"Well, I have been told...."
"Told! Told what you had to know, told to furnish the Earthman with a maximum security cell, and so forth. You know nothing!"
"I still...."
With a wave of his hand, the Director dismissed the warden. Then, sitting alone at his desk, he lit a cigarette. It was an Earth-cigarette, and a good one. These things, the Director mused, we accept from the outworlders. Their little luxuries. But their way of life, he told himself, never. Whatever threatens our way of life, we seek out and destroy. He leaned on a corner of the desk's surface and in a moment a serving girl came obsequiously into the room with a tray. Patting her rump playfully, as you might stroke the head of a dog, the Director selected the bottle he wanted from the tray, indicating that she should make him a drink. He waited, watching her graceful movements as she set down the tray and poured the liquid into a delicate glass of Regan crystal. The drink, heady and delicious, was Aldeberanean fire wine. He savored it slowly, then with a gesture indicated that the girl, who wore nothing but a kirtle to cover the nakedness of her loins, should depart. He leaned back and thought: This too—not the wine, but the woman.
Because the woman would be impossible if the Kedaki way of life were changed. A system, he went on thinking, founded on bedrock as strong as the pull between the planets.
Metempsychosis....
Do you believe in reincarnation? he asked himself. He chuckled, the sound deep in his throat. He was no fool and did not hold a fool's belief. But the others? The servant classes, the slaves? Yes, they believed. All their lives, they were indoctrinated to believe. Reincarnation was the stuff of which their dreams were fashioned, and so it was that they accepted the hard lot of lifelong servitude with the hope that in their next birth, had they led a good, loyal life, they would be born to a higher station.
Change that? thought the Director. He shook his head slowly, grimly. But the Earthman Rhodes had been a problem, for in the age-old ruins of Balata 'kai he'd stumbled on the manuscript of The Book of the Dead, a five thousand year old document which had first propounded the beliefs of metempsychosis. The Book of the Dead was a dangerous document, a document which could ignite Kedak in revolutionary conflagration, for it showed clearly that the so-called gods of the earliest Kedaki civilization were not gods at all and their so-called revelation of metempsychosis not a revelation at all but a clever trick calculated to win them a life of ease at the expense of gullible subjects.
What am I thinking? the Director asked himself. The Earthman Rhodes is dead, of course. He couldn't possibly be alive. I'm as bad as the warden, but the warden is a fool who knows nothing.... Still, even if the warden is a fool and Rhodes is dead, The Book of the Dead is still missing. And if there is one chance in a million that Rhodes lives, then every stone on this planet must be turned to find him....