Collected Short Fiction, page 207
“What’s that you have there?” Leslyn asked.
“Nothing,” Gorman said quickly. He walked to the fire, held the book above the radiance for an instant, tossed it in. It sparkled brightly for a moment, then was consumed.
“Things that are better off forgotten,” he said, half to himself. He looked at Thule’s body. They had covered it with a cloak now.
Force and violence had returned briefly to the world—and had been struck down only by greater force and fiercer violence. Gorman looked at his swollen, bruised fists again, and shook his head.
Outside, the weary sun was sinking below the horizon. The world’s days were numbered, Gorman thought. He drew Leslyn close and held her tightly. Only a few centuries remained. But Earth’s last killer lay dead, and peace had come again to the dying planet.
THE END
World of a Thousand Colors
Winners of the “Test” on the World of a Thousand Colors were granted the soul’s utmost dream. Was this mysterious award worth the killing of a man?
When Jolvar Hollinrede discovered that the slim, pale young man opposite him was journeying to the World of a Thousand Colors to undergo the Test, he spied a glittering opportunity for himself. And in that moment was the slim, pale young man’s fate set.
Hollinrede’s lean fingers closed on the spun-fibre drinkflask. He peered across the burnished tabletop. “The Test, you say?”
The young man smiled diffidently. “Yes. I think I’m ready. I’ve waited years—and now’s my big chance.” He had had a little too much of the cloying liqueur he had been drinking; his eyes shone glassily, and his tongue was looser than it had any right to be.
“Few are called and fewer are chosen,” Hollinrede mused. “Let me buy you another drink.”
“No, I—”
“It will be an honor. Really. It’s not every day I have a chance to buy a Testee a drink.”
Hollinrede waved a jeweled hand and the servomech brought them two more drinkflasks. Lightly Hollinrede punctured one, slid it along the tabletop, kept the other in his hand unopened. “I don’t believe I know your name,” he said.
“Derveran Marti. I’m from Earth. You?”
“Jolvar Hollinrede. Likewise. I travel from world to world on business, which is what brings me to Niprion this day.”
“What sort of business?”
“I trade in jewels,” Hollinrede said, displaying the bright collection studding his fingers. They were all morphosims, not the originals, but only careful chemical analysis would reveal that. Hollinrede did not believe in exposing millions of credits’ worth of merchandise to anyone who cared to lop off his hand.
“I was a clerk,” Marti said. “But that’s all far behind me. I’m on to the World of a Thousand Colors to take the Test! The Test!”
“The Test!” Hollinrede echoed. He lifted his unpunctured drinkflask in a gesture of salute, raised it to his lips, pretended to drain it. Across the table Derveran Marti coughed as the liqueur coursed down his throat. He looked up, smiling dizzily, and smacked his lips.
“When does your ship leave?” Hollinrede asked.
“Tomorrow midday. It’s the Star Climber. I can’t wait. This stopover at Niprion is making me fume with impatience.”
“No doubt,” Hollinrede agreed. “What say you to an afternoon of whist, to while away the time?”
AN hour later Derveran Marti lay slumped over the inlaid cardtable in Hollinrede’s hotel suite, still clutching a handful of waxy cards. Arms folded, Hollinrede surveyed the body.
They were about of a height, he and the dead man, and a chemotherm mask would alter Hollinrede’s face sufficiently to allow him to pass as Marti. He switched on the playback of the room’s recorder to pick up the final fragments of their conversation.
“. . . care for another drink, Marti?”
“I guess I’d better not, old fellow. I’m getting kind of muzzy, you know. No, please don’t pour it for me. I said I didn’t want it, and—well, all right. Just a little one. There, that’s enough. Thanks.”
The tape was silent for a moment, then recorded the soft thump of Marti’s body falling to the table as the quick-action poison unlatched his synapses. Smiling, Hollinrede switched the recorder to record and said, mimicking Marti, “I guess I’d better not, old fellow. I’m getting kind of muzzy, you know.”
He activated the playback, listened critically to the sound of his voice, then listened to Marti’s again for comparison. He was approaching the light, flexible quality of the dead man’s voice. Several more attempts and he had it almost perfect. Producing a vocal homologizer, he ran off first Marti’s voice, then his own pronouncing the same words.
The voices were alike to three decimal places. That would be good enough to fool the most sensitive detector; three places was the normal range of variation in any man’s voice from day to day.
In terms of mass there was a trifling matter of some few grams which could easily be sweated off in the gymnasium the following morning. As for the dead man’s gesture-complex, Hollinrede thought he could manage a fairly accurate imitation of Marti’s manner of moving; he had studied the young clerk carefully for nearly four hours, and Hollinrede was a clever man.
When the preparations were finished, he stepped away and glanced at the mirror, taking a last look at his own face—the face he would not see again until he had taken the Test. He donned the mask. Jolvar Hollinrede became Derveran Marti.
Hollinrede extracted a length of cotton bulking from a drawer and wrapped it around Marti’s body. He weighed the corpse, and added four milligrams more of cotton so that Marti would have precisely the mass Jolvar Hollinrede had had. He donned Marti’s clothes finally, dressed the body in his own, and, smiling sadly at the convincing but worthless morphosim jewels on his fingers, transferred the rings to Marti’s already-stiffening hands.
“Up with you,” he grunted, and bundled the body across the room to the disposall.
“Farewell, old friend,” he exclaimed feelingly, and hoisted Marti feet-first to the lip of the chute. He shoved, and the dead man vanished, slowly, gracefully, heading downward towards the omnivorous maw of the atomic converter buried in the deep levels of Stopover Planet Niprion.
Reflectively Hollinrede turned away from the disposall unit. He gathered up the cards, put away the liqueur, poured the remnant of the poisoned drink in the disposall chute.
An atomic converter was a wonderful thing, he thought pleasantly. By now the body of Marti had been efficiently reduced to its component molecules, and those were due for separation into atoms shortly after, and from atoms into subatomic particles. Within an hour the prime evidence to the crime would be nothing but so many protons, electrons, and neutrons—and there would be no way of telling which of the two men in the room had entered the chute, and which had remained alive.
Hollinrede activated the tape once more, rehearsed for the final time his version of Marti’s voice, and checked it with the homologizer. Still three decimal places; that was good enough. He erased the tape.
Then, depressing the communicator stud, he said, “I wish to report a death.”
A cold robot face appeared on the screen. “Yes?”
“Several minutes ago my host, Jolvar Hollinrede, passed on of an acute embolism. He requested immediate dissolution upon death and I wish to report that this has been carried out.”
“Your name?”
“Derveran Marti. Testee.”
“A Testee? You were the last to see the late Hollinrede alive?”
“That’s right.”
“Do you swear that all information you might give will be accurate and fully honest?”
“I so swear,” Hollinrede said.
THE inquest was brief and smooth. The word of a Testee goes without question; Hollinrede had reported the details of the meeting exactly as if he had been Marti, and after a check of the converter records revealed that a mass exactly equal to the late Hollinrede’s had indeed been disposed of at precisely the instant witness claimed, the inquest was at its end. The verdict was natural death. Hollinrede told the officials that he had not known the late jeweltrader before that day, and had no interest in his property, whereupon they permitted him to depart.
Having died intestate, Hollinrede knew his property became that of the Galactic Government. But, as he pressed his hand, clad in its skintight chemotherm, against the doorplate of Derveran Marti’s room, he told himself that it did not matter. Now he was Derveran Marti, Testee. And once he had taken and passed the Test, what would the loss of a few million credits in baubles matter to him?
Therefore it was with a light heart that the pseudo-Derveran Marti quitted his lodgings the next day and prepared to board the Star Climber for the voyage to the World of a Thousand Colors.
The clerk at the desk peered at him sympathetically as he pressed his fingers into the checkout plate, thereby erasing the impress from the doorplate upstairs.
“It was too bad about that old fellow dying on you yesterday, wasn’t it, sir? I do hope it won’t affect your Test result.”
Hollinrede smiled blankly. “It was quite a shock to me when he died so suddenly. But my system has already recovered; I’m ready for the Test.”
“Good luck to you, sir,” the clerk said as Hollinrede left the hotel and stepped out on the flaring skyramp that led to the waiting ship.
The steward at the passenger hatch was collecting identiplates. Hollinrede handed his over casually. The steward inserted it tip-first in the computer near the door, and motioned for Hollinrede to step within the beam while his specifications were being automatically compared with those on the identiplate.
He waited, tensely. Finally the chattering of the machine stopped and a dry voice said, “Your identity is in order, Testee Derveran Marti. Proceed within.”
“That means you’re okay,” the steward told him. “Yours is Compartment Eleven. It’s a luxury job, you know. But you Testees deserve it. Best of luck, sir.”
“Thanks,” Hollinrede grinned. “I don’t doubt I’ll need it.”
He moved up the ramp and into the ship. Compartment Eleven was a luxury job; Hollinrede, who had been a frugal man, whistled in amazement when he saw it. It was nearly eight feet high and almost twelve broad, totally private with an opaquer attached to the doorscope. Clinging curtains of ebony synthoid foam from Ravensmusk VIII had been draped lovingly over the walls, and the acceleration couch was trimmed in golden bryozone. The rank of Testee carried with it privileges that the late Derveran Marti certainly would never have mustered in private life—nor Jolvar Hollinrede either.
At 1143 the doorscope chimed; Hollinrede leaped from the soft couch a little too nervously and transluced the door. A crewman stood outside.
“Everything all right, sir? We blast in seventeen minutes.”
“I’m fine,” Hollinrede said. “Can’t wait to get there. How long do you think it’ll take?”
“Sorry sir. Not at liberty to reveal. But I wish you a pleasant trip, and should you lack for aught hesitate not to call on me.”
Hollinrede smiled at the curiously archaic way the man had of expressing himself. “Never fear; I’ll not hesitate. Many thanks.” He opaqued the doorscope and resumed his seat.
AT precisely 1200 the drive-engines of the Star Climber throbbed heavily; the pale green light over the door of Hollinrede’s compartment glowed brightly for an instant, signaling the approaching blastoff. He sank down on the acceleration couch to wait.
A moment later came the push of acceleration, and then, as the gravshields took effect, the 7g escape force dwindled until Hollinrede felt comfortable again. He increased the angle of the couch in order to peer out the port.
The world of Niprion was vanishing rapidly in the background: already it was nothing but a mottled grey-and-gold ball swimming hazily in a puff of atmosphere. The sprawling metal structure that was the stopover hotel was invisible.
Somewhere back on Niprion, Hollinrede thought, the atoms that once had been Testee Derveran Marti were now feeding the plasma intake of a turbine or heating the inner shell of a reactor.
He let his mind dwell on the forthcoming Test. He knew little about it, really, considering he had been willing to take a man’s life for a chance to compete. He knew the Test was administered once every five years to candidates chosen by Galaxywide search. The world where the Test was given was known only as the World of a Thousand Colors, and precisely where this world was no member of the general public was permitted to know.
As for the Test itself, by its very nature it was unknown to the Galaxy. For no winning Testee had ever returned from the World of a Thousand Colors. Some losers returned, their minds carefully wiped clean of any memories of the planet—but the winners never came back.
The Test’s nature was unknown; the prize, inconceivable. All anyone knew was that the winners were granted the soul’s utmost dream. Upon winning, one neither returned to his home world nor desired to return.
Naturally many men ignored the Test—it was something for “other people” to take part in. But millions, billions throughout the Galaxy competed in the preliminaries. And every five years, six or seven were chosen.
Jolvar Hollinrede was convinced he would succeed in the Test—but he had failed three times running in the preliminaries, and was thus permanently disqualified. The preliminaries were simple; they consisted merely of an intensive mental scanning. A flipflop circuit would flash YES or NO after that.
If YES, there were further scannings, until word was beamed through the Galaxy that the competitors for the year had been chosen.
Hollinrede stared moodily at the blackness of space. He had been eliminated unfairly, he felt; he coveted the unknown prize the Test offered, and felt bitter at having it denied him. When chance had thrown Testee Derveran Marti in his path, Hollinrede had leaped to take advantage of the opportunity.
And now he was on his way.
Surely, he thought, they would allow him to take the Test, even if he were discovered to be an impostor. And once he took it, he knew he would succeed. He had always succeeded in his endeavors. There was no reason for failure now.
Beneath the false mask of Derveran Marti, Hollinrede’s face was tensely set. He dreamed of the Test and its winning—and of the end to the long years of wandering and toil.
THE voice at the door said, “We’re here, Testee Derveran. Please open up.”
Hollinrede grunted, pulled himself up from the couch, threw open the door. Three dark-faced spacemen waited there for him.
“Where are we?” he asked nervously. “Is the trip over?”
“We have come to pilot you to the Test planet, sir,” one of the spacemen told him. “The Star Climber is in orbit around it, but will not make a landing itself. Will you follow us?”
“Very well,” Hollinrede said.
They entered a lifeship, a slim grey tube barely thirty meters long, and fastened acceleration cradles. There were no ports. Hollinrede felt enclosed, hemmed in.
The lifeship began to slide noiselessly along the ejection channel, glided the entire length of the Star Climber, and burst out into space. A preset orbit was operating. Hollinrede clung to the acceleration cradle as the lifeship spun tightly inward towards a powerful gravitational field not far away.
The ship came to rest. Hollinrede lay motionless, flesh cold with nervousness, teeth chattering.
“Easy does it, sir. Up and out.”
They lifted him and gently nudged him through a manifold compression lock. He moved forward on numb feet.
“Best of luck, sir!” an envious voice called behind him.
Then the lock clanged shut, and Hollinrede was on his own.
A riotous blaze of color swept down at him from every point of the compass.
He stood in the midst of what looked like a lunar crater; far in the distance on all sides was the massive upraised fissured surface of a ringwall, and the ground beneath him was barren red-brown rock, crumbling to pumice here and there but bare of vegetation.
In the sky was a solitary sun, a blazing Type A blue-white star. That sun alone was incapable of accounting for this flood of color.
Streamers of every hue seemed to sprout from the rocks, staining the ringwall olive-grey and brilliant cerise and dark, lustrous green. Pigments of every sort bathed the air; now it seemed to glow with currents of luminous pink, now a flaming red, now a pulsing pure white.
His eyes adjusted slowly to the torrent of color. World of a Thousand Colors, they called this place? That was an underestimate. Hundred thousand. Million. Billion. Shades and near-shades mingled to form new colors.
“Are you Derveran Marti?” a voice asked.
Startled, Hollinrede looked around. It seemed as if a band of color had spoken: a swirling band of rich brown that spun tirelessly before him.
“Are you Derveran Marti?” the voice repeated, and Hollinrede saw that it had indeed come from the band of brown.
It seemed a desecration to utter the lie here on this world of awesome beauty, and he felt the temptation to claim his true identity. But the time for that was later.
“Yes,” he said loudly. “I am Derveran Marti.”
“Welcome, Derveran Marti. The Test will soon begin.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
“Right out here? Just like this?”
“Yes,” the band of color replied. “Your fellow competitors are gathering.”
HOLLINREDE narrowed his eyes and peered towards the far reaches of the ringwall. Yes; he saw tiny figures located at great distances from each other along the edge of the crater. One, two, three . . . there were seven all told, including himself. Seven, out of the whole Galaxy!
Each of the other six was attended by a dipping, bobbing blotch of color. Hollinrede noticed a squareshouldered giant from one of the Inner Worlds surrounded by a circlet of violent orange; to his immediate left was a sylphlike female, probably from one of the worlds of Dubhe, wearing only the revealing token garment of her people but shielded from inquisitive eyes by a robe of purest blue light. There were others; Hollinrede wished them well. He knew it was possible for all competitors to win, and now that he was about to attain his long-sought goal he held no malice for anyone. His mind was suffused with pity for the dead Derveran Marti, sacrificed that Jolvar Hollinrede might be in this place at this time.
