The Third Eagle

by R. A. MacAvoy

  The next one came in with a fist. Good-sized fist. Wanbli slipped it on the outside, watched it go by and gave him a moderate smack on the hinge of the jaw. This one didn’t go down, but he lost a great deal of his interest in the matter.

  The round table to the left of Wanbli was kicked aside with violence. Here came the man with the bloody hands, still game. Wanbli watched him come, red up to the elbows now. The fellow said nothing, but kicked Wanbli as hard as he could. The blow landed on the upper leg; Wanbli had not moved.

  “Lift your knee when you kick or you’ll wind up with artificial joints before you’re fifty,” Wanbli said, and he walked back to his table.

  “Trouble” was getting up, but his direction was away from both Wanbli and Digger. The bartender was still on the floor, malevolent but passive. The two men who had been hit and the one man who had been scraped kept their places. The smoker had never moved, not since standing up. There was another fellow leaning against the far wall, an old man, declaring his separation from the issue at hand in his every fiber. That made six, plus the bartender. There had been seven, but Wanbli had not been watching the door.

  Digger had risen from his bench, but he had not run out, as Wanbli had thought he might. He wouldn’t have held it against the Dayflower; he knew a mathematician when he saw one. But he was heartened to see him. He’d finally managed to draw his ears down.

  “Amazing that this table didn’t get nudged,” he said conversationally to all who would listen. He picked up his drink, out of which only two small sips had been taken. He bent long enough to retrieve his stick from under the table.

  “Freeze,” said number seven, who had been hiding behind the bar. In his hand he had a gun not quite like Wanbli’s blunderbuzz, but still an old-timey projectile thrower.

  Wanbli moved only slightly: eyes and hands. “Easy to do, in this climate,” he replied, eyes searching.

  “I could put a hole through you anywhere.”

  He resisted the impulse to clear his throat. “But why would you want to do that? Even down here it must be against the law to perforate tourists.”

  The gunslinger was thin and dark, with a long, flat-bottomed jaw that rested against the bar top. The gun too was braced against the bar. Wanbli wondered if it was possible to hit what one was aiming at from that position. His doubtful glance communicated itself and the man rose from his crouch.

  “Not when the tourists come busting up the bar,” he said.

  Digger made a misunderstood sort of sound. Wanbli grinned. “We busted the bar? You sure you were paying attention, flyer?”

  “Careful attention.” The muzzle of the gun tracked small circles in the air.

  Now the bartender started to move, and so did the man who had had his arm stung. Even the hopper with the cigarette took a step sideways. Grinning more broadly, Wanbli squeezed the handle of his stick.

  The interrupter made no noise at all, but as the man behind the bar started to sway sideways, Wanbli ducked in place, holding the drink carefully. “Down, Digger!” he shouted.

  The gun hadn’t gone off. There had been only a slight chance it would. Neural Interruption was like having one’s foot asleep all over the body. It was so quick as to be felt only in retrospect.

  Everyone who had moved went back to his place.

  Wanbli still held the tall glass of milky green. He waved the Tearjerker in front of the bartender’s nose. “I paid for this,” he said. He made to scoop the remains of Digger’s candy off the table, but Digger had already done so. He opened the door for Digger, who went out, staring behind him with his deep little eyes. A few seconds later, just as the bartender had begun to curse once more, Wanbli darted in and out again, snatching up his wonderful fur coat.

  Early the next day, the two friends left, quietly and discreetly, shuttling up to a large and expensive string liner.

  The Gaudy Sky

  FOUR

  HE SAT among the stars with his knife in hand. He was not really looking at stars: not as he had been on the roof at Tawlin, or in the Sacred Sand Circle of Southbay School. No ship that ran along the minor strings had anything like a real window. Had there been such, the sight would have been incomprehensible to eyes, but the bubble dome was an excellent translation of what they would look like if massless directionality were more adapted to human experience.

  That experience was brilliant and chilling to a man who had loved the night sky. It was as though Wanbli looked at his wife of many years (the wife he was not likely ever to have) and saw her for the first time: ancient, alien, potent and a werebitch besides.

  So bright were they that the brilliance receded from the eye, leaving the universe stippled with black on white, black on parti-color, and streaked with smudges of dust and passion.

  The passion was not directed at him.

  He saluted the six directions, using the zenith of Six-sixty Pulsar, which was marked as a red dot against the dome, as his arbitrary north. The obsidian knife cut the star weave: black, black. He proclaimed himself of the real people, all the while knowing he had lost his reality—left it behind on Neunacht with the warm sand and the green sky. With Wacaan dignity and Hovart’s building codes and with the green dusty sky of Neunacht that worked so much better than this dome at translating the stars into Tndi.

  From this cold glory he could not hide the fact that he had been a bit of a fool. He could not even blame it on Ake Tawlin: the crazy claim he had made. Confessing (no matter true or false) to having been one’s illegitimate father did not automatically lead to flight off-world. Nor did overwork or mere boredom.

  Wanbli had thrown away his future for the sake of these glaring, untranslatable stars.

  The knife dove down for the last time; the ritual was over. He would not forget it again, nor his exercises. Fool or not, bound for victory or disaster, at least Wanbli could maintain his competence as a Paint.

  He put himself inside himself: uncaring as the star bowl was uncaring. He allowed it to sweep through him, dark and light.

  Next week he would lose Digger to the Institute of Probabilities. Well, good for him. There was a flyer who really knew his way, naive or not. No floundering among the suns for him. Chess player.

  Wanbli felt he would have made a good chess player, had anyone taught him the game. It was all strategy, wasn’t it? Couldn’t be too different from the Third Eagle work. Maybe Digger could teach him. They certainly had nothing else to do.

  Another few weeks and New Benares. Perhaps he should send a gram; let them know he was coming. That would be responsible behavior, but send a gram to whom? He knew no names. Nobody knew his. Not for the first time, he wondered how many people worked on shimmers, and how hard was it to break into the field.

  It would be fine to work in a theatrical, playing any role, though of course adventurous roles were more natural to him. So often when Wanbli watched a good story he felt himself utterly dissolved within the action. In turn he was the hero, the villain, the hero’s comic friend and even the heroine. It was dizzying, but it was natural. More natural to him than sparring, even. When Al Kyle sprang from the Mate’s Chair to the top of the console, his stick whirling, Wanbli’s own leg muscles twitched helplessly in the same motion. When Azima Helga cried, his own brown eyes blinked very fast. A good shimmer exhausted him.

  No one else felt this way among the Paints of Hovart. Tawlin himself, though addicted to the shimmers, sat through them in complete, passive removal. It didn’t seem to matter to him what was portrayed, as long as it had dangling anatomy.

  No, this obsession with the shimmers was Wanbli’s alone. That meant something.

  Besides, he could handle a nerve stick ten times better than Kyle the actor, poor fellow. Wait till they saw him.

  He let his eyes lift to the speckled bowl again and he was only half Wanbli of the Wacaan. The other half was Al Kyle being Grender Alzing, the mercenary. With his knife hand he stroked the beard a Wacaan does not grow. The stars were no longer malign.

 
“You look,” she said, “like you’ve just seen God.”

  She was a very handsome woman: tall, dark, dressed in a shiny thing that threatened to slip off one shoulder and lie in a heap at her feet. Her voice was lazy. By her face, she was bored. So many people were bored. Wanbli put down the knife and rose to his feet.

  “… Or perhaps,” she continued, looking him over with the same glance he was giving her, “you just are a god.”

  Wanbli felt utterly happy.

  She was Ducelet, which was a lovely name, and more than that, she was the Elmira Ducelet. She seemed to think Wanbli should recognize that and so he was obligingly impressed.

  Ducelet (never Ducie, she had to correct him) came from Stantor, a very old society. She enjoyed being the slightest bit degenerate and decayed, especially in bed. Wanbli raised no objections to this, though he was in truth a beans-and-potatoes sort of man in his amatory tastes. In a certain way, she reminded him of Ake Tawlin, but perhaps that was only the flavor of money.

  Or perhaps again it was only wit trying to make up for the inadequacies of the body, for she certainly had no endurance once the hammock started shaking. That was nothing unusual; most of Wanbli’s non-Wacaan sex partners had been ready to pull the pillow over their heads before he was fair warmed up. With the Elmira, however, this inadequacy was more a matter of principle than with most. She expected to be valued for the fact that her elbow joint was bigger around than her upper arm.

  “You certainly are thin,” said Wanbli, to be agreeable.

  “‘Nothing extra’ is our family motto.” She was examining Wanbli’s buttocks with a slothful eye. They just happened to be there, ready to be looked at. Wanbli turned his head an inch to the right and prodded his nose into her ever so slight protuberance of a belly. It just happened to be there. The bed adjusted around them with a noise of exasperation. “This is extra,” he said. “It would be easy to get rid of too.”

  Ducelet swelled, all but her turn, and accused him of severity. She bit him on the buttock, too hard.

  He slapped her away.

  “I’ve got to sit on that.” The Elmira laughed and laughed, past the point of reason. Wanbli was left with quite a set of tooth marks.

  As I said, she was slightly degenerate.

  These days Wanbli saw Digger rarely. The FTL liner (no shuttle, no boat, this) had too many distractions, and the Elmira Ducelet was only one of these. Wanbli was learning to play pong in the ball court, and was already handicapped over many of the passengers who had played for years. It was said that his colors against the white walls proved too great a distraction, and his opponents kept losing sight of the spinneret.

  He almost always had an audience for his morning and evening salutes, and for his sets of forms as well. He never ate alone. The ship’s recreational director told him that he had a job waiting, if he ever needed it.

  On the fourth day (arbitrary reckoning) of his voyage he had a tiff with the Elmira, or rather she had a tiff all around him, and he was passed on to How Mundo, a very practical, nonpossessive woman of some years who traveled often on business. She had no wit in conversation, but she could go the course.

  Sometimes Wanbli slept five or six decs at a stretch.

  Digger’s room was larger than the usual aboard an FTL liner of this expense, but it was not more plush. The walls were of brushed steel and the furniture covered in a heavy metallic, acid- and base-resistant weave. It had been a storage room originally, converted for passenger use by such foreigners as tended to be hard on their surroundings. It had the usual holo of what the stars might look like, were they visible at the speed traveled, but in this case the imitation was less than usually successful, for the frame of the “window” did not rest flat against a gently curved wall.

  The unfriendliness of the space was partially overcome by the homely wealth of Digger’s possessions. He had draped his numberless spools on wires stretching from the com knob to the vent knob, the holo and the lavabo door. They looked like so many drying fruit. His print books (and they were heavy, Wanbli had reason to remember) rose in piles on the three industrial-quality tables. Digger had left something crowning each pile, such as bound ream of paper or a dirty plate, so in the event of a gravity failure there would be something heavy holding it down.

  A mathematician: not a physicist.

  Digger was always at home. Usually his faxereader was brightly lighting his face. He was doing problems.

  Wanbli sat down gingerly. The upholstery was unyielding to human anatomy, but still he felt more at home among this scholarly rubble than most Wacaan would have. He was also conscious of this intellectual ease and quite pleased by it. “What are you trying to prove today?” he asked, putting his head back and his hands behind it. Squaring the circle?”

  Digger shifted his little black eyes. “Is that a joke?”

  Wanbli smirked and didn’t deny it.

  “It is young students who go about proving things. I am working from the other end. Please come look.”

  He went around to the front of the reader, being careful not to scrape against Digger. The screen, which was clotted with gibberish, cleared and then revealed an almost symmetrical shape in white against blue.

  “A doily,” said Wanbli. “My mother used to make them with string and a little hook.”

  “Much the same.” Digger nodded his self-conscious nod.

  “And you made this out of… numbers?”

  The foreigner’s hands made lotuses. It was a sort of laugh. “Someone did, many years ago. What I am doing is trying to stitch it, using these…” And with a few touches of his stylus he turned certain threads to pink. Pink with a few nodes of gold, “… into this.”

  The picture melted into a shape of much finer threads, almost beyond the resolution of the reader. Another touch caused the streaks of pink to shoot through this fabric: unevenly, and with nodes of green. “It should fit here,” he added, pointing with his very clean claw. “But of course I can’t force it.”

  “No, of course not,” answered Wanbli. He knew that much. “Tell me, though. What will you have if you succeed in this? Something to improve people’s lives?”

  The screen cleared entirely. “A greater understanding of fractals,” Digger peeped. “But I have misled you, Wanbli. This is not original work. I am merely reproducing an exercise.”

  Wanbli scooted away along the bench so he could relax. “Exercise. I’ve been getting a lot of it too, this trip.” He yawned. “Nothing original on my part, either.” He was thinking of Mundo and wondering if she expected him for lunch in her cabin, and if so, would he wind up getting anything to eat. Unlike her, he was not trying to lose weight and he was hungry.

  Digger did not know about How Mundo or about the Elmira, either. Wanbli would have found the necessary explanation tedious. “You have marvelous discipline,” he said a bit shyly. “To exert yourself so constantly.”

  “This isn’t discipline?” Wanbli looked pointedly at the piles and the spools and the scraps of unattended paper.

  “Oh no,” answered the Dayflower. “I merely sit on my butt and destroy the furniture.”

  Chess wasn’t as much fun as Wanbli had hoped, and he didn’t find there to be a great carryover between the workings of the board and the strategy of hand-to-hand. He tended to find his queen lost in the first ten moves. Wanbli kept on with it, however, even after he realized he was doing his friend no favor in burdening him with a beginning opponent. It was that matter of discipline.

  The hour before the landing at Shasta, where the Institute of Probabilities was located, was very hectic, even though there wasn’t much for Digger to do except strap books together. “I will leave everything here,” he said, not for the first time. “It will look too… assuming if I come for the final interview with all my gear. I don’t know that anyone has been rejected from matriculation at this point, but still…”

  “I’ll put it all in a heap right here by the door,” said Wanbli, who had done most of the physical
work of packing for Digger. “So you can dart in and out.” Wanbli was riding on the high part of Digger’s emotional stew, thankfully spared the undercurrents of anxiety.

  Losing Digger already. It was as though he was losing another bit of home. But of course the Dayflower had never been to Neunacht in his fifteen years of life. It was only that Wanbli wasn’t used to parting with friends so soon and so completely.

  Such a big, grinding universe.

  He stared at Digger, who stared back, his little deep eyes as wide as they could get. He was so excited his claws were out and his genitals in. “Hey,” said Wanbli. “We should drink a toast before you go.”

  “You go ahead and order one,” said Digger, settling uneasily into a chair. “I’m too excited for sugar.”

  “Order one?” Wanbli thought of his exchequer and of the very expensive fur coat he had not worn since leaving Icor. “Wait, why should I order one? I have our first drink together in my bag.”

  It took a few minutes for him to get back, which was just as well, as there was almost a dec to kill before touching Shasta. The Tearjerker had not been improved by its residence in polymer, but Wanbli raised the shampoo bottle to his lips and took a grand swallow, after which he breathed hard and capped the bottle. “There,” he said. “After that sacrifice, your career will have to be spectacular.”

  “What about your career, Red?” He sat perched on the edge of his seat like a big and very heavy bird, his claws linked on his knees. “You are too bright a fellow to be drifting without goals.”

  “Bright?” echoed Wanbli. He was indeed beginning to drift and he wished he could catch his breath. “You mean colorful, I think. But don’t worry about me. I have secret plans and I’ll write to you about them. I can write, you know.”

  Digger smiled with a small display of ivory and then leaped up, certain he had forgotten to seal his faxereader, which was not at all the case.

  Wanbli decided he liked the stars after all; his initial anomie had been only a result of too much too fast. He sat on his heels in the crystal dome, wearing only his half-thigh shorts, returning his own colors to the colors of the blazing display. If any other of the passengers—the Elmira Ducelet, Mundo, the hexaped that breathed out through its chest—came to enjoy the galaxy, they saw him so and went away again. Maybe it was the obsidian knife.