Margaret St. Clair (3 page)

Her toilet completed, she looked scrutinizingly at George. “My, he certainly hit you hard,” she said. “Did he get away with the pig?”

George winced. The pig was something he didn’t want to be rem inded of. And anyhow, what did this girl know about it? “What pig?” he asked warily.

“Oh, be reasonable. You know very well what I mean. Id-ris’ pig. You should have taken better care of it.”

“Um.”

“Well, you should. Say, what’s your name?”

“George.”

“Well, mine’s Blixa. I was supposed to pick up the pig.”

This was a little too much. “You’re not wearing a black camellia,” George pointed out rather acidly. “And you’re certainly not a man.”

“No, of course not.” Blixa agreed, looking down at her slim round body with some complacency. “But there was a last minute change in our plans. The regular messenger couldn’t come. They sent me instead. Try me. I know the countersign.”

“Perfumed Mars, planet of perfumes,” George said unwillingly.

“Perfumes that take captive or set free the heart,” Blixa said briskly. “See. I know it. I was supposed to get the pig.”

George looked at her thoughtfully. His head was aching so much that clear thought was difficult. And besides, the scent that Blixa wore (Martian women were always drenched in it) disturbed and oddly troubled him. All the same, in the depths of his mind an alarm signal was going off. Blixa might be telling the truth, but there was about her, as palpab l y as her heady perfume, a positive aura of unreliability. He wouldn’t have trusted her as far as he could throw a rhyoorg with one hand.

“Um,” he said. They had been walking along slowly as they talked, and by now had come, through the scented Martian sh adows, to the top of a little rise. Marsport at night, a glittering twinkling incredible pageant, lay spread out in front of them.

“Well, I was,” Blixa said impatiently. “But only Pharol knows where the pig is now.”

“Out there somewhere, I guess,” George said, indicating the ten thousand dancing lights.

“No doubt,” Blixa replied. “But it’s too important to dismiss like that. Do you want to help me try to get it back?”

George hesitated. He had an overpowering hunch that a man who was associ ated with Blixa was heading for trouble. “You’ll be sorry!” the zygodactyl had croaked at him. On the other hand, Bill’s job depended on making safe delivery of the pig, and he had always been fond of Bill in an unsentimental masculine way. There was the m atter of the bonus which would, he was almost sure, provide the final argument in persuading Darleen to marry him. And besides, some reliable person ought to keep an eye on this girl.

“All right,” he said. “Nobody can steal my pig and get away with it.”

“Fine!” Blixa exclaimed. “Then we’ll go hunt a good clairvoyant to locate it for us.”

“Clairvoyant?” George echoed incredulously. The idea was so foreign to the notion he had formed of Blixa’s character he could not believe he had heard her aright.

“Certainly. How else are we to find the pig? I never can see why you Earth people admit that telepathy and clairvoyance and other sorts of ESP exist, and yet refuse to consult experts in them. It’s not reasonable.”

They were coming now to populous streets. Blixa’s long graceful stride (not as feminine, though, as Darleen’s shorter one) made walking with her agreeable. Ahead of them a laughing girl dashed out of a doorway, her white thighs flashing under her blue shari, and ran down the street. A young ma n ran after her, his sandals going slap slap slap. A perfume cart, rumbling past, drenched them both, and as the driver came abreast of George he raised the nozzle and showered him with the fragrant drops. Somebody was throwing aveen petals from a rooftop; somebody else was playing on a double anzidar. The music, thin and high and a little sad, floated out excitingly on the warm air. Against his better judgment, George found that he was rather enjoying himself.

“Will we be able to find a clairvoyant at this time of night?” he asked. Blixa’s idea seemed far-fetched to him, but he had to admit there was a certain logic in what she had said.

“Oh, I think so. This is the Anagetalia, you see, and if anybody goes to bed, it isn’t at night.” She pointed down to the cross-iter, where a soma fountain was. Twenty or thirty people were clustered around it. A girl had plunged her arms up to the wrist in the gushing fluid; others were drinking from their cupped hands. Six or eight couples were moving expertly, if a li t tle unsteadily, in the stamping, challenging maze of a Dryland dance. “Turn this way.”

“Urn.” George and the girl were moving into a poorer quarter now. The buildings, though they still had the typical air of Martian elegance (composed, George thought, o f broadleaved trees and good architecture) stood closer to each other and were made of poorer materials. He decided to put one of the questions that were in his mind. “Listen, Blixa, how did you know I had the pig?”

Blixa’s green eyes (hazel? —no, green ) laughed at him. “If you had smelled yourself before the perfume cart went by, you wouldn’t need to ask,” she said. “I don’t think there’s anything in the system that smells quite like Idris’ pig … Here we are. There are several clairvoyants here.”

They knocked on three doors before they found anyone in. The woman who finally answered them had a haggard, rather handsome face, long dark hair, and deep-set, burning eyes. She too had been celebrating the Anagetalia, for there was a long rent in her gauzy mauve tunic and a wreath of aveen flowers sat crookedly on her head. She staggered a little as she showed George and Blixa into her consulting room.

Blixa put the case to her in the long-winded hypothetical Martian manner (“If it should happen that one f ound a certain object”), and the sibyl listened attentively. When Blixa had finished, the woman drew a deep breath. Though her face remained impassive, George felt that she was startled, almost alarmed, by what she had heard. She put a quick question to Bl ixa in Old Martian, and the girl nodded. Once more the woman drew a sharp breath.

She lay down on the long low couch set diagonally in the corner. From a recess she got out fetters of shining metal and slipped them over her hands. She gave one of the bal ls which terminated the chains to Blixa to hold, the other to George. Then she closed her eyes.

For a long time there was silence in the room. Outside in the street people laughed, sang, played on double and single anzidars. Doors slammed. Once someone s creamed. The woman on the couch gave no sign.

George moved restlessly. Blixa quieted him with a severe glance. At last the clairvoyant spoke. “A man,” she said, “a man with a shaved head. He has it. The two crowns.” She writhed, opened her eyes. After a moment she sat up and yawned.

“Did I say anything?” she asked.

“Shaved head. Two crowns,” Blixa answered briefly.

The woman’s eyes grew round. After Blixa had paid her she went with them to the door and stood watching them as they went down the stree t.

“What did she mean?” George asked. Blixa was walking briskly along, headed apparently north.

“She told us who had the pig.”

“So I gathered. But who?”

“The Plutonian ambassador.”

“What!” The exclamation was jarred out of George; his idea of the present possessors of the pig had gone no higher than geeksters, or, perhaps, the agents of some rival cult. “Why?” he asked more calmly.

“This is the Anagetalia,” Blixa replied. She looked down at the folds of her gold-spangled shari, frowned, and rearranged them so that they left a good deal more of her person exposed. “This is the time of year when we negotiate treaties and handle affairs of state. Mars is a poor planet. If one should h a ppen to have possession of a certain small blue animal it might, perhaps, be of advantage to him.”

“But — Look here, I was told that there weren’t more than six members altogether of the cult of the pig.”

“The person who told you that was wrong. There are eight.”

“Well, then, if the cult has so few members, how could having the pig be of advantage to anyone?”

There was a protracted silence. At last Blixa spoke. “It is because of the nature of my people,” she said.

“Go on.” They had been walking north all this time.

George, whose feet were beginning to hurt, wondered briefly why Blixa did not call an abrotanon car. He decided that it was because all the drivers would be celebrating the Anagetalia too. “Go on,” he repeated.

“We Martians are not like you,” Blixa said slowly. “We Martians say always that we are more reasonable than Terrestrials, and so we are.” For a moment pride shone in Blixa’s voice. “We are far more reasonable. Sometimes we find it difficult to understand you at all, you do suc h childish and foolish things.

“But there is one thing about which we Martians are not reasonable in the least. It is as if all the foolishness and illogic and unreason and childishness of our natures, which in you Terrestrials is mixed in with everything you do, were concentrated in one place with us. We are not reasonable about our cults.

“They are not like your religions which enjoin, I have heard, ethical duties on their followers. We Martians” —again the note of pride in Blixa’s voice —“do not need religion to tell us, for example, of the brotherhood of man. We are logical, except about our cults.

“They have but few professed members. Your friend was right about that. But everybody on Mars knows about them and, very quietly, believes in them. Even if they are illogical. Pluto was originally a Martian colony, and the ambassador knows how our minds work. That is w hy it would be of great advantage to someone to have the pig.”

They had reached a stately quarter now. Nobly-framed buildings stood among big trees so crowded with blossoms that they were arboreal bouquets. Vines twisted among their branches and dropped long starry racemes of flowers to the ground. The air was rich with the scent of them. “I don’t know just how we’re going to get the pig back from him,” Blixa said thoughtfully. “But we’ll have to try.”

George slowed down and looked at her. “Why us?” he demanded practically. “If the pig means as much to Martian life as you say, it’s clearly a matter for the government.”

“Government?” Blixa echoed. She looked almost shocked. “Certainly not. Government is a logical activity. If I went to an official with this, he would laugh at me, and if I persisted there would be punishment. You don’t understand. I should be making him ashamed.”

Logical … reasonable … George felt dizzy with the words. His head still hurt where he had been hit. On the other hand, Bl ixa did seem to know what she was talking about, and for the first time that evening she impressed him as being sincere.

“O.K.,” he said.

A few steps farther on Blixa indicated a large building with a broad flat roof. “This is the embassy,” she said in a low voice. “I imagine they still have it, because it’s so hard to get about in Marsport during the festival. Probably they’ll try to get it to a Plutonian ship when people are off the streets. Once it’s aboard, there won’t be anything we can do.”

They walked past the embassy slowly, George making a deliberate effort to look casual and unconcerned. The street was still crowded with revellers. When he and Blixa reached the corner they turned and came back again. From an upper window of the embassy, very faint through the scent of the flowers, a trace of a familiar smell came to George. He would never have noticed it if he had not been expecting it, and even then he could not be sure. He looked enquiringly at Blixa, and she gave him a tiny nod.

Before he realized what she was doing, Blixa led him over to the soma font. “We’ll have to drink and act like the others,” she said in a low voice. “We’d be conspicuous, just hanging about.” She slipped lithely through the crowd, George following her. From the dou b le-spouted fountain she caught soma between her hands and held them up for George to drink. As he awkwardly sipped at the liquid, his lips, unavoidably, brushed the soft flesh of her palms.

Laughing at his clumsiness, Blixa helped herself from the founta in and then held up her hands again for him to drink. It was good soma, though not especially strong; George could feel it warming him, relaxing his tension, washing away his headaches and his fatigue. “Let’s have some more,” he said.

Blixa had turned back to the fountain for more soma when a tall blond Drylander who was standing beside her ran his hands possessively over her shoulders and whirled her off in the first steps of a complicated dance.

George began to frown. It was, of course, none of his business whom Blixa saw fit to dance with, but they were here on business. She ought to remember it. And besides, he could have danced himself if she had taken the trouble to show him how. When a little dark girl came up to him and said challengingly, “Dance with me, Earthman!” he accepted with alacrity.

“Is this one of the DruDehar dances?” he asked after they had moved a few steps. The DruDehar dances (Old Martian for “Golden Garden”) were known all over the system as the Mating Cycle.

“Yes, they all are,” the girl replied. “You Earthmen aren’t very good at dancing, are you? Too stiff. When I come forward, you come forward too. Don’t pull away from me! There, that’s better. Much better. You’re doing fine.”

The dance ended with a wild swoop of anzidar strings. Smiling at him, the small dark girl stood on tiptoe and threw her arms around his neck. She kissed him several times, affectionately if muzzily. “For an Earthman,” she said, “you’re rather nice, I think.” George was not altogether sorry when h e r grinning escort whirled the little dark girl away in another dance.

The crowd began to grow thin. Couples disappeared into doorways, around corners, under the shadows of trees. Blixa, flushed and smiling and redolent of perfume, came up and she and Geo rge drank more soma together. In a surprisingly short time there was no one left in the street but themselves and a man with wrinkled limbs and thin gray hair who snored happily as he lay upon the pave.

Blixa linked her fingers with George’s and led him into the shadow of the basalt statue of Chou Kleor. Chou Kleor was the greatest of the poets of Mars. His works, perhaps, were not much read nowadays, but every Martian schoolchild knew him as the writer who first spoke of “scented Mars”. His statue was a monumental thing, and the shadow it cast was correspondingly large.