But while there was much that any terrestrial traveler would have recognized, nothing, not the smallest pebble underfoot, was quite like its counterpart in the Fifth. Some of these disparities were too vast to be missed: the green-gold of the heavens, for instance, or the elephantine snails that grazed beneath the cloud-nested trees. Others were smaller but equally bizarre, like the wild dogs that ran along the highway now and then, hairless and shiny as patent leather; or grotesque, like the horned kites that swooped on any animal dead or near-dead on the road and only rose from their meals, purple wings opening like cloaks, when the vehicle was almost upon them; or absurd, like the bone-white lizards that congregated in their thousands along the edge of the lagoons, the urge to turn somersaults passing through their colonies in waves.
Perhaps finding some new response to these experiences was out of the question when the sheer proliferation of travelers’ tales had all but exhausted the lexicon of discovery. But it nevertheless irritated Gentle to hear himself responding in cliches. The traveler moved by unspoilt beauty or appalled by native barbarism. The traveler touched by primitive wisdom or caught breathless by undreamt-of modernities. The traveler condescending; the traveler humbled; the traveler hungry for the next horizon or pining miserably for home. Of all these, perhaps only the last response never passed Gentle’s lips. He thought of the Fifth only when it came up in conversation between himself and Pie, and that happened less and less as the practicalities of the moment pressed more heavily upon them. Food and sleeping quarters were easily come by at first, as was fuel for the car. There were small villages and hostelries along the highway, where Pie, despite an absence of hard cash, always managed to secure them sustenance and beds to sleep in. The mystif had a host of minor feits at its disposal, Gentle realized: ways to use its powers of seduction to make even the most rapacious hosteller pliant. But once they got beyond the forest, matters became more problematical. The bulk of the vehicles had turned off at the intersections, and the highway had degenerated from a well-serviced thoroughfare to a two-lane road, with more potholes than traffic. The vehicle Pie had stolen had not been designed for the rigors of long-distance travel. It started to show signs of fatigue, and with the mountains looming ahead it was decided they should stop at the next village and attempt to trade it in for a more reliable .model.
“Perhaps something with breath in its body,” Pie suggested.
“Speaking of which,” Gentle said, “you never asked me about the Nullianac.”
“What was there to ask?”
“How I killed it.”
“I presumed you used a pneuma.”
“You don’t sound very surprised.”
“How else would you have done it?” Pie said, quite reasonably. “You had the will, and you had the power.”
“But where did I get it from?” Gentle said.
“You’ve always had it,” Pie replied, which left Gentle nursing as many questions, or more, as he’d begun with. He started to formulate one, but something in the motion of the car began to nauseate him as he did so. “I think we’d better stop for a few minutes,” he said. “I think I’m going to puke.”
Pie brought the vehicle to a halt, and Gentle stepped out. The sky was darkening, and some night-blooming flower spiced the cooling air. On the slopes above them herds of pale-flanked beasts, relations of the yak but here called doekt, moved down through the twilight to their dormitory pastures, lowing as they came. The dangers of Vanaeph and the thronged highway outside Patashoqua seemed very remote. Gentle breathed deeply, and the nausea, like his questions, no longer vexed him. He looked up at the first stars. Some were red here, like Mars; others gold: fragments of the noonday sky that refused to be extinguished.
“Is this Dominion another planet?” he asked Pie. “Are we in some other galaxy?”
“No. It’s not space that separates the Fifth from the rest of the Dominions, it’s the In Ovo.”
“So, is the whole of planet Earth the Fifth Dominion, or just part of it?”