James Blish
A HERO'S LIFE


I
Listening automatically for the first sound of possible interruption, Simon de Kuyl emptied his little poisons into the catch basin in his room and ironically watched the wisps of wine-coloured smoke rise from the corroded maw of the drain. He was sorry to see them go; they were old though venemous friends.

He knew without vanity - it was too late for that - that High Earth had no more distinguished a traitor than he. But after only four clockless days on Boadicea, he had already found it advisable to change his name, his methods and his residence. It was a humiliating beginning.

The almost worn-away legend on the basin read: Julius Boadicea. Things made on this planet were usually labelled that generally, as though any place in the world were like every other, but this both was and was not true. The present city, Druidsfall, was the usual low jumble of decayed masonry, slightly less ancient slums and blank-faced offices, but the fact that it was also the centre of the treason industry - hence wholly convenient for Simon - gave it character. The traitors had an architectural style of their own, characterized by structures put together mostly of fragmented statues and petrified bodies fitted like puzzle-pieces or maps. Traitors on Boadicea had belonged to an honoured social class for four hundred years, and their edifices made it known.

Luckily custom allowed Simon to stay clear of these buildings after the first formalities and seek out his own bed and breakfast. In the old friendly inns of Druidsfall, the anonymous thumps of the transients - in death, love or trade - are said to make the lodgers start in their beds with their resident guilts. Of course all inns are like that; but nevertheless, that is why the traitors like to quarter there, rather than in the Traitors' Halls: it guarantees them privacy, and at the same time helps them to feel alive. There is undoubtedly something inhibiting about trying to deal within walls pieced together of broken stone corpses.

Here in The Skopolamander, Simon awaited his first contact. This - now that he had dumped his poisons - would fall at the end of his immunity period. Quarantine was perhaps a more appropriate term…

No, the immunity was real, however limited, for as a traitor to High Earth he had special status. High Earth, the Boadiceans thought, was not necessarily Old Earth - but not necessarily not, either. For twelve days Simon would not be killed out of sheer conservatism, at least, though nobody would attempt to deal with him, either.

He had three of those days still to run - a dull prospect, since he had already completed every possible preliminary, and spiced only by the fact that he had yet to figure out how long a day might be. Boadicea's sun was a ninety-minute microvariable, twinned at a distance of a light-year with a bluewhite, Rigel-like star which stood - or had stood throughout historical times - in high Southern latitudes. This gave Druidsfall only four consecutive hours of quasi-darkness at a time, and even during this period the sky was indigo rather than black at its deepest, and more often than not flaring with aurorae. There was one lighting the window now, looking like a curtain of orange and hazy blue fire licking upward along a bone trellis.

Everything in the city, as everywhere upon Boadicea, bespoke the crucial importance of fugitive light, and the fade-out - fade-in weather that went with it, all very strange after the desert glare of High Earth. The day of Simon's arrival had dawned in mist, which cold gales had torn away into slowly pulsating sunlight; then had come clouds and rain which had turned to snow and then to sleet - more weather in a day than the minarets of Novoe Jiddah, Simon's registered home town, saw in a six-month. The fluctuating light and wetness was reflected in Druidsfall most startlingly by its gardens, which sprang up when one's back was turned and did not need to be so much weeded as actually fought. They were constantly in motion to the ninety-minute solar cycle, battering their elaborate heads against back walls which were everywhere crumbling after centuries of such soft, implacable impacts. Half the buildings in Druidsfall glistened with their leaves, which were scaled with so much soft gold that they stuck to anything they were blown against - the wealth of Boadicea was based anciently in the vast amounts of uranium and other power-metals in its soil, from which the plants extracted the inevitable associated gold as radiation shielding for their spuriously tender genes. Everyone one saw in the streets of Druidsfall, or any other such city, was a mutation of some sort - if he was not an out-worlder - but after a day in the winds they were all half yellow, for the gold scales smeared off the flying leaves like butter; everyone was painted with meaningless riches, the very bed-sheets glittered ineradicably with flakes of it, and brunettes -especially among the elaborate hair-styles of the men - were at a premium.

Simon poured water from an amphora into the basin, which promptly hissed like a dragon just out of the egg and blurted a mushroom of cold blue steam which made him cough. Careful! he thought; acid after water, never water after acid - I am forgetting the most elementary lessons. I should have used wine. Time for a drink, in Gro's name!

He caught up his cloak and went out, not bothering to lock the door. He had nothing worth stealing but his honour which was in his right hip pocket. Oh, and of course, High Earth - that was in his left. Besides, Boadicea was rich: one could hardly turn around without knocking over some heap of treasures, artifacts of a millennium which nobody had sorted for a century or even wanted to be bothered to sort. Nobody would think to steal from a poor traitor any object smaller than a king, or preferably a planet.

In the tavern below, Simon was joined at once by a play-woman. 'Are you buying tonight excellence?'

'Why not?' And in fact he was glad to see her. She was blonde and ample, a relief from the sketchy women of the Respectables whom fashion made look as though they suffered from some nervous disease that robbed them of appetite. Besides she would exempt him from the normal sort of Boadicean polite conversation which consisted chiefly of elaborately involuted jokes at which it was considered gauche to laugh. The whole style of Boadicean conversation for that matter was intended to be ignored; gambits were a high art but end-games were a lost one. Simon sighed and signalled for beakers.

'You wear the traitors' clasp,' she said, sitting across from him, 'but not much tree-gold. Have you come to sell us High Earth?'

Simon did not even blink; he knew the query to be a standard opening with any outworlder of his profession.

'Perhaps. But I'm not on business at the moment.'

'Of course not,' the girl said gravely, her ringers playing continuously with a sort of rosary tasselled with two silver phalluses. 'Yet I hope you prosper. My half-brother is a traitor, but he can find only small secrets to sell - how to make bombs, and the like. It's a thin life; I prefer mine.'

'Perhaps he should swear by another country.'

'Oh, his country is well worth selling, but his custom is poor. Neither buyer nor seller trusts him very far - a matter of style, I suppose. He'll probably wind up betraying some colony for a thousand beans and a fish-ball.'

'You dislike the man - or is it the trade?' Simon said. 'It seems not unlike your own, after all: one sells something one never really owned, and yet one still has it when the transaction is over, as long as both parties keep silent.'

'You dislike women,' the girl said, tranquilly, as a simple observation, not a challenge. 'But all things are loans - not just chastity and trust. Why be miserly. To "possess" wealth is as illusory as to "possess" honour or a woman, and much less gratifying. Spending is better than saving.'

'But there are rank orders in all things, too.' Simon said, lighting a kief stick. He was intrigued in spite of himself. Hedonism was the commonest of philosophies in the civilized galaxy, but it was piquant to hear a playwoman trotting out its mouldy cliches with such fierce solemnity. 'Otherwise we should never know the good from the bad, or care.'

'Do you like boys?'

'No, that's not one of my tastes. Ah: you will say that I don't condemn boy-lovers, and that values are in the end only preferences? I think not. In morals, empathy enters in, eventually.'

'So: you wouldn't corrupt children, and torture revolts you. But Gro made you that way. Some men are not so handicapped. I meet them now and then.' The hand holding the looped beads made a small, unconcious gesture of revulsion.

'I think they are the handicapped, not I - most planets hang their moral imbeciles, sooner or later. But what about treason? You didn't answer that question.'

'My throat was dry… thank you. Treason, well - it's an art, hence again a domain of taste or preference. Style is everything; that's why my half-brother is so inept. If tastes changed he might prosper, as I might had 1 been born with blue hair.'

'You could dye it.'

'What, like the Respectables?' She laughed, briefly but unaffectedly. 'I am what I am; disguises don't become me. Skills, yes - those are another matter. I'll show you, when you like. But no masks.'

Skills can betray you too, Simon thought, remembering that moment at the Traitors' Guild when his proud sash of poison shells had lost him in an instant every inch of altitude over the local professionals that he had hoped to trade on. But he only said again, 'Why not?' It would be as good a way as any to while away the time; and once his immunity had expired he could never again trust a play woman on Boadicea.

She proved, indeed, very skilful, and the time passed… but the irregular days - the clock in the tavern was on a different time from the one in his room, and neither even faintly agreed with his High Earth based chronometer and metabolism - betrayed him. He awoke one morning/noon/night to fond the girl turning slowly black beside him, in the last embrace of a fungal toxin he would have reserved for the Emperor of Canes Venatici or the worst criminal in human history.

War had been declared. He had been notified that if he still wanted to sell High Earth, he would first have to show his skill at staying alive against the whole cold malice of all the Traitors of Boadicea.

II
He holed up quickly and drastically, beginning with a shot of transduction serum - an almost insanely dangerous expedient, for the stuff not only altered his appearance but his very heredity, leaving his head humming with false memories and traces of character, derived from the unknown donors of the serum, which conflicted not only with his purposes but even with his tastes and motives. Under interrogation he would break down into a babbling crowd of random voices, as bafflingly scrambled as his blood types and his retina - and finger prints, and to the eyes his gross physical appearance would be a vague characterless blur of many roles - some of them derived from the D.N.A. of persons who had died a hundred years ago and at least that many parsecs away in space - but unless he got the anti-serum within fifteen days, he would first forget his mission, then his skills, and at last his very identity. Nevertheless, he judged that the risk had to be taken; for effete though the local traitors seemed to be, they were obviously quite capable of penetrating any lesser cover.

The next problem was how to complete the mission itself - it would not be enough just to stay alive. After all, he was still no ordinary traitor, nor even the usual kind of double agent; his task was to buy Boadicea while seeming to sell High Earth, but beyond that, there was a grander treason in the making for which the combined guilds of both planets might only barely be sufficient - the toppling of the Green Exarch, under whose subtle non-human yoke half of humanity's worlds had not even the latter-day good sense to groan. For such a project, the wealth of Boadicea was a pre-requisite, for the Green Exarch drew tithes from six fallen empires older than man - the wealth of Boadicea, and its reputation as the first colony to break with Old Earth, back in the first days of the Imaginary Drive.

And therein lay the difficulty, for Boadicea, beyond all other colony worlds, had fallen into a kind of autumn cannibalism. In defiance of that saying of Ezra-Tse, the edge was attempting to eat the centre. It was this worship of independence or rather, autonomy, which had not only made treason respectable, but had come nigh on to ennobling it… and was now imperceptibly emasculating it, like the statues one saw everywhere in Druidsfall which had been defaced and sexually mutilated by the grey disease of time and the weather.

Today, though all the Boadiceans proper were colonials in ancestry, they were snobs about their planet's pre-human history as though they had themselves not nearly exterminated the aborigines but were their inheritors. The few shambling Charioteers who still lived stumbled through the streets of Druidsfall loaded with ritual honours, carefully shorn of real power but ostentatiously deferred to on the slightest occasion which might be noticed by anyone from High Earth. In the meantime, the Boadiceans sold each other out with delicate enthusiasm, but against High Earth - which was not necessarily Old Earth, but not necessarily was not, either - all gates were formally locked. .

Formally only, Simon and High Earth were sure; for the habit of treason, like lechery, tends to grow with what it feeds on, and to lose discrimination in the process. Boadicea, like all forbidden fruits, should be ripe for the plucking, for the man with the proper key to its neglected garden.

The key that Simon had brought with him was now lost; he would have to forge another, with whatever crude tools could be made to fall to hand. The only one accessible to Simon at the moment was the dead playwoman's despised half-brother.

His name, Simon bad found easily enough, was currently Da-Ud tam Altair, and he was Court Traitor to a small religious principate on the Gulf of the Rood, on the edge of The Incontinent, half the world away from Druidsfall. Since one of his duties was that of singing the Rood-Prince to sleep to the accompaniment of a sareh, a sort of gleemans harp (actually a Charioteer instrument ill-adapted to human fingers, and which Da-Ud played worse than most of those who affected it), Simon reached him readily in the guise of a ballad-merchant, selling him twelve-and-a-tilly of ancient High Earth songs Simon had made up while in transit to the principate; it was as easy as giving Turkish Delight to a baby.

After the last mangled chord died, Simon told Da-Ud quietly:

'By the way… well sung, excellence… did you know that the

Guild has murdered your half-sister?'

Da-Ud dropped the fake harp with a noise like a spring-toy coming unwound.

'Jillith? But she was only a playwoman! Why, in Gro's name-'

Then Da-Ud caught himself and stared at Simon with sudden, belated suspicion. Simon looked back, waiting.

'Who told you that? Damn you - are you a Torturer? I haven't - I've done nothing to merit -'

'I'm not a Torturer, and nobody told me,' Simon said. 'She died in my bed, as a warning to me.'

He removed his Clasp from the shoulder of his cloak and clicked it. The little machine flowered briefly into a dazzling actinic glare, and then closed again. While Da-Ud was still covering his streaming eyes, Simon said softly:

'I am the Traitor-in-Chief of High Earth.'

It was not the flash of the badge that was dazzling Da-Ud now. He lowered his hands. His whole plump body was trembling with hate and eagerness.

'What - what do you want of me, excellence? I have nothing to sell but the Rood-Prince… and a poor stick he is. Surely you would not sell me High Earth; I am a poor stick myself.'

'I would sell you High Earth for twenty rivals.'

'You mock me!'

'No, Da-Ud. I came here to deal with the Guild, but they killed Jillith - and that as far as I'm concerned disqualified them from being treated with as civilised professionals, or as human beings at all. She was pleasant and intelligent and I was fond of her - and besides, while I'm perfectly willing to kill under some conditions, I don't hold with throwing away an innocent life for some footling dramatic gesture.'

'I wholly agree,' Da-Ud said. His indignation seemed to be at least half real. 'But what will you do? What can you do?'

'I have to fulfil my mission, any way short of my own death - if I die, nobody will be left to get it done. But I'd most dearly love to cheat, dismay, disgrace the Guild in the process, if it could possibly be managed. I'll need your help. If we live through it, I'll see to it that you'll turn a profit, too; money isn't my first goal here, or even my second now.'

'I'll tackle it,' Da-Ud said at once, though he was obviously apprehensive, as was only sensible. 'What precisely do you propose?'

'First of all, I'll supply you with papers indicating that I've sold you a part - not all - of the major thing I have to sell, which gives the man who holds it a lever in the State Ministry of High Earth. It shows that High Earth has been conspiring against several major powers, all human, for purposes of gaining altitude with the Green Exarch. They won't tell you precisely which worlds, but there will be sufficient information there so that the Exarchy would pay a heavy purse for them - and high Earth an even heavier one to get them back.

'It will be your understanding that the missing information is also for sale, but you haven't got the price.'

'Suppose the Guild doesn't believe that?'

"They'll never believe - excuse me, I must be blunt - that you could have afforded the whole thing; they'll know I sold you this much of it only because I have a grudge, and you can tell them so - though I wouldn't expose the nature of the grudge if I were you. Were you unknown to them they might assume that you were me in disguise, but luckily they know you, and, ah, probably tend rather to underestimate you.'

'Kindly put,' Da-Ud said with a grin. 'But that won't prevent them from assuming that I know your whereabouts, or have some way of reaching you. They'll interrogate for that, and of course I'll tell them. I know them, too; it would be impossible not to tell, and I prefer to save myself needless pain.'

'Of course - don't risk interrogation at all, tell them you want to sell me out, as well as the secret. That will make sense to them, and I think they must have rules against interrogating a member who offers to sell; most Traitors' Guilds do.'

'True, but they'll observe them only so long as they believe me; that's standard too.'

Simon shrugged, 'Be convincing then,' he said. 'I have already said that this project will be dangerous; presumably you didn't become a traitor for sweet safety's sole sake.'

'No, but not for suicide's either. But I'll abide the course. Where are the documents?'

'Give me access to your Prince's toposcope-scriber and I'll produce them. But first - twenty riyals, please.'

'Minus two riyals for the use of the Prince's property. Bribes, you know.'

'Your sister was wrong, you do have style, in a myopic sort of way. All right, eighteen riyals - and then let's get on to real business. My time is not my own - not by a century.'

'But how do I reach you thereafter?'

'That information,' Simon said blandly, 'will cost you those other two riyals, and cheap at the price.'

III
The Rood-Prince's brain-dictation laboratory was very far from being up to Guild standards, let alone High Earth's, but Simon was satisfied that the documents he generated there would pass muster. They were utterly authentic, and every experienced traitor had a feeling for that quality, regardless of such technical deficiencies as blurry image registration and irrelevant emotional overtones.

That done, Simon began to consider how he would meet Da-Ud when the game had that much furthered itself. The arrangement he had made with the play woman's half-brother was of course a blind, indeed a double blind, but it had to have the virtues of its imperfections or nothing would be accomplished. Yet Simon was now beginning to find it hard to think; the transduction serum was increasingly taking hold, and there were treasons taking place inside his skull which had nothing to do with Boadicea, the Green Exarch or High Earth. Worse: they seemed to have nothing to do with Simon de Kuyl, either, but instead muttered away about silly little provincial intrigues nothing could have brought him to care about - yet which made him feel irritated, angry, even ill, like a man in the throes of jealousy toward some predecessor and unable to reason them away. Knowing their source, he fought them studiously, but he knew they would get steadily worse, however resolute he was; they were coming out of his genes and his bloodstream, not his once finely honed, now dimming conciousness.

Under the circumstances, he was not going to be able to trust himself to see through very many highly elaborate schemes, so that it would be best to eliminate all but the most necessary. Hence it seemed better, after all, to meet Da-Ud in the Principate as arranged, and save the double dealing for more urgent occasions.

On the other hand, it would be foolish to hang around the Principate, waiting and risking some miscarriage - such as betrayal through a possible interrogation of Da-Ud - when there were things he might be accomplishing elsewhere. Besides, the unvarying foggy warmth and the fragmented garish religiousness of the Principate both annoyed him and exercised pulls of conflicting enthusiasms and loyalties on several of his mask personalities, who had apparently been as unstable even when whole as their bits and pieces had now made him. He was particularly out of sympathy with the motto graven on the lintel of the Rood-Prince's vaguely bird-shaped palace: JUSTICE IS LOVE. The sentiment, obviously descended from some colonial Islamic sect, was excellent doctrine for a culture given to treason, for it allowed the prosecution of almost any kind of betrayal on the grounds that Justice was being pursued; but Simon found it entirely too pat. Besides, he was suspicious of all abstractions which took the form 'A is B', in his opinion, neither justice nor mercy were very closely related to love, let alone being identical with it.

These bagatelles aside it seemed likely to Simon that something might be gained by returning for a while to Druidsfall and haunting the vicinity of the Guild Hall. At the worst, his address would then be unknown to Da-Ud, and his anonymity more complete in a larger city, the Guild less likely to identify him even were it to suspect him - as of course it would - of such boldness. At best, he might pick up some bit of useful information, particularly if Da-Ud's embassy were to create any unusual stir.

For a while he saw nothing unusual which was in itself fractionally reassuring: either the Guild was not alarmed by Da-Ud, or was not letting it show. On several days in succession, Simon saw the Boadicean Traitor-in-Chief enter and leave, sometimes with an entourage, more often with only a single slave: Valkol The Polite', a portly, jowly man in a black abah decorated only by the Clasp, with a kindly and humorous expression into which were set eyes like two bites of an iceberg. This was normal, although it gave Simon a small, ambiguous frisson which was all the more disturbing because he was unsure which of his personae he should assign it to: certainly not to his fundamental self, for although Valkol was here the predestined enemy, he was no more formidable that others Simon had defeated (while, it was true, being in his whole and right mind).

Then Simon recognized the 'slave', and ran.

There was no possibility of his identifying who the creature was; he was fortunate - in no way he could explain - to be able to penetrate just to what it was. The 'slave' was a vombis, or what in one of the oldest languages was called a Proteus, a creature which could imitate perfectly almost any life-form within its size range. Or nearly perfectly; for Simon, like one in perhaps five thousand of his colleagues, was sensitive to them, without ever being able to specify in what particular their imitations of humanity were deficient; other people, even those of the sex opposite to the one the vombis assumed, could find no flaw in them. In part because they do not revert when killed, no human had ever seen their 'real' form - if they had one - though of course there were legends aplenty. The talent might have made them ideal double agents, were it possible to trust them - but that was only an academic speculation since the vombis were wholly creatures of the Green Exarch.

Simon's first impulse, like that of any other human being, had been to kill this one instantly upon recognition, but that course had many obvious drawbacks. Besides, the presence of an agent of the Exarchy so close to the heart of this imbroglio was suggestive and might be put to some use. Of course the vombis might be in Druidsfall on some other business entirely, but Simon would be in no hurry to make so dangerous an assumption. No, it was altogether more likely that the Exarch, who could hardly have heard yet of Simon's arrival and disgrace, was simply aware in general of how crucial Boadicea would be to any scheme of High Earth's - he was above all an efficient tyrant - and had placed his creature here to keep an eye on things.

Yes, that situation might be used, if Simon could just keep his disquietingly percolating brains under control. Among his present advantages was the fact that his disguise was better than that of the vombis, a fact the creature was probably constitutionally incapable of suspecting. With a grim chuckle which he hoped he would not later regret, Simon flew back to the Gulf of the Rood.

 

Da-Ud met Simon in the Singing Gardens, a huge formal maze not much frequented of late even by lovers, because the Rood-Prince in the throes of some new religious crotchet had let it run wild, so that one had constantly to be fending off the ardour of the flowers. At best it made even simple conversation difficult, and it was rumoured that deep in the heart of the maze, the floral attentions were of a more sinister sort.

Da-Ud was exultant, indeed almost manic in his enthusiasm, which did not advance comprehension either; but Simon listened patiently.

"They bought it like lambs,' Da-Ud said, naming a sacrificial animal of High Earth so casually as to make one of Simon's personae shudder inside him. 'I had a little difficulty with the underlings, but not as much as I'd expected, and I got it all the way up to Valkol himself.'

'No sign of any outside interest?'

'No, nothing. I didn't let out any more than I had to until I reached His Politeness, and after that he put the blue seal on everything - wouldn't discuss anything but the weather while anyone else was around. Listen, Simon, I don't want to seem to be telling you your business, but I think I may know the Guild better than you do, and it seems to me that you're underplaying your hand. This thing is worth money.'

'I said it was.'

'Yes, but I don't think you've any conception how much. Old Valkol took my asking price without a murmer, in fact so fast that I'd wished I'd asked for twice as much. Just to show you I'm convinced of all this, I'm going to give it all to you.'

'Don't want it,' Simon said. 'Money is of no use to me unless I can complete the mission. All I need now is operating expenses, and I've got enough for that.'

This clearly had been what Da-Ud had hoped he would say, but Simon suspected that had matters gone otherwise, the younger man might indeed have given over as much as half the money. His enthusiasm mounted.

'All right, but that doesn't change the fact that we could be letting a fortune slip here.'

'How much?'

'Oh, at least a couple of megariyals - and I mean apiece,' Da-Ud said grandly. 'I can't imagine an opportunity like that comes around very often, even in the circles you're used to.'

'What would we have to do to earn it?' Simon said with carefully calculated doubt.

'Play straight with the Guild. They want the material badly, and if we don't trick them we'll be protected by their own rules. And with that much money, there are a hundred places in the galaxy where you'd be safe from High Earth for the rest of your life.'

'And what about your half-sister?'

'Well, I'd be sorry to lose that chance, but cheating the Guild wouldn't bring her back, would it? And in a way, wouldn't it be aesthetically more satisfying to pay them back for Jillith by being scrupulously fair with them? "Justice is Love", you know, and all that.'

'I don't know,' Simon said fretfully. "The difficulty lies in defining justice, I suppose - you know as well as I do that it can excuse the most complicated treasons. And "What do you mean by love?" isn't easily answerable either. In the end one has to chuck it off as a woman's question, too private to be meaningful in a man's world - let alone in matters of polity. Hmmmm.'

This maundering served no purpose but to suggest that Simon was still trying to make up his mind; actually he had reached a decision several minutes ago. Da-Ud had broken; he would have to be disposed of.

Da-Ud listened with an expression of polite bafflement which did not quite completely conceal a gleam of incipient triumph. Ducking a trumpet-vine which appeared to be trying to crown him with thorns, Simon added at last: 'You may well be right -but we'll have to be mortally careful. There may after all be another agent from High Earth here; in matters of this importance they wouldn't be likely to rest with only one charge in the chamber. That means you'll have to follow my instructions to the letter, or we'll never live to spend a riyal of the proceeds.'

'You can count on me,' Da-Ud said, tossing his hair out of his eyes. 'I've handled everything well enough this time, haven't I? And after all it was my idea.'

'Certainly; an expert production. Very well. What I want you to do now is go back to Valkol and tell him that I've betrayed you, and sold the other half of the secret to the Rood-Prince.'

'Surely you wouldn't actually do such a thing!'

'Oh, but I would, and I shall - the deed will be done by the time you get back to Druidsfall, and for the same twenty riyals that you paid for your half.'

'But the purpose-?'

'Simple. I cannot come to Druidsfall with my remaining half-if there's another Earthman there, I'd be shot before I got halfway up the steps of the Hall. I want the Guild to consolidate the two halves by what seems to be an unrelated act of aggression, between local parties. You make this clear to them by telling them that I won't actually make the sale to the Rood-Prince until I hear from you that you have the rest of the money. To get the point across at once, when you tell His Politeness that I've "betrayed" you - wink.'

'And how do I get word to you this time?'

'You wear this ring. It communicates with a receiver in my Clasp. I'll take matters from there.'

The ring - which was actually only a ring, which would never communicate anything to anybody - changed hands. Then Da-Ud saluted Simon with solemn glee, and went away to whatever niche in history - and in the walls of the Guild hall of Boadicea -is reserved for traitors without style; and Simon, breaking the stalk of a lyre-bush which had sprung up between his feet, went off to hold his muttering, nattering skull and do nothing at all.

 

Valkol the Polite - or the Exarch's agent, it hardly mattered which - did not waste any time. From a vantage-point high up on the principate's only suitable mountain, Simon watched their style of warfare with appreciation and some wonder.

Actually, in the manoeuvring itself the hand of the Exarchy did not show, and did not need to; for the whole campaign would have seemed like a token display, like a tournament, had it not been for the few score of casualties which seemed inflicted almost inadvertently. Even among these there were not many deaths, as far as Simon could tell - at least, not by the standards of battle to which he was accustomed. Clearly nobody who mattered got killed, on either side.

The Rood-Prince, in an exhibition of bravado more garish than sensible deployed on the plain before his city several thousand pennon-bearing mounted troopers who had nobody to fight but a rabble of foot soldiers which Druidsfall obviously did not intend to be taken seriously; whereupon the city was taken

from the Gulf side, by a squadron of flying submarines which broke from the surface of the sea on four buzzing wings like so many dragonflies.

These devices particularly intrigued Simon. Some Boadicious genius, unknown to the rest of the galaxy, had solved the orni-thopter problem… though the wings were membranous rather than feathered. Hovering, the machines thrummed their wings through a phase shift of a full 180 degrees, but when they swooped the wings moved in a horizontal figure eight, lifting with a for-ward-and-down stroke, and propelling with the backstroke. A long fish-like tail gave stability, and doubtless had other uses under water.

After the mock battle, the 'thopters landed and the troops withdrew; and then matters took a more sinister turn, manifested by thumping explosions and curls of smoke from inside the Rood palace. Evidently a search was being made for the supposedly hidden documents Simon was thought to have sold, and it was not going well. The sounds of demolition, and the occasional public hangings, could only mean that a maximum interrogation of the Rood-Prince had failed to produce any papers, or any clues to them.

This Simon regretted, as he did the elimination of Da-Ud. He was not normally so ruthless - an outside expert would have called his workmanship in this affair perilously close to being sloppy - but the confusion caused by the transduction serum, now rapidly rising as it approached term, had prevented him from manipulating every factor as subtly as he had originally hoped to do. Only the grand design was still intact now: It would now be assumed that Boadicea had clumsily betrayed the Exarchy leaving the Guild no way out' but to capitulate utterly to Simon… with whatever additional humiliations he judged might not jeopardize the mission, for Jillith's sake

Something abruptly cut off his view of the palace. He snatched his binoculars away from his eyes in alarm.

The object that had come between him and the Gulf was a mounted man - or rather, the idiot-headed apteryx the man was sitting on. Simon was surrounded by a ring of them, their lance-points aimed at his chest, pennons trailing in the dusty sareh-grass. The pennons bore the device of the Rood-Prince; but every lancer in the force was a vombis.

Simon rose resignedly, with a token snarl intended more for himself than for the impassive protean creatures and their fat birds. He wondered why it had never occurred to him before that the vombis might be as sensitive to him as he was to them.

But the answer to that no longer mattered. Sloppiness was about to win its long-postponed reward.

IV
They put him naked into a wet cell a narrow closet completely clad in yellow alabaster, down the sides of which water oozed and beaded all day long, running out into gutters at the edges. He was able to judge when it was day, because there were clouded bull's-eye lenses in each of the four walls which waxed and waned at him with any outside light; the wet cell was a sort of inverted oubliette, thrust high up into Boadicea's air, probably a hypertrophied merlon on one of the towers of the Traitors' Hall. At night, a fifth lens, backed by a sodium vapour lamp, glared down from the ceiling, surrounded by a faint haze of steam where the dew tried to condense on it.

Escape was a useless fantasy. Erected into the sky as it was, the wet cell did not even partake of the usual character of the building's walls, except for one stain in the alabaster which might have been the under side of a child's footprint; otherwise the veinings were mockingly meaningless. The only exit was down, an orifice through which they had inserted him as though he were being born, and now plugged like the bottom of a stopped toilet. Could he have broken through one of the lenses with his bare hands, he would have found himself naked and torn on the highest point in Druidsfall, with no place to go.

Naked he was. Not only had they pulled all his teeth in search of more poisons, but of course they had also taken his Clasp. He hoped they would fool with the Clasp - it would make a clean death for everybody - but doubtless they had better sense. As for the teeth, they would regrow if he lived, that was one of the few positive advantages of the transduction serum, but in the meantime his bare jaws ached abominably.

They had missed the antidote, which was in a tiny gel capsule in his left earlobe, masquerading as a sebaceous cyst - left, because it is automatic to neglect that side of a man, as though it were only a mirror image of the examiner's right - and that was some comfort. In a few more days now, the gel would dissolve, he would lose his multiple disguise, and then he would have to con

fess, but in the meantime he could manage to be content despite the slimy glaring cold of the cell.

And in the meantime, he practised making virtues of deficiencies : in this instance, calling upon his only inner resources - the diverting mutterings of his other personalities - and trying to guess what they might once have meant. Some said:

'But I mean, like, you know -'

'Wheah they goin'?'

'Yeah.'

'Led's gehdahda heah - he-he-he!'

'Wheah?'

'So anyway, so uh.'

Others:

'It's hard not to recognize a pigeon.'

'But Mother's birthday is July 20.'

'So he knew that the inevitable might happen -'

'It made my scalp creak and my blood curl.'

'Where do you get those crazy ideas?'

And others:

'Acquit Socrates!'

'Back when she was sure she was married to a window-washer.'

'I don't know what you've got under your skirt, but it's wearing white socks.'

'And then she made a noise like a spindizzy going sour.'

And others:

'Pepe Satan, pepe Satan aleppe,'

'Why, so might any man.'

'EVACUATE MARS!'

'And then she sez to me, she sez -'

'… if he would abandon his mind to it.'

'With all of love.'

And… but at that point the plug began to unscrew and from the spargers above him which formerly had kept the dampness running, a heavy gas began to curl. They had tired of waiting for him to weary of himself, and the second phase of his questioning was about to begin.

 

They questioned him, dressed in a hospital gown so worn that it was more starch than fabric, in the Traitor-in-Chief's private office to begin with - a deceptively bluff, hearty, leather-and-piperacks sort of room, which might have been reassuring to a novice. There were only two of them: Valkol in his usual abah, and the 'slave', now dressed as a Charioteer of the high blood. It was a curious choice of costume, since Charioteers were supposed to be free, leaving it uncertain which was truly master and which slave; Simon did not think it could have been Valkol's idea.

Noticing the direction of his glance, Valkol said, 'I asked this gentleman to join me to assure you, should you be in any doubt, that this interview is serious. I presume you know who he is.'

'I don't know who "he" is,' Simon said, with the faintest of emphasis. 'But it must be representing the Green Exarch, since it's a vombis.'

.The Traitor-in-Chief's lips whitened slightly. Aha, then he hadn't known that! 'Prove it,' he said.

'My dear Valkol,' the creature interposed. 'Pray don't let him distract us over trifles. Such a thing could not be proved without the most elaborate of laboratory tests, as we all know. And the accusation shows what we wish to know, i.e., that he is aware of who I am - otherwise why try to make such an inflammatory charge?'

'Your master's voice,' Simon said. 'Let us by all means proceed - this gown is chilly.'

'This gentleman,' Valkol said, exactly as if he had not heard any of the four proceeding speeches, 'is Chag Sharanee of the Exarchy. Not from the embassy, but directly from the court -he is His Majesty's deputy Fomentor.'

'Appropriate,' Simon murmured.

'We know you now style yourself Simon de Kuyl, but what is more to the point, that you proclaim yourself the Traitor-in-Chief of High Earth. Documents now in my possession persuade me that that if you are not in fact that officer, you are so close to being he as makes no difference. Possibly the man you replaced, the putative amateur with the absurd belt of poison-shells, was actually he. In any event you are the man we want.'

'Flattering of you.'

'Not at all,' said Valkol the Polite. 'We simply want the remainder of those documents, for which we paid. Where are they?'

'I sold them to the Rood-Prince.'

'He had them not, nor could he be persuaded to remember any such transaction.'

'Of course not,' Simon said with a smile. 'I sold them for twenty riyals; do you think the Rood-Prince would recall any such piddling exchange? I appeared as a bookseller, and sold them to his librarian. I suppose you burned the library - barbarians always do.'

Valkol looked at the vombis. 'The price agrees with the, uh, testimony of Da-Ud tarn Altair. Do you think -?'

'It is possible. But we should take no chances; e.g., such a search would be time-consuming.'

The glitter in Valkol's eyes grew brighter and colder. 'True. Perhaps the quickest course would be to give him over to the Sodality.'

Simon snorted. The Sodality was a lay organization to which Guilds classically entrusted certain functions the Guild lacked time and manpower to undertake, chiefly crude physical torture.

'If I'm really who you think I am,' he said, 'such a course would win you nothing but an unattractive cadaver - not even suitable for masonry repair.'

'True,' Valkol said reluctantly. 'I don't suppose you could be induced - politely - to deal fairly with us, at this late date? After all, we did pay for the documents in question, and not any mere twenty riyals.'

'I haven't the money yet.'

'Naturally not, since the unfortunate Da-Ud was held here with it until we decided he no longer had any use for it. However, if upon the proper oaths -'

'High Earth is the oldest oath-breaker of them all,' the Fomentor said. 'We - viz., the Exarchy - have no more time for such trials. The question must be put.'

'So it would seem. Though 1 hate to handle a colleague thus.'

'You fear High Earth,' the vombis said. 'My dear Valkol, may I remind you -'

'Yes, yes, I know all that,' Valkol snapped to Simon's surprise. 'Nevertheless - Mr de Kuyl, are you sure we have no recourse but to send you to the Babble Room?'

'Why not?' Simon said. 'I rather enjoy hearing myself think. In fact, that's what I was doing when you two interrupted me.'

 

Simon was naturally far from feeling all the bravado he had voiced, but he had no choice left but to trust to the transduction serum, which was now on the shuddering, giddy verge of depriving all three of them of what they each most wanted. Only Simon could know this, but only he also knew something much worse - that in so far as his distorted time-sense could calculate, the antidote was due to be released into his bloodstream at best in another six hours, at worst within only a few minutes. After that, the Exarchy's creature would be the only victor - and the only survivor.

And when he saw the Guild's toposcope laboratory, he wondered if even the serum would be enough to protect him. There was nothing in the least outmoded about it; Simon had never encountered its like even on High Earth. Exarchy equipment, all too probably.

Nor did the apparatus disappoint him. It drove directly down into his subconscious with the resistless unconcern of a spike penetrating a toy balloon. Immediately, a set of loudspeakers above his supine body burst into multi-voiced life:

'Is this some trick? No one but Berentz had a translation-permit -'

'Now the overdrive my-other must woo and win me -'

'Wie schaifen Sie es, solche Entfernungen bei Unterlichtges-chwindigkeit zurueckzulegen?'

'REMEMBER THOR FIVE!'

'Pok. Pok. Pok.'

'We're so tired of wading in blood, so tired of drinking blood, so tired of dreaming about blood -'

The last voice rose to a scream and all the loudspeakers cut off abruptly. Valkol's face, baffled but not yet worried, hovered over Simon's, peering into his eyes.

'We're not going to get anything out of that,' he told some invisible technician. 'You must have gone too deep; those are the archetypes you're getting, obviously.'

'Nonsense.' The voice was the Fomentor's. 'The archetypes sound nothing like that - for which you should be grateful. In any event we have barely gone beneath the surface of the cortex; see for yourself.'

Valkol's face withdrew. 'Hmm. Well, something's wrong. Maybe your probe is too broad. Try it again.'

The spike drove home, and the loudspeakers resumed their mixed chorus.

'Nausentampen. Eddettompic. Berobsilom. Aimkaksetchoc. Sanbetogmow—'

'Dîtes-lui que nous lui ordonnons de revenir, en vertu de la Loi du Grand Tout.'

'Perhaps he should swear by another country.'

'Can't Mommy ladder spaceship think for bye-bye-see-you two windy Daddy bottle seconds straight -'

'Nansima macamba yonso cakosilisia.'

'Stars don't have points. They're round, like balls.'

The sound clicked off again. Valkol said fretfully: 'He can't be resisting. You've got to be doing something wrong, that's all.'

Though the operative part of the statement was untrue, it was apparently also inarguable to the Fomentor. There was quite a long silence, broken only occasionally by small hums and clinks.

While he waited, Simon suddenly felt the beginnings of a slow sense of relief in his left earlobe, as though a tiny but unnatural pressure he had long learned to live with had decided to give way, precisely, in fact, like the opening of a cyst.

That was the end. Now he had but fifteen minutes more in which the toposcope would continue to vomit forth its confusion - its steadily diminishing confusion… and only an hour before even his physical appearance would reorganize, though that would no longer matter in the least.

It was time to exercise the last option - now, before the probe could by-pass his cortex and again prevent him from speaking his own, fully conscious mind. He said:

'Never mind, Valkol. I'll give you what you want.'

'What? By Gro, I'm not going to give you -'

'You don't have to give me anything, I'm not selling anything. You see for yourself that you can't get to the material with that machine. Not with any other like it, I may add. But I exercise my option to turn my coat, under Guild laws; that gives me safe-conduct, and that's sufficient.'

'No,' the Fomentor's voice said. 'It is incredible - he is in no pain and has frustrated the machine; why should he yield? Besides, the secret of his resistance -'

'Hush,' Valkol said. 'I am moved to ask if you are a vombis; doubtless the machine would tell us that much. Mr de Kuyl, I respect the option, but I am not convinced yet. The motive, please.'

'High Earth is not enough,' Simon said. 'Remember Ezra- Tse? "The last temptation is the final treason… To do the right thing for the wrong reason." I would rather deal fairly with you, and then begin the long task of becoming honest with myself. But with you only, Valkol - not the Exarchy. I sold the Green Exarch nothing.'

'I see. A most interesting arrangement; I agree. What will you require?'

'Perhaps three hours to get myself unscrambled from the effects of fighting your examination. Then I'll dictate the missing material. At the moment it's quite inaccessible.'

'I believe that, too,' Valkol said ruefully. 'Very well -'

'It is not very well,' the vombis said, almost squalling. 'The arrangement is a complete violation of-'

Valkol turned and looked at the creature so hard that it stopped talking of its own accord. Suddenly Simon was sure Valkol no longer needed tests to make up his mind what the Formentor was.

'I would not expect you to understand it,' Valkol said in a very soft voice indeed. 'It is a matter of style.'

 

Simon was moved to a comfortable apartment and left alone, for well more than the three hours he had asked for. By that time his bodily reorganization was complete, though it would take at least a day for all the residual mental effects of the serum to vanish. When the Traitor-in-Chief finally admitted himself, he made no attempt to disguise either his amazement or his admiration.

"The poison man! High Earth is still a world of miracles. Would it be fair to ask what you did with your, uh, over-populated associate?'

'I disposed of him,' Simon said. 'We have traitors enough already. There is your document; I wrote it out by hand, but you can have a toposcope confirmation whenever you like, now.'

'As soon as my technicians master the new equipment-we shot the monster, of course, though I don't doubt the Exarch will resent it.'

'When you see the rest of the material you may not care what the Exarch thinks,' Simon said. 'You will find that I've brought you a high alliance - though it was Gro's own horns getting it to you.'

'I had begun to suspect as much. Mr de Kuyl -1 must assume you are still he, for sanity's sake - that act of surrender was the most elegant gesture I have ever seen. That alone convinced me that you were indeed the Traitor-in-chief of High Earth and no other.'

'Why, so I was,' Simon said. 'But if you will excuse me now, I think I am about to be somebody else.'

With a mixture of politeness and alarm Valkol left him. It was none too soon. He had a bad taste in his mouth which had nothing to do with his ordeals… and, though nobody knew better than he how empty all vengeance is, an inexpungeable memory of Jillith.

Maybe, he thought, 'Justice is Love' after all - not a matter of style, but of spirit. He had expected all these questions to vanish when the antidote took full hold, wiped into the past with the personalities who had done what they had done; but they would not vanish; they were himself.

He had won, but obviously he would never be of use to High Earth again.

In a way, this suited him. A man did not need the transduction serum to be divided against himself. He still had many guilts to accept, and not much left of a lifetime to do it in.

While he was waiting, perhaps he could learn to play the sareh.