The Virgin of Zesh & the Tower of Zanid Read Online Free PDF

“Methought you Terrans were monogamists.”
    “Ah, but such is our love for her that she couldn’t spurn either lest the one rejected perish of a broken liver. So you’ll not—”
    Althea started as the purport of this speech reached her consciousness.
    “Nay, nay, get aboard,” said the captain. “I’ll pay your fee from my own pocket, so poignantly has your tale plucked at the strings of my affections. Yarely, now!”
    “Good heavens!” said Althea. “Doctor Bahr, you’ve made me out not only an adulteress but a polyandrous one as well! If that ever gets around in mission circles—”
    “Your missionary career will be mud,” said Kirwan, “and a good thing, too.”
    Althea sighed. Life on Earth may have had its shortcomings, but it was simple compared with the bizarre misadventures that had befallen her on Krishna. Each step seemed to plunge her further into quicksand. Kirwan continued: “At any rate, our professor got us a free ride. How’d you work it, Gottfried?”
    “I know the psychology of these folk. Although even more cruel and belligerent than Terrans, they are also romantic and sentimental. The captain could not resist an appeal to his sympathy for runaway lovers.”
    Althea said, “I’m sorry you couldn’t have done something like that to Gorchakov.”
    “A different type,” said Bahr. “A somatonic dynamophile, slightly schizoid and with a paranoid tendency, in addition to his obvious sadism. Very, very hard to influence.”
    Althea stood on the edge of the deck, holding a mast stay to steady herself. With much shouting, the crew swarmed about the rigging and reversed the set of the two yellow sails. One of these crewmen, Althea noticed, was a tailed Krishnan in a dirty loin cloth. He was covered with dark, olive-brown hair, not quite thick enough to be called a pelt. He was shorter and broader than his tailless fellows.
    The tailed one’s face reminded Althea, in a subhuman way, of that football player from Yale with whom she had thought herself in love, before her brothers had broken up the romance. It also seemed that the tailed one was something less than a perfect ferryhand, for the skipper shouted and swore at him more than at all the others put together.
    “Come down, Jinych, and may Dupulán flay you! I said to start the luff brace, not to trim it! Nay, not that line; that one! Beware! Ye’ll catch your cursed tail in the block! Oh, gods, that I should be afflicted with such a clodpate!” Then a moment later: “Jinych, what in the name of Dashmok are ye doing now? Whatever it be, cease forthwith!”
    The ferry got under way, with the hapless Jinych working an oar. Althea found it hard to imagine a being of that type developing an intellect of Newtonian power. Her brothers, she remembered, had likewise deemed the football player subhuman. Then he had become president of Amalgamated Lobbyists and richer than all the Merricks put together.

IV
    Majbur rose behind a kind offence, which resolved itself into the masts and spars of the ships along the waterfront. There were war galleys with gilded figureheads; high-sided square-riggers from the stormy Va’andao Sea; lateen-rigged merchantmen from the Sadabao and Banjao ports, with yards slanting at all angles; and local craft: fishing smacks, river barges, timber rafts, and pleasure yachts.
    The ferry crew grunted at their sweeps as the craft crept into its dock, its yellow sails banging and flapping in the uncertain breeze. The sails subsided as crewmen shinnied up the slanting yards to furl them. The passengers streamed ashore. Crewmen heaved the carriage off the ship. Althea and the two Earthmen got back in, and they rolled into Majbur Town.
    The carriage picked its way through the traffic, which choked the narrow streets. The second and higher floors of the lofty buildings were built out over the sidewalks, upheld by long rows of arches of intricately carven stonework.
    “Damn!” said Kirwan, ever quick to complain. “If I