The Tar-aiym Krang by Alan Dean Foster Read Free Book Online

guide to this confusing city of yours for several days, actually. We’re very glad you’ve agreed to help us out of our difficulty.”
    “I’ll do what I can, gentlesirs.” This flattery was embarrassing.
    “We would prefer to start at dawn tomorrow,” said Tse-Mallory. ‘We’re here on business, you see, and a more intimate acquaintance with the city is a prerequisite which we have put off too long already. We were expecting a guide to meet us, actually, but since he has apparently changed his mind, you will have the commission.”
    “We are staying at a small inn a short distance down this same street,” added Truzenzuzex. “Its sign is three fishes and . . .”
    “. . . a starship. I know the place, sir. I’ll meet you at first-fog—seven hours—tomorrow, in the lobby.” The two shook hands with him once again and made as if to take their leave. Flinx coughed delicately but insistently. “Uh, a small detail, sirs.”
    Tse-Mallory paused. “Yes?”
    “There is the matter of payment.”
    The thranx made the series of rapid clicking sounds with its mandibles which passed for laughter among its kind. The insects had a highly developed, sometimes mischievous sense of humor.
    “So! Our guide is a plutocrat as well! No doubt as a larvae you were a hopeless sugar-hoarder. How about this, then? At the conclusion of our tour tomorrow—I daresay one day will be sufficient for our purposes—we will treat you to a meal at the finest comestabulary in the food crescent.”
    Well! Let’s see now, twelve courses at Portio’s would come to . . . well! His mouth was watering already.
    “That’ll be great . . . sufficient, I mean, sirs.” Indeed, it would!

 
    Chapter Two
     
     
     
    Flinx was of course not a guide by profession, but he knew ten times as much about the real Drallar as the bored government hirelings who conducted the official tours of the city’s high spots for bemused off-wonders. He’d performed this function for other guests of Small Symm more than once in the past.
    These, however, had proved themselves rather outré
touristas.
He showed them the great central marketplace, where goods from halfway across the Arm could be found. They did not buy. He took them to the great gate of Old Drallar, a monumental arch carved from water-pure silicon dioxide by native craftsmen, and so old it was not recorded in the palace chronicles. They did not comment. He took them also to the red towers where the fantastic flora of Moth grew lush in greenhouses under the tender ministrations of dedicated royal botanists. Then to the tiny, out-of-the-way places, where could be bought the unusual, the rare, and the outlawed. Jeweled dishware, artwork, weaponry, utensils, gems, rare earths and rare clothings, tickets to anywhere. Scientific instruments, scientists, females or other sexes of any species. Drugs: medicinal, hallucinogenic, deadly, preservative. Thoughts and palm-readings. Only rarely did either of them say this or that small thing about their surroundings. One might almost have thought them bored.
    Once it was at an antique cartographer’s, and then in a language incomprehensible to the multilinguistic Flinx.
    Yes, for two who had seemed so needful of a guide, they had thus far shown remarkably little interest in their surroundings. They seemed far more interested in Flinx and Pip than in the city he was showing them. As late afternoon rolled around he was startled to realize how much they had learned about him through the most innocent and indirect questioning. Once, when Truzenzuzex had leaned forward to observe the minidrag more closely, it had drawn back warily and curled its head out of sight behind Flinx’s neck. That itself was an oddity. The snake’s normal reaction was usually either passivity or belligerence. This was the first time Flinx could recall it’s displaying uncertainty. Apparently Truzenzuzex made little of the incident, but he never tried to approach the reptile