Her smile vanished and her face darkened suddenly with an abrupt flood of blood below the skin. It was a literal flush—the last thing Jim had expected to discover upon the face of one of the High-born.
“That’s right, stare at me!” she said spiritedly. “I’m not ashamed of it!”
“Ashamed of what?” asked Jim.
“Why—” She broke off suddenly. Her blush fled, and she looked at him contritely. “I’m sorry. Of course—you’re a Wolfling. You wouldn’t even know the difference, would you?”
“Evidently not,” said Jim. “Because I don’t seem to understand what you’re talking about.”
She laughed—but a little sadly, it seemed to him; and patted his arm unexpectedly, with a light, consoling touch.
“You’ll learn soon enough,” she said, “even if you are a Wolfling. I’m a throwback, you see. Something in my gene pattern was atavistic. Oh, my father and mother were as High-born as anyone outside the Main Royal Line; and Afuan will never dismiss me from her household. But, on the other hand, she can hardly show me off. So I’m left with doing things like taking care of the pets for her. That was why I was the one who brought you on board just now.”
She glanced down at his two cases.
“Is that your equipment there?” she asked. “I’ll put it away for you.”
Instantly the two pieces of luggage vanished.
“Just a minute,” said Jim.
She looked up at him, a little puzzled.
“Didn’t you want them put away just yet?” she asked. Instantly the bags were back at their feet.
“No,” answered Jim. “It’s just that there are other things to bring aboard. I told your Princess Afuan that I’d need the bulls—the creatures I work with when I put on my show. I’ve got six more of them in cryogenic storage back in the city. She said I could bring them along, and to tell whoever brought me aboard the ship that she said it was all right.”
“Oh!” said the girl thoughtfully. “No—don’t try to tell me. Just think about where they are in the city.”
Jim obliged by summoning up a mental picture of the refrigerated warehouse behind the compound housing the Earth Trade Delegation, where his bulls were stored. He felt a curious light touch in his mind—a sort of passing sensation, as if his naked brain had been lightly brushed by a feather. Abruptly he and the girl were standing in the refrigerated warehouse, before the stack of six huge cases, each with the frozen body of a fighting bull in suspended animation within it.
“Yes,” said the girl thoughtfully. Abruptly they were someplace else.
This new place was a large, metal-walled chamber with a small assortment of cases and other objects arranged in neat piles at intervals about its floor. The stack of cases containing the frozen bulls was now here also. Jim frowned. The temperature of the room was clearly in the comfortable seventy-degree range.
“These animals are frozen,” he told the girl. “And they have to stay frozen—”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” she interrupted; and then smiled at him, half in cheerfulness, half, it seemed, in apology for interrupting him. “Nothing about their condition will change. I’ve left orders with the ship’s controls to see to that.”
Her smile widened.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Put your hand out and feel for yourself.”
Jim reached out his hand toward the side of the nearest case. There was no change in temperature until his fingertips came within an inch or two of the surface of the case—then they suddenly encountered bone-chilling atmosphere. The cold, he knew, could not come from the cases, since these were superbly insulated. He withdrew his hand.
“I see,” he said. “All right. I won’t worry about my bulls.”
“Good,” she answered.
Instantly they were elsewhere. Not back in the egg-shaped room but in another, a long room, one side of which appeared to be glass looking out on a strip of beach and the surf of an ocean shore—the shore of an ocean aboard a spaceship was no less startling than the other things to be seen within the rectangular, glass-walled room itself.
These were a variety of creatures, running from something like a small, purple-furred squirrel to a creature farther down the room who was tall and covered with black fur—more than apelike, but still less than human.
“These are my other pets,” he heard the girl saying at his elbow, and looked down into her smiling face. “I mean—they’re really Afuan’s pets. The ones I take care of for her. This one—”
She stopped to pet the small, purple-furred squirrel, which arched itself like a satisfied cat under her hand. Neither it nor any of the others seemed to be chained or restrained in any way. Yet they all stayed some little distance from one another.
“This one,” the girl repeated, “is Ifny—”
She stopped suddenly, jumping to her feet.
“I’m sorry, Wolfling,” she said. “You must have a name too. What is it?”
“James Keil,” he answered her. “Call me Jim.”
“Jim,” she echoed, trying it out, with her head cocked on one side. In her Empire accent, the ‘m’ sound was prolonged, so that the short, familiar form of James came out sounding more musical than it might have in English.
“And your name?” Jim asked her.
She started, and looked at him almost in shock.
“But you should call me High-born!” she said a little stiffly. But the next moment the stiffness had melted, as if her interior warmth of character would not endure it. “But I do have a name, of course. I have several dozens of them, in fact. But you know we all go by one name familiarly. My normally used name is Ro.”
Jim inclined his head.
“Thank you, High-born,” he said.
“Oh, call me Ro—” she broke off, as if a little frightened at what she was saying. “When we’re alone, anyway. After all, you are human, even if you are a Wolfling, Jim.”
“That’s something else you can tell me, then, Ro,” said Jim. “What is this ‘Wolfling’ that everyone calls me?”
She stared at him for a moment, almost blankly.
“But you—no, of course, you’d be the very one who wouldn’t know!” she said. Once more she blushed in that remarkable fashion he had noticed earlier. Plainly it was the lightness of her skin, for all its brown tint, that caused the sudden rush of blood to her features to be seen. But it was unusual to Jim to see such a marked reaction in any adult woman. “It’s… not a very nice name for you, I’m afraid. It means—it means something like… you’re a human being, all right, but one who’s been lost in the woods and brought up by animals, so that you don’t have any idea of what it’s really like to be a human.”
Her blush flared again.
“I’m sorry…” she said, looking down. “I shouldn’t have called you that myself. But I didn’t think. I’ll always call you Jim, from now on.”
Jim smiled. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“Yes, it does!” she said fiercely, looking up at him abruptly. “I know what it’s like to be called names. I never let anybody call any of my—Afuan’s—pets names. And I’m not going to let anybody call you names if I can help it.”
“Well, thank you, then,” said Jim gently. She patted his arm again soothingly.
“Come meet my other pets,” she said, moving down the line.
He went with her. The creatures in the room seemed free to wander about the room, but at the same time enclosed and protected by an invisible barrier that kept them from coming any closer than four or five feet to one of the other creatures. They were plainly all animals. Curiously, also, they all appeared to resemble, at least to some extent, an animal type that either was on Earth or had been at some period in its geologic history. This, in itself, was interesting. It seemed to substantiate the Empire’s assumption that the people of Earth were part of its own basic stock—lost, only to be found again when they ventured by their own scientific powers back in as far as Alpha Centauri. The alternative was to assume that human-habitable planets had evolutionary parallels to an extremely remarkable degree.