The Virgin of Zesh & the Tower of Zanid Read Online Free Page B

propose to land first on Zesh, get in touch with this Virgin, and try through her to persuade the other Záva to let themselves be tested.”
    “And if that isn’t a silly thing for a grown man to do,” said Kirwan, “to spend your days asking a lot of monkeys which box you’ve hidden the apple under.”
    Bahr replied with strained politeness. “My dear Brian, I assure you that the mental level I anticipate testing is much higher than you are implying. It’s more likely I shall have to ask them problems in the calculus to solve.”
    “I thought,” said Althea, “the scientists agreed all races were equally intelligent.”
    Bahr smiled tolerantly. “That is an example of the lag between discovery and public understanding. Two centuries ago the opinion was, not that all races were exactly equal, but that there was no scientific reason to believe them unequal. Now that the tests have been further refined, we do know of some small differences.”
    “What differences?” asked Althea.
    “Well, you know it is very difficult to give tests that cancel out the effects of environment and upbringing, because so much of the adult’s aptitudes and abilities depend upon them. Then, when you have done that, you still have the wide variation of individuals within any one group, which masks any average difference. And then you have the sex difference, which is real, though small. Finally, when you eliminate all those variants, you find that there is no such thing as general intelligence, but only a lot of different mental abilities. And when you are done, you find that the average differences between one race and another are so microscopic, compared to the differences within each group, that one can nothing tell about—”
    Kirwan yawned. “Gottfried, you’re a nice lad in some ways, but a fearful bore at times. The Devil fly away with your aptitudes and statistics!”
    “Assuming there is a Devil, for which there is no scientific evidence,” said Bahr, “what is your objection?”
    “Sure, every intelligent man knows there’s just one superior race, and that’s the great and glorious Celtic race.”
    “Which is not a race but a language family,” interjected Bahr, but Kirwan continued:
    “All the rest of humanity is nought but apes with the hair shaved off, the lot of ’em. Wherever you find signs of genius, whether it’s the pyramids of Egypt, or Roman law, or the American skyscrapers, you can be sure there’s a touch of the true Celtic blood involved.”
    Bahr sighed. “It is hard to argue with an Irishman, harder yet with a poet, and impossible with an Irish poet. Anyway, on Krishna we deal with separate species, not mere racial variants of one species as on Earth. So any presuppositions are premature and unscientific.”
    ###
    At the mouth of the Pichidé River, on the south bank of the estuary, lies the Free City of Majbur, a seething commercial metropolis noted for the height of its buildings, the acumen of its merchants, and the impenetrability of its traffic jams. Following the river road downstream from Novorecife, the barouche bearing Althea Merrick, Brian Kirwan, and Gottfried Bahr rattled into the fishing village of Qadr, across the river from Majbur. It was the fifth day after leaving the Viagens outpost.
    As they neared the village, the road converged with the rail line from Hershid, the capital of Gozashtand. Now the carriage rolled past the terminal, where a mahout astride the neck of a bishtar was making up a train. The bishtar, looking somewhat like a gigantic, six-legged tapir with a bifurcated proboscis, trundled the little four-wheeled cars up one spur and down another, pulling with its trunks or pushing with its forehead according to its rider’s commands.
    Beyond the railroad terminal, a fishy smell overhung the rows of sagging shacks that lined the highway. Small tame eshuna ran out to howl at the carriage. Krishnan working women sat in doorways, some with glass-topped incubators