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"Only one physical difference between a Human and a Veldian is apparent on the surface. The nose
cartilage. Yours is split mine is single." He rose to his feet. "Will you come with me, please?"
It was not a request.
* * *
My guards walked singly and in couples, sometimes passing Trobt and myself, sometimes letting us pass
them, and sometimes lingering at a booth, like any other walkers, and yet, unobtrusively they held me
encircled, always in the center of the group. I had already learned enough of the Veldian personality to
realize that this was simply a habit of tact. Tact to prevent an arrest from being conspicuous, so as not to
add the gaze of his fellows to whatever punishment would be decided for a culprit's offense. Apparently
they considered humiliation too deep a punishment to use indiscriminately.
At the edge of the Fair grounds some of the watchers bunched around me while others went to get the
tricars. I stood and looked across the park to The City. That was what it was called, The City, The
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Give Me Liberty
Citadel, The Hearthplace, the home place where one's family is kept safe, the sanctuary whose walls
have never been pierced. All those connotations had been in the name and the use of the name; in the
voices of those who spoke it. Sometimes they called it The Hearth, and sometimes The Market, always
The as if it were the only one.
Though the speakers lived in other places and named them as the homes of their ancestors, most of the
Veldians were born here. Their history was colored, I might say even shaped, by their long era of
struggle with the dleeth, a four-footed, hairy carnivore, physically little different from the big cats of
Earth, but intelligent. They had battled the Veldians in a struggle for survival from the Veldians' earliest
memories until a couple centuries before my visit. Now the last few surviving dleeth had found refuge in
the frigid region of the north pole. With their physical superiority they probably would have won the
struggle against the Veldians, except that their instincts had been purely predatory, and they had no
hands and could not develop technology.
The City had been the one strong point that the dleeth had never been able to breach. It had been held by
one of the stronger clans, and there was seldom unity among the tribes, yet any family about to bear a
child was given sanctuary within its walls.
The clans were nomads made so by the aggression of the dleeth but they always made every effort to
reach The City when childbirth was imminent. This explained, at least partly, why even strangers from
foreign areas regarded The City as their home place.
I could see the Games Building from where I stood. In the walled city called Hearth it was the highest
point. Big and red, it towered above the others, and the city around it rose to it like a wave, its consort of
surrounding smaller buildings matched to each other in size and shape in concentric rings. Around each
building wound the ramps of elevator runways, harmonious and useful, each of different colored stone,
lending variety and warmth. Nowhere was there a clash of either proportion or color. Sometimes I
wondered if the Veldians did not build more for the joy of creating symmetry, than because of utilitarian
need.
I climbed into Trobt's thee-wheeled car as it stopped before me, and the minute I settled into the bucket
seat and gripped the bracing handles, Trobt spun the car and it dived into the highway and rushed toward
the city. The vehicle seemed unstable, being about the width of a motor bike, with side car in front, and
having nothing behind except a metal box that must have housed a powerful battery, and a shaft with the
rear wheel that did the steering. It was an arrangement that made possible sudden wrenching turns that
were battering to any passenger as unused to it as I. To my conditioning it seemed that the Veldians on
the highway drove like madmen, the traffic rules were incomprehensible or nonexistent, and all drivers
seemed determined to drive only in gull-like sweeping lines, giving no obvious change of course for
other such cars, brushing by tricars from the opposite direction with an inch or less of clearance.
Apparently the maneuverability of the cars and the skill of the drivers were enough to prevent accidents, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]