Inside, it was like the nest of some large, burrowing animal. A heap of matted cloth and straw lay in one corner, a few yards from the glowing embers of a small fire. Small bones and vegetable rinds littered the floor.
Daenek picked up a half-burnt stick from the fire and blew on it’s end, re-igniting it into flame. Something rustled in the mound in the corner as he approached it, holding the flame overhead to see.
An old man’s face, wizened and with a beard that was matted with dirt and grease, looked up at him. His body was curled up like a child’s on the rags where he had been sleeping. As Daenek bent down, the old man’s eyes widened, his ancient face becoming suffused with an expression of wonder and delight. In a scratchy falsetto, he spoke. “You’ve come back,” he said. “You’ve come back.”
The old man lapsed into a clouded senility from time to time, and Daenek, nearly an hour later, was still not sure whether the old man understood that he was not the old thane, his father.
Daenek gathered from the old man’s rambling that he had been some type of official or courtier for the old thane. “I crept back here,” mumbled the old man. “Oh—a long time ago. There was nowhere else to go. It was all over. But you’re here now.” He broke into a racking spasm of coughing that brought flecks of blood to his cracked lips.
“Take it easy,” said Daenek, holding the old man’s shoulder steady against the mound of rags and straw. He’s not going to last long, he thought.
“The—the bad priests never bother me.” The old man’s yellowed eyes rolled from side to side. “I think that I’m a pet to them. They bring me some food now and then, little things that they catch—they’re very fast—and water. But they never bother me.”
“That’s good. Don’t get excited.” I don’t have much time, thought Daenek listening to the old man’s ragged breathing. Not if I’m to learn anything from him.
Almost desperately, he pulled the little square of white metal by its chain from beneath his shirt, stiff with dried blood. “Do you know what this is?” he said, holding it out.
Something behind the old man’s eyes seemed to grow clearer as he looked from the metal to Daenek’s face. “That’s right,” he whispered. “You wouldn’t know, would you? You were only a baby.”
Before Daenek could stop him, the old man had risen from the mound and started tottering across the room. “This way,” he piped, waving his gnarled hand.
Daenek picked up another stick from the fire he had re-kindled, then followed the old man. He found him in front of another pair of doors. They were featureless, with no visible way of opening them.
“Here,” the old man said excitedly, pointing a wavering finger at a small slot in the surface of one of the doors.
Leaning forward, Daenek studied the tiny opening. Without thinking, his hand found the square of white metal and pressed it into the slot.
A groan of long unused machinery, and the two doors began to pull apart from each other. Daenek stepped back and the metal fell out of the slot and against his chest. Fluorescent panels flickered, then blazed on inside the chamber revealed when the doors were open all the way. The light gleamed from the gold-plated surfaces of machinery within, ornate in its complexity.
“It still functions,” said the old man with a note of pride in his voice. “The priests, the original ones who came on the seedship, built it well.”
“What is it?” said Daenek. The reflected glow dazzled him.
“This is why I came back.” The old man was quite lucid now, his voice firm and lower in pitch. “I knew that, somehow, you might make your way here, and then you would need someone to explain.” He paused for a moment. “This is where you were born. Here, and not from any woman’s womb.”
Daenek turned and looked into the calm, aged face.
Something in his own heart seemed to stop without pain, like a key turning in its latch.
Chapter XXII
There was only one thane. There had always been but one.
The priests who had come on the seedship had finished the cloning of those who would be the start of the world’s population.
Then, following the Academy’s programming, the priests had constructed the palace and installed an automated unit of the cloning apparatus, still in the gold sheathing that had protected its fragile devices from interstellar radiation, behind the doors for which there was only one key.
All the technology available to the Academy on Earth had gone to alter the genetic material for the thane, the man who would be the ruler of the society the priests were to set up.
Encoded in every cell of the first thane was the power to control other men’s minds, a power invisible but greater than any other human strength.
When the seedship had gone from Earth, the government confiscated the genetic alteration technology, and at last destroyed it. The danger was too great for it to be employed anywhere other than the far-off star to which the seedship was directed.
But there, the thane’s power was too great to be lost, or worse, to be spread through the population. The Academy had made provisions for the inheritance of the power. The cloning unit was kept active in the palace, a final world-encompassing secret known only to the thane and his closest circle. When the thane, who was otherwise sterile and without the possibility of an heir, grew old, an infant would be formed and nurtured in the cloning unit’s artificial womb from the genetic material contained in the thane’s cells. His ‘son’ would then be his own genetic duplicate, the thane’s power of command intact within him. The priests instructed each new child-thane according to the ancient programming of the Academy. When the supraluminal drives were developed, the Academy itself came out to the star and found the world they had created waiting for them.
The secret, the world’s final secret, remained intact with the power. The priests’ programming bound them in silence’ of it.
So, from generation to generation, from the first thane onward into time, the thanes died but lived—immortal in the cycle of their rebirth.
Daenek looked at his face, reflected in one of the gleaming panels of the cloning apparatus. Somewhere, in a tank of blood-like nutrients he had floated as an embryo, and then, an infant, been brought into the world from the metal depths contained before him.
Behind him, the old man was waiting, silent—his explanation finished.
With one hand, Daenek touched his image. There was something left of the mask he had learned to form in it, but it soon faded. It’s my face now, he thought. My inheritance. The face of a thane. A wordless song of knowledge and power coursed through his veins.
“When the old thane was killed,” the old man spoke up, “the Regent had you exiled, though you were only an infant. So that he’d look merciful and just to the people. One of the thane’s court ladies went with you, to some small village—”
“I know,” said Daenek. A flood of memories had risen in him, memories from before a childhood near the quarry, memories of being a thane. Of growing sick with disgust at the loss of humanness in mankind, at the slow drift with each generation of the world’s population towards sloth and the indifference to life that eats life. The resolve to change, to overthrow the old blood-sapping patterns, though it would mean eventually the end of the rule by thanes. And the mistake of letting it become known too soon, too soon to avoid the Academy’s treachery. Daenek studied his reflection and knew. This was the end of the search.