“I am not reassured by that.” Tawlin was working himself into a good rage now. His emotions seemed to be dredging up the last of the Povlen, for his eyes were wonderfully black.
“We destroyed him, you remember.”
“I am not reassured by that either.” Tawlin stopped and faced his tall bodyguard. “I tell you I am not coming out of this room until you follow those two thugs down and get rid of them for real.”
“Then you will have a restricted life, Tawlin. You cannot send a Wacaan after Wacaan, you know.” He put a reassuring hand down on Tawlin’s shoulder. It was brushed off.
“… what I can do and what I can’t do! Who thumbs the check around here? Then go after Rall herself. She’s the bitch who sent them.”
Wanbli sighed. He gazed up at the aimless, buoyant ceiling globes. Without warning he grabbed Tawlin’s delicate hand and slapped it against the wall plate. White daylight filled the room, with moisture and the smell of ferns. Tawlin cursed energetically and pressed the panel again, but Wanbli was standing in the doorway, and the door was inhibited from cutting people in two. “Look, Tawlin. It’s empty. Bare. Okay. Safe.”
“Rall has used both her Wacaan up against you. She will have to apply to Clan Council to be assigned more and until then she’ll be in strict hiding. I won’t be able to find her.
“And what about you? Without Vynur you have only the two of us, and Mimi is on the edge of exhaustion. Don’t you have any more enemies to watch out for? Enemies that might hear about this little tiff today?”
Tawlin glared as though Wanbli was the enemy in question. His expression changed, softened and became desperate and the T’chishetti stumbled off toward the rear wall of the sealed chamber, which slid open and showed him the toilet.
Wanbli sat outside the lavatory door and listened to his employer’s empty retching. He had tried the friendly firm hand at the base of Tawlin’s neck and had been rudely rejected. He sat and he fingered his new car key and he thought. When the distressing noises eased, he called out, “Tell me, Ake, old flyer: does this male mutation you were going on about have anything to do with feet?”
Tawlin T’chishetti was in no hurry to show his face. He dabbed with perfumed water before expanding the door into the bedroom. “Feet? I didn’t mention… oh. Right. I can’t trust that cousin of yours to do anything for me.”
Aymimishett was a clan brother but not a cousin. Wanbli had said as much to Tawlin times without count. He didn’t repeat himself now.
Ake Tawlin felt much better. Much better. The Povlen was kept in the lavatory cabinet. “You, redman, are a different tale altogether. To make that connection—even if it was a silly one. No, ’Bli, the history of vertebrate evolution has a great deal to do with feet, but not with foot fetishism. I got that stack of cheapies on special deal—almost for nothing. I’m good at that. Have to be, poor as I am.”
Wanbli nodded in good-natured agreement. “You are, goldman, you are.” When the Wacaan called the T’chishetti “goldman,” the T’chishetti believed they were referring to skin color. Or they pretended to.
“Most Paints wouldn’t bother trying to make sense out of the two things—my waking up and talking about mutation and the strange flicks I was watching last night.” He gave his Wacaan a very proprietary glance.
“I really should have had you educated. But the noise that would have made…”
Wanbli’s garnet eyes revealed one moment of real anger. “Had me educated? I am educated, Tawlin. There are very few of the Wacaan to have passed the Third Eagle on their first try and almost all of those were women. There are no Third Eagles at all my age.”
Tawlin strode out of the sealed room into the light, looking neither left nor right. He stroked a fern tenderly. “I know, ’Bli. I’ve watched your progress all your life. Only to be expected. But I meant real education. In business. Politics.”
Wanbli’s anger melted into condescension. “You don’t know much about Third Eagle training if you think I’ve missed that.”
Tawlin stretched and cracked his shoulder blades in a very athletic manner (Povlen was like that). “I don’t know much? You don’t know much, my boy. Not about me. Not about yourself, either.”
Tawlin had the attitude of a man about to offer revelations. Wanbli had heard Povlen revelations before. He broke in. “I think it’s time to take you to Hovart Clan House, Tawlin. Remember—you’re short a guardian. Since you repelled an attack today, you have the right to stay there until your house is full again.” The key in his wallet felt delicious against his fingers.
Tawlin yawned, growing more alert by the moment. “The Clan House? Oddly enough, that’s where you just sent the two assassins who were going to kill us, didn’t you? What if I ran into them in the front hallway, heh?”
That Tawlin should run into the pair was unlikely, since they were walking the distance, but perhaps the goldman hadn’t made this particular “connection.” Wanbli’s right to the property brought in the attack was undeniable, but he didn’t want to embark on a discussion of it with a Povlen-laced T’chishetti. “Then you could hire them. Perfect solution to the problem.” Wanbli only half thought of it as a joke, but Tawlin was full of himself enough to take it that way.
“No, thanks. I don’t want losers in my stable,” he said. “Besides—I’m only permitted three guardians by law. Remember?”
“Right said. But I’m leaving,” said Wanbli, and it became true as he said it. He repeated, “I’m leaving.”
Tawlin’s glance became even more tender. He turned to the nearest window, plucked a fern frond and played with the shimmer of the field. “Just like that? What a very unWacaan thing to do. But then you’re not really a Wacaan, are you?”
“It’s not so sudden. You’ve made it sizzling flames to work for you these past… What on the Ninety-eight do you mean by that—not really a Wacaan?”
Ake Tawlin sat down on a white wicker chair under the light of the window. He seemed to have forgotten all danger from outside. His ivory pajamas, however, were slightly soiled with vomit. “I mean that the Wacaan are very predictable. They glory in it.”
“Not in fighting, we’re not.”
“Since you fight with each other, the question is academic. But you, Wanbli, son of Damasc, are very different. Bright, questioning, unconventional. You are like me. As is inevitable.”
“You know that I am on the T’chishett National Baby Board. And, of course, that I spent years in close contact with your mother.”
Wanbli came up behind Tawlin, making the T’chishetti flinch. He leaned past him to inspect the scene out the window, both the desert and the garden. “Are you telling me you decided who my father was to be? I doubt that. It takes a vote of thirty percent in total, as well as a majority of the clan involved, to get the valves opened.”
Tawlin giggled, but he also stepped back. “But I myself, redman, have the key to my own balls. One of the privileges of plutocracy: even such a poor plutocracy as ours.”
Wanbli said nothing at all.
“Your mother was granted one child and by her choice of three fathers. That was all very conventional. But I was there first. I was there first.”
“She must have felt sorry for you,” said Wanbli defensively.
Tawlin grinned reminiscently. “What can you know about that? You were the one who said she died for my life.”
“That was duty! She died maintaining her own honor, moneybags, and I doubt if she thought of you in the process at all!”
“I’ve made the Wacaan angry. How odd. The half-Wacaan, perhaps.”
Wanbli slapped his hand against the wall, so that the pain would bring him back to himself.
“When you were a baby, you looked much more like me.”
“That’s because you look like a baby, goldman. Any baby.” He had himself under control again. “Watch yourself, Ake. You’re bragging yourself into a super-national crime, here.”
“Only among family.” Ake Tawlin was very happy with thi
s riposte. He let the tall Wacaan loom over his chair and waited for the response. It came in the form of soft foot-steps, receding down the hall.
“Wanbli, what are you doing?” Tawlin called. Povlen and lack of sleep made him hoarse.
“I’m being unpredictable again. Go to Hovart or stay here and watch Mimi sleep. I’m gone.”
Tawlin sat down again. He decided that perhaps he would take the drive.
* * *
The dry morning was glorious now. The air felt bright in and out of his lungs and the sky had just enough pink and green to be comfortable. All the day plants were open, both the armored and the feathery and the darters made small creaking noises under the eaves. Wanbli slouched to the Wacaan compound with his gun in his hand; exhilaration made him cautious. He stood by the window, filtering sand between his toes for a moment.
Home seemed killing beautiful, now that he would leave it. He rolled into the guardhouse through a window, crackling the field.
“Mimi, old flyer, wake up,” he said. Wanbli called out from beside the doorway. Not too close: Mimi was overtired and a tired Wacaan could wake up fighting.
He woke up quickly enough, but with no more violence than a protesting bleat. “Protectors, Wanbli, what is it?”
Wanbli came in and sat on the bed. Aymimishett took one look at his face and repeated more querulously, “What is it?”
Mimi did not believe in good news.
“Many things, all pushed into a little half dec,” said Wanbli. His smile was so sly that Mimi found it obnoxious. “We have had an assault.” Mimi made another little noise. “No harm done, and it’s over,” continued Wanbli. His fingers drummed on his bare knee. He was so jazzed, he felt he might as well have taken Povlen himself. “Remember Susie, from Rall’s?”
Mimi began to grin and then remembered the situation. “And Heydoc? They were just here to kill Tawlin. Heydoc claimed to be counting coup, but that was so much gas.”
Mimi was out of bed now and standing at ready, as though there was need for action. “And you took them on together?”
Wanbli chuckled. He did not rise from the pallet. “Oh, I wanted to wake you, but they were pressed for time. I took care of it, though.”
Mimi took a slow, calming breath and began to prowl. As Wanbli didn’t move and it was Wanbli’s story, he had to prowl in small circles. “You’re all right?”
“Far as I know. I haven’t felt any air holes yet. They’re all right too, Mimi, except for some minor bumps. Just out of work.”
Mimi hadn’t wanted to ask. Now he could allow himself to smile at the thought of Susie again.
“And I’ve got the key to a great big Rall aircar in my bag,” concluded Wanbli. There was so much wonderment in his expression that his complacent words were robbed of all insult, even to the unlucky Mimi.
“A car?”
“A very nice car,” answered Wanbli, though he had not yet seen it, except out of the corner of his eye.
“What will you do with it?”
When a Paint came into big money like this (and they came into big money in no other way) it was always a question of what to do with it. He could not possibly keep the car, because it would cost too much to feed, and if a Paint needed transportation, he would see that his employer furnished it.
He could buy food, but he couldn’t eat that much. He could buy clothing, but he couldn’t wear that much. He would not be permitted to buy a house, and if he had been, when would he stay in it, living on the T’chishetti estates as the Paints did? If he were old or merely despondent he might retire to Southbay.
Money would not influence the Council’s decision on genetic suitability, which was the true success of a Wacaan. Usually a rich Wacaan gave the money away on his next birthday, eliminating the worry and earning points as a great good flyer.
“What I’m going to do with it,” Wanbli began very hesitantly, gathering speed in his words, “is travel.”
“Where?” asked Mimi in slightly envious appreciation. More nervously he added, “When? You can’t leave until we get both a replacement for Vynur and a temp for…”
Wanbli looked at the pallet, not at Aymimishett. This was not easy. “No problem there. Tawlin will have to stop gassing and go to Hovart Clan House now. Today. There it can all be handled quickly. You go with him and pick out two new partners, and get a good rest for once.
“I’m not coming back here.”
Mimi stared and made fish mouths. He sank down beside Wanbli with one hand on his friend’s shoulder. He looked old.
No, this was not easy.
“Wanbli. You were born here,” he said, and there was actually pity in the man’s words.
“Not actually. I was born at Hovart House. I spent most of my first twenty years, off and on, in Southbay.”
“Of course. We all did. But Tawlin is home for you.”
Wanbli gave a little sniff, which sounded odd to himself. “No more. I’m leaving today.”
“Because of the attack?” Mimi was floundering for meaning, and Wanbli couldn’t help, for he didn’t understand himself. Not on a level to be explained.
“No. Because I now have the feathers to fly.”
“But today? That’s not planning. That’s not discipline.” Mimi’s large, fleshless features worked with his thinking. “That’s not Wacaan.”
“I don’t need to hear that!” Wanbli was surprised at his own irritation. It was that accident of birth’s damn Povlen-warped suggestion. “It’s perfectly disciplined. When would be better, with Tawlin already having to go to Hovart House? Should I wait for him to replace Vynur and for us all to settle into a routine? It’ll take a bomb to move him again after all this. Strike while the enemy is hot!”
There were flaws in Wanbli’s logic that even Mimi could see. But Mimi had the Wacaan sensibility to know that logic was not at issue here. “So where will you go?”
Wanbli waited in his answer. “New Benares.”
Mimi’s face wrinkled and then he relaxed all over. “Man, I thought you were serious. Don’t wind that around me again!”
This wasn’t easy at all. Not at all. “I am serious, Aymimishett, Clan Brother. I’m leaving as soon as I can get a boat out.” Wanbli stood and faced Mimi, leaning over him, trying to express his earnest in every inch of his body. “I’m going to make shimmers.”
“They won’t let you. The Clan Council won’t give you conge for that. They wouldn’t okay your going off-planet even if they did.”
Mimi wouldn’t look at him. Wanbli straightened.
The air was still very sweet. Outside Mimi’s dark cubby the sun was rising toward a brilliant noon. “So who is going to tell them about it, Mimi?”
Mimi groaned. “So now I’m a party to all this? On top of overwork and… and abandonment? Both you and Vynur. Now I’m to lie to the Council at Hovart and say I don’t know where you’ve gone?”
Tears stung Wanbli’s eyes for an instant. “Not abandonment, Mimi. I don’t want to leave you behind at all. You could come with me and avoid the whole mess. Let Tawlin interview a whole new trio of Paints. A new ‘stable,’ as he calls us. You can walk out. Why not? We’ll see how far the money from the car will take us, and talk our way the rest of the trip.”
Still Mimi didn’t look up. “I have no interest in being an actor, Wanbli, Clan Brother. Nor a thief nor a tramp.” His voice was very sad. Wanbli turned to go.
He was in the doorway when Mimi added, “You are close to guaranteed sire-promotion, you know. As close as any Wacaan ever was.”
Wanbli stopped and sagged against the doorjamb. There was so much feeling behind Mimi’s words. He had never fathered a child.
What he had said was enormous praise: unlike Aymimishett. It was also true.
Wanbli had always depended upon sire-promotion. He would be a better father than Flammulus had been to him. He would never take employment at the other end of the country from his own son or daughter. He closed his eyes and tried to erase the events of the morning
. He tried to forget the key in his pouch.
He found he was out the door and walking.
TWO
THE FLAPS of the cuyo bushes were fluttering around his knees and Wanbli was in a lyrical mood as he followed the track of the Rall assassins backward, carrying only a light pack, his blunderbuzz, and using his interference stick to walk. He sang the Third Protector’s song as he went—under his breath, of course. He had been trained very early not to make noise in the desert—and in his mind he heard the Flamedart instrumental recording, all brass and percussion, as his accompaniment. Flamedart was a Wacaan group, but very popular all over T’chishett. Bright, not subtle.
He was not out of the grounds when he heard a growl in the air behind him and turned to see Tawlin’s own estate car rise and shoot west, toward Hovart. He glimpsed (or wanted to glimpse) two heads against the blue-green sky. If that dinglehead had left Mimi behind with the servants … But no, if Tawlin showed up without Mimi, Hovart House would send him right back for the Wacaan. Within five seconds, the car was only a yellow dot against the horizon.
To the border of the gardens, Heydoc and Susie had come from the north, where they undoubtedly had used the great Pontiac table for cover. It rose up in front of Wanbli now, with sheer, crumbling red sides and a tri-level top that looked laser-planed. It was not the work of man. There was little money on Neunacht for Terraforming, and any reputable company would have done the work more cleanly than nature had.
There were legends connected with the Pontiac table. It was said that the ghosts of Hebe Tawlin and her children walked there at high noon on midwinter, because it was at high noon on midwinter that they had been brought there to be killed. That had been early in the days of settlement: before the Wacaan had come north. Wacaan did not kill children under eighteen and usually waited until the enemy was twenty-one. (T’chishetti of both sexes had developed a habit of underreporting their ages.) Hebe’s oldest daughter (the legend went) had been named Pontiac.
The Third Eagle Page 3
