The Totems of Abydos Read Online Free Page A

perhaps one where they had had a layover for bioadjustment; did he want a local time, and if so, indexed to what world, and to what coordinates on what world; would he like a solar time, a sidereal time, or one indexed to the half-life of a specified element, or what? The ship functioned on commercial time, of course, indexed to the prime meridian on Commonworld, a neutral wilderness of little note or interest in the galaxy other than the fact that its imaginary gridwork of coordinates provided more than four thousand worlds with a common frame of reference.
    Rodriguez answered his own question. “It’s late,” he said. That seemed an odd answer to an odd question. “It’s late,” he repeated. Brenner assumed he meant that he was tired. That was probably what he meant.
    “You have kept much to your cabin,” said Brenner.
    “Surely you have no objection to that,” said Rodriguez.
    “No,” said Brenner. “But if we are to be colleagues—”
    “There are strong worlds and weak worlds,” said Rodriguez.
    “What?” said Brenner.
    “We come from a weak world,” said Rodriguez.
    “You shouldn’t smoke those things,” said Brenner, “and drink that stuff.”
    “It will make my heart like the hoof of a four-horned korf,” said Rodriguez, perhaps quoting some authority, and this stuff,” said he, raising his closed mug, the slurp hole closed, “is a bladder irritant, a disaster to the liver, a poisoner of the bloodstream, and a destroyer of brain cells.”
    “That is about it,” granted Brenner.
    Rodriguez sat back in the webbing. He puffed on a roll of Bertinian leaf. It was outlawed on many worlds, but could be obtained, as one might expect, in various black markets, to which the digital purses of various officials owed remarkable economic latencies, available upon the punching of special numbers, putatively not on file with the state.
    An odious cloud, like some noxious fog or lethal gas, drifted toward Brenner but never reached him, being caught up in the intake of the filtering system. In one hand, Rodriguez, his large, slovenly frame back in the webbing, grasped the zero-gravity mug, a stein of Velasian Heimat. “I take a modest pride in being a man of many vices.” he said.
    Brenner wondered why Rodriguez didn’t partake of the various lozenges and wafers, the candies, or medications, available on many worlds, and even from the small commissary on the freighter, which provided relatively innocuous intoxicants and controllers, stimulants, euphoriants, anesthetics, depressors, inhibitors and such. But Rodriguez, it seemed, preferred the naivety and violence of more primitive poisons, poisons of a sort which on many worlds had not been known for millennia.
    “I have, until now,” said Rodriguez, idly, “courted death.”
    “And it seems you are still at it,” said Brenner.
    Rodriguez looked up at him.
    “With weed and brew,” smiled Brenner.
    “I have sought her on mountains, and in the depths of gaseous seas, on fields of war stretched between stars, in the bistros of subterranean worlds, amongst thieves and assassins, in jungles and ice deserts where my footstep was the first from the beginning of time.”
    Brenner was silent.
    “Do you know why these things are outlawed?” asked Rodriguez.
    “Certainly,” said Brenner, “they are poisonous substances.”
    “Because,” said Rodriguez, a little wildly, “they are the counterfeits of life, and that it what is fearful about them.
    They are false images which call to mind a reality, a reality which is secret.”
    “You are drunk,” said Brenner.
    “In their pernicious way they point to life,” said Rodriguez, “like a lie points to the truth.”
    Brenner was quiet.
    “Life, and truth, are illegal, like reality,” said Rodriguez. “The small people, the mice, the insects, the flowers, are afraid of them. They do not even recognize the battlefields in their cellars, the jungles beneath their porches.”
    “No one is small,”