Read Online Wyst: Alastor 1716 by Jack Vance - Free Book Online

sly merges,” “serves good
wump,” “serves bad wump,” “too many pranksters,” “sexivationist.” Each block
has it’s own legends, songs and special jargon. “Old Fink” is considered
easy-going and faintly raffish, which of course describes me very well, too.
    You ask, What is a “snerge”? A thief. I have already suffered the
attentions of a merge, and my camera is missing so I can’t send photographs.
Luckily I was carrying my ozols with me. Please send me by return mail new
pigments, vehicle, applicators and a big pad of matrix. Ferfan will tell you what
I need. Send them insured; if they came by ordinary delivery, they might be
egalized.
    Later: I have done my first stint of drudge, at an export
factory, for which I receive what is called “drivet”: ten tokens for each hour
worked. My weekly drivet is a hundred and thirty tokens, of which
eighty-two must immediately be paid to the block, for food and lodging. The
remainder is not too useful, since there is not much to buy: garments, shoes,
stadium tickets, toasted seaweed at Disjerferact. I now dress like an Arrabin,
so as not to be conspicuous. Certain shops at the space-port sell imported
goods—tools, toys, occasional trifles of “boater,” at the most astonishing
prices! In tokens, of course, which have almost no exchange value against the
ozol—something like five hundred tokens to the owl.
    Absurd, of course. On second thought, not so absurd. Who wants
tokens? There is nothing to buy.
    Still, this way of life, peculiar as it seems, is not necessarily
a bad system. I suspect that every style of life works out to be a trade off
between various kinds of freedoms. There are naturally many different freedoms,
and sometimes one freedom implies the absence of another.
    In any event I’ve been getting ideas for depictions, which I know
you don’t take seriously. The light here is absolutely ravishing: a deceptively
pale light, which seems to diffract everywhere into colored fringes.
    I have much more to tell you, but I’ll reserve something for my
next. I won’t ask you to send in “bonter”; I’d be—well, to tell the truth, I
don’t know what would happen, but I don’t want to learn.
    Immigrants and visitors are not well liked, yet I find that my
fame as a “fixer” has already spread far and wide. Isn’t this a joke? I know
only what we were taught at school and what I learned at home. Still, everyone
who has a bad screen insists that I fix it for him. Sometimes utter strangers!
And when I do these favors, do they thank me? Verbally, yes, but there is a
most peculiar expression on their faces: I can’t describe it. Contempt, distaste,
antipathy? Because I so easily command this (to them) recondite skill. I have
on this instant come to a decision. No longer will I perform favors free. I
will demand tokens or hours of drudge. They will sneer and make remarks, but
they will respect me more.
    Here are some of my ideas for depictions:
    The blocks of Uncibal, in the colors which hold so much meaning
for the Arrabins.
    The view along Uncibal River from a prospect deck, with the oncoming
sea of faces, all blank and serene.
    The games, the spunk battles, the Arrabin version of hussade. [16]
    Disjerferact, the carnival along the mudflats. More of this later.
    Just a word or two about the local version of hussade, and I hope
no one in the family will be shocked or dismayed. The game is played to
standard rules; the defeated sheirl, however, must undergo a most distressing experience
.. She is disrobed and placed upon a cart with a repulsive wooden effigy, which
is so controlled as to commit an unnatural act upon the sheirl; meanwhile, the
losing team must pull this cart around the stadium. The wonder never leaves me:
how are sheirls recruited? Each must realize that sooner or later her team must
lose, yet none ever seems to consider this contingency.
    They are either very brave or very foolish, or perhaps they are impelled
by some dark human