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Fuzzy Bones by William Tuning
This book is dedicated to ANUBIS, the guide from the first life to the second life. (Also the Egyptian god of embalming, but there’s no need to dwell on that.)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Being, myself, something of an utter fool about science— among other things, I ‘m told—I should like to publicly thank those persons who have given valuable technical advice and assistance, and those who have air-checked my head from time to time as I wrote this novel. They are, alphabetically:
James Patrick Baen, Chev. G.S.B. Csillaghegyi, K.S.J., Dr. Robert L. Forward, Randall Garrett, Frank Gasperik, Robert A. Heinlein, Sherry L. Pogorzelski, Stan Strong, and Antoinette Symons
FUZZY REDUX
PART ONE
Chapter One
“‘Tis a pity she’s a whore,’” the Marine said.
“Don’t bet your ass or your pension on it,” the priest said.
The two of them were perched at the bar of the first-class passengers’ lounge on the City of Asgard, outbound for Zarathustra. They sipped their drinks and chatted while the rest of the first-class passengers “ooohed” and “ahhhed” at the ever-changing panoramas of space that were presented in the observation screens around the edge of the lounge deck.
The Marine nodded toward the object of the conversation, a strawberry blonde named—correction—calling herself Christiana Stone. “That might be your first convert on Zarathustra,” he said.
The Marine was Master Gunnery Sergeant of Fleet Marines Philip Helton. The priest preferred to be called The Rev.
They had hit it off immediately. The Rev was dressed like a priest—collar and all—but thought like a Marine—one who had been able to take the time to absorb and appreciate some of the galaxy’s variety of culture.
You can take the boy out of the Marines. Helton had thought when he met him, but you can’t take the Marine out of the boy. Retired, perhaps. Officer, maybe. Tough, yes.
The Rev snorted derisively. “Do the old Magdalene caper? Not a chance.”
“Why not?” Helton said. “Souls are where you find ‘em.”
“Several reasons,” The Rev replied, as he chewed noisily on an ice cube from his drink. “First, it’s not my style. Round the souls up every spring, put The Brand on them, and drive them to market? That’s a mug’s game. Second; unnecessary. If that young thing is a prostie, then I’m the Archbishop of Nifflheim.”
“You sound pretty sure of yourself,” Helton said.
The Rev snorted again. “My lad, I daresay you’ve observed just about as many whores in your profession as I have in mine. What the lady says she is and what she is don’t have to come to the same thing.” He wagged his finger as Helton started to interrupt. “She may, however, intend to become one when we get to Zarathustra.”
“But you don’t think she’s a—ummmmmm— journeyman,” Helton said.
The Rev slapped his hand lightly on the bar and leaned forward slightly. “Of course not! “he said quietly. “Otherwise she would have been working the ship. Lots of lonely business types in the first-class. A young lady with her looks and just the slightest amount of enterprise could rack up quite a bundle during a six-month hypertrip.”
“That’s where you’ve missed,” Helton said with a chuckle. “You don’t have all the data to draw a conclusion.”
The Rev’s face took on an expression of mock menace. “Well, son, you get to be pretty damned observant in my trade.”
“And in my trade,” Helton said, “I travel quite a bit of the time by commercial carrier.”
“So?” The Rev was not impressed.
“So I happen to know the ship captain on this trip. His name is Hermann Kaltenbrunner and he makes the Orthodox-Monophysites look like a bunch of reckless hedonists. I was on the City of Malverton once—when the old boy was stalking his quarterdeck—and I saw him put a professional gambler out the airlock for starting up a card game on Sunday.”
“Great Ghu!” The Rev gasped. “He does sound to be just a trifle on the puritanical side. Uh—what happened to the rest of the players?”
“Nothing,” Helton said flatly. “They were not professional card-players. Oh, they got a sermon about evil-doing that would set fire to your underwear, but that was about it.”
“So someone tipped her off mighty quick,” The Rev said, “perhaps in hopes of receiving some—ahhhh—non-professional thanks.”
Helton smiled. “Oh, I don’t know. There are people who just have that old soft spot in them.”
“Hunh!” The Rev grumped. “I’d hate to have to hold my breath between meeting the first one and the next one.”
“Now that you’ve muffed your first great deduction,” Helton said, “what do you think her game is?”
The Rev shrugged and swigged from his drink. “She might be a spoiled rich kid who’s out to get even with Mommy and Daddy—come home from Zarathustra with a bundle of money and rub their noses in how it was earned. Or, she might have a decrepit old Mum back home on Terra, and this is the only way she can earn enough sols fast enough to let the old lady live out her last years in style and respectability.”
“Sadie Thompson, and all that,” Helton mused.
“Star-travel makes strange bedfellows,” The Rev said. He rapped his knuckles on the bar for two more drinks. “Who was that you were quoting a minute ago?”
“You mean, ‘Tis a pity…’?” Helton asked.
The Rev nodded.
“John Ford,” Helton said.
The Rev stroked his chin a moment. “John Ford the First Century screenplay director?”
Helton smiled. “John Ford the obscure Elizabethan dramatist; Fourth Century Pre-Atomic.”
The Rev’s eyebrows shot up. “Pretty exotic reading for a Gunnie.”
Helton looked at him levelly. “I get a lot of time for reading,” he said.
“So do I,” The Rev said, “so do I.”
Chapter Two
Helton smiled as he recalled the conversation, which took place only a few days out from Terra.
He stood, now, with his feet apart, his hands clasped behind his back, and rocked up and down on the balls of his feet. It was a habit of his which tended to cause nervousness in units and commands he was auditing; one of the principal assets in his trade was the ability to keep people just a little bit off balance.
At one point in his life he had owned a pair of boots which squeaked softly as he rocked on the balls of his feet. They had been among his most favored possessions, because with them he could, at will, cause others to be visibly disturbed in his presence.
There was no one to audit at the moment. There was not even another Terran human on the first-class lounge deck; only Philip Helton standing in front of the armor-glass observation screen, auditing the star-pinioned darkness of space beyond the vessel—and rocking slightly on the balls of his feet.
One of the moons of Zarathustra was slowly traversing the screen, but at this distance Helton couldn’t tell which one. It might be Xerxes, the site of his next assignment at the huge Navy base that occupied all of it; or it might be Darius, where Terra-Baldur-Marduk Spacelines maintained Zarathustra’s commercial port.
The City of Asgard would dock on Darius in about two hours—just in time to disrupt everyone’s lunch schedule.
Helton turned toward the small noise behind him.
“Good morning, Sergeant,” Christiana Stone said, as she walked across the carpeted deck toward him.
“I would think,” he said, “that after six months of travel in hyperspace, you might not find it improper to call me by my first name.”
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br /> The dim starlight from the observation screen reflected on her reddish-blond hair as she smiled good-naturedly. “I suppose so—Phil,” she replied. “I find it difficult to be informal with people, though. It’s a business habit.”
During the trip, Helton began to suspect The Rev was right; Christiana didn’t likely know much more about the oldest profession than one might learn in a steamy romance novel. But there was a big boom happening on Zarathustra, with fortunes to be made by all sorts of means; if Christiana said she was going there to clean up on the influx of population generated by the Pendarvis Decisions, Helton was willing to go along with it.
It made little difference to him, anyway. He was just as glad to be by himself as around others. He was used to operating alone. There were very few Master Gunnery Sergeants of Fleet Marines, so it was not the usual thing for him to settle in with his peer group at cocktail hour and talk shop. Maybe once every year or two he would run into another Master Gunnie. Mostly he just did his job, auditing weapons systems, gunnery performance, and readiness levels. Most often he traveled by civilian transportation to avoid excessively widespread knowledge of his destination and wasn’t much obliged to answer to anyone below the rank of Fleet Admiral or Force-General.
“Is our fellow passenger about, this morning?” Christiana asked.
“I didn’t see him at breakfast,” Helton replied, “but then I never see him at breakfast.” He looked at the readout on the wall. “Nearly ten hundred, galactic standard, though. The bar will open in a few minutes and that should fetch him out.”
I rarely see you at breakfast, either, he thought, but I suppose you’re in the habit of sleeping late in the morning.
Chapter Three
At the first rattle of ice into the bin as the barman began to open up, the third passenger appeared in the companion way as though answering a mysterious call to nature. He was sporting a Zarathustran sunstone in the neckcloth below his clerical collar. At the start of the trip he had introduced himself—rather grandiloquently—as “The Right Reverend Father Thomas Aquinas Gordon,” but allowed as how he would answer just as readily to “Rev,” “Tom.” “Father G,” or “Thursday.”
“Thursday?” Christiana had said, falling for it.
“I certainly am!” The Rev boomed. “Let’s have a drink!”
“Good morning, children,” The Rev said, without breaking stride as he headed for his favorite barstool. He clapped his hands together and rubbed the palms against each other vigorously. “Sustenance, Harry,” he said to the barman, “sustenance.”
Phil Helton was a bit youngish—early forties—to be a Master Gunnery Sergeant, but he didn’t think of himself as “children” in any sense of the word. To The Rev, though, maybe I am, he thought. But, then, when he talks about “gathering his flock” on Zarathustra, I don’t reckon he means herding sheep, either.
The Rev himself was some indeterminate age which could fall anywhere between thirty and sixty, even allowing for a good deal of hyperspace travel. His hair was gray at the temples, but thick and healthy. He was a little on the fat side, but had the fast, light-footed movements of a young man. There were wrinkles around his eyes but the eyes themselves were an alert and piercing dark blue.
He took a respectful swig of his first drink and shuddered violently for several seconds. “Ahhhhhhhh,” he said. “Like blood to a vampire.”
While The Rev swapped pleasantries with the barman— and gambled him out of the next two drinks playing Double-O—Helton and Christiana drifted around the rim of the lounge toward the bar, drinking in the different views in the observation screens.
Helton had been on Zarathustra before, but not recently, so his replies to Christiana’s barrage of questions about the planet were less than informative. Everything would be changed by the current land rush, in any case.
The two of them had drifted over to The Rev’s roost at the bar.
“Only a couple more hours,” Helton said, nodding toward the image of the Zarathustran moon. “Then the last leg down to Mallorysport for you and the shuttle to Xerxes for me. What’s the name of the place where you’ll be setting up your mission, Rev? I may get down and see you.”
The Rev shrugged. “I don’t know what it’s called or where it is. But I know Mallorysport is the largest city on the planet—seventy-five thousand or so. Might be double or triple that by now, with all this immigration. So there’s bound to be a slum section for me to work in—some place that’s crying for a soup kitchen and medical mission.”
“A slum? “Christiana said. “Already? Zarathustra’s only been settled for a little more than twenty-five years.”
“Oh, it’s there, all right,” The Rev said, tapping his index finger alongside his nose as though he could smell the place already. “Wherever Terrans go, vice and squalor are in hot pursuit and soon pitch camp with the rest of the pilgrims.”
Chapter Four
He was right, of course. The slum of Mallorysport had the name Junktown and in it teemed the throngs of the unwashed and the unfortunate—losers, thieves, gamblers, cut-throats, prostitutes, dope-runners, racketeers, hoodlums, the impoverished, and the eternally down-on-their-luck.
Though there were only the three in the first-class lounge, the economy-class decks of the City of Asgard were crammed with a fresh crop of immigrants to be deposited in Mallorysport. As soon as the word of the Pendarvis Decisions reached Terra, colonists had stampeded toward Zarathustra. A Class-IV, inhabited, planet. No more Company monopoly. Free land. A chance to make your fortune. A chance to get away from Terra—where no one ever had enough room.
When they discovered that it might take longer than a couple of standard galactic days to become deliriously rich, their grubstakes would start running out.
The people who scraped together every sol they could lay hands on to migrate to a colony world weren’t just worthless bums, though; they all had skills, knowledge, and abilities that were needed. The Chartered Zarathustra Company had carved out the modern city of Mallorysport with such people and with the intelligent management of their talents.
Sixteen years earlier, Mallorysport had been a cluster of log and prefab huts beside an improvised landing field. The town had not grown up out of the ground like a tree. People had built it. And, it was built, for the most part, by people like those who were now crowded into the lower decks of the City of Asgard—people who were betting every last centisol they had that they could make a go of it on a new world.
Some, though, would wind up in Junktown when they found the streets of Mallorysport were not actually paved with sunstones.
The Rev ran his finger around his throat, between the cleric’s collar and his neck. The warmth of his hand, brushing across the sunstone in his neckcloth, caused the gem to flare brighter, which cast a glossy light against the ring on his right little finger.
“You figure there are a lot of souls to save in Mallorysport, then?” Helton said conversationally.
The Rev pulled his finger out from under his collar with a disdainful gesture. “I told you I don’t save souls,” he said. “Leave that for the Orthodox-Monophysites. I just help God look out for people who can’t look out for themselves— temporarily or permanently. Theology has to pay its own freight; I don’t preach.”
“What about the souls of the Furries?” Christiana put in. “Don’t—”
“Fuzzies,” Helton interrupted irritably. “You mean Fuzzies.”
“Sure,” she said. “Fuzzies. What about the souls of the Fuzzies. Don’t they need saving?”
“Don’t know,” The Rev said. “Their souls may be in better shape than ours are. On the other hand they might not be what people think they are, these Fuzzies. I make up my mind about such things when I’ve seen for myself.”
“Sounds odd coming from a priest,” Christiana said.
“So it might,” The Rev agreed, “so it might. I don’t worry too much about this intellectual stuff. We have priests in my order who sit around with comput
ers and try to mathematically calculate the ages of the prophets and the angels. That’s swell for them; I just go to where there are people who are hurting and try to put something in their bellies and keep them from catching the polka-dot plague.”
She smiled. “Is that why they sent you to such a helluva—such a Nifflheim of a place? According to my packet, there isn’t a religious congregation on Zarathustra.”
The Rev took a long, noisy suck at his drink, then smacked his lips. “Don’t be particular about cussing around me, daughter,” he said. “I don’t give a damn one way or the other.”
He paused, staring at the observation screen. “If my superior had his way—or wanted to spend that much more money—I suppose he would have sent me even further into the celestial boondocks. Someplace like the Gartner Trisystem. I hear that’s real rough-and-ready country since crazy old Genji Gartner died at Storisende. Everyone’s been wearing out holsters to see who’s going to control Poictesme.”
“But don’t they have a chartered company there?” Christiana asked, “With a Resident General and Federation troops?”
The Rev laughed mirthlessly. “Of course, sweetheart,” he said, “and all the settled planets in the trisystem are Federation members. So what?”
She wasn’t so sure of what she meant, now. “Well, if they have a colonial government, how can law and order break down that way—just over the death of one man?—even if he did establish the first settlement on the planet.”
“Systematically,” The Rev said—genuinely amused, now. “Systematically. You know how long it takes just to get some heavy Federation troops out here?”
Helton frowned for a moment, being logical. “Out there—not less than a year’s turnaround time.”
“Right,” The Rev said. “Six months going and six more coming back. If you squawk for troops out here, it takes at least a year to get any—if you get any. The Federation may decide the request is unwarranted and just send back a message that says ‘Sorry.’”
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