and crushed it under his boot. "Now clear out, all of you. Dismissed. And I'd advise you all to keep your mouths shut. Especiallyyou," he said to the two very young men. "You have enough work to keep you busy. Go and do it. You stay here, Trehearne."
Trehearne stayed, and there was a bitter thought in him that he had failed. The faces of the others, as they left, were full of doubt. Presently he was alone with Joris in the sweep of golden light from the windows. From the eastern quadrant of the port Trehearne saw a great ship rise and clear away for distant suns.
Joris walked the floor, and said nothing. The silence was heavy, an oppressive thing. It was not touched by the sounds of the port, so far below. They were outside it, and the face of Joris was a heavy, sombre mask. Trehearne looked out at the alien sky, where the clouds burned like little nebulae, and then down again at the ships. From this vantage he could see the sector where the planetary craft came in, the slow freighters from the non-Vardda worlds of Aldebaran, and it came to him suddenly how the poor bastards that flew them must feel, watching the starships come and go and knowing they could never follow. Beyond the port the towers of the city rose, and Trehearne wondered if he would ever see it.
Joris stopped his pacing and said, "Come here."
Trehearne obeyed. The pale eyes, harsh and keen as an old eagle's, probed into him, weighing, judging. Trehearne stood and waited. He said nothing. There was nothing more to say.
"Vardda blood," Joris muttered to himself. "Unmistakable. And he wants to fly the stars." He asked abruptly, "Were you a foundling?"
"No," said Trehearne. And then he added slowly, "But I might just as well have been."
Joris turned away, his brows drawn and brooding, his head and shoulders massive against the background of burning sky. "How old are you?"
"Thirty-three, in Earth years."
Still with his back to Trehearne, Joris spoke. "I think I see a way. Whether it will work or not, I don't know. The Council convenes again in five days, at which time I'll be required to make my report on you, and I'll do what I can. Meanwhile, you'll have to go where I tell you and stay there without any fuss. Is that clear?"
"Yes." The pulse of hope had begun to beat again.
"Good. And Trehearne—"
"Yes?"
"If things turn out all right, youwillfly the stars!"
It was a threat as much as a promise.
Thirty minutes later, after a journey under guard in a sublevel tubecar that left him in complete ignorance of his whereabouts, Trehearne was conducted into a square neat cubicle, comfortable in all respects but none the less a prison cell. The magnetic lock clicked behind him and he was alone.
There were no windows. He did not even know whether he was above or below ground. There was neither day nor night nor time. He paced the narrow floor and ate the unfamiliar food delivered to him automatically through a slot in the wall, and tried to sleep. He smoked the last of his hoarded cigarettes and thought of Earth and the distances between the suns. He hoped and hope became gradually a grim despair.
No one came. Shairn had forgotten him. Edri's friendship had turned feeble at the last. The trap that Joris had set for him became more obvious with each passing hour. He hated them all. He raged and waited and remembered the old man's words—You can be put away so quickly and quietly that no one will ever hear of you.
This was his landing on Llyrdis, the fruit of his journey across the star-shot universe. This was the end of his dream.
He ceased to rage.
There came a time when he awoke sharply from uneasy sleep to hear the low click of the lock and a soft slurred step on the floor, coming toward him. He sprang up, and saw that it was Shairn. She cried out, "Michael!" and her words came to him with a sound of unreality, like the voices heard through fever.
"It's all over, Michael—and you're free!"
NINE
An hour had gone by and he still could not quite believe it. He had left the cell behind him and the five eternal days of waiting. He stood on a terrace high above the city. It was night, and the burning moons were brilliant in the sky. The wind from the sea had the clean sting of wine, but it was not like the sea winds he remembered, it was new and strange, intensely thrilling. Around him the tall slim towers rose upward toward the moons, and far below the shining web of streets was a pattern of sensual beauty, many-colored, sounding, alive.
Shairn said softly, "Look at it, Michael. It's all yours."
He looked. His hands were tight on the terrace rail, and there was a fulness in him that made it hard to breathe.
"I had something to do with it, Michael. Aren't you going to thank me?"
He turned. She had put on a flowing thing of white, cunningly draped and spangled over with a diamond frost, and there were strange jewels caught in the dark masses of her hair. He started to speak and then forgot the words, when sounds from inside the apartment—it was Edri's—announced the arrival of Joris.
"Come now and hear how the miracle was done."
From the terrace they passed through sliding doors of glass, open now to the warm breeze, into a low, broad, spacious room of the utmost simplicity and comfort. A millionaire's room, Trehearne would have said, and yet Edri was a poor man by Vardda standards, owning no ships and working for those who did. The window walls looked out over the city, a mighty panorama of light and color that was without garishness, and inside there was quiet and homeliness, made personal by the small things Edri had brought home from his voyages. Robots of various sorts did all the cleaning automatically when he was away, and there was no kitchen. Meals arrived by pressure tube, fresh, hot, and to order, from a service center. Remembering his own bachelor quarters on Earth, Trehearne was overcome with envy.
Joris came toward him, holding out a huge hard hand. Trehearne shook it, and Joris said, "What were you thinking, those five days in the cell?"
Trehearne shook his head. "I won't tell you, since none of it was true."
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 shipSaarga, 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 theSaarga?"
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.
Shairn looked up at him, heavy-eyed. "You were gone so long, Michael."
"Holding Edri's head." Kerrel was still there. A sour mood seemed to have come over everyone. Joris sat with his head hanging forward. His eyes were open, staring moodily into the spilled wine, but he was obviously on the verge of passing out. Shairn had torn to bits the pale flowers in her lap, scattering them on the grass. No one was talking. Kerrel had not touched the wine. He was looking at Shairn, just sitting still and looking at her. Trehearne said to him, "You haven't given up, have you?"
"No."
"He only thinks he hasn't," Shairn said angrily. She rose and stood in front of Kerrel. "What is it you just can't bear to give up—me, or my thirty ships?"
Kerrel got up. He lifted his hand and slapped her hard across the cheek. There was a second when no one moved, when Shairn's eyes blazed wider and wider, and then Trehearne thrust her aside and moved in. Kerrel was stony sober and his reflexes were fast. The next thing Trehearne saw, through a ringing haze, was Kerrel walking away, leaving small sharp scars in the turf where his heels had cut in.
"No," said Shairn. "Not this time, Michael. Let him go."
His head hurt. The wine was turning on him, and he felt ashamed. He wanted to kill Kerrel, and he couldn't.
Shairn said uneasily, "I'm not mad. That's funny, Michael. I'm not mad at all, I'm scared."
"Why?"
"Him." She nodded after the dark figure receding among the trees.
"He'd never hurt you."
"Not directly. It's you I'm thinking of. He won't let you go. He was warning me. He can't let you go, and it isn't only because of me, or his pride. I've left him before, but this is different. You're different. He knows we lied to the Council."
"What can he do?"
"You saw him go after Edri. I don't know, Michael, but be careful. Don't give him even the hint of a chance at you." She shook her head. "I've changed my mind. I'm glad you're going voyaging. And meanwhile, you'd better not see much of Edri."
"You love me, Shairn?"
"I should think I'd done enough to prove it!"
"Don't get your back up. I was only wondering. Would you really have gone to the Orthists to help me?"
She laughed. "It was a safe threat to make. I knew Joris would never call it."
As though the sound of his name had decided him, Joris fell quietly sideways and began to snore. Trehearne bent over him, and he thought he saw in the moonlight a curious thing. He thought he saw tears on the old man's cheeks. He decided he must be very drunk indeed.
Shairn touched his arm. "Come, Michael."
"Where?"
"The home of my family, the Silver Tower. There's so little time to be happy in, before you go."
Two weeks later, dressed in the black and scarlet of the Vardda spacemen, Trehearne left Llyrdis behind him for the starshipSaarga, outbound for Hercules.
TEN
TheSaargawas not like the ship that had brought Trehearne from Earth. She was older and shabbier and clumsier, a great lumbering beldame of a ship, with enormous capacity for cargo and no space at all for passengers. Officers and crew were cramped into quarters functionally reduced to the absolute minimum, and there were no such luxuries as lounges and observation domes. But to Trehearne she was a thing of beauty, of miracle and wonder. Every dent and scar on her unlovely bulk-heads recorded a voyage to a nameless sun. The crammed and odorous vaults of her belly were storehouses of exotic riches. She was outbound for Hercules, and he was part of her. He was no longer merely a hungry onlooker. He belonged. He worshipped her.
He saw her first lying hugely in the dock, her scored and pitted hull-plates giving back a dull glint from the sun. He looked up at her, and then around him at the tremendous clamor of the port, and then he strode down along the walkway feeling ten feet high and happy as a kid at a carnival. He reported aboard, was duly checked in and assigned to quarters in a very small cabin with four very narrow bunks, where he good-naturedly allowed himself to be elbowed into the least desirable upper. His cabin-mates were all younger than he, but they were veterans, and he was forced to admit that this was his first professional voyage.
"Trehearne," said the dark-haired youngster in Lower Two, turning the name over on his tongue and frowning. "Funny sort of name—I've heard it somewhere."