The Green Odyssey - free ebook by Philip José Farmer

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The Green Odyssey

Philip José Farmer

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28 chapters

THE GREEN ODYSSEY

THE GREEN ODYSSEY

by Philip José Farmer Make friends fast. — Handbook For The Shipwrecked Ballantine Books New York Copyright 1957, by Philip José Farmer Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 57-10603 Printed in the United States of America Ballantine Books, Inc. 101 Fifth Avenue, New York 3, N. Y. This is an original novel—not a reprint—published by Ballantine Books, Inc. To Nan Gerding DANGER! THRILLS! ADVENTURE! Alan Green was not exactly a hero. In fact he liked peace just as well as the next man. Not that he

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For two years Alan Green had lived without hope. From the day the spaceship had crashed on this unknown planet he had resigned himself to the destiny created for him by accident and mathematics. Chances against another ship landing within the next hundred years were a million to one. Therefore it would do no good to sit around waiting for rescue. Much as he loathed the idea, he must live the rest of his life here, and he must squeeze as much blood as he could out of this planet-sized turnip. The

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The Duke rose, and everybody followed his example. Jugkaxtr chanted the formula of dismissal, then sat down to finish gnawing on the bone. The others filed out. Green walked in front of Zuni in order to warn her of any obstacles in her path and to take the brunt of any attempted assassination. As he did so he was seized by the ankle and tripped headlong. He did not fall hard because he was a quick man, in spite of his six-foot-two and hundred ninety pounds. But he rose red-faced because of the l

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Her mother had been a Northerner slave; her father, a native freeman, a wheelwright. When she was five years old they had died in a plague. She had been transferred to the Pens and raised by her aunt. When she was fifteen her beauty had attracted the Duke and he had installed her in the palace. There she gave birth to his two sons, now ten and eleven, who would soon be taken away from her and raised in the Duke's household as free and petted servants. The Duke had married the present Duchess sev

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Every city and village of the Empire had its House of Equality, within whose walls distinctions of every type were abandoned. Green did not know the origin of the institution, but he recognized its value as a safety valve to blow off the extreme social pressure put on every class. Here the slave who did not dare open his mouth in the outside mundane world could curse his master to his face and go unpunished by the authorities. Of course, there was nothing to keep the master from retaliating in k

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To Green, the next three weeks seemed to have shifted to low gear, they crept by so slowly. Yet they should have raced by quickly enough, so full of schemes and plots were they. He had to advise Miran on the many technical details involved in building tanks for the fish. He had to keep the Duchess happy, an increasingly difficult job because it was impossible to pretend a one-hundred-per-cent absorption in her while his mind desperately looked for flaws in his plans, found oh, so many, and then

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All the next day Green was too busy setting up the schedule of the hunting party to have time to be gloomy. But when night came he seemed to fold up inside himself. Could he pretend to be sick, too, and be left behind when the party set out? No, for they would at once assume that he had been possessed by a demon and would pack him off to the Temple of Apoquoz, God of Healing. There he'd be under lock and key until he proved himself healthy. The terrible part about going to the Temple of Apoquoz

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The lesser moon had touched the western horizon and the greater was nearing the zenith when Green awoke and jumped to his feet, swearing in sheer terror. He'd fallen asleep and kept Zuni waiting. "My God, what'll she say?" he said aloud. "What'll I tell her?" "You needn't tell me anything," came her angry retort from very close by. He started, and whirled around and saw that she'd been standing behind him. She was wrapped in a robe, but her pale face gleamed from beneath the overhanging hood and

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The terrible growling suddenly changed to a high-pitched howl of despair as Alzo flew over the railing and out into the air above the walk. Green, leaning over to watch him, did not feel sorry for him. He was exultant. He'd hated that dog and had dreamed of just such a moment. Alzo's yelping was cut off as he struck the parapet beside the walk, bounced off, and then dropped from view into the depths beyond. Green's strength had been greater than he'd suspected, for he had thought only to toss th

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It was a matter of two minutes to tie the Duke in a chair with several of the hunting whips hanging from the walls. Meanwhile the Duke came out of his daze. He began screaming every invective he knew—and he knew quite a lot—and promising every refined torture he could think of—and his knowledge was not poverty-stricken in that area either. Green waited until the Duke had given himself a bad case of laryngitis. Then he told him, in a firm but quiet voice, what he intended to do unless the Duke go

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He had no trouble at all, except for making his way through the thick traffic. The explosions and shouting coming from the castle had aroused the whole town, so that everybody who could stand on his two feet, or could get somebody to carry him, was outside, milling around, asking questions, talking excitedly and in general trying to make as much chaos as possible and to enjoy every bit of this excuse to take part in a general disturbance. Green strode through them, his head bent but his eyes pro

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Miran coughed and said, "You two and your children and maid must get off the deck and go amidships. That is where you will live. Never again must you set foot upon the steering deck unless you are summoned. I run a tight ship and discipline is strictly adhered to." Green followed Amra and the children down the steps to the deck below, noticing for the first time that Inzax, the pretty blond slave who took care of the children, was also aboard. You had to give credit to Amra. Wherever she went sh

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For a moment Green thought of leaving the ship and making his way on foot. Miran protested loudly. "This is ridiculous. Why can you not fight on deck like two ordinary men and be satisfied if one gives the other a flesh wound? That way I won't stand the chance of losing you, Ezkr, one of my top topmen. If you should slip, who could take your place? This green hand here?" Ezkr ignored his captain's indignation, knowing that the code of the Clan protected him. He spit and said, "Anybody can wield

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Two weeks of very hard work and little sleep passed as Green learned the duties of a topsailman. He hated to go aloft, but he found that being up so high had its advantages. It gave him a chance to catch a few winks now and then. There were many crow's nests where musketmen were stationed during a fight. Green would slip down into one of these and go to sleep at once. His foster son Grizquetr would stand watch for him, waking him if the foretop captain was coming through the rigging toward them.

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For five minutes the intermittent flashes and bellows told that the Vings were still hammering away. Then the dark took hold again. Apparently the two had either recognized each other or else had decided that night fighting was a bad business and had steered away from each other. If this last was true, then they wouldn't be much to fear, for one Ving wouldn't attack the merchant by itself. The clouds broke, and the big and the little moons spread brightness everywhere. The pirate vessels were no

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"A rocket flare!" "Yes. Mother says that you are to release it when you hear the bos'n's whistle from the deck." "Now, why in the world would I do that? Won't I get into tremendous trouble by doing that? I'll be run through the gauntlet a dozen times for that. No sir, not me. I've seen those poor fellows after the whips were through with them." "Mother said for me to tell you that nobody will be able to prove who sent up the flare." "Perhaps. It sounds reasonable. But why should I do it?" "It wi

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Then the flare had died and had left nothing but its after-image on the eye—and panic on the brain. Green did not know what to make of it. In the first instant he had thought that it was the 'roller alone that was speeding toward an uncharted forest-grown hill. Immediately after, he'd seen that his senses were deceiving him and that the mass was also moving. It had looked like a hill, or several hills, sliding across the grass toward them. But even as the darkness came back he'd seen that there

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Green stayed far enough behind the prisoners and savages to keep out of sight if any man should turn. The path was narrow, winding between crowding trunks and under low branches. The soil underfoot was rich and springy, as if composed of generations of leaves. Green estimated he must have gone at least a mile and a half, not as the crow flies, but more like a drunk trying to find his way home. Then, without warning, the forest stopped and a clearing was before him. In the midst of this stood a v

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After much puffing and panting, muttered encouragements to each other, and occasional cursing, they finally reached the summit of the tallest hill. Abruptly, they found themselves facing a clearing which ran around its crown. Directly ahead of them was a forest of totem poles, all gleaming palely in the moonlight. Beyond it was the dark yawning of a large cave. Green walked out from the shadows of the branches to take a closer look. When he came back he said, "There's a little hut by the side of

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Then Aga was blotted out by the dense cloud of dust that billowed out over her and filled the whole room. With it came an intense heat. Green opened his mouth to cry out to Amra and Paxi to cover their faces and especially their noses. Before he could do so his own open mouth was packed with dust and his nostrils were full. He began sneezing and coughing explosively, while his eyes ran tears in their efforts to wash out the dirt that caked and burned them. Clods of dirt struck him, hurled by the

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Though he hated to go back into the altar room, he forced himself. The scene of carnage was bad enough, but not as repulsive as he'd expected. Dust had thrown a gray veil of mercy over the bodies. They looked like peaceful gray statues; most of them had not burned on the outside but had died because they'd breathed the first lung-scorching wave of air directly. Nevertheless, despite the look of peace and antiquity, the odor of burned flesh from Aga hung heavy. Lady Luck bristled and arched her b

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Green dreamed that his mouth and nose were clogged with dirt and that he was suffocating. He woke to find that, while there was no earth upon him, he was having a difficult time getting his breath. Remedying that by removing the cat from his face, he rose. "What do you want?" he asked her. She was mewing and striking gently at him. She padded toward the doorway to the outside, so he imagined that she wished him to follow her. Grasping his cutlass, he walked after her and out to the tunnel that l

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Later Green thought that if ever the time came when he should have cracked up, that instant of loss, white and sudden as the lightning itself, should have been the one. The others cried out loudly in their grief and shock, but he was as silent as the empty stone shelf. He could not move nor utter a word; all seemed hopeless, so what was the use of motion or talk? Nevertheless, he was human, and human beings hope even when there is no justification for it. Nor could he remain frozen until the nex

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Two weeks later the yacht was scudding along under a twenty-mile-an-hour wind. It was high noon, and everybody except the helmsmen, Amra and Miran was eating. They were lunching on steaks carved from a hoober which Green had shot from the deck and which had been cooked on the fireplace placed under a hood immediately aft of the small foredeck. There was no lack of food despite the fact that the yacht had not been stocked. Fortunately the savages who'd owned it had not bothered to remove the seve

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They were a magnificent sight, those many cones pointing their skyscraping noses upward and their spreading landing struts sinking into the soft earth! Their white eternum metal gleamed in the sun, dazzling the spectator who happened to catch their radiance full in the eyes. They were glorious, embodying all the vast wisdom and skill of the greatest civilization of the Galaxy. No wonder, thought Green, that I dance and howl while these people look at me as if I'm mad, and Amra, tears in her eyes

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Shortly after dawn the yacht set sail and sped toward Estorya, a hundred miles west. The breeze was a strong thirty-five miles an hour, precursor of the violent winds that roared across the Xurdimur during the rainy season. Green set every inch of sail he had and took over the helm himself. Steering was not as simple as it had been, for traffic was getting heavy. In an hour he saw no less than forty 'rollers, ranging in size from small merchants not much larger than his own craft to tremendous t

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Just before dawn the yacht coasted to a stop outside the high stone walls of the north side of the island of Shimdoog. Green had dropped the sail and, judging his speed exactly, had steered the craft until its side was almost scraping the wall. As soon as the roller stopped, Green put Lady Luck in a bag tied to his belt and cautioned her to keep quiet. Then he began climbing up the rungs nailed to the mast. The boy followed him, and both crawled out upon the spar. Green tied one end of a long ro

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"Oh, you beauty, you doll, you lovely Lady Luck! Whatever would I do without you!" shouted Green. He started forward to caress the cat but, alarmed, she jumped from the table and sped across the room. "Come back, come back!" he called. "I wouldn't hurt a single one of your lovely black hairs! I'll feed you on beer and fish the rest of your life, and you'll never have to put in a day's work!" "What's the matter?" said Grizquetr. Green hugged him, then sat down in the chair. "Nothing, except that

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