Nopalgarth

by Jack Vance

  "Excuse me if I'm excessively curious," said Joe. "But what is there in that pot which makes it so important?"

  She looked at him tearfully, finally said, "The second most important living thing in the universe. The only living shoot from the Tree of Life."

  They slowly returned along the blue-tiled corridor toward the ship. Joe said, "I'm not only curious but I'm stupid as well. Why bother to carry a shoot from the Tree of Life all over creation? Unless, of course—"

  She nodded. "As I told you we wished to form a bond with the Ballenkarts—a religious bond. This shoot, the Son of the Tree, would be the vital symbol."

  "Then," said Joe, "the Druids would gradually infiltrate, gradually dominate, until Ballenkarch was another Kyril. Five billion miserable serfs, a million or two high-living Druids, one Tree." He examined her critically.

  "Aren't there any on Kyril who consider the system—well, unbalanced?"

  She burnt him with an indignant look. "You're a complete Materialist. On Kyril Materialism is an offense punishable by death."

  " 'Materialism' meaning 'distribution of the profits,' " suggested Joe, "Or maybe 'incitement to rebellion.' "

  "Life is a threshold to glory," said Elfane. "Life is the effort which determines one's place on the Tree. The industrious workers become leaves high in the Scintillance. The sluggard must grope forever through dark slime as a rootlet."

  "If Materialism is the sin you seem to believe it is— why do the Druids eat so high off the hog? Which means, live in such pampered luxury? Doesn't it seem strange to you that those who stand to lose the most by 'Materialism' are those most opposed to it?"

  "Who are you to criticize?" she cried angrily. "A barbarian as savage as the Ballenkarts! If you were on Kyril your wild talk would quickly be shut off!"

  "Still the tin goddess, aren't you?" said Joe contemptuously.

  In outraged silence she stalked ahead. Joe grinned to himself, followed her back to the ship.

  The lock into the ship opened. Elfane stopped short. "The Son is lost—probably destroyed." She looked sidewise at Joe. "There is no reason why I should continue to Ballenkarch. My duty is to return home, report to the College of Thearchs."

  Joe rubbed his chin ruefully. He had been hoping that this aspect to the matter would not occur to her. He said tentatively, not quite sure how much anger she felt toward him, "But you left Kyril with Manaolo to escape the life of the palace. The Thearchs will learn every detail of Manaolo's death through their spies."

  She inspected him with an expression unreadable to his Earthly perceptions. "You want me to continue with you?"

  "Yes, I do."

  "Why?"

  "I'm afraid," said Joe with a sad droop to his mouth, "that you affect me very intensely, very pleasantly. This in spite of your warped philosophy."

  "That was the right answer," announced Elfane. "Very well, I will continue. Perhaps," she said importantly, "perhaps I'll be able to persuade the Ballenkarts to worship the Tree on Kyril."

  Joe held his breath for fear of laughing and so offending her once more. She looked at him somberly. "I realize you find me amusing."

  Hableyat stood by the purser's desk. "Ah—back, I see. And Manaolo's assassins have escaped with the Son of the Tree?"

  Elfane froze in her tracks. "How did you know?"

  "My dear Priestess," said Hableyat, "the smallest pebble dropped in the pond sends its ripples to the far shore. Indeed, I see that I am perhaps even closer to the true state of affairs than you are."

  "What do you mean by that?"

  The port clanged, the steward politely said, "We take off in ten minutes. Priestess, my Lords, may I web you into your berths against the climb into speed?"

  IX

  Joe awoke from his trance. Remembering the last awakening he jerked up in his web, searched the cabin. But he was alone and the door was locked, bolted, barred as he had arranged it before taking the pill and turning hypnotic patterns on the screen.

  Joe jumped out of the hammock, bathed, shaved, climbed into the new suit of blue gabardine he had bought at Junction. Stepping out on the balcony, he found the saloon almost dark. Evidently he had awakened early.

  He stopped by the door to Cabin 13, thought of Elfane lying warm and limp within, her dark hair tumbled on the pillow, her face, smoothed of doubts and prideful mannerisms. He put his hand to the door. It was as if something dragged it there. By an effort of will he pulled the arm back, turned, moved along the balcony. He stopped short. Someone sat in the big lounge by the observation port. Joe leaned forward, squinted into the gloom. Hableyat.

  Joe continued along the balcony, down the steps. Hableyat made a courtly gesture of greeting. "Sit down, my friend, and join me in my pre-prandial contemplations."

  Joe took a seat. "You awoke early."

  "To the contrary," said Hableyat. "I did not submit to slumber. I have been sitting here in this lounge six hours and you are the first person I have seen."

  "Whom were you expecting?"

  Hableyat allowed a wise expression to form on his yellow face. "I expected no one in particular. But from a few adroit questions and interviews at the Junction I find that people are not all they seem. I was curious to observe any activity in the light of this new knowledge."

  Joe said with a sigh, "After all, it's none of my business."

  Hableyat waggled his plump forefinger. "No, no, my friend. You are modest. You dissemble. I fear that you have become very much engrossed in the fortunes of the lovely young Priestess and so cannot be considered dispassionate."

  "Put it this way. I don't care whether or not the Druids get their plant life to Ballenkarch. And I don't quite understand why you are so cooperative toward their efforts." He glanced at Hableyat appraisingly. "If I were the Druids I'd reconsider the whole idea."

  "Ah, my dear fellow," beamed Hableyat, "you compliment me. But I work in the dark. I grope. There are subtleties I have not yet fathomed. It would surprise you to learn the duplicity of some of our acquaintances."

  "Well, I'm willing to be surprised."

  "For instance—that bald old woman in the black dress, who sits and stares into space like one already dead, what do you think of her?"

  "Oh—harmless unprepossessing old buzzard."

  "She is four hundred and twelve years old. Her husband, according to my informant, evolved an elixir of life when she was fourteen. She murdered him and only twenty years ago did she lose the freshness of her youth. During this time she has had lovers numbered by the thousands, of all shapes, sizes, sexes, races, bloods and colors. For the last hundred years her diet has consisted almost entirely of human blood."

  Joe sank into the seat, rubbed his face. "Go on."

  "I learn that one of my countrymen is a great deal higher in rank and authority than I had assumed, and that I must tread warily indeed. I find that the Prince of Ballenkarch has an agent aboard the ship."

  "Continue," said Joe.

  "I learned also—as perhaps I hinted before the takeoff from Junction—that Manaolo's death and the loss of his flowerpot was perhaps not an unrelieved tragedy from the Druid standpoint."

  "How so?"

  Hableyat looked thoughtfully up along the balcony. "Has it ever occurred to you," he asked slowly, "that Manaolo was an odd choice for courier on a mission of such importance?"

  Joe frowned. "I rather imagined that he fell into the commission through his rank—which, according to Elfane, is —was—rather exalted. An Ecclesiarch, right under a Thearch."

  "But the Druids are not completely inflexible and stupid," said Hableyat patiently. "They have managed to control five billion men and women with nothing more than a monstrous tree for almost a thousand years. They are not dolts.

  "The College of Thearchs no doubt knew Manaolo for what he was—a swaggering egocentric. They decided that he would make the ideal stalking-horse. I, not understanding the intricacy of the plan, decided that Manaolo in turn needed a decoy to divert attention from him. For this purp
ose I selected you.

  "But the Druids had foreseen the difficulty in the mission, and had made arrangements. Manaolo was sent out with a spurious seedling with exactly the right degree of ostentatious stealth. The real Son of the Tree was conveyed in another manner."

  "And this other manner?"

  Hableyat shrugged. "I can only theorize. Perhaps the Priestess has it cunningly concealed about her person. Perhaps the shoot has been entrusted to the baggage car—though this I doubt through fear of our spies. I imagine the shoot is in the custody of some representative of Kyril… Perhaps on this ship, perhaps on another."

  "And so?"

  "And so I sit here and watch to see if anyone shares my suspicion. So far you are the first to appear."

  Joe smiled faintly. "And what conclusions do you draw?"

  "None."

  The white-haired steward appeared, his legs and arms thin and peculiarly graceful in the skin-tight cloth. Cloth? Joe, for the first time, looked closely. The steward asked, "Will you gentlemen take breakfast?"

  Hableyat nodded. "I will."

  Joe said, "I'll have some fruit." Then emboldened by his discovery of beer at Junction, "I don't suppose you have coffee."

  "I think we can find some, Lord Smith."

  Joe turned to Hableyat. "They don't wear many clothes. That's paint on them!"

  Hableyat appeared to be amused. "Of course. Haven't you always known that the Belands wore more paint than clothes?"

  "No," said Joe. "Clothes I've always taken for granted."

  "That's a grave mistake," said Hableyat pompously. "When you're dealing with any creature or manifestation or personality on a strange planet—never take anything for granted! When I was young I visited the world Xenchoy on the Rim and there I made the mistake of seducing one of the native girls. A delicious creature with vines plaited into her hair. I remember that she submitted readily but without enthusiasm.

  "In my most helpless moment she attempted to stab me with a long knife. I protested and she was dumbfounded. Subsequently I found that on Xenchoy only a person intending suicide will possess a girl out of wedlock and since there is no onus either on suicide or impudicity he so achieves humanity's dream, of dying in ecstasy."

  "And the moral?"

  "It is certainly clear. Things are not always what they seem."

  Joe relaxed into the couch, musing, while Hableyat hummed a four-toned Mang fugue under his breath, accompanying himself on six tablets hanging around his neck like a pendant, each of which vibrated to a different note when touched.

  Joe thought, It's evident he either knows or suspects something, which is plain as my face and I can't see it. Hableyat once said I have a limited intellect, maybe he's right. He's certainly given me enough hints. Elfane? Hableyat himself? No, he was talking about the Son of the Tree. A tremendous lot of excitement for a vegetable. Hableyat thinks its still aboard, that's clear. Well, I haven't got it. He doesn't have it or he wouldn't talk so much. Elfane is in the dark. The Cils? The horrible old woman? The Mangs? The two Druid missionaries?

  Hableyat was observing him closely. As Joe sat up with a jerk Hableyat smiled. "Now do you understand?"

  Joe said, "It seems reasonable."

  The rating of passengers once more sat in the saloon but there was a different atmosphere now. The first leg of the voyage had suffered from tenseness but it had been a loose unpleasantness, a matter of personal likes and dislikes, dominated perhaps by the personality of Manaolo.

  Now the individual relationships seemed submerged in more sweeping racial hatreds. Erru Kametin, the two Mang civilians—proctors of the Redbranch policy committee, so Joe learned from Hableyat—and the young Mang widow sat by the hour, playing their game with the colored bars, darting hot glances across the room at the imperturbable Hableyat.

  The two Druid missionaries huddled over their altar in a dark corner of the saloon, busy with interminable rites before the representation of the Tree. The Cils, injured by the lack of response to their silken gambolings, kept to the promenade. The black-gowned woman sat still as death, her eyes moving an eighth of an inch from time to time. Perhaps once an hour she lifted a transparent hand up to her glass-bald pate.

  Joe found himself buffeted by psychological cross-currents, like a pond thrashed by winds from every direction at once. First there was his own mission to Ballenkarch. Strange, thought Joe —only days, hours to Ballenkarch and now his errand seemed drained of all urgency. He had only a given limited amount of emotion, of will, of power, and he seemed to have invested a large part of it in Elfane. Invested? It had been torn out of him, squeezed, wrenched.

  Joe thought of Kyril, of the Tree. The palaces at Divinal clustered around the sub-planetary bulk of the trunk, the endless reaches of meager farms and ill-smelling villages, the slack-shouldered dead-eyed pilgrimage into the trunk, with the last triumphant gesture, the backward look off over the flat gray landscape.

  He thought of Druid discipline —death. Though death was nothing to be feared on Kyril. Death was as common as eating. The Druid solution to any quandary—the avalanche—the all-the-way approach to existence. Moderation was a word with little meaning to men and women with no curb to any whim, indulgence or excess.

  He considered what he knew of Mangtse—a small world of lakes and landscaped islands, a people with a love of intricate convolution, with an architecture of fanciful curves, looping wooden bridges over the streams and canals, charming picturesque vistas in the antique yellow light of the dim little sun.

  Then the factories—neat, efficient, systematic, on the industrial islands. And the Mangs—a people as ornate, involute and subtle as their carved bridges. There was Hableyat, into whose soul Joe had seen for never an instant. There were the fire-breathing Redbranches bent on imperialism. In Earth terms—medievalists.

  And Ballenkarch? Nothing except that it was a barbaric world with a prince intent on bringing an industrial complex into existence overnight. And somewhere on the planet, among the savages of the south or the barbarians of the north, was Harry Creath.

  Harry had captured Margaret's imagination and taken light-hearted leave, leaving behind an emotional turmoil which could not be settled till Harry returned. Two years ago Harry had been only hours away on Mars. But when Joe arrived to bring him back to Earth for a showdown, Harry had left. Fuming at the delay, but tenacious and full of his obsession, Joe had persisted.

  On Thuban he had lost the trail when a drunk's cutlass sent him to the hospital for three months. Then further months of agonized search and inquiry and at last the name of an obscure planet came to the surface— Ballenkarch. Then further months of working his way across the intervening galaxy. Now Ballenkarch lay ahead and somewhere on the planet was Harry Creath.

  Anl Joe thought, To hell with Harry! Because Margaret was no longer at the focus of his mind. Now it was an unprincipled minx of a Priestess. Joe pictured himself and Elfane exploring Earth's ancient playgrounds—Paris, Vienna, San Francisco, the Vale of Kashmir, the Black Forest, the Sahara Sea.

  Then he asked himself, would Elfane fit? There were no dazed drudges on Earth to be killed or beaten or pampered like animals. Maybe there was Hableyat's meaning—Things are not always what they seem. Elfane appeared —fundamentally —a creature of his own general pattern. Perhaps he had never quite understood the profundity of Druid egotism. Very well then, he'd find out.

  Hableyat looked up blandly as Joe got to his feet. "If I were you, my friend, I think I would wait. At least another day. I doubt if as yet she has completely appreciated her own loneliness. I think that your appearance now, especially with that belligerent scowl on your face, would merely arouse her antagonism and she would class you with the rest of her enemies. Let her stew a day or so longer and then let her come upon you in the promenade—or the gymnasium, where I observe she spends an hour every day."

  Joe sank back on the couch. He said, "Hableyat, you mystify me."

  Hableyat shook his head sadly. "Ah, but I am transparent
."

  "First on Kyril, you save my life. Then you try to get me killed."

  "Only as a disagreeable necessity."

  "At times I think you're friendly, sympathetic—"

  "But of course!"

  "—just as now you read my mind and give me fatherly advice. But—I'm never quite sure just what you're saving me for. Just as the goose being fattened for pati de fois gras never understands the unstinting generosity of his master. Things aren't always what they seem." He laughed shortly. "I don't suppose you'll tell me what slaughter you're fattening me for?"

  Hableyat performed a gesture of polite confusion. "Actually I am not at all devious. I make no pretenses, screen myself with nothing but honesty. My regard for you is genuine—but, I agree, that regard does not prevent me from sacrificing you for a greater end. There is no contradiction. I separate my personal tastes and aversions from my work. And so you know all about me."

  "How do I know when you're working and when you're not?"

  Hableyat threw out his hands. "It is a question not even I can answer."

  But Joe was not entirely dissatisfied. He sat back in the couch and Hableyat relaxed the band around his plump midriff.

  "Life is very difficult at times," said Hableyat, "and very improbable, very taxing."

  "Hableyat," said Joe, "why don't you come back with me to Earth?"

  Hableyat smiled. "I may well heed your suggestion— if the Redbranches defeat the Bluewaters in the Ampianu."

  X

  Four days out from Junction, three days to Ballenkarch. Joe, leaning at the rail in the belly of the ship's promenade, heard a slow step along the composition. It was Elfane. Her face was pale and haunted, her eyes were large and bright. She stopped hesitantly beside Joe as if she were only pausing in her walk.

  Joe said, "Hello," and looked back to the stars.