Their Majesties’ Bucketeers ─ An Agot Edmoot Mav Murder Mystery

by L. Neil Smith

  He uttered then a phrase that I had heard before only on two occasions, once from these same nostrils that repeated it now, and once from those of a common dock hand I chanced to overhear while on an errand in the Imperial Navy Yards. With this he flipped the latch. The key-wound engine whirled within the box, turning an armature. Mav snapped into a rigid posture for the briefest moment, then, as the infernal mechanism slowed and halted, relaxed with a sigh.

  “I’ll say this for our landlord, he generates the smoothest current this corner of the Kiiden.” He blinked and took up his inhaling tube from the table.

  “I wouldn’t know,” said I, “though it causes me to wonder whether you’ll eventually embalm your sensibilities with that pipe of yours, or coagulate them first.” I gave the box a little push with my finger.

  “You have neglected mentioning the fire hazard that the two, combined, amount to. Mymy, you are a fine, intelligent, attractive surmale and a capital paracauterist. But you are also a nag and the poorest of juicing companions. Nonetheless”—he reached into a pocket of his uniform—“it occurs to me that you might find enjoyable what promises to be a highly stimulating discussion this evening at the Imperial Museum of Natural Philosophy. An old and extremely respected friend is conducting the lecture.” He flourished a triad of tickets with the title boldly printed upon them:

  “THE ASCENT OF LAMVIINS”

  RECENT CONTINENTAL EVIDENCE

  Srafen Rotdu Rizmou, Prof.

  “And who,” I asked with perfect foreknowledge of the answer it would evoke, “will be completing our trine this evening?”

  “Why, Vyssu, of course. She has a commendable interest in all subjects pertaining to natural philosophy.”

  Particularly the most intimately biological ones, I thought. “Honestly, Mav, why can you not fraternize with persons more suitable to your…well, more representative of your own estate? This rubbing knees with hooligans of every—”

  “Because, my dear Mymy, with the delightful exception of your esteemed self, I find the upper classes of this city—indeed, of this entire Empire—the most excruciating collection of bores and simpletons imaginable. It pains me you will not regard Vyssu more charitably, for she, too, is a valued friend and an astute adviser. Tell me, though, will you come out with us this evening?”

  I hesitated. Mav had never before asked to see me socially, and his invitation seemed both flattering and full of promise—I mean to say that perhaps he was at last beginning to seek his own level in life. It passed my mind that I might be a better moral influence upon him than was the case with his accustomed companions.

  There was, however, the requirement of making myself publicly visible in company with this awful Vyssu creature—not that it would do my reputation any great damage. On the contrary, I am ashamed to say, she was recently quite the darling of the aristocracy. Perhaps they deceived themselves that her matchmaking among the upper classes did not have some baser equivalent for those of meaner stature and more casual moral persuasion, who were also her clientele. Possibly these noble patrons even knew and somehow found her all the more attractive an acquaintance. Perhaps, as was often rumored, they even found some use themselves for—But no, there are limits, after all, aren’t there?

  I began to answer my companion, when someone shouted at him from across the tavern and, swaggering or staggering (I am unsure which), approached us. Perhaps a bit of both. I knew him quite as well as Mav—in fact, as well as anyone would wish to, it being one of my more unfortunate official duties to Triarch and Public to deal with those of his sort—and this abrasive rudeness was quite consonant with whatever it was served him as character. The juicing box he held unsteadily before him had a well-used look for which, in justice, he could not be held entirely responsible. Yet to judge from his slurred and sleepy manner, it had seen recent and repeated application.

  “Ahoy there, Mav, ol’ cactus-hopper! How goesh it with th’ Bucketeerses t’day? An’ Mymy, too—in th’ saloon bar?—how charmin’ly radical of you!” He maneuvered closer despite my pointed appeals to Mav to ignore him.

  “Rewu Uomag Niitood,” responded the detective, “I’d know that intoxicated shuffle anywhere. Why aren’t you out making up lies for that journal that so generously supports your vices?”

  Niitood collided with the end of our table, braced his hands upon it and used one of his walking hands to seize an unoccupied cushion from the next booth. “M’dear Inveshtigator, I am preparin’ myself in th’ only ’propriate manner for an ordeal bebove and ayond th’ call of dutyhood. The Mathas Imperial Intelligencer hash ordained in its editorial wishdom that I musht cover a crackshell conf’rence thish very evening…” He waved the juicing box before our eyes. “I’ll charge thish off to reshearch!”

  He reached into one of the several apparatus-laden pouches draping his carapace and legs to extract a certificate identical to those that Mav had earlier shown me. “‘Ascensionism—Fraud or Hoax?’ Or, how does a senile ol’ sailor keep the money flowin’ from a gullibubble government?” He wobbled one inebriated eye in my direction: “Wanna go, cutie? I gotta press pass, too!”

  Somewhat hastily: “Mav, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to accompany you to Professor Srafen’s lecture—though I am expected at an informal musicale my family are holding for the Lord, Lady, and Lurry Kassafiin. I’m sure my father will forgive this obligation in the interests of bettering my education; I’ll neglect to mention the name of our third companion.”

  And Vyssu,” said Mav, an odd expression forming in his fur, “who has apologies of her own to tender for a previous engagement, will likely neglect to mention yours.” He turned his eye again toward Niitood, who had continued mumbling to himself, somewhat incoherently. “What was that you said?”

  “I said goddamp philosophical johnnies just can’t leave th’ world alone. Always pokin’, always tinkerin’. Always makin’ it a more dangerous an’ confusin’ place. If I had my way—hic!”

  Before my friend could frame a suitably acidic reply, the reporter gave a sort of bobble of his carapace, his walking legs collapsed from beneath him, and he settled, half upon his cushion and half upon the floor, in something mimicking the state of hann, brought on, no doubt, by the electrical current of which he had so freely imbibed. Mav lifted the juicer from his hands and set it on the table, repeating this undeservedly kind gesture with a box camera, which had fallen from an unfastened pouch into the floorsand.

  “Wretched fellow.” Mav examined some electrical attachment to the camera, connected where there should have been a trough and caplock for flash powder. “Small wonder the Empire’s in such a despicable condition, given the quality of its sources of information. I—Hallo, what have we here?”

  I, too, had been alarmed by the familiar racket emanating from across the street. All the bells and trumpets of the Precinct sounded loudly as the giant doors of the station rumbled open upon their massive hinges. I guessed there was a major conflagration somewhere in our district.

  “I must fly,” I told my companion, “for though I have just come off duty, it appears as if perhaps I shall be needed.” Outside, the first straining team hurled themselves into the street, drawing the new steam-driven pumping engine behind them, its steel-rimmed wheels thundering and sparking across the cobbles. Above the rearmost of them the steerslam clung to his tiller, narrowly avoiding catastrophe with every lamheight the vehicle moved down the narrow street.

  “Good-bye, then, O Paragon.” Mav crinkled his fur at me good-naturedly. “I’ll call at your door this evening in a conveyance appropriate to our rank.”

  “We will meet at the Museum,” said I, seizing my bag and hurrying to the door where others of my calling pushed and jostled. Like the six high-strung draft-watun, I found myself exhilarated and anxious to be gone. “My father will have fewer questions to ask that way, and I shall have fewer deceptive answers to give him.”

  II: The Ascent of Lamviin

  The inception of the Bucketeers is
shrouded by the dust storms of antiquity. Legend credits Neoned the Aggressor, discoverer of Foddu, with recruiting the first such body for protection of his beachhead encampment on the Gulf of Dybod. But then legend credits Neoned with much, including running the one-minute fymo and setting the moons in their races. More likely some successor, possibly his son Adetpo Zimyin, provided Mathas her first company of “sand-slingers.”

  They came to be sorely needed. Unlike the Continent, whose primordial stands of cactus our ancestors leveled long before the first bronze tools were cast, Foddu was an untouched desert paradise. Moreover, on the northern and western coasts, windward to the Arms of Pah, whose ramparts defend this blessed island from unwanted and ungodly moisture, there existed (as there exist today) trackless tangles of that peculiar organism whose trunks and limbs have proved even better suited to architectural intentions. Harvesting these wet-weather flora is a dangerously shell-softening occupation, more highly recompensed than common labor, and regarded as unfit employment even for the many convicted miscreants Their Majesties otherwise set to perilous or unsavory tasks.

  Thus, until more recently when improved marine conveyance rendered quarried stone a more practicable material, residential Mathas has been built largely of vegetable matter, and subject to terrible and repeated fires, some of weighty historical significance.

  Paracautery shares a similarly obscure but equally reasonable origin. How ironic it is that one of the more pronouncedly robust species in the world succumbs so rapidly once the carapace is breached! Although it takes considerable force to do so. Contrariwise an adult of any sex can lose an entire limb, enduring only the humiliating inconvenience of a few months’ regeneration, even suffer his jaws to be completely severed (a disgustingly barbaric practice among primitives in certain of the colonies), and, if proper curative measures are taken, little permanent damage will result. Yet once penetrated by an arrow or a bullet, the victim may be saved only by the most modern and heroic exercises, immediately applied.

  For octaries it was assumed that males must dominate here as they continue to in other callings. Yet at the insistence of Rher Imperial Highness Wiidytno, several years ago, a series of experiments determined the unquestionably superior native surgical abilities of surmales, who have subsequently secured the majority of such positions offered by the State. It remains, in my opinion, the shame, not only of the Bucketeers but of the entire government, that compensation in this branch of Service was immediately reduced by half.

  At the appointed hour, I was, by circumstance, nowhere remotely near the Imperial Museum. The fire had proved unusually severe, threatening the better part of several streets along the riverfront across from Pauper’s Island. As so large an area could not be given to the flames, especially so near the city’s principal railway station (in truth, had it not been for the suffering of thousands of working-class innocents, it might have been a benefit to dispose of these last remaining frame buildings this side of the river), an unusual and dangerous measure had been proposed.

  Between the roaring of the fire, the shouts and moans of people roundabout—victims, passers-by, and Bucketeers wrestling with equipment and terrified animals—and the noise of the engines lifting bucket after chain-linked bucket full of sand to drop into the blaze, I nearly missed this novel maneuver, attempting to revive a female well gone into perhaps her dozenth wretched pregnancy, my thirtieth or fortieth patient of the evening.

  The fur was burned away from two-thirds of her carapace where some errant blast of flame had withered it, blackening the naked chiton and blinding her in one eye. This would heal, and she was lucky not to have lost the sight of another.

  She’d be luckier still if I could stem her premature delivery. Her jaws were frozen wide and rigid in prepartum tetany; I was thankful for a series of unblushing lecturers at Royal College who’d insisted that we learn all the signs of even so delicate and personal a thing as this. I did for her what I could, supplying a relaxant, tincture of fedizeto, administered in atomized form to the nostrils, splinted up a leg where she had fractured it, and rose as she was lifted onto a waggon. Looking over the carapaces of the litter-bearers, I beheld one of the most terrifying spectacles I believe I shall ever have to witness.

  Department Chief Lydoraino Hottyn Niifysiir had authorized the movement of our sand pumps toward the edge of the river. There, whitepowder charges were dramatically employed to clear away the rotted planks and shoring of the docks (at no great loss to anyone, as the bulk of commercial traffic had long since been removed to the opposite shore across King’s Island). A squad of firelamn detached their breathing-hoses—so common an appliance that they have, with the sandbucket, become a symbol of our calling—from their nostrils, in order to disencumber themselves for what they were about to undertake. So thickly swathed in protective clothing they could scarcely stir a limb or see what they were doing, the nine gallant Bucketeers forced their balky teams to back the rearmost corners of the engines into the very water itself!

  The chain-driven scoops began to churn the evil-looking surface, lifting mud and vile liquid stories high above us. For once the sightseeing crowds evaporated without the urging of our peacekeepers, unwilling to chance that single random drop that might (in their ignorantly exaggerated belief) dissolve its way through hair and bone into their very brains. It is, in fact, the scientific truth that not only may we survive brief exposures to moisture—complete immersion under certain well-controlled circumstances (else sailing would be far too perilous even for those hardy souls who take it up)—but that some amounts of water are even necessary to sustain life! Fortunately these minuscule traces are present in our victuals and the air. I have tried to imagine taking liquid, say, as one might eat a morsel of food; the thought has never failed to sicken me.

  Nonetheless, not a single pelt among the hardened veterans all around wasn’t set in the attitude of grim determination overcoming instinctual terror. The river seethed and bubbled hideously, the engines hissed and clanked, dripping from their every seam and truss.

  Suddenly the first measures of wet filth fell from the uppermost mechanical extremity and into the flames. There was a great, nasty frying noise, and unimaginable volumes of steam began to rise and mingle with the smoke until I felt the heat diminish perceptibly where it had radiated upon my carapace even as far away as this aid station, a street removed.

  A mighty cheer resounded through the neighborhood, and bells were rung upon our waggons.

  Definitely the fire had been parted in twain. It is a fact that dampened wood and furnishings will not readily burn; our Bucketeers proceeded to divide the fire again and again until conventional methods sufficed to put it out. Fodduan ingenuity once again had triumphed, though there would be considerable cursing tonight among the recruits as they scrubbed the sodden fire equipment with clean dry sand to remove all evil smells and corrosion.

  My final charge had been carted off to Charitable Sanctuary, an institution which the Church maintained across the river in Commoner’s Bridge. I closed my bag wearily, looking forward to a pleasant sandy scrub myself, when I happened to glance at the railway clock a few blocks away. Why, I’d completely forgotten my evening’s engagement with—

  “Rather more exciting a spectacle than a museum lecture, I am compelled to agree!” Mav stood suddenly beside me, fur arranged ironically, his uniform exchanged now for dashing evening dress. “I took the liberty,” he told me as he lifted my bag into the hired carriage drawn before us, “of sending a messenger to your girl, who will be ready to assist you in dressing. Why in heaven’s desiccation will you not have a line put in? This is the twenty-sixth century, after all. Now we’ll have to hurry, just to be fashionably late!”

  I climbed into the cab to discover, with some pleasure, that we were quite alone. “Is Vyssu given to fashionable lateness as well, or is she stamping an impatient hand for us in front of the Museum?”

  “Neither, I’m afraid—as she was able to explain upon the telephone a while ag
o. She had a social obligation which she couldn’t break, after all: a musicale for the Lord, Lady, and Lurrie Kassafiin at your father’s house this evening.”

  By the time we arrived at the Museum, our driver was hard-pressed to convey us through an angry-sounding crowd of demonstrators who had gathered all around the ancient edifice. The streets were overflowing with lamviinity, and Mav, after several vain attempts on the part of our conductor to make a path for us, at last decided we should walk, despite the cablam’s earnest protestations of our safety.

  Through annoying oversight I had left my bag in the carriage while Mav waited outside my modest lodgings, staring at his watch upon its chain. I might, in perfect propriety, have asked him in, but I knew full well this would be transmitted to my mother immediately upon her weekly visit tomorrow afternoon. My maidservant occupied her position far less for my convenience than for my family’s regular edification. That she had a reliable weakness for places like the Bucket & Truncheon and was to be found on such premises more frequently than at her duties suited me perfectly. But it would avail me nothing in the instance of so recent an “indiscretion” as permitting Mav to see my rooms—she had, after all, to have something to report every nine days.

  Accordingly, rather than entrust my instruments (a cherished present from my surfather) to be returned to my apartments by a driver I did not know, I elected to carry them to the lecture, winning, on this rare occasion, an argument against Mav’s archaic insistence that he shoulder the burden. Given the long and arduous day behind me, perhaps I shouldn’t have tried to be quite so persuasive.

  The crowds made quite as much commotion as the earlier fire had. I found myself astonished that the object of their protest was the very lecture we were looking forward to. Of course, the subject of Ascensionism was controversial; but what was there about this esoteric topic to incite what promised soon (were it not for the doughty Bucketeers who formed an inner barrier around the place) to become a riot?