“They will be interested when I return and tell what I have learned here,” he added. “They will probably send people here to trade with you, if you’d like to trade.” It seemed like the sort of comment that might help get him out of there alive. And it was probably true, as far as that was concerned, though there’d hardly be any camel caravans carrying goods between them.
“Indeed. And what do your people make or grow that we might want, here in the empire?”
“I didn’t bring samples, Your Highness. But we make machines which cut trees much faster and more easily than an ax, and others which can cut an entire tree trunk into—” Again he groped, then moved to touch the table near the emperor, to demonstrate boards. A human guard’s hard hand gripped his shoulder, while the throne ogres’ swords hissed from their scabbards. The emperor’s voice in Tibetan cut through the situation, and the hand withdrew, though the ogres’ swords remained free.
“Show me what you planned to show,” the emperor said, and Baver did.
“But you have none of these marvels with you? You seem to have many pockets. What do you have in them? Perhaps there is something you’ve overlooked.”
It struck Baver like a hammer then. Nils had said that Fong was a telepath who served as a spy as well as an envoy, and who somehow communicated what he learned to the emperor, perhaps a thousand kilometers away. So the emperor too would be a telepath!
As soon as he thought it, Baver knew it was so. The emperor’s expression hadn’t changed, but the eyes had. It was as if he’d looked into them. In Tibetan, the emperor snapped an order, and both guards gripped Baver’s arms. He gave another. Corporal Nogai took both pistol and radio from Baver’s pockets and handed them to the emperor.
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“What is this?” the emperor asked, holding up the pistol.
“A weapon. Be careful with it. See the hole in the end? When the right button is pushed and the right lever squeezed, a deadly piece of metal flies out, swifter than the speed of sound. It can kill from a little distance or close up.”
The emperor’s eyes studied it, then turned to Baver. “Why didn’t you use it when my soldiers pursued you?”
Baver hadn’t even thought of it. “It would not have driven them off,” he said, “and they would have killed me then. Besides, that’s my last mag . . .” He groped for an appropriate Mongol word and didn’t find what he needed. “It is mostly used up,” he finished.
Songtsan Gampo pursed his lips and nodded, then held up the radio. “And this?”
“It is used to speak with others at a distance. Even a long distance. But it’s broken. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. My friends would have come for me long before I got to your country.”
The emperor’s eyes seemed to Baver near to drawing his brains out of his eye sockets. “There is something else,” the man said.
Baver shook his head. “There was. I just thought of it. My—” He frowned. “It’s a small machine that stores things that happen, pictures and sounds of things, when it’s pointed at them. For example, if I had it here and pointed it at you while you talked, it would store the event to be looked at again later. Looked at and listened to. I have many things stored, in little cubes like square jewels.”
The emperor’s eyes hadn’t left Baver while he’d spoken. “And you could show them to me?”
“Barely big enough to see. To enjoy them, you need a—a thing to look with. My people have them on our world and on our ship.”
The eyes had left Baver. The emperor frowned, his lips pursed. “And this—thing. It is in your saddlebags?”
The thought struck Baver then that the soldiers might
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have brought his saddlebags. Surely would have. Somehow he’d assumed they were still back with whatever was left of his horse.
The emperor smiled slightly and shook his head, then turned the radio over in his hands, frowning. “A weapon which is almost used up, and a thing which is broken. They do not seem like much.” He handed the radio to the interpreter with a few words in their language, and the man returned it to Baver. “We will look into the matter of the box which stores the past in it,” he said. Then asked, “Just how far away is this homeland of yours?”