Before long I realized that the most powerful man in Manneran was a puppet whose strings I controlled. I decided which cases the High Justice should handle, I chose the applications for special favor that he would read, I gave him the capsuled commentaries on which his verdicts were based. Segvord had not accidentally allowed me to attain such power. It was necessary for someone to perform the screening duties I now handled, and until my coming to Manneran the job had been done by a committee of three, all ambitious to hold Segvord’s title some day. Fearing those men, Segvord had arranged to promote them to positions of greater splendor but lesser responsibilities. Then he slid me into their place. His only son had died in boyhood; all his patronage therefore fell upon me. Out of love of Halum he had coolly chosen to make a homeless Sallan prince one of the dominant figures of Manneran.

  It was widely understood, by others long before by me, how important I was going to be. Those princes at my wedding had not been there out of respect for Loimel’s family, but to curry favor with me. The soft words from Stirron were meant to insure I would show no hostility to Salla in my decision-making. Doubtless my royal cousin Truis of Glin now was wondering uneasily if I knew that it was his doing that the doors of his province had closed in my face; he too sent a fine gift for my marriage-day. Nor did the flow of gifts cease with the nuptial ceremony. Constantly there came to me handsome things from those whose interests were bound up in the doings of the Port Justiciary. In Salla we would call such gifts by their rightful name, which is bribes; but Segvord assured me that in Manneran there was no harm in accepting them, so long as I did not let them interfere with my objectivity of judgment. Now I realized how, on the modest salary of a judge, Segvord had come to live in such princely style. In truth I did try to put all this bribery from my mind while at my official duties, and weigh each case on its merits alone.

  So I found my place in Manneran. I mastered the secrets of the Port Justiciary, developed a feel for the rhythms of maritime commerce, and served the High Justice ably. I moved among princes and judges and men of wealth. I purchased a small but sumptuous house close by Segvord’s, and soon had the builders out to increase its size. I worshipped, as only the mighty do, at the Stone Chapel itself, and went to the celebrated Jidd for my drainings. I was taken into a select athletic society, and displayed my skills with the feathered shaft in Manneran Stadium. When I visited Salla with my bride the springtime after our wedding, Stirron received me as if I were a Mannerangi septarch, parading me through the capital before a cheering multitude and feasting me royally at the palace. He said not a word to me about my flight from Salla, but was wholly amiable in a reserved and distant fashion. My first son, who was born that autumn, I named for him.

  Two other sons followed, Noim and Kinnall, and daughters named Halum and Loimel. The boys were straightbodied and strong; the girls promised to show the beauty of their namesakes. I took great pleasure in heading a family. I longed for the time when I could have my sons with me hunting in the Burnt Lowlands, or shooting the rapids of the River Woyn; meanwhile I went hunting without them, and the spears of many hornfowl came to decorate my home.

  Loimel, as I have said, remained a stranger to me. One does not expect to penetrate the soul of one’s wife as deeply as that of one’s bondsister, but nevertheless, despite the customs of self-containment we observe, one expects to develop a certain communion with someone one lives with. I never penetrated anything of Loimel’s except her body. The warmth and openness she had showed me at our first meeting vanished swiftly, and she became as aloof as any coldbelly wife of Glin. Once in the heat of lovemaking I used “I” to her, as I sometimes did with whores, and she slapped me and twisted her hips to cast me from her loins. We drifted apart. She had her life, I mine; after a time we made no attempt to reach across the gulf to one another. She spent her time at music, bathing, sunsleeping, and piety, and I at hunting, gaming, rearing my sons, and doing my work. She took lovers and I took mistresses. It was a frosty marriage. We scarcely ever quarreled; we were not close enough even for that.

  Noim and Halum were with me much of the time. They were great comforts to me.

  At the Justiciary my authority and responsibility grew year by year. I was not promoted from my position as clerk to the High Justice, nor did my salary increase by any large extent; yet all of Manneran knew that I was the one who governed Segvord’s decisions, and I enjoyed a lordly income of “gifts.” Gradually Segvord withdrew from most of his duties, leaving them to me. He spent weeks at a time on his island retreat in the Gulf of Sumar, while I initialed and stamped documents in his name. In my twenty-fourth year, which was his fiftieth, he gave up his office altogether. Since I was not a Mannerangi by birth, it was impossible for me to become High Justice in his place; but Segvord arranged for the appointment of an amiable nonentity as his successor, one Noldo Kalimol, with the understanding that Kalimol would retain me in my place of power.

  You would be right to assume that my life in Manneran was one of ease and security, of wealth and authority. Week flowed serenely into week, and, though perfect happiness is given to no man, I had few reasons for discontent. The failings of my marriage I accepted placidly, since deep love between man and wife is not often encountered in our kind of society; as for my other sorrow, my hopeless love for Halum, I kept it buried deep within me, and when it rose painfully close to the surface of my soul I soothed myself by a visit to the drainer Jidd. I might have gone on uneventfully in that fashion to the end of my days, but for the arrival in my life of Schweiz the Earthman.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  EARTHMEN COME RARELY to Borthan. Before Schweiz, I had seen only two, both in the days when my father held the septarchy. The first was a tall redbearded man who visited Salla when I was about five years old; he was a traveler who wandered from world to world for his own amusement, and had just crossed the Burnt Lowlands alone and on foot. I remember studying his face with intense concentration, searching for the marks of his otherworldly origin—an extra eye, perhaps, horns, tendrils, fangs.

  He had none of these, of course, and so I openly doubted his story of having come from Earth. Stirron, with the benefit of two years’ more schooling than I, was the one who told me, in a jeering tone, that all the worlds of the heavens, including our own, had been settled by people from Earth, which was why an Earthman looked just like any of us. Nevertheless, when a second Earthman showed up at court a few years later, I still searched for fangs and tendrils. This one was a husky, cheerful man with light brown skin, a scientist making a collection of our native wildlife for some university in a far part of the galaxy. My father took him out into the Burnt Lowlands to get hornfowl; I begged to go along, and was whipped for my nagging.

  I dreamed of Earth. I looked it up in books and saw a picture of a blue planet with many continents, and a huge pockmarked moon going around it, and I thought, This is where we all came from. This is the beginning of everything. I read of the kingdoms and nations of old Earth, the wars and devastation, the monuments, the tragedies. The going-forth into space, the attainment of the stars. There was a time when I even imagined I was an Earthman myself, born on that ancient planet of wonders, and brought to Borthan in babyhood to be exchanged for a septarch’s true son. I told myself that when I grew up I would travel to Earth and walk through cities ten thousand years old, retracing the line of migration that had led my forefathers’ forefathers from Earth to Borthan. I wanted to own a piece of Earth, too, some potsherd, some bit of stone, some battered coin, as a tangible link to the world at the heart of man’s wanderings. And I longed for some other Earthman to come to Borthan, so that I could ask him ten thousand thousand questions, so that I could beg a slice of Earth for myself, but none came, and I grew up, and my obsession with the first of man’s planets faded.

  Then Schweiz crossed my way.

  Schweiz was a man of commerce. Many Earthmen are. At the time I met him he had been on Borthan a couple of years as representative of an exporting firm based in a solar system not far from our own; he dealt in manufactured goods and sought our furs and spices in return. During his stay in Manneran, he had become entangled in controversy with a local importer over a cargo of stormshield furs from the northwestern coast; the man tried to give Schweiz poor quality at a higher-than-contracted price, Schweiz sued, and the case went to the Port Justiciary. This was about three years ago, and a little more than three years after the retirement of Segvord Helalam.

  The facts of the case were clear-cut and there was no doubt about the judgment. One of the lower justices approved Schweiz’s plea and ordered the importer to make good on his contract with the swindled Earthman. Ordinarily I would not have become involved in the matter. But when the papers on the case came to High Justice Kalimol for routine review just prior to affirmation of verdict, I glanced at them and saw that the plaintiff was an Earthman.

  Temptation speared me. My old fascination with that race—my delusion of fangs and tendrils and extra eyes—took hold of me again. I had to talk with him. What did I hope to get from him? The answers to the questions that had gone unanswered when I was a boy? Some clue to the nature of the forces that had driven mankind to the stars? Or merely amusement, a moment of diversion in an overly placid life?

  I asked Schweiz to report to my office.

  He came in almost on the run, a frantic, energetic figure in clothes of flamboyant style and tone. Grinning with a manic glee, he slapped my palm in greeting, dug his knuckles into my desktop, pushed himself back a few steps, and began to pace the room.

  “The gods preserve you, your grace!” he cried.

  I thought his odd demeanor, his coiled-spring bounciness and his wild-eyed intensity, stemmed from fear of me, for he had good reason to worry, called in by a powerful official to discuss a case that he thought he had won. But I found later that Schweiz’s mannerisms were expressions of his own seething nature, not of any momentary and specific tension.

  He was a man of middle height, very sparely built, not a scrap of fat on his frame. His skin was tawny and his hair was the color of dark honey; it hung down in a straight flow to his shoulders. His eyes were bright and mischievous, his smile quick and sly, and he radiated a boyish vigor, a dynamic enthusiasm, that charmed me just then, though it would eventually make him an exhausting companion for me. Yet he was no boy: his face bore the first lines of age and his hair, abundant though it was, was starting to go thin at the crown.

  “Be seated,” I said, for his capering was disturbing me. I wondered how to launch the conversation. How much could I ask him before he claimed Covenant at me and sealed his lips? Would he talk about himself and his world? Had I any right to pry into a foreigner’s soul in a way that I would not dare do with a man of Borthan? I would see. Curiosity drove me. I picked up the sheaf of documents on his case, for he was looking at the file unhappily, and held them toward him, saying, “One places the first matters first. Your verdict has been affirmed. Today High Justice Kalimol gives his seal and within a moonrise you’ll have your money.”

  “Happy words, your grace.”

  “That concludes the legal business.”

  “So short a meeting? It seems hardly necessary to have paid this call to exchange only a moment’s talk, your grace.”

  “One must admit,” I said, “that you were summoned here to discuss things other than your lawsuit.”

  “Eh, your grace?” He looked baffled and alarmed.

  “To talk of Earth,” I said. “To gratify the idle inquisitiveness of a bored bureaucrat. Is that all right? Are you willing to talk a while, now that you’ve been lured here on the pretense of business? You know, Schweiz, one has always been fascinated by Earth and by Earthmen.” To win some rapport with him, for he still was frowning and mistrustful, I told him the story of the two other Earthmen I had known, and of my childhood belief that they should be alien in form. He relaxed and listened with pleasure, and before I was through he was laughing heartily. “Fangs!” he cried. “Tendrils!” He ran his hands over his face. “Did you really think that, your grace? That Earthmen were such bizarre creatures? By all the gods, your grace, I wish I had some strangeness about my body, that I could give you amusement!”

  I flinched each time Schweiz spoke of himself in the first person. His casual obscenities punctured the mood I had attempted to build. Though I tried to pretend nothing was amiss, Schweiz instantly realized his blunder, and leaping to his feet in obvious distress, said, “A thousand pardons! One tends to forget one’s grammar sometimes, when one is not accustomed to—”

  “No offense is taken,” I said hastily.

  “You must understand, your grace, that old habits of speech die hard, and in using your language one sometimes slips into the mode most natural for himself, even though—”

  “Of course, Schweiz. A forgivable lapse.” He was trembling. “Besides,” I said, winking, “I’m a grown man. Do you think I’m so easily shocked?” My use of the vulgarities was deliberate, to put him at his ease. The tactic worked; he subsided, calming. But he took no license from the incident to use gutter talk with me again that morning, and in fact was careful to observe the niceties of grammatical etiquette for a long time thereafter, until such things had ceased to matter between us.

  I asked him to tell me now about Earth, the mother of us all.

  “A small planet,” he said. “Far away. Choked in its own ancient wastes; the poisons of two thousand years of carelessness and overbreeding stain its skies and its seas and its land. An ugly place.”

  “In truth, ugly?”

  “There are still some attractive districts. Not many of them, and nothing to boast about. Some trees, here and there. A little grass. A lake. A waterfall. A valley. Mostly the planet is dunghole. Earthmen often wish they could uncover their early ancestors, and bring them to life again, and then throttle them. For their selfishness. For their lack of concern for the generations to come. They filled the world with themselves and used everything up.”

  “Is this why Earthmen built empires in the skies, then, to escape the filth of their home world?”

  “Part of it is that, yes,” Schweiz said. “There were so many billions of people. And those who had the strength to leave all went out and up. But it was more than running away, you know. It was a hunger to see strange things, a hunger to undertake journeys, a hunger to make fresh starts. To create new and better worlds of man. A string of Earths across the sky.”

  “And those who did not go?” I asked. “Earth still has those other billions of people?” I was thinking of Velada Borthan and its sparse forty or fifty millions.

  “Oh, no, no. It’s almost empty now, a ghost-world, ruined cities, cracking highways. Few live there any longer. Fewer are born there every year.”

  “But you were born there?”

  “On the continent called Europe, yes. One hasn’t seen Earth for almost thirty years, though. Not since one was fourteen.”

  “You don’t look that old,” I said.

  “One reckons time in Earthlength years,” Schweiz explained. “By your figuring one is only approaching the age of thirty.”

  “Also this one,” I said. “And here also is one who left his homeland before reaching manhood.” I was speaking freely, far more freely than was proper, yet I could not stop myself. I had drawn out Schweiz, and felt an impulse to offer something of my own in return. “Going out from Salla as a boy to seek his fortune in Glin, then finding better luck in Manneran after a while. A wanderer, Schweiz, like yourself.”

  “It is a bond between us, then.”

  Could I presume on that bond? I asked him, “Why did you leave Earth?”

  “For the same reasons as everyone else. To go where the air is clean and a man stands some chance to become something. The only ones who spend their whole lives there are those who can’t help but stay.”

  “And this is the planet that all the galaxy reveres!” I said in wonder. “The world of so many myths! The planet of boys’ dreams! The center of the universe—a pimple, a boil!”

  “You put it well.”

  “Yet it is revered.”

  “Oh, revere it, revere it, certainly!” Schweiz cried. His eyes were aglow. “The foundation of mankind! The grand originator of the species! Why not revere it, your grace? Revere the bold beginnings that were made there. Revere the high ambitions that sprang from its mud. And revere the terrible mistakes, too. Ancient Earth made mistake after mistake, and choked itself in error, so that you would be spared from having to pass through the same fires and torments.” Schweiz laughed harshly. “Earth died to redeem you starfolk from sin. How’s that for a religious notion? A whole liturgy could be composed around that idea. A priestcraft of Earth the redeemer.” Suddenly he leaned forward and said, “Are you a religious man, your grace?”

  I was taken aback by the thrusting intimacy of his question. But I put up no barriers.

  “Certainly,” I said.

  “You go to the godhouse, you talk to the drainers, the whole thing?”

  I was caught. I could not help but speak.

  “Yes,” I said. “Does that surprise you?”

  “Not at all. Everyone on Borthan seems to be genuinely religious. Which amazes one. You know, your grace, one isn’t religious in the least, oneself. One tries, one has always tried, one has worked so hard to convince oneself that there are superior beings out there who guide destiny, and sometimes one almost makes it, your grace, one almost believes, one breaks through into faith, but then skepticism shuts things down every time. And one ends by saying, No, it isn’t possible, it can’t be, it defies logic and common sense. Logic and common sense!”

  “But how can you live all your days without a closeness to something holy?”

  “Most of the time, one manages fairly well. Most of the time.”

  “And the rest of the time?”

  “That’s when one feels the impact of knowing one is entirely alone in the universe. Naked under the stars, and the starlight hitting the exposed skin, burning, a cold fire, and no one to shield one from it, no one to offer a hiding place, no one to pray to, do you see? The sky is ice and the ground is ice and the soul is ice, and who’s to warm it? There isn’t anyone. You’ve convinced yourself that no one exists who can give comfort. One wants some system of belief, one wants to submit, to get down and kneel, to be governed by metaphysics, you know? To believe, to have faith! And one can’t. And that’s when the terror sets in. The dry sobs. The nights of no sleeping.” Schweiz’s face was flushed and wild with excitement; I wondered if he could be entirely sane. He reached across the desk, clamped his hand over mine—the gesture stunned me, but I did not pull back—and said hoarsely, “Do you believe in gods, your grace?”

 

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