I exchanged a part of my money — seven hundred credits worth — and left the rest with the UC representatives for safe keeping. I took my time, wanting to be sure that Mandell was already gone before I went outside, and when I did go through the gate to the street neither he nor the missionary was anywhere in sight.
The ramshackle suburbs of Ni began here, stretching away toward the tall towers of the city itself in the distance. Those arches and spires, glinting ruby and saffron in the dull red glare of the sun, had a kind of feverish beauty to them, but the shacks and lean-tos in the foreground were merely scrubby, a junkyard in which people lived.
Awaiting me were two commercial groups eager to offer me their services: chauffeurs and prostitutes. They clamored and waved their arms, all of them, out-shouting and out-gesticulating one another and yet very carefully not bumping into one another, not standing in front of one another, not causing any direct offense to one another.
The prostitutes I had no use for, but the chauffeurs were potentially of interest. Each stood in front of his vehicle, showing it off, shouting its fine points at me, and I studied these vehicles and their drivers with a great deal of care.
There was just about every means of land locomotion imaginable there, most of them pulled by hairhorses, native Anarchaotic beasts whose shaggy hair and rough similarity to Earth’s horses gave them their name. These I was not interested in; it was motorized transport I desired.
Motors were fewer in number, but varied in style. One contraption of wood, with large wooden wheels and no top, seemed to have been homemade, with an electric engine from some other kind of machine mounted on a platform at the rear. Another was a small truck, the sides and top of the body cut away and a fat lumpy sofa mounted sideways in the back for passengers. There were a few fairly ordinary automobiles, some with liquid fuel engines and others with electric engines, all imports from off-planet. There was some limited manufacture here, but not of anything as large and expensive as motorized transport. Those inter-system corporations which found it to their advantage to maintain offices here — and whose towers I could see in the center of Ni — brought any such large equipment here from off-planet, unassembled. These automobiles lined up with all the other conveyances were for the most part obsolete equipment sold by one or another corporation; or, perhaps, were simply stolen property.
In any case, they were what I was most interested in. I studied them, studied their clamoring drivers, and finally chose a small but rather clean auto with two sets of seats, one behind the other. The driver was short, narrow-faced, middle-aged, with nervous energetic movements and darting suspicious eyes; he looked right for my purposes.
I went to him and said, “You’ll take me to Ulik?”
The shout went up all around me: “Here’s another for Ulik! Ulik, Ulik! I live in Ulik, I’ll take you to Ulik!”
My driver squinted at me. “Ulik? Of course. Climb aboard, climb aboard.” He swept the door open.
“How much?” I said.
“The normal rate. Get in, get in.”
“What’s the normal rate?”
“We’ll talk about it when we get there.” And he kept motioning me anxiously to get in. He didn’t quite dare pluck me by the sleeve.
The calls around us were dying down. Everyone wanted to see how the haggling would go, what I would like and what I would mistrust; they wanted to be ready to better this first man’s offer if I should reject him.
I said, “We’ll talk about it now. How much to Ulik?”
He studied me. He put the little finger of his right hand in the corner of his mouth, squinted up his face, squeezed his right eye shut, and with the left eye surveyed me for some clue to what the market would bear.
Another driver shouted, “Hurry it up! Make up your mind before sundown!” Everyone laughed at that, the whores across the street cackling the loudest of all, and I understood this to be a common and well-known joke; only natural, I suppose, on a world where the sun never moves from its place in the sky.
When the laughter died down, my little driver took his finger from his mouth and said, “Five credits an hour. You couldn’t get a better price.”
I shook my head. “No. You’ll—”
“All right,” he said. “Four credits fifty.” He appealed to the others, saying, “Is that fair?”
They hooted him with what might have been good nature, and when they were done I said, “Give me a flat rate. Not by the hour.”
“A flat rate? Nobody ever does that.”
“No?” I turned as though to ask if anyone else would give me a flat rate.
Before I — or anyone — could say a word, my driver shouted, “Wait! Wait! A flat rate!”
“Name it.”
“Mmm, two hundred credits.”
“Forty,” I said.
He turned his back on me.
The whole transaction took about another five minutes, and when we were done he had agreed to drive me to Ulik for ninety-eight credits and five tokens. I got into the back seat, he stationed himself behind the wheel, and we moved off. Behind us the crowd, knowing there’d be no more newcomers this time, separated and drifted aimlessly away.
We drove east across hard-packed dirt streets, through what seemed an endless succession of blocks of squalid huts, shacks, lean-tos and tents. Children flung rocks and other things at us as we passed, and the driver cursed them and shook his fist out his glassless side window. There was no glass in any of the windows, in fact, and a hot breeze blew in on us through the gaping windshield. The driver muttered and mumbled to himself and, hunched over his wheel, drove competently and with good speed down the endless dirt street.
Several blocks from the spaceport we passed a cluster of people, and I saw Brother Roderus standing in their midst. They’d ripped his clothing off him and he was now naked, his pale skin a wretched rose in the light of the sun, the tatters of his clothing around his feet. His suitcase had been ripped apart and its contents scattered over the ground. The crowd seemed to be in high spirits, and hadn’t actually begun to kill him yet. His expression was very earnest, and I saw his lips move; I assume he was making a speech.
“That’s a bad thing,” my driver said, with natural hypocrisy. “No one ought to treat foreigners like that. But don’t you worry. So long as you’re with me, I’ll see to it you’re left alone. If you want a guide after we get to Ulik, someone to watch out for you, clear the way for you…”
“We’ll see,” I said. “What sort of engine do you have? Electric?”
“The finest. Molecular power source. Never run down, never.” He was parroting something he himself knew nothing about.
A short while later we left Ni and got onto the narrow paved road to Ulik; the Union Commission had built this road, paying for it by assessing those off-world corporations with interests on Anarchaos.
For the first hour we crossed a vast grassy plain. Here and there, at great distances from the highway, I caught sight of the high walls of farms, but for the most part the plain was deserted, looking just as it had before man had first come here.
In this early part of the trip my driver attempted from time to time to pump me as to my purposes here, but I ignored him and after a while he gave it up. Then we drove in restful silence.
Adaptation comes quickly. Already I was taking the redness of everything for granted, and my body was feeling less irritated by the subtle increase in gravity. Still, I had to be careful, and not overestimate my adaptability; I was still not as able in this environment as someone who had lived here all his life.