The Science Fiction Anthology. Fritz Leiber
sat down.
She didn’t recline again. Her dress went opaque, but her voice grew silken once more. “Listen, Clarey, I don’t want you to think we’re cheating you out of anything we promised. Even though you stayed only five years, you’re going to have it all. You’ll have U-E status—”
“What do I want that for?”
“Doesn’t it mean anything to you any more, Clarey? It used to mean a lot, though you denied it even to yourself.”
“Did it?” He forced his thoughts back through time. “I suppose it did. But I’ve changed. You know, those five years on Damorlan seem like—”
“Like a lifetime,” she finished. “Couldn’t we dispense with the clichés?”
“On Damorlan the things I said were fresh and interesting. On Damorlan I was somebody pretty special. I’d rather be a big second-hand fish in a small primitive puddle. Isn’t there some way—”
“No way at all, Clarey! The puddle’s drying up. We’ve got a nice aquarium ready for you. Why not dive in gracefully?”
“It was my puddle,” he said. “I belonged.”
She closed her eyes and sank back into the chair which arched to meet the arch of her body. Lying down, she didn’t look nearly as tall. “All right, let’s give the whole opera one final run-through. Nobody cared for you on Earth; on Damorlan your friends liked you; your wife loved you. On Earth you never felt welcome and/or appreciated; on Damorlan you felt both welcome and appreciated. On Earth—”
He was stung out of his apathy. “That’s right! I’m not saying I’m unique, only that I fitted—”
“How about trying to look at it from another point of view? Did it ever occur to you that, if the Damorlanti accepted you, so might your own people, if you approached them in the same way? Did you ever try to make friends on Earth?”
“But on Earth I shouldn’t have to. They were my own people.”
“Aha!” she cried gleefully.
“I mean—well, General Spano said it would be wrong to stoop to hypocrisy to win the friendship of my own people; that, if I did, their friendship wouldn’t be worth anything. You can’t buy friendship.”
“You bought your ulerin. Does it play any the worse because you paid for it? Does it mean any the less to you?”
“What you’re getting at,” he said cautiously, “is that that’s the way to make friends? By being a hypocrite?”
“Was it a sham with the Damorlanti?”
He had to stop for a moment before he could bring out an answer. “It started out as a sham—but I really got to like them afterward. Then it was real.”
“So then you weren’t a hypocrite, Clarey.” Her voice grew more resonant. “Open yourself to people, show them that you want to be friends. Basically, everybody’s shy and timid inside.”
“Like you?” he said, casting an ironical glance at her dress.
“That’s still the outside,” she smiled, making no move to adjust it. “Listen to me, Clarey, and don’t go off on sidetracks: The people of Earth are your own people. Your loyalties have always been with them.”
She had almost had him convinced, but this he couldn’t swallow. “If my loyalties had been with Earth, I would have sent back reports of the trouble. But I didn’t. I tried to stop it from happening. There just wasn’t anything I could do.”
“The deep-probe never lies, Clarey. You didn’t really try to stop it.” She paused, and then went on deliberately: “Because you could have stopped it, you know quite easily.”
“There was nothing I could have done,” he stated. “Nothing.”
“Remember the first time the staff ship came? Just before you left for Barshwat, the woman told you she suspected you were an Earthman. You were afraid for her. Do you remember that?”
He nodded. Yes, he remembered how terrified he had been then, how relieved afterward, thinking everything was going to be all right. Lucky he hadn’t realized the truth, or he wouldn’t have had those extra years of happiness.
Han went on remorselessly: “And you thought if only something would happen to you en route, she would be safe. We might guess why it had happened, but we couldn’t know for sure. We’d have had to start all over again.”
He couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t think. She spaced each word carefully, sweetly. “You were quite right. Because you were the only man on Earth, Clarey, who had the particular physical requirements and the particular kind of mental instability that we needed for the job. You just said you weren’t unique, Clarey. You were too modest; you are. If you’d killed yourself then, your death would have served a purpose; you would have died a hero. Kill yourself now and you die a coward.”
“But at least I’d be dead. I wouldn’t have to live with a coward for the rest of my life.”
“You’re not a coward, Clarey,” she said. “You wouldn’t admit it, but you are and always have been a patriot. To you, Earth came first. It’s as simple as that.”
She had deep-probed his mind. She must know his true feelings. There was no gainsaying that. He could know only his surface thoughts; she knew what lay behind and beneath. And, he reminded himself, at the end the Damorlanti were actually turning on him.
“Try to think of the whole thing as a course in charm that you’ve passed with flying colors,” she said.
“It seems rather an expensive way of making me charming,” he couldn’t help saying, with the last struggle of something that was dying in him, something alien that perhaps should never have been there in the first place.
“Whole civilizations have been sacrificed for nothing at all. This one will not be sacrificed, only quarantined. But its contribution could be of cosmic magnitude.”
“Now what are you going to try to sell me?” he asked drearily. “Are you saying that the essence of the Damorlant civilization is going to live on in me, that I carry its heritage inside myself, and so I have a tremendous responsibility to the Damorlanti on my shoulders?”
She laughed. “You’re really getting sharp, Clarey. If you stayed in the service, you could be one of our best operatives. But you’re not going to stay in the service. Yours is a higher destiny. Here, catch!”
She tossed him something that glittered as it arched through the air.
It was a U-E identcube, made out in his name. He had only seen them at a distance, and now he was holding one warm and gleaming in his hand, with his name and his face in it. His face ... and yet not his face.
“That’s what you’re going to look like when the plastosurgeons get through,” she explained. “They’ll pigment your eyes and skin and hair, and they may be able to add a few inches to your height. Though I think you actually have grown a little. Something about the air, or, more likely, the food.”
“Embelsira thought I was handsome the way I was. Embelsira....” But Embelsira was light-years away. Embelsira was part of a fading dream—and he was awakening now to reality.
“Look at the cube. Look at your status symbol.”
He looked at it, and he kept on looking at it. He couldn’t tear his eyes away. He was hypnotized by the golden glitter of it, the golden meaning of it. “Musician,” he said aloud. “Musician....” A dream word, a magic word. He hadn’t thought of it for years, but this he didn’t have to reach back for. Once touched on, it surged over him, complete with its memories.
But she had made it meaningless, too. He managed to tear a laugh out of his throat. “Spano said I’d be able to buy the Musicians’