They left the office by a rear door, walked a long, bleak corridor, through a metal firedoor and into the pleasant breeze of the early autumn afternoon. The fresh air was a welcome relief from the sterile, chilly air-conditioned tomb of the Alliance headquarters. A sleek, black grav car rested on its rubber cushion before them, its doors open like gaping mouths.
“By the way,” the rep said, fidgeting a bit, “the wife wondered if you might— Well, I have a first edition of this book here, Lilian Girl and . . .”
Davis autographed the book, climbed inside the car, waited for Proteus to enter through the other side, then cycled the doors shut with the proper toggle on the console. All the while, the Alliance man stood by, uncertain if they were parting on friendly or antagonistic terms. Since Davis was supposed to be writing a pro-Alliance novel, he wanted to be as gracious as possible. Pro-Alliance novelists were rare in the creative community. When the book appeared, Davis thought, the little bureaucrat would hate himself for being so gracious now. They’d send Davis a bill, surely, for all the cooperation they were offering freely now. But it was essential to delude them into believing his book was going to take a favorable view of genocide in order to get into the preserves of the winged people and do first-hand research on their architecture and probable lifestyle. He punched to put the car on its own recognizance, leaned back, and relaxed as the car lifted off the ground and purred away from the port city, away from the rep and the square, gray building of Alliance headquarters.
The big robo-car eventually left the concrete nothingness of the port and pulled onto a badly paved road which required the grav plate distance compensators to work overtime. They twisted through rolling hills and green-blue grass. Once, a carnivorous bird, much less menacing than the spiderbats, dove at the windscreen. Proteus flung out a psuedopod, slapped it against the glass before he realized Davis was already shielded. He retracted the plasti-plasma and brooded quietly the rest of the way.
Davis sincerely hoped he would not have to listen to yet another Alliance employee tell him that Demos was safe and heavenly. Was their reassurance about this “paradise” simply a psychological tool to help them justify the extermination of the native Demosians?
The car broke through into sparsely treed foothills and confronted the first of the Demosian houses. The dark stones seemed fitted together without, benefit of mortar, jutting to form a ninety foot tower, fifty feet in diameter. There were several round “doors” on the ground and at seemingly random intervals up the sides. Winged people would be entering, after all, while in flight. Davis turned to stare after the marvelous structure as their car fled onward.
At the thirty-sixth tower, the car pulled onto a dirt track and stopped, flung its doors open as the grav plates shut down and the body settled onto its rubber rim. Proteus was the first out, nervously patrolling the immediate area.
But there was nothing for him to kill.
Davis carried the first of the bags inside, Proteus still in the lead. The exterior of the place had been interesting—but the interior was stunning. The core of the building, which they had reached through a wide passage leading from the entrance, shot directly to the open-beam ceiling ninety feet above. Leading from this small core were portholes to rooms around the “rim” of the tube-within-a-tube structure. The architecture was one of bold sweeps and graceful curves, denying the ancient facade: the lines of men unbound by gravity, spoiled only by a set of rickety homemade stairs. He decided these must have been added by the sociological research team the rep had informed him of. What possible reason would winged men have had for stairs . . . ?
When he had all of his luggage unloaded, he investigated the alien chambers. There were recreation rooms with game-boards pegged to the walls. He took down a few of these, well aware that he would have to decipher their rules in order to include them in his book. Other chambers were Demosian equivalents of kitchens, baths, lounges, and libraries. The bedrooms were hung with lavish tapestries and handwoven grass nets whose fibers formed pictures in the manner of embroidery; the beds were too low and wide, the mattresses thick and a bit too soft by human standards.