The Nail and the Oracle (29 page)

Did he mind. Would he wait, bracketed by the thundering colors of that mountain, the adagio of the sea. Is that all right
.

There was nothing, no way, no word to express his response but to raise his tense fists as high as he could and shout as loud as he could and then turn it into laughter and to tears
.

Vorhidin, having checked out his manifests, joined them before Charli was finished. He had locked gazes with the girl, who smiled up at him and held his forearm in both her hands, stroking and he laughed and laughed. “He drank too much Vexvelt all at once,” she said to Vorhidin. Vorhidin put a big warm hand on Charli’s shoulder and laughed with him until he was done. When he had his breath again, and the water-lenses out of his eyes, Tamba said, “That’s where we’re going.”

“Where?”

She pointed, very carefully. Three slender dark trees like poplars came beseeching out of a glad tumble of luminous light willow-green. “Those three trees.”

“I can’t see a house
 …”

Vorhidin and Tamba laughed together: this pleased them. “Come.”

“We were going to wait for—”

“No need to wait any longer. Come.”

Charli said, “The house was only a short walk from the port, but
you couldn’t see the one from the other. A big house, too, trees all around it and even growing up through it. I stayed with the family and worked.” He slapped the heavy folio. “All this. I got all the help I needed.”

“
Did
you indeed.” The Archive Master seemed more interested in this than in anything else he had heard so far. Or perhaps it was a different kind of interest. “Helped you, did they? Would you say they’re anxious to trade?”

The answer to this was clearly an important one. “All I can say,” Charli Bux responded carefully, “is that I asked for this information—a catalogue of the trade resources of Vexvelt, and estimates of F.O.B. prices. None of them are very far off a practical, workable arrangement, and every single one undercuts the competition. There are a number of reasons. First of all, of course, is the resources themselves—almost right across the board, unbelievably rich. Then they have mining methods like nothing you’ve ever dreamed of, and harvesting, and preserving—there’s no end to it. At first blush it looks like a pastoral planet—well, it’s not. It’s a natural treasure house that has been organized and worked and planned and understood like no other planet in the known universe. Those people have never had a war, they’ve never had to change their original cultural plan; it works, Master, it
works
. And it has produced a sane healthy people which, when it goes about a job, goes about it single-mindedly and with … well, it might sound like an odd term to use, but it’s the only one that fits: with joy … I can see you don’t want to hear this.”

The old man opened his eyes and looked directly at the visitor. At Bux’s cascade of language he had averted his face, closed his eyes, curled his lip, let his hands stray over his temples and near his ears, as if it was taking a supreme effort to keep from clapping the palms over them.

“All I can hear is that a world which has been set aside by the whole species, and which has kept itself aloof, is using you to promote a contact which nobody wants. Do they want it? They won’t get it, of course, but have they any idea of what their world would be like if this”—he waved at the folio—“is all true? How do they think they could control the exploiters? Have they got something
special in defenses as well as all this other?”

“I really don’t know.”

“I know!” The old man was angrier than Bux had yet seen him. “What they are is their defense! No one will
ever
go near them, not
ever
. Not if they strip their whole planet of everything it has, and refine and process the lot, and haul it to their spaceport at their own expense, and give it away free.”

“Not even if they can cure cancer?”

“Almost all cancer is curable.”

“They can cure
all
cancer.”

“New methods are discovered every—”

“They’ve had the methods for I don’t know how many years. Centuries.
They have no cancer.”

“Do you know what this cure is?”

“No, I don’t. But it wouldn’t take a clinical team a week to find out.”

“The incurable cancers are not subject to clinical analysis. They are all deemed psychosomatic.”

“I know. That is exactly what the clinical team would find out.”

There was a long, pulsing silence. “You have not been completely frank with me, young man.”

“That’s right, sir.”

Another silence. “The implication is that they are sane and cancer-free because of the kind of culture they have set up.”

This time Bux did not respond, but let the old man’s words hang there to be reheard, reread. At last the Archive Master spoke again in a near whisper, shaking and furious. “Abomination! Abomination!” Spittle appeared on his chin: he seemed not to know. “I would—rather—die—eaten alive—with cancer—and raving
mad
than live with such sanity as that.”

“Perhaps others would disagree.”

“No one would disagree! Try it? Try it! They’ll tear you to pieces! That’s what they did to Allman. That’s what they did to Balrou! We killed Troshan ourselves—he was the first and we didn’t know then that the mob would do it for us. That was a thousand years ago, you understand that? And a thousand years from now the mob will
still do it for us! And that—that
filth
will go to the locked files with the others, and someday another fool with too much curiosity and not enough decency and his mind rotten with perversion will sit here with another Archive Master, who will send him out as I’m sending you out, to shut his mouth and save his life or open it and be torn to pieces. Get
out!
Get
out!
Get
out!
” His voice had risen to a shriek and then a sort of keening, and had rasped itself against itself until it was a painful forced whisper and then nothing at all: the old eyes glared and the chin was wet.

Charli Bux rose slowly. He was white with shock. He said quietly, “Vorhidin tried to tell me, and I wouldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. I said to him, ‘I know more about greed that you do; they will not be able to resist those prices.’ I said, I know more about fear than you do; they will not be able to stand against the final cancer cure.’ Vorhidin laughed at me and gave me all the help I needed.

“I started to tell him once that I knew more about the sanity that lives in all of us, and very much in some of us, and that it could prevail. But I knew while I was talking that I was wrong about that. Now I know that I was wrong in everything, even the greed, even the fear, and he was right. And he said Vexvelt has the most powerful and the least expensive defense ever devised—sanity. He was right.”

Charli Bux realized then that the old man, madly locking gazes with him as he spoke, had in some way, inside his head, turned off his ears. He sat there with his old head cocked to one side, panting like a foundered dog in a dust bowl, until at last he thought he could shout again. He could not. He could only rasp, he could only whisper-squeak, “Get out! Get out!”

Charli Bux got out. He left the folio where it was; it, like Vexvelt, defended itself by being immiscible—in the language of chemistry, by being noble.

It was not Tamba after all, but Tyng who captured Charli’s heart
.

When they got to the beautiful house, so close to everything and yet so private, so secluded, he met the family. Breerho’s radiant—almost heat-radiant—shining red hair, and Tyng’s, showed them to be mother and daughter. Vorhid and Stren were the sons, one a child,
the other in his mid-teens, were straight-backed, wide-shouldered like their father, and by the wonderful cut and tilt of their architecttured eyes, were brothers to Tyng, and to Tamba.

There were two other youngsters, a lovely twelve-year-old girl called Fleet, who was singing when they came in, and for whose song they stopped and postponed the introductions, and a sturdy tumblebug of a boy they called Handr, possibly the happiest human being any of them would ever see. In time Charli met the parents of these two, and black-haired Tamba seemed much more kin to the mother than to flame-haired Breerho.

It was at first a cascade of names and faces, captured only partially, kaleidoscoping about in his head as they all did in the room, and making a shyness in him. But there was more love in the room than ever the peaks of his mind and heart had known before, and more care and caring.

Before the afternoon and evening were over, he was familiar and accepted and enchanted. And because Tamba had touched his heart and astonished his body, all his feelings rose within him and narrowed and aimed themselves on her, hot and breathless, and indeed she seemed to delight in him and kept close to him the whole of the time. But when the little ones went off yawning, and then others, and they were almost alone, he asked her, he begged her to come to his bed. She was kind as could be, and loving, but also completely firm in her refusal. “But, darling, I just can’t now. I can’t. I’ve been away to Lethe and now I’m back and I
promised.”

“Promised who?”

“Stren.”

“But I thought …” He thought far too many things to sort out or even to isolate one from another. Well, maybe he hadn’t understood the relationships here—after all, there were four adults and six children and he’d get it straight by tomorrow who was who, because otherwise she—oh. “You mean you promised Stren you wouldn’t sleep with me.”

“No, my silly old dear. I’ll sleep with Stren tonight. Please, darling, don’t be upset. There’ll be other times. Tomorrow. Tomorrow morning?” She laughed and took his cheeks in her two hands and
shook his whole head as if she could make the frown drop off. “Tomorrow morning
very
early?”

“I don’t mean to be like this my very first night here. I’m sorry, I guess there’s a lot I don’t understand,” he mumbled in his misery. And then anguish skyrocketed within him and he no longer cared about host and guest and new customs and all the rest of it. “I love you,” he cried, “don’t you know that?”

“Of course, of course I do. And I love you, and we will love one another for a long, long time. Didn’t you think I knew that?” Her puzzlement was so genuine that even through pain-haze he could see it. He said, as close to tears as he felt a grown man should ever get, that he just guessed he didn’t understand.

“You will, beloved, you will. We’ll talk about it until you do, no matter how long it takes.” Then she added, with absolutely guileless cruelty, “Starting tomorrow. But now I have to go, Stren’s waiting. Good night, true love,” and she kissed the top of his averted head and sprinted away lightly on bare tiptoe.

She had reached something in him that made it impossible for him to be angry at her. He could only hurt. He had not known until these past two days that he could feel so much or bear so much pain. He buried his face in the cushions of the long couch in the—living room?—anyway, the place where indoors and outdoors were as tangled as his heart, but more harmoniously—and gave himself up to sodden hurt.

In time, someone knelt beside him and touched him lightly on the neck. He twisted his head enough to be able to see. It was Tyng, her hair all but luminous in the dimness, and her face, what he could see of it, nothing but compassion. She said, “Would you like me to stay with you instead?” and with the absolute honesty of the stricken, he cried, “There couldn’t be anyone else instead!”

Her sorrow, its genuineness, was unmistakable. She told him of it, touched him once more, and slipped away. Sometime during the night he twisted himself awake enough to find the room they had given him, and found surcease in utter black exhaustion.

Awake in daylight, he sought his other surcease, which was work, and began his catalogue of resources. Everyone tried at one time or
another to communicate with him, but unless it was work he shut it off (except, of course, for the irresistible Handr, who became his fast and lifelong friend). He found Tyng near him more and more frequently, and usefully so; he had not become so surly that he would refuse a stylus or reference book (opened at the right place) when it was placed in his hand exactly at the moment he needed it. Tyng was with him for many hours, alert but absolutely silent, before he unbent enough to ask her for this or that bit of information, or wondered about weights and measures and man-hour calculations done in the Vexveltian way. If she did not know, she found out with a minimum of delay and absolute clarity. She knew, however, a very great deal more than he had suspected. So the time came when he was chattering like a macaw, eagerly planning the next day’s work with her.

He never spoke to Tamba. He did not mean to hurt her, but he could sense her eagerness to respond to him and he could not bear it. She, out of consideration, just stopped trying.

One particularly knotty statistical sequence kept him going for two days and two nights without stopping. Tyng kept up with him all the way without complaint until, in the wee small hours of the third morning, she rolled up her eyes and collapsed. He staggered up on legs gone asleep with too much sitting, and shook the statistics out of his eyes to settle her on the thick fur rug, straighten the twisted knee. In what little light spilled from his abandoned hooded lamp, she was exquisite, especially because of his previous knowledge that she was exquisite in the most brilliant of glares. The shadows added something to the alabaster, and her unconscious pale lips were no longer darker than her face, and she seemed strangely statuesque and non-living. She was wearing a Cretan sort of dress, a tight stomacher holding the bare breasts cupped and supporting a diaphanous skirt. Troubled that the stomacher might impede her breathing, he unhooked it and put it back. The flesh of her midriff where it had been was, to the finger if not to the eye, pinched and ridged. He kneaded it gently and pursued indefinable thoughts through the haze of fatigue: pyrophyllite, Lethe, brother, recoverable vanadium salts, Vorhidin, precipitate, Tyng’s watching me. Tyng in the
almost dark was watching him. He took his eyes from her and looked down her body to his hand. It had stopped moving some vague time ago, slipped into slumber of its own accord. Were her eyes open now or closed? He leaned forward to see and over-balanced. They fell asleep with their lips touching, not yet having kissed at all.