Another story said that the tableland was named after an ancient aircar. It did not look much like an aircar to Wanbli as he touched the variegated sandstone wall, but he was willing to allow for imagination.
Here the couple had not yet begun being careful; the big footprints and the littler footprints marked the edge of the wall like a stenciled border. Susie had quite a turnout. She was almost duck-toed. Wanbli wondered if it was a conformational fault, which would be rare among Wacaan, or just her natural swagger.
The darters that nested in the crevices came out to look at him: big ones with their nappy wings and smaller ones which had wings like gauze and the smallest species where the wings were no more than a flicker, like the insect field around the windows. It was the smallest sort of darter that had taken on the responsibility of Wanbli’s totem in his first initiation dreaming. He knew that a creature’s apparent size and strength had nothing to do with its magical potency, but still, Wanbli was a bit embarrassed about it all. In the closed rituals of his year group, when each Paint had to name himself and leap the fire, he came between Howard Black Dog and Heyatuan Screamer: Wanbli Elf Darter. No one had ever laughed. Out loud. It was a very pretty flyer anyway, at least in the breeding season.
Halfway around the kilometer-long rock, he came to a strange thing; it seemed that Susie and Heydoc had stopped to dance right there on the path. Their feet made confused prints in all directions. There were skid marks. At one spot, Susie had gone stomp, stomp in place. As Wanbli stood and marveled, there came a light tap on his head, followed by a sensation of spreading pain.
It was a darter—not his own totem but a dull beast the length of a man’s foot—and it had chosen to resent the presence of humans so close to its nest. Wanbli smacked it away and was out of there and running. A hundred meters away, with his scalp still throbbing, he began to wonder what his own footprints looked like.
The aircar was indeed something. It was long and an ethereal silvery-sand color which faded perfectly into the soil beside Pontiac table. No mere errand car, it seated its two passengers on glistening leather upholstery. Cars on Neunacht were very expensive, because of the amount of metal necessary, but for that same reason, what cars they did build or import were marvels of labor and care. For once the “poverty” of Neunacht would work in Wambli’s favor.
He hopped the door and slid into the cockpit. He put the key against the plate with confidence; had the car been booby-trapped, Heydoc or Susie would have had to tell him so when taking Tag. It lifted with almost no noise.
Oh, it was beautiful. What power. Certainly it was no more than a year old, for the glass over the instruments had almost no sand scour and the upholstery was unsoiled. It was traditional that an employer who sent out Wacaan to risk their lives equipped them with the best they had. To do otherwise was to express doubt. Perhaps this was Rall T’chishett’s personal car.
Wanbli wasted some time (but was it wasted? No, never say so) doing tricks in the air, to accustom himself to the controls of the big vehicle, and then he aimed it toward town.
It occurred to him that he could locate Heydoc and Mimi, who had no reason to be stealthy anymore, and drive them into Hovart. But just because he was in a good mood didn’t mean they would be glad to see him. Just the opposite, in fact. They’d probably rather walk. Wanbli went on, fast but at height enough for speed not to be dangerous. He was not a wild driver.
There was Mount Hov, standing alone in the plain just begging to be circled. Wanbli gratified the mountain, which twinkled its quartz top at him. Someone had climbed the slope, which was not so difficult a feat, and was standing on the round prominence. This someone waved to Wanbli. It was not difficult to climb Hove, but it took time and wind, so the climber would naturally want to be noticed. Wanbli gratified the climber too and waved back. Then he pointed the “mouse” in its box left and downward, toward the suburbs of Hovart.
He knew he had been taken, when he left the car yard, but he knew he had not been taken anywhere near as badly as most Wacaan would have been, and that, for Wanbli, felt like a victory. Third Eagle victory. His pencil-stub-sized, government-sealed changer showed a balance of twenty-five hundred securtys, three solids and five plus. (Singular or plural, plus were plus.)
Wacaan were not bargainers; their only weapon in commercial interactions was their formidable skill, and salesmen learned very quickly that it was all a bluff. No Paint exploded into violence outside of his work. Only timid old ladies like the housekeeper and the T’chishetti—of course, the T’chishetti—were ever afraid of the Paints. Pushovers.
Had he not been a Wacaan—in fact, had he not been a Painted Wacaan—he would have had to show ownership and registration in order to sell the car. It was well-known how the Paints came by their aircars, and in the dealers’ lots the vehicles were stickered: “used, registered as new.” No Paint had ever abused the privilege, though there was the perennial story about the Wacaan nursemaid who had painted her chest with nail polish and gone in to sell her employer’s car. There was no way of telling whether that story was true, but it did surface again and again, like bubbles on a pond.
Wanbli liked Hovart township nearly as much as he liked the desert. It was all good for a change. The buildings were like Tawlin Estate: white, glistening, round-cornered. They enforced the building codes very strictly here.
He bought a bean rito and a glass of juice at a stand on his way to the spaceport. The vendor glanced down as he fit his belt changer into the male end of Wanbli’s changer (the male end was for expenditures, the female for receipts) and he whistled at the balance. His glance at the ornaments on Wanbli’s bright and hairless torso was covert, but Wanbli had to smile.
“Don’t worry. It’s not blood money. Nobody died for it.”
The man grimaced and looked away. “Wouldn’t matter here. Money’s money. Only electrons. But you should do something with all that. Invest it before it dribbles away.”
Whenever the people of T’chishett talked about bonds, stock, debentures, investments of any kind, the Wacaan realized their separateness. Wanbli was no different, but he replied, “I’m on my way to do that right now.”
The port was only ten kilometers outside of town. Had it not been strong noon, Wanbli would have walked or trotted the distance. Nothing trotted the desert at this hour, though, and he took a ground shuttle.
It was quite a trip, especially for a man of some height, because the T’chishetti elite did not generally use the public transport, and consequently the road was not kept in the best repair. He hit the underside of the roof with his darter-stung head more than once.
His mood shifted from very high to quite nasty-tasting. It was that fried Pov-head Tawlin and his pipe dreams that did it. Wanbli looked nothing like Ake Tawlin. He looked nothing like Flammulated Owl either, and that man was supposed to be his father. Was his father.
Actually, it took a very sensitive eye to decide that Wanbli looked nothing like old Flammul’. To an outsider they were all remarkably alike. But everyone had always said that Wanbli had looked just like his mother, at least as a child.
For all the interest Flammul’ had shown in him, he might as well not have been his father. Why should a man accept sire-promotion at all when he had no interest in a son?
Unless he knew something Wanbli didn’t.
Oh shut up.
Many men said that having the valves opened, even for only a month or so, gave added zest to sex. Maybe so, but if a man didn’t care for kids, wouldn’t that eliminate the thrill?
Ouch. Wanbli put his hand above his head and pressed against the unpadded ceiling, keeping himself in the seat. No, it wouldn’t eliminate the thrill, he decided. It would merely make it naughty.
The shuttle gave off a great cloud of dust. Darters stitched into the reddish opacity, to see if there was anything good in it. Pijjin darters. Without stings. Wanbli wished he had saved crumbs from his rito to toss to them.
Was that something a Wacaan would want to do
? He mulled this question until the port came in sight out the front window and decided: yes, many Wacaan did like to throw crumbs to the darters. Many Wacaan and most human children of all castes and both sexes. It was a fine desire and he decided to be proud of it. If the chance came, he would purchase another rito and throw all of it to the darters.
There was a plump woman with white hair and tired-looking eyes sitting across the aisle from him. As the shuttle came to an uneven stop beside the low, rectangular Port Receiving Building, she turned to Wanbli. “You people always look so dignified,” she said. She had a warm, appealing voice.
His mind came down from among the darters. It hit hard. “I… It’s an illusion, Mother. Partly because we are often worn out.”
He had called her “Mother”: a clan title, not for use outside the Wacaan. Well, what the hey.
At the jerk of the opening doors the woman rose and nodded. He followed her down the aisle. “And the rest of it is,” he added, leaping over the stairs to the curb, “simple lack of intellect.”
He was in the filtered air of the Receiving Building in three long strides.
Hovart’s port was not a sophisticated establishment, not even to Wanbli’s eyes. The job bulletin board at the Hovart Clan House was a more expensive device. Here was just a four-sided holo kiosk, listing arrivals and departures in white-on-gray, as might have been seen in a station on Earth almost a millennium ago.
It was because they didn’t have a string station, of course. That was the universal excuse for anything wrong in T’chishett. On all of Neunacht, probably.
Wanbli had come in a mood to be impressed, string station or no, and since there was nothing else to be impressed about, he let himself be impressed by the station’s simplicity. He had been here before a number of times, true, but only to commute to Southbay and back, and once to South Interior for a survival ritual. To catch these short-hop flights one stood out on the pavement, under a sign.
It took him a few minutes to understand the symbology of the flight board, but once he realized that the asterisk didn’t mean for him to look for further explanation at the bottom of the page, but instead that the flight in question was repeated every tenday, he made progress. The station affairs were handled by the Truckers’ Guild, which didn’t care whether they were comprehensible to the denizens of a backwater such as the planet of Neunacht. The station was also climate-controlled to the truckers’ standard, and Wanbli was getting gooseflesh already.
It was all very simple, once he understood. There were no scheduled passenger flights out of Hovart. None. Of the three daily flights going anywhere, only one was marked with a delta, which meant that under the proper circumstances the captain would accept supercargo. (Wanbli owed his comprehension of the word “supercargo” to a shimmer, in which the great Paovo had signed on to a ship as supercargo and had subsequently saved the lives of the entire crew and married the captain. Most Wacaan wouldn’t have known that much about it.) Six other ships shuttled in and out of Hovart once every two tendays or so, and most of these were delta-marked. One was today. That made two chances in all.
The regular ship went from Hovart to Rondo Bay to South Extension Settlement and then out to Icor,. which Wanbli remembered from school as being a nearby rock-exporting colony. He did not know whether Icor was on the route to New Benares; he did not know exactly where New Benares was.
The irregular ship was more of a mystery. The destination column was blank, but the flight designation itself sported a delta, two arrows (facing in opposite directions) and a sign that looked very much like a ring with a jewel in it. Wanbli looked from the kiosk to the single occupied counter.
It was black and shiny and out of the top of it protruded a shiny cockpit, where the agent sat. It was as though they didn’t trust the people of Hovart, Wanbli thought. He didn’t know why not; the Wacaan never went after Truckers’ Guild employees.
The man in the cage was leaning forward, explaining something to a woman in a decent but not flashy gauze sarong. His lips moved so that Wanbli could see his teeth even from where he stood fifty feet away. His motions were exaggerated. A language problem maybe. For many truckers, Tndi was not the native language. There were two people in line behind the woman, trying, as all T’chishett citizens did, to pretend they were not waiting in a line at all.
To Wanbli, the line was not long enough. He would have felt better in a more crowded atmosphere, where functionaries would not be so likely to ask questions. But it was midday, and the station was not going to get busier. Wanbli walked from the kiosk to the truckers’ counter, with the heavy steps of a man on important business. Had he had shoes on, he would have made more noise.
The man at the end of the line wore the cocoa-colored skin and the red shorts of an Intek Clanner. His poor posture made each of his middle vertebrae into a white circle stretched against the skin of his back. His sad, unfocused eyes indicated that he spent much of his time in this manner. Wanbli lay a warm, companionable hand on the man’s shoulder. “Citizen,” he said. “Hold my place.” Then he was off again.
The Intek turned his head in time to get a glimpse of Wanbli’s color, bright as the Elf Darter and just that quickly gone.
A Paint. They were an uncommon tribe: the painted Wacaan. Perhaps only five thousand in total on all of the planet, though they received enough attention through media and word of mouth to make up for their small numbers. The Intek Clanner, who was an educated man and really ought not to have been spending his days waiting to have deliveries of parts signed off by bureaucrats who didn’t know a heating element from a three-cycle flange, knew that the Paint was not about to destroy or even punish him if he failed to do as requested (requested?) and hold his place in line. For all their tradition and their importance to balance of power in the Mercantile Families, the Paints would not be permitted by the UCs to go about smashing people who disappointed them. Still, the Intek thought he would hold the Paint’s place in line.
It was all very well to tap a man on the shoulder and then be off again, but in a situation such as this there were really very few places to be “off” to. There was the tea shop, but Wanbli wasn’t sure he would be able to get back into line in time, and delay worried him as much as being held up for notice. And there was the lavatory.
Wanbli stood in the empty lavatory, staring at his bright reflection in the three-quarter-length mirror. His top Eagle shone jet and golden. His turquoise Eagle gleamed like a desert sky. His Third Eagle was a glimmer and a mystery just above the band of his breechclout. He gazed deep into the mirror and his own body was the only non-exotic thing he saw.
Look at this sink, now, which was sort of a bubble and sort of a bowl, and which would probably be just the sort of thing for hand washing in free fall. Didn’t know how one would get his face in there, though. Or armpits or crotch or feet, if it was to be a really thorough job. Most T’chishett citizens did not undress completely in public places like lavatories, so perhaps the thing was not expected to handle the whole job. He stopped to appreciate the dryer too, which licked at the wet parts of one with little tongues of fiber. It didn’t work very well, but Wanbli enjoyed it just the same.
The woman who had been at the head of the line bumped her way through the door and past Wanbli, not glancing at him. By the tightness of her forehead and the wrinkles under her eyes, she appeared to have a headache. She went into one of the evacuatory booths and slammed the door behind her.
Wanbli emptied his small suitcase neatly onto the counter. At the bottom of it lay a full-sleeved shirt affair which he had earned in the survival ritual. It was covered with tiny beads made of seashell and of ratchett bone, done in the pattern of graphic coordinates of Brawliens 2-98, the star of Neunacht. He thought it might help him pass unnoticed, or if not, that it would certainly warm him up. It was either that or the night blanket, and that commodious vestment would stand out kilometers.
The shirt was warm, but it produced quite an itch over the shoulder blades. It was a
lmost as noticeable as a blanket would have been, but Wanbli could not spend all day dallying before the mirror in indecision.
Exactly as the man who had been holding his place turned (a sour expression on his features) to go to his assigned unloading dock, Wanbli appeared again. The woman who had taken position behind the man retreated from this apparition in a sparkling shirt, which tinkled lightly, like a distant wind chime.
“Good,” said Wanbli, as though it were the end of a conversation, and not the beginning. “One for Icor, no return.” He said these words quickly but clearly, with no intonation, trying to give them a sort of mechanical inevitability. By pretending to himself that the errand of buying tickets was already accomplished, he hoped he would assure that it was accomplished quickly and without questions. But after one close look at the attendant’s face, he realized that he was playing out of his own league.
The attendant was pale—far more pale than most citizens of T’chishett. More pale than most Neunachtians of any nation. His eyes were blue like the center of the sky, where the dust can’t reach. He was a foreigner—a trucker—and that put Wanbli at a disadvantage. More, the man was nasty-hearted. He wore nasty in the set of his mouth and the pull of his eyebrows. He carried a nasty cold boredom over him like a ceremonial cloak.
Wanbli remembered how the woman in the lavatory, who had been conversing with this flyer as he watched, had come away and slammed the door behind her. Wanbli smiled. He never slammed doors.
The attendant was smiling too. It was the sort of smile that made Wanbli glance down to see where the man’s hands were. They were folded on his counter. “I haven’t seen one of your kind here before,” the man said.
“Funny. I haven’t seen you here before, either,” answered Wanbli, and before the fellow could answer, repeated, “One to Icor, no return.”
That was how he had always bought his tickets to school: “One to Southbay, no return.”
The blue eyes stared at him, flat. Very slowly the man asked, “One what to Icor?”
The Third Eagle Page 4