At this Garland Medicine-Bear heaved himself off the wall, his face blotched with anger. “No danger? No, you were just going to murder us in our sleep!”
There was a moment’s silence. “You can’t be expected to understand, but we simply haven’t the resources to take care of every sleeper. There are tens of thousands of you. Of us.”
“There are tens of thousands of habitable planets, you smug bodysnatcher!”
This time Khafiya had an immediate answer. “Not in this quadrant. And not on the strings, there aren’t. And the price for transport is something you don’t understand.”
Garland smashed his fist into the wall beside the speaker, deforming it. “I don’t understand! I don’t? Well, let me tell you, lady, I organized a colony ship! Do you think I don’t know about finance? Do you think I don’t know about compromise? I weighed and saved and scrimped and compromised till my jaws hurt!”
“Your ship shows it,” answered Khafiya with a touch of rancor.
“You’re not sounding much like a savage,” interjected Wanbli in Wacaan.
Garland thumped the wall again and turned away. There was Frederic Standing-Elk standing before him, holding a breadstick under Garland’s nose like a club. Garland took it.
Khafiya was oblivious to the assault upon the metal wall, and to the rejection. She continued: “Our society is tiny, and cannot absorb over fifty new people without breaking down. Nor can we drop you somewhere without losing the tolerance of the planet governments—tolerance we depend on. And without us, there will be no more reclaiming of sleeper ships, because no one else in the whole galaxy cares. That’s thousands of lives, thousands of dead hopes—because as long as one member from a crew is saved, the journey was not entirely in vain.”
“Not so,” answered Wanbli, though she had not been talking to him. “You may pump up a few warm bodies, but the hopes—no. You never wanted to be ship people. Your own hopes are dead.”
“We did fine until you came along.”
Wanbli smiled and scratched his Third Eagle. “Not true. You’re so down about things you don’t even dare have children; that’s not doing fine in any world I know. And you got no sun. No light. No warmth, not even in your spirits. But you might do fine now that I have dropped in. I know the answer to everything.” He paused, knowing how obnoxious that sounded.
“Call a meeting. Let me talk.”
Wanbli entered the Big Ball for the first time chewing on something stringy and gray; he was not sure it had been cooked. But for his small involvement with this culinary question, the march to the Greater Assembly Room might have been more dramatic. There were guns pointed at him. Captain Brezhner behaved himself befittingly as hostage in chief; he stood very tall and looked to neither side. Garland Medicine-Bear, with his stolen pistol in the Captain’s back, also kept an appropriately solemn demeanor. It was Edward Pierce who ruined the effect, for he would neither open his eyes nor stand up straight, and he kept muttering to himself. He was neither seeing nor hearing what was around him.
Wanbli was not oblivious to the guns, but he had seen so much of guns lately, and the food he had grabbed in the kitchen, whether uncooked or merely unappetizing, had stuck in shreds between his teeth. He danced from foot to foot to keep awake, and he noticed certain things as he went by.
—The Ball was much more comfortably built than the Condor. The halls were wide and they did not echo.
—Men and women were blinking roundly at him from doorways, like so many toads in their holes. They were frightened, not furious.
—Khafiya. Coordinator Khafiya looked just as she had the night she had slept in the crook of Wanbli’s arm, and he was certain that she was ready to kill him. That was curious. That was remarkable. In an odd way, it was Wacaan.
—It was a long way to the Greater Assembly Room.
There were almost two dozen people from the Commitment in the march, each with a prisoner. All but two were Garland’s people. The rest of the sleepers had been left in possession of the Condor.
Entering the assembly room, they made a semicircle at one carpeted end: an area which was big enough to dwarf the company. Forty others followed in wary procession. An equal number of revivalists were waiting, standing against the walls.
There was a chandelier, with crystal. Wanbli found that too quite remarkable. Good hall for a dance.
Khafiya preceded them to the proscenium end of the hall.
“Don’t touch that switch,” called Wanbli in sudden suspicion.
She glared her irritation, but her hand stopped in the air. “It brings the seats up,” she said.
“I’ll bet it does. Half of us are standing where the seats will come up, aren’t we?”
The Coordinator didn’t reply. Wanbli hopped up onto the dais beside her, his own gun at the ready. “Yes, we are, my sweetie. Did you think you could pull that without a number of hostages getting burnt?
“Or maybe you don’t care. You flyers are so damn worried about the number of mouths you have to feed that maybe you’d welcome a big accident that left half of you dead. In fact, if you were all dead, you’d have no problems at all, would you?”
“Asshole.” She spoke with feeling.
“Get away from the switch,” answered Wanbli levelly.
They said he was being projected all through the Ball Wanbli had no way of judging whether they had lied to him or not. He looked at the wall-built cameras and down again to the unfriendly faces ringed around him. He decided that it only made sense to talk directly to the people he could see.
He stepped backward, trying to meet as many eyes as possible. “Listen!” he began. “You think we’re here to bargain, don’t you?”
“You don’t have to shout.” It was Khafiya. “The acoustics are fine.”
Wanbli ignored her. “You think we’re here to bargain our lives for those of our prisoners, don’t you?”
None of the dozens of revivalists answered this. They would not even give him that much, thought Wanbli, and he felt sweat prickle. He started again.
“And twenty-three prisoners, including a ship captain, do make a strong bargaining position, don’t they?”
This was greeted by a rumble, neither assent nor dissent, but more like the growling of dogs. With a great sigh, Edward Pierce settled down onto the floor, legs spread out, and he covered his face with his arms.
“Delia,” he said once more, with no particular emotion.
Wanbli stepped over to him. He ruffled the smooth blond hair.
“Well, that’s not what we’re doing here. We’re not bargaining for our lives. We’re offering you your own lives.”
The rumble grew.
“As you meant them to be. What you lost when you woke up and found you’d been on your way to nowhere.”
Now the rumble was unmistakably angry.
“Your Eddie is really sick,” whispered Victoria in Wacaan.
“I know,” Wanbli murmured back.
“Who is Delia?”
Wanbli shook his head and shrugged. “We shouldn’t have put them in the sleeper crates. Coffins. With them especially,” he said.
Wanbli wiped a hand over his mouth and cleared his mind of the problems of Edward Pierce.
Again he shouted. “I know there isn’t a one of you who would choose this life. Who did choose this life, in fact. Every single sleeper wanted to wake up on a world with air. And soil. With a sun.”
“That was then. This is now.” The words were hurled from the audience. They had the ring of a proverb, though it wasn’t one Wanbli had heard before. They sounded tired.
Wanbli shifted from foot to foot. He wished he could make eye contact with whoever it was who had spoken. “And now you could join the truckers, if you really have given up. The Guild can use any intelligent person who doesn’t lose his runners when too long off-planet. One who doesn’t need a home. Hey, the Guild is rich. Nobody weighs out the food they eat. If you flyers were really content with string-ways life, you’d have all gon
e for Guild members.”
“Some do.” It was Khafiya again. “But the rest of us have a purpose here. We’re revivalists. We don’t do it for profit.”
Victoria Whistocken left Edward collapsed on the floor. Coordinator Khafiya backed two steps from the red woman’s outrage. “I don’t think much of your purpose: killing ten people and allowing one to live and patting yourselves on the back. The purpose of the fox in the henhouse, that’s what it is.”
Wanbli reached out his hand and touched Victoria on the shoulder very lightly. He stepped in between the woman he had made love to and the woman he wanted to make love to.
“If you had a planet, Coordinator, wouldn’t you rather live on it?”
Khafiya kept her eyes on Victoria as she replied. “Yes, I’d rather live on a planet. An Earth-type planet. But not at the expense of forgetting the sleeper ships. That’s a duty.”
Garland spoke for the first time. “Killing people is a duty?”
Captain Brezhner took that moment to aim a two-handed punch—more of a slap, really—at the Sioux’s face. Garland Medicine-Bear swept the Captain’s feet out from under him and put him down on his stomach. Coordinator Khafiya moved forward, but a warning glance from Wanbli sent her back. “Sleepers—oh hell, you don’t understand. You can’t understand.”
“I understand. We’re dead. We’re all dead!”
Edward was standing. When he fell again Wanbli caught him, knowing how helpless he was with the crazy man in his arms. He locked eyes with Khafiya.
“We didn’t do this to Eddie on purpose. I want you to know that. We just stuffed them all into the coffins to get them out of the way. For just a few minutes.”
For the first time the Coordinator’s expression thawed a little. “Edward has always… had trouble adjusting.”
“Yeah. Well, I think I understand them. I was at your meeting, remember? I like Eddie.”
Khafiya went cold again. “Then it is surprising how much damage you have done to his life these last few days, Red. You are very hard on people who try to be your friends.”
Once, thought Wanbli, that remark would have stung. Only a few days before…
“And you, whatever your name is. We don’t kill anyone. We only decline to revive more than we can support. Is that our fault? No one else tries at all.”
Garland was sitting on Captain Brezhner’s back, holding the man in a hammerlock. The strong planes of his face hid anger well. “Why don’t you just leave us alone, then? To land where we had planned to land, or to fail. That’s better than being hauled in and used for… fertilizer or spare parts!”
Khafiya shot a glance or recrimination at Wanbli, for betraying the subject of the Condor’s private meeting. “To come crashing down on someone’s city? That has happened before now. And besides—your revival systems were inoperative. You were only going nowhere, dead in a state of perfect preservation.”
Garland cleared his throat loudly, as though he were about to spit. “I’ll tell you this, lady. I’ve been in sleep for three hundred years and more, and in all that time I was not dead. I am alive now, and if I lie down in one of those coffins again and let my core temperature down to nothing at all, I still won’t be dead. Not half as dead as this poor sucker you’ve worked so hard to convince that life is death that five minutes in a harmless box blew his mind out.”
“I don’t agree,” Khafiya began, but Wanbli put up his hands.
“Please, Khafee. Garland. It doesn’t matter now. What matters is that I can take us all home.”
This statement was greeted by silence, and then everyone in the room breathed together.
“Home!” The air filled with Edward Pierce’s hopeless, animal wail. Then he said, very calmly and distinctly, “We have no home.”
“What do you mean, home?”
“A planet, of course.” Wanbli took a long breath. He hadn’t been sure he would be allowed to get this far. “A habitable planet with one sun, two moons and more stars at night than you would want to count. It’s not empty—not the blank page you originally hoped for when you left Earth—but we all found that the blank page gets written on very fast.
“It has room for another two hundred people, or two thousand or twenty thousand.”
“Your own home planet, Red?” Khafiya lounged against the wall, distrust in her every angle.
Wanbli nodded. Khafiya’s expression went more and more sour. “You damned con man. Neunacht is one of the most closed of closed worlds. Don’t you think we know about things like that? You’ve got no immigration and the strictest birth control of any planet on the books.”
Wanbli did not know what the Old Ang expression “con man” meant, but he kept nodding. “All true. We’ve been closed for years. Because we’re a very poor planet. Low in minerals. Slow trade. But Neunacht would welcome you flyers. Hey, we’d throw a dance to welcome you, because you’ve got exactly what we need. And what we’re not going to have without you.”
“And what’s that?”
Wanbli stamped his bare foot. “This. The Ball. A string station.”
The silence was immense, and to Wanbli, heartening.
When the man opened his mouth, Wanbli recognized the voice as that of DeLorca, the captain of the White Cockade. He was dark, and of a slighter build than Wanbli would have guessed. He walked composedly over to Coordinator Khafiya and sat down on the carpet.
This man had confidence, Wanbli decided. He had swagger.
“Release your prisoners and we’ll talk about it.”
Garland Medicine-Bear growled. Crouched by the prone form of the Condor captain, he showed self-assurance of a different kind. Wanbli had only seen pictures of bears, but he could well imagine one in Garland. “Release them with what guarantees?”
Brezhner exploded from the ground. “Guarantees! You had guarantees! We guaranteed the lives of you and your sleepers back there, and you chose to attack instead. How many of my men did you kill, you bastard?”
Garland sat still. “One. That’s half the number of my people your guns took out. We had no guns, remember?”
DeLorca spoke. “You have them now, sir.”
Now Garland rose. “My name is Medicine-Bear. Garland Medicine-Bear. Of the Black Hills of South Dakota.”
DeLorca rubbed his hand over a heavy growth of beard stubble. “Impressive. I am Augustin Patros DeLorca. Once of the broad pampas, but now of the narrower string-ways. I am, like Captain Brezhner, captain of a ship.
“We were talking about release of prisoners.”
“Don’t give them anything!” Brezhner stood again with his bound hands extended in front of him. The heat of his rage had driven the twine deep into the skin.
“We’ll release every prisoner in exchange for a promise of safe release of everyone from the Commitment. And of course, of the Eagle too.”
“The Eagle?” Khafiya glanced from Garland to Wanbli distrustfully.
“His name is Eagle Elf Darter of the Sacred People,” said Garland to Khafiya. With a sly shift of his eyes he added, “Though I admit I don’t know what an Elf Darter is, the rest fits him very well.”
“You will embarrass me terribly,” said Wanbli to the man in Wacaan.
“Another tall tale, Red?”
With a touch of his old smirk, Wanbli said, “You can’t have thought my own people called me Red, did you? I mean, we are all very much the same shade.”
“I don’t know or care what they called you.”
DeLorca cut her off with a look. “You’re asking a lot from us, Medicine-Bear of the Black Hills. This man has done more to damage our society than any in our history.”
“He has exposed your hypocrisy, you mean. Usually there is no one to stand up for your victims.”
“Except poor Eddie maybe.” Edward Pierce looked up at the sound of Wanbli’s voice. “Eddie does his little bit, don’t you?” Wanbli gave him a neighborly thump with his foot: one that rocked the pale man back and forth.
“Hey, Eddie. Who’s
Delia?”
Edward Pierce looked only at the bare feet. “Delia… was my wife.”
“And they didn’t wake her up?”
He didn’t answer. Wanbli glanced at Khafiya, who did not look at Edward or at Wanbli. “Nobody knew. Usually married couples will have some sort of sign of it on the box.”
Wanbli thought about this. “And do you usually wake both of them. Or neither?”
“Neither.” Khafiya looked past him.
Wambli sighed, and again he raised his voice. “I don’t want any guarantees for myself. Guarantees are nothing. What I want is a lot more out of you. I want you all with me. For Neunacht. For the Wacaan.”
“Not terribly likely,” said DeLorca.
“You’re a great one to be talking for your people, aren’t you?” said Khafiya. “You ran out on them.”
Wanbli nodded. “Yeah. I know. But I’m what they got. Now. I’m the one who happens to be in the place and time with the idea. It works that way sometimes.
“Release the prisoners.”
Garland stood up. “Now? They’re going to have to give in sooner or later…”
“Untie them.” Wanbli looked into the Sioux’s face and realized that he could not make it an order. “Please. Your people are safe, and I… I need more than bargaining can give. I want more. I want everything in sight.”
Wordlessly, the Indians backed away from their prisoners. Henry Larssen also dropped his captive—rather roughly, because he was never happy to be ordered about by Garland Medicine-Bear. It was Greta, whom Wanbli still thought of as one of his old drinking buddies, who came forward with a small knife to cut the cords.
“So you think you can turn an antique and obsolete colony ship into a commercial string station that would serve the needs of an entire planet?” DeLorca seemed to find the idea humorous, but Wanbli decided he was the sort who would pretend to, till the last. “If that was commercially feasible, bidding on our salvages would be a lot more sprightly.”
“It’s feasible if a place is desperate enough. Neunacht can’t start all over again playing on a turnkey, ready-built station. We already blew our wad. And the Ball would handle our immediate need without much alteration. It’s a thousand percent better than what we’ve got, which is nothing. You can berth four ships now. More docks and seals can be added. Once we have the big frame itself…”
The Third Eagle Page 25
