“Are you certain my crystals are from New Sonora?”
“Oh yes. If you like, we can run them through a spectroscope, but that will only confirm what I’ve told you. The colors and structure are definitely those of Carson’s crystal. They’re unique to this world, and absolutely worthless.”
“Doesn’t their very uniqueness confer some value?”
“Not when there are hundreds of tons of them available from Xerxes’s mine and not when there’s nothing they’re good for except their pretty colors and any decent fabricator can make you glass baubles that look twice as nice. You might as well try to peddle our sand and rocks.”
I nodded morosely. “There’s no practical use for them at all?”
“Other than junk jewelry? Not to my knowledge.” The factor stuffed another petal into her mouth and chewed voluptuously.
“But I’ve got a ton-and-a-half of the stuff sitting in my hold. Certainly there was a reason why it was mined and shipped.”
Cotita Lazzeri smiled blissfully and for a moment I caught a tantalizing glimpse of the once-beautiful woman trapped within this leathery-skinned creature of almost indeterminate age and sex.
“Oh, Xavier Xerxes had a reason. I’m certain your consignee on Beautiful, or wherever, must have gotten it from him. Xerxes the Zany we call him here in Saguaro. He’s a local character, an offworlder from Kingfire who’s convinced that there must be something on New Sonora that will make his fortune. He’s the kind of man who believes that someday he’ll find a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, so long as he just looks hard enough. He’s been looking now for sixteen or seventeen years with no results, except for this stuff.” The factor shrugged and handed the crystal back to me. “For the last year or so he’s been trying to get people interested in these things. He’s got a mine out in the Hormagaunts. Obviously, he sold your load to some sucker offworld. God knows what Xerxes told him they were good for. He’ll be using the money, I suppose, for research.”
“Research on the crystals?”
Cotita Lazzeri laughed. “What else? I’ve heard that he’s managed to talk some Museum of Man scientists into coming here to examine them.” She gestured indulgently. “What a joke! He’s convinced himself that they must have some secret capabilities just waiting to be discovered.” She plucked and ate another petal and her eyes grew even vaguer.
“What you’re telling me is that no one here sees any value in my crystals except Xavier Xerxes and he has no reason to buy them.”
“Exactly. He’s already got a mountain full of them.” The factor’s head wobbled uncertainly.
“Do you think there’s any use in talking to him?”
“He’s nothing but a hard-luck prospector looking for a pot of gold he’ll never find. I wouldn’t waste my time if I were you.”
With no more information to be gained, I bounced to my feet in the light gravity with the appearance of far more exuberance than I actually felt and left Cotita Lazzeri to her flower petals.
“Does it take long to learn to ride these ’flies?” I asked, speaking into Rebona Myking’s right ear at our cruising height of about a thousand feet. I felt detached, isolated from the world below. Except for the soft hiss of scented wind whispering past my ears the sky was as silent as the noiseless vacuum of space.
“Only a few hours. This little bar in front of my saddle controls our course. The biogeneticists who settled the planet modified the ’flies’ skeleton to make a bone-like joystick growing out of their spine. When you move it, directional nerve impulses are sent to its brain, not that the ’flies’ brains are very big, but they’re large enough to let them take us where we tell them to go.” She tossed her head and laughed gaily. “Usually, that is. Sometimes they have a mind of their own.”
A few minutes later I saw what she meant. The butterfly went into a long slow spiral that seemed to be centered on a thick cluster of giant cacti in an otherwise barren stretch of rocky desert. The ’fly’s enormous scarlet wings, filigreed with an intricate pattern of green and blue, fluttered once, then became rigid as we drifted lower. Although I was securely strapped into the leather saddle that sat athwart the bony blue crest running down the middle of the ’fly’s back, I involuntarily clenched my knees around the saddle.
“Don’t worry,” Rebona assured me, “the saddle is bonded to the carapace by a natural resin made from dead ’flies’ connective tissue. It can’t fall off, and neither can you.”
“Is she going to land on that cactus?”
“The narco-flowers are a treat for the ’flies as well as for humans—it’s no use trying to steer her away. We’re just going to have to be patient until she’s drunk her fill.”
I sat back and tried to enjoy the view as we glided down to the spine-studded plant. The genetic tinkering with the local cacti by the planet’s first settlers had borne spectacular fruit.
There were two kinds of giant “cacti” on New Sonora. One was what our butterfly was now homing in on, the Demon Lover, a huge cone-shaped plant on which grew the prized narco-flowers. The other was what the natives perversely called “saguaros,” although the local variety bore as much resemblance to the Terran cactus as a goldfish does to a great white shark.
I had gotten a good look at the so-called saguaros on my aircar ride in from the landing field. Except for a few industrial buildings for such things as generating power and processing toxic materials, the city of Saguaro was almost entirely composed of the plants. All of the region’s inhabitants lived in the barrel-shaped succulents, although calling them “pumpkins” would have made far more sense than “saguaros.”
If you took a giant green pumpkin, hollowed it out, put the top back on, and then carved away at its sides until you had eight widely spaced staves curving up to fuse together into a single massive green capstone, you’d have a New Sonoran saguaro, except that in this case the capstone was broad enough, and thick enough, to host a game of tennis.
While awesome, their gigantic size was easily understandable. Even in the far heavier gravity of Earth there were giant sequoias and eucalypti well over 300 feet in height. And the ship’s database told me that each of the saguaro’s eight staves was anchored to the desert floor by massive networks of giant roots. In New Sonora’s lighter gravity, creating these cacti would have been child’s play for the two or three generations of eccentric genetic engineers who had amused themselves by growing 20-foot butterflies. And as a final refinement, they had induced titanium-precipitating microbes to live in a symbiotic relationship within the cactus staves. Not only did this help support the gigantic plants, it also enabled the locals to smelt the plant for profit when it died. True ingenuity!
Now practically the entire population lived inside plants that even in the blast-furnace atmosphere of New Sonora were cool and moist and that, except for the cost of installing utility runs, elevators, and ventilation systems, were essentially free.
The Demon Lover cacti were just as tall as the great saguaros but were shaped like knobby green cones. Growing from bases a hundred feet in diameter, their bodies tapered to a blunt, rounded summit almost hidden beneath a dense crown of yellow and orange blossoms.
The nearer we drew to the monstrous Demon Lover plant, the more impressive it became. In addition to having ordinary needles like Terrestrial cacti, this succulent’s tough, fibrous surface also sported a veritable forest of fronds, limbs, and branches, as well as a host of parasitic vines and plants.