The Search for Zei

CHAPTER IX

The train ground to a stop with squealing brakes. As the Earthmen gathered their baggage and got out of their little car, somebody on the splintery boardwalk beside the train said: "Pictures, my lords? Magic pictures?"

It was a shabby oldster with a straggle of hairs on his chin and a large box on a tripod.

"By the green eyes of Hoi," said Barnevelt, practicing a Kirshnan oath, "look at that!"

"What the devil is it?" asked Tangaloa.

"A camera." Barnevelt had recognized an apparatus like those used centuries before on Earth in the pioneering days of photography. He could not help stealing a glance at the little Hayashi secure in its setting on his finger. "Wonder how he can get a picture in this light?"

He gazed up-river where the line of the plain already drew a cord across Roqir's red disk, and continued: "This must be a product of Prince Ferrain's scientific revolution. No thanks," he told the photographer and started to move off, when a shrill explosion of speech made him pause.

A beefy policewoman in scarlet and brass was bawling out the photographer for violating some ordnance by soliciting business on the railway platform. She ended:

"… now go, you riveled wretch, and thank the Mother Goddess you do not pass the night in our dankest dungeon!"

Barnevelt started to go too, but was halted by another outcry: "Stand fast, you! I do perceive you are a stranger and therefore ignorant—but no excuse does ignorance of the law provide. Know that we of Qirib do take it amiss to hear the false goddess Hoi sworn by. 'Tis classed as conduct disorderly, wherefor penalties most codign are established. Lets see those weapons!"

She examined the seals on Barnevelt's sword and Tanga-loa's mace. Barnevelt's heart rose into his mouth; he was sure she would notice the place where Gavao had cut and spliced the wire. But, whether from perfunctory haste or from the weak waning sunset light, she failed to do so and sent them on their way with a final: "Go about your legitimate concerns, aliens, but watch your step!"

Angur's Inn stood in plain sight of the station, with the skull of some long-fanged carnivore over the doorway to identify its line of business. It was a three-story building built out over the sidewalk, a row of arches holding up the overhanging second story. All the ground floor of the building, save an entrance and a small office space at one side, was taken up by an eatery.

The travelers pushed through a crowd watching a sidewalk magician produce a baby unha from his hat and entered the door at the side. A tap on the little gong that hung in the upper part of the cashier's window brought a flat Krishnan face into the opening; a face to which a pair of unusually long antennae gave rather the look of a beetle.

"Angur bad-Ehhen, at your service," said the face.

"Baghan!" yelled Philo from his cage.

"Well—really, my masters…"

"It was not we," said Barnevelt hastily and, embarrassed, plunged into a typically fustian Krishnan speech: "It is this wretched beast from distant lands, whose brutish humor 'tis to cry out words in human tongues the meanings whereof he is as ignorant as you or I of the inmost secrets of the very gods. Therefore take no offense. May your lucky star ever be in the ascendant. Know that I am Snyol of Pleshch, a traveler, and this my companion Tagde of Vyutr."

He paused, slightly out of breath but proud of his performance.

.While they were settling the matter of the room, Angur kept craning his neck through the opening to look at the macaw. "Truly, sirs, never have I seen a creature clad in fur of such strange abnormous form. Whence comes it?"

"From the loftiest mountains of Nyamadze," replied Barne-velt, realizing that feathers were unknown on this planet, and hoping his adopted fatherland had mountains for Philo to come from. The lack of feathers was all to the good: there would be no feather-pillows to give him hay-fever.

"Garrrrk!" said Philo, half opening his wings.

"It flies!" cried Angur. "And yet it be no aqebat nor bijar nor other flying beast of form familiar. 'Twould make a rare attraction for my hospice, could you to part with it persuaded be."

He thrust out a tentative finger, then snatched it back as Philo lunged at it with gaping beak.

"No," said Barnevelt. "Regret it though we shall in aught to contravene you, yet when we—uh—bought the creature, did a great astrologer assure us that our fates were linked to his, and woe betide the day we parted from him."

'Tis pity," said Angur, "but't'is plain as the peaks of Darya that you do have good reason for your answer, as the witch of the forest said to Qarar in the story. Here's your key. Share your chamber with another of my guests, by name Sishen, you must or sleep elsewhere. But let it vex you not, for he is of another world and uses not the bed. Ere you break your fast, would you crave company to comfort you?"

"No thanks," said Barnevelt.

"But we have licensed…"

"No thank you!" said Barnevelt and headed up the stairs.

Tangaloa remarked apologetically: "You see, Master Angur, I suspect my friend of leading a single life." Then he followed Barnevelt, saying: "Wowser! You needn't have been so precipitate. Still, you handled that jolly well. I wonder who is this joker he's putting in with us?"

"He said not of this world, which sounds like a ghost."

"Then you and he could hold a convention. Are you sure it is a he? The personal pronouns don't always distinguish gender."

"No, but we shall see. How do these oil-lamps work?"

When they had adjusted the lamp, they looked for clues to the nature of their fellow-roomer. In one corner lay a small bag with oddments of personal possessions sticking out. On one windowsill reposed three small jars, stoppered, and another open with handles protruding. Barnevelt found that the handles were those of small paint brushes.

He exchanged glances with Tangaloa and shrugged. They stowed their gear, washed up, and checked their disguises. While looking at himself in the mirror, Barnevelt saw over his shoulder something white against the door. It was a posted notice. By working on the Gozashtandou curleycues at the same time, he and Tangaloa managed to translate it:

NOTICE

Rites of Love shall be observed only in accordance with the Regulations of the Governing Council of the Cult of the Goddess Varzai, namely and to wit: They shall be preceded by the Short Prayer to the Mother Goddess followed by the Lesser Ritual Mundification. A Love-Offering of one kard (Qiribo) for the Mother Goddess shall be left with the Innkeeper. By Order of Sehri_fbab-Giraji, High Priestess.

"Well!" said Tangaloa. "That is the first time I ever saw anybody put a tax on that."

Barnevelt grinned. "Just as well we turned down Angur."

"A bigoted lot of henotheists, these Qiribuma. I wonder how the tax collectors can check up?"

"Probably a custom more honored in the breach than the observance," said Barnevelt.

From the tavern came the sounds of weird music. An orchestra of four Krishnans—two men with tottle-pipes, another with a drum, and a girl with a harp-like instrument—were giving it out while in the dimly-lit middle of the room a young female Krishnan was performing a dance in the course of which she was winding herself up in an endless length of gauze, like a caterpillar spinning its cocoon.

"She seems to be doing a strip act in reverse," said Tangaloa. "We should have got here sooner."

Barnevelt replied: "Matter of fact, I half expected to see a male Qiribo stripping to an audience of these Amazonian females."

The room, smelling of Krishnans and of nameless drugs and liquors, had benches extending around most of the wall. Some diners were already at work with their little eating-spears. A mixed lot, thought Barnevelt, but predominantly bourgeois, with a masked couple in the corner in aristocratic silky stuff.

In accordance with custom, the Earthmen gave their orders over the counter to the cook, who sweated at his task in sight of all. Then they sidled around the edge of the room and slid into a vacant place. The waiter brought them their kvad, and they sat and sipped while the girl with the gauze continued her gyrations.

The girl finished. As the audience cracked their thumb joints by way of applause, several more customers came in, and on their heels one who hardly fitted: a dinosaurian creature, a head taller than a man, walking on birdlike legs with a tail as long as the rest of it stuck out behind to balance. Instead of clothes, the newcomer bore upon its body an intricate design of interwoven stripes painted on its scales.

"An Osirian!" said Barnevelt. "And a male from his wattle. Jeepers, I didn't expect to see one of those here."

Tangaloa shrugged. "There are quite a few on Earth. Not a bad lot, though tending towards hypomania: impulsive and excitable."

"I've seen them, but I don't know any. I once took a girl who was deathly scared of snakes to see Ingrid Demitriou in Lust Incorporated, and when the lights went on an Osirian was sitting next to her and she fainted."

"They are mostly harmless," said Tangaloa, "but if you ever get in an argument with one, don't let him look you in the eye, or he will have you under pseudohypnosis before you can say 'thalamus.' Unless you are wearing a silver skullcap next to your scalp."

"Say, George, d'you suppose that's our roommate?" Barnevelt caught the waiter's eye and beckoned.

The servitor approached and murmured: "Seeing that you're Nyamen, my lords, perchance you'd like a brazier of nyomnige; we have a secluded alcove for the purpose…"

"No thanks," said Barnevelt, not sure what nameless vice the waiter was trying to tempt him into. "Who's the^ fellow with the tail?"

"That's Sishen, who dwells here," said the waiter. "A generous tipper, for all his horrid form."

"Well, let's hope the species is honest. When will our chow by ready?"

The Osirian made it plain that the gulf that divided intelligent beings with tails from those without was one not easily crossed. After filing his order in a shrill whistling accent that the cook could hardly understand, he squatted in a corner facing the wall, his tail lying along the floor out into the room, and he looked up nervously every time somebody walked near. The waiter brought him his drink in a special vessel like a large oil-can.

Barnevelt, glancing in the other direction, said: "Oh-oh, if there are ghosts around, this would seem to be it. At least he's haunting us."

It was the whiskered ancient with the box-camera. He had been speaking to the man in the mask and now came over to the Earthmen, quavering: "Pictures, my lords? Magic pictures?"

"Let's give the old sundowner a break," said Tangaloa. "The swindle-sheet will stand it." He turned to the photographer. "How soon can you deliver prints?"

"Tomorrow morn, good my lord. I'll toil and swink all night…"

Barnevelt felt like objecting, for several reasons. But he held his peace, not wishing always to be cast in the role of penurious fussbudget by his colleague's easygoing ways. Besides, it was a chance to see what Earthly pioneers in photography like Daguerre and Steichen had had to go through.

The photographer spent some minutes focussing, moving first one leg of the tripod and then another. Then he got out a little tray with a handle protruding from the center of its lower surface and a ball of string. He cut off a length of the string arid caught one end of the piece under a little cleat on the upper surface of the tray.

Then he brought out a phial from which he sprinkled on the tray a yellow powder like that which Vizqash had extracted from the pods at the start of the abortive picnic. He stoppered and put away the phial, still holding the tray by its handle so that its powdered surface remained level. Then he brought out a flint-and-steel lighter, which he snapped against the dangling end of the string until the latter caught and sizzled. It was a fuze.

"Hold ye still, noble sirs," he said, reaching around to the front of the camera and flipping a switch.

The old man stepped back, holding the tray over his head. The fuze burned with little spitting sounds, the flame running up the string and over the edge of the tray out of sight.

Foomp!

A bright flash lit up the room, and a mushroom of thick yellow smoke boiled up from the tray. As the photographer reached around the camera and again flipped the shutter-switch, a clatter drew eyes down the room to where Sishen the Osirian had leaped to his feet in startlement and upset his drinking-vessel.

The Osirian took two long steps towards the photographer who, peering up, seemed to see the creature for the first time.

"Iya!" howled the old man. Snatching up tray and camera, he rushed from the tavern.

"Now wherefore did he thus?" asked Sishen. "I did but mean to ask him if he would take one of me as well, and off he goes as though Dupulan were hard upon his trail. These Krishnans are difficult folk to fathom. Well, sirs, be you my new roommates? For by your shaven polls I do perceive you are Nyamen, and Angur has but now advised me that I'd share my quarters with such this night."

"It seems so," said Barnevelt.

"Yes? Then let us hope you come not in twixt midnight and morn, in riotous mood to rouse me from my rest. We'll meet again, fair sirs."

As the Osirian returned to his place, Barnevelt said: "It occurs to me old Wiskers might be another janru man."

"You're too suspicious," said Tangaloa. "It's as Castanhoso told us: Everthing out of the ordinary gets blamed… Look, here comes our fish-faced friend with the bad manners."