Tom Paine Maru - Special Author's Edition (9 page)

Of course they did nothing to discourage me from doing anything else, either, including lying down beneath the wheels of the moving cart, or blowing my brains out. (Although they did not offer to lend me a pistol.) The subject of parole had not arisen again. They did not seem to care, now, whether I escaped or not. They simply assumed that I would come along with them meekly. They were right about that, too: wherever they were headed had to be a lot better than where I had been.

But now, at least, they talked to me, Also to one another, joking, arguing, even answering more questions that I sneaked in from time to time, almost as if trying to catch up for their earlier stoic silence, the purpose of which remained unexplained. We ate emergency ration bars not terribly different from those I had “enjoyed” on the way from Vespucci.

Theirs actually tasted like something.

Chalk, I think.

Mostly, they asked me questions.

“We haven’t any record of this planet of yours, Whitey, although the name ‘Vespucci’ is certainly familiar enough,” Owen Rogers was explaining to me as he trudged behind the wagon with Couper. Lucille was taking her turn at guiding the animals up front. “It isn’t too surprising, I suppose. This is the farthest we’ve reached into your particular stellar neighborhood so far. About how far is Vespucci from Sca?”

Was the query as innocent as the way it had been put? Or was there some deceit behind the fellow’s open, questioning eyes? I looked over at the unconscious Lieutenant. “I am not sure I should answer that, question, sir. You must understand, I—” The memories of brutal interrogation rose unbidden inside me, choking off the rest. I guessed that now I would find out what sort of people these Earthians truly were.

“Please don’t call me sir, Whitey, call me Owen. And I understand your reluctance perfectly. ‘Leinster’s Dilemma’, we praxeologists call it. For the sake of your home planet’s survival, you dare not take the chance of trusting us, no matter how you may come to feel about us personally.”

Personally? I preferred to watch Lucille, her emerald eyes alert, glittering with intelligence and passion for living, her golden hair drying now, streaming behind her in the quadruple moonlight as she strode purposefully along. With that cascade of hair and the hooded robe, she looked like a ancient witch of yore, a bewitching ancient witch.

“Something like that, sir, I mean ... ” Scientists were officer-caste to me. It was hard addressing him by his first name. I wondered what her body was like under that bulky— “What did you say, er, Rog?”

“I said okay, then tell me about the Navy, Whitey, your Vespuccian Navy.”

“Naval Reserve. Mine—everybody’s, unless they are in the Army Reserve.”

Rogers’ already worried-looking forehead wrinkled further. “You mean that everybody on Vespucci has to spend a certain amount of his life—and her life, too, I’ll bet—we call the practice universal conscription.”

“Ah,” I breathed. “So you have it, too?”

“Absolutely not.” He seemed offended at the idea. “We abolished it long ago, with every other form of slavery. So how old were you when—”

“I was born into the Navy,” I said with what almost amounted to pride, “just like my father before me. That is why Vespucci—the nation state, I mean this time—was able to consolidate the entire planet so easily. Other countries were flabby, undisciplined. We are not.”

A sour expression flashed over the praxeologist’s face for just an instant, then it was carefully rearranged away, although not without some visible effort. What is it about nosy strangers that makes a person want to stand up for all of those familiar, stupid things that he hates the most? I had always despised compulsory service, military rule, as early in my life as my discovery of the carefully-censored fact that other people, other countries did things very differently. I had always wondered afterward what was so wrong with being flabby or undisciplined.

At least occasionally.

“Meaning that in your nation-state of Vespucci, the trains run on time? Well, that would certainly explain the nature of your name, anyway.”

“What is so wrong about my name? I have the name that my father left to me. We were a Gold Nova family, I will have you understand. My father died earning us two extra digits posthumously at the Battle of Kahl’s Pyre. You could not have a better name unless you were born into one of the old, original Command Families, like the Lieutenant, here.”

Couper, lightfooted like a predator, unlike Rogers plodding beside him, spoke, his narrowed eyes never leaving their suspicious sweep of the countryside all around us. “And what would the Lieutenant’s name be?”

The Lieutenant had been a half-corpse so long, I realized I had failed a little in the introduction department. “Enson Sermander, sir. He—”

Couper began laughing. “One of the upper upper crust, hunh? That’s just swell! Corporal, your lieutenant here doesn’t have a ‘real’ name, any more than you do!” He stopped for a moment as we plodded onward, wiping tears from the corners of his eyes, then had to skip to catch up with the cart. “Great Albert’s ghost, the things you run into out here!”

“I do not get it, er, Coup.”

Rogers maintained a hard-won neutral expression.

“Well, let’s see. You’re a corporal, right? And in the Navy? Son, ‘ensign’ is an old time military rank back where we come from—in the ocean navy. About the equivalent of a shavetail, do you savvy? Never mind. Now tell me, son, does your friend here outrank an Army captain?”

“The Army Reserve” I corrected automatically, “Yes, sir, he does.” I was puzzled. What was Couper’s status? “He ranks just below a Navy colonel.”

“Death and taxes, what a world! Nonetheless, I’ll wager you a tall stack of chips that this ‘Sermander’ is nothing more than a corruption of a pair of old-fashioned titles ‘sir’—or maybe ‘sergeant’—and ‘commander’.”

“I never thought about that before,” I replied, not really wanting to think about it now. I wondered what all of this was leading to. If there were no such thing as a free lunch, when would they answer my questions?

Rogers leaned in, smiling his sad old praxeologist’s smile again, obviously wishing that he were back repairing guns. “People seldom do, not about their own cultures. For example, at one time Coup’s name was a title, too: ‘barrel-maker’. And there are ancestors back in Cilly’s family tree named after a huge furry animal. Tell me, Whitey, what do you know about the first settlers to reach your world, Vespucci, the Hamiltonians?”

Shock: who were these people? Who were these people? Who were these—?

“How in the Holy Name of Absolute Authority do you know about the Hamiltonians? We have only recently discovered our past ... I never mentioned ... Rog, do you know where all human beings originally came from?”

Embarrassed silence all around.

“The stork brought them!” Lucille snorted finally.

Rogers grimaced, picked up his pace, trudging forward to take his turn at coercing the animals. He never did explain what praxeology was.

-4-

In the middle of that long, bright night, we came to yet another clearing, indistinguishable from any other that we had encountered. All evening we had been paralleling the same stream I had bathed in before. Since my first sketchy wash, my skin felt loose, as if it were about to fall off in ragged sheets. I itched. It was a form of torture itself.

“Well,” I said casually, presuming on my apparently cordial new acquaintance with these still mysterious individuals. “If there are no objections from anyone, I am going for another long, sandy scrub. That is, if we intend to linger here for that long.” I slid easily off of the straw-slick cart-bed, marveling all over again at how good my leg felt.

Couper helped Rogers guide the wagon under a low-hanging tree. To my surprise, he began unhitching the animals. Searching through the straw, Lucille produced, unwrapped, then unfolded a small mechanical device resembling a portable electric fan. Rogers began sliding the Lieutenant down with my enlisted help. We placed the unconscious man on the ground, propped securely against a boulder. The Lieutenant mumbled, his eyelids fluttering a little, but he went directly back to sleep.

“Only one objection, son.” Couper drew his plasma-gun. My heart skipped, believing that this was the end, until I saw that he was glancing warily about the clearing. He reholstered his little weapon, then began replacing the daytime shade fabric over the animal’s backs. Using a section of flat harness, he slapped each of the beasts on the rump, driving them out of the clearing. “Some peasant is in for a very profitable surprise,” he said. “The objection, Corporal, is that we’re here.”

Lucille had set the odd collapsible device on the same rock which supported the Lieutenant’s slumbering head. She stared at it intently for a moment, then glanced suddenly at me. Almost as if she had been caught doing something naughty, she hastily threw a switch on its base.

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel,” she intoned, “Let down your hair ... ”

I took it for some kind of code, like fighter-pilots use.

“ ... Rapunzel, Rapunzel, this is Lucy Bear!”

The machine spoke: “Cute, Cilly, cute. Are you people ready? We’re running late.” Involuntarily, my eyes lifted skyward, searching for some super-advanced starship coming to pick us up. I almost began to cry. I had believed that I was going to die on this miserable dirty planet.

Couper’s crew gathered round.

“We’re ready, Ev, with two guests,” replied Lucille, “Non-hostile, more or less, and both severely wounded. They’ll need some special arrangements.”

“Congratulations to one and all, then.” the little communicator replied, “and a hearty well-done. Which is how I’ll have ’em waiting for you and your guests, unless they’re vegetarians, or you prefer yours rare. Okay, computer’s got the fix ... it shouldn’t be too much longer ... ”

I found myself straining to hear rocket-thunder, or maybe even the almost supersonic warbling whistle of some weirdly wonderful alien drive. Rogers folded up the communicator, tucking it under one robed arm.

“There it is!” Lucille cried. She pointed. A minuscule spark of utter brilliance, electric blue, had appeared in front of us, about a meter from my nose. It quickly widened into an azure-edged hole—right through the very air in front of us! Through it, impossibly, I could make out a complex metal-plastic interior where the light was softer.

One at a time, they stepped through the hole, avoiding the lower edge.

I helped Couper carry the Lieutenant. Behind us, the azure circle shrank again, to no more than a blinding dot, brighter than Sca’s sun. It disappeared with a pop! Plastic-upholstered benches fronted a circular wall. Above them were curved windows, reaching to a domed ceiling.

Through them glowed the stars, undimmed by atmosphere.

Below, the surface, deeply curved at this altitude, of the planet Sca.

We were in orbit!

“Welcome aboard the Little Tom, my friends,” said a voice I knew from Lucille’s little radio transceiver. “Dinner is about to be served.”

I turned—nearly fainting with surprise—to confront my first real alien: over a meter tall, man-shaped, but completely covered with fur!

Little Tom

“Dinner is about to be served.”

Thus spake the alien monster.

The thing was little, man-shaped, a couple of heads shorter than I am, spindly, almost frail-appearing. It nonetheless spoke with a deep, rumble-toned authority, its humanlike voice seeming to emanate from a wristwatch-sized electronic instrument it wore strapped to its hairy wrist.

Couper bundled the Lieutenant away, mumbling something about “medical stasis”, “Basset coils”, other meaningless arcana. I went on staring helplessly at the non-human pilot, while Rogers, following Lucille’s example, shucked his monkish robes with every indication of relief.

Underneath, each of them was attired in a close-fitting overall of the now-familiar silvery-gray material, sleeves equipped with an inset control panel similar to those on our bandages, only larger, sporting perhaps ten times as many tiny controls. Ev (was that the alien’s real name, or simply one adopted for the convenience of human tongues?) preferred the “summer issue” version: abbreviated sleeves, shortened legs, the gadget-panel situated where his belt-buckle ought to have been.

Each of my new acquaintances was armed, the ubiquitous small plasma gun slung in a highly unmilitary variety of manners: under the arm, at the waist, in separate holsters or pockets integral with the suit.

Almost immediately, Rogers provided further demonstration of the strange garment’s capabilities, intently pushing sleeve-buttons as a rainbow chased itself across its surface, stabilized, settled into a garish green-yellow checkerboard. For some reason, this aesthetic outrage seemed to please him. He looked up, asked Ev, “When do we eat?”

The pilot’s stubby muzzle wrinkled, displaying an intimidating collection of long yellow fangs. “Very likely never, unless you tone down that vomitous tartan of yours. In any case, we’ll wait for the boss.” He flipped a furry thumb in my direction: “So who’s the supernumerary and who’s paying for his room and board, dinner and drinks?”

I kept wishing that he would turn around so I could see whether he had a tail to go with the pelt. I wondered if there was not perhaps a hole through the seat of his pants for it, like a character in a cartoon.