The Third Eagle

by R. A. MacAvoy

  Individualism was the watchword of that small assortment of planets in communication which was called—arrogantly—galactic civilization. Or perhaps the watchword was better expressed as Caveat Emptor, but whatever the drive of the individual society, it wasn’t denial and sacrifice. The fiddlehead drive had put self-sacrifice out of fashion.

  Here, however, were the revivalists, all of whom had been born more than three hundred years ago, in days when the smallest journey took longer than a human lifetime. Each of these ship-bleached ancients had chosen to journey: had chosen to sleep, to die, on the chance that they might someday wake up again.

  Frugal in thought and action, they were not what Wanbli had grown used to meeting on the commercial liners, on the green-painted lots of New Benares and still less under the peachy lights of Poos. They bore no resemblance to the willfully bored Truckers’ Guild.

  But they were not strange to him, for he was a Wacaan of Neunacht. He had met such pride and such poverty in Hovart and most of all in the homeland of Southbay Extension.

  “You flyers,” he said to Edward over the screen of the readwriter, “have a lot going for you. You can pace yourselves, you can do without—I’ve never eaten plainer—and you can all work together for your common goal, whatever that is. You have it all snapped together except for two things. You don’t know how to fight and you don’t know how to have fun.”

  “We don’t usually talk out loud in the library,” Edward answered mildly. He hardly moved his thin-lipped mouth.

  Wanbli sighed and waved the screen dark. He took the very pale man by the wrist and led—no, pulled—him out through the antique sphincter door. Edward dropped his spool on the table by the door; one was not allowed to remove library books from the room, even when being abducted.

  “I said, you flyers don’t know either how to fight or…”

  “I know what you said, Red; I heard you.” Edward was half a head shorter than Wanbli. He dusted off his impeccable khakis with both hands. “And as far as hand-to-hand fighting goes, it isn’t really as necessary in the interstellar community as it was among primitive humans. Destruction has been perfected on such a massive scale that it makes a simple punch look…”

  “That’s a fallacy,” said Wanbli earnestly. “A very common fallacy. The fact that one big corporation or government can vaporize another big corporation or government doesn’t touch the fact of whether one single man can stand up to what comes against him. Against himself, for that matter.” His tone was touched by doubt as he asked, “Hey, if you believe there’s no use to fighting, why’d you start taking boxing lessons from me? I mean, if you don’t put any value in what I do, what am I doing here? I mean, charity is all well and good and I’m grateful, but…” Wanbli, full of inchoate conviction, became lost in his own syntax and fell silent.

  “Good conditioning,” answered Edward. “Obviously your workouts are very good for the cardiovascular system.” His colorless eyes glanced briefly, covertly, at Wanbli’s arm, which was still raised with the force of gesture. “And the muscular system, of course.” He gave Wanbli a wintry smile—Edward’s smile—and returned to the library and his spool.

  The truth was that the Condor’s crew was very bad at the lessons Wanbli was teaching. They had discipline and they had machines which delivered stimulus to increase the size of the muscle mass, but they had no instinct. They moved slowly and what they learned in pieces stayed in pieces in their performance. Their punches were short and heavy and their kicks—well, frequently they fell backward when they kicked. Perhaps it was the light gravity.

  Of them all (and they were so regular in attendance, every other day depending upon their work shifts) only Coordinator Khafiya, she who had greeted Wanbli upon his own unpleasant awakening, had any degree of grace. She was the oldest on board the Condor, and one of the oldest to have been revived from sleep. Perhaps it was contact with the soil of a planet that made a fighter. Perhaps it was having to scrap as a child.

  Edward was the one who fell most often, but he also got up again and wasted no time in frustration. He alone had the idea that a punch was meant to land on somebody and to hurt. Wanbli had a little hope for Edward, but as with the rest of the crew, the very white man’s greatest pleasure in the lessons seemed to be in testing his changing muscle/ fat/connective ratios and his blood and lung volumes. They all kept charts.

  As though, thought Wanbli, the weight of one’s flesh had anything to do with being a warrior.

  He waited by the door to Central, which was in the belly of the ship. He practiced forms, for he was still not used to weighing a hundred and twenty pounds and he tended to slam himself into the wall. When the Captain came out, he had just done so, making quite a noise. It was embarrassing.

  The Captain was a gray man, but not an old one. Though Wanbli had been presented to him, the Captain had never seen fit to attend one of the self-defense classes. He raised his neat gray hairline. “Trouble with the gravity, kid?”

  “Only at top speed,” answered Wanbli. He slid off the wall bench where he had landed and straightened his breechclout.

  “And are you having no other problems in adjustment to shipboard life?” The Captain was trying to be gracious, in his ponderous way. “I am told you have made a positive difference in the condition of my crew. The average m.f.c. ratio is four points to the left in the three weeks you have been with us, and even bone density has shown improvement, which is surprising in such a short time. That is to be commended.”

  “Thanks, Captain Brezhner, but what I really hope I’m doing is making it harder for people to pick on you folks when you down-planet.”

  Even Brezhner’s eyes were gray. They flickered as he replied, “I don’t think you really have to worry about that, Red. You don’t have to… feel quite so protective. We can defend ourselves when we really need to.”

  Wanbli didn’t want to argue the point. “What I really wanted to ask you, Captain, is when the Condor will be swinging by B2-98. I came aboard because Eddie told me that eventually I’d get home this way.”

  Captain Brezhner sat himself on the wall bench. “Yes. Edward Pierce. You know, he broke our tradition seriously in inviting a stranger aboard. It took a ship meeting and hours of discussion before we could reach consensus. I think it was the fact that you were so sick, and taken off our revival equipment seemed likely to die, that caused the argument to turn in your favor.”

  “I’m very grateful, of course…”

  The Captain waved that away. “Gratitude, in this case, runs in both directions. Our function in society being what it is, we don’t find many friends. Fewer who will wade into a… a shindig like that on Poos for us. But I’m merely explaining that we have no precedent for what we should do for you now.

  “We are chasing down a ship, you see.”

  Wanbli sat down beside him. “I didn’t know that. Nobody in the gym said a thing about that.” (What was their “function in society” anyway?)

  “Well, we are always chasing down a ship, of course. We are revivalists. This one is heading for a two-planet of an M class star, 71-88. I don’t know what that is in your modern Brawliens catalogue…”

  “I wouldn’t either.”

  “But we ought to make contact within ten or eleven days, and after that it will be up to the Coordinator’s staff to decide our next move. Likely we’ll be able to work a side trip to your string station.”

  “Uh, we don’t have a station. Ships have to plow all the way in.” Wanbli felt an obscure sort of shame creep over him. Shame and a new realization of what it meant for a planet to be so poor as Neunacht. The Condor could not take him home.

  Captain Brezhner was standing. “Well, we’ll work something out,” he said vaguely and stepped through the next sphincter. It closed awry and Wanbli came behind him and preened the cartilaginous veins smooth again.

  Sphincter doors had never worked right.

  The Condor did not have a starwatch or even a flat screen to the “outside.” It
had been equipped, after much money and more tinkering, with a simple fiddlestring and the noise of the fiddlehead engine permeated the largely ferrous hull, but the revivalists had not been motivated to the extra expense of a visual space map.

  Wanbli thought it odd they should be so uninterested, since all the crew were planet-born: Earth-born, in fact. Truckers (one understood) had no sense of the stars as lights in the heavens, but most people born under a sky like to look up.

  But it may have been the expense: starwatches were luxury items and the revivalists measured the grams of their dinners. Or it might have been that they were tired of the whole starry picture: none of them had intended to finish their lives wandering in a pod of steel. Wanbli sat with his eyes closed and performed his heretical ritual, invoking the Protectors and the soul of dead Digger, imagining sometimes the invisible glory around him and sometimes the homely sky over Tawlin.

  “We are the outlaws and the presidents, Teachers, saints and whores to worlds, Defenders and betrayers at one stroke, We are Wacaan.”

  The dream came back again for the first time since New Benares: looking for the lost baby, throwing it off the Pontiac table, waking in a sweat. This time the face of the infant bore no resemblance to Ake Tawlin’s. This time he was sure that Damasc, his mother, had been at the bottom to catch it, but when he reached the bottom there was neither mother-ghost nor dream-baby, but only the Rall aircar, which he had been certain he’d driven off and sold.

  He was peeling potatoes in the Condor’s galley. Potatoes were heavy and so an expensive item in the diet, but they had picked up potatoes on Poos. They were always peeled by hand and since his arrival among the crew, it was Wanbli who peeled them. It was something he could do.

  Edward Pierce sat across the table from him and watched, proprietarily. Wanbli was, after all, the lipless man’s protege. “I can’t believe you people let yourselves be used that way. They send you out to kill your own people?”

  Wanbli rinsed the finished potato in the spray cleaner, which wasted much less water than a tub. He liked potatoes; he didn’t even mind peeling them, except that the purple juice tended to stain the hands. “It isn’t that simple,” he answered. “We kill our own only when they make it impossible for us to fulfill our missions.”

  “That’s their mission, to prevent you.” Edward pulled on his long, thin white nose. It was a strange sight, for the nose was quite flexible. Wanbli tried not to stare.

  “Besides,” continued Edward, “these ‘missions’ consist of killing someone anyway. You shouldn’t do that, just upon some bigwig’s order.”

  Wanbli resisted asking what a bigwig was. His Old Ang was only tottering. “A person must be willing to kill as he is willing to die. Otherwise there is no life at all.”

  “I don’t buy it.” Edward Pierce wore a smirk that was much like the one Wanbli used to have, back before when. “Hey, what did you do to yourself now?”

  Wanbli was holding his hand under the spray cleaner, which ran pinky-purple. “I just cut my finger.”

  “Well, don’t get blood in the potatoes. We’re all vegetarians here.”

  “I noticed that,” said Wanbli dryly.

  Suddenly Edward broke out in giggles. “Oh, it’s so funny to hear you talking with a strong Indian accent, Red. All singsongy, up and down and up in the nose like that.”

  Wanbli thought Old Ang sounded like two dogs barking for a fight, but did not say so. “I’m a ’Indi speaker, so what should I sound like?”

  “Well.” Edward tried to calm himself. Wanbli started another potato, regardless of stray corpuscles. “Like an Indian, of course. Not that kind of Indian. A redman, Red. American Indian. You look like one, except…”

  Wanbli waited as the revivalist evaluated him. “Except that you are too red. And your hair is wrong; it should be black. And your eyes are just plain weird.”

  Wanbli did not know what “plain weird” could be, but he knew he was not being complimented. “Were there a lot of people who looked like you back on Earth?” he asked the pale man.

  “Me? I’m one pencil out of a dozen-pack. In Maryland, anyway. Fairer than most, maybe.” Edward pulled on his nose again, turning it blue.

  “But you’ll have a chance to see how much you look like an Indian when we snag this ship. If we find it.” He picked up a potato, played with it, stuck fingernail crescent moons into its skin. “It’s supposed to have Indians on it.”

  “If you find it? Do you miss often?” Wanbli was getting very interested in this chase, as the atmosphere aboard ship became tense with expectation. “The snagging, I mean.”

  Edward picked a peeler off the table and began work on one of Wanbli’s load, neatly and slowly, as he did everything. “Not often. If we do it’s because the old records are wrong, or there was a deflection, or malfunction. Usually the latter.

  “We can’t afford to miss.”

  Wanbli nodded. “All those people, alive and helpless, waiting for you.”

  The revivalist dropped both peeler and potato. His glare held both anger and fright. “There is no one alive aboard that ship!”

  Wanbli was daunted. He must have misunderstood. “You said I would see people who looked like me. Sleepers from … Maryland or somewhere.”

  Very forcefully Edward nodded. “Yes. Sleepers. People who let themselves be put down. No brain activity. No heat. So much cordwood. You do know what cordwood is?” He repeated the word in Hindi.

  “Wood to burn, I think. It has always seemed wrong to me to burn something as beautiful and rare as wood.”

  Edward got his composure and his smirk back. He picked up his potato. “You only think it’s rare because you come from a desert.”

  Wanbli didn’t use a peeler, but a knife, and went through potatoes much faster than Edward. “Not just that. Remember the Flotsam and Jetsam, where we met? All those little bits of wood, very… precious.” He used the Hindi word.

  “That’s freight cost that made it expensive. You could have paneled the whole place in local lumber for less than they paid out in drinks for the donations. It’s shipping that makes everything expensive.” Edward was working on an eye, which he cut out with surgical precision, dropping it into the spray cleaner. “Especially people. You have no idea how expensive a useless thing like a person is.”

  Wanbli smiled a sad smile, not a smirk at all. “Yes, I do. It has cost me a great deal to run nowhere as long as I have.”

  Edward Pierce touched Wanbli’s arm in companionable fashion. His fingers were wet and slimy, so he used the back of the hand. “Tell me, Red. How many men have you killed in your life? Do you remember?”

  Wanbli sat up straight, both hands under the spray cleaner. The cut finger was still oozing a little blood. “Unless one or two of the thugs I met in Poos City has died since, I haven’t had to kill anyone.”

  Edward’s blue eyes rolled. His face was white astonishment. “Nobody? After all this talk about living and dying, you haven’t killed anyone at all?” He began to giggle again.

  Wanbli tried to maintain his dignity. “I haven’t had to. I may have cut off a Patish’s tongue for him, though. That must be worse than death to them.”

  The revivalists were out-of-time, but they were not wholly ignorant. “A Patish? You cut off his tongue?”

  “I held it out and slammed his jaw closed on it.” Wanbli had difficulty escaping the contagion of giggles. “You see, he was trying to… “He didn’t know the Old Ang for the phrase “dust me” so he continued: “Burn me in the eye with it. Or perhaps take out my throat, so I did the obvious thing. Is it… is it as humorous as that?” At this point he decided that yes, it was as humorous as that and gave up knife, potato and spray cleaner.

  They gave way to hysteria, just the two of them, for sixty seconds and then Edward put both hands to his face, cleared his throat, checked the wall clock and rose from the table.

  “I love it,” he said, and walked out.

  Wanbli stared after him. It was possible he
liked that strange, clumsy, cold and very white man. If he liked anyone. If he still could like anyone.

  Four days later Wanbli surprised himself by going to bed with Coordinator Khafiya. It was her idea and he responded through politeness, thinking he would probably prove impotent. He had never in his life been impotent and as it turned out he was not so now, and had a reasonably good time. Almost like before he had been celibate and then a whore. He fell asleep with the Coordinator curled up in front of him and his nose at the base of her neck.

  The capture of the sleeper ship Commitment was only exciting in theory. For Wanbli, it turned out to be only a matter of waiting for someone on tracker duty to give him reports. He did not even have to cancel his classes.

  There was nothing to look at, but when traction had been achieved, a bell rang in the halls and the crew set up a mild sort of cheer.

  Next day Captain Brezhner called him into Central and allowed him to look at the only visual display on the ship, which suffered from exaggerated contrast and was off-color. The Commitment was tubular, with bumps on either end. It could have been anything, hanging there in space: an air pump, a bottle, a New Year scepter. It did not look especially big.

  “Not a particularly good catch,” said the Captain. “The materials are common and the technology too obsolete for resale, unless to an antiques fancier. But it is sizable, and a lot of something that’s already out in space is better than a lot of something that needs to be lifted.”

  Wanbli was already used to the revivalists’ cus’tom of evaluating everything in terms of cost and he didn’t know how to ask politely how it was that the crew of the Condor had any say in the disposal of the Commitment’s equipment.

  When Edward came to ask him if he wanted to be with the evaluation party, Wanbli almost said no, for two reasons. First, his mind was turned strongly toward home and what he would say to the clans concerning their station that so likely was not coming. Secondly, it did not seem that the revivalist actually wanted him along. He didn’t look at him, and in his voice was no enthusiasm. But then why would he ask?