Wolfling

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Jim obliged by summoning up a mental picture of the refrigerated warehouse behind the compound housing the Earth Trade Delegation, where his bulls were stored. He felt a curious light touch in his mind—a sort of passing sensation, as if his naked brain had been lightly brushed by a feather. Abruptly he and the girl were standing in the refrigerated warehouse, before the stack of six huge cases, each with the frozen body of a fighting bull in suspended animation within it.

  “Yes,” said the girl thoughtfully. Abruptly they were someplace else.

  This new place was a large, metal-walled chamber with a small assortment of cases and other objects arranged in neat piles at intervals about its floor. The stack of cases containing the frozen bulls was now here also. Jim frowned. The temperature of the room was clearly in the comfortable seventy-degree range.

  “These animals are frozen,” he told the girl. “And they have to stay frozen—”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” she interrupted; and then smiled at him, half in cheerfulness, half, it seemed, in apology for interrupting him. “Nothing about their condition will change. I’ve left orders with the ship’s controls to see to that.”

  Her smile widened.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “Put your hand out and feel for yourself.”

  Jim reached out his hand toward the side of the nearest case. There was no change in temperature until his fingertips came within an inch or two of the surface of the case—then they suddenly encountered bone-chilling atmosphere. The cold, he knew, could not come from the cases, since these were superbly insulated. He withdrew his hand.

  “I see,” he said. “All right. I won’t worry about my bulls.”

  “Good,” she answered.

  Instantly they were elsewhere. Not back in the egg-shaped room but in another, a long room, one side of which appeared to be glass looking out on a strip of beach and the surf of an ocean shore—the shore of an ocean aboard a spaceship was no less startling than the other things to be seen within the rectangular, glass-walled room itself.

  These were a variety of creatures, running from something like a small, purple-furred squirrel to a creature farther down the room who was tall and covered with black fur—more than apelike, but still less than human.

  “These are my other pets,” he heard the girl saying at his elbow, and looked down into her smiling face. “I mean—they’re really Afuan’s pets. The ones I take care of for her. This one—”

  She stopped to pet the small, purple-furred squirrel, which arched itself like a satisfied cat under her hand. Neither it nor any of the others seemed to be chained or restrained in any way. Yet they all stayed some little distance from one another.

  “This one,” the girl repeated, “is Ifny—”

  She stopped suddenly, jumping to her feet.

  “I’m sorry, Wolfling,” she said. “You must have a name too. What is it?”

  “James Keil,” he answered her. “Call me Jim.”

  “Jim,” she echoed, trying it out, with her head cocked on one side. In her Empire accent, the ‘m’ sound was prolonged, so that the short, familiar form of James came out sounding more musical than it might have in English.

  “And your name?” Jim asked her.

  She started, and looked at him almost in shock.

  “But you should call me High-born!” she said a little stiffly. But the next moment the stiffness had melted, as if her interior warmth of character would not endure it. “But I do have a name, of course. I have several dozens of them, in fact. But you know we all go by one name familiarly. My normally used name is Ro.”

  Jim inclined his head.

  “Thank you, High-born,” he said.

  “Oh, call me Ro—” she broke off, as if a little frightened at what she was saying. “When we’re alone, anyway. After all, you are human, even if you are a Wolfling, Jim.”

  “That’s something else you can tell me, then, Ro,” said Jim. “What is this ‘Wolfling’ that everyone calls me?”

  She stared at him for a moment, almost blankly.

  “But you—no, of course, you’d be the very one who wouldn’t know!” she said. Once more she blushed in that remarkable fashion he had noticed earlier. Plainly it was the lightness of her skin, for all its brown tint, that caused the sudden rush of blood to her features to be seen. But it was unusual to Jim to see such a marked reaction in any adult woman. “It’s… not a very nice name for you, I’m afraid. It means—it means something like… you’re a human being, all right, but one who’s been lost in the woods and brought up by animals, so that you don’t have any idea of what it’s really like to be a human.”

  Her blush flared again.

  “I’m sorry…” she said, looking down. “I shouldn’t have called you that myself. But I didn’t think. I’ll always call you Jim, from now on.”

  Jim smiled. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “Yes, it does!” she said fiercely, looking up at him abruptly. “I know what it’s like to be called names. I never let anybody call any of my—Afuan’s—pets names. And I’m not going to let anybody call you names if I can help it.”

  “Well, thank you, then,” said Jim gently. She patted his arm again soothingly.

  “Come meet my other pets,” she said, moving down the line.

  He went with her. The creatures in the room seemed free to wander about the room, but at the same time enclosed and protected by an invisible barrier that kept them from coming any closer than four or five feet to one of the other creatures. They were plainly all animals. Curiously, also, they all appeared to resemble, at least to some extent, an animal type that either was on Earth or had been at some period in its geologic history. This, in itself, was interesting. It seemed to substantiate the Empire’s assumption that the people of Earth were part of its own basic stock—lost, only to be found again when they ventured by their own scientific powers back in as far as Alpha Centauri. The alternative was to assume that human-habitable planets had evolutionary parallels to an extremely remarkable degree.

  Still, even this could be; a parallelism among fauna on various worlds did not absolutely prove a common ancestry for its dominant species.

  Jim noticed something also that was very interesting about Ro herself. Most of the animals responded happily when she spoke to them or petted them. Even those who did not—and she handled even the fiercest of them without hesitation—showed absolutely no hostility. The farthest they got from expressions of happiness at her attention was something like a lazy indifference.

  Such as in the case of one large catlike creature—easily as big as a South American jaguar and somewhat resembling the jaguar in its spotted coat, although a heavy, horselike head spoiled the general picture. This catlike creature yawned and allowed itself to be petted but made no great effort to respond to Ro’s caresses. The apelike creature in the black hair, in contrast, sadly clung to her hand and gazed into her face as she spoke to it and stroked its head; but it made no other response.

  Letting go of its hand at last—pulling away, in fact—Ro turned finally to Jim.

  “Now you’ve seen them,” she said. “Maybe you’ll help me take care of them sometimes. They really should have more attention than I give them alone. Afuan forgets she has them for months on end… Oh, that won’t happen to you—” She interrupted herself suddenly. “You understand? You’re to perform for the Emperor when we get back to the Throne World. And as I say, you’re not an animal.”

  “Thank you,” said Jim gravely.

  She looked surprised, then laughed. She patted his arm in the gesture he was beginning to find customary on her part.

  “Now,” she said, “you’ll want to get to your own quarters.”

  Instantly they were in a room that they had not been in before. Like the room containing the pets, it had a glass wall window looking out on the beach and the ocean beyond, which, whether illusion or reality, rolled its surf within thirty feet of the glass wall itself.

  “These will
be your quarters,” said Ro. Jim looked around him. There was no sign of a door in any of the walls.

  “Don’t you suppose,” he said, “you’d better tell this Wolfling how to get around from one room to the next?”

  “To the next?” she echoed with a puzzled frown, and suddenly he realized that she had taken him literally. His mind seized on the implications of that.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I simply meant from this room to any other room. But—just for the fun of it—what is the room that’s just beyond that wall there?”

  He pointed to the blank wall of the room opposite the one of glass overlooking the beach and the ocean.

  She stared at the wall, frowned again, and finally shook her head.

  “Why… I don’t know,” she said. “But what difference does it make? You go to all rooms the same way. So there’s really no difference. It doesn’t matter where in the ship they are.”

  Jim filed this information mentally for future reference. “I should know how to get myself from room to room, though, shouldn’t I?” he asked.

  “Oh,” she said, “I’m sorry. Of course, you don’t know. The ship runs everything. You have to tune in to the ship; then it’ll do anything you want.”

  She lit up suddenly.

  “Would you like to see what the rest of the ship looks like?” she asked. “I’ll take you around. Why don’t you get yourself settled in here, or unpack, or whatever you want to do; and I’ll come back in a little while. How soon should I come back?”

  Jim mentioned a time in Empire units that was roughly the equivalent of fifteen minutes.

  “Fine,” Ro said, smiling at him. “I’ll be right back when the time’s up.”

  She vanished.

  Left alone, Jim examined the room, which was furnished with hassocks and pillows of all size—much as the first room he had seen aboard ship, where he had met Ro. The one very large hassock, some four feet thick and eight feet in diameter, at one end of the room, he took to be the bed. At first there seemed nothing in the shape of a bathroom. But the moment this thought occurred to him a section of the wall obediently slid aside, and he found himself looking into a smaller room fitted out with a complete assortment of recognizable lavatory facilities, up to and including a swimming pool—and with several other articles of plumbing which seemed to make little sense. For example, there was one shallow, completely dry basin large enough for him to stretch out in.

  He turned back to his main room and with a corner of his eye saw the door to the bathroom slide shut behind him. He picked up his two suitcases, put them on the bedlike hassock, and opened them. No sooner had he done so than another section of the wall opened, and he found himself looking into what might have been the closet if there had been any pole or clothes hangers in it.

  Experimentally—he was beginning to get the hang of things aboard ship now—he tried to imagine his clothes as being hung up in the closet.

  Obligingly, they were suddenly there—the only unusual part of their appearance and situation being that they hung as he had imagined them, but without any visible means of support, suspended vertically in midair as if held by invisible hangers from an invisible rod.

  Jim nodded. He was about to think the closet closed again, when a second thought made him take the Scottish costume, complete with kilt and knife, from where it hung unsupported in midair, and change into it, placing his suit of lights in the closet in its place, where it hung invisibly supported with the rest of his clothes.

  The closet closed, and Jim was just turning away from it when a visitor materialized in the center of his room. But it was not Ro. Instead, it was one of the male High-born—a man with onyx-white skin, at least seven feet tall.

  “There you are, Wolfling,” the High-born said. “Come along. Mekon wants to see you.”

  They were suddenly in a room which Jim had not been in before. It was rectangular and long, and they stood in about the middle of it. There were no other humans in the room. But at the far end, on a sort of pillow-strewn dais, there lay curled a feline similar in every respect to the one among Ro’s pets. It lifted its horse’s head at the sight of them in the room, and its eyes fastened upon Jim.

  “Wait here,” said the High-born who had brought him. “Mekon will be with you in just a moment.”

  The tall man vanished. Jim found himself left alone with the feline beast, which was now lazily rising to its feet, staring down the room at him.

  Jim stood still, staring back.

  The animal made a curious, whining sound—a sound almost ridiculously small to come from something obviously so physically powerful. Its short stub of a tufted tail began to jerk vertically up and down, stiffly. Its heavy head lowered until its lower jaw almost touched the floor of the dias, and its mouth gradually opened to reveal heavy, carnivorous teeth.

  Still whining, it began slowly to move. Softly, almost delicately, it put one front paw down from the dais; and then the other. Slowly it began to move toward him, crouching and whining as it did. Its teeth were fully visible now, and as it approached, its whine grew in volume, until it was a sort of singing threat.

  Jim waited, moving neither backward nor forward.

  The animal came on. About a dozen yards from him it stopped and gradually crouched. Its tail was jerking like a metronome now, and the singing whine that came from its throat was filling the whole room.

  For what seemed a long time, it crouched there, jaw hung open, whining. Then, without warning, the whining stopped, and it launched itself through the air at Jim’s throat.

  Chapter 3

  The feline creature flashed forward and upward into Jim’s face—and vanished.

  Jim had not moved. For a moment he was alone in the long, rectangular room; and then suddenly there were three of the High-born males around him, one of them with the dragonlike insignia upon his shirt, or tunic, front. That one had brought Jim here. Of the other two, one was almost short by High-born standards—barely three inches taller than Jim. The third was the tallest of the three—a slim, rather graceful-looking man with the first expression resembling a smile Jim had ever seen on purely onyx-colored features; and this last of the three High-born wore a red insignia which looked somewhat like the horns and head of a stag.

  “I told you they were brave, these Wolflings,” drawled this last member of the group. “Your trick didn’t work, Mekon.”

  “Courage!” said the one addressed as Mekon angrily. “That was too good to be true. He didn’t even move a muscle! You’d think he’d been—” Mekon bit off the words abruptly, glancing hastily at the tall Slothiel, who stiffened.

  “Go on. Go on, Mekon,” drawled the tall High-born, but there was an edge to his drawl now. “You were going to say something like… ‘warned’?”

  “Of course Mekon didn’t mean to say anything like that.” It was Trahey, almost literally pushing himself between the other two men, whose eyes were now fixedly fastened on each other.

  “I’d like to hear Mekon tell me that,” murmured Slothiel.

  Mekon’s eyes dropped. “I—of course, I didn’t mean anything of the sort. I don’t remember what I was going to say,” he said.

  “Then I take it,” said Slothiel, “that I’ve won. One Lifetime Point, to me?”

  “One—” The admission clearly stuck in Mekon’s throat. His face had darkened with a rush of blood similar to the flush that Jim had noticed come too easily to the face of Ro. “One Lifetime Point to you.”

  Slothiel laughed. “Don’t take it so hard, man,” he said. “You can have a chance to win it back anytime you’ve got a decent wager to propose.”

  But Mekon’s temper had flared again. “All right,” he snapped, and swung to face Jim. “I’ve given up the point—but I’d still like to know why this Wolfling didn’t even twitch when the beast went for him. There’s something unnatural here.”

  “Why don’t you ask him?” drawled Slothiel.

  “I am asking him!” said Mekon, his eyes burning upon
Jim. “Speak up, Wolfling. Why didn’t you show any sign of a reaction?”

  “The Princess Afuan is taking me to the Throne World to show me off to the Emperor,” Jim answered quietly. “I could hardly be shown off if I were badly torn up or killed by an animal like that one. Therefore, whoever was responsible for the cat coming at me was certain to make sure that I wouldn’t be hurt by it.”

  Slothiel threw back his head and laughed loudly. Mekon’s face, which had paled back to its normal color, now flushed again with a dark rush of angry blood.

  “So!” snapped Mekon. “You think you can’t be touched, is that it, Wolfling? I’ll show you—”

  He broke off, for Ro had suddenly appeared in the room beside them; and now she literally shoved herself between Jim and the angry High-born.

  “What’re you doing to him?” she cried. “He’s supposed to be left with me! He’s not for the rest of you to play with—”

  “Why, you little mud-skinned throwback!” snapped Mekon. His hand darted out to the small black stick running through the two loops of the ropelike material that acted as a belt to her white dress. “Give me that rod!”

  As his hand closed upon it, she snatched at it herself; and for a moment there was a tug-of-war in which the rod had come loose from the belt and they both had hold of it.

  “Let go, you little—” Mekon raised one hand, clenching his fingers into a fist as though to strike down at Ro; and, at that moment, Jim stepped suddenly up to him.

  The High-born yelled suddenly—it was almost a bass scream—and let go of the rod, falling back and holding his right arm with his left hand. All down along his forearm a line dripped red, and Jim was putting the little knife back into its scabbard.

  There was a sudden, utter, frozen silence in the room. Trahey, the heretofore self-possessed Slothiel, and even Ro were utterly still, staring at the blood running down Mekon’s forearm. If the walls of the ship had begun to crumble about them, they could not have looked more overwhelmed and stupefied.

  “He—the Wolfling damaged me,” stuttered Mekon, staring wildly at his bleeding arm. “Did you see what he did?”