If Hywel Jern had contracted his marriage for
reasons of convenience, it was a stable one. There were children,
myself, Faskel, and Darina. My father took little interest in his
daughter, but he early bent more than a little energy to the
training of Faskel and me; not that Faskel showed any great promise
along the lines Hywel Jern thought important.
It was the custom for us to assemble at a large table in an
inner room (we lived over and behind the shop) for the evening
meal. And at that time my father would bring out and pass around
some item from his stock, first asking an opinion of it—its
value, age, nature. Gems were a passion with him and we were forced
to learn them as other children might scan book tapes for general
knowledge. To my father’s satisfaction I proved an apt pupil.
In time he centered most of his instruction on me, since Faskel,
either because he could not, or because he stubbornly would not
learn, again and again made some mistake which sent our father into
one of his cold and silent withdrawals.
I never saw Hywel Jern lose his temper, but his cold displeasure
was not to be courted. It was not so much that I feared such
censure as that I was really fascinated and interested in what he
had to teach. Before I was out of childhood I was allowed to judge
the pledges in the shop. And whenever one of the gem merchants who
visited my father from time to time came, I was displayed as a star
pupil.
So through the years our house became one divided, my mother,
Faskel, and Darina on one side, my father and I on the other. And
our contact—or mine—with other children of the port was
limited, my father drawing me more and more into the shop to learn
his old trade of valuing. Some strange and beautiful things passed
through our hands in those days. Part were sold openly, others
remained in his lockboxes, to be offered in private transactions,
and of those I did not see all.
There were things from alien ruins and tombs, made before the
time that our species burst into space; there were pieces looted
from empires which had vanished into the dust of history so long
past that even their planets had been buried. And there were others
new from the workshops of the inner systems, where all the creative
art of a jeweler is unleashed to catch the eye of a Veep with a
bottomless purse.
My father liked the old pieces the most. Sometimes he would hold
a necklet, or a bracelet (which by its form had never been meant to
encircle a human wrist) and speculate about who had worn it and the
civilization from which it had come. And he demanded of those who
brought him such trinkets as clear a history of their discovery as
he could obtain, putting on tapes all he could learn.
I think that these tapes in themselves might have proven a rich
treasure house for seekers of strange knowledge, and I have
wondered since if Faskel ever suspected their worth and used them
so. Perhaps he did, for in some ways he proved to be more shrewd
than my father.
In one of our round-table meetings after an evening meal my
father produced such an alien curiosity. He did not pass it from
hand to hand as was his wont, but laid it on the well-polished board
of dead-black creel wood and sat staring at it as if he were one of
the fakirs from the dry lands seeking to read a housewife’s
future in a polished seed pod.
It was a ring, or at least it followed that form. But the band
must have been made for a finger close to the size of two of ours
laid together. The metal was dull, pitted, as if from great
age.
Its claw setting held a stone bigger than my thumbnail, in
proper proportion to the band. And it was as dull and unappealing
as the metal, colorless, no sparkle or hint of life in it. Also,
the longer one studied it, the more the idea grew in mind that this
was the corpse of something which might have once had life and
beauty but was long since dead. I had, at that first viewing, a
disinclination to touch it, though I was always avid to examine
these bits and pieces my father used for our instruction.
“Out of another tomb? I wish you would not bring these
corpse ornaments to the table!” My mother spoke more sharply
than was usual. At that time it struck me odd that she, whom I
thought immune to imaginative fancies, had also so quickly
associated the ring with death.
My father did not raise his eyes from the ring. Rather he spoke
to Faskel in the voice he used when he would be answered, and at
once.
“What make you of this?”
My brother put out his hand as if to touch the ring and then
jerked it back again. “A ring—too large to wear. Maybe a
temple offering.”
To that my father made no comment. Instead he said to
Darina:
“And you see what?”
“It is cold—so cold—” My sister’s thin voice
trailed off, and then she pushed away from the table. “I do
not like it.”
“And you?” My father turned to me at last.
Temple offering it might have been, fashioned larger than life
to fit on the finger of some god or goddess. I had seen such things
pass through my father’s hands before. And some of them had
had that about them which gave one a queasy feeling upon touching.
But if any god had worn this—No, I did not believe it had been
made for such a purpose. Darina was also right. It evoked a
sensation of cold, as well as of death. However, the more I studied
it, the more it fascinated me. I wanted to touch, yet I feared. And
it seemed to me that my feeling reflected something about the ring
which made it more than any other gem I had seen, though it was now
but age-pitted metal set with a lifeless stone.
“I do not know—save that it is—or was—a thing of
power!” And my certainty of that fact was such that I spoke
more loudly than I had meant to, so my final word rang through the
room.
“Where did it come from?” Faskel asked quickly,
hunching forward again and putting out his hand as if to lay it
over ring and stone, though his fingers only hovered above it. In
that moment I had the thought that he who did take it firmly would
be following the custom of gem dealers: to close hand about a jewel
was to accept an offered bargain. But if that were so, Faskel did
not quite dare to accept such a challenge, for he drew back
his hand a second time.
“From space,” my father returned.
There are gems out of space—primitive peoples pay high sums to
own them. What forms them we are not quite sure even yet. The
accepted theory is that they are produced when bits of meteor of
the proper metallic composition pass through the blaze of a
planet’s atmosphere. It was the fad for a while to make space
Captains’ rings out of these tektites. I have seen several
such, centuries old, which must have been worn by the first space
venturers. But this gem, if gem it really was, bore no resemblance
to those, for it was not dark green, black, or brown, but a
colorless crystal, dulled as if sand had pitted the surface
deeply.
“It does not look like a tektite,” I ventured.
My father shook his head. “It was not formed in space, not
that I know of—it was found there.” He leaned back in his
chair and took up his cup of folgar tea, sipping absent-mindedly as
he continued to stare at the ring. “A curious
tale—”
“We expect Councilor Sands and his lady—” my mother
interrupted abruptly, as if she knew the tale and wanted not to
hear it again. “The hour grows late.” She started to
gather our cups, then raised her hands to clap for Staffla, our
serving maid.
“A curious tale,” my father repeated as if he had
not heard her at all. And such was his hold over his household that
she did not summon Staffla, but sat, moving a little uneasily,
plainly unhappy.
“But a true one—of that I am sure,” my father
continued. “This was brought in today by the first officer of
the Astra. They had a grid failure in mid-passage and had to come
out of hyper for repairs. Their luck continued bad, for they had a
holing from a meteor pebble. It was necessary then to patch the
hull as well.” He was telling this baldly, not as he usually
spun such stories, but more as one who would keep strictly to
facts, and those were meager. “Kjor was doing the patch job
when he saw it—a floater—He beamed out on his stay line and
brought it in—a body in a suit. Not”—my father hesitated—
“of any species he knew. And it had been there a long time.
It wore this over its suit glove.” He pointed to the
ring.
Over the glove of a space suit—the strangeness of that indeed
made one wonder. The gloves are supple enough; they have to be if a
man wears them in outer space for ship repair, or while exploring a
planet deadly to his species. But why would anyone want to wear an
ornament over such a glove? I must have asked that aloud for my
father answered:
“Why indeed? Certainly not for any reason of show.
Therefore—this had importance, vast importance to him who wore
it. Enough that I would like to know it better.”
“There are tests,” Faskel observed.
“This is a gem stone, unknown to me, and twelve on the
Mohs scale—”
“A diamond is ten—”
“And a Javsite eleven,” my father returned.
“Heretofore that was the measuring rod. This is something
beyond our present knowledge.”
“The Institute—” began my mother, but my father put
out his hand and cupped the ring in it, hiding it from sight. So
hidden, he restored it to a small bag and slipped that into his
inner tunic pocket.
“This is not to be spoken of!” he ordered sharply.
And from that moment on we would not speak of it as he well knew.
He had trained us very well. But neither did he send it to the
Institute, nor, I was sure, did he seek any other official
information concerning it. But that he studied and tested it by all
methods known, and they were not a few, that I also learned.
I became used to seeing him in his small laboratory, at his
desk, the ring on a square of black cloth before him, staring down
at it as if by the very strength of his will he would extract its
secret. If it had ever had any beauty, time and the drift through
space had destroyed that, and what was left was an enigma but no
blazing treasure.
The mystery haunted me also, and from time to time my father
would speak of various theories he had formed concerning it. He was
firmly convinced that it was not meant to be an ornament, but that
it had served its wearer in some manner. And he kept its possession
a secret.
From the day my father had taken over the shop, he had set into
its walls various hiding places. And later, upon enlarging the
rooms, he had built in more such pockets. The majority of these
were known to the whole family, and would answer to hand pressure
from any of us. But there were a few he showed only to me. And one
of these, in the laboratory, held the ring. My father altered the
seal there to answer only to our two thumbs, and he had me seal and
unseal it several times before he was satisfied.
Then he waved me to sit down opposite him.
“Vondar Ustle arrives tomorrow,” he began abruptly.
“He will bring an apprentice warrant with him. When he
leaves, you go with him—”
I could not believe my hearing. As eldest son, apprenticeship,
save to my father, was not for me. If anyone went to serve another
master it would be Faskel. But before I could raise a question, my
father went on with as much explanation as I was ever to get from
him.
“Vondar is a master gemologist, though he chooses to
travel rather than set up an establishment on any one planet. There
is no better teacher in the galaxy. I have good reason to be sure
of that. Listen well, Murdoc—this shop is not for you. You have a
talent, and a man who does not develop his talent is a man who ever
eats dry oat-cake while before him sits a rich meat dish, a man who
chooses a zircon when he need only reach out his hand to pick up a
diamond. Leave this shop to Faskel—”
“But he—”
My father smiled thinly. “No, he is not one who has a
great eye for what is to be seen, beyond a fat purse and the value
in credits. A shopkeeper is a shopkeeper, and you are not meant for
such. I have waited a long time for a man such as Ustle, one on
whom I can depend to be the teacher you must have. In my day I was
known as a master at valuing, but I served in murky ways. You must
walk free of such ties, and you can gain such freedom only by
cutting loose now from the very name you carry on Angkor. Also—you
must see more than one world, walk other planets, if you are to be
all that you can be. It is known that planetary magnetic fields can
influence human behavior, some ebb and flow in them producing
changes in the brain. Alertness and sensibility are stimulated by
these changes; memory can be fostered the brighter, ideas incited.
I want what you can learn from Ustle during the next five planet
years.”
“Something to do with the space stone—?”
He nodded. “I can no longer go seeking knowledge, but you
who have a mind like unto mine are not rooted. Before I die I want
to know what that ring holds, and what it did or can do for the man
who wears it!”
Once more he got up and brought out the ring bag, removed the
band with its dull stone, and turned it about in his fingers.
“There was an old superstition once believed in by our
species,” he said slowly, “that we left impressions of
ourselves on material things we had owned, providing those objects
were closely tied into our destinies. Here—” Of a sudden he
tossed the ring at me. I was unprepared, but I caught it, almost on
reflex, out of the air. For all the months we had had it under this
roof, that was the first time I had held it.
The metal was cold, with a gritty surface. And it seemed to me,
as it rested in my palm, the cold grew stronger, so that my skin
tingled with it. But I lifted it to eye level and peered at the
stone. The clouded surface was as gritty as the band. If it had
ever held fire in its heart, that was long since quenched or
clouded over. I wondered briefly if it could be detached from that
rough setting and recut, to regain the life it had lost. But knew
also that my father would never attempt to do that. Nor, I decided,
could I. As it was, the mystery was all. It was not the ring itself
but what lay behind it that was of importance. And now my
father’s plans for me also made sense—I would be the seeker
for a solution to our mystery.
So I became Ustle’s apprentice. And my father proved
right; such an instructor is seldom found. My master might have
made several fortunes had he wished to root on one of the luxury
worlds, set up as a designer and merchant. But to him the quest for
the perfect stone was far more meaningful than selling it. He did
design—usually during our voyages his mind and his fingers were
busy, turning out patterns which other, less talented men were
eager to buy when he wanted to offer them. But his passion was
exploration of the secrets of new-found worlds, doing his own
bargaining with natives for uncut stones not far from where they
were first unearthed.
He laughed at the frauds he uncovered—the lesser stones soaked
in herbs or chemicals to make them more resemble the precious, the
gems treated by heat to change their color. He taught me odd ways
to impress native sellers so that they respected one’s wisdom
and brought out the better rather than the worse. Such things as
that a human hair stretched across real jade will not burn, even
though you set match to it.
Planet time is reckoned in years, space time less easily. A man
who makes many voyages does not age as quickly as the earthbound. I
do not know how old Vondar was, but if he were judged by his store
of knowledge, he must have outstripped my father. We went far from
Angkor, but in time we returned to it. Only I had no crumb, not
even infinitesimally small, to offer my father on the history of
the space ring.
I had not been more than a day under our own roof when I knew
that all was not well there. Faskel was older. When I looked upon
him and then upon my own face in my mother’s well-polished
mirror, I would have said he was the elder by birth. Also he was
more assertive, taking over the role of my father’s
assistant, making decisions even within my father’s hearing.
And Hywel Jern did not lift even an eyebrow in correction of his
presumption.
My sister was married. Her dowry had been enough to bring her
the son of a Councilor, to my mother’s great content. Though
she had vanished from the house as if she had never lived,
“my daughter, the Councilor’s son’s lady”
was so ever on my mother’s lips as to make of my sister a
haunting ghost.
Of this household I was no longer a well-fitting part. Though
Faskel masked for the most part his displeasure at my return, he
became more and more officious in conducting the business when I
was present though I did nothing to confirm his suspicions that I
had returned to supersede him. Once I had thought the shop all
important, but off-world so many doors had opened to me that now it
seemed a very dull way to spend one’s days, and I wondered
that my father could have chosen it.
He roused himself to ask questions about my journeying, so I
spent most of my time in his inner office detailing, not without
some satisfaction, all I had learned. Though now and then a crisp
comment reduced my self-esteem and sent me into confusion, for he
made it clear that much of this he already knew.
However, after my first burst of enthusiasm, it became
increasingly clear that if my father listened, he heard, or strove
to hear, more than my spate of words. Behind his interest—and it
was interest; in that I was not deceived—lurked some
preoccupation which was not concerned with me or my discoveries.
Nor did he mention the space ring, and I too had a strange
reluctance to introduce the subject. Not once did he bring out that
treasure to brood over it as he had in the past.
It was not until I had been four days home that the shadow which
I sensed on the household drew closer. Like all shops, we would
remain closed during the festival. It was customary for families to
entertain kinfolk and friends, making up parties to go from home to
home. My mother spoke pridefully at the table that night of our
going to Darina’s and being included with them in the
Councilor’s own group for a pleasure cruise on the river in
his own barge.
But when she had done, my father shook his head. He would, he
announced, stay home. I had never seen my mother, though of late
years she might have grown more assertive, stand against my
father’s pronouncements. But this time her anger exploded,
and she stated that that choice might be his, but that the rest of
us should go. To this he nodded and so I found that indeed I was
absorbed in what seemed to me a very boring party. My mother beamed
and nursed another dream, for Faskel was ever by the side of the
Councilor’s niece—though it appeared to me that that lady
shared her smiles with several young men and that the portion of
them which fell to my brother were not particularly warm. As for
me, I escorted my mother, and perhaps pleasured her a little by the
fact that I was traveled and that once or twice the Councilor
singled me out to ask of off-world matters.
As the barge slipped down the river, there grew a kind of
impatience in me, and I kept thinking of my father and who he might
be seeing in the locked shop. For he had hinted to me that he
stayed there, not only because of boredom, but because be had a
definite reason for wishing the house to be empty that day so that
he might meet with someone.
There had always been visitors whom my father had not made known
to his family, some of them using darkness for a cloak, entering
and leaving without their faces being seen. That he trafficked in
things of uncertain history must have been known to the
authorities. But no man ever spoke out against him. For the
Thieves’ Guild has a long arm and they move to protect one
who is of service to them. My father may have outwardly retired
from their Veep councils, but did a man ever retire from the Guild?
Rumor said no.
Only there had been something in my father’s attitude this
time which made me uneasy, as if he both wished for and feared
whatever meeting was to take place. And the more I thought on his
manner, the more I decided that fear—if one could term it fear—
had been uppermost. Perhaps, as my father had suggested, my travel
had heightened in me a sensitivity which the rest of the family did
not share.
At any rate I excused myself before sunset with the lame
explanation that I must meet with Vondar, though my mother did not
believe me. And I summoned one of the small boats for hire,
ordering the oarsman to make good time back to port. Only so
thronged were the waterways that our speed was no more than a weary
crawl, and I discovered myself sitting tensely, willing us forward,
my hands gripped tightly together.
Again, on landing, I found the streets crowded, and worked my
way with impatient thrusting, which earned me some harsh words,
splashes of scented water. The shop front was closed even as we had
left it, and I went through the narrow garden at the back.
As my hand fell upon the door lock, the thumb against the print
which would release it, I felt, as a blow, the full force of all
the unease which had plagued me. It was dark and cool in the family
rooms. I stopped by the door which gave upon the shop to listen,
thinking that if my father still entertained his mysterious caller,
he would not thank me to burst in upon them. But there was no
sound, and when I rapped upon the door to the office, it echoed
hollowly.
When I pushed, the door gave only a little, and I was forced to
exert pressure of shoulder to force my way in. Then I heard the
rasp of wood against stone, and saw that my fathers desk,
overturned, blocked my entrance. I thrust desperately and was in a
wildly upset room.
In his chair sat my father, the ropes which held him upright
stained with his blood. His eyes glared at me fiercely in denial of
what had come to him. But that denial was the glare of a dead man.
All else was overturned, some boxes smashed to bits as if the
searcher, not finding what he sought, had wrecked the inanimate in
his temper.
There are many beliefs in many worlds concerning the end of life
and what may lie thereafter. How can any man deny that some of them
may be true? We have no proof one way or another. My father was
dead when I came to him, and dead by violence. But perhaps it was
his will, his need for revenge, or to communicate, which hung on in
that room. For I knew, as if he had indeed spoken, what lay at the
roots of this.
So I passed him and found that inconspicuous bit of carving on
the wall. To that I set my thumb as he had taught me. The small
space opened, but not easily; it might have been some time since it
was last bared. I took out the bag, feeling through it the form of
the ring. That I drew forth and held before my father as if he
could still see and know that I had it. And I promised him that
what he had sought, I would seek too, and that perhaps so I would
find those who had slain him. For this I was sure of, that the ring
held the key to his death.
But this was not the last of the shocks and losses which were to
come to me on Angkor. For after the authorities had come and the
family had gathered and been questioned, she whom I had always
called mother turned on me and said, in a high, fast voice, as if
she dared not be interrupted:
“Faskel is master here. For he is blood and bone of me,
heir to my father who was lord here before Hywel Jern came. And so
will I swear before the Council.”
That she favored Faskel I had always known but there was a chill
in her words now that I did not understand. She continued, making
the reason plain.
“You are only a duty child, Murdoc. Though mark me true, I
have never made the less of you in this house because of that. And
no one can say that I have!”
A duty child—one of those embryos shipped from a populous
world to a frontier planet in order to vary the stock, by law
assigned to some family to be raised and nurtured as their own.
There were many such in the early settlement of any world. But I
had never thought much about them. It did not greatly matter to me
that I was not of her blood. But that I was not the son of Hywel—
that I hated! I think she read this in my eyes, for she shrank from
me. But she need not have feared any trouble, for I turned and went
from that room, and that house, and later from Angkor. All I took
with me was my heritage—the ring out of space.
If Hywel Jern had contracted his marriage for
reasons of convenience, it was a stable one. There were children,
myself, Faskel, and Darina. My father took little interest in his
daughter, but he early bent more than a little energy to the
training of Faskel and me; not that Faskel showed any great promise
along the lines Hywel Jern thought important.
It was the custom for us to assemble at a large table in an
inner room (we lived over and behind the shop) for the evening
meal. And at that time my father would bring out and pass around
some item from his stock, first asking an opinion of it—its
value, age, nature. Gems were a passion with him and we were forced
to learn them as other children might scan book tapes for general
knowledge. To my father’s satisfaction I proved an apt pupil.
In time he centered most of his instruction on me, since Faskel,
either because he could not, or because he stubbornly would not
learn, again and again made some mistake which sent our father into
one of his cold and silent withdrawals.
I never saw Hywel Jern lose his temper, but his cold displeasure
was not to be courted. It was not so much that I feared such
censure as that I was really fascinated and interested in what he
had to teach. Before I was out of childhood I was allowed to judge
the pledges in the shop. And whenever one of the gem merchants who
visited my father from time to time came, I was displayed as a star
pupil.
So through the years our house became one divided, my mother,
Faskel, and Darina on one side, my father and I on the other. And
our contact—or mine—with other children of the port was
limited, my father drawing me more and more into the shop to learn
his old trade of valuing. Some strange and beautiful things passed
through our hands in those days. Part were sold openly, others
remained in his lockboxes, to be offered in private transactions,
and of those I did not see all.
There were things from alien ruins and tombs, made before the
time that our species burst into space; there were pieces looted
from empires which had vanished into the dust of history so long
past that even their planets had been buried. And there were others
new from the workshops of the inner systems, where all the creative
art of a jeweler is unleashed to catch the eye of a Veep with a
bottomless purse.
My father liked the old pieces the most. Sometimes he would hold
a necklet, or a bracelet (which by its form had never been meant to
encircle a human wrist) and speculate about who had worn it and the
civilization from which it had come. And he demanded of those who
brought him such trinkets as clear a history of their discovery as
he could obtain, putting on tapes all he could learn.
I think that these tapes in themselves might have proven a rich
treasure house for seekers of strange knowledge, and I have
wondered since if Faskel ever suspected their worth and used them
so. Perhaps he did, for in some ways he proved to be more shrewd
than my father.
In one of our round-table meetings after an evening meal my
father produced such an alien curiosity. He did not pass it from
hand to hand as was his wont, but laid it on the well-polished board
of dead-black creel wood and sat staring at it as if he were one of
the fakirs from the dry lands seeking to read a housewife’s
future in a polished seed pod.
It was a ring, or at least it followed that form. But the band
must have been made for a finger close to the size of two of ours
laid together. The metal was dull, pitted, as if from great
age.
Its claw setting held a stone bigger than my thumbnail, in
proper proportion to the band. And it was as dull and unappealing
as the metal, colorless, no sparkle or hint of life in it. Also,
the longer one studied it, the more the idea grew in mind that this
was the corpse of something which might have once had life and
beauty but was long since dead. I had, at that first viewing, a
disinclination to touch it, though I was always avid to examine
these bits and pieces my father used for our instruction.
“Out of another tomb? I wish you would not bring these
corpse ornaments to the table!” My mother spoke more sharply
than was usual. At that time it struck me odd that she, whom I
thought immune to imaginative fancies, had also so quickly
associated the ring with death.
My father did not raise his eyes from the ring. Rather he spoke
to Faskel in the voice he used when he would be answered, and at
once.
“What make you of this?”
My brother put out his hand as if to touch the ring and then
jerked it back again. “A ring—too large to wear. Maybe a
temple offering.”
To that my father made no comment. Instead he said to
Darina:
“And you see what?”
“It is cold—so cold—” My sister’s thin voice
trailed off, and then she pushed away from the table. “I do
not like it.”
“And you?” My father turned to me at last.
Temple offering it might have been, fashioned larger than life
to fit on the finger of some god or goddess. I had seen such things
pass through my father’s hands before. And some of them had
had that about them which gave one a queasy feeling upon touching.
But if any god had worn this—No, I did not believe it had been
made for such a purpose. Darina was also right. It evoked a
sensation of cold, as well as of death. However, the more I studied
it, the more it fascinated me. I wanted to touch, yet I feared. And
it seemed to me that my feeling reflected something about the ring
which made it more than any other gem I had seen, though it was now
but age-pitted metal set with a lifeless stone.
“I do not know—save that it is—or was—a thing of
power!” And my certainty of that fact was such that I spoke
more loudly than I had meant to, so my final word rang through the
room.
“Where did it come from?” Faskel asked quickly,
hunching forward again and putting out his hand as if to lay it
over ring and stone, though his fingers only hovered above it. In
that moment I had the thought that he who did take it firmly would
be following the custom of gem dealers: to close hand about a jewel
was to accept an offered bargain. But if that were so, Faskel did
not quite dare to accept such a challenge, for he drew back
his hand a second time.
“From space,” my father returned.
There are gems out of space—primitive peoples pay high sums to
own them. What forms them we are not quite sure even yet. The
accepted theory is that they are produced when bits of meteor of
the proper metallic composition pass through the blaze of a
planet’s atmosphere. It was the fad for a while to make space
Captains’ rings out of these tektites. I have seen several
such, centuries old, which must have been worn by the first space
venturers. But this gem, if gem it really was, bore no resemblance
to those, for it was not dark green, black, or brown, but a
colorless crystal, dulled as if sand had pitted the surface
deeply.
“It does not look like a tektite,” I ventured.
My father shook his head. “It was not formed in space, not
that I know of—it was found there.” He leaned back in his
chair and took up his cup of folgar tea, sipping absent-mindedly as
he continued to stare at the ring. “A curious
tale—”
“We expect Councilor Sands and his lady—” my mother
interrupted abruptly, as if she knew the tale and wanted not to
hear it again. “The hour grows late.” She started to
gather our cups, then raised her hands to clap for Staffla, our
serving maid.
“A curious tale,” my father repeated as if he had
not heard her at all. And such was his hold over his household that
she did not summon Staffla, but sat, moving a little uneasily,
plainly unhappy.
“But a true one—of that I am sure,” my father
continued. “This was brought in today by the first officer of
the Astra. They had a grid failure in mid-passage and had to come
out of hyper for repairs. Their luck continued bad, for they had a
holing from a meteor pebble. It was necessary then to patch the
hull as well.” He was telling this baldly, not as he usually
spun such stories, but more as one who would keep strictly to
facts, and those were meager. “Kjor was doing the patch job
when he saw it—a floater—He beamed out on his stay line and
brought it in—a body in a suit. Not”—my father hesitated—
“of any species he knew. And it had been there a long time.
It wore this over its suit glove.” He pointed to the
ring.
Over the glove of a space suit—the strangeness of that indeed
made one wonder. The gloves are supple enough; they have to be if a
man wears them in outer space for ship repair, or while exploring a
planet deadly to his species. But why would anyone want to wear an
ornament over such a glove? I must have asked that aloud for my
father answered:
“Why indeed? Certainly not for any reason of show.
Therefore—this had importance, vast importance to him who wore
it. Enough that I would like to know it better.”
“There are tests,” Faskel observed.
“This is a gem stone, unknown to me, and twelve on the
Mohs scale—”
“A diamond is ten—”
“And a Javsite eleven,” my father returned.
“Heretofore that was the measuring rod. This is something
beyond our present knowledge.”
“The Institute—” began my mother, but my father put
out his hand and cupped the ring in it, hiding it from sight. So
hidden, he restored it to a small bag and slipped that into his
inner tunic pocket.
“This is not to be spoken of!” he ordered sharply.
And from that moment on we would not speak of it as he well knew.
He had trained us very well. But neither did he send it to the
Institute, nor, I was sure, did he seek any other official
information concerning it. But that he studied and tested it by all
methods known, and they were not a few, that I also learned.
I became used to seeing him in his small laboratory, at his
desk, the ring on a square of black cloth before him, staring down
at it as if by the very strength of his will he would extract its
secret. If it had ever had any beauty, time and the drift through
space had destroyed that, and what was left was an enigma but no
blazing treasure.
The mystery haunted me also, and from time to time my father
would speak of various theories he had formed concerning it. He was
firmly convinced that it was not meant to be an ornament, but that
it had served its wearer in some manner. And he kept its possession
a secret.
From the day my father had taken over the shop, he had set into
its walls various hiding places. And later, upon enlarging the
rooms, he had built in more such pockets. The majority of these
were known to the whole family, and would answer to hand pressure
from any of us. But there were a few he showed only to me. And one
of these, in the laboratory, held the ring. My father altered the
seal there to answer only to our two thumbs, and he had me seal and
unseal it several times before he was satisfied.
Then he waved me to sit down opposite him.
“Vondar Ustle arrives tomorrow,” he began abruptly.
“He will bring an apprentice warrant with him. When he
leaves, you go with him—”
I could not believe my hearing. As eldest son, apprenticeship,
save to my father, was not for me. If anyone went to serve another
master it would be Faskel. But before I could raise a question, my
father went on with as much explanation as I was ever to get from
him.
“Vondar is a master gemologist, though he chooses to
travel rather than set up an establishment on any one planet. There
is no better teacher in the galaxy. I have good reason to be sure
of that. Listen well, Murdoc—this shop is not for you. You have a
talent, and a man who does not develop his talent is a man who ever
eats dry oat-cake while before him sits a rich meat dish, a man who
chooses a zircon when he need only reach out his hand to pick up a
diamond. Leave this shop to Faskel—”
“But he—”
My father smiled thinly. “No, he is not one who has a
great eye for what is to be seen, beyond a fat purse and the value
in credits. A shopkeeper is a shopkeeper, and you are not meant for
such. I have waited a long time for a man such as Ustle, one on
whom I can depend to be the teacher you must have. In my day I was
known as a master at valuing, but I served in murky ways. You must
walk free of such ties, and you can gain such freedom only by
cutting loose now from the very name you carry on Angkor. Also—you
must see more than one world, walk other planets, if you are to be
all that you can be. It is known that planetary magnetic fields can
influence human behavior, some ebb and flow in them producing
changes in the brain. Alertness and sensibility are stimulated by
these changes; memory can be fostered the brighter, ideas incited.
I want what you can learn from Ustle during the next five planet
years.”
“Something to do with the space stone—?”
He nodded. “I can no longer go seeking knowledge, but you
who have a mind like unto mine are not rooted. Before I die I want
to know what that ring holds, and what it did or can do for the man
who wears it!”
Once more he got up and brought out the ring bag, removed the
band with its dull stone, and turned it about in his fingers.
“There was an old superstition once believed in by our
species,” he said slowly, “that we left impressions of
ourselves on material things we had owned, providing those objects
were closely tied into our destinies. Here—” Of a sudden he
tossed the ring at me. I was unprepared, but I caught it, almost on
reflex, out of the air. For all the months we had had it under this
roof, that was the first time I had held it.
The metal was cold, with a gritty surface. And it seemed to me,
as it rested in my palm, the cold grew stronger, so that my skin
tingled with it. But I lifted it to eye level and peered at the
stone. The clouded surface was as gritty as the band. If it had
ever held fire in its heart, that was long since quenched or
clouded over. I wondered briefly if it could be detached from that
rough setting and recut, to regain the life it had lost. But knew
also that my father would never attempt to do that. Nor, I decided,
could I. As it was, the mystery was all. It was not the ring itself
but what lay behind it that was of importance. And now my
father’s plans for me also made sense—I would be the seeker
for a solution to our mystery.
So I became Ustle’s apprentice. And my father proved
right; such an instructor is seldom found. My master might have
made several fortunes had he wished to root on one of the luxury
worlds, set up as a designer and merchant. But to him the quest for
the perfect stone was far more meaningful than selling it. He did
design—usually during our voyages his mind and his fingers were
busy, turning out patterns which other, less talented men were
eager to buy when he wanted to offer them. But his passion was
exploration of the secrets of new-found worlds, doing his own
bargaining with natives for uncut stones not far from where they
were first unearthed.
He laughed at the frauds he uncovered—the lesser stones soaked
in herbs or chemicals to make them more resemble the precious, the
gems treated by heat to change their color. He taught me odd ways
to impress native sellers so that they respected one’s wisdom
and brought out the better rather than the worse. Such things as
that a human hair stretched across real jade will not burn, even
though you set match to it.
Planet time is reckoned in years, space time less easily. A man
who makes many voyages does not age as quickly as the earthbound. I
do not know how old Vondar was, but if he were judged by his store
of knowledge, he must have outstripped my father. We went far from
Angkor, but in time we returned to it. Only I had no crumb, not
even infinitesimally small, to offer my father on the history of
the space ring.
I had not been more than a day under our own roof when I knew
that all was not well there. Faskel was older. When I looked upon
him and then upon my own face in my mother’s well-polished
mirror, I would have said he was the elder by birth. Also he was
more assertive, taking over the role of my father’s
assistant, making decisions even within my father’s hearing.
And Hywel Jern did not lift even an eyebrow in correction of his
presumption.
My sister was married. Her dowry had been enough to bring her
the son of a Councilor, to my mother’s great content. Though
she had vanished from the house as if she had never lived,
“my daughter, the Councilor’s son’s lady”
was so ever on my mother’s lips as to make of my sister a
haunting ghost.
Of this household I was no longer a well-fitting part. Though
Faskel masked for the most part his displeasure at my return, he
became more and more officious in conducting the business when I
was present though I did nothing to confirm his suspicions that I
had returned to supersede him. Once I had thought the shop all
important, but off-world so many doors had opened to me that now it
seemed a very dull way to spend one’s days, and I wondered
that my father could have chosen it.
He roused himself to ask questions about my journeying, so I
spent most of my time in his inner office detailing, not without
some satisfaction, all I had learned. Though now and then a crisp
comment reduced my self-esteem and sent me into confusion, for he
made it clear that much of this he already knew.
However, after my first burst of enthusiasm, it became
increasingly clear that if my father listened, he heard, or strove
to hear, more than my spate of words. Behind his interest—and it
was interest; in that I was not deceived—lurked some
preoccupation which was not concerned with me or my discoveries.
Nor did he mention the space ring, and I too had a strange
reluctance to introduce the subject. Not once did he bring out that
treasure to brood over it as he had in the past.
It was not until I had been four days home that the shadow which
I sensed on the household drew closer. Like all shops, we would
remain closed during the festival. It was customary for families to
entertain kinfolk and friends, making up parties to go from home to
home. My mother spoke pridefully at the table that night of our
going to Darina’s and being included with them in the
Councilor’s own group for a pleasure cruise on the river in
his own barge.
But when she had done, my father shook his head. He would, he
announced, stay home. I had never seen my mother, though of late
years she might have grown more assertive, stand against my
father’s pronouncements. But this time her anger exploded,
and she stated that that choice might be his, but that the rest of
us should go. To this he nodded and so I found that indeed I was
absorbed in what seemed to me a very boring party. My mother beamed
and nursed another dream, for Faskel was ever by the side of the
Councilor’s niece—though it appeared to me that that lady
shared her smiles with several young men and that the portion of
them which fell to my brother were not particularly warm. As for
me, I escorted my mother, and perhaps pleasured her a little by the
fact that I was traveled and that once or twice the Councilor
singled me out to ask of off-world matters.
As the barge slipped down the river, there grew a kind of
impatience in me, and I kept thinking of my father and who he might
be seeing in the locked shop. For he had hinted to me that he
stayed there, not only because of boredom, but because be had a
definite reason for wishing the house to be empty that day so that
he might meet with someone.
There had always been visitors whom my father had not made known
to his family, some of them using darkness for a cloak, entering
and leaving without their faces being seen. That he trafficked in
things of uncertain history must have been known to the
authorities. But no man ever spoke out against him. For the
Thieves’ Guild has a long arm and they move to protect one
who is of service to them. My father may have outwardly retired
from their Veep councils, but did a man ever retire from the Guild?
Rumor said no.
Only there had been something in my father’s attitude this
time which made me uneasy, as if he both wished for and feared
whatever meeting was to take place. And the more I thought on his
manner, the more I decided that fear—if one could term it fear—
had been uppermost. Perhaps, as my father had suggested, my travel
had heightened in me a sensitivity which the rest of the family did
not share.
At any rate I excused myself before sunset with the lame
explanation that I must meet with Vondar, though my mother did not
believe me. And I summoned one of the small boats for hire,
ordering the oarsman to make good time back to port. Only so
thronged were the waterways that our speed was no more than a weary
crawl, and I discovered myself sitting tensely, willing us forward,
my hands gripped tightly together.
Again, on landing, I found the streets crowded, and worked my
way with impatient thrusting, which earned me some harsh words,
splashes of scented water. The shop front was closed even as we had
left it, and I went through the narrow garden at the back.
As my hand fell upon the door lock, the thumb against the print
which would release it, I felt, as a blow, the full force of all
the unease which had plagued me. It was dark and cool in the family
rooms. I stopped by the door which gave upon the shop to listen,
thinking that if my father still entertained his mysterious caller,
he would not thank me to burst in upon them. But there was no
sound, and when I rapped upon the door to the office, it echoed
hollowly.
When I pushed, the door gave only a little, and I was forced to
exert pressure of shoulder to force my way in. Then I heard the
rasp of wood against stone, and saw that my fathers desk,
overturned, blocked my entrance. I thrust desperately and was in a
wildly upset room.
In his chair sat my father, the ropes which held him upright
stained with his blood. His eyes glared at me fiercely in denial of
what had come to him. But that denial was the glare of a dead man.
All else was overturned, some boxes smashed to bits as if the
searcher, not finding what he sought, had wrecked the inanimate in
his temper.
There are many beliefs in many worlds concerning the end of life
and what may lie thereafter. How can any man deny that some of them
may be true? We have no proof one way or another. My father was
dead when I came to him, and dead by violence. But perhaps it was
his will, his need for revenge, or to communicate, which hung on in
that room. For I knew, as if he had indeed spoken, what lay at the
roots of this.
So I passed him and found that inconspicuous bit of carving on
the wall. To that I set my thumb as he had taught me. The small
space opened, but not easily; it might have been some time since it
was last bared. I took out the bag, feeling through it the form of
the ring. That I drew forth and held before my father as if he
could still see and know that I had it. And I promised him that
what he had sought, I would seek too, and that perhaps so I would
find those who had slain him. For this I was sure of, that the ring
held the key to his death.
But this was not the last of the shocks and losses which were to
come to me on Angkor. For after the authorities had come and the
family had gathered and been questioned, she whom I had always
called mother turned on me and said, in a high, fast voice, as if
she dared not be interrupted:
“Faskel is master here. For he is blood and bone of me,
heir to my father who was lord here before Hywel Jern came. And so
will I swear before the Council.”
That she favored Faskel I had always known but there was a chill
in her words now that I did not understand. She continued, making
the reason plain.
“You are only a duty child, Murdoc. Though mark me true, I
have never made the less of you in this house because of that. And
no one can say that I have!”
A duty child—one of those embryos shipped from a populous
world to a frontier planet in order to vary the stock, by law
assigned to some family to be raised and nurtured as their own.
There were many such in the early settlement of any world. But I
had never thought much about them. It did not greatly matter to me
that I was not of her blood. But that I was not the son of Hywel—
that I hated! I think she read this in my eyes, for she shrank from
me. But she need not have feared any trouble, for I turned and went
from that room, and that house, and later from Angkor. All I took
with me was my heritage—the ring out of space.