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.
14. SEEKER SEVANCE OF XYLMNY
PRECISELY On the tick of time DuQuesne stood again in Sennlloy’s room. He glanced at her; then stood flat-footed and simply goggled. He had expected a display, but this was something that had to be seen to be believed — and then but barely. She was literally ablaze with every kind of gem he had ever seen and a dozen kinds completely new to him. Just as she stood, she could have supplied Tiffany and Carrier both for five years.
Yet she did not look barbaric. Blue-eyed, with an incredible cascade of pale blonde hair cut squarely across well below her hips, she looked both regal and virginal.
“Wow!” he exclaimed finally. “The English has-not a word for it, but a sound,” and he executed a long-drawn-out wolf-whistle.
She laughed delightedly. “Oh? I did not hear that on Tellus; but it sounds… appreciative.”
“It is, Milady. Very.” He took her hands and bowed over them. “May I say, Lady Senny, that you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen?”
“Milady.”
“ ‘Lady.’ I have not told you how much I like those terms, friend Vance. I’m wonderfully pleased that you find me so. You’re magnificently handsome yourself… and you smell nice, too.” She came squarely up to him and sniffed approvingly. “But the… the blade of formality. May I look at it, please?”
She examined it closely, then went on, “Tell me, Vance, how old is your recorded history? Just roughly, in Tellurian years?”
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