Bagshaw was a different kind of man. Sherret couldn’t imagine him handing over his ship to the assistant cook and staying in bed till noon because the assistant cook didn’t believe in early rising.
“It’s time to get me a new ship,” said Sherret aloud to the empty cabin. There was an initial difficulty, however, about that. Bagshaw’s ship, the Pegasus, had landed some three hundred miles away, at a place called by the natives Na-Abiza.
There was a lot of rough country in between. Largely unknown country, inhabited by unknown creatures. Maybe many, maybe few. Maybe hostile, maybe not. Judging from the samples of life hitherto encountered within a radius of twenty miles around Maxton’s ship, there was the promise of novelty. The road to Na-Abiza should be interesting—so long as one remained alive and capable of interest. Thoughtfully Sherret chewed on his B-stick and through the porthole watched the cyclorama of the sky as Amara cruised between her parent suns. Captain Maxton returned as the chronometer ticked the last seconds of the half-hour.
“Well, Sherret?”
“I should be grateful if you’d pack me some sandwiches for the trek, sir. Preferably ham. With just a spot of mustard.”
Red and Yellow shared this sky, while Blue dominated the other side of the world. Sherret shaded his eyes with an orange hand and stared back into orange distance. He’d come five miles, maybe, and the ship was becoming difficult to pick out in the landscape. There were conical rocks around it, and the shape he thought was the ship’s nose was possibly only a rock.
When it came right down to it, a man felt lonely when he’d left the community he’d lived in for so long. It was a bitter sort of comfort to know that that community would presently dissolve into chaos, conflict, and possibly bloodshed. But there it was. He must make his own way.
So far he had met, to speak to, only two Amarans, although he had seen others carefully not seeing him in the middle distance. For the most part, the local Amarans had steered clear of the humans since the obtuse Brewster had shot a fat and iridescent bird and brought it home for the cooking pot. The bird turned out to be a council member in a colony of a highly intelligent species of Bird-Amarans. The blunder was, on the surface, forgiven, because there were Birds and birds on Amara, and the latter were truly bird-brained. Nevertheless, the Bird-Amarans afterwards made it plain that they classed humans with the bird-brains so far as intelligence went. And they did not fly within gunshot again. All other intelligent Amarans also kept their distance. The two types of Amarans with whom the humans could be said to have established any contact were both humanoid and weak-minded.
Humanoid, anyhow. The feeble-mindedness was a spontaneous deduction, but some of the crew had had occasion to think twice about it. The Earthmen had named the types the Paddies and the Jackies. It was a Paddy whom Sherret first encountered on his trek. A hairy, stocky creature with a low gradient forehead and an apelike shamble. Thick was the adjective applied to him—thick in build, in speech, in head. He greeted Sherret surlily, “Don’t kill me, human, because if you do I shall kill you.”
This typical kind of remark had earned the creature its sobriquet. Sherret smiled. “Don’t be afraid, I shan’t kill you. I’m only out for a walk. Have you ever been to Na-Abiza?”
“Yes, I have, human, but I didn’t get there.”
“Why not?”
“Because it wasn’t there when I got there.”
“But you just said you didn’t get there.”
“Of course I didn’t, human, if it wasn’t there.”
“Well, is it there now?”
“How can I tell? I’m here, not there.”
Sherret laughed and abandoned the attempt. Such crosstalk could go on indefinitely. In trying to learn something of the nature of the flora and fauna of Amara by questioning the dour Paddies, the Earthmen had achieved a state of utter confusion. Lifeforms here were weird, certainly. Maybe the Paddies had the right approach in describing them in terms of Irishisms.
He bade the Paddy good-bye and walked on.
He ran into the Jackie a mile further on. When a Jackie stood upright he was, on the average, eight feet tall. As his spine was rubbery he seldom stood upright. Jackies were fleshless and gangling, hinged at every point. The jaw hinge was particularly notable. When a Jackie laughed, the top half of his head lifted clear away. And Jackies always laughed.
Jackie was a diminutive of jackass.
“Good morning,” said Sherret.
The Jackie at once became convulsed with laughter. Jackies laughed at the slightest thing. At first you thought they were laughing at nothing at all. Then you tended to re-examine what you’d said. Perhaps you had said something funny. Or, at any rate, foolish.
Come to think of it, Sherret reflected, it was foolish to wish anyone good morning on Amara, where there was no morning. Nor afternoon, nor evening, nor night. It was always day—of a kind.
The laugh continued to saw through the still air, and Sherret reflected further that there was something disturbing about a Jackie’s laugh. It was more than a mere ass bray. There was a maniacal strain, like the release of the hysteria of a sex-killer at the moment of consummation. And yet there was more irony than cruelty in it. The laugher knew you were a fool, but knew that he was too. He was laughing at the nture of things which made sport of him and of you.
There was bitterness because he had been formed as he was. But this was countered by a note of triumph because in some non-human way he knew more about destiny than you could guess.
It was a devilishly knowing laugh. When it had died away, the Jackie asked in his peculiarly twanging voice, as though his vocal cords were of thin steel wire, “Where are you going, human?”
“Na-Abiza.”
Again Sherret waited patiently for the laugh to end. “Abiza,” in what seemed to be the common language of Amara (for even the Bird-Amarans shrilled it) was a verb as well as a place name. The verb described a bodily function. “Na” meant, variously, no, negative, or unable.
“Na-Abiza” could mean constipation. Naturally, the Jackie chose to see it that way. When he had laughed his fill, and become untwisted and a recognizably humanoid shape again, the Jackie said, “I wish you an interesting journey. But beware of those who have only two, of those two become three, of that which becomes many.”
“Well, thanks a lot,” said Sherret. “But do you have to be so cryptic?”
Even on second thought he could see nothing particularly humorous in this question. But immediately the Jackie was again overtaken by helpless mirth. With repetition, this sort of reaction could become irritating.
“One day you’ll die laughing,” said Sherret, with a touch of impatience, and strode on.
It was some time before the unsettling sound was finally lost in the horny brush behind him.
Eventually he left the thorn belt, crossed an ankle-twisting area of loose rock, then climbed the ridge from which the rocks had rolled. It was there he paused for a parting look back at the ship—if it was the ship.
He’d come this far in this direction before, but he had only a rough notion of the terrain beyond the ridge. Somewhere there was a lake whose western edge he would have to skirt. He went onto the crest and then along it for some distance until he came to a high promontory. He scaled it.
From the summit he took survey. A plain stretched to the horizon. A small section of the horizon was thickened by a bright orange streak. That was the lake. He took a bearing, then picked his way down to the plain.
It was featureless and seemed interminable. Coarse grass matted it. Sometimes he walked springily over the thick tangle. Sometimes his foot sank into a loose patch of it and the grass wound itself around his boot as if it were trying to drag him below ground.