“The writer’s previous papers show that the principle of nonelementalism is not itself altogether a universal, but must be subject to certain psychomathe-matical reservations arising from consideration of the
“What is that jabberwocky?” exploded Lombard.
“I don’t know,” said Vahino helplessly. “The Skontaran mind is as alien to me as to you.”
“Gibberish,” said Lombard. “With the good old Skontaran to-hell-with-you dogmatism thrown in.” He threw the magazine on the little bronze brazier, and fire licked at its thin pages. “Utter nonsense, as anyone with any knowledge of general semantics, or even an atom of common sense, can see.” He smiled crookedly, a little sorrowfully, and shook his head. “A race of cranks!”
“I wish you could spare me a few hours tomorrow,” said Skorrogan.
“Well — I suppose so.” Thordin XI, Valtam of the Empire of Skontar, nodded his thinly maned head. “Though next week would be a little more convenient.”
“Tomorrow — please.”
The note of urgency could not be denied. “All right,” said Thordin. “But what will be going on?”
“I’d like to take you on a little jaunt over to Cundaloa.”
“Why there, of all places? And why must it be tomorrow, of all times?”
“I’ll tell you — then.” Skorrogan inclined his head, still thickly maned though it was quite white now, and switched off his end of the telescreen.
Thordin smiled in some puzzlement. Skorrogan was an odd fellow in many ways. But. . well. . we old men have to stick together. There is a new generation, and one after that, pressing on our heels.
No doubt thirty-odd years of living in virtual ostracism had changed the old joyously confident Skorrogan. But it had, at least, not embittered him. When the slow success of Skontar had become so plain that his own failure could be forgotten, the circle of his friends had very gradually included him again. He still lived much alone, but he was no longer unwelcome wherever he went. Thordin, in particular, had discovered that their old friendship could be as alive as ever before, and he was often over to the Citadel of Kraaka-haym, or Skorrogan to the palace. He had even offered the old noble a position back in the High Council, but it had been refused, and another ten years — or was it twenty? — had gone by with Skorrogan fulfilling no more than his hereditary duties as duke. Until now, for the first time, something like a favor was being asked… Yes, he thought, I’ll go tomorrow. To blazes with work. Monarchs deserve holidays, too.
Thordin got up from his chair and limped over to the broad window. The new endocrine treatments were doing wonders for his rheumatism, but their effect wasn’t quite complete yet. He shivered a little as he looked at the wind-driven snow sweeping down over the valley. Winter was coming again.
The geologists said that Skontar was entering another glacial epoch. But it would never get there. In another decade or so the climate engineers would have perfected their techniques and the glaciers would be driven back into the north. But meanwhile it was cold and white outside, and a bitter wind hooted around the palace towers.
It would be summer in the southern hemisphere now, fields would be green, and smoke would rise from freeholders’ cottages into a warm blue sky. Who had headed that scientific team? — Yes, Aesgayr Haasting’s son. His work on agronomics and genetics had made it possible for a population of independent smallholders to produce enough food for the new scientific civilization. The old freeman, the backbone of Skontar in all her history, had not died out.
Other things had changed, of course. Thordin smiled wryly as he reflected just how much the Valtamate had changed in the last fifty years. It had been Dyrin’s work in general semantics, so fundamental to all the sciences, which had led to the new psychosymbologi-cal techniques of government. Skontar was an empire in name only now. It had resolved the paradox of a libertarian state with a nonelective and efficient government. All to the good, of course, and really it was what past Skontaran history had been slowly and painfully evolving toward. But the new science had speeded up the process, compressed centuries of evolution into two brief generations. As physical and biological science had accelerated beyond belief — But it was odd that the arts, music, literature had hardly changed, that handicraft survived, that the old High Naarhaym was still spoken.
Well, so it went. Thordin turned back toward his desk. There was work to be done. Like that matter of the colony on Aesric’s Planet — You couldn’t expect to run several hundred thriving interstellar colonies without some trouble. But it was minor. The empire was safe. And it was growing.
They’d come a long way from the day of despair fifty years ago, and from the famine and pestilence and desolation which followed. A long way — Thordin wondered if even he realized just how far.
He picked up the microreader and glanced over the pages. His mind training came back to him and he arrished the material. He couldn’t handle the new techniques as easily as those of the younger generation, trained in them from birth, but it was a wonderful help to arrish, complete the integration in his subconscious, and indolate the probabilities. He wondered how he had ever survived the old days of reasoning on a purely conscious level.
Thordin came out of the warp just outside Kraaka-haym Citadel. Skorrogan had set the point of emergence there, rather than indoors, because he liked the view. It was majestic, thought the Valtam, but dizzying — a wild swoop of gaunt gray crags and wind-riven clouds down to the far green valley below. Above him loomed the old battlements, with the black-winged kraakar which had given the place its name hovering and cawing in the sky. The wind roared and boomed about him, driving dry white snow before it.
The guards raised their spears in salute. They were unarmed otherwise, and the vortex guns on the castle walls were corroding away. No need for weapons in the heart of an empire second only to Sol’s dominions. Skorrogan stood waiting in the courtyard. Fifty years had not bent his back much or taken the fierce golden luster from his eyes. It seemed to Thordin today, though, that the old being wore an air of taut and inwardly blazing eagerness: he seemed somehow to be looking toward the end of a journey.
Skorrogan gave conventional greeting and invited him in. “Not now, thanks,” said Thordin. “I really am very busy. I’d like to start the trip at once.”
The duke murmured the usual formula of polite regret, but it was plain that he could hardly wait, that he could ill have stood an hour’s dawdling indoors. “Then please come,” he said. “My cruiser is all set to go.”
It was cradled behind the looming building, a sleek little roboship with the bewildering outline of all tetra- hedral craft. They entered and took their seats at the center, which, of course, looked directly out beyond the hull.
“Now,” said Thordin, “perhaps you’ll tell me why you want to go to Cundaloa today?”
Skorrogan gave him a sudden look in which an old pain stirred.
“Today, he said slowly, “it is exactly fifty years since I came back from Sol.”
“Yes —?” Thordin was puzzled and vaguely uncomfortable. It wasn’t like the taciturn old fellow to rake up that forgotten score.
“You probably don’t remember,” said Skorrogan, “but if you want to vargan it from your subconscious, you’ll perceive that I said to them, then, that they could come back in fifty years and beg my pardon.”
“So now you want to vindicate yourself.” Thordin felt no surprise — it was typically Skontaran psychology — but he still wondered what there was to apologize for.
“I do. At that time I couldn’t explain. Nobody would have listened, and in any case I was not perfectly sure myself that I had done right.” Skorrogan smiled, and his thin hands set the controls. “Now I am. Time has justified me. And I will redeem what honor I lost then by showing you, today, that I didn’t really fail.
“Instead, I succeeded. You see, I alienated the Solarians on purpose.”
He pressed the main-drive stud, and the ship flashed through half a light-year of space. The great blue shield of Cundaloa rolled majestically before them, shining softly against a background of a million blazing stars.
Thordin sat quietly, letting the simple and tremendous statement filter through all the levels of his mind. His first emotional reaction was a vaguely surprised realization that, subconsciously, he had been expecting something like this. He hadn’t ever really believed, deep down inside himself, that Skorrogan could be an incompetent.
Instead — no, not a traitor. But — what, then? What had he meant? Had he been mad, all these years, or…
“You haven’t been to Cundaloa much since the war, have you?” asked Skorrogan.
“No — only three times, on hurried business. It’s a prosperous system. Solar help put them on their feet
