FEDERACY
STANDARD
YEAR 2686
Bilbeis IV hung in the stereo tank: a blue globe, streaked with the white and gray of clouds. Like any terrestrial world seen from space, it was heart-stoppingly beautiful. The crew of the Survey Service ship Jêng Ho eyed it with the same affection they would have given a nest of scorpions at a picnic grounds.
"Why did it have to be us?" Atanasio Pedroza said to no one in particular. In spite of his name, the biologist was big and blond; long ago, his home planet had been settled by Guatemalans and by Afrikaner refugees fleeing the fall of South Africa.
"There's a technical term for the reason," Magda Kodaly said. Despite the anthropologist's cynical turn of mind, Pedroza looked at her expectantly. "It's called the short straw," she amplified.
"Oh, come now," Irfan Kawar said. His specialty was geology, so he was able to take a more dispassionate view of Bilbeis IV. "Odds are, David Ware's interference made no difference at all in the planet's cultural development, just as he said it wouldn't."
"Interference?" Magda snorted. Her green eyes glinted dangerously. "There's a technical term for that, too: fuckup, I think it is. Ware got less than he deserved, if you ask me." The Survey Service had cashiered David Ware, of course, as soon as Central learned what he had done. Now every new class of recruits had his folly drilled into it as the worst of bad examples.
Magda rose from her chair and stretched, deliberately turning her back on the image of Bilbeis IV. She was conscious of Pedroza's eyes following her, and suppressed a sigh. The Jêng Ho was cramped enough to make politeness essential, but he wanted her and she did not want him.
Maybe, she thought hopefully, he would be too busy to pester her anymore once they landed.
Hideko Narahara punched a button. The engineering officer said, "Observation satellites away,"
"Good," Kawar said. "I for one won't be sorry to have new data to work with."
"How much can a planet change in fifteen hundred years?" Pedroza asked rhetorically.
Kawar answered him. "A good deal. For one thing, there was a fair amount of glaciation when the last survey ship was here. They didn't stay long enough to find whether the ice was advancing or retreating. The answer will mean something to your biology, Atanasio, and also to Magda's area: changes in climate and sea level have to affect the locals' culture."
"I suppose so." Pedroza did not sound as though he meant it. He really wanted to believe every discipline had its own cubbyhole and operated in isolation from all the others. That struck Magda as intellectual apartheid; it was one reason she did not find the biologist appealing in spite of his blond good looks.
She started out of the control room. "Where are you going?" Pedroza asked. "Would you care for company?"
"No, thank you, Atanasio," she said, swallowing that sigh again. "I'm heading north back to my cabin to review Margushi irregular verbs."
Pedroza's clear, fair skin showed his flush. All he said, though, was, "It seems a waste of time, when odds are no one speaks the language anymore."
"They may still write it," she said, "or use tongues descended from it. Anyway, until we have some fresh information, it's the best I can do." She left quickly, before he came up with a different suggestion.
Magda was glad she liked working with Irfan Kawar. Over the next several days, she and the geologist from New Palestine spent a lot of time together, using the satellite photos to remap Bilbeis IV.
He made another comparison between the old coastline and the new. "Not much change, I'm afraid," he said, running his hand over the balding crown of his head. He smiled. "One always hopes for drama."
"Of course, if you want anyone to read your data card."
He cocked an eyebrow at her. "This once, I think you would be just as happy with obscurity."
"Between you and me, I won't say you're wrong."
"Be careful, my dear. Such sentiments could get you burned at the stake in the quad of any university in the Federacy."
Magda snorted. "God deliver me from that kind of academic. I delivered myself, by getting into fieldwork as fast as I could once I had my degree."
She bent over the photomosaic map of Bilbeis IV's main continent. The settlement pattern was peculiar. Not surprisingly, the Margush valley was still the most densely populated area. Several other river systems also had good-sized cities, which they hadn't before. And it was reasonable for towns to have arisen along the eastern coast, where only a narrow sea separated the main continent from a lesser neighbor.
But the western coastline also boasted some large towns. That was strange. High, rugged mountains separated it from the rest of the continent, and the ocean to the west stretched for several thousand empty kilometers. The data they had showed no minerals to draw settlers.
"Puzzling." Magda must have said that aloud, for Irfan Kawar gave a questioning grunt. She explained.
"Maybe it is an independent civilization," the geologist suggested.
Magda brushed auburn curls back from her face. "I hope so. Comparing it to the one that diffused out of the Margush would tell us a lot." She scribbled a note to herself. "I have to talk to Hideko. I need high-resolution photos of a western town to compare to some east of the mountains."
"I hate interrupting the mapping program I've set up," the engineering officer said when Magda called, "but I'll see what I can do." Coming from Hideko, that was better than Pedroza's solemn vow of aid.
All the same, the picture series was not done till late afternoon, ship's time. Magda popped a shot of a west-coast town, one from the Margush valley, and one from another valley into a viewer.
She whistled softly. That all three cities were built around large central squares was not surprising. The neat grid pattern of the surrounding streets was. And it was stretching the odds to find the same sort of hexagonal building in a prominent place in each square.
"Coincidence?" Pedroza asked in the galley when she mentioned what she'd found.
"Anything is possible," Magda shrugged, "but that's not very likely. Six-sided buildings aren't common anywhere. It's easier to imagine, say, a common cult than to think them separate developments. The other parts of the towns seem similar, too, and they shouldn't. What would attract people from the Margush valley culture out to that godforsaken coast?"
"Special timber, maybe, or some kind of fur or flavoring or drug?" Pedroza was not a fool—unfortunately, Magda thought. He would have been easier to dislike if he was. The suggestions were all plausible.
She gestured in frustration. "I wish there were more variation."
"Variety is the life of spice," Pedroza agreed with a look that was not quite a leer, and Magda decided he was not so hard to dislike after all.
Her distaste plainly showed. There were several seconds of uncomfortable silence before Norma Anderssen said, "We'll find all the variety we need, I'm sure, when we land." The linguist was pretty, fair as Pedroza, and even-tempered enough to put up with his machismo. Why hadn't he settled on her to bother? Magda thought unhappily.
She supposed that would have been too easy. Sighing, she took a long pull at the vodka and soda in front of her. It did not help much.
After a good deal of wrangling, the Jêng Ho made planetfall west of the mountain chain. To Magda's surprise—and to her annoyance—the person who agreed most vociferously with her was Pedroza. She was eager to investigate those anomalous western cities, he to see how much difference there was between the plants and animals east and west of the range.
Norma, on the other hand, complained. "So far from the site of the last survey, any linguistic work I do is going to be worthless."
Irfan Kawar echoed her. "The most detailed information I have is on the Margush valley and the desert to the north. I could really get a good picture of how they've changed over time—and here we are, six thousand kilometers away. Not that new data aren't welcome, you understand, but comparing new and old would yield more."
"I expect we'll get to the Margush eventually—" Magda began.
"Meanwhile, though, half the research staff might as well be twiddling their thumbs, for all they'll accomplish," Norma said. That she interrupted proved how upset she was.
"I don't think Captain Brusilov wants to get near the Margush any sooner than he has to," Magda said quietly.
"Ah," Kawar said with a slow nod. "That makes sense." Norma's eyes widened—she was too straightforward for that kind of explanation to have occurred to her.
Pedroza's specialty was the first to come in handy, disguising probes and sensors to look like local flying pests so the natives would not notice them. The resulting pictures and sound tapes made the world vividly real in a way the old records could not.
Had the locals not been so human, Magda thought, the immunological amplifier would not have worked on the long-ago Queen Sabium in the first place. That would have saved everyone a lot of trouble—except, the anthropologist had to admit, Sabium herself.
Magda voraciously studied the incoming data: it gave her the basis for whatever fieldwork she would be able to do. She saw to her relief that Bilbeis IV—or at least this little chunk of it—was not as male-dominated as most pretechnological cultures. That so often hampered women in the field. Sometimes the only role available for them was courtesan, and Magda knew she lacked the clinical detachment necessary for that.
Hereabouts, though, the sensors showed women going freely through the streets, buying and selling, working at looms and potters' wheels and in jewelers' and bakers' shops on much the same terms as men. And when Magda saw a recording of a man handing over square silver coins to a woman and receiving in turn a scrawled receipt, the likeliest interpretation she could put on the scene was that it involved paying rent—which seemed to mean women could own property.
"Unusual," Norma Anderssen said when Magda remarked on that: now she rather than Kawar worked most closely with the anthropologist. The same tapes interested them both.
"Certainly a change from the last visit," Magda agreed. "Then women hardly showed themselves in public. I daresay it's the influence of this new cult the locals have."
As Magda had expected, the big hexagonal building in the center of town was a temple. Fifteen hundred years ago, the natives had worshiped a typical pantheon, with gods and goddesses in charge of the various aspects of nature. Now, though, the dominant local religion centered on a mother goddess. Judging from the identical structures Magda had seen in the orbital pictures, it was the dominant religion all over the continent.
"Unusual," Norma said again. "Normally, from what I understand, mother-worshiping cultures aren't progressive technically. They tend to accept things as they are, don't they, instead of seeking change?"
"Yes, usually," Magda said. That bothered her, too. The natives used iron as well as bronze; their carts and wagons had pivoted front axles; they used waterwheels to grind their grain. They had come a long way in a relatively short time.
Magda pushed aside the thought of interference. She said, "My best guess would be that the religion is fairly new and that the technology we're seeing predates it."
"Maybe so. But why would a dynamic society shift to belief in a mother goddess?"
"I can think of several possibilities off the top of my head: internal strife might have made the locals look away from this world toward the next, for instance, or this cult might have grown up in a land annexed by the dominant culture and then spread through the big, politically unified area. That's what happened with Christianity, after all. Maybe we'll find out. What really interests me here is that everyone seems to belong."
The town had no temples but the central shrine. That was not so strange—state-supported faiths, as this one plainly was, tended to drive their rivals underground. But Magda had not been able to find any rivals, any signs that other religions existed at all. It puzzled her. Such perfect unity should have been impossible on a world with no better mass communication methods than signboard and megaphone.
Yet it was there. Every household into which Pedroza's disguised sensors had buzzed or crawled had an image of the local goddess prominently displayed. All were copies, good or bad, of the cult portrait in the hexagonal temple.
At first she suspected the ubiquitous images were in place only as an outward show of conformity. But no one ever came snooping to see if some house might not have a portrait on the wall. Not only that, the locals plainly believed in their goddess. It was not always showy, and so doubly convincing. A casual, friendly nod to an image as someone walked past said more than the rites at the temple.
Magda worked hard with Norma to pick up the local language. As she'd hoped, it was descended from the one the first Survey Service ship had learned. That helped a lot. These days, too, the natives wrote with a straightforward thirty-eight-character alphabet instead of the hodgepodge of syllabic signs, ideograms, and pictograms they'd used before. That helped even more.
Seeing the work she'd done on the way to Bilbeis IV paying off made it hard for Magda not to gloat at Pedroza. He had just started fighting with the language and was still a long way from the fluency he'd need for fieldwork in town. Magda wanted out of the Jêng Ho so badly she could taste it.
The sea breeze blew the stench from the city into the faces of Irfan Kawar and Magda as they hiked down from their hidden ship. The geologist coughed. "Plumbing often gets invented surprisingly late," Magda murmured.
"I knew I should have worn nose filters," Kawar said. "If I'd really wanted to experience the primitive at first hand, I'd've gone into anthropology the way you did."
She made a face at him. Their hiking boots scrunched over gravel. They were on their own, linked to their crewmates only by the little transceivers implanted behind their ears. Both wore khaki denim coveralls, standard Service issue. Traders in a variety of costumes plied their wares in the town's marketplace; one more drab style of clothing should not seem too out of place there.
The first native to spot them was a woman picking berries by the side of the path. She looked up warily, as if wondering whether to flee into the bushes. Magda and Irfan Kawar slowly approached, their hands clasped in front of them in the local greeting gesture.
"The peace of the eternal goddess on you," Magda said, hoping her accent was not too foul to understand.
She must have made herself clear, for the woman's eyes lit. "And on you," the woman replied. She stared at them with frank curiosity. Magda's red-brown curls and smooth cheeks, Kawar's swarthy skin and bald head, were unlike anything she knew. "What distant land are you from?" she asked.
"The far northwest," Kawar replied. The dominant culture had not reached that part of the continent, so the answer seemed safe enough.
The woman accepted it without blinking. Her next question, though, made the two Terrans look at each other in confusion for a moment. It sounded like, "What will you be doing in search?"
Magda was trying to twist the grammar to make the sentence mean "What are you searching for?" when she remembered that the literal meaning of Hotofras—the name of the town ahead—was "Search." She said, "We have jewels to sell or trade. Here, would you like to see?"
She unzipped a pocket and took out a handful of red, blue, and green stones: synthetic rubies, star sapphires, and emeralds from the ship's lab. "Our gems are very fine," she said cajolingly.
The woman's hand came out until she touched a sapphire with the tip of one finger. Then she jerked it away, as if scalded. "No matter how fair your stones, I must make do with beads and colored glass, I fear. My husband is but a candlemaker; we will never be rich."
Kawar chose a much smaller sapphire from Magda's palm and gave it to the woman. Her face was a study in confusion. "Do you seek to buy my body? This is the fee, many times over, did I wish to sell myself to you; but I do not."
"No," he assured her, smiling wryly—he was gay. "But surely you will tell many people of the foreigners who gave a jewel away. They will come to us without the wariness buyers should have, and we will make up the price of this stone many times over." His sly smile invited her to share in the scheme.
"Truly the goddess smiles on me today!" the woman exclaimed. She tucked the sapphire into a pouch that hung from her belt.
"Tell me of this goddess you people follow," Magda said. "When we use your language, we greet the folk we meet in her name, but in our far country we do not worship her ourselves."
The woman shook her head in disbelief. "How could anyone not worship the goddess? She lives forever and knows everything. I am only the poor wife of a candlemaker, and live far from her glory, but one day perhaps even I shall see her." Her face filled with awe at the thought.
"So say the priests of many goddesses," Kawar observed; the local tongue seemed to lack a masculine word for the divine. "How does anyone in this world know which goddess we shall meet in the next?"
"Careful," Magda warned in English-based Federacy Standard. "That might be heresy."
The woman gaped at them, but not for that reason. "The next world!" she burst out. "Who speaks of the next world? If I sold this stone you gave me, I might make enough silver for the journey to the goddess's own home, far though it is."
"Selling a sapphire will not take you to heaven." Magda frowned, again wondering how well she was understanding the local language.
The woman set hands on hips, exasperated with these ignorant strangers. "Your talk makes no sense! I do not need to die to see the goddess, only to travel to the Holy City where she dwells."
"The Holy City?" Kawar echoed.
The woman pointed westward, toward Hotofras. "If you seek to learn more of these things than I can tell you, you have only to speak to one of the upper priests or to the chief magistrate. They have seen the goddess with their own eyes—how I envy them!"
"Perhaps we will do that," Magda said. She and Kawar were making ready to go when she remembered the roles they were playing. "And you, do not forget to speak of us and of the excellent gems we sell."
"I will not forget," the woman promised. "The peace of the eternal goddess on you." That served for good-bye as well as hello. The two Terrans returned it and walked on.
Magda snorted. "Nice setup they have here—the bigwigs talk directly to the goddess and tell everyone under them what to do. Who's going to argue?"
"Don't let your jaundiced point of view make you misread the facts," Kawar reproved. "From what the woman said, she could hope to visit the goddess herself. That would be the cult image the one in the temple here is based on, I suppose. Probably gorgeous, of gold and ivory—do they have ivory here?—and precious stones. That would be worth a long journey to see."
"So it would. I can't quite see, though, why she would refer to an image 'dwelling' in this Holy City of theirs. Maybe there's a line of high priestesses who assume the role of the goddess one after the other. Maybe—hell, what's the point in guessing before we know enough?"
A twinkle showed for a moment in Kawar's dark, liquid eyes. "Because it's fun, of course."
She grabbed his hand, liking him very much. Too damn bad he preferred men, she thought—no wonder he'd been amused at what the woman thought he wanted. But he certainly would be more enjoyable than the implacably serious Atanasio Pedroza. No, that didn't say enough of Irfan, Magda decided—almost anyone was more enjoyable than Pedroza. She sighed. If she'd wanted things to be simple, she should have stayed in her father's pastry shop.
The path from the mountain valley where the Jêng Ho lay hidden descended to meet the main road into Hotofras. The road was rammed earth, heavily graveled to make it of some use even in the rain. Coaches, carts, and wagons rattled along, drawn by the local draft animals, which looked something like zebras and something like camels. "Ugly, with stripes," Kawar put it.
Magda paid more attention to the coaches. Instead of subjecting their passengers to bone-crushing jounces, they had an arrangement of leather straps that cushioned riders from the worst jolts. "It's the first step toward springs," the anthropologist said.
"I think they have a good many more steps to go," Kawar said judiciously, watching a native flung against the side of the coach by the swaying motion the straps imparted. "That still looks bloody uncomfortable."
"Yes, yes, of course," Magda said. "But on Terra people took three times as long to come up with even this rotten a system."
Kawar groaned and put a hand to his kidneys.
Chuckling, Magda went on. "Yes, exactly. They've nipped a lot of aches and pains in the bud here."
"In the butt, you mean."
"That too." Magda made a face at the geologist.
The walls of Hotofras had been tall and strong once. Now they were ramshackle, as if often used to furnish building stone. Half the town lay outside their protection. To Magda that spoke of long years of peace, not what she would have expected from such an obviously energetic culture: that energy should have boiled over, and frequently.
Small boys in ragged smocks gaped at the Terrans. Adults ostentatiously ignored them, except for those who eyed Magda's exotic good looks. Even they were circumspect. Hotofras was a port that attracted all kinds of people—why get excited about one more set of strangers?
The innkeeper into whose establishment they walked found a reason—seeing a pair of foreigners, she tried to rent them a room at double the going rate. But Magda had viewed enough transactions of that sort to have a good idea of what she ought to pay, and her pungent sarcasm brought the woman back to reality with a bump.
"Was that really necessary?" Kawar asked as the chastened innkeeper led them upstairs to their room.
"It wouldn't be in character not to drive a sharp bargain." Magda shrugged. "Besides, everybody here enjoys haggling. If I'd've accepted that first outrageous price, she would have been almost disappointed to take my money . . . almost, but not quite."
The room was all right—cleaner, in fact, than Magda had expected. The cloth-covered mattress was supported by crisscrossing leather straps attached to a wooden bed frame.
Magda had noticed that arrangement before without thinking anything of it. But seen so soon after the coaches, it caught her eye. When she remarked on the similarity, the innkeeper said proudly, "Yes, it was a cousin of my father's who first thought to suspend coaches that way, and who earned the reward of the goddess for it."
"What is that?" Irfan Kawar asked. "The certainty of a happy life in the next world?"
The innkeeper stared at him. "You are from a far country, stranger, not to know of the goddess and her ways; I thought everyone did. No, Rumeli was summoned to the Holy City and rewarded with gold from the hands of the goddess herself."
"Might we speak to such an illustrious personage?" Kawar asked. "Could you introduce us to him?"
"Er, no," the innkeeper said, suddenly less proud. "I fear he squandered the goddess's gift on wine and loose women and died three years ago of an apoplexy." Someone shouted for her from the taproom below; she left with embarrassed haste.
Amused, Kawar turned to Magda, but his grin faded before her grim expression. "What's wrong?"
"The reward-for-invention scheme, that's what. It should have died with Sabium; it was far ahead of its time. But here it is, still. And if that's not cultural contamination, I don't know what is. Damn, damn, damn! Won't the Purists love that?"
She felt like kicking something. Noninterference was the rule the Survey Service lived by. Humanity had learned from painful experience that ramming one culture's answers down another's throat was the wrong way to go about things. Given time and freedom from meddling, intelligent beings usually worked out what they needed—and if they didn't, whose business was it but their own?
The Purists, though, thought any contact with pretech-nological worlds was contamination. They were very well meaning . . . especially if you asked one of them. Magda knew a know-nothing when she heard one, even when the talk, as it all too often was these days, was couched in terms of budget cutting instead of ideology.
"We're a good many hundred years too late to do anything about it now," Kawar said practically. He yawned, then patted his ample belly. "As for me, I'm going down to see what the food and beer are like, then coming back up here to sack out."
"Sensible," Magda had to admit; Irfan usually was. Now that she wasn't on the go anymore, she felt unfamiliar muscles starting to ache; exercise in the Jêng Ho's little gym wasn't the same as hiking over ground sometimes rough. She looked around and started to laugh. "With only one bed, I'd sooner share it with you, Irfan, than with a lot of people I could think of; you'll just use it for sleeping."
He reached out and swatted her on the bottom. She leaped in the air in surprise. "Who knows what strange perversions spending the night with you might tempt me into?"
She thought about it. "Maybe we'll find out."
Rather to her regret, the night passed uneventfully—except that Irfan snored. The sleepy man running the taproom grumbled when they asked him for hot porridge for breakfast the next morning; the locals ate at noon, sunset, and just before they went to sleep.
Action at the central bazaar was brisk by the time the Terrans arrived. Hucksters cried a hundred wares, from furs to roasted nuts to sailcloth. Almost as loudly, customers sneered at the quality of what they were offered. Magda and Kawar somehow managed to stake out a few square meters and took up a chant: "Rare jewels! Fine gems! Rare jewels! Fine gems!"
They quickly sold some sapphires and emeralds; those went well with the natives' coloring. The rubies proved harder to move. The locals would admire them in Magda's hands, then put them against their own skins and wince at the effect. The repeated failures annoyed her, even though she and Kawar were just using their role for concealment. Whatever she did, she wanted to do well.
The Terrans' location let them watch the main temple entrance. Those huge metal doors, splendid with cloisonnéwork, were open day and night. Locals went in and out, both layfolk and priests. The latter were easy to recognize by their sober robes of white or light blue; most of the rest of the people preferred tunics, vests, and baggy trousers dyed in a rainbow of gaudy colors. There seemed to be about as many female priests as men.
As the morning wore on, Magda began to feel she and Kawar were being studied in turn by the priests. She expected curiosity from the locals, but these long, measuring stares were something else again. So were the conversations the priests started having behind their hands.
"Be ready to disappear in a hurry," Magda muttered to Kawar. "I have a feeling we're attracting undue attention somehow."
"Very well," he said gravely, interrupting his call for customers. "At your signal I shall grow a thick head of blue hair and turn pinkish gray all over."
She snorted. "You're incorrigible." Of itself, her hand patted the stunner in a front pocket of her coveralls. That, of course, was nonlethal and for emergencies only. There were stories of Survey Service personnel who let dreadful things happen to them rather than use an offplanet weapon. Magda admired that kind of altruism but did not intend to imitate it.
But when the priests made their approach, it proved peaceable enough. One white-robed woman threaded her way through the crowded bazaar toward the two Terrans. She waited until Magda was done haggling with a magnate in a particularly repulsive purple cloak, then bowed politely. "The peace of the eternal goddess on you, strangers."
"And on you, mistress," Magda and Kawar replied together.
"May we interest you in some stones, mistress, for yourself or for the goddess's temple?" Magda continued.
The priestess blinked, as if that had not occurred to her. "Perhaps you may, at that. But I have seen precious stones before, and I have never seen any folk with your aspect." She smiled; it made her look much younger and gave her an individuality she had lacked before. "Therefore, I am more interested in you. Will you tell me where you come from?"
The Terrans looked at each other. Finding no harm in the question, Kawar answered with the story they had prepared. "From the far northwest. Not many of our people travel as far south as your lands."
"Yes, I can believe that," the priestess said. Magda wondered if the woman's tone really was as dry as it seemed. But when the priestess went on, her questions were of the sort any newcomers might get, on how they had reached Hotofras, what they thought of it, what their homeland was like. She listened gravely to their answers.
At last the priestess said, "I thank the both of you for your patience. We always search out new knowledge of strangers who come to Hotofras."
The use of the verb reminded Magda of the place's unusual name. "If I may ask a question in return," she said, "why is this town called 'Search'?"
"Because it was founded to search out knowledge of strangers, of course," the priestess replied, smiling ever so slightly. She bowed to the Terrans and made her way back to the temple. Pausing outside the entrance, she spoke with a priest in a blue robe. He looked toward Magda and Kawar, scratched his head, and followed the priestess into the shrine.
"I wonder what all that's in aid of," Kawar said. "If we were going to get such a thorough grilling, it should have been at the gate coming in so we wouldn't have the chance to lose ourselves if we were ne'er-do-wells."
Magda shrugged. "I think that was a purely religious interrogation, not a security check. Maybe they have some sort of obligation toward strangers. That would fit a mother-goddess cult: shelter the homeless because in a way they're orphans, and so on."
"Makes sense," Kawar said. "But then, it should, you being the anthropologist and all." Ignoring the face Magda made at him, he went back to extolling the virtues of their jewels.
By evening, they had sold several more stones, two to buyers who had heard of them from the candlemaker's wife. Both ended up paying more than their other customers. "What do you know?" Kawar said, bemused. "I wasn't even lying."
"That's no way to advertise," Magda said. "Enough for one day. Let's go back to the inn. My feet are getting numb from standing in one place so long."
After a dinner of broiled many-legged river creatures with spicy gravy, the two Terrans went up to their rooms to transmit the data they had gathered and to plan what to do next. The latter did not take long: visiting the temple was the obvious next step.
They were walking toward the central square the next morning when they met a delegation of priests heading toward their lodging. Before Magda and Kawar quite grasped what was happening, the priests were all around them. One gave a hand signal. Suddenly the Terrans were grasped and held.
With a curse, Magda kicked out backward. The blow should have caught a male captor where it would do the most good—but the priest was not there when her foot lashed out. Whatever other arcane secrets the clergy of the mother goddess owned, they knew hand-to-hand combat.
Irfan Kawar did not try to break away. Instead he protested angrily. "By what right do you do this to us? We are but harmless traders!"
"If that is so, you will have our apology and a handsome reward," said the priest who had signaled. He turned to his companions. "Search them."
Magda tried again to break free, to no avail; the priests gripping her were strong and alert. She snarled as the locals' hands explored her body, though the examiners took no more liberties than the task required. A priest extracted the pouch of jewels from her hip pocket. "Are you robbers, then, in holy robes?" she demanded. Tears of fear and fury ran unheeded down her cheeks.
The priest opened the pouch, let bright stones cascade into his palm, and peered into the leather sack. When satisfied it was empty, he returned the gems to it. "By no means," he said quietly. "These lovelies are yours, and we shall give them back to you."
"What is the meaning of this outrage, then?" Kawar asked. "Do you always greet foreigners so? If you do, I wonder that you have so many ships tied up at your docks."
The priest in charge of the rest smiled thinly. "Foreigners of a certain sort interest us more than the rest: those who say they come from lands we know nothing of, and whose appearance bears them out. They interest us even more if they carry devices we cannot fathom." He hefted Magda's stunner.
"I will show you the use of that one, if you like," she said eagerly.
"Thank you, no," he replied with cool amusement. "It may be a weapon."
"Irfan! Magda! What's going on? Are you all right?" Norma Anderssen's voice sounded in their transceivers. All Norma and the people back at the Jêng Ho could do was listen and worry.
"What will you do with us?" Magda asked, as much to pass on information as for her own sake.
"Why, send you to the goddess, of course," the priest said.
Magda could not remember a ritual phrase of that sort in the local language. She wondered if it was a euphemism for human sacrifice. "To the next world?" she asked tensely.
The priest stared at her with the same puzzlement the candlemaker's wife had shown. "No, no," he said. "Do you think us barbarians? I meant only that you will be taken—under guard, lest you try to flee, but otherwise in comfort—to the Holy City, where the goddess dwells."