War Games. Brian Stableford
shirt, indicating that it held the message which had summoned him, but he did not complete the gesture.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, switching to the language of the clanless, which was the most convenient of the three tongues they had in common. The formalities were complete now, the ground for their meeting secured.
“The outer city’s rife with rumors of a gathering of the kresh tribes. Is that what Yerema wants to talk about?”
“Partly,” replied the girl. “There was an attempt to assassinate the king this noonday—by a kresh warrior.”
Remy let the surprise show in his face, and was silent for a few moments, digesting the information. He could not pursue the matter further now—Yerema would explain everything in due course. He laid the matter aside, and returned to the language of the clans in order to say to Valla, “You look beautiful.”
She smiled, in the way of her species, more with her eyes than with her mouth. The light, silvery fur that formed a mask around her eyes was silky-smooth, well-combed and groomed. She was wearing a light scent that was only just perceptible to his sense of smell, and was dressed in the kind of white robe that was conventional summer wear for all the upper-class veich in Ziarat, male and female alike. It was, of course, quite spotless—its cleanliness was the chief symbol of her status. She did not have the same air of assurance in wearing the costume that a Calvar girl would have had; as a member of a warrior clan she was habituated to more practical attire.
Remy glanced at the table. There was cold meat, salted and sliced very thin, and hard bread, likewise sliced thin. There was dry wine, sitting in a bowl of ice that had only just begun to melt, and fruit that was also chilled.
“Do you put ice on the table for your siocon visitors?” he asked. “Or would they be concerned about the fact that your refrigerators run on electricity?”
“The Calvars supply ice to the palace every day,” she said. “Ice is only solid water. A wise man simply uses it—he doesn’t bother to ask about the means by which it became solid in the late months of summer.”
His gaze wandered then to the window, which was unglazed but veiled by fine, blue-tinted muslin which somehow kept out the pervasive smell of the night-blooming flowers.
“Summer’s ending, then?” he said. “I’ve been here nearly fifteen years, and still I haven’t accustomed myself to the pattern of the seasons.”
“You can’t tell by looking at the calendar,” she said. “The signs are in the scents of the noonday and the night-dark. The veich are better at detecting such changes than humans. We are nearer in kind to the sioconi. But you have the compensation of being able to operate more comfortably in the noonday.”
“The fact that humans see better by day only balances out the fact that the veich and the sioconi see better by night,” he replied lightly. “If we have any compensation for the inadequacy of our sense of smell, it can only be the greater sensitivity of our sense of touch. You have your nose—I have my fingertips.”
She studied the tips of her fingers, which were thinner than those of a human, with a harder tegument and narrower nails. “Yes,” she said, “I suppose you’re right.”
“But it’s all a matter of degree,” added Remy. “There are humans who can discern scents as well as some veich, and veich as dexterous as many humans. It’s unrealistic to exaggerate the differences between us. We come from common stock—or so it’s said.”
“Do you believe that?” asked Valla.
“That we come from common stock? It seems so—though I wouldn’t profess to any passionate faith in the seeding theories. Insofar as we can trace our evolutionary path with any degree of accuracy, we all seem to have descended from small lemuroid creatures almost identical in kind. Ultimately, we have all come to adopt similar life-styles, though our intermediate ancestors may have had different dietary preferences and habits. Your genetic material is chemically no different from mine. It is conceivable that life everywhere follows the same pattern of chemical and physical evolution, but it seems highly unlikely compared with the thesis that life throughout the known cosmos has a common point of origin. Even if it isn’t literally true, there is still a sense in which you and I and every living cell on this world share a common heritage. We’re the products of our nucleic acids, and that common identity remains in the chemical sense whether our particular double helices can trace their ancestry back through billions of billions of chemical generations to the same molecule or not. Why do you ask?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she replied.
Remy looked at her for a few moments in puzzlement. It was not the kind of question that she had ever put to him before. As a member of a fighting clan she was by no means given to the contemplation of that kind of question. But then, clan Syroleth was by no means an ordinary warrior clan, in that it no longer had any theoretical existence and had—not counting the hundreds of clanless veich who still pledged allegiance to Yerema—only two remaining members.
Perhaps, he thought, what lay behind her question was her memory of the war. The humans and the veich had been at war now for six hundred years—since the twenty-second century, in terms of Earth’s calendar. Its beginnings had been forgotten and there seemed no prospect of an end. Yet here, in the city of Ziarat, in the continent of Azreon, on the world called Haidra, there was a space where the war no longer existed, where the veich were citizens rather than invaders, and where humans fought alongside them instead of against them. It was an anomalous situation, in terms of history...but perhaps not in terms of evolution, if there really had been seeders, and if all the lemuroid races were cousins beneath the skin. Remy didn’t think that way himself—he saw nothing in the least unnatural in cousins trying hard to exterminate one another’s bloodlines—but he could see how the question might take on the appearance of a genuine puzzle.
He was glad when the door opened and Yerema appeared through the curtains.
The father of clan Syroleth was an old man in veich terms. The color of his mask had faded to pure whiteness, and he no longer seemed as tall as he had when Remy first met him. Then he had seemed almost as tall as the human; now Remy was conscious of having to look down in order to meet his eyes. He was still strong, though, and very active. Though he wore a white robe identical to that worn by his daughter, he wore it like a fighting man, as though it was strange and ill-fitting.
Remy stood, and the two men matched palms, then touched their fingers to bowed foreheads.
“Thank you for coming so quickly,” said Yerema in the language of the clans.
“I am grateful to be received in your home,” murmured Remy, hoping that he had the inflection correct. The language of the clans was not so much a language in its own right as a set of social devices which emphasized the superiority of the clansmen over their clanless subjects, maintaining social distance very effectively. There was no way that Remy could ever master the subtleties and nuances of the tongue, but the fact that he was permitted to pretend testified to the special status he had with respect to Yerema and clan Syroleth, and he was conscientious in his attempts to gain assurance in its ways. Only thus could he expect that the Calvars would perpetuate the respect which they now gave him because of his relationship with Yerema.
They sat down at the table now and ate, exchanging only conventional remarks, entirely in the language of the clans. The ritual had always seemed to Remy to be tedious, but he appreciated its importance.
He ate lightly, and drank even more lightly. He would eat again later, at his own house, and had come to Yerema’s house only to talk. The message he had received was, by veir standards, practically a peremptory summons, and implied that there was a matter of considerable difficulty and urgency to be discussed. He let only twelve minutes pass before he signaled that he was replete. Patience was the cardinal virtue in the veir world view, but he saw no need to adopt it for himself. That fetish more than any other was responsible for the fact that the veich had lost half a hundred worlds in the last generation—including Haidra—and were now losing a war which they had once seemed virtually certain to win.
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