Ardor on Aros (6 page)

She had more aplomb than I; I turned away and walked about three steps before I dropped to both knees and vomited. Or tried to, dry-heaving convulsively and painfully as my belly strove to empty itself of its contents: nothing.

After a minute or two of that embarrassing unpleasantness I dragged myself to my feet and turned back to her.

She looked familiar. She was a good-looking woman, with a mass—a very tangled mass, now—of blue-black hair and black eyes beneath long lashes and a petulant mouth above a slightly dimpled chin. Straight, British-looking nose. Broad shoulders, supporting a swelling chest which my American eyes picked out very quickly. Blood had splashed on one, I forget which, and was dripping as if someone had injected red dye into a nursing mother. Her belly was round rather than flat, and so were her hips and thighs; she was thick, I guess, if you’re particularly fond of, say, Nancy Sinatra types.

I was, but I’d always felt that that witch’s mirror on the wall would have to reply: “Sophia’s the fairest dummy! Who else?”

The Jadiriyah sat back, legs widespread and outstretched, her hands behind her, serving as props. There was quite a bit of blood on her, although as far as I knew none of it was her own.

“Who are you?”

The words are “Thank you, Sir Knight, for rescuing me, albeit a trifle late,”
I thought, but I said, “Hank Ardor.” I brandished my bloodstained sword. “And this belonged to Kro Kodres. You are Jadiriyah of Brynda?”

She looked down at herself. “Ugh!” She raised her eyes to me again, nodding. “Yes. You’ve slain Kro Kodres?”

“I found him dying. In a cave, three days’ walk from here.” I nodded to indicate which way; how did I know what direction was which? I’d seen no moss, and for all I knew Aros’ orange sun rose in the west—or for the matter of that the south.

“He summoned me there, with his mind, but I could barely hear him, even though I was close by. He’d taken a wound, here.” I touched my lower belly. “And his leg was broken.”

“Well, Hahnk Ahdah, I suppose now you’ll claim your compensation.”

“My what?”

“Your reward!” she said, he tone conveying “what else, clod?” The word she used was “julan,” which translates as either reward or compensation. Kro Kodres hadn’t explained well enough, and so I paid for my too-little understanding of her language and customs. I paid pretty dearly.

“I—“

“Well?” She cocked her head.

“Uh—nothing necessary, ma’am,” I said. How do you make a
beau geste,
be a nice guy here,
without
being corny? I smiled, in best unassuming hero Gary Cooper fashion.

She looked at me, and I swear there seemed to be anger in her eyes—but it was gone, and she nodded. Anger that I hadn’t demanded a reward? Maybe there was something I didn’t know. But—too late now.

I put that from my mind, but I was frowning, too: “Why don’t I hear you in my mind, now?”

“I’m not send—“ She gazed at me intently, then frowned. The frown deepened. Suddenly I realized: she was “listening.”

“I can’t
hear
you!” (The word is “silgor,” from “gorin,” mind, and “silek, silethe,” to read.)

I should have lied. I should have pretended a great ability to mask my thoughts. I didn’t think of it, then. I was unaware of any reason to dissemble with her, and I am not much of a liar anyhow.

“A blow on the head,” I said, choosing the lesser lie, the natural one. One doesn’t go about introducing oneself as a visitor from another planet, after all. Not if one has anything resembling sense.

“A blow on the head made you unable to mind-speak?”

I nodded.

“Ugh! It must be worse than blindness! Ugh!” She shivered, shaking her head. But then: “Did Kro Kodres give you anything for me?”

What a woman! Acted a little insulted because I claimed no reward. Didn’t say thanks. Then asked calmly if I had anything for her, sitting there with the two dead creatures stiffening at our feet. Their presence, by the way, didn’t seem to disturb her in the least, any more than the blood on her body. “Ugh,” she said, that was all; as if she’d looked in the mirror and seen that her hair was coming undone. She had accepted my brief statement about Kro Kodres’ death, again with nothing resembling emotion or remorse. She did not
sympathize
with my “affliction,” she merely thought how awful it would be. Now she asked, calmly and conversationally, if he had given me anything for her. Without a word, even the usual hollow words, of sympathy or—
something
.

And she hadn’t thanked me. Nor was she making any effort to close her legs.

To call her a strange woman would be to say that Einstein was a bright fellow. I was shaken. I still am, a bit, thinking back on it. But there’s no use piling up nouns and adjectives and superlatives: she was the strangest human being I’d ever encountered. I suppose she still is. Of course now I’ve some idea why. At that time—at that time she was obviously tough, and thus far she’d neither done nor said anything I expected.

And…she looked…familiar.

“Uh—yes,” I said. “A ring, and a message.” I wondered if the message was for her. He had never said.

Her eyes sparkled. “Save the message—where is the ring?”

“Uh—” I glanced at the Vardor mounts. Saw the waterbags, fat, nearly full. I nodded and unstrapped mine and dumped it out on the ground. The ring rattled in the neck, then plopped into the dust. I started to bend for it.

And a slender, strong-looking hand shot out and snatched it up. I looked up in fresh surprise; she had got up and come over without a sound or a flicker to apprise me that she was other than still sprawled between the corpses. And she’d grabbed that ring as if it were Kidd’s long-lost treasure. I straightened, watching her.

She looked even better standing. She was the kind of girl that a man first sees nude and immediately thinks she looks as good or better that way as clothed, which is of course always a mistake. She was as close to perfect as a woman can get without being ridiculous about it, despite the fact that she was dirty, and blood-splashed, and stringy-haired. I wondered what she’d look like clean and brushed ad ready for the boudoir, and I had a hard time trying to visualize improvements. I knew she’d be spectacular, clothed. Dazzling. She was, even now.

Her teeth flashed in a smile, and her eyes sparkled delightedly. She had her precious ring.

Later I wished I’d done a little bartering with that precious ring!

Blood—Vardor blood—trickled slowly from her, unnoticed now as she drew the ring on her finger—the left index. She held it up, smiling, her eyes flashing black jewels of…avarice? Call it ineffable delight.

Those black eyes rose to me. That petulant mouth stretched into a grin—yes, a grin, not a smile. Again, my mind flickered a light along its hallways; she looked familiar. But there wasn’t time to think about that:

“Ah, that feels better. Now I am whole! You have clothing, and plenty of food and water,” she nodded at the saddlebags near the hobbled slooks, “and both mount and pack animal. Well! Good fortune, Hank Ahdah!”

And she closed her right hand over the left, folding down thumb and all fingers save that on which the odd ring glittered. She closed her eyes.

“Brynda,” she murmured.

And she vanished.

I stood there and stared through the spot where Jadiriyah had been. Stupid; she wasn’t coming back. I’d saved her life (or at least saved her from Vardor servitude), not to mention the traditional fate worse than which death isn’t. (That she had apparently not been entirely discommoded by her ravishment is beside the point, surely. It
was
rape.)

She hadn’t thanked me. She’d just—I reconstructed. Yes, I had it right the first time. She’d just rubbed the ring she’d snatched from me and—disappeared.

So it was a magic ring. So I’m an American, and I don’t
believe
in magic. Didn’t. Apparently it was time to start.

I had rescued the fair maiden in distress, and not only was she presumably not the daughter of the planetary ruler, she was an ungrateful bitch. And a vanishing witch. And I had thought
all
damsels in distress were princesses and their saviors became warlords, emperors, king—princes at the very least!

I sat down. (I didn’t decide to. My legs did.) I looked around, and up, and around again. Aros. I had now met two Arones, unless one counted Vardors—I didn’t, and don’t. Kro Kodres had not (at least so I assumed) been a prince or anything of the sort. I wasn’t even certain if the poor guy had been a warrior; maybe he was a courier. Packing a ring belonging to a witch—whose face had seemed vaguely familiar.

I squinted my eyes, then closed them, trying to call up a mental picture of the girl whose face I’d seen so briefly. (And at that, not under the best conditions: it was night, she was dirty, and her hair was a mess.) Besides, she was naked, so that I didn’t study her face much. I couldn’t evoke her image. She couldn’t look familiar:
I must be déjà-vuing,
I thought.
I probably have a mental picture of her from K.K.’s mind, and from hers.
That
makes me think she’s familiar.

Having thus handily disposed of the most minor of the mysteries, I opened my eyes again. Back to Kro Kodres. One: not royalty.

Two: he was carrying a message. He’d forgot to tell me who it was for. Maybe for Miss bitchwitch Jadiriyah, who hadn’t give me time to deliver it. I repeated it to make sure I still had it:
Hai azul thade cor zorveli nas
Yeah: the golden cup is big bones. OK. I still had that. So what?

Three: I’d killed the two Vardors. I glanced over at them. Ugh. Don’t let anybody kid you. A stiff is a stiff, and they’re all bad stuff. True, some are worse than others. Like: these two. Not just that they were gray, and too tall; they were all over blood, and I was not a man who’d seen a lot of blood. As a matter of fact I couldn’t remember having seen any other than my own, in any quantity worth mentioning. Oh—and all that red stuff in the Peter Cushing movies, but I hardly counted that.

I stood up. Well, I thought, I’m in possession of two god riding slooks, food (how could I have forgotten how hungry I was?), water, a good-sized munitions dump—their weapons, Kro Kodres’, and Jadiriyah’s. And clothing: what I wore and, again, the Vardors’ and—hers. She’d departed in the same state she’d been in when I had come belatedly bound to the rescue: bare.

I packed up everything there was, mounted one slook, hung onto the reins of the other, and got the hell away from there.

No, I did not bury them, either. Why should I try to cheat buzzards, jackals, or whatever?

I ate as I rode. An hour or so later I halted, made sure my Arone beasties were all hobbled, and I stretched out. I was asleep in about seventeen seconds.

None of it made any more sense in the morning. As a matter of fact it made less, because I awoke knowing who the Jadiriyah looked like. My subconscious had been ferreting about through my memory banks while I lay asleep, and proudly it produced its catch as the sun awoke me.

She looked like Elizabeth Taylor. Pre-Cleopatra, pre-Burton Taylor, when she was slenderer. I had not been able to place that face and body at once because:
first,
the circumstances: one doesn’t expect to wind up on a planet way the hello someplace or other and run into Elizabeth Taylor! (Don’t get excited: figure of speech. She WASN’T Taylor; she just looked like her. As it turned out later, when I saw her properly clothed and cosmeticized and coiffed, she looked
exactly
like that most unique sex symbol: the one who could act.
second:
her state of dishabille, just mentioned.
third:
she looked like our Liz years ago, not as she was when I left you, just after having seen THE SECRET CEREMONY and noticing that the two female stars in it could have profited by swapping twenty-five carefully-chosen pounds.

Which, of course, reminded me that Kro Kodres had resembled—quite strongly—that beturbanned Indian I’d gone to school with, Ram Gupta.

Maybe,
I thought,
this is one of those alternate Earths I’ve read about. Which could raise problems: what if I meet me? Oh—I guess he’s back on my Earth.

Or maybe it’s what passes for heaven, and I died in that machine of Dr. Blakey’s.
I hadn’t seen Ram Gupta for several months.
Maybe Ram was in a car accident or something, and he’s dead too.
(At which point I had an uncharitable thought:
Serves ’im right! That’ll teach him to hang around America because it’s nicer, rather than take his education back home to Delhi where they need him!
)

There was a flaw in that one: if this was “Heaven,” how come he’d died here? And what about the Vardors, even if Liz Taylor HAD got killed or died just after my departure from Earth?

I could think of several flaws in the alternate or parallel Earth theory, too, including the parrot Dr. Blakey had sent. How come his replacement hadn’t show up back “home,” if this was a swap deal? And if it wasn’t…if there was another Hank Ardor here, and another Pope Borgia…then weren’t we two objects occupying the same space at the same time? A paradox in Aristotle’s logical universe?

Both were wild theories. Trouble is, now I know the truth, it is no less wild. It also contains paradoxes.

But when I woke up that morning on the yellow desert I hadn’t the foggiest where I was, other than—someplace else.

I lay there awhile, trying to assimilate it, toying with the two look-alikes I’d met. And reviewing Jadiriyah’s clothing or lack of same, which led me to Kro Kodres’, and the Vardors—who had worn standard desert garb. Which I now wore.

Despite nature-addicts and -ists, clothing is important for more than cover and what some idiots call “morality.” Clothing is also decoration, adornment. The first clothing was probably nothing more. It was becoming so again when I left America, and would become even more so with environmental control—and assuming the country didn’t become totally Pastoreized. First there was the darkness of Puritanism, then the sickness of Victorianism, followed by a brief burst into the sunlight in the Twenties and Thirties. Then War Two, when clothing became revoltingly utilitarian and sensible; clothing
qua
clothing (if you call those broad-shouldered female styles sensible; trying to look like the men they were replacing in industry, I suppose). After that women’s apparel was designed by un-men (and some un-women, too!) who hated women, and certainly much of it wasn’t designed to decorate. The Sixties brought clothing-as-adornment, as natural to the TV Generation as rebellion and experiments with post and LSD and sex, because with TV you just can’t lie much to kids anymore.

What Kro Kodres had worn depicted his culture, and an Earthly sociologist could have said a lot about Aros just from that clothing: garishly, barbarically bright, male plumage, designed for freedom of movement—a tunic without a sleeve on the sword arm; how clever for a swordsman!—and, adornment.

And now I word the garb of desert dwellers, nomads. Loose robes that reflected the sun and formed a sort of cage about the body, a barrier between it and the heat. Very effective in a dry climate.

I wondered what the Jadiriyah’s at-home clothing looked like, or even her traveling clothes. Which reminded me that I could ride back and find out. Her clothes were back there somewhere behind me, with the late Oth and Ard.

I twisted around to look: yes, I could see the rocks, looking tiny and unimportant now. I shook my head. Unimportant! They were mighty important to Jadiriyah-Liz, and to me, too. I had killed. I would never be the same again. I’m not. I have killed. Not at a distance, with high-powered rifles or bombs or grenades or ridiculous distances with heavy artillery. I had killed up close, and swords are personal. Very personal, I remembered, thinking of Oth’s wide eyes on me and what I’d done to the right one. I shuddered, and my stomach lurched.

Then the feeling went away. It hasn’t come back. I was over the hump. I was a killer. Of men—and saying that the Vardors aren’t really men makes little difference.

And I hadn’t wanted to go to Vietnam!

Yeah well, I told myself, this was different; it was kill or be killed.

Like hell,
inner me snapped back.
They weren’t threatening you!

Yeah, but I saved the girl from slavery or death.

Uh-huh; that’s what old L.B.J. said about Vietnam, The Other Side wanted to kill ’em or enslave ’em.

“Yeah,” I said aloud, “well, I can
prove
it!” And thus smugly victorious over myself, over Hank
₂
, I got up and ate some Vardor rations and drank some Vardor water and, in my Vardor clothing, I climbed aboard my Vardor beast of burden and set off across Vardor domain.

To the victor go the spoils!

I rode all day, due west—I hoped—and stopped when the sun was crouching like a fat orange goblin atop the long range of hills to the (?) west (?). (It was. Yes, Aros travels in the same direction about its sun as Earth does. Why not? I suppose the odds are fifty-fifty. I don’t know, and as it turned out that isn’t germane to Aros anyhow. Aros has very little to do with physics; its existence, I mean.

(Besides, if this message DOES get to Earth, you will certainly never be able to contact me and correct my errors, anyhow! I admin you’d get better explanations, and longer ones, too, if I were science writer Poul Fredrikssen, say. But I’m not, and he probably doesn’t do things like grabbing girls in labs and getting knocked on his tail into “Temporal Dissociators.”)

I had brought along Kro Kodres’ knapsack—my former waterbag and ring-bearer—and I propped it up twenty or thirty yards off. Then, for an hour, I practiced with the short Vardor bows. We will not discuss the first nine arrows. The next two I sank into the bag, the next three elsewhere, and the final three into the bag. Seven others were within a foot of it or had passed no more than a foot above it.

In the morning I spent about an hour plodding about on and off my slook, collecting arrows.

The slook is an apparently happy beast. He does not moan and groan all day like the Earth-side camel (
el-jeml:
“supercilious-head,” did you know that?). Nor does he sleep standing up as Earthly horses do. Nor does he swell his gut to fake you out when you’re tightening the girth-strap, a favorite trick of horses, who are entirely too clever.

A slook seems able to go on forever with little effort. He can store up enough water and foot to operate for days. His walk is less comfortable, really, than his dead run: those long pushing legs in back jar one quite a bit at a walk. But when he flattens out and runs in long soaring leaps the ride is quite comfortable and the landings smooth and not unpleasant—except for the final one. His braking system is admittedly over-efficient.

It is typically human, typically American, to personalize everything, and I named my riding-slook ERB. I pronounced it as a word, rather than a jammed-together collection of initials, but I think of it as in all capitals. The other animal, plodding along behind us with the gear, I named Kline, which seemed appropriate enough.

We were approaching something green. We kept approaching it for two days. I wondered why I was not seeing any animals and other creatures, and shortly thereafter I did. Birds in various sizes and nonstartling hues, snakes of unstartling size and color, insects and lizards. The green line I was approaching became a forest, and as ERB and I drew closer and closer it sprouted legs: treetrunks of only two shades, either gray-black or red-brown, like mahogany.

I didn’t know if it was a jungle or forest, and I wondered why Kro Kodres hadn’t mentioned it. I had a choice: either try to bust through or parallel it awhile, in hopes of seeing a road. I had no doubt there’d be one.

Why search for a way through this greenery, why seek out Brynda?

Why not? I had so far met four Arone natives. I didn’t belong here. I had no place to go. My one contact was a dead man named Kro Kodres. He was from a place called Brynda, and I had things of his to prove I knew him—unless some idiot decided I had killed him and would be stupid enough to come straight to his hometown. He had apparently been on his way back to deliver a very important message, a message he held back from me, evidently, until he was 101% certain of me—or dying. I wasn’t even sure I HAD the message. I merely carried along in my head the words he’d shouted as he died.

I had marked it down in my brain. He’d had no written message. As to the girl: well, her thoughts had given me a cloe or two there. She didn’t appear to have been his willing companion. As to his having the ring: from what I now know, I felt he’d taken it from her to put the quietus on her magical powers (I felt silly thinking that, but what les was there to think?). Where’d they’d been, what they were to each other—these I didn’t know. But I could find the Jadiriyah in Brynda, and I would try again. Carefully. Tangling with witches really didn’t seem too cool!

I knew nothing else to do. I had been jerked off Earth and set adrift on this planet, as if God, as I had previously suspected, was not dead at all but was quite, quite mad. This way I had a goal: Brynda. I had a name to use, and I even knew someone in Brynda.

I had no guarantee, and the thought crossed my mind many times and still does, that I could be jerked suddenly up from here and redeposited. Back on Earth, perhaps, in that same lab with Evelyn Shay glaring at me—or in the Atlantic Ocean. Or on another planet, perhaps, where there were critturs called
tharks
and
thoats
and a city called Helium, or where there were
vooklangan
and men living high in monster trees, and Mephis and Muso.