Tom Paine Maru - Special Author's Edition

by L. Neil Smith

  Koko watched, her eyes mild, as fingers of heat felt their way up into my face. Howell shook his head, a very human gesture. “The ‘poet’ she cites was a satirist, after whom the shuttle you arrived on was named—blast!, there’s just no way to end that elegantly without a preposition!”

  I repeated Lucille’s words. “No right to exist? I understand, then, how you could slaughter a whole company of men in the name of some stupid abstraction. On Vespucci this would make you a great politician!”

  Her face redder than mine, Lucille was erect suddenly, threw her cigarette away, snapped into a combat stance. “Get up and say that, stormtrooper!”

  “Why?” I asked her. “You only want to hit me for expressing my opinion.”

  “Oho!” Howell exclaimed, “Hoist by her own petulance, I believe! Have we suspended free speech when I wasn’t looking, my dear, or is somebody—I won’t mention her name—simply being unethical and rude?”

  “Sit down, Cilly,” Koko drew smoke, patted the ground with a hand as large as both of mine placed side-to-side. “You’ll get sand in my ukulele.”

  As always, the furious girl glared sharply at the speaker when the name “Cilly” was pronounced. But she subsided somewhat: “All right, Koko—for you. For now! But somebody’s got to give this Kilroy an education!”

  “And aversive conditioning,” replied the coyote, sarcasm dripping from the tiny holes in his collar-speaker, “is such a very effective means!” Koko offered him a drag on the cigar. He took it, inhaling deeply.

  To my utter amazement, he actually got through. “Howell, please don’t be mad at me. Can’t you see? These Vespuccians are military. They represent a government!” She thumped back to the sand as Koko had suggested, this time only one space away from me, to the left of the talking coyote. My own reaction—whether to her anger or proximity—amazed me just as utterly. I folded an arm across my lap to conceal it.

  He grinned, “I’m not angry, Cilly, say you’re sorry, it’ll make it square.”

  “I never apologize,” her lower lip was trembling. “It’s a sign of weakness!”

  He laid his muzzle on her lap, looking up at her with big brown eyes. “On the contrary,” he sighed, “it is partial payment of a moral debt.”

  There were tears in her voice, rather than her eyes, “I’m sorry, Howell ... ”

  “No, my dear, you must apologize to the Corporal, here. He’s the one you’ve been riding. My back wouldn’t have stood it for this long. I’d have to’ve done something about it.” He gave me a significant look.

  “I’d rather die!” It was almost a whisper, jaw tight, lower lip trembling.

  “Somebody may eventually arrange that for you,” I growled. “I will not be made to feel ashamed of my country. Sure, if everybody was like Howell or Koko, here—rational—then this anarchistic system of yours might just work. But if even one of them is like you, Lucille, then everybody needs the protection of the military or a government!”

  Heaving my sea-tired body to its weary feet, I frowned down at the girl. “Now threaten me again! This time you will not throw me by surprise!”

  Lucille’s eyes grew large. She moved back a little. Howell shook his head, then looked at Koko as she reached up with a long arm to pat me on the shoulder with an astonishingly gentle hand. “Please calm down, Whitey,” soothed the gorilla. “Nobody’s going to hurt you, here.”

  A trickle of sweat ran down between Lucille’s breasts, for some reason driving me half crazy. Beneath the upper portion of her virtual bathing suit, Lucille, too, was betrayed by an involuntary reaction very nearly as embarrassing as my own as hard points showed at their tips.

  “Nobody will hurt you,” Howell agreed with Koko, “Even if they wanted to. But what ever gave you the idea that rationality is a prerequisite to liberty? There’s a sapient right to be free, period, whatever condition we find ourselves in. We do not need to earn it. Nobody has a right to withhold it from us until we do. Nor does a society operate on reason—which is an individual attribute—any more than it operates on kindness. As I recently explained to your Lieutenant with regard to criminality, in the Confederacy, stupidity and ignorance have just been priced out of the market, made too expensive ... ”

  “Whitey,” Koko interrupted—these people seemed to do a lot of that—“In all of sapient history, there are only three ways that people have ever discovered to organize themselves. One individual can tell everybody what to do—that’s called monarchism. Or everybody can tell everybody else what to do—that’s called majoritarianism. Or—”

  “Or nobody,” Lucille almost shouted, although I could tell she was horrified at her bodily response to the idea of fighting with me, and trying frantically to calm down. “Nobody tells anybody what to do! Always the best way, Corporal. My sister Edwina and I were raised on the old Confederate Solar frontier, in a place called the Venus Belt. I—”

  The girl stopped talking suddenly. There was another of those odd, lengthy, prescient silences. Then, even more voices came to us from behind ...

  -4-

  “But you cannot have it both ways,” the Lieutenant bellowed. “Do you not see?” Koko, Lucille, turned in the direction of the noise. Howell’s ears perked, but he kept his eyes on Elsie, playing in the surf.

  “Three ways, you mean, Enson. Perhaps that’s where you’ve gone wrong. It is Mindkind’s second oldest argument: is the universe chaotic, as it often appears to be, or is it rigidly determined, as cause-and-effect seem to imply? Wait, now. Does free will truly operate, as we intuitively feel, or does determinacy eliminate any such possibility? And back around, does free will necessarily imply chaos?”

  “Grrr!” The Lieutenant did not actually say that, but it was something close. “These are childish semantic games! Of course the universe is determined, my good doctor. Free will is a pathetic illusion!”

  “Well,” chuckled the other voice. “You could have fooled me. But then, I suppose that’s what illusions are all about. Hello, darling. Hello, everybody! I’m attempting to introduce Lieutenant Sermander to the many wonders of praxeology, but he’s resisting my blandishments manfully.”

  “Darling” turned out to be Koko. She reached a big hand upward to an even bigger one, while its owner bent down to give her a peck on the cheek. In the rapidly-gathering darkness, it was difficult to see precisely who this friend of hers was. A gorilla, certainly, male to judge from his size. He wore a sleeveless short-pantsed outfit in pale green with a large red circled cross on the left shoulder. He also wore light, wire-rimmed spectacles. He held a brown cigarillo in one hand.

  He plumped down on the sand beside Koko.

  “Francis,” the gorilla began, “you know everybody except for the Corporal, here, Whitey O’Thraight. We went sailing this morning, while you were in surgery. Whitey, this is Francis W. Pololo, H.D., my husband.”

  Transferring the cigar to his left hand, he swallowed mine with his massive right. “Pleased to meet you, Corporal, did you like sailing?”

  I was glad he could not see me blushing in the dark.

  “Francis,” said Koko, “you’ve made him blush! He did very well, for a first-timer. Where he comes from, they haven’t any open water at all.”

  Now how had she known that? The people of Tom Paine Maru seemed almost telepathic at times, clairvoyant at others, sharing information and experience with each other without speaking, gazing at the ceiling and suddenly knowing. Now, apparently, they could also see in the dark.

  “Nor praxeologists, I gather,” Pololo observed, looking at the Lieutenant.

  “That’s obvious!” snorted a sarcastic voice the other side of Koko.

  “Hello there, Lucille, how have you been?” Pololo responded, “I take it that you’ve been teaching Corporal O’Thraight the finer points?”

  “Only of ‘feudin’, fussin’, and fightin’,” Howell scratched himself idly with a back leg, “They haven’t gotten to praxeology, yet.”

  “What in the name of Hamilton’s
ghost is praxeology?” I demanded. I had been trying to get Lucille to answer that very question for days.

  “Properly,” intoned the gorilla, “it’s the study of human action—and by extension,” he brushed a hand over his pelt, patted Howell, “of the actions of all Mindkind, taking in everything from ethics and epistemology, through sociology and anthropology, to politics and economics.”

  “Are you a teacher of this subject?” I asked.

  “Dear me, no,” said Pololo. “I’m a physician, Corporal, a Healer, which is not a praxeological discipline, but a physio-mechanical one. It’s simply an interest of mine, as it is with many—otherwise, soap operas would soon lose their lucrative appeal. I met your Lieutenant, here, while he was attempting to find the ship’s captain.” He grinned at his wife who looked down at the sand, shaking her head. “I’ve been trying ever since then to explain to him why that’s such a difficult undertaking.”

  Even in the dark, I could sense the Lieutenant’s exasperation. “The good doctor assures me that there is, indeed, a captain. Yet no one will conduct me to the bridge, to the control-room, or even to the captain’s cabin. I have been assured that this personage may be found at unpredictable times in private quarters—which do not appear to exist—or in a certain forest. I wandered that forest for three hours this morning, witnessing nothing more than several groups of picnickers!”

  Koko laughed. “You might have seen me there, any morning. I like picnics.”

  -5-

  Before us on the beach, the fire burned low, no longer reflected by the moon-glistening waves rolling up onto the sand. One by one, the celebrators had departed, first the strangers who had built the fire, played games, eaten primitively-cooked food, sung several songs as we listened to them. Then Koko, her husband, the Lieutenant, muttering about “getting an early start”. Finally the Nahuatls, Howell and Elsie.

  The evening was warm. Breezes off the water were moisture-laden. Even Lucille, who had remained behind, seemed not at all unpleasant, breathing close beside me in the darkness. She graced the air with a fragrance all her own, that had everything to do with being female, and nothing at all to do with perfume. Eleva, Vespucci, the Navy, my duty, all seemed very far away at the moment. Thoughts of witchery, dangerous, often unbearable—but oh, so stirring—crowded into my mind.

  “What?” I asked, jolted out of my reverie.

  Lucille, however, could never just leave things alone. “I said, ‘a permanently powerless underclass’. Why don’t you ever pay attention Corporal? That’s what you come from, you know, without hope, without a future. What’s it like to spend your whole life, cradle-to-grave, in grade?”

  I began to feel different, less pleasant emotions. “This is not strictly correct, Lucille. I am a corporal, now, but we are all born privates.” Except, of course, for officer class children like the Lieutenant.

  She said, “I’ll refrain from the dirty double-entendre that inspires.”

  “That is uncommonly decent of you, Lucille. Are you sure you feel well?”

  “Aha!” she exclaimed. “The worm turns at last! You’re learning bad habits with us here, Whitey. Sassing back. Disrespect for authority. Hell, I thought you were actually going to hit me, back there for a minute.”

  “I do not hit women,” I told her. Not even small, nasty-tempered ones who needed it, I thought to myself. Despite the edge in her words, Lucille’s had softened with the last few phrases, dropped half an octave. It was the first time she had ever called me by my given name.

  I wondered what she wanted.

  She snorted: “I understand. It would be discourteous. Unmilitary. ‘Duty, Honor, Country’. Is that all you really want out of life, Corporal?”

  Even in the darkness, I could imagine the arch of her eyebrows. If anyone could manage a come-on sneer, it would be Lucille, I thought. Me, I wanted to go home to Eleva. Now, more than at any other moment, even in the dungeons of Sca, I wanted—I needed—to go home to Eleva.

  “Come on, Corporal, tell us what you really want. To save glorious Vespucci—what a name!—from us bad, nasty anarchists? Is that what you want? Well, I’ve got some news for you. It’ll take a better man than you are to do it—and he won’t want to! You’d have to do a heap of growing, all in the wrong direction, as far as your culture’s concerned.”

  “What do you mean by that?” I snapped.

  “Nothing much. Except that at this moment, in order to serve the best interests of Vespucci as you conceive them, you’re going to have to overcome what it created in you: passivity, resignation, overawe for the high and mighty. It’s ironic, but far from surprising. To save your precious culture, you’ve got to become what it least wants you to be.”

  “What is that? You were going to say ‘a man’, were you not? Not very original. Nor very true, although I do not expect you to see it. Your friends are all afraid to say it, but you do not see very much of anything, Lucille, except the mixed-up angry garbage inside your own head.”

  Craaack!

  My mouth stung where she had backhanded it. I had known it would happen, sooner or later. Grinning, I spat out a drop of blood, feeling as if my arteries were charged with something carbonated. “What is the matter, little girl? You can ration it out, but you cannot take it yourself?”

  Lucille leaped up, turning to stamp away. In the last flicker of firelight, I seized her by the ankle, twisting my wrist. She slammed back onto the ground, spitting sand as I had been spitting blood just an instant before. In the heat of the moment, she seemed to forget what she knew of real combat, raining ineffectual blows on my chest and shoulders as I crawled alongside her, holding her down. I grabbed her wrists, held them together with one hand. Her face was flushed—I could feel the warmth of it on my own—her breath came in harsh gasps.

  Then she composed herself: “Okay, let’s do something military,” she said sarcastically. “How about a little rape to round out the evening’s—”

  I pressed my free hand hard over her mouth—her eyes had gone wild—“Lucille,” I told her, “with you, I suspect that would be impossible.”

  She would have hit me again, but by then I had skinned her suit down over her upper arms, binding her. In another moment, she was free again, completely, as was I. Her small, naked breasts were crushed against my chest. Her mouth half open, her eyes rolled back in her head, she moaned, almost screamed as I penetrated her. Her back arched, her arms locked rigidly around me, pulling me deeper inside her. She thrust her flat, hard belly against me, climaxing before I did.

  An unbearable light flared within my brain, a brilliant, all-consuming white light that left little violet sparks behind when it faded.

  Eventually, they faded, too.

  For a moment, it had felt to me as if I knew the secrets of the universe, the answer to every problem men had ever confronted. As she lay in my arms, breathing hard, her voice, very low now, husked in my ear.

  “What took you so fucking long, Whitey?”

  The wrath of koko

  “More coffee, Corporal darling?”

  The swimming-pool session, the Lieutenant’s argument with Pololo, were neither the first educational experiences I was subject to aboard Tom Paine Maru, nor by any means the last. There were moments when the entire ship felt like some vast stargoing campus, but it was always difficult distinguishing teachers from students, or schooltime from recess. Maybe that had something to do with the utter absence of books.

  Recess did have its moments, however. “No, thank you,” I answered her. “I believe that I will just lie here for a while, gathering my strength.”

  The low buzz of something called a “bumblebee” distracted me for a moment. As it faded, I could hear the trilling of something called a meadowlark.