It did not seem polite, however, to ask.
“Ev Williamson, captain of the
Little Tom,
meet Corporal Whitey O’Thraight, from the planet Vespucci,” Lucille answered before Rogers or I could do more than open our mouths. “He’s an armorer, if we’re to believe him, and an accomplished musician, late of something called the ‘Vespuccian Navy’.” She rolled her eyes ceilingward in mocking disbelief.
“Just add him and his Lieutenant to the Survey Service tab,” said Rogers. “My guess is that the investment will prove to be well worth it.”
“Naval Reserve,” I corrected Lucille stiffly, then, before I could stop myself, I said, “A standing army is the age-old instrument of tyranny.”
“No shit, Corporal,” Lucille said sarcastically. “How about a navy treading water? Two tenth-bits says you learned that in a government school, the
ultimate
instrument of tyranny.” Before I could summon up a suitably acid comeback, she yawned, “Well, this seminar has been fascinating, but I’m headed for the showers. That mudball down there is more than a mere smartsuit can handle, the remotes don’t tell the half of it. And you simply wouldn’t believe that pile of rocks and garbage they call a castle. I’ll be having unsanitary nightmares for a week!”
Without waiting for a reply from any of us, Lucille took a step backward, then seemed to melt into the floor. She vanished without a sound.
There was a chuckle from behind me. “Well don’t just stand there rubber-necking, Admiral,” Williamson seemed to be addressing me. “And don’t take it personally, she treats everybody that way. Gonna be a fine human being someday, if we let her live. C’mon park it somewhere. Can I get you something to drink?” He turned slightly. No tail. I was disappointed.
I picked a spot on the continuous, well-upholstered sofa running completely around the room, beneath the windows. Covered in some warm, supple plastic, it was the only article of furniture in sight. It was embossed with riding-animals like those we had seen on Sca. These were carrying men in broad-brimmed, floppy hats, twirling cables of some kind above their heads as they pursued creatures not unlike those that had pulled the cart. The plastic was darkish tan in color, contrasting with the polished metal window-framing, or the deep, soft-colored carpeting that covered the entire circular floor-space from wall to wall.
“Thanks, er ... Ev. Say, would you mind my asking you a nosy question?”
On Vespucci, we are given to doing even the smallest things with elaborate ceremony, public rituals where the masses mass, officials officiate, where everybody is highly aware that something important is happening—such as laying a new section of sidewalk in a residential area, your tax dollars at work. All this chit-chat seemed incredibly, almost scandalously flippant, informal, considering what was actually transpiring.
It kept coming back to me, over and over again, that I was aboard an authentic alien starship, beginning a perfectly polite, extremely trivial conversation with a genuine Creature from Outer Space! (The Scavians, somehow, I did not count as aliens, perhaps because they had been human enough to torture me.) Who were these people, anyway, who appeared to take my presence among them for granted, as if they made a habit of encountering heretofore unknown human civilizations every day?
“Ask away.” He turned back to face me, amusement in his big brown eyes, as a small section rose from the thickly-carpeted floor behind him, seemingly of its own accord. “Depends on how nosy you make it, Kilroy.”
Kilroy?
Glasses of various types, bottles of different sizes, shapes, and colors, other universal alcoholic paraphernalia nestled in plush lined recesses in the side of the extruded column. A small deep-pile divot rested on its upper surface. The furry bartender fumbled with the drinks.
“Well ...” (I fumbled for an honorific, uncomfortably settling for a given name in its place.) “Geoffrey Couper tells me that he is from a ... from some place called ‘Earth’. I am curious about where you are from, er, what sort of ... person you are.” How the Hamilton do you put a question like that courteously? What species are you, sir?
He paused, what might have been a grin on his face, staring out at the stars for a moment in contemplation. “I suppose you might say I’m from Ceres—the central core city—take a right at Earth and keep going for another hundred megamiles. I’m a Chimpanzee, which means my people are originally from Africa. But then so are yours. Scotch okay, Kilroy?”
Rogers had done something to one of the windows. It had become a mirror in which he was critically examining his garish programmed suit pattern. He glared resentfully over his shoulder at Ev, then gave it up as an incomprehensible difference in tastes. He slumped down on the sofa a few feet away from me, with his arms folded across his chest.
“Chim-pan-zee,” I muttered, getting a feel for the exotic word. All these planets I had never dreamed existed: Earth, Ceres, Africa. “Scotch is fine, whatever it is. I will try anything once. What is a mile?”
“Five thousand of these.” Williamson held his oddly-shaped hands twenty centimeters apart. “Rocks? Water? And what’re you drinking, Rog?”
What did rocks have to do with anything? More importantly, who the devil was Kilroy? The gunsmith looked up from a contemplative study of the boots built into the legs of his—what had she called it?—‘smartsuit’.
“Anything that burns. I’m hitting the showers when Annie Oakley’s done. She wasn’t kidding about conditions planetside—no offense, Whitey.”
“Listen,” I protested. “It is not my planet!”
They both laughed. Aside from an only partially psychosomatic outbreak of furious itching, this second mention of showers in five minutes made me realize that: a) water falling downward; plus b) rear ends adhering to sofas by themselves; must mean that c) we were under acceleration.
A glance through the windows confirmed it spectacularly. Sca was slipping steadily away. I was not heartbroken. I looked at Williamson. The so-called pilot handed me a tiny glass of innocent-looking amber fluid.
I wondered who was driving.
I had been thinking, ever since I had understood the nature of our present location, of asking another question. I had even begun framing it several times, but backed off, partly out of fear of the likeliest answer. Now, with trepidation, I asked, “Can you people take me, take the Lieutenant, home in this machine?” The two gave each other an odd, almost embarrassed look. Williamson blinked. Rogers opened his mouth, then shut it. There followed a long awkward pause I did not much care for.
“Let’s talk about that after we’ve had something to eat.” My head jerked around: Couper rose through the carpet, stepped forward without leaving a hole behind him. His smartsuit had been adjusted to a dull, non-reflective gray with the look of a uniform about it, abetted by a rank of colorful campaign ribbons on his left breast. “How about it, Ev? The Lieutenant is tucked away safely, and Lucille’s right behind me.”
So she was, oozing weirdly out of the floorboards just as Couper himself had done. I remembered the drink that I had not touched, took a big gulp of the “Scotch”. It
burned,
all right. I gasped, wheezed, started coughing as I watched a sizable portion of the floor in the middle of the room begin to get taller. The carpet-pile on its surface dwindled somehow until there was a smooth, table-like surface it its place. Then, up through that surface, places settings rose, complete with silverware, also substantial servings of food, steaming in their containers.
Who were these people, anyway?
-2-
More drinks were produced as the company politely waited through Rogers’ turn to freshen up. It was loudly hoped that the man would reprogram his suit. We were five for dinner. If there were any more crew aboard the
Little Tom,
they failed to manifest themselves. Couper paternally headed the irregularly-shaped table, our pilot, the Cerean/African/ Chimpanzee, occupying a seat more or less at the end opposite.
They honored me with the place on Couper’s right, directly across from Lucille. With a thorough shampoo, some imaginative tinkering with the push-buttons of her suit (it now had a somewhat daring neckline—from a Vespuccian point of view, I suppose—and was a medium shade of violet with a single bright diagonal band of green), she looked exactly as she had before: a soldier of whatever kind she was, who happened to be a remarkably beautiful young woman. That is, if you could overlook the pistol she carried slung cross-draw at her left hip.
The women I had known all of my life carried babies there, not guns.
Rogers sat beside me. They heaped their plates as if it had been they, not I, who had been living on Scavian largesse for several weeks; I surprised myself by not being particularly interested in food. The stars outside drifted like faraway cities glimpsed from a high-flying aircraft. What must our velocity be? This had never happened aboard the
Asperance.
I am not sure it is ever supposed to happen. “Aren’t the stars supposed to bunch together, turn blue, or something?”
“Or something, right enough,” laughed Williamson. “The inertialess field around this ship is thick enough to warp the skyscape out there into a full-color 3D portrait of Lysander Spooner himself, beard and all. What you’re seeing isn’t even a computer correction, Corporal. It’s a holomural, entitled ... now, let me see, something historical, something literary, I forget. Oh yes!
Stardate.
Personally, I think it’s very silly, but the passengers always seem to like it. Pass the radishes, please—
excuse me
—the little red things in that bowl there?”
I took another sip. Wine. I certainly found it more to my taste than Scotch, although, compared to potables available to the enlisted classes back home, even that was smoothly agreeable to the palate. I wondered: were we eating alien-food, or was Williamson politely dining Earthian tonight. Or was it some eclectic mixture? I had not heard of a single thing on the table before me. Each bite was a new adventure. Or a risk, as I discovered when I tried eating one of those little red things.
Embarrassing afterward, too.
There were thick, savory sections of grainy-textured protein they called “beef”, rather akin, they told me, to Scavian pulling-animals, but bred by Earthians for slaughter only. Their culture had no need for beasts of burden. The most highly-valued varieties of beef came from two planets, as I understood it, one called “Alamo”, one called “Newer Zealand”. Nobody thought to mention what had become of Older Zealand.
I was given a creature about the size of a roof rabbit (familiar Vespuccian fare I would have welcomed as a relief from culture-shock), but shaped much differently. “Squab”. Ugly name for such a delicious thing.
There was another menu item, too, served in impossibly monumental slices. lightly spiced. It was the correct pinkish-orange color, too, but ... Well, if ham does not come from a hamster, where does it come from?
Many vegetables, none recognizable, took the place of Vespuccian turnips, palmetto, or cabbage. Salt was offered in perfectly ordinary shakers. It was seemingly inseparable from some black-white speckled substance that felt worse on the tongue than Williamson’s little red things. However, exactly the same flavoring, somehow formed into a thick crust that was cooked onto the beef in an oven, was absolutely wonderful.
Beside a gigantic bowl of sugar, double-fist sized, grand enough to grace an Admiral’s table, rested a second, delicious powdery-brown condiment that some of my companions stirred into a hot black bitter drink, along with enough milk to dry up the community hutches for a week. “Coffee”, they said of the black drink, some of it brewed with cinnamon, a spice greatly favored on a planet they called “Mexico”, as was the brown powdery “chocolatl” they used with it. Couper vied with Williamson expressing delight in an even more esoteric substance, “chicory”, at which Lucille wrinkled up her pretty nose, simply at the mention.
What she said of it, oddly, were things I had been thinking about her.
-3-
I am not certain what I had been running on, thus far.
I had drifted through all that had happened so far rather numbly. Matter-of-factly. Now, reality was catching up, giving everything that occurred at that table a dreamlike quality. It all required effort, concentration, to focus on any given object, or any specific moment in time.
Conversation was lapping around me like that stream on Sca, words, phrases, sentences making no more sense than its babbling waters. Even my palate was overwhelmed. So many new things, so much of it. If these people were nothing else, they were fabulously rich. This holiday feast was nothing more to them, I realized somewhere along the line, than a hearty farmhand’s supper. At home, for example, custom reserves milk for babies or toothless ancients. These people fairly swam in the stuff.
Having tried coffee without satisfaction, I somewhat diffidently asked them whether they might ever have heard of something called tea. They answered me with a list of thirty or forty different varieties, enumerated on a ColorCom screen that somehow oozed out of the table’s surface.
“Just tea,” I pleaded, beginning to shake all over.
Williamson brought me “liptons”, inoffensively sweet, wonderfully aromatic. I accepted the cup from him, then found that I had drifted off somewhere again. When I went to sip at it, the tea was already cold.