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04%20-%20The%20Pnume.txt the room, followed her.
She had climbed the companionway to the quarterdeck, where she stood leaning
on the taffrail, looking back the way they had come. Reith seated himself on a
bench nearby and pretended to bask in the wan brown sunlight while he puzzled
over her behavior. She was female and inherently irrational-but her conduct
seemed to exceed this elemental fact. Certain of her attitudes had been formed
in the Shelters, but these seemed to be waning; upon reaching the surface she
had abandoned the old life and discarded its points of view, as an insect
molts a skin. In the process, Reith ruminated, she had discarded her old
personality, but had not yet discovered a new one ... The thought gave Reith a
qualm. Part of the girl's charm or fascination, or whatever it was, lay in her
innocence, her transparency ... transparency?
Reith made a skeptical sound. Not altogether. He went to join her. "What are
you pondering so deeply?"
She gave him a cool side-glance. "I was thinking of myself and the wide ghaun.
I remember my time in the dark. I know now that below the world I was not yet
born. All those years, while I moved quietly below, the folk of the surface
lived in color and change and air."
"So this is why you've been acting so strangely!"
"No!" she cried in sudden passion. "It is not! The reason is you and your
secrecy! You tell me nothing. I don't know where we are going, or what you are
going to do with me."
Reith frowned down at the black boil of the wake. "I'm not sure of these
things myself."
"But you must know something!"
"Yes ... When I get to Sivishe I want to return to my home, which is far and
remote."
"And what of me?"
And what of Zap 210? wondered Reith. A question he had avoided asking himself.
"I'm not sure you'd want to come with me," he replied, somewhat lamely.
Tears glinted in her eyes. "Where else can I go? Should I become a drudge? Or
a Gzhindra? Or wear an orange sash at Urmank? Or should I die?" She swung away
and marched forward to the bow, past a group of the spade-faced seamen, who
watched her from the side of their pale eyes.
Reith returned to the bench ... The afternoon passed. Black clouds to the
north generated a cool wind. The sails were shaken out, and the cog drove
forward. Zap 210 presently came aft with a strange expression on her face. She
gave Reith a look of sad accusation and went down to the cabin.
Reith followed and found her lying on one of the couches. "Don't you feel
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well?"
"No."
"Come outside. You'll be worse in here."
She staggered out upon the deck.
"Keep your eyes on the horizon," said Reith. "When the ship moves, keep your
head level. Do that for a while and you'll feel better."
Zap 210 stood by the rail. The clouds loomed overhead and the wind died; the
Nhiahar lay wallowing with slatting sails ... From the sky came a purple
dazzle, slanting and slashing at the sea-once, twice, three times, all in the
flicker of an eye-blink. Zap 210 gave a small scream and jerked back in
terror. Reith caught her and held her as the thunder rumbled down. She moved
uneasily; Reith kissed her forehead, her face, her mouth.
The sun settled into a tattered panoply of gold and black and brown; with the
dusk came rain. Reith and Zap 210 retreated to their cabin, where the steward
served supper: mincemeat, seafruit, biscuits. They ate, looking out through
the great windows at the sea and rain and lightning, and afterwards, with
lightning sparking the dark, they became lovers.
At midnight the clouds departed; stars burnt down from the sky. "Look up
there!" said Reith. "Among the stars are other worlds of men. One of them is
called Earth." He paused. Zap 210 lay listening, but Reith for some obscure
reason could say no more, and presently she fell asleep.
The Nhiahar, driven by fair winds, plunged down the Second Sea, crashing
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04%20-%20The%20Pnume.txt through great white billows of foam. Cape Braise
reared up ahead; the ship put into the ancient stone city of Stheine to take
on water, then fared forth into the Schanizade.
Twenty miles down the coast a tongue of land hooked out to the west. Along the
foreshore a forest of dark blue trees shrouded a city of flat domes, cambered
cusps, sweeping colonnades. Reith thought to recognize the architecture, and
put a question to the captain: "Is that a Chasch city?"
"It is Songh, most southerly of the Blue Chasch places. I have taken cargoes
into Songh, but it is risky business. You must know the games of the Chasch:
antics of a dying race. I have seen ruins on the Kotan steppes: a hundred
places where Old Chasch or Blue Chasch once lived, and who goes there now?
Only the
Phung."
The city receded into the distance and disappeared from view as the ship
passed south beyond the peninsula. Not long after a cry from one of the crew
brought everyone out on deck. In the sky a pair of airships fought. One was a
gleaming contrivance of blue and white metal, shaped to a set of splendid
curves. A balustrade contained the deck, on which lay a dozen creatures in
glistening casques. The other craft was austere and bleak: a vessel sinister,
ugly, gray, built with only its function in mind. It was slightly smaller than
the Blue Chasch ship and somewhat more agile; in the dorsal bubble crouched
the
Dirdir crew, intent at the work of destroying the Chasch ship. The vessels
circled and swung, now high, now low, careening around each other like
venomous insects. From time to time, as circumstances offered, the ships
exchanged volleys of sandblast fire, without noticeable effect. Far up into
the gray-brown sky spun the sparkling shapes, to spiral giddily down, one
after the other, veering only yards above the ocean's surface.
The whole company of the Nhiahar came on deck to watch the battle, even the
two old women who had not previously shown themselves. As they scanned the sky
the hood fell back from the head of one of them to reveal a keen pale
countenance. Zap 210, standing beside Reith, uttered a soft gasp, and quickly
turned away her gaze.
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The Blue Chasch ship slid suddenly down; the bow guns struck under the counter
of the Dirdir ship, knocking it up, tumbling it over and down into the sea,
where it struck with a soundless splash. The Blue Chasch vessel swung in a
single grand circle, then cruised back toward Songh.
The old women had disappeared below. Zap 210 spoke in a tremulous whisper:
"Did you notice?"
"Yes. I noticed."
"They are Gzhindra."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, I am sure."
"I suppose Gzhindra make voyages like other folk," said Reith, somewhat
hollowly. "So far at least they've done nothing to bother us."
"But they are here, aboard the ship! They do nothing without purpose!"
Reith made another skeptical sound. "Perhaps so-but what can we do about it?"
"We can kill them!"
Zap 210, for all the strictures of her upbringing, was still a creature of
Tschai, thought Reith. He said: "We'll keep close watch on them. Now that we
know who they are, and they don't know that we know, the advantage is ours."
It was Zap 210's turn to make a skeptical sound. Reith nevertheless refused to
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