The Virgin of Zesh & the Tower of Zanid (3 page)

III

The barouche slowed through the Hamda’ east of Novorecife, a little settlement where beings from a dozen planets dwelt in picturesque squalor. The driver swerved to avoid a trio of drunks—an Earthman, a Krishnan, and a reptile-man from Osiris—swinging down the street with arms around each other’s necks. They were singing a song about an English King who lived long years ago.

The carriage reached open country, and the driver whipped his team to a gallop. The barouche raced along the river road, its wheels rattling and the twelve hooves of its two ayas drumming. Overhead Karrim, looking twice as big and four times as bright as the earthly moon, lit up the flat Krishnan landscape. Smaller Golnaz, half-full, had just risen, and little Sheb lay below the horizon.

The driver, a gnarled and taciturn Gozashtandu, was human-looking but for his greenish hair, large pointed ears, and external organs of smell. These last were a pair of feathery antennae, like those of a moth, sprouting from between his brows. He gripped his reins tautly, leaning to right and left as the road curved. The road followed the bend of the Pichidé River, as it wound across the Gazashtandu plain toward the Sadabao Sea. In the body of the vehicle sat Althea Merrick, Gottfried Bahr, and Brian Kirwan. Now and then, one or another looked apprehensively back along the road.

Kirwan spoke above the noise. “I told you it would be easy. When the great Brian Kirwan turns on the blarney, neither man nor woman can resist him. Damned if I don’t make a poem about this rescue; something in heroic heptameters.”

“I used to consider myself well-read, Mr. Kirwan, but I don’t remember coming across any of your poems. What have you had published?” asked Althea Merrick.

“No crass best-sellers, if that’s what you’re thinking of,” said Kirwan. “My poems are published in five small volumes of limited editions. The first volume was put out in 2119 under the title
The Seven Square Serpents,
bound in limp lavender leather and limited to ninety-nine copies. That, my girl, is art—none of your swinish Boeotian commercialism.”

“Then how do you live?” asked Althea.

“Oh, various worthless ancestors of mine have conveniently crossed the Stygian ferry, and Ireland’s the one country left where a man can get a bit of a legacy without its all being taken away by taxes.”

Gottfried Bahr spoke up. “Very interesting, but we had better give thought to Miss Merrick’s future. Do you wish all the way to Zesh to go?”

“What else can I do?” she said. “I don’t know how I could make my living in Majbur.”

“That she could not,” said Kirwan, “now that we’re all given this damned Saint-Rémy treatment that ties our tongues in knots when we try to impart useful information to the Krishnans.”

A deep groan rolled across the plain. The ayas twitched their ears and increased their speed.

“What’s that?” said Althea, shivering.

“That would be a hunting yeki,” said Kirwan. “You know, one of those big brown things like a lion and a bear and an otter rolled into one, with six legs.”

“Let us hope it does not hunt us,” said Bahr in a strained voice.

“Ah, we wouldn’t let this Krishnan pussy-cat hurt the darling girl, now would we?” said Kirwan. “Anyway, she can pray to her E.-M. God.”

“It is all very well to joke.” Bahr plucked the driver’s sleeve. “Can you not go faster?” he said in Gazashtanduu.

“Any faster would overset us on these turns, my lord,” said the driver, leaning as they rounded a bend on two wheels.

Althea asked, “Doctor Bahr, what’s your program? You said something about testing a strain of genius that has appeared on Zá. Is that near Zesh?”

Bahr replied, “The
Krishnanthropi kolofti
live on Zá, between Jerud and Ulvanagh. Zesh is a much smaller island southwest of Zá.”

“But all the other islands are inhabited by the tailless Krishnans, aren’t they?”

“Yes, until one gets down south to Fossanderan.”

“And what’s on Zesh? Do Mr. Kirwan’s Roussellians live with the tailed Krishnans?”

“Not likely!” said Kirwan. “We’ve got an agreement with the king of the monkeys to leave us alone. The other monkeys all live on Zá, except one female they call the Virgin of Zesh—at least that’s what they
call
her—and come over only for ceremonies.”

“Who’s this virgin?” asked Althea.

“Oh, some kind of heathen priestess or oracle. When you get there, there’ll be two virgins, I suppose, unless you lose your status on the way, and a good thing, too.”

Althea pressed her lips together but ignored the gibe. She asked Bahr, “Then why are you going to Zesh instead of to Zá?”

“Because if one lands uninvited on Zá, the tailed ones knock one’s brains out.”

“Hospitable fellows,” said Kirwan.

“It is not surprising,” said Bahr. “The tailless Krishnans have been attacked so often by slavers that they are very, very touchy. So I propose to land first on Zesh, get in touch with this Virgin, and try through her to persuade the other Záva to let themselves be tested.”

“And if that isn’t a silly thing for a grown man to do,” said Kirwan, “to spend your days asking a lot of monkeys which box you’ve hidden the apple under.”

Bahr replied with strained politeness. “My dear Brian, I assure you that the mental level I anticipate testing is much higher than you are implying. It’s more likely I shall have to ask them problems in the calculus to solve.”

“I thought,” said Althea, “the scientists agreed all races were equally intelligent.”

Bahr smiled tolerantly. “That is an example of the lag between discovery and public understanding. Two centuries ago the opinion was, not that all races were exactly equal, but that there was no scientific reason to believe them unequal. Now that the tests have been further refined, we do know of some small differences.”

“What differences?” asked Althea.

“Well, you know it is very difficult to give tests that cancel out the effects of environment and upbringing, because so much of the adult’s aptitudes and abilities depend upon them. Then, when you have done that, you still have the wide variation of individuals within any one group, which masks any average difference. And then you have the sex difference, which is real, though small. Finally, when you eliminate all those variants, you find that there is no such thing as general intelligence, but only a lot of different mental abilities. And when you are done, you find that the average differences between one race and another are so microscopic, compared to the differences within each group, that one can nothing tell about—”

Kirwan yawned. “Gottfried, you’re a nice lad in some ways, but a fearful bore at times. The Devil fly away with your aptitudes and statistics!”

“Assuming there is a Devil, for which there is no scientific evidence,” said Bahr, “what is your objection?”

“Sure, every intelligent man knows there’s just one superior race, and that’s the great and glorious Celtic race.”

“Which is not a race but a language family,” interjected Bahr, but Kirwan continued:

“All the rest of humanity is nought but apes with the hair shaved off, the lot of ’em. Wherever you find signs of genius, whether it’s the pyramids of Egypt, or Roman law, or the American skyscrapers, you can be sure there’s a touch of the true Celtic blood involved.”

Bahr sighed. “It is hard to argue with an Irishman, harder yet with a poet, and impossible with an Irish poet. Anyway, on Krishna we deal with separate species, not mere racial variants of one species as on Earth. So any presuppositions are premature and unscientific.”

###

At the mouth of the Pichidé River, on the south bank of the estuary, lies the Free City of Majbur, a seething commercial metropolis noted for the height of its buildings, the acumen of its merchants, and the impenetrability of its traffic jams. Following the river road downstream from Novorecife, the barouche bearing Althea Merrick, Brian Kirwan, and Gottfried Bahr rattled into the fishing village of Qadr, across the river from Majbur. It was the fifth day after leaving the Viagens outpost.

As they neared the village, the road converged with the rail line from Hershid, the capital of Gozashtand. Now the carriage rolled past the terminal, where a mahout astride the neck of a bishtar was making up a train. The bishtar, looking somewhat like a gigantic, six-legged tapir with a bifurcated proboscis, trundled the little four-wheeled cars up one spur and down another, pulling with its trunks or pushing with its forehead according to its rider’s commands.

Beyond the railroad terminal, a fishy smell overhung the rows of sagging shacks that lined the highway. Small tame eshuna ran out to howl at the carriage. Krishnan working women sat in doorways, some with glass-topped incubators containing their unhatched eggs beside them. Swarms of Krishnan children, naked but for a coating of dirt, chased each other screaming.

The fishy smell waxed as the vehicle coasted with squealing brakes down the slope to the shore. There Krishnan men mended nets, fished, smoked cheap cigars, and swapped yarns. Eshuna dug into stinking piles of marine offal and fought over the head of some denizen of the Krishnan deeps.

The driver drew up at the empty ferry slip and set his brake. He drew from his wallet a saláf root, bit off a piece, and sat silently chewing.

Althea and her companions got out of the carriage, which creaked on its suspension straps as they left it. In five days of fast riding over Krishnan roads, Althea had learned to stretch her cramped limbs at every chance. She and her companions strolled out to the end of the pier, where several Krishnans stood or sat on the tops of piles. These stared briefly at the Terrans and returned to their own concerns.

Althea looked out over the broad estuary toward Majbur, whose five- and six-story buildings rose in a crowded mass against the flat skyline. To the right, the placid Pichidé sparkled in the late afternoon light of Roqir. To the left, the estuary merged with the emerald waters of the Sadabao Sea. Here and there a sail, bright in the sunlight, broke the horizon.

“There’s the ferry,” said Kirwan.

A big, rectangular, double-ended barge moved sluggishly on the estuary under the impulse of a pair of yellow triangular sails and a set of sweeps. Little by little it grew, until Althea could see the passengers clustering it: gentlefolk in satiny stuffs, with swords at their sides; laborers in breech-clouts; seafarers in sashes, with stocking-caps wound like turbans around their heads; even a Terran tourist in a rumpled white suit, a camera case dangling around his neck.

Althea watched the approach of the barge. During the past five days, the men had made it plain that they did not wish to be proselytized. Althea was not aggressive enough to thrust upon them a doctrine about which she herself entertained secret qualms. Bahr could talk about his specialty, but on such a technical level that he soon left the other two floundering. And Kirwan, the most garrulous of the three, had soon wearied his companions by boasting and self-assertion and by bursting into a tirade of insults whenever crossed.

The ferry nosed into its slip. Its passengers streamed ashore. Those waiting on the pier boarded the craft, paying fares to a piratical-looking captain on the companionway. When the carriage started to move aboard, with members of the crew grasping the wheel hubs to help it over the bumps, a furious argument broke out between the driver and the ferry skipper.

“What’s this?” said Kirwan in Brazilo-Portuguese.

The driver said, “This rascal try to collect twice regular tariff for carriages. He think rich Earthmen can afford extra charge.”

“The black-hearted spalpeen!” roared Kirwan. “Let me at him!” The poet began to yell at the captain in a mixture of English, Portuguese, and Gazashtanduu, which he apparently made up as he went along:
Tamates, hishkako baghan!
D’ye think I
deixe você
to swindle me?”

Looking puzzled, the captain spoke to the driver, who translated. “He does not understand.”

“Hell, don’t he understand his own language, and me so fluent and all?” said Kirwan. “The man must be half-witted.”

Bahr addressed the captain in careful Gazashtandu. “Good my sir, pray take not advantage of our plight. For we’re no visitors rich to be bilked, but harried fugitives from our own kind’s vengeance and as such have a claim upon your mercy.”

“What are you fugitives from?” asked the captain.

“See you this wench? Her cruel mate swore to slay her because he’d learned of her love for us, so we snatched her from him. But he follows hard upon our track with—”

“Mean you you’re
both
her lovers?” cried the captain. “Methought you Terrans were monogamists.”

“Ah, but such is our love for her that she couldn’t spurn either lest the one rejected perish of a broken liver. So you’ll not—”

Althea started as the purport of this speech reached her consciousness.

“Nay, nay, get aboard,” said the captain. “I’ll pay your fee from my own pocket, so poignantly has your tale plucked at the strings of my affections. Yarely, now!”

“Good heavens!” said Althea. “Doctor Bahr, you’ve made me out not only an adulteress but a polyandrous one as well! If that ever gets around in mission circles—”

“Your missionary career will be mud,” said Kirwan, “and a good thing, too.”

Althea sighed. Life on Earth may have had its shortcomings, but it was simple compared with the bizarre misadventures that had befallen her on Krishna. Each step seemed to plunge her further into quicksand. Kirwan continued: “At any rate, our professor got us a free ride. How’d you work it, Gottfried?”

“I know the psychology of these folk. Although even more cruel and belligerent than Terrans, they are also romantic and sentimental. The captain could not resist an appeal to his sympathy for runaway lovers.”

Althea said, “I’m sorry you couldn’t have done something like that to Gorchakov.”

“A different type,” said Bahr. “A somatonic dynamophile, slightly schizoid and with a paranoid tendency, in addition to his obvious sadism. Very, very hard to influence.”

Althea stood on the edge of the deck, holding a mast stay to steady herself. With much shouting, the crew swarmed about the rigging and reversed the set of the two yellow sails. One of these crewmen, Althea noticed, was a tailed Krishnan in a dirty loin cloth. He was covered with dark, olive-brown hair, not quite thick enough to be called a pelt. He was shorter and broader than his tailless fellows.