Katana fumed in a different way. She muttered under her breath about cheating Rithian scum. Aloud she promised to pay the additional fee—and indeed it arrived within a decawatch—in the form of a naval boarding party. The carrier’s skipper, an upper-caste Rithian of galactic stock mongrelized by sapiens lineage, was indicted by the commander of the boarding party under an obscurely ancient Imperial law which had never been rescinded by the Pschol-ars. His trial lasted a mere thirty-two inamins, whereupon he was summarily executed in front of his dimwit sapiens crew, all rigidly at attention.
Katana cheered as the execution proceeded and afterward sliced off the dead skipper’s ears as a souvenir. Teach the Rithians a lesson. It was an old Stars&Ship custom from the harsh campaigns of the First Empire, probably originating in the customs of the Frightfulpeople. Jama made a rapid reevaluation of his companion’s character.
She wasn't joking!
How could such bloodlust have survived into modem enlightened times? No longer playing the victimized jackleg, he was appalled in his inner soul at this wholly unexpected display of violence even though he was an admirer—an advocate—of the stimulating violence engendered by the Interregnum. How could such ferocious genes have been passed on through her family for ten millennia, undiluted? What kind of people was he now attracting to his revolution? How could this woman have such an angelic daughter who sat in his lap and teased his nose? Did Katana have an ear of her husband mounted somewhere as a souvenir of recompense for his insults? Jama was going to ask her the next time they made love. And how did one get ears past the eyes of the customs bureaucrats?
The Frightfulperson proceeded to review the chastised crew, souvenir ears between forefinger and thumb, while with the fingers of the other hand she playfully tweaked their ears, chiding them for malicious stupidity with a politeness that mocked their previously hypocritical politeness. When she saw Jama’s pale face, she grinned. “I don’t like the Rithian sense of humor,” she said of her kidnappers. “Let them sweat!”
“Now, is it fair to judge all Rithians by the standards of this miscreant crew?”
Gallantly, three members of the boarding party agreed to pilot the ship to its original destination as a free naval service granted to law-abiding citizens of the Second Empire. There the jackleg and his hussy vanished. Whereupon an itinerant spaceman and meek wife appeared to take steerage passage in a transport bound for the inner planets of a dim red star, Rhani, which was a minor dependent system of the Sewinnese Archipelago.
Finally a chartered yacht, registered at Rhani, brought businessman and secretary into Faraway orbit. The yacht, not planetworthy, docked at a space station where they transferred to a ferry. The ferry aerobraked in a graceful glide over a river’s meanderings across thousands of kilometers of reddish desert, the whole countryside devoid of bureaucratic warrens! How had Faraway ever ruled? The scenery lacked even the ruins of a bureaucracy! Then came megahectares of forest with scant signs of habitation! Only at the last mo-ment did they collide with civilization as the ferry descended in a sickening drop down to the outskirts of Faraway’s Telomere City.
From there the mad scramble into the City through underground tunnels was a more homey adventure. It almost reminded Kikaju of the comforts of Splendid Wisdom. But that wasn’t to last. They had rented a room in the imposing Hober Hostel. For a Hyperlord used to ever-present ceilings, the nearby buildings were very tall and the drop from the hostel window sickening—and distances! From the luxury of their fortieth-floor aerie, they overlooked the Mall of Knowledge, which had been laid out by the original colonists after a sketch by the Founder himself. Kikaju hung on to the curtains for safety while he let his eyes stray down the Mall. Open-air skyscrapers offended his sense of balanced architecture.
To the left end of that extended plaza was the Palace of the Chancellor. It was hard to believe that the Chancellor of this unimpressive university town of only twenty million had once held sway over the Galaxy. The signs of boon-docks were everywhere. Trees along the great Mall open to the air!
To the right, far across the haze at the other end of the Mall, the fading light of Faraway’s reddish sun cast shadows on the columns of the Mausoleum of the Founder, seeming to radiate the power of that mythical figure who had continued to make pronouncements from there long after his death. Jama was startled to find that the vast scene inspired reverence in his cynical soul. The Founder’s dead hand still wound up the clockwork of the Galaxy. There was an exclamatory expression they all used when overwhelmed by sudden insight. By the eyes of the Founder! Yes, the sight impacted one’s emotions—and if indeed there were a second focal point to the Galaxy outside of Splendid Wisdom, it was here in that magnificent Mausoleum.
While Kikaju held onto the curtains for dear life and paid his silent respects to the majesty of an ancient man, Katana had been working the room’s console to contact their guarantor. But the agreed-upon coded message was evoking no response. “Nothing,” she said.
Jama’s heart dropped a full forty floors. Had they come all this way for nothing? Ah, but he had already made allowance for that. He was impressed by his perspicacity at having included a clause in their contract which forced a default payment in case of nonappearance. “I suppose that means they wish us to show respect by cooling our heels for a few revolutions of Faraway.” To relieve his anxiety he closed the curtains.
“No.” She smiled. “It means they haven’t arrived yet. They cannot be Faraway citizens. So. We wait. I’ve already set up a watch-screen to catch likely off-planet visitors. We are now spiders. By a jerk in the web we’ll know who they are and when they arrive—before they contact us. An old Naval Intelligence trick. If they turn out to be police, we just vanish. How do you like our room? Two beds! We can have sex twice in one night!”
“I’ve been more taken by the decor. Such taste!” He was admiring the rear of his head inside the gilded frame of a magic mirror. He switched to profile view and tried a cocky rising-of-the-nose. “If I denuded these magnificent walls of their ornamentation and sneaked off into the dark of space with my loot, I’d make a fortune back on Splendid Wisdom.”
“They’re only replicas of beau mondesaid Katana disdainfully, unwilling to admit that any provincial this far out on the Rim could have expensive taste, no matter how adept they might once have been at gauche conquest.
“You don’t have my eyes or my savvy for antiques. Of course such priceless artifacts are replicas, though you can’t have any guarantee of that without a nanometric examination—but I’d wager good betting odds that on all of Splendid Wisdom no dealer has templates for these particular delights. It’s a subtle theme the hostel has running across the walls of our rooms.” His arm swept out to include the whole hallway and adjoinments.
“First,” he continued, “there isn’t a single item enshrined here that isn’t pre-Empire. Pre-Kambal-the-First. These artifacts were old when Splendid Wisdom was just another upstart trading world battling its way out of an agricultural age on the labor of farmers playing at engineer, dwarfed by the resources of the Sotamas and the Machan Confederacy. Why—when glorious aboriginal craftsmen were working the genesis of these astonishments, your sanctimonious Frightfulpeople weren’t even a gleam in your ancestors’ eyes, they being busy scrabbling out a life as raucous comet-belt thieves.” He hooked a thumb in his sash for effect.