Rogue Dragon

XI

They kept on coming after him.

And, after them, came the dragon.

It was probably futile to try to escape them on foot.

They were fresh, he was weary. They were armed, he was not. And even if he could outrun them, there was still the dragon to contend with… not the chicken-witted wittold of the settled regions, but the murderously intelligent great beast of The Bosky. Various old bywords went rushing through his mind. If you can’t go across, you must go around. If you can’t go across, you must go across. No, not those. He tried to bring his buttocks even lower than they were, and dragged himself, face first, through something nasty. If you can’t go across, you must go up. Probably there was no such byword at all. Or hadn’t been… till now.

He went up and he went up the far side of the twisted old tree. Something had built a nest or a den there once, and it still smelled rotten. Not matter. Such things had ceased to count long ago. He pulled his legs up after him and used the stinging twig-work as a blind to peer through. The men had not seen him, yet. Neither, apparently, had the dragon. It came running along as he had never before seen dragons run: lightly, and on all fours, but as though it ran on its toes and not upon the pads of its feet at all. It made no sound. It made no sound at all that Jon-Joras could hear.

But the men below had heard something. Or had felt or scented or sensed something. One of them whirled around and cried out. The others on the instant did the same. They scattered. And Jon-Joras in the tree realized a few sudden things. For one, the dragon was not hunting him. For another, the dragon was not hunting for or with the men. And for a third and last, it was hunting against them. It was clear that they knew it, too.

This hunt was short-lived, for the weapons the men were carrying were not the local model hunt-guns. They had not come loaded for dragon; at least, he knew of no reason why they should have. And in any event this one was not marked and was not even running erect so that they might guess at where its vital spot, where the fatal shot, might be and might be placed. So far as Jon-Joras knew, they had only come loaded for Jon-Joras, and his body rattled in a sudden spasm of fear when he saw one of them level the thick and snub death-weapon and blow the dragon’s head into a mash of blood and brain and bone and pulp that flew all about. And then, then, oh, how horrible! to see the dying dragon, the dragon that should have been dead, still stumbling along, and groping and clutching for its prey while all the while fountains of blood spurted from its broken arteries and torrents of blood poured from its severed veins. It was as though the headless body still remembered what its eyes had seen and still knew where to go and what to do.

Pounding, now, pawing the stained grasses, it came on, came onward, still came on, while the man it approached scrambled backwards and stumbled backwards as though not daring to turn his head; and the other two retreated, took their stances again, and blew great chasms and abysses into it. Off in the woods another dragon called, briefly, abruptly, cut off in mid-cry. Were all the dragons of The Bosky being massacred? “… in the egg, and out…”? as, even now, this one, its spine exposed and smashed, fell at last to the ground, which shook to receive it. A short moment more the fore-limbs tore at the bloody turf and tried to pull the bleeding mountain of flesh further. There was a spasm, a flurry, and the ravaged hulk lay still.

The three, shaking their heads, came cautiously together and surveyed their kill. And the other dragon, walking fully erect—walking fully erect! — and again with that curious stride upon the tips of its toes — passed beneath Jon-Joras as he clung to the tree and peered in numbed more-than-fright through the soiled integuments of the abandoned nest. Beneath him, beyond him, nodules swollen in silent rage, and then it bellowed the rage that made the forest quake as it fell upon them. And ripped and tore. One died where he stood, one fired upwards and vanished into the giant, trap-like mouth even as the limb his shot had shattered dangled and spurted blood; and one fled, shrilling as he ran, and was almost immediately followed down and dragged and torn and trampled. And so ended the last dragon hunt that Jon-Joras was ever to see.

What happened next was less terrifying, but no less amazing. For the great beast, pushing aside the corpse at its feet, with one of its forepaws seized hold of a branch and transferred it to the wounded limb which grasped it convulsively but held it firm. Then it rooted out another. Then, turning around and around, and looking up and looking down and looking all about it, it began that beating together, that clicking and rustling, which could only have been a deliberate attempt at imitating the methods of the Old Man interpreter. It was capable of no other meaning than a desire to locate Jon-Joras. And a desire to indicate that its desire was not hostile.

Quaking and trembling, he came down from the tree. The faceted eyes flashed at him. It moved off, he followed, it turned and saw that he followed, and so it turned no more until at last they reached the castle. But he had not followed until, forcing his quivering stomach into obedience, he turned over one of the mangled bodies on the bloody forest floor. Only one, but that one was enough. Jetro Yi. No wonder his voice, his manner, had seemed familiar. Flunky Jetro. He would bow and scrape no more.

Thus far, the door onto the mysteries had opened. But up there in the castle, it had swung shut in a manner forbidding it should or could ever be opened in any near time again. The Old Man, his poor grimy forehead battered and blue where, presumably, the butt of a gun had struck it, lay face upwards and mouth open. He had been afraid and he had been rightfully afraid, but Jon-Joras was very glad that he did not seem to be afraid any longer. It was simply too bad that his release had been so long in coming.

The Kar-chee looked at him with huge dull eyes. It seemed, somehow, to be crooked. Jon-Joras looked more closely and saw that it, too, was hurt. The three “proper men,” with Jetro Yi one of them, had done a fine day’s work. It was possible to reconstruct it, almost as though the gaunt, hurt creature was able to tell him of it. They had appeared and spoken to the castle’s keeper. They knew that Jon-Joras must be here, or — perhaps — they had only guessed that he might. Perhaps the timorous Old Man had somehow given it away.

They had demanded him, the one who stole their flyer, had caused the death of the crew of the other, the crashed flyer. Of course it was not that alone or even mostly that which brought them after him. But—

Almost certainly the Kar-chee had confronted them with their perpetually broken promise. Had, likely enough, demanded that it be immediately fulfilled. Had refused to surrender someone else who had promised that promise to fulfil. Blows were struck. They left the castle looking still for Jon-Joras and certainly it had never been their intention to allow him to escape. He had a quick, over-vivid picture of his own head struck by the same shot which had killed the first dragon out there in the woods. The first dragon, the first and second dragons. Like minor players in an archaic play-drama… but their roles had not been minor, but their roles had been and still were things of the mystery. He thought that, finally, finally, he was beginning to understand. But with the Old Man dead (and perhaps, with his ruined mind, even if he had not been dead), he could never be fully sure that he had understood or ever would, entirely.

As for the Kar-chee — and he found it not hard to pity it now, wounded and alone, despite all that its kind had done so long ago to this the home of all man’s race — it understood this much, at any rate: that only in and through Jon-Joras it had hopes of survival and escape. Therefore it had sent the dragon, not only to save him, but to bring him back.

Therefore it had sent its other self!

The flyer in which Jetro Yi and his two fellows had come was in the clearing where it had landed and which smelled of the stale fuel of its many prior comings. Perhaps forewarned against leaving it alone by Jon-Joras’s theft of the other one that morning, they’d left a man on armed guard. But he was dead now, too, and from the shape (or shapelessness) of him, it would have been neither grace nor favor to him if he were still alive. Jon-Joras, infinitely weary, glad of the excuse given him by the slow and limping Kar-chee, slowed his own walk. It was almost dark when they reached the craft. He put its lights on and the two of them entered. Fortunately it was a larger craft than the one he’d made off with this morning, but even so the alien had to crouch, looking not less fearful because he was huddled instead of erect. But there was no longer, so it seemed, fear between them. And Jon-Joras made a wry smile at the thought that perhaps the Kar-chee was even now reminding itself that the fact that Jon-Joras had a bad smell did not mean that Jon-Joras was therefore bad!

He settled into the drive-seat with a grateful groan of relief. He took the craft up and then he radioed in to ConfedBase, down on the underside of the Earth in a small continent which the Kar-chees had raised up around what had once been the Andaman Islands, and had ConfedBase connect him to Delegate Anse.

“How are you? Where are you? How have you been? Why did you go away from the hospital?” the questions came pouring out.

Jon-Joras said, “I’m in a stolen flyer up at 30,000 feet. I am very tired, but otherwise well. One group of men tried to kill me early this morning. Another group of them — or maybe just another group — tried to kill me late this afternoon. I have a Kar-chee with me, and—”

“You have a what?” Anse interrupted, in a low voice.

“A Kar-chee, he’s injured, but I don’t know how much or how seriously. Where should we meet you? Sir? Delegate? Are you—”

“I’m here, yes. I’m just thinking. I’m afraid that you’re still quite ill. The best thing would be for you to put down in the nearest place you can. Would that be Peramis?”

Jon-Joras later found it easier to see things as Anse had seen them, but at that exact moment he saw nothing incredible in his own report. He did not make things any better by shouting that nothing would persuade him to go anywhere near any of the four city-states or, for that matter, anywhere near any place where dragon hunts were conducted. “Think fast,” he wound up. “They may be monitoring this call right now. They may try to bring me down.”

“Oh, dear,” said Anse. “Oh, oh, oh… Hold on. Hold on.”

Later, too, Jon-Joras realized that the anxiety was not at all occasioned by belief, but entirely by disbelief. At the moment, though, he found it somewhat gratifying. Anse came back in a moment, asked him how his fuel was, gave him a course to set, and informed him that a special fast-flyer was being sent out and would pick him up in as little time as possible and bring him down to ConfedBase. And this it did. That is, it did not so much pick him up as scoop him up. Then it went down a great ways and leveled out to allow him to transfer. Part of the crew were Prime Worlders, and promptly went into something approaching hysteria when they saw the Kar-chee. But the others had seen enough of aliens even more uncanny-looking than the Kar-chee, and, moreover, had no backlog of almost hereditary fear and hatred concerning Prime World’s former conquerors. They even made educated guesses as to what it would eat and drink, and although it did not do much of either, it did enough of both to relieve Jon-Joras’s mind. He reproached himself for not having thought of this, and was engaged in formulating a useless and incomprehensible apology when he fell asleep sitting up.

The sun was shining when he awoke, and, not reflecting that it was in the nature of things sun-time at ConfedBase when it was night-time on the other side of the world, he thought he had had a good night’s rest. He nodded amiably at the immense avenues of gorgeous flowering trees through which they passed, and, his memory of having seen them at the time of his arrival here on Prime World becoming confused with his seeing them now, he passed into a state where he was not very far from dreaming, and thought of what he recalled having been through as being but singularly vivid visions seen along the roads of sleep. He was in fact thoroughly asleep in a very few minutes, and so he remained for hours yet to come. At one point or at several points he heard familiar voices and this comforted him and it was of no matter to him at the moment if they were dream-voices or real-voices or what they were.

“I was certain that he was feverish or hallucinating or something of that sort — result, you know, Confidential Chief, of his previous illness.”

“Were you?” said the other voice, the voice which pleased him most to hear, although the voice itself seemed not pleased at all.

There was a short pause; the first voice said, “You know that we have little investigatory apparatus here. There has never been any need for it. I saw him briefly when he came through here to make arrangements for you and he said nothing of your special status then—”

“He didn’t know anything about it. Go on—”

“I heard nothing further from him. Then your communication arrived, and I wondered that I’d heard nothing. I sent word out and was told of his being missing after attending an impromptu hunt which had evidently been attacked by a rogue dragon. So many had been killed… I offered a reward… But still nothing turned up. Then came his radio message and his, well, rather wild-sounding story. The physician said he was certainly ill. Then he vanished, as you know, from the physician’s care. And when he said that he had been attacked twice yesterday and had stolen a flyer and had a Kar-chee on board with him — Now, would you not, in my place, have thought—”

And the second voice said, “I am not in your place, Delegate. Nor are you in mine.” Then it asked, “What do you think of his story now? Of all of it, I mean?”

“A living Kar-chee? Here? After all these centuries? A living dodo or dinosaur would be less of a marvel. Much less. If that much of his story is true — and it obviously is! — then all the rest of it could be true, too. And what it all means, is more than I can guess. — You?”

“Me? I have neither need to nor intention of guessing. When my boy wakes up he will tell me. He looks so thin and worn. And so young, so young, so very young…”

The voices fell away. And the young, young, very young man slept on and on. Now it seemed to him that he was aware that he was sleeping and this was pleasant. Somewhere outside was danger. Inside all was safe. The Kar-chee was at the head of his bed and the dragon was at the foot of it and Por-Paulo sat beside it, on the right, the side of honor, which was proper. For he was the proper man, the proper proper man. It was a pity that no one could tell this to the Kar-chee. But perhaps he knew it anyway.

“In a way, old Ma’am Anna was right,” Jon-Joras explained over a long and leisurely breakfast, after having slept the clock around. “Because, in a way, the dragons did turn into Kar-chees. And, in another way, Hue was also right. Because, in a way, the dragons were Kar-chee. Neither was altogether right nor altogether wrong. I think that the truth — as nearly as we can arrive at it — lies somewhere in between. And I think that it goes a long way towards explaining the whole history and mystique of the dragon hunts. Where to start?”

Well-rested, well-washed, well- and cleanly-clothed once again, in slow contented process of becoming well-fed, and two exceedingly important older men listening intently to his every spoken word — Jon-Joras had reason to be as well-pleased with his present situation as, indeed, he was. He had surprises to spring… but then, surprises had been sprung on him as well. And on an empty stomach, too.

Delegate Anse, a small, thin and precise man whose pale hair was cut in the tonsure customary to his native continent, had registered a very mild note of complaint on one of these latter matters. “I don’t recall your telling me,” he had said, “that besides being the private man of Elected King Por-Paulo, you were also his free-born son.”

“He didn’t know it, Delegate,” Por-Paulo said. He was a big man, grayhaired, prominent of nose and jaw. “I very much wanted to marry his mother, but she had — and hasher own ideas on this, as on many subjects. She not only refused me, she chose to reserve the information. And according to our hegemonial laws I could not reveal it myself. But—” his eyes, uplifted for a brief, gleaming instant, “they don’t apply here…”

Unspoken but understood was the intimation that this was at the least one of the reasons for his sending Jon-Joras to Prime World. And following after him. And Jon-Joras had only repeated, bewildered, but never in the least displeased, “I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I always wondered. But I didn’t know…”

The delegate dismissed the matter, as far as he himself was concerned, with a brisk nod, and, “He being free-born, the Nepotism Acts do not apply…” then continued, “You seem to have really done a quite good job, Private Man. I commend you for it — and I commend you, Confidential Chief, for your choice.”

Por-Paulo nodded rather absently, and continued to regard his natural son with the affection he had previously been unable to express openly in his closely, intensely regulated native hegemony. For Jon-Joras, however, it had been another by no means unpleasant shock. Confidential Chief! Not only was Por-Paulo his father — and it might be years before he could fully adjust to this: in the past, though father had been inhibited, son had been totally ignorant — but he was one of the one hundred “shadow rulers” of the Confederation, chosen by lot from among the thousands of paramount executives!

Jon-Joras hoped, and rather expected that he would be able to digest both surprises as well as his breakfast. “Where to begin?” he repeated, now. “I wish the Old Man were still alive. Then we’d be able to speak to the Kar-chee, and check my guesses against its own knowledge.”

Anse said, “It might just be possible. It seems to me that Dr. Cannatin has arrived. Let’s have him in.”

The egg-round, egg-bald archaeologist was not in the best of humors at having been abruptly removed from his dig and flown down to ConfedBase. “Three pot-shards and half a glass medicine-bottle may not seem like much to you,” he protested, “considering the time I’ve spent. But I can assure you of the value and significance of the—”

“I have no doubt—” Anse had begun.

“Not that the medicine-bottle is of a particularly rare type,” Cannatin swept on along. “No, on the contrary, it’s found with sufficient frequency to justify dating other artifacts by its presence in a given stratum. We are, however, still not certain what the name of the medicine was. Hrospard Uu — you’ve of course read his monumental Tentative Glottochronology of the Ichthyopophagous Peoples of Alghol—”

“Dr. Cannatin, we—”

“—Uu claims it was called colacola. Dr. Pix, the labial surd chap, on the other hand, insists that cococo is the proper form. I should like an explanation of why I was bundled up and hustled down here, if you please. Well?”

His annoyance vanished quickly enough on hearing the explanation. For, like all archaeologists of his time, Cannatin was also a linguist. And, as Delegate Anse, who had examined his records on his arrival on Prime World, knew, the scholar had at one time done excavations on the non-affiliated world of Laralpersis, off in the Lace Pattern.

“Wasn’t there — isn’t there—” Anse asked, “a colony of Kar-chee in that place?”

Cannatin nodded, then at once shook his head. “Kar-chee-like,” he corrected. “Smaller. Gray. Not the same. Similar. I did some work among — Why do you ask? Dare I hope that at last I’m to be allowed to try my hand on Kar-chee sites? I’ve always wanted to, but there were always obstructions put in my way. Nothing can really be done here, as I’m sure you know, without the cooperation of the Hunt Company. And the Hunt Company, for some reason… Well, I suppose they’re not interested in anything but hunting. Eh?”

He was incredulous when they told him that a living Kar-chee was present there at ConfedBase, that the physicians were doing their best to treat its injuries, and that anything he knew or could surmise about its morphology or habits or language — in short, anything about it — based on his knowledge of a kindred species, would probably be of considerable help.

“In-cred-ible!” he exclaimed. “Wonderful! Yes. Yes, yes, of course. I do know something of the subject. We used a little mechanical device to communicate with them, electronic, similar — or, at least, not grossly dissimilar — to the ancient telegraph instrument. And not utterly, remote, either, to various drum-systems of reproducing certain languages. I’m sure I could rig one up with a little help. Mind you, it’s no magical-telepathic gadget, it won’t teach me their talkee-talkee. But… on the basis of what I know about a presumably cognate type of language, plus what we all know, all we linguists, I mean, on the question of general communications between intelligent species: I should be able to manage something. It will be fine fun to try, and, meanwhile, well, my pot-shards and medicine-bottles will stay and wait for me. Nobody else wants them.

“Take me to your Kar-chee,” he wound up. “And,” to Jon-Joras, “I’ll be sure to mention you, with full credits, young man, in the paper I mean to write about this.”

Jon-Joras, mouth full of marmalade, gestured to him to stay a second more. Hastily swallowed. Asked, “Did the ones on Laralpersis give the appearance of living in symbiosis with another form of life?”

Cannatin frowned. “Hadn’t thought of it in those terms,” he said, after a moment. “Symbiosis, commensality… There was a fuzzy little nothing of a creature that all the Kishchefs seemed fond of — in fact, we were told it was as much as our life was worth to tamper with one of those fuzz-balls. Why? Well, I’ll ask you later. Duty, duty.”

It fit in, it all fit in. I must consult with my other self. In the past, among men, the possession by one entity of more than one ego had been regarded with, generally, fear and terror. They had spoken of demoniac indwelling, of satanic possession, multiple personality. Victims had been exorcized, lobotomized, mulcted, hospitalized, incarcerated — If the Kar-chees, and their cognates, the Kish-chefs, had ever in an earlier stage or age of their species, undergone similar experiences, could not be said. What could be said, though — and Jon-Joras said it clearly — was this:

“There seems to me to be three things certain. One, is that every member of this species has at least two egos… selves… personalities. Maybe some have more, I don’t know, the only one I spoke to mentioned only one other self. Two, that they solved the problem, if indeed it ever was a problem to them, by finding another life-form to serve as host to the other personality. This other life-form was, had to be, one whose own intelligence — or should I say, intelligence-ego? — was sufficiently feeble to present no obstacle. In the case of the Kish-chefs, this ‘mount’ was what he calls the ‘fuzzy balls of nothing.’ And this brings us to number three: The ‘mount’ used by the Kar-chee was the creature we call the dragon.

“No wonder it seemed ‘that the dragons were the Kar-chee’s dogs.’ The Kar-chee could be in one place and one of his selves in the Kar-chee body in that place; meanwhile, the other self was in the dragon body, hunting down the comparatively feeble human. As long as the dragon body was being ‘mounted’ by a Kar-chee ego, it was capable of acting intelligently. The moment it ceased to be occupied, or, as I’ve been saying, ‘mounted’, by a Kar-chee ego, it had nothing in charge of it but its own low-grade, feeble intelligence. Which wasn’t interested in humans, generally speaking. See how all the fragments fit together. Before the era of the Kar-chee: no dragons. After the Kar-chee reign: lots of dragons. And a tradition which absolutely associated the dragons with the Kar-chee but which, through ignorance, was utterly confused as to what that relationship was.

“I see no other possibility but that the Kar-chee did bring the dragons with them. And in their campaign of conquest they fought the humans here in both their sets of bodies. But the ones which the humans saw the most of was the dragon set. The Kar-chee sets would have been mostly inside the walls of their outposts — the castles, as we call them — planning, directing, moving land and sea. All that. With no humans around to observe. The humans were all outside, being pursued by the dragons. So some of them thought that the dragons were a sort of were-Kar-chee, or vice-versa, changing their shapes back and forth. And some of them… and I take this to be a later tradition… fused their memories and assumed that the dragon-shape was the only shape. The dragons, then, to them, were the Kar-chee! And of course, in a way they were, only in a mental rather than a physical way, don’t you see?”

It seemed odd that they were not bothered by the fact that the Kar-chee had certainly been at least the equal of humanity in intelligence, while the dragons had the intellectual ability of a barnyard fowl. But this was beside the point. Which was, that the human race on Prime World had waged war upon a hideous and hated enemy which had (although not exclusively) the form of the dragon. And right down to the present day, the human race on Prime World was still waging war upon that enemy! It was a war which had never ceased, stylized, ritualized, former ‘enemy’ reduced to an animal, goaded into battle, preserved chiefly that it might be destroyed: but war, nonetheless. Revenge, it could be called revenge. Racial sadism, it could be called that, too. And it would be equally correct to call it a symbolic re-enactment of the liberation of Prime World. But in the end it still returned to the same point.

War.

The dragon hunt was war.

“It does,” Delegate Anse said, reflectively, running his thin hands over his thin, pale hair, when Jon-Joras stopped; “it does seem to make sense. Much sense.”

Por-Paulo thrust out his chin, as he did when he was displeased, and pushed his lower lip out after it. “Well…” he said. “I suppose it could be argued that it serves a useful purpose and function of sorts. There are plenty of parallels. I believe that even up to the First Expansion Period here on Prime World there were such ritual combats. ‘Combats’ I say. They weren’t really. They never are, these sort of things. It’s always fixed, always rigged. The beast is always doomed. It’s better to face the fact honestly and not pretty it up with a lot of lies about blowing off steam and reducing tensions and getting rid of this and that, acting out anxieties, moment of truth. Piddle. There’s an ancient word, I don’t know what language it is. Bazazz. All those arguments are a lot of bazazz. Unless you’re wiping out vermin or hunting for meat to eat, the man who kills animals does so because he likes to kill. And people who like to watch do so because they like to see things being killed.

“I hunt. But I know my own motives. And I know what keeps the Hunt Company in business. And, speaking of which—”

“Yes—” said Anse.

“Yes—” said Jon-Joras. “The Hunt Company as business. Which it is by definition. But whereas, in places like Gare or Sundi, it fits its purposes into the local scene without interfering, here it has in effect taken over the whole continent and frozen it solid and made everything and everyone else fit into its purpose. The Gentlemen as a caste are ideally suited for that, they make admirable instruments. They want to live without creative toil, and the Hunt Company is delighted to help them do so. So decorative! It means nothing that most of the population has been turned into helotry and that some of them — Hue, I mean, and his followers — have even been driven into functioning insanity as a revulsion against the Hunt System and the Gentlemen caste. Hang them up by the heels and shoot them full of arrows… that’s decorative, too for that matter.

“Of course not all the Gentlemen are deliberately base. But I’ve seen what absolute devotion to the principle can do to a man of the caliber of Aëlorix. I’ve seen what it can it do in the way of corrupting official justice, and I almost died of it. But it never was quite clear to me that the Hunt Company wasn’t just riding the wave, that it was in fact creating the wave. I did wonder that Jetro Yi always put me off whenever I wanted to come over into The Bosky, but I thought he was just worrying about perhaps losing a commission on one single hunt, or perhaps that he had caught a kind of superstitious fear of the place as a result of all the stories told about it.”

Delegate Anse was unhappy, and Delegate Anse had good cause to be. This had been going on under his eyes and he had never seen it. Others, elsewhere, had suspected something of it — wherefore Jon-Joras arriving in all innocence to make arrangements for Por-Paulo’s hunt; Por-Paulo all the while acting on behalf of the Confidential Chiefs and their suspicions — but Anse had had no suspicions. It was well enough to say that this had all been going on for a long, long time before he had arrived to take up his residence on ConfedBase. This was true, and it was also true that in adhering to the policy of “non-interference in local ways, rules, and customs” he had only been carrying out Confederation practice. The truth is not always an absolute defense. Anse had been ignorant of what had been going on, and he ought not to have been ignorant. It is one thing to avoid gross interference and it was another thing entirely not even to know that something was going on which he might (and, then, might not) have been justified in not interfering with.

Anse had a problem. But in this particular respect it was all Anse’s problem.

“Companies have become corrupt before,” Por-Paulo said, in a sort of growl. “The temptation is always there, and when the place it operates in is both distant and primitive, the temptation is even greater. I don’t know if we can stick the whole Hunt outfit with responsibility for this rotten local scene. It may really be that the rest of it knows nothing about the local branch working hand and glove with the Kar-chee in keeping people out of The Bosky. Not much doubt as to why they were doing it, I suppose?”

Anse, still musing over his personal problem, had nothing to say. But Jon-Joras had. “Not much doubt in my mind,” he said. “If The Bosky had been wide open, the plebs — Doghunters or Free Farmers, call them what you like — the poor; there — they’d have abandoned the city-states in large numbers. And rightly so. Now, of course, the Gentlemen don’t want that. Nor does the Hunt Company. They want the rotten, picturesque pattern preserved, never mind at what terrible cost to the majority of the population. They want the Gentlemen on their estates and the archers and the bannermen and the musics and the beaters and the whole archaic and hypocritical rest of it. And they want it cheap, too. Package deals for rich officials and executives. They couldn’t have it at the price they want, which is the current price — the current price as paid by the Hunt Company, that is; if they raise their mark-up, that’s the Hunt Company’s business — but they couldn’t have it at the present price if the population dropped because of a migration into The Bosky. Sooner or later, those who’d be left would realize that there are no longer a hundred men eager and waiting and ready to step into their shoes. And they’d set a better sort of price on themselves and their services. They might even say, The Hell with it! and dispense with offering their services altogether.”

He pushed away his breakfast. His appetite was dulled, and he thought of the gray-haired “chick-boys” and the old “marky” with his fingers eaten into twisted stumps from decades of smearing acid into X-marks so that rich men could murder dragons and go and boast of it; this thought did nothing to restore his appetite. “I don’t know how long this blockade of The Bosky has been going on. I don’t know who it was who first got in touch with the Kar-chee and started it going. Or if there were more Kar-chee then and this is the last, or — well, any of that. It brings up a thousand questions. Was there a colony of them left behind? Do they live long, very, very long? I don’t know. Maybe with Dr. Cannatin working on the communications, we’ll be able to find out. Ohh, and — I did promise, while the Old Man was still alive (and there’s another strike against the Hunt Company, another black, black mark: giving those interpreters over to a life-long exile and a living death there. Locked up with beings so alien that gradually they became all but de-humanized. Why! This last one, Old Man, I mean, he had been brought all the way from Dondon-oluc! So someone there must have known about what was going on here…)

“But, as I say, I did promise that the Kar-chee would be taken back to the Kar-chee worlds, to the Ring Stars. I hope that my promise will be kept, sir?”

Por-Paulo shifted in his seat and nodded. Then he blew out his cheeks. “I don’t at the moment know how, boy. And its dragon, too? But I’m sure that it can be done. And so it will. Because — What—?”

“Oh,” said Jon-Joras, “the thought just came to me. It’s that the Hunt Company is the biggest rogue dragon of them all. What’s to be done about that?”

He had some notions, and he expressed them, about annulling its charters and disqualifying its officials. Por-Paulo grunted, muttered something about baby and bath-water. The best thing, he thought, was to do nothing and allow nothing to be done. Just let the word get around that the dragons in The Bosky were harmless, and nature — human nature — would take its course. “You just stated rather clearly what it was that the Hunt Company didn’t want to happen. Well, then. We’ve drawn their teeth. The mere fact that we know and that they’ll know that we know will see to that. And all those things will just go ahead and happen. And we’ll just let them. The Company and their gentlemanly allies will hurt. All right. Let them. They’ll adjust. It won’t happen overnight.”

The flower-scented, salt-scented breeze came in through the screens. Jon-Joras moved and stretched. He had a quick picture of sandy beeches and surfy waters and perhaps, probably, why not? female company. But first. “And meanwhile, sir? What of all those mismarked dragons wandering around? And all the trained rogues? Are we to allow the hunts to go on when they might turn into massacres? In a way, I suppose, we could say, if any over-ripe Commissioners get smeared all over Belroze Wood that it serves them right. Eh?”

His father pulled his nose and pulled his chin and said Mmph a few times. “Well, what do you suggest, damn it?” he demanded, after a while.

Promptly, Jon-Joras said, “That we not do nothing. That we do something. A ten-year moratorium, at least, on hunting. That will not only allow the marked and mis-marked dragons to die off, it will let the Company and the Gentlemen do their hurting now. That way the pain will fall on those who deserve it and not on their children and successors. In fact, I’m not sure that it might not be a bad idea to send trained crews to comb the woods and blow the heads off everything over hatchling size. That way would make sure. And I certainly wouldn’t let the movement into The Bosky and beyond go on haphazardly. What’s to stop some Gentleman who’s shrewd enough to see the handwriting on the wall from moving in there himself? With his servants and his little private army, I mean, and carving himself out another little feudal empire and getting ready to start the whole thing all over again?”

Again Por-Paulo grunted and fingered his face. And now Delegate Anse unexpectedly had something to say. Confederation, he suggested, could do more than continue its passive role. This was after all, Prime World, the birthworld of mankind. Confederation had many debts to pay here, and this was an excellent place to begin. “We have ample experience in helping settlements get started in proper fashion,” he pointed out. “We needn’t let this one go higgledy-pig-geldy, root-hog-or-die, and devil-take-the-hindmost. We can help those who want to move to help themselves in the most efficient fashion. And the same goes for those who want to stay. In fact, I rather think we’d better. There must be lots of the Hue sort around… men whose sufferings have unhinged them to the point where they’d rather burn the house down than see it cleaned up. I rather think we’d all rather see it cleaned up.”

The answer of Por-Paulo to this was oblique. “But I want to have a personal talk with Gentleman Aëlorix,” he said. “And as for that puissant poop, the Chairman of Drogue…” He thrust out his chin and his lip and he growled. Then he turned to Jon-Joras. “Finish your breakfast,” he said.

Jon-Joras pushed the tray away. “I don’t want any more,” he said.