Star of Gypsies
- Автор: Силверберг Роберт
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Star of Gypsies». Краткое содержание книги:
I smiled sweetly. In the end the stalemate still stood; I remained his prisoner, he remained in questionable possession of a shaky throne. He got red in the face and went back to muttering threats. Mentiroso, he said again. Alta Hannalanna. He waved Trinigalee Chase before my nose again too. He might have gotten me to give in, if he really had tried to ship me off to Trinigalee Chase. A good thing I had never told anyone how much I loathed that place, or why, a policy that I intend to continue to honor until the end of my days.
In the face of Shandor's threats I kept calm and cool. He was furious. I grew wary of pushing him any harder. There comes a point with any enemy where you can get him angry enough to act against his own self-interest, and then you're really in trouble. If Shandor did away with me in a fit of rage, it would really foul up his position among the Rom; but even so, I'd be dead. As I had pointed out on Xamur to Valerian, I could be useful even as a martyr. Still and all, that wasn't my first choice. It wasn't even high on my list.
He went away, eventually, muttering and cursing. Something was going to happen now, of that I was certain. Sticking me in that damp rat-infested oubliette hadn't accomplished anything for him and nothing better had come of letting me sit here in this gilded cage. I had done a lot of waiting in my life and Shandor was beginning to see that I was capable of doing a great deal more. He had expected me simply to come around after a time and put my blessing on his kingship, but it hadn't happened, and now, I suspected, he was reaching the limits of his patience. He might very well start in on me now with some more active form of persuasion. Torture? Brainburning? Little softening-up trips to some of the uglier worlds of the galaxy?
Be prepared for the worst, I told myself. Something is going to happen.
Something happened, all right. The very next day when the robots brought me my dinner I found a grilled fish on my plate, swimming in a delicate creamy sauce. After months of mush and gruel, a grilled fish in a fancy sauce? This is Shandor's idea of torture? With it came elegant little potato puffs, thin brown crusts enclosing globes of air, and some kind of long bluish beans in a pungent and subtle gravy. A beaker of wine on the side, nicely chilled, and a crisp little loaf of bread.
There had to be a catch. Maybe this stuff is poisoned, and he figures I'll fall upon it with such greed that I won't even notice the faint trace of cyanide that it's laced with, right? For perhaps five minutes I sat there staring miserably at that beautiful food, afraid to touch it. Then I realized that I was very hungry and that I could die of starvation just as easily as I could from cyanide poisoning. If I passed up this lovely meal I might be passing up the cyanide, if there was any cyanide, but
I'd also be passing up this lovely meal, and either way I'd be dead before too long. So I took a gingerly nibble. Ecstasy! If Shandor had had my meal poisoned, it was at least a delicious poison. I waited and nothing sinister happened. Another nibble. Another. What the hell, I thought, this food is too good to be lethal. And I went at it with gusto.
I had lived on Shandor's prison garbage so long that my stomach nearly rebelled at cuisine of such extraordinary caliber. It was all I could do to keep the first few mouthfuls down. But I gave it a good fight, and I won. The bread and the wine helped. And after a while it became a lot easier. When I went to sleep that night-still wondering vaguely whether I'd been poisoned-I spent my last few moments of wakefulness brooding over the significance of Shandor's strange gesture. It made no sense. I hate things that make no sense. If he wasn't trying to poison me in some crazy roundabout way, did he seriously think he could bribe me into cooperating by feeding me fancy dinners?
Of course not. I decided that it must have been somebody else's dinner, delivered to me by mistake. A malfunction of the serving robots. Off I went to sleep.
And woke, unpoisoned, to find that the robots had brought me breakfast. Two crisp crescent-shaped rolls of surpassingly fine texture, a flask of coffee that was close to ambrosia, and a little plate of mild white cheese and assorted local fruits glittering with tiny flecks of gold. I was baffled.
To my shame it was another day and a half before I stopped eating long enough to figure things out. Help is on the way. Polarca had told me, early in my imprisonment. When it gets here, you 71 know it. The clue will be right on the plate in front of you.
What kind of food was it that these demented robots had suddenly begun to bring me? Why, it was French food. And who did I know whose great passion it was to cook in the classic French manner? Why, Julien de Gramont, pretender to the throne of France and special adjunct to his lordship Periandros of the imperial court. Yes. Of course.
Somehow Julien had infiltrated this place and he was preparing superb meals for me that were actually intended as messages. What all these cassoulets and ragouts and terrines and sautes were meant to tell me, these mousses and aspics and souffles, was that I had friends on the premises. And help would shortly be on the way.
7. The Sixteenth Emperor
We start out stupid. All we have at the beginning is the built-in wisdom of the body, which tells us which end to eat with and which end to shit with and not much more. But we are put here to do battle with entropy, and entropy equals stupidity. Therefore we are obliged to learn. Our job is to process information and gain control of it: that is to say, to grow wiser as we go along.
If I am just as stupid when I am twenty as I was when I was two, if I am just as stupid when I am a hundred as I was when I was fifty, then I am not doing my job. I am occupying space and time to no purpose, and I might just as well have been a lump of rock.
Of course, a time comes when even the wisest of men stops growing wise and starts getting stupid again. It may take two hundred years for that to happen to him, but it will happen. I am reconciled to the inevitability of that, I think. All that means is that entropy wins in the end, which we knew all along. No matter. The fact that we're fighting a losing battle does not excuse us from fighting it. The great human achievement is to postpone the moment of defeat as long as possible.
WHAT I DIDN'T KNOW WAS THAT THE IMPERIUM HAD undergone some major changes. The old emperor had finally died-without naming his successor-and the three high lords were making their moves. So there was chaos now among the Gaje as well as the Rom.
Tucked away in my cozy cell I didn't hear anything about any of this. My only visitors now were the silent robots that continued to bring me ever more elaborate meals. I didn't even get any ghosts. Instead of news from the outside, what I got was supremes de volaille, noisettes d'agneau, grenadins de boeuf. My waistline was spreading wildly. Meanwhile, beyond the walls of my prison, the whole precariously balanced structure that had held the human race together during the thousand years of expansion into the galaxy was falling apart in one great triumphant burst of greed and stupidity.
Imagine! Kings and emperors, here in the thirty-second century! As though we were living in the middle ages. Pomp and circumstance, fanfares and panoplies. Crowns and scepters. Wars of succession. It sounds childish, doesn't it? But what system, I ask you, would have worked better? Democracy? A parliament of worlds? Don't make me laugh. That stuff works well enough on a small scale, maybe. Within a single country, say. You'll notice that Earth in its time never managed to get representative democracy going on so much as one entire continent at any one time, let alone the whole planet. So how could it be achieved on a galactic scale? We buzz around pretty spectacularly in our faster-than-light starships, but communication between solar systems still has built-in lags. The parliament would always be six weeks behind the times in knowing what was going on. The galactic president wouldn't have a clue. And there are hundreds of inhabited worlds, right? Thousands. You'd need a parliament building half the size of a city to house all the delegates. Imagine the babble and yatter. What you need is a symbolic figure, a kind of animated flag to hold all the worlds together. We knew what we were doing when we revived monarchy. Of course this really isn't the middle ages, and the monarchy we set up isn't really much like the ancient ones. What the emperor is, basically, is a message that is sent simultaneously to all the worlds of the galaxy. His very existence says, We are human, we are members of one family. The emperor is like a poem, if you take my meaning. When he speaks, you may not understand the literal sense of what he might say, but you get the impact on some other level.