“Why? You think he means me harm?”
“He is not so foolish. But if you cannot accept the fact that this Tarin Bul is dead, as dead as if he had been shot through the heart, and that this new person is exactly that, a new and different person you do not know and have never met, he will torture you horribly. You must put aside your guilt, for it is misplaced. There is nothing you could have done to stop this. Nothing. You would only have hastened it. In the case of Bul, you must abandon hope with that guilt. Otherwise, cancel and eat here with us.”
He nodded. “Til handle it. But what should my reaction be?”
“You are not yourself here!” the psych snapped. “You are not even the Confederacy! You are all of mankind, and all of the Diamond as well! You’ve been elected, without your consent, to a post that makes you more nonhuman than these Altavar things! You must be above all human concerns, all personal concerns, for the duration of this conference! If not, you are lost.”
He nodded and smiled wanly. “Then you know at least as much as I do about this.”
“I know what Laroo knows, and that is quite a lot. I assume that you are here because you know, too. If you don’t, then God help us all.”
He sighed. “Well, I don’t pretend to have all the answers, or, maybe, any answers at all, Doctor, but you’ve convinced me I have to go to dinner tonight.”
“Eh?”
“If I can’t handle Talant Ypsir’s mad egomania, how the hell can I handle tomorrow?”
After the cramped quarters below, he was surprised at the size of Ypsir’s apartment. Surely the man hardly ever visited Boojum, and so this place spoke volumes about the man’s mind. Ypsir must have a place like this on every damned one of these moons, he assumed.
He entered a main hall and turned into a room at the sound of conversation. They were there, all of them, the old and the new, and he recognized the ones on sight that he had not yet met. The tall, distinguished man with the snow white hair was Duke Kobe, new Lord of Lilith. The tall, muscular, handsome man was Laroo, in his robot body totally indistinguishable at this point from a normal human one. Morah was there, too, temporarily representing Charon. He made a mental note to ask him sometime what happened to his pretty little killer. And over there, laughing and joking, a distinguished-looking civilized worlder with incongruous flaming red hair and mustache, his eyes mischievous-looking and flanked by “laugh lines,” dressed in deep black and gold. He just had to be Talant Ypsir.
Scampering around were four scantily clad young women of inordinate beauty and sexual endowments, supplying hors d’oeuvres, replenishing glasses, lighting Kobe’s Lilithian cigars, all with a smile and an adoring expression. Goodtime Girls, happily plying their trade. Idly he wondered if they were always here, waiting for that incredibly rare occasion when their master might show up, or whether they were part of his traveling party.
Ypsir spotted him, grinned a politician’s grin, and made his way over to him, hand out. “Well, well! So you’re the man’s who’s going to save the universe!” His manner was joking, not sarcastic-sounding, and he recognized the man’s public persona in an instant. The eternal baby-kissing hypocritical politician, the crook who knows full well he’s got everything in the bag. He snapped his finger and a Good-time Girl was immediately at hand, eagerly awaiting a command. “Get Mr.—Carroll, I believe?—a homau and a tray of those little sausage things with the cheese inside.”
The girl was quick to obey and was soon back with both. He sipped the sweet drink and took a small sausage on a toothpick and tasted it. The drink was a bit sweet for him—he recognized it as some blend of Charonese fruits and alcohol—but the appetizer was quite good.
Ypsir engaged him in small talk for some tune, and he found it remarkably easy to do. His indignation and outright hatred were still there, of course, but under complete control. He doubted if he’d ever met someone so internally corrupt and evil, but he’d tracked down and caught a bunch of very unpleasant types in the past, and quite often he’d had a meal with them and been forced to endure their bizarre lifestyles and values.
All the men in the room except himself were in that class, he realized. Laroo had been the criminal boss of a dozen worlds; Morah had run the criminal brotherhood’s scientific branch, which included projects that would probably make the Goodtime Girls seem tame. Kobe had in his youth been a master of the robot and computerized alarm systems, personally looting more works of art by great masters from impregnable fortresses—or so they were thought to be—than any other single human being. And yet, oddly, he felt almost a kinship with those three, whose careers were based upon disdain for the very values he now disdained, and who, beyond that, were at least sane enough to live in the real universe.
Of them all, only Talant Ypsir hoped he would fail to stop the impending war. Dumonia had been most specific about that point. Ypsir saw the destruction of the Confederacy, and perhaps the whole non-Warden branch of humanity, as something very much to be desired. He was assured of survival with his harem, and that was all that mattered to him. He did not consider the Altavar any threat, because they did not interfere with him or threaten what he considered important. In fact, to Talant Ypsir the entire alien race was just another tool against his enemies.
Ypsir held up a finger and grinned broadly, ever the jovial, friendly politician, only his incredibly cold eyes betraying anything of his inner self. “Wait herel I want to show you my most precious possession!” And, with that, he ducked from the room.
He heard the others whispering admiringly of what they knew was coming. But when Talant Ypsir re-entered, in spectacular fashion, he was aware that the eyes of the other Lords—Morah’s inhuman, burning orbs in particular—were all upon him and not on the newcomer to the room. To Ypsir, this was fun torture; to the others, it was very much a test of his own self-control and resolve. If he blew it now, there would be no tomorrow morning.
She was almost inhuman in her wild, exotic, sensuous beauty, far beyond the sketches he’d seen in Fallon’s office. Despite all his knowledge and feelings, he was almost overcome by wanton desire, by pure lust, and that, he realized later, was the key.
You must think of her as someone you do not know and have never met.
It was easier to do than he’d believed.
She entered on all fours, playfully tugging at a golden leash held by Ypsir, whose face showed absolute ecstasy and triumph. Ypsir was having a doubly fine tune, not only tweaking this outsider’s nose and, by so doing, the Confederacy’s, but also showing off to the other Lords, his political equals, with an air of I have her and you never can or will.
Ypsir and the girl halted just inside the entrance door, and she rolled over and then partly propped herself up on one arm, legs crossed, and looked up at them with those enormous green eyes, at once sexy and, somehow, wild as well.
She was, he thought lustfully in spite of himself, the ten best pornographic performances ever given all rolled up into one. She was quite literally designed to create instant envy and lust, and he could only stare at her. She looked straight into his face and there was no glimmer of any recognition at all, but there was a vibrancy, a fire in those eyes that was not in any of the Goodtime Girls.