“What if we have a mechanical breakdown?” Trompe asked.
“Press the alarm button in the vehicle and wait. The time will afford an excellent opportunity for meditation. Eventually someone will come to fetch you.”
“We can’t hike to the nearest village?”
“All worlds have their threats. We make rules to protect visitors from the threats present on Dinadh. Outside the vehicle, you might be injured, or even killed. Then your world would bring a complaint against our world. And our world would have to defend the complaint before the high Alliance courts. We would have to hire experts qualified to present cases before that court. We are a poor people. We cannot afford the expenses of litigation.”
Trompe muttered about this exchange to Lutha, concluding, “So much for exploration! Even though the route is programmed in, the vehicles aren’t automatic, oddly enough. Evidently we can stop to rest or admire the view wherever we like, we just can’t get out!”
“You rejected the idea of a guide?” she asked curiously.
He made a face. “The people here want us to hire a guide. They want it so firmly I feel we’ll find out more without. During the trip we’ll get a feel for the place, enough to be well acclimated when we arrive at Cochim-Mahn.”
“So be it, then.” She smiled, indicating acceptance. She would have preferred to go quickly and get the matter over with, but it didn’t really matter. They could go without a guide.
The vehicle, though clumsy looking, was commodious, with both a sanitary compartment and a well-stocked food-service console. The food was off-planet, Lutha noted, prepackaged elsewhere and imported. Every meal they’d been served at the Edge had been off-planet food. Which made one wonder if planetary food was tasty enough for off-worlders. Or if there was enough of it. Of course, at the price they had paid to rent the vehicle, they could have been fed on ambrosia with enough left over to pay a year’s expenses on Central!
“Now if Leely will just leave his clothes on,” Trompe remarked.
His slightly sarcastic tone reminded Lutha of Leelson. Though she understood it, it angered her nonetheless. Fastigats could always empathize, always understand, except with Leely. They had no idea how or why he felt as he did. They were offended, as though they had reached out and been rudely rebuffed. She bit back an angry response. If Leelson himself had felt frustration, then Trompe was certainly entitled to a similar feeling.
“Pity you have to be bothered with all this,” she said, thinking it a pity she herself had to be.
He made an impatient gesture. “Sorry. This is my job after all. You really couldn’t have managed alone.”
“No,” she said, mimicking his tone and surprised at the depth of her furious agreement. “I really could not have managed alone.”
Though their destination was a considerable distance north, they had first to go eastward from the coast, up a series of switchbacks on the face of a more or less vertical cliff until they reached the level highland that we, who live here, call the skylands. At first they were relieved to have reached the level road, but soon they found they made no more progress than previously as they traveled first eastward, then westward, then eastward again between the deep gorges that interdigitated the skylands from either side.
“This is ridiculous,” Trompe muttered, making yet another hundred-sixty-degree turn.
“Dinadh at one time had a great deal more water than it has now,” remarked Lutha. “These canyons must have been cut by sizable rivers.”
She peered down at the threadlike trickles glittering in the depths among clean-edged patches of green, letting her eyes move upward to the mesa tops, all of them like the one they were traversing, covered with low forest broken by occasional grassy glades.
“Trompe. Stop!”
He stopped obediently. “What?”
“Animals.” They were approaching an open glade where a group of small, woolly, long-necked animals grazed under the watchful care of herdsmen. “What are they doing?”
“Eating grass,” said Trompe. “Haven’t you seen an animal before?”
“I never have. Oh, sensurround, of course, but not a real one. What are the herdsmen doing? Twirling those things?”