The Garbage Chronicles (3 page)

“I’ll say! Barging in like that!”

“You’re supposed to instruct me, I believe.”

“In social graces?
Me? Ha!
What a laugh. You and I should go to the same school, pal.”

“Uh, I think Papa also wants you to explain my emotions to me. He says they are very important.”

Javik continued to glance around warily. “I don’t like this,” he said. “Smells like a Colonel Peebles trick . . . but he’s dead.”

“You want me to leave, then?” The little comet moved farther down the hallway. “I shouldn’t bother you.”

“Hold on,” Javik said. He walked past Wizzy and knelt beside him. “You look like a Bu-Tech surveillance unit,” he mumbled, studying Wizzy’s irregular surface.

“Oh no! Nothing of the sort!”

“A final security check before my ship takes off?” Javik touched Wizzy’s surface. It was lumpy and cool.

“No.”

“It
is
a classified mission.”

“I said
no.
That’s not it at all.” Spying a chunk of aquamarine crystal on a charcoal-tinted glassplex hall table, Wizzy flew over for a closer look.

Javik shivered. He drew his robe shut at the neck.

“Pretty one,” Wizzy said to the crystal. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

The crystal remained silent and motionless.

“So you’re a male meckie, eh?” Javik said. “Well forget it, pal. That’s just a meteor fragment I picked up in the Hepfer Droids.”

“Speak!” Wizzy demanded.

There was no response from the crystal.

“Hmmmph!” Wizzy said haughtily. “Just another pretty face.” He focused his cat’s eye on Javik.

Javik leveled his pistol at Wizzy, saying, “You wanna know about emotions, eh? Let’s start with fear, then. You got any of that?’

“I presume so. What is fear?”

“It’s when you worry about your own skin.”

“Skin.” Wizzy glowed red again, calling upon his data banks. “Ah . . . epidermis. But I have nothing like that.”

“You try to act smart, but you know what I think? I think you’re dumb.”

“I am not! I am wise now, with the inherited data banks of my parents. Papa Sidney says I will grow wiser each day!”

“Shit! What in the hell are you?”

Wizzy nudged the piece of crystal and dropped to the tabletop for a rest. “You remember Sidney Malloy?” he asked.

“Sure. But what—”

“That’s my papa.”

Javik’s head snapped back in surprise. “Your
papa? Ha!”

“He is! Papa Sidney’s in deep space.”

Javik lowered the gun. “Sid died last year . . . never returned from our mission.”

“Oh, he’s very much alive. Let me assure you of that. And I sense Papa wants to see you again someday. But he’s quite busy now with assignments from the Council of Magic.”

“Magic, huh,” Javik said, scratching his head. “Where do you fit in?”

“I’ve already told you that. You and I are supposed to help one another. I would prefer not being here, but Papa said—”

“Papa said, Papa said! I don’t care what your goddamned papa said!”

Wizzy flashed an angry shade of orange. “Now look here, Thomas Patrick Javik!”

Javik became introspective. He laid the gun on the floor. “I was thinking of Sid before falling asleep,” he mumbled. “Is this a dream?”

“I sense an answer to that question,” Wizzy said.

“And that is?”

Wizzy buzzed across the hallway and slammed into the knuckle of Javik’s hand.

“Ow!” Javik groped for the pistol with his other hand.

Wizzy knocked it beyond Javik’s reach. “Does that answer your question about a dream?”

“Yes!” Javik said. “Yes!” He shook his wounded hand, wondering if he should lunge for the gun.

Wizzy laughed mischievously. Then his yellow cat’s eye darted around in surprise. “That sound I just made,” he said. “What was it?”

“What?” Javik snapped. “What-what-what?” His hand throbbed.

“The odd noise I made. Ha-ha-ha! Like that.”

“Laughter,” Javik said with a sneer. “You were laughing, idiot!”

“This laughter—it has a purpose?”

“It makes a person feel good, you little S.O.B.!”

“S.O.B.?”

“Son of a bitch. You’re a son of a bitch!”

‘That would be S.O.A.B. No, S.O.B. must be something entirely different. Like ‘Sweet Old Boy.’ But I’m not old, not at all old.”

Javik fumed.

“You seem very confused. I think I’ll laugh again. A ha-ha-ha! That feels very good, indeed. Ha-ha-ha!”

Javik shook his sore hand. The pain was subsiding. “Damn, but that hurt,” he said. Out of the corner of one eye he looked at the automatic pistol. It lay several centimeters away, just beyond his grasp.
Maybe if I lunged . . .

“Don’t even think about it,” Wizzy said.

The pain was almost gone now. Javik shook his hand and flexed the fingers, still eyeing the gun.

“Your weapon probably couldn’t harm me, anyway,” Wizzy said. “I am young, though, and uncertain of my powers.”

Should I go for the gun?
Javik wondered.
Could be an Atheist trick. Spying on my mission
. . .

“You still don’t trust me,” Wizzy said. “Now you think the Atheists sent me.”

Startled, Javik blurted, “How did you . . . ? Oh, my energy waves . . . from my brain?”

“Uh huh,” Wizzy said. “I know all about your mission: You’re to scout Guna One, checking for unusual activity in the landing region of garbage catapulted there by Winston Abercrombie. You’re to bring him back, too, if you can find him.”

Javik felt that his jaw must be scraping the floor.

“It’s the Abercrombie recycling crime you’re investigating. Isn’t that right, Captain Tom?”

Javik stared at the table legs and chewed at his lower lip. “That doesn’t prove anything,” he said. “Atheist operatives are everywhere.”

“What about this? You remember the big reunion at the Sky Ballroom.. .where they discovered Papa Sidney was a cappy? And the time you went to see him in therapy detention?”

Javik’s sea blue eyes opened wide. “I remember those things,” he said. He looked at Wizzy and nodded like an old man, with his chin continuing to bob up and down.

“‘You and me on an important mission together’—that’s what you said to Papa.”

“Sure, I said that. But you could have gotten it from my thoughts.”

“You weren’t thinking about it in my presence, Captain Tom. Not reasoning this out too well, Me you?”

“It’s not up to me whether you can go. You’ll have to be cleared with mission control.”

“Impossible. They’d think you were nuts. Just for checking. It might cost you the mission.”

Javik pursed his lips. “I need this assignment. It’s the comeback trail for me.”

“Then believe what I said. I
can
help you.”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t believe me, then. I could care less. I’m just here because Papa—” Wizzy saw Javik’s eyes flash angrily.

“All right,” Javik said. “You’re coming along.”
I don’t like this creep’s personality,
he thought.
But something tells me—”

“Maybe I don’t like you either.”

“Huh? Oh.”

“You’ve made a wise decision,” Wizzy said. He yawned, using unseen mouth muscles.

“What did you say your name was?” Javik asked. He opened his hand and extended it.

“Wizzy. Wizzy Malloy.” The little comet hopped on Javik’s open hand.

Javik felt a tingle in his palm and heard a barely audible hum. It resembled the purr of a meckie cat. Wizzy was heavy —far heavier than he appeared to be. “Wizzy, eh?” Javik said with a smile. “Is that because you’re a wise stone?”

“It’s a name. That’s all.”

Javik wondered how the dark blue stone on his palm could be Sidney’s son but not human. And he did not understand where Sidney was at that moment.

“Papa Sidney is flying,” Wizzy said, referring to one of Javik’s unspoken questions.

“He has a ship?” Frustrated at the lack of privacy, Javik felt his heart skip a beat.

“In a sense, yes. A very large ship. But I’m too weary to explain now.” The cat’s eye dimmed and closed. Soon Wizzy was breathing deeply, expanding and contracting on Javik’s hand. The rolling rumble of snores followed;

“Well I’ll be,” Javik said, rubbing an itchy eyelid with his free hand. He placed Wizzy on the couch. Obtaining a hand towel from the linen-closet module, he laid it gently over Wizzy’s clear agate top.

“Concentrate on happiness,” Javik said softly. “That’s the biggy—the emotion that’s eluded me.”

It was an overcast morning at the northeast corner of Robespierre Field, with a thick layer of Bu-Tech-made clouds overhead. Javik stood with his two crewmen beside other clusters of crewmen near their cream-colored, AmFed-marked ships. Gray-uniformed ground crews were making final adjustments to the ships, chattering back and forth as they worked.

Javik felt in the side pocket of his Space Patrol jumpsuit. Wizzy buzzed contentedly in there, and felt warm to his touch. Javik considered the reason for the Bu-Tech clouds: placed there at President Ogg’s orders to conceal the sky writing comet’s embarrassing activity from AmFed citizens.
We AmFeds like to think we can control everything,
Javik thought, bemused.
But here’s something beyond the power of our technology.

Javik felt a chill wind as he removed his hand from his pocket. He mento-zipped his jumpsuit all the way to his neck. Glancing to his left, he focused on the buxom figure of copilot Marta Evans. Clad in a white and gold Space Patrol jumpsuit like his with ribbons across the chest, Evans had short yellow hair with big Venusian curls. She held her helmet with both hands in front of her waist.

He stared at her chest.
Amazing, the things surgeons can do,
he thought.

She caught his gaze, smiled.

Javik looked away and grimaced.
Stinking transsexual,
he thought.
Why couldn’t they have sent along a real woman, or even a meckie, instead of this
. . .
thing?
Recalling the killer meckie that had been sent with him on the last mission, he shuddered.

Beside Evans stood the other crewman, the freckle-faced, red-haired science officer, Vince Blanquie. Blanquie was fat and soft. He shook noticeably.

Evans whispered in Javik’s ear, “He’s on withdrawal.”

“Huh?”

“Video games. He’s hooked. They made him cold turkey it, I hear.”

“No mention of that in his dossier,” Javik husked.

Evans shrugged. “My source is unimpeachable,” she said.
I hope they left the sex-change operation out of my file,
she thought.

A meckie buzzed nearby. Javik turned to see it service the cluster of crewmen who stood at the base of an adjacent space cruiser.
Rings and necklaces,
Javik thought.

Moments later, the meckie stood in front of Javik, fitting a two-jeweled ring on the third finger of his right hand. “These were rush-packed,” the meckie said, showing synthetic nervousness. “Hope they work okay.” The meckie draped a language-mixer pendant around Javik’s neck, then moved on to Evans.

Javik studied the ring. It was tita-gold, bearing two rectangular stones, one white and one turquoise.

“White for shower, turquoise for change of clothes,” the meckie said to Evans. “It’s called a wardrobe ring.”

Evans grunted.

While attending to Blanquie, the meckie said, “Your necklaces are more powerful than older models. They can locate a common language denominator for up to five hundred beings within a fifty-meter radius. Less people, more radius—and vice versa.”

After the meckie moved on to another crew, Javik lifted the necklace pendant. It was octagonal and ruby red, with four rainbow-hue stylized faces on it: one round, one square, one triangular, one rectangular. Javik knew they were representative of different cultures and races that might be encountered in deep space. He touched a button on one side, causing the faces to spin in a blur. The mechanism beeped and flashed a green light, indicating it was operating properly. Javik shut it off and tucked it beneath his shirt.

“The President!” Evans said excitedly.

Javik glanced quickly at Evans, then followed the gaze of her large olive green eyes to the west. Autocopter One banked over the General Oxygen Factory, then began its descent toward Robespierre Field.

The craft was white, with the red, yellow, and blue markings of the American Federation of Freeness. Javik saw a large presidential seal on the underside and smaller ones on each side of the cabin. The copter descended rapidly and set down in a cloud of dust, As it had dark-tinted windows, Javik could not see the President. Javik smelled dust and rubbed a speck out of one eye.

Presently, President Euripides Ogg short-stepped from the copter to a lift, followed by two aides. The lift dropped slowly.

President Ogg was an immense, hulking black man in a bright yellow leisure suit with green lapels. He brushed his hand through a wave of long, golden hair that he combed straight back from a widow’s peak. The aides spoke to him nervously and constantly, one in each ear. The President and his aides moved quickly to a stage that had been erected for the occasion.

“He looks tired,” Evans said.

Javik heard low tones from the clusters of crewmen nearby.

As President Ogg reached the top of the stage, Javik watched the aides brush dust from the President’s suit. Then Ogg rolled to the microphone.

The crews fell silent.

“I’ll make this short and sweet,” Ogg said, addressing the crewmen. “Get out there and find where our catapulted garbage went!”

“Yes, sir!” the crewmen responded. Javik felt the patriotism of the moment as he spoke in unison with the others.

“And when you find it,” President Ogg continued, “see if the garbage can do us any goddamned harm!” He coughed.

“Yes, sir!”

One of the aides was a tail blond man whom Javik recognized as Chief of Staff Billie Birdbright. Birdbright leaned close to Ogg’s ear and whispered something.

Ogg nodded, looked flustered. “Uh,” Ogg said, returning to the microphone. “I mean, report back any unusual activity.”

“Yes, sir!”

Without warning, a great wind swept across the field. Javik shuddered and closed his eyes as dust blew in his face and filled his nostrils. He smelled grit and sulfur. He tried to open his eyes, but a blinding flash covered the sky.