"It seems like it," Horn said. He swung around. Wu was standing behind him. He was in his s.p.a.ce breeches once more, the single suspender, the green synsilk shirt, and the skullcap. Lil, perched on his shoulder, stared one-eyed at Duchane's crumpled body.

"Such," Lil said sadly, "is the end of all ambition."

"You seem to make a habit of saving me," Horn said, letting the cord pull his gun up to his chest.

Wu shrugged. "It is a pleasure to lengthen the years of one who has so few to spare."

"Where have you been? The last I saw of you, you were being taken to Vantee with me."

"The prison has not yet been built that will hold us, eh, Lil? Since then we have been here and there, as whim and fortune dictate. It is a good time for picking up diamonds."

Horn knelt beside the bars and reached through them to Duchane's jacket. He felt inside it. When he pulled back his hand, it held a sheaf of papers. "I didn't understand how they could miss a gun," Horn said. "He was unarmed."

Horn opened the pages and scanned them, his eyes flicking back and forth, the pages turning. When he looked up, his eyes were distant. "It's a report on you," he said. "You've been at almost every Tube activation."

"So?" Wu said. "I had not thought we attended so many. But they are times of ceremony, where even the hours are jeweled."

"The Directors didn't know the secret of the Tube," Horn said slowly. "And yet the Tubes were activated. Someone else had to know the secret, and yet-I said it once-the secret couldn't pa.s.s down through the hands of any other group without the Directors discovering it. But if a man lived for fifteen hundred years-"

"I!" Wu chuckled. "If we had known the secret, Lil, we wouldn't have needed to steal diamonds, eh? We would have sat us down somewhere, and the worlds would have brought them to us."

"There were six people on the platform at the Dedication," Horn went on inexorably, unheeding. "I kept thinking that one of them had to know the secret. But they were at other activations singly. Wendre told me that. It couldn't be any one of them. It had to be all of them. But it wasn't. It wasn't any of them. But you were there. You were closer to the platform than anyone else. It has to be you, Wu. It has to be you."

"Reductio ad absurdum," Lil said pontifically.

"But logical, dear friend," Wu said. "Very logical." His voice had changed. It was firmer, colder, harder.

"You made me shoot Duchane," Horn went on. "He was going to tell me something about you, and you made me shoot him. Not you. You didn't shoot him. You got someone else to do it for you. Somebody has pushed," he muttered. "There's a pattern in that. Someone who thinks like that might readily hire an a.s.sa.s.sin."

"A pretty argument," Wu said. "But it doesn't quite hold true. You see, I have no objection to doing my own killing."

It should not have surprised Horn to see the pistol in the yellow hand that Wu thrust forward out of his ragged green sleeve. It did; he had been unable to believe what logic proved. He stared at the gun and looked back at Wu's lined face. He could not remember now why he had thought the face was harmless and benign. This was a face that had been weathered by a millennium and a half; these were eyes that had seen too much. The face was old and wise and evil.

"It's true then," Horn said dazedly.

"Should I tell you?" Wu asked. "Of course. What difference does it make? You've come too close to the truth, about me and about the Tubes, and so you must die. I hope you will let me explain before I kill you. You want to know the meaning behind all this. And it is a vast relief for me to speak. You can't know the immense burden of keeping a secret for a thousand years. There was Lil, of course, but, as fine a companion as she is, she isn't human."

"And are you?" Horn asked sharply.

"I'm not at all sure I am," Wu said carefully.

"You did hire me then?"

"Yes, I hired you to kill Kohlnar. I hired many men, but you were the only one who even reached the foot of the mesa where Sunport once stood. But the story begins a long time before that."

"A thousand years before?"

"Exactly. Eron did not rise haphazardly. It was the only empire that was built, and the tools we used were challenge and response and a little subtle guidance. I choose Eron as my instrument of empire because it had bred a strong, hungry race. Humanity needed the Tube, and it needed Eron to force it upon them. Listen carefully, Horn, and you will be enlightened before you die; you will hear a strange story of human emotions and how they benefit humanity and of good intentions and how they change."

"I'm listening," Horn said grimly, judging the distance between them, estimating his chances. The distance was too great and the chances too slim. He forced himself to wait.

"The Tube, then. Man needed it if he was to develop an interstellar civilization instead of isolated, divergent, spatially determined cultures which could contribute almost nothing to the race. With the best of motives, then, we gave man the Tube, Lil and I. If mankind were to continue as a single, functioning race, we had to abolish that deadly limitation: the speed of light."

"Since the speed of light is a limitation in our universe," Horn said, moving a little, "then the Tubes enclose a s.p.a.ce that is not in our universe."

Wu shook his head appreciatively. "I was afraid your experience in the Tube might lead you to that conclusion, and a scientist, with that clue, might be able to activate a Tube. But it isn't likely. It has been recognized, for longer than I have lived, that gravity is a consequence of the geometry of physical s.p.a.ce, which is determined by matter. In other words, it is the matter in the universe that curves s.p.a.ce around itself, which effect we recognize as gravity. But it is another thing to build a s.p.a.ce not of this universe."

Horn nodded and edged a little closer.

"Light," Wu went on, "is affected by this curvature of s.p.a.ce. It, too, is curved. And in this universe of matter and curved s.p.a.ce, speed is restricted to that of light. But outside this universe, this isn't true. Lil and her people knew this a long time ago. When the uranium in their cavern was gone, they were forced to learn the nature of energy and matter and s.p.a.ce and time. They became the greatest mathematicians the universe has ever known."

"Go on," Horn said, sliding one foot forward imperceptibly.

Wu wiggled his gun. "No, my friend. Do not move. Not if you wish to hear the rest. Our problem, you see, was to provide within this universe a s.p.a.ce which was not of this universe. A star was our power source; Lil's mind was the matrix. Inside the energy cylinder of the Tube was created something never before known: s.p.a.ce shielded from the warping effect of matter, shielded from gravity, if you like. Inside the Tube, the universe shaped by matter doesn't exist; the unnatural limitation set upon velocity by this matter-determined universe does not exist. All our terms are meaningless there: light, sound, energy, matter, velocity, distance. Anything in the Tube exists, if at all, as an anomaly in its own miniature universe with its own s.p.a.ce folded around itself; the Tube, by its nature, must reject it."

"Then only you and Lil can activate a Tube."

"Only Lil," Wu corrected. "And it has kept us busy. But I get ahead of my story. This fact, though, influenced our choice of Eron as the instrument through which humanity would be reunited. It would have been physically impossible for Lil to have activated Tubes in two or more civilizations. That wasn't desirable for other reasons; it would have meant conflict, disunion, destruction. We chose Eron."

"Ah, those were days to live in," Lil croaked reminiscently.

"They were indeed," Wu agreed. "With the best of intentions, we gave Eron the Tube and built around it a myth of secrecy and greatness; the Golden Folk were quick to believe and go on to build their own myths. At crucial points we helped the Empire continue its growth until only the Pleiades Cl.u.s.ter remained outside. You, my short-lived friend, won't understand how we began to change. Power is habit-forming. We grew addicted to it. Few things survive the centuries' slow decay: senses grow dull; pa.s.sions grow weak; and ideals die. Only the taste for power lives on as an excuse for survival."

"You began to meddle then," Horn said grimly, "for the sake of meddling." He couldn't move toward Wu; he could never get close enough to hit him or knock the gun aside before Wu fired. His own gun, nestled under his left arm, would be quick to his hand, but Wu's finger would be quicker. Wait! Horn told himself. Wait!

"True," Wu said. "We meddled, but not in the amateurish connotations of the word. We were skillful. Kohlnar needed little help in conquering the Cl.u.s.ter; his own fiery determination carried him on. But this was only postponing the slowly approaching crisis, and the longer it was delayed, the more dangerous it became. Eron was decaying; revolt was inevitable. The only chance to save it was to precipitate the crisis. Against a premature rebellion, Eron might win and gain a second chance."

"So you hired me to a.s.sa.s.sinate Kohlnar," Horn said. His right hand was inching across his waistband toward the pistol b.u.t.t hanging above it.

"I was wrong," Wu said. "Even the experience of fifteen hundred years can be wrong; even Lil's fantastic mathematical ability can't balance the billions of terms implicit in the star-flung problem. We miscalculated. Eron lost."

"And you've lost, too," Horn said.

"We?" Wu chuckled. "Oh, no. We never lose. There will be more strings to pull, more puppets to dance. We will transplant ourselves to the new focal center of power, the Cl.u.s.ter. It is disorganized now, but it will soon grow strong. It will shape the Empire into something new and dynamic, and we will shape the Cl.u.s.ter."

"Haven't you done enough?" Horn asked. "Isn't it time for men to work out their own destinies?"

"And remove my one reason for existence?" Wu asked mockingly. "No, my idealistic friend, I can't permit that. And it is time for you to die. Kohlnar is dead. Duchane is dead. Now you."

Horn's eyes widened briefly. Behind Wu something had moved.

"An old trick," Wu said, smiling. "Subtly done. But it won't work." His hand tightened on the gun.

Horn tensed himself. The flicker of movement came again. Red-gold. Wendre! What was she doing? She hated him. She had said so herself.

Wendre threw herself toward Wu's back.

"No trick! No trick!" Lil screamed, glancing behind.

Wu twisted away instinctively. Horn threw himself to one side, his pistol jumping into his hand. For a moment he couldn't shoot for fear that the bullet would pa.s.s through Wu into Wendre.

Wendre missed. She slipped past, and Horn's response was instantaneous. He did not miss.

THE HISTORY.

Giver of gifts....

The galactic frontier: new worlds without end, virgin planets lying fertile for the human sperm, a million unspoiled continents rich with every treasure, black soil and mountain dawns and mysterious sh.o.r.es of a million seas. But the greatest gift was freedom.

With the coming of the Empire, the frontier became the marches.

The influence of great civilizations have always reached beyond their immediate borders. Around them, like armor, they created protective states which kept at bay the alien hordes. And when the civilizations began to decay, the marches turned their martial talents inward against their creators.

Eron created the Cl.u.s.ter by the challenge of its power and crushed it when it refused to be absorbed.

But Eron was rotten. The Empire could not last. Its response to challenge was not leadership but force.

Eron was a fossil. Its continued existence was a deadly threat to all humanity....

21.

CHALLENGE.

Horn sat in the exotic luxury of the golden room and squirmed. Under him, the chair was too soft and slick; he sank down into it so far that it would take him minutes to get out. Around him, the colors were too indefinite; the pictures glowing in the wall were too meaningless. There was nothing to look at.

He had been waiting for half an hour and he wished he hadn't come.

What did Wendre Kohlnar have to say to him that she had not said before?

Soaked, scrubbed, trimmed, shaved, Horn felt like a different person. He had stared into the mirror at a lean, dark-faced stranger. He hadn't recognized the suggestion of understanding in the once-hard eyes, the lines of suffering and compa.s.sion around the once-immobile mouth. He had grown old and wise in the last few months.

He was glad that he had turned down the rich synsilks and furs. It was good to be back in the sober, durable, woven cords of the Cl.u.s.ter.

Horn shifted again. Whatever Wendre had to say, he wished she would come and say it. There had been seven days since he had seen her, seven days in which she could have summoned him and he would have come, seven days since the major fighting had ended. Now, long after he had stopped hoping, only hours before he was due at the ship that would take him back to the Cl.u.s.ter, she had asked him here to wait-and wait.

He remembered the last time he had seen her. He remembered how Wu had collapsed, tiredly, almost gratefully. He had cheated death for the last time.

Horn's gun had followed the swooping, screaming thing called Lil. His finger had tightened on the trigger and relaxed. He couldn't shoot her. What had she done except befriend a man? She hadn't sought vengeance against the race that had exterminated her own. She had attached herself to one of them and served him, too well....

And then it had been too late. Lil was gone.

"Why didn't you shoot it?" Wendre asked. She had picked herself up from the floor.

"You heard?"

"Enough to know that she was dangerous. Why didn't you shoot?"

"I couldn't."

"Think what she could do if we don't find her!"

"How can we find her?" Horn asked helplessly. "She might be anything, anywhere. And if we found her, how could we hold her? I wonder if a bullet would have done any damage. I wonder, too, if the master switch-the one that would cut off the Tubes-is Lil's life."

"But it could be important. She might-"

"I wonder. Wu was the human. Without him, what could that alien thing do? The damage would be insignificant compared with the chance of destroying the Tubes. The damage Wu did was subtle and all-pervading; Lil doesn't know enough about people for that."

Horn knelt beside Wu's body. A red stain spread darkly over the torn green shirt from the hole in the chest. The heartbeat was still; the breath was stopped. Wu was dead. There was something strangely pitiful about the limp body in the tattered clothes. It was so small and weak to have done so much, so finally dead after having evaded death so long.

It was irony that the man who had preached the social theory of history to him had been the greatest proof of the personal theory. Wu had been the somebody who pushed. He had stood outside the river and guided its course. He had guided Horn, too. He, more than Horn, had pulled the trigger that fired the bullet that killed Kohlnar. He had wielded the forces that shape empires and men's destinies. But Horn had escaped and been himself a shaper; perhaps Wu's death had been implicit in that moment.

Horn had been bred on individualism and independence; events had forced him to recognize the truths of interrelation and interdependence. He recognized now that there was no sharp division between them. They were not a dichotomy; they blended together inseparably. They could not be equated with good and bad abstractly. Circ.u.mstances dictated which one should predominate, which one should be stressed, which one should be desired.

Horn had looked up. Wendre had been standing beside him still. "Why did you save me?"

For a moment her eyes had flashed. "You saved me," she said. "Now we are even." And she walked away.

Horn had stared after her with eyes that burned, but he did not follow. He went to get Sair and found him gone. In the moment of victory he had slipped away. They searched for him; it was like locating one ant in a city-sized anthill. He returned, as he had gone, alone, unnoticed.

He had been sitting in a chapel, he said; he had been thinking. Although he was not a religious man, he had been forced to recognize occasionally a power greater than a man or the sum of men. It was incredible that a few men should have defeated the greatness of Eron. Surely they owed it to something or someone else, whatever it was called. A man can sometimes be stronger or wiser than he is; sometimes he can reach his dreams.

"But not too often," Horn had said. "The fulfillment of dreams can become an obsession. A man may be tempted to play G.o.d, and there is only one end to that-tragedy for his creation, destruction for himself."

He had taken Sair to see the body-and the body had been gone. "What did Duchane say about dead men walking?" Horn asked, incredulous.

"Duchane?"

Horn had rushed to the bars. The door swung open. "He's gone, too! They were both dead. I'm sure of it."

"Of course they were," Sair said, chuckling. "The bodies have been collected; they're probably burnt by now. It doesn't matter. I'd have liked to have seen the man who built Eron and the Empire, but it is only a fancy. That era is ended, and he is ended with it. All men must die, even demiG.o.ds. Death is Nature's way of canceling her mistakes, of making room for the new and the different-"

The little noise the door made as it slid aside broke into Horn's thoughts. He looked up. Wendre was standing in the room. He was surprised at her appearance. She was beautiful, true, and rest and care had made her young again. But he had expected, unconsciously, that she would wear something as lovely and revealing as the gown she had worn at the Dedication. Instead her suit was blue, tailored, and practical.

So much for vanity, Horn thought wryly as he struggled to his feet.

"Have you been waiting long?" Wendre asked.

"Long enough."

She flushed. "You have a talent for saying the wrong thing."

"Would you like me to lie and flatter?"