He raised the cup to his mouth, and took a sip. Then he threw his head back and said something with a ritual ring to it, but in a language so foreign that even Henlo could understand that his tongue and vocal cords had difficulty in forming the sounds properly. Then he drained the cup and shook himself with pleasure. It was the first time Henlo had ever seen him display normal gratification at some appealing vice.
He set the cup down and grinned at Henlo. “That’s my genuine trademark, Admiral-in-Chief D’ Henlo. One toast in skaatch to the Agency when I finish a job. But you wouldn’t know.”
Henlo looked at him with complete mystification, and Miranid widened his grin. “You were going to suggest your announcing to Farla that I had died in battle, weren’t you. In accordance with the orders handed you by the Minister for Preparedness. A most engaging rascal. But he should have done something about his inability to recognize superior talent—meaning yours, not mine.”
“Substantially, that was my plan, yes,” Henlo said, still trying to glean all of Miranid’s implications from his almost incomprehensible remarks. “The next step, of course, would have been to play on your remarkable popularity with the fleet. We would have jointly revealed the entire plot to them, declared that no such government was fit to rule, and staged a coup.”
“Thereafter ruling together in prosperous harmony, eh, my Machiavellian comrade?”
Henlo tried to find some meaning for the exotic word, as he had tried for skaatch, and similarly failed.
“Well, that’s precisely what we shall do, up to a point,” Miranid assured him. “But with one modification. Just before we reach Farla, I shall die most convincingly—and most, to remove all doubts from the minds of the fleet, naturally. My dying wish shall be to be buried in space, in a lifeboat. That lifeboat, conveniently enough for me, shall be pointed toward Earth.
“I might hastily add, at this point, Henlo, that my fur may be grafted and my tail false, but the weapons built into me are far from imitations. I should not advise your indulging your natural instincts when I tell you, as I tell you now, that I am an Earthman.”
Henlo’s tail lashed violently, and his eyes dilated. He had not lost control of himself so thoroughly since his youth. He stared at Miranid for several silent moments, then moved his hand slowly toward his sidearm.
Miranid chuckled. “I didn’t think you’d bluff.” He flexed his shoulders and something small and glittering pushed its nose out of the thick, dead fur at the base of his heavy pectorals. “That’s one of them, Henlo. Just one, and don’t make me stretch any farther, or it will go off.” The glittering thing was pointed directly at Henlo’s skull. “Besides, you need me. You need me right up to the last, when I chug off valiantly in my steel mausoleum. You’ll never get the fleet to accept your succession to leadership unless I pass it to you.”
Henlo stared malevolently at the Earthman, and his lipless mouth compressed until it almost disappeared. But he took his hand away from the sidearm.
“I am, as I’ve said, an Earthman—a hired soldier, if you’ll believe there are such people. And believe me, the Minister for Preparedness was only too glad to get me— neglecting to realize that I had his little schemes figured out before he even conceived them.
“After all,” he said depreciatingly, “We’ve got paranoids on Earth, too.”
Henlo failed to understand the reference.
“And, for what it’s worth as a compliment—a genuine, sincere, altruistic compliment, Henlo—even if I could, I wouldn’t take my chances with you, on Farla. After all, I’m getting old, and you’re bound to improve over even the remarkable standard you now maintain.”
Miranid really smiled then, with the mellow warmth of an undefeated soldier-philosopher cheered by wine.
“Can an entire society be psychotic and not realize it? Apparently it can. All of you Farlans have passed over the borderline. You are all paranoids. You are all twice as mad as March hares. But you have a beautiful way of rationalizing it—exemplified in the Farlan definition of paranoia. So long as you hold fast to that definition, which is the exact opposite of the truth in all respects, you will continue to believe that black is white, and white black!”
X
Henlo walked slowly away from the window.
The years he had bought so painfully were gone, dribbled away in hours here and half-hours there, and now suddenly it was as though that half-century had never been, except in the memory of a senile old man.
Slowly, through the spinning of the years, he had put the structure together, guessing what he must and confirming when he could, until he could see it, looming over Farla, casting shadows deeper than the night.
For one man—even the Laughing Genius the fleet still remembered so fondly and so erroneously—could never have arranged so complicated a negotiation, or had himself so well disguised and indoctrinated. And Miranid—the Earthman, rather, an Earthman named Smith—had just once, in one cryptic phrase, mentioned an agency. The Agency.
There were agencies of various kinds on Farla, dealing in services and commodities, and collecting their percentages. A pity, he thought, that none of them dealt in years. But it was The Agency which would have the necessary facilities for locating, offering, and indoctrinating the required talent.
Smith. Smith, and how many more like him? The leaders of the Vilk tribes that had allied themselves with the fleet? Yes… and the others. The others he knew were agents. The great leaders of the hundred empires that had sprung remarkably to life from the blasted ashes of the Vilk’s captive nations, all squabbling among themselves, all fighting stalemate wars—and all hating Farla, for it had been Farlan ships and Farlan guns that had systematically scoured their planets.
The barbarian empire was gone, collapsed in its own blood, as Smith had predicted. In its place were a hundred civilizations, pressing close to Farla’s borders.
Bit by bit, he had given his frontiers away to them, rather than fight. Piece by piece, they had tattered Farla’s hide. For he did not dare leave Farla to lead the fleet—he had too many heirs at home. And the fleet, in any case, was weaker than ever. He had not dared leave it intact, or permit it to have able officers.
Governments were covetous of governing, he had once told himself.
He laughed bitterly. Here, in this impregnable fortress-dungeon that was his capitol, he was the government. And his heirs had waited patiently, once he’d taught them its impregnability. But now it was over. They’d waited patiently, as the Earthmen were waiting.
Wars in space were impossible. But the strength of Farla’s fleet had not been in her guns, but in Smith’s mind. An Earthman’s mind.
And he wondered now, as the darkest shadows fell, how much was in the minds of the Earthmen. Had they, as he himself once had, chosen the definite situation in preference to the equivocal? Had they deliberately given him all these hints, knowing that he must act as he had, stripping Farla’s strength in exchange for her life, rather than ever hire an Agency hero to give Farla another poison dose of treacherous strength?
Certainly, they had never even attempted to contact him. But were they waiting now, only until his successor took his place, to offer pat salvation to the bleeding Farlan Empire? Waiting for this new opportunity?