“So. A very small Political Union, ey?” asked the official, whose feet were up on his desk.
“Never seemed that small to me,” answered Wanbli blandly. “Not smaller than Icor itself, anyway.”
Akavit sniffed. “Icor is not a Political Union at all, Wacaan. It’s a corporation.” He obviously felt he was saying something very meaningful.
“Oh,” said Wanbli.
The customs building was deceptively large, for the little square block was only the tip of a larger building that dug down into the rock. There were two light shafts punched into the wall, in which were dangling houseplants in pots. An entire wall was decorated with knives, swords, and axes, like the Long Hall at Tawlin. This display was much less decorative, however, since the blades of each weapon were fitted into holes drilled into the rock and only the hilts were visible. The entire wall was riddled with such wounds.
Two windows. Houseplants. Weapons display. So Comptroller Akavit was at least that important. Wanbli finished the form, wiped graphite dust from his hands and handed it back to Akavit. He was sitting straight in the hard chair and his feet were flat on the floor, because forms in paper and real stylus always made him feel very ritual. He always expected the clerk to sprinkle ceremonial sand over his writing; or press it with a blotter, or sing a chant.
Akavit did. none of these things. He scanned the paper quickly, with a great deal of mouth and eyebrow movement. “So why are you here in Boom, my boy?”
“On my way,” answered Wanbli, and reluctantly added, “New Benares.”
Akavit’s facial play stopped. “We’re not on the way to New Benares. We’re not on the way anywhere.”
Wanbli tried to keep his shoulders from drooping. “I know that now. I… got on the wrong boat.”
He had to sit there and let the man’s doubt roll all over him. He had no tools to convince him.
“Then why didn’t you stay on that boat you came on? It swings back to Neunacht every week or so.”
Wanbli sighed and settled back. At least it was warmer in the customs house. Not warm, but warmer. “I thought about it. But I don’t get to travel often, and I don’t want to retrace my steps, you know?”
Or give Clan Council another chance to haul him in.
Akavit’s face twitched and jiggled as he considered this. Wanbli was beginning to think all foreigners expressed themselves like that. Too bad it didn’t make them easier to read.
“Why New Benares?”
“I have family there,” answered Wanbli, carefully casual.
Akavit was looking again at Wanbli’s arsenal. “Ah. I thought perhaps you were looking to put your pretty face in the shimmers.” When Wanbli let this slide by, Akavit extended one hand. “Let’s see the gun,” he said. His other hand was not to be seen. Wanbli suspected it was not empty. He looked down, to find that the front of the desk was paperboard.
He unsnapped the holster from his waistband and handed over the blunderbuzz. Akavit looked at it curiously and pressed his thumb here and there without effect. “No laser here?”
“No. Just projectile.”
Akavit looked at the gun with a kinder eye. Perhaps he was interested in antiquities. “A real granddaddy, ey? Where’s the ammunition?”
Deadpan, Wanbli said he hadn’t brought any. The strict truth.
“Then why the gun at all?”
Wanbli risked an apologetic smile. “It’s what my people wear.”
The blunderbuzz was not a popular sort of weapon. It was an example of bright engineering combined with the very old idea of projectile weapons. It was cost-effective, but most people would just as soon use coherent light, which sliced and diced as well as perforated. The Wacaan thought lasers were terribly unsubtle.
Akavit returned it to him. “And the cane?” the man continued. “Has it got a blade in it?”
“Oh no. Nothing like that.” Wanbli’s eyes were round. He was made to deliver it over the desk, where Akavit examined it with more intelligence than he had the gun.
“Ah. An interrupter.”
Wanbli’s heart sank. He didn’t like the thought of being without the stick in a strange place, especially one as forbidding as Icor. But of course the Comptroller would have experience with crowd control, and even decorated with wings and painted leather, a nerve stick was a nerve stick. He was very surprised when Akavit slid the stick back to him, over the granite top of the desk. “You’ll let me keep it?”
Akavit scratched his smooth round head and also his smooth round nose tip. “It’s no business of the corporation how a man chooses to protect himself. A mining camp can be a mean place.”
Wanbli had to grin. Those were the exact words used by the voice-over narrator to begin the shimmer Hounds of Juna, starring Al Kyle. “A mining camp can be a mean place.” Kyle had proven meaner, of course.
“Then why check them at all?”
Akavit looked slightly smug, as though he’d led Wanbli to that question. Perhaps he had. He opened a drawer, closed it again and then rose to his feet. He stood by the wall of weapons. “Your relationship with other folks is your own business, sure. But what you do to the planet is the business of the Icor Corporation. Look.” He drew an ordinary, inexpensive machete from its lodging. It seemed to be sticking; it squeaked shrilly on its way out. Akavit raised his arm and brought the blade down again in a loose, practiced strike. Wanbli winced at the thought of what would happen as the cheap steel struck rock.
It went in—not as straight or as neatly as most of the blades in their sockets, but it went in. “I wouldn’t do this to someone’s good blade, you understand. It would ruin the edge.
“But out here a man with a big knife and one too many firefloats in his turn could hack up the side of a house. Rock doesn’t heal. It can’t easily be repaired: not like wood, or synthetics.”
“I see,” answered Wanbli.
“And there’s another thing. A man with a blade goes out into these hills and in two days he’s dug himself a house and we have a hell of a time getting him out.”
Akavit seemed to think this was self-explanatory. Wanbli was forced to ask why one would want to get a man out.
Akavit’s face stopped its usual twitching. “If Icor Corporation wants you to have a house,” he said. “It will tell you it does. And it will sell you one.”
His stare was more than challenging; it was threatening. Wanbli refused to let his shoulders rise. Nor did he lower his own garnet gaze. He leaned forward.
“What I really want to know, Comptroller, is where I can get a coat just like yours.”
Wanbli crunched his way along the street of pumice, stepping lightly, stepping high. He was amid wind-worn spires and plateaus of lava rock. He was in a city of towers and castles. It was astonishing, and the workmanship was generally bad. There was garbage rolling down the street: metal cans, not perfectly round anymore and making insect rhythms over the stone, scraps of bread, too cold to rot. Somewhere down here was a store, with a sign in Hindi to proclaim it so. Once Wanbli could get in, he would begin to believe in life again.
But was he still on the street? From where he stood he saw cliffsides—or walls—riddled with windows. Most of them were glass, since a field that would hold out that amount of cold and wind was a more expensive proposition than glass, but little of it was transparent. It was white and milky, like old eyes, and even now Wanbli could hear the dry scrape of sand against the panes. Lava sand.
But there were no doors, and doors usually opened on the street side of a building. If he could go around one of the spires until he found the door, he’d be on the road again, or at least near it. Hands folded into his armpits, Wanbli shuffle-danced forward, keeping his left shoulder to the wall of a spindle tower of rock.
Someone was coming around the other way, startling Wanbli, who had not seen another pedestrian since leaving the customs house. He whipped upright from his cold crouch. His arms flew out. He staggered.
He was one meter away from a creature much taller t
han he, much broader too, with hide, talons and fangs. On its breast it wore a badge of gold in the shape of a flower. It spread its own immense arms out and hooted at him.
Wanbli sprang back by reflex and landed in guard almost two meters away. He reached for his blunderbuzz, which he had stopped to load with a pebble immediately upon reaching the street, but his hands were not behaving like hands at all. One touch of the cold plastic side of the weapon convinced him he could not use it.
The interrupter was another story. He had it out of its stick pad and armed before his brain had really registered that the gun would not do. It was pointed at the behemoth, but he did not yet squeeze the firing ring.
The check came from his brain, which had been doing other things while his body put him into motion. His brain had been telling him that Icor did not possess wild beasts of this size. It had brought to his attention the golden badge, which seemed to be pinned directly through the hide of the thing and indicated that the creature was either domestic or sentient. It had made mention of the fact that the thing was apparently female, and that female creatures lacking young were less likely to attack. Also more often protected under law. Finally it had noted that when the creature spread its talons wide it had smacked the right one into the rock wall, doing that wall some cosmetic damage and leaving a red streak on the back of the silver-gray paw, and that it was now holding that hand in its other and looking as betrayed as any carpenter with a smashed thumb. Wanbli listened to his brain, backed further away and lowered the tip of the stick.
It was humanoid, though well over two meters tall. It had smallish eyes, with nictitating membranes that worked constantly, from the outside in, sort of like windshield wipers. It had a round, button nose, where noses are set on Earth creatures, and a mouth that was only slightly muzzled and more delicate than seemed fitting, given the rest. Its ears were set low on its head, and the auricles leathery and long.
It rubbed the rock dust from its paw—hand, rather—with a sandpaper noise and it emitted a whistle which was identical to the whistle that would be emitted by a human who had closely escaped danger. The talons of its hand, clean-polished and four centimeters long, disappeared into the first joint of the fingers, which Wanbli had not noticed were webbed. At the same time, rather as though the two responses were conjoined physiologically, a complex organ poked out of the now relaxed slit between its long legs.
It gave a great sigh and said in careful Hindi, “I’m sorry if I frightened you.” It had a light, child’s voice. “I was frightened too.”
Wanbli found he was giggling, and the response embarrassed him. “No, you just warmed me up a little,” he said, returning the stick to its position as a walking aid. He did not press the top to disarm it, however. He stepped back over the ground he had lost in his retreat, and he looked the creature up and down and up and down. It was his first real foreigner.
The tall creature looked too, wiping and wiping its eyes. “What are you?” it asked first, barely before Wanbli could ask the same question. “Are you homo sapiens?”
Wanbli giggled again. “Why shouldn’t I be homo sapiens?” He leaned on his stick and tried to look as human as possible.
The foreigner hesitated. He played with his fingers. When not in use, he kept his hands pursed, so that the gray, abrasive hide concealed the soft white palm surface. Now they looked like flower buds opening and closing.
“None of the humans I have seen are as… beautifully colored as you are.”
Wanbli felt himselt warming considerably to his first real foreigner.
“Or… or is it only for breeding season?”
Wanbli guffawed and struck a more arrogant stance. “Among humans, my friend, all seasons are breeding season. This color is the mark of a Painted Wacaan, and that is what I am. We are definitely human. My name is Wanbli.”
This time the great soft ears rippled as the hands folded and unfolded. “Thank you for trusting me with your name, Wobbly. I am”—the sound was a whistle with two hoots scattered within—“of the Dayflower people.”
That was a name Wanbli recognized, though just barely: one of the pages in the illustrated book he had used for elementary cosmography. He had been very fond of that book, but he remembered the picture as being much less imposing than this reality. It had shown a grayish sort of person of no particular size, with ears held out like ceremonial fans. Whistle-two-hoots here had yet to stick out his ears.
“I am very happy to meet you,” said Wanbli, and he gave him a Wacaan bow, which did not involve losing eye contact. “I am a stranger here. I just got in on a shuttle boat.”
“I just got in on a shuttle boat,” said Whistle-two-hoots. “This seems to be a very unfriendly place.”
Wanbli, who had been dancing from foot to foot and slapping himself, agreed. “Don’t you find it unpleasantly cold?”
Now Whistle-two-hoots did erect his ears. “And windy too.”
Hearts one and loyalty united. The Dayflower dropped his own not very pressing business, and led Wanbli down the lava street and to the Corporation Store.
He awoke from a nightmare in which he was carrying an unbelievably heavy child up the side of Pontiac Rock. It was his child, and he was determined to take care of it, though it seemed they were both going to tumble to their deaths. Then he was at the top of the table, not knowing how he had done it, and he put the baby down, to find that it wore Ake Tawlin’s old, debauched face. It was not his child after all, and he backed away from it, though it cried and put out ugly little arms. He was over the edge and falling, but no, really he was only being stung by an Elf Darter, The ugly baby would be stung too, and he couldn’t let that happen, no matter whose child it was, but now the windy red rock was bare, though he still heard it cry.
Wanbli sat up and rubbed his head, which really did hurt. He was on the floor of the foreigner’s room on the cheap sudsy-foam flooring and covered by a really magnificent fur parka which was his very own. The foreigner was curled on the bed, hanging over a bit in all directions, and he was snoring. The room smelled strongly of leather, though Wanbli didn’t know whether that was from his new outfit or from his new companion.
Why should the top of his head be smarting so? He hadn’t struck himself on anything. The last insult his scalp had suffered had been—and here he mused and mumbled and remembered his dream—that very darter attack at Pon-tiac Rock, a long time ago. He tried to count days and realized that he had totally lost track of days. That knowledge raised a sweat under the fur, and a feeling of dizziness. He counted meals instead and decided that two days only had passed since he had tracked the aircar of Rall’s Paints to its concealment: that day had ended with his falling asleep at dinner on Captain Blanding’s boat, and the next day, or at least spell of wakefulness, had ended on Digger’s floor here.
He had decided to call the Dayflower individual Digger, after a large dog that had belonged to his First Eagle School Group. It was easier than Whistle-two-hoots. And as he was reluctant to be called Wobbly for who knew how long, he had asked the Dayflower to call him Red.
The toxins of a good, well-placed darter sting ached for five to seven days. No wonder. Events had just driven that small distraction out of his mind.
It wasn’t that bad a pain but still Wanbli sweated. He thought he might have a recurrence of his abdominal problems too. That would be unfortunate in these close quarters, where the evacuatory was sitting right in the middle of the room. Not his own room, either. He breathed deeply and attempted to calm himself. It was difficult; he seemed all out of control.
The attempt at self-mastery at least let him remember exactly what he had been doing wrong in these past few days. He had not been working out. Five days now, with none of the exercises that kept a Paint being a Paint. Worse, he had not done either the morning or the evening rituals. No wonder he was out of kilter.
Wanbli was not superstitious—for a Wacaan. He knew the world would not come to an end if he stopped his observances. Brawliens 2-98 would s
till rise and set in relation to Neunacht in colors of rose, lime and turquoise if Wanbli became a Pov-head or mentally disturbed and never invoked the six directions again. But Wanbli himself would have some trouble rising and setting in the proper colors.
For a bad moment he thought he had forgotten to pack his altar kit, but then he remembered that he had stowed it first of all, as was his early training at school, and so it was at the very bottom of the suitcase. He divested himself of the parka and of the lovely, soft-tickly fur-lined trousers that went with it, and spread his gear. A compass showed him local north, and from then on it was easy.
When he was finished, he felt much better, and the intimations of diarrhea had disappeared. That was just as well, for he was being watched by Digger’s little, deep-set eyes, and the foreigner’s ears were sail-spread to catch the whispered words.
“The knife made me nervous at first,” he said. Wanbli had forgotten Digger’s voice was so peeping a treble. “But then I saw that it was all a magic ritual. A very nice one too.”
Wanbli rose with a crackling of knees and took a whiz into the rather primitive urinal. Either Digger had profound elimination taboos or he had been taught that humans did, for he turned his body to the wall and pulled the covers over his head.
“You have your own rituals, I suppose,” said Wanbli, just to have something to say.
Digger sat up and the iron bed frame creaked much louder than Wanbli’s knees had. “Not really. Just the religious observances, of course.”
Wanbli had been putting the trousers back on over his breechclout, not because he really needed them in the room, but because they felt so good, and he stopped with one leg in the air. “That was a religious observance.”
“Ah,” said the Dayflower individual, in tones that suggested that he could say more but was not going to. He didn’t piss at all, but glanced covertly at the facilities so often that Wanbli put on his parka and said he was going out for another glance at Boom.
Much to his confusion, it was just getting dark. Had he slept through a local day and night, or was this planet a very slow spinner? He should have asked Digger.
The Third Eagle Page 7