“Careful there!” he croaked as he gave up the girl he had brought out. “She’s the wife of a very great man.…”
“Councillor Braithwin had already informed me,” Horn explained in husky tones, “that no retainer on Creew ’n Dith would turn against his master in time of trouble. So it could hardly have been one of the staff who set the fire. That left one likely candidate among those inside the house.”
“Moda Talibrand,” Braithwin grunted.
“Right. I knew she hated her brother-in-law—and with good reason, of course, though she only had her suspicions to go by. So I went down and made some inquiries of the women and children who’d been given safe-conduct from the house. She wasn’t there. And when someone realized that she’d been with them when they assembled to make their dash for safety in the great hall, and wasn’t among them now, there was only one possible conclusion: Jan Talibrand had kept her back to burn alive in the fire she herself had started. And there she was, lying where Talibrand had thrown her under a serving-table. So I brought her out.”
He raised his beer-mug and poured the contents down his throat. He was acquiring the taste for the stuff, he decided, and held the mug out for more.
Around the table in Braithwin’s great hall, the surviving councillors nodded approval. They had rested after the battle, and before resuming their interrupted business they were refreshing themselves with food and drink.
“At the risk of pre-empting the official verdict,” Braithwin commented gruffly, “I can’t help feeling the planet is a better place without someone who could revenge himself that way upon a helpless woman … hrr’hm!”
Clearing his throat, he noisily rustled his stack of papers together.
“For the benefit of our distinguished visitor Derry Horn, I propose to transact a small part of our next business in Anglic. First: a motion. It is resolved that no more so-called ‘androids’ be permitted passage through Creewndithian ports, and henceforth it shall be an offense for any Creewndithian citizen to engage in traffic in them. Aye?”
Every hand was raised.
“Second: a motion. It is resolved that Derry Horn, a citizen of the planet Earth, be granted the honorary citizenship of Creew ’n Dith. Aye?”
Again, every hand went up.
“Third: an entry of record. Jan Talibrand of the house of Talibrand formerly of this council did for causes by this council in their several persons witnessed forfeit his right and the right of his descendants to the rank of hereditary councillor. Aye?”
And a third time agreement.
“Good,” said Braithwin, and sat back. “Well, there’s no need to detain you further, Mr. Horn—you’ll hardly be interested even with your new honorary status as a Creewndithian citizen in the rather elaborate procedure of nominating Talibrand’s successor … anyhow, it’s not legal for anyone but councillors to be present! I’ll arrange for your citizenship papers to be prepared at once, and once you have them you can depart for Earth whenever you wish. Though there is, of course, one other small problem we’ve been considering—the fact that your skin is at present blue.”
Horn shrugged. “People are going to have to get used, even on Earth, to the fact that blue skins don’t label artificial men that can be treated as simple property.”
“Yes, but even so I think you’d be the first to grant that getting rid of the dye would help the process of adjustment. Now it’s been suggested, and we agree, that as a—hah!—a near-friend of a citizen of the galaxy you might find another of that distinguished company willing to assist you. I’ve already sent a message to Gayk on Vernier, offering what funds may be required to develop an antidote to the android blue.”
He fumbled in his belt-pouch. “And, speaking of citizens of the galazy … ah, here we are.” He withdrew the grey wallet that had formerly belonged to Lars Talibrand. “I think there is no one in whose hands we could more aptly leave this relic which was discovered in the ashes of Talibrand Hall?” He made it a question, and the councillors answered with vigorous nods.
Accepting the certificate, Horn rose. He had intended to speak, to utter formal thanks, but he was too overcome to do more than bow his head and turn towards the door of Braithwin’s study. He had left the hall, and closed the door of the smaller room behind them, before he realized that the other person present, whom from the corner of his eye he had taken for a mere serving-wench, was Moda Talibrand.
She had put off her mourning garb and resumed the plain white Creewndithian gown. Her face was full of a strange mixture of sorrow and happiness.
There was a long silence. When at last she spoke, it was in a tone which suggested she was resuming a conversation that had been briefly interrupted.
“You know, I have two reasons for being glad that Lars’s work has been completed after all. The first is obvious—that anything he so prized as to risk his life was worth doing and I couldn’t help but want to see it done, too. But the second reason is hardly clear even to me. Perhaps I can put it like this.
“I thought there could only be one man like my Lars in the whole galaxy, and once I’d lost him I could have no further reason for wanting to live. But I was wrong. There are other men like him. I’ve met one of them, and where there are two there must be many, many more.”
She reached out impulsively and seized his hand. He bowed his head. A lump rose in his throat. He was thinking of a red-haired man lying dead with a knife in his chest on the floor of a room on Earth.
The word went out.…
They told Shembo that no more androids would be shipped through Creew ’n Dith, and that his livelihood was gone. He beamed with a flash of teeth and refrained from mentioning that his next inbound cargo was already on order: furs, cured hides, and rough-cut natural gemstones too random for machines to duplicate.
All he said was, “Must be trade!”
They told Dize the same, and he brushed the information aside; he was too busy studying up for the examination which would make him master of his own ship instead of a junor officer to Larrow. It had amused his sons greatly to find their father going back to school.
Also the word came to a place where battered ancient starships put down on a hard salt-pan beside a sluggish sea, and the wind seemed to turn chillier with its coming. But on Arthworld, and Vernier, and Lygos, and many others where for decades no mother had known when she might have to weep for the loss of a child stolen by kidnappers, it was more as if the sun had broken through a cloud.
It came to Earth, and Derry Horn senior spoke frowningly to his father, saying, “That whippersnapper of a son of mine seems to have kicked up quite a ruckus out yonder!”
“Wrecked our export balances, for one thing!” Grandfather Horn grunted, studying reports which said that Arthworld and Vernier had followed the lead of Creew ’n Dith in banning the android trade, and that Lygos was expected to join them shortly.
Then both together lifted their eyes worriedly to look at the butler, Rowl, and wondered: does he know?
The word traveled fastest of all, of course, among the androids; it had already passed along the trade routes before the ban began to interfere with the traffic.
Androids were used to conversing through a third party; in one such conversation which followed the arrival of the news on Earth the intermediary was the driver of a garbage wagon that served the hotel where Lars Talibrand had died, who bunked in the same android barracks as Berl of the wreck-salvage squad.
From Berl to Dordy the driver carried the opening remarks: “What do you know? I never thought that soft-looking boy would make out! Say, what are you going to do when they get the message down here and have to repeal the regulations that keep us on the hook? First off, I’m going to—”
There followed a list of wild fantasies, most of which would have called for androids to be freed from the laws of nature as well as the laws of man to make them possible. When they were relayed to Dordy he smiled, and sent back his answer crisp, concise and as the fruit of much quiet thought.
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“Start a campaign to have Derry Horn made a citizen of the galaxy!”
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Also by John Brunner
A Maze of Stars
A Planet of Your Own
Age of Miracles
Bedlam Planet
Born Under Mars
Castaways’ World
Catch a Falling Star
Children of the Thunder
Double, Double
Enigma from Tantalus
Galactic Storm
Give Warning to the World
I Speak for Earth
Into the Slave Nebula
Manshape
Meeting at Infinity
More Things in Heaven
Muddle Earth
Players at the Game of People
Polymath
Quicksand
Sanctuary in the Sky
Stand on Zanzibar
Telepathist
The Atlantic Abomination
The (Compleat) Traveler in Black
The Altar on Asconel
The Avengers of Carrig
The Brink
The Crucible of Time
The Dramaturges of Yan
The Dreaming Earth
The Gaudy Shadows
The Infinitive of Go
The Jagged Orbit
The Ladder in the Sky
The Long Result
The Martian Sphinx
The Productions of Time
The Psionic Menace
The Repairmen of Cyclops
The Rites of Ohe
The Sheep Look Up
The Shift key
The Shockwave Riders
The Skynappers
The Space-Time Juggler
The Squares of the City
The Stardroppers
The Stone That Never Came Down
The Super Barbarians
The Tides of Time
The World Swappers
The Wrong End of Time
Threshold of Eternity
Times Without Number
Timescoop
To Conquer Chaos
Total Eclipse
Web of Everywhere
John Brunner (1934–1995) was a prolific British SF writer. In 1951, he published his first novel, Galactic Storm, at the age of just 17, and went on to write dozens of novels under his own and various house names until his death in 1995 at the Glasgow Worldcon. He won the Hugo Award and the British Science Fiction Award for Stand on Zanzibar (a regular contender for the ‘best SF novel of all time’) and the British Science Fiction Award for The Jagged Orbit.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © John Brunner 1968
All rights reserved.
The right of John Brunner to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 1968
This ebook first published in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 10146 3
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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John Brunner, Into the Slave Nebula
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