I departed the hillock and returned to the place I had left. There was a raft that needed building.
VII
As I lamented my missing cowardice--it had been such a lifesaving virtue in the past--it responded by rushing back and leaving me scared as hell once again.
I'd lived far too long, and with every day that passed the odds kept growing against my lasting much longer. Although they didn't put it quite that way when giving the sales pitch, my insurance company's attitude is reflected in the size of the premiums involved. Their computer classified me along with terminal xenopath cases, according to their rates and my spies. Comforting. Probably right, too. This was the first piece of dangerous business I had been out on in a long while. I felt out of practice, though I was not sorry I had skimped. If Green Green noticed that my hands were shaking, he made no comment. They held his life, and he felt badly enough about this as it was. He was in a position now to kill me any time he wanted, if you stop to think about it very carefully. He knew it. I knew it. And he knew I knew it. And ...
The only thing that was holding him back was the fact that he needed me to get him off of Illyria--which, logically, meant that his ship was on the isle. Which, by extension, meant that if Shandon had a ship at his disposal, he could come looking for us by air, despite our hallucinatory companions' feelings with respect to a confrontation. Which meant that we would be better off working under the trees than on the beach, and that our voyage required the cover of night. Accordingly, I moved our project inland. Green Green thought this a very good idea.
The cloud cover cracked that afternoon as we assembled the raft, but it did not break completely. The rain continued, the day grew a bit brighter, and two white, white moons passed overhead--Kattontallus and Flopsus--lacking only grins and eye-sockets.
Later in the day a silver insect, three times the size of the _Model T_ and ugly as a grub, left the isle and circled the lake six times, spiraling outward, then inward. We were under a lot of foliage, burrowed our ways beneath more, stayed there until it returned to the isle. I clutched my ancient artifact the while. The bunny did not sell me out.
We finished the raft a couple hours before sundown and spent the balance of the day with our backs against the boles of adjacent trees.
"A penny for your thoughts," I said.
"What is a penny?"
"An ancient monetary unit, once common on my home planet. On second thought, don't take me up on it. They're valuable now."
"It is strange to offer to buy a thought. Was this a common practice among your people, in the old days?"
"It had to do with the rise of the merchant classes," I said. "Everything has a price, and all that."
"That is a very interesting concept, and I can see how one such as yourself could well believe in it. Would you buy a _pai'badra?_"
"That would be barratry. A _pai'badra_ is a cause for an action."
"But would you pay a person to abandon his vengeance against you?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"You would take my money and still seek the vengeance, hoping to lull me into a sense of false security."
"I was not speaking of myself. You know that I am wealthy, and that a Pei'an does not abandon his vengeance for any reason. --No. I was thinking of Mike Shandon. He is of your race, and may also believe that everything has a price. As I recall it, he incurred your disfavor in the first place because he needed money and did things that offended you in order to obtain it. Now he hates you because you sent him to prison and then killed him. But since he is of your race, which places a monetary value upon all things, perhaps you might pay him sufficient money for his _pai'badra_ so that he will be satisfied and go away."
Buy our way out? The thought hadn't occurred to me. I had come to Illyria ready to fight with a Pei'an menace. Now I held him in my hand and he was no longer a menace. An Earthman had replaced him as my number one enemy of the moment, and there was a possibility that this assessment was correct. We are a venal lot, not necessarily moreso than all of the other races--but certainly more than some. It had been Shandon's expensive tastes that had gotten him into a bind in the first place. Things had happened quickly since my arrival on Illyria, and strangely enough--for me and my Tree--it had not occurred to me that my money might be my salvation.
On the other hand, considering Shandon's record as a spender--a thing brought out at the first trial and at the appellate level--he went through money like a _betta splendens_ through that most liquid of all aichemical elements. Say I gave him a half million in universal credit drafts. Anybody else could invest it and live on the dividends. He would go through it in a couple years. Then I would have problems again. He would have hit me this once, and he would figure he could do it again. And of course I could come through again. I could come through any time. So maybe he would not want to kill his golden goose. But then again, I'd never know for sure. I could not live with that.
Still, if he were agreeable, I could buy him off now. Then I could arrange for a team of professional assassins to take him out of the game as soon as possible.
But if they should fail ...
Then he would be on my tail immediately, and it would be him or me again.
I turned it over, looked at it from every possible angle. Ultimately, it boiled down to one thing.
He'd had a gun with him, but he'd tried to kill me with his hands.
"It won't work with Shandon," I said. "He's not a member of the merchant class."
"Oh. I meant no offense. I still do not quite understand how these things work with Earthmen."
"You're not alone in that."
I watched the day fade away and the clouds zip themselves together once again. Soon it would be time to carry the raft to the shore and make our ways across the now temperate waters. There would be no moonlight to assist us.
"Green Green," I said, "in you I see myself, as perhaps I have become more Pei'an than Earthman. I do not think this is the real reason, however, for everything that I am now is but an extension of something that was already within me. I, too, can kill as you would kill and hold with my _pai'badra_ come hell or high water."
"I know that," he said, "and I respect you for it."
"What I am trying to say is that when this thing is over, if we should both live through it, I might welcome you as a friend. I might intercede for you with the other Names, that you have another chance at confirmation. I might like to see a high priest of Strantri, in the Name of Kirwar of the Four Faces, Father of Flowers, should He be willing."
"You are trying to find my price now, Earthman."
"No, I am making a legitimate offer. Take it as you would. As yet, you have given me no _pai'badra_."
"By trying to kill you?"
"Under false _pai'badra_. This does not bother me."
"You know that I may slay you whenever I wish?"
"I know that you think so."
"I had thought this thing better shielded."
"It is a matter of deduction, not telepathy."
"You _are_ much like a Pei'an," he said, after a moment. "I promise you that I will withhold my vengeance until after we have dealt with Shandon."
"Soon," I said. "Soon we shall depart."
And we sat there and waited for the night to fall. After a time, it did.
"Now," I said.
"Now," and we stood and raised the raft between us.
We carried it down to the water's edge, waded out into the warm shallows, set it a-drifting.