He tried the names of the Dukes: Gardagger of Merdune, Tranquish of Dania, Wayheight-Winson of Upland, Vestik-Vanserdel of Barfezi. With a little digging he found events that measured their lives at well over a century. Each of them had traveled for the Lord Paramount, had worked for him and had fought for him. So, he thought, tapping his teeth again,clickety click, the Lord Paramount rewarded his faithful servants with a long life. He tried the Marshal. The Marshal was relatively young: he had only recently turned sixty.
The versifying clerk came into view at the end of the corridor, moving angrily, as though propelled, arms loaded with books. As he approached, Aufors blanked the screen, called up the genealogy of the Bellser-Bars of Merdune, and by the time the clerk peered over his shoulder, he seemed totally immersed in the Gardagger family tree.
“Dreadful deadly dull,” sneered the clerk, obviously smarting from some very recent encounter. “Almost a total null. . . .”
“Stop,” said Aufors, forbiddingly. “I’m too tired to make sense out of you.”
The clerk heaved a sigh and spoke, venom dripping from every word. “I don’t know why we put up with it. Royalty, I mean. It’s unfair, the attention we pay them, neglecting worthier men.”
“From what I’ve read,” Aufors replied, somewhat startled by this display of ill feeling, “every society has some way of allocating power. Some places do it by age, some by money, some by war, some by class, like us. All systems have their faults, but everyone has roughly as much life as everyone else, and that’s as fair as can be, so far as I know.”
“Well!” The clerk turned pale as ash. “If that were true it would all be very nice, but when power means two or three hundred years of life while others get cut off short … I’d call that unfair.”
Aufors swung around, staring. “Now that’s interesting,” he commented, as though it were news.
The clerk paled, shuddered. “My sense of preservation’s broken,” he muttered, wiping his forehead. “Believe me, I should not have spoken.”
Aufors grinned at him. “Don’t worry. I shan’t repeat it. You may depend upon my word … if you’ll set aside both your sense of self-preservation and your versifying for a moment more.”
The clerk barked a laugh, brief and cut off sharply, his eyes focusing on Aufors for the first time, sharp, vital, full of intelligence. “I can’t tell you any more. I don’t know anything real. Some of the Lord Paramount’s colleagues are very old, and the Lord Paramount himself ages slow as a tree. He evidently decides who’s to get the gift of long life, whatever that gift may be.”
“You don’t know what it is?”
“It’s a well-kept secret, Colonel. We all assume—we being the dusty grovelers here in the bowels, we burrowers in the racks, we delvers in the stacks—we assume it’s from off-world, like the rest of the things forbidden to the rest of us. And we assume it’s expensive, for the ones who get it are favorite and few.”
“It seems unthinkably criminal to me, to buy such a thing for oneself and keep it from one’s people,” said Aufors.
The archivist bit his lip and whispered, “You’ve heard that old proverb, Colonel. Thirst makes any wine drinkable . . .’“
“ ‘And greed makes any crime thinkable,’“ Aufors concluded the couplet. He himself could not, at the moment, think of any reward high enough for such dishonorable behavior, but he set that aside for the moment. “I wonder what determines who the favorites are?”
The clerk patted the console Aufors was seated at. “Well, you want to ask, let this do the task. It’s very strange that I know how, but never thought of it till now.”
“How, then?”
“Give the machine some names or common factors, it’ll come up with a list for you. And, Colonel! Delete what you’re doing before you leave. I’m not supposed to let anyone in here.”
He drifted away, and Aufors entered, listall persons currently alive in Haven who are more than one hundred twenty years old.
The list came spitting at him, longer than he had thought it would be. All the names were male. He stared at it for a moment, then asked,Who was the first person to gain this age on Haven?