Skylark DuQuesne

13. DUQUESNE AND SENNLLOY

IN the eyes of Blackie DuQuesne, Seaton was forever and helplessly trapped in the philosophy of the “good guy.” It was difficult for DuQuesne to comprehend why a mind of as high an order of excellence as Seaton’s — fully the equal of DuQuesne’s own in many respects, as DuQuesne himself was prepared to concede — should subscribe to the philosophy of lending a helping hand, accepting the defeat of an enemy without rancor, refraining from personal aggrandizement when the way was so easily and temptingly clear to take over the best part of a universe.

Nevertheless, DuQuesne knew that these traits were part of Seaton’s makeup. He had counted on them. He had not been disappointed. It would, have been child’s play for Seaton to have tricked and destroyed him as he entered that monster spaceship Seaton had somehow acquired. Instead of that, Seaton had made him a free gift of its equal!

That, however, was not good enough for Blackie DuQuesne. Seeing how far Seaton had progressed had changed things. He could not accept the status of co-belligerent.

He had to be the victor.

And the one portentous hint he had gleaned from Seaton of the existence of a true fourth-dimensional system could be the tool that would make him the victor; wherefore he set out at once to get it.

Since he had misdirected Seaton as to the vector of the course of the Jelmi, sending him off on what, DuQuesne congratulated himself, was the wildest of wild-goose chases, DuQuesne need only proceed in the right direction and somehow — anyhow; DuQuesne was superbly confident that he would find a means — get from them the secret of what he needed to know. His vessel had power to spare. Therefore he cut in everything his mighty drives could take, computed a tremendous asymptotic curve into the line that the Jelmi must have taken, and took out after the intergalactic flyer that had left Earth’s moon such a short time before.

DuQuesne was aware that force would be an improbably successful means of getting what he wanted. Guile was equally satisfactory. Accordingly he took off his clothes and examined himself, front and back and sides, in a full-length mirror.

He would do, he concluded. There would be nothing about his physical person which would cause him any trouble in his dealings with the Jelmi. Since he always took his sun-lamp treatments in the raw, his color gradation was right. He was too dark for a typical Caucasian Tellurian; but that was all right — he wasn’t going to be a Tellurian. He would, he decided, be a native of some planet whose people went naked… the planet Xylmny, in a galaxy ’way out on the Rim somewhere… yes, he had self-control enough not to give himself away.

But his cabin wouldn’t stand inspection on a usually naked basis, nor would any other private room of the ship. All had closets designed unmistakably for clothing and it wasn’t worth while to rebuild them.

Okay, he’d be a researcher who had visited dozens of planets, and everybody had to wear some kind of clothing or trappings at some time or other. Protectively at least. And probably for formality or for decoration.

Wherefore DuQuesne, with a helmet on his head and a half-smile, half-sneer on his face, let his imagination run riot in filling closet after closet with the utilitarian and the decorative garmenture of world after purely imaginative world. Then, after transferring his own Tellurian clothing to an empty closet, he devoted a couple of hours to designing and constructing the apparel of his equally imaginary native world Xylmny.

In due time a call came in from the spaceship up ahead. “You who are following us from the direction of the world Tellus: do you speak English?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you following us, Tellurian?”

“I am not a Tellurian. I am from the planet Xylmny; which, while very similar to Tellus, lies in a distant galaxy.” He told the caller, as well as he could in words, where Xylmny was. “I am a Seeker, Sevance by name. I have visited many planets very similar to yours and to Tellus and to my own in my Seeking. Tellus itself had nothing worthy of my time, but I learned there that you have a certain knowledge as yet unknown to me; that of operating through the fourth dimension of space instantaneously, without becoming lost hopelessly therein, as is practically always the case when rotation is employed. Therefore I of course followed you.”

“Naturally. I would have done the same. I am Savant Tammon of the planet Mallidax — Llurdiaxorb Three which is our destination. You, then, have had one or more successes in rotation? Our rotational tests all failed.”

“We had only one success. As a Seeker I will be glad to give you the specifications of the structures, computers, and forces required for any possibility of success — which is very slight at best.”

“This meeting is fortunate indeed. Have I your permission to come aboard your vessel, as such time as we approach each other nearly enough to make the fourth dimensional transfer feasible?”

“You certainly may, sir. I’ll be very glad indeed to greet you in the flesh. And until that hour, Savant Tammon, so long and thanks.”

Since Mergon braked the Mallidaxian down hard to help make the approach, and since the two vessels did not have to be close together even in astronomical terms, it was not long until Tammon stood facing DuQuesne in the Capital D’s control room.

The aged savant inhaled deeply, flexed his knees, and said, “As I expected, our environments are very similar. We greet new friends with a four-hand clasp. Is that form satisfactory?”

“Perfectly; it’s very much like our own,” DuQuesne said; and four hands clasped briefly.

“Would you like to come aboard our vessel now?” Tammon asked.

“The sooner the better,” and they were both in Tammon’s laboratory, where Mergon and Luloy looked DuQuesne over with interest.

“Seeker Sevance,” Tammon said then, “these are Savant Mergon, my first assistant, and Savant Luloy, his… well, ‘wife’ would be, I think, the closest possible English equivalent. You three are to become friends.”

The hand-clasp was six-fold this time, and the two Jelmi said in unison. “I’m happy that we are to become friends.”

“May our friendship ripen and deepen,” DuQuesne improvised the formula and bowed over the cluster of hands.

“But Seeker,” Luloy said, as the cluster fell apart, “must all Seekers do their Seeking alone? I’d go stark raving mad if I had to be alone as long as you must have been.”

“True Seekers, yes. While it is true that any normal man misses the companionship of his kind, especially that of the opposite sex—” DuQuesne gave Luloy a cool, contained smile as his glance traversed her superb figure — “even such a master of concentration as a true Seeker must be can concentrate better, more productively, when absolutely alone.”

Tammon nodded thoughtfully. “That may well be true. Perhaps I shall try it myself. Now — we have some little time before dinner. Is there any other matter you would like to discuss?”

For that question DuQuesne was well prepared. A Seeker, after all, needs something to be Sought; and as he did not want to appear exclusively interested in something which even the unsuspicious Jelmi would be aware was a weapon of war, he had selected another subject about which to inquire. So he said at once:

“A minor one, yes. While I am scarcely even a tyro in biology, I have pondered the matter of many hundreds probably many millions — of apparently identical and quite possibly inter-fertile human races spaced so immensely far apart in space that any possibility of a common ancestry is precluded.”

“Ah!” Tammon’s eyes lit up. “One of my favorite subjects; one upon which I have done much work. We Jelmi and the Tellurians are very far apart indeed in space, yet cross-breeding is successful. In vitro, that is, and as far as I could carry the experiment. I can not synthesize a living placenta. No in vitro trial was made, since we of course could not abduct a Tellurian woman and not one of our young women cared to bear a child fathered by any Tellurian male we saw.”

“From what I saw there I don’t blame them,” agreed DuQuesne. It was only the truth of his feelings about Tellurians — with one important exception. “But doesn’t your success in vitro necessitate a common ancestry?”

“In a sense, yes; but not in the ordinary sense. It goes back to the unthinkably remote origin of all life. You can, I suppose, synthesize any non-living substance you please? Perfectly, down to what is apparently its ultimately fine structure?”

“I see what you mean.” DuQuesne, who had never thought really deeply about that fact, was hit hard. “Steak, for instance. Perfect in every respect except in that it never has been alive. No. We can synthesize DNA-RNA complexes, the building blocks of life, but they are not alive and we can not bring them to life. And, conversely, we cannot dematerialize living flesh.”

“Precisely. Life may be an extra-dimensional attribute. Its basis may lie in some order deeper than any now known. Whatever the truth may be, it seems to be known at present only to the omnipotence Who we of Mallidax call Llenderllon. All we know about life is that it is an immensely strong binding force and that its source — proximate, I mean, of course, not its ultimate origin — is the living spores that are drifting about in open space.”

“Wait a minute,” DuQuesne said. “We had a theory like that long ago. So did Tellus — a scientist named Arrhenius — but all such theories were finally held to be untenable. Wishful thinking.”

“I know. Less than one year ago, however, after twenty years of search I found one such spore. Its descendants have been living and evolving ever since.”

DuQuesne’s jaw dropped. “You don’t say! That I want to see!”

Tammon nodded. “I have rigorous proof of authenticity. While it is entirely unlike any other form of life with which I am familiar, it is very interesting.”

“It would be, but there’s one other objection. What is the chance that on any two worlds humanity would have reached exactly the same stage of evolution at any given time?”

“Ah! That is the crux of my theory, which I hope some day to prove; that when man’s brain becomes large enough and complex enough to employ his hands efficiently enough, the optimum form of fife for that environment has been reached and evolution stops. Thenceforth all mutants and sports are unable to compete with Homo Sapiens and do not survive.”

DuQuesne thought for a long minute. Norlamin was very decidedly not a Tellus-type planet. “Some Xylmnians have it, ‘Man is the ultimate creation of God.’ On Tellus it’s ‘God created man in his own image.’ And of course the fact that I’ve never believed it — and I still think it’s unjustifiable racial self-glorification — does not invalidate it.”

“Of course it doesn’t. But to revert to the main topic, would you be willing to cooperate in an in vivo experiment?”

DuQuesne smiled at that, then chuckled deeply. “I certainly would, sir; and not for purely scientific reasons, either.”

“Oh, that would be no problem. Nor is your present quest — it will take only a short time to install the various mechanisms in your vessel and to instruct you in their use. If my snap judgment is sound, however, this other may very well become of paramount importance and require a few days of time.” He touched a button on an intercom and said, “Senny.”

“Yes?” came in a deep contralto from the speaker.

“Will you come in here, please? It concerns the in vivo experiment we have been discussing.”

“Oh? Right away, Tamm,” and in about half a minute a young woman came striding in.

DuQuesne stared, for she was a living shield-maiden — a veritable Valkyrie of flesh and blood. If she had had wings and if her pale blonde hair had been flying loose instead of being piled high on her head in thick, heavy braids, DuQuesne thought, she could have stepped right out of Wagenhorst’s immortal painting Ragnarok.

Tammon introduced them. “Seeker Sevance of Xylmny, Savant Sennlloy of Allondax, you two are to become friends.”

“I’m happy that we are to become friends,” the girl said, in English, extending her hands. DuQuesne took them, bowed over them; and said, “May our friendship ripen and deepen.”

She examined him minutely, from the top of his head down to his toenails, in silence; then, turning to Tammon, she uttered a long sentence of which DuQuesne could not understand a word.

“You should speak English, my dear,” Tammon said. “It is inurbane to exclude a guest from a conversation concerning him.”

“It is twice as inurbane,” she countered in English, “to insult a guest, even by implication, who does not deserve it.”

“That is true,” Tammon agreed, “but I have studied him to some little depth and it is virtually certain that the matter lies in your province rather than mine. The decision is, of course, yours. Caps-on with him, please, and decide.”

She donned a helmet and handed its mate to DuQuesne. Expecting a full-scale mental assault, he put up every block he had; but she did not think at him at all. Instead, she bored deep down into the most abysmal recesses of his flesh; down and down and down to depths where the expert though he was at synthesizing perfectly any tangible article of matter — could not follow.

Eyes sparkling, she tossed both helmets onto a bench and seized both his hands in a grip very different from the casual clasp she had used a few minutes before. “I am glad — very, very glad, friend Seeker Sevance, that we are friends!”

Although DuQuesne was amazed at this remarkable change, he played up. He bowed over her hands and, this time, kissed each of them. “I think you, Lady Sennlloy. My pleasure is immeasurable.” He smiled warmly and went on, “Since I am a stranger and thus ignorant of your conventions and in particular of your taboos, may I without offense request the pleasure of your company at dinner? And my friends call me Vance.”

She returned his smile as warmly. Neither of them was paying any attention at all to anyone else in the room. “And I accept your invitation with joyous thanks. We go out that mine call me Senny. You may indeed, friend Vance, and archway there and turn left.”

They walked slowly toward the indicated exit; side by side and so close together that hip touched hip at almost every step. In the corridor, however, Sennlloy put her hand on DuQuesne’s arm and stopped. “But hold, friend Vance,” she said. “We should, don’t you think, make this, our first meal together, one of full formality?”

“I do indeed. I would not have suggested it but I’m very much in favor of it.”

“Splendid! We’ll go to my room first, then. This way,” and she steered him into and along, a corridor whose blankly featureless walls were opaque instead of transparent.

Was this his cue? DuQuesne wondered. No, he decided. She wasn’t the type to rush things. She was civilized… more so than he was. If he didn’t play it just about right with this girl, who was very evidently a big wheel, she could and very probably would queer his whole deal.

As they strolled along DuQuesne saw that the walls were not quite featureless. At about head height, every twentyfive feet or so, there was inset a disk of optical plastic perhaps an inch in diameter. Stopping, and turning to face one of these disks, Sennlloy pressed her right forefinger against it, explaining as she did so, “It opens to my fingerprints only.”

There was an almost inaudible hiss of compressed air and a micrometrically fitted door — a good seven feet high and three feet wide — moved an inch out into the hall and slid smoothly aside upon tracks that certainly had not been there an instant before.

DuQuesne never did find out how the thing worked. He was too busy staring into the room and watching and hearing what the girl was doing and saying.

She stepped back a half-step, bowed gracefully from the waist, and with a sweeping gesture of both hands invited him to precede her into the room. She started to say something in her own language — Allondaxian — but after a couple of words changed effortlessly to English. “Friend Seeker Sevance, it is in earnest of our friendship that I welcome you into the privacy of my home” — and her manner made it perfectly clear that, while the phraseology was conventionally formal, in this case it was really meant.

And DuQuesne felt it; felt it so strongly that he did not bluff or coin a responsive phrase.

Instead: “Thank you, Lady Sennlloy. We of Xylmny do not have anything comparable, but I appreciate your welcome and thank you immensely.”

Inside the room, DuQuesne stared. He had wondered what this girl’s private quarters would be like. She was a master scientist, true. But she was warmly human, not bookishly aloof. And what would seventy thousand years of evolution do to feminine vanity? Especially to a vanity that apparently had never been afflicted by false modesty? Or by any sexual taboos?

The furniture — heavy, solid, plain, and built of what looked like golden oak — looked ordinary and utilitarian enough. Much of it was designed for, and was completely filled with and devoted to, the tools and equipment and tapes and scanners of the top-bracket biologist Senalloy of Allondax in fact was. The floor was of mathematically figured, vari-colored, plastic tile. The ceiling was one vast sheet of softly glowing white light.

Three of the walls were ordinary enough. DuQuesne scarcely glanced at them because of the fourth, which was a single canvas eight feet high and over thirty feet long. One painting. What a painting! A painting of life itself; a painting that seemed actually to writhe and to crawl and to vibrate with the very essence of life itself!

One-celled life, striving fiercely upward in the primordial sea toward the light. Fiercely striving young fishes, walking determinedly ashore on their fins. Striving young mammals developing tails and climbing up into trees — losing tails, with the development of true thumbs, and coming down to earth again out of the trees — the ever-enlarging brain resulting in the appearance of true man. And finally, the development and the progress and the history of man himself.

And every being, from unicell to man, was striving with all its might upward; toward THE LIGHT. Upward! Upward!! UPWARD!!!

At almost the end of that heart-stopping painting there was a portrait of Sennlloy herself in the arms of a man; a yellow-haired, smooth-shaven Hercules so fantastically welldrawn, so incredibly alive-seeming, that DuQuesne stared in awe.

Beyond those two climactic figures the painting became a pure abstract of form and of line and color; an abstract, however, that was crammed full of invisible but very apparent question marks. It asked more, it demanded and it yelled — “What is coming next?”

DuQuesne, who had been holding his breath, let it out and breathed deeply. “And you painted that yourself,” he marveled. “Milady Sennlloy, if you never do anything else as long as you live, you will have achieved immortality.”

She blushed to the breasts. “Thanks, friend Vance. I’m very glad you like it: I was sure you would.”

“It’s so terrific that words fail,” he said, and meant. Then, nodding at the portrait, he went on, “Your husband?”

She shook her head. “Not yet. He has not the genes the Llurdi wish to propagate, so we could not marry and he had to stay on Allondax instead of becoming one of this group.

But he and I love each other more than life. When we Jelmi aboard this Mallidaxian have taught those accursed Llurdi their lesson, we will marry and we’ll never be parted again. But time presses, friend Vance; we must consider our formalities.”

Walking around the foot of her bed — the satin coverlet of which bore, in red and gold, a motif that almost made even DuQuesne blush — she went to a bureau-like piece of furniture and began to pull open its bottom drawer. Then, changing her mind, she closed it sharply; but not before the man got a glimpse of its contents that made him catch his breath. That drawer contained at least two bushels of the most fantastic jewelry DuQuesne had ever seen!

Shaking her head, Sennlloy went on, “No. My formality should not influence yours. The fact that you appreciate and employ formality implies, does it not, that you do not materialize and dematerialize its material symbols, but cherish them?”

“Yes; you and I think very much alike on that,” DuQuesne agreed. He was still feeling his way. This hadn’t been a cue; that was now abundantly certain. In fact, with Sennlloy so deeply in love with one man, she probably wouldn’t be in the business herself at all… or would she? Were these people advanced enough — if you could call it advancement — different enough, anyway — to regard sex for-love and sex-for-improvement-of-race as two entirely different matters; so completely unrelated as not to affect each other? He simply didn’t know. Data insufficient. However the thing was to go, he’d played along so far; he’d still play along. Wherefore, without any noticeable pause, he went on:

“I intended to comply with your conventions, but I’ll be glad to use my own if you prefer. So I’ll ask Tammon to flip me over to my own ship to put on my high-formal gear.”

“Oh, no; I’ll do it.” Donning the helmet that had been lying on the beautifully grained oak-like top of the bureau, she took his left hand and compared his wristwatch briefly with the timepiece on the wall. “I’ll bring you back here in… in how many of your minutes?”

“Ten minutes will be time enough.”

“In exactly ten minutes from—” She waited until the sweep hand of his watch was exactly at the dot of twelve o’clock. “Mark,” she said then, and DuQuesne found himself standing in his own private cabin aboard the Capital D.

He picked up shaving cream and brush; then, asking aloud, “How stupid can you get, fool?” he tossed them back onto the shelf, put on his helmet, and thought his whiskers off flush with the surface of his skin. Then, partly from habit but mostly by design — its richly masculine, heady scent was supposed to “wow the women” — he rubbed on a couple of squirts of after-shave lotion.

Opening closet doors, he looked at the just-nicely-broken-in trappings he had made such a short time before. How should he do it, jeweled or plain? She was going to be gussied up like a Christmas tree, so he’d better go plain. Showy, plenty; but no jewels.

And, judging by that spectacular coverlet and other items in her room, she liked fire-engine red and gold. Okay.

Taking off his watch and donning one exactly like it except for the fact that it kept purely imaginary Xylmnian time — that had been a slip; if she’d noticed it, she’d have wondered why he was running on Tellurian time — he dressed himself in full panoply of Xylmnian finery and examined himself carefully in a full-length mirror.

He now wore a winged and crested headpiece of interlaced platinum strips; the front of the crest ridging up into a three-inch platinum disk emblazoned with an intricate heraldic design in deeply inlaid massive gold. A heavy collar, two armbands, and two wristlets, all made of woven and braided platinum strands, each bore the same symbolic disk. He wore a sleeveless shirt and legless shorts of gleaming, glaringly-red silk, with knee-length hose to match — and red-leather-lined buskins of solid-gold chain mail. And lastly, a crossed-strap belt, also of massive but supple gold link, with three platinum comets on each shoulder, supported a solid-platinum scabbard containing an extremely practical knife.

He drew the blade. Basket-hilted and with fifteen inches of heavy, wickedly curved, peculiarly shaped, razor-edged and needle-pointed stainless-steel blade, it was in fact an atrocious weapon indeed — and completely unlike any item of formal dress that DuQuesne had ever heard of.

All this had taken nine and one half minutes by his watch — by his Earth-watch, lying now upon his dresser. The time was now zero minus exactly twenty-eight seconds.