Again, he studied Ruth.
She returned his stare defiantly.
“Your lives are so short,” Kelexel said. “Your past is so short—yet one gains the definite feeling of something ancient from you. How can that be?”
“Score one for our side,” Ruth said. She could feel her emotions being adjusted, soothed. It happened with an uncanny rapidity. Insane sobriety invaded her mind.
“Please stop changing me,” she whispered.
And she wondered: Was that the right thing to say then? But she felt she had to disagree with the creature now, even risk making him angry. She had to oppose him—subtly, definitely. It was either that or lose her sanity in this wasteland of unreason. She could no longer remain passive, fencing in a mental world where the Chem could not come.
Stop changing her? Kelexel wondered.
There lay a kernel of opposition in that whispered cry and he recognized it. Thus the barbarian always spoke to the civilizer. Instantly alerted, he became at once the true cynic of the Federation, the loyal servant of the Primacy. The native female should not be able to oppose him.
“How do I change you?” he asked.
“I wish I knew,” she said. “All I know is you think I’m stupid and don’t realize what you’re doing.”
Has Fraffin trained this creature? Kelexel wondered. Was she prepared for me? He remembered his first interview with Fraffin, the sense of menace.
“What has Fraffin told you to do?” he demanded.
“Fraffin?” Her face showed blank puzzlement. What had the storyship’s director to do with her?
“I won’t betray you,” Kelexel said.
She wet her lips with her tongue. Nothing the Chem did or said made any sense. The only thing she really understood was their power.
“If Fraffin’s done anything illegal with you creatures I must know about it,” Kelexel said. “I will not be denied. I will know about it.”
She shook her head.
“As much as can be known of Fraffin, that I know,” Kelexel said. “You were little more than the rawest sort of animals here when he came. Chem walked among you as gods then without the slightest concern.”
“Illegal?” she said. “What do you mean illegal?”
“You’ve rudimentary laws among your kind,” Kelexel sneered. “You know about legality and illegality.”
“I’ve never even seen Fraffin,” she said. “Except on the room screen.”
“The letter of the law, eh? His minions, then—what have they told you to do?”
Again, she shook her head. There was a weapon here she could use; she sensed this, but couldn’t quite understand enough to grasp it.
Kelexel whirled away from her, strode to the pantovive and back. He stopped ten paces from Ruth, glared up at her. “He bred you and shaped you and nudged you—changed you—into the finest story property in the universe. Some of the offers he’s had—and turned down—would . . . well, you wouldn’t understand.”
“Turned down . . . why?” she asked.
“Ahh, that is the question.”
“Why . . . why’re we so valuable?”
He gestured, a handsweep that pointed from her feet to her hair. “You’re gross and overgrown, but quite a bit similar to us. We can identify with you. There’s entertainment in your strivings, a surcease from boredom.”
“But you said—illegal?”
“When a race such as yours reaches a certain stage, there are . . . liberties we do not permit. We’ve had to exterminate certain races, severely punish a few Chem.”
“But what . . . liberties?”
“Never mind.” Kelexel turned his back on her. It seemed obvious she spoke from actual ignorance. Under such manipulator pressure she could hardly lie or dissemble.
Ruth stared at Kelexel’s back. For long days now, a question had been creeping upward in her mind. The answer felt deeply important now. “How old are you?” she asked.
Slowly, Kelexel rotated on one heel, studied her. It took a moment to overcome the distaste aroused by such a gauche question, then: “How could that possibly bear on anything that concerns you?”
“It . . . I want to know.”
“The actual duration—that’s not important. But a hundred such worlds as yours, perhaps many more, could’ve come into being and dissolved to dust since my conception. Now, tell me why you want to know.”
“I . . . just want to know.” She tried to swallow in a dry throat “How . . . how do you . . . preserve . . .”
“Rejuvenation!” He shook his head. What a distasteful subject. The native female was truly barbaric.
“The woman Ynvic,” Ruth said, sensing his emotional disturbance and enjoying it. “She’s called the shipsurgeon. Does she supervise the ….”
“It’s routine! Purely routine. We’ve elaborate protective mechanisms and devices that prevent anything but minor damage. A shipsurgeon takes care of the minor damage. Very rare, that. We can take care of our own regenerative and rejuvenating treatments. Now, you will tell me why you ask.”
“Could I . . . we . . .”
“Oh, ho!” Kelexel threw his head back in a bark of laughter. Then: “You must be a Chem and conditioned for the process from birth or it cannot be done.”
“But . . . you’re like us. You . . . breed.”
“Not with you, my dear pet. We’re pleasurably similar, that I admit. But with you it’s dalliance, insulation from boredom, no more. We Chem cannot breed with any other . . .” He broke off, stared at her, remembering a conversation with Ynvic. They’d been discussing the native violence, wars.
“It’s a built-in valving system to keep down the immunes,” Ynvic had said.
“The conflicts?”
“Of course. A person immune to our manipulations tends to become generally dissatisfied, frustrated. Such creatures welcome violence and disregard personal safety. The attrition rate among them is very high.”
Remembering Ynvic’s words, Kelexel wondered: Is it possible? No! It couldn’t be! Gene samples from these natives were on record long ago. I’ve seen them myself. But what if . . . No! There’s no way. But it would be so simple: falsify the gene sample. Shipsurgeon Ynvic! But if she did, why? Kelexel shook his head. The whole idea was preposterous. Even Fraffin wouldn’t dare breed a planet full of half-Chem. The immune ratio would give him away before . . . But there’s always the “valving system.”
“I will see Fraffin now,” Kelexel muttered.
And he remembered: “Ynvic was referring to native immunes, but she said person.”
Chapter 15
Fraffin sat waiting behind his desk as Kelexel entered the director’s salon. The room’s silver light had been tuned to a high pitch, almost glaring. The surface of the desk glittered. Fraffin wore native dress, a black suit with white linen tie. Golden buttons at the cuffs reflected shards of brilliance into Kelexel’s eyes.
Behind a mask of brooding superiority, Fraffin felt himself poised for a pouncing elation. This poor fool of an Investigator! The man had been aimed at his present moment like an arrow. It only remained for him to find the sort of target in which he’d been embedded.
And I aimed him! Fraffin thought. I put him here as surely as I put any native into its predicament.
“You asked to see me?” Fraffin asked. He remained seated, emphasizing his displeasure with the visitor.
Kelexel noted the gesture, ignored it. Fraffin’s posture was almost boorish. Perhaps it reflected confidence and that would bear watching. But the Primacy did not send complete fools to do its investigating and the Director must discover this soon.
“I wish to discuss my pet with you,” Kelexel said, seating himself across from Fraffin without invitation. The desk was an enormous empty expanse separating them. A fault glistening reflection of Fraffin could be seen in its surface.
“There’s something wrong with your pet?” Fraffin asked. He smiled to himself, thinking of the latest report on Kelexel’s antics with the native femal
e. The Investigator was suspicious now; no doubt of that. But too late—far too late.
“Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with my pet,” Kelexel said. “Certainly she delights me. But it has occurred to me that I know so little really about the natives, her sources, so to speak.”
“And you came to me to fill out this information?”
“I felt certain you’d see me,” Kelexel said. He waited, wondering if that barb would sink home. Surely, it was time they brought the battle more into the open.
Fraffin sat back, eyelids drooping, silver-blue shadows in the sockets. He nodded to himself. Ahh, it was going to be good sport playing out this fool’s downfall. Fraffin savored the anticipatory moment, the instant of revelation.
Kelexel put his hands on the arms of his chair, felt clean edges of construction, a gentle warmth. A distant musky aroma permeated the room, an exotic tantalizing thing full of alien strangeness . . . a floral essence perhaps.
“But you enjoy your pet?” Fraffin asked.
“A delight,” Kelexel said. “Better even than the Subi. I wonder that you don’t export them. Why is that?”
“So you’ve had a Subi,” Fraffin said, parrying the question.
“I still wonder that you don’t export these females,” Kelexel said. “I find it very odd.”
Oh, you find it odd, Fraffin thought. He experienced an abrupt sour feeling about Kelexel. The man was so obviously besotten with the native female—his first experience with them.
“There are many collectors who’d leap at the chance to have one of these natives,” Kelexel said, probing. “Of all the delights you’ve gathered here . . .”
“And you think I’ve nothing better to do than collect my natives for the delight of my fellows,” Fraffin said. His voice sounded snappish and he wondered at the emotion in it. Am I jealous of Kelexel? he asked himself.
“Then what is your task here if not to make profit?” Kelexel asked. He could feel himself growing angry with Fraffin. Certainly, the Director knew he faced an Investigator. But none of Fraffin’s actions betrayed fear.
“I’m a collector of gossip,” Fraffin said. “That I create some of this gossip myself, that is of no moment.”
Gossip? Kelexel wondered.
And Fraffin thought: A collector of ancient gossip—yes.
He knew then that he was jealous of Kelexel, envious of the man’s first encounter with a native female. Fraffin remembered the old days when the Chem had moved more openly on this world, creating the machinery of long maturation which they could exploit—devising leprous diplomats full of pride’s blind ignorance, nurturing death wishes to ride each back like a demon. Ahhh, those had been the days.
Fraffin felt himself stretched for a moment on the rack of his own vision, remembering days when he’d lived among the natives—manipulating, maneuvering, eavesdropping, learning, listening to sniggering Roman boys talks of things their elders had forgotten even to whisper. In his mind, Fraffin saw his own villa with sunglow on a brick walk, grass, a tree, a planting of petulant forsythia. That’s what she’d called them—”petulant forsythia.” How clearly he could see in his mind the young pear tree beside the walk.
“They die so easily,” he whispered.
Kelexel put a finger to his cheek, said: “I think you’re just a touch morbid—all this emphasis on violence and death.”
It wasn’t in the plan, but Fraffin couldn’t help himself. He glared at Kelexel, said: “You think you hate such things, eh? No, you don’t! You say you’re attracted by such things as this pretty native of yours. I hear you fancy the native clothing.” He touched a sleeve of his jacket, a curious caressing gesture. “How little you know yourself, Kelexel.”
Kelexel’s face went dark with anger. This was too much! Fraffin exceeded all bounds of propriety!
“We Chem have locked the door on death and violence,” he muttered. “Viewing it as a dalliance, no more.”
“Morbid, you say?” Fraffin asked. “We’ve locked the door on death? No longer for us, is it?” He chuckled. “Yet, there it stands, our eternal temptation. What do I do here that attracts you so—attracts you so much that in the very voice of admission you inquire about that which repels? I’ll tell you what I do here: I play with temptations that my fellow Chem may watch.”
Fraffin’s hands moved as he talked—chopping, cutting gestures that exposed the ever-young flesh, active, vibrant—small hairs curling on the back of the fingers, nails blunt, flat.
Kelexel stared at the man, caught in the spell of Fraffin’s words. Death-temptation? Surely not! Yet, there was a cold certainty in the idea.
Watching Fraffin’s hands, Kelexel thought: The hand must not overthrow the mind.
“You laugh,” Kelexel said. “You think me amusing.”
“Not just you,” Fraffin said. “All is amusement—the poor creatures of my caged world and every last blessed one of us who cannot hear the warnings of our own eternal lives. All warnings have one exception, eh? Yourself! That’s what I see and that’s what amuses me. You laugh at them in my productions, but you don’t know why you laugh. Ahh, Kelexel, here’s where we hide the awareness of our own mortality.”
Kelexel spoke in shocked outrage: “We’re not mortal!”
“Kelexel, Kelexel—we’re mortal. Any of us can end it, cease the rejuvenation, and that’s mortal. That’s mortal.”
Kelexel sat silently staring. The Director was insane!
For Fraffin, the everlasting awareness which his own words had aroused foamed across his mind and, receding, exposed his rage.
I’m angry and remorseful, he thought. I’ve accepted a morality no other Chem would entertain for a moment. I’m sorry for Kelexel and for all the creatures I’ve moved and removed without their knowing. They sprout fifty heads within me for every one I cut off. Gossip? A Collector of gossip? I’m a person of sensitive ears who can still hear a knife scraping toast in a villa that no longer exists.
He remembered the woman then—the dark, exotic chatelaine of his Roman home. She’d been no taller than himself, stunted by native standards, but lovely in his sight—the best of them all. She’d borne him eight mortal children, their mixed blood concealed in the genetic melt. She’d grown old and dull of face—and he remembered that too. Remembering her blunted look, he saw the black throng, the mixed-up disasters of their mingled genes. She’d given him something no other could: a share in mortality that he could accept for his own.
What the Primacy wouldn’t give to know about that little interlude, he thought.
“You talk like a madman,” Kelexel whispered.
We contend openly now, eh? Fraffin thought. Perhaps I move too slowly with this dolt. Perhaps I should tell him now how he’s caught in our trap. But Fraffin felt himself swept up in the flow of his own anger. He couldn’t help himself.
“A madman?” he asked, his voice sneering. “You say we’re immortal, we Chem. How’re we immortal? We rejuvenate and rejuvenate. We achieve a balance point, frozen short of final destruction. At what stage in our development, Chem Kelexel, are we frozen?”
“Stage?” Kelexel stared at him. Fraffin’s words were firebrands.
“Yes, stage! Are we frozen in maturity? I think, not. To mature one must flower. We don’t flower, Kelexel.”
“I don’t . . .”
“We don’t produce something of beauty and loveliness, something which is the essence of ourselves! We don’t flower.”
“I’ve had offspring!”
Fraffin couldn’t contain his laughter. When it subsided, he faced a now openly angry Kelexel, said: “The unflowering seed, the perpetual immaturity producing the perpetual immaturity—and you brag about it! How mean and empty and frightened you are, Kelexel.”
“What’ve I to fear?” Kelexel demanded. “Death can’t touch me. You can’t touch me!”
“Except from within,” Fraffin said. “Death can’t touch a Chem except from within. We’re sovereign individuals, immortal citadels of selfdom that
no force can storm . . . except from within. In each of us there’s that seed out of our past, the seed which whispers: Remember? Remember when we could die?’”
Kelexel pushed himself upright, stood glaring down at Fraffin. “You’re insane!”
“Sit down, visitor,” Fraffin said. And he wondered at himself. Why do I goad him? To justify myself in what I must do? If that’s so, then I should give him something he can use against me. I should make this a more equal contest.
Kelexel sank back into his seat. He reminded himself that the Chem were mostly immune to the more bizarre forms of madness, but one never knew what stresses might be imposed by outpost living, by contact with an alien race. The boredom psychosis threatened all of them—perhaps Fraffin had succumbed to something in that syndrome.
“Let us see if you have a conscience,” Fraffin said.
It was such an unexpected statement that Kelexel could only goggle at him. There came a sense of furtive emptying within himself, though, and Kelexel recognized peril in Fraffin’s words.
“What harm could there be in that?” Fraffin asked. He turned. Earlier one of the crew had brought a vase of roses and put them on the cabinet behind his desk. Fraffin looked at the roses. They were full blown, dripping blood-colored petals like the garlands on Diana’s altar. There’s no more joking in Sumeria, he thought. No more do we jest, inserting foolishness into Minerva’s wisdom.
“What are you talking about?” Kelexel asked.
For answer, Fraffin moved a control stud beneath his desk. His pantovive reproducer whirred into action, slid across the room like a giant beast and positioned itself at Fraffin’s right where they would share the view of its focusing stage.
Kelexel stared at it, suddenly dry-mouthed. The frivolous entertainment machine was a sudden monster that he feared was capable of striking him unaware.
“It was thoughtful of you to provide one of these for your pet,” Fraffin said. “Shall we see what she’s watching?”
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