The Third Eagle

by R. A. MacAvoy

  It was a wonderful restaurant, and Wanbli had managed to snag a table in the corner where he could put himself against two walls and watch everything. This didn’t give Audry such a view, but she wasn’t a Paint and probably wouldn’t care about the angles.

  She did have a nice body, though. Best he had seen since Vynur. Since home.

  “He did seem to know your people. What did he call you: painted warriors? Is that an organization of some kind?”

  He nodded, wondering what was in that tall green glass of hers. He could smell the fruitiness of it across the table. “We’re… uh, bodyguards. From the Wacaan clan on Neunacht. But how he should know I don’t know.”

  “Perhaps you have a bad reputation.” As she spoke, she sipped: a pretty sight. He did not know which was more inviting, the frosted green glass or the heavy, red-brown lips that puckered around it. He decided the lips had the advantage, just as Audry said, “Do you want some? I hadn’t thought of suggesting it to you; it’s so much a lady’s drink. It’s called ‘spring equinox.’”

  Wanbli put his mouth right over the spot her lips had made in the ice frosting of the glass. He hoped she would notice this gallantry. It was sweet, light, flowery. It almost destroyed him.

  “O Protectors! And you drink this down like lemonade!”

  He finished choking and handed the glass back across the table. “What is it you were asking about… our reputation? Do we have a bad reputation?”

  Audry Hish put the drink down and looked across the table at the new stuntman—at his bright beaded shirt, his flushed cheeks, his heavy gasping and his watery eyes—and she answered, “Never mind, Red. It was a silly question.”

  He would certainly have invited her home, had he had a home and not merely a guest room in Reynaldo and Cyrene’s house. He wished very hard that she would invite him to her house, but she did not. Perhaps she lived with her parents.

  As it was, she drove him back to the door of the villa, remarking that for a penniless bodyguard and aspirant toward the Arena, he seemed to have fallen on his feet. Wanbli wished he might have found the proper smooth and witty way to explain that he had made friends with Reynaldo by beating him up, but the wit wouldn’t come and the time was soon past. He was waving and she was driving off in her little green groundcar. He hadn’t touched those perfect, heavy, red-brown lips once, not even with his finger.

  Reynaldo wanted to hear all about it: the interviews, the first shooting, the hoomie’s terrible jokes. Wanbli wanted to talk about Audry.

  He asked Reynaldo, who was older and with a child besides, whether he believed in love of a man for a woman the way the shimmers had it: love that destroyed reason, that overturned dignity and swamped the vessel of the soul.

  They were in Reynaldo’s den, which had been walled and paved in bricks, regardless of expense. The black man laughed and curled his toes in his slippers. That was exactly the sort of love he had for his wife, he said, and in proof of it, if he didn’t tell her so once a week, she would see to it that all reason in the house was destroyed, his dignity spun like a top and the vessel of his soul sunk without salvage.

  Sunk without salvage: he repeated the line twice, liking it. Wanbli laughed with great appreciation and knew he had extended his welcome at the house by at least another seven days.

  * * *

  His dreams were very scrambled that night. Estamp, the hoomie, wore Tawlin’s eyes in its puckery face. Someone like Audry (but not Audry herself) was telling Wanbli that he was arrested and being deported to Icor. He said it didn’t matter, as long as she would come along, but she would not. He was in the ship and there was a repeated bumping. It was a body bumping the hull. It had been released too close and caught in an antenna. Wanbli expected it to be Digger, because Digger was dead, but he looked out the window and it was the stiff form of Aymimishett, going thump-thump against the metal scales of the ship. Aymimishett saying, “I don’t want to be an actor, or a tramp or a thief.” I don’t want to be an actor.

  New Benares had two moons, just like Neunacht: ordinary, low-density moons, one of which chased the other continually across the sky, passing it once every fifty-five of the local days. The moon that chased was called Dogmoon, and it was spotted. The other, white moon was called Rabbit. Rabbit’s orbit was eccentric.

  For one entire pursuit Wanbli worked the sweatshops of Myronics, bathed in neutral beige paint and following after Audry Hish with an eccentric dedication. Audry was always kind and usually cool, though more than once she allowed him to kiss her heavy, berry-colored lips. (This kiss became, for Wanbli, more than a salute among friends. Kissing Audry was a religious observance; afterward, he might not remember the touch, but he would remember the awe that went along with it.) He spent hours in the commissary, waiting for her to come to lunch. He walked the routes she drove, so that he might wave ever so casually as she passed. They had late, weary little dates after his long day’s shooting was over, and her longer evening of scheduling the next day’s activities. He visited her nunnish two-room apartment but did not so much as touch the fabric of her exotic tropical dresses.

  Wanbli was learning a great deal about the nature of romance.

  Audry’s title was Active-Roles Manager, which meant she kept up the large multicolored stunt-schedule charts, making maximum use of those actors whose job was to perform the acts other actors could not or would not do: to run around and get hurt. In flat production a lot of tricks could be worked—blows sent ten centimeters off target—blows which looked deadly and merely struck air, focus on a face while a man was supposedly being knifed in the stomach—but in AT work everything but disembowelment had to be shot as it was to appear.

  It was Audry’s job to make sure that all the crew had work (except those carrying injuries which would appear obvious in shimmer, of course) and that one stuntperson wasn’t exposed to unusual risk: made to jump off the roof of a building three days running, let’s say. The others would be jealous of both screen time and hazard pay. It was also Audry’s job to visit the hospital regularly.

  The largest part of her work, however, was in reconciling the beliefs of the Active-Roles crew one with another.

  All athletes are superstitious. Boxers, hand-to-hand fighters, duelists and wrestlers are the worst of the lot. Those whose fighting skills are an outgrowth of a basic religious or philosophical stance, such as karatekas, Dominicans or Registered Xenophobes, grow completely intransigent, and the intransigence of an RX is not compatible with that of the Hounds of Christ.

  So: incense or no incense, bows to the east or to the west or to the south (Audry had no one in the charts listed as north-bowing), sets purified by sexual activity or by abstinence of same, on-location chow breaks or red, white, or purely liquid food, offerings of sun vegetables or root vegetables, according to which moon was leading…

  It would not have been so bad if each athlete had been content to control his own consumption, emission or intromission. It was instances such as Tweet Lashva’s complaint that Eliot Edwards’s sexual continence was destroying the quality of the neural field around the set: this interchange ran half through one evening and into the night, with Eliot countering that Tweet was a gland-drugged whore and was only angry that he had refused her. Audry was inclined to take Eliot’s side in the matter, but it led to Tweet’s withdrawal from the project, and that was its own problem, There were not so many women who would allow to be done to them what was done to them by the Myronics Active-Roles Division. Small men in padded bras did not look the same falling from high places.

  Audry herself was from the city of Old New Benares, where she had a retired mother and a younger sister in school, both of whom she was helping financially. Though the customs of ONB favored serial monogamy, Audry was by no means as unapproachable as Wanbli believed. It was only that the oddities of her crew had put her off involvement for a while, and then she was always tired.

  Wanbli would wake up in his little dormotel cubby (not too different from what he was used t
o at Tawlin, but uglier), perform his now heretical ritual in dim light in the parking space that was his, though he had no vehicle to fill it, and then void against one of the ever-present tree boles. They seemed created expressly to fulfill this function. He did his own workout after breakfast, wherever he thought people might come to watch. The gravity was a bit heavy for Wanbli, the air a bit too damp. It was a place for passions as well as infections to grow. He ached plaintively for Audry’s heavy lips and touched no woman at all.

  Less and less did he want to be doing what he was doing on New Benares, but then no one seemed to want to be doing what they were doing. The stunts wanted to be serious actors, the actors wanted to be Bright Lights, the Lights wanted to direct, the directors wanted to produce and the producers talked about nothing except the expense of their children’s genetic surgery. No one admitted to being what he seemed to be except those lucky few such as Reynaldo, who had jobs of real work. Or such as Audry, who was not as lucky but knew damn well what she was about.

  But the less exciting the career became, the more comfortable it was as a job. It was such a routine, with the juice stands always on the same corner under the same green weather, and the shops for rolls and mashes for breakfast and the commissary for lunch, and on location shoots they fed him supper too.

  He was good at what he did, having a gift for choreography, and when Pylos said, “One, you fire; two, you take three steps, fall on your stomach with your head facing west, roll three times and drop the gun so its shadow covered your face,” that was how he did it: fire, three steps, fall west, three rolls and lose the gun. He only had to be told once.

  One would think that this prompt and intelligent obedience would have won his superior’s heart in time. Wanbli did think so, and so he kept trying. But Pylos, the Master Martial Artist and Technical Authority for all Myronics, did not like him. After he found Wanbli on the grass behind the commissary doing forms in the air and mugging for the crowd, he liked him even less.

  Some days the Active-Roles wore pink body paint, some days biscuit brown and some days shiny blue-black. Often they were covered up completely in clothing, layer upon layer of it under the tropical sun. In the beginning Wanbli tried to keep straight the plots of the ATs which he touched with his small presence, but he gave up. There was no one around him who did know, to explain, and then there were so many jobs. In one shimmer, which the AR crew shot for almost eight working days, the baddies were all red-skinned and still Wanbli had to slather up, because they wanted their red, which had a tad more pink to it, and not his. Audry explained it all to him and he carried the paint pots for her and never, never complained about anything (not like those others) but he was like an old wolf in a collar; he never got used to covering his eagles.

  “Red, how would you feel about going to Bakersfield?”

  Audry was driving the crew bus back to Central Garage for the evening. Wanbli always had the little seat beside the driver’s; it had been weeks since anyone disputed it with him. That day he had done nothing but tumble off one wall and have two collapsible bayonets thrust through his middle. Both had worked perfectly, so he was very fresh.

  He didn’t know if her question was business or whether she was really asking him out. Before his hopes could soar too high, he asked, “Are we shooting in Bakersfield? Where’s that?”

  She raised to her lips the straw of a traveler’s flask bag, keeping half her attention on the road. Wanbli was slightly surprised to note that the flask was filled with the green liquid that had gagged him on their first date. The things people could get down their throats.

  “Yes, we’re shooting in Bakersfield, or at least six of us are. Most ARs don’t like to go, though. It’s a desert climate. We’re shooting a remake of Hounds of Juna. This time with more groping and less red blood. Fashions.”

  At the word “desert” Wanbli glowed like a candle and when those perfect lips so coolly spoke about groping he came close to saying, “Oh, sleep with me, darling Audry: Audry of the berry-colored lips and infinite black eyes. Touch your body to mine and we will make every night and every day beautiful and worth living, though all around us are moss-headed, numb-bodied fools!”

  He came close to saying it, but the same wistfulness that had sparked this poetry in him inhibited him from saying it at all. What he did say was “I’d do anything to get back to the desert, Audry. I gather you’re going?”

  “‘Where the sheep are, there find the shepherd.’ Just six of us—and Pylos, of course. It’s all hand-to-hand: fists and feet against the evil creatures of the mine owners. Warrior stuff. That’s your strong point, Wanbli, isn’t it?”

  “It was,” he said. He was staring out the window. Audry gave him a deep, round-eyed look and sucked on her straw.

  It was a desert, all right, but not Wanbli’s desert. The arid regions of Neunacht were native and lived in a light, almost playfully delicate balance. There were usually spots of blue and rose in the corners of one’s eyes, and the sky was a good green. Bakersfield was one of the inevitable consequences of Terraforming: even such mild Terraforming as New Benares had undergone. Audry called it a “cusp” point. It had large sliding piles of sand which moved under the wind and very few plants, either native or introduced. The sky was more white than blue and the air tended to leave painful crusts in a person’s nostrils. Yet it was a desert. Wanbli, aware that his color had been fading from ferrous to earthenware, stripped to his breechclout and tramped around the landing station. Anytime he left the pavement, his bare feet sank out of sight into the sand.

  “You, Red, come here and help for once.” Pylos had only now come down the ramp of the big airvan. His old man’s eyes wrinkled painfully in the glare.

  Pylos was short, partly through stooping, and a trifle thick through the middle. Wanbli was not misled by these things; most of his teachers had been old, a few of them had had bad posture and at least one had been far fatter than Pylos. All his teachers had decked young Wanbli whenever he needed to be decked, even his instructor of botany. They were terrible old people, and Pylos walked with the same rolling confidence. The rumor was that he had learned all there was to know about hand-to-hand in the NB war twenty years before and had been putting it together in new combinations since. Wanbli ran to his order.

  There had been talk of introducing a giant mechanical hound into this remake, but Estamp wasn’t excited about the climate of Bakersfield and it would have been very expensive to transport him. The hounds—really loader robots in fancy dress—had been shipped down the week before and were lined up at the edge of the field. The AR crew had been warned that the units’ gleaming two-meter plastic jaws were extremely fragile. The name roles would be carted in on the days their desert scenes (not many) were to be shot and taken back almost immediately, so there were only a vanload of ARs, the engineer’s wagon and one other ship on the field. Not Myronics’. At the sight of this strange vehicle Pylos cursed and sent Audry over to intimidate them.

  Audry, instead of stripping for the heat, had changed into a long garment that hid her body completely and tended to float. One length of the gauze went over her mouth and nose, filtering the grit from the air, and the glimpse of her black doe eyes against the white (when he knew those lips were in there somewhere) brought Wanbli close to hiccups. It had been a long time.

  After ten minutes she came back. “I couldn’t budge them, boss. They had indefinite clearance signed by a nephew. I did warn them about stepping out into the shooting, though. They seemed to think it amusing.”

  Pylos had been filling a glass at the electrolytes dispenser. Slowly he turned to her. It seemed he was amused by the intruders’ amusement. “Maybe I can be less entertaining, child.” He always called Audry “child.” Wanbli didn’t think that meant Pylos thought she was one. Just the reverse.

  Audry glanced obliquely at him. “It’s a Patish troop,” she said.

  “Patish?” he repeated. “Well, damn.” Pylos went out the door, but did not proceed toward the othe
r vessel.

  Wanbli pressed past Eliot Edwards, who was reverently libating the interior of the van with electrolyte fluid, to Audry’s side. The floating gauze tickled his leg. “Why is that important—Patish, I mean?”

  “They’re nonhuman,” she replied, and brushed by him like a breeze. He was left oddly embarrassed.

  “I knew that much,” he called after her, but she didn’t answer.

  They trooped after Pylos, heavily laden, to where the scene setter had laid out the arena and piled an artificial dune to conceal the refueling station. Wanbli was uncontestedly the strongest AR, and he pulled the water wagon on its great balloon tires. As they passed in the shadow of the foreign lander, someone came out and watched.

  Tall and willowy, it was dressed much like Audry against the sand, but hadn’t the shoulders to be mistaken for the narrowest human female. It looked straight at Wanbli and its eyes were so very much like hers—round, black and soft-edged—that he stopped in his tracks and the wagon almost ran him over. Then the figure turned its gaze on someone else and the fur of the muzzle became apparent, richly brown and glossy as mud. A pink tongue extruded from the end of the face and wrapped three times around the muzzle before licking in. Wanbli found himself hurrying to catch up.

  Pylos called them all together. They gathered in the shadow of a rock, limbs outstretched to touch as little of themselves as possible. Wanbli was drinking not electrofluid but water, slowly and constantly, from a canteen.

  “Listen, you wamanas. I’ve got two days with you and that’s all. I ought to ride you—this is an expensive blink—but I’m involved in seven different shimmers at one time. Two days for blocking out action and after that you’re on your own.”

  Each of the ARs tried to hide his or her elation. Only Audry succeeded. Audry was different. Wanbli tried to pass along his canteen, but Eliot tasted it and refused.