“If we’d rented a car, we wouldn’t have just whipped by them and gone,” Dewhurst grumbled, fulfilling his end of the symbiotic relationship.
“I shouldn’t have thought you’d be driving under the canopy, here,” Belgeddes said. “I wouldn’t, at any rate. I leave that sort of thing to people like Dickie, here. He never saw a risk without wanting to take it.”
“Tsk!” said Wade. “If I’d been thinking, I’d have suggested that we bring a cooler like that vendor at the back of the car has. This would be a good time for a beer—if I’d only thought ahead.”
“Vendor?” asked Da Silva, looking at the half dozen Hobilo natives sharing the vehicle with the tourists. One of them was a woman of indeterminate age, seated on an insulated cooler that looked bigger than she herself was.
“So I surmise,” agreed Wade. He looked tactfully away. Da Silva stood up, fumbled out a credit chip, and made his way down the swaying aisle toward the woman.
“Well then, Belgeddes,” Dewhurst said. “We could all have rented one car and Wade here could have driven us himself. What were you here on Hobilo, Wade? Afield marshal?”
Dewhurst turned to glance out at the landscape of fleshy, spike-edged leaves just as a pair of lizards banked away from the window. Trie creatures were only thirty centimeters long nose to tail, and they were cruising for arthropods stirred up by the monorail’s passage. They glided on flaps of skin stretched by their hind legs while they used their webbed forepaws like canard fins to steer.
Dewhurst saw open jaws of needle teeth fringing scarlet palates. He shouted and jumped back while his wife, who’d watched the lizards’ approach, oohed in delight
“Actually, my friend . . .” Wade said as he looked toward the jungle. His mouth held only the slightest twist of satisfaction. “The last time I drove in this tangle, I hit a tree and had to hike the next twenty klicks. Nothing I’d choose to do again, either one of those things, I assure you.”
Da Silva came back with five glass-bottled beers, jeweled with condensation.
Ms. Dewhurst looked at the local brew with an expression mingled of curiosity and horror, the way she might have viewed the thing her cat was playing with on the rug. She waved the offer away.
“All the more for the rest of us,” Belgeddes said contentedly.
Dewhurst mopped his face with a kerchief and settled his expression behind the cloth. “Racing to rescue hostages during the Long Troubles, I dare say, Wade?” he said in a slightly wheezy voice. “When you had the crash, I mean?”
“Coming back, actually, weren’t you, Dickie?” Belgeddes said around the mouth of his beer.
“Yes, that’s right,” Wade agreed. “And they put a burst into the rear linkages—firing from the church dome.” He shook his head sadly. “I was a young fellow then, idealistic. I didn’t dream the rebels would put armed men in their churches, for pity’s sake!”
“Dewhurst was wondering if you were a field marshal,” Belgeddes said. “That’s not how I remember it.”
“Certainly not,” Wade said. “Civilian, purely a civilian at the time. But the poor fellow’s daughters—Varkezadhy, it was, planetary manager for Simourgh Corporation—had been kidnapped as hostages. Whatever you thought of the chap—”
“Simourgh gives a bad name to greed,” Da Silva said through pursed lips.
“—or of Simourgh,” Wade agreed, nodding, “I couldn’t let that happen to a pair of sweet little children. Slipped in from behind on foot—”
“That can’t have been easy, Dickie,” Belgeddes said.
The monorail hummed over a slough of water black with tannin dissolved from the logs rotting in it. Animals stared at the car or dived away, but even Ms. Dewhurst was watching Wade now.
“Not so very hard,” Wade said in self-deprecation. “They weren’t expecting it, you see. One man, that is. And I stole an aircar when we escaped.”
He sighed. “I often think,” he continued, “that if I’d assassinated the Prophet instead of snatching the girls back, things might have been different.”
“The Prophet Elias was there?” Da Silva blurted.
Wade nodded. “Oh, yes,” he said. “It was at Taskerville, don’t you know? But I was naive, as I say. Cold-blooded murder was just beyond me then.” “Wait a minute,” said Dewhurst. “If the car crashed, then what happened to the hostages? The little girls, you call them.”