Wildeblood's Empire. Brian Stableford
if these things were all that needed to be said, as if they were enough. A collective false modesty.
I moved slowly through the stone forest, swinging the light back and forth. Even after I knew the pattern and sensed something of the idea embodied in it, I looked for something like a mausoleum—something extra special. I didn’t find it.
When I heard something moving to my left I spun on my heel, feeling a sudden surge of adrenalin thrusting up within me like an internal fist. I hadn’t realized how keyed-up I’d become. All my fears had lain subconsciously, but nevertheless active. Walking in a cemetery can’t help but stir the deep-seated anxieties within us. They are not, in themselves, fear of ghosts or ghouls—these are merely the ideas that an imagination may attach to them to make them comprehensible. They are more basic, perhaps to do with our innate psychological relationship with death.
In any case, when the light picked out his white face a lance of fear, a genuine shudder, passed through me.
It wasn’t a very pretty face, but in daylight it would have seemed merely ugly, not disturbing at all. The eyes were deep-set, the mouth thick-lipped. The nose was large—not bulbous, but pointed, seeming to project unnaturally far from its root in the turbinal bones.
He was tall—somewhat taller than I, and powerfully built. He didn’t look like a musician, although that had been his ostensible role when I’d seen him earlier in the day, in the town.
A wandering minstrel? He certainly qualified on the grounds of thread and patches...his clothes were worn and untidy. He probably did a lot of traveling. He was a musician, but also a carrier of information—news, rumor, person-to-person messages. In all probability he would be a mender, too, a man of considerable general practical knowledge. And a thief. But his role would be a necessary one in a widely-dispersed colony like this one, where there was no efficient communicative network—and might never be if James Wildeblood’s priorities continued to be served. His role, too, would be the perfect one to cloak a rebel—if not the leader of the underground, then its lifeblood.... Not just a thief, but a king of thieves...the other hegemony...the anti-aristocracy.
“Your name’s Alexander?” He said. His voice was sharp, pitched higher than one might expect of such a big man. But I’d heard him sing high and low earlier in the day.
“Who were you expecting?” I said dryly. “The Scarlet Pimpernel?” I let the sarcasm smother my untimely nervousness.
He didn’t laugh. He didn’t even get the joke.
“The appointed place,” he said, “is this way.”
He turned away. I followed. I didn’t see that it mattered much. We’d found one another. But he, apparently, was a stickler for the script. In the true melodramatic tradition he’d invited me to meet him at James Wildeblood’s grave, and nearby obviously wasn’t good enough. He took me into the oldest part of the cemetery, where the grass between the graves grew a little higher, and the weeds upon them a little wilder.
The most important gravestone of them all wasn’t particularly massive. There was no mausoleum, no vault. There wasn’t even anything special in the inscription. The covert assumption was that people didn’t need reminding who and what this man had been. No birth date was given—Earth dates didn’t count here. The date of his death was 33. I could deduce from that that he’d been seventy-odd when he finally dropped dead, but from the point of view of his descendants only the years he’d spent on their world were to be remembered.
“He took the place that became available in the natural course of events,” said the big man. “Between a shoemaker and a fisherman. He expected to be admired for that. The humility of the omnipotent.”
“He could afford it,” I said.
“But someday,” said the other, “he’ll be forgotten. And then there’ll be nothing here to sort him out from all the rest. In time, he can be made to vanish.”
I doubted it. I doubted it very much. He’d contributed too much just to the naming of everything here. The “James” might decay and die from memory in a thousand years, but not the “Wildeblood.” I doubted whether it could ever lose its meaning entirely. But I hadn’t come to argue.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I don’t use my name,” he said. “Names help people to remember. I let people remember me by what I am, what I do. That way I can be confused with a dozen other men.”
I thought it undiplomatic to point out to him that the other dozen were unlikely to have such remarkable and memorable features. Cyrano de Bergerac, as I remembered it, had been quick to take offense if anyone suggested that his nose was anything out of the ordinary. There was no point in taking chances.
“Okay,” I said. “You’re nameless. What do you want?”
“To speak to you.”
“I guessed that much,” I replied, with some impatience. “You’d hardly make an appointment to meet me in a graveyard at dead of night unless you had something to say—something which couldn’t be said while Elkanah’s flapping ears were working nineteen to the dozen. I’m cold. I don’t want to play games. Say what you have to say.”
“I have to be careful,” he told me.
And that was fair enough. He had indeed. He’d already exposed himself. He had no way of knowing how we stood relative to Philip Wildeblood and his ancien régime. He didn’t want me turning him in, and he didn’t want to give away more than was strictly necessary in case I did—or in case our meeting was subsequently to become known. He had a vested interest in playing the mystery man, and in his place I wouldn’t have trusted me as far as I could throw a gravestone, either. He was putting himself at some risk. James Wildeblood’s code of laws didn’t have any death penalties, but it embodied some very strenuous ways of working off debts to society. Not pleasant ones, either.
“We thought that it was about time we made contact,” he said. “I came down from Skerry some days ago. I’ve asked questions in the town. You landed thirty days ago?”
“Thirty-two,” I corrected him.
“And you’ve been...inspecting the colony.”
“You could put it that way. We came to help—to find out what problems the colony has faced in adapting to Poseidon and to help solve any that looked dangerous. We’ve been looking at the crops in the field, the health of the people—all areas of endeavor. Philip has co-operated fully...even to the extent of providing very efficient guides.”
The last comment was ironic. Our guides were also our keepers. They were with us at all times. We were followed everywhere. Philip was co-operating all right, but he was also watching our every move like a hawk. In all probability, if we hadn’t been such good, innocent outworlders this last month the vigilance might not have relaxed sufficiently for me to slip away that night.
The big man didn’t understand my reference to “Poseidon”, but he didn’t query it.
“You want to help,” he said.
“That’s right,” I affirmed.
“And the people? You find them healthy?”
I had to answer that one cautiously. “Their physical condition isn’t quite what we’d find on Earth,” I said. “There are certain physiological anomalies, but they’re consistent within the population. We expect to find slight changes, adaptations to new conditions. Often we don’t understand just how and why the balance changes, but it always does. All in all, though, there seems to be no significant deficiency or maladjustment in the population.”
“Suppose I told you that the people are not healthy?” he said.
I shrugged. I didn’t know what he was getting at. Was there a considerable sector of the population that was being hidden from us? It seemed unlikely.
“Show me evidence,” I said.
“And