The Third Eagle

by R. A. MacAvoy

  Ducie blinked at him as he went past her toward the nearest facility. “Could you… I mean wasn’t that terribly dangerous or at least inconvenient? With his sandpaper skin…”

  Wanbli laughed wholeheartedly. “Oh, lady! I meant good times out drinking.” Then he remembered and the laugh fell off. “No, I don’t mean that, either. Just had a few good times.”

  She was following him down the hall. Away from the uncompromising light of the dome her glamour reasserted itself. Wanbli remembered that he had liked looking at her clothes. “Hey! Ducie. Why did you sic Reynaldo on me like that? And him such a nice flyer too?”

  Her giggles were childish. They took five years off her age and possibly she meant them to do so. “Oh, Red! You have no idea. He was such a bore, with his Elmira this and Elmira that. And the idea was so funny. You have to admit. You have to admit.”

  Wanbli turned as he came to the door. “I admit it. Now can you make Reynaldo admit it?”

  Very gently (for she was the Elmira of the Stations) he closed the lavabo door against her. On a ship of this class they were sexually segregated.

  The Steamy Sky

  FIVE

  WANBLI RODE in spins and spirals over the jungle surrounding the city of New Benares on the planet of the same name. Most new arrivals in his financial condition had to take the bus and he tried to be appreciative of his fortune, but Reynaldo was a wild driver.

  “Good to feel warm again, het? Het?” shouted the black man. His aquiline nose and high forehead gave him a severe profile. Wanbli clutched his seat harness and showed his teeth in a grin, or at least he showed his teeth.

  It was warm all right, even so far above the ground, but it was not the warmth of home. It was a wet warmth: twice as humid as Southbay. Five times as wet as Tawlin. The air fought against his lungs and he suspected he could feel an infection beginning there.

  Downward was green with careless plants with their loose, sloppy leaves hanging over everything, smothering each other like people in a crowded city. Huge leaves, some almost a meter long, far too heavy to fold up at night or at dawn. But then they didn’t want to. This limp foliage looked like lengths of fabric or plastic extrusions: nothing natural Wanbli had ever seen. Trees reached up into the sky and sometimes Reynaldo dove his machine among them chortling with glee. Wanbli thought he could make out other green things battening on the boles of the trees. Perhaps these would leap out into the car.

  Wanbli, who had an extremely fine sense of balance, was very ill.

  Upward also had its touches of green, as the ground gave reflection to the bellies of blooming clouds. Maybe it was about to rain. Wanbli hoped so, for then Reynaldo would have to come down.

  It didn’t rain. “Notice the buildings,” Reynaldo shrieked over the wind noise of his latest precipitous dive.

  “What buildings?” Wanbli had to try again. “What buildings?”

  “You can’t see them.” The car swooped further, touching the damp canopy of the trees. A flock of birds, not darters but real birds with fluffy bodies and opaque wings, rose in angry protest, like Wanbli’s stomach. “Unless they are part of a set, all buildings in the consortium have to be painted banana-leaf green. Makes things easier.”

  Wanbli closed his eyes.

  Unexpectedly he felt the car touch down. “Het! Did you fall asleep?” asked Reynaldo, snapping his harness open and hopping nimbly over the low door of the open car.

  “Something like that,” answered Wanbli. He clenched and unclenched his fists. Silently he repeated the ritual to encourage the spirit to return to the endangered body. Choosing dignity over grace, he opened the door with the handle and stepped onto pavement. It was slimy.

  “You’re a cool character,” said Reynaldo. He must have been very happy to be home. He trotted around and clapped Wanbli on the shoulder. “Some people are made nervous by my driving.”

  Wanbli took a belly breath of the strange air, hoping all would stay down. “I don’t tend to be nervous.”

  “… can believe that.” Reynaldo led him away.

  * * *

  He lay by the pool, his belly against the domed tops of the paving stones. His cheek rested upon a flat stone of decorative unatite. He knew it was unatite because his host had told him so; it was pink and green in lacework. One of the by-products of Reynaldo’s mining concerns.

  It was much like Digger’s doily.

  Around him was the splash of water as Reynaldo’s daughter played Naiad games. Scarlet fishes nibbled Wanbli’s fingers, for he had both arms in the pool. The householders sat in chairs, one on each side of him.

  “You know, Wanbli,” Reynaldo began, after one of his ceremonial throat clearings, “I’m not sure about this station contract between Elmira and your people. After bankruptcy, the law is… very individual about what liabilities are to be covered.”

  “You’re saying we have been paying for three generations for nothing?” Wanbli pulled his face over the stone.

  Reynaldo was a black shape against moist blue sky. “I’m saying I don’t know. It’s not something to get perturbed about.”

  Perturbed? Wanbli laughed at the word, which he had usually heard used in the description of orbits. Planetary bodies. Ships. He imagined himself perturbed. His grin faded.

  “I may never go home again,” he said aloud, as though that were the answer to a question.

  The heat was like a sweathouse. Wanbli became a ratchett in the sun. Only the girl made noise. She was half grown: all vertical.

  “Don’t stick your hand in the filter, Doas,” Reynaldo’s wife, Cyrene, called over the splashing. Cyrene was touching her wrists and elbows with enamel. She was not exactly a fashionable woman, being plump and comfortable and keeping a comfortable house, but she had a feeling for style.

  Doas blew bubbles before answering. “It’s not my hand, Mama. It’s my hair. It gets caught and feels funny.”

  Cyrene did not look up. “The principle is the same, dear. When you break the field you let the refuse back into the pool. And for the same reason, don’t swallow any of the water.”

  “For the same what reason?” Doas was being deliberately provocative. Wanbli knew it was for his benefit and he kept his eyes closed.

  “Because the fish eliminate in it,” answered her mother, unruffled. The girl sputtered and made three faces, one after the other, and then climbed out onto the moss of the bank. She sat there naked and dripping, regarding Wanbli peripherally. She was twelve years old: a simply conceived baby—no gene sculpture used or needed—natural average of her father’s ebony and her mother’s onion-soup coloring. Her long straight hair hung to her waist, dripping, and drops formed on her budding nipples. She had an undeniable gangly charm.

  Wanbli kept his eyes closed.

  “This is not a unified planet, though it possesses only one major industry.” Reynaldo was making a large circle over the boundaries of Greenbunch Studio, dipping close enough so that the buildings could be discerned among the leaves. Wanbli was becoming used to this style of driving, though he noticed that not only was the paint scraped from under the vehicle but there were the marks of other, more decisive impacts on the chassis.

  Not content with letting Wanbli run tame through the house, Reynaldo had devoted hours to showing him around his home city. Once again Wanbli wondered at the strength of friendship one could elicit from a man by the simple expedient of beating him up. Beating him up the right way, of course. Without humiliation.

  “In the beginning they tried a Parliamentary Democracy, though I don’t know how they chose that form. Perhaps because it made such good theater. It wilted, of course, because the only entities on the planet with any power are the three studios, and they were not about to be bound by the dictates of uninvolved people acting in a hall that was to them a cheap interior set.”

  Reynaldo dropped down into the center of a tree. Wanbli whipped his head down to his knees to prevent whiplash or worse, but the tree turned out to be made of flexible vinyl sheets t
hat licked at his back as they descended. Camouflage again.

  “They fought a war once. Greenbunch against the combined might of Myronics and UAT.” They settled onto green paving. “Very expensive and played havoc with schedules. I was little more than a boy but I remember it clearly.”

  The parking yard was extensive and entirely invisible from above. Wanbli thought the T’chishetti could learn a lot from this place. Once stable in at least the vertical dimension, Wanbli began to perk up. “Did you fight?”

  “I audited. It was a peacekeeping mission.” There was a certain quiet pride in Reynaldo’s voice. “In the end we pronounced the hostilities unfeasible.”

  Wanbli knew very little about organized warfare. He saw he would have to treat the black man with more respect.

  This garden was familiar. Wanbli could not miss the lake in the middle: over an acre of shimmering water, crossed by a bamboo bridge. A fountain splashing and pumping. The colors of the lake bounced off the debris screen that covered the whole. At first Wanbli assumed that the pastel, soft-tissued flowers along the path were artificial, for none of them moved at his presence, not even when they were touched. The lake itself might have been a sheet of glass. (In T’chishett it would be easier to assemble that much glass than that much water.)

  “Do you feel like you’ve been here before?”

  “Many times,” answered Wanbli. “The Travels of Sito Mow, Kelvin and of course The Garden of Grief.”

  Reynaldo looked a bit quizzical. “Those are all fairly old movies.”

  A great deal of money was represented in these rolling hills of grass and tasteful posies. The field itself, twice larger than all of Tawlin Manor—and Tawlin was shielded only over the windows—it must cost a man’s left leg and privates too in energy.

  “I can see why they reuse it so often,” he said, to be saying something.

  “Every child’s daydream setting.” Reynaldo gave a disapproving grunt. “Always the same too.

  “Holo work is the death of art,” he said, leading Wanbli over the bridge. There were other tourists walking toward them from the opposite shore. “With flat-screen work, the camera is the eye and the eye is always new. With shimmers, well, there it just is. Blop. See it. Walk around. There it still is, just the same.”

  “The same can be said for live acting,” Wanbli offered, but it was the wrong thing to say, because Reynaldo turned and made a face. “Who said live acting was the be-all and end-all?” His expression cleared as he saw that Wanbli’s gaze and attitude was pointed forward to the other end of the bridge. Wanbli had gone gray.

  “What is it?”

  “I … thought I saw someone I knew.”

  “Oh.” Reynaldo led on. “Everyone does here. Is it Enric Paovo?”

  The name drew only a twitch of a smile. “No. His name’s Mimi—Aymimishett—and he doesn’t want to be an actor. Or a thief or a tramp.”

  “A man of sound instincts.” Reynaldo had to lean out over the rail to pass the group coming in the opposite way. Wanbli moved over, but he allowed the others to do the leaning. The man was not Aymimishett, of course. He was not even very red.

  This morning, when Wanbli was scheduled to meet the friend of Reynaldo who might help him at Myronics, he completely lost the desire to be an actor in the shimmers. Perhaps it was the baby dream again. This time he had killed the baby and was awaiting punishment. Shortly after waking in a sweat, he had cut himself on the obsidian knife. Clumsy. Less excuse than Reynaldo had had. Cyrene and Reynaldo had had an argument after breakfast. Over the Elmira, though Wanbli had not revealed a word. Doas showed him her secret way out of the house when her parents went to it like that.

  Stubbornly, Wanbli pushed his feelings into the shape of a good omen. All through his past, whenever he had had to make a decision in advance—to go someplace far, to leave a comfortable slot, to start a program as a beginner—he woke up with these cold-shower unenthusiasms. And usually the effort had been worthwhile. Ergo, this would be too. He decided to walk to the Myronics man’s office.

  “Show me terror,” said the casting man, and when Wanbli responded, he burst out laughing. “I didn’t say be terrified of me, mister. I want you to show me the language—theater language communication for terror.”

  Wanbli felt swallowed by the loose foam and leatherette of the lounge chair. Tilted back on his ass and helpless as a baby. He drew his legs up, crossed them and thought hard. He remembered Hounds of Juno, where all the old prospectors were savaged by the savage watchrobots. They had made a silly face: each of them. Wanbli made that face.

  “Right,” said the interviewer. “Now we’re beginning to understand.”

  He was an individual of average brown, but with the blue-gray sheen Wanbli had first noticed in the woman aboard the shuttle that had taken him off-planet. A good effect, he considered, but it would require a completely different palette of tattoos—if these people ever wore tattoos.

  “I’ve always wondered,” Wanbli ventured to say. “I mean, that really isn’t what a person looks like when he’s afraid of something. It’s more like he’s going to vomit, or that he’s eaten a mouthful too hot. When a flyer’s really scared…”

  “When a human being is really injured, he spouts blood all over. But if you drain your changer for a—a book, let’s say—that’s sold as a novel of suffering and transcendence, you don’t expect to find the pages damp and red-stained. You want words. One step removed. It’s the symbology that makes art out of life.”

  Wanbli tried to catch up with all this, sparking another giggle out of the Myronics man. “You don’t have to understand, mister. Just do it.”

  “Oh, I will,” said Wanbli, all readiness to please. He had come with no particular views on the nature of theater.

  The man went back to his own cushy chair and threw himself into it. He did not seem to feel the worse for being half swallowed by it. His head poked out the top and he drummed his fingers on a projecting knee.

  “Your face isn’t bad,” he murmured. “Not even by our standards.”

  Wanbli said nothing. His face was not the focus of his vanity.

  “The problem is your body.”

  Wanbli came half out of the chair; he didn’t know how. “Problem? My body? What’s wrong with it?”

  The Myronics man seemed to enjoy this reaction: the outrage, the flush, the disbelief. He smiled and settled deeper in his own chair. But then he did not know what a Paint was.

  “As far as the shape goes, and the general decorativeness, nothing at all. It’s the color and those… markings.”

  “You only like certain colors?” Wanbli settled again so that this flabby office nester might not get any more enjoyment out of him. His opinion of the fellow’s sophistication fell rapidly. A man who didn’t like a good, bright red…

  “My own personal opinion has nothing to do with it. It’s all efficiency.

  “You have all the brilliance of a turning leaf (in places where it gets cold enough for leaves to turn, of course). How many parts are written around fox-colored men with black and green feathers on their chests?”

  “Not feathers: eagles.” To Wanbli, a feather was a unit of coinage.

  “And”—he drowned out Wanbli’s protest—“if they were, why couldn’t we take an actor we already have—with name recognition—and have him painted to fit?”

  He seemed to be finished, so Wanbli cleared his throat. He got no further. “… And you needed to be told—told outright—how to show terror. Most shimmer-struck kids have got it down as second nature by the time they get here. And those are just the ordinary ones. A good actor doesn’t even remember what the dumb brute of a human does to register emotion.” He gave a whuff to show what he thought either of actors or of the dumb brute of a human.

  Wanbli took the opportunity of silence to open his mouth, but the other was faster. “So I don’t think we need you at all.”

  Using his arms, Wanbli pulled himself out of the chair. It was like fighting with a
n intestine. This time he knew what would happen when he tried to speak, and it did.

  “So goodbye,” the Myronics man said.

  Obediently Wanbli rose, but he did not go. He. moved very fast past the man’s many-shelved and surfaced, kidney-shaped desk. He ducked under an antique air-conditioning unit with lapis lazuli knobs and a sterling-silver grill and reached one long red arm behind the man in his chair-nest. Two fingers slipped down gently into the man’s eye sockets and pulled the head back over, where he held it. The man floundered toward the touch plate at the corner of his desk—the one that would call security—but only succeeded in knocking over a holo of himself shaking hands with Noren Myronics at the five-year ceremony. It was a thing he valued.

  So was his neck.

  Wanbli squatted down beside the chair, so that his head was almost at a level with the other’s. The floundering arm he caught quite casually and locked with a folded wrist. The left arm was too far away and too unpracticed to do damage, and besides, Wanbli was hidden by the chair.

  “You,” he began slowly, speaking at his leisure, “are a difficult man to talk with.”

  His prisoner whimpered, but he talked over him. “I’m not used to being treated like this, and do you know why? Did Reynaldo tell you? No? Well, I suppose you really can’t talk with your neck bent back like that.

  “What I am is a professional killer. A real professional: we take vows. I don’t always kill people, of course; sometimes I don’t need to.”

  The truth was the circumstances had never been such that he had had to kill at all. Many Paints went their lives long and never had to kill.

  “Now, that doesn’t mean I will make a good actor. Not in itself. I have some good friends among my own clan who would make lousy actors.” He had Aymimishett in mind, of course.

  Wanbli shifted on the floor, working himself into a position of greater comfort. The man’s neck stretched a little tauter. “But what it does mean is that I can move well. Also, I have a certain gift for getting into other people’s heads. Like yours, here. If I had not realized you were working to get me angry at you, I probably would have fallen for it. As it is…”