“That is right, Corporal,” Sermander soothed. Holding the little girl’s neck in a vise-like grip, he reached up with his gun-hand to peel his suit mask down to his chest. It was foolish, but made good politics.
“Come join me, Whitey. There is no responsible alternative. I have discovered—employing the startling powers that these Confederates have been naive enough to bestow upon me—that they have not felt it necessary, as yet, to notify the remainder of their vast fleet about Vespucci.”
Elsie squirmed, “Let me go, you big mammoth-turd!”
He looked down at her almost benevolently, “Is that any way for a child to talk? At home, we would teach you better manners, would we not, Whitey?” He shook his head, “Indiscipline is chronic among these people. It is a sickness, a contagion, a plague. It deserves only death.”
He looked up again at me: “It is a great pity that we cannot send a warning home. But we can buy our beloved nation time. What do you say, Corporal?”
“I say that they need more than time, sir. They need that warning—every last bit of the information that you alone can give them, now.”
Glancing sidewise at the hole that had been cut in the ship’s hull, I could just make out the motion of fingertips clinging to the ragged lower edge. Someone had adjusted his smartsuit to give visual impressions from the ends of those digits, a sort of periscopic effect.
With overly dramatic sadness: “It is we who have no time left. It is required of both of us that we give our lives, unremembered, unsung—the ultimate sacrifice for which our beings were shaped at their incep—”
“Let me go!”
Renewing her struggles, Elsie flailed her arms as Sermander held her by the rubbery nape of her smartsuit. Almost negligently, he slapped the side of her head a second time with his heavy military pistol.
A third.
The little girl went limp.
“At long last,” he sighed, “blessed silence.”
I drew my own gun, pointed it at his face. “If you have hurt her ... Let her go now, Sermander, there is something wrong about your implant. This insanity has gone far enough if it means hurting little girls.”
Big ones, too. I did not know if Lucille was still alive.
He laughed. “So they finally got to you after all. I thought that might be the case. How many little girls, do you suppose, perished in the Final War? Yet can you deny that it was a war that had to be fought? Sentimentalism will not alter what has to be done, even now, Corporal.”
Carefully, Sermander transferred his weapon to the hand that also held the now-unconscious little girl. Stooping down, he stretched to reach to the glowing control panel of the atomic bomb between his knees.
“Enough debate. So long, Corporal, it has been—”
Firming my two-handed grip on the Dardick, I shouted “I am not fooling around with you, Sermander, let her go now! Get away from there!”
Chuckling at me, Sermander lifted poor Elsie like a coat on a hanger, until her quiet, unmoving form shielded his body from head to knees.
“Are you aware how foolish you appear, Corporal, using a mere pistol to threaten an individual who is prepared to blow himself up with—
“AAAGHHH!”
Elsie twisted the dagger she had slid beneath Sermander’s kneecap. In an agony of pure reflex, he tossed the little girl savagely away. With a horrible noise, her tiny body crashed among a mountain of stowage. A barrel burst around her with the impact. Sermander plucked feebly at the knife-hilt where it projected from his ruined joint, looked at me, a sickly smile on his face, then reached again for the bomb.
I pulled the trigger. The ship’s hold lit briefly with the muzzle-flash.
Sermander’s headless body pitched forward, spewing gore.
Belatedly, Rogers’ shot roared through the space where Sermander’s head had been only a fraction of a second earlier. His bolt of plasma blew yet another hole, in the opposite side-wall of the Amybo Kiidetz.
Unconcerned about anything else, I whirled, knelt, gathered Lucille in my arms. I was cradling her motionless body when they found me.
-2-
The people of Tom Paine Maru filled Lucille’s stateroom with flowers.
MacDougall Olson-Bear turned out to be a decent enough fellow, after all. A great deal taller than I was—he was perhaps a full two meters tall—he possessed a thick mop of reddish-blonde hair, his mother’s sea-green eyes, along with muscles on his muscles on his muscles.
Under the circumstances, I did not think to ask him very much about himself. A fighter-pilot, someone had said. Whatever it might have been, it had given his clean-shaven face a weathered reddish-pink finish typical of people who spend a lot of time outdoors but do not tan well. It looked as if his chin had never seen a razor—or needed to.
I met him in Lucille’s quarters where he was busy filling cartons with belongings. The place smelled cloyingly-sweet with murdered foliage.
“I guess it wasn’t really much like having a mother,” he admitted, continuing our awkward conversation while attempting to control his expression as each item that he packed away evoked a long-buried memory.
Earlier, he had told me that he had grown up aboard the Tom Jefferson Maru. He had never gotten along particularly well with his father, from whom he had sought something like a divorce at an early age. He had pursued an adventurous life ever since then, still using his father’s name, unaware of his mother’s, or even that she was still alive.
They had found each other years later through a fleet-wide survey for people who had blood like hers, rare blood that had been needed after her eventual revival. How ironic life could be. How stupidly ironic.
“It was more,” he said now, “like having a sister I had never met until it was almost too late.” Was that really a tear he was sniffing back?
I was having some trouble with emotions, too, especially when he found a bedraggled teddy bear in the closet. Peculiar, how similar the customs of two civilizations can be, even separated for so long. There had been a toy like that for me once, back home. It had been my only toy.
“Hamilton take me,” he said with a catch in his voice. “Now I remember, this was mine! Lucille must have kept it all these ... ” He cleared his throat violently, then wiped a broad freckled hand across his eyes. “Whitey, I’ve no need of this where I’m going. Neither has Lucille ... any more. Can you think of anybody else who’d like to have it?”
Elsie was recovering from minor injuries at the place she shared with Howell. She had fetched against a barrel of spike-nails aboard the Fodduan warship when Sermander had thrown her. When I could speak again, I said, “Yes, Mac, if you are absolutely sure. I will see to it.”
“Thank you very much, Whitey.” He walked around the bed where he had placed the cartons, handed me the bear, hesitated, then: “I hope you won’t mind my saying I’m very glad that you and Lucille met each other—”
I shook my head, “You need not to say anything. I, er... your mother... ”
He grinned ruefully, “I understand, and I hope—”
“Are you two about through with the man-talk?”
Looking at least ten years younger than the giant she had given birth to, Lucille came in from the spare bedroom, another carton of her son’s belongings in her arms. There was a pained expression on her face.
She set her burden on the bed—like me, Mac had known better than to offer to carry it for her—rubbed her sternum where that Fodduan sailor’s heavy, slow-moving bullet had been stopped by her smartsuit. Looking at both of us guiltily, she slipped her left arm back into the sling that Doctor Pololo had insisted she wear about her neck.
“Mac, I’m awfully sorry to pitch you out like this, just when we’d started getting comfortable with each other, but ... ” She tapered off.
He laughed. I do not believe that I have ever seen a human being more relaxed, so completely, unselfconsciously self-confident. “Don’t mention it, Mumsie, I have parsecs to go and promises to keep, myself. Be
sides, it wouldn’t do to have your son interfering with your, er, honeymoon.”
She blushed.
So did I.
“And since you’re running off again so soon, before you give this away,” she said, “you might ask me, first.” She took the bear from me, plumped up its slightly-leaking body, squeezed it in her good arm. “What’s so all-fired important you’d leave your poor old mother and her—”
“Gigolo,” I offered.
“I kind of like that—‘gigolo’—to go running off for?”
“There’s an urgent alarm of some kind out in Tom Huxley Maru’s investigation sector, something about one of Voltaire Malaise’s colony ships that’s only just now arriving, thanks to time-displacement, and with its mind-control system still operating. Maybe the old son-of-a-bureaucrat himself is aboard. I want to be there when the plug gets pulled.”
“Tom Huxley Maru?” Lucille consulted the ceiling for data, then blinked, “Why, that’s Brion Bayard’s new command. Mac, I hate to disappoint you, but we’re beginning to think Voltaire Malaise wound up on Whitey’s world. Isn’t that right, Corporal darling? Nevertheless, I wouldn’t mind being there, myself. Think of it: tens of thousands of freshly-kidnapped women, free to do whatever they want with their kidnappers!”
She held the bedraggled little stuffed bear out at arms’ length, sighed deeply, then sat it on the bed, leaning against one of Mac’s plastic cartons. “Well, Mac, if you have to go, you have to go. About this ... ”
“I think Whitey was going to give it to Elsie Nahuatl.”
She grinned, then looked at me. “My daddy gave it to me when I was laid up with a bad appendix. Good therapy. Come to think of it, you’ll probably need it yourself, Corporal, after your brain operation this afternoon.”
Brain operation. Lovely. The animal stared at me dementedly with its scratched plastic eyes, but refused to offer any comfort or advice.
-3-
Nahuatl, Elsa Lysandra: current head of xenopsychology department, praxeology divison, starship Tom Paine Maru. Born Cody, Wyoming, Solar Confederacy, May 23, 267 A.L., mostly of Australian Aborigine lineage, [identification of seventeen biological parents under privacy protection except in certifiably appropriate emergency. Adopted parent G. Howell Nahuatl, Operations Division, Tom Paine Maru. height 37 inches, weight 53 pounds. Hair blonde, complexion dark brown, eyes blue.
More info? [Y/N]
Elsie’s likeness, in full-color stereo, hung before my wondering eyes. Curious, I nodded microscopically. Before very long, I had been told a little while ago, only the subliminal muscular traces of my intention to nod would be sufficient to cue the implant correctly. Until then, it would take a little practice to get to know one another.
Through the ID hologram, I could see another Elsie, chatting with her friends. We were attending something like a wake, except that the nine-year-old guest of honor was sitting up in bed, cleaning her little dagger. Her tiny automatic pistol lay in neatly-ordered pieces on a cloth on the end-table, ready for reassembly after Owen Rogers had thrust them through the room’s shower-curtain three or four more times.
She was a tough customer to satisfy. On Sodde Lydfe, she had confided in me that she wanted to be just like Lucille when she grew up.
God help the galaxy!
Associated reference: Nahuatl, G. Howell, Operations Division, Tom Paine Maru. American coyote with cyberenhanced cognition. Further info under discretionary privacy-protection at subject’s specification.
Contact subj. for info release? [Y/N]
With a microscopic shake of my head, I suppressed any further retrieval from the implant. It was the first thing I had been shown to do, by the implant itself. The arduous “operation” I had dreaded for so long had taken all of three minutes, most of it to dab a little alcohol on the site before injection, a useless procedure medically, but some rituals survive everything. It seemed to make the nurse feel better.
The bright green letters vanished from the bottom edge of my field of vision, along with the picture of the coyote and a map of “North America”.
Howell himself, of course, was right there, curled up on one corner of Elsie’s bed. Also Francis W. Pololo—along with Mymysiir who was listening intently to the gorilla lecture rher on the subject of alien (meaning human) anatomy. In the corner, Vyssu was showing Edwina how to knit using three needles. My freshly-inserted computer likely would have stripped its gears supplying information on this crowd.
“They’re fragile,” Pololo was telling the lamviin paracauterist, “unlike you or I, yet somehow they’re very tough. This rugged young individual, despite a fractured vertebra, a punctured lung, and three broken ribs, wanted to get up and stomp what was left of Serman—oh, hello, Whitey! I didn’t see you come in. Lucille, how are you feeling, dear?”
She gulped. “A whole bloody lot better before I walked into this room, let me tell you! I had no idea little Elsie had been hurt so badly.”
Neither had I.
The conversation’s subject said, “Little Elsie’s gonna hurt you badly, Lucille Olson-Bear, unless you stop talking about her in the diminutive third person! Hi there, Corporal darling, what’d you bring me?”
I held up the tattered toy bear with a fresh red ribbon around its neck. “This, sweetheart. It is actually from Lucille, here—also Mac.”
“MacBear? He ’commed to say goodbye, but I didn’t know he was going to send me—a teddy! An old one! Oh, Cilly, he must have been yours!”
Tears quivering in her eyes, my cast iron warrior-maiden nodded silently. The little girl peered thoughtfully at the gunsmith as she supervised his reassembly of her pistol, teddy bear clutched to her chest.
“Wanna know what I’m gonna call him, Rog?”
The gunsmith/praxeologist smiled, shook his head—then cursed as the sharply-ground end of a coil-spring gouged him underneath his thumbnail.
Elsie giggled, “I’m gonna call him Owen!”
Mymy examined the stuffed animal closely. Howell sniffed at it, confessing that he’d once had a stuffed sandhopper he would not go anywhere without. The gorilla physician closed up his case, extracted a cigar from his pocket, then drew smoke as the smelly thing lighted itself.
“I’ll be going. Koko’s calling. She’s arranging the equivalent of a tea for the royal trines of Podfet and Foddu, and the pleasure of my company has been requested. We’re going to show them holograms of the ruined Sodde Lydfe on the other side, so they may not have much of an appetite. Thanks for the smelling-salts, Mymy, we may need them. Now a question of protocol: how are they likely to react when they discover that we won’t call people by their authoritarian titles aboard this ship?”
Mymy stirred one of her manipulatory limbs to give the teddy bear an affectionate stroke. “I don’t know about the Podfettians, Doctor Pololo, but the crown surprince will be absolutely delighted. Rhe’s just finished preparatory school—the very first surmale of the royal family ever to do so—and rhe wants everyone to call rher ‘Vuffi’!”
Me, I do not know exactly when I made up my mind about Vespucci. Perhaps in that cargo hold with Sermander, perhaps down on Afdiar somewhere. It is not the kind of conclusion one comes to overnight or all in one piece. I simply began operating on the assumption—before I knew that I had come to it—that I would be acting as Tom Paine Maru’s “primitive expert” on my own native planet, that Afdiar or Sodde Lydfe were merely practice for what would be to me the main event.
Perhaps it was at this same time that I made up my mind about Eleva. It turned out after all that “acceptably bland” is not my style.
For Lucille, the least bland human being I had ever known, the main event was over for a while. It was ironic that her problem down on Sodde Lydfe arose because Confederates refuse to suppress their unpleasant experiences. Lucille was still in the process of learning how to live with the hideously sharp, clear memories of what happened to her years ago on the same planet, and, under the stress of being struck by that enormous bullet,
those memories had simply overwhelmed her.
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