they decide to do with us will be done. We are too few to fight our way out.'
Ulysses patted her back and then stroked it, enjoying even in his anxiety the sensuous softness of the fur. He said, 'Do not worry. The Neshgai seem to be an intelligent people. They will realise that I have too much to offer for them to dispose of us as if we were a pack of wild dogs.'
That had been his original reason for so boldly entering into the Neshgai territory. But now the galley had made him wonder. What if these people were so far advanced that nothing he could offer them could match what they already had? It was true that he had seen no signs of land transportation using motors, and that seemed strange. Perhaps the motors the galley used required too much space and fuel to be used in automobiles. In which case, he could show them how to build steam cars.
Then the gates of the fort opened, and a line of automobiles and trucks drove out. They looked somewhat like the earliest cars of his time, more like modified carriages and wagons. They were built of wood except for the wheels and tires. The wheels seemed to be of glass or another plastic which looked like glass. (Glass, of course, was a plastic.) The tires looked like white rubber, and they were (as he found out later) made of the specially treated sap of a tree which had not existed in his time.
The vehicles had to be huge to accommodate the gigantic Neshgai. The steering wheels were enormous, more like those of sailing ships. They seemed to require great hands and strength to turn, which may have been why only Neshgai were the chauffeurs, even for the trucks. However, Ghlikh said that the humans were never trusted to operate cars or any advanced technological devices except the voice transmitters.
No sound came from under the hood. Ulysses put his hand on the wooden hood but could feel no vibrations. He asked Ghlikh what drove the cars, and Ghlikh shrugged.
'I do not know,' he said. 'The Neshgai allowed me a certain amount of freedom as a trader of goods and information. But they would not describe their devices or even let me get close to any unless I was supervised.'
This must have been frustrating for Ghlikh, Ulysses thought, since his primary objective here would undoubtedly be to get the secret of Nesghai technology.
Their culture contained many contradictions. There were so many primitive things here, side by side with advanced devices. The Neshgai had bows and arrows and plastic-tipped spears but no gunpowder. Or perhaps they knew about gunpowder but had no firearms because they lacked the metal or a plastic which could be used in the place of metal.
Gooshgoozh sat in the back of the foremost vehicle. He stopped eating a huge dish of vegetables and drinking from a pitcher of milk long enough to order food for the humans and the newcomers. Most of this was vegetable, but there was some horse meat. Horses were also used, as he discovered, for drawing wagons and carriages for the human slaves and the rural Neshgai.
After the food was eaten, most of Ulysses' party was herded into the trucks, and the human soldiers piled in with them. Ulysses, his chiefs, Awina and the two bat-men went into the car behind Gooshgoozh's. His car moved out onto a brick road covered with plastic into which was set pieces of brick to afford more traction. Ulysses watched the driver, who controlled his speed and the braking with a single pedal under his right foot. The instrument panel held a number of dials and gauges with various symbols around the faces. Ulysses studied them because they were the first indications of writing he had seen. There were some familiar symbols, a reversed4, anH on its side, anO, aT, a barredZ, but these were symbols whose simplicity made it probable that they would be independently invented.
The vehicles had windshields but the sides were open. Wind was no problem since the cars never exceeded an estimated twenty miles an hour. And they slowed down to ten when ascending steep hills. There was not even a slight purr from the motors.
After about an hour and a half, the cavalcade drove into the square of a large fort, and the party got out of their vehicles into others. Ulysses did not understand why they should have to exchange cars as if they were riders of the Pony Express. Then it occurred to Ulysses that his simile of the Pony Express might be more appropriate than he had thought. Maybe the motors were not mechanical or electrical but were biological. Could the Neshgai be using some kind of muscle engine?
He saw a slave pouring fuel into the tank through a pipe on the side of the hood, and this strengthened his theory. The stuff was certainly not gasoline or anything like that. It was thick and syrupy and had a vegetable odour. Food for the living motor?
The cavalcade set out again, proceeding through country as before. This was rolling and heavily wooded except for the cleared fields and farm-houses. There were some strange plants growing in these, and once, when they stopped to rest, he walked over to the nearest growth. Nobody tried to stop him, though three archers did stay close. The plants were about seven feet high, green, and made of thin stalks topped by box-like growths of a darker green. He pulled one over to examine it. The stalk bent readily without indications of breaking. He opened the fleshy box by digging his fingers into a slit across its top. Beneath the layers of soft greenish leaves was a thin cartilaginous plate the surface of which was crossed by broad and thin dark lines. At the junction of the lines were little green pulpy nipples. He tried to visualise what the plate would look like when it ripened.
Unless he was using too much imagination, he was looking at a not-yet-matured printed circuit board.
Gooshgoozh said something, and everybody got back into the vehicles. Ulysses looked at the fields with more interest and, inside a mile, he saw another crop which he thought he could identify. Or, at least, he could make a reasonably inspired guess about its nature. These plants were short, squat and bore round cases wrapped in leaves. The cases were about four feet long, three wide and two deep. His theory was that these were the motors for the vehicles. They were of vegetable, not animal origin, though they might be high protein plants.
He considered the implications of his discovery while they drove past more fields with a variety of plants the nature of which he could not even guess. They also drove through a number of villages composed of the larger, more finely carved and painted houses of the Neshgai and the smaller, bare, often unpainted houses of the humans. After a while, he quit trying to theorise about the vegetable technology of the Neshgai and considered the implications of the setups of the villages and the farms. The humans seemed to outnumber the Neshgai about six to one or about three human adults to one Neshgai adult. Huge as the Neshgai were, strong as they seemed to be, one Neshgai should not be a match for three swifter co-operating humans, even if some of the humans were female.
What kept the humans from revolting? A slave mentality? Some weapon which made the Neshgai invincible? Or were the humans actually living in a symbiosis with the Neshgai which was profitable enough for the humans so that they did not mind slavery?
He considered the human soldiers sitting on seats facing him. They were half-bald. Both the men and the women he had seen in the villages were half-bald, though the children had a full head of hair. The hair was very curly, almost kinky.
Their skins were a beautiful dark brown. Their eyes were brown or, sometimes, greenish-brown. The faces were mainly narrow with a tendency to aquiline noses, jutting chins, and high cheekbones.
The only nonhuman feature was their lack of a little toe. But this could be accounted for by evolution. After all, some speculators, scientists and laymen alike, had said that man might lose his little toe. And his wisdom teeth.
He leaned forward and spoke in Ayrata to the soldier opposite him. The man looked puzzled, and a little alarmed, at first. Ulysses repeated his request at a slower rate. This time, the soldier understood most of the message. His Ayrata was not quite Ghlikh's or Ulysses', since Ayrata was his native speech, and it had deviated somewhat from the original. But Ghlikh knew the unfamiliar words and translated them.
The soldier looked dubious at first, but Ulysses reassured him that he meant no harm. The soldier turned and asked the giant in the front seat if he should obey. The great elephantine head turned, looked at Ulysses, and then spoke. The soldier opened his mouth wide, and Ulysses looked inside and ran his finger along the teeth. There were no wisdom teeth.
Ulysses thanked him. The Neshgai took out a notebook and wrote something on it with a fountain pen the size of a big flashlight.
The journey took until late at night. They changed vehicles five times. At the end, they came down out of a series high hills onto a plain set on a cliff above the shore. The city was still well lit with torches and electric light bulbs. Or what looked like bulbs, though Ulysses thought they could be living organisms. They were attached to hard brown cases of living vegetable batteries or fuel cells.
