Free Ardor on Aros by Andrew J. Offutt

swordsman!—and, adornment.
    And now I word the garb of desert dwellers, nomads. Loose robes that reflected the sun and formed a sort of cage about the body, a barrier between it and the heat. Very effective in a dry climate.
    I wondered what the Jadiriyah’s at-home clothing looked like, or even her traveling clothes. Which reminded me that I could ride back and find out. Her clothes were back there somewhere behind me, with the late Oth and Ard.
    I twisted around to look: yes, I could see the rocks, looking tiny and unimportant now. I shook my head. Unimportant! They were mighty important to Jadiriyah-Liz, and to me, too. I had killed. I would never be the same again. I’m not. I have killed. Not at a distance, with high-powered rifles or bombs or grenades or ridiculous distances with heavy artillery. I had killed up close, and swords are personal. Very personal, I remembered, thinking of Oth’s wide eyes on me and what I’d done to the right one. I shuddered, and my stomach lurched.
    Then the feeling went away. It hasn’t come back. I was over the hump. I was a killer. Of men—and saying that the Vardors aren’t really men makes little difference.
    And I hadn’t wanted to go to Vietnam!
    Yeah well, I told myself, this was different; it was kill or be killed.
    Like hell, inner me snapped back. They weren’t threatening you!
    Yeah, but I saved the girl from slavery or death.
    Uh-huh; that’s what old L.B.J. said about Vietnam, The Other Side wanted to kill ’em or enslave ’em.
    “Yeah,” I said aloud, “well, I can prove it!” And thus smugly victorious over myself, over Hank 2 , I got up and ate some Vardor rations and drank some Vardor water and, in my Vardor clothing, I climbed aboard my Vardor beast of burden and set off across Vardor domain.
    To the victor go the spoils!

    I rode all day, due west—I hoped—and stopped when the sun was crouching like a fat orange goblin atop the long range of hills to the (?) west (?). (It was. Yes, Aros travels in the same direction about its sun as Earth does. Why not? I suppose the odds are fifty-fifty. I don’t know, and as it turned out that isn’t germane to Aros anyhow. Aros has very little to do with physics; its existence, I mean.
    (Besides, if this message DOES get to Earth, you will certainly never be able to contact me and correct my errors, anyhow! I admin you’d get better explanations, and longer ones, too, if I were science writer Poul Fredrikssen, say. But I’m not, and he probably doesn’t do things like grabbing girls in labs and getting knocked on his tail into “Temporal Dissociators.”)
    I had brought along Kro Kodres’ knapsack—my former waterbag and ring-bearer—and I propped it up twenty or thirty yards off. Then, for an hour, I practiced with the short Vardor bows. We will not discuss the first nine arrows. The next two I sank into the bag, the next three elsewhere, and the final three into the bag. Seven others were within a foot of it or had passed no more than a foot above it.
    In the morning I spent about an hour plodding about on and off my slook, collecting arrows.
    The slook is an apparently happy beast. He does not moan and groan all day like the Earth-side camel ( el-jeml: “supercilious-head,” did you know that?). Nor does he sleep standing up as Earthly horses do. Nor does he swell his gut to fake you out when you’re tightening the girth-strap, a favorite trick of horses, who are entirely too clever.
    A slook seems able to go on forever with little effort. He can store up enough water and foot to operate for days. His walk is less comfortable, really, than his dead run: those long pushing legs in back jar one quite a bit at a walk. But when he flattens out and runs in long soaring leaps the ride is quite comfortable and the landings smooth and not unpleasant—except for the final one. His braking system is admittedly over-efficient.
    It is typically human, typically American, to personalize everything, and I named