McClendon's Syndrome (v1.1)

by Robert Frezza

  As I rolled my window down, I heard Lydia Dare saying, “And so begins the first day of the Ken MacKay watch. With that vicious desperado finally behind bars—”

  “This is too good to miss,” I said. “Mother, may I?”

  “Well, it fits in with the plan. Go ahead,” Catarina said.

  As Piper slowed the car, I hopped out and walked up right next to Lydia’s mike. “Hi, Lydia, how’s tricks?” I exclaimed. “Listen, I just stopped by to let your viewers know that everything’s been cleared up, I’m back out on the street, you’re still getting sued, and I’m still not going to give you an interview.”

  As I walked away, I heard her sputtering into the mike. “This must rank as another stunning example of corruption in high places in this city!”

  I climbed back into the car. “Am I going to be helping Catarina with her investigation?”

  “Not immediately,” Piper said. “Catarina thinks that the political trouble with the Macdonalds in Kopernican sector is getting worse. You were in logistics, right? Depending on what orders come through on the mailship, I may need you to do some things.”

  “What trouble?” I asked.

  The Macdonalds were the first advanced nonhuman species mankind had come across, and they were the most nearly human in a number of ways, which made them pretty obnoxious to deal with. They had been a wizened-looking bunch of pastoralists when the first ship ran across them, which is supposedly how they got their name, although I’ve never figured out why. The Contact/Survey Corps was specifically formed to manage humanity’s contacts with the Macdonalds and to uplift them, which is something the Macdonalds have yet to forgive us for.

  “War and rumours of war,” Piper explained. “The Macdonalds want a few extra planets of their own, and they’ve started making noises about their ‘biological destiny.’ The Navy has been quietly moving a large part of the fleet out that way in the hope that the diplomats will screw things up so we can beat the tar out of them while they’re still small enough to whip. It could get serious.”

  “I did a tour in intelligence out that way,” Catarina volunteered. “Macdonalds look and think a lot like humans. Unfortunately, their leadership isn’t very sophisticated—their societies changed technologies without necessarily internalising too many cultural changes. They’re still pretty much barbarians at heart, and they tend to judge us by the Contact boys. It will be pretty hard to convince them not to get too greedy.”

  “Wonderful,” I commented as we drove past the Atlantic Hotel.

  I cleared the polarisation on my side, squinted up at the building, and pointed. “You can see my old room from here. I should ask whether Clyde knows I’m out.”

  Catarina nodded. She looked tired, but her eyes had a little hint of a smile. “He has accommodations waiting for you. Your quarters allowance will cover it.”

  Just then, the window of my old room blew out in a sudden explosion. The glass fell and shattered on the street. The fire alarm went off. From the yelling, I deduced that the people inside the hotel were a little excited. “Not much of a bomb,” I commented as calmly as I could. “It was probably Elaine. She always did go for flashy touches.”

  I noticed Piper was staring at me wide-eyed.

  “You know, for a while there I was beginning to feel neglected,” I said in the calmest voice I could manage.

  “Ken,” Catarina explained, “has a certain talent for winning friends and influencing people.”

  Piper shook her head. “Ken, when you want a drink, I’m buying.”

  Clyde had an inflatable sleeping bag waiting for me at his place. I rolled it out under a table as far from the window as I could get and went to sleep.

  Once upon a Mailship

  The following morning, I pinned insignia on a set of my new tailor-made fatigues and reported to Piper for duty. She was busy putting things together for the mailship and barely glanced at me when I walked in.

  Mankind has yet to come up with a method of long-distance communication that operates faster than lightspeed, and mail-ships are the glue that hold civilised planets together, as well as places like Schuyler’s World. Even in places that qualify as pestholes, the arrival of the monthly mailship is an occasion for great joy and great sorrow. In addition to ordinary mail, a mailship’s electronic memory comes bearing documents, pictures, banking records, and a month’s worth of television programming at a time. Unfortunately, mailships also facilitate monthly reporting, which was what Piper and I were going to be busy at.

  I needed to touch base with Wyma Jean, so Piper waved me to a desk and told me to go ahead. Bunkie, of course, had anticipated my need to call and had me set up. I was just getting ready to put the call through when Catarina walked in the door wearing civilian clothes. “Good morning, Lieutenant,” I said cautiously.

  Catarina smiled. “No need to be formal. Just remember to try not to give Commander Hiro a heart attack. Are you calling Wyma Jean?”

  “Yeah. Cheeves is already on his way up in the shuttle, and I need to tell her what’s going on before Fast Eddie gets here.” Bunkie gave me a high sign to tell me we had a connection, and I switched on the phone. “Hello, Wyma Jean. Good morning, it’s Ken.”

  “Hello, Ken, you douchebag,” she replied.

  Wyma Jean was sitting in the command chair in a ratty kimono with her hair up, finishing off a carton of ice cream.

  “Oh.” I was momentarily at a loss for words. I couldn’t remember starting off a conversation that way with a woman I wasn’t married to. “Uh, how’s it going, Wyma Jean?”

  “Boring. The damned cat is on a hot streak. She keeps winning. I think she cheats. How did the auction go?”

  “Uh, yeah,” I said. “I guess you’ve heard I’m the proud purchaser of the Scupper.“

  “You are?” Spooner sounded surprised. “Oh, well. Good for you.” She waved the spoon for emphasis.

  “You’re not mad? I figured you were mad at me for buying her.”

  “Oh, that had nothing to do with it. You’re a guy—all of you are worthless scum-suckers,” Spooner said in a perfectly normal tone of voice. “The more I know about men, the better I like cats.”

  “Uh, one second, Wyma Jean.” I put the phone on mute and leaned out of the picture. Catarina had drawn the blinds in the other room and seated herself at a terminal. “Catarina, what do women take for PMS?”

  “Are you talking about Wyma Jean?” She shook her head. “I don’t think that’s it. You know that Clyde’s taken up writing poetry, don’t you? Bad haiku mostly.”

  I shuddered briefly and took the phone off mute. “Wyma Jean, now that I own the ship, I’d like to exercise my option to renew your contract. I’ll figure out how to pay you somehow.”

  She looked startled for a second. “That’s okay, Ken. I know you haven’t got any more money than the rest of us. We can work something out if you ever get the ship fixed.”

  “No, I’d rather start paying you now since you’re up there working, if that’s all right with you. It’ll make me feel better. How’s everything else going?”

  “Things aren’t going bad. You find any lattices so we can eventually move this piece of junk if we somehow find a full crew?”

  “No. We’re still working on it. There’s none to be had here. I’m sending out an order with the mailship. Dr. Beaver, the !Plixxi* ambassador, thought that maybe Dennison’s World had some to spare.”

  “I figured you’d order some, so I told Fast Eddie to make sure he delivered the order.”

  “Oh, you’ve heard from Eddie?”

  “He says he’s about twenty light-minutes out,” Wyma Jean affirmed.

  Mailships were flown by fourth-generation expert systems, and Fast Eddie was the artificial personality construct aboard mailship Foxtrot Echo 7. A human pilot trained each artificial intelligence aboard well enough to operate independently, which left space for a passenger, although the accommodations were not exactly up to QE3 standards. For short hops, such as Cheeves’s trip
to Dennison’s World, a mailship was fine for any dwarf-sized person who didn’t eat much and didn’t mind sensory deprivation. I personally had never ridden one and didn’t plan on starting soon.

  “What did Fast Eddie have to say?” I asked guardedly.

  “The usual. ‘Well, shush my mouth, it’s Wyma Jean, the little gal with the celestial knockers. Say there, honey, you want to fire up my solar panels?’ Little pervert!”

  Eddie was pretty eccentric, even by mailship standards. Most of the mailships in this sector had been trained by Big Jake Bauer. Unfortunately, that meant that most of the mailships in this sector talked like Big Jake Bauer, and Fast Eddie was no exception.

  Peeled out of his shell, Big Jake Bauer was about half Bernie Bobo’s size, with a deep bass voice and the metabolism of a frog. That made him a perfect mailship pilot on papers like account ledgers, a fact that Big Jake exploited with merciless regularity. Big Jake habitually wore size-four boots and a ten-gallon hat, and he spent most of his time between planets watching shoot-’em-ups. As a result, there were about fifty mailships in service that habitually called out to orbiting traffic, “Whoa, watch it there, little doggie!” Most of them had also picked up some rudimentary ideas about how to respond to the choice expletives they received in reply.

  Unfortunately, Fast Eddie was better at being Big Jake than Big Jake was.

  “Did Eddie include any details?” I asked Wyma Jean.

  “It’s not funny, Ken,” Wyma Jean said, rubbing her neck. “That’s twice he’s done this to me! It’s embarrassing to get propositioned by a computer program whenever we match orbits.”

  “I know, Wyma Jean, but the poor little ship doesn’t know any better. You’ve got it better than Davie Lloyd, though. Eddie always tells him, ‘Mine’s bigger than yours, pardner.’ “

  “That really makes me feel a whole lot better,” she said sarcastically.

  I figured it was time to change the subject. “Wyma, I called to say that the shuttle will be matching orbits with you in a few minutes. It’s carrying a passenger for the mailship, a Rodent named Cheeves. He’s the number-two man at the !Plixxi* consulate and a real nice being. He’s headed back to Dennison’s World to try and straighten out our diplomatic problems with the Rodents. The ship we helped to blow itself away was carrying a Rodent prince, one of the sons of their planetary ruler—”

  Wyma Jean whistled. Apparently, she’d missed that part.

  “—so I’d like you to roll out the red carpet for him. I thought it would be better for him to wait aboard the Scupper than in the space station.”

  Eddie would be orbiting for a day or two while people downside composed immediate replies to whatever priority mail he was carrying, and it was marginally cheaper to let Cheeves board the Scupper and wait for Fast Eddie there than to put him up in the space platform. Although the space platform did have a place about the size of a small bedroom for transients to wait, Schuyler’s World left the systems shut down to save money, and Cheeves wouldn’t be waiting long enough to make it worth starting them up.

  “Okay, Ken. No problem,” she assured me.

  “I think you’ll like Cheeves. Let him have whatever he wants, within reason. Fast Eddie say anything worth mentioning?”

  “There’s a war alert. The Macdonalds are acting up. A lot of the fleet is deploying out that way, and it might be serious this time. You ought to mention it to Catarina and the other Navy people.”

  I thumped my head. “Oh, I forgot to tell you. I’m with the navy now. They called me into active service.”

  “Oh, that explains the funny clothes. I thought you just got tired of blue. God, they must really be desperate. Why you?”

  “It’s a long story that has to do with the local politics down here. I’ll explain some other time. You need anything else up there?”

  “No, I’ll be fine as long as you didn’t forget the skim milk. Thanks for asking, Ken. You’re okay, even though you’re still useless male slime.”

  “Thanks, Wyma Jean. I’ll talk with you later.”

  Bunkie cut the connection. I walked over to Catarina’s workstation. “Uh, Catarina, about our problem—if I talk to Clyde, will you talk to Wyma Jean?”

  “If I say yes, what’s in it for me?” she asked mischievously.

  “Dinner,” I said promptly. “I’ll buy, with, uh, Lieutenant Piper’s money.”

  “Yeah, count me in,” Piper said without looking up from her desk. “Get Clyde to pick the place. He can’t boil water, so he knows most of the restaurants in town.”

  “I’ll do that.” I looked down at Catarina. “Well?”

  “You knew about the haiku, didn’t you?” she said, tapping away at her terminal.

  “No. When Clyde locked himself in the bathroom for about three hours, I knew there was something going on, but I figured it wasn’t something I wanted to know about.”

  “You’re right about that.”

  As I sat down and tried to make sense out of the paperwork Bunkie had laid out for me, Commander Hiro opened the door and walked in, and we all stood at attention.

  “At ease. Continue what you’re doing. Ensign Mickey, welcome aboard!”

  “Thank you, sir. I’m happy to be here.” As a rule, Navy offices are nicer than jail cells.

  “Good, good.” Hiro nodded his head up and down as he talked. “Where are you staying now?”

  “I’m staying with Petty Officer Witherspoon, sir.”

  Hiro’s brow furrowed and he stopped nodding. “You’re rooming with an enlisted man? That sounds like fraternisation. That’s hardly proper, is it?”

  Piper looked up from her desk. “It’s all right, sir. He’s a reserve officer.”

  “Oh.” Hiro nodded his head firmly in apparent satisfaction. “Well, anyway, Ensign, I just want you to remember that no matter what calumnies that news-media person heaps upon you, you’re still Navy. Navy reserve, but still Navy for all that.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  As soon as he disappeared into his office, I stuck my head up. “Calumnies?” I asked.

  Piper looked up again. “You hear the news this morning?”

  “I’ve been trying very hard not to,” I admitted. “Is it about me?”

  She nodded. “Our intrepid newsperson decried the bombing. She wants your underworld contacts brought to light.”

  I rubbed my temples. “I didn’t know you had an underworld here.”

  Piper didn’t bat an eye. “We don’t, but it sounds good, doesn’t it?”

  “Right.” I looked to see if there was enough room to crawl under the desk. “What have the police figured out about the bomb?”

  “Let’s just say that we have a bomb squad as of this morning, and they’re looking into it. Makes you want to take up a life of crime, doesn’t it?” She tilted her head. “Nobody was hurt. I saw the pictures. Your room was a mess. Looks like somebody packed a pipe with black powder and nails.”

  “That’ll do the job,” I said, thinking back to the short course the Navy had given me on demolition for fun and profit.

  I picked up the top piece of paper in front of me, which was last quarter’s command expenditure report, and started trying to make sense out of it.

  Piper tilted her head. “Oh, Bunkie?” she called. “You’d better get in here. Ensign MacKay’s eyes are beginning to glaze over. He may need some help getting back into a military routine.”

  It was sad, but true, and the rest of the day was singularly uneventful.

  Clyde is one of those people who think that sushi is Japanese for “gesundheit,” and the restaurant he picked for dinner was Zack’s Famous Grotto of Fine Fish.

  The place was sort of a local landmark. Every three months it would fold and somebody would buy it and change the name. This month, it was a hot-rock restaurant, one of those places where they give you raw vegetables and meat and a hot rock to cook them on. As Catarina put it, it’s the kind of place where you can have your steak and heat it through. It was on
e of the two or three nice places in town where they handed out napkins, and it sounded all right to me. I’m usually not too particular as long as poshint’ang isn’t on the menu.

  It was only a few blocks away on Second Street. When we got there, a little after six, the hostess hitched up her gown and put us in a nice little corner booth. Piper and Clyde sat on one side, and Catarina slid in beside me.

  While everyone else was studying the menus, which were shaped like little stones, I looked around the room. The decor was mixed: they had fake palm trees at one end and a fake fireplace at the other. There was a live band clustered around the palm trees playing “hot New Orleans jazz”—they were okay, although the guy with the accordion kept losing the beat.

  The waitress working the room eventually found us. For obvious reasons, nobody ordered the fish. I ordered the veal francine, which came out as tender little slivers of meat served with vegetables and three secret sauces which looked an awful lot like mustard, ketchup, and horseradish. Catarina asked for a vegetarian platter, and Clyde and Piper got the chicken.

  Flipping my morsels of veal onto my rock, I cooked them up and bit into one. Then I looked around to see if there were any dogs in the room. “Uh, this really doesn’t taste like veal,” I said, setting down my chopsticks.

  Piper spoke up. “It probably isn’t. I should have warned you that they don’t have very many cows here.”

  “Oh,” I said. Poshint’ang is Korean dog stew.

  Piper poked at my rock with her chopsticks. “It’s probably gerbil. They grow them big as chickens. Actually, they look an awful lot like miniature Rodents.” She picked up one piece of meat and turned it over. “It looks like you’ve got a couple of thighs there.”

  Clyde started giggling. “You should have ordered the chicken!”

  Catarina stopped eating. She put her elbow on the table and rested her chin on her hand with a little half smile on her face. She and I both looked at Piper, who cleared her throat. “Well, the chicken isn’t exactly chicken either. They have a couple of iguana ranches not too far from here.”