The Far Side of The Stars

by David Drake

  "Come, Georgi," the Klimovna said, leading her husband into the back before he could decide to protest. The Count was a generally pleasant companion, but his tipsy fall into the muck had made him ridiculous in his own eyes . . . and, he correctly suspected, in the eyes of his wife and the spacers as well. He was in a foul mood.

  Tovera smiled her cobra smile as she and Adele got in, squeezing themselves to opposite sides of the middle bench so that Daniel could sit between them. Tovera, like Hogg and Daniel himself, carried a sub-machine gun from the corvette's arms locker. It was a good weapon for dense forest. In addition she had her own smaller weapon in a holster under her left shoulder.

  The Captain was still singing, but the words were so slurred that Daniel wasn't sure whether they were meant to be Universal. Barnes brought the drive fans up to 90% power, angling them against one another so that the aircar hopped and quivered like a hound straining at its leash.

  "If you're ready, Barnes," Daniel said, "then take us along the plotted course at just above the treetops—and no faster than you have to, either."

  Barnes synched the fans and poured on the coal. He'd chosen too steep an angle for the present load: the car leaped upward at 30 degrees for a few seconds, then mushed and would've crashed into the slough if Barnes hadn't slammed his yoke forward to drop the nose. They picked up speed in a swoop that he converted into a climbing turn just before they plunged into the forest. The car zoomed over the trees and kept rising till Barnes tilted the yoke at five hundred feet—overcorrecting again but this time with enough height that the maneuver wasn't immediately dangerous.

  The Count and Countess were shouting in terror. Daniel wasn't especially worried, though now that he thought about it he understood why the Klimovs would be. He supposed he'd gotten so used to Barnes' driving that it didn't bother him any more than walking along a spar in the Matrix did.

  The native in the front seat sat upright and stared in all directions, his eyes seeming twice the size they'd been when he closed them on the ground. "I'm dead!" he screamed. Daniel put a hand on the fellow's shoulders, but he stayed firm in his seat. "I'm dead! I'm in Hell!"

  The aircar pulled out of its dive twenty feet above the treetops, then started to climb again. "Barnes, slow down!" Daniel said. "We're there, just bring us down by the tree with the orange foliage over there to the right!"

  He wasn't actually sure that was the right place, but he knew he'd better give Barnes a specific target or the good lord knew where they'd end up. The car banked and came around in a tight starboard turn, losing altitude more rapidly than it slowed. At what seemed to Daniel to be the last possible instant, they slid between the tops of two emergent trees and dropped to the height of the undergrowth where they hovered, barely crawling forward. Ahead of them was a battered metal cylinder covered with vines, tree roots, and generations of composted leaf litter.

  Barnes landed softly. He's a better driver than I realized, Daniel thought.

  Barnes turned and beamed at him. "How about that, sir?" he said cheerfully. "I thought we were going to auger right in, but what d'ye know, she leveled out after all!"

  And then again, maybe Hogg should drive the car back. . . .

  They got out of the aircar gratefully, stepping onto black leaf-mold from which fungus sprouted in a score of different shapes and colors. Daniel found a prism of rock just beneath the surface and slid his boot to the side before putting weight on it. Valentina, not a woodsman, wasn't so careful. She shouted as her ankle twisted. She'd have tumbled forward if her husband hadn't caught her.

  "Careful, dear one," the Count said as he set her upright. He was smiling for the first time since he plunged into the slough. "The footing here is tricky."

  The wrecked starship was belly-up or nearly so. Thinking aloud for his companions' sake, Daniel said, "It wasn't moving very fast when it went over, so they probably didn't crash while landing. Now, I wonder if . . ."

  He strode purposefully toward the vessel, oblivious of the others and confident he was safe in ignoring everything but his personal question. Hogg was watching the forward arc about them while Tovera took the rear, a division of concern they'd made without discussion so far as Daniel could tell. The two worked well together.

  He extended the wire butt of his sub-machine gun and used it to scrape litter away from the ship's steel hull. "Yes!" he cried, pleased to have support for his surmise.

  "You've found Tsetzes' yacht?" Valentina called eagerly.

  Her husband in almost the same breath said, "How do we get in? Good God, if the regalia's still aboard her, think of it!"

  "Excuse me, your excellencies!" Daniel said hastily as he straightened. "I was unclear, I'm afraid. This isn't the Nicator. It's a typical country craft, the sort of trader-cum-raider we saw in San Juan and all over the Commonwealth. But judging from the height of the trees that've grown around it—"

  Which could only be an estimate, based on what Daniel knew of similar trees on similar planets.

  "—I'd say that the wreck is of roughly the same period as when John Tsetzes might have arrived on Morzanga. And the wreck was destroyed—"

  He tapped the hull's smeared bands of rainbow discoloration.

  "—by plasma bolts at short range. It's possible that two pirates fell out with one another, of course; but it's also possible that John Tsetzes forestalled what he suspected was an attempt at piracy by destroying a strange vessel as soon as it arrived. He was, I gather from his history, a man who might have made that sort of decision?"

  "He was a butcher," said the Count. His tone was more approving than not. "A bloody-handed butcher."

  The native stepped forward purposefully and stabbed his long spear into the leaf litter. He brought it up with something the length of his finger wriggling on the point. Before Daniel got a good look—it was multi-legged but seemed to have a soft body—the fellow lifted his head and dropped the creature down his throat without chewing. If you were going to eat the thing, swallowing it whole in that fashion was probably the better course. . . .

  "Captain?" Valentina said to him. As she spoke, she walked toward where a vine bearing hard-shelled fruit crawled along hull-plates whose seams had ruptured. "How long has the ship been here? Do your people have year records?"

  "Missy, not there!" the native warned in sudden alarm. He thrust his spear before her in bar. "The firebugs will gnaw your bones!"

  "What?" Valentina said. She stopped and turned to the native, but she was still within a foot of the dangling fruit.

  Daniel, guessing the problem without knowing the specifics of it, touched Valentina's forearm and moved her back more by guidance than force. "See the little holes in the rind of those orange gourds?" he said. "I think the chief means that there are insects, insectoids, living there that defend the fruit."

  The Captain nodded approvingly at Daniel. He tapped the vine with his spear-point, then stepped back quickly. From three holes in the nearest gourd spilled insects so tiny they looked like a seepage of liquid. Individually they had black shells with a line of red.

  "Firebugs!" the fellow said. "They guard the money plants. Maybe tomorrow I smoke them out to get the money seeds, but today we must bury the old Lieutenant."

  He looked shrewdly at Daniel and added, "Perhaps you fly me here again quick-quick in your flying boat?"

  "Perhaps," Daniel temporized. "But answer the Countess' question: how long ago did this ship crash?"

  The Captain shrugged. "Long long time," he said. "My mother's father's father came on this."

  "So the crew survived?" said the Klimovna. "Do you have artifacts from the ship?"

  "Some live, some die," said the Captain with another shrug. "Now all dead."

  He looked at the wreck with a spark of interest which quickly faded. "Once our village was rich from this," he said, "but that was long long past. There's nothing left to take, not for long long time."

  Klimov frowned. "Perhaps there's a locked compartment these natives couldn't get into? he
said to Daniel. "One that might hold the Earth Diamond?"

  "If a number of the crew survived, they'd have been able to open any compartments—by force with tools from the vessel if no other way," Daniel said. "And this wasn't John Tsetzes' ship, your excellency."

  "Yes, yes, of course," Klimov said, sinking into himself again. "Damn it, so close and nothing!"

  Perhaps close, thought Daniel. But in his heart he was just as disappointed as the Count.

  "You take me back," the Captain said. "We bury the old Lieutenant today. There be much food, much drink."

  He smacked his lips; for further emphasis he slapped his belly with his free hand. His palm and spread fingers cracked like pistol shots.

  "Yes, we'll take you back," said the Klimovna with a look of calculation. "And we'll supply you with a tub of slash if you let us—let me, at least—record the funeral celebration."

  Daniel's protest didn't make it to his tongue. He thought it was a bloody poor idea to get the villagers drunk and sit in the middle of them, but Valentina already knew what her employee thought. She was going to do as she pleased anyway.

  Well, Daniel had obeyed orders before that he disagreed with. That was how a chain of command worked.

  "Yes, missy!" the Captain said. He laughed heartily, then added, "Poor bastard Lieutenant, he miss all this slash by one day only! He chew rocks when we put him in the ground!"

  "Right!" Daniel said. "We'll get back then, shall we?"

  Speaking from his side, Adele said, "I've radioed ahead, in case Mr. Pasternak needs to run more liquor. Fortunately, slash doesn't seem to require aging."

  "And I," said the Klimovna, "will fly us back. You will not argue."

  Daniel bowed to her. "I wouldn't think of arguing, your excellency," he said. "It's a fine idea."

  "Yes," said Adele. "A lifesaver, I would put it."

  * * *

  Adele, walking alongside the aircar with Daniel, hadn't thought much about what the funeral feast would entail. She was shocked to see the dead man tied to the base of a tree in a seated position, his legs splayed out in front of him. His scrawny body was stark naked, but he'd been painted orange, blue, and yellow. If there was a pattern, it was too subtle for Adele to recognize it.

  His arms were curled around the bushel-sized pile of strung beads resting on his lap. Beside the corpse, one hand toying with the beads, stood a younger man with similar facial features. His chest was splotched orange, blue and yellow also, but he wore a feather breechclout like other adult natives; children under the age of ten went naked.

  The whole village was assembled, close to two hundred people above the age of nursing infants. They had neither plates nor utensils, but each held a polished wooden drinking bowl.

  On reed mats stretching from where the dead man sat were baskets of fruit, trays of broiled fish, and wooden tubs cut from sections of large tree-trunks. Some of the tubs held porridge, but most of them were filled with pale yellow fluid on which floated chewed bits of vegetable matter. Adele assumed it was alcoholic, but she couldn't imagine circumstances in which she would taste it herself.

  Valentina drove the aircar slowly into the clearing with twenty heavily-armed spacers walking alongside. The Count sat beside his wife; Woetjans and the native Captain had the rearmost pair of seats. Mr. Pasternak's technicians had removed the middle bench and put in its place a 50-gallon tank, previously part of the water purification system.

  The Sissies pushed back the crowding natives until the car could halt beside the corpse as the Captain had directed. As soon as the vehicle stopped, eight crewmen began filling gallon buckets from the tap in the big tank while the others remained on guard.

  Adele felt prickly, prepared for serious trouble but not seeing any way to prevent it. She clasped her hands in front of her. She'd have been less nervous if she could've taken out her data unit, but that would've been silly.

  Daniel, walking beside her, looked cheerfully at ease. He wore a pistol in a full-flap holster, but Adele didn't recall ever having seen her friend use a gun. He had a baton of structural plastic as long as his forearm, however. Given the strength of Daniel's wrists and shoulders, it would lay out anyone as quickly as a shot from his service pistol.

  Daniel eyed the beads in the dead man's lap. "Look, Adele!" he whispered. "They're seeds, little hard seeds. They must come from gourds like those near the wreck. Of course! The seeds are valuable because the insects, the firebugs, make them difficult to gather!"

  Adele looked carefully at the strings because they were of interest to her friend, though she didn't share Daniel's enthusiasm for natural history. The individual seeds were about the size of her little fingernail and flat, running ten or a dozen to the inch the way they were strung. She frowned: there must be many thousands of seeds in the pile. Cleaning and drilling each one would've taken time, quite apart from the risk of being attacked by the insects.

  The Captain rose to his feet in the back of the aircar. "My people!" he shouted. "My great friends from the sky have brought me slash! I will share it with you out of the goodness of my heart!"

  When the aircar stopped, the villagers had been seated to either side of the long mat; the elders—the officers—and their families were on the end close to the dead man. The crowd gave a great bawl of sound and surged upright, about to rush the aircar like a tidal wave pouring over the shore.

  "Hogg!" Daniel said.

  Hogg fired his stocked impeller into the treetop, blowing a thigh-thick limb off in a shower of matchstick-sized fragments. The gun's buzzing whiplash was lost in the whack! of the slug disintegrating thick wood a heartbeat later. The limb sagged with a series of pops as it tore the few remaining fibers holding it to the trunk; then it plunged twisting to the ground.

  Natives nearby wailed as they scrambled back. Hogg watched with a disdainful expression as heat waves shimmered above the barrel of his weapon. The powerful slug had kicked the limb enough to the side that no one in the crowd was in any danger.

  "If you, our honored hosts, will remain seated with your bowls waiting . . . ," Daniel said in a voice easily heard even by ears stunned by the sudden gunshot. "Then members of my crew will pour out the amount of our gift to you. Anyone who gets to his feet instead of waiting will show himself to be unworthy of the gift. Do you understand?"

  The natives made a variety of noises. Collectively it sounded like a growl, but those who were still standing scrambled to places at the mat; none of those seated got to their feet.

  The Captain nodded to the painted man standing—now squatting—beside the corpse. He hopped to his feet and squeaked, "My father bids the feast begin!"

  The natives set in with a will. The preferred technique seemed to be to stick the left hand into the porridge tubs and use two fingers of the right to guide any overflow back into the corners of the mouth. Fish up to the size of the diner's palm were swallowed whole; larger chunks were devoured in mouth-sized increments.

  Layton dipped a standard ten-ounce mess mug into his bucket of slash and handed it to the gleeful Captain, while the dead man's son got a similar amount in a bowl fashioned from a seed pod. Adele didn't see any pottery, even low-fired earthenware; the tubs were waterproofed with pitch on the inside and painted on the outer surfaces with geometric designs in several colors.

  Hogg edged close to Daniel and Adele. "Reminds me of my old man's wake," he said, chuckling. He grinned at Adele and added, "Of course, these folk're neater about the way they chow down than we was back at Bantry, eh, young master?"

  "Perhaps a trifle," Daniel said judiciously, watching food flying in all directions. "Of course, they haven't been drinking all afternoon the way everybody was at Old Guzzler's wake."

  The native Bosun, a grizzled man with feathers stuck through holes in both earlobes, tossed off his slash with thoughtless haste. He choked, spewed the clear liquid out his nose, and fell over on his back retching. After a moment he rolled upright again and dipped a bowl of the local brew.

  The K
limovna squeezed down between the dead man's son and the Captain, seated to his right. The natives made room cheerfully, talking to her and to one another as they ate.

  The Count stood behind his wife, looking awkward and out of place. When he happened to catch Adele looking at him, he flashed her an embarrassed smile; they both quickly looked away.

  Adele thought about the Klimovs' relationship. Obviously it worked for them. . . . She realized, not for the first time, that one of the reasons she liked dealing with information that had already been compiled was that it was much simpler than understanding people in the raw.

  Spacers carrying buckets of slash bustled about behind the facing rows of natives. They were working from several points around the mat, taking the bowls and dipping them full before handing them back.

  Adele looked at Daniel with pursed lips. He shrugged and said, "Since I wasn't able to carry out my original plan, I'm proceeding on the second option: getting them all falling-down drunk before they have time to go berserk."

  "Ah," Adele said, nodding. She pursed her lips again. "But the children?" she said.

  "All the boys old enough to wear a nappy," said Tovera, standing behind her, "have flint knives as well. For myself, I don't assume the girls of similar age are harmless either. I wasn't."

  Adele cleared her throat. "Yes," she said. "There's that."

  Better that she watch the children drink themselves comatose than that she see what happened when one of them did something Tovera thought was threatening. Having a servant like Tovera was in some ways like walking around with a live grenade.

  Sometimes, of course, you need a live grenade. Signals Officer Adele Mundy did, at any rate.

  A native turned and vomited over the ground behind her. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and resumed eating. Halfway through another bowl of porridge, her eyes rolled up and she toppled onto her face in the tub. The man sitting next to her lifted her out, apparently because she was in the way of him getting porridge.

  Daniel was no more an ethnologist than Count Klimov was, so instead he kept up a breezy discussion of the animals that were coming to light. Most of them appeared by crawling over or into the food. Adele noted with wry amusement that bugs which looked like black rice-grains had a particular affinity for the native beer in which they spun like tiny boats; those which landed in cups of slash quickly sank.