Star of Gypsies
- Автор: Силверберг Роберт
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Star of Gypsies». Краткое содержание книги:
"You abdicated!"
"So? You believed me?"
"You stormed around telling everyone on fifty worlds that you had had it with being king. You disappeared and no one heard a peep out of you for years. You hid yourself away on God knows what uninhabited planet somewhere outside the Imperium, walking out flat on your responsibilities, letting your own beloved people shift for themselves, ignoring the-"
"Shandor." "Don't interrupt me."
"What? Who the hell do you think you are?" I almost went up the wall in a wild fit of wrath. Telling me to shut up? Me. ME. "You viper. You miserable shit."
His face was white. "I won't hear crap like that. I'm your legally anointed king-"
"My king? My king?" I started to rant and rave. I wanted to throttle him. He saw it in my eyes and I think this time he really was afraid of me. And if he was, it was probably for the first time in his life.
I looked back across the years, across what seemed like geological eons, and I saw him at his mother's breast. My sweet and comforting Esmeralda, first of my wives, holding little red-faced sniveling Shandor, first of all my sons, and he was biting her breast. Really sinking his fangs in.
King? Him? I wanted to swat his behind.
"The abdication was conditional," I said. "It's invalid." "Conditional? Conditional on what?"
"On my continuing to stay abdicated. I voluntarily gave up the kingship and now I voluntarily take it back. The throne was never vacant. The alleged election that allegedly put you where you think you are was illegal."
"You're out of your mind-"
"You need your mouth washed out," I told him.
You have to bear in mind that this Shandor I was berating was no kid. I figure he must have been something close to a hundred years old, which once upon a time was considered a ripe old age. Even now it's a little past the prime of life, though the easy availability of remakes makes it hard to say when the prime of life really is.
But to me Shandor had always been a snot, a shit, and a worthless treacherous villain. That's a hell of a thing to have to say about your own first-born son, I know.
I gave him some three non-stop minutes on the subject of laws and customs and the kingship and filial obligation, and he was so stunned that for once he listened to me without saying a word. He was frightened and angry at first, and then troubled and angry, and then annoyed and angry, and then the anger disappeared and I saw him starting to look crafty. I could read every emotion as though he was sending up beacons. Shandor might be dangerous but he wasn't really smart. He just thought he was. Now that everyone lives so long, you see false wisdom all over the place. Just because someone has lived a long time doesn't make him a sage. You accumulate smarts up to a point, and then you stop, and often you start to slide backward.
(Except me, that is. I'm always the exception. Does that sound to you like I'm kidding myself? All right, then I'm kidding myself. Go ahead and fuck around with me because you think I'm senile. You'll find out.) I paused for breath finally and he said, "Are you finished?"
"More or less. I'm calling a session of the krisatora to have you deposed and me reinstated. I just wanted to give you the courtesy of knowing that ahead of time."
He didn't react. He didn't even seem mildly irritated. Now he was being crafty.
"You have nothing to say to that?" I asked. "I have plenty to say."
"Go on."
He sat there looking at me. I saw my own face staring back at me, except his was dark and bleak and joyless, my face with all the true essence of my soul burned out of it.
After a time he said, very quietly but with a really ugly, menacing undertone in his voice, "I say that you're a crazy old fool. I say that if I have to listen to any more of your garbage it's likely to start seriously bothering me. I say that if you bother me in any serious way you're likely to make me do something that you'll regret. I may even regret it too. Now get your ass out of here or I'll have you thrown out." "You say that to me?"
"I say that to you. If I didn't think you were insane I'd have you locked up. And maybe brainburned to keep you harmless. But you are harmless."
"You know who I am, Shandor?"
"I know who you were, yes. But that was a long time ago. I feel sorry for you. Now get out of here. Shoo, old man. Shoo. Beat it."
I took a deep breath. It was time to make a real move, I saw. Things were starting to slide off in the wrong direction. It wouldn't do anybody any good for me to go slinking away from Shandor like a whipped dog. Getting thrown out of the house of power like some grubby panhandler might be marginally more useful, but it still wasn't what I had had in mind.
Glowering, fuming, I took a couple of steps toward him.
"You pig, Shandor. You unmentionable stench. You loathsome offense in the eyes of God."
He looked really troubled. He didn't have any idea what I was likely to do.
"Keep back-" "You need a lesson." "I warn you-"
"Discipline, that's what you need." I brought my arm swooping up on a sharp curve and slapped him hard in the face. My hand left red marks on his cheek. He stared at me, amazed. Utterly astounded.
"I don't believe this. Laying hands on God's anointed-"
"You wish," I said. I slapped him again. This time his lower lip, the fat one, started to bleed.
"Guards!" he yelled.
Alarms were going off all over the room. Just like Shandor to have filled the room with all these alarm systems, too. In his own house of power, cowering with fear, hiding behind electronic nonsense.
"Guards. Guards. "
They came running, and paused, panting, baffled, looking at us. Shandor waved his arms wildly. He was crazy with rage. Suddenly he was six years old again and Daddy was beating the shit out of him, and he couldn't stand it.
"Grab him! Take him out of here! Lock him up! Put him in chains! Throw him in the bottom dungeon! The one with the snakes! With the riptoads!"
"I am your anointed king," I said calmly.
They were paralyzed. They didn't know what to do. Afraid to touch me, afraid to disobey Shandor. They gaped like fools. There was a long ugly moment of absolute stillness. I felt a certain sympathy for them. In the end Shandor had to call for his robots, and they had no compunction at all about dragging me out of the room. Down to the bottom dungeon, yes, the foulest and smelliest hole on the entire planet. I was in for it now. I was really going to suffer, that was absolutely certain. At my age. After all that I had achieved. Well, I was pretty sure I could take it. I wouldn't be the first wise and venerable old relic to get himself locked up and tormented in the name of some high cause. And in fact that was precisely what I had come here to accomplish. All I hoped was that I hadn't underestimated Shandor's ferocity and overestimated his political savvy. I had really pushed his buttons just now; he might really make me suffer for it, regardless of the cost to himself. He might even have me killed.
Ah, well. Even that would be worth it, in the long run. Or so I told myself.
The last thing I heard as they took me away was Shandor, starting to sound as though he was getting control of himself again, saying in a venomous voice, "I'll fix you, old man! I'll have you brainburned! I'll have you disconnected! When I get through with you you'll be too stupid to drool! Be sure you put him in chains. Tight ones."
In chains, no less.
You might think that your own first-born son might show more respect for you. But then again, this was Shandor. He was always a bastard, my son Shandor.