They waited, watching Kamm’s swift-moving small moons, and each time an inner moon come into conjunction with an outer moon, they stared intently at the castle. But no light flashed in any window.
After the third conjunction, Darzek stirred uneasily. “Is it possible that he’s finished and left already?”
“Maybe he’s signaling from a window we can’t see from here,” Riklo said.
“Then let’s move.”
They walked along the edge of the forest on a path that took them directly under the garbage heap, and the overpowering stench enveloped them like a corrosive cloud. It became a tangible thing, and Darzek wanted to seize it with his two six-fingered hands and shove it aside so he could breathe. They stumbled forward, keeping their eyes on the castle.
Suddenly Riklo halted. “What’s that?”
There was a scraggly sponge growth at the foot of the cliff, and something had crashed into it and was caught there. A limp arm dangled perpendicularly; a twisted leg was entangled in the sponge fronds. They hurried toward it, ignoring the foul squish of garbage underfoot. Carefully, tenderly, they lifted the body down and carried it to the concealment of the forest.
The soft bark had cushioned its fall, and most night creatures had found it not yet ripe enough for their liking. Darzek and Riklo stretched out the body and examined it with a hand light, flicking the beam from time to time to make it look like one of the night creatures scurrying among the sponge stalks.
Wenz, agent of the Galactic Synthesis. Young, good-looking, intelligent, well trained, skilled, highly capable. The Duke Merzkion had inflicted upon him the final indignity that the Dukes of Storoz reserved for enemies and victims alike: his body had been thrown out with the garbage.
At least that final indignity had been painless. The evidence of what came before it sickened Darzek. The teeth were set; the face was twisted gruesomely; the hands and even the feet were clenched; every body muscle was tensed—not from rigor mortis, but from torture.
And yet the body was unmarked except for the trickle of blood that had caked in the nose and eyes and mouth.
Darzek and Riklo exchanged glances.
Wenz had remarked jokingly that if the Duke Merzkion actually possessed a death ray, he would find it. The duke did, and Wenz had found it; and it had killed him.
At the same instant, it had doomed a world.
CHAPTER 2
Jan Darzek first heard of the world of Kamm at a meeting of the Council of Supreme.
It was Interstellar Trade Day at the council. Supreme, the world-sized computer that governed the galaxy, gave birth to a mountain of economic statistics every ten cycles; and the Council of Supreme, which liked to think that it governed the galaxy, felt obligated to meet and consider them.
Old E-Wusk, the Second Councilor and the council’s expert on trade, had achieved a formula of condensation that almost capsuled Supreme’s report out of existence; but first he felt obliged to perform a statistical analysis. “The balance of trade in the neighboring sector, in contrast to the two sectors just cited—”
Darzek, the First Councilor and, under the name Gul Darr, a well-known interstellar trader himself, cared nothing for either statistics or economics. He suppressed a yawn and amused himself by watching his fellow councilors.
The large ball with an upper hemisphere bristling with eye stalks was THREE, the Third Councilor. When bored, its eye stalks twitched and intertwined. When bored to distraction, they began to tie themselves into knots. At the moment it was plaiting the stalks into rather complicated braids, the final stage before knot tying.
SIX, the Sixth Councilor, a gaunt, angular, nocturnal triped, was performing an involved plaiting of her own. Her three looping arms twined and untwined incessantly. Her expression was invisible behind the shaded translucency of her light shield.
FIVE was equally capable of fanciful plaiting, but she kept her multifingered tentacles in a state of perfect relaxation. Her massive, conical head was bent forward slightly in a posture of attentiveness; her twig of a body was concealed by the drooping tentacles. The Fifth Councilor always maintained a guise of polite interest, however boring the report.
SEVEN was listening silently, which meant that it was asleep. It was a massive lung in a slug-like body, and its regular wheezes were disconcertingly audible when it was awake. When it slept, its metabolism slowed almost to zero.
FOUR probably was asleep. He was the council’s enigma, a faceless life form with a row of sensory humps located across his shoulders. He rarely spoke, and the only evidence of consciousness was the twitching and jerking of the humps as he focused and refocused his organs of sight and hearing to follow a discussion. Now the humps were motionless.
Darzek turned his attention to EIGHT, Rok Wllon, the council’s Director of Uncertified Worlds. He had been watching the Eighth Councilor intermittently through the meeting, but now he scrutinized him with concern.
Rok Wllon’s usual listening attitude was one of poised alertness as he waited to pounce on a contradiction or interrupt with a question. His knack for transforming an orderly meeting into acrimony with a well-placed interruption or two was exceeded only by his remarkable talent for interminable debate on inconsequential issues.
But today he was leaning far back in his chair, and his half-closed eyes seemed to be focused on the infinity of the jace-vaulted ceiling. This entirely unwonted silence worried Darzek. There was no visible sign of illness—the Eighth Councilor had a decidedly blue set to his complexion, but that peculiar hue was his normal color, just as his normal but unlikely looking silhouette was massively broad when seen from the front and improbably narrow when viewed from the side-but something was decidedly wrong with him. Never before had he permitted E-Wusk to rattle off economic statistics without challenge.
E-Wusk harrumphed twice and swung into his capsuled summary: The total volume of trade among the worlds of the Galactic Synthesis was up slightly. The trade of twenty-six and something per cent of the worlds had increased; the trade of twenty-eight and something per cent of the worlds had diminished. The trade of the others showed no significant fluctuation. A few worlds were experiencing unusual prosperity. A few were enmeshed in economic difficulties. Any councilor interested in either category could ask Supreme for a list of the twenty or thirty thousand worlds numbered therein. In E-Wusk’s opinion, the decacycle just concluded showed no anomalies, and none were predicted for the decacycle to come.
The Second Councilor harrumphed to a conclusion and then sank back into a tangle of telescoping limbs.
Darzek opened the meeting to discussion or questions. There was no response, so he officially accepted E-Wusk’s report with the council’s thanks. “Is there any further business?” he asked.
The Third Councilor hurriedly unbraided its eye stalks and inflated its vocal sack. “I have a complaint,” it hissed.
Darzek asked politely, “What is it that you wish to complain about?”
“I’m not complaining,” THREE protested. “I have received a complaint. From compatriot tourists. They complain that they can’t see the government.”
Darzek reflected for a moment. “That’s probably true.”
“Of course it’s true. They make a long and expensive journey in order to view Primores, the central world of the galaxy, home of Supreme, principal site of the governing bodies of the Galactic Synthesis. And when they arrive here, it’s just another alien world and not as interesting as most. There are governmental structures, of course, but all worlds have governmental structures. There’s nothing for them to see.”
“What do you suggest?” Darzek asked.
“There should be displays. Festivities. Ceremonies,