She dragged deeply on her cigarette, then ground it out in a glass dish she’d taken from the nightstand. “A provincial governor—Huey Long—was asked whether fascism would ever take his country over: ‘Yes, but we’ll call it anti-Fascism’. And he was right: everybody was election-bent to make the trains run on time, just like on Vespucci, Efficiency and discipline are the keywords, am I right, Corporal O’Thraight?”
Lucille could never resist giving me the needle. I was learning to ignore it. “Damn it, is no one ever going to tell me what a Kilroy is?”
She laughed: “By coincidence, an expression from the very period we’re talking about, a sort of a fragment of a joke. Millions of conscriptees battled all over the planet as politically identical nations struggled for control. Wherever the slave-soldiers went, they saw a chalked-up drawing of a little man—” She held the sheet up, fingers curled over the edge, her nose resting between them. “—and the legend, ‘Kilroy Was Here’. Me, I always thought it was a pretty black piece of establishment humor: countless men and women bleeding and dying, thinking that they were fighting the dragon, when, all the time ...”
She trailed off a moment, then, “Anyway, when we Confederates finally had a reliable stardrive—as opposed to the engineering nightmare that got your ancestors into trouble—we burst out into space, expecting an endless, open frontier. Instead, you—the Vespuccians, the Scavians, the Obsidians, everybody else—were here first.”
She pulled another lighted cigarette from the bedside table. Taking it from her hand, I drew on it experimentally, then made the horrible mistake of inhaling. When I was through coughing, I said, past streaming tears, “So we are all of us Kilroys—also we are fascists.”
“Right,” she nodded, dropping the sheet. Paralyzed by the reminder that this beauty had been mine to take and hold and play with, and would be soon again, I nearly forgot what the conversation had been about.
“Somebody once observed,” she said, “that the word ‘Kilroy’ might be interpreted—in a language of Earth called French—to mean ‘Kill the King’. Now that’s a joke of a different color. Maybe it’s us who are the Kilroys, since it’s our solemn, sacred duty to kill off the very concept of a king! Well, are you about through dogging it, Corporal-baby?”
Ah, the endless joys of courting a military woman. My spirit was more than willing, but the flesh still needed a little time. I thought back to her laundry-list of badguy governments. “I was told that this California was a part of the United States. So how did it get to be separate—”
“A different time, Whitey, a very different world. California was a fascist state before the word ever got invented, back in the first century of the Confederacy. It had an Emperor, Norton the First—and Last, thank Gallatin. But the real power was Hamiltonian, kicked out of the Confederacy after the Whiskey Rebellion. We had trouble with them again, the next century, Prussia, the War Against the Czar. They always like someone else do their fighting. They held Hawaii for a while.”
I wanted to say that I was a Hamiltonian—it is a name straight out of legend, but this was not the time. Unless I was ready to get dressed and leave her quarters. In any case, another thought struck me: North America seemed to have about twice as much history as it deserved, considering the time involved. This confused me. I said as much.
“Whitey, that’s absolutely brilliant! And I hate people who give me answers like this, but I think you lack the necessary background in physics to go any further—with this particular conversation, I mean.”
She lay back on one elbow, pulled my mouth down to hers. When I could breathe again, I asked, “What has physics got to do with history?”
“My darling Corporal, the real world isn’t divided into subjects, like highschool curricula. You need physics to understand the Second World War—radar, Hiroshima—or to understand the part played by Guccione cells in the Antarctican campaign of the War against the Czar.”
I shook my head, weary of answers like that, myself. “So tell me something I do not need physics for—say, something about yourself, Lucille.”
She laughed again, but with bitterness touching at the edges of her voice. “My word, you need more physics for that, dear Whitey, than you do for anything else we’ve discussed. But all right, then, I was born on Earth, although just barely: my folks had recently been to the Venus Belt, and they returned there, shortly after I was born. I was raised on a homestead with my sister. We both grew up and studied praxeology.”
She lit another cigarette.
“Edwina Olson-Bear?” I asked. “Somebody mentioned her as Chief Praxeologist.”
“Whither thou goest, honey,” Lucille replied enigmatically again, assuming a grim expression. “As I was, once, before her. She taught at the same university we both graduated from. I opted for field studies, aboard the original
Tom Sowell Maru.
Yet somehow, we both wound up here ...”
This initiated another thoughtful moment. Abruptly, she set her cup back on the nightstand, resoftened the bed-surface, got up with a graceful, unwinding motion. The outdoor scene vanished, replaced by white, sterile walls. “To the state with that, Corporal, we’re burning daylight.”
“But Lucille, I thought—”
“You pissed it away, sweetie. Thinking about my sister too much gives me a severe case of the nuns. I’m not in the mood any more. Just like a man, all action and no traction. Now get out of here, I want to dress.”
-2-
I found Howell—rather, he found me—in the hall outside my compartment.
I had not been back for three days, not since a dreamlike evening on the beach that now seemed like a century ago. I discovered with chagrin that I had not thought of Howell during that time, nor of anybody else. particularly Eleva, toward whom I was not only feeling guilty for what I had done, but for the enthusiasm with which I had done it. In penance, every muscle ached, particularly my lower back. I desperately wanted a shower, despite the continuous cleansing of my suit.
I also needed to talk. In a few well-chosen words—selected during the angry walk back to my room—I conveyed to the coyote the difficulties that I was having understanding a difficult subject. Women in general, Lucille in particular. Or possibly the other way around.
“Over surprisingly few generations,” the ceiling was lecturing when the door cleared, “the human brain enlarged without correlative changes in the mechanics of reproduction, which necessitated greater and greater prematurity of birth. Even so, human beings are the only known mammal for whom birth is an agonizing—” Not having known how before my stay in Lucille’s quarters, I now waved it off, adjusting the walls to pretend that they were nice clean open interstellar space.
“Well, I can tell you at least one part of Lucille’s story ... ” the coyote offered as I sagged into a chair. I did not even have the satisfaction of taking off my shoes. The damned things were part of my clothing, more comfortable than going barefoot. He hopped onto another seat, wrapped his bushy tail neatly about his hind-quarters. “... and explain one of her mysterious remarks. She can be very annoying, can’t she?”
Beyond a weary, assenting grunt, I did not bother to reply to him, but simply sat there, steeping in the disgusted realization that I felt worse in that moment than I ever had, even in the dungeons of Sca.
“Naturally,” Howell continued, once aware that silence was all he was going to get from me, “I would not reveal anything that Lucille would not willingly volunteer. I have known her for a long time, and watched her grow from a lovely child into a somewhat tragic young woman. But this much is public knowledge: Lucille grew up to become head of praxeology aboard the
Tom Paine Maru,
Whitey—and her sister’s boss. It was not an arrangement contrived in any pleasant mythological realm. The two sisters have never been on the best of terms.”
“Howell,” I said abruptly, “I want a straight answer. If you do not have it, then I want to know who does. When, if ever, can I go home?”
“Oho, a change of subject. Or is it? Whitey, I—”
“Please do not string me, as your people say, my furry friend. I have been asking that question, among others, since I first boarded the
Little Tom.
But I have yet to receive an answer that satisfied me.”
Howell sat thinking for a moment—if that was what he was doing—then: “I’m afraid you can’t go home, poor fellow. Not yet. Events are about to culminate on Obsidia. We also have stops to make at Hoand and Afdiar. There is, as you know, a major operation being planned for Sodde Lydfe. We are sorely pressed for time, and we cannot afford a detour—”
“Howell, stop lying to me! I will not be deterred this time, not by you or by anybody else. This ship is made of smaller ships. Surely one—”
He raised a paw: “The truth, then, although I wish you’d waited until Obsidia. It might have clarified matters. Still, no one ought to operate on faith. My boy,
Tom Paine Maru,
and all within her, rely upon a recent technological revolution so vast as to make the First Industrial Revolution, or what happened in electronics afterward, seem minuscule.”
“
More physics!”
I snorted.
“How’s that?” He blinked at me.
“Nothing, Howell. Only I am tired of being offered philosophy instead of substance. Lucille with her politics. Koko’s husband with his nonsense about free will, chaos, or determinism. Your own little girl-child with her anthropological dissertations. Just get on with it.”
“Elsie’s nine, it’s true. Rather small for her age, but a typical Confederate person in every other respect. Whitey, all three ancient propositions are valid: the universe is random, but within natural law; its apparent chaos is merely the result of its complexity. It is determined, knowable, orderly. Free will—not an arbitrary set of trivial whims in defiance of what’s true or possible—grows from the fundamental nature of the entire universe, and consistently with it. Consider—”
“
Howell!”
“Very well, you are aware of the situation on Sodde Lydfe. What do you suppose would happen if either the Great Fodduans or the Hegemony of Podfet managed to get hold of even a fraction of
Tom Paine Maru’s
capabilities?”
Those were Sodde Lydfen nation-states I had discussed a little with Lucille. Thinking about her, feeling the strange sensations that merely thinking about her caused me, made this all the more urgent. I had to get home to see Eleva. Yet, equally, I had to answer Howell truthfully, as he seemed to be doing with me. “It would not be very pretty.”
“Now, and this is the ethically touchy part, why should we of the Confederacy more sanguinely convey such knowledge to the government of Vespucci?”
It was about what I had been expecting. “I suppose that makes me—also Lieutenant Sermander—something of an embarrassment, does it not?”
He laughed, “Only by demanding what is morally due you. Believe me, we are not kidnappers by choice. No policy has been made with regard to you. We don’t know what policy to make. Is it possible you owe us something—for the rescue on Sca? Yes? Then bear with us. When we have a little breathing-space—after Sodde Lydfe—we’ll arrive at a solution mutually satisfying to all. That is the point of our of civilization, as you will come to learn with the passing of time.”
-3-
Elsie offered to be “mother”, serving hot tea from an insulated plastic baggie until the Lieutenant, the last of us she got to, held a hand up, refusing the drink. Nodding, she placed the “teapot” in the center of a small table where it jiggled, then climbed into her own chair.
“Now,” the little girl said, settling in and taking a sip of her own tea, “as the saying goes, I suppose you wonder why I called you here.”
“Here” happened to be Koko and Pololo’s apartment in what looked like an escarpment wall overlooking a dense tropical forest. Howell had showed up at my quarters to invite me over. At his request I had rounded up the Lieutenant, who had brought me up to date on his own explorations:
“I have continued searching,” he had told me on the way to Koko’s, “for the uppermost strata of the Confederate hierarchy—to little effect.”
I kept on walking, not saying anything. Now we were approaching a transport patch where the coyote, having presently gathered up his tiny scientist daughter, was supposed to meet us. The truth was, I did not much like these devices. I was not looking forward to using one again.
The Lieutenant continued: “I have, however, exacted the promise of an appointment with the captain of this vessel, later in the day. You simply would not believe the lengths that I have had to go to, merely to achieve that barely minimal assurance. Corporal—are you paying attention?”
“What? Oh—yes, sir!”
“Very good. I have just learned, for example, that this great ship has no identifiable control room, as difficult as that may be to credit.”
“What?”
“Precisely. No one has an office. There are no stenographers, no clerk-typists, no filing cabinets, no telecommunications devices, save for the ubiquitous wall-displays, or the makeshift arrangement that we witnessed in that canteen aboard
Tom Lehrer Maru.
Whitey, there is no engine room! Just restaurants, shops, parks, other recreational or training areas—some machine shops, if that is what they really are.”
I shook my head, my own purely mental filing cabinet of bizarre facts filled to overflowing. Outwardly, I just trod grimly to our destination.