I estimated that this “mother ship” everybody had been talking about had to be in the neighborhood of three or four thousand meters in diameter. Three or four kilometers! Why, monstrous was hardly the word—
“Two point one zero Jeffersonian metric miles,” Rogers observed as if he could read my mind, a possibility I was beginning to take into serious consideration. The second ship, twin to the first, stood off as we maneuvered into place. I wondered why it was here, why it was waiting.
“Wait,” cried the gunsmith-praxeologist, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”
The stars dimmed briefly, blotted out as we docked. Then they reappeared as if we were seeing through the mother ship—as if we were now a part of the mother ship, seeing things from its point of view.
Ahead still lay that second vessel, swelling with every moment that passed, expanding, growing, engulfing the universe from rim to rim.
I gulped as my battered sense of scale underwent another dizzying reorientation. Beneath the impossibly vast ship, seven giant docking bays awaited! The first ship had been only intermediary. Now we were preparing to link up with
its
mother ship, riding up into a vast bowl, a featureless, brilliant white caldera. Overhead, the stars went out once again. They stayed out this time. Daylight was reinstated, sound, motion returned to the garden—the tiny backyard garden—of LeeLaLee.
“This is where we get off!” Owen Rogers exclaimed, grinning so hard I believed that he would crack his face in half if it went any further, “Before you ask, she’s seven and one-half miles in diameter—a little better than twelve of your kilometers, if I understand right.
“Gentlemen, I give you
Tom Paine Maru!”
Pool of information
It did not resemble a classroom; it did not sound like a lecture.
G. Howell Nahuatl called at my assigned quarters first thing the next “morning”. I was already up, from lifelong habit. The door became transparent—at least in one direction—revealing the furry, four-legged creature as he sat in the companionway outside, one hind foot scratching absently in the vicinity of his brightly multicolored collar.
“Alexander Hamilton!” I entered the main compartment from the bathroom, freshly showered. “Do you have any idea what time it is?” These people had struck me as being more relaxed about rising in the morning.
I needed to ask someone about shaving, although Howell was not the one to ask. My beard itched, although it did not look terribly bad—somewhat unmilitary, but then so was the pattern that I had hastily programmed into my suit: eight or nine subtle shades of gray-brown hairy-textured illusion, closely matching the natural coloration of my visitor.
Unable to see me, the coyote rolled his eyes back, considering: “Why, yes,” he answered over the door-communicator. “It’s just after six A.M. That’s oh-six-hundred, to you, Corporal. I thought that you might appreciate an opportunity to have some of your many questions answered.”
Almost immediately upon our arrival the night before, pleading urgent business, Rogers had introduced the Lieutenant and me to this remarkable creature from his remarkable story. The coyote was quite unlike the simians or cetaceans I had met thus far. There had scarcely been time—I had scarcely had the energy—to do more than simply be guided to my billet, to fall into an exhausted unconsciousness. Dimly, I recalled something about the Lieutenant being similarly seen to. Also a promise of more guiding-service tomorrow, issued by the canine.
He nipped suddenly at the base of his tail—the canine, not the Lieutenant—then turned with sedate dignity to wait. Thinking that my foremost question—when could we go home?—never seemed to get answered, I wrapped my pistol-belt around my middle, then checked each magazine and the pair of stripper clips I carried. Sixty trounds. It was good to have enough ammo. Sealing the final suit seam, I asked, “What is the drill this morning, Howell? Can we have some coffee, first?”
The door dilated, or whatever it is called. Howell sat in the hallway outside, exactly as before, no sharper nor apparently real than he had been, courtesy of the door’s sophisticated imaging electronics.
“The drill?” He looked puzzled. At least I think he did. Facial expressions are somewhat difficult to figure with non-humans. I could not tell whether he was confused by the question, or by my smartsuit pattern, which was supposed to be a joke. “Ah, yes!” he replied at last, “You mean, ‘What are we about to do?’ Well, we shall obtain the coffee to which you have become so rapidly habituated. Very briefly after we meet your comrade-in-arms, I shall conduct both of you to ‘school’, for your first formal lesson in privateering for fun and profit.”
He blinked, pausing to scratch at an ear, “I do believe, Whitey, either the vermin are growing immune to my shower curtain, or I shall have to get my circuits examined for an altogether different sort of bug.”
-2-
We walked down the corridor a few meters to something he called a “transport patch”. We must have used it, or one like it, the night before, but I had no memory of having done so. I was still a bit dizzy at the casually-mixed colors in the decor, along with the consistent absence of written signs. I hitched at my gunbelt, fastening it a notch looser. Life aboard the Confederacy’s ships was already having as unmilitary an effect on my waistline as it was on my grooming habits.
“Privateering?” I asked.
Howell replied, “A small jest. Wait a moment before you follow me.”
The coyote hesitated himself, then trotted onto the scarlet carpet covering a two-meter square. An area of about the same size covered the wall behind it. He walked directly toward this, as if it did not exist, then was gone. I began dimly to remember. Even in the full (if artificial) light of morning, I did not believe I would ever get used to this particular sight. It had only been my fatigue the night before that had allowed me to accept, as in a dream, that it was happening. Howell’s head popped back out of the wall, looking like a hunting trophy.
“Well, Corporal O’Thraight, are you coming?”
“No, but my eyes are getting glassy.” He didn’t laugh.
Suppressing a shudder, I shut them tightly, stepping into the wall exactly as Howell had done, There was no sensation. Blackness, silence surrounded me, then we were both on a mustard-colored patch, facing the opposite direction, away from a wall, Hamilton knows how many floors from where we had started, or how many thousands of meters away.
The coyote cocked his head, regarding me with what my unpracticed eye took for sympathy. “I know just how you feel, Whitey. It requires some getting used to, being squirted around like the contents of a small intestine. If it’s any comfort, I had to be carried through the first time, drugged and semi-comatose, while the electronic portion of my consciousness decided that the walls weren’t really eating me.” He sighed. “It would appear that some of my inborn canine instincts are more difficult to suppress than others. Count yourself lucky in this regard.”
“Now where did we put your Lieutenant, last night?” He blinked, gave a cheerful flip of his tail, trotted to a door not far along the corridor.
“... in the name of Authority do you want?” bellowed a familiar voice as I caught up. This side, the door was opaque, preserving the Lieutenant’s privacy. “Oh, it is only you. Wait while I get something on.”
He had not yet learned to sleep comfortably in his smartsuit. The door vanished, he stood before us arrayed in Naval Reserve pattern, employing his usual vice-regal tone. “Have you any idea what time it is?”
“Everybody thinks I’m a chronometer this morning. What d’you think I have, ticks?” He glanced at me to see if I had appreciated the joke, then enjoyed a desultory scratch. “It is six-seventeen precisely, Lieutenant Sermander, of a beautiful artificial dawning in the season of your choice. Will you have some coffee, or will you just eat us here?”
The Lieutenant shot a look of hatred or something at the little canine, then gained control. “Coffee—yes. Something to eat as well, I think. What is the agenda today, Nahuatl? Another round of endless, profitless philosophizing?” Together we left the compartment, began walking back a few dozen meters to the transport patch we had arrived by.
“Profitless? Scarcely, Lieutenant. In the Confederacy, that would practically be a mortal sin. As I was explaining to the Corporal, this morning you’re finally going to begin to grasp the function of this ship ...”
Sermander’s eyes lit, but he kept his peace as he stepped into the wall.
Blackness, silence.
“Coffee and breakfast for two,” Howell requested as we stepped through the carpet onto another patch. The chimp who met us nodded, turning away. Howell called, “And a brace of tender lamb-cutlets, rare, while you’re about it, will you, with an iced mocha cappuccino. Gentlemen?”
I blinked. This was not another of the narrow corridors housing transients, nor the restaurant I had expected, but a broad, outdoor space, lit by an artificial sky. We were surrounded by jungle foliage, the bustle of multispecies traffic somewhere in the background, far beyond.
The resilient lavender walkway skirted the edge of a wide meadow. At its other end, looking as small as insects to us, several teams of individuals ascended or descended a rocky cliff-face, on ropes strung between them. There was a faint shimmer in the air around them. The area had been partitioned off somehow, forming its own climatic zone. On the other side, sand was blowing, a brisk wind fanned it into a wispy pompadour at the top of the cliff. The place almost resembled home.
Howell noted my interest: “That’s for Sodde Lydfe,” he observed. “A most difficult place, indeed. These conditions you observe are meant to duplicate the equatorial wet season. Certainly not my idea of recreation.”
We stopped to peer at the cliff-base, where a pair of humanoid figures fired at an orange multi-legged beast clawing its way toward them. Its furious screaming was audible even on this side of the barrier. As the plasma hit, the hairy thing gave a cough, rippled, vanished.
“Hologram,” Howell explained. “Keeps them on their toes. Shall we continue?”
Abruptly, the sidewalk plunged into a forest, through a clearing where a dozen chimpanzees were throwing flat steel knives at the butt of a log propped between the trees. The weapons stuck with a
thump!
Chatting gaily, the non-humans walked forward to recover their hardware.
“Also for Sodde Lydfe,” Howell offered. “They really ought to be practicing in burnooses, with a desert gale howling. Elsewhere you’ll find others, learning the knack of diving in water that’s slushy with crusted salt, or attempting to control an ultralight plane in a dust-filled tornado. Now the Captain has returned, the training will double its pace, I’m afraid. Not my lid of tea, even if I do have a built-in sand-repellent coat. Let us betake ourselves, then, to moister climes, whatsay?”
The Lieutenant scratched his thinly-covered scalp, offered not a word.
I could see that he, too, was greatly impressed with the technical achievement
Tom Paine Maru
represented. Who would not be? There was discipline apparent here, as well, a purposeful order both of us could admire. Nonetheless, I continued worrying over the lack of clocks. Not a single book or sign, presented itself, nor any labels on products or artifacts. No thermometers or barometers to be seen. No one, at least in my sight, had consulted any written reference, nor written anything down.
If anyone had started a dossier on us, they were keeping it well hidden.
People aboard this ship simply seemed to
know,
without any of the effort that implied, without any source for the knowledge. It sent chilly fingers up my spine each time one of them halted to contemplate the insides of his eyelids for a moment, then produced data he had not possessed before. I wondered what the Lieutenant thought of it, all, but had not yet had a chance to ask him. Now might be the opportunity. Howell had continued walking along the path, while Sermander hung back preoccupied.
“Discipline, you say, Corporal?” He almost whispered the words. “Try asking one of these people about it. Its existence will promptly be denied! I have small patience for all this affected leaderlessness. There is an imperial iron fist hidden somewhere in the Confederate velvet glove. I am determined to know who wields it—and much more importantly, whom they will choose to wield it for them when they take Vespucci!”
Shock surged through me. “Lieutenant! You do not think—!”
“Be obedient to your orders, Corporal, if only for lack of a more substantial course. Be mindful of your duty. Accept my lead. Refrain from any unsolicited comment or unguarded opinion. I am aware that you are just as curious as I am about this ‘Sodde Lydfe’ planet, about all of these careful preparations being made. Still, I would caution you: accept only those answers that are volunteered to you. Ask no question yourself. That way we both may live to understand what is really going on.”
-3-
We caught up with Howell along the purple walk, just as the sound of carefree laughter came splashing at us like sunlit droplets from a fountain.
The Lieutenant addressed the coyote. “If your community operates so equitably upon good will,” he gave my pistol-belt a contemptuous look. “Tell me, Howell, what purpose is served by all these warlike preparations.”