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"If they say that, admit it. It's true."
"But . . ."
"Listen. They know you are the only possible representative at the
conference from this Autonomy. Let them know you require this measure of
independence -- a separate statement. If they won't go that far, they will at
least allow you to appear to negotiate for one."
"It seems like very little."
"You intend to sign. They know that."
Gregorius considered this, and his hand, which shook. "And where is this
statement? They won't wait long."
"I'll prepare it. Tomorrow you'll have it."
"I'd like to discuss it."
"No time. Believe me, it will be mild enough." He rose. The appointments
secretary, whose name was Nashe, approached. "Did you know, by the way,"
Reynard said, "that USE has recently developed a military arm?"
"Hearsay."
"Of course they are pacifist."
"I've heard the rumors,"
"The USE people are here, Director," Nashe said.
"Five minutes," Gregorius said without looking at her. "They've denied
everything. Assassinations, terror bombings -- they've completely condemned
all that, whenever they've been linked with it."
"Yes, But the rumors persist." He took up his stick. "As effective, it
seems to me, as if they were true. Now, is there another exit here? I'd rather
not pass the time with USE."
Gregorius laughed. "You amaze me. You hate them, but you show me how to
surrender to them."
"Hate," Reynard said, smiling his long, yellow-toothed smile, "isn't the
night word, exactly."
When his counselor had sticked away without farewell, Gregorius sat
again in the deep chain behind the blank field of his desk. He should compose
himself for the USE people. They would speak in that impenetrable jargon,
dense as the priestly Latinate of ancient Jesuits, though half of it was
invented yesterday; would speak of social erg-quotients and a holocompetent
act-field and the nest of it, though what they wanted was clear enough. Power.
He felt, involuntarily, an apprehensive reflex: his scrotum tightened.
That was why Reynard was invaluable. As invaluable as he was strange. He
knew those ancient alterations of the spine and cortex, knew them when he saw
them, though "saw" wasn't what he did. Unconfused by any intervening speech,
he knew when a man was beaten, on unbeatable; he knew at what point fear would
transmute within a man, alchemically, to anger. He had never been wrong. His
advice must be taken. It had made Gregorius, and unmade his enemies.
Concerning USE, though, he couldn't be sure. How could a creature not
quite a man tell Gregorius anything just, anything disinterested, about a
force that wanted to make the world wholly man's? Perhaps at this point the
fox ran out of usefulness to him.
And yet he had no choice. He no longer wholly trusted the fox, and yet
there was no way now he could not follow his advice; he knew of nothing else
to do. He felt a sudden rush of chemical hopelessness. The damn crystal. He
looked at the silver cylinder on his desk, moved to pick it up, but did not.
He would be firm with them. It couldn't cost him anything to be
intransigent for a day. It would be on record then that he was no thing of
theirs to be slotted into their plans, or however they put it. He glanced at
his watch. There would be no time today for his afternoon ride with Sten. He
wondered if the boy would be disappointed. For sure he wouldn't show it.
"Nashe," he said in his beautifully modulated voice, "ask them to come
in."
There was no way for Reynard to conceive of himself except as men had
conceived of foxes. He had, otherwise, no history: he was the man-fox, and the
only other man-fox who had ever existed, existed in the tales of Aesop and the
fables of La Fontaine, in the _contes_ of medieval Reynard and Bruin the bear
and Isengrim the wolf, in the legends of foxhunters. It surprised him how well
that character fitted his nature; or perhaps, then, he had invented his nature
out of those tales.
The guards at the gate neither stopped his black car nor saluted it.
The foxhunters (like those in the aquarebbes that lined Gregorius's
walls) had discovered long ago a paradox: the fox, in nature, has no enemies,
is no one's prey; why, then, is he so very good at escape, evasion, flight?
They used to say a fleeing fox would actually leap aboard a sheep and goad it
to run, thus breaking the distinctive trail of its scent and losing the
hounds. The foxhunters concluded that in fact the fox enjoyed these chases as
much as the)' themselves did, and used not natural terror in its flight but
cunning practiced for its own sake. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]