The Third Eagle

by R. A. MacAvoy

  How Wanbli pitied the whole place. How he loved it. He had seen nothing as beautiful as Tawlin on three planets. No one as fine and honest as old Aymimishett. Wanbli rocked gently back and forth, overcome by the memory of Mimi. Of all the poor, thickheaded, hopeful peoples of Neunacht, the poorest, most thickheaded and most hopeful must be the Wacaan.

  “I invoke the moon, my little sister, And the other who is my little sister to come.”

  Poor simps. The Councils had invested as much in the station as anyone. And written some very silly ritual. Now if he made it past Nem’s people, Myronics Security and the unknown drug runners, it would be up to Wanbli to let all the people of Neunacht down.

  No Sky at All

  SEVEN

  THE PORTS of Poos are illustrious, as are the taverns attached to them. That into which Wanbli walked was lined in wood, every stick of which came from off-planet, and every stick of which had been brought by the Merchant Guildsmen of Poos and donated, in exchange for a drink. The result had no unity of design, but it was mentioned in Wu and Fabricant: Wanbli read the page hung framed on the wall beside the bar.

  The multendorf had not yet let him down. Perhaps when it did he would die, and save many people some problems. Or maybe there would be no ill effect at all. Right now he was content: filled with the glory and the inevitability of going home.

  His changer did not read impressively. He had had only two pay periods at Nem’s. The tips made up more than the pay, but still, it would not get him home. He would have to make himself useful.

  Useful. That was a stunner. How could he, with his peculiar assortment of skills (or lack of them) be useful on a string-going vessel? He scratched his Third Eagle, wondering.

  He remembered the social organizer on the liner out who had offered him a job. She might have been joking; a Wacaan warrior looking for a job as a steward seemed such an unlikely eventuality back in those days. And Wanbli suspected that he wasn’t, perhaps, as much the life of the party as once he had been.

  “How can I help?” asked the bartender, who was a sharp-featured human female of some years. The question was entirely too appropriate to be real. Seeing him start and stare, she repeated herself in Ang, of which he knew nothing.

  He replied in Tndi that he would have whatever was going. It didn’t matter what he ordered, after all. Unless it was fruit juice, he couldn’t drink the stuff.

  The dark brown substance she poured him looked really vile. It was a small, heavy glass, which seemed to concentrate its deadliness. Wanbli carried it to a table and sat down to think, and to watch the travelers pass the time.

  How distant, how compassionate he felt, gazing at the worried faces, the thoughtful faces, the tired, blank faces around him. There in the corner was a Dayflower, swathed in a metal-mesh drape to protect the chair and table under him. Wanbli, for a misty moment, thought the fellow was playing chess, but it was cards actually, with two truckers and a very well dressed woman in leather lace. A business-being, probably. Why shouldn’t the Dayflower people engage in business; there was plenty of time to buy and sell, given thirty-five years. Were they playing that ominous and exotic game of bridge? No, he decided, for there was no dummy. Besides, they were too high-class.

  Wanbli was good at the card games of his people: hi-lo, piscine, rummy. He had played hi-lo with the other arrangeurs at Nem’s; all bets on the smallest digit of the changer. But now he wouldn’t want to play, for his was the detachment of the departed spirit, and as such he had gone beyond win, lose and “gin.”

  He picked up his glass and swirled the brown liquid.

  Dreamily he held it to his nose, waiting for the sting. It came, but for once it did not choke him; it was not unpleasant. It felt like mint, but not cold like mint. He dared a sip, which tasted unpleasant but felt very good. Wanbli stared cross-eyed at the glass in surprise, then remembered that his body was running with natural painkillers, all at an unnatural level. He tried it again, amazed at the effect.

  A group of six came in, dressed alike in very dreary tan, just different enough from the truckers’ khaki to mark them. As they sat down at the table beside him, a number of other groups, including the four cardplayers, got up and moved. The lady in laces stalked out of the bar entirely, clattering in her high wooden clogs.

  Wanbli could not see anything special about the newcomers, except that their coloring was a bit extreme. Two had hair as pale as their uniforms and blue eyes. Two were black. One looked like Ake Tawlin, but even shorter. Wanbli, however, knew he had no right to call another individual’s color extreme. He had met no one as red as he since leaving home.

  He pulled at the drink again, and grinned so that the glass clinked against his front teeth. “If the multendorf doesn’t kill me,” he whispered to himself, “this will have been a very educational experience.” He sighed. “If it does kill me, it still will have been very educational.”

  “What was that?” The accent was flat and guttural.

  Leaning over the back of a stool toward him was one of the tan party—a pale one. He had thick eyelids and almost no eyelashes and a very sharp nose between rosy cheeks. Wanbli thought he looked less human than the average Patish. He didn’t judge the man for that; he just noticed it.

  He understood the mistake. “Oh, I was talking to my drink.”

  The Dayflower was now following the woman out of the bar. “You know,” Wanbli said to the very pale man, “I had a friend once who used this stuff—alcohol—to kill himself. Very sad.”

  The almost invisible eyebrows rose. “Many do.”

  Wanbli nodded and put his glass down. “Yes, I guess. It was the last time I went to a bar. He was a Dayflower, like that one. He used my drink to commit suicide.”

  The man’s eyes, like his nose, became sharper. He spared a small smile. “That wasn’t considerate of him.”

  Wanbli glanced over to see that the others at the table were looking at him. “I’m sure he didn’t mean to be inconsiderate. It was just that he was a mathematician,” he said.

  The other pale one—a woman—spoke in a language Wanbli did not recognize. She seemed to be speaking to him. Or at him.

  “Greta says that here at least is one man who doesn’t mind talking with us.”

  Wanbli met his interlocutor’s eyes. These were the color of sky with just a wisp of cloud. “Why should I mind talking with you?”

  His lips were thin and pink, and he hardly moved them to talk. Wanbli thought the man’s face looked like a neat case of white leather over a framework. A football, perhaps, or a fancy shoe. So even and rounded, without the jutting framework of nose and cheekbone of a Wacaan face, or the pudgy, dimpled cheeks of the T’chishetti. He could clearly see the pink-white scalp under its cap of sand-colored hair, as the man turned to translate Wanbli’s question for his fellows.

  The diversity among humans was endless. Wanbli, sparkling and tingling with well-being, was glad to be one among them.

  The group showed their teeth companionably and one of them laughed. The pale man turned back to Wanbli and said in careful Hindi. “We are revivalists.”

  Every few years there would be a revival somewhere in Southbay. Last time, just as Wanbli was training for his Third Eagle, it had spread so far and taken so aggressively a Wacaan separatist flavor that Council had had to interfere. Wanbli’s own religious sensibilities did not incline toward group fervor, and he had become heartily sick of hearing “The Womb of the Father” sung off-key.

  This, of course, would not be a Wacaan revival and could only be more interesting. He scooted his chair toward them all and waited receptively.

  But the sand-haired man did not elaborate. Instead he bought Wanbli another drink.

  Two of them spoke Hindi, and two more had enough understanding to follow Wanbli as he talked. Or at least they nodded at appropriate times. He was telling his own story: not about Nem’s, or the fiasco on New Benares, but the part that had turned out to be important. He told them how the Wacaan had come to Neunach
t full of ideals of the pure warrior life and been outcompeted by just about everybody. It was not written that way in the local history books, of course, but that’s the way it was. How he had learned to resent his peculiar bondage to the T’chishetti, who seemed to possess the world, and how he had discovered, quite recently, that the T’chishetti resented it too. How could that happen? he asked the tan people. How could there be an unbreakable arrangement that suited nobody who was involved? The table agreed that it was very strange but that such things happened.

  Then he told them how all the clans of Neunacht had been paying for generations toward a commercial station that would open up the economy of the planet enormously and make it possible for them all to live the way they wanted. The pale man, who was leaning very close to Wanbli for purposes of translation, hazarded that maybe it would not do all that: people are often disappointed.

  They would be very disappointed, admitted Wanbli, because the station was not coming. The corporation providing it had recently reorganized and was not going to fulfill, and he had to take that message home. He bore an immense and dark responsibility.

  The other Hindi speaker—the one who was even shorter than the T’chishetti—did not accept this. “You are only one man,” he said, pointing a finger. His name was Lin and his was a very dignified manner. “You cannot take responsibility for an entire colony.”

  Wanbli sat back. The multendorf had not left him, but he was feeling a little muscle sore. Also a little light-headed. “I used to be just one man,” he answered. “But now I think I’m either no one at all or everyone. You see?”

  The ones who only understood a little bit of Hindi nodded forcefully.

  There were more drinks and the revivalists began to talk about themselves. They said some very strange things. Edward, the pale man, said he had been born three hundred and nineteen years ago. Earth years, not standard. Lin was fifty years older.

  It was either the translation or the drinks, decided Wanbli. Human people fell apart after about one hundred years: no way out of it. Or perhaps there was a religious meaning to the figures. He did not press or contradict them.

  They admitted that revivalists were very unpopular in places. They traveled in groups because alone they were often beat up or even found murdered. Sometimes even large parties were attacked by mobs of locals. Wanbli thought this was a shame, especially when he discovered that none of the party had any idea of self-defense beyond that of carrying a gun, and so he explained to them what a Paint was (he did this very nicely, without boasting, because he was merely concerned for them) and he offered to see them back to their ship.

  It was dark when they all left the tavern, and the airs of Poos were bracing. Wanbli was beginning to need bracing. There was a long walk, some confusion, and Wanbli was left with a memory of thumbing his stick—which he had not put to use once since training classes—and of having put some very noisy flyer down on his tail on the sidewalk. All very frustrating and incomplete. Then he was inside again.

  The multendorf let him down.

  When the door burped open, Wanbli was curled in the hammock, an afghan wrapped around his feet. He opened his eyes. It was very unpleasant.

  “That was the longest, worst hangover I have ever witnessed,” said the woman in the doorway. She was wearing a tan uniform which ought to have been familiar. “We had to put you into one of the revival units or I think you’d have died. You were in there for twenty-four hours, which is many times what it takes to put life back into a frozen body. Your metabolism did not want to stabilize at all.”

  Wanbli had to stop and think what an hour was. It was an archaic way of dividing up time: not in units of ten. Or perhaps that was shillings he was thinking of. He decided sitting up would be preferable to thinking. He unstrapped, and wrapped the woolly afghan around his shoulders.

  “You also ran down the battery in the scrubber once we got you in here,” she added, gesturing to the corner of the room, where the squat canister unit sat, all its lights dim. “I have no idea what you found to vomit after all that time, but there it was.”

  That explained why he felt so very light, and also the taste in his mouth. Still, the level of ache in his body had reduced itself to manageable levels, and when he put his feet to the floor nothing terrible happened.

  It seemed pointless to try to convince the woman that it was no hangover he had suffered. She might only think him a multendorf junkie instead. “I’m sorry to have troubled you,” he said. “I’m not sure myself what went wrong with me.”

  She was a woman of middle age, slightly heavy. She pulled up on the knees of her trousers and settled down on the lower lip of the round sphincter doorway.

  Round sphincter doorways were very antique. This one looked like an original. “You weren’t any real trouble,” she said, “because we didn’t dare do anything for you after pulling you from the unit—not with you half out of your head, and after the performance you gave on Morion night before last.”

  There was that single memory again: dropping the flyer on his tail. Wanbli squinted horribly. “What exactly did I do? Was I… out of line?”

  The woman looked like she might snicker, but only for a moment. “Not out of line in our book. You wiped up a gang of locals armed with paving blocks, and you had only your hands and a stick. I’m told you could have done without the stick too. This was outside the Flotsam and Jetsam. They don’t like revivalists on Poos, you know.”

  “I heard that before.” Wanbli felt no particular elation at the news of this victory. Crowd control was not a heroic action, especially with a nerve stick.

  “And we’re very grateful. Only we didn’t know what you might do, half delirious as you were.”

  Wanbli let the afghan fall from his shoulders. He noticed that he had sweated away most of the body paint. His eagles were returning. He felt fuddled. “I don’t think I’d do much. I’m not really hair-trigger or anything. I don’t kill people on reflex.”

  He raised his head and tried to make sense out of the humming walls, the firmly built-in furnishings, the lack of pressure on his sit-bones. “This is a ship?”

  “Of course it’s a ship.” He could see the question hadn’t made the woman happy. By her stance and attitude, she was obviously a person of authority. Once, Wanbli would have exerted himself to be attractive to a woman in authority. Not so long ago.

  “And it’s moving?” he continued, regardless of the fact that she thought him a bore.

  She sighed and stood very straight. He could see the bones of her shoulders through her jacket. “Mister, don’t give me any—guff—about wanting to be put back on Morion. You were damn enthusiastic to come with us, before you came down from your spree, and we don’t have the money to waste…”

  Wambli spread out his hands in protest. The afghan slid entirely off him and floated to the floor in the two-thirds earth gravity: standard ship weight on most nonluxury deep-space vessels. Authority or no, she appreciated Wanbli’s build. Her change in expression was better for Wanbli’s spirits than a dose of painkiller. “I don’t want to be put back. It’s true I don’t remember much, but I’m happy. Happy,” he repeated. “I only want to know where and why, and if you’re too busy right now, even that can wait.”

  Evidently she was placated. She lowered herself onto the dead canister of the cleaner and put her hands on her knees. “Where you are is in a dormitory of the Earth colony ship Condor, which left from Peru in the year 2038 toward star M781-31. Their destination was the big moon of the seventh planet of the system, which they had reason to suppose was of Earth type.”

  Wanbli did some figuring on his changer. “That was two-hundred eighty years ago. Years of some kind. We didn’t even have fiddle flight then. We hadn’t caught the strings.”

  Again she was irritated. “I told you—they told you we were revivalists.”

  Wanbli rubbed his aching shoulders and tried not to look stupid. “So who are you trying to revive: the ghosts of the crew?”

&n
bsp; “I thought you were just that ignorant, but Pierce said…” She got off the cleaner and hopped to the hammock. As she landed next to Wanbli, he bounced a little. It was unpleasant.

  “I am one of the crew of the Condor. Don’t I… look a little odd—exotic—to you?”

  It was Wanbli’s turn to frown. “You look a lot more normal than most I’ve seen in that uniform. For example, the pink guy without lips… I mean no offense to him, but that’s exotic.”

  She chortled with one brown hand over her brown face. “I’ll have to tell Pierce you said so. But the truth is that I am one of the ghosts of the Condor. I’m one of those colonists.

  “I was a sleeper.”

  Wanbli rocked back in the hammock, setting up waves. “Protectors!” Diffidently he reached to touch her hand, as one might touch a strange beast, or a saint. “You’ve been asleep for hundreds of years? Since before my home was even settled?” She didn’t bother to answer.

  “So you finally got to your planet and… then what?”

  “We never arrived.” The woman took her hand out from under his. “We would have been traveling for two hundred more years, but the revivalists snagged the Condor.”

  Wanbli forgot his headache in fascination. “So you never even got there?”

  “It was just as well. Bigmoon, we now know, has an average surface temperature of 210 centigrade. Small error.” She rose again, moving in ship weight very buoyantly.

  “I’ll have them send you in some grub.”

  Wanbli wilted at the thought.

  They were a community of four traveling ships and one ancient mammoth without fiddleheads, which orbited loosely around the planetless star B-333. In age they were between fifteen and fifty; there were no children at all, and no officially recognized pairings. Not all the crew of the Condor spoke Hindi, and those that did had a peculiar range of accents. Their own common language was Old Ang, which he applied himself to learn, waking and sleeping. Their custom was military in its scheduling and neatness. They did not force this life upon Wanbli, but he did his best to fit in.