Free Wyst: Alastor 1716 by Jack Vance Page A

Jantiff! He is at least candid!”
    “Well then, let’s be off, toilet paper and all!”
    The group proceeded to the man-way, rode to Uncibal River,
moved west for an hour, changed to a lateral which took them south into the
hills.
    Jantiff had studied a map the day previously, and now tried
to identify features of the landscape. He pointed to a great granite abutment
looming over the way ahead. “That must be the Solitary Witness; am I right?”
    “Exactly,” said Thworn, an assertive young man with russet.
hair. “Over and beyond is the Near Wold and a spate of banter if we’re lucky.
See that notch? That’s. Hebron Gap; it will take us into Pamatra Valley and
that’s where we’re bound.”
    “I suspect we’d do better out on the Middle Wold, toward Fruberg,”
said a saturnine young man named Uwser. “Some people. I know worked Pamatra Valley
two, or three months ago and came home, hungry.”
    “Nonsense,” scoffed Thworn. “I can smell the vat-berries
dripping from here! And don’t forget the Frubergers: a stone-throwing
gang of villains!”
    “The Valley folk are no better,” declared Sunover, a girl as
tall as Jantiff and of far more impressive girth. “On the whole, they’re
fat and smelly, and I don’t like to copulate with them.”
    “In that case, run,” said Uwser. “Have you no imagination?”
    “Eat, copulate, run,” intoned Garrace. “The three dynamics
of Sunover’s existence.”
    Jantiff asked Sunover: “Why either copulate or run, if you’re
not of a mind to do so?”
    Sunover merely made an impatient clucking sound. Kedidah
gave Jantiff a pat on the cheek. “They’re both good for the soul, dear boy, and
sometimes they aid one’s comfort as well.”
    Jantiff said in a worried voice: “I’d like to know what’s expected
of me. Do I copulate or do I run? What are the signals? And where do we find
the bonter?”
    “Everything happens at once,” said Garrace with an impish grin.
    “All in good time, Jantiff!” spoke the imperious Thworn. “Don’t
become anxious at this stage of the game!”
    Jantiff shrugged and gave his attention to a set of industrial
buildings toward which most of the traffic on the man-way seemed to be directed.
In response to his question Garrace informed him that here those hormones
which figured largely in Arrabin exports were extracted, refined and packaged. “You’ll
get your notice before long,” Garrace told him. “It’s our common fate. Into the
plant like so many automatons, down on the pallet, along the operation line.
They milk your glands, distill your blood, tap your spinal ducts, and in general
have their way with all your most private parts. Don’t worry; you’ll have your
turn.”
    Jantiff had not previously known of this aspect to life in
Arrabus. He frowned over his shoulder toward the cluster of pale brown
buildings. “How long does all this take?”
    “Two days, and for another two or three days you are totally
addled. Still, export we must, to pay for maintenance, and what, after all, is
two days a year in the interests of egalism?”
    Thee man-way ended at a, depot, where the group boarded an
ancient omnibus. Swaying and wallowing perilously, the omnibus slid them up the
road between slopes overgrown with blue canker-wort and black dendrons studded
with poisonous scarlet seed balls.
    After an hour’s ride the bus arrived at the, head of Hebron
Gap. “End of the road, all out!” cried Thworn. “Now we must march off on foot,
like the adventurers of old!”
    The troop set off along a lane leading downhill through a stand of kirkash trees smelling strong and sweet of resin. Ahead the land
flattened to become Pamatra Valley; beyond stretched the Weirdlands under a
smoke-colored shroud of forest.
    Garrace called over his shoulder: “Jantiff, shake a leg
there; you’ll have to keep up. What are you doing?”
    “Just making a sketch of that tree. Look at the way the
branches angle out! They’re like dancing