Emperor of Gondwanaland Read Online Free Page A

if hosting me in a lavish palace.
    Incredulously, I swept debris from a chair and sat. As I did, I noticed two other objects in the room. One was a wall-mounted glass-fronted case, with a useless lock, bearing on racks a score or more of laser pistols. The other was a tall, sheet-draped figure in a corner. From its shrouded lines, I had sworn it were a man, had it not been so stiff and immobile. Perhaps it was some religious effigy, and I thought it best not to mention it.
    Not so with the weapons, however, the presence of which made me skittish.
    “Why do you carry so many arms?” I asked, nodding toward the case.
    Merino, seating himself, said, “It was felt that we should have them against the Fanzoii, should they escape. But you can see how needless such precautions were.”
    Tess remained standing, seemingly awaiting orders. Merino at last deigned to acknowledge her, speaking directly to her for the first time in my hearing. I listened closely for what his tone of voice might reveal.
    “Tess,” he said equably, “please serve us a meal.”
    Nothing. Master to slave, equal to equal, captor to captive—any or all of these might have been inferred.
    Tess departed through the second door, and soon the noise of clanking pots and pans filtered out.
    “Now,” said Merino, “out of that brutal sun, with a glass of good wine to hand, we may truly talk.” He lifted the broad-based flask full of amber wine and poured us each a glass. “You must praise such an excellent vintage. It’s from my estate back home. I bless the day I thought to ship several cases of it. Truth be told, I believe sometimes it’s all that has seen me through this crisis.”
    I sipped my wine after Merino sipped his. “Very palatable,” I said. “But you should not give the wine overmuch credit. Surely the inner qualities of a man count for far more. Fortitude, endurance, courage, wit.”
    Merino’s false ebullience disappeared. “Perhaps you are right. Yet when those fail a man, the consolations of wine are not to be spurned.”
    Merino drained his glass and poured another. Aromas of cooking wafted out the open galley door.
    “This bouquet reminds me of my home,” Merino said dreamily. “The dark woods, the bright, cloud-swept lawns, the lavish rooms of Truro …” His bronze-olive face grew animated. He stroked his oily mustache. Without preamble, as we sat in the gloom, he launched into a rambling discourse on his distant home.
    I had only to listen and nod, and used the interval to study the enigmatic captain. He struck me as whimsical and capricious, by turns mordant and blithe, a poorly balanced fellow, who knew not his own mind. I felt then that his trouble was that he had no code to live by, was rudderless in the ethical sea, despite the imposed strictures of the Aristarchy. I, who have always prided myself on living by a certain code (whose tenets need not be described here), thought this to be the ultimate moral abyss.
    What I did not consider at the time was the possibility that Merino had had a code—but that it had broken down of its inherent inconsistencies or limitations, leaving him despairing and deracinated.
    The man chattered on, his black eyes liquidly refulgent, seeming to trap all the small light there was. What I gathered from his talk was that his old life had been one of leisure and only ceremonial duties, carefree and pleasure-centered.
    Not the best preparation for the mission he had been sent on.
    At last Tess entered with our meal: canned beef, heated, with boiled potatoes in which I later found a dead worm.
    Her entrance completely transformed Merino. His pathetic panache vanished, and he fell mostly silent, drinking even more heavily.
    As I ate, I studied the Fanzoy.
    She—I had accepted Merino’s assertion of her sex—sat on the bunk while we picked at our meal. Her supple arms hung lightly, with her hands folded in her lap. Her soft skin, with its nap the color of certain pale-orange roses, was