Appurtenances included, adjacent to the port on the east, a district containing warehouses for the storage of goods being transhipped, hay barns for winter feed of Commons’ livestock, various respectable shops and amusements run by local citizens, the Port Hotel, and the hospital. This area, including the port itself, was called the Commercial District.
Also included was an area on the west side of the port, where buildings blazoned with tawdry glitter stood along Portside Road, where the sensees stayed open around the clock and where visitors routinely stepped over bodies without worrying much about it. Not many of the bodies were dead; few of them were seriously wounded; some of them were still busily engaged. The crowded buildings led an indefinable stink made up of drugs, dirt, and various biological exudates. This disreputable area took its name from its road and was called simply Portside.
In addition to the Commercial District and Portside, the southern area contained about forty square miles of common hay meadow and grazing land, sloping on the east, south, and west from the high plateau of the port down to the swamp forest.
Connecting the port areas and Commons through a notch cut through the wall of Gom was Grass Mountain Road, a well-traveled thoroughfare which ran along the east side of the peak past the order station and the tall, solid gates occasionally used to block all traffic. It was not unknown for freighter crews to emerge from Portside establishments in the waning hours of the night determined to seek the extraordinary pleasure that comes from disrupting the sleep of ordinary people. Under such conditions, the gates were shut. Usually, however, traffic moved along Grass Mountain Road between port and Commons with no hindrance.
The port was busy, far busier than the planetary population could have warranted on its own behalf. Grass lay at a topological crossroads, an accessible destination in qua-space that coincided with a planet in real-space, and this alone made it valuable. The aristocrats, isolated on their estancias and concerned with other matters, had never considered how advantageous Grass’s location was. They would have been amazed to learn that the wealth of Grass was not, as they continued to believe, concentrated in the estancias, but was in fact held in off-planet banks by a sizable fraction of the people of the town. Few bons ever came to Commoner Town, and if they came at all, they came no farther than the merchants’ offices. The residents of Commons who went to the estancias kept their mouths shut about town business. What the bons thought of as eternally true regarding their own social and economic superiority, Commons had long since discarded in favor of a more pragmatic view. Without the aristocrats becoming more than superficially aware of it, the Commercial District had gradually become a major transshipment point offering temporary lodging to sizable numbers of travelers.
While waiting for a connecting ship, transients staying at the Port Hotel often went into Commons in pursuit of local color. Sellers of grass cloth and grass pictures and cleverly woven multihued grass baskets shaped like fantastic birds or fish did a brisk business. The purchase of some such gimcrack was as close as any of the transients would come to seeing the reality of Grass. The aristocrats had forbidden aircar tours over the prairies. At one time the Port Hotel had offered tours into the edges of the swamp forest, but after a boatload of influential persons had failed to return, the tours had been discontinued. The only sightseeing was in Commons, which meant a constant easy flow of traffic along the road. Townees were not surprised to see new faces.
Thus, when Ducky Johns stopped early one morning at the Order Station with a beautiful girl in tow, the officer thought no more of it than that some off-worlder had escaped from the Port Hotel and fallen into questionable company. Not that Ducky Johns was a bad sort. She and Saint Teresa were the madams of the two largest sensee houses in Portside, and they often traveled into Commons with their housekeepers and cooks. Ducky was usually at the top of the list of contributors to any charitable cause, if Saint Teresa didn’t have his name there first. Ducky’s machines were well maintained and seldom damaged anyone other than superficially, and none of her girls or boys or genetically altered whatsits had ever tried to kill any of the customers.
’’What’s this, Ducky?” the officer, James Jellico, asked. He was a husky and muscular man of middle years, covered with the misleading layer of plushy flesh which had earned him his nickname. “Tell good old Jelly what you’ve got there.”
“Damned if I know,” replied Ducky, sketching helplessness with both shoulders, the flounces on her tent-dress quivering in response to the mountain of shivering flesh beneath. “I found it on my back porch, under the clothesline.” Her flutelike voice made it a plaint, minor key. Her spangled eyebrows arched and the fringes of her tattooed eyelids drooped across her cheeks.
“You should’ve taken it back to the hotel,” Jelly said, giving the girl a hard look, which she returned with a wide, innocent eye.
“I tried,” Ducky said, sighing and pursing baby-lips, waving a baby-hand, the wrist braceleted with gems between tiny rolls of fat. “I’m not a fool, Jelly. I thought the same as you. Off a passenger ship, I thought, waiting around for another one. Wandered out of the Commercial District and got lost, I thought, just as you did. I asked it its name, but it didn’t have a thing to say for itself.”
“Mental, you think? Drugged up?”
“No sign of it.”
“Maybe it’s one of those, what you call ’em, de-personed things they sell on Vicious.”
“I looked and it isn’t. It’s been used some, but it hasn’t been tampered with, not the way they do there.”
“So what did the hotel say?”
“The hotel picky-pecked at its little keyboards and winky-winked at its little screens and told me to take it away. Not theirs, they said. They didn’t have any like this one, and if they did have, all theirs were accounted for.”
“I be damned.”
“Yes. Exactly what I said. Couldn’t be a Commons townee, could it?”
“You know every one of ’em as well as I do, Ducky. You know every face and every figure and if any of ’em puts on five pounds or insults his sister-in-law, you’d know and so would I.”
“Well, we both know what that leaves, Jelly That leaves the estancias, that does. Lots of unfamiliar faces out there. But that’s very puzzling indeed, isn’t it, my dear? If it had come from there, we’d have seen it.”
Aircars going between Commoner Town and the estancias were permitted to land only at the car terminal at the center of town or at the port. Any aircar landing at the port or in town would be observed. If this lovely creature with the strange eyes had turned up either place, surely somebody would have seen it.
“Off a ship?” hazarded Jellico.
“You know the silly regulations as well as I do, Jelly, dear. Passengers and crew off, fumigate at every port. How could this have lived on a ship while it was being debugged? No, it didn’t come off an empty ship. And it didn’t come from the hotel. And it doesn’t belong to me or to Saint Teresa or to any of the other bitty bit-players down in our place, no it doesn’t. I’m afraid it’s your problem, Jelly. Yours alone.” Ducky Johns giggled, the ruffles on the tent-dress quivering, a fleshquake in paroxysm.
Jellico shook his head. “Not mine, Ducky, old girl. I’ll get an image of her, then you take her back. You’ve got plenty of room in that place of yours. Put it in an empty room and feed it something. The stasis-tank is no place for that. Doesn’t need freezing. Needs tending. Better with you.”