<h2>6</h2>
<p>All the next day Green was too busy setting up the schedule of the
hunting party to have time to be gloomy. But when night came he seemed
to fold up inside himself. Could he pretend to be sick, too, and be
left behind when the party set out?</p>
<p>No, for they would at once assume that he had been possessed by a
demon and would pack him off to the Temple of Apoquoz, God of Healing.
There he'd be under lock and key until he proved himself healthy. The
terrible part about going to the Temple of Apoquoz was that it made
death almost inevitable. If you didn't die of your own disease you
caught somebody else's.</p>
<p>Green wasn't worried about catching any of the many diseases he'd be
exposed to in the Temple. Like all men of terrestrial descent, he
carried in his body a surgically implanted protoplasmic entity which
automatically analyzed any invading microscopic organisms and/or
viruses and manufactured antibodies to combat them. It lived in the
space created by the removal of his appendix; when working to fulfill
its mission it demanded food and radiated a heat that assured its host
of its heartening presence. An increased appetite plus a slight fever
indicated that it was killing off the disease and that within several
hours it would successfully repel any boarders. In the two years Green
had been on the planet it had had to attack at least forty times; Green
calculated that he would have been dead each and every time if it had
not been for his symbiote.</p>
<p>Knowing this didn't help him. If he played sick he'd be locked up and
couldn't get on the 'roller. If he went on the hunting party he missed
the boat, too.</p>
<p>Suppose he were to disappear the night before the party, to hide on the
windroller while the castle vainly looked for him?</p>
<p>Not very likely. The first thing that would occur to Zuni would be to
order the windbreak closed and all 'rollers searched for a possible
stowaway. And if that happened Miran would be so delayed that it was
unlikely he'd sail. Even if he, Green, hid in Miran's cabin, where he
would probably be safe, there would still be the inevitable and totally
frustrating delay.</p>
<p>Then why not disappear several days earlier, so that Miran could have
time to reload his cargo? He'd see the merchant tomorrow. If Miran fell
in with his plans, Green would disappear four nights from this very
night, which would leave three days for the windroller to be emptied
and reloaded. Fortunately the tanks wouldn't have to be taken off,
because any fool could see that the runaway wasn't hiding at the bottom
among the fish.</p>
<p>Much relieved that he at least had a way open, if a very perilous one,
Green relaxed. He was sitting on a bench along a walk on top of one of
the castle walls. The sky was blazingly beautiful with stars larger
than any seen from Earth. The great moon and the small moon had risen.
The larger had just cleared the eastern horizon and the lesser one
was just past the zenith. Mingled moonwash and starwash softened the
grimness and ugliness of the city below him and laved it in a flood of
romance and glamour. Most of Quotz was unlighted, for the streets had
no lamps and the windows were shut up tight against thieves, vampires
and demons. Occasionally the torchflares of the servants of a drunken
noble or rich man moved down the dark canyons between the towering
overhanging houses.</p>
<p>Beyond the city was the amphitheater formed by the hills curving out
to the north and the great brick wall built to continue the natural
windbreak. A wide opening had been left so that the 'rollers, their
sails furled, could be towed in or out. Past this the great plain
suddenly began, as if the hand of some immense landscaper had pressed
the hills flat and declared that from here on there would be no
unevennesses.</p>
<p>Westward lay the incredibly level stretch of the grassy ground of the
Xurdimur. Ten thousand miles straight across, flat as a table top,
broken only here and there by clumps of forests, ruins of cities,
waterholes, the tents of the nomadic savages, herds of wild animals,
packs of grass cats and dire dogs, and the mysterious and undoubtedly
imaginary "roaming islands," great clumps of rock and dirt that legend
said slid of their own volition over the plains. How like this planet,
he thought, that the greatest peril to navigation should be one that
existed only in the heads of the inhabitants.</p>
<p>The Xurdimur was a fabulous phenomenon, without parallel. On none
of the many planets that Earthmen had discovered was there anything
similar. How, he wondered, could the plain keep its smoothness, when
there was always dirt running on to it from the eroding hills and
mountains that ringed it? The rains, too, should have done much to
wear it away unevenly. Of course, the grass that grew all over it was
long and had very tough roots. And if what he had been told was true,
beneath the vegetation was one mass of inextricably tangled roots that
held the soil together.</p>
<p>There was another thing to consider, though: the winds that blew all
the way across the Xurdimur and furnished propulsion for the wheeled
sailing craft. To have winds you must have pressure differentials,
which were usually caused by heat differentials. Although the Xurdimur
was ringed by mountains there were no large eminences on it for ten
thousand miles, nothing to replenish the currents of air. Or so it
seemed to his limited knowledge of meteorology, though he did wonder
how the trade winds that swept Earth's seas managed to keep going for
so many thousands of leagues, just on their original impetus. Or did
they get boosts? He didn't know.</p>
<p>What he did know was that the Xurdimur was a thing that shouldn't
be. Yet, the very presence of men here was just as amazing, just
as preposterous. Homo sapiens was scattered throughout the Galaxy.
Everywhere that the space-traveling Earthmen had gone, they had
found that about every fourth inhabitable planet was populated by
men of their species. The proof lay not just in the outward physical
resemblance of terrestrial and extra-terrestrial; it lay in their
ability to breed. Earthman, Sirian, Albirean, Vegan, it made no
difference. Their men could have children by the women of other planets.</p>
<p>Naturally there had been many theories to account for this fact. All
had as a common basis the assumption that Homo sapiens had sometime,
somewhere, in the very remote past, originated on one planet and then
had spread out over the Galaxy from it. And, somehow, space travel had
been lost and each race had gone back to savagery, only to begin again
the long hard struggle toward civilization and the re-discovery of
spaceships. Why, no one knew. One could only guess.</p>
<p>There was the problem of language. It might seem that if man had come
from a common birthplace he would at least have kept a trace of his
home language and that the linguists could break down the development
of tongue and link one planet to another through it. But no. Every
world had its own Tower of Babel, its own ten thousand languages. The
terrestrial scientist might trace Russian and English and Swedish, and
Lithuanian and Persian and Hindustani back to a proto-Indo-European,
but he had never found on any other planet a language which he could
say had also derived from the Aryan Ursprache.</p>
<p>Green's mind wandered to the two Earthmen now imprisoned in the city of
Estorya. He hoped they weren't being treated badly. They could be in
horrible pain at this very moment, if the priests felt like subjecting
them to a little demon-testing.</p>
<p>Thinking of torture led him to sit up a little straighter and to
stretch his arms and legs. In an hour he was supposed to meet the
Duchess. To do that he had to go through the supposedly secret door
in the wall of the turret at the northern end of the walk, up a
stairway through a passage between the walls, and so to the Duchess's
apartments. There one of the maids-of-honor would usher him into Zuni's
presence and then would try to eavesdrop so she could report to the
Duke later on. Zuni and Green weren't supposed to know about this, but
were to pretend that she was their trusted confidante.</p>
<p>When the great bell of the Temple of the God of Time, Grooza, struck,
Green would rise from his bench and go to what he now thought of as
a wearisome chore. If that woman could only be interested in talking
of something else besides her complexion or digestion, or idle palace
gossip, it wouldn't be so bad. But no, she chattered on and on, and
Green would get increasingly sleepy, yet would not dare drop off for
fear of irreparably offending her. And to do that....</p>
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