Soon he would see it.
The Palace of the Governor of Night.
The most useless building in all Old North Australia.
Solider than steel and yet invisible to normal eyes except for its ghostly outline traced in the dust which had fallen lightly on it.
The Palace had really been a palace once, on Khufu II, which rotated with one pole always facing its star. The people there had made fortunes which at one time were compared with the wealth of Old North Australia. They had discovered the Furry Mountains, range after range of alpine configurations on which a tenacious non-Earth lichen had grown. The lichen was silky, shimmering, warm, strong, and beautiful beyond belief. The people gained their wealth by cutting it carefully from the mountains so that it would regrow and selling it to the richer worlds, where a luxury fabric could be sold at fabulous prices. They had even had two governments on Khufu II, one of the day-dwelling people who did most of the trading and brokering, since the hot sunlight made their crop of lichen poor, and the other for the night-dwellers, who ranged deep into the frigid areas in search of lichen, stunted, fine, tenacious and delicately beautiful.
The Daimoni had come to Khufu II, just as they came to many other planets, including Old Earth, Manhome itself. They had come out of nowhere and they went back to the same place. Some people thought that they were human beings who had acclimated themselves to live in the subspace which planoforming involved; others thought that they had an artificial planet on the inside of which they lived; still others thought that they had solved the jump out of our galaxy; a few insisted that there were no such things as Daimoni. This last position was hard to maintain, because the Daimoni paid in architecture of a very spectacular kind — buildings which resisted corrosion, erosion, age, heat, cold, stress, and weapons. On Earth itself Earthport was their biggest wonder — a sort of wine glass, twenty-five kilometers high, with an enormous rocket field built into the top of it. On Norstrilia they had left nothing; perhaps they had not even wanted to meet the Old North Australians, who had a reputation for being rough and gruff with strangers who came to their own home planet. It was evident that the Daimoni had solved the problem of immortality on their own terms and in their own way; they were bigger than most of the races of mankind, uniform in size, height and beauty; they bore no sign of youth or age; they showed no vulnerability to sickness; they spoke with mellifluous gravity; and they purchased treasures for their own immediate collective use, not for retrade or profit. They had never tried to get stroon or the raw santaclara virus from which it was refined, even though the Daimoni trading ships had passed the tracks of armed and convoyed Old North Australian freight fleets. There was even one picture which showed the two races meeting each other in the chief port of Olympia, the planet of the blind receivers: Norstrilians tall, outspoken, lively, crude, and immensely rich; Daimoni equally rich, reserved, beautiful, polished and pale. There was awe (and with awe, resentment) on the part of the Norstrilians toward the Daimoni; there was elegance and condescension on the part of the Daimoni toward everyone else, including the Norstrilians. The meeting had been no success at all. The Norstrilians were not used to meeting people who did not care about immortality, even at a penny a bushel; the Daimoni were disdainful toward a race which not only did not appreciate architecture, but which tried to keep architects off its planet, except for defense purposes, and which desired to lead a rough, simple, pastoral life to the end of time. Thus it was not until the Daimoni had left, never to return, that the Norstrilians realized that they had passed up some of the greatest bargains of all time — the wonderful buildings which the Daimoni so generously scattered over the planets which they had visited for trade or for visits.
On Khufu II, the Governor of Night had brought out an ancient book and had said,
“I want that.”
The Daimoni, who had a neat eye for proportions and figures, said, “We have that picture on our world too. It is an Ancient Earth building. It was once called the great temple of Diana of the Ephesians, but it fell even before the age of space began.”
“That’s what I want,” said the Governor of Night.
“Easy enough,” said one of the Daimoni, all of whom looked like princes. “We’ll run it up for you by tomorrow night.”
“Hold on,” said the Governor of Night. “I don’t want the whole thing. Just the front — to decorate my palace. I have a perfectly good palace all right, and my defenses are built right into it.”
“If you let us build you a house,” said one of the Daimoni gently, “you would never need defenses, ever. Just a robot to close the windows against megaton bombs.”
“You’re good architects, gentlemen,” said the Governor of Night, smacking his lips over the model city they had shown him, “but I’ll stick with the defenses I know. So I just want your front. Like that picture. Furthermore, I want it invisible.”
The Daimoni lapsed back into their language, which sounded as though it were of Earth origin, but which has never been deciphered from the few recordings of their visits which have survived.
“All right,” said one of them, “invisible it is. You still want the great temple of Diana at Ephesus on Old Earth?”
“Yes,” said the Governor of Night.
“Why — if you can’t see it?” said the Daimoni.
“That’s the third specification, gentlemen. I want it so that I can see it, and my heirs, but nobody else.”
“If it’s solid but invisible, everybody is going to see it when your fine snow hits it.”
“I’ll take care of that,” said the Governor of Night. “I’ll pay what we were talking about — forty thousand select pieces of Furry Mountain Fur. But you make that palace invisible to everybody except me, and my heirs.”
“We’re architects, not magicians!” said the Daimoni with the longest cloak, who might have been the leader…
“That’s what I want.”
The Daimoni gabbled among themselves, discussing some technical problems. Finally one of them came over to the Governor of Night and said,
“I’m the ship’s surgeon. May I examine you?”
“Why?” said the Governor of Night.
“To see if we can possibly fit the building to you. Otherwise we can’t even guess at the specifications we need.”
“Go ahead,” said the Governor. “Examine me.”
“Here? Now?” said the Daimoni doctor. “Wouldn’t you prefer a quiet place or a private room? Or you can come aboard our ship. That would be very convenient.”
“For you,” said the Governor of Night. “Not for me. Here my men have guns trained on you. You would never get back to your ship alive if you tried to rob me of my Furry Mountain Furs or kidnap me so that you could trade me back for my treasures. You examine me here and now or not at all.”
“You are a rough, tough man, Governor,” said another one of the elegant Daimoni. “Perhaps you had better tell your guards that you are asking us to examine you. Otherwise they might get excited with us and persons might become damaged,” said the Daimoni with a faint condescending smile.
“Go ahead, foreigners,” said the Governor of Night. “My men have been listening to everything through the microphone in my top button.”
He regretted his words two seconds later, but it was already too late. Four Daimoni had picked him up and spun him so deftly that the guards never understood how their Governor lost all his clothes in a trice. One of the Daimoni must have stunned him or hypnotized him; he could not cry out. Indeed, afterwards, he could not even remember much of what they did.