Horemheb did not think that it had been concerned to conceal its presence. Rather that was the way it moved.
“Speak,” said Horemheb, after a time. “Speak!”
Horemheb knew it was close to him. He knew its presence, especially here, in this place. Sometimes it was so close to him he could have put out its his hand and touched it. Once he had done so, on a rainy night. The fur had been wet and matted. There had been a strong smell upon it.
“You know why I have come,” said Horemheb. “Speak.”
The thing moved about, twice, turning, on the platform, and bit at its fur, doubtless to rid itself of vermin.
“Speak,” said Horemheb.
But the thing did not speak.
Horemheb had read the parchments, but they had been silent. In his distant youth he had sat before the elders, but they had not told him, if they knew. He had made long journeys, even to the place of smoke and ships, but had not found what he sought. Now, again, he had come to the platform.
“Speak,” begged Horemheb.
But Horemheb heard only the wind, and the soft sounds from amongst the rocks.
“I have come through the forest,” said Horemheb. “I have braved the darkness. I have stood before the platform. A thousand times I have brought my body and my staff, and my question, to this place, and have not been heeded. A thousand times I have returned to the village empty-handed.”
“Speak!” said Horemheb.
But it did not speak.
Horemheb then put the sack of meal on the platform, as his small offering, small in value to many, but a gift of considerable price to Horemheb.
Horemheb then bent down and picked up his staff. He descended from the dais and found the string once more, which he would follow back to the village.
Behind him the beast looked down at the sack of meal between its paws. It was not such stuff that the beast ate.
Chapter 2
“So you are at the beginning of your career?” said Emilio Rodriguez.
“Or perhaps at the end of it,” smiled Allan Brenner.
“For you are on your way with old Rodriguez to Abydos?” smiled the other.
“Something like that,” said Brenner. He was not certain, really, how to address Rodriguez. Should it be as “Mister,” as “Professor,” as “Doctor”?
“Didn’t they teach you grantsmanship?” inquired Rodriguez. “Is this the best you could land?”
“I was assigned,” said Brenner.
“To keep an eye on me?”
“I don’t think so,” said Brenner. He didn’t.
“What time is it?” asked Rodriguez.
Brenner smiled. That was an odd question. Did he want a body-time, indexed to some recent port, perhaps one where they had had a layover for bioadjustment; did he want a local time, and if so, indexed to what world, and to what coordinates on what world; would he like a solar time, a sidereal time, or one indexed to the half-life of a specified element, or what? The ship functioned on commercial time, of course, indexed to the prime meridian on Commonworld, a neutral wilderness of little note or interest in the galaxy other than the fact that its imaginary gridwork of coordinates provided more than four thousand worlds with a common frame of reference.
Rodriguez answered his own question. “It’s late,” he said. That seemed an odd answer to an odd question. “It’s late,” he repeated. Brenner assumed he meant that he was tired. That was probably what he meant.
“You have kept much to your cabin,” said Brenner.
“Surely you have no objection to that,” said Rodriguez.
“No,” said Brenner. “But if we are to be colleagues—”
“There are strong worlds and weak worlds,” said Rodriguez.
“What?” said Brenner.
“We come from a weak world,” said Rodriguez.
“You shouldn’t smoke those things,” said Brenner, “and drink that stuff.”
“It will make my heart like the hoof of a four-horned korf,” said Rodriguez, perhaps quoting some authority, and this stuff,” said he, raising his closed mug, the slurp hole closed, “is a bladder irritant, a disaster to the liver, a poisoner of the bloodstream, and a destroyer of brain cells.”
“That is about it,” granted Brenner.
Rodriguez sat back in the webbing. He puffed on a roll of Bertinian leaf. It was outlawed on many worlds, but could be obtained, as one might expect, in various black markets, to which the digital purses of various officials owed remarkable economic latencies, available upon the punching of special numbers, putatively not on file with the state.
An odious cloud, like some noxious fog or lethal gas, drifted toward Brenner but never reached him, being caught up in the intake of the filtering system. In