Read Online Jack Vance - Gaean Reach 01 by Gray Prince - Free Book Online Page A

made no comment. Clearly she was not a Redemptionist by instinct, or by innate conviction…How to reconcile her love for Morningswake with the guilty suspicion that she had no right to the property? Kelse and Gerd Jemasze had no such qualms. On an impulse she asked Elvo Glissam: “Suppose you owned Morningswake: what would you do?”
    Elvo Glissam smiled and shook his head. “It’s always easier to relinquish somebody else’s property…I’d like to believe that my principles would dominate my avarice.”
    “So you’d give up Morningswake?”
    “I honestly don’t know. I hope that’s what I’d do.”
    Schaine pointed toward a cluster of tung-beetle mounds about a hundred yards west. “Look: in the shadow to the right! You wanted to see a wild erjin—there it is!”
    The erjin stood seven feet tall, with massive arms banded with stripes of black and yellow fur. Tufts of stiff golden fiber stood above the head; folds of gunmetal cartilage almost concealed the four small eyes in the neck under the jutting frontal bone. The creature stood negligently, showing neither fear nor hostility. Gerd Jemasze and Kelse became aware of the beast. Kelse stared in fascination, and slowly brought forth his gun.
    Elvo asked in dismay: “Is he going to shoot it? It’s such a magnificent creature!”
    “He’s always hated erjins—worse since he lost his arm and leg.”
    “But this one isn’t threatening us. It’s almost murder.”
    Gerd Jemasze suddenly turned and fired to the east at a pair of erjins lunging forward from a thicket of greasebush. One sprawled forward and fell only four feet from Schaine and Elvo Glissam, to lie with great six-fingered hands twitching; the other jerked up into a grotesque backward somersault and fell with a thump. The first erjin, who had acted as a decoy, slipped behind the tung mounds before Kelse could aim his gun. Jemasze ran off to the side to get another shooting angle, but the creature had disappeared.
    Elvo Glissam stood looking down at the quivering hulk of the near erjin. He noticed the hand-palps, as sensitive as human fingers, and the talons which extended themselves when the erjin made a fist. He examined the tuft of bronze bristles on the scalp, which some authorities declared to be telepathy receptors. Another bound and the creature would have been at his throat. In a subdued voice he said to Gerd Jemasze, “That was a close call…Do the erjins often use tricks like that?”
    Jemasze nodded curtly. “They’re intelligent brutes, and unforgiving. How they can be domesticated is a mystery to me.”
    “Maybe the secret was Uther Madduc’s ‘wonderful joke’.”
    “I don’t know. I plan to find out.”
    Kelse asked: “How do you propose to do that?”
    “As soon as we get to Morningswake we’ll fly back to the Sturdevant and rescue the log,” said Gerd Jemasze. “Then we’ll have an idea where he went.”
    The afternoon waned. At sunset the party camped among the sandstone pinnacles, with the southern edge of Morningswake Domain still three miles to the north. Jemasze stalked, killed and cleaned a ten-pound bustard, the wild descendant of fowl imported from beyond the stars. Schaine and Elvo Glissam gathered fuel and built a fire, and the four toasted chunks of the bird on twigs.
    “Tomorrow we’ll find water,” said Gerd. “Three or four streams cross South Morningswake, so I recall.”
    “It’s about ten miles to South Station,” said Kelse. “There’s a windmill and maybe a few stores there. But no radio, worse luck.”
    “Where are the Aos?”
    “They might be anywhere, but I suspect they’re moving north. No help for it; we’ve still got sixty miles to go.”
    “How’s your leg holding up?”
    “Not too good. But I’ll get there.”
    Elvo Glissam leaned back and lay staring up at the stars. His own life, he thought, seemed relatively simple compared to that of a land-baron…Schaine! What went on in her mind? One moment she seemed intensely