They had found each other years later through a fleet-wide survey for people who had blood like hers, rare blood that had been needed after her eventual revival. How ironic life could be. How stupidly ironic.
“It was more,” he said now, “like having a sister I had never met until it was almost too late.” Was that really a tear he was sniffing back?
I was having some trouble with emotions, too, especially when he found a bedraggled teddy bear in the closet. Peculiar, how similar the customs of two civilizations can be, even separated for so long. There had been a toy like that for me once, back home. It had been my only toy.
“Hamilton take me,” he said with a catch in his voice. “Now I remember, this was mine! Lucille must have kept it all these ... ” He cleared his throat violently, then wiped a broad freckled hand across his eyes. “Whitey, I’ve no need of this where I’m going. Neither has Lucille ... any more. Can you think of anybody else who’d like to have it?”
Elsie was recovering from minor injuries at the place she shared with Howell. She had fetched against a barrel of spike-nails aboard the Fodduan warship when Sermander had thrown her. When I could speak again, I said, “Yes, Mac, if you are absolutely sure. I will see to it.”
“Thank you very much, Whitey.” He walked around the bed where he had placed the cartons, handed me the bear, hesitated, then: “I hope you won’t mind my saying I’m very glad that you and Lucille met each other—”
I shook my head, “You need not to say anything. I, er... your mother... ”
He grinned ruefully, “I understand, and I hope—”
“Are you two about through with the man-talk?”
Looking at least ten years younger than the giant she had given birth to, Lucille came in from the spare bedroom, another carton of her son’s belongings in her arms. There was a pained expression on her face.
She set her burden on the bed—like me, Mac had known better than to offer to carry it for her—rubbed her sternum where that Fodduan sailor’s heavy, slow-moving bullet had been stopped by her smartsuit. Looking at both of us guiltily, she slipped her left arm back into the sling that Doctor Pololo had insisted she wear about her neck.
“Mac, I’m awfully sorry to pitch you out like this, just when we’d started getting comfortable with each other, but ... ” She tapered off.
He laughed. I do not believe that I have ever seen a human being more relaxed, so completely, unselfconsciously self-confident. “Don’t mention it, Mumsie, I have parsecs to go and promises to keep, myself. Besides, it wouldn’t do to have your son interfering with your, er, honeymoon.”
She blushed.
So did I.
“And since you’re running off again so soon, before you give this away,” she said, “you might ask me, first.” She took the bear from me, plumped up its slightly-leaking body, squeezed it in her good arm. “What’s so all-fired important you’d leave your poor old mother and her—”
“Gigolo,” I offered.
“I kind of like that—‘gigolo’—to go running off for?”
“There’s an urgent alarm of some kind out in
Tom Huxley Maru’s
investigation sector, something about one of Voltaire Malaise’s colony ships that’s only just now arriving, thanks to time-displacement, and with its mind-control system still operating. Maybe the old son-of-a-bureaucrat himself is aboard. I want to be there when the plug gets pulled.”
“
Tom Huxley Maru?”
Lucille consulted the ceiling for data, then blinked, “Why, that’s Brion Bayard’s new command. Mac, I hate to disappoint you, but we’re beginning to think Voltaire Malaise wound up on Whitey’s world. Isn’t that right, Corporal darling? Nevertheless, I wouldn’t mind being there, myself. Think of it: tens of thousands of freshly-kidnapped women, free to do whatever they want with their kidnappers!”
She held the bedraggled little stuffed bear out at arms’ length, sighed deeply, then sat it on the bed, leaning against one of Mac’s plastic cartons. “Well, Mac, if you have to go, you have to go. About this ... ”
“I think Whitey was going to give it to Elsie Nahuatl.”
She grinned, then looked at me. “My daddy gave it to me when I was laid up with a bad appendix. Good therapy. Come to think of it, you’ll probably need it yourself, Corporal, after your brain operation this afternoon.”
Brain operation. Lovely. The animal stared at me dementedly with its scratched plastic eyes, but refused to offer any comfort or advice.
-3-
Nahuatl, Elsa Lysandra: current head of xenopsychology department, praxeology divison, starship
Tom Paine Maru.
Born Cody, Wyoming, Solar Confederacy, May 23, 267 A.L., mostly of Australian Aborigine lineage, [identification of seventeen biological parents under privacy protection except in certifiably appropriate emergency. Adopted parent G. Howell Nahuatl, Operations Division,
Tom Paine Maru.
height 37 inches, weight 53 pounds. Hair blonde, complexion dark brown, eyes blue.
More info? [Y/N]
Elsie’s likeness, in full-color stereo, hung before my wondering eyes. Curious, I nodded microscopically. Before very long, I had been told a little while ago, only the subliminal muscular traces of my intention to nod would be sufficient to cue the implant correctly. Until then, it would take a little practice to get to know one another.
Through the ID hologram, I could see another Elsie, chatting with her friends. We were attending something like a wake, except that the nine-year-old guest of honor was sitting up in bed, cleaning her little dagger. Her tiny automatic pistol lay in neatly-ordered pieces on a cloth on the end-table, ready for reassembly after Owen Rogers had thrust them through the room’s shower-curtain three or four more times.
She was a tough customer to satisfy. On Sodde Lydfe, she had confided in me that she wanted to be just like Lucille when she grew up.
God help the galaxy!
Associated reference: Nahuatl, G. Howell, Operations Division,
Tom Paine Maru.
American coyote with cyberenhanced cognition. Further info under discretionary privacy-protection at subject’s specification.
Contact subj. for info release? [Y/N]
With a microscopic shake of my head, I suppressed any further retrieval from the implant. It was the first thing I had been shown to do, by the implant itself. The arduous “operation” I had dreaded for so long had taken all of three minutes, most of it to dab a little alcohol on the site before injection, a useless procedure medically, but some rituals survive everything. It seemed to make the nurse feel better.
The bright green letters vanished from the bottom edge of my field of vision, along with the picture of the coyote and a map of “North America”.
Howell himself, of course, was right there, curled up on one corner of Elsie’s bed. Also Francis W. Pololo—along with Mymysiir who was listening intently to the gorilla lecture rher on the subject of alien (meaning human) anatomy. In the corner, Vyssu was showing Edwina how to knit using three needles. My freshly-inserted computer likely would have stripped its gears supplying information on this crowd.
“They’re fragile,” Pololo was telling the lamviin paracauterist, “unlike you or I, yet somehow they’re very tough. This rugged young individual, despite a fractured vertebra, a punctured lung, and three broken ribs, wanted to get up and stomp what was left of Serman—oh, hello, Whitey! I didn’t see you come in. Lucille, how are you feeling, dear?”
She gulped. “A whole bloody lot better before I walked into this room, let me tell you! I had no idea little Elsie had been hurt so badly.”
Neither had I.
The conversation’s subject said, “Little Elsie’s gonna hurt
you
badly, Lucille Olson-Bear, unless you stop talking about her in the diminutive third person! Hi there, Corporal darling, what’d you bring me?”
I held up the tattered toy bear with a fresh red ribbon around its neck. “This, sweetheart. It is actually from Lucille, here—also Mac.”
“MacBear? He ’commed to say goodbye, but I didn’t know he was going to send me—a teddy! An old one! Oh, Cilly, he must have been yours!”
Tears quivering in her eyes, my cast iron warrior-maiden nodded silently. The little girl peered thoughtfully at the gunsmith as she supervised his reassembly of her pistol, teddy bear clutched to her chest.
“Wanna know what I’m gonna call him, Rog?”
The gunsmith/praxeologist smiled, shook his head—then cursed as the sharply-ground end of a coil-spring gouged him underneath his thumbnail.
Elsie giggled, “I’m gonna call him Owen!”
Mymy examined the stuffed animal closely. Howell sniffed at it, confessing that he’d once had a stuffed sandhopper he would not go anywhere without. The gorilla physician closed up his case, extracted a cigar from his pocket, then drew smoke as the smelly thing lighted itself.
“I’ll be going. Koko’s calling. She’s arranging the equivalent of a tea for the royal trines of Podfet and Foddu, and the pleasure of my company has been requested. We’re going to show them holograms of the ruined Sodde Lydfe on the other side, so they may not have much of an appetite. Thanks for the smelling-salts, Mymy, we may need them. Now a question of protocol: how are they likely to react when they discover that we won’t call people by their authoritarian titles aboard this ship?”
Mymy stirred one of her manipulatory limbs to give the teddy bear an affectionate stroke. “I don’t know about the Podfettians, Doctor Pololo, but the crown surprince will be absolutely delighted. Rhe’s just finished preparatory school—the very first surmale of the royal family ever to do so—and rhe wants everyone to call rher ‘Vuffi’!”
Me, I do not know exactly when I made up my mind about Vespucci. Perhaps in that cargo hold with Sermander, perhaps down on Afdiar somewhere. It is not the kind of conclusion one comes to overnight or all in one piece. I simply began operating on the assumption—before I knew that I had come to it—that I would be acting as
Tom Paine Maru’s
“primitive expert” on my own native planet, that Afdiar or Sodde Lydfe were merely practice for what would be to me the main event.
Perhaps it was at this same time that I made up my mind about Eleva. It turned out after all that “acceptably bland” is not my style.
For Lucille, the least bland human being I had ever known, the main event was over for a while. It was ironic that her problem down on Sodde Lydfe arose because Confederates refuse to suppress their unpleasant experiences. Lucille was still in the process of learning how to live with the hideously sharp, clear memories of what happened to her years ago on the same planet, and, under the stress of being struck by that enormous bullet, those memories had simply overwhelmed her.
In the future, for all events, main or otherwise, I planned to train right alongside her. I suspected that our relationship would always be a noisy one, but that, together, we could make sure no demons would ever begin haunting her again. I thought my being beside her from now on would make a lot of difference. At least I hoped it would.
The trouble with being free is that it funnels a lot of decisions your way that you were used to having made by someone else. Mav had made a decision I learned about when he joined his mates in Elsie’s room:
“I say, old armorer, this is a bit of all right, what?”
“What?” The alien’s breathing orifices had not moved a centimeter. He was “speaking” to me over the implant interlink. “Mav, you have had an—!”
As silently as the “priests” who had rescued me on Sca, he said, “Too right, dear fellow. I loathed and detested growing old, although I attempted to make the best of it. Now I find it won’t be necessary. This niggling little operation is only the first step. The Healing staff informs me that, with Mymy’s assistance, there will soon be a cure for aging among lamviin much as there are for the various species of the Confederacy. I shall await it with as much patience as I can muster.”
I laughed out loud, then: “I take it, then, that one of our starships will be returning you to Sodde Lydfe in the not-too-distant future.”
“You take it wrong. Actually, you see, we’re going with you.”
“But Mav,” I said aloud, “You planet is undergoing a revolution. Everything is going to change. Your people will be needing you. There will be all of the things you’ve fought for so long: peace, freedom, prosperity—”
“And no heroes and no gurus, not if I can help it, Whitey. I am going to be young again and see more of the universe than I had ever imagined possible. My people? They need only themselves. And besides, you see, these,” he gestured with his middle hand at everyone in the room. “These are my people—what you all call ‘mindkind’. And I am content.”
I had already learned that coordination in this culture comes not from cerebral-corticalimplants—they’re nothing but tiny computers, after all—but out of sheer self-interest. Here was a wonderful example.
I put both my arms around Lucille. She looked up at me. I winked and kissed her. She went back to watching Elsie playing with the old bear.
“Yes, Mav, so am I.”