Wanbli lay back in his hammock, Old Ang story tapes plugged into his ears. Studying the language had become much more entertaining once he’d reached this level.
This one was about a young woman orphaned by outlaw parents on an automatic mining station. She and her younger brother lived among the surly group of fugitives and criminals who had hidden in this out-of-the-way spot, outwitting the mechanical guardians of the station and stealing refined ore and equipment. Goulas, the King of Fences, wanted to make her his love slave, and the Company Investigator, discovering their pitiful lair in the sands, demanded she submit to him in exchange for her brother’s life. At this moment there wandered in a reckless, laughing desperado…
Wanbli realized he was listening to a version of Hounds of Juna. He flung the ball of the speaker field across the room in disgust. How he hated that movie.
Edward popped through the doorway, the receding sphincter plates withdrawing around him like an alio releasing its ratchett. “Didn’t you hear me?”
Wanbli pointed to the ball, which was still rolling across the floor.
“Well, you are asked to attend the meeting for a few minutes,” said the revivalist, and then he about-faced and harried for the door again. The sphincter was slow; Edward pushed the membranes roughly aside and stepped over.
It was an odd sort of asking, when the asker didn’t stay for the answer. Wanbli decided the invitation was obligatory and he followed Edward warily out. The door was half open, its flaps folded out of order. Wanbli let it be.
They were sitting on the floor. The gym had not been emptied of its apparatus, and crew members occupied the seats of the mass-building machines and sat in rows on the rolled mats, like birds on the tree branches on New Benares. It was like Hovart Clan meeting, except these lacked the Paints’ gift of arrogant lounging. Their khaki uniforms were neat and their faces intent.
Edward Pierce led Wanbli to where Khafiya was sitting on the bench press, a portable screen propped on the handgrips. The screen made silver snow, tuned to nothing at the moment. Khafiya granted Wanbli a thin smile: one that did not admit she had ever fallen asleep curled under the weight of his arm.
“He had his head in a speaker,” said Edward. Someone in the room giggled. Khafiya did not respond to the humor of it.
“We have an important question to ask you, Red.”
He tried to look attentive.
“Is there any chance you will want to stay among us? Not just as a way of getting home, but permanently.” Her eyes flickered over him. She did not smile, she was not welcoming, nor yet rejecting. She only asked.
Wanbli felt in a bind. He liked these people, hopeless as they were in many ways, and did not want to offend. Also, he needed them to get as far as he could toward Neunacht. He called upon his training for words that would walk the tightrope.
“I have an urgent message for my people. I must go home.”
Khafiya’s face didn’t lighten. “Messages may be sent printdoc.”
Wanbli tried to imagine a printdoc that said all he had to say to the Wacaan. To all of T’chishett. To Neunacht. Your station not coming. Money wasted. Your way of life is mistaken. Stop it at once.
“A message won’t do,” he said with more assurance. “I have to be there.”
She nodded. “I just had to know. Thank you.” She turned her attention to the screen.
Evidently he was to go now, not knowing what it was all about. There was Edward, waving him away from the Coordinator. He went, feeling foolish.
Edward had no explanation, either. The pale man was gazing past Wanbli at the crew. He was muttering to himself, counting, pulling his nose.
Wanbli strode off, his steps filled with natural Paint swagger. Between the gathering and the wall of the gym, he stopped. He folded his hands on his chest and leaned against a traction machine, watching.
This was the place of his own power aboard the ship, if he had one at all. This room was where he was teacher. Perhaps for that reason, or because they thought he had been told to remain, or perhaps just because of the garnet glint in his eyes, the few who noticed him did not challenge.
“So. What does that give us?” Evidently she was continuing a conversation interrupted by his visit. “On the Condor we can take two…”
“Three,” interjected Edward Pierce. His voice was joking but slightly edged.
Khafiya pushed hair from her face and turned to him. “You always do that to us, Ed. Two is more realistic: one for security and one in line for Central.”
“Three,” he said again. “One will refuse membership and demand to be set down on the nearest planet. One in three always does.”
“Then we’ll have another opening for the next catch. We don’t exactly need two more mouths, you know.”
“Three,” said Edward.
Khafiya waved it aside. “Well, we’ll vote on it. Now the Albatross refuses any recruits this time…”
“Damn gooney bird has said that for four years!” The words came out of the ship’s announcement system. They sounded like Captain Brezhner. Coordinator Khafiya was no whit intimidated. “They haven’t had deaths or detections for four years, Brezhner. What should they say?”
She returned to her screen. “The Hope is down seven; they won’t refuse us, especially since their last chase ended in an explosion. But for the same reason, they don’t want to feed a full crew. They’ll take two for now.
“I still haven’t heard from the White Cockade.”
“Went down at the battle of Culloden,” shouted a young woman Wanbli recognized as an Outsider. The Outsiders patrolled the hull, fully suited. It was a dangerous occupation and the three Outsiders (Edward Pierce was another) were granted a lot of leeway. Wanbli heard the spreading laughter and wondered what the joke was.
“I’ve got ’em.” It was Brezhner’s voice above their heads again. “They’re on right now; I’ll put ’em through to your blackboard.”
Khafiya glanced down at the screen and played with the focus. Over the amplifiers came a voice in heavily accented Old Ang. “Coordinator. Sorry to be late in getting back to you.”
“Too busy chasing?”
“Don’t we wish so. No, we have been arguing the point at issue here. I did not want to get back to you before we had browbeat a consensus.”
“Which is?” All the crew of the Condor shifted and leaned toward the voice.
“Send us a beautiful young lady. One.”
“Come off it,” said the Coordinator. “We’re in full meeting here and have a lot to decide.”
The voice rumbled. “We are serious. We are full crew, but down by two women. We need a female person, and I wish we could take two, but since we can’t, we would like the one to be beautiful.”
There was a snicker through the gym. “I can promise you young,” said Khafiya. “They’re all young this catch.”
The voice rumbled again. It was laughter. “Then she is certain to be beautiful. Young women always are.”
Wanbli thought of the splendid young woman in the coffin, and of the delicate, flowerlike one, and of the pretty black girl who was hardly more than a child. It seemed they were auctioning people off here. Except the goal seemed to be to obtain as few as possible and give as many as possible to other bidders.
“You’re a walking fossil, DeLorca,” said Khafiya to the screen before her.
“So are we all,” answered the voice. “Send me one female.” The connection was broken with an audible pop.
Khafiya took a collecting breath. “So much for the WC.” There was more laughter, incomprehensible to Wanbli.
“Now for the Big Ball itself. I had their response yesterday. Home will take three. Only three.”
There was silence and a swaying. Then someone spoke out: “Three? One, two, three?”
Khafiya shrugged and locked eyes with the questioner. “We can’t continue to use them as a dumping ground. The Ball’s almost a closed system.”
She bent back to her screen again a
nd touched the controls, perhaps randomly.
“What about their destination—uh, Roseland is its present name. Will they pay us to deliver the first settlers to their doorstep?”
Greta spoke up. “M-1447: Roseland denies all responsibility. They claim they never heard of the Commitment.”
Khafiya did not look too surprised. “Why can’t all societies be as nice as Colomblank and take in their own strays?” She chewed a nail for a few seconds.
“So we go to the secondary markets. Kalliope, what’s the nearest open colony to our present position? Isn’t it Mauli? They had absolutely no limits, last I recall.”
A very thin woman with black hair and a long nose cleared her throat. “G506 Mauli star is only forty klicks, that is, light-years, away. But as of last month Mauli Corporation underwent a merger with the second planet of its binary.”
Khafiya winced. “War?”
The dark-haired woman did not reply to that. “They’re not up to taking anyone now.”
“Well, what else, for God’s sake? We’re not in uninhabited space!”
Kalliope looked down at her hands, seeming to wish she had something to hold. A shield. “There’s Houton Center, of course. Out into the Halo.” This statement raised a murmur.
“Houton is at least a thousand light-years away,” said the Coordinator, flat. “Not on any convenient string. We can’t make it with the stores we have.”
Researcher Kalliope twisted her hair around her hands. “Actually, Coordinator, we’d be better off if we were in uninhabited space. These urban areas all have growth limits.”
Khafiya leaned on the handlebar of a triceps puller and let Kalliope sit down. “Okay, that’s hopeless. What about tertiary markets? Did anyone research that? Sandy. Okay, spill it.”
The man’s hair was nothing at all like sand, Wanbli thought. It was more like rusty wire. He was a burly, belligerent student and easy to knock flat. He stood up now, brushing nonexistent dust from his trousers. “Coordinator, there’s a small market for parts back on Morion. Nothing financially significant. And it’s only eyes and ganglia. Houton again… but that’s not feasible, as you say. It’s too bad we’re in the traffic lanes.”
He scratched his wiry head and looked around at his fellows. He almost noticed Wanbli, who had faded behind the spine tractor. “Poonas is only eighty klicks away, and they’ll take anything certified obtained legally for ritual use, but they pay in goods or local scrip only, and we’re carrying such a midden heap of trinkets now…”
“Forget Poonas,” said Khafiya, looking sullen.
“Then that leaves agricultural use only: stock meals and fertilizer, and that doesn’t pay the cost of shuttling down.” Sandy took from his pocket a tissue and honked away. “It’s really too bad we’re in the traffic lanes.”
All the revivalists glanced at one another and shook their heads, as at some improbably bad bottom line to a column of figures.
“All right.” Khafiya’s voice rang with more authority. “It’s spoilage, obviously. Time for the vote.”
For a moment Wanbli believed that he had misunderstood. That they had been talking of cargo all along. The coffins, perhaps, and not their sleeping contents. Then he saw Edward Pierce’s face clearly and he knew he had made no mistake.
“I move,” began Khafiya, “that we declare all the cargo spoiled except for seven, to be chosen by the assembly.” There was a large response.
“Eight!” called Edward as Wanbli edged out the door. Groans of irritation were the last sounds of the meeting that he heard.
He was in shock—the kind of shock in which one discovers suddenly that one has been mistaken: the whipped cream was actually depilatory cream, the second-story flooring was cardboard all the time. These clumsy, inhibited but kindhearted relics of the past were actually monsters that would convert clean flesh to fertilizer for profit.
Wanbli left the meeting with no thought but to put distance between himself and the hideous, foreordained voting. In his head was a humming that was more than the resonance of the fiddlehead engine fooling the speed of light. His fingers shook against his thighs, and in an empty passageway he leaned against the wall. It was neither hot nor cold, like them.
Perhaps they were right, and that long sleep was death. And they were so many zombies, deciding which corpses in a shipwreck to consume and which to add to their own meaningless ranks. In that case there was no tragedy here, but only horror. With the side of his head pressed against the neutral fabric of the wall, Wanbli closed his eyes and he saw not one face from the ranked coffins, but all of them superimposed upon one another. The crossbars, the sea-shell, the horse, the eagles…
These were not dead. Perhaps the crew of the Condor had convinced themselves into death, but the sleepers in Medical were as alive as so many seed pods shot into the desert air to float on trembling wind-wings and to wait.
There were forty-three crew members in that meeting. Wanbli stood and considered running back there to tell them how grievously they were mistaken, to stop them before they committed a huge murder. But Wanbli kept his reason; he knew what they would reply. They would tell him that he could not be expected to understand. They would show him once again the bottom line and say they could not afford it. They would repeat again the bizarre axiom by which they regulated their career: a sleeper is not in any sense alive.
Wanbli found he was at the door to Medical. It was locked, as he expected. He wandered away from it, back to his own metal cubby and his own pack. When he came out again he was wearing one and leaning on the other. This time his use of the nerve stick as a staff was not part of an act or image. He needed the support, and in that way, like an old man, he returned to the door of Medical.
He would wait for them here and stun them as they approached their murder. That would only be a delay, of course. Even if he could overpower the crew entirely he couldn’t drive the ship. And it was going to get him killed. He slammed his angry hand against the vanes of the sphincter and cursed his own helplessness.
Someone called out from inside, asking him if the meeting was over. Complaining his audio was bad.
So this was where the other missing crew member waited for the outcome. Of course. Someone had to watch the bodies.
Wanbli froze in place, his hand raised for a moment, and then he answered in urgent-toned gibberish. His body and some nonverbal part of his brain became engaged in a planning the rest of him could only observe.
The sphincter stretched. It was Guillermo, small, slight, with a shade of green to his brown skin. Medical attendant. He blinked at Wanbli and puckered his forehead. “I couldn’t hear you through the door,” he said.
“The mongrel thing stuck again,” said Wanbli, waving the personal key he wore on his wrist. “Wouldn’t open to my code: just shuddered in place. I hate these shithole doors.” He stepped into Medical, enveloped in an intimidating cloud of ill temper. Guillermo took two steps back.
“But they do close automatically in case of depressurization,” the attendant said to the taller man. “They never stick then.”
“How do you know? You been depressurized lately? They only have to stick once.” Wanbli looked down at Guillermo without favor. He Was Wanbli’s most hopeless student, and the one who created the fat/muscle/connective ratio charts that obsessed all the other revivalists. It was easy for Wanbli to glare at him.
“They’re about to vote now,” Wanbli answered his original question. “But it’s going to be a difficult consensus.”
This was a safe thing to say. Clan Council meetings had taught him that all consensus was difficult and arrived at only after much browbeating of minority opinion. A good number of Third Eagle techniques had been developed from strategies recognized from Wacaan clan meetings.
“Why?” Guillermo’s face expressed honest surprise. Perhaps that was another aspect of the revivalist’s zombie nature. They agreed with each other. Wanbli snorted.
“Why? Because… Eddie Pierce, of course.”
/> Guillermo’s wonderment became sly understanding. He let out a long appreciative sound. “So, then what are you…”
Wanbli had stepped over to where the coffins of the Commitment lay in rows, touching. The rounded glass of the lids made the whole assemblage resemble the faceted eye of a darter. The coffin of the splendid young woman was in the outside corner; it had been Wanbli’s whim to make sure of that, in unloading the day before.
“We need to revive one right away, before the end of the meeting,” he told Guillermo, and he began to haul on the top handle.
Guillermo was at his side, both hands on Wanbli’s arm, restraining him. “You have to what? No, we don’t do it that way. Until the vote…”
Then the plan that the rest of Wanbli had devised became clear to his conscious mind. “Not me, flyer. We. That’s why I was sent here. It’s a sop to DeLorca of the White Cockade. Didn’t you hear him? He blasted his message all over the ship!”
Guillermo faded back and let him pull. “I heard, but hearing meetings is not like being there. I didn’t understand there was anything special…” He came in from the other side with a neat wheeled forklift that eased the coffin up and toward a row of hatches in the rear wall of Medical. The hatch opened to reveal a long concavity with gel walls and drains. It looked much like a ship’s lavabo turned on its side. Wanbli did not remember being inside one. The forklift deposited the coffin into the declivity and Guillermo sealed the hatch. Ten seconds later the hatch opened again and spit out the coffin, its seal broken.
At first Wanbli thought this meant the machine had rejected the splendid woman: that she was dead in the real sense as well as that of the revivalists. But the shell was empty; it had left her inside.
The Third Eagle Page 20