Wildeblood's Empire Page 5

  “What do they look like?”

  “The tallest ones stand about five and a half feet, but even the smallest—the juveniles—are four-ten. They don’t do a lot of growing in the terrestrial phase, though they change somewhat in physique and body coloring. Their skins look rather like plastic from a distance—smooth, with a kind of marbled effect—but I think they’re probably softer than they look. They virtually all wear things like ponchos, made from vegetable fiber. Sometimes, in hot sun, they use headgear made out of big, spatulate leaves. Their heads look big by human standards, but not really frog-like...more like seals. In bright sunlight their skins look very dark—black dappled brown and green, but when the day’s overcast the green stands out more, and when they’re in the desert areas the brown seems more obvious, though how profound a change in the actual skin pigmentation there is I’m not entirely sure. The juveniles are generally much lighter in tone, with the black reduced to powder-blue in the youngest ones. I don’t know yet whether they have distinctive individual patterns that will allow us to tell them apart. I can’t spot any significant element which will even allow us to tell members of the one group from members of the other.”

  “What’s the situation between the two groups?”

  “Keep pretty much to themselves. Basically peaceful. They pass by one another in narrow gullies without reaching for their knives. All the adults carry stone tools about with them, although there’s a much larger stock in continuous production and use at the village. But they seem to use them on crabs and trees, not on each other. But this is the good season coming up. When winter comes and things get tough...then there might be a bit more aggression in interpersonal relationships.”

  “What about the mating season?” I asked. “It should be now or pretty soon. Any signs of activity within the groups?”

  “Not a lot,” he replied. “Maybe they’re waiting for the weather to cheer up. I would if I were them. There’s a certain amount of tension within the groups—we’ve seen squabbles, especially between juveniles. But until we get a lot closer we won’t be able to make any genuine judgments about what goes on in the village. They do have privacy, you know—the lodges are spaced and they put a lot of ingenuity into the business of improvising shelters. There are some aspects of their lives we might never get to know much about. And they don’t come around trying to peep into our tents.”

  “They don’t show a lot of curiosity, then? Do you think they recognize you as intelligent beings?”

  “I don’t know. If one appears in the camp, raises his palm, and says ‘I come in peace’ I’ll call you promptly and let you know.”

  “And if he says ‘Take me to your leader’ you’ll bring him right along?”

  “Sure.”

  “I wish I was with you,” I said.

  “It’s time the rest of us got an outing,” he said, with mock sourness. “You’ve had all the fun before. How’s the routine coming along?”

  “Slowly,” I said. “As might be expected with only one of me. And with people always looking over my shoulder...not to mention the extracurricular activities.” I gave him an abridged account of the meeting in the cemetery and my thoughts on the white powder. “How are you on codes and ciphers?” I finished up.

  “A past master,” he assured me.

  I read him the number sequence, adding in the extra one that had been on Nathan’s copy. “There’s a prize for decoding it,” I said, “but we haven’t decided what it is yet.”

  “The message or the prize?”

  “Both.”

  “There’s not much of it,” he complained.

  “It’s never easy,” I reminded him.

  “If it was in a Sunday paper,” he mused, “I could be sure that there was enough, and that the solution would be simple, elegant and adequately clued. But something tells me that I’d be taking a lot for granted if I approached this on the same basis.”

  “I think they’re being parsimonious with their handouts,” I said. “Basically, they want the answer but they don’t want us to have the whole message, just in case it’s anything interesting. It’s called having your cake and eating it too.”

  “Well,” said Conrad. “If we’re going to be decoding an alien sign-language next week I guess a little practice should just about tune us up. It shouldn’t defeat us, if we can spare the time to think about it. Don’t happen to know who wrote it or why or what they might have wanted to communicate so cunningly?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “But I might get some clues next time my cloak-and-dagger man gives me a whisper. I take it, incidentally, that you’re having no problems on your end with...shall we say, overbearing solicitude on the part of our hosts?”

  “No. The boss man is a pleasant enough type, and he doesn’t interfere with our affairs. Nor do his servants. They stick pretty much to camp and even help out a bit. They’re keeping an eye on us, of course, but not obtrusively and not with the true obsessiveness of the paranoid. The ship’s not here at the moment—it’s picking up supplies for us and should be back in three days. But the sailors are no trouble either. They didn’t even steal anything except a few small items of no particular significance. If they wanted to, they could make things impossible for us...but they don’t. They’re okay.”

  “I only wish I could say the same about our end,” I commented dryly. “Um...given that they don’t interfere, would you say that they might prove...talkative given the appropriate encouragement.”

  “Our guardian angel, never. Nor the servants...they’re tightlipped by nature. The ship’s crew, certainly. But we’re not exactly encouraged to mingle, and they don’t look to make friends with us. There’s a kind of social gulf, if you know what I mean. Possibly the captain or one of his officers, but I don’t really think that we’re ideally placed as spies.”

  “No,” I agreed. “It was only a thought. If you do happen to hear a careless word dropped.... There seems to be this feeling abroad that one hell of a lot is going on that we don’t know about. Yet.”

  “We’ve been down four weeks,” said Conrad. “We’re strangers—outsiders. I know places on Earth where you get the cold shoulder if your grandfather wasn’t born within a stone’s throw. Take it easy. We’ll make contact. It’s probably a toss-up whether we make contact first with the aliens or the people. That’s the way it is.”

  It was a note of optimism that might have come in handy, but I couldn’t accept it. I was too far gone in gloom and suspicion. I signed off.

  Pete was off-shift catching up with some sleep, but Karen was about, supposedly looking after the ship. It didn’t need looking after—everything dangerous was switched off. But the checks still had to be carried out with ruthless efficiency. I made a couple of cups of coffee. I intended to go back to the house to sleep, as a matter of form, but I didn’t see why I had to suffer their local brew as well. I didn’t take my responsibilities as a guest quite as seriously as Nathan.

  “See anything interesting today?” I asked, to make conversation. “While you were out?”

  “There was a rather pleasant young man appeared—purely by coincidence, of course—to keep me company.”

  “They’ve got half a dozen people constantly watching the ship,” I said. “They’re on the hill in the cottages. And I think there’s always a man in the coppice over the other way, watching our non-existent back door. They don’t believe that the airlock is the only way out. Did he seduce you?”

  “Who? Oh...him. No. I didn’t seduce him, either. There seemed to be little point. He looked as if he’d had practice.”

  “At what?”

  “Being seduced. I don’t think I’d have had the advantage of surprise.”

  “Maybe not,” I conceded.

  Silence fell. I didn’t like it much, so I said something else. “The thing I can’t figure out,” I mused, “is how Wildeblood and company have managed to go more than a century without the secret of where they get the stuff—assuming it is their junk—leaking out. How d
o you keep a secret for a hundred years? At least a dozen people must be in on the whole thing, and hundreds must be in on the distribution. So how come Cyrano de Bergerac still needs me to tell him where the stuff comes from?”

  “His intelligence network probably has an I.Q. of three,” she said, tiredly; “You beat your brains out too much. Give it a rest.”

  “If I were living here,” I said, “I’d find out. I wouldn’t rest until I found out. One way or another....”

  “The mines are probably full of people who thought the same,” she said. “And likely the seabed too. Just be careful you don’t end up in the same place. You wouldn’t like hewing coal.”

  It was a warning I didn’t take seriously.

  Perhaps I should have.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When I got back to the house Nathan was playing cards with Zarnecki, Philip and Miranda. I was offered a game by Philip’s sister, Alice, who volunteered to co-opt a man named Cade and some other relative whose name I didn’t catch, who were presently employed playing some game that was obscenely like billiards in the next room. I declined. We played cards on the ship during transits, but there seemed to be something slightly decadent about playing cards with the in-group on a colony world. I didn’t like passing the time as a way of life. In addition, there was the small matter of protocol. I didn’t have to inquire who was winning in the game that was going already. No money was at stake but diplomatically-aided fortune smiled perpetually the same way, bringing her small bounty of joy and satisfaction.

  Personally, I didn’t see a lot of point in playing games with Philip.

  I would have been quite happy to find something to do on my own account—or even to go straight to bed and catch up on some sleep. But our hosts were nothing if not dutiful. Alice felt compelled to look after me. She was younger than Philip, but not by much—he was getting on for thirty, and she was in her late twenties. There was another sibling—another sister, younger still—but she was away at one of the schools where the elite were taught.

  After I’d refused food, Alice had to cast around a bit for another idea to offer. But she had, by now, some idea of what kind of person I was, and she’d obviously been keeping something back for just such an occasion. She asked me if I’d seen the west wing.

  I hadn’t. I hadn’t seen much of the house at all—I’m not a great one for touring vast, half-empty houses oozing a lousy hundred years of very self-conscious history at every pore. She insisted that I would be interested in looking at something there, and as she carefully refused to specify what it was I couldn’t really insist that I wouldn’t. Her suggestion didn’t quite carry the force of a command, but I felt that I wasn’t really left with much option. She led me away as soon as she considered that I’d had a decent time to rest my legs after the walk back from the ship (which had, of course, been attended by the blond youth.)

  I was surprised to find that the west wing wasn’t dressed up, either for use or for tourists. I supposed they didn’t get many tourists. Nobody lived in the west wing, but then, nobody lived in a lot of the rooms in the rest of the house either, and they were kept clean and tidy. It would undoubtedly have been wasted effort to maintain the wing in a state of perpetual readiness and tidiness, but in the absence of any kind of servant problem it surprised me that the Wildebloods would allow a substantial part of their mansion to descend into the early stages of decay. Obviously, when James and his son had built the house originally their ambitions had considerably outstripped their needs, but it seemed that subsequent generations hadn’t put in the serious work required to catch up. In the main body of the house and the east wing continuous improvements had been made—including the establishment of electric generators in an outbuilding to supply electricity—but the west wing was still cold and lighted—or rather unlighted, until we arrived—by candles.

  There was dirt in abundance, webs spun by predatory insects, and signs of fungal decay in the woodwork.

  Alice led me through corridors past sealed-up doors until we came to the southern end of the wing—one extremity of the U-shaped house. There, we found a pair of double doors, which she pushed back with some difficulty. They gave access to a large gallery—very long and also very deep, in that its ceiling was the ceiling of the second story. A wide balcony ran around the room where the floor of the second story might have been, but there was still a great vault of unused space. It lent a strange feeling to the place.

  It would have made a very impressive banqueting hall—much more impressive than the dining room the family actually used. But it was filled, instead, by oblong boxes on stilts—glass-topped cases. They loomed in the semi-darkness like ranked sarcophagi.

  “We’ll have to light the candles,” said Alice, “Would you...?” She offered me a taper, which I lighted from the candle she was carrying, and went over to the far side of the room. There were twenty brackets, each containing four candles, spaced along the length of the wall. I moved slowly along, lighting each and every one, while Alice did likewise on the other side. It took quite a long time.

  Even eighty candles didn’t fill the room with brilliance. Their light was yellow but they made everything in the gallery gray...gray with dust, with the languid evenness of the long-forgotten. It would have been much easier to see by day, but I had to admit that it had a special kind of impressiveness by night—the black vault above my head, shadowed by the balcony, seemed to hang like a predatory creature over the grimed display cases.

  Last night the cemetery, I thought, today the museum. What’s left for tomorrow?”

  Alice was smiling as she took back the taper and blew it out. It was an attractive smile and, in all likelihood, perfectly sincere. But my attitude to it was the attitude of a wise and ancient fish to a cunningly-wrought fly on an angler’s hook. I wasn’t biting. She wasn’t a beautiful girl—a little too heavily built, although not exactly fat, with hair that was too coarse in texture, very dark brown but not quite black. But her manner was pleasant. There was no trace of Zarnecki’s muffled hostility or Philip’s lizard-like remoteness.

  She gestured with her arm toward the nearest of the cases.

  “We don’t use this now,” she said. “It was great-grandfather’s collection. Actually, I mean great-great-great-great-grandfather’s, but for convenience...you know who I mean.”

  I knew all right. I already knew all about James Wildeblood’s sense of the past. I’d never given it a thought in the past, but it seemed obvious to me now. Of course he’d have a museum—an assembly of relics. A collection to display his knowledge of the flora and fauna of Wildeblood—his world. All classified, all labeled. A labor of...not precisely love...something more than that, and perhaps, in a way, something less. This was just another facet—but perhaps a significant facet—of his legacy. The legacy of Wildeblood the naturalist.

  I went to the nearest case and looked in, half-expecting what I saw.

  It was full of seashells.

  Row upon row, arranged as per species, genus, family. All named in Latin and numerically coded. All done without the aid of a computer—in fact, probably not on a statistical unit-character comparison at all, but by eye and instinct, the classical way. Wildeblood and Linnaeus both.

  They sat upon a sheet of milky glass, black lines painted to link them up in groups. Some of the black lines were dotted, tentative. No one had ever confirmed them. No one had ever bothered to try. This was the work of one man...perhaps aided by his children. But this was one legacy he hadn’t managed to make meaningful. It endured, but it was dead. Finished, but not complete. A thing like this could never be complete; it had to keep growing, changing, maturing. Here was only the beginning, a bare skeleton of a whole Natural History.

  Perversely, I felt almost glad when I looked at it. Glad that somewhere, in something, James Wildeblood had failed.

  I moved on to the next case. The dim candlelight sent ripples of light across the uneven glass surfaces as I moved. On a colony world, in its early days, I tho
ught, glass is precious. As precious as iron. How many windows are there in this mansion? How many panes deck these cases? But the equitable division of the colony’s wealth had never been the rule here. Quite the reverse, in fact. I removed some of the dirt with my sleeve, to see more clearly what was within.

  More shells—calcined relics of the sea’s vast population. Everything dry, cold, hard. Nothing to decay. And everything labeled, ranked, linked.

  Where did he find the time? I wondered. To be everything and to do everything. Did he ever sleep? Or is that the real prerogative of a monarch—to be forever doing whatever takes the royal whim. If James Wildeblood couldn’t take his hobbies seriously, who could? I wondered about Wildeblood in his twenties and thirties, on Earth...a life on a planet squeezed of natural resources, where great wealth had almost ceased to matter in many areas because there was so little it could buy. On Earth, nations owned collections like this. Nations and universities. Not people. How frustrated must Wildeblood have been? How cramped for space to expand and impose his personality upon his environment? He must, I thought, have been a man of truly awesome greed, not in terms of piling up credit but in terms of wanting things to belong to him—the kind of things that didn’t belong to anyone on Earth, but to everyone or no one.

  “I thought you’d like to see it,” said Alice.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s fascinating.”

  “You...like this kind of thing.”

  “Yes,” I said, though it wasn’t really a question.

  “You’re like...him...in some ways.”

  I looked at her sharply, then. She wasn’t kidding. It was the work of her imagination, of course, but it was more than just the fact that my job was similar to his. She had an image of James Wildeblood...an almost worshipful regard. He’d been half-deified. The things that were known about him, his talents, his interests, had been invested with a certain sacredness. And he was remembered as something slightly alien...different.