Tom Paine Maru - Special Author's Edition (16 page)

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PART TWO

The Privateers

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The garden of leelalee

In the gray salt marshes of the Vespuccian Low Desert, there live certain rare, minuscule, fin-scaly creatures without legs, breathing water instead of air. A porpoise is something like that, but it is bigger, uses lungs like human beings, pointedly claims possession of a mind, as well as a central nervous-system more subtly complex than any human’s. It also considers itself the hottest space pilot in the Known Galaxy.

I was not certain, at the start, which of these quirks was true of porpoises in general, which peculiar to LeeLaLee Aukorkauk S’reen. She was the only porpoise I had ever met. It was equally true that only six-plus hours were not going to be enough to get well acquainted, even if I had wanted to. It was not really time enough to absorb anything.

Around us, people (here I use the term as loosely as they did, themselves, taking into consideration the variety of finned or furry folk within eye’s reach) were busily rising or sinking through the floor of what appeared to be a broad green shallow valley. The virus attack seemed to have generated some urgency or excitement among them, which I thought was natural enough. I recalled the damage I had seen being done to this ship by the creatures, wondering what its condition was.

It was difficult to say. From wall to unseen wall, a thick carpet of vegetation lay before us, randomly punctuated with trees, sometimes sparsely, often in thick copses interwoven with a complicated network of brightly-colored rubber footpaths. Also fin-paths, as I was to discover. If there was appreciable battle-damage, it was not in these quarters.

Lost to everything, to everybody else, the Lieutenant stood where the deck extruded him, deep in thought. Or culture-shock. By default, the task of carrying his luggage with my own was delegated to the lowest-ranking representative of the Vespuccian State present at the time.

Couper smothered my hand in his own giant paw. “I’m afraid I’ve got some chores waiting. Have a good time, son, take a sightseeing tour. We’ll round you up when it’s time to transship again, right, Rog?”

“I’ll take care of it.” The praxeologist hiked a big shoulder-bag closer to his chest, shook my hand when Couper had released it, then clapped me on the back. “Hoist a couple for me. We’ll see you in a few.”

They turned their polite attention to my superior, all of them but Lucille. She looked at me as if she were seeing me for the first time, a puzzled expression on her pretty face. Then she shrugged, shook her head ironically, took a step in my direction. I barely avoided the reflex to shrink away from the tense ferocity she always carried with her.

She stood briefly on her tiptoes, to brush her lips across mine. “That oughta hold you for a few hours, Corporal, until we get the fire put out.” There was a sharp nip at the end of that semi-kiss she gave me, rather painfully, on the lower lip. It throbbed for a long time afterward.

It was not the only thing that throbbed.

As the company from the
Little Tom
dispersed, we Vespuccians followed the porpoise LeeLaLee, at her suggestion, walking briskly behind her shiny mechanical trundler. I did not even think to ask her where we were going, being a bit worried about the Lieutenant, who had not yet said a single word. He had to be nudged before he started moving.

“What? Oh ... yes ... let us go, by all means. There is a good fellow.” Immediately he fell silent again. I was more than a little dazed, myself, but this had more to do with the tiny blood-blister forming on my lower lip than with any scenic wonders the
Tom Lehrer Maru
might have offered. Lucille was a girl who believed in fighting a fire by starting others, elsewhere. Nonetheless, I made admiring noises at what seemed to be the right places. It seemed the politest thing.

“How very gratifying it is, young landling,” The porpoise pointed one of her spindly metal manipulators at some object of interest, “I am extremely fond of this vessel myself—and do not like having her attacked—albeit she is merely the material consequence of certain gross human and simian manipulatory capabilities that a kind evolution seems to have bestowed upon them, in lieu of truly adequate cognitive faculties.”

I did not follow half of what she said, but was aware that it was not particularly nice. “However in plain truth, if you wish to be impressed,” she went on, “wait until you see the ship we’re about to meet!”

LeeLaLee’s wheeled contrivance began to slow as it approached the bank of a narrow canal that paralleled the footpath. I stopped right behind her, then had to take the Lieutenant by the elbow until he halted, as well. The man looked up at me blankly, blinked down at the swift current that he had nearly stepped into, then returned to his thoughts.

In one respect, I was impressed. Unlike
Little Tom,
no one was rising or sinking through the ceiling here. It may have been fifty or a hundred meters high, difficult to tell in the mist-diffused glare. LeeLaLee steered her gleaming contraption down into the water. With a gleeful
splash!
she left it, then continued by swimming along beside us.

Occasionally the pathway would dip or the canal would rise, then her sleek form would be visible through a transparent retaining-wall. In some places, usually encompassed by privacy-creating leafy bowers, there would be a table with chairs, set on the synthetic flagging before the water-windows. “Landlings” conversed with porpoises through the glass, the inevitable topic being the combat action that had just occurred. There did not seem to be much concern for the safety of the ship or of its complement, rather the atmosphere resembled a break in the ordinary routine, a holiday of sorts. I would attempt to remember that, the next time I found myself cowering in a foxhole in somebody’s carpet.

Some distance ahead, I could make out a complicated double looped figure-eight, where several converging footpaths suddenly vaulted over the water. Unbelievably, a transparent aqueduct arched over them, in turn.

Meanwhile, sharing the overhead with the birds, many chimpanzees, humans, other bipedal sentients less clearly discernble, hung from fabric-covered wings, swooping, soaring, kicking at the treetops with laughter. Occasionally a land-dweller, plastic extensions on his hands or feet, a large lens on his face, would meet LeeLaLee in the canal, nod, pass her by. This seemed equitable: not every marine being we observed had abandoned its wheels. I had to dodge several on the footpath, pulling the Lieutenant out of harm’s way before he was run down.

Finally we reached the rim of the vast park-like chamber, almost needing the reminder of familiar oval-doorwayed bulkheads that we were inside a gigantic starship, moving through space at incomprehensible velocities.

I said something about this to LeeLaLee.

“You’d remember, my fine shore-grubber, were we not moving!” the Captain observed as she swam into a waiting set of wheels to join us on the walk. “Each precious drop of water, every clod of carefully-cultured soil, would be swirling overhead in a muddy maelstrom, did we not allow a calculated inefficiency in the inertialess field, enough uncorrected acceleration to give us one-half of a gee, if that means anything.”

Walking around the garden perimeter, now, I looked at storefronts, cafes, other shops with fancy, interesting window displays. Was this a spacecraft or a shopping-center? Experimentally, I bounced a little on the balls of my smartsuit-shod feet. “The gravity feels about right to me, Captain.” Among its other virtues, dense-cored Sca was a great place for the development of bad backs, fallen arches. “Which would be closer to your own standard,” I asked her without thinking, “Sca or Vespucci?”

“How would the creature know?” The Lieutenant’s derisive snort caught me by surprise. “It has not been anywhere near either planet.” He gave the porpoise a look of apologetic embarrassment, “Enlisted people!”

LeeLaLee’s wire-spoked wheels rolled nearer, leaving diamond-patterned tracks on the tile that vanished quickly in the warm, dry atmosphere. “On the contrary, pompous officer, this Sca where you were found falls within three decimal places of possessing an Earth-like gravity. Your own—Vespucci? You actually call it that?—appears to be a rather small, tired world, of approximately seven tenths standard.”

The Lieutenant stared at her in astonishment. “But how could you possibly—”

“How could I possibly? Because I make it my business to know these things, Lieutenant.” She fell silent, then: “After all, I am the Captain.”

Now there was an answer that made sense to the Lieutenant. He shut up again. We three continued along the esplanade, looking into shop windows.

-2-

“How are we supposed to pay for this?”

LeeLaLee had left us at a colorful open-fronted restaurant nestled in a shop-cluster at the margin of the park. Where we were seated, we could gaze out over the landscaping or into a rippling blue-green tunnel courtesy of a transparent canal-wall passing directly through the cafe. Both thoroughfares bustled with passers-by of a half a dozen species.

The waiter was a short, wiry, bald-headed human male attired in a dark green two-tone pin-striped smartsuit that might have nauseated even Owen Rogers. He rolled his eyes ceilingward a moment as if for divine inspiration. “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. It says here you’re on a Survey Service account. Funny, you ginks don’t look like no Survey rowdies. Where’d y’get them fancy suit-patterns, anyway?”

He indicated our Vespuccian Navy Reserve markings.

I opened my mouth, but the Lieutenant held up a hand. “I believe, sir, that we are specimens. Now tell me: does one choose a white wine with this repast, or a red?” I wanted to ask him how he suddenly knew that two strangers who had just walked into his establishment were on an account of any kind. Also, who was he to talk about funny suit-patterns?

He goggled at the Lieutenant’s inquiry. “With lobsterburgers? How ’bout a Coke, buddy? It’s the real thing, y’know. Fresh shipment today all the way from New Atlanta. A very good month.” He busied himself at a fountain tap. “Specimens, are you? Thought those came in a bottle, too.”

“Please, my good man, not at luncheon! We shall, with certain self-explicable trepidations, accept your culinary recommendation. Now leave us, if you please.” He eyed the food before us with suspicion, then looked up at me with very much the same expression on his face. “Corporal, I would be interested in hearing your impressions thus far.”

“Um, well, I cannot tell whether these little things on the bread are insects or seeds of some kind. I do not think I am going to eat them.”

Outside, an enormous dark chimpanzee-like animal knuckled past our cafe, gliding on tiny wheels that were somehow attached to its huge feet. One of its massive arms was in a silvery rubber sling. Abruptly, a bright pink balloon blossomed from its mouth, swelled nearly to the diameter of the creature’s head, then collapsed, leaving sticky pink remains across its leathery muzzle. The monster blinked, cleared its eyes, its nostrils, looked around to see whether anyone had witnessed the accident. Then it stuffed the peculiar substance back into its jaws, hitched up its heavy pistol belt, rolled onward on its little wheels.

“No, you dimwit! I refer to our situation—to our experiences—to our putative hosts, their society, their technology. I realize that you are scarcely the trained observer I am, but ... what are your reactions?”

I thought about his question, sipping at the bubbly brown liquid the waiter had brought us. So far, I had been too busy gawking to do very much processing. “Well, sir,” I finally told him, “I do not much care for the cavalier manner in which they shuffle us around. Oh, they are polite enough about it, but just the same the disrespectful way that Geoffrey Couper treated you. About the sidearms, I mean, I could have—”

“Nonsense, my dear boy, nonsense!” He waved a hand negligently. “I understood entirely. Chain of command, et cetera, et cetera. Come to speak of it now, I rather liked his keen, decisive manner. Beneath the facade of sloppy—one might almost say civilian—casuality that we see all around us here, there is a core of steel, a center entirely unembarrassed in the exercise of power. Confidence. Discipline. These combinations do not occur often enough in our military, let me tell you!”

He took a bite of his sandwich, got a very odd expression on his face.

“Lieutenant!” I glanced wildly around. “Never say things like that!”

“Come, Corporal,” he replied around the bite of food, “Have you never entertained the thought yourself?” He gave me a knowing, cynical look.

I kept my eyes on the tabletop. “If I had, sir, I would not voice it out loud. Certainly not in public.” I made a gesture that, for generations in Vespuccian enlisted society, has meant, “The walls have ears”.

“A very wise precaution, Corporal—Whitey. There is something profoundly wonderful about these people, reaching further than bland explanations involving scientific research.” He lowered his head along with his voice until he resembled a Vespuccian carrion-bird. “It is obvious that our expedition—what is left of it—has accidentally stumbled across the cutting edge of a vast, wealthy, expanding empire.”

What I wanted to say was that they did not seem very imperial to me.

“They are ultra-cautious at their frontier, or follow a velvet glove policy in general, but the power is there, mark my word. They make us Vespuccians look like, how do the ranks have it? Like ’tiny turnips’.”