Free Ardor on Aros by Andrew J. Offutt Page B

Sol, in Earth’s celestial backyard, to make their stories—homier. Mars and Venus, after all, are the worlds next door. Aros—well, I don’t know. I looked up that day, and I shook my head. I didn’t remember that either of the Centaurii was orange!
    My stolid mount and I plodded along, a hundred feet or so out from where the forest dribbled out to become this perdurable plain—why? Why the suddenness: desert, bang, forest, just like that? It didn’t seem possible. The line of demarcation was minuscule. Dust and rocks here, a tiny twilight zone of scraggly grass, and: rich greenery and foliage. I didn’t have an explanation, but again I chewed on it, because I like explanations. I’d asked why all my life, and I saw no reason to stop just because I was someplace other than Earth.
    The dense jungles of Africa and the Sahara Desert are on the same continent, yes. And in California there are floods, snows, vineyards, earthquakes, and deserts. And what else, along with the desert: the world’s champion trees! And Aros is certainly bigger than California, or America either. The curvature would be much more pronounced, the horizon a lot closer, the day a lot shorter, otherwise.
    But that wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t sell myself. Deserts don’t just become jungles like that—snap!
    Things are not what they seem, Hank.
    Yeah, well, look Hank 2 , that ain’t no explanation. This world seems more and more the product of a diseased mind!
    ERB and Kline and I had by now worked out a pretty decent sleeping arrangement. They seemed able to sleep forever or for a short time, until awakened, and without moving more than a little. For the past several nights I had curled close to ERB, sleeping on his saddle blanket with my removed stoba (read “burnūs;” burnous, if you don’t know any better) serving as a coverlet. We slept that way that first night of paralleling the jungle or forest. It was somewhat warmer at night, although seemingly a bit cooler by day. More impossibility.
    Our sleep was disturbed. ERB woke me; I lurched up to a sitting position to see a pair of yellow eyes glowing at us out of the darkness. ERB growled. The eyes blinked. I called. There was no answer. I fitted an arrow to my bow and tried to aim between and just below the eyes. But I had not replaced the cover that slid off as I sat up. I shivered just as I loosed my long Vardor shaft, and neither roar nor scream of pain greeted my shot. The eyes, however, left, apparently having got the message.
    One thing I noticed: ERB had, for the first time, growled. He WAS closer to the lupine or canine family than to the equine one then, even though his phytophagous nature was obvious: the way he stripped those trees of their leaves!
    I took a long time going back to sleep. ERB dropped off instantly.
    In the morning I went out to examine the tracks. There were lots: man-tracks. Barefooted. My arrow was imbedded in the ground just in front of the foremost of one set. I must have fair wiped his nose for him. A man, emerging from the jungle to stare at me, in silence. But—a man with glowing yellow eyes?
    I retrieved the arrow and went back to make breakfast. I let the slooks over to the jungle and tethered them where they could make their own salad.
    Using my sword, I chopped firewood from a fallen tree. God bless the Vardors: their flint-and-steel worked beautifully, and the meat from their supply tasted a lot better cooked. I ate, sitting on the thin growth of grass that trickled out from the forest, as if it were trying to fight off the desert—or being driven back by it. I wondered if there were animals in that forest. And what about the spy I’d shat at last night? Big golden eyes that left man-tracks?
    They looked like bird eyes, or cat eyes. I glanced at the silent forest. (Why no bird noises?) A cat? Just what I need, I thought: a lion or something. Very deadly and, as I remember, also fast. I’ve seen lions only on TV, in movies, and in the