But Naill had little chance to note that, for the bundle of bark slid toward him and he had just time to catch it. The stuff was lighter than it looked, though the size of the roll made it awkward to manage. He got it to the stack safely in spite of the unsteadiness of his feet.
Three such journeys brought him back to an empty cart. And he stood still, with a chance to look about him.
Two heavy-shouldered, snorting beasts were harnessed to each of the wagons. Broad flat hind feet and haunches were out of proportion to their slim front legs, which ended in paws not unlike his own hands. They sat back on those haunches while, with the hand paws, they industriously scratched in the hairy fur on their bellies. In color they were a slaty blue with manes of black—a dusty black—beginning on their rounded, rodentlike skulls, and running down to the point end of their spines. They had no vestige of tail. Wide collars about their shoulders were fastened in turn to the tongue of the cart by a web of harness, but Naill could see no control reins.
“In!” Kosburg’s hairy hand swept past his nose. And Naill climbed into the now empty wagon.
He settled down on a pile of rough sacking, which still gave forth the not unpleasant odor of the bark. Two of his fellow immigrants followed him, and the back of the cart was locked into place by the garthmaster.
The son, who had not uttered a word during the unloading, occupied the single raised seat at the front of the wagon. Now he raised a pole to rap smartly in turn the two harnessed scratchers. They complained in loud snorts, but moved away from the port strip, their pace between a hop and a walk, which made the cart progress unevenly in a fashion not comfortable for passengers. One of the men was promptly and thoroughly sick, only managing to hang over the tailboard in time.
Naill studied his companions dispassionately. One was big, even if he was only a bony skeleton of the man he must once have been. He had the greenish-brown skin of a former space crewman and the flat, empty eyes of one who had been on more than one happy-dust spree. Now he simply sat with his shoulders planted against the side of the cart, his twitching hands hanging between his knees, a burned-out hulk.
The one who had been sick still leaned against the tailboard, clawed fingers anchoring him to that prudent position. Fair hair grew sparsely on a round skull; his skin was dough-white. Naill had seen his like before, too. Some skulker from the port who had signed on for fear of the law—or because he had chanced to cross a powerful Veep of the underworld.
“You—kid—” The man Naill watched turned his head. “Know anything about this place?”
Naill shook his head. “Labor recruiter said Janus—agriculture.” In spite of the jiggling process of the cart, he ventured to pull himself up, wanting a chance to see the countryside.
They were following a road of beaten bare earth, running between fenced fields. Naill’s first impression was of somberness. In its way this landscape was as devoid of color and life as the blocks of the Dipple.
The plants in the fields were low bushes set in crisscross lines, while the fences which protected them were stakes of peeled wood set upright, a weaving of vines between them. Mile after planet mile of such fields—but, in the far distance, a dark smudge that might mark either hills or woodland.
“What’s all that?” The man had moved away from the tailboard, edging around to join Naill.
Naill shrugged. “I don’t know.” They might be companions in exile here, but he felt no liking for the other.
Small but very bright and knowing eyes surveyed him. “From the Dipple, ain’t you, mate? Me—I’m Sim Tylos.”
“Naill Renfro. Yes, I’m from the Dipple.”
Tylos snickered. “Thought you was gonna get yourself a new start off-world, boot? The counters don’t never run that way ‘cross the table. You just picked yourself another hole to drop into.”
“Maybe,” Naill replied. He watched that smudge at the meeting of the drab, unhappy land with a sky that carried a faint tinge of green. Suddenly he wanted to know more about that dark line, approach it closer.
The hop-shuffle of the animals drawing the wagon was swift. And the group of five wagons, their own the leading one, was covering ground at a steady and distance-eating pace. Sim Tylos with a lifted finger indicated the driver of their own cart. “Suppose he’ll talk a bit?”
“Ask him.”
Naill let Tylos pass him but did not follow when the other took his stand behind the driver’s seat.
“Gentlehomo—” Tylos’s voice was now a placating whine. “Gentlehomo, will you—”
“Whatcha want, fieldman?” The younger Kosburg’s basic was even more gutturally accented than his father’s.
“Just some information, gentlehomo—” Tylos began. The other cut in: “Like where you’re goin’ and what you’ll be doin’ there, fieldman? You’re going right on to the end of the fields—to the Fringe, where like as not the monsters’ll get you. And what you’ll be doin’ there is good hard work—’less you want the Speaker to set your sins hard on you! See them there?” He flicked the end of his encouragement pole at the bushes in the fields. “Them’s our cash crop—lattamus. You can’t set out lattamus till you have a bare field—no shoots, no runners, nothin’ but bare field. And on the Fringe getting’ a bare field takes some doin’—a mighty lot of axin’, and grubbin’, and cuttin’. We aim to get us some good lattamus fields ‘fore you all go to account for your sinnin’.
” ‘Course”—young Kosburg leaned over to stare straight into Tylos’s eyes—”there’re some sinners as don’t want to aid the Clear Sky work—no, they don’t. And them has to be lessoned—lessoned good. My sire back there—he’s a good lessoner. Speaker puts the Word on him to reckon with real sinners. We’re Sky People—don’t hold with killin’ or such-like off-world sinnin’. But sometimes lessonin’ sits heavy on hard-hearted sinner!”
Though his words might be obscure, his meaning was not. There was a threat there, one that young Kosburg took pleasure in delivering. Tylos shrank back, sidled away from the driver’s seat. Kosburg laughed again and turned his back on the laborer. But Tylos now stood as still as the jolting of the wagon would let him, staring out over the countryside. When he spoke again, it was in a half whisper to Naill.
“Nasty lot—not by half, they ain’t. Work a man—work him to death, more’n likely. This here’s a frontier planet—probably only got one spaceport.”
Naill decided the little man was thinking aloud rather than taking him into his confidence.
“Got to play this nice and easy—no pushing a star till you’re sure you got a line on the comet’s tail—no fast movin’. This lessonin’ talk—that ain’t good hearin’. Think they has us all right and tight, does they? Let ’em think it—just let ’em!”
Naill’s head was aching, and the lurching of the cart was beginning to make him queasy. He sat down, across from the still-staring ex-spaceman, and tried to think. The agreement he had signed in the labor office—it had been quite detailed. So much advance—Naill’s memory shied away violently from the thought of how that advance had been spent—so much for expenses, for shipment to this world. He had no idea of the value of the bark that Kosburg had paid for him, but that could be learned. By the agreement he should be able to repay that—be a free man. But how soon? Best settle down and learn what he could, keep eyes and ears open. The Dipple had been a static kind of death; this was a chance at something . . . what he had no idea, but he was hoping again.
Duan Renfro had been a Free Trader, born of a line of such explorers and reckless space rovers. Though Naill could hardly remember his father, some of the abilities of that unsettled and restless type were inherited qualities. Malani Renfro was of a frontier world, though one as far different from Janus as sere autumn was from spring. She had been third generation from First Ship there, and her people had still been exploring rather than settling. To observe, to learn, to experiment with the new, were desires which had lain dormant in Naill growing up in the vise of the Dipple. Now those needs awoke and stirred.
When they stopped for a meal of gritty bread and dried berries, Naill watched the beasts munching their fodder. The driver of the second cart was small and thin, a seamed scar of an old blaster burn puckering the side of his head, plainly another off-world laborer.
“What do you call them?” Naill asked him.