“Two should have been able to handle the bannus,” Five said irritably. “I certainly hung enough equipment on his fat body.”
“Yes, but all the equipment in the Organisation won’t help a person if his willpower isn’t up to it,” Reigner Three objected. “Two’s isn’t. We saw. Bleating at the Servant like that!”
“I always thought he was soft,” said Reigner Four. “Ah well.”
There was a short silence while the three younger Reigners thought about Reigner Two. None of them bothered to look even as woebegone as Giraldus had looked over Controller Borasus. Eventually Five gave a short laugh and removed the cube from its slot in his chair. The glassy table reflected a puzzled frown growing on Reigner Four’s face.
“But couldn’t the Servant have handled the bannus?” he asked. “He never seemed short of willpower. In fact, this particular Servant never struck me as human that way.”
“You’re forgetting,” Reigner Three told him. “His training will have blocked his will in exactly those places where—”
Here Reigner One made a quiet but decided interruption. “No, my dear. Four has put his finger on it. I very much hope he hasn’t, but I fear he has.” They stared at him. He twinkled benignly back. “I am afraid we are all in considerable danger,” he said blandly, “though I’ve no doubt we shall survive it, the way we always do. You all know the nature of the bannus. Well. Now consider that Reigner Two not only discussed the matter, almost frankly, with Mordion Agenos, but also forgot, as far as I could see, to order him to forget about it.”
His cheerful old eyes turned roguishly to Reigner Five. “Two did forget, didn’t he?”
“If you don’t count the Sign,” Reigner Five said, wary and scowling, “the only orders he gave anywhere on the cube were, first to think about the bannus, then to read about it in our private fax. What are you driving at, One?”
“Of course,” Reigner One said, “it depends to some extent on what idiot imaginings that clerk set the bannus to work on. Since we now know the clerk was a liar, I’m not sure I believe what that letter said. Making – what were they? – handball teams? Even if that were true, I could still think of a dozen ways the bannus could use to get round my blocks in our Servant’s mind. And it will try. Because – I am sorry to have to tell you this – our Servant is a pure-bred Reigner.”
“What!” exclaimed the other three. Reigner Three shouted, “Why weren’t we told? Why are you always doing things behind our backs?” while Reigner Four was bellowing, “But you told us there weren’t any Reigners left except you!” and Reigner Five’s bitter voice cut across both, demanding, “Does the Servant know?”
“Please be quiet,” said Reigner One. His finger was stroking and patting at his silver moustache in a way that was almost agitated. His eyes went more than once to the two sentinel statues at the doorway. They were showing signs of unusual disturbance, jigging, bending and struggling about on their pillars. “No, Five,” he said. “The Servant has no idea – what a preposterous notion! And I am only half-Reigner myself, Four. And Three, you were not told because you were only newly a Reigner and somewhat overwhelmed by it when the situation came about. It was when I exiled the last of my one-time fellow Reigners. I kept some of their children back and bred them to be our Servants. The idea pleased me. And you must admit it has been very handy to have someone with Reigner powers at our beck and call. But there always does come a time when we have to terminate them, or—” he gestured towards the agitated statues at the door “—put them to other uses.”
Five swung his chair round and stared at the statues keenly. “Excuse me a moment,” he said. He got up and strode to the doorway. The movements of the statues became almost frantic as he approached them. Five watched them for a moment, with a bitter, appraising look. Then, with a flash and a dull thump, he put an end to the half-life of the things. “Sorry about that,” he said, as he came back to the table.
Reigner One waved a cheerful hand at the things, drooping from their plinths. “They were no use to us after this. We can put Mordion in their place as soon as someone fetches him back. As for poor old Two – well, there’s no doubt that one of us is going to have to go to Earth.”
His eyes, and Three’s and Five’s, turned to Reigner Four.
Reigner Four knew that he came only just above Two in the real order of the Reigners. He knew it was important one of them went to Earth. He tried to accept it with a good grace.
“So I tackle the bannus?” he said, doing his best to sound willing and competent.
“If you don’t,” said Reigner One, “you’ll cease to be a Reigner. But since we can’t trust the Servant any longer, you’d better terminate Two as soon as you spot him—”
“But who runs our finance if Two’s terminated?” Reigner Three protested. “One, aren’t you forgetting we’re an enormous commercial combine these days?”
“Not at all,” Reigner One said, at his blandest. “You can all see Two’s passed his usefulness. There’s that young Ilirion at the House of Interest who’s turning out to be even better than Two was once. We can elect him Reigner Two as soon as Four gets back. But Four – even above stopping the bannus and terminating Two, I want you to make it your priority to slap Mordion Agenos into stass by any means you can contrive. Then bring him back. And do it soon. If he discovers enough about the bannus, he could be coming back here to terminate us all in a week or so.”
“Yes,” said Four, willing but puzzled. “But why stass? Killing him would be much easier.”
“I haven’t bred from him yet,” said Reigner One, “and I’ve got two good girls lined up for it. The annoying thing about this business is that it’s putting our future Servants in jeopardy.”
“All right.” Reigner Four got up. “I’m on my way,” he said as he strode out past the dead statues.
“He’s taking it well!” Reigner Three said, staring after him. “Could it be that my little brother is learning to be responsible – after all these centuries?”
Five laughed cynically. “Or could it be that they’re offering people dancing girls on Iony?”
Reigner Four could not be bothered to go down to the basement to select Earth clothes. He disliked that girl down there – Vierran – too much. He sent a robot down with an order instead, while he took his Earth languages course.
The robot eventually returned with a carefully wrapped package. “Unpack it,” Reigner Four said from under the language helmet. He was lying on a couch having his body toned and tuned by other robots. The robot obeyed and left. When Reigner Four at length finished with his treatments and the helmet and strode across his suite, naked, vibrant and muscular, he found, carefully laid across a pearly table, a pair of red tartan plus-fours and a coat of hunting pink. With these, Vierran apparently intended him to wear green high-topped trainers, orange socks and a frilly-fronted white shirt.
Reigner Four scratched his curls and stared at these things. “Hm,” he said. He had an idea that the girl Vierran disliked him at least as much as he disliked her. “I think I’ll check,” he said.
So while another robot fitted him into the undervest that contained his monitors and the other miniature gadgets that made him the Reigner he was, Reigner Four keyed for a visual of an Earth street scene. It took a while. The computer had to call in a live archivist, and it was only after a frantic search that she managed to find film of a football crowd leaving a match in 1948. Reigner Four gazed at the hundreds of men hurrying past in their hundreds of long drab macs and flat caps.
“I’ll teach that girl to make a fool of me!” he said. He had a longing to go down to the basement and kill Vierran slowly with his bare hands. He might have done it too, except that Vierran was, like everyone else who worked in the House of Balance, from an important Homeworld family. The House of Balance had this way of controlling the other great mercantile Houses of Homeworld. They were allowed to trade so long as they did not attempt to compete with the Reigner Organisation, and to make sure they
knew their place, the Reigners required at least one member of each House to go into service in the House of Balance. Vierran’s House of Guaranty was one of the ones who could – and would! – make things awkward for Reigner Four. On the other hand, even the House of Guaranty could not complain if some complete accident happened to Vierran. What if she were to have a crippling fall when she was out riding that beloved horse of hers?
Nice idea. It had the added advantage that Reigner Four would then be able to get near the beautiful cousin that Vierran kept defending from him. Four promised himself he would set that accident up as soon as he got back from Earth. Meanwhile he dressed himself in the all-over metallic suit he wore when he went hunting and added a long green cloak for the look of it. Reigner Three might preach about the need for secrecy, but let the Earth people stare! Reigner Four still failed to see why Earth had to be kept ignorant. He more or less owned Earth after all. It was time Earth knew its masters.
Clad in silver and green, he strode off to the portal and began his journey. It took him a good deal longer than it had taken Reigner Two and the Servant. He paused in each sector to enjoy the stir he caused there, and when he reached Iony he turned off his monitors and accepted the Governor’s offer of dancing girls. They were very good. They were so good, in fact, that he forgot to turn the monitors on again when he went on. With his mind still on dancing girls, he reached Albion at last, where Associate Controller Giraldus met him with great respect and no surprise at all.
“This is sad news, Excellency, sire, about Earth, isn’t it? Runcorn is still all to pieces. They seem to have lost their Area Director. Hearing you were coming in person, Excellency, sire, I conjectured you would wish to be on the spot with all possible speed to rescue your Servant, and I decided not even to trouble Runcorn for a car. I took the liberty of recalibrating the portal more closely. I can now set you down directly outside the library complex at Hexwood Farm.”
“Very good,” Reigner Four said genially. The fellow really was too efficient by half and ripe for termination. And he would have to do it himself since the Servant was unavailable. But the dancing girls had put him in a lazy mood. He decided to do it on the way back, and simply waved the man over to key the portal.
It set him down in broad daylight in the middle of a road. No one much about. Afternoon by the look of it, on a chilly blue day filled with white scudding clouds. There were dwellings around, but Reigner Four dismissed these with a glance. The place he wanted was clearly behind the large wooden gate opposite. His gadget-augmented perceptions could pick out the circuitry embedded in the woodwork and – this was pretty annoying! – they were the antiquated kind of lock that his body-keys were not equipped to deal with.
Nothing else for it then. He took a run, got his hands to the top of the gate and swung himself over. He landed, easy and supple, on the other side. There was an empty Earth-type vehicle blocking his path to the door of the building beyond. The litter of twigs on its top and a number of bird-droppings showed him it had been there for some time. He pulled down his mouth in distaste as he edged past the thing. It smelt. And surely it was carrying secrecy a bit far to let the house and garden look so run down! He stooped in under the half-open door of the house.
“Anybody there?” he shouted in his young, carrying voice.
Nobody answered. From the look of the cobwebs and the dust, this room had been abandoned even longer than the van outside. Reigner Four strode through it into a slightly less neglected area beyond. This room held nothing but two stass-stores of a type he had thought were all scrapped several centuries ago. It was probably cheaper to dump them on Earth than scrap them. Both were working, one of them with a senile whine that was really irritating. The sound annoyed Reigner Four into slapping the thing, first on its metalloy side, and then, when that only changed the noise to a buzz, on its glass front. The thing was labelled in Hamitic script, Earlyjoy Cuisine, but someone had half-covered that with a label written in purple, in Earth script, Breakfasts. The second stass-store was similarly labelled, Squarefare in Hamitic and Lunch & Suppers in purple Earth script. Reigner Four peered into the second one as he passed and shuddered to see it about one-third full of small plastic trays, each one containing different coloured globs of provender.
He found a staircase at the end of the room, leading down into the depths below the house. Since it was carpeted and in good repair, Reigner Four descended unhesitatingly. The room below brought him up short with disgust. It was a bedsitting room, and whoever had been living in it must have had the habits of an ape. That clerk, Reigner Four conjectured. The smell from the unwashed bed was appalling. Reigner Four picked his way fastidiously through old beer cans, newspapers and abandoned clothes, orange peel and cigarette stubs, and kicked aside a stack of used stass-trays to clear his way to the modern dilating door at the far end.
“Ah!” he said as he came through it.
This was the operations area, and it was actually clean and cared for, if not precisely up to date. There were various machines for computing and information retrieval – all about the same age as the stass-stores but in much better order – and, stretching away beyond in three directions, numbers of big dark caverns lined with dimly seen books, machinery, cubes, tapes and even, at the nearest corner, a rack holding parchments. The bannus should be in here somewhere. Now if he could discover how the lights in these caves went on …
As he turned back to examine the operations area for light switches, a red light caught his eye, flashing beside one of the display units. Reigner Four discovered, in a leisurely way, which button should be pressed to stop it, and pressed.
He seemed to have got it wrong. The display lit up. A severe face with folds in its eyelids looked out of the screen at him. “At rast!” it said. “I am Suzuki of Layner Hexwood Japan. I have tlied contact for two days for book on Atrantis urgentry. Now my wrongstanding Olientar patience is lewarded.”
“This installation is closed for urgent repairs,” said Reigner Four. He pressed the button again.
The face failed to disappear. It said, “You are not crerk who is usuary here.”
“No, I’ve come to deal with the fault. Get off the line,” said Reigner Four.
“But I have urgent message about Bannus,” said the Japanese face. “Flom Luncorn.”
“What?” said Reigner Four. “What message?”
“Bannus is at end of lecord stack stlaight behind you,” said the image.
Reigner Four spun round eagerly, to find that the central dark cavern was now lighted, with a gentle dim glow that allowed him to see no more than a vista of shelves leading off into the distance. He set off down the vista at a fast swinging stride.
There was a moment of slight giddiness.
Reigner Four found that what he was really doing was riding a horse down a long green glade in a forest.
He had another giddy moment in which he thought he was going mad. Those old-age treatments did sometimes have peculiar side-effects. Then his head cleared. He sat upright and looked around him with pleasure.
The horse under him was a great strong chestnut, glossy with grooming and bridled in green-dyed leather. A war horse. It had armour over its head and mane, which ended in a metal spike between its ears. His helmet hung at his knee against the flowing green saddle cloth, polished steel with a green plume floating off it. His knee, beside it, was also in polished steel. In fact, now he looked, he found he was dressed in an entire suit of armour, beautifully hinged and jointed. His green shield, with his own personal device of the Balance painted on the green in gold, was slung at his left shoulder. Below it, at his waist, hung a most satisfyingly hefty sword. His other arm cradled a mighty green-painted lance.
This was splendid! Reigner Four laughed aloud as he thudded down the green glade. It was spring, and the sun shone through the tender leaves, and what more could a man ask? Well, perhaps a castle and a damsel or so for when it came to nightfall, he supposed. And almost as he thought this, he came out beside
the rippling water of a lake and saw a castle on a green sward across the water. A wooden bridge led across the lake to the castle, but the central portion of the bridge was hauled up to make a drawbridge. Reigner Four thundered along the rough-hewn logs of this bridge and drew his horse up near the gap.
“Hallo there!” he yelled, and his voice went ringing round the water.
After a minute or so, a man in herald’s dress left the castle by a small door and advanced down the green meadow to the other end of the bridge. “Who are you and what do you want?” he called in a mighty voice.
“Whose castle is this?” Reigner Four called back.
“The castle of King Ambitas,” the herald shouted. “The king wishes it made known that no man bearing arms may enter this castle unless he first defeats the king’s Champions in fair fight”
“Fair enough!” Reigner Four shouted. He hunted daily. He had trained for years in every form of warfare and had absolutely no doubt about his abilities. “Let down your bridge and lead me to your Champions.”
They did not let down the bridge straight away. First, with a tremendous clamour of trumpets, the great door of the castle opened to let men-at-arms with spears and young squires with banners hurry out These arranged themselves in a wide half-circle in front of the white walls of the castle. Ladies came out next, in a beautiful flutter of finery. Reigner Four grinned. This got better and better. Another very solemn fanfare announced the king himself. He was carried through the gates in a sort of bed, by four sturdy servitors, and arranged high up near the gates where he had a good view of the sloping meadow. It looked as if he was some sort of invalid. Realising that the king would probably be the last member of the audience to arrive, Reigner Four busied himself with strapping on his helmet, securing his shield to his arm and feeling the balance of the lance.
Sure enough, the raised section of the bridge came cranking down and crashed into place to make a path to the meadow. As it did, horse hooves clattered in the archway of the gate above. The herald, standing near the centre of the field to act as umpire, bellowed, “The first Champion of our noble King Ambitas, Sir Harrisoun.”