The Green Odyssey | Page 6

clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its
mother's breast or an old man clings to his property.
Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it was worth while to
become a martyr.
He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.
"Alan! Alan!"
He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought desperately for a
moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a woman's, it was powerful and
penetrating, and everybody around him had already turned to see its owner. So he
couldn't pretend he hadn't heard it.
"ALAN, YOU BIG BLOND NO-GOOD HUNK OF MAN, STOP!"
Reluctantly Green told his rickshaw boy to turn around. The boy, grinning, did so. Like
everybody else along the harbor front he knew Amra and was familiar with her relations

with Green. She held their one-year-old daughter in her arms, cradled against her
magnificent bosom. Behind her stood her other five children, her two sons by the Duke,
her daughter by a visiting prince, her son by the captain of a Northerner ship, her
daughter by a temple sculptor. Her rise and fall and slow rise again was told in the
children around her; the tableau embodied an outline of the structure of the planet's
society.
3
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 several years after his liaison with Amra
began and her jealousy had forced him to get rid of Amra. Back to the Pens she had gone;
perhaps the Duke had not been too sad to see her go, for living with her was like living
with a hurricane, and he liked peace and quiet too well.
Then, in accordance with the custom, she had been recommended by the Duke to a
visiting prince; the prince had overstayed his leave from his native country because he
hated to part with her, and the Duke had wanted to give her as a present. But here he'd
overstepped his legal authority. Slaves had certain rights. A woman who had borne a
citizen a child could not be shipped away or sold unless she gave her permission. Amra
didn't choose to go, so the sorrowing prince had gone home, though not without leaving a
memento of his visit behind him.
The captain of a ship had purchased her, but here again the law came to her rescue. He
could not take her out of the country, and she again refused to leave. By now she had
purchased several businesses-- slaves were allowed to hold property and even have slaves
of their own-- and she knew that her two boys by the Duke would be valuable later on,
when they'd go to live with him.
The temple sculptor had used her as his model for his great marble statue of the goddess
of Fertility. Well he might, for she was a magnificent creature, a tall woman with long,
richly auburn hair, a flawless skin, large russet brown eyes, a mouth as red and ripe as a
plum, breasts with which neither child nor lover could find fault, a waist amazingly
slender considering the rest of her curved body and her fruitfulness. Her long legs would
have looked good on an Earthwoman and were even more outstanding among a
population of club-ankled females.
There was more to her than beauty. She radiated a something that struck every male at
first sight; to Green she sometimes seemed to be a violent physical event, perhaps even a
principle of Nature herself.
There were times when Green felt proud because she had picked him as her mate, chosen

him when he was a newly imported slave who could say only a few words in the highly
irregular agglutinative tongue. But there were times when he felt that she was too much
for him, and those times had been getting too frequent lately. Besides, he felt a pang
whenever he saw their child, because he loved it and dreaded the moment when he would
have to leave it. As for deserting Amra, he wasn't sure how that would make him feel.
Undeniably, she did affect him, but then so did a blow in the teeth or wine in the blood.
He got down out of the rickshaw, told