The Venom Trees of Sunga

X – Sungecho Harbor

Salazar quickly looked down at the pages of Yorimoto. After Alexis, a Kook climbed into the car bearing a bag like Salazar's record case. Alexis sat a few seats away from Salazar; her Kook attendant handed her the case, bowed, and departed. Mahasingh did not appear.

Salazar tried to return to his reading, but soon he realized that he was reading the same paragraph for the third time and had not taken in any of it. Then Alexis spoke:

"Hey, you're Kirk Salazar! The hat's different and the whiskers are shorter, but I still know you. Well?"

"Well, what?"

"What have you to say for yourself? What's the point of going around in that outfit when I know you anyway?"

"Why should I say anything? I needn't excuse myself to the murderer of a friend of mine."

"What do you mean? Dumfries? I never did!" Alexis rose and stepped toward Salazar.

"No, I mean Jean-Pierre Latour. I suppose he dove into the crater on his own?"

"Oh, you mean that Frenchman? I never heard of him! And where's my knife?"

"What knife?"

"The knife I—you know the one! It's mine, and I want it back!"

"It's like the Gnome King's magic belt, which Dorothy confiscated when he tried to use it on her."

"Dorothy? Gnome King? What the hell are you talking about?"

"If you don't know, your education's been neglected."

"Oh, you're impossible!" Her arm went up, swinging her loaded handbag. Salazar started to duck, but Choku shot out a scaly arm and caught Alexis's wrist in a steely grip. The handbag flew across the aisle and landed on a seat with a clank.

"Naughty, naughty!" said Salazar, retrieving the handbag. "I ought to keep this, too, on the same principle."

"It's not fair, two of you against one!"

"Life is unfair, as my father quotes some politician as saying." Salazar hitched his pistol holster around within easy reach. "I must say, you've added a lot to my education in the last month."

"If you don't give me back my money, I'll have you arrested for robbery! That'll sure add to your education!"

Salazar handed the coin-weighted bag to Choku. "Hold this, please. Alexis, if you're a good girl all the way to Sungecho and don't give me away, I'll return your money."

"How do I know you will? Why should I trust you?"

"You don't know. You'll have to trust me because I have the firepower."

She spit an expletive and returned to her seat. Conductor Zuiha put his head in the door. "Tickets, prease!"

"Conductor!" said Alexis in Sungao. "I demand that this Kook be removed. His smell makes me ill."

The conductor looked from passenger to passenger. To Salazar he said: "Have you any objection to this human being's presence, sir? This is, after all, our planet."

"On the contrary," said Salazar, "he works for me, and I brought him here. As you see, his ticket is in order."

Alexis fell silent. Zuiha took the tickets, returned the stubs, and left the car. Choku said:

"If I may say so, sir, I think you handled that rather well. But you aliens' minds are so complex and devious that one never knows."

"You are right about our minds, Choku. Perhaps in another century I shall get the hang of them myself."

The locomotive whistled, Zuiha whaled his gong, the conductor and his trainkooks shouted, and the Unriu Express pulled out with a clank and a clatter.

"Kirk," said Alexis, standing in the aisle, "I'm sorry I lost my temper. Let's be friends."

Salazar looked up. "Okay."

"Will you be stopping at Levontin's again?"

"Sure. It's the only choice for us effete Terrans."

"Well, perhaps we could get together." She touched a plump hip against his shoulder, and the lurching of the car made it rub back and forth. He felt the familiar hypogastric thrill, but he sternly told himself that it would be safer to take a venomous boshiya to bed. She continued:

"Perhaps I could add some more to your education. But I wouldn't make it a heavy date with all that spinach on your face. What's the point of it, since I know who you are anyway?"

"Good idea," said Salazar, thinking: This woman is unshakably convinced that if all else fails, she can infallibly get what she wants from any male by offering the hot notch in her crotch. "Might as well change back to myself. Choku, have you the solvent for taking off the beard?"

A quarter hour later he emerged from the toilet compartment with the beard in his hand and the greasepaint scrubbed from his face and hands.

"That's better," said Alexis, "though you could do with a shave."

"Thought I'd grow the real thing. Some people, including your luscious self, said I reminded them of a rabbit with my poor little chin. A beard might help." He sat down and took up his book.

She said: "We'll have a great time together. Now, how about giving me back my money?"

"Not till we get to Sungecho."

"I'll tell people you are also the swami Sen!"

"Then I'll tell how Val Dumfries met his timely end."

"What I did was no more illegal than your taking my money!"

"Maybe so, but Dumfries has fanatical followers, and at least some of them would come after you for revenge."

She cursed him with a verve that would have roused envy in a longshoreman and stamped back to her seat. Salazar resumed reading.

As they alighted at the Sungecho terminal, Salazar handed over the handbag. Alexis looked at it as if she could not believe her eyes. "Jesus, you really meant what you said, didn't you?" She turned and called: "Hey, Matt!"

The large, sandy-haired man down the platform turned. In the twilight, Salazar thought he had seen this man before.

The young man and Alexis threw themselves into a passionate clinch. When they untangled, Alexis said: "Kirk, this is my friend Matthew Peters. Kirk Salazar, the up-and-coming scientist."

Peters put out a hand the size of a gorilla's. Salazar, by applying pressure first, got his hand back intact. Peters took Alexis's traveling case, and the two walked off arm in arm. The young man was the one she had been with in Levontin's breakfast room on Salazar's first morning in Sungecho.

Salazar wondered what would have happened if he had taken Alexis up on her latest advance. Would she have had Peters lying in wait, to pounce just as Salazar prepared to dip his wick? Or had she planned a mini-orgy, with Peters and Salazar mounting seriatim? It would be interesting to attend an orgy once in his life; but on the whole, this was a mystery of the sort he was willing to leave unsolved.

On the way to Levontin's, Salazar and Choku encountered Hilbert and Suzette Ritter. After greetings, Salazar said:

"Alexis came down on the train with me, but she went off with Peters."

Suzette sighed. "Not surprising. She avoids us, saying she can't bear to be preached at. Peters is her local fancy man, whom she comes down more or less monthly to quote see unquote. Oyodo says he's got his cranky engine fixed and, Metasu willing, the Ijumo will sail tomorrow night.

"Meanwhile I've been studying the phonetics of Sungao. Some call it a dialect of Feënzuo, while others consider it a separate language."

"I know these endless arguments," said Salazar, "which boil down to questions of definition. In my field it's about questions like: Does the extant hurato belong to the same species as the fossil hurato one of my colleagues dug up last year? The only way to settle it would be to put a male of one kind in a cage with a female of the other and wait to see if they were interfertile. But there's no way you can cross-breed a fossil with a living animal, or anything else, for that matter. Has Levontin an empty room?"

"I'm sure he has. He says rumors of disturbances on Mount Sungara have damaged his tourist trade ever since that boatload of Suvarovians was here."

Choku helped Salazar settle in his room at Levontin's Paradise Palace. As usual, Choku declined Salazar's offer to share the room, saying that his kind did not feel comfortable in alien dwellings, wherefore he would sleep against the outside wall as usual. Then a loud knock was followed by a demand in Sungao:

"Open in the name of High Chief Yaamo!"

The speaker proved a Kook with the painted insignia of Yaamo's constabulary. "Both of you!" he said. "You are commanded by the High Chief to appear in the conference room forthwith!"

"What now?" muttered Salazar. Soon he found himself back in the converted game room, as at the end of the trip to the Michisko Bush. He sat facing Chief Yaamo, with a translator and a squad of subordinates.

Those summoned, besides Salazar and Choku, were the elder Ritters, Alexis Ritter, and her friend Matthew Peters. The last two had evidently been snatched from bed at an inopportune moment. Peters had a sheet wrapped around his otherwise unclad torso, while Alexis was nude but for slippers. Her defiant glare said that nobody had better comment on those facts if he knew what was good for him.

"May aw your heth be good," said Yaamo slowly and with effort. "We wi' do wizzout ze perim— preriminaries."

He turned to his interpreter and spoke rapidly in Sungao. The interpreter translated:

"The High Chief has received reports of violence on Mount Sungara among Miss Ritter's followers and the employees of the Adriana Company. This has shut down the lumbering. Most of the lumbermen have departed, leaving too few to carry on.

"In addition, there is a tale of a Terran, a holy prophet, who stirred up this trouble. His name is reported as Sen. After arousing many to form a group to oppose the lumbering, he vanished, leaving the former subforeman in command. We have been unable to find him despite close watch on transportation facilities.

"A local Terran, who lives by selling other Terrans-predictions of their futures, told us that some Terran holy men have the power of making themselves invisible. We.

shall doubt this until we see a convincing demonstration. Can any of you Terrans vanish whilst we watch? Nay? We thought not.

"Furthermore, we have a complaint from one Takao, owner of the juten stable in Amoen, of the disappearance of a juten rented by this alien Sen without payment for the animal. The remains of a carcass, mostly devoured by wild animals, were found on the edge of the nanshin forest, and it is suspected that this is the beast in question." The interpreter looked at Salazar. "You are Mr. Salazar, are you not?"

"I am."

"What have you to say about these matters?"

"The Reverend Khushvant Sen came by my camp on the juten in question. Later he returned afoot, saying that Mr. Mahasingh, enraged by his teachings, had pursued him and shot his animal dead. Sen escaped by hiding in the nanshins, where the spirit of Metasu protected him from the venom. So if anyone owes Takao for the animal, it is Mahasingh."

"Where is Mahasingh now?"

"This morning he meant to take the train to Sungecho with me. But questions about the missing juten detained him in Amoen until after train time."

Yaamo muttered to one of his subordinates; Salazar caught the word 'Maasinga'. The Kook hurried out, doubtless to alert the police to watch for Mahasingh.

So began an hour of questioning and tale telling. Salazar's heart was in his mouth lest Alexis blurt out that he was also Khushvant Sen. But she held her fire, probably, he thought, because of his counterthreat to expose her murder of Dumfries, whose name did not come up. Salazar wondered what she would do if it did. Yaamo would think nothing of the fact that she had sacrificed Dumfries to Shiiko to pay the rent on her lease; but if she confessed to this in open court, she would arouse fierce hostility among other Terrans.

She said that she had seen Salazar; in fact, they had climbed Sungara to the crater together for a picnic. Afterward, all she saw of him was glimpses as he went about his research. She attended Sen's meeting but had no idea whence he came or whither he went. When she finished, Salazar drew a breath of relief.

Even riskier was the chief's questioning of Choku, since every Kook had a built-in lie detector. When his turn came, Choku merely said that he had brought Sen down from the crater and had seen him as far as Amoen. If the high chief had asked about the true identities of Sen and Salazar, the fat would have been in the fire, but that question seemed not to have occurred to the inquisitors.

At last Yaamo said through his interpreter: "The more we look into this affair, the more tangled it becomes. Trust Terrans to complicate matters beyond human understanding! When we locate Mahasingh and Sen, questioning may make some sense of the story. Meanwhile the Terrans Salazar and the young female Ritter shall remain in Sungecho until these matters be clarified.

"Like a sensible person, we avoid interference in disputes amongst aliens. Know, however, that all this business of strange Terran cults, crimes, conflicts, and riots is intolerable to us human beings. The next such outbreak, we shall order all aliens off Sunga, even if it means that we shall have to send real human beings to Shikawa to keep Shiiko well disposed. We are sure that as a result of the bad example set by you Terrans, we shall have enough human criminals to satisfy the volcano spirit.

"While the aliens' presence brings us some small advantages in manufactures and trade goods, they are not worth these disturbances and interruptions of the island's orderly activities. Your crimes against one another we do not deem our proper business, but lately there have even been Terran offenses against human beings. We will not put up with that!

"From all we have seen of Terrans, we conclude that whilst you have pretensions to an advanced civilization, based upon your precocious technological progress, you are actually primitive organisms, evolved but little beyond the kusi stage. You are still driven by the sort of instincts that adapted you to a life of wandering about the wilderness in little bands and foraging for anything edible.

"You are not, however, at all suited to a civilized life of order and reason. You require an elaborate apparatus of law, government, and supernatural belief to keep you in a barely tolerable state of order. Remove these restraints, as by letting you roam at large in human lands, and you run wild, assaulting, robbing, and slaying one another and sometimes even molesting real human beings."

It sounded to Salazar much like what the hermit Seisen had said. Yaamo continued: "To tolerate many of you in our midst were like giving a band of kusis the run of one's house. Kusis make amusing and even affectionate pets. But they also go on rampages, destroying everything breakable and biting you if you try to stop them.

"That is all we have to say for the present, save that, we repeat, at the next outbreak of Terranism, off to the mainland the lot of you go! What our fellow authorities on the mainland choose to do with your turbulent, irrational species is their affair. May your health remain good!"

The next day Salazar drew his money out of the bank, got a haircut, and returned the book on Asian religions to the library. He visited Doctor Deyssel to see if he needed treatment for any of the cuts, scrapes, sprains, and bruises that he had lately suffered, and he took care of other needful chores. From the physician he learned that George Cantemir was still undergoing treatment for the repair of his member and would not be ready to return to the mainland on the Ijumo's next voyage.

.At seventeen by Terran clocks, trailed by Choku, Salazar walked to Mao Dai's with the record case beneath his arm. At the retsuraan, he counted notes out of his wallet. When he handed the wad to Choku, the Kook riffled through them, detached three, and handed them back, saying:

"Honorable boss, you miscounted. You owe me these not."

"That is a gift for taking such good care of me. Without you, I would have been dead several times over."

"Thank you, sir, but I cannot accept. We had an agreement as to how much a day you should pay me, and I have served you for precisely forty days. I should be most unhappy to receive either more or less than my exact due."

"Oh, all right," said Salazar. "Would you like to continue as my assistant back to Henderson? I find you invaluable."

In the dimming light, while Choku's turtle-beaked face remained impassive, his neck spines rippled. "Thank you, sir, but I will not now leave Sunga."

"Why not? Are you not fain to see more of the world?"

"Nay, sir. I was born on the mainland and have traveled about the continent. For another thing, I have not seen my wife in forty days, and I begin to feel somewhat as those lumberjacks did when the Kashanite females flaunted their persons at them."

"I knew not that you even had a wife!"

"You never asked me, sir. A wife, named Dzucho, and three small human beings. Now, if you wish, I will carry your bag aboard the ship whilst you and your Terran friends consume your dinners."

Later, accompanied by Choku, Salazar approached the pier to which the Ijumo was moored. Under his arm he tightly gripped his case of records, which now included the confessions of the three gangsters in Dumfries's pay. As the men had disappeared without giving their testimony in open court, the confessions were of flimsy legal value, since they might have been extorted by torture. Still, Salazar was glad to have them in case someone should raise questions back in Henderson.

Suzette and Hilbert Ritter followed Salazar and Choku. As they neared the pier, Salazar said:

"Choku, I see what I think is one of Yaamo's policemen at the foot of the gangplank. I suspect that he is there to make sure that I stay in Sungecho, as the High Chief commanded."

"Then must you remain on shore, sir?"

"Belike you could approach him and tell him that there has been a disturbance, with shooting, at Mao Dai's retsuraan."

"Very well, sir," said Choku doubtfully. He walked out on the pier and spoke to the sentry. The Kook slung his rifle over his shoulder and set off at a run, passing Salazar and the Ritters without pause.

Choku came back. "It is fortunate, sir, that in the darkness the officer could not clearly see my neck bristles or he would have known that I lied. You aliens!"

Salazar mused: "I am sorry to run out on the High Chief, leaving the Takao case in the air, but I have my own work to do. Besides, Yaamo might decide, from the loftiest motives, that I was next in line for Shikawa. Or Alexis might hire another gang from the local underworld, as Dumfries did, to do me in."

Walking up the gangplank, Hilbert Ritter said: "Kirk, I agree that Alexis deserves to 'go to Shiiko' herself. But one can't take quite so cold-blooded an attitude with a daughter. She'll doubtless go on and on, pulling one outrage after another, until someone equally ruthless does the same to her. As some ancient Greek said, the best equipment for life is effrontery."

"She and Abdallah will fight it out," said Salazar. "He's a tough customer."

Hilbert Ritter said: "There's a rumor that Dumfries is dead."

"So I hear," said Salazar. "Some say his heart just stopped, not surprising in one so overweight. Others say he tripped over a lava rock and fell into Shikawa. At least that's one threat to the local environment eliminated."

"For the present," said Ritter. "But don't be surprised if someone else, hoping to profit from that conquer-the-universe message, picks up Dumfries's torch and runs with it. It's not a war you can win by overrunning the enemy's lands but a battle for people's minds, which never ends."

"I think I know the true story of Dumfries's death," said Suzette quietly.

"What?" cried Hilbert. "Why didn't you tell me, darling?"

"I didn't think it safe until we were aboard the ship."

"What is it?"

Suzette narrated the successive confrontations at the crater much as Salazar remembered them. He said: "How did you hear that?"

"Kooks are great gossips. Some were at the crater, and one passed the word to one of my phonetic informants. I also heard about that meeting called by Sri Something, which started the anti-Adriana movement. Mr. Something sounded remarkably like Kirk Salazar doing his burlesque swami act on the Ijumo."

"Well?" said Salazar.

"You could be a hero to the environmentalists if you let it all come out."

"Thanks; I'd rather be a live scientist than a dead hero. Some fanatical cultist would probably bump me off. I told your daughter that if she didn't blow the gaff on Sri Khushvant Sen, I'd keep quiet about her sending the reverend to his Gnostic heaven. And that's what I shall do."

On the fantail Salazar said to Choku: "Good-bye, and may your health remain good."

"May your health be better than ever," replied the Kook.

"May your ancestral spirits adroitly guide you."

"And may your ancestral spirits protect you from all contingencies."

Feeling that this time he ought to show his best Kukulcanian manners, Salazar continued the formulas as long as he could remember them. When he ran out of well-wishes, Choku said:

"Farewell, honorable boss."

The Kook walked down the gangplank and disappeared. Captain Oyodo bawled:

"Aw passengers on board, prease!"

Then he shouted in Sungao. Deckhands seized the gangplank to haul it aboard. Others cast off mooring lines. Forward, the engine puffed and the paddle wheels began slowly to turn.

With a quick thud of feet, Matthew Peters, Alexis's local bed partner, dashed up the plank. Salazar had been facing forward and was unprepared when the case of his research materials was snatched out from beneath his arm. Peters whirled and sprinted aft. The gangplank was dropped to the deck with a bang, but the pier was still within easy jump. The captain shouted.

Salazar could have drawn his pistol and shot Peters, but then Peters would have fallen into the sea, document case and all. Instead, Salazar launched himself in a flying tackle. He was no expert at that athletic feat, but his life in the outback had hardened him, and the surge of adrenaline at the prospect of losing his research gave him abnormal strength and adroitness. He and Peters slammed to the deck together.

The case, which Peters had clutched to his bosom, flew out of his grasp, skittered across the deck, and vanished into the water astern.

Damn, thought Salazar, I might as well have shot the bastard, after all! He reached the fantail, where the deckhands had not replaced the movable section of rail. The case bobbed ghostly on the slight swell. Salazar dove in, came up spitting dirty harbor water, and struck out for the case. His garments hampered his swimming, but he grimly plowed on until he had a grip on the case.

Peters, too, rose. He took two steps and launched himself in a leap toward the pier. But the distance had widened since Salazar had downed him. Peters struck the edge of the pier with his shins and, with a yelp of pain, fell into the water near Salazar.

Salazar swam a one-armed back stroke toward the receding Ijumo. At a shout from the captain, the paddle wheels stopped turning and a rope was thrown from the deck. Salazar looped the end of the rope around the case and tied the loop.

"Pull that up first!" he sputtered.

When Salazar was finally hauled aboard, Ritter said: "Kirk, I wish I were on the committee you'll take your orals from! If there ever was a dedicated scientist, you're it!"

Salazar shrugged. "I couldn't waste a season's research." He glanced astern, where a pair of Kooks were hauling Peters up on the pier. "I could pick him off ... but better not. Things are complicated enough, and my gun's wet. But why the devil should that woman want to get her hands on a mass of records of the ethology of Cusius brachiurus?"

Ritter shrugged in turn. "Maybe in hope of luring you back on shore, where her boys could grab you, or to extort something from you. She knows you value it." He spread his hands. "I suppose you could go back to Sunga and ask her."

"I'll do that when Kashani comes back from the dead! As Choku says, with Terrans one never knows what crazy thing they'll do next." He sneezed. "Now excuse me. I need to get dry."

On the pier at Oõi, the Ritters watched as a small, blond young woman and Kirk Salazar threw themselves into each other's arms. When they came up for air, Salazar said:

"Do you know Calpurnia Fisker? These, darling, are the Doctors Ritter, Hilbert and Suzette. My best friends on the trip."

"Delighted," said Ritter. "Miss Fisker, this young man is remarkable. He's not so big as some or so handsome as others, but he has something more important in the long run."

"I know he's smart!"

"No, though that's also important. I mean he has character. Inside that modest, mousy fellow is a hero struggling to get out."

"Oh, I've known that all along," said Calpurnia. "He looks years older with that sprouting beard. He even looks taller."

"Sunga matured him," said Ritter. "He'll have lots of adventures to tell you."

"Oh, bilge!" said Salazar. "Flattery will get you everywhere. I'm just another apprentice professor and would-be scientist, trying to do his job." To himself he added: There is one adventure that I won't even mention!

Ritter continued: "How did you happen to be here to meet the ship?"

"Kirk wrote he would probably come on this one," said Calpurnia. "He said he had something important to say, so I—I ..."

"Came four days by train to make sure he said it." Ritter turned to Suzette. "Come on, darling. They want us in the customs shed."

Watching Salazar and Calpurnia walk off with arms around each other, Salazar pressing his record case firmly under his other arm, Suzette said: "I hope they make it."

Ritter replied: "Nobody knows the future, but I'd say their chances were as good as anybody's. Let's find the table with the R's."