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THIRTY-THREE

Baver regained a groggy consciousness while being tied across the back of a horse, and tried to raise his head. A soldier cursed—at least it sounded like a curse—and cuffed him. Whereupon the commander rode up to the soldier, and bending struck him hard on the head with the flat of his sword. The man fell to the ground, partly from the blow and partly in self defense, while an angry string of words rattled from the commander’s mouth.
The language was one Baver felt sure he’d never heard before. Chinese? he wondered. He’d heard Chinese several times on a cube, ancient Chinese, on New Home. Alex Malaluan had been hypno-learning it. It had sounded more tonal than this. But then, languages change, some more, some less.
With quick fingers, a different soldier untied him. Two others helped him off the horse, onto his feet, where his hands were retied in front of him, leaving twenty centimeters of twisted thong between them to give him some freedom of hand movement. This done, he was boosted into the saddle.
He was aware that virtually all the soldiers were staring at him. He supposed they’d never seen anything like a jumpsuit before, with its pockets at chest, hips, and thighs.
It occurred to him then that Hans wasn’t there. Perhaps he’d gotten away. Or was dead. There was no way to ask. But these people didn’t seem to be in a killing mood. Did they have orders to bring in prisoners alive and well?
And what had there been about himself and Hans that inspired the chase? Perhaps it was simply that Hans had bolted. Or no, Hans hadn’t bolted till after the soldiers had lacked their own horses to a gallop. And there had been Han’s dream!—prophetic in a way. Perhaps accurately prophetic if they’d stayed where they’d camped.
He wondered what they’d do with him. And why the commander had struck the trooper for actually rather modest abuse. Baver had seen and heard enough, on this primitive world, to know that here, merely cuffing a prisoner was benign behavior.
There was more to this, he decided, than appeared on the surface.
During two long days of riding with his hands tied, Baver was treated with consistent brusque decency, and learned a few words of the soldiers’ language, notably chu and kyöra sagiyö: water or drink, and eat or food.
The third morning brought them to the ruins of a large city. An old city, some of it dating to well before the days of knock-down-and-replace buildings. Probably a major capital, because some of the individual buildings were so large, or had been. A lot of them were more or less intact, implying that they predated the technological era with its widespread use of steel beams and reinforcment bars.
The capital of ancient China, Baver decided. He groped for the name: Beijing, that was it. Now an army was barracked there, in scores or maybe hundreds of long, single-story stone buildings. Nearby were farms, their mud-brick buildings clustered in hamlets. There was wheeled transport, both wagons and carts, and the road was rutted from the last wet weather, but dusty now from drought.
From Beijing the troop turned north, the midday sun at their backs, and after a while they were in forested hills again—the Yan Mountains, though Baver didn’t know their name. Late the next day they came to a town of perhaps twenty thousand, in a valley of farms; an un-walled town. A large hill rose above it, with large buildings surrounded by a defensive wall. Atop the hill was what Baver thought must be the imperial palace. From a distance its size impressed him, and as they came closer, its beauty. They rode into the town on a road paved with stone blocks, till they came to a great gate that swallowed the road.
It was at the gate that Baver saw his first Yunnan ogres. He’d never heard of them before, and they both awed and astonished him. Each was well over two meters tall, looked enormously strong, and wore an indigo uniform with buttons and trim of copper. Their helmets were steel, though he didn’t know it, for the steel was plated with polished bronze. Each held a great sword at shoulder arms, while on his other shoulder was slung an enormous bow. Baver doubted he could do more than lift the sword, and was sure he couldn’t begin to bend the bow. The creatures looked intelligent and alert, their eyes on the coming cavalrymen and particularly on himself, an obvious prisoner.
At the last minute, one of them stepped in front of the troop’s commander. And spoke! Its speech sounded to Baver not unlike that of the soldiers he’d been traveling with, though the voice had a different timbre, with a sort of “hard-napped fuzz” to it unlike any human voice he’d ever heard.
Then the column waited calmly. No one dismounted or spoke. Almost the only sounds were the occasional clop of a shod hoof on stone, a slight snort, the buzz of horse flies and swish of tails.
One of the ogres had planted himself in the gateway, sword loosely ready in one long hand. The blade was one-and-a-half-edged, Baver noticed, one edge sharp the whole length, the other only half. The long hand had an opposable thumb, and thick nails that might be thought of as blunt claws. The feet were bare, and their claws curved strongly enough for traction.
From inside the gate came the sound of shod feet marching in step. Then a squad of human guards came out. Like the ogres, they wore uniforms of indigo and copper. With them came what was clearly an officer, by both uniform and bearing. He seemed to be senior to the cavalry commander. Haughtily he rattled off several sentences, then two of his men strode to Baver and lifted him down. These were large men, larger than most of the troopers, and with hands beneath Baver’s arms, they walked him through the great gate and into the palace grounds.
Baver had visited the national garden on New Home. The palace grounds were at least as beautiful, and exotic to boot. He realized this even as he was hustled along a graveled path to a building, lovely on the outside, which inside proved to be a prison. At least the cellar was. They took him down a corridor and pushed him into a cell, where one of them untied his hands.
They left him standing there and slammed the barred door behind them. A key or keys seated massive bolts. The only light was that from the corridor, and from an airshaft with a barred opening.
Baver stood bemused, not willing to sit, as if sitting would make the situation more final, more irrevocable. Well, he told himself after a long couple of minutes, they didn’t go to all that trouble just to lock me up. Something’s bound to happen before long.
With that he did sit, and wondered where Hans was, and Nils. He didn’t even think of Matthew and Nikko and pinnace Alpha just then. They belonged to another world, an earlier life.
Songtsan Gampo could sense the prisoner’s mind as he was led up the great marble stairway and along the broad hall with its panelling of tropical hardwoods from Guangxi, inlaid with carved ivory. It was a worried but not inordinately fearful mind, able to notice its surroundings and even to appreciate them. Images stirred in it, and comparisons with other halls and rooms.
Two guards marched Baver to the door of the audience chamber and inside. One was a Mongol, a mercenary. Their strong hands halted the prisoner three steps inside, Baver’s eyes taking in as much of the room as possible without obviously gawking. This was clearly the imperial audience chamber. There was a throne on a raised dais, and on it a strong-faced man wearing beautiful robes; surely the emperor. Ogre guards stood behind the throne on either side, while to his right stood an ogre notably larger than the others.
The emperor’s visitors were required to offer an obeisance, the degree varying with the person and circumstance. Even the emperor’s brother Drukpa bowed when he entered. Baver unwittingly had done nothing. The emperor spoke quietly to the Mongol, Corporal Nogai, who then spoke to Baver in fluent Buriat Mongol. “You are expected to bow to the emperor,” he said mildly, and demonstrated.
Baver bowed from the waist, not deeply. The emperor monitored him telepathically and found no sense of defiance or disrespect, only embarrassment that he’d had to be told.
A star man indeed, the emperor thought, just as Tenzin had said. He smiled slightly to put the man somewhat at ease, and spoke to him, Corporal Nogai translating into Mongol a sentence behind.
“We welcome you to our empire and our palace. Even though you entered our territory without permission, in our imperial wisdom we believe you intended no harm. Therefore we do not now plan to punish you. It is enough that you be restrained from wandering and spying.”
Baver wondered if he was expected to reply. Unsure, he decided not to, beyond a perfunctory acknowledgment. “Thank you,” he said.
The slanted oval eyes were on his, emotionless; the emperor and his translator went on. “You are a foreigner. Your clothing is of interesting design, and the material seems unfamiliar to us, though as dirty as it is, it is not possible to be sure. Where did you get it?”
“In my homeland, far to the west.” The lie seemed to Baver the lesser of undesirable alternatives. Telling the truth might get him in trouble as a liar, or perhaps for disrespect to the imperial throne. Or it might get him branded a lunatic. And actually the only untruth in what he’d said was the west.
“Indeed. When you have been returned to your quarters, clean clothes will be provided. These will be washed and returned to you.
“Now, your homeland: What is it called? Perhaps I have heard of it.”
“I think not, Your Highness.” He turned to Corporal Nogai. “Is that the right term to use? Your Highness?”
The interpreter passed the question on, commenting that the Mongol language was not fully adequate for court etiquette, and that while the prisoner’s knowledge of Mongol seemed quite functional, he was not fully articulate in it. The emperor didn’t tell the interpreter that he wasn’t much interested in Baver’s verbal answers. His interest was in the concepts and images that his questions brought to or near the surface.
“The term ‘Your Highness’ is adequate,” the emperor answered. “And what is your function in your homeland?”
“I am—” Baver groped. He knew no Mongol words for ethnologist or student. “I am one who learns. From teachers and from watching people. I am one who lives among foreigners and watches them, in order to learn how they live and think.” He felt uncomfortable with his answer—it might well sound unbelievable here, even incomprehensible—so he added, “It is respected work in my homeland.” So respected that hundreds applied for the ethnologist positions on the expedition, he remembered. If it hadn’t been for my doctorate in ancient Earth history, I wouldn’t have had a chance.
“They will be interested when I return and tell what I have learned here,” he added. “They will probably send people here to trade with you, if you’d like to trade.” It seemed like the sort of comment that might help get him out of there alive. And it was probably true, as far as that was concerned, though there’d hardly be any camel caravans carrying goods between them.
“Indeed. And what do your people make or grow that we might want, here in the empire?”
“I didn’t bring samples, Your Highness. But we make machines which cut trees much faster and more easily than an ax, and others which can cut an entire tree trunk into—” Again he groped, then moved to touch the table near the emperor, to demonstrate boards. A human guard’s hard hand gripped his shoulder, while the throne ogres’ swords hissed from their scabbards. The emperor’s voice in Tibetan cut through the situation, and the hand withdrew, though the ogres’ swords remained free.
“Show me what you planned to show,” the emperor said, and Baver did.
“But you have none of these marvels with you? You seem to have many pockets. What do you have in them? Perhaps there is something you’ve overlooked.”
It struck Baver like a hammer then. Nils had said that Fong was a telepath who served as a spy as well as an envoy, and who somehow communicated what he learned to the emperor, perhaps a thousand kilometers away. So the emperor too would be a telepath!
As soon as he thought it, Baver knew it was so. The emperor’s expression hadn’t changed, but the eyes had. It was as if he’d looked into them. In Tibetan, the emperor snapped an order, and both guards gripped Baver’s arms. He gave another. Corporal Nogai took both pistol and radio from Baver’s pockets and handed them to the emperor.
“What is this?” the emperor asked, holding up the pistol.
“A weapon. Be careful with it. See the hole in the end? When the right button is pushed and the right lever squeezed, a deadly piece of metal flies out, swifter than the speed of sound. It can kill from a little distance or close up.”
The emperor’s eyes studied it, then turned to Baver. “Why didn’t you use it when my soldiers pursued you?”
Baver hadn’t even thought of it. “It would not have driven them off,” he said, “and they would have killed me then. Besides, that’s my last mag . . . ” He groped for an appropriate Mongol word and didn’t find what he needed. “It is mostly used up,” he finished.
Songtsan Gampo pursed his lips and nodded, then held up the radio. “And this?”
“It is used to speak with others at a distance. Even a long distance. But it’s broken. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. My friends would have come for me long before I got to your country.”
The emperor’s eyes seemed to Baver near to drawing his brains out of his eye sockets. “There is something else,” the man said.
Baver shook his head. “There was. I just thought of it. My—” He frowned. “It’s a small machine that stores things that happen, pictures and sounds of things, when it’s pointed at them. For example, if I had it here and pointed it at you while you talked, it would store the event to be looked at again later. Looked at and listened to. I have many things stored, in little cubes like square jewels.”
The emperor’s eyes hadn’t left Baver while he’d spoken. “And you could show them to me?”
“Barely big enough to see. To enjoy them, you need a—a thing to look with. My people have them on our world and on our ship.”
The eyes had left Baver. The emperor frowned, his lips pursed. “And this—thing. It is in your saddlebags?”
The thought struck Baver then that the soldiers might have brought his saddlebags. Surely would have. Somehow he’d assumed they were still back with whatever was left of his horse.
The emperor smiled slightly and shook his head, then turned the radio over in his hands, frowning. “A weapon which is almost used up, and a thing which is broken. They do not seem like much.” He handed the radio to the interpreter with a few words in their language, and the man returned it to Baver. “We will look into the matter of the box which stores the past in it,” he said. Then asked, “Just how far away is this homeland of yours?”
For a moment Baver thought to think of other things, sing songs in his mind perhaps, because he didn’t want to tell. What ambitions might it arouse in this emperor? But he knew he wouldn’t leave this room before they’d wrung the information from him, and it might well be impossible to withhold from a telepath anyway. “Our homeland is a whole world,” he said, “so far away that the light from our sun takes more than seventeen years to get here.”
The emperor stared long and hard at Baver, inwardly sorting images and impressions. The strange foreigner thought what he said was true; there was no doubt of that.
He spoke to the guards who’d brought Baver. “Take him back to his cell,” he said. “Let him go without further food today, to worry him a little, but give him a soldier’s breakfast tomorrow.”
He would meditate on what he’d learned from this man, he decided.

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THIRTY-THREE

Baver regained a groggy consciousness while being tied across the back of a horse, and tried to raise his head. A soldier cursed—at least it sounded like a curse—and cuffed him. Whereupon the commander rode up to the soldier, and bending struck him hard on the head with the flat of his sword. The man fell to the ground, partly from the blow and partly in self defense, while an angry string of words rattled from the commander’s mouth.
The language was one Baver felt sure he’d never heard before. Chinese? he wondered. He’d heard Chinese several times on a cube, ancient Chinese, on New Home. Alex Malaluan had been hypno-learning it. It had sounded more tonal than this. But then, languages change, some more, some less.
With quick fingers, a different soldier untied him. Two others helped him off the horse, onto his feet, where his hands were retied in front of him, leaving twenty centimeters of twisted thong between them to give him some freedom of hand movement. This done, he was boosted into the saddle.
He was aware that virtually all the soldiers were staring at him. He supposed they’d never seen anything like a jumpsuit before, with its pockets at chest, hips, and thighs.
It occurred to him then that Hans wasn’t there. Perhaps he’d gotten away. Or was dead. There was no way to ask. But these people didn’t seem to be in a killing mood. Did they have orders to bring in prisoners alive and well?
And what had there been about himself and Hans that inspired the chase? Perhaps it was simply that Hans had bolted. Or no, Hans hadn’t bolted till after the soldiers had lacked their own horses to a gallop. And there had been Han’s dream!—prophetic in a way. Perhaps accurately prophetic if they’d stayed where they’d camped.
He wondered what they’d do with him. And why the commander had struck the trooper for actually rather modest abuse. Baver had seen and heard enough, on this primitive world, to know that here, merely cuffing a prisoner was benign behavior.
There was more to this, he decided, than appeared on the surface.
During two long days of riding with his hands tied, Baver was treated with consistent brusque decency, and learned a few words of the soldiers’ language, notably chu and kyöra sagiyö: water or drink, and eat or food.
The third morning brought them to the ruins of a large city. An old city, some of it dating to well before the days of knock-down-and-replace buildings. Probably a major capital, because some of the individual buildings were so large, or had been. A lot of them were more or less intact, implying that they predated the technological era with its widespread use of steel beams and reinforcment bars.
The capital of ancient China, Baver decided. He groped for the name: Beijing, that was it. Now an army was barracked there, in scores or maybe hundreds of long, single-story stone buildings. Nearby were farms, their mud-brick buildings clustered in hamlets. There was wheeled transport, both wagons and carts, and the road was rutted from the last wet weather, but dusty now from drought.
From Beijing the troop turned north, the midday sun at their backs, and after a while they were in forested hills again—the Yan Mountains, though Baver didn’t know their name. Late the next day they came to a town of perhaps twenty thousand, in a valley of farms; an un-walled town. A large hill rose above it, with large buildings surrounded by a defensive wall. Atop the hill was what Baver thought must be the imperial palace. From a distance its size impressed him, and as they came closer, its beauty. They rode into the town on a road paved with stone blocks, till they came to a great gate that swallowed the road.
It was at the gate that Baver saw his first Yunnan ogres. He’d never heard of them before, and they both awed and astonished him. Each was well over two meters tall, looked enormously strong, and wore an indigo uniform with buttons and trim of copper. Their helmets were steel, though he didn’t know it, for the steel was plated with polished bronze. Each held a great sword at shoulder arms, while on his other shoulder was slung an enormous bow. Baver doubted he could do more than lift the sword, and was sure he couldn’t begin to bend the bow. The creatures looked intelligent and alert, their eyes on the coming cavalrymen and particularly on himself, an obvious prisoner.
At the last minute, one of them stepped in front of the troop’s commander. And spoke! Its speech sounded to Baver not unlike that of the soldiers he’d been traveling with, though the voice had a different timbre, with a sort of “hard-napped fuzz” to it unlike any human voice he’d ever heard.
Then the column waited calmly. No one dismounted or spoke. Almost the only sounds were the occasional clop of a shod hoof on stone, a slight snort, the buzz of horse flies and swish of tails.
One of the ogres had planted himself in the gateway, sword loosely ready in one long hand. The blade was one-and-a-half-edged, Baver noticed, one edge sharp the whole length, the other only half. The long hand had an opposable thumb, and thick nails that might be thought of as blunt claws. The feet were bare, and their claws curved strongly enough for traction.
From inside the gate came the sound of shod feet marching in step. Then a squad of human guards came out. Like the ogres, they wore uniforms of indigo and copper. With them came what was clearly an officer, by both uniform and bearing. He seemed to be senior to the cavalry commander. Haughtily he rattled off several sentences, then two of his men strode to Baver and lifted him down. These were large men, larger than most of the troopers, and with hands beneath Baver’s arms, they walked him through the great gate and into the palace grounds.
Baver had visited the national garden on New Home. The palace grounds were at least as beautiful, and exotic to boot. He realized this even as he was hustled along a graveled path to a building, lovely on the outside, which inside proved to be a prison. At least the cellar was. They took him down a corridor and pushed him into a cell, where one of them untied his hands.
They left him standing there and slammed the barred door behind them. A key or keys seated massive bolts. The only light was that from the corridor, and from an airshaft with a barred opening.
Baver stood bemused, not willing to sit, as if sitting would make the situation more final, more irrevocable. Well, he told himself after a long couple of minutes, they didn’t go to all that trouble just to lock me up. Something’s bound to happen before long.
With that he did sit, and wondered where Hans was, and Nils. He didn’t even think of Matthew and Nikko and pinnace Alpha just then. They belonged to another world, an earlier life.
Songtsan Gampo could sense the prisoner’s mind as he was led up the great marble stairway and along the broad hall with its panelling of tropical hardwoods from Guangxi, inlaid with carved ivory. It was a worried but not inordinately fearful mind, able to notice its surroundings and even to appreciate them. Images stirred in it, and comparisons with other halls and rooms.
Two guards marched Baver to the door of the audience chamber and inside. One was a Mongol, a mercenary. Their strong hands halted the prisoner three steps inside, Baver’s eyes taking in as much of the room as possible without obviously gawking. This was clearly the imperial audience chamber. There was a throne on a raised dais, and on it a strong-faced man wearing beautiful robes; surely the emperor. Ogre guards stood behind the throne on either side, while to his right stood an ogre notably larger than the others.
The emperor’s visitors were required to offer an obeisance, the degree varying with the person and circumstance. Even the emperor’s brother Drukpa bowed when he entered. Baver unwittingly had done nothing. The emperor spoke quietly to the Mongol, Corporal Nogai, who then spoke to Baver in fluent Buriat Mongol. “You are expected to bow to the emperor,” he said mildly, and demonstrated.
Baver bowed from the waist, not deeply. The emperor monitored him telepathically and found no sense of defiance or disrespect, only embarrassment that he’d had to be told.
A star man indeed, the emperor thought, just as Tenzin had said. He smiled slightly to put the man somewhat at ease, and spoke to him, Corporal Nogai translating into Mongol a sentence behind.
“We welcome you to our empire and our palace. Even though you entered our territory without permission, in our imperial wisdom we believe you intended no harm. Therefore we do not now plan to punish you. It is enough that you be restrained from wandering and spying.”
Baver wondered if he was expected to reply. Unsure, he decided not to, beyond a perfunctory acknowledgment. “Thank you,” he said.
The slanted oval eyes were on his, emotionless; the emperor and his translator went on. “You are a foreigner. Your clothing is of interesting design, and the material seems unfamiliar to us, though as dirty as it is, it is not possible to be sure. Where did you get it?”
“In my homeland, far to the west.” The lie seemed to Baver the lesser of undesirable alternatives. Telling the truth might get him in trouble as a liar, or perhaps for disrespect to the imperial throne. Or it might get him branded a lunatic. And actually the only untruth in what he’d said was the west.
“Indeed. When you have been returned to your quarters, clean clothes will be provided. These will be washed and returned to you.
“Now, your homeland: What is it called? Perhaps I have heard of it.”
“I think not, Your Highness.” He turned to Corporal Nogai. “Is that the right term to use? Your Highness?”
The interpreter passed the question on, commenting that the Mongol language was not fully adequate for court etiquette, and that while the prisoner’s knowledge of Mongol seemed quite functional, he was not fully articulate in it. The emperor didn’t tell the interpreter that he wasn’t much interested in Baver’s verbal answers. His interest was in the concepts and images that his questions brought to or near the surface.
“The term ‘Your Highness’ is adequate,” the emperor answered. “And what is your function in your homeland?”
“I am—” Baver groped. He knew no Mongol words for ethnologist or student. “I am one who learns. From teachers and from watching people. I am one who lives among foreigners and watches them, in order to learn how they live and think.” He felt uncomfortable with his answer—it might well sound unbelievable here, even incomprehensible—so he added, “It is respected work in my homeland.” So respected that hundreds applied for the ethnologist positions on the expedition, he remembered. If it hadn’t been for my doctorate in ancient Earth history, I wouldn’t have had a chance.
“They will be interested when I return and tell what I have learned here,” he added. “They will probably send people here to trade with you, if you’d like to trade.” It seemed like the sort of comment that might help get him out of there alive. And it was probably true, as far as that was concerned, though there’d hardly be any camel caravans carrying goods between them.
“Indeed. And what do your people make or grow that we might want, here in the empire?”
“I didn’t bring samples, Your Highness. But we make machines which cut trees much faster and more easily than an ax, and others which can cut an entire tree trunk into—” Again he groped, then moved to touch the table near the emperor, to demonstrate boards. A human guard’s hard hand gripped his shoulder, while the throne ogres’ swords hissed from their scabbards. The emperor’s voice in Tibetan cut through the situation, and the hand withdrew, though the ogres’ swords remained free.
“Show me what you planned to show,” the emperor said, and Baver did.
“But you have none of these marvels with you? You seem to have many pockets. What do you have in them? Perhaps there is something you’ve overlooked.”
It struck Baver like a hammer then. Nils had said that Fong was a telepath who served as a spy as well as an envoy, and who somehow communicated what he learned to the emperor, perhaps a thousand kilometers away. So the emperor too would be a telepath!
As soon as he thought it, Baver knew it was so. The emperor’s expression hadn’t changed, but the eyes had. It was as if he’d looked into them. In Tibetan, the emperor snapped an order, and both guards gripped Baver’s arms. He gave another. Corporal Nogai took both pistol and radio from Baver’s pockets and handed them to the emperor.
“What is this?” the emperor asked, holding up the pistol.
“A weapon. Be careful with it. See the hole in the end? When the right button is pushed and the right lever squeezed, a deadly piece of metal flies out, swifter than the speed of sound. It can kill from a little distance or close up.”
The emperor’s eyes studied it, then turned to Baver. “Why didn’t you use it when my soldiers pursued you?”
Baver hadn’t even thought of it. “It would not have driven them off,” he said, “and they would have killed me then. Besides, that’s my last mag . . . ” He groped for an appropriate Mongol word and didn’t find what he needed. “It is mostly used up,” he finished.
Songtsan Gampo pursed his lips and nodded, then held up the radio. “And this?”
“It is used to speak with others at a distance. Even a long distance. But it’s broken. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. My friends would have come for me long before I got to your country.”
The emperor’s eyes seemed to Baver near to drawing his brains out of his eye sockets. “There is something else,” the man said.
Baver shook his head. “There was. I just thought of it. My—” He frowned. “It’s a small machine that stores things that happen, pictures and sounds of things, when it’s pointed at them. For example, if I had it here and pointed it at you while you talked, it would store the event to be looked at again later. Looked at and listened to. I have many things stored, in little cubes like square jewels.”
The emperor’s eyes hadn’t left Baver while he’d spoken. “And you could show them to me?”
“Barely big enough to see. To enjoy them, you need a—a thing to look with. My people have them on our world and on our ship.”
The eyes had left Baver. The emperor frowned, his lips pursed. “And this—thing. It is in your saddlebags?”
The thought struck Baver then that the soldiers might have brought his saddlebags. Surely would have. Somehow he’d assumed they were still back with whatever was left of his horse.
The emperor smiled slightly and shook his head, then turned the radio over in his hands, frowning. “A weapon which is almost used up, and a thing which is broken. They do not seem like much.” He handed the radio to the interpreter with a few words in their language, and the man returned it to Baver. “We will look into the matter of the box which stores the past in it,” he said. Then asked, “Just how far away is this homeland of yours?”
For a moment Baver thought to think of other things, sing songs in his mind perhaps, because he didn’t want to tell. What ambitions might it arouse in this emperor? But he knew he wouldn’t leave this room before they’d wrung the information from him, and it might well be impossible to withhold from a telepath anyway. “Our homeland is a whole world,” he said, “so far away that the light from our sun takes more than seventeen years to get here.”
The emperor stared long and hard at Baver, inwardly sorting images and impressions. The strange foreigner thought what he said was true; there was no doubt of that.
He spoke to the guards who’d brought Baver. “Take him back to his cell,” he said. “Let him go without further food today, to worry him a little, but give him a soldier’s breakfast tomorrow.”
He would meditate on what he’d learned from this man, he decided.

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