An hour or so later, the ship had arced into orbit around a planet with teal oceans and russet continents.
“Excuse me? Being?” said the pilot.
Marshall looked up.
“Huh?” he said in a hoarse croak.
“We’re here. Tradaxa.”
He shook his head and looked back down, neither understanding nor interested in understanding.
“What are you doing that for?” said the pilot. “Pile of eggs you wanted to see a planet, didn’t you? They told me to show you a representative planet.”
He could not believe that an hour ago he had almost asked this passenger if he was the genius semi from the Roo Rootum program. He had almost done so, of course, because the passenger, like the genius, came from a Zetan reclamation world. But the idea, he now realized, was preposterous. Merely looking at this burrow worm you could see he was no genius. Maybe not even a real semi. Maybe—the pilot hunted around in his mind for an alternative—maybe an enhanced animal companion with emotional problems. Something like that.
Strange the Zetans would buy him a tour, though, and fill the contract with clauses like, “He must be accompanied and protected during every moment he remains in your care.”
Well, maybe he was someone’s very endearing animal companion, before the onset of the disorder. It could happen.
The contract also required that he be apprised of his options “in a manner suited to his level of comprehension,” and this the pilot now attempted to do.
“All right, then, being? Would you pay attention? Being?
“Oh, pile of eggs. All right then, just go on staring at whatever it is you’re staring at, but try to hear what I’m saying, won’t you? We’ve arrived at a planet, see. And we’re going to be setting down in its main city, which happens to be a very famous city called, like the planet, Tradaxa. Why is it famous? Well, because it’s like a hundred cities on a hundred different planets, all in one. Every species you can think of, you’ll find it here. Every custom or food you can think of, you’ll find it here. And why is that? Well, because everyone’s in Old Mode. Do you know about Old Mode? Well, Old Mode means that every species is going about in its traditional manner, and has a market set up just as if it was centuries ago, before instantaneous fabrication and delivery. So that means if you buy something on Tradaxa with the money that I am going to give you, and bring it back for your Zetan master, he will be very happy with you. Because you cannot get something from Tradaxa anywhere else. It is a very special present.”
The being did not look up, oscillate its head or in any way acknowledge receipt of this information. The pilot turned back to his controls, and the vessel began dropping into the atmosphere, along with his spirits.
Was he really going to spend the next five hours shepherding this brain-dead barnacle through the tourist hordes? No! for creek’s sake. He would find an alternative, and into the sand with the contract.
After all, how would the Zetans find out? Certainly this mute lump wasn’t going to tell them.
Although the question remained as to whether, this late, an alternative could still be found.
Quickly he tapped a message into his communications console and impatiently awaited a reply.
But even after they had streaked over the innumerable spires and ziggurats of Tradaxa, all the way to the passenger transport pad in its eastern sector, no return message had arrived.
And then they were down, with nothing further to do but secure a land vehicle and head into the hordes.
The pilot looked at his passenger, then at his blank screen, then at his passenger again.
“Say, maybe we’ll sit here a while. Soak up the atmosphere. Probably not something you’ve seen before.”
And in fact it wasn’t something the passenger had seen before. For all around him were vehicles of every conceivable and inconceivable kind. There were a few other trimarans and a smattering of buslike things, but also metallic croissants and spinning muffin tops, pulsating jellyfish and hovering chandeliers. While in the sky there were more, lots more, some of them crowding in, some accelerating away, all in motion yet none colliding, either with one another or with the wordlike symbols that appeared continually in their midst.
It was a spectacle, in short, to dazzle a person who, during most of his life, would have considered seeing even a single UFO a momentous event. But now he was at a different point in his life and not dazzled in the least. His head remained down; his eyes, wide with horror, stayed locked on the knob.
While his pilot, unleashing a seemingly limitless supply of improper words and phrases, poured his frustration onto his uncommunicative communications screen.
“Belly up on the s’creeting slime in the muck of a . . .”
The result being that neither of them noticed the creature that was advancing towards them between a muffin top and a bus.
It was approaching on sixty, seventy or maybe even a hundred legs. Who could say when there were so many and they moved so quickly? They propelled a long, tubular body dressed in a thick yarn garment with lots of leg holes. The garment matched a snugly fitting hat, which also had holes, for two sturdy antennae. And both hat and body garment were richly colored in autumnal browns and oranges and yellows, with pompoms contributing a festive touch. Also, the front two legs really weren’t legs at all, but arms, connected to hands, which held a tabletlike device the creature consulted as it arrived at the three-hulled ship.
First it stopped by Marshall, who paid no attention, then went around to the pilot’s side, where it issued a clicking noise, which Marshall also didn't notice, although his translator rendered it instantly intelligible.
“You requested a guide and transport?”
“What?” The pilot looked up, startled. Then his eyes brightened. “Yes. Yes! But”—he punched the communications screen—“why no response to my message?”
The creature produced a shruglike motion that began in its arms and rippled along its body. “How would I know? They don’t tell me things like that. You had almost landed, I guess, and I was nearby, so they didn’t bother to . . .” He stopped in mid-sentence, pondering further. “Or maybe it’s that if you contract for service when you’re already on-world, with no prior booking off-world, it costs twice the standard tariff.”
The pilot gurgled cynically. “You think that might be it, huh? Eggs in the mud. Well, how much then?” The creature began to answer, but the pilot didn’t let him. “No. Wait.” He fished a small, bronze-colored token from his coat and handed it over. “This is what the Zetans allotted for him.”
“Allotted for whom?”
“Him.” The pilot indicated Marshall. “Your fare, hopefully. Will it cover?”
The creature held the token against his tablet and clicked doubtfully. “Well, it’s enough, barely, if we don’t stay out long. But there’d be nothing remaining for purchases. Or food. Or—
“—a tip,” he added tentatively but too late, as the pilot was already into his reply.
“No problem,” the pilot was saying. “He isn’t interested in purchases. He doesn’t even speak.” Reaching behind him, he grabbed Marshall by a knee. “Look! Being! Look what I found for you. A Centi-cab. Best guide you could have in a place like this. Knows it all. Where to go. What to do. Far better than me. I don’t know anything.” He turned back to the Centi-cab—“We have an agreement?”—then back to Marshall. “Main thing is, though, stay with him. You hear me? Do you? You do not want to be observed in an unaccompanied state.”
To the Centi-cab he then emphasized that Marshall had to return in precisely five hours. “Zetan specificity,” he explained. “You know how they are.” The Centi-cab nodded and moved back to Marshall’s side of the vehicle, where he climbed over the starboard hull and stood parallel with the central one.
Marshall, however, remained oblivious, even as the section of trimaran to his right dropped away, leaving nothing between him and a colorful cylinder of yarn.
“Yolk afloat!” exclaimed the pilot. “Get on! Get on!”
His passenger looked up, uncomprehending.
“Climb onto his back!”
Marshall looked at the Centi-cab.
“His back!”
Using the tiny fraction of his mind not swamped by other matters, Marshall roused himself and straddled the long body. The Centi-cab retraced its steps over the starboard hull, and its legs disappeared.
* * *
It would have been accurate to say the Centi-cab was running—accurate but inadequate. To its passenger, hurtling across the Galaxy had felt slower. Parked vehicles shot by him while a city leapt up before him, and air smelling of both ammonia and licorice swatted his face.
Atop the Centi-cab's hat, meanwhile, the two antennae probed restlessly about.
Perhaps it was the slap of the wind that did it, but for the first time since being tossed into an inner abyss, Marshall found himself contemplating something other than his predicament. Quite involuntarily, he began visualizing his old apartment and the centipedes that had visited him there. He remembered the one that had hoisted itself from his sink drain as he was bending over to spit out his toothpaste, and the one he had thought was a tickly dust bunny when he reached under his bed for his slippers, until it raced up his arm. And this, inevitably, brought to mind episodes of squashing centipedes, along with the sensations of fear and revulsion that had always accompanied such episodes, especially when the squashing left a trail of wriggling, severed legs.
Oddly, at the same moment that he was remembering reaching out with a huge ball of paper towel to wipe up one particularly large and leggy specimen, both of the Centi-cab's antennae shot backwards in a single, decisive move.
“If something is not to your liking, you can inform me,” said a peeved voice. “There is no need to harbor violent resentments.”
“What?” Marshall asked, startled. “Are you speaking to me? What do you mean?”
At once, the memory of wiping up the centipede reappeared in his mind. Except it wasn’t a memory and didn’t come from him. It was, rather, an approximation of the memory, which got a few details wrong (positioning his furniture on the walls of his apartment, for example). And it included an even rougher approximation of the centipede, which was now larger and wore a knitted sweater.
Marshall began to blush furiously, while experiencing new waves of self-loathing and shame. “My gosh,” he stammered. For it appeared that the Centi-cab, like certain characters on Star Trek, possessed telepathic powers. In which case the thoughts that he, Marshall, had just had—of feeling revolted by centipedes, squashing centipedes, wiping up centipedes—had all entered the Centi-cab’s mind!
And now, because he was rethinking these thoughts, in order to regret thinking about them, they were probably entering the Centi-cab’s mind again!
The cab came to a halt so abrupt it pitched Marshall forward until his face was pressed against the rubbery surface of a glistening green compound eye.
“Get off me, please, and remove yourself from my presence,” demanded the voice. “I will not tolerate a hostile work environment!”
Frantically he tried to appease the arthropod. He pictured himself patting and praising it. He visualized himself back in his apartment, waving cheerfully to a variety of centipedes that scurried by.
In another moment he was on his back on the concretelike surface of the passenger transport pad.
“How much of this do I have to endure?” fumed the guide, shaking itself vigorously. "What is the true price for trying to educate others, to open their minds to scientific marvels they have never bothered to contemplate?”
Though dazed from the fall, Marshall was mainly confused. “But you give rides,” he said, sitting up. “That’s your job, isn’t it?”
“Oh, I see. Just because you find me cabbing myself out, you conclude that’s all I do, that’s who I am, that’s what I’m good for. If he were good at anything else, you say to yourself, he’d be doing it. That’s how things work, is it?”
“Isn’t it?” said Marshall, getting to his feet. “I mean, I don’t know. Before last week I'd never left my home planet.”
“Must be quite a planet, where everyone gets to lead fulfilled, creative lives. Can I move there? Oh no, I forgot. I’ll only get murdered. By someone like you. Squashed and then smeared across a wall.”
Once again, Marshall had an approximation of a memory hurled at him.
“But that’s not true,” he argued. “Those creatures you saw me, uh, opposing, they’re not like you. They don’t have minds. They live in damp crevices.”
“Not everyone gets a nice cistern,” retorted the other. “If you set out to have a worthy career, you might end up in a crevice. The ones you killed were probably like me, concerned with higher matters: astronomy, genetics, undiscovered dimensions. They probably spent years creating accurate, informative yet pleasingly diverting thoughticles, even though they knew they’d never attract a single female that way, and even though their relatives warned them that if they didn’t get more practical they’d be carrying boorish outlanders on their sagging abdomen.”
Marshall was stunned. “I’m sorry!” he said. “But please believe me, I am not a murderer and didn’t mean to be hurtful. The truth is, I have the greatest respect for you. In fact, it seems not impossible that you and I are . . .”
But the Centi wasn't listening. He'd been hunting through his garment and now pulled out the bronze-colored token, which he threw at Marshall’s feet.
“There. You can have it back. Find someone else to abuse.”
Then he began to walk away, at a pace a centipede would consider slow and ponderous but a human would consider a rapid jog.
Marshall jogged rapidly after him. “Wait!” he pleaded. “You don’t realize—I also lived in a crevice, only we call it a basement, and worked at elevating my species, and couldn’t anymore, and had to apply for a job like yours, and would have taken it if not for unusual circumstances. And as for females, if you think you have problems—”
“Yes, yes,” said the Centi, turning his head even as he continued to move, and looking Marshall over with sad and weary contempt. “And yet somehow you ride around in your own private starship and drop in on Tradaxa for a few hours, while titillating yourself with fantasies of murder and dismemberment. Oh, you’re just like me, let me tell you.”
“But I am,” panted Marshall desperately. “I am. Please. Let me explain.”
The guide, however, would not let him. And sped up, to a pace any centipede would consider an amble, and any human a violation of municipal speed limits. He was on a road now, approaching a large and convoluted traffic circle from which other roads branched off, each into a clump of densely packed buildings. In about two seconds he had chosen one of these; in another two he was gone.