Twenty-eight hours later Koven landed in Maru, knowing a good deal more about the history of contemporary poetry, but knowing nothing which would help him unravel the puzzle of the raids.
"No Van Isaac wasn't kidding," Jimmy Spotwood said. "The colonization board worked Valaya over from one end to the other. This is genuine, authentic and otherwise real tropicana."
Koven stood at the window of Spotwood's shack, which looked down a long street to the central clearing which formed the crossroads of Maru. Bluish sky spread out overhead like sheets of hot metal, and the almost poisonously colorful foliage stuttered gently in a hot breeze. The nearly undressed inhabitants, skins belying only a touch of the bluish blood from Mars, idled along from hut to hut, talking or playing with the children. The only note of turmoil was sounded by the slapping skin drums from the far side of the village. Koven turned around to his host.
"Are they beating the drums for any purpose?" he wanted to know.
Spotwood took a drink from a sanitary plastic bubble. "Once a month everybody on North gets together for a shindig." He smirked with good-natured lasciviousness. "The whole rigamarole is years old. Guarantees that plenty of good strong babies will be born, and that the crops won't fail, or some such rot. O'course," Spotwood said laconically, "this monthly assembly would be the logical time to suspect, if they ever did anything but put on a sexual exhibition in that clearing down the road. Maybe," he added, "the head dancer's pelvis—a female, by the way—is tattooed with a message in some sort of invisible ink our poor old Earth eyes can't see. Her belly gyrations would guarantee high readership, if nothing else."
Koven smiled thinly, as a knock rattled on the slatted door.
Spotwood's eyes slitted down and jumped briefly to Koven's, in a glance which the latter interpreted to read, News isn't slow in Maru. I'll bet this is the prime mover. Koven instinctively patted the flat pistol beneath his coat, his back to the door as Spotwood opened it.
"I understand we have a visitor in the village," came the sound of an unpleasant, wet and wheezing voice.
"You're right," said Spotwood. "Come on in, Bruschloss."