Piet smiled.
'— then we owe it to Venus to learn what we can.'
He fitted the mask back over his face. 'Our hosts have waited long enough,' he said. 'I'll take a few men and some gifts to meet with them. And we'll see what we see.'
Stephen frowned at '
'And I'm another,' I added.
'Yeah, those are food crops,' Cseka agreed, peering over the edge of the platform at the brown and ocher vegetation twenty meters below. 'The inside stems and the leaves both. You wouldn't know it was the same plant.'
The platform didn't have a guardrail, but Piet seemed equally nonchalant as he leaned forward to view the fields. Chay agriculture was labor-intensive: at least a hundred gray-clad figures stooped over the sinuous crop, pruning and cultivating. The vines were as big around as my thighs, but the relatively small leaves looked more like fur than foliage.
Stephen and I stayed back a step from the edge. He grimaced every time Piet overhung the platform, and his free hand-the one not on the grip of his flashgun-was poised to snatch his friend back if a jolt sent him toppling.
However, the dirigible rode as solidly as a rock. The platform was suspended on hoselike tubes that stretched and compressed as the gas bags lifted or fell in the breeze. The deck undulated only slightly as cilia beneath stroked us forward.
We slid between two brown-tinged domes together covering nearly a hectare. 'Workers' housing,' Cseka volunteered, gesturing with his elbow toward the dome on our side of the platform. I could see the dim outlines of tiered buildings under the curving surface. Cseka had spoken more during the ride from the
I carried a flashgun too, but just as a gift to the council. Our ceramic cassegrain lasers were far superior to the nearest Terran equivalents, though not many Venerians cared to use weapons so heavy and unpleasant for the shooter. I sometimes wondered whether Stephen carried a flashgun because each round was so effective, or if a part of him liked the punishment.
A clear dome far larger than those housing the Chay workers loomed before us. The structures inside looked like mushrooms with multiple caps one above another on a single central shaft. Those near the middle of the enclosure had eight or nine layers.
Our dirigible settled to the ground. Rather, settled onto a living surface of hair-fine leaves woven as tightly as carpeting. The arched opening in the dome was big enough for three or four people to walk abreast. The passage writhed like an intestine instead of going straight through to the interior.
'Come,' said Cseka. 'The council will be waiting for us.'
He stepped from the platform to the carpet of vegetation. Stephen and Piet fell in to either side of the castaway, while the three of us carrying presents-Dole and Lightbody with me-followed closely behind. Chay on the dirigibles wheezed a fanfare on horns several meters long driven by four musicians squeezing bellows simultaneously.
There wasn't a door at either end of the tunnel, but its walls were lined with fine hairs that greatly increased the surface area. That and the winding course-the dome's wall was only three meters through even here where it was thickened, but the passage was a good twenty-served to filter the carbon dioxide down to levels the Chay found comfortable.
A crowd of Chay with their cowls thrown back lined both sides of the route inside the dome. At least half of them wore the colored garments I'd come to associate with higher ranks. As we six humans entered the enclosed area, the spectators began to stamp their feet in a slow rhythm. The flooring was as hard and dense-grained as a nutshell, and the dome reverberated.
We walked along a boulevard a hundred meters wide, thronged with stamping Chay. Musicians from the dirigibles followed us, wheezing on their horns. Additional spectators leaned from the upper stories of buildings.
'Do they have radio, do you suppose?' I said. I was speaking mostly to myself at first, but I added loudly enough to be heard by the men ahead of me, 'Captain Cseka, do the Chay have radio?'
A party in silvery capes marched to meet us. They played instruments a meter and a half long; bangles on either end clattered like the beads of an abacus when the musician plucked his one string. These strings, the bellows trumpets, and the stamping crowd each kept an individual rhythm. Only the cacophony aboard
Cseka turned his head. 'Only to talk to human ships,' he shouted. 'We use beans that vibrate the same as others from the same pod instead.'
He shrugged. 'The range is only a few light-seconds and they aren't faster than light, nothing like that. But they work.'
The string players reversed course to precede us down the boulevard. The towers were arranged in three rings of increasing height. At the center of the enclosure, a low building sat in a circular court several hundred meters across.
Near the entrance to the central structure was a cage, grown rather than woven in a lattice with about a hundred millimeters across openings. The two lines of string players parted around it. A man-a human being in the remnants of a Federation uniform-clutched the bars to hold his torso upright.
There were-three at least, maybe more-human corpses in the cage with the living man. One of them had been dead long enough that the flesh had sloughed to bare his ribs. The stench of death and rotting waste was a barrier so real that I stumbled three steps away.
Piet stopped and touched his hand to Cseka's arm. 'What's this?' Piet asked, exaggerating his lip movements to be understood without bellowing.
'Sometimes we take Feds alive,' Cseka said nonchalantly. 'They're brought here for entertainment.'
His right hand came out from beneath his cape with the handweapon I'd seen outlined there. Grip, receiver, and barrel were one piece of dark brown, black-grained wood. A lanyard growing from the butt quivered back in a springy coil which held the pistol out of the way when it wasn't in use.
Cseka fired. A snap of steam lifted the gun muzzle. The prisoner screamed and arched convulsively. He skidded on his back, thrashing across a floor slippery with filth.
Cseka held his weapon up for us to see. 'Darts,' he said. 'They're not fatal, not usually. But they drop a fellow quicker than bullets. And they-'
He aimed again toward the prisoner. The procession halted when we did, but the wracking music continued.
Piet put two fingers under the barrel of the dart gun and lifted it away. 'Please don't,' he said. 'The things we have to do in war are terrible enough.'
'Nothing could be enough!' Cseka shouted. He raised the pistol and brought it down in a slashing stroke at Piet's head. Stephen blocked the blow with his left forearm, catching Cseka's wrist numbingly. The pistol flew loose and slithered back under the cape.
Cseka began to giggle. 'Nothing could be enough,' he repeated. 'Some day we'll have them all here, with your help.'
He strode around the left side of the cage. We five Oriflammes scrambled to catch up, but the Chay in the procession resumed marching without missing a step.
The Chay hadn't reacted to the momentary human conflict. The Fed prisoner lay quiescent. His eyes were open, and his chest trembled like that of a dog panting.
'Our rifles throw fireballs a hundred meters,' Cseka said, his voice raised only to be heard over the background noise. The maniacal rage switched itself off and on in an eyeblink. He tapped the barrel of Stephen's flashgun. 'Within their range, they're better than this.'
'Within their range,' Stephen repeated. There was nothing in his tone to suggest he believed the Chay shoulder weapons-they certainly weren't rifled-were really as effective as his laser at any range.
