Shadow's End (28 page)

“So long as taxes are kept low,” Poracious rumbled.

“That too. But mostly one has only to wear a kingly mask in public while seeming to be interested in the common man. It's easy to do. One simply watches for occasions when common men do something uncommon, then one notifies the news sniffers that one is gratified at this example. One has one's picture taken with the awed hero, who may, in fact, have done a very stupid thing. All his neighbors treat him with reverence for several days thereafter, and a holo of himself rests into perpetuity upon his altar shelf, along with the image of his god.”

“Your ministers cooperate in this effort?”

“Oh, yes. Aristocracies conspire to keep their reputation clean. Though they fuss at one for not begetting sons, one has heard them privately say that a bachelor king is less trouble than royal offspring, who are, however one trains them, beset by the passions, ambitions, and rebelliousness of youth. One's own escapades have been minor. One was assured, for example, that word of the previous flight from Kamir never reached any further than the palace walls.”

“It reached the Fastigats,” she said. “Obviously. May I make a suggestion?”

“Of course.”

“It is not customary for commoners to refer to themselves as ‘one.' If you are desirous of appearing less—”

“Oh, one takes the point. I, that is. Do.” He flushed. “It's difficult. I keep forgetting. When I ran away, I had a role I'd planned on. I'd practiced my speech, my gait, the
clothes I would wear. I haven't practiced this.” He fell silent, nodding to himself, before saying, “About the Fastigats. I didn't know that Famber's finding me was merely an assignment. I'm afraid I attributed to him some degree of personal malice. To one being pursued, the pursuer may seem motivated by something more than mere duty, and once he had found one … that is me …”

“If you'd told him you didn't want to come back, he'd have left you alone, as required by Fastigat ethics.”

The king flushed. “I didn't ask. He didn't say.”

“It's of no consequence now,” she said. “So, tell me, do you have a favorite mistress or sweetheart?”

Jiacare smiled slightly. “I did. One or two.”

“But you didn't bring anyone with you.”

“No encumbrances,” he said. “I wish to experience freedom. I've never had freedom before. The other time I was a fugitive, not a free man. By the Great God Fathom, madam, do you have any idea what it's like, being born to royalty? Every action scrutinized. Every word assessed. Every royal bowel movement inspected. Every royal sneeze worried over. I cannot say with any certainty that there were not several pairs of eyes looking through holes in the wall during my acts of sexual congress. The best I could do was draw the bed curtains and stay beneath the sheets!”

“It would have a damping effect,” she admitted.

“Indeed. A very good word for it. All that attention put out one's, that is, my fires very well, madam, both physical and spiritual. Believe it.”

“I can see why you wanted revenge against Famber.”

“Well, yes. But I shouldn't have done it, even so.”

Poracious allowed him a moment of reflection before asking, “So, tell me what kind of woman you like? Assuming, that is, you do like women.”

“Women, yes.” He stared at the curved surface above them as though he saw a picture there. “I have never paid much attention to appearance. My favorite woman—up
until the time she married someone else in order to have children—was not at all attractive in a physical sense, though she had great vitality. I admire humor and intelligence. And, of course, patience. It takes a great deal of patience to be mistress to a king.”

“In future, perhaps your companions will need less patience. That is, if you are truly resolved to be no more a king.”

He shrugged carelessly. “If one went back, they'd have to depose Fenubel in one's favor. Such is Kamirian law. But if one … that is, I don't go back … Well. I am free not to go back.”

Poracious Luv nodded. He was indeed free not to go back. Perhaps he would stay on Dinadh. The Alliance had offered him a vast sum for his help. The former king could live much as he would, if he would.

“I've been wondering,” he said. “What happens if we get to Dinadh and find that my assassins have already killed Famber's wife and child? What if they've found Famber himself and killed him?”

She shifted her huge bulk uncomfortably. “Pray they have not. When this Ularian business started, there were four populated systems in Hermes Sector: Dinadh, with one world and a few storage installations; Jerome's system, with several settled worlds and moons; Goan's system, with several settled worlds and a homo-norm team on another one called …Perdur Alas; and finally Debair's system, with several settled worlds, one of which, Tamil's world, was wiped clean by the Ularians just before we left Kamir. Or, so I heard. I don't remember how many worlds that makes. Half a dozen or more, totally wiped clean. The losses are in the millions.”

He scowled at her, vertical wrinkles appearing between his eyes. “That's too many to keep quiet. You'll have a panic.”

“There's already considerable panic in the outlying areas, those nearest Hermes Sector.”

“The ship's library says the Dinadhi keep their foreign guests pretty well spread out. Will the authorities let us go directly to the Famber leasehold?”

She grunted, a porcine sound. “They must. I bear letters of demand from the Procurator. All ships of the line are engaged in evacuation, but the Dinadhi don't know that. I'm to threaten them with invasion if they don't cooperate.”

“I shall follow your lead,” he said carefully. “Lord Fathom, but I've messed things up.”

“Not your fault, lad,” she murmured. “Not anyone's fault. How can you lay guilt for an enigma like the Ulari-ans? We still have no idea who, or what, or why—”

“Or when,” he murmured.

“Or when,” she agreed. “All we can do is our best, and do it as quickly as possible.”

A
mong the scattered buildings at Simidi-ala was a small stone house occupied by Thosby Anent, the Alliance agent, and by Chadra Tsum, a Dinadhi woman. The moment Thosby took up residence, everyone in Simidi-ala knew what he was, for everyone knew who Chadra Tsum was, and she was assigned as his housekeeper. Chadra was an agent for Simidi-ala, assigned to find out things, which she did with one hand while busily keeping Thosby's house with the other. All in all, the functionaries of the Edge were thankful that Alliance interference was limited to one elderly individual, known to be addicted to imported tobaccos and liqueurs, who was, even when sober, more otiose than diligent.

Thosby Anent was as blessedly unaware of this assessment as he was of most other real things. He galloped through life like a fifth leg on a horse, always in motion, seldom touching the ground, and to no purpose when he did. Even in childhood he had been far too preoccupied with being other people to learn to be himself. Early on, he had played at being Mysterious Child or Royal-Boy-Raised-by-Commoners.
Later he had played Brilliant Scholar and Gallant Lover and Deep Thinker, in each case adapting or even curtailing reality to accord with his current persona. He maintained a little recorder in which he entered supportive quotations from old books and antiquarian records along with lists of tasks he meant to undertake, turning each morning to a new page without ever referring to the old.

All this I was told, in time, by Poracious Luv, who had used all the resources of the Alliance to get a clearer picture of its agent upon Dinadh.

While in his early twenties, Thosby had experienced the biography of an almost legendary diplomat-cum-secret-agent, and this had convinced Thosby that his true talent lay in foreign service. He thereupon invented the role of Sagacious Applicant, performing it so well that the Bureau of Information Services actually awarded him a minor clerical position, which he filled with his customary distracted inefficiency. His supervisors, finding him too ineffectual to retain but too amiable to dismiss, shifted him to another department, whence he was shifted to others yet as successive executives moved him gently along. Thosby misinterpreted their efforts as he did most things. He believed he was being groomed for A Really Important Position, so he flitted from job to job with an air of intent incomprehension, waiting for his true talents to be applied.

Thosby reached the acme of incompetence in the Division of Minor Planets, a department whose charge it was to recruit unencumbered persons to serve as factotums and general mumbleglums on small and unimportant worlds—places like Far Barbary or Finagle-Chump or Dinadh. No one objected when Thosby was sent to Dinadh as covert flunky in charge of routing intelligence from Hermes Sector. The personnel officer who made the assignment knew, quite rightly, that any idiot could route intelligence!

Thosby Anent, however, was not just any idiot. He was an idiot convinced he was being moved into An Important Place! Prior to his arrival on Dinadh, he spent a great deal of time choosing the roles he would play there—the roles, that is, in addition to the one he had been assigned—coming up with two that were no more inappropriate than all his other roles had been. He chose, as primary persona, the role of Master Spy. For this he had designed and rehearsed a conspiratorial manner and a repertoire of winks and nods of great significance. As a “cover” for Master Spy, he adopted the persona of Codger. This required him to smoke a tobacco pipe, wear an eccentric hat, and adopt a manner of gruff but kindly bemusement along with a spraddled way of walking, as though slightly crippled in the knees. In order to avoid “giving anything away,” Master Spy was laconic while Codger was obfuscatory, apt to take off in dizzying locutory flights, which left his listeners not only lost but remote from any point of reference.

Between the mystifications of Master Spy and the divarications of Codger, Dinadh-Alliance communication soon dwindled to a muddy trickle. People back at Prime learned to send Thosby's infrequent reports directly into the files, not even feeding them through content analyzers that would have scanned for key concepts, such as
lost contact
or
disappearance.

Thosby took comfort in the lack of feedback. He felt continued silence from Prime was an expression of confidence in him and his work. Meantime, after one or two feeble attempts at supervision, line functionaries at Prime gave up on Thosby and turned to alternate sources of information: agents for other organizations, rumor mongers who were paid for knowing things, people with relatives or friends on settled worlds in Hermes Sector. It was through these that Prime had learned of the Ularian incursions, almost as promptly as Thosby could have informed them.

One young administrator, who was still naive enough to believe that efficiency was a Good Thing, unearthed Thosby's reports, and after laboriously plodding through one or two, recommended that Thosby be replaced. The recommendation, however, languished on the desk of the aide to the deputy assistant to the subassistant secretary for personnel matters. Everyone was now in a panic about Ularians and much too busy to do anything at all about Dinadh.

All of which, so Poracious Luv told me, explains how the Intelligence Division at Prime, purely on the basis of contiguity and without questioning competence, assigned Thosby Anent the responsibility of monitoring the highly secret work of the Perdur Alas shadow team.

“For want of a nail,” the Procurator would say to me, Saluez, as he reviewed this entire matter, with many a shake of the head and furrowing of the brow. “For want of a nail, the horse was lost….” (Our animals on Dinadh do not have nails, so I had to ask Lutha what he meant.)

Thosby accepted responsibility for the shadow team with his usual nonchalance. No one told him how important Perdur Alas was. It would have made no difference if they had. The more challenging and important a task, the more good sense and concentration it required, the more likely Thosby was to ignore it in preference for something else, anything else, that was repetitive and familiar and disconnected from reality.

As a consequence, the shadow team had been gone for some time before Thosby knew it. To give him credit, he did use his equipment to search for survivors, though it took him ten times as long as it should have. He found Snark through sheer luck, and when he set the machines to provide a readout of Snark's sensory data, he found, to his slight discomfort, that it covered a very long period of elapsed time, during which he, Thosby, should probably have Done Something.

Codger was neither honest enough to admit incompetence nor dishonest enough to destroy the evidence. Master Spy, on the other hand, was convinced it was a ploy. Trapped among his several personalities, Thosby chose to do what he had often done in the past with real things that presented real problems: ignore them until they went away.

Perdur Alas didn't go away. The ship that had transported the shadow team stopped subsequently on Dinadh, where, in a drunkenly lugubrious moment, the captain had grieved over the fate of the bait. This was reported to Chadra Tsum, who routinely used Thosby's equipment to find out things that interested her, whether they interested anyone else or not. Chadra knew about Snark long before Thosby did. She told her colleagues, who told other people, with the consequence that, among certain circles in Simidi-ala, Snark was spoken of familiarly and with sympathy as the lonely shadow of Perdur Alas.

Which is not to say that
Dinadh
knew. The people at Simidi-ala, because of their forced association with foreigners, are not considered to be real Dinadhi. They are, so to speak and through no fault of their own, tainted and resented. Though I had not realized it, it seems the resentment runs both ways. They are as suspicious of us as we are of them. So, though the port buzzed with the drama of one lonely shadow upon Perdur Alas, one lonely shadow confronting the might and mystery of the Ulari-ans, the rest of Dinadh remained ignorant.