“Leaving my child as heir, and a Regent of my own choice?”
“Perhaps,” Axt said with caution, “they chose your Regent for you.”
The king frowned. “I think not,” she said.
“Whom had you thought of naming?”
There was a long pause. Axt saw the muscles of Argaven’s throat working as she struggled to get a word, a name, up past a block, a harsh constriction; at last she said, in a forced, strangled whisper, “Gerer.”
Axt nodded, startled. Gerer had served as Regent for a year after Emran’s death and before Argaven’s accession; he knew her honesty and her utter devotion to the young king. “Gerer serves no faction!” he said.
Argaven shook her head. She looked exhausted. After a while she said, “Could the science of your people undo what was done to me, Lord Axt?”
“Possibly. In the Institute on Ollul. But if I sent for a specialist tonight, he’d get here twenty-four years from now… You’re sure, then, that your decision to abdicate was—” But a servant, coming in a side door behind them, set a small table by the Plenipotentiary’s chair and loaded it with fruit, sliced bread-apple, a silver tankard of ale. Argaven had noticed that her guest had missed his breakfast. Though the fare on Winter, mostly vegetable and that mostly uncooked, was dull stuff to Axt’s taste, he set to gratefully; and as serious talk was unseemly over food, Argaven shifted to generalities. “Once you said, Lord Axt, that different as I am from you, and different as my people are from yours, yet we are blood kin. Was that a moral fact, or a material one?”
Axt smiled at the very Karhidish distinction. “Both, my lord. As far as we know, which is a tiny corner of dusty space under the rafters of the Universe, all the people we’ve run into are in fact human. But the kinship goes back a million years and more, to the Fore-Eras of Hain. The ancient Hainish settled a hundred worlds.”
“We call the time before my dynasty ruled Karhide ‘ancient.’ Seven hundred years ago!”
“So we call the Age of the Enemy ‘ancient,’ and that was less than six hundred years ago. Time stretches and shrinks; changes with the eye, with the age, with the star; does all except reverse itself—or repeat.”
“The dream of the Ekumen, then, is to restore that truly ancient commonalty; to regather all the peoples of all the worlds at one hearth?”
Axt nodded, chewing bread-apple. “To weave some harmony among them, at least. Life loves to know itself, out to its furthest limits; to embrace complexity is its delight. Our difference is our beauty. All these worlds and the various forms and ways of the minds and lives and bodies on them—together they would make a splendid harmony.”
“No harmony endures,” said the young king.
“None has ever been achieved,” said the Plenipotentiary. “The pleasure is in trying.” He drained his tankard, wiped his fingers on the woven-grass napkin.
“That was my pleasure as king,” said Argaven. “It is over.”
“Should—”
“It is finished. Believe me. I will keep you here, Lord Axt, until you believe me. I need your help. You are the piece the game-players forgot about! You must help me. I cannot abdicate against the will of the Council. They will refuse my abdication, force me to rule, and if I rule, I serve my enemies! If you will not help me, I will have to kill myself.” She spoke quite evenly and reasonably; but Axt knew what even the mention of suicide, the ultimately contemptible act, cost a Karhider.
“One way or the other,” said the young king.
The Plenipotentiary pulled his heavy cloak closer round him; he was cold. He had been cold for seven years, here. “My lord,” he said, “I am an alien on your world, with a handful of aides, and a little device with which I can converse with other aliens on distant worlds. I represent power, of course, but I have none. How can I help you?”
“You have a ship on Horden Island.”
“Ah. I was afraid of that,” said the Plenipotentiary, sighing. “Lord Argaven, that ship is set for Ollul, twenty-four lightyears away. Do you know what that means?”
“My escape from my time, in which I have become an instrument of evil.”
“There is no escape,” said Axt, with sudden intensity, “No, my lord. Forgive me. It is impossible. I could not consent— “
Icy rain of spring rattled on the stones of the tower, wind whined at the angles and finials of the roof. The room was quiet, shadowy. One small shielded light burned by the door. The nurse lay snoring mildly in the bed, the baby was head down, rump up in the crib. Argaven stood beside the crib. She looked around the room, or rather saw it, knew it wholly, without looking. She too had slept here as a little child. It had been her first kingdom. It was here that she had come to suckle her child, her first-born, had sat by the fireplace while the little mouth tugged at her breast, had hummed to the baby the songs Borhub had hummed to her. This was the center, the center of, every thing.
Very cautiously and gently she slipped her hand under the baby’s warm, damp, downy head, and put over it a chain on which hung a massive ring carved with the token of the Lords of Harge. The chain was far too long, and Argaven knotted it shorter, thinking that it might twist and choke the child. So allaying that small anxiety, she tried to allay the great fear and wretchedness that filled her. She stooped down till her cheek touched the baby’s cheek, whispering inaudibly, “Emran, Emran, I have to leave you, I can’t take you, you have to rule for me. Be good, Emran, live long, rule well, be good, Emran…”
She straightened up, turned, ran from the tower room, the lost kingdom.
She knew several ways of getting out of the Palace unperceived. She took the surest, and then made for the New Harbor through the bright-lit, sleet-lashed streets of Erhenrang, alone.
Now there is no picture: no seeing her. With what eye will you watch a process that is one hundred millionth percent slower than the speed of light? She is not now a king, nor a human being; she is translated. You can scarcely call fellow-mortal one whose time passes seventy thousand times slower than yours. She is more than alone. It seems that she is not, any more than an uncommunicated thought is; that she goes nowhere, any more than a thought goes. And yet, at very nearly but never quite the speed of light, she voyages. She is the voyage. Quick as thought. She has doubled her age when she arrives, less than a day older, in the portion of space curved about a dustmote named Ollul, the fourth planet of a yellowish sun. And all this has passed in utter silence.
With noise now, and fire and meteoric dazzle enough to satisfy a Karhider’s lust for splendor, the clever ship makes earthfall, settling down in flame in the precise spot it left from some fifty-five years ago. Presently, visible, unmassive, uncertain, the young king emerges from it and stands a moment in the exitway, shielding her eyes from the light of a strange, hot sun. Axt had of course sent notice of her coming, by instantaneous transmitter, twenty-four years ago, or seventeen hours ago, depending on how you look at it; and aides and agents of the Ekumen were on hand to greet her. Even pawns did not go unnoticed by those players of the great game, and this Gethenian was, after all, a king. One of the agents had spent a year of the twenty-four in learning Karhidish, so that Argaven could speak to someone. She spoke at once: “What news from my country?”
“Mr. Mobile Axt and his successor have sent regular summaries of events, and various private messages for you; you’ll find all the material in your quarters, Mr. Harge. Very briefly, the regency of Lord Gerer was uneventful and benign; there was a depression in the first two years, during which your Arctic settlements were abandoned, but at present the economy is quite stable. Your heir was enthroned at eighteen, and has ruled now for seven years.”
“Yes. I see,” said the person who had kissed that year-old heir last night.
“Whenever you see fit, Mr. Harge, the specialists at our Institute over in Belxit— “
“As you wish,” said Mr. Harge.
They went into her mind very gently, very subtly, opening doors. For locked doors they had delicate ins
truments that always found the combination; and then they stood aside, and let her enter. They found the person in black, who was not Gerer, and compassionate Rebade, who was not compassionate; they stood with her on the Palace balcony, and climbed the crevasses of nightmare with her up to the room in the tower; and at last the one who was to have been first, the person in red and white, approached her saying, “Majesty! A plot against your life—” And Mr. Harge screamed in abject terror, and woke up.
“Well! That was the trigger. The signal to begin tripping off the other instructions and determine the course of your phobia. An induced paranoia. Really beautifully induced, I must say. Here, drink this, Mr. Harge. No, it’s just water! You might well have become a remarkably vicious ruler, increasingly obsessed by fear of plots and subversions, increasingly disaffected from your people. Not overnight, of course. That’s the beauty of it. It would have taken several years for you to become a real tyrant; though they no doubt planned some boosts along the way, once Rebade wormed his way— her way—a way into your confidence… Well, well, I see why Karhide is well spoken of, over at the Clearinghouse. If you’ll pardon my objectivity, this kind of skill and patience is quite rare…” So the doctor, the mindmender, the hairy, greyish, one-sexed person from somewhere called the Cetians, went rambling on while the patient recovered herself.
“Then I did right,” said Mr. Harge at last.
“You did. Abdication, suicide, or escape were the only acts of consequence which you could have committed of your own volition, freely. They counted on your moral veto on suicide, and your Council’s vote on abdication. But being possessed by ambition themselves, they forgot the possibility of abnegation, and left one door open for you. A door which only a strong-minded person, if you’ll pardon my literalness, could choose to go through. I really must read up on this other mindscience of yours, what do you call it, Foretelling? Thought it was some occultist trash, but quite evidently… Well, well, I expect they’ll be wanting you to look in at the Clearinghouse soon, to discuss your future, now that we’ve put your past where it belongs, eh?”
“As you wish,” said Mr. Harge.
She talked with various people there in the Clearinghouse of the Ekumen for the West Worlds, and when they suggested that she go to school, she assented readily. For among those mild persons, whose chief quality seemed a cool, profound sadness indistinguishable from a warm, profound hilarity—among them, the ex-king of Karhide knew herself a barbarian, unlearned and unwise.
She attended Ekumenical School. She lived in barracks near the Clearinghouse in Vaxtsit City, with a couple of hundred other aliens, none of whom was either androgynous or an ex-king. Never having owned much that was hers alone, and never having had much privacy, she did not mind barracks life; nor was it so bad as she had expected to live among single-sexed people, although she found their condition of perpetual kemmer tiresome. She did not mind anything much, getting through the works and days with vigor and competence but always a certain heedlessness, as of one whose center is somewhere else. The only discomfort was the heat, the awful heat of Ollul that rose sometimes to 35° C in the blazing interminable season when no snow fell for two hundred days on end. Even when winter came at last she sweated, for it seldom got more than ten degrees below freezing outside, and the barracks were kept sweltering—she thought—though the other aliens wore heavy sweaters all the time. She slept on top of her bed, naked and thrashing, and dreamed of the snows of the Kargav, the ice in Old Harbor, the ice scumming one’s ale on cool mornings in the Palace, the cold, the dear and bitter cold of Winter.
She learned a good deal. She had already learned that the Earth was, here, called Winter, and that Ollul was, here, called the Earth: one of those facts which turn the universe inside out like a sock. She learned that a meat diet causes diarrhea in the unaccustomed gut. She learned that single-sexed people, whom she tried hard not to think of as perverts, tried hard not to think of her as a pervert. She learned that when she pronounced Ollul as Orrur some people laughed. She attempted also to unlearn that she was a king. Once the School took her in hand she learned and unlearned much more. She was led, by all the machines and devices and experiences and (simplest and most demanding) words that the Ekumen had at its disposal, into an intimation of what it might be to understand the nature and history of a kingdom that was over a million years old and trillions of miles wide. When she had begun to guess the immensity of this kingdom of humanity and the durable pain and monotonous waste of its history, she began also to see what lay beyond its borders in space and time, and among naked rocks and furnace-suns and the shining desolation that goes on and on she glimpsed the sources of hilarity and serenity, the inexhaustible springs. She learned a great many facts, numbers, myths, epics, proportions, relationships, and so forth, and saw, beyond the borders of what she had learned, the unknown again, a splendid immensity. In this augmentation of her mind and being there was great satisfaction; yet she was unsatisfied. They did not always let her go on as far as she wanted into certain fields, mathematics, Cetian physics. “You started late, Mr. Harge,” they said, “we have to build on the existing foundations. Besides, we want you in subjects which you can put to use.”
“What use?”
They—the ethnographer Mr. Mobile Gist represented Them at the moment, across a library table—looked at her sardonically. “Do you consider yourself to be of no further use, Mr. Harge?”
Mr. Harge, who was generally reserved, spoke with sudden fury: “I do.”
“A king without a country,” said Gist in his flat Terran accent, “self-exiled, believed to be dead, might feel a trifle superfluous. But then, why do you think we’re bothering with you?”
“Out of kindness.”
“Oh, kindness… However kind we are, we can give you nothing that would make you happy, you know. Except… Well. Waste is a pity. You were indubitably the right king for Winter, for Karhide, for the purposes of the Ekumen. You have a sense of balance. You might even have unified the planet. You certainly wouldn’t have terrorized and fragmented the country, as the present king seems to be doing. What a waste! Only consider our hopes and needs, Mr. Harge, and your own qualifications, before you despair of being useful in your life. Forty or fifty more years of it you have to live, after all…”
The last snapshot taken by alien sunlight: erect, in a Hainish-style cloak of grey, a handsome person of indeterminate sex stands, sweating profusely, on a green lawn beside the chief Agent of the Ekumen in the West Worlds, the Stabile, Mr. Hoalans of Alb, who can meddle (if he likes) with the destinies of forty worlds.
“I can’t order you to go there, Argaven,” says the Stabile. “Your own conscience— “
“I gave up my kingdom to my conscience, twelve years ago. It’s had its due. Enough’s enough,” says Argaven Harge. Then she laughs suddenly, so that the Stabile also laughs; and they part in such harmony as the Powers of the Ekumen desire between human souls.
Horden Island, off the south coast of Karhide, was given as a freehold to the Ekumen by the Kingdom of Karhide during the reign of Argaven XV. No one lived there. Yearly generations of seawalkies crawled up on the barren rocks, and laid and hatched their eggs, and raised their young, and finally led them back in long single file to the sea. But once every ten or twenty years fire ran over the rocks and the sea boiled on the shores, and if any seawalkies were on the island then they died.
When the sea had ceased to boil, the Plenipotentiary’s little electric launch approached. The starship ran out a gossamer-steel gangplank to the deck of the launch, and one person started to walk up it as another one started to walk down it, so that they met in the middle, in midair, between sea and land, an ambiguous meeting.
“Ambassador Horrsed? I’m Harge,” said the one from the star-ship, but the one from the launch was already kneeling, saying aloud, in Karhidish, “Welcome, Argaven of Karhide!”
As he straightened up the Ambassador added in a quick whisper, “You come as yourself— Explain when I ca
n— “ Behind and below him on the deck of the launch stood a sizable group of people, staring up intently at the newcomer. All were Karhiders by their looks; several were very old.
Argaven Harge stood for a minute, two minutes, three minutes, erect and perfectly motionless, though her grey cloak tugged and riffled in the cold sea wind. She looked then once at the dull sun in the west, once at the grey land north across the water, back again at the silent people grouped below her on the deck. She strode forward so suddenly that Ambassador Horrsed had to squeeze out of the way in a hurry. She went straight to one of the old people on the deck of the launch. “Are you Ker rem ir Kerheder?”
“I am.”
“I knew you by the lame arm, Ker.” She spoke clearly; there was no guessing what emotions she felt. “I could not know your face. After sixty years. Are there others of you I knew? I am Argaven.”
They were all silent. They gazed at her.
All at once one of them, one scored and scarred with age like wood that has been through fire, stepped forward one step. “My liege, I am Bannith of the Palace Guard. You served with me when I was Drillmaster and you a child, a young child.” And the grey head bowed down suddenly, in homage, or to hide tears. Then another stepped forward, and another. The heads that bowed were grey, white, bald; the voices that hailed the king quavered. One, Ker of the crippled arm, whom Argaven had known as a shy page of thirteen, spoke fiercely to those who still stood unmoving: “This is the king. I have eyes that have seen, and that see now. This is the king!”
Orbit 5 - [Anthology] Page 9
