The Man Without a Planet

TWO

SO RAUL WENT TO SEE the Border Administrator, Dykon Ma­ther, who sat him down and proffered cigarels and Vegan brandy, and chatted with him in a friendly but vague man­ner before suddenly unleashing a barrage of pointed, weighted questions.

Raul sat, quietly, with cold but hooded eyes, as his in­quisitor explored his actions, point by point, question by question. Why did he snub and ignore invitations from His Own Kind? Why was he mingling with all sorts of dubious people—servitors, shamans, native princelings, rabble-rousers, expositors of this or that curious and undoubtedly seditious cult, philosophy, religion, or political persuasion? Was he aware he had been seen in very questionable and probably treasonable company? What were his plans? Did he in­tend to resume his Naval career? Or return to Barnassa, to the life of a gentleman farmer? Or would he follow the Linton tradition, and request a government job? If so, why did he delay?

All of this Raul endured with a quiet half-smile, and when the Administrator had run out of questions at last, he re­plied. In a twenty minute monolog, he poured out all the wrath and indignation, sarcasm and bitterness, that had been storing up in his heart from that unforgotten day there on the bridge of the scoutship when he had watched Darogir burn to death in eight terrible minutes.

His phrases were well-chosen stinging commentaries on prying, spying Officialdom, withering retorts and sarcasms aimed at stuffy, tradition-blinded policies. His remarks sav­ored of treason, but hovered just short of it. Oddly, although bitter, his tirade was Impersonal. There was no malice in his words, but a world-weary disillusionment and disappoint­ment. The polite conventions of “civilization” had been weighed in the balance and found wanting. He was a man from whom the blindfolds had been stripped—a man who saw clearly the obscenities usually masked behind genteel fictions.

In brief, he tore the Administrator’s self-esteem to tat­ters, punctured beyond repair his ego, slapped his fat face with stinging, merciless criticism, and littered the office with toppled, shattered idols all too obviously clay-footed. Dykon Mather gaped, his face crimsoning.

“In Arion’s Name, Commander, are you a revolutionary?”

“Don’t be more of an idiot than you can help,” Raul said coldly. “Do you think I’ve won the freedom of my own mind, only to hand it over to mouth the catch-phrases of some blind ism or osophy? I think for myself—and speak for my own thoughts, no one else’s.”

“But such words are plainly treasonable! Don’t you owe your allegiance to the Imperator—”

“I owe allegiance to myself. Freedom of ideas is the first obligation of a man.”

Dykon Mather waved this aside impatiently.

“You talk republicanism!”

“I said don’t be an idiot. Republicanism went out with the United Systems. I talk common sense. I’m no more of a republican than I am an anarchist or a theocrat—”

Mather pounced on that.

“But you are reported to have talked theocracy with—”

“Oh, kak on that! I’ve discussed stabilism with a war-bard from Dorrhea and plenum mechanics with a neospace-drive technic from Aldebaran and Vuudhistic philosophy with the younger son of a Kahan from Argastral And that doesn’t prove I’m going to become a stabilist or a mathematical theorist or a convert to Vuudhana. Of which of these loath­some criminalities am I accused?”

Mather puffed. “We accuse you of nothing. We’re just inquiring—”

“Inquire ahead. But let me ask you something. Do you—really and truly—think war ever accomplishes anything? Do you think the last war accomplished anything—besides the deliberate murder of sixteen billion poor Vruu Kophe spider-men, and several hundred thousand humans on Darogir who wished to remain neutral out of sympathy with the Vruu Kophe cause—and were vaporized with a nitrogen bomb barrage for all their neutrality?”

“Well, I’m not—”

“And something else. Do you know what intelligent gov­ernment is? Have you ever seen it in operation? Do you really think the government in this Cluster is intelligent?” Raul took a long drink of the cold brandy while Dykon Mather stammered and huffed.

“If you feel this way,” the Administrator said, trying a different tack, “then don’t you feel a man of your experience and background and training owes it to his Cluster to enter the government and bring some intelligence to it?”

Raul set down his goblet with a clack on the polished wood of the Administrator’s desk.

“How—by seeking to become Commissioner of my home-world, and having my hands tied on every improvement I want to make by Imperial Policy, or Provincial Regulations, or Viceregal Instructions? Perhaps I should join your group of yes-sir-you-certainly-are-right-sir robots and spend my life initialing acts and decrees I know to be blind, stubborn idiocy.”

The Administrator went white to the lips. And now he showed a glint of steel behind the good old velvet glove.

“You’re aware, Linton, that I can order your deportation.”

“Space! I almost wish you would. You see, man, I’m spoil­ing for a fight. I’ve had my eyes stripped naked and seen the Galaxy for what it really is. I’m loafing around and soaking up wine because I don’t know which Bad Thing to strike out at. But, by Arion, if you try deporting me, you give me something to attack. I’ll truly be grateful, Mather. Why, man, I’ll make you famous. If you deport me for think­ing my own thoughts, and for not being afraid to speak them either, then your kaking misgoverned misgovemment becomes a personal cause, a personal enemy. By Space, I think that’s a great ideal You deport me, and I’ll hold you up as the Living Example of Imperial Idiotic Provincial Confusion. My drunk of an older brother left me enough monetary units to live on, and a little over. I’ll spend every last munit on The Cause, Mather! Yes—a great ideal I’ll hold you up to contempt, derision, mockery and laughter on every last kaking planet in the whole filthy backwards Clus­ter. I’ll lampoon you, besmirch you, slander and libel you every time you open your fat mouth—and expose your fat brains, or lack of them. I’ll make speeches in the Planetary Parliament, to which I have a hereditary chair; I’ll publish articles about you in every newsfax circuit and magazine that wants to build circulation with some good old-fashioned controversy. I’ll hire artists to caricature you, put you up on posters from one end of the Cluster to the other, buy Parlia­ment members to move to depose you, tie you up with law suits and counter-suits and counter-counter-suits until you don’t know which end is up. Yes, let’s do it, Mather! Come on—deport me, and you’ll die a famous man!”

Mather wilted before the blast, shrank back into his ex­pensive pneumo.

“I am merely … cautioning you.”

“Kak on your warnings, then!”

The Administrator winced fastidiously.

“Please … must you be obscene? Can’t we discuss this matter like intelligent gentlemen?”

“No. Because you’re neither intelligent nor a gentleman. You’re a bureaucrat. And I say kak on bureaucracy—and let’s have done, Mather, once and for all, with cautioning and warning. If a lowly drive technic or impecunious shop­keeper was guilty of all the treasonable and suspiciously seditious practices you accuse me of, you’d slap him in Correction or deport him from Omphale faster than fast. But I’m a Linton, aren’t I, one of the Cluster’s Own, the Fine Old Families, and laws are different for such as I am, eh? Call that intelligent government, Mather? No. I won’t play. You’ve had spies on me, trailed me from winehouse to winehouse, searched my room, pawed through my luggage, tapped my communicator, fax’d my mail, opened a dossier under my name, and slandered me to my face. If you had one tiny kaking wisp of evidence—one rag or tatter of proof that I am any of the things you think I am—you’d have deported my corpus without a moment’s hesitation. But you haven’t. So I know you don’t.”

“Enough I You’ve been warned.” Administrator Mather got up, subtle intimation that the interview was over. But Linton remained seated, sprawled with calculated insolence, long legs thrust out before him. After a few moments of standing, Mather flushed, feeling foolish.

“Sit down, Mather; the interview isn’t over until I say it is,” Raul Linton drawled coolly. Mather sat—collapsed, rather—back into his chair. Such behavior was unthinkable!

“So let’s have done with warnings,” Linton continued. “I’m sick to death of them.”

He reached over and selected a fine cigarel from the burnished, satin-finished harpwood box that had been prof­fered at the beginning of the “interview.”

“I warn you Mather, be careful. Handle me gently. I’m on the brink. Right now I’m completely disgusted—another word for neutral. But push me the slightest, shove me just a wee bit, and I go over the edge. Right now I don’t give a leak how you govern Hercules—keep the natives ignorant, the border planets technologically backwards, the govern­ment blind and stupid. Go to hell at twenty parsecs a min­ute—I just don’t care. But—mess with me, push me about, deport me, and I’m one hundred percent dead set against you and your rotten Provincial Viceroy. Do you understand, Mather?”

He pulled his booted legs beneath him and came to his feet. Then he leaned over and spoke straight into the Ad­ministrator’s tight, white-lipped face.

“Leave. Me. Alone.”

The interview was over. Raul stalked out grandly, leaving Mather to stare blankly at the opposite wall. He sat and stared and thought for several minutes. Then he touched a stud on the under-surface of his desk.

“Yes, Administrator?” A female voice spoke from empty air.

“Get me P-5,” he snapped.

“P-5, sir. Connecting. Go ahead.”

“Ragul? Mather. Just spoke to Linton. You know the case? Fine. Get Pertinax—I don’t care what he’s working on at the moment. Put him on Linton’s tail. He’s the shrewd­est spy in the Cluster, and I want him to watch Linton— the man’s a time-bomb, set to go off at a jiggle. Tell him to watch. I want to know everyone Linton speaks to, every­thing he does, everywhere he goes, every minute of the day and night. I want Linton, understand? He’s a traitor, and I want evidence—unshakable, documentary evidence. Photo­grams, tapes, video—the works. Tell Pertinax to be careful —to use long-range stuff, pinhead mikes, audio search-beams, the spyray, anything he needs. But get that man for me!”

No tapes were taken of this interview, but all Omphale was filled with ears—eyes—and noses. Someone overheard, or deduced, or was told—and soon many quiet men in little rooms knew. And one of these was a tall, rangy Border-worlder called Sharl of the Yellow Eyes. It was not true, as had earlier been reported, that Raul Linton and Sharl of the Yellow Eyes had been seen together in private conversation before this fateful interview. They had, perhaps, both been in the same cafe or wineshop at the same time. But now he of the Yellow Eyes determined they would, indeed, meet—and soon.

The Queen Dagundha Bazaar is the place of places on Omphale for local color, native exotica, and such-like. Night and day—especially during the Month of Harvest—it teems with the fruits and artistries of half the Cluster worlds. A great, staggered parallelogram floored with mosaic tiles and walled with cool arcades of shops and booths, one may buy virtually anything—with enough platinum Imperials. (The typical native distrusts paper munits, prefers something weighty, that jingles.)

After his exciting, and, although he could not know it, history-making interview with the Border Aministrator, Raul Linton headed for the bazaar, stopping off briefly for an in­digestible lunch. He caught an air cab crosstown to the Queen Dagundha Bazaar in the native quarter for two reas­ons: first, he knew he could find Gundorm Varl there, hag­gling over livestock; second, he wanted a good long cold drink of that native-brewed liquid lightning called chark. He paid off his cab, tipped the driver handsomely, and strolled into the seething maelstrom of color, sound and stenches that was the great bazaar.

At the booths and stands along the arcade-walls was ex­hibited the produce of a thousand worlds. Vegetables, wine-fruit, pargolac and iogma, loaves of fresh-baked iskth bread, temple cakes and offering-meats, garments hand-loomed of iophodon-wool, fine suede cloaks from Dorrhea, leather jerk­ins fetched from Croma or Valthoom, basket-hilted swords with gemmed hilts, tasseled daggers in snakeskin sheaths, flowers, wine, ale, beer, fresh meat, spices, herbs, incense, perfumes, rugs and shawls and capes and sashes, jewels by the cask, keg or quart, the amulets, sigils, talismans and charms of half ten thousand religions, cults, magical sciences or occult persuasions.

Women. Firm-fleshed Mountain girls from Vaela. Dusky, raven-haired charmers from the Desert Worlds. Great stupid mammoth-breasted milky females from the Port o’ Worlds.

Or boys. Men. Animals. Drugs. Stimulators—why ruin one’s digestion, or risk a venereal disease, when one could slip on a mesh helmet and have the pleasure-centers of the brain throb with ecstasy beyond the limits flesh could bear, with a tickle of electricity?

Raul loved the bazaar. The bustle and jostle, the shapes and colors. Even the smells. Especially the smells. He lin­gered by a straw-floored stall to watch a leggy Nomad Prince from the Veil haggling over the purchase of a fine hom-stallion. Paused to watch the antics of a troupe of jug­glers and clowns, whose Gypsy ancestry went back ages further than the history of Galactic civilization.

Here went a chieftain from Arkonna, his pointed beard dyed indigo, jewels dangling from his stiffly-waxed mustachios. And there strutted a mercenary swordsman from the Orion Stars, if his green-gold cloak and wheat-blond hair were any sign. There a cowled, crimson-robed Star Scientist paced with shaven skull, thumb holding his place in a leather-bound Ephemeris, the constellations of his nativity tattooed in blue ink on his naked brow. There, to the left, ivory baton raised warningly, crowd melting away from before him, went a Herald in full canonicals, bearing the ukase of some Planet- Prince on a small silken cushion. Further beyond him, a Cat- man from Kermnus prowled sleekly, a high-caste Holy Chief from the patterns dyed in his smooth-napped fur.

The out-pourings, dregs and spewed-up froth of a hundred planets jostled around him in all the colors of twenty rain­bows. Soldiers. Thieves. Whores. Tradesmen. Nobles. Tech­nics. Priests. High-bom Ladies. Painted boys. Mercenaries. Wrestlers. Spies. Wizards. Assassins. Farmers. Naval officers. Fortune-tellers. Policemen. Officials of this bureau or that subdivision. Tourists. Slumming society fops. Minstrels. Pick­pockets. Expensive courtesans. Poets.

Raul Linton loved it, all of it.

It was real. Honest. It stunk, of course, but at least it was alive and sweating. He grinned at the jugglers, tossed coins to beggars, bought a stoup of sour beer at a booth, a flower from a barefoot, grimy boy, laughed at clowns, watched a professional strongman from the heavy-gravity planet, Strontame, crush a gold ingot into glittering pulp. He be­gan to enjoy himself, the stuffy, dusty vapors of Officialdom clearing from his head. Many turned to watch him pass, this alarmingly tall, eagle-eyed, deeply-tanned terrestrial with shabby gray space-fatigues tucked into high, scuffed, dusty boots, a great boat-cloak slung around his rangy shoulders, his shaggy thatch of fire-red hair tossed to the noonward sun. Some were “professional” women who meas­ured his lean-muscled height with an admiring eye, and his shallow purse with a glance at the condition of his clothes.

But others watched also. One was a tall, thin, sour-faced and dark-skinned man in unobtrusive green, a black cap pulled over his eyes, an extraordinary number of “rings” on his hard long fingers.

Colonel Nijel Pertinax. Spy.

Another was a tall, bearded man with sternly uncompro­mising mien, wrapped in a heavy Border cloak of brown stuff, the crested tarboosh of a Rilké warrior-chieftain on his head. Thoughtful, clever eyes in a tanned, bony, leathery face—eyes of startling canary yellow.

Sharl ka-Nabon Tahukam. Spy—perhaps. Or—patriot?

Pertinax did not bother keeping out of Linton’s sight. He knew well enough Raul had never seen him. P-5 agents did not mix socially with Old Family Aristocrats—or even with Naval officers. Except, once in a while, in their professional capacity. As, for, example, now. He brushed by Raul cas­ually, one lean bony hand just touching the hem of Lin­ton’s huge, billowing boat-cloak. A miniscule bead of dark gray ceramic flew from his hand to adhere to the lining of the cloak. He smiled sourly, smugly, and stalked on. None had seen the encounter.

Or had they?

From the deep, purple shadows of the arcade, a pair of keen yellow-eyes flashed with a sudden smile. Colonel Nijel Pertinax was no stranger to Sharl of the Rilké Warriors. They had met, socially, even professionally, many times before.

Keeping within the velvet shadows of the arcade, Sharl paced Raul Linton, keeping at his stride. Shrewd, cool canary eyes measured—weighed—appraised, slowly, without hurry, without hope, and without error.

Raul stopped short.

So short that a fat, perspiring Diikan pottling along be­hind him jammed into him, cursed briefly and pungently, glanced up at the towering Herculian, taking in the raw-boned and red-thatched height of him, and meekly scuttled around and off.

Raul did not take his eyes off the Sword.

It lay, alone, on a space-black cushion of virgin sable fur. Five lean, long, narrow feet of glittering mirror-bright ion-steel. Long and thin and needle-pointed as a fencing épée … but center-ribbed and keenly strong and sharp-edged enough for a saber. Superb. A princely, no, a kingly weapon. The hilt, a spiral of narwhal-horn, would grip the hand like a silk glove. The crossbar was also ion-steel, welded with pur­est gold. A great glowing drop of emerald fire throbbed at the knobbed ends, and a greater orb of grass-green crystal weighted the hilt.

It was love at first sight. Besides the gold-hilted long-sword, the booth was cluttered and crammed with mursks, scimitars, straight-blades and hook-swords, jag-edged saw-swords—the blades of a score of native worlds.

He had eyes only for the one.

They had measured him well. The tradition of the Landed Gentry had raised him, sword in hand. Half his childhood had been given over to the 35th Century equivalent of a salle d’armes.

Without thought his hand went out.

“I would purchase that blade.”