by Steve Perry
“A Jewish/Christian story,” Jo said. “The reason mankind lost direct contact with God and was banished from Paradise. A snake talked the first woman into trying fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, after God had warned them not to eat it.”
“Sah, I understand this god is supposedly much more powerful than our gods. I wonder, if he created all things and was all-knowing and omnipotent, why would he put such a tree there? Would he not know in advance that Eve would succumb to the temptation?”
“The tale doesn’t bear too close an inspection,” Gramps said. “Believers view these stories as allegories, metaphors, rather than as literal happenings.”
Gunny jumped in quickly to amend Gramps’s response: “Some of ’em,” she said. “Some of ’em are literalists, and crazy as space-station roaches when the hatch opens to blow them into vac. They think the Earth is six thousand years old and that every word of the Bible is absolutely true. You can have a field day pointing out inconsistencies in those stories, doesn’t bother them, just bounces right off their self-righteous armor.”
Gramps said, “Hmm. Somebody have a traumatic event connected to religion along the way?”
“Fuck you.” Jo felt that had a harder edge than usual to it. Gunny was angry with him.
If Gramps noticed, he didn’t show it. “Always the idle threat. Anyway, in the story, the serpent, who at the time was more of a lizard, with legs and all, conned the woman into picking the forbidden fruit. For his reward, God struck off his legs and condemned him and his offspring to crawl on their bellies until the end of time. God apparently wasn’t big on forgiveness much in those days.”
“But they let snakes onto the Ark, didn’t they?” Jo said.
Off Singh’s look, she said, “Another story, end-of-the-world flood, and God had one of his own build a big boat and load two of every critter onto it to be spared.”
“It must have been an exceedingly large boat.”
“Not really. Somebody put the measurements up in one of the holy books, and it would have been a tight squeeze just to get all the different kinds of beetles, ants, and spiders on board, much less all the other animals.”
“Metaphor,” Gramps said. “Offering a moral lesson. But to your point, Chocolatte, yes, I had an unpleasant experience with snakes once, and I avoid them to this day.”
“One of them bite you and die from it?”
He looked at her, catching something in her tone.
“You can’t leave that hanging,” Jo said. “Tell us.”
“It’s a long story. You’ll be leaving soon.”
“Our ride’s ETA is half an hour away.”
He shrugged.
“Once upon a time, in the dawn of history, I was in basic training. Of course, back then, we still used fire-hardened pointed sticks for weapons and wore animal skins.” He glanced at Gunny, who didn’t smile.
“We were in a swamp somewhere, lot of mucky green water, knobby evergreen trees growing out of it, squishy ground, where there was any. Reptiles all over, alligators or some relative thereto, mosquitoes, hot, damp, a playground for mold and mildew. Kind of like this place, but worse.
“We’d been told there were snakes but that we probably wouldn’t see many, they would seek to avoid us.
“Our training mission was to capture the flag on a small island smack-dab in the middle of a shallow lake. We had to wade most of a klick through scummy water that ranged from knee to chest deep, and we had to do it in the dark.
“There were dumbot guns on the island, sensors set to fire training rounds at anything man-sized. The rounds would sting pretty good, raise a welt on exposed skin, but wouldn’t really damage you, we had eye-protection goggles, like that.
“The Monitors counted you dead if one of the db rounds hit you anywhere a real bullet would likely be fatal.
“To avoid being shot as we got closer to the island, we had to duck under the water and move laterally before we came back up. The dbs were set for slow acquisition, so you’d have a few seconds before you got reacquired and had to submerge again.”
“Sounds like a lot of fun,” Gunny said.
“To a masochist like yourself, maybe.
“The notion was that our training grenades would shut the dumbots down once we got close enough to throw them. So we had to get within grenade range, which was around twenty or thirty.”
“What kind of launchers had such short range?” Singh asked
“Launchers? We weren’t using launchers, we were throwing them.”
“Like rocks,” Gunny said. “To go with the pointed sticks.”
“My squad was still sixty meters out when we came to a little oval islet of mud and sedge grass a few meters wide, sticking up maybe a meter out of the water. Our sergeant decided that this would be enough to block the dbs’ sensors if we lined up behind it. Give us a chance to take a quick break, gather ourselves for the final slog. Maybe while the dbs were shooting at some other poor suckers on another approach, we could make our push and get close enough to spike the guns.
“So the sarge ordered us to line up two wide and four deep, to use the hillock for cover. He was ahead of me, along with one other newbie; the other six trainees in our squad were behind us.
“Our supposedly waterproof coms weren’t worth crap, they came and went. ‘Working com’ in the field? That’s usually an oxymoron.
“The grunt in front of me either misheard or misunderstood the message. He got to the islet and slogged right onto it, dropped prone in the mire.
“Sarge yelled at the guy to fucking get back in the fucking water, but by then, it was too late.
“The trainee had laid himself down in a nest of breeding water snakes, dozens, scores of them, and they weren’t happy about it. They latched onto him, biting whatever they could reach. He screamed, stood, tried to run, but sank hip deep into the mud.
“He was covered with snakes, beating at them with his hands, screeching like a banshee.
“The dbs locked onto him, and because he was thrashing and waving around, they peppered him and kept doing it.
“He looked like Medusa’s hair.
“That image is seared into my memory. A screaming, panicked, trapped man, slapping at snakes that hung off him like fringe.
“In his struggles, he threw snakes every which way. One of them hit me in the chest, sank its fangs into me, just above the right collarbone. I grabbed it and slung it and did some serious screaming of my own.
“Bite burned like electric fire, and I lost it. I turned and ran as fast I could in the chest-deep water, but it was like running in a nightmare, so slow! The dbs raked my back with stingers, I found the marks later, but in the moment, I was beyond feeling them.
“The rest of the squad also scattered, save for our medic and the sarge, I found out later, who went to try and help the guy stuck in the ooze.
“I didn’t look back.
“I remember the sound of a fanboat roaring toward us, Monitors coming to see what the fuck was going on. After that, things got hazy, and next thing I remember, I was on a muddy shore with the medic telling me I was going to be okay, the antivenom I had circulating would counteract the poison.”
“What of the man on the islet?” Singh asked
Gramps shook his head. “Not enough antivenom in the world to counteract all those bites. He died stuck hip deep in the mud.”
“I can see why you might not care for snakes,” Singh said.
“Fun story.” Jo glanced at Gunny. “I’m going to the landing pad,” she said.
“And I have to report to Formentara,” Singh said. “I will take my leave, sahs.”
“Go ahead, Jo,” Gunny said. “Ah’ll see you at the pad.”
After they were gone, Gramps said, “Something wrong?”
“Ah’m fahn; why do you ask?”
“You seem
a little more pissed off at me than usual.”
“Nothin’ wrong here.”
He hesitated for a moment, then decided. “Listen, Gunny, I . . .” He ran down.
“Cat got yore tongue?”
He shook his head. “During the hurricane, when you called the FCV? The reason I was late getting the call, I was in the shower.”
“Nice to know you haven’t completely lost your sense of personal hygiene.”
“See, the thing is, I went out to fix a busted cable and in the rain and wind and shit, we had a little enemy infil, some rounds were exchanged, and I got a little nick. So I was washing away the mud and blood when you called.”
“Really.” It didn’t sound like a question.
“Yeah, it punched a little hole through-and-through on my hip, here.”
“And this happened before Ah called?”
“Yeah.”
“And you didn’t think to fuckin’ tell me?”
He looked away, sighed, then back at her. “It was already done, the damage was minimal, and . . .”
“And what?”
“I didn’t want to worry you. You had plenty going on to think about where you were.”
“You didn’t want to worry me? What makes you think Ah’d been the least fuckin’ bit worried? Every morning I get up, I expect you to have keeled over and croaked during the night. I don’t worry about you!”
He shrugged. “Sorry. I should have told you.”
“Yeah, you should have.” She paused a second, then said, “And it’s a good fuckin’ thing you finally did, ’cause that would have really pissed me off.”
“What can I do to make it up to you?”
“Ah will think of something. Meanwhile, Ah got to go, my ride is here.”
“Be safe, Gunny.”
“Dammit, you don’t need to tell me that!”
But she smiled, just a little, and he knew she wasn’t really mad at him for saying it. And he felt better for having told her about the hip, too.
TWENTY
When they got to the pad, Wink was there.
“Come to wish us a bon voyage?” Jo asked.
“Nope, I’m going with you.”
“Really? Why would you think that?”
“Our esteemed commander allowed me to convince him that a visit to a modern Terran city is probably not as intrinsically dangerous in and of itself as being in an active war zone; besides which, if you need to question a Bax, I might be of some assistance, my happy juice notwithstanding.”
“You know I’m gonna call him.”
“You don’t trust me? I’m wounded.”
She accessed her aug: “Rags?”
He was expecting the call; there was no preamble: “Yes, I said he could go.”
“Got it.”
“Don’t let him get into any trouble.”
– – – – – –
Jo felt like a new woman . . .
Actually, what she felt like was her old self. Formentara had repaired and reset her system, all of her augs were functioning as they were supposed to; the well was flowing now, and she appreciated the hell out of it.
Gunny said, “Ah always feel like an impostor in civilian weeds.”
“You look fine,” Jo said. In truth, Gunny had a military look about her no matter how she dressed, and Jo supposed the same was true about her. Then again, they were going to San Antonio’s Cuarto Extranjero, the alien quarter, and in an exteetown, the things that humans noticed weren’t always picked up by offworlders.
Wink didn’t look like he was in anybody’s army; he looked like he was dangerous to any fem within range. Husbands and Significant Others instinctively moved closer to their mates when he was around, which was a good idea. Wink welcomed trouble, he gloried in it, and making a run at an attached fem with her partner standing right there wouldn’t faze him. He lived to walk the razor’s edge, and falling off didn’t seem to bother him at all.
Jo had been in a few exteetowns. They all had their own sensibilities, depending on which alien visitors predominated. This one had wide sidewalks, so nobody worried about bumping into anybody else. The various buildings were decorated in odd colors, and sometimes door and window shapes appeared off to human eyes. Signs were often repeated in five or six languages, and tightcasts tracked passersby with open coms, to offer the spoken version of the main language inside, for those who couldn’t read it.
It wasn’t as if the Terran city stopped as if sheared by a blade on one corner, and exteetown began on the next one, but you couldn’t help but notice when the shift became apparent. Here, you were strolling down the walk of a NorAm human city, and a couple of hundred meters past that, you were in a place that catered to people who didn’t look or act like you.
“And welcome to exteetown, people. Careful what you say, and if you smile crooked when you say it,” Wink said.
“You be sure and take your own advice, Doctor Death.”
“Hey, my heart is pure, don’t worry about me.”
“Right.”
What a lot of humans apparently didn’t understand was that other intelligent aliens didn’t always get along with each other, that lumping them together in a district like so many odds and ends was an ignorant thing to do. Rel didn’t socialize with Vastalimi, given that Kay’s people thought of Rel as prey. Bax and Zinna had a long-standing antipathy for each other, going back five hundred years. While offworlders weren’t required to stay in the exteetowns once they cleared customs and, sometimes, medical isolation, many of them did. Being an alien among humans was not always comfortable or safe. There was still a lot of xenophobia on the human homeworld. Better the ghetto, some thought, than being surrounded entirely by savages. When it came to civilization, humans were not the top of the heap. Not even close.
Even a few friends to watch your back was better than none when among the humans.
Most of the offworlders in San Antonio’s exteetown were either Rel or Emov. There were a few others, among them, a handful of Bax. No Vastalimi on record at the moment, and any Zinna onworld were apparently somewhere other than San Antonio, too.
Kay would have come along, but her presence would have been too notable. When a Vastalimi entered a room with Rel or Emov, those aliens would, as soon as they could manage it, leave. Along with some of the more skittish humans.
Blending in was not in the cards if you were a Vastalimi on Earth. People would stop and stare.
Few people wanted to relax and sip a drink next to somebody who, given the right circumstance, would happily kill and eat them. Such was illegal, of course, simply not allowed on civilized worlds, but the predator/prey relationship was hardwired in, and if you were prey, you didn’t feel comfortable under the predator’s gaze.
Rel and Emov came from herd cultures, they were vegetarians, and while Bax were omnivores, they had seemingly civilized themselves beyond what Vastalimi considered predator behavior . . .
The plan was to locate the targets, talk to them, and determine, if they could, which needed further interrogation.
“I am a little late to the party,” Wink said, “so tell me how we are going to do this again?”
Jo nodded at the storefront just ahead. Neo-neon signs outlined the entrance and spelled out words in a bright rainbow of Chau, the Bax’s main trade language. “That’s a Bax hangout.”
Wink said, “The writing looks like it was done by a pair of agitated spiders dancing on a hot skillet with paint on their feet.” He pulled his belt reader, pointed it at the building, and thumb-waved a command.
The unit made the translation. He squinted at it in the bright sunshine.
“‘House of Beroh’? What does that mean?”
“Look it up, you’ll remember it longer,” Gunny said.
“Why would I want to remember it at all? I haven’t dealt wit
h a Bax since I was a resident.”
“Yeah, but they are about to be in your immediate future.”
He shrugged.
Jo went on: “Beroh is a gambling game the Bax love. Kind of like a cross between poker, roulette, and craps, with a dash of chess thrown in.”
“That sounds like fun,” Wink said. “I put myself through medical school playing poker. Maybe I’ll sit in a few hands.”
“As I understand it, the rules and combinations are . . . complex. There are, according to the b.g. I read, a thousand ways to lose and one way to win. Serious players have to do complicated mathematics in their heads while rolling eight-sided dice, tallying cards, and watching a wheel with eight differently colored balls drop into slots that are even or odd, including negative numbers. The combination of cards, dice, and balls gives a choice of pieces and the order of moves on the game board, which looks kind of like threedee chess, but on circular boards four times as big. The player who controls the central sixteen squares for two moves is the winner of that round.”
“Hmm,” Wink said. “Might be tricky.”
“It gets better. The chess part is different with each deal, with handicaps given, based on who lost which pieces the previous round. How much you win is based on how many players there are and how much they bet along the way. You could bet a hundred to win one, or vice versa.”
Wink said, “Or, maybe I’ll just watch until I get the hang of it.”
“Probably a good idea.”
“Won’t we stand out?”
Gunny: “You had thirty minutes on the ride here, Doc, didn’t you read anything?”
He smiled at Gunny. “I have to save my dendrites for the important stuff, Megan. You can do my light-fighting for me, can’t you?”
“Sheeit.”
Jo said, “Apparently there are more than a few human gamblers who want to try the game. The Bax are always happy to take their money. As far as I can tell from the b.g. material, there are only a handful of human Beroh adepts, and they are fairly far along the autistic spectrum.”
“I’ll definitely stick to poker. Let’s go see.”
They made their way through the garishly outlined door, and Jo noticed the scanner and the two guards watching it as they cleared the entrance.