Ythri, which has enjoyed better relations with us than with you—” His hand chopped the air. “No, I’m distressing you, am I not? And with what can only be guesswork. Apologies. See here, if you don’t care for more ale, why not arthberry brandy? I guarantee a first-class drunk and— You may suppose you’re a peaceful fellow, Chunderban, but I know an atom or two about your people, your specific people, I mean. What’s that old, old book I’ve heard you mention and quote from? Rixway?”
“Rig-Veda,” Desai told him.
“You said it includes war chants. Do you know any well enough to put into Anglic? There’s a computer terminal.” He pointed to a corner. “You can patch right into our main translator, now that official business is over. I’d like to hear a bit of your special tradition, Chunderban. So many traditions, works, mysteries—so tiny a lifespan to taste them—”
It became a memorable evening.
Restless, Desai stirred in his chair.
He was a short man with a dark-brown moon face and a paunch. At fifty-five standard years of age, his hair remained black but had receded from the top of his head. The full lips were usually curved slightly upward, which joined the liquid eyes to give him a wistful look. As was his custom, today he wore plain, loosely fitted white shirt and trousers, on his feet slippers a size large for comfort.
Save for the communication and data-retrieval consoles that occupied one wall, his office was similarly unpretentious. It did have a spectacular holograph, a view of Mount Gandhi on his home planet, Ramanujan. But otherwise the pictures were of his wife, their seven children, the families of those four who were grown and settled on as many different globes. A bookshelf held codices as well as reels; some were much-used reference works, the rest for refreshment, poetry, history, essays, most of their authors centuries dust. His desk was less neat than his person.
I shouldn’t go taking vacations in the past, he thought God knows the present needs more of me than I have to give.
Or does it? Spare me the ultimate madness of ever considering myself indispensable.
Well, but somebody must man this post. He happens to be me.
Must somebody? How much really occurs because of me, how much in spite of or regardless of? How much, and what, should occur? God! I dared accept the job of ruling, remaking an entire world—when I knew nothing more about it than its name, and that simply because it was the planet of Hugh McCormac, the man who would be Emperor. After two years, what else have I learned?
Ordinarily he could sit quiet, but the Hesperian episode had been too shocking, less in itself than in its implications. Whatever they were. How could he plan against the effect on these people, once the news got out, when he, the foreigner, had no intuition of what that effect might be?
He put a cigarette into a long, elaborately carved holder of landwhale ivory. (He thought it was in atrocious taste, but it had been given him for a birthday present by a ten-year-old daughter who died soon afterward.) The tobacco was an expensive self-indulgence, grown on Esperance, the closest thing to Terran he could obtain hereabouts while shipping remained sparse.
The smoke-bite didn’t soothe him. He jumped up and prowled. He hadn’t yet adapted so fully to the low gravity of Aeneas, 63 percent standard, that he didn’t consciously enjoy movement. The drawback was the dismal exercises he must go through each morning, if he didn’t want to turn completely into lard. Unfair, that the Aeneans tended to be such excellent physical specimens without effort. No, not really unfair. On this niggard sphere, few could afford a large panoply of machines; even today, more travel was on foot or animal back than in vehicles, more work done by hand than by automatons or cybernets. Also, in earlier periods—the initial colonization, the Troubles, the slow climb back from chaos—death had winnowed the unfit out of their bloodlines.
Desai halted at the north wall, activated its transparency, and gazed forth across Nova Roma.
Though itself two hundred Terran years old, Imperial House jutted awkwardly from the middle of a city founded seven centuries ago. Most buildings in this district were at least half that age, and architecture had varied little through time. In a climate where it seldom rained and never snowed; where the enemies were drought, cold, hurricane winds, drifting dust, scouring sand; where water for bricks and concrete, forests for timber, organics for synthesis were rare and precious, one quarried the stone which Aeneas did have in abundance, and used its colors and textures.