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didn't think so.
'He was in the corridor,' explained the man who'd found me. 'I told him to go
away. He's an outworlder.'
As this revelation was made - quite unnecessarily, as it was obvious to anyone
who cared to look. I flicked the light back to the worshippers, hoping that it
might awaken their curiosity.
One face - only one - turned my way. It was a small boy, and he took just one
quick glance at me before he looked away again. I saw an expression of utmost
horror in his pale pink eyes.
The priests weren't scared of me, I knew that. If anything, they felt
revulsion. My mind went back to the faces of Rion Mavra, of Coria and Khemis,
and the beautiful
Angelina. And the gunmen. I could see now what had been behind their stony
expressions and their silence. Perhaps - in Mavra's case, at least - a long
way behind, deeply buried beneath diplomacy and necessity, but there
nevertheless. How else could a chosen people regard those who had elected to
go to hell?
'You must go,' said the priest whose service I had interrupted. 'You cannot
stay here. Go, at once.'
'Where?' I asked him. 'Where do I go?'
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ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
'Anywhere,' said the priest. 'There is nothing for you here. The people will
not see you. There is nothing for you here. You must go.'
'I want something to eat,' I said. 'Some clean clothes.' 'No one will give you
anything,' he said. 'Suppose I take it?' I said, feeling an edge of real
hatred creeping into my voice.
'We will not see you,' said the priest, and promptly looked straight ahead
again.
He took up his recitation again. I glanced back at the priest who had
discovered me. He was studiously looking elsewhere, and while I stared at him
he assumed the air of one going about his proper business and moved away,
quietly and respectfully.
Deliberately, I shone the beam into the eyes of the speaking priest. He did
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not blink. I moved closer, making the beam more intense and more direct. It
must have hurt him, but he did not show by the slightest sign that anything
was happening. Suddenly, I
had become the invisible man.
I went back into the corridor, and began opening the other doors, searching
for food and water and clothing. I found water, and I found a thick overall
which enabled me to replace my filthy trousers.
I washed my hands slowly and carefully, realising for the first time that they
were badly blistered. I am inordinately sensitive about my hands - a pilot has
to have good hands to handle a ship well - and the blisters brought home the
fact that I had plunged neck-deep into bad trouble. I paused to wonder what
was wrong with me, sure that I would never have acted this way in the old
days. But that soon passed, and I began to wonder once again what I was going
to do next. The weird attitude of the people had caught me completely by
surprise. What was the point of being free if nobody would see me? But I
knew full well that if I tried to go back to the capital, steal a spacesuit
and get back to the
Swan, the armed miners would have no difficulty in seeing me and shoving me
right back into my cosy cell. And this time they'd be more careful about
letting me out. When I
was good and ready, I went back outside.
" Okay, said the wind, so you're an ace burglar. You can steal what you like.
So what?
'Somewhere,' I said, 'there has to be someone who can tell me where to find
whatever it is that's caused all the trouble.'
" Sure, he agreed. But how are you going to get him to look at you, let alone
tell you what he knows?
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ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
I didn't know.
6
Once upon a time, long before the
Javelin ploughed a ditch in the black rock of
Lapthorn's Grave, Lapthorn and I had occasion to set the
Fire-Eater down on a world which had pretensions to being a planet of beauty
and elegance. The people there thought very highly of themselves and had a
generally low opinion of everybody else. As a nut cult, I suppose, they were
no less unusual than the worm-like citizens of Rhapsody, but they certainly
seemed to have a lot more to be proud of (and conceited about). However, I
don't like cults of any kind, and I probably wouldn't have liked them any
better than I
liked the Exclusive Rewardists even if they hadn't been so consistently nasty
to me. They thought that Lapthorn and I were pretty poor specimens, both
physically and idealistically, and they lost no opportunity to offer us
evidence of our failings.
In the main square of the port where we made landfall stood a monument which
carried a proud boast of their ambitions and their philosophy. The statue was
corny enough - a stylised athlete in the classical mould. The ancient Greeks
had produced hundreds just as good, but because the cultists had plonked
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