Free Orion Shall Rise by Poul Anderson Page B

stay on at the library. But all I care to do with the books is read them. My duties are deadly simple. Hence I pay a succession of poor students half my salary to handle them for me. What’s left, I eke out by occasionally performing in a better class of taverns than this, where the tips are good, and by occasionally sitting in a marketplace booth as a public scribe. A grubby life, but mostly a merry one.’
    He took a deep draft. Silence fell. Iern sipped his own wine. It was cheap stuff, thin and sour. Plik had known far better.
    ‘I don’t wish to pry,’ the Clansman said at length, cautiously, ‘but it seems odd to me that, well, that you stick in Kemper. You could make a fresh start in, well, even Tournev.’
    ‘Why don’t I?’ the poet rasped. ‘Why do you think?’ His glance sought the door above the rear stairs.
    ‘Oh. She’s attractive, in her way, but –’ Iern decided to say no more.
    ‘In me is my demon,’ Plik mumbled. ‘In her
is
the very Goddess. And me a Christian who deplores the heresies into which my Breizhad friends have fallen. Sometimes she lets me sleep with her.’
    He rattled forth a laugh and turned his look upon the pilot. ‘She’s right about my making an ass of myself,’ he said. ‘I’ve done it afresh. Could we talk about you for a while?’
    ‘You seem to have heard of me,’ Iern said, a shade self-consciously. ‘There isn’t much I can add.’
    ‘There’s everything.’ Plik made a wobbly gesture. ‘Not the showy things – your exploit against the whirlwind, year before last; your father, whom the Clan Seniors will probably choose for Skyholm’s next Captain when old Toma Sark dies; your slightly legendary status among the pysans of Ar-Mor and, I understand, your unusual popularity among many pysans elsewhere; your leadership of the Weather Corps aerobatic glider team; your coruscant social life – no, not even your championship of such peculiar causes as kindness to animals, or your outspoken opinion that Gaeanity is a menace to the Domain – Let those be. I’d rather know what it feels like to be you. To stand in Skyholm, looking thirty kilometers down to Earth while infinity surrounds you. To believe that the anim, the basic identity of Charles Talence himself, may someday pass into you, coalescing with the uniquenesses of ancestors who already indwell. To know that your Aerogens and its lofty citadel are more than the governors and guardian of an entire civilization, they areits central myth. For every society must have a myth to live by, else it’s a walking corpse that will soon fall to the ground –’
    ‘O-o-oh!’
    The squeal passed through his grandiloquence and nailed it to the spot. He and Iern yanked attention to Sesi. Unnoticed by either, she had come back from the outhouse and stood on the landing with ears open wide as her eyes.
    ‘Oh, you’re a saint! You’re
Talence Iern Ferlay!’
She scampered down the stairs and across the floor to cast herself on her knees before him. ‘Oh, sir, oh, sir!’
    Oh, damn,
he thought.
    Although – well, Plik seemed a person worth talking with, but perhaps not when this drunk and fulsome. And Sesi had arranged her posture of adoration to give Iern a good look down her cleavage.
    ‘Now never mind that,’ he said. Rising, he bent over, grasped her beneath the arms, and helped her to her feet. She stumbled against him. The sensation was delightful. ‘Let’s be friends together,’ he urged.
    ‘But this is so marvelous,’ she breathed. ‘I’m actually in, in your embrace.’
    ‘Sesi, the Aerogens doesn’t really encourage superstitions about itself. We’re men and women like any others.’
    She dipped her lashes. ‘A most handsome man, sir.’ She raised them and plucked his sleeve. ‘Could we go off in a corner for just a second? Please? You don’t mind, do you, Plik?’
    The poet sent her a wry smile and returned to his wine.
    Sesi led Iern aside, stood on tiptoe very close, laid her hands