The Green Odyssey

«You'll come home tonight? Surely the Duchess will let you out one night a week?»

«Not one single night. And I can't come here this evening because I'm to meet Miran the Merchant at the House of Equality. Business, you know.»

«Oh, I know! You'll dillydally about the whole matter, and put off acting for one reason or another, and the first thing you know, years will go by, and-«

«If this keeps up I'll be dead in six months,» he said. «I'm tired! I have to get some sleep.»

She changed instantly from anger to sympathy. «Poor dear, why don't you forget that appointment and sleep here until time to go back to the castle? I'll send a messenger to Miran telling him you're sick.»

«No, this is something I just can't pass by.»

«What is it?»

«It's of such a nature that telling you, or anybody, would spoil it.»

«And just what could that be?» she demanded, angry again. «It concerns some woman, I'll bet!»

«My problem is keeping away from you women, not getting into more trouble. No, it's just that Miran has sworn me by all his gods to keep silent and of course I couldn't think of breaking a vow.»

«I know your opinion of our gods,» she said. «Well, go along with you! But I warn you, I'm an impatient woman; I'll give you a week to work on the Duchess, then I'm launching an attack myself.»

«That won't be necessary,» he said. He kissed her and the children and left. He congratulated himself on having delayed Amra that long. If he couldn't carry out his scheme in a week he was lost, anyway. He'd have to walk away from the city and out onto the Xurdimur, even if packs of wild dogs and man-eating grass cats and cannibalistic men and God knew what else did roam the grassy plains.

4

EVERY CITY AND VILLAGE of the Empire had its House of Equality, within whose walls distinctions of every type were abandoned. Green did not know the origin of the institution, but he recognized its value as a safety valve to blow off the extreme social pressure put on every class. Here the slave who did not dare open his mouth in the outside mundane world could curse his master to his face and go unpunished by the authorities. Of course, there was nothing to keep the master from retaliating in kind, for the slave also cast off his legal rights when he entered. Violence was not unknown here, though it was infrequent. Blood shed within these walls did not, theoretically, call for punishment. But any murderer would find that, though the police paid no attention to him, he'd have to deal with the slain one's relatives. Many feuds had had their origin and end here.

Green had excused himself after the evening meal, saying that he had to talk to Miran about getting some spices from Estorya. Also the merchant had mentioned that on his last trip he'd heard that a band of Estoryan hunters were going after the rare and beautiful getzlen bird and that he might find some for sale when he returned there. Zuni's face lit up, because she desired a getzlen bird even more than a chance to annoy her husband. Graciously she gave Green permission to leave.

Inwardly exultant, though outwardly pulling a long face that was supposed to suggest his sadness at having to leave the Duchess, he backed out of the dining room. Not very gracefully, for Alzo chose that moment to refuse to get out of Green's path. Green tumbled backward, sprawling over the huge mastiff, who snarled with anger and trembled with hypocritical indignation and bared his fangs with the intention of tearing Green apart. The Earthman did not try to rise, because he did not want to give Alzo an excuse for jumping him. Instead he bared his own teeth and snarled back. The hall roared with laughter and the Duke, holding his sides, tears running from his bulging eyes, rose and staggered over to where the two faced each other on all fours. He clutched Alzo's spike-studded collar and dragged him away, meanwhile choking out a command to Green to take off while the taking off was good.

Green swallowed his anger, thanked the Duke and left. Swearing that he'd rip the hound apart some day with his bare hands, the Earthman left for the House of Equality. It took all the long rickshaw ride to the temple for him to calm down.

The great central room with its three-story ceiling was full that night. Men in their long evening kilts and women in masks crowded around the gambling tables, the bars and the grudge-stages. There was a large crowd around the platform on which two dealers in wheat were slugging it out to work off resentment arising from business disputes. But by far the greatest number had gathered to watch a husband-and-wife match. His left hand had been tied to his side, and she had been armed with a club. Thus equalized, they'd been given the word to go to it. So far the man had had the worst of the match, as bloody patches on his head and bruises on his arm showed. If he could get the club away from her he had the right to do what he wanted to her. But if she could break his free arm she had him at her complete mercy.

Green avoided the stage, because such barbarous doings made him sick. Looking for Miran, he finally found him rolling a pair of six-sided dice with another captain, This fellow wore the red turban and black robes of the Clan Axucan. He had just lost to Miran and was paying him sixty iquogr, a goodly sum even for a merchant-prince.

Miran took Green's arm, something he'd never have done outside the House, and led him off to a curtained booth where they could get as much privacy as they wished. He matched Green for drinks; Green lost, and Miran ordered a large pitcher of Chalousma.

«Nothing but the best for yours truly-whenever someone else is paying,» Miran said jovially. «Now, I'm a great one for fun, but I'm here primarily for business. So-let's have your proposal at once, if you please,»

«First I must have your solemn oath that you will tell absolutely no one what you hear in this booth. Second, that if you reject my idea you do not then use it later on. Third, that if you do accept you will never attempt later on to kill me or get rid of me and thus reap the profits.»

Miran's face had been blank, but at the word «profits» it twisted into many folds and creases, all expressive of joy.

He reached into the huge purse he carried slung over his shoulder and pulled out a little golden idol of the patron deity of the Clan Effenycan. Putting his right hand upon its ugly head, he lifted his left and said, «I swear by Zaceffucanquanr that I will obey your wishes in this matter. May he strike me with lice, leprosy, lecher's disease and lightning if I should break this, my solemn vow.»

Satisfied, Green said, «First I want you to arrange for me to be aboard your windroller when you leave for Estorya.»

Miran choked on his wine and coughed and sputtered until Green pounded his back.

«I do not ask that you give me passage back. Now, here's my idea. You plan to be taking a large cargo of dried fish because the Estoryans' religion requires that they eat them at every meal and because they use them in great quantities at their numerous festivals.»

«True, true. Do you know, I've never been able to figure out why they should worship a fish-goddess. They live over five thousand miles from the sea, and there's no evidence that any of them have ever been to the sea. Yet, they demand saltwater fish, won't use the fish from a nearby lake.»

«There're many mysteries about the Xurdimur. However, they needn't concern us. Now, do you know that the Estoryans' Book of Gods places much more ritual-power in freshly killed and cooked fish than in smoked fish? However, they've always had to be content with the dried fish the windrollers brought them. What price would they not pay for living sea-fish?»

Miran rubbed his palms together. «Indeed it does make one wonder…?»

Green then outlined his idea. Miran sat stunned. Not at the audacity or originality of the plan, but because it was so obvious that he wondered why neither he nor anyone else had ever thought of it. He said so.

Green drank his wine and said, «I suppose that people wondered the same when the first wheel or bow and arrow were invented. So obvious, yet no one thought of them until then.»

«Let me get this straight,» said Miran. «You want me to buy a caravan of wagons, build water-tight tanks into them and use them to transport ocean fish back to here? Then the wagon bodies, with their contents, will be lifted onto my windroller and fitted into specially prepared racks-or perhaps, holes-on the middeck? Also, you will show me how to analyze sea water so that its formula may be sold to the Estoryans, and they can thus keep the fish alive in their own tanks?»

«That's right.»

«Hmmm.» Miran ran his fat, ring-studded finger over his hook nose and the square gold ornament hanging therefrom. His single eye glared pale-bluely at Green. The other was covered with a white patch to hide the emptiness left after a ball from a Ving musket had struck it.

«It's four weeks until the very last day on which I can set sail from here and still get to Estorya and back before the rains come. It's just barely possible to have the tanks built, get them convoyed down to the seashore, get the fish in and bring them back. Meantime, I can be having the deck altered. If my men work day and night we can make it.»

«Of course, this is a one-shot proposition. You can't possibly keep a monopoly on the idea, once the first trip is over. Too many people are bound to talk, and the other captains will hear of it.»

«I know; don't teach an Effenycan to suck eggs. But what if the fish should die?»

Green shrugged and spread out his palms, «A possibility. You're taking a tremendous gamble. But every voyage on the Xurdimur is, isn't it? How many windrollers come back? Or how many can boast your list of forty successful trips?»

«Not many,» said Miran.

He slumped in his seat, brooding over his goblet of wine. His eye, sunk in ranges of fat, seemed to stare through Green. The Earthman pretended indifference, though his heart was pounding, and he controlled his breathing with difficulty.

«You're asking a great deal,» Miran finally said. «If the Duke were to find out that I'd agreed to help a valued slave escape, I'd be tortured in a most refined way, and the Clan Effenycan would be stripped of all its rights to sail windrollers and would probably be exiled to its native hills. Or else would have to take to piracy. And that, despite all the glamorous stories you hear, is not a very well-paying profession.»

«You'd make a killing in Estorya.»

«True, but when I think of what the Duchess will do when she discovers you've fled the country! Ow, ow, ow!»

«There's no reason why you should be connected with my disappearance. A dozen craft leave the harbor every day. Besides, for all she'll know, I've gone the opposite way, over the hills and to the ocean. Or to the hills themselves, where many runaway slaves are.»

«Yes, but I have to return to Tropat. And my clansmen, though notoriously tight-lipped when sober, are also, I must confess, notorious drunkards. Someone'd be sure to babble in the taverns.»

«I'll dye my hair black, cut it short, like a Tzatlam tribesman, and sign on.»

«You forget that you have to belong to my clan in order to be a crew member.»

«Hmmm. Well, what about this adoption-by-blood routine?»

«What about it? I can't propose that unless you've done something spectacular and for the profit of the clan. Wait! Can you play any musical instrument?»

Promptly, Green lied, «Oh, I am a wonderful harpist. When I play I can soothe a hungry grass cat into lying down at my feet and licking my toes with pure affection.»

«Excellent! Though it would not be an affection so pure, since it is well known that the grass cat considers a man's toes a great delicacy and always eats them first, even before the eyes. Listen well. Here is what you must do in four weeks' time, for if all goes well, or all goes ill, we set sail on the Week of the Oak, the Day of the Sky, the Hour of the Lark, a most propitious time…»

5

TO GREEN, the next three weeks seemed to have shifted to low gear, they crept by so slowly. Yet they should have raced by quickly enough, so full of schemes and plots were they. He had to advise Miran on the many technical details involved in building tanks for the fish. He had to keep the Duchess happy, an increasingly difficult job because it was impossible to pretend a one-hundred-per-cent absorption in her while his mind desperately looked for flaws in his plans, found oh, so many, and then as anxiously sought ways of repairing them. Nevertheless he knew it was vital that he not displease or bore her. Prison would forever ruin his chances.

Worst of all, Amra was getting suspicious.

«You're trying to conceal something from me,» she told Green. «You ought to know better. I can tell when a man is deceiving me, There's something about the voice, the eyes, the way he makes love, though you've been doing very little of that. What are you plotting?»

«I assure you it's simply that I'm very tired,» he said sharply. «All I want is some peace and quiet, a little rest and a little privacy now and then.»

«Don't try to tell me that's all!»

She cocked her head to one side and squinted at him, managing somehow even in this grotesque attitude to look ravishingly beautiful.

Suddenly she said, «You wouldn't be thinking of running away, would you?»

For a second he became pale. Damn the woman anyway!

«Don't be ridiculous,» he said, trying hard to keep his voice from cracking. «I'm too much aware of the penalties if I were caught. Besides, why should I want to run away? You are the most desirable woman I've ever known. (This was the truth.) Though you're not the easiest one in the world to live with. (A master understatement.) I would have gotten no place without you. (True; but he couldn't spend the rest of his life on this barbarous world.) And it is unthinkable that I would want to leave you.» (Inexpressible, yes, but not unthinkable. He couldn't take her with him, for the simple reason that even if she would go she would never fit in his life on Earth. She'd be absolutely unhappy. Moreover, she'd not go anyway, because she'd refuse to abandon her children and would try to take them along, thus wrecking all his escape plans. He might just as well hire a brass band and march behind it out of the city and onto the wind-roller in the light of high noon.)

Nevertheless his conscience troubled him. If it was painful to leave Amra it was hell to leave Paxi, his daughter. For days he had considered taking her along with him, but eventually abandoned the idea. Trying to steal her from under Amra's fiercely watchful gaze was almost impossible. Moreover, Paxi would miss her mother terribly, and he had no business exposing the baby to the risks of the voyage, which were many. Amra would be doubly hurt. Losing him would be bad enough, but to lose Paxi also…! No, he couldn't do that to her.

The outcome of this conversation with her was that she apparently dropped her suspicions. At least she never spoke of them again. He was glad of that, for it was impossible to keep entirely hidden his connection with the mysterious actions of Miran the Merchant. The whole city knew something was up. There was undoubtedly a lot of money tied up with this deal of the wagon caravan going to the seashore. But what did it all mean? Neither Miran nor Green would say a word, and while the Duke and Duchess might have used their authority to get the information from their slave, the Duke made no move. Miran had promised to let him in on a share of the profits, provided he gave the merchant a free hand and asked no questions. The Duke was quite content. He planned on spending the money to increase his collection of glass birds. He had ten large rooms of the castle glittering with his fantastic aviary: shining, silent and grotesquely beautiful, all products of the glass-blowers of the fabulous city of Metzva Moosh, far, far away across the grassy sea of the Xurdimur.

Green was present when the Duke talked to Miran about it.

«Now, Captain, you must understand just exactly what I do want,» warned the ruler, lifting a finger to emphasize the seriousness of his words. His eyes, usually deep-sunk in their fat, had widened to reveal large, brown and soulful orbs. The passion for his hobby shone forth. Nothing: good Chalousma wine, his wife, the torture of a heretic or runaway slave, could make him quiver and glitter with delight as much as the thought of the exquisitely wrought image of a Metzva Moosh bird.

«I want two or three, but no more because I can't afford more. All made by Izan Yushwa, the greatest of the glass-blowers. I'd particularly like any modeled after the bird-of-terror….»

«But when I was last in Estorya I heard that Izan Yushwa was dying,» said Miran.

«Excellent, excellent!» cried the Duke. «That will make everything recently created by him even more valuable! If he is dead now it is probable that the Estoryans, who control the export of the Mooshans, will be putting a high price on anything of his that comes their way. That means that bidding will be high during the festival and that you must outbid any prospective buyers. By all means do so. Pay any price, for I must have something created by him in his last days!»

The Duke, Green realized, was so eager because of the belief that a part of a dying artist's soul entered into his latest creations when he died. These were called «soul-works» and brought ten times as much as anything else, even if the conception and execution were inferior to previous works.

Sourly Miran said, «But you have given me no money to buy your birds.»

«Of course not. You will lend me the sum, buy them yourself, 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 winds that swept Earth's seas managed to keep going for so many thousands of leagues, just on their original impetus. Or did they get boosts? He didn't know.

What he did know was that the Xurdimur was a thing that shouldn't be. Yet, the very presence of men here was just as amazing, just as preposterous. Homo sapiens was scattered throughout the Galaxy. Everywhere that the space-traveling Earthmen had gone, they had found that about every fourth inhabitable planet was populated by men of their species. The proof lay not just in the outward physical resemblance of terrestrial and extra-terrestrial; it lay in their ability to breed. Earthman, Sirian, Albirean, Vegan, it made no difference. Their men could have children by the women of other planets.

Naturally there had been many theories to account for this fact. All had as a common basis the assumption that Homo sapiens had sometime, somewhere, in the very remote past, originated on one planet and then had spread out over the Galaxy from it. And, somehow, space travel had been lost and each race had gone back to savagery, only to begin again the long hard struggle toward civilization and the re-discovery of spaceships. Why, no one knew. One could only guess.

There was the problem of language. It might seem that if man had come from a common birthplace he would at least have kept a trace of his home language and that the linguists could break down the development of tongue and link one planet to another through it. But no. Every world had its own Tower of Babel, its own ten thousand languages. The terrestrial scientist might trace Russian and English and Swedish, and Lithuanian and Persian and Hindustani back to a proto-Indo-European, but he had never found on any other planet a language which he could say had also derived from the Aryan Ursprache.

Green's mind wandered to the two Earthmen now imprisoned in the city of Estorya. He hoped they weren't being treated badly. They could be in horrible pain at this very moment, if the priests felt like subjecting them to a little demon-testing.

Thinking of torture led him to sit up a little straighter and to stretch his arms and legs. In an hour he was supposed to meet the Duchess. To do that he had to go through the supposedly secret door in the wall of the turret at the northern end of the walk, up a stairway through a passage between the walls, and so to the Duchess's apartments. There one of the maids-of-honor would usher him into Zuni's presence and then would try to eavesdrop so she could report to the Duke later on. Zuni and Green weren't supposed to know about this, but were to pretend that she was their trusted confidante.