A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  I hadn’t had the time or the money to compartmentalize the hold of the Eggbeater. If some of the pod was soured, it was all soured.

  “New Niger,” Ripotee murmured. His eyes were sleepy blue slits, contemplating the wall charts. “We could reach New Niger faster than Netchkay could. They would buy the Eggbeater and fight Bob afterward to keep it.”

  I sat paralyzed with indecision. The New Nigerians certainly would buy the Sealyham Eggbeater, given the chance.

  It was to keep my ship out of such hands as theirs that Bob was so anxious to take it over. All the other Steinways are later models, set to blow themselves up if strangers go poking around in their guts. This protects the Steinway secret: what Aunt Juno did to fit her short haul ships for travel between systems without hitching rides at the extortioners’ rates that long haulers charge. An engineer could dig into my ship, though, and come out unscathed to report that Aunt Juno had simply modified the straight-and-tally system in a particular manner with half a dozen counter-clock Holbein pins, without disturbing the linkup with the stabilizers and the degreasing works. Everybody knows the general principles, but nobody outside of us Steinways knows the exact arrangement.

  The Chinese, long haulers exclusively, wouldn’t be interested. They would only take my ship to tuck it away out of commission so its secret couldn’t be used by anybody else to cut down their income from giving hitches.

  But the Africans of New Niger ran short haul ships and were long time competitors of the Steinway Line on the in-system short haul routes. They could use Aunt Juno’s secret, if they had it, to bounce from system to system cheap, as we did, and wipe out our advantage.

  Ripotee said, “Or you could just give up and let Netchkay have the ship. A lot of people would say you should. He’s a good administrator.” I took a swipe at him, but he eluded me with a graceful leap onto the food synthesizer, which burped happily and offered me a cup of steaming ersatz. “He’s a North American,” Ripotee continued, “a go-getter, who’s trying to rebuild North American prestige—”

  “To build himself, you mean, on my ships and my sister’s treachery!”

  “The Captain’s always right,” Ripotee said, “in her own ship.”

  I drank the ersatz and glared at the wall, ignoring for the moment the instruments blinking disaster warnings at me: Bob’s ship was following my jig course already. If I was starting to pick him up, he would be picking me up too, first in signals and then in reality.

  Among the instruments that gave the walls their baroque look of overdone detail I had stuck a snapshot of a New Nigerian captain I had encountered once, closely. What were the chances that somebody down there would know where Barnabas was these days? It would make a difference to know that I had one friend on New Niger.

  My console jumped on, and there was a splintery image of Bob Netchkay’s swarthy, handsome face. He looked grave and concerned, which made me fairly pant with hatred.

  “You got my offer, Dee,” he said in a honey voice.

  If I turned off again he would think I was too upset to deal with him. I looked him in the eye and did not smile.

  “Did you?” he pressed. He faced me full on, obscuring the predatory thrust of his beaky features.

  “I know all about this final stage of your grab project, yes,” I said.

  He shook his head. “No, Dee, you don’t understand. I’m thinking about the family now.” He had changed his name to Stein way on marrying Nita, which was good for business but bad for my blood pressure. “I’ve talked this over with Nita and she agrees; the only way to handle it right is together, as a family.”

  I said, “I have no family.”

  Nita came and looked over his shoulder at me, her round, tanned face reproachful. I almost gagged: Nita, charter member of the New Lambchop League, sweet and slinky and one pace behind “her” man, pretending she knew nothing about business. She had dumped me as a partner for this ambitious buccaneer because he would play along with her frills and her protect-me-I’m-weak line. I think Aunt Juno had hoped to lead her in another direction by leaving half of the Steinway fleet to her. But Nita was part of the new swing back to “romance,” a little lost lambchop, not an admiral of the spaceways.

  “We’re still sisters, Dee.” She blinked her black eyes at me under her naked brows. She had undergone face stiffening years ago to create the supposedly alluring effect of enormous, liquid orbs in a mysterious mask.

  “You may be somebody’s sister,” I snapped. “I’m not.”

  She whispered something to Bob.

  He nodded. “I know. You see how bad things have gotten, Dee, when you get into a worse temper than ever at the sight of your own sister. Sometimes I think it’s a chemical imbalance, that temper of yours, it’s not natural. Nita has to go, she’s got things to do. I just wanted you to know that anything I suggest has already been run past her, and she’s in complete agreement. Isn’t that right, Nita?”

  Nita nodded, fluttered her tapered fingers in my direction, and whisked her svelte, body-suited figure out of the picture. Where she had been I saw something I recognized behind Bob’s shoulder: one of those stretched guts from the Wailies of Tchan that’s supposed to show images of the future if you expose it to anti-gravity. It had never shown Aunt Juno these twoconnivers running her flagship.

  “Well?” I said. I sipped the cold dregs of my ersatz.

  Bob lowered sincerely at me. “Look, Dee, I’m older than you and a lot more experienced at a lot of things, like running a successful trade business. And I’m very concerned about the future of the Steinway name. You and I have been at odds for a long time, but you don’t really think I’ve gone to all this trouble just to junk the line, do you? I did what I had to do, that’s all.”

  He stopped and glared past me; I turned. Ripotee had a hind foot stuck up in the air and was licking his crotch. He paused to say loudly, “I’m doing what I have to do too.”

  “Get that filth off the console!” Bob yelled. I chortled. He got control of himself and plowed on: “Already I’ve restored your family’s reputation; Steinway is once again a name held in commercial respect. And I can do more.

  “You don’t realize; things are going to get rougher than you can imagine, and it won’t be any game for a free-lance woman with nobody to back her up. Look around you: times are changing, it’s a tougher and tougher short haul market, and women are pulling back into softer, older ways. What will you be out there, one of a handful of female freaks left over from the days of Juno and her type? Freaks don’t get work, not when there are good, sound men around to take it away from them. You’ll be a pauper.

  “I don’t want that. Nita doesn’t want it. You don’t want it. Give up and face facts.”

  He paused, the picture of a man carried away by his own eloquence. And a pleasure to look at too, if I hadn’t been burning up with loathing for his very tripes. Even without the frame of curling black hair and high collar, the subtly padded shoulders and chest—the New Lambchops weren’t the only ones looking back in time to more romantic eras—Bob was handsome, and very masculine looking in a hard, sharp-cut way.

  He knew it and used it, posing there all earnest drama, to give me a minute to react, to cue him as to how all this was setting with me. I said, deadpan, “What’s the deal?”

  He looked pained. “Not a deal; a way for us all to come out all light. You give me the Sealyham Eggbeater, pull out of the business, take a holiday someplace, grow out your hair. In exchange for your ship I’ll give you a one-third inalienable interest in the Steinway stock and a nice desk job for income. But I get to run things by own way without interference. You keep your mouth shut and let me do what I know how to do, and I take care of you and your sister.”

  I was so mad I could hardly work my jaw loose enough to utter a sound. “But I don’t get to do what I know how to do, which is to pilot a short haul ship. My answer is no.”

  I wiped the console and punched a new jig. Then I plugged in a tingle of electracalm an
d a light dose of antistress because I needed my head clear.

  Ripotee lay stretched out along the sill of a viewport, curved within its curve, one paw hanging down. He liked to keep his distance when I was upset. His sapphire eyes rested on me, intent, unreadable. He had either found that he could not or decided that he would not learn to use his facial muscles for expressiveness on the human model. I couldn’t interpret that masked, blunt-muzzled visage.

  I said, “Ripotee, what do you know about New Niger?” His tail started swinging, lashing. That was something he had never been able to control. He was excited, onto something.

  “Jungle,” he said. “Tall trees and vines and close underbrush. Good smells, earth and voidings and growth. Not like here.”

  “You’ve got cabin fever,” I snorted. I was already setting up a fast but indirect course for Singlet, New Niger’s main port. “Aren’t your mice entertaining you enough any more?”

  I reached out to pat his head, but he jerked away. He didn’t say, Don’t do that, though he could have. Sometimes he was pleased to show me the superfluity of that human invention, speech. We had been in space a longish while. Ripotee got just as irritable as anyone else—as me.

  The autodrives took over at full speed on a wild zig-zag course. Strapping in tight, I signalled Ripotee, over the shout of the engines, to get into his harness. I tried to cut the graveys, but the switch stuck: it was going to be a rough ride. I felt reckless. Bob was close; if he tried to grab the Eggbeater now, he’d run a good chance of collision and of getting himself killed, if not all of us.

  There was a lot of buffeting and slinging as the ship shunted from course to course. I kept my eyes on Ripotee, not wanting to see evidence of impossible strain, of damage, of imminent ruin on the dials that encrusted the walls. He lay flat in his nest of straps secured to a padded niche over the internal monitor banks, his claws bradded into the fibres. He was Siamese, fawn beneath and seal-brown on top, a slight shading of stripes on his upper legs, cheeks, and forehead. He had street blood in him, none of your overbred mincing and neurosis there. I hoped he wasn’t about to come to a crashing end on account of my feud with Netchkay.

  I am a natural pilot but not what they call a sheepherder, the kind who thrives on being alone in space. A good short haul ship can be managed by one operator and can carry more cargo that way, and I don’t like crowding. So I had acquired Ripotee instead of a human partner.

  He had been a gift as a kitten, along with a treatment contract on him for a place out in the Tic Tacs where they use pod infections to mutate animals upward—if humanizing their brains is actually a step in that direction. He came out of his pod fever with a good English vocabulary and a talent for being aggravating in pursuit of his own independence.

  Even at his worst he was the companion I needed, a reminder of something besides the bright sterility of space and its stars. There wasn’t anything else. We had yet to find alien life of true intelligence. Meanwhile, the few Earth animals that had survived the Oil Age were all the more important to us—to those of us who cared about such things, anyway.

  The ship dropped hard, slewing around to a new heading. Straps bit my skin. I thought of the time when, after a brush with some name-proud settlers on Le Cloue, I had asked Ripotee, “Do you want to change your name? Maybe you don’t like being called ‘Ripotee’ ?” I was thinking that it was hard for him to pronounce it, as he had some trouble with t’s.

  He had said, “I don’t care, I don’t have to say it. I can say ‘I,’ just like a person. Anyway, Ripotee isn’t my name; it’s just your name for me.”

  Only later I wondered whether this proud statement covered not some private name he had for himself but the fact that he had no name except the one I had given him.

  I could hardly draw breath to think with now, and I was very glad to have had no breakfast but that cup of ersatz.

  Another hard swing, and I smelled rotting pod; a cargo seal must have broken and who knew what else. Ripotee let out a sudden wail—not pain, I hoped, just fear. I kept my eyes closed now. If he’d been shaken loose from his harness he could be slammed to death on the walls, just as I would be if I tried to go and help him.

  One thing about Ripotee that neither of us nor his producers in the Tic Tacs knew was how long he had to live. He was approaching his first watermark, the eighth year, which if successfully passed normally qualifies a domestic cat for another seven or eight. In his case, we had no idea whether the pod infection had fitted him with a human life span to go with his amplified mind, or, given that, whether his physical small-animal frame would hold up to such extended usage. One thing was sure, enough of this battering around and he would end up just as punchy as any human pilot would.

  I blacked out twice. Then everything smoothed down, and my power automatically cut as the landing beams locked on. A voice sang a peculiarly enriched English into my ears over the headset: looping vowels, a sonorous timbre—reminding me of Barnabas’ voice. “Singlet Port. So now you will be boarded by a customs party. Please prepare to receive… .”

  Prepare to give up—but never to Bob.

  Ripotee was first out on New Niger. I sprung the forward hatch and a group of people came in; he padded right past them, tail in the air, none of your hanging about sniffing to decide whether or not it was worth his time to go through the doorway. Normally he’s as cautious as any cat, but he is also given to wild fits of berserker courage that are part existential meanness and part tomcat.

  He paused in his progress only to lay a delicate line of red down the back of a reaching hand—just an eyeblink swipe of one paw, an exclamation from the victim, and Ripotee was off, belly stretched in an ecstatic arc of all-out effort above the landing pad. Well out of reach, he paused with his tail quirked up in its play mode, glanced back, and then bounded sideways out of sight behind a heap of cartons and drums.

  I had to pay a quarantine fine on him, of course. They were very annoyed to have lost any organisms he might have brought in with him that could be useful in pod experiments. The fine was partly offset by some prime wrigglies they got out of me, leftovers from a visit to the swamps of Putt.

  There were forms to fill out and a lot of “dash” to pay for hints on how to fill them out with the least chance of expensive mistakes. I stood in the security office, my head still fuzzy from the rough flight, and I wrote.

  A young man with a long thin face like a deer’s came and plucked me by the sleeve. He said in soft, accented English, “You are asked for, Missisi. Come with me please.”

  “Who?” I said, thinking damn it, Bob has landed, he’s onto me already. I stalled. “I have these forms to finish—”

  He looked at the official who had given me these books of papers and said, “Missisi Helen will see to it that everything is put right.”

  The official reached over, smiling, and eased the papers out from under my hand. “I did not know that Captain Steinway was a friend of Missisi Helen. Do not worry of your ship; it goes into our clean-out system because of the oatmeal.”

  My guide led me through corridors and once across a landing surface brilliant with sun. I wondered if this Missisi Helen was the famous Helen who had been trading from New Niger as far back as Aunt Juno’s own times: a tough competitor.

  We went to a hangar where a short hauler stood surrounded by half-unpacked bales and boxes and spilled fruit. For a barnyard flavor, chickens (the African lines would carry anything) ran among the feet of the passengers, who shouted and pawed through everything, looking, I supposed, for their own belongings mixed in with the scattered cargo. The mob, rumpled and steamy with their own noise and excitement, was all Black except for one skinny, shiny-bald White man in the stained white sari of a Holy Wholist missionary. He stood serenely above it all.

  I picked my way along after my guide, trying not to wrinkle my nose; after all, I’d had no more opportunity for a thorough bath and fresh change of clothing than these folks had. To tell the truth, I felt nervous in that crush and
scramble of people; there were so many, and I had lived without other humans for a long time.

  A knot of argument suddenly burst, and a little woman in a long rose-colored dress stepped out to meet me, snapping angrily over her shoulder at a man who reached pleadingly to restrain her: “And I tell you, it is for you some of my cargo was dumped cheap at Lagos Port to make room for this, your cousin. I am surprised you did not want my very ancestor’s bones thrown away so you could bring your whole family! You will pay back for my lost profits, or I will make you very sorry! Speak there to my secretary.”

  She faced me, one heavily braceleted arm cocked hand-on-hip, her bare, stubby feet planted wide. Her hair, a tight, springy pile of gray, was cut and shaped into an exaggerated part, like two steep hills on her head. She tipped her head back and looked down her curved, broad, delicate nose at me.

  “Dee Steinway. You do not look at all like your aunt Juno.”

  “I favor my father’s side.”

  “As well,” she said. “Juno ran to fat in her later years. I knew her well; I am Helen Nwanyeruwa, head of Heaven Never Fail Short Hauling Limited. Why are you here, and why did Bob Netchkay land right behind you, waving pieces of paper under the noses of customs?”

  Well, that was straight out, and it shook me up a little bit. Most trading people talk around things to see what all the orbits are before they set a plain course. I looked nervously at the intent faces surrounding us. I said, “He wants to take my ship.”

  She grimaced. “With papers; that means with laws.”

  “I’d rather sell the ship to you before he can slap those papers on me,” I said.

  “What ship?”

  “Not just any ship. The Steinway Eggbeater.”