War, the Italians reclaimed it, knocked off the Ivan-the-Terrible gingerbread, dynamited the onion-shaped domes, and turned it into a first-class hotel. Today it was dingy, smelling of mildew and rat dung, slumping into decay.
Before we got down to the talking, the girl, Ilsa, drew the soundproof curtains while the greasy-faced Ukrainian, favoring me all the while with surly, glowering looks, unpacked a slim plastic case from the mound of luggage and set it going. I cocked a thumb at the gadget and raised an inquiring eyebrow.
“Is all well, Konstantin?” the Doctor asked, before answering my unspoken query. The surly Russian growled assent.
“Merely a slight precaution, Cn. Tengren. I believe the Americans, in their delightful slang, call it a debugging device. We have no particular reason to believe our rooms are under electronic surveillance; still, one can never be sure in these troubled times. And rumor has it that most hotels these days tape everything that happens on their premises as a matter of course. I believe some of the less scrupulous of them make a tidy sum giving information to the government spies and the political police.”
“It’s been a national custom for years,” I grinned. “Won’t they be suspicious, though, when this room registers a blank tape?”
He smiled that saintly smile again. “Not at all; almost everyone uses one of these devices. They are easily available on the Gray Market and most reasonably priced. Spies and criminals and revolutionaries—but also ordinary businessmen with an important contract to negotiate and everyday people cheating on their wives—use them. The instrument merely broadcasts a heterodyne wave that oscillates all over the radio frequencies, quite effectively scrambling the sound recordings. Since the wave is continuously overlapping, and the oscillations are purely random, it is technologically impossible to unscramble the tapes. But come! Let’s to business. My dear, coffee, I think, unless Cn. Tengren would prefer brandy…?”
“I’ve had enough for one night, I think.”
He offered me the best cigar I had tasted in six years; I leaned back in the big, comfortable pneumochair. It adjusted its shape to the contours of my body and began unobtrusively massaging the back of my neck and the muscles of my shoulders. I drank in the richly mellow smoke and let the old man talk in his smooth, gentlemanly diplomat voice, while the girl took the surly Ukrainian off somewhere to fix his face; he came back with his purpled jaw repaired with cosmetic gel above the beard and his vomit-messed suit exchanged for electric blue lounging pajamas. He looked a lot better, but from the smouldering glances he shot at me from time to time, I knew his temper had not improved. That sort of muscular lout protects his masculine self-image by throwing his weight around. I had hit him directly in the virility center of his ego—a far more sensitive spot than the pit of his stomach—and he would not soon forget that I had made him look ridiculous in the presence of the blond girl. I would have trouble with that one, I knew. But I hardly cared: if they could get me to Mars, they could break every bone in my body.
“Just a precaution,” the Doctor was saying in that beautiful, soothing voice. “I quite doubt if the politicals are still watching you after all this while; perhaps an occasional spot check, nothing more. But it’s been two full years since, ah, since your legal troubles, and even the publicity must have died down long since. With the instrument on, we are safe from anything outside of an audio search beam, and you will observe I have seated our little group out of any possible direct beam, and the curtains should muffle our little conversation. Better to be on the safe side…”
The only question I asked, at the start, was the obvious one. If he had a thought record that told the way to the fabulous Treasure City, why did he need me? I told him, not quite with complete candor—but I’ll get back to that later—that I knew no more than most people about Lost Ilionis.
“Ah, but that is the simplest of all questions to answer, my dear sir!” he said in his quaint and charming, courtly way. “We will be going deep into the Drylands, far deeper than any—what is it they call us? F’yagh? Outworlder?—has ever gone before. You know as well as I that beyond the Drylands we will be getting into High Clan country: a proud people; an ancient people; they have never yielded to the authority of the Colonial Administration, and they have never ratified the Great Treaty—”
“Why should they, since the CA cops never got close enough to them to hold a gun to the heads of their women? Which is the way the bastards got the rest of the Nations to sign that piece of toilet paper.” The bitterness locked up in my guts for so long must have leaked into my tone of voice, for the old man favored me with a gently commiserating smile and uttered some soothing platitude about the nobility of patriotism and hurried on to spread a little goose grease on my ego.
“We stand no chance of getting into that country without being stopped by High Clan war patrols, and that is where your services will prove completely indispensable,” he said.
“I don’t know about that; they have never seen me; they may not even have heard the news that an Outworlder has the Iron Crown.”
His eyes twinkled benignly, but he was unswerving. “You know how to prove to even the Wild Huntsmen who you are,” he said gently.
He had me there.
“All right, we get by them. But do you really believe the warriors of the High Clans will let even me lead a party of Hated Ones into the Treasure City—the most sacred place on the whole of the planet?”
The benign twinkle did not even flicker. “Your whim is a holy law from Syrtis to the Pole,” he said. “With the Jamad Tengru at our head, why, we could ride across the Bridge of Fire to the very gates of Yhoom, the Hidden World of the Gods, without fear or hindrance. Without you in our midst we would not get ten meters beyond the River of Death.”
He had me there too. The full scope of my authority had seldom been brought home to me with so vivid an illustration. A billion years of Holy Law encloaked me: my person was sacrosanct: my mere word could open gates locked two hundred million years. At my whim ten thousand warriors would ride into the gaping jaws of hell…again, as very often in the wild, warring years gone by, I quailed beneath the awful burden that had been bequeathed to me. And the taste of my unworthiness was like brass upon my tongue.
Dr. Keresny sensed my mood of depression with the faultless tact of a born diplomat. He rose, went over to a coffee table, fetched back a liqueur flask and three glasses. The oily fluid, which he identified as Lunarian, was amber-colored, smooth on the tongue, with a musky, mushroomy taste and a heart of golden fire. Doubtless the Arachnidae extracted it from some slimy fungus in their lightless caverns: I did not care. It was heady, strong, with a real bite to it. I leaned back in the chair and let him talk. Gradually, I relaxed, letting the liqueur, the espresso, and the superb Panatella work their old white magic, letting the chair work out the tension at the nape of my neck, idly listening to his roundabout conversational style, watching his granddaughter. She was indeed pleasant on the eyes: tall, cool as iceberg lettuce, blond as summer wheat, with a long, lithe, lovely pair of legs revealed from crotch to toe in a silky sheath of iolon. She wore one of the currently fashionable peekaboo blouses, certain portions of which became completely transparent at random intervals, and during one of those random intervals I could hardly help noticing that she had superb breasts, tanned, firm, deliciously tip-tilted, and they looked natural. Still, you can never tell, and the marvels of cosmetic plastisurgery are cheap enough these days. But she amused me by her manner: despite her fashionably provocative bodyglove she was prim as a school marm. She sat stiffly erect, not allowing herself to relax in the lascivious embrace of the pneumo; and she sat with her sleek, lovely knees pressed primly together. In fact, her entire body, stiff, awkwardly erect, tight, made me wonder if it was possible she could be a virgin. In these hectic days, with complete permissiveness a universal lifestyle, it seemed hardly possible. She must have been eighteen at least, perhaps
