Mac raised both eyebrows.
“He was,” the captain-mother replied to the gesture, “trafficking—although we hesitate to believe it was at the behest of his government, as uncivilized as they have demonstrated themselves to be at times—trafficking with the…the…”
“The natives?” Pemot had all three eyebrows raised, although the captain-mother couldn’t see the one in back.
“Indeed”—her tone was indignant—“in an effort to enlist them in an unwholesome alliance against us.”
“How innovative of him.” Pemot’s tone was neutral.
“The very word for it.” Captain-Mother b’Tehla nodded, puckering with distaste. “Although we are certainly glad you have had a word such as that in your mouth instead of us!”
They spoke a while longer about j’Kaimreks.
Meanwhile, Mac had discovered something else. Thanks to the several cups of tea he’d had since dawn, one of his physical requirements had exceeded the capacity of his smartsuit, which, owing to its age and state of repair, had been limited to begin with. Something he couldn’t quite define about the current social circumstances made him embarrassed to ask about the Compassionate’s sanitary facilities, and he decided to try waiting for a later opportunity.
If he could.
“And so,” Pemot explained to their hostess when they’d finished discussing the Securitasians, “we drastically require transportation to Geislinger so that we may be in time to rejoin the interstellar fleet. Is it possible to persuade you, Madam Captain-Mother, to help us or to find someone who can help us?”
“Dearie me.”
The captain-mother’s wicker chair squeaked as she rocked it back and forth. “We’re afraid this does present us with an insurmountable difficulty, for you see, we represent not only Her Kindness alone, but Her Kindness’ Government-in-Exile, and for this reason cannot venture anywhere near the poles, doctor.”
The lamviin blinked. “Well, I suppose we can make alternative arrangements if we must. We’d planned walking in any case.”
He changed the subject with such haste that even Mac, in his current state, noticed it. “Please advise me, Captain-Mother—and I confess I wondered about this with regard to the Securitasian captain, as well—why do you all continue employing the expression ‘government-in-exile’? Surely the Galactic Confederacy’s never threatened to interfere with the nonaggressive activities of your respective polities. They’re chiefly interested in trade and exploration.”
Mac also noticed the way Pemot had distanced himself from the Confederacy. The ploy—if ploy it was—seemed to work, as Captain-Mother b’Tehla’s answer indicated.
“Perhaps they do not interfere as a collective entity,” she argued, “but they certainly do as individuals, whose irresponsible ideas and actions we are helpless to defend ourselves and our comparatively fragile cultures against. As a consequence, even our own young people have begun to ignore us—and with an impunity against sanctions, which the Confederacy has extended to them. This is not the proper manner in which to run a society, and it is the reason we stay out here, upon the Sea of Leaves, where young people can be brought up properly, without distractions, and with some notion of social responsibility.”
She went on to tell them about a great fleet which had, since what she termed the “invasion,” become a mobile nation, patrolling the Sea of Leaves, converging only in prearranged places at prearranged intervals. Possessing the most limited means of telecommunication—which they regarded as a dangerous liability in any case—the Antimacassarites nevertheless had an accurate idea of the technological capabilities of orbiting spacecraft, and took pains to mask these gatherings from infrared and other kinds of detection.
As the captain-mother explained them to the fascinated xenopraxeologist, their own navigational skills were impressive, considering the primitive implements they used, and they could communicate with other vessels using flag signals, messages sometimes being relayed in this fashion a quarter of the way around the planet.
Mac’s discomfort was increasing, and, at the same time, he was becoming annoyed with his companion. This old lady was just like his grandfather, whose sweetness and sunlight could transform themselves into poison and thunderclouds at any moment, in particular when his authority over his grandson was challenged.
Why couldn’t Pemot see that?
“Okay then, ma’am, since we have business of our own and no intention of subverting anybody, why don’t you just let us off this machine so we can be on our way? It’ll get us out of contact with your precious young people that much sooner.”
The captain-mother shook her head. “Dearie me. We could never accept the responsibility for so reckless a course. It is dangerous enough upon the Sea of Leaves for the fully armed and mechanized contingent we have here in the Compassionate, let alone a pair of relatively helpless strangers to our harsh environment such as yourselves. Why, for the sake of your own safety if for no other, we must insist you stay with us.”
“Besides”—Mac stood—“your superiors might want to squeeze information out of us?”
“MacBear!”
“Sorry, Pemot, but, as far as this old lady’s stock in trade is concerned, you seem to be buying out the store. I’m not. Underneath all the smiles and endearments, she isn’t any different from Captain j’Kaimreks. Can’t you see that?”
An embarrassed silence descended. The boy didn’t dare explain to the lamviin—who, no doubt, was already beginning to think his companion was turning into a paranoid lunatic—that he also suspected the ready availability of the tea and the lack of bathroom facilities, might be another gentle, hidden persuader.
Pemot didn’t answer.
“She’d keep us here,” Mac added, “using anything, including initiated force, if we weren’t armed.”
“Well, young man,” the captain-mother answered, “as much as we deplore reinforcing your suspicions of us, it may well come to that, although we would much prefer you thought of it in a different light. You are our guests—and gracious guests certainly do not carry lethal weapons into the homes of their hosts.”
Mac felt something cold and hard touch the back of his neck like a steel finger. He turned toward the open window overlooking the command deck and discovered he was staring into the age-stained and pitted muzzle of Leftenant Commander MacRame’s stubby pistol barrel. At the end of the spiral of rifling, deep inside the chamber, he could even see a large-caliber, hollow-pointed bullet.
He turned back to the captain-mother. “You’re really going to be sorry now. Don’t you realize the Tom Edison Maru—”
“Dearie me,” the captain-mother repeated for the dozenth time, “young man, you don’t seem to realize your precious starship left off orbiting this planet twenty-four hours ago, and constitutes no threat to us. We keep track of these things, you know. So, despite your ungracious and ungrateful behavior, we believe you will surrender those weapons and remain here as our guests.”
Pemot’s voice was even. “In that case, Captain-Mother b’Tehla, since you’re so fond of having guests, perhaps you wouldn’t mind having a few more. Perhaps a few thousand more.”
“Might we be so bold as to inquire,” inquired the old lady, “what you are referring to?”
“By all means you may ask. But before you do, permit me to answer with a demonstration—”
The Sodde Lydfan leaned forward on his stool toward the open window, pressed two fingers to each of the nostrils beside his upraised major limb, and whistled! The glass panes shattered. Both tea mugs on the captain-mother’s table went tink! as their glazing crazed, although they managed to stay in one piece.
In answer, a blurred projectile whisked up past the astonished leftenant commander through the window and thunked, quivering, into the raftered ceiling.
“Consider this a message, Captain-Mother, terse in content but certainly to the point, from our taflak friend Middle C. He and his friends, in fact his own tribe as well as the assembled warriors
of several neighboring villages—whose territory you’re violating—would greatly appreciate seeing us, alive, uninjured, and uninhibited, back down on the surface immediately.”
“Or else,” Mac added.
“Quite so,” echoed Pemot. “Or else.”
No other warriors, of course, existed. This had been one of the strategies worked out with the Majestan native before leaving him for the Intimidator. For a while, Mac had wondered—and worried—whether Pemot would remember it.
Captain-Mother b’Tehla’s reaction was well worth waiting for. She thought of something to say, opened her mouth, closed it, thought of something else, opened her mouth, and closed it again. In the end, she seemed to find her voice.
“Snake-eye lovers! Ugh! Goldberry, take them anywhere they please but get them out of my sight!”
In ten minutes they found themselves afoot again and almost alone on the Sea of Leaves.
The Compassionate had turned and was speeding away at its full seven miles per hour.
Meanwhile, not five hundred yards away, a patch of moss, just beginning to turn brown with death, stirred and trembled as whatever lay beneath it raised itself upward a few inches, all the better to watch the two off-planet travelers.
Chapter XVIII: Is It Safe?
Dalmeon Geanar was disgusted.
He reached up to a small, softly-illuminated panel just above his vehicle’s broad, curving windshield, which even at this inhuman temperature was threatening to fog up, and turned the air conditioner knob the few remaining degrees to its last stop, trying to wring another drop of moisture out of the hot, soggy air. If the open atmosphere of Majesty was intolerable, here, just inches beneath the insulating surface of the leaves, it was a thousand times worse.
Something moist and pallid—the diameter of Geanar’s wrist and with altogether too many legs for his peace of mind—slithered along the side window, leaving behind a slimy track and sending chills up the man’s already sweaty spine.
The brand-new smartsuit he’d just purchased aboard the Tom Edison Maru didn’t seem to be doing its job at all—not that he had much familiarity with such things—another failure of technology to provide properly for mankind’s needs. It was, he imagined, rather like wearing an Eskimo parka in the Congo basin. Or perhaps what his eyes saw around him overrode what his body felt.
Odd, he reflected, how from the first he’d hated this planet, how it had almost seemed to hate him as well. Back aboard the Tom Edison Maru, he’d filled his apartment with plants of every kind, organisms which he’d always seemed to get along with and understand much better than he ever had human beings.
They were the only things in his life which he now regretted having left behind.
Make no mistake about that, though, he thought. He’d left them and everything else, including each of the many failures and humiliations Confederate civilization had imposed upon him, behind. When this miserable, sorry fiasco was over with at last, he was going to find himself some nice, neat, orderly, predictable, terraformed garden planetoid, spend the rest of his natural life in reasonably luxurious contemplation, perhaps even write a book or two of his own as a guide for his fellow men, setting forth the way they ought to live—and never set foot aboard one of those accursed starships ever again.
Behind him in the back seat of the hovercraft, still in its shipping crate, was that artifact of cold, inhuman, and impersonal technology, which with gratifying irony, was going to make all of this possible, make all of his dreams come true. Perhaps, in time, it would allow him to change the revolting state in which all men were forced to live, and they’d come to follow the example he’d set. It was probably immodest to believe this might come to pass within his own lifetime. It would be enough if, after he’d departed from this unreal world, his wisdom lived after him through its recognition by others.
If mankind had been meant to flit promiscuously about the universe in this life, polluting with his presence the untrammeled purity of the stars and of interstellar space, he wouldn’t have required machines to do it with, and Frater Jimmy-Earl would have been inspired to mention it in his writings. The heavens must be reserved for beings who existed on a higher plane than mere mundane reality.
Geanar reached for a box of tissues to wipe his face and discovered he’d used the last one.
He’d traveled to this place, out in the middle of nowhere on a dismal, moldy planet which, in itself, was nowhere made manifest, at the behest of an uncivil voice on his radio receiver that claimed to represent interests he wanted to do business with—individuals he’d never encountered face-to-face, who refused to meet him in the discreet comfort of Watner or even in Geislinger or Talisman as he’d desired—only to be confronted with half a dozen shocks all at once, any one of which could have spoiled his entire week all by itself.
In this damp heat, he thought, it was a wonder he hadn’t had a coronary or a stroke.
The first shock had been that long, crude, snaky, muscle-powered machine, the Securitasian crankapillar. In the beginning, when from his hiding place just below the surface of the vegetation he’d watched it approaching the appointed place at the appointed time, he’d believed, despite its primitive construction, that it had been sent by the Hooded Seven. He still couldn’t bring himself to believe its appearance was a coincidence, and wondered what it meant.
Still believing the Intimidator (which he didn’t know by name) represented an opportunity he’d dreamed about and wished for all his life, which he’d planned with painstaking care and worked arduously toward for years, he’d watched in open-mouthed horror as the crankapillar picked up a pair of interloping, smartsuited strangers—one human, one alien—who’d subsequently murdered the machine’s uniformed commander in a fiery blast of pistol shots and, threatening more of the same, driven off all of the underlings.
There ought to be, he thought, some way of keeping individuals from owning and carrying weapons.
The much larger Compassionate had come along and finished the job, its troops reducing the primitive moss machine to nothing more than ashes, smoke, and twinkling coals.
Some of Geanar’s initial shock had worn off. Obviously the smartsuited interlopers had been, like himself, agents of the Hooded Seven, settling some dispute of which he, Geanar, wasn’t a party—or simply disposing of unwelcome company.
He’d hoped it was the latter, admiring the ruthlessness of moral character which it implied. If this failed to be entirely consistent with the visceral horror he’d experienced watching the death of the Securitasian captain, Geanar didn’t notice; at the most fundamental level he agreed with whoever had claimed that a foolish regard for consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
The screwmaran was more sophisticated in design and faster, just the sort of thing he’d have expected of his potential business partners, and he felt foolish, having mistaken a crude thing like the crankapillar for the machine he was anticipating.
Thus, with excruciating patience, he’d waited hour after hour for those aboard the Compassionate to contact him. He’d resisted, although it had been difficult, the urge to adjust and readjust the simple, homebuilt radio transceiver lying on the passenger seat of the hovercraft he’d rented and modified for this trip. Instead, trying to fill the time, he’d prepared a modest, strictly vegetarian meal using the contents of a small paratronic freezer and the compact microwave oven built into the passenger seat dashboard.
Afterward, he’d read once again from his well-tattered, favorite volume, The Confession of Frater Jimmy-Earl, the unaffected testament of a humble leguminist who, through his loving labors in the vegetable kingdom, had discovered the great truth of mankind’s proper place in the universal scheme of things. Suppressed by unenlightened forces who couldn’t make money on it, the book was rare. Geanar’s was the only copy he’d ever seen, stumbled upon by accident one lucky afternoon in his youth. Yet he’d not profane its wisdom by having it encoded for his implant. Never mind that concentration on the yellowed pages had beco
me a trifle difficult. He knew them all by heart, in any case.
If the hours hadn’t flown by, at least they’d passed. All in all, Geanar felt he’d been patient, and expected to be rewarded for it. When contact hadn’t been immediately forthcoming, still he’d waited. This was the place, all his navigational instruments indicated so, and the word he’d gotten had been that the rendezvous might occur at any time within a twenty-three hour period which comprised day and a night on this misbegotten excuse for a planet.
The worst shock of all, however, had come when Geanar saw the smartsuited interlopers being put off the screwmaran and left behind—only to be met a short while later by one of the sickening vermin who, although they consisted of little more than tentacles and eyeballs, were nevertheless rumored to be the intelligent natives of this world. He’d gotten a clear enough look at them—adjusting the windshield for maximum light amplification and magnification—as they’d climbed down the flexible ladder at the aft end of the Compassionate.
Incredible!
It was bad enough that one of them—another of those disgusting clumps of soulless hair and leather being treated these days by bleeding-hearted fools as the full equals of human beings—was that pseudo-scientific meddler who’d been eavesdropping on his electromagnetic conversations with the Hooded Seven. When the Voice of the Seven had warned him about that, he’d been a fool himself to hire those simian morons in Watner, instead of doing something about it himself.
He wondered what had ever become of them.
What was truly awful, almost beyond belief, was that the other interloper, co-conspirator with the hideous lamviin and revolting taflak, had been human.
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