The preacher was a tremendously fat man; he was also, a rarity among Terrans of his day, bald. His round, cleanshaven features bore a wide mouth beneath a blob of a nose and blue eyes beneath two bristly bushes of gray eyebrow. He had a way of screwing up the inner corners of his eyelids that gave the effect of a hypnotic glare. He wore a transmundane, the usual semisafari suit adopted by most Terrans for going about a foreign planet. But Dumfries's suit, instead of the usual khaki, was black. He leaned on a massive, crutch-headed walking stick as he rolled slowly forward like something risen from a Mesozoic swamp.
"Look, Val," began Cantemir, "this red-haired floozy—"
"I saw it all," rumbled Dumfries. "I've warned you."
The Kook policeman, identified by the symbols painted on his scaly hide, reappeared, unslinging the rifle strapped slantwise across his back. Salazar noted that the firearm was a breech-loading repeater instead of a muzzle-loading, single-shot musket such as a few years before had been the island's most advanced native weaponry. He had heard of High Chief Yaamo's efforts to modernize his armament.
Several Terrans from the Ijumo, drawn by the disturbance, followed the Kook. The reptilian officer hissed like a teakettle, and a quarter-meter of pink forked tongue flicked out and in. He said:
"Troubre iss?" Terrans unused to it could not understand it.
"No, nothing I cannot control," said Dumfries. Cantemir quietly returned his pistol to its pocket. Alexis said:
"Now you bugger off, Mr. Cantemir, or I'll have you run in!"
With a wordless growl, Cantemir turned away. He and Dumfries walked off, talking heatedly in undertones. Alexis Ritter said to the Kook in good Sungao:
"The trouble is all over, Officer."
As the policeman departed, Ritter asked: "What happened, Alexis?"
"The usual," she said. "He put it more politely, but the gist was 'How about a nice, quick fuck?' You'd better go claim your baggage."
Two nights before, after the final show of passengers' night on the Ijumo had ended and Kirk Salazar had washed off his makeup, Hilbert Ritter had said: "Hey, Kirk, come have a drink with us!"
Seated at a bar-lounge table, he continued: "Quite a show you put on, your burlesque mahatma act. All that bilge about resuming the triad in unity, engendering the cosmic tetrad. You made it sound as if it really meant something."
"I got a stitch from laughing," said Suzette Ritter. "You even got a discreet smile or two out of the Reverend Dumfries."
Ritter continued: "You surprised me. You seemed like such a quiet, shy little fellow—" Salazar winced at the word "little"
"—but on the platform you became a real spellbinder, with a hypnotic delivery. You could probably lead a cult and make ten times the money you get as assistant instructor at the U."
Salazar waved a dismissive hand. "Oh, I was in the drama club as an undergraduate, and the patter I got from a couple of occult books. Speaking of cults, I heard something of your daughter's being involved in one."
Suzette sighed. "That's our particular problem."
"Oh, I'm sorry," said Salazar. "Didn't mean to bring up a sore subject which is none of my—"
"That's all right," said Suzette. "We don't mind talking about it, especially since you'll probably run into her where you're going."
"Then are you two on this safari to look at zutas or to—ah—rescue your daughter?"
"In a sense, both," said Ritter, "though anybody who thinks he can rescue Alexis when she doesn't want to be rescued has his work cut out for him. At least, we hope to make her hold still long enough for a reasonable discussion. You might say we're in the Patel Society under false pretenses, but Igor won't mind. He's an old friend, and we've paid our dues up to date. We leave the main group at Amoen."
"I suppose I'm a faker, too," said Salazar. "I joined because I could get to Sunga cheaper on the group rate. The university makes us take such field trips on our own; say they've already committed all their grant money for the year."
"If not to identify zutas, then why are you going to Sunga?"
"Bucking for my doctorate. My thesis is on the kusinanshin problem."
"Tell us," said Ritter. "I'm in xenanthropology, and Suzette's in linguistics, so we wouldn't know."
"All right," said Salazar, seeming to expand in size and stature as he started in on his specialty. "You know the kusi, the omnivorous, semiarboreal relative of the hurato? Well, the stump-tailed kusi, Cusius brachiurus, lives in the forests of Mount Sungara. Some colleagues think it's a living fossil, like the common ancestor of the Kooks and the rest of the Pithecoidea.
"This species has a peculiar adaptation. The main tree on the upper slopes of Mount Sungara is the nanshin or venom tree, Pharmacodendron saitonis, though it also grows elsewhere in the highlands. If you brush against it, it sprays corrosive venom from its needles, like little hoses. The stuff eats holes in your skin if not quickly washed off. But the stump-tailed kusi lives in the nanshin's branches without apparent damage. I'm supposed to find out how it does it."
"How," asked Suzette, "will you do that without getting holes in your skin, too? Wear a fireman's suit?"
Salazar shrugged. "I shall have to see when I get there." His speech held an audible trace of his father's down-East accent, from the elder Salazar's youth on the coast of Maine, on Terra.
Ritter asked: "What if, despite precautions, you get some on your skin?"
"They say sodium bicarb neutralizes it, or at least limits the damage."
"Are you doing the whole job yourself?" asked Ritter.
"Not quite. A Kook at the U, a Gariko scholarship student, recommended his cousin Choku as a helper. This Hakka, a Shongarin, was, I suppose, as close to a personal friendship as one can have with a Kook."
"I know," said Ritter. "Those cold, reptilian minds don't seem to know friendship in our sense. That inflexible formality becomes a bore."
"That's not fair, dear," said Suzette. "They have excellent qualities. You can rely on their word more than on a Terran's."
"True, my dear. They're honest, truthful, logical, and literal-minded. Also humorless, hidebound, and pigheaded, like our daughter. If I had to jump into a river to save a drowning man, I'd rather hand my wallet to a Kook to hold than to a Terran, but I could never have so good a time with one as with a Terran friend—or with you. Go on, Kirk, about this helper."
"If I can find this Choku in Sungecho, I shall at least have someone to haul the heavy baggage. It's no imposition, since they are much stronger than we. And I'm to inquire after my former roommate, Jean-Pierre Latour."
"The one who disappeared?"
"Yep. The kusi problem was originally his."
"I've heard rumors of others' disappearance on Sungara. When they send someone to investigate, all they find is a mob of naked naturists running around and saying they know nothing."
"Is your daughter's cult on Sungara?"
"So they tell me."
"Then I ought to talk to your daughter. She might be helpful in getting me into the kusi country."
"Well, watch yourself. She's the most willful, bull-headed person I've ever known, quite different from her brothers. Besides, we don't know what the Reverend Dumfries is cooking up, and he wields a big stick on Sunga. He may disapprove of her cultists' going bare-arse naked and send the lot packing. Is the kusi problem the basis for your thesis?"
"Yep. If it's accepted, there'll be another unread Ph.D. thesis on the university library shelves."
"I don't know about that," said Ritter. "Remember the dust-up your father's friend Firestone made with his scholarly book on population statistics, showing that the two civilized societies on Kukulcan were on a collision course? He thought that births should be managed, which made the natalists howl."