The Third Eagle

by R. A. MacAvoy

  Wanbli was sure the man had understood. He heard the woman behind him shift from foot to foot and he felt the itch over his shoulder blades. “One ticket to Icor. On the ship that leaves later today.” Very simple, he wanted to add, but he held his tongue. Give the flyer nothing to bite down on.

  The attendant rubbed his two pale hands together, insect style. He glanced up at the wall clock. “What exactly are you sending to Icor?” He glanced beyond Wanbli to the two people in line behind, as though to invite them to guess what a man of Wanbli’s peculiar appearance and attire would be sending to Icor. Both the waiters shuffled and avoided the sky-blue eyes. Wanbli had the feeling they were regulars in this line and had learned not to trust.

  “I am sending myself to Icor. A passenger ticket. Very simple,” he heard himself saying, knowing all the while it was a mistake.

  Because the man picked up the phrase before it had fairly hit the counter. “Not so very simple,” he said in his slow, drawling ’Indi. He overpronounced his h’s, at least to T’chishettian ears. “To begin with, that is not a passenger ship, but a freighter.”

  This statement, phrased as it was, promised to lead to another and more explanatory statement. The attendant, however, let his mouth close after it and seemed content to wait. More shuffles sounded in Wanbli’s ears, and a man at the end, new to the line, let out a sigh.

  “It’s a delta freighter,” said Wanbli, who was sweating fearfully despite the chilly air. Behind him he almost heard the bare feet of the Clan Officers, coming to ask him quietly (it would be ever so quietly) what he was about. “It takes on passengers as well as freight.”

  The man’s eyes flickered, but it was a flicker Wanbli couldn’t read. The color put him off. “Those arrangements are usually made a long time in advance.”

  Now there were five people behind him, and one asked another how long the wait was likely to be. Wanbli heard him perfectly.

  He’d got what he’d wanted: a crowded counter. But the strategy had backfired on him, for this sky-blue devil behind the counter (and his veins made even his skin a sort of blue) didn’t feel the pressure at all, whereas Wanbli was not used to inconveniencing large numbers of ordinary people. It was not part of the Paint training. “Let’s make the arrangements right now and get it over with.”

  “Can’t do that.” The flat drawl of the answer sounded like a direct insult, but that might have been only the man’s dialect.

  The attendant said nothing else. He gazed out beyond Wanbli as at a landscape barren of people. He yawned. This was very insulting, in any dialect. He shifted his hand, which happened to be holding a mouse stylus, and let it click against the field of the cockpit.

  Wanbli was very familiar with that gesture. People often checked that their fields were in order when in the presence of a Paint. Ofttimes they were not conscious of having done so. This flyer, for instance, would not likely admit to himself he was nervous about riding Wanbli so hard. He might not even know what a painted Wacaan was, so few of them entered his little truckers’ realm. But any human body could recognize a good deal about another simply by the way it moved, and so the man checked his shield.

  Not many air-transparent shields would stand against an educated Wacaan.

  “So why can’t you sell me the ticket?” asked Wanbli, and he was grinning again. Now that he knew things were going to be this difficult, he might as well grin.

  “Because this is a freight counter.” He said it as though it were the punch line of a joke, which, in a sense, it was. “Next.”

  Wanbli did not move, and the attempt of the line to move forward ended in a series of hopeless shuffles. Instead, he leaned forward and rested his beaded shoulder against the field. It sparkled prettily. Both his hands moved—not fast, not slow, very peacefully—through the invisibility and settled around the very surprised attendant’s arm. He stroked it lightly, against the growth of the hair.

  “Get… get out of my field!” The attendant’s face was ice blue. His eyes did not change.

  “What field?” asked Wanbli. His grip tightened slightly. “Tell me exactly how I go about buying a ticket to Icor.”

  “I’ll tell you, dearie.” The voice was slightly familiar. It came from behind him. Wanbli released the blue man and turned. The field of the cockpit closed with a grateful pop.

  It was the little lady from the shuttle bus. She had been in the line behind him all this time, her paper-wrapped package in her arms. “You go outside and look for a little boat in the middle of a big blue circle—on the pavement, I mean, the circle is. You turn right out of the door and keep at the edge Of the long shadow: it’s easy to find. When you get there tell the first man you see that you want to talk to the purser. Only the purser. Do you have that?”

  “Yes, Mother,” said Wanbli, leaning with his hands on his knees.

  “Tell him you want a ticket as far as Icor, and that you want it commuter rate. If you don’t specify they’ll give you first class, which doesn’t mean anything on a flight that short except a drink with dinner, and you can do without that easier than pay half again the fare.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  The woman nodded forcefully. “There shouldn’t be any trouble you getting on. They’re never full on a Thirdday. The Sixday flight is different, but today it’s probably empty. Do you want me to write this all down?”

  “No, Mother.”

  “And if anybody else teases you, give them my name: Matitia Blanding. Now hurry—it would be a shame if you missed it now.”

  “Yes, Mother,” said Wanbli again. He scooped up his suitcase and headed smartly for the door. Behind him he could hear her talking to the attendant. She was saying, “They’re very dignified, you know, and if you keep teasing them…”

  The sun made him stop to pull off his fancy shirt. It had already left the beginnings of a rash on his shoulders.

  There was the shadow of the building and the blue circle of the pad at the end of it. The boat was not so small when seen close up. Wanbli asked the first man he saw for the purser.

  Why had he done this? Upon waking up this morning, he had had no idea to leave Tawlin Estate, let alone Hovart Clan. Let alone T’chishett. Let alone Neunacht. This hop felt like any other: small jolts to the stomach and lots of boredom. He might have been on his way to Southbay for any of a number of reasons, instead of leaving his home world for no reason at all.

  The trip to Rondo Bay took only a half dec, and Wanbli could not help thinking how he could step out there and take a commuter flight home. No one got off. No one got on. Wanbli kept to his seat in the crew’s lounge, between the wash tank and the drinks machine. People came and went, not ignoring him quite, but not speaking. They were truckers; truckers came in all colors and though they moved their faces a lot he found them difficult to read.

  There was nothing else to read. Wanbli was more of a reader than most Wacaan, which was not to say he was obsessive about it. Still, there was nothing at all to read except a sign on the wall, which was very dirty and not written in ’Indi. They lifted from Rondo Bay again.

  Wanbli felt calm enough. Collected. But he kept chewing on the question of why he had done it. Not why he had left Tawlin: that had been brewing for a year and more. Not even why he had done it today: the price of an aircar changed everything. The fleabite, unendurable question was why he had chosen this particular method of cutting his life in two parts, heading off into black space without planning. No return ticket. It was really very un-Wacaan, whatever he had said to Mimi.

  The thought of Aymimishett hit him hard under the ribs. He wished he had convinced the old flyer to come with him (impossible, even in wishes). He wished Vynur had never left.

  He found himself nostalgic for the presence of Mother Blanding.

  It was so damn cold in the ship. Surely the savings in energy could not be so much. Since crew’s temperature control was usually funneled off the light striking the hull, it should not matter how much heat they allowed into the crew quarters.
Maybe they all preferred to trot about the ship with clothing flapping over their bodies and their noses and tootsies blue, but it wasn’t Wanbli’s idea of fun.

  He slipped his blanket out and put it over his head, letting only his face poke through the head hole. If he curled his legs on the chair, it covered all of him nicely.

  Now he felt much better. Now he could appreciate that his leaving was an inevitable decision. It had been in the cards long before this morning, and Ake Tawlin’s crazy Povlen talk about being his father had nothing to do with it. Wanbli wanted to act in the shimmers, therefore he must go to where shimmers were made. Simple and perfect reasoning. There was no need for excitement. There was no excitement.

  It surprised him very much that he had to run for the lavatory four times between Rondo Bay and South Extension. It was also very unpleasant. His bowels were not listening to simple and perfect reasoning.

  “Who’s the dizzy under the blanket? A scrabbler?”

  Wanbli had enough trouble with the pronunciation without worrying about what a dizzy was, or a scrabbler. Neither could be a compliment. He raised the face flap of his cocoon.

  It was a woman, dressed neck to ankle in drab. A trucker, of course. He had often wanted to meet truckers: people who had chosen or been born to a life in ships with no home planet and few contacts with planet-dwelling people. He had thought they might be different from the rest of mankind, though he hadn’t had any ideas how. Now, having met the trucker at the port, he had some ideas. This one fit right in with them.

  Her face was a gray-blue-brown and she did not look at all sympathetic toward him. She was answered by another, equally colorless. A man, and off to one side. Not a word of this reply was intelligible to Wanbli. The blanket was suddenly too warm and Wanbli thrust it off him. He unfocused his eyes, to keep both man and woman in view.

  She gave a sudden gasp, which might have been flattering to Wanbli, had it not ended in a sort of giggle. “If a scrabbler is a ground dweller, that’s me,” he said to her. Pointedly to her. “But I haven’t been dizzy on a ship since childhood.”

  She stared at his chest and he let her do so, with the air of a king conferring a favor.

  As Wanbli had spoken to the woman, excluding the man, who was standing a nervous-making distance to the left and to the side, so her answer came only for her fellow trucker: “Bright bird, isn’t it?”

  Once, when Wanbli was nine years old (a Neunacht year was only slightly less than human standard, which in turn is only slightly longer than that of Earth), he had let himself get separated from his class by a strange First Eagle tutorial. It had been his own fault; he’d been showing off and had wandered too far looking for spikepods to throw at the others. Trainee Paints didn’t kill each other in their little spats, or not often, but they were no kinder than human standard. That day he had learned very impressively that one cannot beg, smile or fight one’s way out of the amusements of the pack: not when the pack was on its home territory. He knew of only one way.

  Wanbli was very much in truckers’ home territory. If he started kicking ass here, they would eventually come put him down. He sighed, yawned as the counterman had yawned at him and folded his blanket. His interrupter went thud against the floor.

  “Have you ever really seen a bird?” he asked. Wanbli had not. They had tried to introduce birds of one sort or another to Neunacht, but the darters always got them. Even through the bars of cages. Dogs did better.

  “What’s that stick for?” The trucker man took a step closer to Wanbli and folded his arms. His legs were wide and braced, locked at the knee.

  Like police, thought Wanbli. Or a very badly trained bodyguard. Did the flyer know how unprotected his knees were, let alone his groin?

  “Why didn’t they make you check it?”

  The purser hadn’t made Wanbli check his stick because he had voluntarily given up his blunderbuzz. Admitting the one as a weapon drew attention from the other’s offensive possibilities, and the interrupter was a much more useful weapon on a boat. The orange slider skin wrapped around the handle and the twinkling bundle of Elf Darter wings also gave the thing a friendly appearance.

  “Why should I check it? It doesn’t get in your way, does it?”

  Another trucker came around the corner into the tiny lounge: another woman. If they were going to be belligerent, Wanbli was glad it was a woman. Even when the women were Third Eagle he’d rather be facing two women and a man than the other way around. Women almost always waited for the attack and Wanbli could end the game by not attacking.

  And if it did not come to fighting at all, he’d rather be faced by two women. Lots.

  “I’ll decide what gets in my way and what doesn’t.” The man had many stamps and badges on his costume, which would have been very useful for Wanbli to understand, he was sure.

  “You know the rock, if it’s you who stumbled over it,” answered Wanbli, though he wasn’t sure that the man would recognize the proverb.

  The new woman—she was yellowish pale, a color that went miserably with the drab uniform—said to the man, “I can’t understand his language at all. What’s he speaking?”

  “It’s Hindi with all the h’s taken off, and most of the middle syllables slid over.”

  Wanbli understood this, and was very proud of himself for it. “I never could see the importance of an h,” he said, being careful to pronounce the middle syllables of every word. He glanced at the clock, the three truckers and one particular door out of the lounge. Soon he would be due for visit number five to the evacuatory. Bad timing.

  Two people spoke at one time. The man said, “I want that stick out of here,” and the yellowish woman said, directly to Wanbli, “Why do you wear all those tattoos?” By the way the man bit down on his words to let her finish, Wanbli learned something about the boat’s hierarchy. He felt justified in ignoring him to answer the woman.

  “They are marks of rank, like the badges on your suit.” He did not preen for her; for all he knew, she might be the captain, like in The Garden of Grief, and although Paovo had begun by offending Captain Satvananda deeply and ended by marrying her, Wanbli was not certain that the bad start was a necessary part of it.

  She stepped closer. She was not bad-looking, though spindly. Thin women often had great sexual endurance. Wanbli looked back attentively. Respectfully.

  “But how do you change them if you’re promoted?” She had to repeat the word “promoted” for him before he understood.

  He explained that the Eagles were additive, but he did not explain what they represented. He decided to like this lady; the trucker man was wearing a thwarted sort of scowl. Another trucker came in and opened conversation with the first woman—she of the blue-brown skin—and he was left standing there by himself.

  “You seem to have filled yourself up,” continued Wanbli’s interrogator. She glanced down at his breechclout, where the top of the Third Eagle winked and disappeared with his breathing, and then she glanced away. “I mean, you have no more room for tattoos.”

  “Yes,” he answered her, adding, “Alas.” He knew that to be an ancient word, and he threw it out to see whether she was educated.

  She giggled: doubtful response. “What happens if you are demoted, once the tattoos are there?”

  “Usually that does not become a problem. Usually we are demoted by the fire.” It was Wanbli’s turn to laugh then, but the laugh did not come out, for into his mind came, with horrid vividness, the memory of his mother’s open funeral pyre.

  She had been only forty.

  “I really do want that stick checked, Captain,” trucker man number one spoke into the silence. “Who knows what’s in this guy’s head. Obviously not civilized. It could be dangerous.”

  She was the captain. Only of a minor-run boat, true, but still that made her the highest-ranking trucker aboard. Wanbli was very bucked with himself for having attracted her.

  “Checked? If that is the custom, of course,” Wanbli answered in his most civilize
d tones. He lifted what appeared to be an ordinary walking stick, leather-handled and with bright flashing dangles. Before the fellow could step forward he added, “But be very careful handling it. It has strong magic in it.”

  “Magic?” The trucker’s jaw dropped in scornful triumph. “You believe… the thing is magic?”

  “It’s a ceremonial piece,” said Wanbli for the Captain’s ears, leaving her to doubt whether he really believed or was only constrained by his own cultural mores. “It could do quite a bit of damage if you handle it with untutored hands,” he said louder, to the man.

  Speaking the strict truth.

  Now the flyer stood in front of him in policeman stance again. “Let’s see some magic,” he said.

  Wanbli sighed, but in satisfaction. It had taken so long to elicit those words. “All right. Coming right up,”he said, and his hand dove into his waist pouch. When that hand came out it had three polished gold coins in it.

  Chargers were the usual medium of exchange on Neunacht, as on most worlds on the minor strings, but coins were still made and still tendered, though most usually used as gifts for children. Each of these three coins had been given to him on Solstice by his father. Flammul’ never thought of anything more original than gold coins.

  “Behold, madam. Simple coins of ordinary gold. No trickery possible. I dispose them so…”

  They went between the first and second, the second and third, and the third and fourth fingers of his right hand. “And with such a gesture of the left hand—which is of course magical in its very nature—I put these coins into the care of the Sixth Protector, who was my own great-grandfather.”

  The coins were there, and then they were not there. You have seen it a hundred times.

  The Captain made a gratifying sort of bubbling noise and clapped her hands together. “He does know magic. What a joke on you, Travis. Real stage magic. So much for your unpredictable barbarian!”

  “Well, there was certainly nothing up his sleeve,” added the new man.

  “I want to see those coins again,” said the blue-brown woman, leaning very close over Wanbli. She was really better-looking than the Captain, or at least that mud color suited her better.