Vestiges of Time Read Online Free Page B

No paper.”
    “It wi ll be.”
    “Very good.”
    We finished our drinks in silence and then departed the pleasure-house.
    At the appointed time I sat in the pleasure-house lounge with a sack that held the hard currency, small, flat bars of platinum embossed with the symbols of the highest castes of VarKhohs. I had just finished my drink when RyoNa entered, took a seat across from me, and waited while I ordered drinks for us. “You have it?”
    I passed the leather sack to him under the table. I felt like a fool. What did I know of this RyoNa? How far could I trust him?
    “Good,” he said. “I will drink my drink and then
    I must go. Wait here for me. I should be back shortly before dark. I will then have the arrangements.” “Okay.” I sighed, and sipped my fresh drink, while he swallowed his in a single gulp and then rose and left the lounge.
    After a short wait I rose to follow him. He probably expected me to.
    Damned right he’d expected me to!
    That’s how I’d ended up in a cell, remembering all this while I waited for his “veiy important people” to Vfeit me.
    Into the Underground
    It wouldn’t be correct to say that the time was interminable, but it was much - longer than I would have liked, alone in the cramped room under the earth, but at last RyoNa did return and with him were three others, as well as the two black-clad guards, who may have been outside the room the whole time.
    The guards entered the room first, looked me over carefully as if there were some means by which I could have gained weapons in their absence—fat chance!— and then stood on either side of the open door. RyoNa entered next and suggested I get up off the cot and remain standing. Remembering what the Shadowy Man had said, I stood up.
    AkweNema, so the first man was introduced, a name that had an almost familiar ring to it, though I couldn’t recall where I’d heard it. He was a big man, larger and heavier even than RyoNa, more given to fat, with long hair of an unexpected, astonishing red and a florid cast to his swarthy complexion. This North America too was a melting pot of racial types, it seemed. His robes were rich and dazzling, of a dark red material with silvery piping that reflected the room’s dim light, and he wore the symbols of an elevated caste and of the medical profession on his chest and sparkling rings on his fingers.
    AkweNema bowed slightly when introduced, a gesture he expected me to reproduce, which I did, and then he looked me over with an intelligent if somewhat piercing gaze, and with a bit of the clinical about it.
    I later learned that he was, in fact, a medical doctor, among other things.
    Then he nodded to RyoNa and gave him a pleasant, you-haye-done-well sort of smile. RyoNa was pleased and I felt like a side of beef that he had just procured for AkweNema’s pantry.
    The second man was smaller than either AkweNema or RyoNa, a slender, almost wizened man of indeterminate age, with bright eyes set deep in their sockets under heavy eyebrows. He could have been fifty years old or he could have been seventy. He too was dressed in the luxurious robes of one of the higher castes, a technologically oriented one, I suspected from the decoration of his robe, and if I read the symbols rightly, he practiced his profession in the academic manner of a university instructor. His name was KaphNo and he carried an honorific that could just barely be translated as “professor.”
    The third man was the youngest, in his late twenties, I suspected, although his full beard initially gave the impression of someone older, as did his eyes and the premature streak of gray in his long, carefully coiffured hair. Though his robes were less lavish than those of the first two, the symbols on his chest were those of one of the highest castes of all. Lord Dessa- Tyso, as he was named, stood closer to the peak of the social pyramid than did the others, although I soon began to suspect that he was in a lesser position to