by Jerry
Her eyes were very bright. “Then it is good I have set some friends of mine here to wrapping Bob Netchkay in many, many yards of bright red tape. If you knew how often I tried to get Juno to trade me a ship of hers—” She looked me up and down, scowling now. “I don’t want to have to discuss this over Netchkay’s papers; so, we must hide you. Hey!” She spoke rapidly in her own language to one of her attendants, who hurried away.
Helen watched the attendant engage in an animated conversation with the Holy Wholist. “See that missionary,” she commented, “how he waves his arms, he is all rattled about, he outrages as if back in his own place now, not a foreign planet. I tell you, some of these White priest people think they are still in Nineteenth Century Africa when they throw their weights around. Ah, there, something is agreed; now tell me about this ship.”
I started to tell her. Somewhere in the second paragraph, one and then the other of my legs were tapped and lifted as if I were a horse being shod. I looked down. My space boots had been deftly removed. Before I could object I was wrapped in an odorous garment which I recognized disgustedly as the yards and yards of the Holy Wholist’s grubby sari. The Wholist himself was gone.
“A trade,” said Helen calmly, adjusting a fold of this raggedy toga into a pretty tuck at my waist.
“What, my mag shoes for his clothes? Come on!” Space boots—mag shoes, we call them—are valuable in industry for walking on metal walls and such.
“Not so simple,” she said, “but in the end, yes. He said he would take nothing for his sari but a permit to preach in the markets where we do not like such interferences. I know an official who has long wanted a certain emblem for the roof of his air car, for which he would surely give a preaching permit. And among my own family there is a young man upon whose air-sled there is fixed this same fancy metal emblem—”
“Which he was willing to swap for my mag shoes,” I said. “But how did you work it all out so fast?”
“Why, I am a trader, what else?” Helen said. “Did your aunt never teach you not to interrupt your elders in the middle of a story?”
“Sorry,” I muttered, got annoyed with myself for being so easily chastened, and added defiantly, “But I’m not going to shave my head as bare as the Wholist’s for the sake of this fool disguise.” I go baldheaded in space rather than fuss with hairnets and stiffeners and caps to keep long hair from swimming into my eyes in non-gravey. Approaching landfall, I always start it growing out again.
Helen shrugged. Then she whirled on her attendants and clapped her hands, shouting, “Is there no car to take these passengers to town?”
The passengers grabbed their things and were herded toward an ancient gas truck parked outside. The Heaven Never Fail Short Hauling Line seemed to deal, in some very small consignments. The area was still littered with boxes and sacks. These were being haggled over by Helen’s people and the drivers of air-sleds who loaded up and drove off.
Helen caught my arm and took me with her to a raised loading platform from which she could observe the exodus while she asked me about the Sealyham Eggbeater. She knew all the right questions to ask, about construction, running costs, capacity, maintenance record, logged travel history (and unlogged). When she heard of the long hauls that the little ship had made, she nodded shrewdly.
“So it has Juno’s modifications; unshielded, as I have heard—it can be examined?”
“Yes.”
“You do not know the specifications of the modifications yourself, do you?”
“I’m a pilot, not an engineer,” I said huffily. It embarrasses me that I can’t keep that sort of thing in my head.
She asked about the name of the ship.
I shrugged. “I don’t know about ‘Sealyham’, but ‘Eggbeater.’ dates from when the Kootenay Line ran ships shaped like eggs and it became a great fashion. Aunt Juno didn’t want to spend money to modify our own ships, so we stuck with our webby, messy look and renamed all of them some kind of eggbeater.”
Helen smiled and nodded. “Now I remember. At the time I suggested taking slogans for her ships as we do here. You know my ships’ names: In God Starry Hand; No Rich Without Tears; Pearl of the Ocean Sky. I have twenty-seven ships.” She waved at the hangar floor. “You see how quickly my cargo is gone. I have a warehouse too but only small, and this is my one hangar. My goods move all the time, and my ships are moving them. Yams in the yam-house start no seedlings.”
“Yams?” I said. I was beginning to feel a little feverish, probably from the antipoddies I’d taken before landing.
“You must scatter yams in the ground,” Helen said impatiently. “In Old Africa. Yams don’t grow here; we must import. But the saying is true everywhere, so my ships fly, my goods travel. I named the ships in old style pigdin talk from Africa, in honor of my beginnings—in my ancestors’ lorry lines. All the lorries bore such fine slogans.
“My personal ship is Let Them Say. It means, I care nothing how people gossip on me, only how they work for me—”
She fell abruptly silent. Alarmed, I looked where she was looking. A machine was in the doorway I’d come in by, its scanner turning to sweep the hangar while its sensor arm patted about on the floor and and door jambs.
Helen signaled to one of the freight sleds with a furious gesture. It lifted toward us. She tapped at her ear—that was when I noticed the speaker clipped there in the form of an earring—and said bitingly into a mike on her collar, “Robot sniffers are working this port, why were they not spotted, why was I not told?”
Jerked out of the spell of her exotic authority, I remembered my danger and I remembered Ripotee: “I had a companion, a cat—”
“It must find you, then. These machines come from the Steinway flagship.”
I looked around frantically for some sign of Ripotee. “Don’t you have to stay a little to make sure everything gets done right here?”
“My people will do for me. Sit down, that sniffer is turned this way.”
With surprising strength, Helen yanked me onto the sled beside her; the sled, driven by a heavy girl in a bright blue jumper, slewed around and sped us swiftly out into the bright sunshine.
We headed toward a cluster of domes and spires some distance away. The sled skimmed over broad stubbly fields between high, shaggy green walls that were stands of trees and undergrowth: outposts of the jungle Ripotee had spoken of. Other sleds followed and preceded ours, most of them fully loaded.
“Where are we going?” I said.
“To market, of course.”
I remembered that Helen was an old opponent in the marketplaces of the worlds, and it occurred to me that perhaps she was simply keeping me scarce until she could trade me in for a good profit. I checked the driver’s instruments out of the corner of my eye, gauging the possibility of jumping for it and hiding out on my own in the jungle or something, just in case I had to. Helen must have seen me because she laughed and patted my knee.
“Ah, my runaway White girl, what are you looking for? Is it that you are suspicious of me now? Netchkay flashes his papers about, claiming that you are space-sick and need to be protected from yourself, or why would you flee from your own family to the home of the trade rivals of the great Steinway Line? You think I might sell you to Bob Netchkay.
“Foolish! I am your friend here, and not only because of Juno and her invention, which can make me very much richer; not even only for the sake of the Steinway Line as it was in its heyday, all those bright, sharp little ships running rings around the big men and their big plans. Yes; not only for these reasons am I your friend, but because women know how to help each other here. The knowledge comes in the blood, from so many generations that lived as many wives to one man. They all competed like Hell, but if the husband treated one wife badly, the others made complaint, and were sick, and scorched his food, until he behaved nicely again. So, here is Bob Netchkay being nasty with you; I will play co-wife, and for you I will scorch bad Bob’s supper.”
Now, why couldn’t my
own sister Nita take that line?
“That man is a fungus,” I muttered.
“Now, that is the proper tone,” Helen said approvingly, “for a missionary talking about one of another sect.” Then she added with serene and perfect confidence, “As for Netchkay, I will shortly think what to do about him.
“First tell me just what you yourself want out of it.”
“My ship back and some money to start flying.” On a sudden inspiration I added, “My mag shoes were worth much more than this Holy Wholey rag I’m wearing. You have to count them in any deal between us.”
She let that pass and leaned forward to snap out an order to our driver. “There is the market,” she said to me, indicating a high translucent dome with landing pads hitched round it in a circle like a halo on a bald head.
I scowled. “I know you have business there, but what good is the market to me?”
“Bob Netchkay’s robot sniffers cannot enter on your trail. No servos are permitted on the market floor. They are not agile enough for the crowds and always get trampled and pushed about until they break, and then they sit there in the way with their screamers on for assistance, driving everyone mad. In there you must play missionary a little. White missionaries are not remarkable here on New Niger; if those sniffers ask of you outside the market from people coming out, they will learn nothing.
“Sit still and be quiet till we land, I must listen to the trading reports.”
She turned up the volume on the button communicator in her earring and ignored me. I studied her as we neared the market building. She didn’t look old enough to have known Aunt Juno, but it never occurred to me to doubt that she had. I thought I saw in her the restless, swift energy of my aunt. In Helen it was keen ambition, right out there on the surface for all to see. Helen even had the same alert, eager poise of the head that Aunt Juno had so noticeably developed along with her progressive nearsightedness.
She shooed me out onto a ribbon lift which lowered me to the edge of the immense seethe and roar of the jam-packed market floor. She herself boarded a little floater. That way she could oversee the trading at her booths, darting like an insect from one end of the hall to the other.
I took up a position as deep within the crowd as I could elbow myself room. On my right a fat woman hawked chili-fruits from Novi Nussbaum; on my left squawking chickens were passed over the heads of the crowd to their purchasers. Women carrying loads on their heads strode between buyers and sellers, yelling at each other in the roughly defined aisles between stalls.
I shouted myself what I imagined might be the spiel of a Holy Wholist: “The sky of New Niger is the sky of Old Earth; our souls are pieces of one great eggshell enclosing the universe!” and similar rubbish. Some of the crowd stopped around me; about a dozen women, and two men with red eyes and the swaying stance of drunks.
Suddenly there was a shriek from the chili-fruit woman. Over a milling of excited marketers I could just glimpse her slapping among her wares with her shoe.
Helen’s floater zipped in; she seized the shouting woman by the arm and spoke harshly into her ear, reducing her to silence. I managed to insinuate myself through the crowd, which was already beginning to disperse in search of more interesting matters.
Helen said to me in a venomous whisper, “Did you hear it? This woman says she saw moving, maybe, a sweetsucker among the chili-fruits. A sweetsucker, can you imagine, carried all the way from Novi Nussbaum with my cargo!”
The vendor, eyes cast down, muttered, “I saw it, I am telling you—sweetsucker or not. A long thing like what they call snake in Iboland, but hairy, and making a nasty sound,” and she drew her lips back and made clicking sounds with her tongue and widely chomping teeth, like a kid who hasn’t learned yet to chew with its mouth closed. It was just the sound Ripotee makes when he’s eating.
Helen rounded on the woman again, snarling threats: “If you spread rumors of sweetsuckers drying up my Novi Nussbaum fruits, I will see you not only never sell for me again but find every market on New Niger closed to you!”
I bent down and hunted quietly around the stand, calling Ripotee’s name. Not quietly enough: some friendly people at the next stall over turned to watch and saw my religious attire. Identifying my behavior as some exotic prayer ceremony, they cheerfully took up my call as a chant, clapping their hands: “Rip-o-tee! Rip-o-tee!”
Helen took me firmly by the wrist. “What are you doing?”
“This vending woman must have seen my cat.”
“And by now many people in the market have your cat’s name in their mouths, which is very foolish and not good for us. Netchkay is clever, and I just now get word that seeing he could not introduce his machines here to find if you are at the market, he has sent instead your own sister, Nita Steinway. She will know that cat’s name if she hears it spoken, and she will look for you. So we must go at once, though it means I break my business early, which I do not like at all.”
She propelled me onto the floater with her, hovering there a moment to give curt orders to the vending woman: “Go take these chili-fruits to put water in them and plump them up, so no one will believe this nonsense about sweetsuckers!” We rose straight for one of the roof hatches.
I said, “Helen, my cat—”
“Oh, your cat, this cat is driving me mad!” she cried, shooting us out onto one of the landing pads again and bustling me sharply into a waiting town skipper. It was an elegant model with hardwood and bright silver fittings inside. She drove it herself, shying us through the sky in aggressive swoops that made other skippers edge nervously out of our way.
“Now listen, is it this cat you want to talk about or diddling Bob Netchkay? If you are interested, I have arranged it; I have set engineers to copying the Steinway modification from your ship. When plans are drawn we will show them to Netchkay. If he wants them sold to every short hauler in the business, he can continue to worry you. If he agrees to leave you alone, he will have only one competitor with the secret of long-hauling in short haul ships: myself.”
Chuckling, she sideslipped us past a steeple that had risen unexpectedly before us. “Oh, he will grind his teeth to powder, and I—I will be the one to carry on the true spirit of the Steinway Line.”
I looked down at the bubble buildings we were skimming over, interspersed with what looked like not very satisfactorily transplanted palm trees, all brown and drooping. I felt lonesome and exposed in the hands of Helen Nwanyeruwa above that alien townscape.
We landed on the roof of a square, solid cement building. Helen shouted for attendants to come moor the skipper and for a guide to show me to my room. She said kindly, “Go there now,
I have made a surprise for you. Maybe then you will stop wailing after this cat and enjoy my party tonight.”
The surprise was Barnabas, sitting on the bed and grinning. He had grown a curl of beard along his jawline and wore not a captain’s jumper but tan cord pants and a gown-like shirt of green and black.
“Barnabas!” I said. “What in the worlds—”
“Everybody here knows you and I have met and made connection before. New Niger is the market place of gossip.”
“Better to make connection than to just talk about it,” I said and began tossing off my clothes. I’d forgotten that peculiarly electrical expression of New Nigerian English; it set me off. I was suddenly so horny I could hardly see straight.
In space I forget; most of us do, though we like to keep up the legend of rampant pilots whooping it up in free fall. Actually, all that is inhibited out there, maybe by stress. But it comes back fast and furious when you are aground again.
Barnabas had the presence of mind to get up and shut the door. He knew right away what was happening and threw himself into it with a cheerful, warm gusto that had me almost in tears. I finally had to beg off because he was making me sore with all that driving, and he tumbled off me sideways, laughing: “Sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you, but it is long since I did this with a crew-cut woman!”
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br /> “It’s the first thing I’ve done on New Niger that didn’t feel all foreign and strange,” I said. “Let’s do it again, but this time I’ll get on top.”
Later on a small boy came padding in with his eyes downcast bringing us towels, and padded out again. Two towels.
Pilots tend to be a little prudish about these things, which are after all more important and isolated incidents for us than for your average planet-bunny with all his or her opportunities. “Don’t you people know what servomechs are for?” I grumbled.
Barnabas was stroking my throat. “You have a beautiful neck, just like the belly of a snake. No, no, that is compliment! Don’t mind the youngsters—Helen gives employment to many children of relatives. She is very rich, you know.”
“How did he know there were two of us needing towels?”
“Everyone knows I was up here, and what else does a man do with a woman. They forget that I am a captain myself and might have business to talk with you. To people here, I am just a man, good only for fun and fathering… .”
At his sudden glance of inquiry and concern I shook my head. “Lord no, Barnabas, I shot myself full of antipoddies before leaving the ship. Otherwise I’d be nailed to the toilet with the runs.” All pilots use antis on landfall. You have to make a special effort to conceive.
“I have several children now,” Barnabas said, and his voice took a bitter edge. “But unfortunately no ship. A falling out with my employer.” He smiled wrily. “I am sorry for myself. What have you been doing, Deedee? I hear you have a lot of trouble with Bob Netchkay and your sister.”
I explained. He grimaced and shook his head, half condemning, half admiring “I told you long ago, that man is to be watched; he has plenty of brains and drive, and with your clever sister to help him he is making a great company to rival even the Chinese.”
“He’s a fungus,” I said. I liked that word.
Barnabas laughed. “Let’s not argue in the shower.”
We stood in the wet corner under the fine spray shooting in from the walls and talked, rubbing and sponging each other and picking our hairs out of the drain. Then we toweled off, got back on the bed, and soon had to clean up all over again.
