Tom Paine Maru - Special Author's Edition (21 page)

“Sir,” I offered. “You can shut these windows off, if you want to. Just turn this knob at the base. They showed me how to do it when I was given my room downstairs.” I demonstrated. The windows quickly faded to opaque. Just as quickly, the desert landscape wrapped around the room, enclosing us securely in the pseudo-familiar. The Lieutenant seemed to breathe easier. He finished off his drink, poured himself another.

“Thank you, Whitey. Now get out of here. Go—what did you call it?—‘sailing’? Perhaps it will take some of the starch out of that overly-stiff collar of yours. And while you’re sailing, Corporal, think upon what part you might play in a New Confederate-Vespuccian Order.”

I could actually hear the capital letters.

I got.

-3-

For days, sitting around, I am waiting for your call,

Hope my face won’t fall—off the wall.

And the daisies in the ground are around ten feet tall,

Though they started pretty small, half-past Fall ...

Butterfly, how come why I never see ya?

Have your fun, when you’re done,

I wouldn’t wanna be ya!

’Cause I’m through sitting around, getting rusty on the shelf—

I can be lonely, by myself, without your help ...

Koko started over again at the bridge, “Butterfly, how come why ... ”, repeating the final line. By the finish, I had figured out the chords—you mashed your fingers down on the strings between the inset wires, just as if they were buttons. Primitive, compared to the mandolar I was used to, but satisfactory. I was anxious to try it for myself.

She passed me the little box. It was a remarkably unsophisticated artifact for so technically advanced a culture. I found that I could omit the fingering-positions for the last two mandolar-columns, to play a creditable C, F, or G7, strumming the strings where they passed an acoustic aperture in the body, just as if they were control-vanes. The resulting sound was crude, yet somehow wistfully appealing. Koko promised to show me a tune called “Ukulele Lady”. As I experimented with her ukulele, the lady extracted a cigar from a pocket on her gunbelt, lit it, then lay back in the sand, watching the waves roll in.

We sat on a dune at the margin of the water. The “shore”. It is only called a “beach” when there is sand. Her little boat was hauled up, its brightly colored sail furled. In the “west”, the artificial sun was setting as spectacularly as any ever did, except, perhaps, on Sca.

I was still thinking about my earlier conversation with the Lieutenant. A year ago, perhaps even a month, I would have found his blatant opportunism normal, if not exactly admirable. Half of the conquests in Vespuccian history had been initiated in the name of advancing “international understanding”. The pragmatism offered afterward—often in the name of the legendary philosopher MacVelly—as an excuse for duplicitude and treachery was standard classroom fare.

Now, having met these people of
Tom Paine Maru
and the Galactic Confederacy, I was no longer sure. They were powerful, accomplished, wise, but naive. The Lieutenant’s intentions would have disappointed them.

Koko and I were not alone on the beach, although Confederates give each other lots of elbow-room unless otherwise invited. Other people watched the sunset. Several were assembling scraps of water-worn wood, for a fire—deliberately set aboard a starship, I reminded myself. A larger number stretched a net between poles thrust into the sand, then batted a ball over it, using their hands, their heads—even their feet.

One of these impressive kickers proved to be the injured Norris from yesterday’s “class”, late of the
Peter LaNague.
Blond, bearded, stocky, he was also short, almost tiny. Despite the dressing on his leg (I shuddered to contemplate what sort of wound required two weeks to heal in this society) he gave a good account of himself, spinning, twisting, lashing out with a good foot that was probably a lethal instrument.

I turned to Koko: “Tell me about Obsidia.”

“Zzzzz—what?” She started awake in time to avoid a cigar burn to her pelt. “Where’d you hear about that? Oh, yes. It’s just another primitive planet, Whitey, our next stop, according to the scientists. The name is one we assigned it, appropriate to its tech-level. People there don’t know what a planet is, let alone that they live on one. There’s about a zillion tribes, nations, empires, all of which call the place “Dirt” in their native languages. Conditions there are your standard ‘nasty, brutish, and short’, thanks to widespread sapient sacrifice, and a ruling priesthood in what we laughingly regard as the leading culture, very similar to the ancient Aztecs. If that means anything.”

It did not.

“In any case, our work is almost done there, and it’s our final visit for a while. Then on to Sodde—hold on, isn’t this Howell coming?”

Koko must have had fantastically sensitive hearing. It was many seconds before I heard their voices, coming from the other side of a dune behind us, even longer until they were in sight. It was little Elsie I noticed first, chattering gaily, skipping barefoot alongside her father. Then I could not help but notice Lucille. Her costume may have begun as a smartsuit. Opaque here, transparent there—mostly transparent there—it was a tribute to Confederate technology. A while later, I remembered—with some annoyance at myself—to breathe.

They stopped, Koko exchanging greetings with the females. Elsie ran off at once to play in the water. The gorilla scratched the coyote behind an ear, careful not to disturb the dark glasses he was wearing. He extended a friendly paw to me. “Well, old fellow, how did you like sailboating?”

I reddened. “The porpoises would thank me if I gave it up.”

I did not think until later to ask myself how he knew what we had been doing. Something inside me had begun to grow accustomed to the way these people seemed to read each other’s minds, to know things without perceptible reason, to share information, experience, without speaking.

Koko laughed, not without sympathy. Howell admitted that he felt much the same about the sport. Lucille sat gracefully on the sand beside them, as far away from me as possible. She took a cigarette from a small case she carried—somehow it dispensed itself already lit—then gazed out, wordless, past its orange-glowing coal at the slowly darkening water. Less than a dozen yards away, someone set the head-high heap of wood afire. I felt its radiation on my face almost immediately.

Or maybe it was just my imagination.

“I’m glad we can offer something to offend everyone, Corporal.” Lucille peered around the gorilla’s impressive bulk, also the lesser obstruction of the coyote, to give me one of her most malicious grins. “You know it may surprise you to learn that there are individuals aboard this ship—the two legged kind and otherwise—with exactly the same instinctive reaction to your kind as you say you have to sailing.”

She expelled smoke as if it were a bad memory. Then she took in another deep puff, let it drift from her half-open mouth, and inhaled it into her nostrils. For some bizarre reason, I found it horribly attractive.

But I was rapidly getting tired of her attitude. “Precisely what is my kind, Miss Olson-Bear, or are you not prepared to be specific?” My hands shook to match the racing of my heart. My words came from between gritted teeth—with anger or with what, I could not have said.

“Oh, our little Lucille is always prepared to be specific,” Howell offered blandly. “Although somewhat less often to be courteous to our guests.”

“Guests?” snorted the girl. “Is that what you call them, Howell? I’d use another word, myself! Your kind—since you ask, Corporal O’Thraight—is the uniformed, goose-stepping soldier-boy kind who wants to ‘fight and bleed and kill and die’, in the words of the poet, for an evil institution that hasn’t any more right to exist than he has!”

Koko watched, her eyes mild, as fingers of heat felt their way up into my face. Howell shook his head, a very human gesture. “The ‘poet’ she cites was a satirist, after whom the shuttle you arrived on was named—blast!, there’s just no way to end that elegantly without a preposition!”

I repeated Lucille’s words. “No right to exist? I understand, then, how you could slaughter a whole company of men in the name of some stupid abstraction. On Vespucci this would make you a great politician!”

Her face redder than mine, Lucille was erect suddenly, threw her cigarette away, snapped into a combat stance. “Get up and say that, stormtrooper!”

“Why?” I asked her. “You only want to hit me for expressing my opinion.”

“Oho!” Howell exclaimed, “Hoist by her own petulance, I believe! Have we suspended free speech when I wasn’t looking, my dear, or is somebody—I won’t mention her name—simply being unethical and rude?”

“Sit down, Cilly,” Koko drew smoke, patted the ground with a hand as large as both of mine placed side-to-side. “You’ll get sand in my ukulele.”

As always, the furious girl glared sharply at the speaker when the name “Cilly” was pronounced. But she subsided somewhat: “All right, Koko—for you. For now! But somebody’s got to give this Kilroy an education!”

“And aversive conditioning,” replied the coyote, sarcasm dripping from the tiny holes in his collar-speaker, “is such a very effective means!” Koko offered him a drag on the cigar. He took it, inhaling deeply.

To my utter amazement, he actually got through. “Howell, please don’t be mad at me. Can’t you see? These Vespuccians are military. They represent a government!” She thumped back to the sand as Koko had suggested, this time only one space away from me, to the left of the talking coyote. My own reaction—whether to her anger or proximity—amazed me just as utterly. I folded an arm across my lap to conceal it.

He grinned, “I’m not angry, Cilly, say you’re sorry, it’ll make it square.”

“I never apologize,” her lower lip was trembling. “It’s a sign of weakness!”

He laid his muzzle on her lap, looking up at her with big brown eyes. “On the contrary,” he sighed, “it is partial payment of a moral debt.”

There were tears in her voice, rather than her eyes, “I’m sorry, Howell ... ”

“No, my dear, you must apologize to the Corporal, here. He’s the one you’ve been riding. My back wouldn’t have stood it for this long. I’d have to’ve done something about it.” He gave me a significant look.

“
I’d rather die!”
It was almost a whisper, jaw tight, lower lip trembling.

“Somebody may eventually arrange that for you,” I growled. “I will not be made to feel ashamed of my country. Sure, if everybody was like Howell or Koko, here—rational—then this anarchistic system of yours might just work. But if even one of them is like you, Lucille, then everybody needs the protection of the military or a government!”

Heaving my sea-tired body to its weary feet, I frowned down at the girl. “Now threaten me again! This time you will not throw me by surprise!”

Lucille’s eyes grew large. She moved back a little. Howell shook his head, then looked at Koko as she reached up with a long arm to pat me on the shoulder with an astonishingly gentle hand. “Please calm down, Whitey,” soothed the gorilla. “Nobody’s going to hurt you, here.”

A trickle of sweat ran down between Lucille’s breasts, for some reason driving me half crazy. Beneath the upper portion of her virtual bathing suit, Lucille, too, was betrayed by an involuntary reaction very nearly as embarrassing as my own as hard points showed at their tips.

“Nobody will hurt you,” Howell agreed with Koko, “Even if they wanted to. But what ever gave you the idea that rationality is a prerequisite to liberty? There’s a sapient right to be free, period, whatever condition we find ourselves in. We do not need to earn it. Nobody has a right to withhold it from us until we do. Nor does a society operate on reason—which is an individual attribute—any more than it operates on kindness. As I recently explained to your Lieutenant with regard to criminality, in the Confederacy, stupidity and ignorance have just been priced out of the market, made too expensive ... ”

“Whitey,” Koko interrupted—these people seemed to do a lot of that—“In all of sapient history, there are only three ways that people have ever discovered to organize themselves. One individual can tell everybody what to do—that’s called monarchism. Or everybody can tell everybody else what to do—that’s called majoritarianism. Or—”

“Or nobody,” Lucille almost shouted, although I could tell she was horrified at her bodily response to the idea of fighting with me, and trying frantically to calm down. “Nobody tells anybody what to do! Always the best way, Corporal. My sister Edwina and I were raised on the old Confederate Solar frontier, in a place called the Venus Belt. I—”

The girl stopped talking suddenly. There was another of those odd, lengthy, prescient silences. Then, even more voices came to us from behind ...

-4-

“But you cannot have it both ways,” the Lieutenant bellowed. “Do you not see?” Koko, Lucille, turned in the direction of the noise. Howell’s ears perked, but he kept his eyes on Elsie, playing in the surf.

“Three ways, you mean, Enson. Perhaps that’s where you’ve gone wrong. It is Mindkind’s second oldest argument: is the universe chaotic, as it often appears to be, or is it rigidly determined, as cause-and-effect seem to imply? Wait, now. Does free will truly operate, as we intuitively feel, or does determinacy eliminate any such possibility? And back around, does free will necessarily imply chaos?”