The Third Eagle

by R. A. MacAvoy

  He heard himself saying, “Don’t you have to set anything? According to the person you put in there?”

  The medical attendant made fussy little sounds. “Not for the body, no. Humans are pretty uniform and the reviver adjusts by its own readings. It’s the mechanism of the box we have to adjust for and that I did yesterday. I set them all. It’s as well to be ready.” His glance slipped from complacency to startled amusement as he watched Wanbli. “Red! Why, por Dios, are you taking your clothes off right now?”

  “I’m not, really,” answered Wanbli, who had pulled separate the opening of his one-piece khaki, just over the navel. “It’s just that you’re right. It’s as well to be ready, and I wasn’t. I’m going to need this.” He pulled out the woven waistband of his breechclout, which he wore from habit under the uniform of the revivalists.

  Guillermo did not understand yet, and so in meek astonishment he had to suffer his lock bracelet to be pulled off his arm, that very arm being twisted back behind him, tied by the wrist to his other arm and then his legs, bent back at the knees, added to the package. He had gotten around to resisting by the time this had been accomplished, but only uttered a few loud queries and exclamations before Wanbli had found a roll of support wrap and used it to plug the unfortunate’s mouth. By now Guillermo was quite alarmed and rolled his eyes with much emotion.

  “I’m not going to hurt you, Gilly,” said Wanbli jovially as he threw the wrap’s paper wrappings into the trash receptacle. “But I don’t have much luck arguing with you flyers, so I played a little trick on you. It’ll all work out.”

  Guillermo made noises through his nose, disagreeing heartily.

  Wanbli returned to the doorway of Medical and looked thoughtfully at the sphincter. He’d made a study of door sphincters during his stay on the Condor. Now he opened the thing halfway and yanked at the vanes, jamming them in groups of two so they could interleave, but not smoothly. Then he palmed the hand press and watched the thing close, grind against itself and come to its final rest in a knot.

  “Can’t believe they work that well in pressure loss, either,” he said, either to Guillermo or to himself.

  The medical attendant’s office was only a chair and a flat desk attached to the wall. A portable screen, similar to Coordinator Khafiya’s, sat gently mumbling on top of it. Wanbli increased the volume.

  “… more we have thirty votes for reviving eight and thirteen for the original figure of seven.” Khafiya sounded dispirited through the speaker.

  “I will never pass seven, not if we’re here all day and night,” Edward Pierce was shouting. He, on the other hand, seemed to be enjoying himself. “Come on, people. One more isn’t going to hurt anyone.”

  “Well, I ain’t gonna goddamn eat just a goddamn little less than ever,” he was answered by someone very angry. “I eat too goddamn little as it is.”

  “No, you don’t, Sandy. You could go down another eleven percent in fat and be the better for it.”

  There was laughter, but tense, tired laughter.

  Wanbli left the volume high and started to work.

  There were a dozen hatches in the wall. Using the little forklift, which was very nimble, he filled each one with a coffin. Only nine spilled the coffin back to him, so he had to reach back in and pull out the three and place them ready beneath the units that seemed to be working.

  The vote was running thirty-seven for eight, five for seven and one temporarily abstaining when the first of the revival units uttered a very sweet chime and Wanbli wheeled a gurney over to the hatch.

  The woman was shivering, but she did not feel cold to Wanbli’s tentative fingers. Her eyes were open, and though they had no shade of Wacaan garnet in them, they were very pretty eyes.

  “Is this still the clinic?” she asked in perfectly understandable Old Ang. “Was it called off again?”

  She sounded in accent exactly like Edward Pierce.

  Wanbli crouched beside the gurney. “No, it was not called off.” He pressed her face toward his. She almost focused on his eyes. “Please listen closely to me. You have been traveling for three hundred years. Your destination is not… what you thought it was. You would not have survived the landing. You would not have wakened anyway. Your ship has been snagged out of its flight by a group of—uh—people who want the hardware. They are planning to toss almost all of you out into space, still sleeping. I’ve locked us in here, but the others will be arriving any minute. We have to prevent their stopping us before you’re all awake. We have to take over.”

  She looked at him with serious brown eyes. “I think I had a dream,” she said, and fell asleep under his hand.

  Wanbli made a sound of disappointment. He lifted the woman off the gurney, laid her on the floor and ran back to the forklift.

  “What’s the matter, Guillermo; you go off-line?” The voice was Khafiya’s. She was rapping against the vanes of the jammed door. “Meeting’s over at last,” she shouted. “It’s time to choose.”

  Wanbli had thirty-four sleeping people lying in the corner of the room, all around the medical attendant. They slept a natural sleep, occasionally turning and flopping arms in each other’s faces. Two of them were talking in their sleep. Six more had been placed back in their coffins, cooling moment by moment.

  It had not occurred to him that the first thing a sleeper would do upon reviving would be to fall asleep like a person starved of all rest.

  Nine more sleepers were “in the oven.” Wanbli had doffed his khakis and was glistening with sweat from as hard a work as he had ever attempted. His eagles shone bright, and because he had donated his waistband to Guillermo, he was naked. All the sleepers were naked too. He had turned up the heat.

  He didn’t answer and he heard the sphincter door rasping: attempting to open. It didn’t budge. “Door’s stuck,” said the Coordinator without surprise.

  Two more hatches opened and Wanbli was busy with the helpless contents. One was brown and one pale. Both had made it.

  He had placed both in the nursery with the others when he heard Khafiya calling, “We’re going to have to burn it open, Will. Stand back.”

  Wanbli trotted to the door and stood not in front but beside it. His sweaty shoulder slipped against the wall. He was warmed up well now and too alert to feel doubts. “I wouldn’t do that, Khafiya. I’ve got Gilly here strapped to the door with tape.”

  The medical attendant made loud whining noises in negation, but these only served to heighten the effect.

  There was a peculiar silence.

  “Red? Is that you?” This was Edward.

  Wanbli collected himself and stood straight. “I am Wanbli Elf Darter of the Clan of Wacaan, and I stand between these people and the death you would bring them. Here I will remain until your death, or my death, or the…” He didn’t know the Old Ang for “cessation.” “… end of the threat which you pose to them.”

  This time the response came quickly. “Oh, Jesus, you misbegotten fool!” It was Khafiya. “You’re making a theater tragedy out of nothing!”

  “You didn’t think it was nothing back there in the meeting. I could see your faces. It is only that you are willing to kill them to avoid expense.”

  Three chimes sounded in quick succession, followed by three more, and Wanbli left the door to remove the six living sleepers. Roughly he hauled out the ones for whom the sleep had been final and dragged them out of the way. Then he filled the units again, thankful for the power of the little forklift. He was panting when he came back to the door.

  The revivalists had been calling to him. Some of the things they said were very irate in tone. He had never been able to elicit such deep reaction from the Condor crew in class. As he came close to the wall he caught Edward Pierce in mid-sentence. “… like sperm cells, or even brand-new embryos, Red. Very few of them are destined to live. Most fade off before the mother is even aware and no one wastes a tear on them. What’s going to happen is that eventually we will cut our way in and then we’ll have to space
you, and all for a pile of boxes of unknown viability.”

  Hearing his death described as inevitable moved Wanbli not a whit. Everyone’s death was inevitable. Edward thought he could be the servant of that fact, but others had thought that too. Heydoc, for instance.

  Wanbli cleared his throat. “The viability part is pretty good, considering how old the Commitment is, Eddie. It’s about four out of five. Of course, you flyers might be able to save

  more; I’m just doing it by rote.”

  “I already waked them up, you see.”

  There was a wail and lament on the other side of the door as though he had announced catastrophic death instead of life. He heard the thin woman, Kalliope: “Oh my God, my God, that’s seventy people!”

  “About,” answered Wanbli bravely, although he had just a few more than half that number dozing in his nursery. “And they’re alive, alive-o, even by your standards. What do your funny laws let you do with all of them?” He wished he had better Old Ang; it was impossible for him to be eloquent or even persuasive in his words of a few syllables.

  “I don’t know what to do with them,” shouted Khafiya. “But I know what we’ll do to you.”

  Wanbli didn’t respond. He was tending his machines.

  Once they tried to burn through the wall to one side of the hatch, but Wanbli pressed his fingernail between the two bones of Guillermo’s elbow and the resultant shrieks were enough to stop the attempt. Evidently the revivalists were tender of their own. Or else they had another plan in mind.

  * * *

  There were sixty-eight various-colored sleepers on the floor and a sad row of bodies resealed in their glass coffins.

  “Red?” Edward again. Wanbli turned from the contemplation of his work and walked wearily to the, sphincter.

  “Red, we’re going home. Fastest. We’ve got a direct string out to the Big Ball”

  “That’s nice,” said Wanbli’s voice, in the service of that small part of him that knew what he was doing.

  “We’re going to leave you all in there until we land.” There was a pause. “And then there won’t be much you can do to keep us out.”

  “And then what? Sixty-eight people without friends, relatives or government just disappear again: invisible as they were these three hundred years?”

  He could hear the thump of Edward’s shoulder or back against the vanes of the doorway. “No. They’re alive now—God help us. And they’re innocent of this. Just one person without friends is gonna disappear.”

  It was not the threat that made Wanbli grimace. Not the threat exactly.

  “Damnit, Red, I vouched for you. I went on the line.”

  And Edward had been the one to push against them all for a small gain of mercy. Eight instead of seven. A manageable gain.

  “You never told me you were ghouls, Eddie,” Wanbli called through the door. His voice cracked once.

  “Ghouls?” There was more emotion in the single shout than Wanbli had heard out of the revivalists in his entire sojourn. “Without us there would be no sleeper alive. Who else bothers to find us—them—let alone wake them up? And who has the better right to make the decisions?” Now Edward Pierce was screaming. “Damn you, damn you, you ignorant muscle-headed barbarian. You kill your own kin! What revivalist has ever done that?

  “Didn’t you ever hear about Accibos settlement, where the supposedly lost sleeper ship came down, right on target, in the most logical place to build a city? Where, in fact, they had built a city? Annihilation! Since Accibos no one has stood in our way. The entire populated galaxy needs us!”

  “The entire populated galaxy doesn’t like you, though,” answered Wanbli, as mildly as he could get, shouting through the vanes of the door. More quietly he added, “And I really can’t blame them.”

  “I don’t know whether you’re protecting us or you kidnapped us.”

  Wanbli spun around, for the words came from behind him. There was the man of the large features: first on the dais and second into the revival unit. He was blinking with eflFort but standing on his own. Behind him the splendid young woman was sitting curled, knees to chest.

  Wanbli opened his mouth to explain, but could not find a beginning. “Are you okay? Not going to fall over or anything?”

  The man’s legs were straight and braced, but he was hugging himself and trembling. “I’ll make it. How long? How long have we been asleep.”

  It struck Wanbli as odd that this question should take precedence in the sleeper’s mind over all others. “Something like three hundred years.”

  For a moment the brown face flushed bronze in triumph, but then it darkened. “Not long enough. We can’t be there.”

  “Sit down,” said Wanbli, but he was not surprised when the man did not. “You can’t… you never can be there, flyer. Your equipment isn’t right and then, things have changed.”

  On the floor behind, a young man was gagging dryly. The awakened sleeper turned and squinted at his naked company in a manner both helpless and proprietary.

  The sick fellow hauled himself up onto his knees. His face was gray under its black pigment. “Oh dear Jesus,” he whispered, and he folded his hands in front of him.

  Wanbli pulled up a chair, and when the other wouldn’t sit in it, he used it himself. “Listen to me and remember as much as you can, because I don’t want to have to repeat this for each of you…”

  Then Wanbli told him three hundred years of history, or at least as much of it as he thought he had to know.

  Fiddlehead engines, which followed the minor strings from system to system. The seven sentient races, among which hoomies lived longest, dayflowers the shortest and humans were by far the most expansionist. He did not mention the two interspecial military exchanges of the last century, because he did not even think of them, and it did not occur to him to tell the sleeper that men, nations and planets were constantly striving with one another in violent and unkind manner.

  What he did tell them was that the great world grab of the last two hundred years was over, that string-served real estate was the most expensive commodity existing and that travel was the next. All this was in preface to Wanbli’s explanation of why they were all where they were, scattered on the floor behind a broken door in the middle of a hostile ship, with no one in the universe on their side and nowhere to go.

  When he was done the sleeper had sat down and was holding his chin in one hand. “No planet?” he asked. “No… money? Nothing?” Musing, he added, “We might as well be dead.”

  “Thanks! Thank you very much!” Wanbli stood up, sending the chair skidding. “That’s exactly what I needed to hear!” Three angry steps took him across Medical to where the small package that was Guillermo lay, feet and hands touching behind his back.

  The revivalist despaired as Wanbli loomed over him, bright and bitter, with a scalpel in his hand, but the stroke of the knife cut the cord that bound his arms to his legs. With a pull of the bandage tab Wanbli freed the man’s mouth.

  The medical attendant was weeping with the pain of returned circulation. “Sorry, ratchett. Forgot you were there,” said Wanbli. Guillermo scuttled on knees and elbows to the jammed sphincter door and crouched there, glaring at Wanbli and all the lawless lives he had brought into being.

  NINE

  THERE WAS no food in Medical; this was the second day. It was not as hard a situation as it might have been, because the sleepers woke with empty stomachs and went from their hibernation to a fasting state without much perturbation to the system. Wanbli felt it more, but that particular hardship was among those he had been trained to handle. Guillermo, the medical attendant, was not fasting, strictly speaking. He was living on ethyl alcohol and anesthetics from the stores.

  Two things were worth thankfulness: being naked did not seem to bother the sleepers as much as Wanbli had feared it might, and the revivalists had been kind enough to leave the water open.

  They were heading at top speed toward the Big Ball: their home base. It would be only a
nother two days. What would happen there no one in Medical knew, except that they had promised to kill Wanbli. For that reason, the awakened sleepers regarded him with almost superstitious awe. There had been three cases of hysterics, as the sleepers understood they were not to have the lives they had chosen and risked for: that they were to be outcasts if anything. There were many more storms of weeping and lamentation for the friends, lovers and family who had not made it through, but these were responses in a different category.

  Three hysterics out of sixty-eight seemed a magnificent record to Wanbli, considering these people were not Wacaan.

  He himself did not regard his death as inevitable, though he was buried in the heart of his enemies’ vessel and heading for their stronghold. It was not that he could not imagine himself dying; he had known and encompassed his own death at the age of seventeen, sitting cross-legged in underground darkness, fasting (as he was now) and his lungs filled with ceremonial smoke. It was more that he could not regard any particular death as unavoidable, save that self-willed, or from old age. There would be a confrontation of some sort, and he would live through it or he would not.

  In the. meantime he tutored the sleepers and wished he himself had a better grasp of human history. He could tell them that there was a planet called Nashua which called itself the Heart of Empire, but he could not tell them of what that empire was composed. Not armies, certainly (in answer to the question). Nashua was far away: at least twenty-five strings’ connection. The whole idea of empire was no-never-mind to the people of Neunacht, his own people, and most particularly the Nashuite Empire did not deal with such things as lost or preempted sleeper ships. He had to repeat this to the sleepers many times. No army. No police. No help coming from outside.

  Especially not from Wanbli’s own people.

  The sleepers waved hands or drummed fingers helplessly and met each other’s eyes over Wanbli’s head, feeling extremely guilty but also relieved that they were not individually under sentence of death. Happy that the unknown revivalists—kidnappers or rescuers—no longer thought them suitable for trade or fodder. So grateful were the sleepers that their hosts’ peculiar ethics spared them, they were almost reluctant to judge them for condemning Wanbli.