Chapter 4
Jim went to the girl. She was not aware of his presence until he had reached down and put his arms around her. She looked up, startled and suddenly stiff; but then, when she saw who it was, she clung to him.
“You’re all right. At least, you’re all right…” she managed to get out.
“Where did this come from?” asked Jim, pointing down at the dead feline.
The question triggered off a new burst of emotion. But gradually the story began to come out. She had raised this feline, as she had raised the other one that was one of the pets. This feline had been given to Mekon by Afuan some time back, and Mekon had taught it to attack on command.
“But it was all right when I saw it last,” said Jim. “How did this happen to it?”
She drew back a little from him and stared at him, shakily and with surprise.
“Didn’t you hear?” she asked. “Afuan left it up to Galyan to fine Mekon for what he’d done. And Galyan decided that the fine would be…” She choked and could not go on, pointing at the animal.
“It’s a strange sort of fine,” he said slowly.
“Strange?” She looked up at him puzzledly. “But it’s just the sort of fine that Galyan would exact. He’s a demon, Jim. Where somebody else, operating on the Princess’ orders, might have fined Mekon one of his favorite servants, or something else he valued, Galyan chose this poor animal instead—because along with losing it, of course, Mekon’s going to lose a point. Oh, not a Lifetime Point. Galyan’s too clever to be that hard on someone like Mekon. But it’ll be at least a One-Year Point. And Mekon has enough points against him already, Lifetime and otherwise, so that he can seriously worry from time to time about some kind of an accident that might bring him up to the level of banishment.”
“Banishment?” asked Jim.
“Why, of course. Banishment from the Throne World—” Ro caught herself suddenly, and wiped her eyes. She stood up straight and looked down at the body of the dead animal at her feet. Immediately it vanished.
“I keep forgetting you don’t understand things,” she said, turning to Jim. “There’s so much I’m going to have to teach you. All the High-born play points. It’s one game that even the Emperor can’t overrule; and too many points means you have to leave the Throne World forever. But I’ll explain it all to you a little later. Right now I’d better begin teaching you how to move from room to room—”
But Ro’s words had woken a new train of thought in Jim’s mind.
“Just a second,” he said. “Tell me something, Ro. If I wanted to step back into the city right now on an errand before the ship leaves, could I do it?”
“Oh!” she shook her head sadly at him. “I thought you at least knew that. The ship left that outworld world we were on some time ago. We’ll be at the Throne World in three ship’s-days.”
“I see,” said Jim grimly.
Her face paled abruptly, and she caught his arms with her hands, as if to keep him from stepping backward from her.
“Don’t look like that!” she said. “Whatever it is, you shouldn’t look like that!”
Jim forced his face to smooth out. He put away the sudden fury that had exploded inside him. He forced himself to smile down at Ro.
“All right,” he said. “I promise you I won’t look like that.”
Ro still held him by the arms.
“You’re so strange,” she said, looking up at him. “So strange, in every way. What made you look like that?”
“Something Galyan said to me,” he answered. “Something to the effect that I could never go back home again.”
“But—you aren’t going to want to go back home!” said Ro, a little wonderingly. “You’ve never seen the Throne World, so of course you don’t know. But no one ever wants to leave it. And the only ones who can stay are the High-born who can keep their point levels down in the Game, and their servants and their possessions. Not even the Governors of the Colony Worlds can do more than visit the Throne World for short periods of time. When their time is up, they have to leave. But the High-born and people like you and me—we can stay.”
“I see,” he said.
She frowned down at his arms, which she still held. Her fingers were feeling them through the sleeves of his jacket.
“You’re as hard-muscled as a Starkien,” she said puzzledly. “And you’re so tall for someone who’s not High-born. Was it natural for you to be this tall back on that wild world you came from?”
Jim laughed a little shortly.
“I was this tall when I was ten years old,” he said. The look of slight incomprehension on her face made him add, “That’s halfway through my normal growing period.”
“And you stopped growing then?” Ro asked.
“I was stopped,” he said a little grimly. “Some of our medical practitioners ran a lot of tests on me because I was so big for my age. They couldn’t find anything wrong, but they put me on an extract of the pituitary gland to curb my growing. And it worked. I stopped growing—physically. But I went on growing otherwise.”
Jim interrupted himself abruptly. “Never mind that,” he said. “You were going to show me how to move around the ship, from room to room.”
“That—and other things!” Suddenly she seemed to grow several inches in front of him, and something came into her that was like the cold imperiousness of Princess Afuan. “They can take my animals and give them away or kill them. But they’re not going to hurt you. When I get through with you, you’ll know more than enough to survive. I may be a throwback, but I’m as High-born as any of them. The Emperor himself can’t dismiss me, without cause, from the Throne World; and everything that is High-born’s, by right is mine! Come along, and I’ll begin to show you what it’s like to live among the High-born and be a citizen of the society of the Throne World!”
She took him first to a section of the ship he had not yet visited. It consisted of a large, high-ceilinged, metal-walled room, with one wall covered with the rays of blinking lights of various colors. Tending this wall was one of the short brown men with long hair down his back. He was, Jim discovered, all that the ship possessed in the way of a crew—in fact, he was not even that. In actuality, he was nothing more than a standby engineer, on hand in case of the unlikely chance that some small repair or adjustment needed to be made to the ship’s mechanism.
The ship, in fact, ran itself. It not only ran itself, it supplied the motive power for all the transfers of people between rooms, and everything else in the way of visible and invisible equipment aboard. Like some huge robot dog, it responded immediately to the mental whims of the Princess Afuan; and, to a lesser extent, it stood ready to accommodate the whims of everyone else aboard.
“Now,” Ro instructed Jim, “simply stand here and relax. Let it make contact with you.”
“Make contact with me?” Jim echoed. He assumed that she was talking about something like telepathy, and tried to say so—but found he had no word for it in the Empire language. Ro, however, understood him, and to his considerable surprise, launched into a complete and highly technical explanation of how the ship worked. In brief, it was simply that the ship studied the electrical activity of an individual brain and from this drew up what amounted to an individual electrical code for whatever the person was thinking or doing. Thoughts which were visualized clearly enough, Ro explained, triggered off motor subactivity in the body—in short, the body physically responded at a very low level to the scene it was imagining, as if that scene were real. The ship then matched these responses with the proper scene, and shifted the person to the scene by literally disassembling him at his present position and reassembling him at the location of the imagined scene.