and when you come back with them I will raise the money to repay you.”
Miran didn’t seem too happy, but Green knew that the fat merchant was already planning to charge the Duke double the purchase price. As for Green, he liked to see a man interested in a hobby, but he was disgusted because taxes would now be raised in order to allow the Duke to add to his collection.
The Duchess, bored as usual by her husband’s conversation, suddenly said, “Honey, let’s go hunting next weekend. I’ve been so restless lately, so unable to sleep nights. I think I’ve been cooped up too long in this dismal old place. My digestion has been so sluggish lately. I think I need the exercise and the fresh air.” And she went into vivid detail about certain aspects of her gastrointestinal troubles. The Earthman, who’d thought he was hardened to this people’s custom of dwelling on such matters, turned green.
At the suggestion of a hunt the Duke didn’t exactly groan, but his eyes rolled upward in supplication to the gods. Until he had reached the age of thirty he had enjoyed a good hunt. But like most upper-class men of his culture, he rapidly put on flesh after thirty and became as sedentary as possible. The belief was that fat increased a man’s life span. Also, a big belly and double chin were signs of aristocratic blood and a full purse. Unfortunately, along with this came an inevitable decline in vigor, which, coupled with the December-May marriages that their society expected of them, had given birth to another institution: the slave male companion of the rich man’s young wife.
It was toward Green that the Duke looked. “Why not let him conduct the hunt?” he suggested hopefully. “I’ve so much business to take care of.”
“Like sitting on your fat cushion and contemplating your glass birds,” she said. “No!”
“Very well,” he said, resignedly. “I’ve a slave in the work-pens who’s to be executed for striking a foreman. We’ll use him as the quarry. But I think we ought to give him two weeks to build up his wind and legs. Otherwise it would hardly be sporting, you know.”
The Duchess frowned. “No. I’m getting bored; I can’t stand this inaction any longer.”
She shot a glance at Green. He felt his stomach muscles contracting. Evidently she’d noticed his lukewarm interest in her. This hunt was partly to suggest to him that he’d be meeting a like fate unless he perked up and began to be more entertaining.
It wasn’t that thought that made his heart sink. It was that next weekend was when Miran’s windroller raised sail and when he planned to be aboard it. Now, he’d be gone conducting the hunting party up in the hills.
Green looked appealingly at Miran, but the merchant’s shoulders rose beneath the yellow robe as if to say, “What can I do?”
He was right. Miran couldn’t suggest that he too go along on the hunt, and thus give Green a chance to slip aboard afterward. The day on which the Bird of Fortune was scheduled to leave the windbreak was absolutely the last date on which it could set sail. He couldn’t afford to take the chance of being caught in the rains in the middle of the vast plains.
6
All the next day Green was too busy setting up the schedule of the hunting party to have time to be gloomy. But when night came he seemed to fold up inside himself. Could he pretend to be sick, too, and be left behind when the party set out?
No, for they would at once assume that he had been possessed by a demon and would pack him off to the Temple of Apoquoz, God of Healing. There he’d be under lock and key until he proved himself healthy. The terrible part about going to the Temple of Apoquoz was that it made death almost inevitable. If you didn’t die of your own disease you caught somebody else’s.
Green wasn’t worried about catching any of the many diseases he’d be exposed to in the Temple. Like all men of terrestrial descent, he carried in his body a surgically implanted protoplasmic entity which automatically analyzed any invading microscopic organisms and/or viruses and manufactured antibodies to combat them. It lived in the space created by the removal of his appendix; when working to fulfill its mission it demanded food and radiated a heat that assured its host of its heartening presence. An increased appetite plus a slight fever indicated that it was killing off the disease and that within several hours it would successfully repel any boarders. In the two years Green had been on the planet it had had to attack at least forty times; Green calculated that he would have been dead each and every time if it had not been for his symbiote.
Knowing this didn’t help him. If he played sick he’d be locked up and couldn’t get on the ‘roller. If he went on the hunting party he missed the boat, too.
Suppose he were to disappear the night before the party, to hide on the windroller while the castle vainly looked for him?
Not very likely. The first thing that would occur to Zuni would be to order the windbreak closed and all ‘rollers searched for a possible stowaway. And if that happened Miran would be so delayed that it was unlikely he’d sail. Even if he, Green, hid in Miran’s cabin, where he would probably be safe, there would still be the inevitable and totally frustrating delay.
Then why not disappear several days earlier, so that Miran could have time to reload his cargo? He’d see the merchant tomorrow. If Miran fell in with his plans, Green would disappear four nights from this very night, which would leave three days for the windroller to be emptied and reloaded. Fortunately the tanks wouldn’t have to be taken off, because any fool could see that the runaway wasn’t hiding at the bottom among the fish.
Much relieved that he at least had a way open, if a very perilous one, Green relaxed. He was sitting on a bench along a walk on top of one of the castle walls. The sky was blazingly beautiful with stars larger than any seen from Earth. The great moon and the small moon had risen. The larger had just cleared the eastern horizon and the lesser one was just past the zenith. Mingled moonwash and starwash softened the grimness and ugliness of the city below him and laved it in a flood of romance and glamour. Most of Quotz was unlighted, for the streets had no lamps and the windows were shut up tight against thieves, vampires and demons. Occasionally the torchflares of the servants of a drunken noble or rich man moved down the dark canyons between the towering overhanging houses.
Beyond the city was the amphitheater formed by the hills curving out to the north and the great brick wall built to continue the natural windbreak. A wide opening had been left so that the ‘rollers, their sails furled, could be towed in or out. Past this the great plain suddenly began, as if the hand of some immense landscaper had pressed the hills flat and declared that from here on there would be no unevennesses.
Westward lay the incredibly level stretch of the grassy ground of the Xurdimur. Ten thousand miles straight across, flat as a table top, broken only here and there by clumps of forests, ruins of cities, waterholes, the tents of the nomadic savages, herds of wild animals, packs of grass cats and dire dogs, and the mysterious and undoubtedly imaginary “roaming islands,” great clumps of rock and dirt that legend said slid of their own volition over the plains. How like this planet, he thought, that the greatest peril to navigation should be one that existed only in the heads of the inhabitants.
The Xurdimur was a fabulous phenomenon, without parallel. On none of the many planets that Earthmen had discovered was there anything similar. How, he wondered, could the plain keep its smoothness, when there was always dirt running on to it from the eroding hills and mountains that ringed it? The rains, too, should have done much to wear it away unevenly. Of course, the grass that grew all over it was long and had very tough roots. And if what he had been told was true, beneath the vegetation was one mass of inextricably tangled roots that held the soil together.
There was another thing to consider, though: the winds that blew all the way across the Xurdimur and furnished propulsion for the wheeled sailing craft. To have winds you must have pressure differentials, which were usually caused by heat differentials. Although the Xurdimur was ringed by mountains there were no large eminences on it for ten thousand miles, nothing to replenish the currents of air. Or so it seemed to his limited knowledge of meteorology, though he did wonder how the trade