“By analogue. Remember the planet of Thetis Alpha called Fitzgerald, where they used a big beast called a horse for everything— from pulling carts to racing? All right: suppose you visited a place where you had been told that a few horses had been taught to talk. While you’re working there, somebody comes to give you a hand, dragging a spavined old plug with a straw hat pulled down over its ears and a pack on its back. (Excuse me, Karst, but business is business.) You aren’t going to think of that horse as one of the talking ones. You aren’t accustomed to thinking of horses as being able to talk at all.”
“All right,” Hazleton said, grinning at Karst’s evident discomfiture. “What’s the main strategy from here on out, boss? I gather that you’ve got it set up. Are you ready to give it a name yet?”
“Not quite,” the mayor said. “Unless you like long titles. It’s still just another problem in political pseudomorphism.”
Amalfi caught sight of Karst’s deliberately incurious face and his own grin broadened. “Or,” he said, “the fine art of tricking your opponent into throwing his head at you.”
III
IMT was a squat city, long rooted in the stony soil, and as changeless as a forest of cenotaphs. Its quietness, too, was like the quietness of a cemetery, and the Proctors, carrying the fanlike wands of their office, the pierced fans with the jagged tops and the little jingling tags, were much like friars moving among the dead.
The quiet, of course, could be accounted for very simply. The serfs were not allowed to speak within the walls of IMT unless spoken to, and there were comparatively few Proctors in the city to speak to them. For Amalfi there was also the imposed silence of the slaughtered millions of Thor V blanketing the air. He wondered if the Proctors could still hear that raw silence.
The naked brown figure of a passing serf glanced furtively at the party, saw Heldon, and raised a finger to its lips in the established gesture of respect. Heldon barely nodded. Amalfi, necessarily, took no overt notice at all, but he thought: Shh, is it? I don’t wonder. But it’s too late, Heldon. The secret is out.
Karst trudged behind them, shooting an occasional wary glance at Heldon from under his tangled eyebrows. His caution was wasted on the Proctor. They passed through a decaying public square, in the center of which was an almost-obliterated statuary group, so weatherworn as to have lost any integrity it might ever have had; integrity, Amalfi mused, is not a characteristic of monuments. Except to a sharp eye, the mass of stone on the old pedestal might have been nothing but a moderately large meteorite, riddled with the twisting pits characteristic of siderites.
Amalfi could see, however, that the spaces sculpted out of the interior of that block of stone, after the fashion of an ancient sculptor named Moore, had once had meaning. Inside that stone there had once stood a powerful human figure, with its foot resting upon the neck of a slighter. Once, evidently, IMT had actually been proud of the memory of Thor V—