The Third Eagle

by R. A. MacAvoy

  The impossible, embarrassing face withdrew. “I think there’s more, to it than that,” it whispered, its muzzle turned toward Wanbli’s scattered pack. “But the answer to that is simple. We of the High Culture are always recruiting.” It forestalled Wanbli’s question by adding, “… recruiting artists.”

  Wanbli sat down where he was, on the carpet. “I’m what’s called a Martial Artist. Is that part of your High Culture?”

  The Patish had double-cusped, pointed teeth, which it now displayed. Wanbli suspected he was seeing what was supposed to be a human translation of Patish emotion.

  “The High Culture is expressed in the relationship of one being with another, with as little material artifact intervening as is possible. Not to denigrate crafts such as painting and sculpture, which have meant so much to your species, but the material element becomes a great crutch. With the arts of individual combat, there is nothing but the delicious interplay between individual and individual.

  “So yes, my friend, an artist of battle is a high artist.” Then the creature barked, just like a dog, and it said, “It may not be commercial, but it is certainly art!”

  It seemed to sober suddenly, and its tongue wound left and then right. “One hopes to achieve both…”

  A delicate chime interrupted. The Patish lifted its head to listen. Something that was not human spoke a message, in a language of whines and rumbles.

  It showed its double teeth again. “Two small ships are approaching in formation. What might that mean, my dear sir?”

  Wanbli did not move. “You know as well as I that Myronics Security travels in pairs.”

  “But, sir, I do not know that. We are not natives of this very hot and vulgar planet. We have nothing to do with the sort of cheap showmanship of the shimmers. This is a deep-space vessel and we light but for a moment ‘like snow upon the desert’s dusty face’ and we have no intention of remaining long enough to melt.

  “The question is, shall we leave you to the tedious business of explaining to these parochials how the practice of your art happened to be fatal to that nip-farthing old man…”

  “That what kind of old man?”

  The Patish groomed a rosette under his chin. “He was cheap. A skinflint, grasping… The idioms are endless.” As Wanbli continued to stare, it added, “He visited us yesterday evening, sir. Professional capacity. It is not that we landed in this howling wilderness with any thought of finding an audience, but yet it is not in the real artist to refuse.”

  Enlightenment grew behind Wanbli’s impassive countenance. “You flyers are… prostitutes.”

  The tail of the Patish swelled visibly. It was not just the pelt, but the tail itself thickening like a sausage. “Sir, if you ever use that word again you will go out the door. Even if we are in space.”

  Wanbli did not reply to that. “Who else was here last night?”

  “Do you go or stay?”

  He felt completely unable to decide. It was a frightening feeling. To run out on Audry was not the act of a brave man. To remain at the landing with her as witness to his arrest and prosecution, though… That would be no gift to her.

  Likely the studios had heard from Hovart Clan Council already. Even if this thing with Pylos had never happened.

  He was going down in flames. It was all over with him. These people were whores. Once he had entertained the idea of being a sex toy as preferable to a Paint’s way of life. That was when he was also hot to act in the shimmers. That was someone else.

  He opened his mouth and answered the Patish, but afterward he had no idea of what he had said. He sat with his head on his knees beside the universal chair in the empty lounge and after a dec or so he felt the shudder of engines around him.

  My dear Miss Hish, he began, and then sat back to stare at the blank screen. Wanbli knew how to compose a polite print document, but he didn’t find it easy. The blank screen had a tendency to glare at him.

  How long the time has been since I have seen you. Twenty days, really.

  I eagerly inquire of your health and that of your aged relative.

  That was the important part, all right, but it didn’t look right to have nothing else down there. Looked more like he was expecting to inherit money or something. Perhaps it was only necessary to pad. After the first, undeniably true sentence, he added: Life is not the same here without you. No, both sentences ought not to end in “you.” It was like beginning all one’s lines with “I.” Life is not the same.

  Indeed it was not. Wanbli, gazing unfocused above the faxereader, could hear Covazh, Nem Patish’s scion down the hall serving a customer. Covazh was young and athletic and had a trick of hissing once it’d got going. Perhaps it was only the air in its lungs; the client was human and Patish did not do well in human standard temperature and humidity.

  His fingers hovered over the key wheel but did not spin out Oh, Audry, all the time I was with you I guarded my chastity. That was not one of the few sentiments he had been taught would fit into a polite print document, though it was true, and he would have liked to use it, having just learned the word “chastity.”

  Come to think of it, he was guarding his chastity still, if he remembered the definition correctly. No one came to a Patish establishment for any act as ordinary as copulation. It was all “pheromonal catharses” and “ephemeral opuses” and the occasional individual who wanted someone to tickle him or to tickle.

  I am doing very well, he wrote. I am appalled by everything around me, he wrote and then blinked both lines out.

  Humans who wanted to be tickled to orgasm requested a Patish; that was one of their specialties. Those who wanted the dominant role (and there were a few, especially in this city of Poos, where the flagship facility of Nem Patish was located) always wanted to tickle another human. Wanbli was the perfect whore for the business, because he was not at all ticklish and yet he could act. How odd, after New Benares and Pylos and all, to find he had been right; he could act.

  Nem wanted him to have surgical implants, to make his performance less dependent upon mood. Bracing and plumbing, the operation was popularly called. Little Pascal had had the implants at the age of six and now entertained himself by shooting his penis out to strike marbles on his bed, like a biological billiard game. But Pascal had not yet reached puberty; it was all the same to him. Wanbli had so far avoided the issue by claiming he didn’t want to be off work that long. Truth was, he’d kill the Patish first.

  The only operation he wanted was one which was forbidden to the men of his people. But the Patish did not at all understand his desire to have his valves opened, or at least put under his control. They refused to tinker with a working sterility device.

  The print document letter, in final form, read:

  Dear Miss Hish,

  How long it has been since I had the pleasure of seeing you. I have taken your advice and sought my position in life elsewhere, but I am not yet convinced that it has been the right decision. I do miss you a great deal, and hope you can find the time to renew our sundered correspondence.

  You must write and tell me how things are with Mummy and your little sister. Have I missed any interesting messages?

  And do you still work for that funny little old man?

  Your workaday friend,

  Wanbli considered the signature for a long time and finally put down Feathers.

  There were no feathers to be seen, really. During the flight from New Benares to Poos City, Wanbli had had them painted over with an enduring red body stain. The gold had been hard to obscure.

  Poos City, on Morion, was the first important place Wanbli had visited. (New Benares, for all its superficial glamour, was basically parochial.) On Poos, Wanbli learned the truth of Ake Tawlin’s repeated assertion that he was poor. All of Neunacht was dirt poor compared with Poos. Wu and Fabricant gave the city twenty-five lines and recommended most prominently the Hall of the Seven Sentients. This had been the Hall of the Six Sentients until the hoomies had sued to have both of their
brains recognized as one. A mistake, some thought. People will always judge others by their own standards.

  Wanbli visited the Hall and spent hours in contemplation of the Dayflower display, emerging sadder than when he had gone in. He did not enter the Patish rooms at all. He also became acquainted with the extensive public gardens of Poos, where under the green canopy the Neo-Mithraists kept their intoxicating beds of violets and the little carnivorous native clowr made tall topiary columns: mauve over Lincoln green. He was fascinated not with the plants but with the heavy, black garden soil, so different from the porous gold of Tawlin. He suspected the humus carried disease, but then his mind was on disease; either the body dyes or the numberless inoculations necessary to his new occupation had given him a rash and a permanent sniffle.

  The slums of Poos were more famous than its gardens, though not recommended in W&F. The prosperity of Poos was reflected even in these crowded streets, as the original housefronts had been extended out the front and back in cheap foam in a myriad of styles. It seemed that only the ferocity of the drivers, both surface and pneumo, kept the streets from being built over entirely.

  One day, under both sun and streetlighting, Wanbli was attacked by a young woman with a stiletto. Not expecting trouble (for in general no one messed with a man who looked and walked like him), he might have been injured, had she not begun the attack with a highly sexual embrace.

  Wanbli was tired of being clutched by strangers and so he spun her off with a simple wristlock and the knife clattered to the paving stones. So had the woman, twitching and muttering.

  Wanbli had hauled her to the nearest clinic: the one with a fountain and the nonrepresentational portrait of Galen on the façade, only to be told that it was only withdrawal from addictive substances. Such withdrawal, complete with shudders and bowel incontinence, was the woman’s inalienable right and if Wanbli didn’t want to be in violation of Poos’s law, he would put her back where he had found her.

  He sat her on the steps of the clinic instead, and then,

  without expression, he tugged his crotch band aside and peed into the fountain. His inalienable right.

  Wanbli was becoming morose.

  The answer to his letter came as promptly as could reasonably be expected:

  Dear Feathers,

  Things are much the same here—you’d be as bored as ever. My funny old boss is spitting acid. He claims he was assaulted by an unscrupulous rookie AR millions in shooting delays. So humorous.

  Audry

  There it was. Wanbli was ten seconds overjoyed that Pylos was alive. He was ten minutes furious that the old man would blame him. For the next dec and indeed the whole day he was slightly sad that Audry hadn’t written more. But deep-space grams were terribly expensive and he doubted she made that much. He had no time to dwell on the matter then, because he was busy with an anniversary party.

  Every year, on the Morion autumnal equinox, Gerald Deec and his wife, Mamba, came to Nem’s Arrangeurs to celebrate their anniversary in a re-creation of their wedding night: he relived it as exactly as memory could recall with a female arrangeur who resembled his wife at thirty years as exactly as Nem’s could manage. She did the same, with the aid of a human man who looked as she would have preferred her bridegroom to look. Wanbli, cast in the role of Deec, Esq., wondered why they bothered with an exact replay. Surely in the subsequent twenty years they had both honed their marital skills. But it was not an onerous way to pass a day and there was no tickling involved at all. Madame Mamba tipped generously.

  When next he was free, Wanbli sent his second doc.

  Dear Audry,

  You were there and so was Jaime and three others. Tell them he lies.

  Time passed and time passed and time passed. There was no reply.

  “So you’re all subtracters?” asked Pascal, with what might have been a sly grin on an older face. Wanbli glanced down at the boy distrustfully.

  “Subtracters. You know. Strike men. Professional eliminators.” Pascal played with the single earring in his right ear, spinning the spiky wheel of it.

  “No.” This small misunderstanding was somehow bothersome. Maybe it was the headache he always seemed to have these days. “We are bodyguards. Our job is to keep the employer alive, not…”

  “But those other two. You just finished saying that they took a job on your boss.”

  Wanbli took a delaying breath. “When the employer requests, and when a Paint is convinced that another T’chishetti is a positive danger to the estate, then the Wacaan can move. Under no other circumstances.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said the boy, being obnoxious as only an eight-year-old can be. He had been so all morning. “Call it what you want.”

  Pascal was chewing bubble, with just a taste of Pov in it. He was on a roll.

  “Thank you. I will,” answered Wanbli dryly.

  The boy snickered and bounced roughly off an old woman in a turban. Wanbli, following, apologized to her.

  “I can tell you’re behind me,” Pascal called, crossing the street against the signal. “You still stink from yesterday.”

  Yesterday had been fully booked by foreigners, with pheromonal accompaniment. Wanbli had scrubbed for twenty minutes afterward. He had even used vinegar. He wasn’t ready to hear this out of the eight-year-old.

  His feet stopped. He let the boy forge ahead in the crowd. Without Wanbli’s red-eyed two meters of height warning the Seechuk Straightaway pedestrians to give way, it became more and more difficult for Pascal to make progress. At last he turned and noticed that Wanbli had deserted him. He came back, breasting the traffic flow.

  “You were told to stick by me!”

  Wanbli grinned. “Were you told to be a little turd?”

  The boy blinked. He rubbed the back of his pudgy little hand over his rosebud mouth. His little tongue made a tube and he whistled through it. Like a Patish.

  “Who do you think old Nemmish will believe when I tell it you walked out on a pickup?”

  A pneumo shot by, popping ears all around it, followed by a police automatic remora. Wanbli swallowed and pulled on one ear before answering. “I don’t know, but I’m willing to find out, flyer.” Then his eyes squeezed at the corners as he asked, “What are we picking up for him anyway that he needs two of us?”

  Pascal sighed. “Not him: it. Patish don’t like to be called him. Or her. And it’s just a package. Nothing special.” He trotted on again.

  Wanbli knew very well that the Patish had a separate pronoun which meant “individual whose gender is none of the public’s business,” but they reserved that for their own languages, which they did not teach to foreigners.

  They gave nothing away.

  In later years his memories of Poos City would reduce themselves to two: disillusionment and the pinky-peach glare of the light strips.

  The lights of Poos ran along the first-story cornices of all buildings. They were mostly filter-banded mercury vapor strips engineered to give as useful and pleasant an illumination to the various sentient races moving through the commercial capital as was possible. They had been pressed into a series of spirals, in an artistic style now a generation out of date.

  What was designed for all races was generally accepted as good for none—the lights made Wanbli squint worse than the setting sun of T’chishett—but they were a trademark of Poos City and they were left shining night and day, from broad Seechuk to the ticky-tacky alleys of the Wallow uptown, driving the shadows of seven races away.

  Pascal ducked into the recessed doorway of a small building with a double storefront. The right side had had its windows etched with Gothic arches containing an arrangement of spiral galaxies around a rather blotchily done blue-and-white planet. In the center arch was a full-body picture of a human male, looking very dashing and exotic in ancient jodhpur trousers and a shirt with buttons. Above the window the sign read man the explorer and in smaller letters father to civilization.

  There had been attempts to break the window
. Paint had been splashed. Across the figure’s genital region had been scratched the words: “One more nutty religion for old Poos City.”

  Wanbli put his eye to the polymer, but it was filthy and the place behind seemed an empty room.

  Meanwhile Pascal had opened the door to the other shop, a travel agency, where the display in the window was of a lake with a large white bird sitting on it, and an equally white Palladian revival palace in the background. “See Nashua itself through out convenient Securi-Tour System: The Heart of Empire.”

  Nashua called itself an empire, but Wanbli had never seen any evidence of that. But then he was provincial. Now he curled his lip at the Imperial Palace but the bird puzzled him. It was big and bulky and didn’t look at all like the sort of thing that could balance itself atop the surface tension like a dipper bug. It looked like it should sink.

  It was a swan, that’s what it was. He remembered the name as the door shut behind him.

  One entire wall was a destination board: a holo of twilight over Poos City, with the orangy sun of Morion setting behind the Civic Center, the seven (six original plus one) identical spires of the Hall painting black vertical lines to the left of it. A woman in a traditional Poos peach suit stood in front of it, with a pointer.

  “Gideon,” said her customer, an older man with a scrubbed face. “Gideon,” repeated the agent, and she touched the pointer to one star in the picture’s sky. “Let’s go to Gideon, then.” The starry blackness became shot through with the lightning network of the minor strings which stitched together this portion of the galaxy. There were many of them, and from the angle of the holo (the angle of Poos) they looked reminiscent of a certain doily of mathematics, seen on a faxereader screen many days ago. Fractals, Digger had said. Behind all—behind even the mass of the galaxy that dusted the holo’s background—were the glimmers of other star nests, cut through by the blazing line of the major string which had formed the birth of minor strings and galaxies alike.

  Wanbli didn’t know what connection fractals had with the minor strings (the strings of travel). He wondered if Digger had understood it all. To learn that would be a sort of gift to the dead Dayflower. The sort of gift a mathematician would appreciate.