“Then go, for pity’s sake!” Kneale snapped with a brusque gesture.
Ran stepped quickly down the gangplank. He glanced back and saw Wanda Holly entering the Embarkation Hall. They’d planned to get together when his shift ended—Szgrane was a new planet to both of them—but the summons from Lady Scour put paid to that notion. Ran waved to the Second Officer and hoped that Kneale would fill her in.
Szgranian flowers tended to blue and blue-gray petals. Their scent was sharp rather than sweet, and it mingled unpleasantly with the smoke of shanties ignited as the starliner docked.
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!” Wanda called from the starliner as a female page threw open the door of the palanquin.
The first thing Ran noticed as he got in was that the vehicle had double-wall paneling. The intricate carvings on the outside were complemented by those of the separate sheet some twenty millimeters within. Ran could look out from the shadowed interior of the palanquin, but the offset panels acted the way a one-way mirror does to protect the privacy of those behind it.
The second thing Ran noticed as the door closed behind him was that Lady Scour already reclined on the cushions he was expected to share.
“Good evening, Junior Lieutenant Randall Colville,” the Szgranian noblewoman said. The palanquin rolled upward on the shoulders of its eight bearers. “Are you surprised to see me? I was going to send the palanquin back . . . and then I thought I should watch as you got your first view of my planet.”
“I—ah, I’m surprised and pleased to see you again, Lady Scour,” Ran said. His mind clicked through possibilities, all of which were absurd except for the obvious male/female connection.
Of course, Lady Scour wasn’t human . . . though Ran didn’t find her as inhuman as he would have expected before meeting her.
The Szgranian chuckled, but Ran couldn’t be sure whether the impetus was humor or scorn. They faced forward in the palanquin. She looked out through the ivory panels and asked, “What do you think of my city?”
The vehicle didn’t pitch in a front-and-back motion, as Ran had rather expected, but it rocked side-to-side as the bearers stepped forward. Eight right legs paced, then eight left legs, as regular as clockwork. Lady Scour shifted sinuously so that her hip brushed Ran’s at every stride.
“It’s fascinating,” Ran said. “I very much appreciate the opportunity you’ve offered me.”
Starliner crews normally saw only the slums or the quick-look tourist spots of their ports of call. Even if they were on the same run for ten years straight, they had only a day or two at a time unless they were on the beach—dismissed, deserting, or abandoned. In those latter cases, the slums provided all the beachcomber wanted anyway.
None of the human colonies, even the largest and most powerful, were old enough to have a culture truly distinct from that of Earth. Szgrane was an alien society. The portside facilities that catered to starfarers and deracinated Szgranian watermen were similar in kind if not in personnel to those of a thousand other ports, but Lady Scour’s palanquin left those areas behind in minutes.
Ran was seeing the real Betaniche, the real Szgrane. For all the human aspects of the natives, particularly Lady Scour herself, Ran had the feeling that he’d been shrunk and dropped into an anthill.
The entourage climbed the bluff that bounded the river’s floodplain. Instead of a street, the clan mistress’s escort proceeded through a tunnel fringed by multistory houses with walls and roofs of translucent paper. Open walkways crossed between the higher floors. Sunlight trickled through the sides of buildings, creating a shadowless ambiance.
The pavement twisted like a snake’s track. It was thronged with pedestrians and shoppers at open-fronted booths.
A guard twenty meters ahead of the palanquin blew a horn made from the coiled shell of some sea creature. The warning note was a deep lowing punctuated with hacking emphasis, like the bellow of a cow desperate to be milked. Commoners struggled to get clear, shouting and waving a desperate profusion of arms.
Lady Scour chuckled again. “Look at Rawsl!” she said. The fingers of her three left hands played over Ran’s sleeve like butterfly touches. “Isn’t he angry?”