Travis, his arms still folded, had to grin and bear it, for his pack had broken into lone wolves around him and he really wasn’t up for tackling this strange fellow alone. He still suspected he was not entirely civilized.
Wanbli extended the coins. “Of course, madam. But I need them back again. They’re keepsakes.”
These three gold coins he had kept, polished and ready, in his pouch since he was nine years old, when the same coins and the same trick and the same, very same line of patter had won him free past eleven hostile, albeit inexperienced, enemies.
Five minutes and two tricks later, he was able to rise and saunter unharassed into the evacuatory, swinging his stick at his side.
So they were not much different from the people of T’chishett, at least not in their group behavior. Wanbli felt he could handle truckers. As long as he kept his tricks intact. But in his concern with his status on the boat, Wanbli completely missed the moment when they caught and held the string that ran nearest to Brawliens 2-98 and left his home planet far behind. He was in the evacuatory when they engaged what FTL—fiddlehead—engines the boat possessed, and although he didn’t miss noticing the lurch when they caught the string, he mistook it for something else he had recently been suffering.
He returned to the lounge to find the entire crew—nine of them—assembled with matching boredom stamped on every face. It was the boat’s logic and only that which could hold the minor string and scoot them beyond the speed of light. The crew was useless in this and they knew it.
Wanbli did his best to charm. He ran out of magic tricks very early and told stories instead. He told them about Hebe Tawlin and Pontiac Rock. He explained why the Fifth Protector was also called “Joker in the Pack.” He described the lives of his people and the lives of the T’chishetti themselves. He found himself repeating the gist of what Ake Tawlin had said to him: not about the combative males but about how the T’chishetti had no choice but to keep the Wacaan’ and how they didn’t like it. After this he gave the standard Wacaan view, which was that they had no choice but to be kept by the T’chishetti and how they didn’t like it. His audience found it all very profound and a good joke. Someone asked whether this was perhaps why Neunacht was so damn poor that it had never gotten a station.
This irritated. Tawlin had cried poor every dec of the day, for as long as Wanbli could remember, and he was one of the richest brokers in the Hovart area. Wanbli himself, owning only what he had worn or carried on his person, had never felt in the slightest poverty-stricken.
It was coming, he answered. The station was coming. He recited for them the invocation. He assured them that they had been paying on the account for seventy-five years. Things would be looking up on Neunacht very soon now. (It was an old joke: looking up, as at the station. He scarcely remembered it was supposed to be funny.)
His audience looked tolerant but unconvinced. Perhaps they preferred the idea of a poor, uncivilized Neunacht. Certainly the string station would mean one less stop for a fiddlehead shuttle, cartage prices being what they were. Perhaps they simply did not believe that things changed. There were people like that. Wanbli dropped the subject.
Instead he described the darter that lived under his eaves and how it waited for the alios to open, so it could catch ratchetts in midair, and the other darter that had stung him in the scalp while he followed footprints.
By this time, the truckers again thought Wanbli was a barbarian, but they had all mellowed enormously toward barbarians.
Dinnertime came and though he had paid commuter, they gave him the glass of wine anyway. Wanbli was very unused to the stuff, but honor seemed to compel, so he drank it, holding his breath to reduce the taste. He lost track of the conversation after that, busy with his own thoughts. Perhaps he could do some positive good for old Neunacht if he could become a popular actor. Actors were very used to promoting things; maybe he could promote his planet. He could well imagine people wanting to visit Southbay, or even the desert around Hovart. Once the station was in, it would be very convenient. It wasn’t really picturesque, but with its mornings and evenings of rose and green, it was very homey. Home away from home.
He was going away from home. Right now. It was very wearing, and Wanbli fell asleep at the table, the empty wineglass locked in his fingers. The steward cleared around him, and if he was the butt of jokes, he didn’t know it.
When he woke up he was on the floor, curled around the chair legs, and two blankets had been laid catty-corner over him. He had had a dream in which there had been a small child with Ake Tawlin’s face, and the child had been very angry at him, with reason. What the reason was, he didn’t remember, but he woke apologizing. His interrupter was in the palm of his right hand, where the slider skin’s scales had left a strong pattern.
When he returned from the evacuatory (things were getting better) there was only one trucker in the lounge: one he didn’t even remember from the evening before. The clock on the wall registered one hour to Icor. Wanbli computed hours to decs in his mind and regretted the glass of wine. He had hoped to get together with the Captain. He decided to look for her.
The boat was small and his steps echoed on the walkways. This was not a fancy vessel. Touching the bare metal froze his feet: no wonder the truckers wore shoes.
He found the Captain in a small, square room which contained a lot of switches, a rather nice holo-mouse control resting on a transparent base and two chairs, the other of which was occupied by the man called Travis. She was turning the pages of a magazine with one hand, while the other hand rested in the mouse hole itself, making oily interference patterns.
Wanbli came in and leaned against the wall. Not even Travis objected. That was odd in itself. Wanbli had been prepared for a protest of some sort from the trucker; he was obviously of the complaining variety.
Perhaps Wanbli had been bragging about his fighting skills a bit the night before. He certainly didn’t remember it now.
“You keep things very cold here,” he said, and removed his bare shoulder from the wall.
The Captain raised her head from the print. “Ship normal. That’s… What do you use at home? Centigrade?”
“We use the sun.” He sat down on what bare floor there was. There was at least a felt mat in here. “If you kept it a bit warmer, you wouldn’t need all those clothes, Captain.”
She laughed. Spindly, yes, but she had a nice laugh. “These outfits were designed by a team of ethnologists, biologists and, for all I know, phrenologists to offend as few local taboos as possible. We’d have to wear them even if it was thirty in here, so why not be comfortable?”
Wanbli gazed at the gooseflesh on his arm and answered nothing for a while. She. turned another page. Travis stared at the Captain’s hand, inside the mouse run.
“We don’t have any local taboos,” Wanbli offered casually.
Travis turned in wide-eyed disbelief. “Neunacht? You’re full of them. Provincial as… as all get-out.”
“We,” explained Wanbli, chafing his arms, “…is not Neunacht. We are the Wacaan. We cover nothing. Except, of course, the privates.”
The Captain laughed again, this time less pleasantly, or so it seemed to Wanbli. “That’s what they all say. All of them. It’s just that no two cultures agree as to what’s private.”
“Why, the genitals; that’s all,” answered Wanbli. “What’s between the legs.”
Travis snorted at this inelegant terminology and added, “And of course, the… uh, bosom… uh, area.”
Wanbli glanced again at Travis. “The what? The chest? Why that?”
Travis’s pale eyes said “shame, shame,” as clear as Hindi, and again the Captain laughed, this time for a reason neither Travis nor Wanbli could see.
The transparent base lit up blue and the mouse squeaked. Both truckers became very busy and Wanbli sat quiet, afraid of the consequences of disturbing them.
What if nothing were private at all? If every passing stranger could see his pride and dangle and ha
ve a pretty good guess at the state of his feelings? He would get used to that—maybe. If everyone else did it too. Men’s organs were pretty much alike, and women’s, though interesting, mostly obscured by hair.
But if he were prancing about stark, everyone could see his Third Eagle. That was a different matter; it was made to be private. The unveiling of the Third Eagle, though performed nonchalantly, was an act of moment, and only done for special people.
If everyone saw it, then there would be no doubt that Wanbli was heavy medicine, even at first meeting. But everyone could see it already, or guess from the glint of golden down tattooed below his navel. No, there would be no advantage in keeping the real, unmistakable privates exposed.
Concealing the chest, though—women’s pretty nipples and baby-handles, men’s hard-won flat pectorals, the very tattoos themselves—this was an act of idiocy. It was sad. Wanbli looked at the back of Travis’s head and wondered if it was things like this in his upbringing that made the man so difficult. Perhaps the trucker in the freight office came from the same place.
The light in the mouse run went out and the truckers subsided into their chairs again. Bored. It struck Wanbli like a bolt from the black that perhaps the thing that drove people to be truckers was not adventure or an inhuman indifference to place, but only the desire to be bored.
There was so little to do here he considered perhaps they had landed already and he hadn’t noticed any more than he had noticed their grabbing the string. Surely, though, someone would tell him if they were already on Icor. They wouldn’t want him hanging around.
“Icor,” he said aloud. “Is it going to be difficult to get passage from there out to New Benares?”
The Captain swiveled her chair. Her small features registered a confusion which evolved into astonishment. “You’re going to Icor on the way to New Benny? Why? Do you have business on Icor first? Oh, you must,” she answered herself. “Otherwise you wouldn’t go in the opposite direc tion to New Benny.”
“Of course.” Wanbli’s shoulders sagged so the pop in his right scapula (remains of an old training wound) was audible across the room. He made his face blank, as he had been taught since childhood to do at difficult moments. “Poker” was the ceremonial word for that discipline. “But if I had known I was going in the opposite direction, I might have arranged to… take care of that business another time.”
The Captain looked as though she might not believe him. “Why are you going to New Benares, my bright bird? Going to become a celebrity?”
Wanbli shook his head and tittered scornfully at what was the simple truth. Having used up the first universal excuse for traveling—business—he now touched on the other. “I have family there.”
That might seem unlikely to the Captain, Wanbli being what he was and all, but who is going to tell a man to his face that he does not have family where he says he does? “I see,” is what she said. “Then why didn’t you ask for the direct route, down at Hovart?”
Wanbli chanced the truth. “That flyer in the booth there. He’s a real pain in the… I couldn’t get a straight answer out of him.”
Travis spun in his chair. They were from the same planet, thought Wanbli. Perhaps brothers. Now he had gotten himself into real trouble.
Travis was scowling. “Isn’t he, though? Isn’t he a real yokel? People like that—always trying to turn every situation into a damn contest—they… they just goad me! No wonder they anchored his chain down there in the middle of nowhere!”
“Travis has had many encounters with your freight dispatcher at Hovart,” said the Captain, smiling wryly.
“Our…” Wanbli snickered. “He ain’t ours, Captain. Believe me. Nothing like that lives anywhere in T’chishett. Or on all of Neunacht. When I left the line, Mother Blanding was telling him off, point by point, for the way he…”
“Who?” said the Captain, and the Mate. “Who? Matitia Blanding? You know her?”
“She sent me here.” Both truckers continued to stare at him, so he went on: “She told me to give her name if anyone gave me… I mean, if anyone started to pinch me hard again.”
The Captain settled back in her chair, her head resting against one fist. “I wish I’d known that,” she said.
very nice lady who lived in Hovart. I didn’t figure which clan.”
“She is a very nice lady,” said Travis.
“She’s my mother,” said Captain Blanding. “I wish I’d known last night that you were a friend of hers.”
“So do I,” said Wanbli, with feeling.
The Gray Sky
THREE
SO LITTLE had Wanbli known about Icor that he had grown up believing the name of the place was pronounced “Eecor,” whereas everyone who lived there said “Ayecor.” He was now down on Icor and very unhappy about it.
Icor was valuable in parts—those parts which had a certain igneous history and composition—and those parts were being slowly and carefully taken away. There was nothing terribly wrong with the rest of the planet, but it had never evolved life of greater complexity than large worms and small tufted trees; it was boring. As boring as a truckers’ shuttle boat. Men who lived and worked on Icor also tended to act like bored men.
The fact that the climate of Boom Port was classified as desert gave Wanbli a feeling of grievance: the only feeling he really possessed this morning, as his fingers and toes had gone numb.
At Tawlin Estate they had occasionally known cold nights, and the rains of winter promoted the wearing of blanket into all hours of the morning, but the sky of Icor was gray as well as cold and windy, and this at midday. The settlement had no soil, as such, but a surface of red rubble rock which crumbled in the hands and yet sliced through bare feet nastily. The few constructed buildings were made of pieces out of other things: plates from ships roofed by great sending disks, corrugated tubes for shipping machinery, even slabs of plywood. Most of the residents of Boom lived within the rocky skin of Icor itself; Boom was a honeycomb.
Wanbli stood outside the small customs building, which was one of the few that had been built of blocks: a planned thing, and he looked up at a cliff dotted with windows. It must have been ten stories high. He approached it and found himself leaping out of the path of a long, balloon-tired yellow vehicle, which rang an irritated bell at him. Someone he could not see laughed at him.
It was humiliating. It was unfair too, for how could one tell the street from the surroundings when it was all the same red porous rock? He fingered the hilt of his interrupter and examined the front door of the skyscraper.
There was an ordinary steel door: windowless, prehung. Its smooth metal jamb fit very loosely into the hole which had been cut into the stone, and the gaps were filled with ferrofoam. One could clearly see the hack marks. It was sloppy, sloppy. It would never have made it in Hovart.
Someone was following him across the street. Wanbli didn’t know whether he knew by smell, radar or simple footsteps. He turned and stepped sideways, so he was not backed into the building by the red-cheeked man, who was puffing crystals into the cold air.
Wanbli had no idea what the fellow said, or in what language he was speaking. He seemed a trifle excited, or even accusatory, but he was a heavy man, and had been running, so that didn’t necessarily signify. Since gestures were as culture-bound as language and could get a flyer in trouble, Wanbli merely lifted an inquiring eyebrow and waited.
“I said, you got away from us.” The man’s ’Indi was even more drawling than that of Captain Blanding, but at least he didn’t sound like a leaky boiler.
“Us?”
“Customs.”
Wanbli noted the fleecy blue hip coat (he wore it with the fur side inside), the glistening, bichrome shirt and the quilted, over-the-instep bronze trousers. Impossible that could be a uniform, but who was to say that every official needed a uniform? Perhaps the mufti meant the man was important.
“You didn’t even come inside.”
“I didn’t know I had to.” Wanbli could
look very innocent. He leaned against the lava-rock wall, and it grabbed the beads on his shirt. “I took one look at this street, and I had to go see if it was real. It’s a very interesting place you have here.”
The official was not lulled by this vacuous amiability. He was frowning at Wanbli’s midsection. “There we go,” he said. “That’s exactly what I was worried about. Weapons, dammit. Well, come along with me, bouncer boy.” And he turned back across the street, his bright bald head lowered against the wind.
Wanbli, who had just gotten his blunderbuzz back, picked up his bag and followed in no great good mood.
What was a bouncer boy anyway? Was it like a dizzy? Or was it no more opprobrious a term than “flyer”? It didn’t matter, really. Words.
From the Procrustes bed of their forms, Wanbli emerged as Wanbli E. Wacaan, transient, artist—m. (Luckily they hadn’t asked what the “m” stood for, nor the “E” in his name. Let the files of Icor remember him as a painter, if they liked. It would cause less ruffles than martial artist and was spelled close enough to Paint.) His travel papers looked very official, but were meaningless to almost everyone along the Arm, for the Wacaan Clan had been pushed into issuing papers unwillingly, and had done so in the Wacaan ceremonial language, which even Wanbli could only read with a dictionary in hand.
“Neunacht? Where zat? What do they export?”
Where was Neunacht? How could he answer that question? He could scarcely point to the proper quadrant of the gray sky. “You’ve never heard of it? It’s very close, along this same string.”
“Close along a string has nothing to do with real close,” answered the man. His eyes were small in a padded face. Perhaps cold-adapted.
Unlike Wanbli. “And we don’t export much off-world. Too expensive cartage fees. We don’t have a string station, you see. Yet.”
The Third Eagle Page 6
