Philip Farmer: The Green Odyssey

«The answer to both is yes. My proposal has to do with the dried fish that you carry as cargo to the Estoryans. There is another thing, too, but I may not even hint at it until I have your oath.»

«Very well then. At the agreed hour. Fish, eh? I must be off. Time is money, you know. Get going boys, full sails.»

Green hailed a passing rickshaw and seated himself comfortably in it. As assistant majordomo he had plenty of money. Moreover, the Duke and Duchess would have been outraged if he had lowered their prestige by walking through the city's streets. His vehicle made good time, too, because everybody recognized his livery: the scarlet and white tricorn hat and the white sleeveless shirt with the Duke's heraldic arms on its chest-red and green concentric circles pierced by a black arrow.

The street led always downward, for the city had been built on the foothills of the mountains. It wandered here and there and gave Green plenty of time to think.

The trouble was, he thought, that if the two imprisoned men at Estorya were to die before he got to them he'd still be lost. He had no idea of how to pilot or navigate a spaceship. He'd been a passenger on a freighter when it had unaccountably blown up, and he'd been forced to leave the dying vessel in one of those automatic castaway emergency shells. The capsule had got him down to the surface of this planet and was, as far as he knew, still up in the hills where he'd left it. After wandering for a week and almost starving to death he'd been picked up by some peasants. They had turned him in to the soldiers of a nearby garrison, thinking he must be a runaway slave on whom they'd collect a reward. Taken to the capital city of Quotz, Green had almost been freed because there was no record of his being anybody's property. But his tallness, blondness and inability to speak the local language had convinced his captors that he must have wandered down from some far northern country. Therefore if he wasn't a slave he should be.

Presto, changeo! He was. And he'd put in six months in a quarry and a year as a dock worker. Then the Duchess had chanced to see him on the streets as she rode by, and he'd been transferred to the castle.

The streets were alive with the short, dark, stocky natives and the taller, lighter-complexioned slaves. The former wore their turbans of various colors, indicating their status and trade. The latter wore their three-cornered hats. Occasionally a priest in his high conical hat, hexagonal spectacles and goatee rode by. Wagons and rickshaws drawn by men or by big, powerful dogs went by. Merchants stood at the fronts of their shops and hawked their wares in loud voices. They sold cloth, grixtr nut, parchment, knives, swords, helmets, drugs, books-on magic, on religion, on travel-spices, perfumes, ink, rugs, highly sugared drinks, wine, beer, tonic, paintings, everything that went to make up their civilization. Butchers stood before open shops where dressed fowl, deer and dogs hung. Dealers in birds pointed out the virtues of their many-colored and multi-songed pets.

For the thousandth time Green wondered at this strange planet where the only large animals were men, dogs, grass cats, a small deer and a very small equine. In fact, there was a paucity of any variety of animal life, except for the surprisingly large number of birds. It was this scarcity of horses and oxen, he supposed, that helped perpetuate slavery. Man and dog had to provide most of the labor.

No doubt there was an explanation for all this, but it must be buried so deep in this people's forgotten history that one would never know. Green, always curious, wished that he had time and means to explore. But he didn't. He might as well resign himself to keeping a whole skin and to getting out of this mess as fast as he could.

There was enough to do merely to make his way through the narrow and crowded streets. He had to display his baton often to clear a path, though when he approached the harbor area he had less trouble because the streets were much wider.

Here great wagons drawn by gangs of slaves carried huge loads to or from the ships. The thoroughfares had to be broad, else the people would have been crushed between wagon and house. Here also were the so-called Pens, where the dock-slaves lived. Once the area had actually been an enclosure where men and women were locked up for the night, But the walls had been torn down and new houses built in the old Duke's time. The closest Earthly parallel Green could think of for these edifices was a housing project. Small cottages, all exactly alike, set in military columns.

For a moment he considered stopping off to see Amra, then decided against it. She'd get him tied up in an argument or something, and he'd spend too much time trying to soothe her, time that should be spent at the marketplace. He hated scenes, whereas Amra was a born self-dramatist who reveled in them, almost wallowed, one might say.

He averted his eyes from the Pens and looked at the other side of the street, where the walls of the great warehouses towered. Workmen swarmed around them, and cranes, operated by gangs pushing wheels like a ship's capstan, raised or lowered big bundles. Here, he thought, was a business opportunity for him.

Introduce the steam engine. It'd be the greatest thing that ever bit this planet. Wood-burning automobiles could replace the rickshaws. Cranes could be run by donkey-engines. The ships themselves could have their wheels powered by steam. Or perhaps, he thought, rails could be laid across the Xurdimur, and locomotives would make the ships obsolete.

No, that wouldn't work. Iron rails cost too much. And the savages that roved over the grassy plains would tear them up and forge weapons from them.

Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more efficient method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of tradition and custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods accepted it. The gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its mother's breast or an old man clings to his property.

Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it was worth while to become a martyr.

He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.

«Alan! Alan!»

He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard it.

«ALAN, YOU BIG BLOND NO-GOOD HUNK OF MAN, STOP!»

Reluctantly Green told his rickshaw boy to turn around. The boy, grinning, did so. Like everybody else along the harbor front he knew Amra and was familiar with her relations with Green. She held their one-year-old daughter in her arms, cradled against her magnificent bosom. Behind her stood her other five children, her two sons by the Duke, her daughter by a visiting prince, her son by the captain of a Northerner ship, her daughter by a temple sculptor. Her rise and fall and slow rise again was told in the children around her; the tableau embodied an outline of the structure of the planet's society.

HER MOTHER had been a Northerner slave; her father, a native freeman, a wheelwright. When she was five years old they had died in a plague. She had been transferred to the Pens and raised by her aunt. When she was fifteen her beauty had attracted the Duke and he had installed her in the palace. There she gave birth to his two sons, now ten and eleven, who would soon be taken away from her and raised in the Duke's household as free and petted servants.

The Duke had married the present Duchess several years after his liaison with Amra began and her jealousy had forced him to get rid of Amra. Back to the Pens she had gone; perhaps the Duke had not been too sad to see her go, for living with her was like living with a hurricane, and he liked peace and quiet too well.