“I am aware of it, my Hero,” she said levelly. “All I can say is that I intend that this wench shall never give her Hero a moment’s unease—and my intentions are usually carried out. I am not ‘Her Wisdom’ for nothing.”
“Fair enough. I never thought you would cause me that sort of unease. I was trying to show that the task may not be too difficult. Damn it, we’ve wandered off. Here’s my real problem. I’m not good for anything. I’m worthless.”
“Why, my dearest! You’re good for me.”
“But not for myself. Star, gigolo or not, I can’t be a pet poodle. Not even yours. Look, you’ve got a job. It keeps you busy and it’s important. But me? There is nothing for me to do, nothing at all!—nothing better than designing bad jewelry. You know what I am? A hero by trade, so you told me; you recruited me. Now I’m retired. Do you know anything in all twenty universes more useless than a retired hero?”
She mentioned a couple. I said, “You’re stalling. Anyhow they break up the blankness of the male chest. I’m serious, Star. This is the issue that has made me unfit to live with. Darling, I’m asking you to put your whole mind on it—and all those ghostly helpers. Treat it the way you treat an Imperial problem. Forget I’m your husband. Consider my total situation, all you know about me—and tell me what I can do with hands and head and time that is worth doing. Me, being what I am.”
She held still for long minutes, her face in that professional calm she had worn the times I had audited her work. “You are right,” she said at last. “There is nothing worth your powers on this planet.”
“Then what do I do?”
She said tonelessly, “You must leave.”
“Huh?”
“You think I like the answer, my husband? Do you think I like most answers I must give? But you asked me to consider it professionally. I obeyed. That is the answer. You must leave this planet—and me.”
“So my shoes get tossed anyhow?”
“Be not bitter, milord. That is the answer. I can evade and be womanish only in my private life; I cannot refuse to think if I agree to do so as ‘Her Wisdom.’ You must leave me. But, no, no, no, your shoes are not tossed! You will leave, because you must. Not because I wish it.” Her face stayed calm but tears streamed again. “One cannot ride a cat…nor hurry a snail…nor teach a snake to fly. Nor make a poodle of a Hero. I knew it, I refused to look at it. You will do what you must do. But your shoes will remain ever by my bed, I am not sending you away!” She blinked back tears. “I cannot lie to you, even by silence. I will not say that no other shoes will rest here…if you are gone a long time. I have been lonely. There are no words to say how lonely this job is. When you go… I shall be lonelier than ever. But you will find your shoes here when you return.”
“When I return? You have a Sight?”
“No, milord Hero. I have only a feeling…that if you live…you will return. Perhaps many times. But Heroes do not die in bed. Not even this one.” She blinked and tears stopped and her voice was steady. “Now, milord husband, if it please you, shall we dim the lights and rest?”
We did and she put her head on my shoulder and did not cry. But we did not sleep. After an aching time I said, “Star, do you hear what I hear?”
She raised her head. “I hear nothing.”
“The City. Can’t you hear it? People. Machines. Even thoughts so thick your bones feel it and your ear almost catches it.”
“Yes. I know that sound.”
“Star, do you like it here?”
“No. It was never necessary that I like it.”
“Look, damn it! You said that I would leave. Come with me!”
“Oh, Oscar!”
“What do you owe them? Isn’t recovering the Egg enough? Let them take a new victim. Come walk the Glory Road with me again! There must be work in my line somewhere.”
“There is always work for Heroes.”
“Okay, we set up in business, you and I. Heroing isn’t a bad job. The meals are irregular and the pay uncertain—but it’s never dull. We’ll run ads: ‘Gordon & Gordon, Heroing Done Reasonable. No job too large, no job too small. Dragons exterminated by contract, satisfaction guaranteed or no pay. Free estimates on other work. Questing, maiden-rescuing, golden fleece located night or day?’”
I was trying to jolly her but Star doesn’t jolly. She answered in sober earnest. “Oscar, if I am to retire, I should train my heir first. True, no one can order me to do anything—but I have a duty to train my replacement.”
“How long will that take?”
“Not long. Thirty years, about.”
“Thirty years!”
“I could force it to twenty-five, I think.”
I sighed. “Star, do you know how old I am?”
“Yes. Not yet twenty-five. But you will get no older!”
“But right now I’m still that age. That’s all the time there has ever been for me. Twenty-five years as a pet poodle and I won’t be a hero, nor anything. I’ll be out of my silly mind.”
She thought about it. “Yes. That is true.”
She turned over, we made a spoon and pretended to sleep.
Later I felt her shoulders shaking and knew that she was sobbing. “Star?”
She didn’t turn her head. All I heard was a choking voice, “Oh, my dear, my very dear! If I were even a hundred years younger!”
TWENTY
I let the precious, useless gems dribble through my fingers, listlessly pushed them aside. If I were only a hundred years older—
But Star was right. She could not leave her post without relief. Her notion of proper relief, not mine nor anyone else’s. And I couldn’t stay in this upholstered jail much longer without beating my head on the bars.
Yet both of us wanted to stay together.
The real nasty hell of it was that I knew—just as she knew—that each of us would forget. Some, anyhow. Enough so that there would be other shoes, other men, and she would laugh again.
And so would I—She had seen that and had gravely, gently, with subtle consideration for another’s feelings, told me indirectly that I need not feel guilty when next I courted some other girl, in some other land, somewhere.
Then why did I feel like a heel?
How did I get trapped with no way to turn without being forced to choose between hurting my beloved and going clean off my rocker?
I read somewhere about a man who lived on a high mountain, because of asthma, the choking, killing land, while his wife lived on the coast below him, because of heart trouble that could not stand altitude. Sometimes they looked at each other through telescopes.
In the morning there had been no talk of Star’s retiring. The unstated quid-pro-quo was that, if she planned to retire, I would hang around (thirty years!) until she did. Her Wisdom had concluded that I could not, and did not speak of it. We had a luxurious breakfast and were cheerful, each with his secret thoughts.
Nor were children mentioned. Oh, I would find that clinic, do what was needed. If she wanted to mix her star line with my common blood, she could, tomorrow or a hundred years hence. Or smile tenderly and have it cleaned out with the rest of the trash. None of my people had even been mayor of Podunk and a plow horse isn’t groomed for the Irish Sweepstakes. If Star put a child together from our genes, it would be sentiment, a living valentine—a younger poodle she could pet before she let it run free. But sentiment only, as sticky if not as morbid as that of her aunt with the dead husbands, for the Imperium could not use my bend sinister.
I looked up at my sword, hanging opposite me. I hadn’t touched it since the party, long past, when Star chose to dress for the Glory Road. I took it down, buckled it on and drew it—felt that surge of liveness and had a sudden vision of a long road and a castle on a hill.
What does a champion owe his lady when the quest is done?
Quit dodging, Gordon! What does a husband owe his wife? This very sword—“Jump Rogue and Princess leap. My wife art thou and mine to keep—for richer, for poorer, for bett
er, for worse…to love and to cherish, till death do us part.” That was what I meant by that doggerel and Star had known it and I had known it and knew it now.
When we vowed, it had seemed likely that we would be parted by death that same day. But that didn’t reduce the vow nor the deepness with which I had meant it. I hadn’t jumped the sword to catch a tumble on the grass before I died; I could have had that free. No, I had wanted “—to have and to hold, to love and to cherish, till death do us part”!
Star had kept her vow to the letter. Why did I have itchy feet?
Scratch a hero and find a bum.
And a retired hero was as silly as those out-of-work kings that clutter Europe.
I slammed out of our “flat,” wearing sword and not giving a damn about stares, apported to our therapists, found where I should go, went there, did what was necessary, told the boss biotechnician that Her Wisdom must be told, and jumped down his throat when he asked questions.
Then back to the nearest apport booth and hesitated—I needed companionship the way an Alcoholics-Anonymous needs his hand held. But I had no intimates, just hundreds of acquaintances. It isn’t easy for the Empress’s consort to have friends.
Rufo it had to be. But in all the months I had been on Center I had never been in Rufo’s home. Center does not practice the barbarous custom of dropping in on people and I had seen Rufo only at the Residence, or on parties; Rufo had never invited me to his home. No, no coldness there; we saw him often, but always he had come to us.
I looked for him in apport listings—no luck. Then as little with see-speak lists. I called the Residence, got the communication officer. He said that “Rufo” was not a surname and tried to brush me off. I said, “Hold it, you overpaid clerk! Switch me off and you’ll be in charge of smoke signals in Timbuktu an hour from now. Now listen. This bloke is elderly, baldheaded, one of his names is ‘Rufo’ I think, and he is a distinguished comparative culturologist. And he is a grandson of Her Wisdom. I think you know who he is and have been dragging your feet from bureaucratic arrogance. You have five minutes. Then I talk to Her Wisdom and ask her, while you pack!”
(“Stop! Danger you! Other old bald Rufo (?) top compculturist. Wisdom egg-sperm-egg. Five-minutes. Liar and/or fool. Wisdom? Catastrophe!”)
In less than five minutes Rufo’s image filled the tank. “Well!” he said. “I wondered who had enough weight to crash my shutoff.”
“Rufo, may I come see you?”
His scalp wrinkled. “Mice in the pantry, son? Your face reminds me of the time my uncle—”
“Please, Rufo!”
“Yes, son,” he said gently. “I’ll send the dancing girls home. Or shall I keep them?”
“I don’t care. How do I find you?”
He told me, I punched his code, added my charge number, and I was there, a thousand miles around the horizon. Rufo’s place was a mansion as lavish as Jocko’s and thousands of years more sophisticated. I gathered an impression that Rufo had the biggest household on Center, all female. I was wrong. But all female servants, visitors, cousins, daughters, made themselves a reception committee—to look at Her Wisdom’s bedmate. Rufo shooed them away and took me to his study. A dancing girl (evidently a secretary) was fussing over papers and tapes. Rufo slapped her fanny out, gave me a comfortable chair, a drink, put cigarettes near me, sat down and said nothing.
Smoking isn’t popular on Center, what they use as tobacco is the reason. I picked up a cigarette. “Chesterfields! Good God!”
“Have ’em smuggled,” he said. “But they don’t make anything like Sweet Caps anymore. Bridge sweepings and chopped hay.”
I hadn’t smoked in months. But Star had told me that cancer and such I could now forget. So I lit it—and coughed like a Nevian dragon. Vice requires constant practice.
“‘What news on the Rialto?’” Rufo inquired. He glanced at my sword.
“Oh, nothing.” Having interrupted Rufo’s work, I now shied at baring my domestic troubles.
Rufo sat and smoked and waited. I needed to say something and the American cigarette reminded me of an incident, one that had added to my unstable condition. At a party a week earlier, I had met a man thirty-five in appearance, smooth, polite, but with that supercilious air that says: “Your fly is unzipped, old man, but I’m too urbane to mention it.”
But I had been delighted to meet him, he had spoken English!
I had thought that Star, Rufo, and myself were the only ones on Center who spoke English. We often spoke it. Star on my account, Rufo because he liked to practice. He spoke Cockney like a costermonger, Bostonese like Beacon Hill, Aussie like a kangaroo; Rufo knew all English languages.
This chap spoke good General American. “Nebbi is the name,” he said, shaking hands where no one shakes hands, “and you’re Gordon, I know. Delighted to meet you.”
“Me, too,” I agreed. “It’s a surprise and a pleasure to hear my own language.”
“Professional knowledge, my dear chap. Comparative culturologist, linguisto-historo-political. You’re American, I know. Let me place it—Deep-South, not born there. Possibly New England. Overlaid with displaced Middle Western, California perhaps. Basic speech, lower-middle class, mixed.”
The smooth oaf was good. Mother and I lived in Boston while my father was away, 1942-45. I’ll never forget those winters; I wore overshoes from November to April. I had lived Deep South, Georgia and Florida, and in California at La Jolla during the Korean unWar and, later, in college. “Lower-middle class”? Mother had not thought so.
“Near enough,” I agreed. “I know one of your colleagues.”
“I know whom you mean, ‘the Mad Scientist.’ Wonderful wacky theories. But tell me: How were things when you left? Especially, how is the United States getting along with its Noble Experiment?”
“‘Noble Experiment’?” I had to think; Prohibition was gone before I was born. “Oh, that was repealed.”
“Really? I must go back for a field trip. What have you now? A king? I could see that your country was headed that way but I did not expect it so soon.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “I was talking about Prohibition.”
“Oh, that. Symptomatic but not basic. I was speaking of the amusing notion of chatter rule. ‘Democracy.’ A curious delusion—as if adding zeros could produce a sum. But it was tried in your tribal land on a mammoth scale. Before you were born, no doubt. I thought you meant that even the corpse had been swept away.” He smiled. “Then they still have elections and all that?”
“The last time I looked, yes.”
“Oh, wonderful. Fantastic, simply fantastic. Well, we must get together, I want to quiz you. I’ve been studying your planet a long time—the most amazing pathologies in tile explored complex. So long. Don’t take any wooden nickels, as your tribesmen say.”
I told Rufo about it. “Rufo, I know I came from a barbarous planet. But does that excuse his rudeness? Or was it rudeness? I haven’t really got the hang of good manners here.”
Rufo frowned. “It is bad manners anywhere to sneer at a person’s birthplace, tribe, or customs. A man does it at his own risk. If you kill him, nothing will happen to you. It might embarrass Her Wisdom a little. If She can be embarrassed.”
“I won’t kill him, it’s not that important.”
“Then forget it. Nebbi is a snob. He knows a little, understands nothing, and thinks the universes would be better if he had designed them. Ignore him.”
“I will. It was just—look, Rufo, my country isn’t perfect. But I don’t enjoy hearing it from a stranger.”
“Who does? I like your country, it has flavor. But—I’m not a stranger and this is not a sneer. Nebbi was right.”
“Huh?”
“Except that he sees only the surface. Democracy can’t work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that’s all there is—so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man
in a given group.
“But a democratic form of government is okay, as long as it doesn’t work. Any social organization does well enough if it isn’t rigid. The framework doesn’t matter as long as there is enough looseness to permit that one man in a multitude to display his genius. Most so-called social scientists seem to think that organization is everything. It is almost nothing—except when it is a straitjacket. It is the incidence of heroes that counts, not the pattern of zeros.”
He added, “Your country has a system free enough to let its heroes work at their trade. It should last a long time—unless its looseness is destroyed from inside.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“I am right. This subject I know and I’m not stupid, as Nebbi thinks. He’s right about the futility of ‘adding zeros’—but he doesn’t realize that he is a zero.”
I grinned. “No point in letting a zero get my goat.”
“None. Especially as you are not. Wherever you go, you will make yourself felt, you won’t be one of the herd. I respect you, and I don’t respect many. Never people as a whole, I could never be a democrat at heart. To claim to ‘respect’ and even to ‘love’ the great mass with their yaps at one end and smelly feet at the other requires the fatuous, uncritical, saccharine, blind, sentimental slobbishness found in some nursery supervisors, most spaniel dogs, and all missionaries. It isn’t a political system, it’s a disease. But be of good cheer; your American politicians are immune to this disease…and your customs allow the non-zero elbow room.”
Rufo glanced at my sword again. “Old friend, you didn’t come here to bitch about Nebbi.”
“No.” I looked down at that keen blade. “I fetched this to shave you, Rufo.”
“Eh?”
“I promised I would shave your corpse. I owe it to you for the slick job you did on me. So here I am, to shave the barber.”
He said slowly, “But I’m not yet a corpse.” He did not move. But his eyes did, estimating distance between us. Rufo wasn’t counting on my being “chivalrous”; he had lived too long.