Here it was, and Jon-Joras could think of nothing safe to put forward. So he decided to leave this to the other, and so he said, “To discuss and discover what it is that the Kar-chee most want, with a view to adjusting matters.”
Silence fell. After a moment the Kar-chee clicked, then stopped, then rustled, and stopped. The interpreter coughed a bit and cleared his throat. Then the Kar-chee “spoke” rapidly and abruptly turned and made off in its eerie, stalking, waddling gait. The interpreter spat on the ground and rubbed his spittle into it with his foot. He glanced up, grimaced, shrugged, seemed to hang and dangle on invisible wires which, if cut, would let him collapse into a huddle of puppet-cloth.
“What did he — What did it — What did the Kar-chee say?”
“Mmm? Say? Said to give you food, take care of what you, mmm, will want… What will you want?” the old man asked, almost querulously. And added, “Come, then. Come. Come on.”
The rank odor of the Kar-chee was thicker down below, but it was largely replaced in the old man’s quarters, away off in a distant chamber down long and dusty echoing empty corridors, by the at least equally rank odor of the old man himself and his quite indifferent housekeeping. New clothes were piled in a niche in the wall and old clothes mouldered on a heap in the corner and one nasty garment hung over the sill of the high slit-window as though the effort of tossing it there precluded any attempt to correct the poor aim and shove it on through. The old man sat down on his frowsty bed and coughed and rumbled and spat. Then he stared blankly at his sudden guest, a long while. From time to time a flicker of something passed over his dehumanized face and it twitched and made movements as though it were about to express interest or another emotion. But before ever this was done, the face sagged into the same blankness as before. Was he drugged, perhaps, Jon-Joras wondered.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
This did produce reaction; after all, the old man’s function was to serve as a channel for questions and answers to pass through and to repass through; he had to employ his own mouth and tongue and vocal cords for one of these passages, and his mind, no matter how mechanically, for both. “What’s…” the question seemed to sink into the sands of stupor and there be lost, but after a moment it welled up again, a bit diminished: “… name?” Blear eyes looked up, slack mouth pursed and twisted, lips blubbered in a short, abrupt sound which might have retained the ghost of scorn or pain or laughter: the scornful, painful laughter which ends in a little bubble of blood, seen or unseen: the hands fluttered in the briefest, slightest gesture of pushing things away; then fell back and down.
There was a not-quite-mutter, a more-than-whisper, which might have been, “Never mind…”
“Well, but… Where do you come from?”
No. Not drugs. The old man’s mind had simply rusted away. Who could say how long he had been here, a prisoner? A prisoner-at-large, but still a prisoner. He licked his thin lips with a bluish tongue, stirred on his dusty couch and looked about him. “Food,” he said. Sighed. Pointed. There was a small pile of camp-rations, and empty and part-empty containers lay where they had fallen or had been dropped, adding the rotten-sweet tainted smell of garbage to the other ill smells of the room. “Food,” he said again.
Jon-Joras got up and helped himself, paused with a bit of something almost at his mouth. “They bring it here for you?” he asked. And, answering his own question, said, “Yes. They bring you the food and the clothes, too. The other men who come here — the ones who approach in a proper order. Who are they? Who are they? And what is this all ab—”
Now the old man leaped up and scuttled across the dirty floor and sort of crouched before him, looking up and breathing into his face a fetid breath and now his face was distorted with feeling and he grasped Jon-Joras’s arms and he said to him in a whisper like a scream, “Oluc? Oluc? You know Dondon-oluc?”
Remembrance sprang into the young man’s mind and must have instantly been reflected on his face, for the old one tightened his timid grip and made anguished little noises.
“Dondon-oluc and Tiran-lou,” said Jon-Joras. “And the huge old trees—”
“And Lou! And Lou!” the old man cried, in a jerky voice. “Oluc and Lou, ah! And the trees, the trees! The trees…”
He fell into a heap of smeared and smattered clothes that cried and twitched and made dreadful, sobbing noises. Jon-Joras was torn between pity and dismay and hope, and then the old man scuttled backwards away from him and rose to a slouch and stared at him with his awful crumpled face askew and then turned and ran, tottering, out of his nasty room and down the dim, black corridors and whimpered and flapped his wrinkled, dirty hands.
Jon-Joras stared after him. Run after him? No, no, he might get lost, and he had no desire to get lost here in this place where the Kar-chee scent was forever strong, forever fresh. Was the old interpreter off to reveal something to his alien masters? It seemed not likely. Likelier only that he had been all unsettled by having some of the rust and dust of decades fall in scales and flakes from his poor withered mind and memory. The young man put the bit of food into his mouth and looked out the tall slit-window. Outside, downside, between the castle and the woods, the dragon patrolled. Alert, watchful, and with deliberate leisure.
“I’m afraid, I’m afraid,” the old man said. “I’m so afraid.” He spoke in halting, stifled tones, again his face so close to Jon-Joras’s.
“Of what, Old Man?”
“I could be punished. Back there. Ah, back home. Why I came away. Ran. Left me here. Didn’t dare, don’t dare. Afraid,” he wept.
“Confederation has a twenty-five year statute of limitations,” Jon-Joras reminded him. “And Dondon-oluc and Tiran-lou, both, are confederate-worlds. Surely it must be longer than that, you’ve been here?”
Bit by bit and scale by scale by flake, he was trying to do a work of repair. Vast holes had been hopelessly eaten away. The Old Man was either determined to have no name or had simply lost that intensely important part of his persona. Nor would he, or, perhaps, nor could he, describe how or when he had come here or who had taken him here — the who being certainly those still supplying, the those in contact with the Kar-chee. It seemed obvious, though, that whoever they were they had taken advantage of his fugitive status. An interpreter was certainly always needed here, the Kar-chee being incapable of articulate human speech. There had been an interpreter here, of course, when the Old Man had first arrived. “The Poor Woman,” he called her. However awful this life-in-death must be to a man, how much more so must it have been to her! — whoever she was or had been. Poor woman, indeed. For some while at any rate they had been some company for each other, she teaching him to understand the Kar-chee “speech” and to reproduce it; and then she had died.
Longer than twenty-five years that he’d been here? Closer, probably, to fifty!
“Afraid all changed, on Oluc. Oh, terrible—!”
“I was there just two years ago. It didn’t seem to be a place of the sort which changes fast. And the soil was still as thick and rich and the trees were still gigantic.” He reached into his memory for such names as he could recall, trees, rivers, towns… the Old Man made dreadful attempts to smile.
“Afraid of them, still, always. Here.”
“The Kar-chee?”
“Of them, too. But most afraid of this?” And again the dreadful terror-whisper. “Suppose they go? The Kar-chee. And take me with them!”
Enough, indeed, to make the mind of any man, even if young and even if strong and sound, freeze with fear: the Kar-chee departing at long and ancient last for their lairs around the Ring Stars, black and cold and devoid of man and the things which stood between man and madness: this was indeed just cause for fear, to be taken along and to tarry there forever.