Wyst: Alastor 1716 Read Online Free Page A

truculent.
    Fausgard numbly shook her head and Orgold merely gazed
impassively at a point above the Connatic’s head.
    Lemiste asked: “Who is this Jantiff?”
    “A person who has corresponded with me; it is no great
matter. If I visit Arrabus I will take the trouble to look him up. Good evening
to you all.”
    His image moved into the shadows at the side of the room,
and faded.
    In the dressing room the Connatic removed his casque. “Esclavade?”
    “Sir?”
    ‘What do you think of the Whispers?”
    “An odd group. I detect voice tremor in Fausgard and
Le-mists. Orgold’s assurance is impervious to tension. Delfin lacks all
restraint. The name ‘Jantiff Ravensroke’ may not be unfamiliar to them.”
    “There is a mystery here,” said the Connatic. “Certainly
they did not travel all the way from Wyst to make a series of impossible
proposals, quite at odds to their stated purposes.”
    “I agree. Something has altered their viewpoint”
    “I wonder if there is a connection with Jantiff Ravensroke?”

Chapter 2
    Jantiff Ravensroke had been born in comfortable circumstances
at Frayness on Zeck, Alastor 503. His father, Lile Ravensroke, calibrated
micrometers at the Institute of Molecular design; his mother held a part-time
job as technical analyst at Orion Instruments. Two sisters, Ferfan and Juille,
specialized respectively in a sub-phase of condaptery [5] and the carving of mooring posts. [6]
    At the junior academy Jantiff, a tall thin young man with a
long bony face and lank black hair, trained first in graphic design, then,
after a year, reoriented himself into chromatics and perceptual psychology. At
senior school he threw himself into the history of creative imagery, despite
the opinion of his family that he was spreading himself too thin. His father
pointed out that he could not forever delay taking a specialty, that unrelated
enthusiasms, while no doubt entertaining, would seem to merge into frivolity
and even irresponsibility.
    Jantiff listened with dutiful attention, but soon thereafter
he chanced upon an old manual of landscape painting, which insisted that only
natural pigments could adequately depict natural objects; and, further, that synthetic
substances, being bogus and unnatural, subconsciously influenced the craftsman
and inevitably falsified his work. Jantiff found the argument convincing and
began to collect, grind and blend umbers and others, barks, roots, berries, the
glands of fish and the secretions of nocturnal rodents, while his family
looked on in amusement.
    Lile Ravensroke again felt obliged to correct Jantiff’s instability.
He took an oblique approach to the topic. “I take it that you are not
reconciled to a life of abject poverty?”
    Jantiff, naturally mild and guileless, with occasional
lapses into absent-mindedness, responded without hesitation: “Certainly not! I
very much enjoy the good things of life!”
    Lile Ravensroke went on, in a casual voice: “I expect that
you intend to earn these good things not by crime or fraud but through your own
good efforts?”
    “Of course!” said Jantiff, now somewhat puzzled. “That goes
without saying.”
    “Then how do you expect to profit from your training to
date: which is to say, a smattering of this and an inkling of that? ‘Expertise’
is the word you must concentrate upon! Sure control over a special technique:
this is how you put coin in your pocket!”
    In a subdued voice Jantiff stated that he had not yet discovered
a specialty which he felt would interest him across the entire span of his existence.
Lile Ravensroke replied that to his almost certain knowledge no divine fiat had
ever ordained that toil must be joyful or interesting. Aloud Jantiff
acknowledged the rightness of his father’s views, but privately clung to the
hope that somehow he might turn his frivolity to profit.
    Jantiff finished his term at senior school with no great distinction,
and the summer recess lay before him. During these few brief months he