Tom Paine Maru - Special Author's Edition (34 page)

Gonzales stood in the middle of a knee-high ring of fallen bodies, his back to that of Charlie Norris. The two of them were having a grand old time. I could not decide whether they were an irresistible force or an unmovable object. They seemed the center of considerable attention.

Occasionally one or more Afdiarians would step into the deadly circle. Gonzales would kick, Norris would punch. Or the other way around. They would both whirl about. Before you could tell what had happened, the wall of bleeding, unconscious idiots around them would be a few bodies higher. Each had a flagon in his hand. Neither had so much as spilled a drop. They would take a swig. By then another idiotor two would decide to try his luck. The whole process would repeat itself.

But it could not go on forever.

There came a shout, a whistle. Suddenly uniforms were pouring into the bar from every door, every window. While busy with a half dozen sailors, Norris took a sharp crack on the arm that had just healed. I heard it break from across the room. He sank to his knees. Someone struck Gonzales from behind. Eyes crossed, he joined Norris on the floor.

I used my chair as best I could, unable to see my comrades in the crowd, smashing it over the heads of two policemen who were kicking someone. Someone else jumped on my back. I turned around, smashed that person into the bar, but another pair of hands immediately seized my throat.

Unable to pry them loose, I began to suffocate. The light in the room was growing dimmer, dimmer. I even thought I was beginning to hallucinate.

The burning blue razor-circle of a Broach appeared on one wall. Lucille Olson-Bear stepped out of it. In her upraised hand, she held an object like a grenade. Taking deliberate aim, she threw it at my feet.

Catching in the grating, it went off.

-2-

Notes from the Asperance Expedition

Armorer/Corporal YD-038 recording

Page forty-seven:

The North American Confederacy developed a reliable interstellar stardrive around 250
Anno Liberatis.
(I have yet to adequately reconcile these Confederate dates to our Vespuccian calendar, but they make mention of another, older reckoning, 2026 A.D.) All they wanted, in the beginning, was to explore freely among the stars, trade among them.

Worried that “degenerate” colonies might make use of the new technologies (inertialess tachyon drive, quarkotopics) to plunge the galaxy into eternal warfare. A minor “party” in the N.A.C., the NeoImperialists, insisted that the revolution must be completed, systematically destroying every post-Malaise government as it was discovered.

Two huge fleets were constructed to accomplish that task ...

My avenging angel Lucille was still there in the bar as I regained consciousness and returned to the world, a surprisingly genuine look of concern on her pretty face. I was lying uncomfortably on the floorgrid, its pattern printing itself into my back. She knelt—probably even more uncomfortably—slapping me in the face with a greasy bar towel.

“Whitey, speak to me!” She was almost hysterical. “Say something intelligent!”

“Something intelligent,” I groaned.

There had been some tidying up. Someone, a rescue team from the ship, had sorted out the bodies. Policemen were stacked like cordwood over here. Navy personnel were lying in a corner over there. There was a pile for civilians, another one for bar employees. Somehow, they were being kept unconscious while we Confederates were being brought around.

“That one there’s an informer,” Woodie Murphy sneered from the chair he was reclining in. “Let’s put his carcass over with the police.”

There was warm laughter that I recognized. Geoff Couper observed, “That ought to engender a raised eyebrow or two, once everybody wakes up.”

“Oh yeah?,” the Confederate operative replied. “Well, the other one there. That’s right, the little one with all the face-fur an’ the naked scalp. He’s Navy Intelligence, such as they have. But put him with the cops, and the street-snitch with the Navy. Confusion to the enemy!”

I sat up. “Your accent is slipping again, Woodie.”

“What of it, me bhoy? I’m retirin’ off this mudball, about t’be listed as the only fatality of an otherwise friendly barfight. Me griefstricken wife’ll be after dyin’ of the shock. You folks did bring the silicone corpses with you? Orta keep ’em from makin’ me a plaster saint like every other conveniently deceased dissenter in Afdiarite history!”

“Well, we’d better be quick about it.” suggested Couper, dusting his hands off. “We’ve got to get back upstairs, and fast. You’d all have been recalled anyway, within the hour, fight or not. There’s an emergency.”

I looked over at Lucille. “Message from Bobfleet, via Zorro. A planet on their side it’s too late to save, now a radioactive ball of lava.”

A premonitory chill ran down my spine. “Sodde Lydfe?”

Couper nodded. “Its otherworld equivalent, and a terrible loss to everyone. Tomfleet’s own mission has been accelerated. We may be just in time to save their counterparts in this stretch of reality—if we hurry.”

“Counterparts?” I echoed stupidly.

“And our first alien race,” admitted Lucille, “the Lamviin. Nine legs, three sexes, exoskeleton covered with fur. Pretty weird. We didn’t know whether to tell you or not. Weren’t sure how you’d take it.”

I struggled painfully to my feet, the realization dawning on me that the actions of a starship twelve kilometers in diameter, possibly the fate of everyone within it, were suddenly in the hands of a nine year old child, because she had once been the only person interested enough to think about a particular topic. Elsie Nahuatl would be ecstatic.

“Aliens,” I repeated, “All right, let us go, then.”

Lucille asked, “You’re sure you feel up to it?”

“Just fine,” I lied.

“Good—”

Lucille kicked me with all of her strength, at the point where my legs join my torso. Red haze filling my head, I went straight to my knees.

“That’s for fucking around with somebody else, Corporal!
Anybody
else, especially including my little sister! Now we can go back to the ship.”

***********************

Part Three

The Lamviin

***********************

wings of an angel

Wings of an Angel

Notes from the Asperance Expedition

Armorer/Corporal YD-038 recording

Page Fifty:

It has been argued that, while you sweat your brain away over personal choices, there are other “yous” out there, sweating over them equally in alternative universes, but making them differently, every way they can be made. They all cancel out. Therefore, everything is stupidly futile. Confederates call this Niven’s Fallacy for some reason, pointing out that you are the only one you have. Only your choices count, since you can only live one life, in one universe at a time.

Now Howell informs me that Confederate physicists are playing with the idea of a third time-dimension, completing symmetry with the three dimensions of space. They do not know what it is, any more than Australian Aborigines saw that time is a different thing from space, or people before Pascal knew about statistical probability (or that it was a fundamental pillar of reality before P’wheet and Thorens). But it will likely be something that we have known about all along, in an entirely different context. After all, people gambled long before Pascal.

It might simply be the way time flies when you are having fun!

“Whitey!” Owen Rogers hissed at me, “Come here a minute!”

His sibilant crackle in my helmet-phones threatened the well-being of my eardrums. I shrugged, levered around to face the praxeologist where he lay like a beached dolphin beneath a wind-weathered overhang. The sun broiled down into my face. As long as I kept my eyes closed, that unmerciful orb shut out of my consciousness, I was comfortable. My smartsuit was more than adequate to any task this planet set for it.

It was only my mind that threatened to bake me to a cinder.

Below, the quarried fortress squatted in a low, marshy depression, a long-extinct caldera atop the isolated monolith locals called Zeam Island. We were just off the south coast of the nation-state of Great Foddu, seat of the world-wide Fodduan Empire. Triangular in floorplan (like most of the buildings on this overheated planet), the place was a low security prison, reserved for the highest-ranking clientele. It was three stories tall—yet broad enough to appear low, forbidding, dangerous.

My thoughts took me unwillingly back to Sca, a full-circle from dungeon to dungeon. It was not the most comfortable of feelings. Over the past few months, I had come to agree with the undisciplined Confederates on at least one point: there is no excuse—ever—for keeping another sapient being in a cage, no matter how he may deserve it.

Far better to kill him outright.

Cleaner.

Elbow-crawling toward Rogers, I kept low as possible behind meager cover, wary of the soldiers posted below. There were six of us, me, Rog, Couper, Lucille, Howell—along with little Elsie—plus the alien who was acting as our guide. We all lay concealed by an outcrop, the Gulf of Dybod behind us at the foot of a sheer, cruel cliff-face. The soggy meadow with its sprinkling of wildflowers, guarded jealously by heavily-armed beings of the same species as our guide, lay before us.

Everything looked
wrong.

The sky overhead glowed a custardy yellow, cloudlessly clear. The sun on the horizon was the color of dried blood. This would brighten to a dull orange as it rose, bringing local temperatures even higher than the hundred thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit that my instruments attested.

The water all around—an extension, according to my suit-map, of the “Rommish Ocean”—was a brilliant crimson, owing to a variety of algae with a high red chlorophyll content. This far from the mainland, dense growths of equally-red higher-order plants thrust up through the water’s surface, their stalks calming the waves to an oily languor. It got on my nerves almost as much as the yellow color of the sky, which on my homeworld would have been a warning of rare destructive twisting storms.

Pink surf pounded on the white sand cliff-base.

The meadow itself was a riot of reds, oranges, yellows. Anything that offered cover lay in a charred heap to one side of the building, but fresh grass, or something like it, a few low shrubs, told a tale of garrison troops grown lax. Overhead, one of the creatures Elsie had dubbed “whirlybirds” circled, looking for something helpless to pounce on.

Like every other advanced organism on Sodde Lydfe, it was built on a trilateral symmetry, boasting three large wings, three eyes, even three sexes, just as promised. Sculling itself around its own axis to obtain lift, how it saw where it was going was anybody’s guess. If his went well, Confederate biologists would be scrabbling gleefully over this planet for the next three centuries, asking themselves similar questions.

Provided the natives did not reduce it to radioactive cinders, first.

Settling in beside Rogers, I realized that my inquiring expression was not being conveyed by a smartsuit-face camouflaged to resemble rock-grown cactus. Apparently he needed some help adjusting a setting dial on the fist-sized piece of machinery he had brought with him through the down-Broach. It was identical to the object that Lucille had thrown at my feet in the bar. I held it while he tightened a tiny screw.

Elsie, lying on her stomach, conversed in low tones with Couper who was interrogating our native guide while Howell looked on. As she talked, Elsi played with a small, double-edged knife as casually as she had with her bubble-pipe. Lucille sat up a little higher, keeping watch, a plasma pistol in each hand. I was astonished at the way my attitude had changed toward her. Lucille’s personal problems were fairly easily understood, after all—although not so easily dealt with.

Somehow, the alien had contrived to meet us in exactly the correct place when we dilated down from orbit. It was my first chance to see one of these “lamviin” up close. The thing stood over a meter tall, much wider than a human, covered with thick, coarse, blondish fur, shading to a darker tone at the extremities. Its pelt rippled as it spoke, making me suspect that this was not an effect of the offshore breeze.

Each of its eyes, a trio evenly distributed around the inverted bowl-shaped body, was bigger than my hand, dark-irised, protected by a heavy ridge of brow bone. It gazed out from beneath a fringe of furry lashes with calm, unnerving wisdom. An obscenely hairless hemisphere, divided into three saw-toothed sections, formed a mouth atop the alien creature.

Even more disturbing were its limbs. At the rim of its carapace, spaced between the huge eyes, three heavy “legs” emerged, covered with a camouflage fabric spanning the underside of its body, as well. About halfway down, at the cuff of the garment, each limb split into three more delicate extremities, heavily furred like the rest of the alien, terminating in strong, slim, three-fingered “hands”—or “feet”. It walked on six of whatever you called them, holding the remaining three upward.

Carrying a large valise made of the same brush-patterned fabric as its clothing, it wore a large handgun in a leather harness strapped to the underside of its carapace. I could see that Rogers itched to get ahold of that weapon. I will admit to some curiosity, myself, not only about the gun, but about the fact that the creature was not an “it” at all, nor a he or a she, but a third sex that human beings do not have. I wondered what pronoun to call it by, also what in the despised name of Voltaire Malaise’s miserable navigator, its biological function was.