Anywhen

Anywhen Read Free Page B

Book: Anywhen Read Free
Author: James Blish
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of all the Traitors of Boadacea.
    CHAPTER FOUR
    How the Exarchy or the prehuman interstellar empires were held together is unknown, but in human history, at least, the bureaucratic problems of managing large stellar holdings from a single center of government have proven to be insoluble. Neither the ultraphone nor the Imaginary Drive permitted the extension of human hegemony over a radius of more than ten light-years, a fact the colonies outside this sphere were not slow to appreciate and put to use. Luckily, a roughly uniform interstellar economy was maintained by tacit agreement after the political separations, since it was not widely recognized then —or now—that this much older invention can enforce a more thorough rule than can any personal or party autocracy.
    In this connection, one often hears laymen ask, Why do the various worlds and nations employ professional traitors when it is known that they are traitors? Why would they confide to the traitors any secret valuable enough to be sold to a third party? The answer is the same, and the weapon is the same: money. The traitors act as brokers in a continuous interstellar bourse on which each planet seeks to gain a financial advantage over the other. Thus the novice should not imagine that any secret put into his hands is exactly what it is said to be, particularly when its primary value purports to be military. He should also be wary of the ruler who seeks to subvert him into personal loyalty, which tears the economic tissue and hence should be left in the domain of untrained persons. For the professional, loyalty is a tool, not a value.
    The typical layman's question cited above should of course never be answered.
    —"Lord Gro": The Discourses, Bk. I, Ch. LVII
    Simon holed up quickly and drastically, beginning with a shot of transduction serum—an almost insanely dangerous expedient, for the stuff not only altered his appearance but his very heredity, leaving his head humming with false memories and false traces of character, derived from the unknowable donors of the serum, which conflicted not only with his purposes but even with his tastes and motives.
    Under interrogation, he would break down into a babbling crowd of random voices, as bafflingly scrambled as his karyotypes, blood groups, and retina- and fingerprints. To the eye, his gross physical appearance would be a vague, characterless blur of many roles—some of them derived from the DNA of persons who had died a hundred years ago and at least that many parsecs away in space.
    But unless he got the antiserum within fifteen High Earth days, he would forget first his mission, then his skills, and at last his very identity. Nevertheless, he judged that the risk had to be taken; for effete though some of the local traitors (always excepting Valkol the Polite) seemed to be, they were obviously quite capable of penetrating any lesser cover—and equally obviously, they meant business.
    The next problem was how to complete the mission it-self—it would not be enough just to stay alive. High Earth did not petrify failed traitors and mortar them into walls, but it had its own ways of showing displeasure. Moreover, Simon felt to High Earth a certain obligation—not loyalty, Gro forbid, but, well, call it professional pride—which would not let him be retired from the field by a backwater like Boadacea. Besides, finally, he had old reasons for hating the Exarchy; and hatred, unaccountably, Gro had forgotten to forbid.
    No: It was not up to Simon to escape the Boadaceans. He had come here to gull them, whatever they might currently think of such a project.
    And therein lay the difficulty; for Boadacea, beyond all other colony worlds, had fallen into a kind of autumn cannibalism. In defiance of that saying of Ezra-Tse, the edge was attempting to eat the center. It was this worship of independence, or rather, of autonomy, which had not only made treason respectable, but had come nigh on to ennobling it . . . and was

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