B404 Glory Road Sec4

Someone was shaking my shoulder. “Wake up!”

“Le’me lone!”

“You’ve got to wake up. Boss, please wake up.”

“Yes, my Hero–please!”

I opened my eyes, smiled at her, then tried to look around. Kee-ripes, what a shambles! In the middle of it, close to me, was a black glass pillar, thick and about five feet high. On top was the Egg. “Is that it?”

“Yep!” agreed Rufo. “That’s it! He looked battered but gay.

“Yes, my Hero champion,” Star confirmed, “that is the true Egg of the Phoenix. I have tested.”

“Uh–” I looked around. “Then where’s old Soul-Eater?”

“You killed it. Before we got here. You still had sword in hand and the Egg tucked tightly under your left arm. We had much trouble getting them loose so that I could work on you.” I looked down my front, saw what she meant, and looked away. Red just isn’t my color. To take my mind off surgery I said to Rufo, “What took you so long?”

Star answered, “I thought we would never find you!”

“How did you find me?”

Rufo said, “Boss, we couldn’t exactly lose you. We simply followed your trail of blood–even when it dead-ended into blank walls. She is stubborn.”

“Uh . . . see any dead men?”

“Three or four. Strangers, no business of ours. Constructs, most likely. We didn’t dally.” He added,

“And we won’t dally getting out, either, once you’re patched up enough to walk. Time is short.”

I flexed my right knee, cautiously. It still hurt where I had been pinked on the kneecap, but what Star had done was taking the soreness out. “My legs are all right. I’ll be able to walk as soon as Star is through. But”–I frowned–“I don’t relish going through that rat tunnel again. Rats give me the willies.”

“What rats, Boss? In which tunnel?”

So I told him.

Star made no comment. Just went on plastering me and sticking on dressings. Rufo said, “Boss, you did get down on your knees and crawl–in a passage just like all the others. I couldn’t see any sense to it but you had proved that you knew what you were doing, so we didn’t argue, we did it. When you told us to wait while you scouted, we did that, too–until we had waited a long time and She decided that we had better try to find you.”

I let it drop.

We left almost at once, going out the “front” way and had no trouble, no illusions, no traps, nothing but the fact that the “true path” was long and tedious. Rufo and I stayed alert, same formation, with Star in the middle carrying the Egg.

Neither Star nor Rufo knew whether we were still likely to be attacked, nor could we have held off

anything stronger than a Cub Scout pack. Only Rufo could bend a bow and I could no longer wield a sword. However, the single necessity was to give Star time to destroy the Egg rather than let it be captured. “But that’s nothing to worry about,” Rufo assured me. “About like being at ground-zero with an A-weapon. You’ll never notice it.”

Once we were outside it was a longish hike to the Grotto Hills and the other Gate. We lunched as we hiked–I was terribly hungry–and shared Rufo’s brandy and Stars water without too much water. I felt pretty good by the time we reached the cave of this Gate; I didn’t even mind sky that wasn’t sky but some sort of roof, nor the odd shifts in gravitation.

A diagram or “pentacle” was already in this cave. Star had only to freshen it, then we waited a bit–that had been the rush, to get there before that “Gate” could be opened; it wouldn’t be available for weeks or perhaps months thereafter–much too long for any human to live in Karth-Hokesh.

We were in position a few minutes early. I was dressed like the Warlord of Mars–just me and sword belt and sword. We all lightened ship to the limit as Star was tired and pulling live things through would be strain enough. Star wanted to save my pet longbow but I vetoed it. She did insist that I keep the Lady Vivamus and I didn’t argue very hard; I didn’t want ever to be separated from my sword again. She touched it and told me that it was not dead metal, but now part of me.

Rufo wore only his unpretty pink skin, plus dressings; his attitude was that a sword was a sword and he had better ones at home. Star was, for professional reasons, wearing no more.

“How long?” asked Rufo, as we joined hands.

“Count down is minus two minutes,” she answered. The clock in Star’s head is as accurate as my bump of direction. She never used a watch.

“You’ve told him?” said Rufo.

“No.”

Rufo said, “Haven’t you any shame? Don’t you think you’ve conned him long enough?” He spoke with surprising roughness and I was about to tell him that he must not speak to her that way. But Star cut him off.

“QUIET!” She began to chant. Then–“Now!”

Suddenly it was a different cave. “Where are we?” I asked. I felt heavier.

“On Nevia’s planet,” Rufo answered. “Other side of the Eternal Peaks–and I’ve got a good mind to get off and see Jocko.”

“Do it,” Star said angrily. “You talk too much.”

“Only if my pal Oscar comes along. Want to, old comrade? I can get us there, take about a week. No dragons. They’ll be glad to see you–especially Muri.”

“You leave Muri out of this!” Star was actually shrill.

“Can’t take it, huh?” he said sourly. “Younger woman and all that.”

“You know that’s not it!”

“Oh, how very much it is!” he retorted. “And how long do you think you can get away with it? It’s not fair, it never was fair. It–”

“Silence! Count down right now!” We joined hands again and whambo! we were in another place.

This was still another cave with one side partly open to the outdoors; the air was very thin and bitterly cold and snow had sifted in. The diagram was let into rock in raw gold. “Where is this?” I wanted to know.

“On your planet,” Star answered. “A place called Tibet.”

“And you could change trains here,” Rufo added, “if She weren’t so stubborn. Or you could walk out–although it’s a long, tough walk; I did it once.” I wasn’t tempted. The last I had heard, Tibet was in the hands of unfriendly peace-lovers. “Will we be here long?” I asked. “This place needs central heating.” I wanted to hear anything but more argument. Star was my beloved and I couldn’t stand by and hear anyone be rude to her–but Rufo was my blood brother by much lost blood; I owed my life to him several times over.

“Not long,” answered Star. She looked drawn and tired. “But time enough to get this straightened out,” added Rufo, “so that you can make up your own mind and not be carried around like a cat in a sack. She should have told you long since. She–”

“Positions!” snapped Star. “Count down coming up. Rufo, if you don’t shut up, I’ll leave you here and let you walk out again–in deep snow barefooted to your chin.”

“Go ahead,” he said. “Threats make me as stubborn as you are. Which is surprising. Oscar, She is–” “SILENCE!”

“–Empress of the Twenty Universes–“

We were in a large octagonal room, with lavishly beautiful silvery walls.
“–and my grandmother,” Rufo finished.

Not ‘Empress,’ ” Star protested. “That’s a silly word for it.”

“Near enough.” “And as for the other, that’s my misfortune, not my fault.” Star jumped to her feet, no longer looking tired, and put one arm around my waist as I got up, while she held the Egg of the Phoenix with the other.

“Oh, darling I’m so happy! We made it! Welcome home, my Hero!”

“Where?” I was sluggy–too many time zones, too many ideas, too fast.

“Home. My home. Your home now–if you’ll have it. Our home.”

“Uh, I see . . . my Empress.” She stomped her foot. “Don’t call me that!”

“The proper form of address,” said Rufo, “is ‘Your Wisdom.’ Isn’t it, Your Wisdom?”

“Oh, Rufo, shut up. Go fetch clothes for us.”

He shook his head. “War’s over and I just got paid off. Fetch ’em yourself. Granny.”

“Rufo, you’re impossible.”

“Sore at me, Granny?”

“I will be if you don’t stop calling me ‘Granny.’ ” Suddenly she handed the Egg to me, put her arms around Rufo and kissed him. “No, Granny’s not sore at you,” she said softly. “You always were a naughty child and I’ll never quite forget the time you put oysters in my bed. But I guess you came by it honestly–from your grandmother.” She kissed him again and mussed his fringe of white hair. “Granny loves you. Granny always will. Next to Oscar, I think you are about perfect–aside from being an unbearable, untruthful, spoiled, disobedient, disrespectful brat.”

“That’s better,” he said. “Come to think of it, I feel the same way about you. What do you want to wear?”

“Mmm . . . get out a lot of things. It’s been so long since I had a decent wardrobe.” She turned back to me. “What would you like to wear, my Hero?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Whatever you think is appropriate–Your Wisdom.”

“Oh, darling, please don’t call me that. Not ever.” She seemed suddenly about to cry.

“All right. What shall I call you?”

“Star is the name you gave me. If you must call me something else, you could call me your ‘princess.’ I’m not a princess–and I’m not an ’empress’ either; that’s a poor translation. But I like being ‘your princess’–the way you say it. Or it can be ‘lively wench’ or any of lots of things you’ve been calling me.” She looked up at me very soberly. “Just like before. Forever.”

“I’ll try . . . my princess.”

“My Hero.”

“But there seems to be a lot I don’t know.”

She shifted from English to Nevian. “Milord husband, I wished to tell all. I sighed to tell you. And milord will be told everything. But I held mortal fear that milord, if told too soon, would refuse to come with me. Not to the Black Tower, but to here. Our home.”

“Perhaps you chanced wisely,” I answered in the same language. “But I am here, milady wife–my princess. So tell me. I wish it.”

She shifted back to English. “I’ll talk, I’ll talk. But it will take time. Darling, will you hold your horses just a bit longer? Having been patient with me–so very patient, my love! –for so long?”

“Okay,” I agreed. “I’ll string along. But, look, I don’t know the streets in this neighborhood, I’ll need some hints. Remember the mistake I made with old Jocko just from not knowing local customs.”

“Yes, dear, I will. But don’t worry, customs are simple here. Primitive societies are always more complex than civilized ones–and this one isn’t primitive.” Rufo dumped then a great heap of clothing at her feet. She turned away, a hand still on my arm, put a finger to her mouth with a very intent, almost worried look. “Now let me see. What shall I wear?”

“Complex” is a relative matter; I’ll sketch only the outlines.

Center is the capital planet of the Twenty Universes. But Star was not “Empress” and it is not an empire.

I’ll go on calling her “Star” as hundreds of names were hers and I’ll call it an “empire” because no other word is close, and I’ll refer to “emperors” and “empresses”–and to the Empress, my wife.

Nobody knows how many universes there are. Theory places no limit: any and all possibilities in unlimited number of combinations of “natural” laws, each sheaf appropriate to its own universe. But this is just theory and Occam’s Razor is much too dull. All that is known in Twenty Universes is that twenty have been discovered, that each has its own laws, and that most of them have planets, or sometimes “places,” where human beings live. I won’t try to say what lives elsewhere.

The Twenty Universes include many real empires. Our Galaxy in our universe has its stellar empires–yet so huge is our Galaxy that our human race may never meet another, save through the Gates that link the universes. Some planets have no known Gates. Earth has many and that is its single importance; otherwise it rates as a backward slum.

Seven thousand years ago a notion was born for coping with political problems too big to handle. It was modest at first: How could a planet be run without ruining it? This planet’s people included expert cyberneticists but otherwise were hardly farther along than we are; they were still burning the barn to get
the rats and catching their thumbs in machinery. These experimenters picked an outstanding ruler and tried to help him.

Nobody knew why this bloke was so successful but he was and that was enough; they weren’t hipped on theory. They gave him cybernetic help, taping for him all crises in their history, all known details, what was done, and the outcomes of each, all organized so that he could consult it almost as you consult your memory.

It worked. In time he was supervising the whole planet–Center it was, with another name then. He didn’t rule it, he just untangled hard cases.

They taped also everything this first “Emperor” did, good and bad, for guidance of his successor.

The Egg of the Phoenix is a cybernetic record of the experiences of two hundred and three “emperors” and “empresses,” most of whom “ruled” all the known universes. Like a foldbox, it is bigger inside than out. In use, it is more the size of the Great Pyramid.

Phoenix legends abound throughout the Universes: the creature that dies but is immortal, rising ever young from its own ashes. The Egg is such a wonder, for it is far more than a taped library now; it is a print, right down to their unique personalities, of all experience of all that line from His Wisdom IX through Her Wisdom CCIV, Mrs. Oscar Gordon.

The office is not hereditary. Star’s ancestors include His Wisdom I and most of the other wisdoms–but millions of others have as much “royal” blood. Her grandson Rufo was not picked although he shares all her ancestors. Or perhaps he turned it down. I never asked, it would have reminded him of a time one of his uncles did something obscene and improbable. Nor is it a question one asks.

Once tapped, a candidate’s education includes everything from how to cook tripe to highest mathematics–including all forms of personal combat for it was realized millennia ago that, no matter how well he was guarded, the victim would wear better if he himself could fight like an angry buzz saw. I stumbled on this through asking my beloved an awkward question.

I was still trying to get used to the fact that I had married, a grandmother, whose grandson looked older than I did and was even older than he looked. The people of Center live longer than we do anyway and both Star and Rufo had received “Long-Life” treatment. This takes getting used to. I asked Star, “How long do you ‘wisdoms’ live?”

“Not too long,” she answered almost harshly. “Usually we are assassinated.”

(My big mouth–)

A candidate’s training includes travel in many worlds–not all planets-places inhabited by human beings; nobody lives that long. But many. After a candidate completes all this and if selected as heir, postgraduate work begins: the Egg itself. The heir has imprinted in him (her) the memories, the very personalities, of past emperors. He (She) becomes an integration of them. Star-Plus. A supernova. Her Wisdom.

The living personality is dominant but all that mob is there, too. Without using the Egg, Star could recall experiences that happened to people dead many centuries. With the Egg–herself hooked into the cybernet–she had seven thousand years of sharp, just-yesterday memories.

Star admitted to me that she had hesitated ten years before accepting the nomination. She hadn’t wanted to be all those people; she had wanted to go on being herself, living as she pleased. But the methods used to pick candidates (I don’t know them, they are lodged in the Egg) seem almost infallible; only three have ever refused.

When Star became Empress she had barely started the second half of her training, having had imprinted in her only seven of her predecessors. Imprinting does not take long but the victim needs recovery time between prints–for she gets every damned thing that ever happened to him, bad and good: the time he was cruel to a pet as a child and his recalled shame of it in his mature years, the loss of his virginity, the unbearably tragic time that he goofed a really serious one–all of it.

“I must experience their mistakes,” Star told me. “Mistakes are the only certain way to learn.”

So the whole weary structure is based on subjecting one person to all the miserable errors of seven thousand years.

Mercifully the Egg doesn’t have to be used often. Most of the time Star could be herself, no more bothered by imprinted memories than you are over that nasty remark in second grade. Most problems Star could solve shooting from the hip–no recourse to the Black Room and a full hookup.

For the one thing that stood out as this empirical way of running an empire grew up was that the answer to most problems was: Don’t do anything.

Always King Log, never King Stork–“Live and let live.” “Let well enough alone.” “Time is the best physician.” “Let sleeping dogs lie.” “Leave them alone and they’ll come home, wagging their tails behind them.”

Even positive edicts of the Imperium were usually negative in form: Thou Shalt Not Blow Up Thy Neighbors’ Planet. (Blow your own if you wish.) Hands off the guardians of the Gates. Don’t demand justice, you too will be judged.

Above all, don’t put serious problems to a popular vote. Oh, there is no rule against local democracy, just in imperial matters. Old Rufo–excuse me; Doctor Rufo, a most distinguished comparative culturologist (with a low taste for slumming)–Rufo told me that every human race tries every political form and that democracy is used in. many primitive societies . . . but he didn’t know of any civilized planet using it, as Vox Populi, Vox Dei translates as: “My God! How did we get in this mess!”

But Rufo claimed to enjoy democracy–any time he felt depressed he sampled Washington, and the antics of the French Parliament were second only to the antics of French women.

I asked him how advanced societies ran things.

His brow wrinkled. “Mostly they don’t.”

That described the Empress of Twenty Universes: Mostly she didn’t.

But sometimes she did. She might say: “This mess will clear up if you will take that troublemaker there–What’s your name? You with the goatee–out and shoot him. Do it now.” (I was present. They did it now. He was head of the delegation which had brought the problem to her–some fuss between intergalactic trading empires in the VIIth Universe–and his chief deputy pinned his arms and his own delegates dragged him outside and killed him. Star went on drinking coffee. It’s better coffee than we get back home and I was so upset that I poured myself a cup.)

An Emperor has no power. Yet, if Star decided that a certain planet should be removed, people would get busy and there would be a nova in that sky. Star has never done this but it has been done in the past. Not often–His Wisdom will search his soul (and the Egg) a long time before decreeing anything so final even when his hypertrophied horse sense tells him that there is no other solution.

The Emperor is sole source of Imperial law, sole judge, sole executive–and does very little and has no way to enforce his rulings. What he or she does have is enormous prestige from a system that has worked for seven millennia. This non-system holds together by having no togetherness, no uniformity,

never seeking perfection, no Utopias–just answers good enough to get by, with lots of looseness and room for many ways and attitudes.

Local affairs are local. Infanticide? –they’re your babies, your planet. PTAs, movie censorship, disaster relief–the Empire is ponderously unhelpful.

The Crisis of the Egg started long before I was born. His Wisdom CCIII was assassinated and the Egg stolen at the same time. Some baddies wanted power–and the Egg, by its unique resources, has latent in it key to such power as Genghis Khan never dreamed.

Why should anybody want power? I can’t understand it. But some do, and they did.

So Star came to office hall-trained, faced by the greatest crisis the Empire had ever suffered, and cut off from her storehouse of Wisdom.

But not helpless. Imprinted in her was the experience of seven hypersensible men and she had all the cyber-computer system save that unique part known as the Egg. First she had to find out what had been done with the Egg. It wasn’t safe to mount an attack on the planet of the baddies; it might destroy the Egg.

Available were ways to make a man talk if one didn’t mind using him up. Star didn’t mind. I don’t mean anything so crude as rack and tongs. This was more like peeling an onion, and they peeled several.

Karth-Hokesh is so deadly that it was named for the only explorers to visit it and come back alive. (We were in a “garden subdivision,” the rest is much worse.) The baddies made no attempt to stay there; they just cached the Egg and set guards and booby traps around it and on the routes to it.

I asked Rufo, “What use was the Egg there?”

“None,” he agreed. “But they soon learned that it was no use anywhere–without Her. They needed either its staff of cyberneticists . . . or they needed Her Wisdom. They couldn’t open the Egg. She is the only one who can do that unassisted. So they baited a trap for Her. Capture Her Wisdom, or kill Her–capture by preference, kill Her if need be and then try for key people here at Center. But they didn’t dare risk the second while She was alive.”

Star started a search to determine the best chance of recovering the Egg. Invade Karth-Hokesh? The machines said, “Hell, no!” I would say no, too. How do you mount an invasion into a place where a man not only can’t eat or drink anything local but can’t breathe the air more than a few hours? When a massive assault will destroy what you are after? When your beachheads are two limited Gates?

The computers kept coming up with a silly answer, no matter how the question was framed.

Me.

A “Hero,” that is–a man with a strong back, a weak mind, and a high regard for his own skin. Plus other traits. A raid by a thus-and-so man, if aided by Star herself, might succeed. Rufo was added by a hunch Star had (hunches of Their Wisdoms being equal to strokes of genius) and the machines confirmed this. “I was drafted,” said Rufo. “So I refused. But I never have had any sense where She is concerned, damn it; She spoiled me when I was a kid.”

There followed years of search for the specified man. (Me, again–I’ll never know why.) Meanwhile brave men were feeling out the situation and, eventually, mapping the Tower. Star herself reconnoitered, and got acquainted in Nevia, too.

(Is Nevia part of the “Empire?” It is and it isn’t. Nevia’s planet has the only Gates to Karth-Hokesh other than one from the planet of the baddies; that is its importance to the Empire–and the Empire isn’t important to Nevia at all.)

This “Hero” was most likely to be found on a barbaric planet such as Earth. Star checked, and turned down, endless candidates winnowed from many rough peoples before her nose told her that I might do.

I asked Rufo what chance the machines gave us.

“What makes you say that?” he demanded.

“Well, I know a little of cybernetics.”

“You think you do. Still–There was a prediction. Thirteen percent success, seventeen percent no game–and seventy percent death for us all.”

I whistled. “You should whistle!” he said indignantly. “You didn’t know any more than a cavalry horse knows. You had nothing to be scared of.”

“I was scared.”

“You didn’t have time to be. It was planned so. Our one chance lay in reckless speed and utter surprise. But I knew. Son, when you told us to wait, there in the Tower, and disappeared and didn’t come back, why, I was so scared I caught up on my regretting.”

Once set up, the raid happened as I told it. Or pretty much so, although I may have seen what my mind could accept rather than exactly what happened. I mean “magic.” How many times have savages concluded “magic” when a “civilized” man came along with something the savage couldn’t understand? How often is some tag, such as “television,” accepted by cultural savages (who nevertheless twist dials) when “magic” would be the honest word?

Still, Star never insisted on that word. She accepted it when I insisted on it.

But I would be disappointed if everything I saw turned out to be something Western Electric will build once Bell Labs works the bugs out. There ought to be some magic, somewhere, just for flavor.

Oh, yes, putting me to sleep for the first transition was to keep from scaring a savage silly. Nor did the “black biers” cross over–that was posthypnotic suggestion, by an expert: my wife.

Did I say what happened to the baddies? Nothing. Their Gates were destroyed; they are isolated until they develop star travel. Good enough, by the sloppy standards of the Empire. Their Wisdoms never carry grudges.

Center is a lovely planet, Earth-like but lacking Earth’s faults. It has been retailored over millennia to make it a Never-Never Land. Desert and snow and jungle were saved enough for pleasure; floods and other disasters were engineered out of existence.

It is uncrowded but has a large population for its size–that of Mars but with oceans. Surface gravity is almost that of Earth. (A higher constant, I understand.) About half the population is transient, as its great beauty and unique cultural assets–focus of twenty universes–make it a tourist’s paradise. Everything is done for the comfort of visitors with an all-out thoroughness like that of the Swiss but with technology not known on Earth.

Star and I had residences a dozen places around the planet (and endless others in other universes); they ranged from palaces to a tiny fishing lodge where Star did her own cooking. Mostly we lived in apartments to an artificial mountain that housed the Egg and its staff; adjacent were halls, conference rooms, secretariat, etc. If Star felt like working she wanted such things at hand. But a system ambassador or visiting emperor of a hundred systems had as much chance of being invited into our private home as a hobo at the back door of a Beverly Hills mansion has of being invited into the drawing room.

But if Star happened to like him, she might fetch him home for a midnight snack. She did that once–a funny little leprechaun with four arms and a habit of tap-dancing his gestures. But she did no official entertaining and felt no obligation to attend social affairs. She did not hold press conferences, make speeches, receive delegations of Girl Scouts, lay cornerstones, proclaim special “Days,” make ceremonial appearances, sign papers, deny rumors, nor any of the time-gnawing things that sovereigns and VIPs do on Earth.

She consulted individuals, often summoning them from other universes, and she had at her disposal all the news from everywhere, organized in a system that had been developed over centuries. It was through this system that she decided what problems to consider. One chronic complaint was that the Imperium ignored “vital questions”–and so it did. Her Wisdom passed judgment only on problems she selected; the bedrock of the system was that most problems solved themselves.

We often went to social events; we both enjoyed parties and, for Her Wisdom and Consort, there was endless choice. There was one negative protocol: Star neither accepted nor regretted invitations, showed up when she pleased and refused to be fussed over. This was a drastic change for capital society as her predecessor had imosed protocol more formal than that of the Vatican.

One hostess complained to me about how dull society had become under the new rules–maybe I could do something?

I did. I looked up Star and told her the remark whereupon we left and joined a drunken artists’ ball–a luau!

Center is such a hash of cultures, races, customs, and styles that it has few rules. The one invariant custom was: Don’t impose your customs on me. People wore what they did at home, or experimented with other styles; any social affair looked like a free-choice costume ball. A guest could show up at a swank party stark naked without causing talk–and some did, a small minority. I don’t mean non-humans or hirsute humans; clothes are not for them. I mean humans who would look at home in New York in American clothes–and others who would attract notice even in l’Ile du Levant because they have no hair at all, not even eyebrows. This is a source of pride to them; it shows their “superiority” to us hairy apes,

they are as proud as a Georgia cracker is of his deficiency in melanin. So they go naked oftener than other human races. I found their appearance startling but one gets used to it.

Star wore clothes outside our home, so I did. Star would never miss a chance to dress up, an endearing weakness that made it possible to forget, at times, her Imperial status. She never dressed twice alike and was ever trying something new–and disappointed if I didn’t notice. Some of her choices would cause heart failure even on a Riviera beach. She believed that a woman’s costume was a failure unless it made men want to tear it off.

One of Star’s most effective outfits was the simplest. Rufo happened to be with us and she got a sudden notion to dress as we had on the Quest of the Egg–and biff, bang, costumes were available, or manufactured to order, as may be; Nevian clothes are most uncommon in Center.

Bows, arrows, and quivers were produced with the same speed and Merry Men were we. It made me feel good to buckle on the Lady Vivamus; she had been hanging untouched on a wall of my study ever since the great black Tower.

Star stood, feet planted wide, fists on hips, head thrown back, eyes bright, and cheeks flushed. “Oh, this is fun! I feel good, I feel young! Darling, promise me, promise me truly, that someday we will again go on an adventure! I get so damn sick of being sensible.”

She spoke English, as the language of Center is ill suited to such ideas. It’s a pidgin language with thousands of years of imports and changes and is uninflected, positional, and flat.

“Suits,” I agreed. “How about it, Rufo? Want to walk that Glory Road?”

“After they pave it.”

“Guff. You’ll come, I know you. Where and when, Star? Never mind ‘where’–just ‘when.’ Skip the party and start right now!”

Suddenly she was not merry. “Darling, you know I can’t. I’m less than a third of the way through my training.”

“I should have busted that Egg when I found it.”

“Don’t be cross, darling. Let’s go to the party and have fun.”

We did. Travel on Center is by apports, artificial “Gates” that require no “magic” (or perhaps still more); one sets destination like punching buttons in an elevator, so there is no traffic problem in cities–nor a thousand other unpleasant things; they don’t let the bones show in their cities. Tonight Star chose to get off short of destination, swagger through a park, and make an entrance. She knows how well tights suit her long legs and solid buttocks; she rolled her hips like a Hindu woman.

Folks, we were a sensation! Swords aren’t worn in Center, save possibly by visitors. Bows and arrows are hen’s teeth, too. We were as conspicuous as a knight in armor on Fifth Avenue.

Star was as happy as a kid playing trick-or-treat. So was I. I felt two axe handles across the shoulders and wanted to hunt dragons.

It was a ball not unlike one on Earth. (According to Rufo, all our races everywhere have the same basic entertainment: get together in mobs to dance, drink, and gossip. He claimed that the stag affair and the hen party are symptoms of a sick culture. I won’t argue.) We swaggered down a grand staircase, music stopped, people stared and gasped–and Star enjoyed being noticed. Musicians got raggedly back to work and guests went back to the negative politeness the Empress usually demanded. But we still got attention. I had thought that the story of the Quest of the Egg was a state secret as I had never heard it mentioned. But, even if known, I still would have expected the details to be known only to us three.

Not so. Everyone knew what those costumes meant, and more. I was at the buffet, sopping up brandy and a Dagwood of my own invention, when I was cornered by Schherazade’s sister, the pretty one. She was of one of the human-but-not-like-us races. She was dressed in rubies the size of your thumb and reasonably opaque cloth. She stood about five-five, barefooted, weighed maybe one twenty and her waist couldn’t have been over fifteen inches, which exaggerated two other measurements that did not need it. She was brunette, with the slantiest eyes I’ve ever seen. She looked like a beautiful cat and looked at me the way a cat looks at a bird.

“Self,” she announced.

“Speak.”

“Sverlani. World–” (Name and code–I had never heard of it.) “Student food designer, mathematicosybaritic.”

“Oscar Gordon. Earth. Soldier.” I omitted the I.D. for Earth; she knew who I was.

“Questions?”

“Ask.”

“Is sword?”

“Is.”

She looked at it and her pupils dilated, “Is-was sword destroy construct guard Egg?” (“Is this sword
now present the direct successor in space-time sequential change, aside from theoretical anomalies involved in between-universe transitions, of the sword used to loll the Never-Born?” The double tense of the verb, present-past, stipulates and brushes aside the concept that identity is a meaningless abstraction–is this the sword you actually used, in the everyday meaning, and don’t kid me, soldier. I’m no child.)

“Was-is,” I agreed. (“I was there and I guarantee that I followed it all the way here, so it still is.”)

She gave a little gasp and her nipples stood up. Around each was painted, or perhaps tattooed, the multi-universal design we call “Wall of Troy”–and so strong was her reaction that Ileum’s ramparts crumbled again.

“Touch?” she said pleadingly.

“Touch.”

“Touch twice?” (“Please, may I handle it enough to get the feel of it? Pretty please, with sugar on it! I ask too much and it is your right to refuse, but I guarantee not to hurt it”–they get mileage out of words, but the flavor is in the manner.)

I didn’t want to, not the Lady Vivamus. But I’m a sucker for pretty girls. “Touch . . . twice,” I grudged. I drew it and handed it to her guard foremost, alert to grab it before she put somebody’s eye out or stabbed herself in the foot.

She accepted it gingerly, eyes and mouth big, grasping it by the guard instead of the grip. I had to show her. Her hand was far too small for it; her hands and feet, like her waist, were ultra slender.

She spotted the inscription. “Means?”

Dum vivimus, vivamus doesn’t translate well, not because they can’t understand the idea but because it’s water to a fish. How else would one live? But I tried. “Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.”

She nodded thoughtfully, then poked the air, wrist bent and elbow out. I couldn’t stand it, so I took it from her, dropped slowly into a foil guard, lunged in high line, recovered–a move so graceful that big hairy men look good in it. It’s why ballerinas study fencing.

I saluted and gave it back to her, then adjusted her right elbow and wrist and left arm–this is why ballerinas get half rates, it’s fun for the swordmaster. She lunged, almost pinking a guest in his starboard
ham.

I took it back, wiped the blade, sheathed it. We had gathered a solid gallery. I picked up my Dagwood from the buffet, but she wasn’t done with me. “Self jump sword?”

I choked. If she understood the meaning–or if I did–I was being propositioned the most gently I had ever been, in Center. Usually it’s blunt. But surely Star hadn’t spread the details of our wedding ceremony? Rufo? I hadn’t told him but Star might have.

When I didn’t answer, she made herself clear and did not keep her voice down. “Self unvirgin unmother unpregnant fertile.”

I explained as politely as the language permits, which isn’t very, that I was dated up. She dropped the subject, looked at the Dagwood. “Bite touch taste?”

That was another matter; I passed it over. She took a hearty bite, chewed thoughtfully, looked pleased. “Xenic. Primitive. Robust. Strong dissonance. Good art.” Then she drifted away, leaving me wondering. Inside of ten minutes the question was put to me again. I received more propositions than at any other party in Center and I’m sure the sword accounted for the bull market. To be sure, propositions came my way at every social event; I was Her Wisdom’s consort. I could have been an orangutan and offers still would have been made. Some hirsutes looked like orangutans and were socially acceptable but I could have smelled like one. And behaved worse. The truth was that many ladies were curious about what the Empress took to bed, and the fact that I was a savage, or at best a barbarian, made them more curious. There wasn’t any taboo against laying it on the line and quite a few did.

But I was still on my honeymoon. Anyhow, if I had accepted all those offers, I would have gone up with the window shade. But I enjoyed hearing them once I quit cringing at the “Soda? –or ginger ale?” bluntness; it’s good for anybody’s morale to be asked.

As we were undressing that night I said, “Have fun, pretty things?” Star yawned and grinned. “I certainly did. And so did you, old Eagle Scout. Why didn’t you bring that kitten home?”

“What kitten?”

“You know what kitten. The one you were teaching to fence.”

“Meeow!”

“No, no, dear. You should send for her. I heard her state her profession, and there is a strong

connection between good cooking and good–”

“Woman, you talk too much!”

She switched from English to Nevian. “Yes, milord husband. No sound I shall utter that does not break unbidden from love-anguished lips.”

“Milady wife beloved . . . sprite elemental of the Singing Waters–”

Nevian is more useful than the jargon they talk on Center.

Center is a fun place and a Wisdom’s consort has a cushy time. After our first visit to Star’s fishing lodge, I mentioned how nice it would be to go back someday and tickle a few trout at that lovely place, the Gate where we had entered Nevia. “I wish it were on Center.”

“It shall be.”

“Star. You would move it? I know that some Gates, commercial ones, can handle real mass, but, even so–”

“No, no. But just as good. Let me see. It will take a day or so to have it stereoed and measured and air-typed and so forth. Water flow, those things. But meanwhile–There’s nothing much beyond this wall, just a power plant and such. Say a door here and the place where we broiled the fish a hundred yards beyond. Be finished in a week, or we’ll have a new architect. Suits?”

“Star, you’ll do no such thing.”

“Why not, darling?”

“Tear up the whole house to give me a trout stream? Fantastic!”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, it is. Anyhow, sweet, the idea is not to move that stream here, but to go there. A vacation.”

She sighed. “How I would love a vacation.”

“You took an imprint today. Your voice is different.”

“It wears off, Oscar.”

“Star, you’re taking them too fast. You’re wearing yourself out.”

“Perhaps. But I must be the judge of that, as you know.”

“As I don’t know! You can judge the whole goddamn creation–as you do and I know it–but I, your husband, must judge whether you are overworking–and stop it.”

“Darling, darling!”

There were too many incidents like that.

I was not jealous of her. That ghost of my savage past had been laid in Nevia, I was not haunted by it
again.

Nor is Center a place such ghost is likely to walk. Center has as many marriage customs as it has cultures–thousands. They cancel out. Some humans there are monogamous by instinct, as swans are said to be. So it can’t be classed as “virtue.” As courage is bravery in the face of fear, virtue is right conduct in the face of temptation. If there is no temptation, there can be no virtue. But these inflexible monogamists were no hazard. If someone, through ignorance, propositioned one of these chaste ladies, he risked neither a slap nor a knife; she would turn him down and go right on talking. Nor would it matter if her husband overheard; jealousy is never learned in a race automatically monogamous. Not that I ever tested it; to me they looked–and smelled–like spoiled bread dough. Where there is no temptation there is no virtue. But I had chances to show “virtue.” That kitten with the wasp waist tempted me–and I learned that she was of a culture in which females may not marry until they prove themselves pregnable, as in parts of the South Seas and certain places in Europe; she was breaking no taboos of her tribe. I was tempted more by another gal, a sweetie with a lovely figure, a delightful sense of humor, and one of the best dancers in any universe. She didn’t write it on the sidewalk; she just let me know that she was neither too busy nor uninterested, using that argot with skillful indirection.

This was refreshing. Downright “American.” I did inquire (elsewhere) into the customs of her tribe and found that, while they were rigid as to marriage, they were permissive otherwise. I would never do as a son-in-law but the window was open even though the door was locked.

So I chickened. I gave myself a soul-searching and admitted curiosity as morbid as that of any female who propositioned me simply because I was Star’s consort. Sweet little Zhai-ee-van was one of those who didn’t wear clothes. She grew them on the spot; from tip of her nose to her tiny toes she was covered in soft, sleek, gray fur, remarkably like chinchilla. Gorgeous!

I didn’t have the heart, she was too nice a kid.

But this temptation I admitted to Star–and Star implied gently that I must have muscles between my ears; Zhai-ee-van was an outstanding artiste even among her own people, who were esteemed as most talented devotees of Eros.

I stayed chicken. A romp with a kid that sweet should involve love, some at least, and it wasn’t love, just that beautiful fur–along with a fear that a romp with Zhai-ee-van could turn into love and she couldn’t marry me even if Star turned me loose.

Or didn’t turn me loose–Center has no rule against polygamy. Some religions there have rules for and against this and that out this mixture of cultures has endless religions and they cancel each other the way conflicting customs do. Culturologists state a “law” of religious freedom which they say is invariant: Religious freedom in a cultural complex is inversely proportional to the strength of the strongest religion. This is supposed to be one case of a general invariant, that all freedoms arise from cultural conflicts because a custom which is not opposed by its negative is mandatory and always regarded as a “law of nature.”

Rufo didn’t agree; he said his colleagues stated as equations things which are not mensurate and not definable–holes in their heads! –and that freedom was never more than a happy accident because the common jerk, all human races, hates and fears all freedom, not only for his neighbors but for himself, and stamps it out whenever possible.

Back to Topic “A”–Centrists use every sort of marriage contract. Or none. They practice domestic partnership, coition, propagation, friendship, and love–but not necessarily all at once nor with the same person. Contracts could be as complex as a corporate merger, specifying duration, purposes, duties, responsibilities, number and sex of children, genetic selection methods, whether host mothers were to be hired, conditions for canceling and options for extension–anything but “marital fidelity.” It is axiomatic there that this is unenforceable and therefore not contractual.

But marital fidelity is commoner there than it is on Earth; it simply is not legislated. They have an
ancient proverb reading Women and Cats. It means: “Women and Cats do as they please, and men and dogs might as well relax to it.” It has its opposite: Men and Weather which is blunter and at least as old, since the weather has long been under control.

The usual contract is no contract; he moves his clothes into her home and stays–until she dumps them outside the door. This form is highly thought of because of its stability: A woman who “tosses his shoes” has a tough time finding another man brave enough to risk her temper.

My “contract” with Star was no more than that if contracts, laws, and customs applied to the Empress, which they did not and could not. But that was not the source of my increasing unease.

Believe me, I was not jealous.

But I was increasingly fretted by those dead men crowding her mind.

One evening as we were dressing for some whing-ding she snapped at me. I had been prattling about how I had spent my day, being tutored in mathematics, and no doubt had been as entertaining as a child reporting a day in kindergarten. But I was enthusiastic, a new world was opening to me–and Star was always patient.

But she snapped at me in a baritone voice.

I stopped cold. “You were imprinted today!”

I could feel her shift gears. “Oh, forgive me, darling! No, I’m not myself, I’m His Wisdom CLXXXII.”

I did a fast sum. “That’s fourteen you’ve taken since the Quest–and you took only seven in all the years before that. What the hell are you trying to do? Burn yourself out? Become an idiot?”

She started to scorch me. Then she answered gently, “No, I am not risking anything of the sort.”

“That isn’t what I near.”

“What you may have heard has no weight, Oscar, as no one else can judge–either my capacity, or what it means to accept an imprint. Unless you have been talking to my heir?”

“No.” I knew she had selected him and I assumed that he had taken a print or two–a standard precaution against assassination. But I hadn’t met him, didn’t want to, and didn’t know who he was.

“Then forget what you’ve been told. It is meaningless.” She sighed. “But, darling, if you don’t mind, I won’t go tonight; best I go to bed and sleep. Old Stinky CLXXXII is the nastiest person I’ve ever been–a brilliant success in a critical age, you must read about him. But inside he was a bad-tempered beast who hated the very people he helped. He’s fresh in me now, I must keep him chained.”

“Okay, let’s go to bed.”

Star shook her head. ” ‘Sleep,’ I said. I’ll use autosuggestion and by morning you won’t know he’s been here. You go to the party. Find an adventure and forget that you have a difficult wife.”

I went but I was too bad-tempered even to consider “adventures.”

Old Nasty wasn’t the worst. I can hold my own in a row–and Star, Amazon though she is, is not big enough to handle me. If she got rough, she would at last get that spanking. Nor would I fear interference from guards; that had been settled from scratch: When we two were alone together, we were private. Any third person changed that, nor did Star have privacy alone, even in her bath. Whether her guards were male or female I don’t know, nor would she have cared. Guards were never in sight. So our spats were private and perhaps did us both good, as temporary relief.

But “the Saint” was harder to take than Old Nasty. He was His Wisdom CXLI and was so goddam noble and spiritual and holier-than-thou that I went fishing for three days. Star herself was robust and full of ginger and joy in life; this bloke didn’t drink, smoke, chew gum, nor utter an unkind word. You could almost see Star’s halo while she was under his influence.

Worse, he had renounced sex when he consecrated himself to the Universes and this had a shocking effect on Star; sweet submissiveness wasn’t her style. So I went fishing.

I’ve one good thing to say for the Saint. Star says that he was the most unsuccessful emperor in all that
long line, with genius for doing the wrong thing from pious motives, so she learned more from him than
any other; he made every mistake in the book. He was assassinated by disgusted customers after only fifteen years, which isn’t long enough to louse up anything as ponderous as a multi-universe empire.

His Wisdom CXXXVII was a Her–and Star was absent two days. When she came home she explained. “Had to, dear. I’ve always thought I was a rowdy bitch–but she shocked even me.”

“How?”

“I ain’t talkin’, Guv’nor. I gave myself intensive treatment to bury her where you’ll never meet her.”

“I’m curious.”

“I know you are and that’s why I drove a stake through her heart–rough job, she’s my direct ancestor. But I was afraid you might like her better than you do me. That unspeakable trull!”

I’m still curious.

Most of them weren’t bad Joes. But our marriage would have been smoother if I had never known they were there. It’s easier to have a wife who is a touch batty than one who is several platoons–most of them men. To be aware of their ghostly presence even when Star’s own personality was in charge did my libido no good. But I must concede that Star knew the male viewpoint better than any other woman in any history. She didn’t have to guess what would please a man; she knew more about it than I did, from “experience”–and was explosively uninhibited about sharing her unique knowledge.

I shouldn’t complain.

But I did, I blamed her for being those other people. She endured my unjust complaints better than I endured what I felt to be the injustice in my situation vis-a-vis all that mob of ghosts.

Those ghosts weren’t the worst fly in the soup.

I did not have a job. I don’t mean nine-to-five and cut the grass on Saturdays and get drunk at the country club that night; I mean I didn’t have any purpose. Ever look at a male lion in a zoo? Fresh meat on time, females supplied, no hunters to worry about–He’s got it made, hasn’t he?

Then why does he look bored!

I didn’t know I had a problem, at first. I had a beautiful and loving wife; I was so wealthy that there was no way to count it; I lived in a most luxurious home in a city more lovely than any on Earth; everybody I met was nice to me; and best second only to my wonderful wife, I had endless chance to “go to college” in a marvelous and un-Earthly sense, with no need to chase a pigskin. Nor a sheepskin. I need never stop and had any conceivable help. I mean, suppose Albert Einstein drops everything to help with your algebra, pal, or Rand Corporation and General Electric team up to devise visual aids to make something easier for you. This is luxury greater than riches.

I soon found that I could not drink the ocean even held to my lips. Knowledge on Earth alone has grown so out of hand that no man can grasp it–so guess what the bulk is in Twenty Universes, each with its laws, its histories, and Star alone knows how many civilizations.

In a candy factory, employees are urged to eat all they want. They soon stop.

I never stopped entirely; knowledge has more variety. But my studies lacked purpose. The Secret Name of God is no more to be found in twenty universes than in one–and all other subjects are the same size unless you have a natural bent.

I had no bent, I was a dilettante–and I realized it when I saw that my tutors were bored with me. So I let most of them go, stuck with math and multi-universe history, quit trying to know it all.

I thought about going into business. But to enjoy business you must be a businessman at heart (I’m

not), or you have to need dough. I had dough; all I could do was lose it–or, if I won, I would never know whether word had gone out (from any government anywhere): Don’t buck the Empress’s consort, we will make good your losses.

Same with poker. I introduced the game and it caught on fast–and I found that I could no longer play it. Poker must be serious or it’s nothing–out when you own an ocean of money, adding or losing a few drops mean nothing.

I should explain–Her Wisdom’s “civil list” may not have been as large as the expenditures of many big spenders in Center; the place is rich. But it was as big as Star wanted it to be, a bottomless well of wealth. I don’t know how many worlds split the tab, but call it twenty thousand with three billion people each–it was more than that.

A penny each from 60,000,000,000,000 people is six hundred billion dollars. The figures mean nothing except to show that spreading it so thin that nobody could feel it still meant more money than I could dent. Star’s non-government of her un-Empire was an expense, I suppose–but her personal expenses, and mine, no matter how lavish, were irrelevant.

King Midas lost interest in his piggy bank. So did I.

Oh, I spent money. (I never touched any–unnecessary.) Our “flat” (I won’t call it a palace)–our home had a gymnasium more imaginative than any university gym; I had a salle d’armes added and did a lot of fencing, almost every day with all sorts of weapons. I ordered foils made to match the Lady Vivamus and the best swordmasters in several worlds took turns helping me. I had a range added, too, and had my bow picked up from that Gate cave in Karth-Hokesh, and trained in archery and in other aimed weapons. Oh, I spent money as I pleased.

But it wasn’t much fun.

I was sitting in my study one day, doing not a damn thing but brood, while I played with a bowlful of jewels.

I had fiddled with jewelry design a while. It had interested me in high school; I had worked for a jeweler one summer. I can sketch and was fascinated by lovely stones. He lent me books, I got others from the library–and once he made up one of my designs.

I had a Calling.

But jewelers are not draft-deferred so I dropped it–until Center.

You see, there was no way for me to give Star a present unless I made it. So I did. I made costume jewelry of real stones, studying it (expert help, as usual), sending for a lavish selection of stones, drawing designs, sending stones and drawings out to be made up.

I knew that Star enjoyed jeweled costumes; I knew she liked them naughty–not in the sense of crowding the taboos, there weren’t any–but provocative, gilding the lily, accentuating what hardly needs it.

The things I designed would have seemed at home in a French revue–but of real gems. Sapphires and gold suited Star’s blond beauty and I used them. But she could wear any color and I used other gems, too.

Star was delighted with my first try and wore it that evening. I was proud of it; I had swiped the design from memory of a costume worn by a showgirl in a Frankfurt night club my first night out of the Army–a G-string deal, transparent long skirt open from the hip on one side and with sequins on it (I used sapphires), a thing that wasn’t a bra but an emphasizer, completely jeweled, and a doohickey in her hair to match. High golden sandals with sapphire heels.

Star was warmly grateful for others that followed.

But I learned something. I’m not a jewelry designer. I saw no hope of matching the professionals who catered to the wealthy in Center. I soon realized that Star wore my designs because they were my gift, just as mama pins up the kindergarten drawings that sonny brings home. So I quit.

This bowl of gems had been kicking around my study for weeks–fire opals, sardonyx, carnelians, diamonds and turquoise and rubies, moonstones and sapphires and garnets, peridot, emeralds, chrysolite–many with no English names. I ran them through my fingers, watching the many-colored fire falls, and felt sorry for myself. I wondered how much these pretty marbles would cost on Earth? I couldn’t guess within a million dollars.

I didn’t bother to lock them up at night. And I was the bloke who had quit college for lack of tuition and hamburgers.

I pushed them aside and went to my window–there because I had told Star that I didn’t like not having a window in my study. That was on arrival and I didn’t find out for months how much had been torn down to please me; I had thought they had just cut through a wall.

It was a beautiful view, more a park than a city, studded but not cluttered with lovely buildings. It was hard to realize that it was a city bigger than Tokyo; its “bones” didn’t show and its people worked even half a planet away.

There was a murmur soft as bees, like the muted roar one can never escape in New York–but softer, just enough to make me realize that I was surrounded by people, each with his job, his purpose, his function.

My function? Consort.

Gigolo!

Star, without realizing it, had introduced prostitution into a world that had never known it. An innocent world, where man and woman bedded together only for the reason that they both wanted to.

A prince consort is not a prostitute. He has his work and it is often tedious, representing his sovereign mate, laying cornerstones, making speeches. Besides that, he has his duty as royal stud to ensure that the line does not die.

I had none of these. Not even the duty of entertaining Star–hell, within ten miles of me were millions of men who would jump at the chance.

The night before had been bad. It started badly and went on into one of those weary pillow conferences which married couples sometimes have, and aren’t as healthy as a bang-up row. We had had one, as domestic as any working stiff worried over bills and the boss.

Star had done something she had never done before: brought work home. Five men, concerned with some intergalactic hassle–I never knew what as the discussion had been going on for hours and they sometimes spoke a language not known to me.

They ignored me, I was furniture. On Center introductions are rare; if you want to talk to someone, you say “Self,” and wait. If he doesn’t answer, walk off. If he does, exchange identities. None of them did, and I was damned if I would start it. As strangers in my home it was up to them. But they didn’t act as if it was my home.

I sat there, the Invisible Man, getting madder and madder.

They went on arguing, while Star listened. Presently she summoned maids and they started undressing her, brushing her hair. Center is not America, I had no reason to feel shocked. What she was doing was being rude to them, treating them as furniture (she hadn’t missed how they treated me).

One said pettishly, “Your Wisdom, I do wish you would listen as you agreed to.” (I’ve expanded the argot.)

Star said coldly, “I am judge of my conduct. No one else is capable.”

True. She could judge her conduct, they could not. Nor, I realized bitterly, could I. I had been feeling angry at her (even though I knew it didn’t matter) for calling in her maids and starting to ready for bed with these lunks present–and I had intended to tell her not to let it happen again. I resolved not to raise that issue.

Shortly Star chopped them off. “He’s right. You’re wrong. Settle it that way. Get out.”

But I did intend to sneak it in by objecting to her bringing “tradespeople” home.

Star beat me to the punch. The instant we were alone she said, “My love, forgive me. I agreed to hear this silly mix-up and it dragged on and on, then I thought I could finish it quickly if I got them out of chairs, made them stand up here, and made clear that I was bored. I never thought they would wrangle another hour before I could squeeze out the real issue. And I knew that, if I put it over till tomorrow, they would stretch it into hours. But the problem was important, I couldn’t drop it.” She sighed. “That ridiculous man–Yet such people scramble to high places. I considered having him fool-killed. Instead I must let him correct his error, or the situation will break out anew.”

I couldn’t even hint that she had ruled the way she had out of annoyance; the man she had chewed out was the one in whose favor she had ruled. So I said, “Let’s go to bed, you’re tired”–and then didn’t have sense enough to refrain from judging her myself.

We went to bed.

Presently she said, “Oscar, you are displeased.”

“I didn’t say so.”

“I feel it. Nor is it Just tonight and those tedious clowns. You have been withdrawing yourself, unhappy.” She waited.

“It’s nothing.”

“Oscar, anything which troubles you can never be ‘nothing’ to me. Although I may not realize it until I know what it is.”

“Well–I feel so damn useless!”

She put her soft, strong hand on my chest. “To me you are not useless. Why do you feel useless to yourself?”

“Well–look at this bed!” It was a bed the like of which Americans never dream; it could do everything but kiss you good night–and, like the city, it was beautiful, its bones did not show. “This sack, at home, would cost more–if they could build it–than the best house my mother ever lived in.”

She thought about that. “Would you like to send money to your mother?” She beckoned the bedside communicator. “Is Elmendorf Air Force Base of America address enough?”

(I don’t recall ever telling her where Mother lived.) “No, no!” I gestured at the talker, shutting it off. “I do not want to send her money. Her husband supports her. He won’t take money from me. That’s not the point.”

“Then I don’t see the point as yet. Beds do not matter, it is who is in a bed that counts. My darling, if you don’t like this bed, we can get another. Or sleep on the floor. Beds do not matter.”

“This bed is okay. The only thing wrong is that I didn’t pay for it. You did. This house. My clothes. The food I eat. My–my toys! Every damned thing I have you gave me. Know what I am. Star? A gigolo! Do you Know what a gigolo is? A somewhat-male prostitute.”

One of my wife’s most exasperating habits was, sometimes, to refuse to snap back at me when she knew I was spoiling for a row. She looked at me thoughtfully. “America is a busy place, isn’t it? People work all the time, especially men.”

“Well . . . yes.”

“It isn’t the custom everywhere, even on Earth. A Frenchman isn’t unhappy if he has free time; he orders another cafe au lait and lets the saucers pile up. Nor am I fond of work. Oscar, I ruined our evening from laziness, too anxious to avoid having to redo a weary task tomorrow. I will not make that mistake twice.”

“Star, that doesn’t matter. That’s over with.”

“I know. The first issue is rarely the key. Nor the second. Nor, sometimes, the twenty-second. Oscar, you are not a gigolo.”

“What do you call it? When it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and acts like a duck, I call it a duck. Call it a bunch of roses. It still quacks.”

“No. All this around us–” She waved. “Bed. This beautiful chamber. The food we eat. My clothes and yours. Our lovely pools. The night majordomo on watch against the chance that you or I might demand a
singing bird or a ripe melon. Our captive gardens. All we see or touch or use or fancy–and a thousand times as much in distant places, all these you earned with your own strong hands; they are yours, by right.”

I snorted. “They are,” she insisted. “That was our contract. I promised you great adventure, and greater treasure, and even greater danger. You agreed. You said, ‘Princess, you’ve hired yourself a boy.’ ” She smiled. “Such a big boy. Darling, I think the dangers were greater than you guessed . . . so it has pleased me, until now, that the treasure is greater than you were likely to have guessed. Please don’t be shy about accepting it. You have earned it and more–as much as you are ever willing to accept”

“Uh–Even if you are right, it’s too much. I’m drowning in marshmallows!”

“But, Oscar, you don’t have to take one bit you don’t want. We can live simply. In one room with bed folded into wall if it pleases you.”

“That’s no solution.”

“Perhaps you would like bachelor digs, out in town?”

” ‘Tossing my shoes,’ eh?”

She said levelly, “My husband, if your shoes are ever tossed, you must toss them. I jumped over your

sword. I shall not jump back.” “Take it easy!” I said. “It was your suggestion. If I took it wrong, I’m sorry. I know you don t go back on your word. But you might be regretting it.”

“I am not regretting it. Are you?”

“No, Star, no! But–”

“That’s a long pause for so short a word,” she said gravely. “Will you tell me?”

“Uh . . . that’s just it. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell what, Oscar? There are so many things to tell.”

“Well, a lot of things. What I was getting into. About you being the Empress of the whole works, in particular . . . before you let me jump over the sword with you.”

Her face did not change but tears rolled down her cheeks. “I could answer that you did not ask me–”

“I didn’t know what to ask!”

“That is true. I could assert, truthfully, that had you asked I would have answered. I could protest that

I did not ‘let you’ jump over the sword, that you overruled my protests that it was not necessary to offer

me the honor of marriage by the laws of your people . . . that I was a wench you could tumble at will. I could point out that I am not an empress, not royal, but a working woman whose job does not permit her even the luxury of being noble. All these are true. But I will not hide behind them; I will meet your question.” She slipped into Nevian. “Milord Hero, I feared sorely that if I did not bend to your will, you would leave me!”

“Milady wife, truly did you think that your champion would desert you in your peril?” I went on in English, “Well, that nails it to the barn. You married me because the Egg damned well had to be recovered and Your Wisdom told you that I was necessary to the job–and might bug out if you didn’t. Well, Your Wisdom wasn’t sharp on that point; I don’t bug out. Stupid of me but I’m stubborn.” I started to get out of bed.

“Milord love!” She was dying openly.

“Excuse me. Got to find a pair of shoes. See how far I can throw them.” I was being nasty as only a man can be who has had his pride wounded.

“Please, Oscar, please! Hear me first.”

I heaved a sigh. “Talk ahead.”

She grabbed my hand so hard I would have lost fingers had I tried to pull loose. “Hear me out. My beloved, it was not that at all. I knew that you would not give up our quest until it was finished or we were dead. I knew! Not only had I reports reaching back years before I ever saw you but also we had shared joy and danger and hardship; I knew your mettle. But, had it been needed, I could have bound you with a net of words, persuaded you to agree to betrothal only–until the quest was over. You are a romantic, you would have agreed. But, darling, darling! I wanted to many you . . . bind you to me by your rules, so that”–she stopped to sniff back tears–“so that, when you saw all this, and this, and this, and the things you call ‘your toys,’ you still would stay with me. It was not politics, it was low–love romantic and unreasoned, love for your own sweet self.”

She dropped her face into her hands and I could barely hear her. “But I know so little of love. Love is a butterfly that lights when it listeth, leaves as it chooses; it is never bound with chains. I sinned. I tried to bind you. Unjust I knew it was, cruel to you I now see it to be.” Star looked up with crooked smile. “Even Her Wisdom has no wisdom when it comes to being a woman. But, though silly wench I be, I am not too stubborn to know that I have wronged my beloved when my face is rubbed in it. Go, go, get your sword; I will jump back over it and my champion will be free of his silken cage. Go, milord Hero, while my heart is firm.”

“Go fetch your own sword, wench. That paddling is long overdue.”

Suddenly she grinned, all hoyden. “But, darling, my sword is in Karth-Hokesh. Don’t you remember?”

“You can’t avoid it this time!” I grabbed her. Star is a handful and slippery, with amazing muscles. But I’m bigger and she didn’t fight as hard as she could have. Still I lost skin and picked up bruises before I got her legs pinned and one arm twisted behind her. I gave her a couple of hearty spanks, hard enough to print each finger in pink, then lost interest.

Now tell me, were those words straight from her heart–or was it acting by the smartest woman in twenty universes?

Later, Star said, “I’m glad your chest is not a scratchy rug, like some men, my beautiful.”

“I was a pretty baby, too. How many chests have you checked?”

“A random sample. Darling, have you decided to keep me?”

“A while. On good behavior, you understand.”

“I’d rather be kept on bad behavior. But–while you’re feeling mellow–if you are–I had best tell you

another thing–and take my spanking if I must.”

“You’re too anxious. One a day is maximum, hear me?”

“As you will, sir. Yassuh, Boss man. I’ll have my sword fetched in the morning and you can spank me

with it at your leisure. If you think you can catch me. But I must tell this and get it off my chest.”

“There’s nothing on your chest. Unless you count–”

“Please! You’ve been going to our therapists.”

“Once a week.” The first thing Star had ordered was an examination for me so complete as to make an Army physical seem perfunctory. “The Head Sawbones insists that my wounds aren’t healed but I don’t believe him; I’ve never felt better.”

“He, is stalling, Oscar–by my order. You’re healed, I am not unskilled, I was most careful. But–darling, I did this for selfish reasons and now you must tell me if I have been cruel and unjust to you again. I admit I was sneaky. But my intentions were good. However, I know, as the prime lesson of my profession, that good intentions are the source of more folly than all other causes put together.”

“Star, what are you prattling about? Women are the source of all folly.”

“Yes, dearest. Because they always have good intentions–and can prove it. Men sometimes act from rational self-interest, which is safer. But not often.”

“That’s because half their ancestors are female. Why have I been keeping doctor’s appointments if I don t need them?”

“I didn’t say you don’t need them. But you may not think so. Oscar, you are far advanced with

Long-Life treatments.” She eyed me as if ready to parry or retreat.

“Well, I’ll be damned!”

“You object? At this stage it can be reversed.”

“I hadn’t thought about it.” I knew that Long-Life was available on Center but knew also that it was rigidly restricted. Anybody could have it–just before emigrating to a sparsely settled planet. Permanent residents must grow old and die. This was one matter in which one of Star’s predecessors had interfered in local government. Center, with disease practically conquered, great prosperity, and lodestone of a myriad peoples, had grown too crowded, especially when Long-Life sent skyward the average age of death.

This stern rule had thinned the crowds. Some people took Long-Life early, went through a Gate and took their chances in wilderness. More waited until that first twinge that brings awareness of death, then decided that they weren’t too old for a change. And some sat tight and died when their time came.

I knew that twinge; it had been handed to me by a bolo in a jungle. “I guess I have no objection.”

She sighed with relief. “I didn’t know and should not have slipped it into your coffee. Do I rate a spanking?”

“We’ll add it to the list you already rate and give them to you all at once. Probably cripple you. Star, how long is ‘Long-Life’?”

“That’s hard to answer. Very few who have had it have died in bed. If you live as active a life as I know you will–from your temperament–you are most unlikely to die of old age. Nor of disease.”

“And I never grow old?” It takes getting used to.

“Oh, yes, you can grow old. Worse yet, senility stretches in proportion. If you let it. If those around you allow it. However–Darling, how old do I look? Don’t tell me with your heart, tell me with your eyes. By Earth standards. Be truthful, I know the answer.”

It was ever a joy to look at Star but I tried to look at her freshly, for hints of autumn–outer corners of eyes, her hands, for tiny changes in skin–hell, not even a stretch mark, yet I knew she had a grandchild.

“Star, when I first saw you, I guessed eighteen. You turned around and I upped the ante a little. Now, looking closely and not giving you any breaks–not over twenty-five. And that is because your features seem mature. When you laugh, you’re a teen-ager; when you wheedle, or look awestruck, or suddenly delighted with a puppy or kitten or something, you’re about twelve. From the chin up, I mean; from the chin down you can’t pass for less than eighteen.”

“A buxom eighteen,” she added. “Twenty-five Earth years–by rates of growth on Earth–is right on the mark I was shooting at. The age when a woman stops growing and starts aging. Oscar, your apparent age under Long-Life is a matter of choice. Take my Uncle Joseph–the one who sometimes calls himself ‘Count Cagliostro.’ He set himself at thirty-five, because he says that anything younger is a boy. Rufo prefers to look older. He says it gets him respectful treatment, keeps him out of brawls with lounger men–and still lets him give a younger man a shock if one does pick a fight because, as you know, Rufo’s older age is mostly from chin up.”

“Or the shock he can give younger women,” I suggested.

“With Rufo one never knows. Dearest, I didn’t finish telling you. Part of it is teaching the body to repair itself. Your language lessons here–there hasn’t been a one but what a hypno-therapist was waiting to give your body a lesson through your sleeping mind, after your language lesson. Part of apparent age is cosmetic therapy–Rufo need not be bald–but more is controlled by the mind. When you decide what age you like, they can start imprinting it.”

“I’ll think about it. I don’t want to look too much older than you.”

Star looked delighted. “Thank you, dear! You see how selfish I’ve been.”

“How? I missed that point.”

She put a hand over mine. “I didn’t want you to grow old–and die! –while I stayed young.” I blinked at her. “Gosh, lady, that was selfish of you, wasn’t it? But you could varnish me and keep me in the bedroom. Like your aunt.”

She made a face. “You’re a nasty man. She didn’t varnish them.”

“Star, I haven’t seen any of those keepsake corpses around here.”

She looked surprised. “But that’s on the planet where I was born. This universe, another star. Very pretty place. Didn’t I ever say?”

“Star, my darling, mostly you’ve never said.”

“I’m sorry. Oscar, I don’t want to hand you surprises. Ask me. Tonight. Anything.”

I considered it. One thing I had wondered about, a certain lack. Or perhaps the women of her part of

the race had another rhythm. But I had been stopped by the fact that I had married a grandmother–how old? “Star, are you pregnant?”

“Why, no, dear. Oh! Do you want me to be? You want us to have children?”

I stumbled, trying to explain that I hadn’t been sure it was possible–or maybe she was. Star looked troubled. “I’m going to upset you again. I had best tell it all. Oscar, I was no more brought up to luxury than you were. A pleasant childhood, my people were ranchers. I married young and was a simple mathematics teacher, with a hobby research in conjectural and optional geometries. Magic, I mean. Three children. My husband and I got along well . . . until I was nominated. Not selected, just named for examination and possible training. He knew I was a genetic candidate when he married me–but so many millions are. It didn’t seem important.

“He wanted me to refuse. I almost did. But when I accepted, he–well, he ‘tossed my shoes.’ We do it formally there; he published a notice that I was no longer his wife.”

“He did, eh? Mind if I look him up and break his arms?”

“Dear, dear! That was many years ago and far away; he is long dead. It doesn’t matter.”

“In any case he’s dead. Your three kids–one of them is Rufo’s father? Or mother?”

“Oh, no! That was later.”

“Well?”

Star took a deep breath. “Oscar, I have about fifty children.”

That did it. Too many shocks and I guess I showed it, for Star’s face reflected deep concern. She
rushed through the explanation.

When she was named heir, changes were made in her, surgical, biochemical, and endocrinal. Nothing
as drastic as spaying and to different ends and by techniques more subtle than ours. But the result was

that about two hundred tiny bits of Star–ova alive and latent–were stored near absolute zero.

Some fifty had been quickened, mostly by emperors long dead but “alive” in their stored seed–genetic gambles on getting one or more future emperors. Star had not borne them; an heir’s time is too precious. She had never seen most of them; Rufo’s father was an exception. She didn’t say, but I think Star liked to have a child around to play with and love–until the strenuous first years of her reign and the Quest for the Egg left her no time.

This change had a double purpose: to get some hundreds of star-line children from a single mother, and to leave the mother free. By endocrine control of some sort, Star was left free of Eve’s rhythm but in all ways young–not pills nor hormone injections; this was permanent. She was simply a healthy woman who never had “bad days.” This was not for her convenience but to insure that her judgment as the Great Judge would never be whipsawed by her glands. “This is sensible,” she said seriously. “I can remember there used to be days when I would bite the head off my dearest friend for no reason, then burst into tears. One can’t be judicial in that sort of storm.”

“Uh, did it affect your interest? I mean your desire for–”

She gave me a hearty grin. “What do you think?” She added seriously, “The only thing that affects my libido–changes it for the worse, I mean–are . . . is? –English has the oddest structure–is-are those pesky imprintings. Sometimes up, sometimes down–and you’ll remember one woman whose name we won’t mention who affected me so carnivorously that I didn’t dare come near you until I had exorcised her black soul! A fresh imprint affects my judgment as well, so I never hear a case until I have digested the latest one. I’ll be glad when they’re over!”

“So will I.”

“Not as glad as I will be. But, aside from that, darling, I don t vary much as a female and you know it. Just my usual bawdy self who eats young boys for breakfast and seduces them into jumping over swords.” “How many swords?”

She looked at me sharply. “Since my first husband kicked me out I have not been married until I married you, Mr. Gordon. If that is not what you meant, I don’t think you should hold against me things that happened before you were born. If you want details since then, I’ll satisfy your curiosity. Your morbid curiosity, if I may say so.”

“You want to boast. Wench, I won’t pamper it.”

“I do not want to boast! I’ve little to boast about. The Crisis of the Egg left me almost no time in which to be a woman, damn it! Until Oscar the Rooster came along. Thank you, sir.”

“And keep a civil tongue in your head.”

“Yes, sir. Nice Rooster! But you’ve led us far from our muttons, dear. If you want children–yes, darling! There are about two hundred and thirty eggs left and they belong to me. Not to posterity. Not to the dear people, bless their greedy little hearts. Not to those God-playing genetic manipulators. Me! It’s all I own. All else is ex offico. But these are mine . . . and if you want them, they are yours, my only dear.”

I should have said, “Yes!” and kissed her. What I did say was, “Uh, let’s not rush it.”

Her face fell. “As milord Hero husband pleases.”

“Look, don’t get Nevian and formal. I mean, well, it takes getting used to. Syringes and things, I suppose, and monkeying by technicians. And, while I realize you don’t have time to have a baby yourself–”

I was trying to say that, ever since I got straightened out about the Stork, I had taken for granted the usual setup, and artificial insemination was a dirty trick to play even on a cow–and that this job, subcontracted on both sides, made me think of slots in a Horn & Hardart, or a mail-order suit. But give me time and I would adjust. Just as she had adjusted to those damned imprints-

She gripped my hands. “Darling, you needn’t!”

“Needn’t what?”

“Be monkeyed with by technicians. And I will take time to have your baby. If you don’t mind seeing my body get gross and huge–it does, it does, I remember–then happily I will do it. All will be as with other people so far as you are concerned. No syringes. No technicians. Nothing to offend your pride. Oh, I’ll have to be worked on. But I’m used to being handled like a prize cow; it means no more than having my hair shampooed.”

“Star, you would go through nine months of inconvenience–and maybe die in childbirth–to save me a few moments’ annoyance?”

“I shall not die, Three children, remember? Normal deliveries, no trouble.”

“But, as you pointed out, that was ‘many years ago.’ ”

“No matter.”

“Uh, how many years?” (“How old are you, woman?” The question I never dared ask.)

She looked upset. “Does it matter, Oscar?”

“Uh, I suppose not. You know more about medicine than I do–”

She said slowly, “You were asking how old I am, were you not?”

I didn’t say anything. She waited, then went on, “An old saw from your world says that a woman is as young as she feels. And I feel young and I am young and I have zest for life and I can bear a baby–or many babies–m my own belly. But I know–oh, I know! –that your worry is not just that I am too rich and occupy a position not easy for a husband. Yes, I know that part too well; my first husband rejected me for that. But be was my age. The most cruel and unjust thing I have done is that I knew that my age could matter to you–and I kept still. That was why Rufo was so outraged. After you were asleep that night in the cave of the Forest of Dragons he told me so, in biting words. He said he knew I was not above enticing young boys but he never thought that I would sink so low as to trap one into marriage without first telling him. He’s never had a high opinion of his old granny, he said, but this time–”

“Shut up, Star!”

“Yes, milord.”

“It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference!”–and I said it so flatly that I believed it–and do now. “Rufo doesn’t know what I think. You are younger than tomorrow’s dawn–you always will be. That’s the last I want to hear about it!”

“Yes, milord.”

“And knock that off, too. Just say, ‘Okay, Oscar.’ ”

“Yes, Oscar! Okay!”

“Better. Unless you’re honing for another spanking. And I’m too tired.” I changed the subject. “About this other matter–There’s no reason to stretch your pretty tummy if other ways are at hand. I’m a country jake, that’s all; I’m not used to big city ways. When you suggested that you do it yourself, did you mean that they could put you back together the way you were?”

“No. I would simply be host-mother as well as genetic mother.” She smiled and I knew I was making progress. “But saving a tidy sum of that money you don’t want to spend. Those healthy, sturdy women who have other people’s babies charge high. Four babies, they can retire–ten makes them wealthy.”

“I should think they would charge high! Star, I don’t object to spending money. I’ll concede, if you say so, that I’ve earned more than I spend, by my work as a professional hero. That’s a tough racket, too.”

“You’ve earned it.”

“This citified way of having babies–Can you pick it? Boy, or girl?”

“Of course. Male-giving wigglers swim faster, they can be sorted out. That’s why Wisdoms are usually men–I was an unplanned candidate. You shall have a son, Oscar.”

“Might prefer a girl. I’ve a weakness for little girls.”

“A boy, a girl–or both. Or as many as you want.”

“Star, let me study it. Lots of angles–and I don’t think as well as you do.”

“Pooh!”

“If you don’t think better than I do, the cash customers are getting rooked. Mmm, male seed can be stored as easily as eggs?”

“Much easier.”

“That’s all the answer we need now. I’m not too jumpy about syringes; I’ve stood in enough Army queues. I’ll go to the clinic or whatever it is, then we can settle it slowly. When we decide”–I shrugged–“mail the postcard and when it goes clunk! –we’re parents. Or some such. From there on the technicians and those husky gals can handle it.”

“Yes, milo–Okay, darling!”

All better. Almost her little girl face. Certainly her sixteen-year-old face, with new party dress and boys a shivery, delightful danger. “Star, you said earlier that it was often not the second issue out even the twenty-second that matters.”

“Yes.”

“I know what’s wrong with me. I can tell you–and maybe Her Wisdom knows the answer.”

She blinked. “If you can tell me, sweetheart–Her Wisdom will solve it, even if I have to tear the place down and put it back up differently–from here to the next galaxy–or I’ll go out of the Wisdom business!”

“That sounds more like my Lucky Star. All right, it’s not that I’m a gigolo. I’ve earned my coffee and cakes, at least; the Soul-Eater did damn near eat my soul, he knew its exact shape–he . . . it–it knew things I had long forgotten. It was rough and the pay ought to be high. It’s not your age, dearest. Who cares how old Helen of Troy is? You’re the right age forever–can a man be luckier? I’m not jealous of your position; I wouldn’t want it with chocolate icing. I’m not jealous of the men in your life–the lucky stiffs! Not even now, as long as I don’t stumble over them getting to the bathroom.”

“There are no other men in my life now, milord husband.”

“I had no reason to think so. But there is always next week, and even you can’t have a Sight about

that, my beloved. You’ve taught me that marriage is not a form of death–and you obviously aren’t dead, you lively wench.”

“Perhaps not a Sight,” she admitted. “But a feeling.”

“I won’t bet on it. I’ve read the Kinsey Report.”

“What report?”

“He disproved the Mermaid theory. About married women. Forget it. Hypothetical question: If Jocko visited Center, would you still have the same feeling? We should have to invite him to sleep here.”

“The Doral will never leave Nevia.”

“Don’t blame him, Nevia is wonderful. I said If–If he does, will you offer him ‘roof, table, and bed’?”

“That,” she said firmly, “is your decision, milord.”

“Rephrase it: Will you expect me to humiliate Jocko by not returning his hospitality? Gallant old Jocko, who let us live when he was entitled to kill us? Whose bounty–arrows and many things, including a new medic’s kit–kept us alive and let us win back the Egg?”

“By Nevian customs of roof and table and bed,” she insisted, “the husband decides, milord husband.”

“We aren’t in Nevia and here a wife has a mind of her own. You’re dodging, wench.”

She grinned naughtily. “Does that ‘if’ of yours include Muri? And Letva? They’re his favorites, he

wouldn’t travel without them. And how about little what’s-her-name? –the nymphet?”

“I am aware of it, my Hero,” she said levelly. “All I can say is that I intend that this wench shall never give her Hero a moment’s unease–and my intentions are usually carried out. I am not ‘Her Wisdom’ for nothing.”

“Fair enough. I never thought you would cause me that sort of unease. I was trying to show that the task may not be too difficult. Damn it, we’ve wandered off. Here’s my real problem. I’m not good for anything. I’m worthless.”

“Why, my dearest! You’re good for me.”

“But not for myself. Star, gigolo or not, I can’t be a pet poodle. Not even yours. Look, you’ve got a job. It keeps you busy and it’s important. But me? There is nothing for me to do, nothing at all! –nothing better than designing bad jewelry. You know what I am? A hero by trade, so you told me; you recruited me. Now I’m retired. Do you know anything in all twenty universes more useless than a retired hero?”

She mentioned a couple. I said, “You’re stalling. Anyhow they break up the blankness of the male chest. I’m serious, Star. This is the issue that has made me unfit to live with. Darling, I’m asking you to put your whole mind on it–and all those ghostly helpers. Treat it the way you treat an Imperial problem. Forget I’m your husband. Consider my total situation, all you know about me–and tell me what I can do with hands and head and time that is worth doing. Me, being what I am.”

She held still for long minutes, her face in that professional calm she had worn the times I had audited her work. “You are right,” she said at last. “There is nothing worth your powers on this planet.”

“Then what do I do?”

She said tonelessly, “You must leave.”

“Huh?”

“You think I like the answer, my husband? Do you think I like most answers I must give? But you asked me to consider it professionally. I obeyed. That is the answer. You must leave this planet–and me.”

“So my shoes get tossed anyhow?”

“Be not bitter, milord. That is the answer. I can evade and be womanish only in my private life; I cannot refuse to think if I agree to do so as ‘Her Wisdom.’ You must leave me. But, no, no, no, your shoes are not tossed! You will leave, because you must. Not because I wish it.” Her face stayed calm but tears streamed again. “One cannot ride a cat . . . nor hurry a snail . . . nor teach a snake to fly. Nor make a poodle of a Hero. I knew it, I refused to look at it. You will do what you must do. But your shoes will remain ever by my bed, I am not sending you away!” She blinked back tears. “I cannot lie to you, even by silence. I will not say that no other shoes will rest here . . . if you are gone a long time. I have been lonely. There are no words to say how lonely this job is. When you go . . . I shall be lonelier than ever. But you will find your shoes here when you return.”

“When I return? You have a Sight?”

“No, milord Hero. I have only a feeling . . . that if you live . . . you will return. Perhaps many times. But Heroes do not die in bed. Not even this one.” She blinked and tears stopped and her voice was steady. “Now, milord husband, if it please you, shall we dim the lights and rest?”

We did and she put her head on my shoulder and did not cry. But we did not sleep. After an aching time I said, “Star, do you hear what I hear?”

She raised her head. “I hear nothing.”

“The City. Can’t you hear it? People. Machines. Even thoughts so thick your bones feel it and your ear almost catches it.”

“Yes. I know that sound.”

“Star, do you like it here?”

“No. It was never necessary that I like it.”

“Look, damn it! You said that I would leave. Come with me!”

“Oh, Oscar!”

“What do you owe them? Isn’t recovering the Egg enough? Let them take a new victim. Come walk the Glory Road with me again! There must be work in my line somewhere.”

“There is always work for Heroes.”

“Okay, we set up in business, you and I. Heroing isn’t a bad job. The meals are irregular and the pay uncertain–out it’s never dull. We’ll run ads: ‘Gordon & Gordon, Heroing Done Reasonable. No job too large, no job too small. Dragons exterminated by contract, satisfaction guaranteed or no pay. Free estimates on other work. Questing, maiden-rescuing, golden fleece located night or day?’ ”

I was trying to jolly her but Star doesn’t jolly. She answered in sober earnest. “Oscar, if I am to retire, I should train my heir first. True, no one can order me to do anything–but I have a duty to train my replacement.”

“How long will that take?”

“Not long. Thirty years, about.”

“Thirty years!”

“I could force it to twenty-five, I think.”

I sighed. “Star, do you know how old I am?”

“Yes. Not yet twenty-five. But you will get no older!”

“But right now I’m still that age. That’s all the time there has ever been for me. Twenty-five years as a pet poodle and I won’t be a hero, nor anything. I’ll be out of my silly mind.”

She thought about it. “Yes. That is true.”

She turned over, we made a spoon and pretended to sleep.

Later I felt her shoulders shaking and knew that she was sobbing. “Star?”

She didn’t turn her head. All I heard was a choking voice, “Oh, my dear, my very dear! If I were even a hundred years younger!”

I let the precious, useless gems dribble through my fingers, listlessly pushed them aside. If I were only a hundred years older-

But Star was right. She could not leave her post without relief. Her notion of proper relief, not mine nor anyone else’s. And I couldn’t stay in this upholstered jail much longer without beating my head on the bars.

Yet both of us wanted to stay together.

The real nasty hell of it was that I knew–just as she knew–that each of us would forget. Some, anyhow. Enough so that there would be other shoes, other men, and she would laugh again.

And so would I–She had seen that and had gravely, gently, with subtle consideration for another’s feelings, told me indirectly that I need not feel guilty when next I courted some other girl, in some other land, somewhere.

Then why did I feel like a heel?

How did I get trapped with no way to turn without being forced to choose between hurting my beloved and going clean off my rocker?

I read somewhere about a man who lived on a high mountain, because of asthma, the choking, killing land, while his wife lived on the coast below him, because of heart trouble that could not stand altitude. Sometimes they looked at each other through telescopes.

In the morning there had been no talk of Stars retiring. The unstated quid-pro-quo was that, if she planned to retire, I would hang around (thirty years!) until she did. Her Wisdom had concluded that I could not, and did not speak of it. We had a luxurious breakfast and were cheerful, each with his secret thoughts.

Nor were children mentioned. Oh, I would find that clinic, do what was needed. If she wanted to mix
her star line with my common blood, she could, tomorrow or a hundred years hence. Or smile tenderly
and have it cleaned out with the rest of the trash. None of my people had even been mayor of Podunk
and a plow horse isn’t groomed for the Irish Sweepstakes. If Star put a child together from our genes, it
would be sentiment, a living valentine–a younger poodle she could pet before she let it run free. But
sentiment only, as sticky if not as morbid as that of her aunt with the dead husbands, for the Imperium

could not use my bend sinister.

I looked up at my sword, hanging opposite me. I hadn’t touched it since the party, long past, when Star chose to dress for the Glory Road. I took it down, buckled it on and drew it–felt that surge of liveness and had a sudden vision of a long road and a castle on a hill.

What does a champion owe his lady when the quest is done?

Quit dodging, Gordon! What does a husband owe his wife? This very sword–“Jump Rogue and Princess leap. My wife art thou and mine to keep.” “–for richer, for poorer, for better, for worse . . . to love and to cherish, till death do us part.” That was what I meant by that doggerel and Star had known it and I had known it and knew it now.

When we vowed, it had seemed likely that we would be parted by death that same day. But that didn’t reduce the vow nor the deepness with which I had meant it. I hadn’t jumped the sword to catch a tumble on the grass before I died; I could have had that free. No, I had wanted “–to have and to hold, to love and to cherish, till death do us part”!

Star had kept her vow to the letter. Why did I have itchy feet?

Scratch a hero and find a bum.

And a retired hero was as silly as those out-of-work kings that clutter Europe.

I slammed out of our “flat,” wearing sword and not giving a damn about stares, apported to our therapists, found where I should go, went there, did what was necessary, told the boss biotechnician that Her Wisdom must be told, and jumped down his throat when he asked questions.

Then back to the nearest apport booth and hesitated–I needed companionship the way an Alcoholics-Anonymous needs his hand held. But I had no intimates, just hundreds of acquaintances. It isn’t easy for the Empress’s cosort to have friends.

Rufo it had to be. But in all the months I had been on Center I had never been in Rufo’s home. Center does not practice the barbarous custom of dropping in on people and I had seen Rufo only at the Residence, or on parties; Rufo had never invited me to his home. No, no coldness there; we saw him often, but always he had come to us.

I looked for him in apport listings–no luck. Then as little with see-speak lists. I called the Residence, got the communication officer. He said that “Rufo” was not a surname and tried to brush me off. I said, “Hold it, you overpaid clerk! Switch me off and you’ll be in charge of smoke signals in Timbuktu an hour from now. Now listen. This bloke is elderly, baldheaded, one of his names is ‘Rufo’ I think, and he is a distinguished comparative culturologist. And he is a grandson of Her Wisdom. I think you know who he is and have been dragging your feet from bureaucratic arrogance. You have five minutes. Then I talk to Her Wisdom and ask her, while you pack!”

(“Stop! Danger you! Other old bald Rufo (?) top compculturist. Wisdom egg-sperm-egg. Five-minutes. Liar and/or fool. Wisdom? Catastrophe!”)

In less than five minutes Rufo’s image filled the tank. “Well!” he said. “I wondered who had enough weight to crash my shutoff.”

“Rufo, may I come see you?”

His scalp wrinkled. “Mice in the pantry, son? Your face reminds me of the time my uncle–”

“Please, Rufo!”

“Yes, son,” he said gently. “I’ll send the dancing girls home. Or shall I keep them?”

“I don’t care. How do I find you?”

He told me, I punched his code, added my charge number, and I was there, a thousand miles around the horizon. Rufo’s place was a mansion as lavish as Jocko’s and thousands of years more sophisticated. I gathered an impression that Rufo had the biggest household on Center, all female. I was wrong. But all female servants, visitors, cousins, daughters, made themselves a reception committee–to look at Her Wisdom’s bedmate. Rufo shooed them away and took me to his study. A dancing girl (evidently a secretary) was fussing over papers and tapes. Rufo slapped her fanny out, gave me a comfortable chair, a drink, put cigarettes near me, sat down and said nothing.

Smoking isn’t popular on Center, what they use as tobacco is the reason. I picked up a cigarette.
“Chesterfields! Good God!”

“Have ’em smuggled,” he said. “But they don’t make anything like Sweet Caps anymore. Bridge sweepings and chpped hay.”

I hadn’t smoked in months. But Star had told me that cancer and such I could now forget. So I lit it–and coughed like a Nevian dragon. Vice requires constant practice.

” ‘What news on the Rialto?’ ” Rufo inquired. He glanced at my sword.

“Oh, nothing.” Having interrupted Rufo’s work, I now shied at baring my domestic troubles.

Rufo sat and smoked and waited. I needed to say something and the American cigarette reminded me of an incident, one that had added to my unstable condition. At a party a week earlier, I had met a man thirty-five in appearance, smooth, polite, but with that supercilious air that says: “Your fly is unzipped, old man, but I’m too urbane to mention it.”

But I had been delighted to meet him, he had spoken English!

I had thought that Star, Rufo, and myself were the only ones on Center who spoke English. We often spoke it. Star on my account, Rufo because he liked to practice. He spoke Cockney like a costermonger, Bostonese like Beacon Hill, Aussie like a kangaroo; Rufo knew all English languages.

This chap spoke good General American. “Nebbi is the name, he said, shaking hands where no one shakes hands, “and you’re Gordon, I know. Delighted to meet you.”

“Me, too,” I agreed. “It’s a surprise and a pleasure to hear my own language.”

“Professional knowledge, my dear chap. Comparative culturologist, linguisto-historo-political. You’re American, I know. Let me place it–Deep-South, not born there. Possibly New England. Overlaid with displaced Middle Western, California perhaps. Basic speech, lower-middle class, mixed.”

The smooth oaf was good. Mother and I lived in Boston while my father was away, 1942-45. I’ll never forget those winters; I wore overshoes from November to April. I had lived Deep South, Georgia and Florida, and in California at La Jolla during the Korean unWar and, later, in college. “Lower-middle class”? Mother had not thought so.

“Near enough,” I agreed. “I know one of your colleagues.”

“I know whom you mean, ‘the Mad Scientist.’ Wonderful wacky theories. But tell me: How were things when you left? Especially, how is the United States getting along with its Noble Experiment?”

” ‘Noble Experiment’?” I had to think; Prohibition was gone before I was born. “Oh, that was repealed.”

“Really? I must go back for a field trip. What have you now? A king? I could see that your country was headed that way but I did not expect it so soon.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “I was talking about Prohibition.”

“Oh, that. Symptomatic but not basic. I was speaking of the amusing notion of chatter rule. ‘Democracy.’ A curious delusion–as if adding zeros could produce a sum. But it was tried in your tribal land on a mammoth scale. Before you were born, no doubt. I thought you meant that even the corpse had been swept away.” He smiled. “Then they still have elections and all that?”

“The last time I looked, yes.”

“Oh, wonderful. Fantastic, simply fantastic. Well, we must get together, I want to quiz you. I’ve been studying your planet a long time–the most amazing pathologies in tile explored complex. So long. Don’t take any wooden nickels, as your tribesmen say.”

I told Rufo about it. “Rufe, I know I came from a barbarous planet. But does that excuse his rudeness? Or was it rudeness? I haven’t really got the hang of good manners here.”

Rufo frowned. “It is bad manners anywhere to sneer at a person’s birthplace, tribe, or customs. A man does it at his own risk. If you kill him, nothing will happen to you. It might embarrass Her Wisdom a little. If She can be embarrassed.”

“I won’t kill him, it’s not that important.”

“Then forget it. Nebbi is a snob. He knows a little, understands nothing, and thinks the universes would be better if he had designed them. Ignore him.”

“I will. It was just–look, Rufo, my country isn’t perfect. But I don t enjoy hearing it from a stranger.”

“Who does? I like your country, it has flavor. But–I’m not a stranger and this is not a sneer. Nebbi was right.”

“Huh?”

“Except that he sees only the surface. Democracy can’t work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that’s all there is–so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group.

“But a democratic form of government is okay, as long as it doesn’t work. Any social organization does well enough if it isn’t rigid. The framework doesn’t matter as long as there is enough looseness to permit that one man in a multitude to display his genius. Most so-called social scientists seem to think that organization is everything. It is almost nothing–except when it is a straitjacket. It is the incidence of heroes that counts, not the pattern of zeros.”

He added, “Your country has a system free enough to let its heroes work at their trade. It should last a long time–unless its looseness is destroyed from inside.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I am right. This subject I know and I’m not stupid, as Nebbi thinks. He’s right about the futility of ‘adding zeros’–but he doesn’t realize that he is a zero.”

I grinned. “No point in letting a zero get my goat.”

“None. Especially as you are not. Wherever you go, you will make yourself felt, you won’t be one of the nerd. I respect you, and I don’t respect many. Never people as a whole, I could never be a democrat at heart. To claim to ‘respect’ and even to ‘love’ the great mass with their yaps at one end and smelly feet
at the other requires the fatuous, uncritical, saccharine, blind, sentimental slobbishness found in some nursery supervisors, most spaniel dogs, and all missionaries. It isn’t a political system, it’s a disease. But be of good cheer; your American politicians are immune to this disease . . . and your customs allow the non-zero elbow room.”

Rufo glanced at my sword again. “Old friend, you didn’t come here to bitch about Nebbi.” “No.” I looked down at that keen blade. “I fetched this to shave you, Rufo.”

“Eh?”

“I promised I would shave your corpse. I owe it to you for the slick job you did on me. So here I am,
to shave the barber.”

He said slowly, “But I’m not yet a corpse.” He did not move. But his eyes did, estimating distance between us. Rufo wasn’t counting on my being “chivalrous”; he had lived too long.

“Oh, that can be arranged,” I said cheerfully, “unless I get straight answers from you.”

He relaxed a touch. “I’ll try, Oscar.”

“More than try, please. You’re my last chance. Rufo, this must be private. Even from Star.”

“Under the Rose. My word on it.”

“With your fingers crossed, no doubt. But don’t risk it, I’m serious. And straight answers, I need them. I want advice about my marriage.”

He looked glum. “And I meant to go out today. Instead I worked. Oscar, I would rather criticize a woman’s firstborn, or even her taste in hats. Much safer to teach a shark to bite. What if I refuse?”

“Then I shave you!”

“You would, you heavy-handed headsman!” He frowned. ” ‘Straight answers–‘ You don’t want them, you want a shoulder to cry on.”

“Maybe that, too. But I do want straight answers, not the lies you can tell in your sleep.”

“So I lose either way. Telling a man the truth about his marriage is suicide. I think I’ll sit tight and see if
you have the heart to cut me down in cold blood.”

“Oh, Rufo, I’ll put my sword under your lock and key if you like. You know I would never draw against you.”

“I know no such thing,” he said querulously. “There’s always that first time. Scoundrels are predictable, but you’re a man of honor and that frightens me. Can’t we handle this over the see-speak?”

“Come off it, Rufo. I’ve nobody else to turn to. I want you to speak frankly. I know that a marriage counselor has to lay it on the line, pull no punches. For the sake of blood we’ve lost together I ask you to advise me. And frankly, of course!”

” ‘Of course,’ is it? The last time I risked it you were for cutting the tongue out of me.” He looked at me moodily. “But I was ever a fool where friendship speaks. Hear, I’ll dicker ye a fair dicker. You talk, I’ll listen . . . and if it should come about that you’re taking so long that my tired old kidneys complain and I’m forced to leave your welcome company for a moment . . . why, then you’ll misunderstand and go away in a huff and we’ll say no more about it. Eh?”

“Okay.”

“The Chair recognizes you. Proceed.”

So I talked. I talked out my dilemma and frustration, sparing neither self nor Star (it was for her sake, too, and it wasn’t necessary to speak of our most private matters; those, at least, were dandy). But I told our quarrels and many matters best kept in the family, I had to.

Rufo listened. Presently he stood up and paced, looking troubled. Once he tut-tutted over the men Star had brought home. “She shouldn’t have called her maids in. But do forget it, lad. She never remembers that men are shy, whereas females merely have customs. Allow Her this.”

Later he said, “No need to be jealous of Jocko, son. He drives a tack with a sledgehammer.”

“I’m not jealous.”

“That’s what Menelaus said. But leave room for give and take. Every marriage needs it.”

Finally I ran down, having told him Star’s prediction that I would leave. “I’m not blaming her for anything and talking about it has straightened me out. I can sweat it out now, behave myself, and be a good husband. She does make terrible sacrifices to do her job–and the least I can do is make it easier. She’s so sweet and gentle and good.”

Rufo stopped, some distance away with his back to his desk. “You think so?”

“I know so.”

“She’s an old bag!”

I was out of my chair and at him at once. I didn’t draw. Didn’t think of it, wouldn’t have anyhow. I wanted to get my hands on him and punish him for talking that way about my beloved.

He bounced over the desk like a ball and by the time I covered the length of the room, Rufo was behind it, one hand in a drawer.

“Naughty, naughty,” he said. “Oscar, I don’t want to shave you.”

“Come out and fight like a man!”

“Never, old friend. One step closer and you’re dog meat. All your fine promises, your pleadings. ‘Pull no punches’ you said. ‘Lay it on the line’ you said. ‘Speak frankly’ you said. Sit down in that chair.”

” ‘Speaking frankly’ doesn’t mean being insulting!”

“Who’s to judge? Can I submit my remains for approval before I make them? Don’t compound your broken promises with childish illogic. And would you force me to buy a new rug? I never keep one I’ve killed a friend on; the stains make me gloomy. Sit down in that chair.”

I sat down.

“Now,” said Rufo, staying where he was, “you will listen while I talk. Or perhaps you will get up and walk out. In which case I might be so pleased to see the last of your ugly face that that might be that. Or I might be so annoyed at being interrupted that you would drop dead in the doorway, for I’ve much pent
up and ready to spill over. Suit yourself.

“I said,” he went on, “that my grandmother is an old bag. I said it brutally, to discharge your tension–and now you’re not likely to take too much offense at many offensive things I still must say. She’s old, you know that, though no doubt you find it easy to forget, mostly. I forget it myself, mostly, even though She was old when I was a babe making messes on the floor and crowing at the dear sight of Her. Bag, She is, and you know it. I could have said ‘experienced woman’ but I had to rap your teeth with it; you’ve been dodging it even while you’ve been telling me how well you know it–and how you don’t care. Granny is an old bag, we start from there.

“And why should She be anything else? Tell yourself the answer. You’re not a fool, you’re merely young. Ordinarily She has but two possible pleasures and the other She can’t indulge.”

“What’s the other one?”

“Handing down bad decisions through sadistic spite, that’s the one She dare not indulge. So let us be thankful that Her body has built into it this harmless safety valve, else we would all suffer grievously before somebody managed to kill Her. Lad, dear lad, can you dream how mortal tired She must be of most things? Your own zest soured in only months. Think what it must be to hear the same old weary mistakes year after year with nothing to hope for but a clever assassin. Then be thankful that She still pleasures in one innocent pleasure. So She’s an old bag and I mean no disrespect; I salute a beneficent balance between two things She must be to do her job.

“Nor did She stop being what She is by reciting a silly rhyme with you one bright day on a hilltop. You think She has taken a vacation from it since, sticking to you only. Possibly She has, if you have quoted Her exactly and I read the words rightly; She always tells the truth.

“But never all the truth–who can? –and She is the most skillful liar by telling the truth you’ll ever meet. I misdoubt your memory missed some innocent-sounding word that gave an escape yet saved your feelings.

“If so, why should She do more than save your feelings? She’s fond of you, that’s dear–but must She be fanatic about it? All Her training, Her special bent, is to avoid fanaticism always, find practical answers. Even though She may not have mixed up the shoes, as yet, if you stay on a week or a year or twenty and time comes when She wants to. She can find ways, not lie to you in words–and hurt Her conscience not at all because She hasn’t any. Just Wisdom, utterly pragmatic.”

Rufo cleared his throat. “Now refutation and counterpoint and contrariwise. I like my grandmother and love Her as much as my meager nature permits and respect Her right down to Her sneaky soul–and I’ll kill you or anyone who gets in Her way or causes Her unhappiness–and only part of this is that She has
handed on to me a shadow of Her own self so that I understand Her. If She is spared assassins knife or blast or poison long enough, She’ll go down in history as ‘The Great.’ But you spoke of Her ‘terrible sacrifices.’ Ridiculous! She likes being ‘Her Wisdom,’ the Hub around which all worlds turn. Nor do I believe that She would give it up for you or fifty better. Again, She didn’t lie, as you’ve told it–She said ‘if’ . . . knowing that much can happen in thirty year’s, or twenty-five, among which is the near certainty that you wouldn’t stay that long. A swindle.

“But that’s the least of swindles She’s put over on you. She conned you from the moment you first saw Her and long before. She cheated both ways from the ace, forced you to pick the shell with the pea, sent you like any mark anxious for the best of it, cooled you off when you started to suspect, herded you back into line and to your planned fate–and made you like it. She’s never fussy about method and would con the Virgin Mary and make a pact with the Old One all in one breath, did it suit Her purpose. Oh, you got paid, yes, and good measure to boot; there’s nothing small about Her. But its time you knew you were conned. Mind you, I’m not criticizing Her, I’m applauding–and I helped . . . save for one queasy
moment when I felt sorry for the victim. But you were so conned you wouldn’t listen, thank any saints who did. I lost my nerve for a bit, thinking that you were going to a sticky death with your innocent eyes wide. But She was smarter than I am. She always has been.

“Now! I like Her. I respect Her. I admire Her. I even love Her a bit. All of Her, not just Her pretty aspects but also all the impurities that make Her steel as hard as it must be. How about you, sir? What’s your feeling about Her now . . . knowing She conned you, knowing what She is?”

I was still sitting. My drink was by me, untouched all this long harangue.

I took it and stood up. “Here’s to the grandest old bag in twenty universes!”

Rufo bounced over the desk again, grabbed his glass. “Say that loud and often! And to Her, She’d love it! May She be blessed by God, Whoever He is, and kept safe. We’ll never see another like Her, mores the pity! –for we need them by the gross!”

We tossed it down and smashed our grasses. Rufo fetched fresh ones, poured, settled in his chair, and said, “Now for serious drinking. Did I ever tell you about the time my–”

“You did. Rufo, I want to know about this swindle.”

“Such as?”

“Well, I can see much of it. Take that first time we flew–”

He shuddered. “Lets not.”

“I never wondered then. But, since Star can do this, we could have skipped Igli, the Horned Ghosts, the marsh, the time wasted with Jocko–”

“Wasted?”

“For her purpose. And the rats and hogs and possibly the dragons. Flown directly from that first Gate to the second. Right?”

He shook his head. “Wrong.”

“I don’t see it.”

“Assuming that She could fly us that far, a question I hope never to settle, She could have flown us to the Gate She preferred. What would you have done then? If popped almost directly from Nice to Karth-Hokesh? Charged out and fought like a wolverine, as you did? Or said ‘Miss, you’ve made a mistake. Show me the exit from this Fun House–I’m not laughing.’ ”

“Well–I wouldn’t have bugged out”

“But would you have won? Would you have been at that keen edge of readiness it took?”

“I see. Those first rounds were live ammo exercises in my training. Or was it live ammo? Was all that first part swindle? Maybe with hypnotism, to make it feel right? God knows she’s expert. No danger till we reached the Black Tower?”

He shuddered again. “No, no! Oscar, any of that could have killed us. I never fought harder in my life, nor was ever more frightened. None of it could be skipped. I don’t understand all Her reasons. I’m not Her Wisdom. But She would never risk Herself unless necessary. She would sacrifice ten million brave men, were it needed, as the cheaper price. She knows what She’s worth. But She fought beside us with all She has–you saw! Because it had to be.”

“I still don’t understand all of it.”

“Nor will you. Nor will I. She would have sent you in alone, had it been possible. And at that last supreme danger, that thing called ‘Eater of Souls’ because it had done just that to many braves before you . . . had you lost to it, She and I would have tried to fight our way out–I was ready, any moment; I couldn’t tell you–and if we had escaped–unlikely–She would have shed no tears for you. Or not many. Then worked another twenty or thirty or a hundred years to find and con and train anther champion–and fought just as hard by his side. She has courage, that cabbage. She knew how thin our chances were; you didn’t. Did She flinch?”

“No.”

“But you were the key, first to be found, then ground to fit. You yourself act, you’re never a puppet, or
you could never have won. She was the only one who could nudge and wheedle such a man and place

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him where he would act; no lesser person than She could handle the scale of hero She needed. So She
searched until She found him . . . and honed him fine. Tell me, why did you take up the sword? It’s no
common in America.”

“What?” I had to think. Reading ‘King Arthur’ and ‘The Three Musketeers’, and Burroughs wonderful Mars stories–But every kid does that. “When we moved to Florida, I was a Scout. The Scoutmaster was a Frenchman, taught high school. He started some of us lads. I liked it, it was something I did well. Then in college–”

“Ever wonder why that immigrant got that job in that town? And volunteered for Scout work? Or why your college had a fencing team when many don’t? No matter, if you had gone elsewhere, there would have been fencing in a YMCA or something. Didn’t you have more combat than most of your category?”

“Hell, yes!”

“Could have been killed anytime, too–and She would have turned to another candidate already being honed. Son, I don’t know how you were selected, nor now you were converted from a young punk into the hero you potentially were. Not my job. Mine was simpler–just more dangerous–your groom and your ‘eyes-behind.’ Look around. Fancy quarters for a servant, eh?”

“Well, yes. I had almost forgotten that you were supposed to be my groom.”

” ‘Supposed,’ hell! I was. I went three times to Nevia as Her servant, training for it. Jocko doesn’t know to this day. If I went back, I would be welcome, I think. But only in the kitchen.”

“But why? That part seems silly.”

“Was it? When we snared you, your ego was in feeble shape, it had to be built up–and calling you ‘Boss’ and serving your meals while I stood and you sat, with Her, was part of it.” He gnawed a knuckle and looked annoyed. “I still think She witched your first two arrows. Someday I’d like a return match–with Her not around.”

“I may fool you. I’ve been practicing.”

“Well, forget it. We got the Egg, that’s the important thing. And here’s this bottle and that’s important, too.” He poured again. “Will that be all, ‘Boss’?”

“Damn you, Rufo! Yes, you sweet old scoundrel. You’ve straightened me out. Or conned me again, I don’t know which.”

“No con, Oscar, by the blood we’ve shed. I’ve told the truth as straight as I know it, though it hurt me. I didn’t want to, you’re my friend. Walking that rocky road with you I shall treasure all the days of my life.”

“Uh . . . yes. Me, too. All of it.”

“Then why are you frowning?”

“Rufo, I understand her now–as well as an ordinary person can–and respect her utterly . . . and love her more than ever. But I can’t be anybody’s fancy man. Not even here.”

“I’m glad I didn’t have to say that. Yes. She’s right She’s always right, damn Her! You must leave. For both of you. Oh, She wouldn’t be hurt too much but staying would ruin you, in time. Destroy you, if you’re stubborn.

“I had better get back–and toss my shoes.” I felt better, as if I had told the surgeon: Go ahead. Amputate.

“Don’t do that!”

“What?”

“Why should you? No need for anything final If a marriage is to last a long time–and yours might, even a very long time–then holidays should be long, too. And off the leash, son, with no date to report back and no promises. She knows that knights errant spend their nights erring, She expects it. It has always been so, un droit de la vocation–and necessary. They just don’t mention it in kiddies’ stories where you come from. So go see what’s stirring in your line of work elsewhere and don’t worry. Come back in four or forty years or something, you’ll be welcome. Heroes always sit at the first table, it s their right. And they come and go as they please, and that’s their right, too. On a smaller scale, you re something like Her.”

“High compliment!”

“On a ‘smaller scale,’ I said. Mmm, Oscar, part of your trouble is a need to go home. Your birthing land. To regain your perspective and find out who you are. All travelers feel this, I feel it myself from time to time. When the feeling comes, I pamper it.”

“I hadn’t realized I was homesick. Maybe I am.”

“Maybe She realized it. Maybe She nudged you. Myself, I make it a rule to give any wife of mine a vacation from me whenever her face looks too familiar–for mine must be even more so to her, looking as I do. Why not, lad? Going back to Earth isn’t the same as dying. I’m going there soon, that’s why I’m clearing up this paper work. Happens we might be there the same time . . . and get together for a drink or ten and some laughs and stories. And pinch the waitress and see what she says. Why not?”

Okay, here I am.

I didn’t leave that week but soon. Star and I spent a tearful, glorious night before I left and she cried as she kissed me “Au ‘voir” (not “Good-bye”). But I knew her tears would dry once I was out of sight; she knew that I knew and I knew she preferred it so, and so did I. Even though I cried, too.

Pan American isn’t as slick as the commercial Gates; I was bunged through in three fast changes and o hocus-pocus. A girl said, “Places, please”–then whambo!

I came out on Earth, dressed in a London suit, pass-port and papers in pocket, the Lady Vivamus in a kit that did not look like a sword case, and in other pockets drafts exchangeable for much gold, for I found that I didn’t mind accepting a hero’s fee. I arrived near Zurich, I don’t know the address; the Gate service sees to that. Instead, I had ways to send messages.

Shortly those drafts became, numbered accounts in three Swiss banks, handled by a lawyer I had been told to see. I bought travelers checks several places and some I mailed ahead and some I carried, for I had no intention of paying Uncle Sugar 91 percent.

You lose track of time on a different day and calendar; there was a week or two left on that free ride home my orders called for. It seemed smart to take it–less conspicuous. So I did–an old four-engine transport, Prestwick to Gander to New York.

Streets looked dirtier, buildings not as tall–and headlines worse than ever. I quit reading newspapers, didn’t stay long; California I thought of as “home.” I phoned Mother; she was reproachful about my not having written and I promised to visit Alaska as soon as I could. How were they all? (I had in mind that my half brothers and sisters might need college help someday.)

They weren’t hurting. My stepfather was on flight orders and had made permanent grade. I asked her to forward any mail to my aunt.

California looked better than New York. But it wasn’t Nevia. Not even Center. It was more crowded than I remembered. All you can say for California towns is that they aren’t as bad as other places. I visited my aunt and uncle because they had been good to me and I was thinking of using some of that gold in Switzerland to buy him free from his first wife. But she had died and they were talking about a swimming pool.

So I kept quiet. I had been almost ruined by too much money, it had grown me up a bit. I followed the rule of Their Wisdoms: Leave well enough alone.

The campus felt smaller and the students looked so young. Reciprocal, I guess. I was coming out of the malt shop across from Administration when two Letter sweaters came in, shoving me aside. The second said, “Watch it, Dad!”

I let him live.

Football had been re-emphasized, new coach, new dressing rooms, stands painted, talk about a stadium. The coach knew who I was; he knew the records and was out to make a name. “You’re coming back, aren’t you?” I told him I didn’t think so.

“Nonsense!” he said. “Gotta get that old sheepskin! Silliest thing on earth to let your hitch in the Army stop you. Now look–” His voice dropped.

No nonsense about “sweeping the gym,” stuff the Conference didn’t like. But a boy could live with a family–and one could be found. If he paid his fees in cash, who cared? Quiet as an undertaker–“That leaves your GI benefits for pocket money.”

“I don’t have any.”

“Man, don’t you read the papers?” He had it on file: While I was gone, that unWar had been made eligible for GI benefits.

I promised to think it over.

But I had no such intention. I had indeed decided to finish my engineering degree, I like to finish things. But not there.

That evening I heard from Joan, the girl who had given me such a fine sendoff, then “Dear-Johnned” me. I intended to look her up, call on her and her husband; I just hadn’t found out her married name yet. But she ran across my aunt, shopping, and phoned me. “Easy!” she said and sounded delighted.

“Who–Wait a minute, Joan!”

I must come to dinner that very night. I told her “Fine,” and that I was looking forward to meeting the lucky galoot she had married.

Joan looked sweet as ever and gave me a hearty arms-around-my-neck smack, a welcome-home kiss, sisterly but good. Then I met the kids, one crib size and the other toddling.

Her husband was in L.A.

Her sister and brother-in-law stayed for one drink; Joan and her sister put the kids to bed while the brother-in-law sat with me and asked how things were in Europe he understood I was just back and then he told me how things were in Europe and what should be done about them. “You know, Mr. Jordan,” he told me, tapping my knee, “a man in the real estate business like I am gets to be a pretty shrewd judge of human nature has to be and while I haven’t actually been in Europe the way you have haven’t had time somebody has to stay home and pay taxes and keep an eye on things while you lucky young fellows are seeing the world but human nature is the same anywhere and if we dropped just one little bomb on Minsk or Pinsk or one of those places they would see the light right quick and we could stop all this diddling around that’s making it tough on the businessman. Don’t you agree?”

I said he had a point. They left and he said that he would ring me tomorrow and show me some choice lots that could be handled on almost nothing down and were certain to go way up what with a new missile plant coming in here soon. “Nice listening to your experiences, Mr. Jordan, real pleasant. Sometime I must tell you about something that happened to me in Tijuana but not with the wife around ha ha!”

Joan said to me, “I can’t see why she married him. Pour me another drink, hon, a double, I need it. I’m going to turn the oven down, dinner will keep.”

We both had a double and then another, and had dinner about eleven. Joan got tearful when I insisted on going home around three. She told me I was chicken and I agreed; she told me things could have been so different if I hadn’t insisted on going into the Army and I agreed again; she told me to go out the back way and not turn on any lights and she never wanted to see me again and Jim was going to Sausalito the seventeenth.

I caught a plane for Los Angeles next day.

Now look–I am not blaming Joan. I like Joan. I respect her and will always be grateful to her. She is a fine person. With superior early advantages–say in Nevia–she’d be a wow! She’s quite a gal, even so. Her house was clean, her babies were clean and healthy and well cared for. She’s generous and thoughtful and good-tempered.

Nor do I feel guilty. If a man has any regard for a girl’s feelings, there is one thing he cannot refuse: a return bout if she wants one. Nor will I pretend that I didn’t want it, too.

But I felt upset all the way to Los Angeles. Not over her husband, he wasn’t hurt. Not over Joanie, she was neither swept off her feet nor likely to suffer remorse. Joanie is a good kid and had made a good adjustment between her nature and an impossible society.

Still, I was upset.

A man must not criticize a woman’s most womanly quality. I must make it clear that little Joanie was just as sweet and just as generous as the younger Joanie who had sent me off to the Army feeling grand. The fault lay with me; I had changed.

My complaints are against the whole culture with no individual sharing more than a speck of blame. Let me quote that widely traveled culturologist and rake, Dr. Rufo:

“Oscar, when you get home, don’t expect too much of your feminine compatriots. You’re sure to be disappointed and the poor dears aren’t to blame. American women, having been conditioned out of their sex instincts, compensate by compulsive interest in rituals over the dead husk of sex . . . and each one is sure she knows ‘intuitively’ the right ritual for conjuring the corpse. She knows and nobody can tell her any different . . . especially a man unlucky enough to be in bed with her. So don’t try. You will either make her furious or crush her spirit. You’ll be attacking that most Sacred of Cows: the myth that women know all about sex, just from being women.”

Rufo had frowned. “The typical American female is sure that she has genius as a couturiere as an interior decorator, as a gourmet cook, and, always, as a courtesan. Usually she is wrong on four counts. But don’t try to tell her so.”

He had added, “Unless you can catch one not over twelve and segregate her, especially from her mother–and even that may be too late. But don’t misunderstand me; it evens out. The American male is convinced that he is a great warrior, a great statesman, and a great lover. Spot checks prove that he is as deluded as she is. Or worse. Historo-culturally speaking, there is strong evidence that the American male, rattier than the female, murdered sex in your country.”

“What can I do about it?”

“Slip over to France now and then. French women are almost as ignorant but not nearly as conceited and often are teachable.”

When my plane landed, I put the subject out of mind as I planned to be an anchorite a while. I learned in the Army that no sex is easier than a starvation allowance–and I had serious plans.

I had decided to be the square I naturally am, with hard work and a purpose in life. I could have used those Swiss bank accounts to be a playboy. But I had been a playboy, it wasn’t my style.

I had been on the biggest binge in history–one I wouldn’t believe if I didn’t have so much loot. Now was time to settle down and join Heroes Anonymous. Being a hero is okay. But a retired hero–first he’s a bore, then he’s a bum.

My first stop was Caltech. I could now afford the best and Caltech’s only rival is where they tried to outlaw sex entirely. I had seen enough of the dreary graveyard in 1942-45.

The Dean of Admissions was not encouraging. “Mr. Gordon, you know that we turn down more than we accept? Nor could we give you full credit on this transcript. No slur on your former school–and we do like to give ex-servicemen a break–but this school has higher standards. Another thing, you won’t find Pasadena a cheap place to live.”

I said I would be happy to take whatever standing I merited, and showed him my bank balance (one of them) and offered a check for a years fees. He wouldn’t take it but loosened up. I left with the impression that a place might be found for E. C. “Oscar” Gordon.

I went downtown and started the process to make me legally “Oscar” instead of “Evelyn Cyril.” Then I started job hunting.

I found one out in the Valley, as a junior draftsman in a division of a subsidiary of a corporation that made tires, food machinery, and other things–missiles in this case. This was part of the Gordon Rehabilitation Plan. A few months over the drafting board would get me into the swing again and I planned to study evenings and behave myself. I found a furnished apartment in Sawtelle and bought a used Ford for commuting.

I felt relaxed then; “Milord Hero” was buried. All that was left was the Lady Vivamus, hanging over the television. But I balanced her in hand first and got a thrill out of it. I decided to find a salle d’armes and join its club. I had seen an archery range in the Valley, too, and there ought to be someplace where American Rifle Association members fired on Sundays. No need to get flabby-

Meanwhile I would forget the loot in Switzerland. It was payable in gold, not funny money, and if I let it sit. It might be worth more–maybe much more–from inflation than from investing it. Someday it would be capital, when I opened my own firm.

That’s what I had my sights on: Boss. A wage slave, even in brackets where Uncle Sugar takes more than half, is still a slave. But I had learned from Her Wisdom that a boss must train; I could not buy “Boss” with gold.

So I settled down. My name change came through; Caltech conceded that I could look forward to moving to Pasadena–and mail caught up with me.

Mother sent it to my aunt, she forwarded it to the hotel address I had first given, eventually it reached my flat. Some were letters mailed in the States over a year ago, sent on to Southeast Asia, then Germany, then Alaska, then more changes before I read them in Sawtelle.

One offered that bargain on investment service again; this time I could Knock off 10 percent more. Another was from the coach at college–on plain stationery and signed in a scrawl. He said certain parties were determined to see the season start off with a bang. Would $250 per month change my mind? Phone his home number, collect. I tore it up.

The next was from the Veterans Administration, dated just after my discharge, telling me that as a result of Barton vs. United States, et al., it had been found that I was legally a “war orphan” and entitled to $110/month for schooling until age twenty-three.

I laughed so hard I hurt.

After some junk was one from a Congressman. He had the honor to inform me that, in cooperation with the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he had submitted a group of special bills to correct injustices resulting from failure to classic correctly persons who were “war orphans,” that the bills had passed under consent, and that he was happy to say that one affecting me allowed me to my twenty-seventh birthday to complete my education inasmuch as my twenty-third birthday had passed before the error was rectified. I am, sir, sincerely, etc.

I couldn’t laugh. I thought how much dirt I would have eaten, or–you name it–the summer I was conscripted if I had been sure of $110 a month. I wrote that Congressman a thank-you letter, the best I knew how.

The next item looked like junk. It was from Hospitals’ Trust, Ltd., therefore a pitch for a donation or a hospital insurance ad–but I couldn’t see why anyone in Dublin would have me on their list.

Hospitals’ Trust asked if I had Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstakes ticket number such-and-such, and its official receipt? This ticket had been sold to J. L. Weatherby, Esq. Its number had been drawn in the second unit drawing, and had been a ticket of the winning horse. J. L. Weatherby had been informed and had notified Hospitals’ Trust, Ltd., that he had disposed of ticket to E. C. Gordon, and, on receiving receipt, had mailed it to such party.

Was I the “E. C. Gordon,” did I have the ticket, did I have the receipt? H. T. Ltd. would appreciate an early reply.

The last item in the stack had an A.P.O. return address. In it was an Irish Sweepstakes receipt–and a note; ‘This should teach me not to play poker. Hope it wins you something–J. L. WEATHERBY.’ The cancellation was over a year old.

I stared at it, then got the papers I had carried through the Universes. I found the matching ticket. It was bloodstained but the number was clear.

I looked at the letter. Second unit drawing-

I started examining tickets under bright light. The others were counterfeit. But the engraving of this ticket and this receipt was sharp as paper money. I don’t know where Weatherby bought that ticket, but he did not buy it from the thief who sold me mine.

Second drawing–I hadn’t known there was more than one. But drawings depend on the number of tickets sold, in units of ￡120,000. I had seen the results of only the first.

Weatherby had mailed the receipt care of Mother, to Wiesbaden, and it must have been in Elmendorf when I was in Nice–then had gone to Nice, and back to Elmendorf because Rufo had left a forwarding address with American Express; Rufo had known all about me of course and had taken steps to cover my disappearance.

On that morning over a year earlier while I sat in a cafe in Nice, I held a winning ticket with the receipt in the mail. If I had looked farther in that Herald-Tribune than the “Personal” ads I would have found the results of the Second Unit drawing and never answered that ad.

I would have collected $140,000, never have seen Star a second time-

Or would Her Wisdom have been balked?

Would I have refused to follow my “Helen of Troy” simply because my pockets were lined with money?

I gave myself the benefit of doubt. I would have walked the Glory Road anyhow!

At least, I hoped so.

Next morning I phoned the plant, then went to a bank and through a routine I had gone through twice

in Nice.

Yes, it was a good ticket. Could the bank be of service in collecting it? I thanked them and left.

A little man from Internal Revenue was on my doorstep-

Almost–He buzzed from below while I was writing to Hospitals’ Trust, Ltd.

Presently I was telling him that I was damned if I would! I’d leave the money in Europe and they could whistle! He said mildly not to take that attitude, as I was just blowing off steam because the IRS didn’t like paying informers’ fees but would if my actions showed that I was trying to evade the tax.

They had me boxed. I collected $140,000 and paid $103,000 to Uncle Sugar. The mild little man pointed out that it was better that way; so often people put off paying and got into trouble.

Had I been in Europe, it would have been $140,000 in gold–but now it was $37,000 in paper–because free and sovereign Americans can’t have gold. They might start a war, or turn Communist, or something. No, I couldn’t leave the $37,000 in Europe as gold; that was illegal, too. They were very polite.

I mailed 10 percent, $3,700, to Sgt. Weatherby and told him the story. I took $33,000 and set up a college trust for my siblings, handled so that my folks wouldn’t know until it was needed. I crossed my fingers and hoped that news about this ticket would not reach Alaska. The L.A. papers never had it, but word got around somehow; I found myself on endless sucker lists, got letters offering golden opportunities begging loans, or demanding gifts.

It was a month before I realized I had forgotten the California State Income Tax. I never did sort out the red ink.

I got back to the old drawing board, slugged away at books in the evening, watched a little television, weekends some fencing.

But I kept having this dream-

I had it first right after I took that job and now I was having it every night-

I’m heading along this long, long road and I round a curve and there’s a castle up ahead. It’s beautiful, pennants flying from turrets and a winding climb to its drawbridge. But I know, I just know, that there is a princess captive in its dungeon.

That part is always the same. Details vary. Lately the mild little man from Internal Revenue steps into the road and tells me that toll is paid here–10 percent more than whatever I’ve got.

Other times it’s a cop and he leans against my horse (sometimes it has four legs, sometimes eight) and writes a ticket for obstructing traffic, riding with out-of-date license, failing to observe stop sign, and gross insubordination. He wants to know if I have a permit to carry that lance? –and tells me that game laws require me to tag any dragons killed.

Other times I round that turn and a solid wave of freeway traffic, five lanes wide, is coming at me. That one is worst.

I started writing this after the dreams started. I couldn’t see going to a headshrinker and saying, “Look, Doc, I’m a hero by trade and my wife is Empress in another universe–” I had even less desire to lie on his couch and tell how my parents mistreated me as a child (they didn’t) and how I found out about little girls (that s my business).

I decided to talk it out to a typewriter.

It made me feel better but didn’t stop the dreams. But I learned a new word: “acculturated.” It’s what happens when a member of one culture shifts to another, with a sad period when he doesn’t fit. Those Indians you see in Arizona towns, not doing anything, looking in shop windows or just standing. Acculturation. They don’t fit.

I was taking a bus down to see my ear, nose, and throat doctor–Star promised me that her therapy plus that at Center would free me of the common cold–and it has; I don’t catch anything. But even therapists that administer Long-Life can’t protect human tissues against poison gas; L.A. smog was getting me. Eyes burning, nose stopped up–twice a week I went down to get horrid things done to my nose. I used to park my car and go down Wilshire by bus, as parking was impossible close in.

In the bus I overheard two ladies: “–much as I despise them, you can’t give a cocktail party without inviting the Sylvesters.”

It sounded like a foreign language. Then I played it back and understood the words.

But why did she have to invite the Sylvesters?

If she despised them, why didn’t she either ignore them, or drop a rock on their heads?

In God’s name, why give a “cocktail party”? People who don’t like each other particularly, standing around (never enough chairs), talking about things they aren’t interested in, drinking drinks they don’t want (why set a time to take a drink?) and getting high so that they won’t notice they aren’t having fun. Why?

I realized that acculturation had set in. I didn’t fit.

I avoided buses thereafter and picked up five traffic tickets and a smashed fender. I quit studying, too. Books didn’t seem to make sense. It warn’t the way I lamed it back in dear old Center.

But I stuck to my job as a draftsman. I always have been able to draw and soon I was promoted to major work.

One day the Chief Draftsman called me over. “Here, Gordon, this assembly you did–”

I was proud of that job. I had remembered something I had seen on Center and had designed it in, reducing moving parts and improving a clumsy design into one that made me feel good. It was tricky and I had added an extra view. “Well?”

He handed it back. “Do it over. Do it right.”

I explained the improvement and that I had done the drawing a better way to-

He cut me off. “We don’t want it done a better way, we want it done our way.”

“Your privilege,” I agreed and resigned by walking out.

My flat seemed strange at that time on a working day. I started to study ‘Strength of Materials’–and chucked the book aside. Then I stood and looked at the Lady Vivamus.

“Dum Vivimus, Vivamus!” Whistling, I buckled her on, drew blade, felt that thrill run up my arm.

I returned sword, got a few things, traveler’s checks and cash mostly, walked out. I wasn’t going anywhere, just tataway!

I had been striding along maybe twenty minutes when a prowl car pulled up and took me to the station.

Why was I wearing that thing? I explained that gentlemen wore swords.

If I would tell them what movie company I was with, a phone call could clear it up. Or was it television? The Department cooperated but liked to be notified.

Did I have a license for concealed weapons? I said it wasn’t concealed. They told me it was–by that scabbard. I mentioned the Constitution; I was told that the Constitution sure as hell didn’t mean walking around city streets with a toad sticker like that. A cop whispered to the sergeant, “Here’s what we got him on, Sarge. The blade is longer than–” I think it was three inches. There was trouble when they tried to take the Lady Vivamus away from me. Finally I was locked up, sword and all.

Two hours later my lawyer got it changed to “disorderly conduct” and I was released, with talk of a sanity hearing.

I paid him and thanked him and took a cab to the airport and a plane to San Francisco. At the port I bought a large bag, one that would take the Lady Vivamus cater-cornered.

Charlie said he agreed perfectly and his friends would like to hear it. So we went and I paid the driver to wait but took my suitcase inside.

Charlie’s friends didn’t want to hear my theories but the wine was welcome and I sat on the floor and listened to folk singing. The men wore beards and didn’t comb their hair. The beards helped, it made it easy to tell which were girls. One beard stood up and recited a poem. Old Jocko could do better blind drunk but I didn’t say so.

It wasn’t like a party in Nevia and certainly not in Center, except this: I got propositioned. I might have considered it if this girl hadn’t been wearing sandals. Her toes were dirty. I thought of Zhai-ee-van and her dainty, clean fur, and told her thanks, I was under a vow.

The beard who had recited the poem came over and stood in front of me. “Man, like what rumble you picked up that scar?” I said it had been in Southeast Asia. He looked at me scornfully. “Mercenary!”

“Well, not always,” I told him. “Sometimes I fight for free. Like right now.”

I tossed him against a wall and took my suitcase outside and went to the airport–and then Seattle and Anchorage, Alaska, and wound up at Elmendorf AFB, clean, sober, and with the Lady Vivamus disguised as fishing tackle.

Mother was glad to see me and the kids seemed pleased–I had bought presents between planes in Seattle–and my stepdaddy and I swapped yarns.

I did one important thing in Alaska; I flew to Point Barrow. There I found part of what I was looking for: no pressure, no sweat, not many people. You look out across the ice and know that only the North Pole is over that way, and a few Eskimos and fewer white people here. Eskimos are every bit as nice as they have been pictured. Their babies never cry, the adults never seem cross–only the dogs staked-out between the huts are bad-tempered.

But Eskimos are “civilized” now; the old ways are going. You can buy a choc malt at Barrow and airplanes fly daily in a sky that may hold missiles tomorrow.

But they still seal amongst the ice floes, the village is rich when they take a whale, half starved if they don’t. They don’t count time and they don’t seem to worry about anything–ask a man how old he is, he answers: “Oh, I’m quite of an age.” That’s how old Rufo is. Instead of good-bye, they say, “Sometime again!” No particular time and again well see you.

They let me dance with them. You must wear gloves (in their way they are as formal as the Doral) and you stomp and sing with the drums–and I found myself weeping. I don’t know why. It was a dance about a little old man who doesn’t have a wife and now he sees a seal-

I said, “Sometime again!”–went back to Anchorage and to Copenhagen. From 30,000 feet the North

Pole looks like prairie covered with snow, except black lines that are water. I never expected to see the North Pole.

From Copenhagen I went to Stockholm. Majatta was not with her parents but was only a square away. She cooked me that Swedish dinner, and her husband is a good Joe. From Stockholm I phoned a “Personal” ad to the Paris edition of the Herald-Tribune, then went to Paris.

I kept the ad in daily and sat across from the Two Maggots and stacked saucers and tried not to fret. I watched the ma’m’selles and thought about what I might do.

If a man wanted to settle down for forty years or so, wouldn’t Nevia be a nice place? Okay, It has dragons. It doesn’t have flies, nor mosquitoes, nor smog. Nor parking problems, nor freeway complexes that look like diagrams for abdominal surgery. Not a traffic light anywhere.

Muri would be glad to see me. I might marry her. And maybe little whatever-her-name was, her kid sister, too. Why not? Marriage customs aren’t everywhere those they use in Paducah. Star would be pleased; she would like being related to Jocko by marriage.

But I would go see Star first, or soon anyhow, and kick that pile of strange shoes aside. But I wouldn’t stay; it would be “sometime again” which would suit Star. It is a phrase, one of the few, that translates exactly into Centrist jargon–and means exactly the same.

“Sometime again,” because there are other maidens, or pleasing facsimiles, elsewhere, in need of rescuing. Somewhere. And a man must work at his trade, which wise wives know.

“I cannot rest from travel; I will drink life to the lees.” A long road, a trail, a “Tramp Royal,” with no certainty of what you’ll eat or where or if, nor where you’ll sleep, nor with whom. But somewhere is Helen of Troy and all her many sisters and there is still noble work to be done.

A man can stack a lot of saucers in a month and I began to fume instead of dream. Why the hell didn’t Rufo show up? I brought this account up to date from sheer nerves. Has Rufo gone back? Or is he dead?

Or was he “never born”? Am I a psycho discharge and what is in this case I carry with me wherever I go? A sword? I’m afraid to look, so I do–and now I’m afraid to ask. I met an old sergeant once, a thirty-year man, who was convinced that he owned all the diamond mines in Africa; he spent his evenings keeping books on them. Am I just as happily deluded? Are these francs what is left of my monthly disability check?

Does anyone ever get two chances? Is the Door in the Wall always gone when next you look? Where do you catch the boat for Brigadoon? Brother, it’s like the post office in Brooklyn: You can’t get there from here!

I’m going to give Rufo two more weeks-

I’ve heard from Rufo! A clipping of my ad was for warded to him but he had a little trouble. He wouldn’t say much by phone but I gather he was mixed up with a carnivorous Fraulein and got over the border almost sans calottes. But he’ll be here tonight. He is quite agreeable to a change in planets and universes and says he has something interesting in mind. A little risky perhaps, but not dull. I’m sure he’s right both ways. Rufo might steal your cigarettes and certainly your wench but things aren’t dull around him–and he would die defending your rear.

So tomorrow we are heading up that Glory Road, rocks and all!

Got any dragons you need killed?

End