He sat in his morning ritual, though his hands were empty. His mind was empty too. For the first time since the age of seven, when the obligation to help raise and lower the sun had been placed upon him by his elders, Wanbli could not call to mind any of the sacred words: not even his own heretical emendations. He was locked in ringing silence, while the sleepers of the Commitment—perfect name, that—talked and touched and moved with one another to make up for their lost pasts and unknowable futures. In the single examination room, and behind a rigged line of sheets, a few couples were using the time more intimately, but most were content to hold hands.
The browns stayed with the browns, the darker browns with the darker browns and the few pales were a group of their own. Guillermo, of course, was a group unto himself, and he glanced often from his desk with real fear in his eyes, as though the awakened sleepers might mob him.
Wanbli, always fascinated by people who looked different, wondered why people who had slept together for so long should be so divided. Were they worried they might conceive babies with health problems? No, they didn’t seem worried about conception at all, and matching color to color didn’t make it as scientific breeding. He found it curious, the way they clumped.
When Wanbli closed his eyes, as he did often under the strain of fasting and of worry, he saw a face: not that of a sleeper, nor yet one of the incomprehensible revivalists. It was a face of heavy hide, stone gray in color, with small blue eyes set so deep they appeared to be tunnels into sky. Wanbli wondered if Digger had felt like this just before the end: thrust flaming down a path of fate where effort could not slow him down and there were no turnoffs between now and the end. He had judged Digger for his suicide; for Wanbli, there had always been alternatives. That was Third Eagle belief—that there were always undiscovered alternatives.
The announcement system came on with a pop. Everyone in Medical looked up, even Guillermo.
“Red.” It was Edward again. Wanbli dispersed the ghosts in his mind and answered.
“There’s a communication for someone: not one of us. Came through New Benares.”
Wanbli thought of Audry and threw the thought aside. He thought of Reynaldo. He just waited.
“Anyone ever call you Wobbly?”
First disappointment faded. “Yes, I have to admit it. It’s for me, all right. You mean you’d read it to me?”
Guillermo interrupted, crying loudly over Wanbli’s words that he had to be let out. That it was unbearable. That sooner or later they were going to kill him. Wanbli bellowed him down.
“I’m not going to kill him, Eddie. He’s drunk. What’s the Elmira have to say?”
“I haven’t opened it, of course.” Edward was scandalized.
Wanbli settled back against the wall behind him, chuckling. “You have no objections to dusting me, but you won’t read my mail. That’s very… uncompromising of you, Eddie. I’d be very pleased to have you read it to me, even though I’m not one of your favorite people anymore.”
There was a moment’s open silence. “I’ll read it to you. If I thought there was anything you could do in exchange, I’d trade for it. But you don’t have anything we want.”
“Not Gilly? Tell you truly, Eddie, we could do without him easy.”
“Sorry, Guillermo, but we’ve voted to keep the room sealed until docking.”
Guillermo stood with the aid of his desk, clutching a clear pouch in his right hand. “Voted? But I didn’t vote. It’s not consensus if I didn’t agree!”
“N minus one consensus. You know.” The voice of Edward Pierce sounded slightly shamed. There was the hissing of a printdoc relaxing its seal. “Here comes. Red.
“Dear Wobbly,
What a surprise to hear from you, and traveling again. Wasn’t being a face in the shimmers enough for you? I REALLY miss you and your wonderful little butt end.”
At this point Edward rattled the film and cleared his throat. Wanbli put his head in his hands and thanked all Nine Protectors that the message was in Hindi, for all the awakened sleepers were listening intently.
“There isn’t anyone on all of Duden that can keep the game going like you, lover.
“But as for your questions and your funny little plea to me for old times’ sake, do keep in mind that I’m not at that level of Elmira that makes the legal decisions and companies restructure every day and you can’t take it personally.
“And you know, asking me for favors like that is not how a real friend would treat me. Friendship is sort of sacred and so is business.
“Keep it clean, but keep it up.
“Ducelet.”
After Wanbli had sat silent for perhaps ten seconds, Edward Pierce beeped an inquiry over the broadcast.
“I’m here,” said Wanbli. “I suppose you know what that was about.”
“Parts were obvious. The rest: not at all.”
Wanbli switched back into Old Ang. “I told you about the station we paid toward for seventy years, that they’re not going to deliver. Well, it’s her company, but I didn’t know that, back… uh, then.”
Edward snorted: a sound which seemed to envelop the room. “You seem to sleep around in high society.”
Dully Wanbli answered, “Money doesn’t rub off between the sheets.” It was an old Wacaan saying. “Eddie,” he added. “Eddie, will you send a printdoc for me?”
Edward cursed into the broadcast. “Will I do what for you? You have so much goddamn gall, Red. I won’t do fuck-all else for you and you know it!”
Wanbli listened carefully to the tone of the man’s anger and decided that he knew no such thing.
“This is just a little favor, Eddie, and it’s not really for me at all but for a whole planetful of people.”
“Don’t call me Eddie. No one calls me Eddie!”
“I just need to tell my folks at home what I just heard. That we’re out of luck. No station. No hope. No money, no better life. That was the message I was going home for, remember? If you’re going to snip me into little pieces, then I can’t deliver it, and it’s real important. See?”
Edward Pierce did not submit gracefully, but he took the message.
Wanbli woke from a dream about his mother to racket and tussle. One of the pale sleepers had discovered Guillermo sucking a bag of dextrose in the Medical lavabo. As was made evident, he had been concealing a stock of mixed sugars and honey and had been tapping them constantly, as well as the alcohol. This explained why Guillermo had been living in alternating hysteria and depression, while the fasting sleepers were only a bit lethargic. It took a good deal of earnest persuasion by Wanbli to prevent the assemblage from denuding the shelves and having a high old time.
Later that same night, he was roused again to watch Garland Medicine-Bear punishing one of his group who had been found appropriating the alcohol bottle. Wanbli watched the fisticuffs, not with a critical eye (they didn’t deserve it), but rather wondering why the man should be so upset by one of his company’s being drunk. The hangover would be enough punishment, surely. But Medicine-Bear kept bellowing long after the miscreant had folded in front of him, to the effect that he would not have it, would not have it, would see them all in hell before he would have them degenerating into drunks before his eyes.
It was remarkable.
The dream chased at the edge of things all night. Damasc came calling upon him, looking as she had last time he had seen her. She did not try to hide the fact that she was dead; that was understood. He tried very hard to explain to her why he had left home, and why things had turned out the way they had, but she was always busy with something: the jewels in her short hair, their dinner, her bone-handled blunderbuzz. And there was a schedule on the table to which she kept referring—bus routes perhaps. Wanbli then remembered that it was his schedule, not hers. He glanced at it to see how far he was going, and one more time was awakened by Guillermo’s pounding on the wall.
Garland formally introduced some of his people: Frederic Standing-Elk, Victoria Whistocken—she w
as the splendid young woman—Mary Standing-Shoes and William Ollokot. They were not of the same nationality and had not the same language but they were all still of the same large group, he explained very carefully, around Wanbli’s lack of English.
Most of the colonists were of this large group, but there were also eight Baptists and four political dissidents. The Baptists were darker and the dissidents were for the most part much paler, leaving the large group, which was popularly called Indians, in the middle.
Indians they called themselves, yet not one of them could speak Tndi. Wanbli laughingly averred that he himself had the better right to be called Indian, but none of them found that funny. They tended to stare at him.
The last day before landing, the fast began to tell on everyone. Guillermo slept all day. Wanbli would have been happy to sit in the corner under the bulk of the revival units and meditate on things, but he dared not let his body grow stiff and cold: not while things might happen. He forced himself to sociability. He pursued the acquaintance of Victoria Whistocken. He ran through his forms for her, though only at quarter speed. She was very appreciative.
Victoria had been the daughter of a ranch owner. (A ranch was an estate, like Tawlin, he guessed.) She had lost one cousin aboard the Commitment so far, but though she grieved for Lennie, he was no more or less dead than everyone she had left at home. She wondered whether a person could live through that: losing everyone she had ever known.
Wanbli said she could, and she nodded, distantly, with the dignity of indifference. But a moment later she was asking him about himself.
He explained Neunacht, and how the T’chishetti and his own clan were locked together, needing and not liking each other, and about the poverty of the place and the station which was not coming, though it had been promised and they had paid for so many years.
She was a marvelous young woman; she seemed to understand everything and she nodded and nodded. A real listener. Wanbli had met very few real listeners since leaving home. By the end of her first day of waking, she had begun to lose that distant look.
“And before Neunacht, Red? What part of Earth did you emigrate from? Surely you are one of the red peoples—I mean, the Amer-Mongolian race.”
Wanbli smiled. He was hearing many new words from the sleepers, though he hadn’t the energy to ask what they meant.
“We didn’t come from Earth, Vikki. We came from Novare Colony, which didn’t work out. The first elders got together there, and managed to buy the right to Southbay on Neunacht. It’s not far away from here along the strings. If you had the money you could be there in a few ten’ys. And we weren’t then what we’ve since…”
“What about genetic surgery?” she pressed him. “Do you use it?” He pressed her back, physically. “Your eyes and hair, and the—exceptional color of your skin. Did your ancestors have their babies changed?”
Wanbli shrugged. “Didn’t everybody’s, some time or another? I hear there used to be a lot more of”—and he flicked his eyes across the room to where one of the dissidents squatted beside Guillermo’s curled form, seeming to lecture—“them. People like Eddie—though you haven’t met Eddie yet—with no color to speak of. Gamma rays played hell with them and they couldn’t take suns. So they changed.”
She looked warily at his face and hands. “So you might have been white?”
It seemed such a strange thing to say. “So you might have been white.” Meaningless. “I might have been a hoomie, or a dog, but what I actually am is Wanbli Elf Darter. Of the Wacaan.”
Victoria Whistocken’s splendid face went blank and her mouth opened. She touched his arm with significance of manner and rose to her feet, calling, “Garland, Garland. Garland!”
“Lakota!”
Garland Medicine-Bear’s excitement was suppressed into dignity. He sat on a chair in front of Wanbli (for his knees were bad and made squatting painful) and announced in the ceremonial language of the Wacaan, “So it is. You are Sioux.”
Wanbli didn’t mind the attention. He never minded attention, and he was amused by the seriousness with which the group took this identity of language: of names. “I’m sorry, but that can’t be. I am Wacaan. We are ourselves.”
Unmoved, Garland answered. “There are many branches of the Sioux, and all are sacred. That is what the word means: sacred.”
The other sleepers of his group gathered around. Those who called themselves Sioux tended to look complacent. Others tried to appear not to care much. A few of the Baptists glanced over the shoulders of the assemblage, since there was nothing much else to do in the sealed medical pod, but they turned away again. They really didn’t care much.
“Sacred? That’s interesting.” Wanbli resting his fist on his knee and his chin on his fist. “Really presumptuous too, isn’t it?” He glanced at the faces around him, which were smug, portentous or tickled, according to nature. For a moment he wondered if he could work this discovery into an approach to Victoria, who interested him enough to outweigh the effects of a three-day fast and impending doom. But no, Victoria Whistocken had retreated behind the first ranks; she herself was not Sioux. Besides, everything was so public here.
“… and your name—Wanbli—means eagle.”
“Oh, I know that. Named after the clan tattoos.”
Garland growled a laugh. “Named after the great hunting bird, largest predator in the air.”
This was interesting. “Larger than a swan?” He remembered the swan in the travel holo. Of course, such things might be faked…
The Sioux laughed again. “Not like the swan at all.”
Wanbli continued using Old Ang. He really had never been comfortable in Wacaan Ceremonial. “But I wouldn’t put too much… belief in the fact of the language. People can learn any language. Any human language, that is. If they have to, or even just because they like it. And as far as the color of the skin goes—well, I know a man who is as black as the inside of a closed closet and he claims to be of pure Anglo-Something-or-Other blood, which I guess is white with pink eyes.”
There was a laugh from one of the Baptists.
Garland looked almost ready to be offended. “So you don’t believe we are your brothers—ancestors?” The Sioux glanced at their leader and sat up a little straighter.
Wanbli put out his hand. “Everyone of Old Earth was my ancestor, I think. Go back far enough. And every human is related to me now, even the T’chishetti.”
Wanbli fell silent with his jaw open, realizing what he had just said. He had resisted Tawlin’s claim upon him so violently he had dropped his life in its tracks to avoid it, and here he was, admitting something like it in order to resist someone else’s claim.
Here. He had hold of the tail of something. What was it?
He put the thoughts aside and said, “I don’t say these things because of not wanting to be one of you, but because you will be making a mistake if you think there is a likeness which is not there.”
“You are a warrior.” It was not Garland, but Victoria who spoke. (Wanbli had, of course, been spinning yarns to the woman.)
“I’m… I was… a bodyguard. Then an actor. Then…” He didn’t want to go on.
Garland Medicine-Bear grinned. “And you don’t call yourself a warrior? The life you learn and live; isn’t that a warrior’s life?”
“Oh, the Wacaan call themselves great warriors!” Wanbli dropped his hands in his lap and laughed. “That was what they are all about. That’s what makes them such pushovers.”
Garland cleared his throat. “So now you are disassociating yourself from your own people. You seem to have that habit. But yet I would call you a warrior. The care you take with things. You are alert. You are in control of yourself. You are alone though you are among us. That is perhaps the biggest part of it. You will do for a Sioux.”
“Not Dakota: he’s too skinny,” came the call from Fred Standing-Elk, directed to the room at large. There were giggles and everyone speaking together, very warm and welcoming. Wanbli found it hard
to resist.
He stood up. “The revivalists thought I might make a pretty good crew member too. Now they think I have betrayed them. And there were people on New Benares who thought I would make an actor, and on Poos…
“Well, before that there was a whole clan on Neunacht who had my life planned out for me. And they had most claim…”
He slapped limp arms at his sides. “So. Don’t expect great things out of me. It doesn’t work.” He walked over to where a sleeper of the group called Pan-ethnic Socialists was pinching the skin of the comatose Guillermo with his thumbnail and fingernails and demanding to know the locations of the rest of the edible stores. The tormentor rose when Wanbli came near and went off without a word. Wanbli looked down at the small, sad, drunken crew member and wondered if he might lift him off the cot and use it himself; Guillermo wasn’t feeling anything anyway. And if Edward was to be trusted, they still had most of a day before docking at the Big Ball. Surely someone would wake him up if the revivalists attempted entry. And he was so lethargic.
In the end, he lay down under the cot, without disturbing Guillermo. The floor, at least, wasn’t cold.
Fatigued and light-headed, Wanbli tried to sleep. His brain was moving very fast, he thought, but like a simple engine with the clutch not engaged. If he could harness the various thoughts that spun about him, he would learn something worth knowing.
His betrayals: he had spoken them right out, so that the sleepers would know. So that he would not do the same to them. But at the same time, the secret was kept close inside him, in some airless, lightless place, that he had betrayed no one.
His betrayal of the revivalists was only keeping faith with the humanity of the faces in ranked coffins: with Garland Medicine-Bear and lovely Victoria and even the large, stern-faced Socialist who pinched Guillermo’s fingers. And his break with the… the artists on Poos (Wanbli was finding it harder and harder to use the word “whore,” even to himself) was the result of their misdirection and betrayal of him. And for the sake of the humanity of a young boy. Hopeless.
The Third Eagle Page 22
