Promised Land by Brian Stableford Page B

them.’
    â€˜What exactly do you hunt spiders for?’ I asked him. ‘What good are they?’
    â€˜No good at all,’ he replied. ‘We use them—for clothes, sometimes to make other things. Sometimes to eat. But there is nothing we can get from the spiders that the people of the Zodiac cannot give us.’
    â€˜And you’d rather use the stuff from the Zodiac than get your own?’
    â€˜It’s better,’ he said.
    â€˜But Danel hunts spiders,’ I said. ‘He wears that breastplate thing, which is presumably spider hide, or spider shell, or whatever you call it.’
    â€˜Danel likes to hunt spiders,’ Micheal explained.
    â€˜Danel doesn’t like the people of the Zodiac ?’
    â€˜Perhaps not.’
    I observed the diplomatic ‘perhaps.’
    â€˜And you like to hunt with him,’ I said amiably. ‘And carry the bulk of the load. And you don’t even carry a gun to protect yourself.’
    â€˜Danel needs someone to hunt with him,’ said Micheal flatly, as though that were the sum total of the explanation.
    â€˜Rather you than me,’ I said drily, though it was an extremely pointless remark. I was eyeing his pack and estimating how much heavier than mine it was. He was a strong man. My capabilities, though, had declined since the days before Lapthorn’s Grave. Even with the help of the wind I wasn’t able to make quite as much use of myself. My semi-fascination with the size of Micheal’s load was only a reflection of my own realisation of my decline. Age had rubbed a bit of my capability right out. Two years on that black mountain had reversed the direction of my life’s progress. If I didn’t fight tooth and claw to retain myself, my days as a crack pilot would be over in seven years and I’d have to take up engineering or liner-jockeying or renew a long-abandoned intimacy with the ground. The two years which I owed Charlot might be two of the last of my best, and that wasn’t going to make them pass any faster or any easier. Lapthorn’s Grave had set me on the downhill ride.
    But that wasn’t what I wanted to talk to Micheal about, and I cleared my mind of it. I talked a little about the forest, but as soon as I managed to actually involve him in the conversation, we had to talk a little more about me. He was interested in me. I told him a few irrelevancies about my personal history and my way of life. Finally, I gained the confidence to touch on certain subjects which might have proved offensive if introduced without care.
    â€˜That spiel you were pouring out night before last,’ I said. ‘It was mostly for show, wasn’t it?’
    â€˜Spiel?’ he queried.
    â€˜Sorry,’ I said. ‘The conversation we all had in your house. It was an exhibition, wasn’t it? It was faked.’ It wasn’t a very friendly thing to say, but I thought that the Anacaon conception of good manners paid a lot more respect to the truth than ours does.
    â€˜Why do you say that?’ he asked. I glanced ahead. Linda was too far ahead to overhear, and Eve and Mercede weren’t listening.
    â€˜It was a show for Linda,’‘ I said. ‘For the people of the Zodiac . You’ve never said a word on your own behalf, have you? Your whole dealings with the humans are conditioned by what the humans want from you, aren’t they?’
    â€˜Of course,’ he said. I wondered just how inevitable that was. Attitude is always affected by what people expect, but the Anacaona seemed to have adapted with remarkable enthusiasm and facility to their human-defined role in the Promised Land. It didn’t seem natural to me.
    â€˜Why do you capitulate to such an extent so easily?’ I asked him directly.
    â€˜I can’t answer that,’ he said. ‘It’s a question that I can only define in your terms, and in those terms it’s a question which doesn’t