The Third Eagle

by R. A. MacAvoy

  He had no close friends anymore, but then he had no boss, he was subject to no Clan Council and his digestion was good. For now, that was enough.

  It was odd how reluctant he felt to tell anyone of his decision to be an actor in the shimmers. Perhaps it had something to do with certain phrases dropped by the Elmira, or with Comptroller Akavit’s laugh. Acting seemed to be an ambiguous occupation, above a man’s station or below his dignity. T’chishett knew nothing of that. Well, guard work was an ambiguous occupation too: a combination of hero, valet and thug. Wanbli was used to that.

  The ship was spinning but the stars in the dome were not. The captain had chosen to project the Milky Way diagonally across it; more brilliance for your money, Wanbli decided. He would have liked some patches of black, for contrast.

  And black did move between the stars, coming closer. It opened eyes at him and was a black man wearing black. “You have offended a very important person,” he said, and unfolded his arms, revealing the pistol-grip nerve rod.

  “I try not to do that.”

  It was a nasty, nasty gun, though its range was limited. It could kill, but it’s foremost use was to make people hurt. Such tools were illegal in T’chishett, and only the T’chishetti themselves ever smuggled them in. The sadism of weakness, said the Wacaan. Wanbli’s own nerve stick was not designed to be used as punishment, but it was the better weapon. No matter. The stick was three yards away, on the plush, sound-absorbing floor. Might as well not exist.

  “You failed,” answered the gap among the stars. “The Elmira has been made very unhappy by you.”

  Wanbli stared. “Ducie wouldn’t send you to shoot me,” he said, though not certain this was true.

  “A woman like that doesn’t have to command in words.”

  The fellow’s accent was definitely not Hindi.

  “Now wait,” began Wanbli, setting his toes to grip the flooring. First the left haunch, then the right. “I presume you find yourself… a close friend to Ducie. Right?”

  “She is the Elmira.” The man slipped the safety of the gun off. Wanbli was surprised he hadn’t done this before. Not tremendously effective, to confront an enemy with the safety on. Perhaps things were not as tight as they had seemed.

  “Well, think on it, flyer. Had Ducie not gotten rubbed wrong by me, you might never have had the opportunity to get to know her. That would have been a shame, right? So you have no reason to be down on me.”

  The gun leveled. Oh well, it had been a good try. Wanbli reverted to Second Eagle training. With only his toes against the flooring for anchor, he leaped like a frog straight for the two dull stars that marked his attacker’s position, black against black. It was the most difficult, slow sort of leap, but Wanbli was highly motivated to make it work. He spun in the air and hit his attacker upside down and facing away from him. Had his aim been perfect he would have been a few degrees more rotated, and the fellow would have taken his full force through Wanbli’s bare feet to his bare face. Distances in the dome were deceptive, however, and he hit flat against the black man’s body with the feet drubbing one-two immediately after.

  Had the attacker’s aim been perfect, Wanbli would have taken the interrupter shot right in the crotch. The man was not a gunman, however, or at least not under the circumstances of being hit with a full-body slam and thrown into a glass wall. The gun went off against the edge of Wanbli’s thigh.

  As they fell together onto the discreet black floor foam, Wanbli was howling. He called the attacker names that one did not in the least understand, and then both of them were scrabbling through the dark after the gun. The black man found it at the same moment that Wanbli found his feet and grabbed the head of the stooping man between his thighs. This hurt quite a bit.

  “Just twitch,” said Wanbli, “and I break your neck. Just a twitch.”

  It would have been difficult to snap a spine in this position, even if both legs were working with equal power, but Wanbli knew from experience that this was a terrible threat. Yet the man picked up the gun anyway. Wanbli kicked it. out of his hand. Did this flyer really want to die? Still the man struggled, and Wanbli put his foot down on the wiggling neck. “Didn’t you hear me say don’t even twitch or I’d kill you?”

  The man’s mouth opened in surprise. One could see teeth. “No,” he said aggrievedly. “I couldn’t hear anything at all. You had your damn legs over my ears.”

  Wanbli lifted his foot. Gun in hand, he sat down to massage his aching thigh.

  “I can’t believe Ducie sent you after me. Unless she wants to be rid of you a lot.”

  The black man sighed and sat up. He was not dressed in assassin’s black, Wanbli could now see, but instead in an almost glossy and very expensive fabric, patterned indigo upon black. It reminded Wanbli of damask. Like his mother.

  “I told you, such a lady does not have to command directly.”

  “Well, if she commanded by chin points and whistles, still she meant to do you wrong. She knows I’m a Paint.”

  “Painted very gaudily too,” answered the other. He rubbed his hands over his battered face and introduced himself as Reynaldo Errenthorp, which Wanbli thought was a name of great potential. He himself had often wished for more syllables, to increase his dignity.

  Reynaldo started and gave a small shriek. “I’m bleeding. I’m bleeding like a broken hose!”

  Wanbli looked closely, to where blood was only a slick surface against the dark. “It’s not your face. It’s your hand. It’s sliced.” His fingers fumbled carefully over the floor.

  “My knife.” He raised the obsidian tool in his hand: again, black over black. “You put your hand down on my ceremonial knife.”

  The black man whimpered and ran out into the light.

  Wanbli arrested the bleeding with a spray from his first-aid kit. “At least it’s clean. That knife was never used to cut anything but air. Until now. I’ll have a hell of a time cleaning it again.”

  “I’m not carrying any… disease or anything.” Reynaldo seemed inclined to resent things.

  Wanbli smiled and slipped the knife (not wrapped, this time) into his suitcase. He sat on the bed next to Reynaldo. “No, I didn’t think you were. It’s a different sort of cleanness. My clan doesn’t usually fight with such knives. They’re sacred.”

  Reynaldo understood, or thought he did. He gave a man-of-the-world laugh, which slid into a giggle: slightly hysterical. He kept his eyes on the pink foam that hardened on his ebony hand.

  “I’d give you a drink, but the only stuff I got is left in someone else’s cabin. It wasn’t very good anyway. Tasted like shampoo.”

  Reynaldo looked straight at Wanbli for the first time since entering his cabin. Visibly he took command of himself. “You’re very good about this,” he said. He was a tall, good-looking man. Not an athlete.

  “Why not?” Wanbli gave a shrug that explained nothing but was very impressive. “All’s you did is sting me a little. It’s hard to kill a man with a gun like that.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean to kill you,” said Reynaldo hurriedly. He added, with some diffidence, “She did suggest I go after you, you know.”

  Wanbli sighed and said nothing.

  “I… I had begun to suspect she was finding me boring.”

  Now Wanbli grunted sympathetically. “Ducie can be… sort of perverted.”

  “Real bitch.” They sighed together.

  They went to dinner, waiting for the uncomfortable moment when ship’s logic found the string. It was not the same string that had taken them to Stanfor. It was the third string Wanbli had traveled; travelers often counted their experiences by the number of minor strings.

  Wanbli waved to How Mundo and to three other people, but he stayed in a private booth with Reynaldo. He liked to sound his new friends deeply.

  Wonder of wonders, the black man came from New Benares. He was an importer of metal goods, but upon gentle probing he let it be known he had important contacts in the AT industry. Wanbli was on fire to pump him
for information, so he asked about Ducelet instead.

  “Why the Elmira?” Reynaldo raised his wineglass to his lips. As he now wore another outfit as black and glossy as the first, the stain of pink on his hand fluttered against darkness like a moth. “It is no silly, Johnny-come-lately aristocracy, Wacaan, sir.”

  “Call me… uh, Red. Wacaan is the name of the clan.”

  “It is a real title, inherited through living trade. Elmira Stations and Planetary Satellites. They are the largest purveyer of turnkey cargo stations in the Short Arm. Their name in small, free-orbiters is more recent, but growing.”

  The transfer came and passed. Not a bad one, this time. Nothing like the slam of going FTL in a shuttle boat.

  Wanbli wanted to ask what the wine was made of, but at the dinner booth, unlike in the star dome, Reynaldo was the stronger party. He drank wine like it was water, and although Wanbli wanted a taste, he did not want to pay for a whole glass out of his rapidly dwindling resources. He lowered his eyes and was abashed.

  “We’ve bought a station. Neunacht. Us.”

  Reynaldo looked at him through the red of the glass. “Neunacht? I think I recognize the name. Warm place, isn’t it?”

  “Perfect,” answered Wanbli.

  “We been paying for it since my great-grandmommy’s time. It’s even a part of my clan’s morning ritual. We invoke the moon and the moon’s little sister, which is coming. Any year now, I guess.”

  The waiter came with steaming plates. Reynaldo asked for a fork in place of chopsticks. “That will make life different,” he said reflectively. “Not necessarily for the better, either. Tourism. Loss of local handicrafts, local idiosyncrasies. Whole cultures disappear within a generation.” He received his fork and tasted his fettuccine. It was passable. He was pleased to see that his dinner companion, despite all the bare skin and muscles, ate daintily. “I am surprised that with a station coming, you did not recognize the name of Elmira.”

  Wanbli looked up. He thought the fettuccine had too much grease in it. “We didn’t get it from Elmira. It’s coming from Cynthia Contractors.”

  Reynaldo stopped eating. His hand grasped the stem of his glass, but he did not raise it. “Cynthia… was bought out by Elmira ten years ago.”

  Equably Wanbli answered. “Well, then we’re going to get it from Elmira. That doesn’t change the fact that Ducie has behaved like a real whizzer.”

  Reynaldo blinked this away. “No. No, they bought the firm in receivership.”

  “Wherever.” Wanbli whipped more greasy noodles over his chopsticks.

  There was a waiter standing beside the table, hands folded behind his back. He stood silent for five seconds. This was beyond the level of service even of a large FTL liner. Wanbli glanced up and met very urgent eyes.

  “Pardon me, sir, but didn’t you board ship in the company of the nonhuman gentleman in cabin 287—uh—the Silver Suite?”

  Wanbli made a series of connections in his head. “I’m not really responsible for damages, though. No relation.”

  The officer—not a waiter at all—winced noticeably. “We wouldn’t think of holding you responsible, but we would be grateful if you would come with us. Me, I mean.”

  In the middle of dinner, thought Wanbli, but he went. Reynaldo, elegant despite his lacerated hand, followed unasked.

  In the hall the smell of leather was almost overpowering, and there was another, worse, on top of it. “What in fortune did he leave behind?” Wanbli asked the officer, who opened the door.

  What Digger had left behind was himself, stretched face-up from the doorway to the books on the overturned central table. With his tiny eyes shut tight and his lips everted he looked impossibly fierce and brutish. He had vomited.

  “He’s dead,” said the officer.

  Wanbli shook his head and rubbed his hands over his face. He backed into a corner and stared from an astonished Reynaldo to the official and back again, as though he expected either an attack or an explanation. “Are you sure? I mean… he was already gone. To his institute. I don’t understand.”

  “He left a letter.” The officer took it out of his pocket. “For you.”

  Wanbli took the sheet of paper. With surprise he noted that his hand was not shaking.

  Friend Red,

  They did not know I was Dayflower. They left me waiting for a dec and then the director came and told me he thought the institute was not appropriate for me. He said I would spend the rest of my life learning and never have a chance to put my study to use. He said he was certain I would eventually feel cheated. I don’t think he told me the complete truth. I think it was they who felt cheated when they discovered I intended to use my life in the Institute. I had every intention of spending the rest of my life learning.

  I am very disappointed. In them.

  Please forgive me that I took your toiletry bottle without asking.

  There was an illegible signature at the bottom, followed by a block-printed “Digger Whistle-two-hoots.”

  “The toiletry bottle?” asked the officer diffidently.

  Wanbli found it under the table. It was empty. “It had booze in it; that’s all.”

  Reynaldo spoke for the first time. “He intended to get drunk?”

  “He intended to die. He told me many times it was poison to him. They eat sugar to get high.” Wanbli was dry-eyed, but his throat was not behaving. He had lost friends before, and sometimes other friends had killed them. But never this. He looked down at his ugly friend, whose fall had scraped the binding off three books. “Are you sure? That he’s not in a coma, or hibernating, or something?”

  “Very sure. We’ve sent a fiddlegram to his people. No response yet.”

  There was silence. Reynaldo started to back out of the foul room and Wanbli could not blame him.

  “Did you call the IP too?” Wanbli asked the officer, who was manfully trying not to gag. “I think they oughta know.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did they say?” There was an un-Wacaan amount of anger in Wanbli’s voice.

  “I don’t know. It wasn’t I who called. I can find out of course?”

  Wanbli took a deep breath. For some reason the smell didn’t bother him. “I’ll go myself. I want to see those people.”

  Both Reynaldo and the officer looked at Wanbli and then away. “I’m sorry,” said the officer. “We transferred a little while ago; didn’t you feel it? We couldn’t go back now for any reason. Not if the captain himself died.”

  The response came from Digger’s home county. They wanted him back and so the poor corpus was lifted by two men in heavy gloves and a small forklift and it went into cold storage. Wanbli kept a vigil in the empty room, with the cleaners working around him. No one suggested he leave.

  “… We are the big ones. We are the small. We live ten thousand years. We live a day. Our lives are a single learning. We are those who remain people. We are Wacaan.”

  He had not purified the black knife after all. He knew he did not have to, for no possible impurity could touch in this morning’s ritual. Nor did it matter to him whether it was morning at Tawlin Estate by Hovart in T’chishett on Neunacht far away, where the dust made a green border to the blue living sky and the Paints killed each other on command: this sky was black and gaudy and the mathematician was dead.

  Wanbli had found himself possessed of many books and spools as well as an expensive faxereader, upon the screen of which he did not know how to invoke Digger’s bright lace.

  Damasc.

  “I invoke the six directions upon this morning. I invoke the suns.

  I invoke all worlds and their little sisters that are made by man.

  They are all my own sisters.

  I am of the people of the sky. I am Wacaan.”

  He had known he had an audience. He often had an audience; at one time he had played to it, but anymore he didn’t give a good condemn. This presence had not felt threatening: not like Reynaldo that day. Only a few days ago.

&n
bsp; It still might be that very elegant gentleman who often came by to smother the idle decs. Reynaldo liked having a friend among the exotic and deadly, and liked it all the more that that friend had a sorrow. It affected his own deep but conventional sentiments.

  Wanbli finished the circle and laid down the obsidian knife. He had to urinate, of course, and as he rose he was a bit nonplussed to find that it was the Elmira standing at the gate of the dome.

  “You’re up early,” he said.

  “Haven’t been to sleep yet,” said Ducie. She looked haggard, but that might have been mere affectation.

  Wanbli did not reply or move to squeeze past her or to set her aside. He stood silent and forced her to continue.

  “I’m damn sorry about your friend.”

  He was slow in answering, feeling suddenly that he hadn’t slept well. “How did you know? Reynaldo? The steward said they were trying to keep it a secret.”

  She was sucking on something: probably Pov-lace. With her fashionably hollow cheeks it was very easy to notice. “Whole damn ship knows. It’s gotten to damn twenty-five inhabited planets by now—that the foremost scientist among the Hemerocallis was rejected as a student by IP and killed himself.

  “I hope those buggers find themselves with a public black eye stretching all along the Arm. I hope this leaves them in a hole. A cold, cold hole.”

  She spoke with more emotion than Wanbli had yet shown to anyone regarding Digger’s death. Or regarding anything, for that matter. He was daunted momentarily, but consoled himself with the thought that it was better having her furious at someone other than him.

  “He shouldn’t have done it,” was all he could think to say. “It wasn’t worth it.”

  Ducie’s eyes were militantly bright. It was undoubtedly Povlen. “It was a political protest.”

  “It was despair,” he said softly, looking at the expensive drab floor. “I thought we were close. He… we still could have had a few good times. He didn’t have to give up.”