On the pad grew other vegetation: shrubs rooted in the spongy tissue, a thicket of bamboolike rods yielding a goodquality withe, epiphytes hanging from the central spike of the sea-plant-this rising twenty or thirty feet to terminate in a coarse white spore-producing organ. Most of the plants of the pad yielded produce of benefit to man: fruit, fiber, dye, drug or decorative foliage. On other pads the plants might be ordered according to aesthetic theory; Sklar Hast had small taste in these matters, and the center of his pad was little more than an untidy copse of various stalks, fronds, tendrils and leaves, in various shades of black, green and rusty orange.
Sklar Hast reckoned himself a lucky man. As a Hoodwink by caste and assistant Master Hoodwink by trade he enjoyed a not inconsiderable prestige. Standing before his hut, Sklar Hast watched the gold and lavender dusk and its dark pastel reflection in the ocean. The afternoon rain had freshened and cooled the air; now the evening breeze arose to rustle the foliage and brush susurrations across the water… Chaezy Zander was growing old, Sklar Hast wondered how long the old man would persist in fulfilling the rigorous exactitude of his duties. True, he showed no lapse whatever in precision or flexibility of usage, but almost insensibly his speed was falling off. Sklar Hast could outwink him without difficulty should he choose to do so; a capability which Sklar Hast, for all his blunmess, had so far not demonstrated. Useless folly to irritate the old man! Sklar Hast suspected that even now he delayed his retirement mainly out of jealousy and antipathy toward Sklar Hast.
There was no hurry. Life seemed to extend ahead of him as wide and lucid as the dreaming expanse of water and sky which filled his vision. On this water-world, which had no name, there were no seasons, no tides, no storms, no change. very little anxiety regarding time. Sklar Hast was currently testing five or six girls of orthodox Hoodwink background for marital suitability. In due course, he would make a choice, and enlarge his hut. And forever abandon privacy, Sklar Hast reflected wistfully. There was definitely no need for haste.
He would continue to test such girls as were eligible, and perhaps a few others as well- Meanwhile, life was good. In the lagoon hung arbors on which grew the succulent spongelike organisms which when cleaned, plucked and boiled formed the staple food of the Hoat-folk. The lagoon teemed likewise with other edible fish, separated from the predators of the ocean by the enormous net which hung in a great hemisphere from various buoys, pads and the main float-this a complex of ancient pads, compressed, wadded and interlocked to create an unbroken surface five acres in area and varying from two feet to six feet in thickness. There was much other food available: spores from the sea-plant fruiting organ, from which a crusty bread could be baked. There were in addition other flowers, tendrils and bulbs, as well as the prized flesh of the gray-fish to take which the Swindlers must fare forth in their coracles and cunningly swindle from the ocean, which horizon to horizon, pole to pole, enveloped the entire surface of me world.
Sklar Hast turned his eyes up to the skies, where the constellations already blazed with magnificent ardor. To the south, half up the sky, hung a cluster of twenty-five middlebright stars, from which, so tradition asserted, his ancestors had fled in the Ship of Space, finally to reach the world of water. Eighty-three persons, of various castes, managed to disembark before the ship foundered and sank; the eightythree had become twenty thousand, scattered east and west along fifty miles of floating sea-plant. The castes so jealously differentiated during the first few generations, with the Bezzlers at the top and the Advertisermen at the bottom, had now accommodated themselves to one another and were even intermingling. There was little to disturb the easy flow of life; nothing harsh nor unpleasant-except, perhaps, King Kragen.
Sklar Hast made a sour face and examined those three of his arbors which only two days before had been plucked clean by King Kragen, whose appetite as well as his bulk grew by the year. Sklar Hast scowled westward across the ocean, in the direction from which King Kragen customarily appeared, moving with long strokes of his four propulsive vanes, in a manner to suggest some vast, distorted, grotesquely ugly anthropoid form swimming by means of the breaststroke. There, of course, the resemblance to man ended. King Kragen's body was tough black cartilage, a cylinder on a rectangle, from the comers of which extended the vanes. The cylinder comprising King Kragen's main bulk opened forward in a maw fringed with four mandibles and eight palps, and aft in an anus. Atop this cylinder, somewhat to the front, rose a turret from which the four eyes protruded: two peering forward, two aft. During Sklar Hast's lifetime King Kragen had grown perceptibly, and now measured perhaps sixty feet in length. King Kragen was a terrible force for destruction, but luckily could be placated. King Kragen enjoyed copious quantities of sponges and when his appetite was appeased he injured no one and did no damage; indeed he kept the area clear of other marauding kragen, which either he killed or sent flapping and skipping in a panic across the ocean.
Sklar Hast's attention was attracted by a dark swirl in the water at the edge of the net: a black bulk surrounded by glistening cusps and festoons of starlit water. Sklar Hast ran forward to the edge of the pad, peered. No question about it! A lesser kragen was attempting to break the net that it might plunder the lagoon!
Sklar Hast shouted a curse, shook his fist, turned, ran at full speed across the pad. He jumped into his coracle, crossed the twenty feet of water to the central float. He delayed only long enough to tie the coracle to a stake formed of a human femur, then ran at top speed to the hoodwink tower.
A mile to the west me tower on Thrasneck Float flickered its lamps, the configurations coming with the characteristic style of Durdan Fair, the Thrasneck Master Hoodwink: "… thirteen… bushels… of… salt… lost… when… a … barge… took… water… between… Sumber … and… Adelvine…"
Sklar Hast climbed the ladder, burst into the cupola. He pointed to the lagoon. "A rogue, breaking the nets. I just saw him. Call King Kragen!"
Chaezy Zander instantly flashed the cut-in signal. His fingers jammed down rods, he kicked the release. "Call…
King… Kragen!" he signaled. "Rogue… in… Tranque … Lagoon!"
On Thrasneck Float Durden Fan- relayed the message to me tower on Bickle Float, and so along the line of floats to Sciona at the far west, who thereupon returned the signaclass="underline"
"King… Kragen… is… nowhere… or… hand."
Back down the line of towers flickered die message, returning to Tranque Float in something short of sixty seconds.
Sklar Hast read the message as it left the Bickle Tower. before reaching Thrasneck, and rushed over to the side of the cupola, to peer down into the lagoon.
. Others had now discovered the rogue kragen and set up a shout to the tower "Call King Kragen!" Sklar Hast shouted In return, "He can't be found!" Chaezy Zander, tight-lipped, was already dispatching another message: "To… the… various… intercessors… along… the… line. Kindly … summon… King… Kragen… and… direct… him… to… Tranque… Float."
Sklar Hast pointed and bellowed, "Look! The beast has broken the net! Where is Voidenvo?"
He swung down the ladder, ran to the edge of the lagoon.
The kragen, a beast perhaps fifteen feet in length, was surging easily through the water, a caricature of a man performing the breaststroke. Starlight danced and darted along the disturbed water, and so outlined the gliding black bulk. Sklar Hast cried out in fury: the bnite was headed for his arbors, so recently devastated by the appetite of King Kragen! It could not be borne! He ran to his coracle, returned to his. pad.