Free The Enemy of My Enemy by Avram Davidson Page A

world. The river at Old Port was an open sewer, it didn’t even have tide enough to keep it clean. I saw the body of an infant floating there once, I remember. Came back a week later, it was still there.” He grimaced, shook his head and shoulders. Then he turned to his friend.
    “How is your new lady?”
    Hob Sarlamat smiled, the lines about his full mouth deepening. “She is well, she is wonderful. We are good friends, very good ones. She now accepts the fact that I don’t and never will paint leaves well, and of course blames it on my foreign upbringing. And I of course don’t bother to explain that I simply have no interest in painting leaves. Some things sink in more than others, I suppose. But I am in no hurry to leave, you can understand.”
    “I do, I must hope,” said Tonorosant, who had been Jerred Northi. And, in a way, still was. “Atoral is coming for supper and she will stay the night.”
    Sarlamat murmured, How nice. He smiled again. He made no move to leave.
    “ — And. I don’t know if you were informed … ” Tonorosant knew, in fact, almost nothing of the subtle means whereby Hob was kept informed. “ … but I have paid the last amount. To the Craftsmen, I mean. I now own myself.” It was his turn to smile. He saw his face reflected in a little pool below. It was a well-made face, in more senses than one, and he liked it not the least because it lacked a certain pinched, bitter look which the face of Jerred Northi had been sometimes wont to have. He admired in a detached way the line of the upper eyelids, in between acanthic and epicanthic, and the way the green of the iris took on a deeper green from the water.
    “Congratulations,” Sarlamat said, in his low, slow, unhurried voice. “ ‘On owning yourself,’ I mean. It was a good stroke of business, wouldn’t you agree? Yes … you no longer need me. You haven’t for quite some time now. As far as that’s concerned I could leave. But … I rather like it here, do you know,” he smiled. “And in addition to everything else, there’s my new lady. So I am in no hurry.”
    His friend disclaimed any desire that he should ever be in any hurry to leave. Somehow the talk fell upon the subject of “foreign toys,” as the Tarnisi had from the first chosen to call them. There were the water sleds which had set at least half of the younger male Tarnisi skimming and darting over rivers and lakes. The great, kite-shaped gliders which had made so great and so unexpected an appeal to the older members of the community, with their slow, silent, majestic soarings and swoopings, rich — it turned out — in philosophical over- and undertones. The coiffures, available in at least a hundred different models, undistinguishable by touch and sight from natural hair, which released the mature and elder matrons from the hours of tedious setting and waiting previously required to procure the results demanded by inflexible and unchanging tradition which had almost the force of law. And all the others … .
    And still it passed off without difficulty as a mere hobby of Tonorosant’s, he helping to gratify the curiosity of his fellow-elite with foreign-acquired acumen. The stigma of commerce was not present. The open work of importation was arranged by his Pemathi clerk and distribution carried on between the latter and the clerks and stewards or other upper servants of the Tarnisi interested. Openly, the once Jerred Northi never touched money. No one insulted him by asking a price, he insulted no one by naming it. In all probability, no one but the Pemathi under-class was even aware that he was making money. The mind of aristocratic Tarnis was simply not attuned to thinking along such lines. The Pemathi, of course, knew. They had the task of paying out their master’s money, after all. Which made them, likely, the most pleased of all; for it was a firm principle of their homeland’s that “money must melt.” And it melted a little in every pair of