And The Devil Will Drag You Under (1979) by Jack L. Chalker Read Free Book Online Page A

rob-bers in some western drama. None of them paid her the slightest attention, and the final barrier dropped when she saw many female infants and girls as naked as she.
    The supercharging that had gotten her up was wear-ing off, and she could think more clearly now. "Where are we going?" she asked the boy.
    "Just up ahead," he replied, gesturing but not breaking stride. "A small cantina that sells to the merchants and people in town from the farms. Just relax and keep quiet and let me do all the talking. You don't want to make any more mistakes, 'specially out in public," hewarned. She didn't mind this in the least. If she could help it, she wasn't going to hear that weird voice again.
    A number of kids were gathering near the cantina-perhaps a dozen or so, all of whom seemed to be in boy-girl pairs. They ranged in age from about five or six to eleven, which, she guessed, was close to her own age. She found the numbers difficult to dredge up; when she thought, Five or six, her mind said, About the age of her friend Cathy's daughter. The concept of age was there, but not the figures.
    The other children seemed to recognize them.
    "Just don't say anything you don't have to," the boy cautioned her.
    "These others-they are all orphan beggars, too?" she whispered.
    He nodded. "It happens. There is no dishonor in it."
    "I-I didn't mean that there was," she shot back, a bit startled by his reaction.
    They joined the crowd of children, and she shut up as he made no further comments. She felt a little awkward and there was a creeping depression growing inside her. Nothing was going right; nothing she said or did was right. The objective looked more and more hopeless every passing moment.
    The boy greeted several other boys by name; they were regulars and friendly. The girls, she saw, generally kept quiet and deferred to the males, which was cul-turally irritating but, considering her situation, provided a comfortable blanket in which she had no obligations to screw up.
    One problem surfaced immediately, and it was almost comic. The Zolkarian language was most com-pact; a number of sounds went together to form different words depending on the mere arrangement of this syllable or that. As a result, names tended to be single long terms that, nonetheless, meant graphic things to the listener. It was awkward-the language went in for elaborate names, yet provided no simple way for nicknames or shortenings. It made for long-winded talks.
    "Hey! Shadow of the City! I hear you did real good in the Street of the Nine Thousand Buffaloes yester-day!" a chubby eight-year old called.
    "Not bad, Whisperer of the Long Marsh Grasses," Shadow of the City responded. He looked around. "Flower of the Long, Dark Hills is no longer with you, I see."
    The pudgy Whisperer of the Long Marsh Grasses nodded. "You know how it is. Man came along acou-ple days ago and offered her Solace. Said she looked like his dead daughter or something. I dunno. Who can ever understand 'em?"
    "Women?" Shadow of the City responded quizzically.
    "Naw. Grown-ups," the pudgy one replied. "I may have something working with Flower of the Deep Orange Sunset, though. We'll see. Free Wind of the Black Earth is turnin' grown-up fast, and he may just decide to give up the life and turn shareholder."
    And so it went, with the massively complex names coming quickly and the conversation, while very human, running on an alien cultural level. The words were there, but not the meanings.
    The children were all there because of the cantina, run by an elderly man named Winged Dancer of the Buffalo Stampede. He dealt mostly in confections and bite-sized, open-faced sandwiches.
    The culture had no refrigeration, and therefore storage of such things was impossible. Rather than just throw the stuff out, the next morning he gave it to the poor kids, showing kind-ness and charity at absolutely no cost. Sometimes he had nothing, of course, but the beggar children's sub-culture had a way of knowing just how