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Isle Of The Dead :: Zelazny Roger
Страница: 87 из 110This was the first piece of dangerous business I had been out on in a long while. I felt out of practice, though I was not sorry I had skimped. If Green Green noticed that my hands were shaking, he made no comment. They held his life, and he felt badly enough about this as it was. He was in a position now to kill me any time he wanted, if you stop to think about it very carefully. He knew it. I knew it. And he knew I knew it. And ...
The only thing that was holding him back was the fact that he needed me to get him off of Illyria--which, logically, meant that his ship was on the isle. Which, by extension, meant that if Shandon had a ship at his disposal, he could come looking for us by air, despite our hallucinatory companions' feelings with respect to a confrontation. Which meant that we would be better off working under the trees than on the beach, and that our voyage required the cover of night. Accordingly, I moved our project inland. Green Green thought this a very good idea.
The cloud cover cracked that afternoon as we assembled the raft, but it did not break completely. The rain continued, the day grew a bit brighter, and two white, white moons passed overhead--Kattontallus and Flopsus--lacking only grins and eye-sockets.
Later in the day a silver insect, three times the size of the _Model T_ and ugly as a grub, left the isle and circled the lake six times, spiraling outward, then inward. We were under a lot of foliage, burrowed our ways beneath more, stayed there until it returned to the isle. I clutched my ancient artifact the while. The bunny did not sell me out.
We finished the raft a couple hours before sundown and spent the balance of the day with our backs against the boles of adjacent trees.
"A penny for your thoughts," I said.
"What is a penny?"
"An ancient monetary unit, once common on my home planet. On second thought, don't take me up on it. They're valuable now."
"It is strange to offer to buy a thought. Was this a common practice among your people, in the old days?"
"It had to do with the rise of the merchant classes," I said. "Everything has a price, and all that."
"That is a very interesting concept, and I can see how one such as yourself could well believe in it. Would you buy a _pai'badra?_"
"That would be barratry. A _pai'badra_ is a cause for an action."
"But would you pay a person to abandon his vengeance against you?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"You would take my money and still seek the vengeance, hoping to lull me into a sense of false security.
The only thing that was holding him back was the fact that he needed me to get him off of Illyria--which, logically, meant that his ship was on the isle. Which, by extension, meant that if Shandon had a ship at his disposal, he could come looking for us by air, despite our hallucinatory companions' feelings with respect to a confrontation. Which meant that we would be better off working under the trees than on the beach, and that our voyage required the cover of night. Accordingly, I moved our project inland. Green Green thought this a very good idea.
The cloud cover cracked that afternoon as we assembled the raft, but it did not break completely. The rain continued, the day grew a bit brighter, and two white, white moons passed overhead--Kattontallus and Flopsus--lacking only grins and eye-sockets.
Later in the day a silver insect, three times the size of the _Model T_ and ugly as a grub, left the isle and circled the lake six times, spiraling outward, then inward. We were under a lot of foliage, burrowed our ways beneath more, stayed there until it returned to the isle. I clutched my ancient artifact the while. The bunny did not sell me out.
We finished the raft a couple hours before sundown and spent the balance of the day with our backs against the boles of adjacent trees.
"A penny for your thoughts," I said.
"What is a penny?"
"An ancient monetary unit, once common on my home planet. On second thought, don't take me up on it. They're valuable now."
"It is strange to offer to buy a thought. Was this a common practice among your people, in the old days?"
"It had to do with the rise of the merchant classes," I said. "Everything has a price, and all that."
"That is a very interesting concept, and I can see how one such as yourself could well believe in it. Would you buy a _pai'badra?_"
"That would be barratry. A _pai'badra_ is a cause for an action."
"But would you pay a person to abandon his vengeance against you?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"You would take my money and still seek the vengeance, hoping to lull me into a sense of false security.