The Third Eagle

by R. A. MacAvoy

  “This shimmer is half fighting, half sex and half scenes of sand boats cutting a wake. Each of you four fellows has two scenes apiece, as well as the usual group flounders. You, Tersea, get to be both the women who catch the liner, as well as backing the heroine. You, Red, get to back Kyle.” This was said flat-voiced, with Pylos not looking at Wanbli at all, but still it raised a murmur.

  Backing Al Kyle in his remake of Hounds of Juna was about as high as an AR could go. Jaime Lepp, at Wanbli’s right, gave him a good-natured dig in the ribs. “It’s just a matter of… what worked out,” said Pylos, flipping through his reader with his thumb. (What worked out had been determined by Kyle himself, who had taken one look at Wanbli’s physique and declared dictatorially that no one but this barbarian would get any of his shirt-off scenes.)

  Wanbli looked unmoved. He was unmoved, his theatrical ambitions dead, his hopes all pinned on the cool, blue-brown, heavy-lipped source of peace squatted in her white gauze one meter away from him.

  He could take her away, back to the ever-spreading trees. A cabin in the wilderness. A place of hiding. A deer carried home over his shoulders. She would rush out in excitement to meet him, with a long skirt and a spatula in her hand. Perhaps it was a paintbrush and a painter’s smock: he didn’t yet know Audry’s proclivities that well and his fantasy was adaptable.

  “When’s the last time you did any real fighting?” Wanbli was dragged back to Pylos’s dry question. His unprepared memory flashed back to Tawlin—to the attack by Heydoc and Susie. “‘Bout seven ten’ys ago,” he said.

  All the ARs sat very still and gazed at Wanbli. Nobody tittered. No one raised a doubt. Behind Pylos’s weathered eyes something moved briefly. “In a bar?”

  Wanbli didn’t hear the contempt in the question, though he was usually open to nuance. Just now he was so far away, with Audry and the dead deer. “Oh. If you count that, it’s a little more recently. Say six ten’ys.”

  Mail came, and much to Wanbli’s surprise there was a gram for him. A printed letter. He giggled to think how much energy Reynaldo was putting into his friendship with a penniless alien AR. He must have worked up this printdoc the very minute Wanbli told him he was going up to Bakersfield. Probably a joke. He ripped it open without reading the return.

  Clan Council

  Hovart

  T’chishett K1K4

  Neunacht BR 2-98

  Wanbli Elf Darter Son of Damasc Branch-of-Flame:

  You are to remain in place until contacted by council again.

  Important business.

  Mychael Irradiate

  Mychael was head of HCC.

  What kind of message was this? Not “you are cursed,” “stand accused” or even “change your shamed name,” but only “wait.” Wanbli, holding the single sheet of print, felt cursed, accused and shamed. If it had ordered him to kill himself, it would have been less of a shock.

  Audry was at his elbow. “Bad news?” she asked. Not uncaring.

  “It’s… from home,” he said. He mumbled.

  “Has someone died?”

  Wanbli shivered, just exactly as if someone had died. “No. It’s about… the station. Something about the space station we’re buying,” he said. It was the first thing that came into his mind.

  “I throw a punch, you bounce back from it. Simple law of reaction.” Pylos picked up Jaime Lepp off the ground and added, “Back, remember, not straight down. We’ll run this again.”

  Wanbli, with the other ARs, stood watching. Jaime Lepp had not been drinking enough water, was Wanbli’s observation. Most people strange to the desert made that mistake. Eliot, for example, poured water over the rag on his head instead of downing it. Not so effective.

  But there was more to Lepp’s difficulty than that. Pylos wasn’t easy to understand. In his mind, Wanbli ran the move over and over. He was the avatar of Al Kyle: M’boten, the wrecked adventurer, lover of orphaned Lizza of Juna. Jaime was an unnamed company inspector. Nasty. M’boten catches Nasty about to tie up Lizza and her little brother and throws a single punch to the jaw that sends Jaime—Nasty, that is—airborne for six feet. Wanbli imagined himself on the practice stand of Tawlin, both punching and being punched. “It doesn’t feel right,” he said, not loudly. He suspected the guy would go straight down.

  They were doing it again. Jaime was a great faller; that was his specialty. He lost his balance like no other man in the AR crew, and could hop invisibly backward at the brush of a fist with more than a dancer’s timing. As Pylos’s bony hand launched toward his head he went back.

  Not fast enough. Pylos moved at full speed and all heard the clack of teeth hitting teeth as Jaime went over backward. All stared at the man blinking up at the dazzling sun. His mouth moved. He seemed to be tasting blood.

  “That looked better,” said Pylos, breathing hard. He smiled slowly at Lepp. “Amazing what being really hit does for verisimilitude.”

  Jaime got up, looking away. He was obviously angry, but his eyes were wide and set. Wanbli knew him to be a gymnast: no fighter at all. Not used to being hit. He put his finger to his mouth and it came away pink.

  Pylos watched this with an expression on his face which was half worried and half pleased about something. “All right. It’s a little scene, children. A tiny scene. Let’s do it and get it spooled before… before the bruise comes up.”

  Wanbli winced but stepped into the circle. The cameras lengthened their noses, focusing close to the spot of loose sand where Jaime waited, brushing sand off the silver glitter of his Juna Corporation kilt and greaves.

  M’boten was wearing a torn shirt and tartan trousers (a real man’s clothes). His hair fell in his face and so did some very convincing shadows, so that no one could tell that this was not the aging, blue-eyed Al Kyle. He allowed the three camera people and two set directors to place him properly.

  “Let’s take it in one, Red,” called Pylos. “Do what I did.”

  Wanbli turned his face, which leaped free of the shadows, looking harsh. His eyes glinted garnet, looking very odd against the pale dye of his face. “Hit him, you mean?”

  “That’s the only way we’re going to get it out of him, don’t you think? Or does the thought of hitting somebody give you problems, Paint?”

  Being hit wasn’t much of a much to Wanbli, as long as it didn’t alter his face or send him to the dentist. He glanced back at Jaime to find that one didn’t agree. The man had an expressive monkey face, better suited for a character actor than an AR, really, and it showed fear bordering on dread. Fear of Wanbli.

  Not since childhood had Wanbli had to strike at anyone who was afraid of him. He was unprepared. He tried to whisper something reassuring to Lepp: to tell him that it wouldn’t be that bad, that if he moved smartly he wouldn’t catch it at all. Then the little “beep” sounded and he had to move.

  It was a big, blustering, syrup-slow punch with nothing behind it, but so spooked was the AR that he ducked down and sideways, terribly inefficiently. He caught the edge of Wanbli’s hand on his cheekbones and fell sitting on the sand.

  Pylos cursed in good Hindi and waltzed in as the cameras snapped off together. He kicked Lepp out of the way.

  “I told you to hit him, to knock him back. Now we’ve got to do it all over again. Is this kindness? To him, to me? To us all?

  “Or can you throw a controlled punch at all? I want to see a real punch out of you, not this nonsense.”

  Wanbli saw Jaime edging out of the circle. He wanted to tell the man to go drink something. There was Audry, hiding in the shade of a camera. Always hiding. No expression in her black-brown eyes, on her berry-brown lips.

  “Do you hear me!” The bellow brought Wanbli back. Pylos was slightly berrylike in color himself. The top of his head came up to Wanbli’s nose. “Yes,” said Wanbli. “You want it again.”

  “I want to see you throw one. If you can.” Pylos pointed at his own face and took one step backward, supremely confident, almost sneering.

  Wanbli kne
w his last punch had been laughable. He wasn’t proud of it. He felt much better about punching at the technical authority, who was an old teacher and could deck him: no offense in the world involved. He threw at Pylos’s jaw a back-knuckle strike, fast and loose as a rubber band: just a warm-up.

  He stared down at the TA, who had gone six feet airborne and landed flat on his back in the sand, just outside the focal circle of the arena. “That’s the move, all right,” admitted Wanbli. “But I really don’t think it would work that way. I think the flyer would just go down.”

  Pylos didn’t answer or open his eyes.

  Wanbli felt the sting on his knuckles where they had made solid contact with the flat of Pylos’s jaw. He took two steps forward. What was the old teacher—the old TA—the old viper—trying to prove this way? Was he waiting for Wanbli to kneel beside him, so he could lash out and destroy his diaphragm, or his throat or his genitals? Very nervously, Wanbli bent knees beside Pylos and put his hand to the old man’s neck.

  “I… don’t feel a pulse,” he said. “What kind of hospitals do they…”

  Audry was beside him, still swathed in white. She opened Pylos’s eyes and looked at the pupils. She reached into his mouth and pulled at the tongue. She looked up.

  “Go away, Red,” she said very softly. “Go someplace else very quickly.”

  He stood on the landing strip among scurrying engineers and drivers who did not know yet. The sun was white and deadly—not his sun at all. Around him rose the humpty shape of the vans and the freighters of Myronics. Beyond that, only the artificial desert.

  Go someplace else. Hah.

  How did it happen? A back-knuckle. A stinger. Not the blow to knock a man out. Not a blow to kill. Protectors, had he killed his first man out there, and by accident? Sweat rolled down Wanbli’s shoulder blades and he was very cold. Calling the discipline of his Third Eagle training, he stopped pacing. Slowed his breathing. Closed his eyes. Turning his soaring fears into a giant darter and beat that to the ground.

  He rehearsed what he would tell them when they asked for an explanation for the defunct TA. “I hit him on the jaw: a light stinger. It shouldn’t have done any harm. He must have had a weakness in his neck. Besides, he asked for it.”

  No, no, you never, ever said, “He asked for it.” That was not Third Eagle, but First Eagle stuff. It turned the whole world against you. It led to forced personality restructuring.

  But he had. He had said… what? Wanbli screwed up his sweaty face with concentration. To the best of his recall, Pylos had said, “I want to see you throw one. If you can.” And then he pointed at himself.

  It had been at himself, hadn’t it? Wanbli squeezed his head between his hands. He sat down on a metal drum, which made him stand up again, fast. Everyone would admit Pylos had wanted Wanbli to strike at him. Please, everyone, admit that. Jaime would stand behind him, certainly. Even though he’d hit him. And Audry, of course.

  Go somewhere else. He wished he could. Wanbli had lost every trace of interest in the art of acting.

  The air conditioning of the crew van gave Wanbli a fit of shivers. It was empty of people. There was his pack, with his few possessions in it. He would squat here until they came for him. At least he would show dignity.

  He leaned back against the fabric of the pack and it crackled. He glanced in to see the white glimmer of the letter he had received that morning from Hovart Clan Council, and which the recent extremities had driven from his mind.

  He thought: they are not going to restructure me. They are going to kill me. Some quiet emissary will arrive from Hovart or more likely South Bay itself, find me on trial for murder and very neatly dust me to save clan honor.

  As had been done to the maniac who broke Tag. Not a Wacaan anymore. Wanbli himself had said that to Tawlin. Glibly.

  But then he never had been a Wacaan, according to Tawlin. Well, now he was willing to believe that. Wanbli sat still and hoped they would come for him soon.

  The footsteps were very light and rapid. The shadow in the van’s doorway was small. The person who stood before Wanbli was a young boy in shorts with fat, dimpled knees.

  “They’ve got him on a stretcher,” he said. “Silver sheet over him.” The boy had fog-gray eyes and a lisp.

  “He’s dead?” Wanbli was surprised how collected he sounded.

  “Looks that way.” The boy, like a cricket, rubbed one leg against the other. He wasn’t sweating much. Time passed.

  “You going to sit there?”

  Wanbli glanced up into a pink, chubby face. “What should I do, flyer?”

  Very airily the boy said, “Oh, I think I’d go away if I was you.”

  “Did Audry send you?”

  This question received only a giggle.

  “Go where? There is nothing around here but sand. It’s not even a desert, just… sand.”

  The boy hopped in place, as little boys do. “There’s another ship, you know. Not their ship. Our ship.”

  Wanbli, remembering, opened his mouth but said nothing.

  “We,” announced the little boy, “are the carriers of culture. The fulfillers of dreams. We are free people.”

  Wanbli stared straight across at the boy’s face. “What has all that to do with me?”

  He must have been older than he looked, this little fat-faced boy. He said, “Come across and be one of us. It is”—his fog-colored eyes shifted up and down—“your destiny.”

  SIX

  IT WAS AS THOUGH he were on the liner again, back in the days when he carried a heavy changer and was on his way. Wanbli sat in the lounge where the boy had left him, amid the daises, padded platforms and piled cushions: common-denominator furniture, suitable for any traveling race, except the hoomie. Wanbli shivered, for it was chilly in here after the desert. Except the hoomie.

  From his pack he took the wonderful fur jacket, which had not seen use since the planet of its purchase. It smelled musty already. He put it over his shoulders.

  His blunderbuzz fell out at his feet. Indecisively he regarded it, touched it, took it out of its holster.

  It was disturbing how much he wanted to put it on. He asked himself if he thought he could buzz his way out of his problems. (It was a rhetorical question.) Going from little error to big error, from honest mistake to murder. Ending up in a bloodbath—no doubt suicide. He’d seen enough shimmers to know how it went.

  Just a few minutes ago he’d been resigned. Not happy, but resigned. Now, because some hatchling had an idea, he was cowering under the aegis of perfect strangers. He remembered the Patish, and its tongue. Perfectly strange. Why would the creatures feel bound to protect him? How could they, against Myronics Security, which was a good-sized army, or even against the less imposing civil authorities of New Benares? It didn’t make sense for strangers to try.

  Running away was not the act of an innocent man. He had convicted himself before all eyes. Perhaps even Audry’s.

  But she had said, “Go away. Go somewhere else…”

  There was someone in the doorway. Wanbli had heard nothing, but there was someone in the doorway. He gave a spring sideways and came rolling down a set of padded stairs which existed to serve the seating requirements of six different races. This it did moderately well. Rolling down would not have suited any of them, but Wanbli did not lose his blunderbuzz. He came to rest with the rise of the two bottom steps in between himself and the open doorway.

  It was empty again.

  A voice spoke around the corner. It was thin and lisping, as the boy had lisped, but Wanbli recognized it as Doych, a language of which he only knew a hundred words. He shouted back that information.

  “I am telling you that you do not need that gun. I am the owner of the ship and it was I who sent Pascal to invite you here.”

  Wanbli stood up. He was not full of trust, but that hardly mattered. He could not hold off all comers indefinitely, from behind a universal chair. He was not a frightened beast. He put the blunderbuzz down on the second stair.r />
  The Patish came out. If it was the same creature he had seen that morning, it had taken off its robe, wimple and drapeau. It was a four-limbed biped, but a greater proportion of its length was body than would be normal in a human being. It had fur which grew in multiple rosettes or cowlicks around its body. Its sex was not obvious. It was less than five feet tall.

  “I’m sorry,” said Wanbli. “You moved very quietly. I was startled.”

  It approached within three meters and stopped there. “I understand better than you might think, sir. With your reflexes, you might almost be Patish. Humans usually move like the slow-turning seasons.”

  Wanbli had to smile.

  “You might wonder why you have been invited here, at such an odd and unusual moment in your life. Or perhaps I assume too much, and it is no strange thing for you to break a man’s neck.”

  The smile went out, but slowly. “Is he dead, then?”

  The Patish’s tongue extruded. He used it to scratch between his hairless fingers. He sighed, very humanlike. “I see no reason to doubt it. They have removed his form from the arena and there is a great deal of expostulating going on. The woman in the bawghaa sits still and strokes her face with her hand repeatedly. The other athletes shake their heads. The man with the pale hair raises his arms and slaps his sides; he is depressed. So is she.”

  Wanbli digested all this. He could see Audry behind his closed eyes. He leaned against the universal chair. “You watch very closely. Not to be ungrateful, owner, but what is it all to you?”

  Now the Patish approached closer. It sat itself on the lowest step and gazed up at Wanbli, looking like all beasts and not a beast at all. “People of all races interest me. People in crises interest me profoundly,” it said.

  “And I interest you?”

  The head leaned closer. Wanbli hoped the tongue would not come out. “Yes. You do. Don’t I interest you?”

  Wanbli felt his blood speed with embarrassment. He put a lock on his expression. Neutrally he replied, “Of course. I wonder why you would hide me.”