"When can I leave, sir?" Mjipa asked.
"Well, there's forms to fill out, and I don't know when Glumelin will be up to it—"
"Oh, bugger Boris! Let's go to your office and fill them now. You still have the authority."
Kennedy sighed. "Such a nice party, too! But let me make one thing clear, Percy. You're not authorized to start a private guerilla war against Khorosh, merely because you don't like how he treats Dyckman. You may defend yourself, of course. If Dyckman has violated their laws, you may use their legal system, whatever it is, to defend her. But so long as they stick to their own system of justice, you must do the same."
"Even if they sentence her to be burned at the stake for using the wrong spoon at dinner?"
"Well—you don't have to put up with absurdities. So long as they follow civilized procedure—"
"Some civilized peoples have burned people for no worse offenses."
"Oh, use your common sense, man! If you have any, that is." As they started off, Kennedy added:"Hadn't you better go Krishnan? The Khaldoni nations aren't used to Earthmen yet. They may fear them."
Mjipa shook his head. "No, I'll go as I am. It would take a barrel of makeup to keep my skin and hair from resuming their natural appearance, and it's not worth it. I should have to spend an hour a day making up, gluing on feelers and false ears, and I shan't have that kind of leisure. Besides, since Krishna has no really black races, my color is useful in getting the upper hand over the blokes. It awes them."
"Be careful one of them isn't so awed he puts a spear through you!"
"I'll watch my step. Have you a set of those gift certificates on Sivird's shop? I may need them. And where's Angioletti? I need some Krishnan cash. Also, he's an American, so perhaps he can give me advice on handling headstrong American women."
Karrim, the largest of Krishna's three moons, had thrice circled the planet when the Jafez of Majbur put in to Kalwm Harbor. Roqir shone dimly through a light overcast. The striped sails flapped feebly in a near-calm, and the crew were manning sweeps to row into the harbor. The air was hot, humid, and breathless.
Sweat beaded the shiny black skin of Percy Mjipa, leaning on his elbows on the rail of the forecastle and slowly puffing a pipe. He stared at the low, flat shoreline and the low, dun-colored buildings behind it. Still farther back, a huge structure loomed over the city. It formed a truncated cone with only a slight taper, so that it reminded Mjipa of one" of the cooling towers of a Terran power-generating plant. Irregularities around the top of the structure implied that construction was still proceeding.
Aside from sandals, Mjipa's only visible garment was an abbreviated kilt, checkered in white and purple squares. The Krishnans of Kalwm and its neighbors, when they wore any clothes at all, affected this garment. Around Mjipa's neck hung a rectangular tablet of synthetic jade, the size of a hand, bearing the wearer's name and title in five Krishnan languages.
Nobody would have mistaken Mjipa for a Krishnan. The sailors, being Daryava, went naked save in cold weather. Scurrying about to lower the sails, they were of generally human shape, with light-brown skins of slightly greenish cast and dark-green bluish hair. They differed from Terrans in many minor anatomical details, such as the pointed ears; the external organs of smell, a pair of feathery antennae, like extra eyebrows just above the real ones; an3 the less prominent organs of sex. Whereas most Krishnans averaged as tall as the taller human races, at nearly 200 centimeters Percy Mjipa overtopped them all.
Over Mjipa's right shoulder was slung a baldric of purple-dyed leather, supporting a Krishnan sword in its scabbard. Depending from the other shoulder, its straps crossing the baldric, was a large leather wallet or musette bag, containing the petty possessions that Mjipa would, in a cooler climate, have carried in pockets. The belt that upheld the kilt also supported a formidable dirk. A bulky canvas bag lay at Mjipa's feet.
The triangular sails were down and furled at last. Near the harbor entrance, a rattle of chain announced that the anchor was dropped. The Jafez halted, rocking slightly in the low swell.
Speaking fluent Gozashtandou, Mjipa asked Captain Takhriclass="underline" "Wherefore the delay?"
Moving his jaw with a chew of salaf root, the Krishnan skipper waved to indicate two other ships anchored in the nearby shallows. He spat over the rail and said: "Customs. We must needs await our turn, as must all other seaborne wights of less than royal rank."
They'll take all day, Mjipa thought, with their damned native inefficiency, and then probably want a bribe to pass us through.
"Captain," he said, "what's that, pray?" He pointed to the tall structure ashore.
"That?" said the captain. "Oh, yon tower be that which the present Heshvavu, Vuzhov the Visionary, doth erect in hopes of storming the very heavens and demanding honored place amongst the gods. Of course, ye and I do wit that the planet be round like a ball, and that the heavens above be but empty space. But once ashore, suffer not the whisper of such an heretical dogma to reach the ears of our moon-struck monarch or his spies, lest you be served as Qarar served the king of 'Ishk in the story."
"You mean he cuts off the heads of those who say the world is round?"
"Aye, sir. Their sacred books have it that 'tis flat, so flat it must be by royal fiat. Throughout his reign hath Vuzhov driven his folk to swink on this tower; but all along of his building, he finds that, no matter how high he build, Heaven still eludes his besotted grasp. So instead of revising his opinions like a man of sense, he waxes tetchy and irascible in enforcing that which already molders in what he clepes his brain, albeit 'twere more likely that his skull doth harbor nought but a porridge of mashed tabid and shaihan milk. Do Terrans e'er fall into the same whim wham?"
"Yes," said Mjipa, thinking that the great vice of the Krishnan peoples was not factiousness but oratory. "We once had a great navigator who, before our planet was well explored, sought by sailing across the sea to find a continent called Asia. He did not know that two other continents, joined together, lay athwart his path. So, when he came upon this obstacle, he made his crew sign a document that they had reached Asia. But that did not change the reality."
"Ah me, 'tis plain as the peaks of Darya that ye have the same faults as we. As saith Nehavend, the gods who made men wise also made them foolish, lest they use their wisdom to seize Heaven and cast down the gods from their golden thrones." Shaking his head, Captain Takhril went off to give orders.
Mjipa opened the duffel bag at his feet and dug out two small books: a Gozashtandou-Khaldoni dictionary, and a Portuguese-Khaldoni phrase book. Sourly he thought, how would you say: "Move your arses, you blithering incompetents"? Or: "Sir innkeeper, there is a lizardlike thing as long as my arm under my bed. What should I do with it"? More realistically, he bent his attention to the polite phrases of greeting and questioning, muttering as he reviewed them.
Captain Takhril came back. Mjipa asked: "You know this town from previous visits, do you not?"
"Aye, sir; Kalwm City and I be old copemates. I ken its alleys and its avenues as I do the lines on my palm."
"Then how does one get to Irants's Inn? Gorbovast in, Majbur referred me to it."
"Best ask a public street car man to carry you thither."
"Street cars?" said Mjipa. "Aye. See ye them yonder?"
The captain handed Mjipa his brass telescope. Squinting through the tube, Mjipa made out a row of man-sized boxes on wheels.
Then the customs officials arrived, to stare at Mjipa's color and look through his bag. They were smaller and darker than the more northerly Krishnan races, and their smelling antennae were conspicuously longer. Mjipa tried out his Khaldoni for "Good afternoon," which brought the Krishnan equivalent of a smile and a rattle of speech in the Kalwmian dialect, too fast too follow.