He climbed from the chair seat to the tabletop.
“The real conundrum before us is: will a different evolutionary history, that of the Sodde Lydfens, engender a markedly different attitude toward authority? Will a different physical placement of the generative organs—at the opposite end of the body from those of elimination—have a salutary effect on their view of procreation? Most importantly, how will a broader birth-channel affect their fundamental psychology? Not to speak of their rather novel number of sexes ...”
-4-
It went on a full six hours, until noon, people arguing, joking, debating points I could not comprehend. We had breakfast, lunch, and something called “tea” that was more than something to drink. Now and again someone with no reason to know would announce news of this or that expedition to this or that planet. Occasionally scores were given for games called baseball, hockey, fencing, and metallic silhouette. I estimated that I understood an average of one word in ten, At last the session began to break up—perhaps “melt away” was a more accurate term. Increasingly fewer sat around the pool or were interested in the talk.
Abruptly, the blue-eyed child with the bubble-pipe jumped up to run in our direction. Without prelude, she threw both her arms around Howell’s furry neck, then unhesitatingly kissed the coyote on the muzzle.
She looked and sounded normal until she said, “I gotta go now! Koko promised t’show me some United Statesian video flatties of Carl Sagan, for the History of Xenopsych lecture I hafta give tomorrow morning.”
The coyote nodded, once he had been released, used his right front paw to poke a lock of the little girl’s golden hair back into place. “That should be amusing, my dear. I believe I’ve seen those old tapes, myself, I needn’t caution you not to take the fellow too seriously, Mowgli?”
“Aw, Daddy, please don’t call me that!” The little girl blushed. “Anyway, Carl Sagan was practically a Kilroy, himself, wouldn’t you say?”
Howell gave his odd laugh. “A few decades before the fact, and in a galaxy far, far away. It’s a state of mind, sweetheart. See you at dinner.”
She picked up her toys, said goodbye, ran full pitch away from the pool. He turned to us, pride in his electric voice, “Elsie, gentlemen, my daughter. She’s the only xenopsychology student on our praxeology staff. Until lately, it was a discipline in search of subject matter. Now she finds herself the resident expert at a time of crisis, I’m afraid.” He nipped at a knot in his fur. “Well, would you like to see something else, stir up the circulation a bit, perhaps think about a meal?”
“It will amount to nearly the only thing I shall have gained from an otherwise wasted morning,” complained the Lieutenant. But he rose, following the child down the path with a confused expression on his face.
“Howell,” I asked diffidently, as we left the brick-floored clearing for the deep woods again, “there is one thing you could explain ...”
He laughed. “Surely not that Elsie is adopted ... ?”
“No.” I admitted how little of the morning’s intellectual exercise I had understood, He assured me once again that, in time, all would become crystal clear. I had not believed it the first time he had said it.
“But Howell, I am most embarrassed to confess that I do not even know who the teacher at this morning’s session was supposed to have been!”
The coyote stopped on the path, looking up at me. “Whitey, the principle focus this morning was on you—and the Lieutenant, of course.”
“On us?”
“And you did perfectly splendidly. Take my word for it!”
nobody hears the mandolar
It is one thing to look at water, to appreciate the miracle of it, to sit on a bank dangling your feet luxuriously as it slips between your toes. It is quite another to ride on top the stuff, piled dozens—hundreds—of times higher than your head, grimly pretending you are enjoying yourself. In that respect, I shared the prejudices of chimpanzees.
“Wahoo!” a voice from somewhere shouted, as a curved, glistening, transparent wall of liquid threw itself against our boat, trying to overturn it. Overhead, a great white bird made noises like a rusty hinge.
“I knew you’d like this, Whitey!” said the same voice.
“Ulp!” I answered politely, giving the voice a sickly smile.
The wave passed—the water-wave, not the wave of nausea it had provoked—depositing cold salt spray down the neck of my borrowed nautical jacket. Koko Featherstone-Haugh, my sailing-companion for the afternoon, worked mysteries upon a bunch of ropes, then hollered at me to
duck!
The spar at the bottom of the sail swung suddenly around, just brushing the top of my head with only a hint of its potential for destruction.
The boat pitched over in the opposite direction.
As did my stomach. I threw up.
A strapping female who wore pink ribbons in her dark, curly hair, Koko kept a small four-stringed “ukulele” in a waterproofed custom smartsuit-fabric case somewhere belowdecks in this seagoing deathtrap. On a stout belt at her waist, replacing the plasma pistol favored by most
Tom Paine Maru
personnel, she lugged a monstrous antique reciprocating bullet-gun. It was a fifty-caliber Gabbet-Fairfax, she told me—about twelve millimeters—a gift from “a dear and trusted friend”.
Oh yes: Koko was also a gorilla.
This might be why she quickly became one of the few individuals I felt sure about aboard ship—the big star-traversing one, not the wallowing marine disaster of this afternoon. Koko had been the person with the sling on her arm that morning beside the swimming pool. She was also the roller-skating gum-bubbler I had seen aboard
Tom Lehrer Maru.
Off on a “mission simulation” somewhere else, she had returned to her own vessel, after having broken her arm during a practice climb.
With nothing but Vespuccian experience to guide me, never having met people like these, I was uncertain how to read them. Couper seemed like a man you could lean on, big, tough, ugly. On Vespucci, officers like him routinely ordered other men to certain death, all the while assuring them that everything was just fine. Owen Rogers was a fellow artisan, but with a distinctly Confederate attitude, whatever that ultimately implied. Howell, just like Koko, was not human, but I liked him.
On the other hand, I trusted that little witch Lucille no further than I could throw her. Probably not far at all, the way she had been trained.
Earlier that terror-filled morning, I spoke with the Lieutenant once again. He was fascinated with this great ship, with everything aboard her, with her obvious dedication to a cause. He seemed avid to possess what Rogers called “a piece of the action”. How could a mere corporal insist that his superior consider more carefully what little we actually knew about this “action” that he so badly wanted a piece of?
-2-
“Corporal, do not be a fool.”
We were in the Lieutenant’s quarters—a four-compartment suite featuring tall, broad windows overlooking
Tom Paine Maru’s
answer to an ocean. Up to my ankles already in his sandy-colored wall-to-wall carpet, I looked down several dizzying stories, onto that dangerous, foam-flecked, shattered mirror, dazzling under the ship’s artificial sun. Already I was anticipating this morning’s new experience with dread.
Even this early, coming here, I had run across groups of people taking inhuman-sounding language lessons under the brilliant sky. I had seen peculiar equipment being manufactured in rooms I passed, or clothing being fitted or tried out. Repeatedly I had been told, “Oh, that’s just for Sodde Lydfe—” Followed by an abrupt change of subject.
I needed to compare notes with my boss, to learn what he had discovered.
Lacking any artistic bent of his own, Sermander, whose talents lay more in persuading others to do things, had badgered Howell’s little girl Elsie into selecting a 360-degree hologram of some less deadly desert than Sodde Lydfe, from a lengthy Confederate catalog of such images. This, apparently, was a planet called “Wyoming”. Three walls were given over to it, creating an illusion of furniture grouped amid sandy scrub. They had dimmed the sun, edited visible vegetation, until it was indeed like the Central Oasis at what passed for springtime on Vespucci.
I cannot say it made me feel homesick. I had seen a battle fought in this place, during the Final War. Ten thousand dead. The facsimile only made me feel guilty—mainly for not thinking about Eleva all morning.
Koko, I had met formally last evening at a “dinner theater” my praxeologist friend had insisted attending,
Tom Paine Maru’s
amateur musical production of
Loose Lips,
based on an ancient classic about a young mutant, the physician who taught her to capitalize upon her peculiarity, the many men whose problems her unique talents helped solve.
I blushed through the entire performance.
Recognizing Koko, I made the mistake of telling her how much I had enjoyed the swimming pool schoolroom. Her broken limb was fine now, in only a few days’ time, thanks to the Confederacy’s medical technology. She intended to celebrate by risking its integrity all over again, on the high seas. Distracted by the play, I found myself conscripted into going sailing along with her. Before keeping my dubious appointment with the ocean-going gorilla this morning, I was grimly determined to convey my doubts to the Lieutenant, in order to ask him what he thought.
He told me.
“Corporal O’Thraight, this vessel is over twelve kilometers in diameter. Twelve kilometers! These people—if we must call them that—are only a small part of something unthinkably more enormous. Just imagine the industrial establishment capable of such construction! Imagine the energy sources! Simply the place-names that we hear, the products that we sample, betray an empire vaster than Vespucci ever dreamed!”
He strode to a cabinet built into the bulkhead beside the door, poured himself a drink, tossed it back, then poured another. “This is so much larger than your petty misgivings, Corporal, so much larger than you are, yourself. But it is not, I assure you, larger than Enson Sermander!”
For some reason, he seemed uncomfortable on the glass-fronted side of the room. The view was somewhat daunting. Far across the water, cloaked in haze, nearly at the horizon, there appeared to be a city, with tall buildings gleaming. He paced the carpet in front of a sofa near the claustrophobic safety of the hallway door, one hand thrust into his pants pocket, the other locked around his drink. He seemed to mutter at the floor, rather than at me: “Yes, yes, I know what that must sound like. But let us try to face the facts, Corporal, let us be realistic.”
“Yes, sir,” I answered, my gaze distracted momentarily. Outside, several individuals of at least two species, wearing big multicolored triangular wings, soared above the pounding waves. “That is what I am attempting to do, sir. I am not comfortable, being friends with people I do not understand. I wish to know if you believe that they can be trusted.”
“Entirely immaterial, Corporal—Whitey. They can be trusted to be whatever they are, to do what they have already done, to create a stellar hegemony with unimaginable resources to draw upon. Think, man: when they confront our puny world-state, Vespucci will not last a microsecond!”
“I admit I have been thinking much the same thing, Lieutenant. But is that not scandalously disloyal, shamefully unpatriotic, maybe even treasonous?”
“Think, Corporal!” the Lieutenant demanded again. “What does true loyalty to Vespucci demand of us? We must survive. We must learn what we can. We must return upon the day of confrontation with a complete understanding of these people, an ability to negotiate, to intercede, to ... ”
To
rule,
he was thinking. The Lieutenant imagined himself the Confederate viceroy on Vespucci, destroying our independence to save it.
“But, sir, I—!”
“But nothing, Corporal!” He sighed dramatically: “Oh how true the observation is, that it is invariably the underclasses who defend the system and their place within it most vehemently. However, Corporal—Whitey—I am attempting to make an appointment with the captain of this vessel, whoever that may be. I await his call at any moment. I shall offer my knowledge of our planet, offer my wisdom in promoting peaceful contact between the two civilizations. Vespucci needs her strongest minds at this moment, her strongest hands, her strongest resolve—”
Her strongest stomachs. I had first heard a speech like this at the age of five, when they announced a reduction in the milk ration. I told myself that he could not help himself. He was an officer, after all.
“—in order to survive!” he was going on. “Trust them? In the long run, it is an investment. Work with them, relax with them, eat with them, sleep with them, if that is your inclination. I shall see you are awarded a medal for duty beyond the call. You can remain my aide, if that is your desire, or be a provincial governor, once we get home.”
Once we get home.
Already, it had begun to sound like an unattainable fantasy. The Lieutenant was correct about one thing. We were helpless on our own, totally dependent on Confederate generosity for our eventual return to Vespucci, for our day-to-day survival, even for the clothes we were wearing.
“Yes, sir,” I said, “If you say so, sir.” I think I actually meant it. He scowled at me, then winced when his line-of-sight took in the far horizon, the vast agoraphobic chasm outside the floor-to-ceiling windows.