It was a two-day journey via the coastal highway, through a countryside ever more lush, ever more densely tropical, as we approached the Gulf of Sumar. Schweiz was in high spirits, as was I. We talked to one another in the first person constantly; to him it was nothing, of course, but I felt like a wicked boy sneaking off to whisper “I” and “me” in a playmate’s ear. He and I speculated on what quantity of the Sumaran drug we would obtain, and what we would do with it. No longer was it just a question of my getting some to use with Halum: we were talking now of proselytizing everyone and bringing about a wholesale liberation of my self-stifling countrymen. That evangelical approach had crept gradually into our plans almost without my realizing it, and had swiftly become dominant.
We came to Hilminor on a day so hot the sky itself seemed to break out in blisters. A shimmering dome of heat covered everything, and the Gulf of Sumar, as it lay before us, was golden-skinned in the fierce sunlight. Hilminor is rimmed by a chain of low hills, which are thickly forested on the seaward side and desert on the landward; the highway curved through them, and we stopped at one point so that I could show Schweiz the flesh-trees that covered the parched inland slopes. A dozen of the trees were clustered in one place. We walked through crackling tinder-dry underbrush to reach them: twice the height of men they were, with twisted limbs and thick pale bark, spongy to the touch like the flesh of very old women. The trees were scarred from repeated tapping of their sap, making them look all the more repugnant. “Can we taste the fluid?” Schweiz asked. We had no implements for making the tap, but just then a girl of the town came along, perhaps ten years old, half-naked, tanned a deep brown to hide the dirt; she was carrying an auger and a flask, and evidently had been sent out by her family to collect flesh-tree sap. She looked at us sourly. I produced a coin and said, “One would show his companion the taste of the flesh-tree.” Still a sour look; but she jammed her auger into the nearest tree with surprising force, twisted it, withdrew, and caught the gush of clear thick fluid. Sullenly she handed her flask to Schweiz. He sniffed it, took a cautious lick, finally had a gulp. And whooped in delight. “Why isn’t this stuff sold all over Velada Borthan?” he asked.
“The whole supply comes from one little area along the Gulf,” I told him. “Most of it’s consumed locally, and a lot gets shipped to Threish, where it’s almost an addiction. That doesn’t leave much left over for the rest of the continent. You can buy it in Manneran, of course, but you have to know where to look.”
“You know what I’d like to do, Kinnall? I’d like to start a flesh-tree plantation, grow them by the thousands and get enough juice bottled so we not only could market it all over Velada Borthan, but could set up an export deal. I—”
“Devil!” the girl cried, and added something incomprehensible in the coast dialect, and snatched the flask from his hand. She ran off wildly, knees high, elbows outthrust, several times looking back to make a finger-jabbing sign of contempt or defiance at us. Schweiz, bewildered, shook his head. “Is she crazy?” he asked.
“You said ‘I’ three times,” I said. “Very careless.”
“I’ve slipped into bad habits, talking with you. But can it really be such a filthy thing to say?”
“Filthier than you’ll ever imagine. That girl is probably on her way to tell her brothers about the dirty old man who obscened at her on the hillside. Come on: let’s get into town before we’re mobbed.”
“Dirty old man,” Schweiz murmured. “Me!”
I pushed him into the groundcar and we hurried toward the port of Hilminor.
40
Our ship rode at anchor, a small squat craft, twin screws, auxiliary sail, hull painted blue and gold. We presented ourselves to the captain—Khrisch was his name—and he greeted us blandly by the names we had assumed. In late afternoon we put out to sea. At no time during the voyage did Captain Khrisch question us about our purposes, nor did any of his ten crewmen. Surely they were fiercely curious about the motives of anyone who cared to go to Sumara Borthan, but they were so grateful to be out of their escrow even for this short cruise that they were chary of offending their employers by too much prying. The coast of Velada Borthan dipped from sight behind me and ahead lay only the grand open sweep of the Strait of Sumar. No land at all could be seen, neither aft nor fore. That frightened me. In my brief career as a Glinish seaman I had never been far from the coast, and during stormy moments I had soothed myself with the comforting deceit that I might always swim to shore if we capsized. Here, though, the universe seemed all to be of water. As evening approached, a gray-blue twilight settled over us, stitching sky seamlessly to sea, and it became worse for me: now there was only our little bobbing, throbbing ship adrift and vulnerable in this directionless, dimensionless void, this shimmering anti-world where all places melted into a single nonplace. I had not expected the strait to be so wide. On a map I had seen in the Justiciary only a few days before, the strait had had less breadth than my little finger; I had assumed that the cliffs of Sumara Borthan would be visible to us from the earliest hours of the voyage; yet here we were amid nothingness. I stumbled to my cabin and plunged face first onto my bunk, and lay there shaking, calling upon the god of travelers to protect me. Bit by bit I came to loathe myself for this weakness. I reminded myself that I was a septarch’s son and a septarch’s brother and another septarch’s cousin, that in Manneran I was a man of the highest authority, that I was the head of a house and a slayer of hornfowl. All this did me no good. What value is lineage to a drowning man? What use are broad shoulders and powerful muscles and a skill at swimming, when the land itself has been swallowed up, so that a swimmer would have no destination? I trembled. I think I may have wept. I felt myself dissolving into that gray-blue void. Then a hand lightly caught my shoulder. Schweiz. “The ship is sound,” he whispered. “The crossing is a short one. Easy. Easy. No harm will come.”
If it had been anyone else who had found me like that, any other man except perhaps Noim, I might have killed him or myself, to bury the secret of my shame.
I said, “If this is what it is like to cross the Strait of Sumar, how can one travel between the stars without going mad?”
“One grows accustomed to travel.”
“The fear—the emptiness—”
“Come above.” Gently. “The night is very beautiful.”
Nor did he lie. Twilight was past and a black bowl pocked with fiery jewels lay over us. Near cities one cannot see the stars so well, because of the lights and the haze. I had looked upon the full glory of the heavens while hunting in the Burnt Lowlands, yes, but then I had not known the names of what I saw. Now, Schweiz and Captain Khrisch stood close alongside me on deck, taking turns calling out the names of stars and constellations, vying with each other to display their knowledge, each one pouring his astronomy into my ear as though I were a terrified child who could be kept from screaming only by a constant flow of distractions. See? See? And see, there? I saw. A host of our neighboring suns, and four or five of the neighboring planets of our system, and even a vagrant comet that night. What they taught me stayed with me. I could step out of my cabin now, I believe, here in the Burnt Lowlands, and call off the stars the way Schweiz and the captain called them off to me aboard ship in the Strait of Sumar. How many more nights do I have, I wonder, on which I will be free to look at the stars?
Morning brought an end to fear. The sun was bright, the sky was lightly fleeced, the broad strait was calm, and it did not matter to me that land was beyond sight. We glided toward Sumara Borthan in an almost imperceptible way; I had to study the surface of the sea with care to remind myself we were in motion. A day, a night, a day, a night, a day, and then the horizon sprouted a green crust, for there was Sumara Borthan. It provided a fixed point for me, except that we were the fixed point, and Sumara Borthan was making for it. The southern continent slid steadily toward us, until at last I saw a rim of bare yellow-green rock stretching from east to west, and atop those naked cliffs rose a thick cap of vegetation, lofty trees knitted together by heavy vines to form a closed canopy, stubbier shrubs clustering in the darkness below, everything cut down the side as if to reveal the jungle’s edge to us in cross-section. I felt not fear but wonder at the sight of that jungle. I knew that not one of those trees and plants grew in Velada Borthan; the beasts and serpents and insects of this place were not those of the continent of my birth; what lay before us was alien and perhaps hostile, an unknown world awaiting the first footstep. In a tumble of tangled imaginings I dropped down the well of time, and saw myself as an explorer peeling the mystery from a newly found planet. Those gigantic boulders, those slender, high-crowned trees, those dangling snaky vines, all were products of a raw, elemental mystery straight out of evolution’s belly, which now I was about to penetrate. That dark jungle was the gate to something strange and terrible, I thought, yet I was not frightened so much as I was stirred, deeply moved, by the vision of those sleek cliffs and tendriled avenues. This was the world that existed before man came. This was as it was when there were no godhouses, no drainers, no Port Justiciary: only the silent leafy paths, and the surging rivers scouring the valleys, and the unplumbed ponds, and the long heavy leaves glistening with the jungle’s exhalations, and the unhunted prehistoric beasts turning in the ooze, and the fluttering winged things that knew no fear, and the grassy plateaus, and the veins of precious metals, a virgin kingdom, and over everything brooding the presence of the gods, of the god, of the god, waiting for the time of worshipers. The lonely gods who did not yet know they were divine. The lonely god.