Murray Leinster - Gateway to Elsewhere

His conscience said sternly that though an untutored slave girl, reared in a highly unfavorable atmosphere, she at least showed a devotion to duty and a sense of moral values which Tony was not displaying. Only Heaven knew, said Tony’s conscience, what enormities he might commit at any time, now that he had ceased to heed his proper mentor—it was fortunate that this poor slave girl had a sense of duty!

To this Tony replied that Ghail’s sense of duty had led her to pick out two very attractive slave girls as presents for him, and since he was going off somewhere and didn’t know when he’d be back, he might as well call them in and have some music while he waited.

He stood up to pull the bell cord.

Then he saw a stirring down at floor level out of the corner of his eye. He whirled with something like a gasp. After the affair of the dungeon courtyard and the windowsill last night, he was becoming jumpy when bugs and frogs and other small objects moved in his neighborhood.

Two of the marble tiles of the floor were rising where they joined, as if something swelled beneath them. Tony stared, momentarily paralyzed. A green shoot appeared and grew. Leaves appeared at its tip as he watched. Branches spread out, and more leaves, and then a bud. The bud swelled. It opened into an enormous lush blossom of a violent magenta hue. And then the flower rearranged itself. It became a miniature head—and there was the beaming, sentimental face of Nasim the djinnee, wearing her explicitly minus-I.Q. expression of amiability.

“Sh-h-h-h!” said the face in the flower, coyly.

Tony gulped. “I’m sh-sh-h-h-shed,” he said. “What’s up?”

“I’m sorry about Es-Souk,” said the djinnee, beaming. “He’s so jealous! He can’t help it, poor thing! The king has put him in jail and it serves him right!”

Tony said: “Oh!”

“I felt that I had to tell you I was sorry,” said the djinnee, almost simpering. “You’re not angry with me?”

“Oh, no,” said Tony. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“That’s so good of you!” said Nasim. She regarded him with adoring, cowlike eyes from the flower bush. “I’ve been hiding in a crack as a little moth’s egg, waiting to tell you how sorry I am. But there’s been somebody around all the time.”

“Yes,” said Tony. “There has been.”

“Would you like me to take the form of a human woman?” asked Nasim hopefully—and giggling—“for a while?”

“You’d better wear some clo—” began Tony in apprehension. Then he said desperately, “Better not. Somebody might come in.”

Nasim beamed. “All right. But you’re going to our king’s court. I’ll see you there! I’ll be around!”

“I’m sure you will be,” said Tony dismally.

“I’m watching over you,” said Nasim beatifically. “Since I heard about what Es-Souk tried to do on my account, I made up my mind to watch over you night and day. And I will! Night and day!”

Tony stared at her, appalled. There was a small noise outside the door. Nasim said sentimentally:

“I hate to go like this, but somebody’s coming.” She beamed. “I’ll be a little grease spot on the floor. Mind, now,” she added archly, “don’t step on me!”

The flower and blossom and all the leaves and branches seemed to contract smoothly. Suddenly they were not. The marble floor tiles fell together with a clink.

A delicate tapping on the door. Esir and Esim poked their heads around the door frame. Their faces were hopeful, and at the same time distressed.

“Lord!” said Esir plaintively. “We hear that you go on a journey! Do we go too?”

Tony sighed.

“I’m afraid not,” he admitted. “Affairs of state, and all that. I’m taking only one attendant, and I’ve not choice of that one.”

“But, lord,” protested Esim, “we have just been given to you and we do not even know if we please you or not!”

They came into the room. They were young and shapely. They pleased him very much. They were openly eager for experimental evidence of this fact, and looked at him imploringly.

I like you both very much,” said Tony. “In fact—” He thought back along a lifetime in New York, spent on subways and in automats and over double-entry ledgers, with only one interlude pounding a typewriter in an army camp. “In fact, I think I could be perfectly happy here in Barkut but for one thing.”

They said anxiously: “Lord, what is it that keeps you from happiness?”

Tony sighed deeply. He said in deepest gloom: “Dammit, there’s no privacy!”

The djinn camel was twenty feet tall, and it ambled through the night over the desert with monstrous strides. There were bright stars overhead, and a low-hung moon to cast long shadows; there was a camel-guard of djinns riding other djinn camels on every hand. Altogether the picture was one of barbaric magnificence. Wind swept past the contrivance which did duty as a cabin on the huge ship of the desert. The contrivance reminded Tony forcibly of the inside of a British miniature car, minus the instrument board. But it did not ride so smoothly. The size of the camel did not change the nature of its gait, and it would not be wise to burp while the animal was in motion.

Tony looked out a window at their escort. Ten-foot djinns on twenty-foot camels. Bearded, mustachioed, tusked and pointed-eared monstrosities, with spears as tall as their camels, with monstrous scimitars as tall as Tony himself, with garments of silk and velvet and garnished with gigantic precious stones which gleamed even in the moonlight. A hundred of them, no less, keeping close formation about the beast on which Tony and Ghail the slave girl rode.

In the moonlight, the djinn guard looked bored. It probably was boring, Tony reflected abstractedly, to be plodding at a mere forty miles an hour over endless sand, on the back of an acquaintance metamorphosized into a camel who would presently expect you to change places with him. This kind of exchange was taking place with some regularity. At least camels and their riders dropped out of formation and fell behind, and presently new camels and new riders came hurrying up from the rear to resume the place that had been vacated.

A lurching of the camel threw Ghail against him. She was veiled, now, and swathed in all the drapery of a woman dressed for travel or the street. She was singularly remote, too. Back at Barkut’s city gate, she had climbed the ladder to the camel cabin—at the height of a second-story window—with an air of extreme aloofness, ignoring the demoniac djinn guardsmen waiting about. Tony had been unable to match her dignity as he scrambled up and joined her in the small, close coupe. The guard had formed up about them and they had gone sweeping away into the desert darkness, leaving the city’s faint and twinkling light behind. Ghail had spoken no word then, and she did not speak now. The silence was burdensome. A moment later the camel lurched again. Tony was thrown almost into her lap.

“I’m sorry,” he said politely. “Bad road, this.”

“There is no road,” said Ghail composedly. “We have reached the foothills of the mountains, and the djinn are not used to walking. They wished to carry us in whirlwinds, but in your name I declined.”

“I suppose,” agreed Tony, “we’d have gotten dizzy.”

He fell silent again. Another monstrous lurch, and Ghail landed almost exactly on his knee. He helped her back into her own place again and said:

“Look here! We’d better have some system about this! I know you disapprove of me thoroughly, but in default of safety-belts I’d better put my arm around you.”

The camel seemed to stumble and Tony grabbed. They were suddenly upright again, and his arm was firmly around her and she made no protest.