“I’m a Wolfling,” he said. “I don’t know any better.”
“Right,” said Slothiel, ignoring Ro’s frantic attempts to silence him by her voice and her hand over his mouth. “Hang on. I’ll send you there. For all the Emperor and Vhotan will know, you found the way yourself.”
Immediately, Jim was in a different room. It was a very large circular room with some sort of transparent ceiling showing a cloud-flecked sky above—or was the sky with its clouds merely an illusion overhead? Jim had no time to decide which, because his attention was all taken up by the reaction of the half-dozen people already in the room, who had just caught sight of him.
Of the half-dozen men in the room, one was the Emperor. He had checked himself in mid-sentence on seeing Jim appear; and he stood half-turned from the older, powerfully bodied High-born who had sat at his right during the bullfight. Standing back a little way from these two, with his back to Jim, and just now turning to see what had interrupted the Emperor, was a male Highborn whom Jim did not recognize. The other three men in the room were heavily muscled, gray-skinned, bald-headed individuals like the one Galyan had referred to as his bodyguard. These wore leather loin straps, with a black rod thrust through loops in the belt around their waist, and about the rest of their body and limbs were metallic-looking bands, which, however, seemed to fit and cling to position on them more like bands of thick elastic cloth than metal. At the sight of Jim, they had immediately drawn their rods and were aiming them at him when a sharp, single word from the Emperor stopped them.
“No!” said the Emperor. “It’s—” He seemed to peer at Jim without recognition for a second; then a broad smile spread across his face. “Why, it’s the Wolfling!”
“Exactly!” snapped the older High-born. “And what’s he doing here? Nephew, you’d better—”
“Why,” interrupted the Emperor, striding toward Jim, still smiling broadly at him, “I invited him here. Don’t you remember, Vhotan? I issued the invitation after the bullfight.”
Already the Emperor’s tall body was between Jim and the three thick-bodied, armed bodyguards. He stopped one of his own long paces away from Jim and stood smiling down at him.
“Naturally,” the Emperor said, “you came as soon as you could, didn’t you, Wolfling? So as not to offend us by keeping us waiting?”
“Yes, Oran,” answered Jim.
But now the older man, called Vhotan, who was apparently the Emperor’s uncle, had come up to stand beside his nephew. His lemon-yellow eyes under their yellowish tufts of eyebrows glared down at Jim.
“Nephew,” he said, “you can’t possibly let this wild man get away with something like this. Break protocol once, and you set a precedent for a thousand repetitions of the same thing!”
“Now, now, Vhotan,” said the Emperor, turning his smile appeasingly on the older High-born. “How many Wolflings have we on our Throne World who don’t yet know the palace rules? No, I invited him here. If I remember, I even said I might find him interesting to talk to; and now, I believe I might.”
He stepped aside, and folded himself up, sitting down on one of the large hassocklike pillows that played the role of furniture for the High-born.
“Sit down, Wolfling,” he said. “You too, Uncle—and you, Lorava—” He glanced aside at the third High-born, a slim, younger male who had just come up. “Let’s all sit down here together and have a chat with the Wolfling. Where do you come from, Wolfling? Out toward galaxy’s-edge of our Empire, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Oran,” Jim answered. He had already seated himself; and reluctantly Vhotan was lowering himself to a hassock beside the Emperor. The young High-born called Lorava took two hasty strides up to them and also sat down on a nearby pillow.
“A lost colony. A lost world,” mused the Emperor, almost to himself, “filled with wild men—and no doubt wilder beasts?”
He looked at Jim for an answer.
“Yes,” said Jim, “we still have a good number of wild beasts—although that number’s been reduced, in the last few hundred years particularly. Man has a tendency to crowd out the wild animals.”
“Man has a tendency to crowd out even man, sometimes,” said the Emperor. For a moment a little shadow seemed to pass behind his eyes, as if he remembered some private sadness of his own. Jim watched him with careful interest. It was hard to believe that this man before him was the same one he had seen drooling and making incoherent sounds in the arena.
“But the men there—and the women. Are they all like you?” the Emperor said, returning the focus of his eyes to Jim.
“Each one of us is different, Oran,” said Jim.
The Emperor laughed.
“Of course!” he said. “And no doubt, being healthy wild men, you prize the difference, instead of trying to fit yourselves all into one common mold. Like we superior beings, we High-born of the Throne World!” His humor calmed slightly. “How did we happen to find your world, after having lost it so many centuries—or thousands of years—ago?”
“The Empire didn’t find us,” said Jim. “We found an outlying world of the Empire.”
There was a second’s silence in the room, broken by a sudden half-snort, half-bray of laughter from the youngster Lorava.
“He’s lying!” Lorava sputtered. “They found us? If they could find us, how did they ever get lost in the first place?”
“Quiet!” snapped Vhotan at Lorava. He turned back to Jim. His face and the face of the Emperor were serious. “Are you telling us that your people, after forgetting about the Empire, and the falling back into complete savagery, turned around and developed civilization all over again—including a means of space travel?”
“Yes,” said Jim economically.
Vhotan stared hard into Jim’s eyes for a long second, and then turned to the Emperor.
“It might be worth checking, Nephew,” he said.
“Worth checking. Yes…” murmured the Emperor. But his thoughts seemed to have wandered. He was no longer gazing at Jim, but off across the room at nothing in particular; and a look of gentle melancholy had taken possession of his face. Vhotan glanced at him and then got to his feet. The older High-born stepped over to Jim, tapped him on the shoulder with a long forefinger, and beckoned for him to rise.
Jim got to his feet. Behind the still-seated, still abstractedly gazing Emperor, Lorava also rose to his feet. Vhotan led them both quietly to a far end of the room, then turned to Lorava.
“I’ll call you back later, Lorava,” he said brusquely.
Lorava nodded and disappeared. Vhotan turned back to Jim.
“We’ve had an application from Slothiel to sponsor you for adoption,” Vhotan said quickly. “Also, you were brought here by the Princess Afuan; and I understand you had some contact with Galyan. Are all of those things correct?”
“They are,” said Jim.
“I see…” Vhotan stood for a second, his eyes hooded thoughtfully. Then his gaze sharpened once more upon Jim. “Did any of those three suggest that you come here just now?”
“No,” answered Jim. He smiled slightly at the tall, wide-shouldered old man towering massively over him. “Coming here was my own idea—in response to the Emperor’s invitation. I only mentioned it to two other people. Slothiel and Ro.”
“Ro?” Vhotan frowned. “Oh, that little girl, the throw-back in Afuan’s household. You’re sure she didn’t suggest your coming here?”
“Perfectly sure. She tried to stop me,” said Jim. “And as for Slothiel—when I told him I was coming, he laughed.”
“Laughed?” Vhotan echoed the word, then grunted. “Look at my eyes, Wolfling!”
Jim fastened his own gaze on the two lemon-yellow eyes under the slightly yellowish tufts of eyebrows. As he gazed, the eyes seemed to increase in brilliance and swim before him in the old man’s face, until they threatened to merge.