Kesley nodded. It was the truth, he saw; the bandit had merely been following instructions.
Everyone follows instructions, he thought suddenly. He had followed van Alen's orders; the bandits were puppets of Don Miguel. And Miguel?
Who, he wondered, pulled the Duke's strings?
Kesley smiled. Van Alen had tainted him with philosophy. Life would undoubtedly have been much simpler if he'd remained in Iowa Province, on the farm.
The contradiction followed at once: he hadn't been happy there, he realized. Life had never been simple—not even in a world where the benevolent Dukes tried manfully to avoid the fatal complexity of the Old Days.
They reached the approaches to the Palace, now. It was an imposing, almost breathtaking building. In seeing to it that the short-lived peoples of the world remained properly close to the ground, the Dukes had stressed their own grandeur. The milk-colored Palace swept upward like a bright fang piercing the sky. It was perhaps three blocks square at its base, and rushed upward for more than a hundred feet before its firm lines were broken by as much as a window.
The building's facade was frosty white and immaculate, a solid wall of irradiated polyethylene. Spotlights—even now, in the daytime—played against its shining bulk. The building was awesome, magnificent, a monolithic monument to a fortuitous mutation affecting but twelve men—and, thought Kesley, its very grandeur was faintly ridiculous.
A row of blue-clad guards was arrayed before the main entrance. Kesley's captors rode to the approach, and the bandit chief engaged in a brief colloquy, at the end of which one of the guards vanished within.
He returned a few moments later, bearing with him a small brown leather pouch. The bandit accepted the pouch eagerly, and tossed it to one of his men.
My price, Kesley guessed in wry amusement.