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Adam nodded in the direction from which the priest had come. The colony of
black-clad folk were back that way, only a couple of kilometers distant.
Father Marti appeared to consider the question seriously. He said at last:
"No. I have been trying to warn them-some of them travel frequently alone and
unarmed in the woods. Maybe their patriarch would listen to you more readily
than to me."
Both men glanced toward the end of the right sleeve of the priest's white
robe, from which no hand emerged. Father Marti did own quite a good right
hand, but it was complex enough that the metal and plastic joints of it tended
to freeze up or exhibit other bizarre behavior whenever he wore it into the
Field. He usually, as today, left his right hand in the city whenever he
visited the wilderness. Father Marti too had once walked in these woods
unarmed. But then had come his wrestling match with a small geryon. Since then
he came with the sheath of a Bowie knife hanging on his belt, ready for a
left-hand draw.
"I'll talk to them tomorrow," Adam said.Before I leave for the mountains , he
thought. /really had better go. Then why don't I tell the Father I'm making
one more hunting trip this winter? Because I know I'm not going. I mean to
stay here instead and hang around another man's wife. Being merely human, I
always lie to myself .
"Father."
"What is it?"
But there was nothing, really, to be said.
In the late afternoon Adam heated some water and got cleaned up and dressed to
go into the city. He had no very extensive wardrobe, and wore a modified
version of his usual garb. According to what he could see of himself in his
small metal mirror, he looked like a tourist trying to look like an old
settler. Not, he supposed, that it made any difference anyway.
By the time he had paddled and motored himself across the river to Far
Landing, darkness was at hand, the million distant lights of Stem City
starting to come on against the night. The shuttle copter rose from the meadow
behind Far Landing into the last fading fire-glory of the sunset. The only
other passengers this trip were a tourist couple carrying cameras and wearing
tired, vaguely disappointed expressions. Maybe I shouldn't have washed up and
changed clothes, Adam thought. He pictured himself boarding the copter in a
begrimed hunting shirt, saying to the tourists: "Me half Tenoka. You take
picture?" He grinned.
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When he was on his way to look for Merit, he could feel good about his life.
The first thing he did on reaching the city was to try to call the Lings at
their hotel-she had told him which one they were staying at. But they were
out. They might, Adam supposed, be dining tonight at the home of one of the
Fieldedge scientists, but he had no way of looking for them there. Stem City's
rapidly multiplying places of entertainment were a different matter. He would
give some of those a try.
Already the center of the only city on Golden strongly resembled that of a
resort town on Earth. If the buildings here were not yet quite as tall as
those on more crowded worlds, the money flowed at least as freely. People who
traveled this far from Earth or anywhere else to seek amusement had plenty of
money to spend.
Adam started on a round of bars, working his way outward from the exact center
of town. He actually drank only a small amount. Neither alcohol nor other
drugs had ever assumed any great importance in his life.
While smoking an Antarean cigar in a place that featured the worst music he
had heard in at least a year, he happened to glance out through a large bubble
window a hundred meters above the street. Kilometers distant, out near the
northern perimeter of the Stem, there stood the newest tower on the planet,
four hundred vertical meters of steel and stone, bathed at night in
searchlights of changing color. A huge sign flashed pictures, first frothy
bubbles pouring from a glass, then a couple dancing side by side, then the
name of some entertainer blazing out, and then the cycle started over.
Yes, Adam thought, quite likely. It was the newest hotel on planet, advertised
as top-status. Built on a hill that was still outside the burgeoning city
proper, the tower looked up to the northern mountains in the distance, whence
the savage fur hunters could look down at it in wonder. A Fieldedge scientist
might well consider such a hotel the ideal place to take off-world visitors.
Anyway, Merit would certainly not be here where Adam was now, listening to
this subhuman music.
From the center of Stem City an enclosed, multi-lane slideway stretched all
the way out to the new resort. FASTEST WITHIN TEN LIGHT YEARS! advertised the
slideway's entrance signs. The dully-gleaming, black-surfaced lanes bore a
thin scattering of passengers. Adam stepped from lane to lane, out to the
express walk that moved nearest the stationary central divider, and was
whistled along at highway speed. People going the other way blurred past him,
just on the other side of the air-buffered plastic barrier in the center.
There was clear plastic overhead, too, a shield against weather. Every two
hundred meters or so, glass or composite observation platforms had been
bubbled out from the slideway's structure, other-wise mostly enclosed tunnel.
These platforms were accessible from the slow outer lanes, and gave day or
night a good view of the Stem country. Much of the Stem was already lighted at
night, sketched in with roads and markers for future development even where
there were as yet no buildings. Soon, Adam expected, the city was likely to
fill the Stem completely; at which point the developers would be sure to want
a new treaty with the Tenoka, and then an expansion of development into Field
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