"She explained the customs as regard an onnifa and the master she's sworn allegiance to, kind of like some medieval knighthood thing. One requirement is that the master, whenever he isn't with his legal wife, is supposed to screw the onnifa instead. The Kook wives don't mind, since this is an ancient custom, and you know how set the Kooks are in their ways. So now she wanted to know when we were going to do our thing.
"Well, Tootsie may not be exactly the kind of gal you'd lay in Erika's place in Suvarov. She's not even human. I've heard of screwing sheep but never a lizard or a crocodile. On the other hand, I hadn't had any for a month, and my poor neglected whang was driving me crazy. And what real man would pass up a chance for a free fuck? So I thought, let's try it!
"What I didn't know was that she-Kooks have scales inside as well as out, and what happened to my poor joystick was what happens to a pencil in a pencil sharpener. Damn near skinned the poor thing."
"How is it now?"
"Hurts like hell every time the train jerks. If you had a shot of whiskey in your baggage ..."
"Okay," said Salazar, digging out his flask. Cantemir drank, coughed, and drank some more. When he handed back the flask, a shake told Salazar that the flask was empty. He had brought it to ameliorate boresome stretches of the trip, but he would have to find another anodyne.
The liquor abated Cantemir's reticence, and the lumberman began to blubber again. "My God, just think of it! Never to be able to fuck again!"
"Won't you?" asked Salazar.
"Dunno. Have to see if the docs back in Henderson can patch me up enough to function. But oh, just think of it!" The voice rose to a wail, and the tears came in a stream. "Never — to — fuck — again!"
"You'd be all through some day, anyway," said Salazar. "If you can still do it at a hundred and fifty, you're remarkable."
"But goddamn it, I'm not yet fifty!" screamed Cantemir. "It's not fair!"
"Who said life was fair? If it were, you'd have dissolved in nanshin juice for trying to kill me."
"And if it was, I wouldn't have missed the one good shot I had. Serve you right for interfering with a man's legitimate living, all for the sake of some seven-legged bug or slimy reptile that shouldn't have been let live in the first place!"
"All you businessmen think of is a quick profit and getting out. You'd turn the whole planet into a lifeless desert if you thought there was frick to be made."
"Oh, go stick your head in a bucket of water and forget to take it out!"
Fetutsi intervened in Sungao: "Mr. Sarasara, you must not disturb my patient!"
"I shall be glad not to," said Salazar stiffly, returning to his seat and O'Sullivan's book.
Although the trip downward was faster than the ascent from Sungecho, Salazar found time heavy on his hands. It occurred to him that if Cantemir ordered Fetutsi to do him violence, as by throwing him off the train or tearing him limb from limb, she just might obey despite any Kook regulations. He wished he had the faithful Choku along, but he could not have done that and also secured his camp.
In Choku's absence, Salazar got the pistol out of his baggage and clipped the holster to his belt. Watching from his stretcher, Cantemir called:
"Hey, Kirk! Was you thinking of bumping me off? I warn you: If you get me, Tootsie'll get you!"
"Relax, George," said Salazar. "It was along here that you set up an ambush. Just dumb luck your lumberjacks didn't kill half the zuta watchers."
"Wrong, as usual! In the first place, nobody was supposed to kill nobody, just take prisoners. In the second, it wasn't my doing, but a cockamamy idea by Mahasingh. I raised hell with him when I found out. So you don't need the gun now."
"Says you! I'll keep it handy, thanks."
"If the stupid mounted gang on jutens hadn't gotten lost and arrived late, they'd have scooped up the lot of you before you could organize resistance."
Salazar wondered which one, Cantemir or Mahasingh, had truly ordered the ambush, but that was probably another insoluble mystery with which he would have to live.
The locomotive whistled; brakes squealed. Conductor Zuiha put his head in the door to announce: "Station Torimas!"
The train pulled up alongside another, a way freight waiting on a siding. A vendor walked along the platform, crying:
"Moriin! Moriin!"
Salazar leaned out and bought a bladder of bumble-berry wine. It proved neither very good nor very bad. Cantemir called:
"Hey, Kirk! Let's not stay mad at each other all the time just because we don't agree on everything. I admit I shot at you, but it wasn't anything personal."
Salazar grinned. "Seems to me that shooting a man is about as personal as you can get. What you're hinting at, with all the subtlety of a charging tseturen, is that you'd like a drink of this, wouldn't you?"
"Well—ah—now that you mention it, that would be nice."
"Okay." Salazar dug a pair of cups out of his bag. "You are without doubt the crassest son of a bitch I've ever met."
"Huh? What's that mean?"
"Nothing personal." Salazar poured. "And this isn't exactly what Omar had in mind when he wondered what the vintners bought one-half so precious as the stuff they sold. But here you are."
"Who's Omar?"
"Never mind. Drink up!"
As Salazar munched his luncheon sandwich, Cantemir continued: "That guy who sold us the moriin wine reminds me I once had a girlfriend named Maureen, between my third and fourth wives. Her face was nothing much, but she had the prettiest tits."
Between the bites that Fetutsi fed him, Cantemir rambled on about the women with whom he had been intimate. The supply seemed endless. While Salazar had a normal, healthy young man's interest in such matters, he found that even sex could become a bore. Under the endless concatenation of copulations, he found his eyelids growing heavy.
"Excuse me, George," he said. "I'm taking a nap." While he worked his bag into position as a pillow, Cantemir droned on. The last Salazar heard before dropping off was:
"... and then there was Yasmini, who had the longest orgasms I ever knew ..."
The train pulled into Sungecho at sunset, only an hour late. Fetutsi rounded up her Kook stretcher bearers to carry Cantemir off to Doctor Deyssel. Watching the procession march away, Salazar remembered Seisen's comment on the incorrigible Terran talent for "copulating up" their enterprises. He took a room at Levontin's Paradise Palace.
The next morning Salazar was waiting at the door of the library when it opened at ten hours by Terran clocks. The librarian said:
"Good morning. Aren't you Kirk Salazar, Professor Salazar's son?"
"Why, yes. How did you know?"
"I heard you had come to Sunga and was watching for you. Your father's a big name around here since his work on Fort Yayoi."
Salazar asked for tapes of religious and occult movements and cults. She handed him a stack, and he said: "Thanks. Now, where's your viewing room?"
He spent the day running tapes of noted Terran religious and occult leaders. He was particularly struck by the histrionics of the Reverend Alma Schindler Ferguson, who for a quarter century had moved multitudes of fanatical followers in North America. Her downfall had begun when she was caught in a love nest on Sea Island, Georgia, by the wife of her love of the moment, a media liaison officer for her Church of the Holy Pentagram.
The tape showed her standing on a plinth upon a stage. Black velvet covered all, while a spotlight picked out the priestess, in a white, gauzy, glittery gown like that worn by Alexis Ritter for her rituals. When Mrs. Ferguson raised her arms, the gown spread like the wings of a zuta. The costume, the voice, and the mannerisms were so much like those of Alexis that Salazar had an uneasy feeling that Alexis was a second coming of Mrs. Ferguson, dead for a century. More likely, he decided, Alexis had studied this same tape.