Emile and the Dutchman
Page 15
Bar-El shrugged. "So much for fixing this. Major " He looked around. "It's going to be a Drop, no?"
Norfeldt started to say something, but I beat him to it. "I think when we get a properly equipped lab down there and study the chiropterans, we'll find that when the sun goes down it triggers some kind of hormonal change. Their color changes and they get more aggressive. Which is when they go hunting."
"For what?" Donny asked. "There's not enough animal life down there to keep a few of them alive, let alone the concentrations we saw."
"Down below, no. But upstairs, in the treetops, there's an ecology more like the ones we're used to. Photosynthesis on a large scale, arboreal herbivores, carnivores. But you need sunlight to drive the whole process, and a lot of it. All there is downstairs is a sarcophagy, which probably provides the minerals for the giant trees, but damn little else.
"In the lower regions, near the ground, the plants live off what little sunlight they can get, and they live off their more successful big brothers. I'll bet that if you dig out the root system of one of those giants, you'll find the vegetation for a klick around hooked into it, feeding off it."
"And the chiropterans feed off the more successful animal life," Donny said.
I nodded. "Night falls, the life processes up above slow down a bit, and the peaceable lower-level carnivore adopts the right temperament for feeding."
"Great," Akiva said. "If we can keep the sun from going down, they'll all starve to death, and the planet is ours. Sounds simple enough." He snorted.
"Nothing that drastic," the Dutchman said. "Not necessary. Now that we know they're dangerous, they're not so fucking dangerous."
"We might be able to gimmick up some counteragent for their aggression hormone, and maybe let them move or starve."
"We'll do it with mirrors," the Dutchman said, his right hand folded over his left, which was knotted into a fist.
Akiva and Donny were surprised. I wasn't.
"Bring in some powerscreens and set the suckers in orbit over our installations," Norfeldt said. "The old Solares trick. You put it in the right orbit, aim it right, and they'll catch the sunlight and direct it downward. The sun never goes out, so the bats move elsewhere."
"Could you match the candlepower of full sunlight?" Akiva asked.
"You can better it, if you have to; you can make powerscreens huge, jewboy. But I don't think it's necessary, not if Emmy's right. All we'd need is enough to fool the bats." He looked at the green world, full and round in the aft monitors.
"Drop, shit," he said.
VII
I knocked lightly on the curtain rod. "Akiva?"
He slid the curtain aside and let me in. Like me, he had a bunk, a closet, and a few plastic web-covered shelves under the air-conditioning unit. Only a couple of spare uniforms were on the shelves. There were no pictures, no letters on the gleaming walls. Nothing to make the cubicle personal.
It was the first time I'd been in his cabin.
"Yes, Lieutenant?" His eyes were dark and fathomless.
"I came for a couple of reasons. For one, to apologize," I said. "And to thank you."
He eyed me carefully. "Your apology is accepted. And you are welcome. And if that's it—"
"That was one reason. The other one is Norfeldt."
He looked me over. "I doubt that it would do much good to turn him in, at this point. The unwritten law, and all—he is good on the ground, it seems."
"But you're going to do it anyway." Just because something wouldn't do any good wouldn't stop a man who would take on a couple dozen chiropterans barehanded, and then push a skimmer hard enough and fast enough to arrive in time to pull a miracle with powder, lead, and steel.
"I can't let him get away with it. I . . . understand that winning is everything to him, and that he has no sense of decency, no sense of proportion, but I will not let him get away with it."
"We won't," I said. "But let's punish the bastard, not just report him."
"Excuse me?"
"He cheats at poker, Akiva. He has a flasher carved into the bottom of his Team Leader ring—he reads the cards as he deals them."
"So?"
"So, he only deals a quarter of the time," I said, pulling my reader out of my blouse pocket and tossing it gently to him. "According to Mr. Scarne, two partners working in tandem are a lot more dangerous than an occasional peeker. Study up—we've got a few weeks until we're back home."
He looked at me for a long moment, and then he broke into a smile.
By the time we were home, the Dutchman was down a full two years' pay, and had resolved to give up poker forever.
Not that I got heavily into Qualifications Courses; the Team just switched over to bridge. In order to get anywhere cheating at bridge, you have to have two partners working in collusion. I was sure that the Dutchman wouldn't suggest it to Donny N'Damo, or to me.
Or to Akiva Bar-El, whose smile had become a permanent fixture on his ugly face.
Interlude
Destination:Captain Manuel Curdova, TWCS
Contact Service Administrative
Bureau
Building 4, Level 3 VNYC
Routing:1800RQW5R62EE83
Origin:First Lieutenant Emile von du Mark,
TWCS Aboard TWS NEIL ARMSTRONG
(#LC3369)
Subject: Personal
File Created: 2 January 2247
Dear Manny,
Insert some sincere applause here, amigo. Nicely done, Captain.
As you might have gathered, I've been reading the A/A reports on your field trip. I gather they're going to give you the DSD and a cluster. As to the promotion that's undoubtedly in the wind, I have mixed feelings about the salutation above; it's unlucky to anticipate too strongly, but I hope you've gotten your oak leaves by the time you're reading this.
I'm only partly jealous. I don't want to ever *AHEM* luck into a TL ring that way, and I don't know if I could have handled anything like the G'Reeeth situation on my first time in the field.
Which isn't meant to be patronizing; I'm not willing to claim I could handle it now. After all, I only went out on First Assignment a bit less than six years ago. I swear it feels like yesterday.
Although, I have to wonder why I feel so old, Manny, so old. . . .
But never mind that.
To repeat, I am very jealous—of your results, dammit, not what you had to go through to get them.
Now, will you listen to some advice from, granted, a junior officer, and someone who's yet to earn a TL ring—but one who is, nevertheless, still up a bit of field experience on you?
Take your TL ring, mount it on the plaque, put the plaque up on the wall behind the desk in your office, get the hell back into your office, and stay there, Manuel. I have the feeling that Veronica won't say that to you, but you and I go way back, and I have to say this.
Nobody's doubting your courage. But the simple fact is that anyone in fieldwork is living on borrowed time. Team Leader is not a job for a man with a wife, and most particularly not for a man with a wife and two children. I want you to think about what it would have been like for Emilita and most particularly Arturo, if you'd been just a little slower—he never would have known his father.
Think about it, dammit.
Yes, I got your message. Would you try to explain things to Janine? I don't see a lot of point in continuing on, all things considered, in light of what I'm suggesting to you. I know, I know I should say something to her myself, but the woman just doesn't listen to me.
People not listening to me seems to be an ongoing problem.
I've got a really bad feeling about this Pon business, and the Dutchman and I are going into it alone, without the rest of the Team. I can understand leaving N'Damo out—the poncharaire are completely psi-neg, after all—but I wish we could have gotten Bar-El.
I don't have any good reason for that feeling, granted, but I do.
Oh, by the way, as long as I keep an eye on him a
nd whip out the calipers every now and then to check the dice, the Dutchman plays a good game of backgammon.
Which is to say that I'm way up; and the best part of it is that the Dutchman won't quit. I don't give a rat's ass about the money.
But I do like beating the bastard.
I guess that's all for now.
Best wishes,
Emile
File Transmitted: 9 January 2247
In the Shadow of Heaven
I
By the time I'd finished vomiting and had gotten my shaking under control and my freezing body back into the relative warmth of the drafty stone igloo, the Dutchman was practically green.
Not with envy—while the pureed-akla gruel that was the mainstay of the poncharaire diet wasn't quite poisonous, it did contain a compound or two that was, for humans, a powerful emetic. And despite my suspicions, the Dutchman was human, after all.
"Major, my name is Emile. Emile von du Mark. Not Emmy."
"Listen, shithead," the Dutchman said gently, "and listen good." His smile broadened; his tone became even more affectionate. "If you ever raise your voice to me again," he said as he nodded and smiled, his jowls and extra chins waggling in rapid syncopation, "I'll choke you to death with your own small intestines, Lieutenant. Understood?"
"Yes. Sir."
The Dutchman settled back into his wooden chair. If I hadn't disliked him so much, I would have had a bit of sympathy for the way he was holding up. The plus-twenty-percent gravity of Pon added only about fifteen kilos to my weight; it added a full twenty-five to his, and made his muscles—which would have included his heart, if the Dutchman had one—work much, much harder carrying his already ample bulk around. Even sitting up must have been a chore.
The larger of the two poncharaire raised his head from where he knelt beside the low table, then froze into position. That's one of the things I'll never get used to about them: sitting statuelike for a full minute's contemplation before speaking is strictly pro forma. They think humans are impetuous.
K'chat's body was of the hexipedal, centauroid form common on high-gee planets, at least among sapients. On worlds with gravity much greater than Earth's, creatures with only four legs never seem to free the front pair from the task of fighting gravity. And without manipulative members—hands—you don't get sapience.
Please don't bring up cetaceans and airybs: the first gave up their hands to go back to the sea; the second are sapient only if you're not fussy. I'm fussy.
Hmm . . . maybe calling the poncharaire centauroid was an oversimplification. I'm not claiming that either K'chat or Ahktah looked like an improbable mixture of human and horse; they looked much more like wolves. A poncharaire's long body is all of one piece, covered by soft brown fur from the top of its cloven hooves to the wrists of the six-digited hands with their paired, opposable thumbs.
I couldn't read K'chat's lupine face. I'd had enough trouble learning the language, and I'd yet to make a dent in their nonverbal cues. I didn't have much hope to; I was trained to be a Team's pilot and second-in-command, not a combination substitute psi-neg comm officer and ersatz—and very expendable—diplomat.
K'chat reached out a thick-wristed hand, conveying a smidgen of gruel from the bowl on the table to his mouth.
I'd never really thought of vomiting as meditation before. but claiming such as the purpose of my leaving the room had been a reasonable excuse.
Besides, it was the sort of thing that the poncharaire wanted to believe; much better to accept the need for me to take a moment away in meditation than to believe I was out upchucking the delicious meal that they had sold the Dutchman and me.
As I tried to phrase a polite negative, the other poncharaire snapped his toothy jaws.
Ahktah stroked the center of his face: a poncharaire shrug.
The Dutchman's face was somber and emotionless as he tasted the gruel before speaking to Ahktah.
The hypocrite. "More wood and food than can be spared." hah. It wasn't the gods that were twitchy about dealing with humans, it was the priest. I was sure that the reason that the gods' blessing might prove too expensive was that Ahktah was afraid that any changes would endanger his power. Look at history: shamans are like that; they've preached against things as trivial as lipstick and something as vitally important as spaceflight.
K'chat turned again to Ahktah—speaking to someone one is not facing is one of several things that the poncharaire consider a very serious insult. An offer of charity is another—which was a large part of the poncharaire's problem.
And the Dutchman's and mine, for that matter.
And one of the reasons I very much missed large, ugly Akiva Bar-El.
"You're a pious fraud!" The words leaped out of my mouth. In Basic, thank God.
Ahktah turned slowly toward me.
I couldn't help it: I liked the poncharaire. And Ahktah's prohibition of any extensive dealings with humans meant their extinction.
"Emmy." The Dutchman smiled kindly. "Assuming the nice doggie doesn't rip your throat out, you're about three fucking seconds from buying yourself a court. Now, sit down, please. We're not going to make any progress with you venting your spleen all over the place—if your spleen needs venting, I'll do it. With a butter knife, not a Fairbairn. Understood?"
Without waiting for an answer, he scooped a bit of the gruel to his mouth and turned to Ahktah.
K'chat's eyes twinkled as he tasted the gruel, then spoke to me.
He gestured to the black, thumb-sized heaters scattered around the room.
He used a form of the poncharaire word for winter, but it really wasn't winter; we were, technically, in late summer. But Pon was a thousand or so years into an ice age, and the poncharaire, who had evolved in warmer times, weren't ready for it. Which is why their population had shrunk, from the millions that ha
d covered the southern continent like a blanket to a small clustering of settlements, the total population perhaps as many as a hundred thousand.
Ahktah took a taste of the gruel, and stood.
The cold north wind blew in; I went over and closed the door, then reached down to my belt and turned my rubbery coldsuit up a notch.
K'chat sighed.
"Major, can I—"
"Might as well." The Dutchman shook his head. "You may already have blown it." Norfeldt let himself sag back in his chair.
"Emmy. Go easy, there."
Damn, he was right—that was starting to sound like an offer of charity. <—that is, to trade with thee and thine, to our benefit and to yours. Ahktah can't be allowed to interfere. The True People will die.>
K'chat stroked the center of his face, both thumbs trembling slightly.
The Dutchman raised a palm. "Not your job, Emmy." I guess he was right. It wasn't my job to explain to K'chat that it was well worth it to the Thousand Worlds to trade ten-for-a-quid heaters for mineral rights. It would have sounded like I was making an offer of charity. Under normal circumstances, a subconscious psychic explanation could have been made by a comm officer, but the poncharaire were all psi-neg. Explaining that we were offering a fair exchange, not charity, was a job for a Commerce Department Trade Team negotiation expert.