Read Online Space Opera by Jack Vance - Free Book Online

it’s a mathematics which none of our mathematicians can understand. But I’m only glancing around the subject of the ’zants. To know a folk like this, even superficially, you have to live with them for years.”
    “But what of music?” persisted Dame Isabel. “Do they have any ear for music, do they compose, is there a native musical idiom?”
    “I suspect not,” said Dyrus Boltzen with careful courtesy. “But of course I can’t be entirely sure. I have held this station down for six years, but I still keep running into things which surprise me.”
    Dame Isabel nodded brusquely. She did not find Dyrus Boltzen’s manner ingratiating, though he had given her no specific cause for resentment. She now ceremoniously introduced the members of the company, watching Dyrus Boltzen sidelong as she spoke the famous names, but they seemed to mean nothing. “As I suspected,” she told herself. “The man is a musical illiterate.”
    Dyrus Boltzen took the group on a tour of the settlement, which consisted of little more than four concrete buildings surrounding a bleak compound. Two of the buildings were warehouses for trade-goods: one for imports, the other for articles to be exported — bowls, salvers, vases, goblets and dinner services polished from native stone: translucent obsidian, turquoise, jade, carnelian, a dense blue dumortierite, black basalt. There were jewels and crystals, chandeliers with pendants of diamonds, emeralds and sapphires, tourmaline wind-chimes. In the compound the group saw its first byzantaurs, a team of four equipped with brooms and water-sprays, sweeping the concrete expanse with great care and concentration. They were even more grotesque than their photographs had indicated: an impression furthered by the motion of their four arms and four legs, the working of the oddly placed features in the two heads, the texture of the skin, as rough and grey as rock.
    Dame Isabel spoke to Dyrus Boltzen: “The creatures seem cooperative, even mild.”
    Boltzen laughed. “Those four are what, for lack of a better word, we call elders. Every day, for some reason quite beyond my comprehension, they sweep the compound. Notice the shawl around the neck? That’s a fabric woven of rock fiber. The colors are significant by the way, almost like the old Scottish tartans. The brown and blue and black are characteristic of the Royal Giants, and the length of the fringe is a measure of prestige or rank.” He summoned one of the byzantaurs; it approached on thick stiff legs which clicked against the concrete. “Friend ’zant,” said Boltzen, “here are people from the sky. They come in big ship. They like to show all friend ’zants many pretty things. They like friend ’zants to come to ship. Okay?”
    From somewhere deep inside the thorax came a rumbling voice. “Maybe okay. Friend ’zants scared.”
    Dame Isabel stepped forward. “You need fear nothing. We are a legitimate grand opera company, we will perform a program we are sure you will enjoy.”
    “Maybe okay, we go to look for yellow no-good ’zants. Maybe not scared.”
    Boltzen explained. “He’s not literally afraid, it’s only that they dislike to come up from their tunnels any more than necessary; they feel that it’s demeaning.”
    “Interesting! But why should this be?”
    “It’s a matter of social standing. They eject their criminals and nonconformists upon the plain where they become either rogues or bands of what might be termed psychotics. So you see the plain represents an undesirable environment to the ’zants.”
    “I understand fully,” said Dame Isabel. “Well, the performance will take place inside the ship, and they will be spared the indignity of watching from the plain.”
    Boltzen turned to the elder. “You hear sky-talk? He show pretty things, pretty noise, not on plain, but inside ship. You and friend ’zants run over plain and go inside ship to look. Okay?”
    “Okay. I go down, talk to friend