When the dinner chimes called the passengers to follow their glowing chits toward the barrel vault leading into Dome Two, Méarana noticed the dusky man still engrossed in his screen; so she went to him and touched him on the shoulder. “Dinner bell sounded,” she said. “They won’t wait.”
The man did not look up. “You are casting a shadow on my screen.”
Surprised to be so admonished, Méarana stepped aside and glanced curiously at the man’s screen—and recognized the gene map he was studying.
“Professor Doctor Doctor Sofwari! I have been wanting to meet you for a very long time.”
At that, he did look up, his eyes showing surprise, puzzle, and pleasure in rapid succession. He rose and took Méarana’s hand in his and kissed the back of it in a greeting gesture that the harper had not encountered before, but found unusually pleasant. “And I have been waiting even longer for a beautiful stranger to say that to me.”
Méarana laughed and offered her arm and they walked together to the dining hall. “You and I,” she said, “have much to discuss.”
Teodorq Nagarajan knew he was destined for greatness. He was not certain what form this greatness would take, only that his village did not contain it. And so, not long after killing his first man, he had taken up the trade of the wandering champion. Partly, this was a necessity. Dead men have kinsmen. But partly, too, it was sheer wanderlust. On some worlds, he would have been called a mercenary though he often worked pro bono.
He followed rumors to the coast, where he found “the Big Encampment” to be wood-and-brick buildings, stacked cheek-by-jowl, some soaring to three storeys, and built by the strange green-faced men from over the Boundless Main. They had come, the coastalmen told him, in large canoes with blankets tied to sticks. But Teodorq set himself the task of “learning the ropes,” in the sailormen’s talk, signing on as a “landsman” and making several voyages with them.
He mastered the new by never allowing his sense of wonder to become a sense of awe. He learned to study a thing with narrow-eyed concentration rather than to stare at it in gape-jawed astonishment. Too many coastal-men had fallen into drunkenness and squalor from awe of the green-faced men.
In the Oversealand he saw wonders beyond wonders and learned that the “Big Encampment” was a poor imitation of the sprawling, brawling cities of Old Cuffy and Yavelprawns and the other Great States. There had been employment there, too, and he had learned the art of the musket and the cannon. Although he regarded the latter as unmanly and the former as too slow to reload, he did not allow his sense of honor to outweigh his sense of practicality. He learned, too, a grave respect for captains who used men well, and contempt for those who used them badly.
Still, it was the “stunt” which lured him, and he sensed that in the massed armies of the Great States there was little scope for a man not “born with a cockade in his cap.” He heard tales that far to the southeast, in the land of the swartsmen, were fabulous cities where men had caged fire in steel. And so he set out to find them.
His journey, had any of the skalds of his homeland known of it, would have earned him immortality seven times seven. He crossed inland seas and deserts, he passed the broken monuments of forgotten empires, he gazed on the ruins of a city that would have put to shame even the grand capital of Yavelprawns had it not been the hovel now of howling savages. He endured a winter beyond imagination in the high ice-mountains of Bellophor, where lived a degraded and cannibalistic folk who dressed in the furs of the White Grizz. And in the end he had come to the finest city on World, where an appalling stench of soot and fire blackened the very air, but in whose stamping mills wondrous weapons and other goods were forged. The smiths of the plains had fashioned swords upon anvils with mighty strokes of thick-hewed arms. Those of Old Cuffy and the other Great States had done so with trip-hammers and water-driven wheels. But in the cities of Varucciyam in the far southeast they had tamed the Fire itself! Ai, Tengri! Awe very nearly overcame wonder in his heart.
But he had schooled himself well, and he saw in the whirling “gears” and “driveshafts” but finer versions of the cams and blocks and tackle of the northwest, and in the power delivered by steam a more refined version of the power delivered by water unboiled. He hired himself out as usual, starting with the most menial deeds; found dishonor and treachery to be fine arts among the Varucciyamen; and taught them a bit of what honor meant on plains so distant that word of them had not yet reached their ears.
And then, one day a ship that sailed no ocean drifted down from the skies. That something so massive could float like a leaf was a wonder in itself, and Teodorq found himself asking, “How do they do that?” It shamed him that the proud men of Varucciyam abased themselves before these overskymen. Had not he, Teodorq sunna Nagarajan the Iron-Arm, stood before the squalid wonders of the “encampment” of New Cuffy, knowing that he stood before that which his own people could not build? And yet he had stood before it. He had not knelt or bowed or banged his forehead on the ground. That a man commands steel or fire made a man more dangerous, but it did not make him more of a man. Greed and pride and, yes, love and honor were to be found among alclass="underline" among the plainsmen and the Varucciyamen, among the Great States and even among the feral tribes of the Ice Mountains.
And so it was with an eye practiced on a score of cultures that he had identified among the strange-garbed men of the sky-ship the “chief of the boat.” This man understood the speech of the Varucciyamen, for this was not the first such visit, and Teodorq approached him and became once again a “landsman” on a new sort of “sailing ship.”
And there he found his understanding blunted at last. The gulf that separated the overskymen from even the Varucciyamen was wider than the gulf of the Grand Crevasse that split the Wondering Mountains of Eastern Bellophor. Yet there were certain tasks that wanted less the How than the simple What. What this button did could be learned. How it did so was better left to the shamans.
Afterward he thought, in a moment of self-awareness, that he had moved so easily with the overskymen because he had not come to them with the same conceit as the Varucciyamen. He had seen, time and again in his wanderings, that none could count themselves the greatest of all. Conceit he had; but it was conceit in himself as a man, and not in his mastery of this tool or that weapon. The proud cities of the southeast, looking far and wide, had found no rival to their greatness. To learn their true place in “the Spiral Arm” had been a crushing blow and made of a once-proud people a race of lackeys.
And so Theodorq listened to the science-wallah aboard the Blankets and Beads with a practiced and a practical ear, if not with an ear tuned to full understanding. He heard the Whats and dismissed the Hows. He suspected there was more of the latter in the explanation than was strictly needed. Sofwari was one of those who enjoyed the mystification of others. It was common among the physically weak to seek their victories on other fields. For any man must feel that he excels at some one thing, and the more he fails in other endeavors, the more he elevates the one in which he does not.
Yet Teodorq detected no malice in the man, and wondered if he chattered on not to show off his kennings but simply because he took such joy in them that he could not conceive that others did not.
Teodorq understood maps, and the holographic projections that Sofwari showed them were only another sort. That the color gradients indicated the spread of certain clans from their points of origin he accepted on faith. In his own land, the migrations of the clans were recorded in the Great Lays and sometimes one came across a mountain or a river or a rock formation remembered from a Lay and would feel one’s heart swell at the thought of ancestors who had once roamed there.