Tom Paine Maru - Special Author's Edition

by L. Neil Smith

  She spread her hands. “The question before all of us this morning is whether this catastrophic pattern is inevitable elsewhere, as well.”

  Taking a step toward the pool, she looked disdainfully into the water, unconsciously fingered her bracelet speech-synthesizer, her only article of clothing, as she waited for the background noise to die.

  “We are speaking,” she said, “of evolutionary changes occurring with hyper-rapidity, for the first time under the impetus of the evolving species itself, yet only partially so. And therein lies the tragedy: those involved had no idea whatever of what was happening to them.”

  The killer-whale pivoted on his tail, ribboning around to face the chimpanzee, regarding her with a docile brown eye that belied the ferocity of his teeth. Waves splashed over the edge, darkening the brick flooring. The fastidious female hopped backward, avoiding damp feet.

  “Can this be?” demanded the Orca in a ridiculously shrill voice, “Can something be under control, as you suggest, and yet be out of control?”

  “Understand, friend waterlog,” interrupted a naked human dangling his toes at the pool’s margin. His neatly rolled-up pistol belt lay on the sun-warm tiles beside him. “They thought they were doing something else!”

  Laughter all around. I did not see anything funny.

  Our table was near the water. One ear cocked to the conversation, Howell hopped onto a screen-seated chair. The Lieutenant dug into his breakfast without saying a word, ignoring what was going on. I sat down absently, forgetting my food, trying to make sense of things. I thought about Eleva, wondering if whatever I learned here might help get us home to Vespucci. Next to us, a gorilla played backgammon with an unfamiliar orange-furred alien draped in swollen purple rolls of fat.

  “Quite correct,” this unattractive individual offered through her wrist-talker. “Young Miss Lakebones simply felt that Mr. Flintchip told more amusing stories than any of his rivals. Which, from the typically human viewpoint, automatically made him better husband material. Unless he demonstrated his virility by raping her first, of course.”

  “Cynic! Maybe Mr. Flintchip simply whispered sweeter nothings,” grinned a woman lounging in a suit adjusted to conceal everything but her skin. A huge pair of tinted spectacles perched atop her nose. She had laced her fingers together across her middle, a dozen centimeters too high (or too low) to salvage anything resembling modesty. She was even beginning to sunburn a bit, or was of a naturally red-pigmented subspecies.

  “We’ve gone over this before,” said the orange-purple alien.

  “And we’ll go over it again. The fact that humans evolved language at all refutes the image of our species—of its males, anyway—as inherently brutal, or that rape is instinctive, or that it’s even particularly widespread! Believe me, we wouldn’t be sitting here now discussing it. None of us humans would carry the genes to make that possible!”

  At her feet, a pair of tiny black-haired children braided colored string complexly through their fingers. One of them gave a double flip of her wrists. The pattern changed completely, at which the other child giggled with delight. Children were present everywhere, in fact, human, non-human, many paying rapt attention. Others (in this respect they did not differ from their elders) variously ate, drank from tall, frosted glasses, dozed in the increasingly-hot sun, knitted, cleaned weapons, tanned, played table games alone or with companions. A blond bearded individual mercilessly stropped a huge curve-edged knife on a peculiarly-shaped stone as he listened to the conversation, testing its edge periodically on the fine golden hairs of his heavily-muscled forearms.

  It was utter chaos.

  Worse, I could not tell who was who. The chimpanzee I had taken as the lecturer, who had begun the session in what seemed the middle, had gone back to her table to ponder a chess problem, uttering not another word through the morning. Three meters away, a blonde, blue-eyed girl child with black skin sat on the warm brick tiling. She could have been no more than nine. In one hand, she held a loop-ended stick, in the other, a bottle of liquid, foamy at the top. She wet the loop, extracted it, blew through it, releasing dozens of glistening bubbles wafting on the still air over the pool, shimmering with iridescent color.

  “Back to the point,” the girl dipped into the liquid again. “Prior to this, Blind Nature had conducted evolution through a never-ending series of random mutations, winnowed for viability by environmental stresses. It was an excruciatingly slow, but excruciatingly thorough procedure ...”

  The words sounded odd, delivered across a soft palate, through the merest beginnings of her second set of teeth, She blew again, making more bubbles. “Then, suddenly, folks began selecting themselves—rather, each other—for a narrow list of attributes, without any idea what they were doing, or of the likely consequences.” Producing another impressive stream of bubbles, she subsided to let someone else talk.

  This someone was a large gray dolphin sloshing around in the slanted shallows, delicately nibbling on a rack of freshly-grilled fish.

  “Quite so,” it whistled through its blow-hole while it ate. “Quite so. And yet before we speak to the frequently disastrous consequences of overly-selective processes, it is vital to realize that language, during this period and afterward—is only secondarily a medium of communication. It was and is vastly more important as the substance of rational thought, software for the mind, as will be the case wherever we—”

  “There he goes again!” laughed a chimpanzee behind me. She waved a long cigarette-holder at the porpoise. “Needlessly belaboring the obvious!”

  It was not that obvious to me. If speech is not primarily a means of communication, then in Hamilton’s name, could it be what they said it is? Brain software? I leaned to whisper this question to Howell. Before I could, the Lieutenant grumbled, “So this is what you dragged me out of bed for, a midshipman squat-session at eight o’clock in the morning!”

  The fellow sharpening the knife strode to the pool’s edge, He was younger than I had taken him for, angrier, somehow. “Norris,” he growled a sketchy introduction, “Just off the Peter LaNague, fresh from Obsidia!” He pointed the blade at his ankle, thickly bound in gray-silver. “I’ll be disabled for two weeks because speech on that rotten mudball is neither communication nor thought!” He stood, the huge double-edged dagger in one hand, the odd Y-shaped stone in the other, feet spread in a combat-stance, daring anyone to contradict him.

  The gorilla with her arm in that familiar-looking sling lounged beside the pool in a long reclining chair across from young Norris, “I got this day before yesterday, Charlie, just practicing for Sodde Lydfe.”

  For some reason, laughter rippled through the crowd. Somebody at a nearby table murmured something about “roller skates”. Another said, “Clumsy!”

  “I heard that!” I think the injured simian would have stamped her foot, had she not been lying down. “You ever try rappelling down a cactus-covered sand-mountain? Or diving in water so salt-saturated you need a hundred pounds of weight to keep you down? The whole planet is like that, and the operations we’ve planned are a lot more complex than anything we’ll be doing on Obsidia the next few days. Sure it’s a primitive world. There are lots of them, precisely because almost none have discovered the ‘obvious’ facts that this class is supposed to cover.”

  Norris nodded grudgingly, then turned to sit where he had been, but never stopped honing his knife, I wondered what would be left of it by the time we reached this “Obsidia” that he had spoken of so bitterly.

  Now that it had been called to my attention, quite a few of those present were recovering in various stages from injury or disease. One person, a dark brown man with black, tight-knitted hair I had first mistaken for a cap, was covered with greenish blotches of some exotic infection. He lay in the “sun”, soaking up energy as if it were a cure. Perhaps it was. In addition to casts or splints on every kind of limb possessed by these highly-varied beings, some wore flat bandages, eye-patches, back-packs, all constructed of the same basic
smartsuit material. I wondered about the backpacks—then made myself stop. They would be an excellent place to carry an artificial heart or liver.

  As before, the Lieutenant paid no attention to any of what was going on, but went back to his breakfast as mine grew cold while I gawked.

  There was plenty to gawk at.

  “Howell,” I whispered at the coyote, “I thought that all of your Confederate ships were named ‘Tom-’ or ‘Bob-’ something, ‘Maru’. That means ‘ship’, somebody told me. Now Norris says he is from ‘Peter LaNague’—”

  “‘Maru’ is Japanese,” said the coyote, “one of many languages of Earth.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but—”

  He interrupted me. “The universe that we live in is vaster than most individuals know, my young friend. It is vaster than they can know, ever. Not only is space itself infinite (or as near to infinite as makes no difference), so is time, you see. And in more ways than one.”

  “You are saying that there’s more than one kind of time?”

  “I cannot explain all of this at once, Whitey. I wish I could. But we have three fleets, altogether. Tom Paine Maru, Tom Edison Maru, and others of what we term ‘Tomfleet’, operate in one kind of space. Bob Shea Maru, Bob Wilson Maru, and all the other ‘Bobs’, operate in another kind of space, which is nearly identical, but separated from the first by a kind of time. A different kind of time than ... well, you lack the basic vocabulary, I’m afraid.” He paused as if in thought.

  “Peter LaNague is part of a ranger fleet that traverses the distance—or rather, the difference—between the two kinds of space.”

  “I see,” I lied.

  “You don’t,” Howell corrected cheerfully, “but you shall, with due effort.”

  He returned his attention to the larger conversation, still going strong. Something about “birth trauma”, evolutionary cul-de-sacs. At least that is what it sounded like. We were not alone in having our own private colloquium. There seemed to be no rules, no discipline, no leaders. If it was indeed a “class”, it was the strangest I had ever attended.

  Everywhere small knots of people spoke quietly among themselves, seeming not to disturb others. In a corner near the pool, on a stretch of thick grass, a pair of human males sparred—some sort of karate—trading blows, grappling, stopping to contribute to the class discussion.

  Madness.

  “Right!” spoke an all-too-familiar voice, replying to the injured gorilla’s comment about ‘obvious’ facts. Lucille said, “We’ve wandered off the subject. I was born on Earth, where this problem started. My mother was one of the Healers who had to deal with it when cross-time immigration began. My dad was an immigrant, fleeing a government fully as nasty as our Vespuccian ‘guests’ over there represent. Dad was a sort of pragmatic praxeologist who, for some strange reason was never afflicted—”

  “It’s you who’re wandering now, my dear,” said Howell politely. “And I believe that I, of all beings here, may speak to the subject of genetic predisposition with the greatest authority, having borrowed civilization from the human race, as have all you simians, without paying the evolutionary price. The origins of cetacean culture are lost in the mists of an antiquity so ancient as to be irrevocably untraceable.”

  He climbed from the chair seat to the tabletop.

  “The real conundrum before us is: will a different evolutionary history, that of the Sodde Lydfens, engender a markedly different attitude toward authority? Will a different physical placement of the generative organs—at the opposite end of the body from those of elimination—have a salutary effect on their view of procreation? Most importantly, how will a broader birth-channel affect their fundamental psychology? Not to speak of their rather novel number of sexes ...”

  -4-

  It went on a full six hours, until noon, people arguing, joking, debating points I could not comprehend. We had breakfast, lunch, and something called “tea” that was more than something to drink. Now and again someone with no reason to know would announce news of this or that expedition to this or that planet. Occasionally scores were given for games called baseball, hockey, fencing, and metallic silhouette. I estimated that I understood an average of one word in ten, At last the session began to break up—perhaps “melt away” was a more accurate term. Increasingly fewer sat around the pool or were interested in the talk.

  Abruptly, the blue-eyed child with the bubble-pipe jumped up to run in our direction. Without prelude, she threw both her arms around Howell’s furry neck, then unhesitatingly kissed the coyote on the muzzle.

  She looked and sounded normal until she said, “I gotta go now! Koko promised t’show me some United Statesian video flatties of Carl Sagan, for the History of Xenopsych lecture I hafta give tomorrow morning.”

  The coyote nodded, once he had been released, used his right front paw to poke a lock of the little girl’s golden hair back into place. “That should be amusing, my dear. I believe I’ve seen those old tapes, myself, I needn’t caution you not to take the fellow too seriously, Mowgli?”

  “Aw, Daddy, please don’t call me that!” The little girl blushed. “Anyway, Carl Sagan was practically a Kilroy, himself, wouldn’t you say?”

  Howell gave his odd laugh. “A few decades before the fact, and in a galaxy far, far away. It’s a state of mind, sweetheart. See you at dinner.”

  She picked up her toys, said goodbye, ran full pitch away from the pool. He turned to us, pride in his electric voice, “Elsie, gentlemen, my daughter. She’s the only xenopsychology student on our praxeology staff. Until lately, it was a discipline in search of subject matter. Now she finds herself the resident expert at a time of crisis, I’m afraid.” He nipped at a knot in his fur. “Well, would you like to see something else, stir up the circulation a bit, perhaps think about a meal?”

  “It will amount to nearly the only thing I shall have gained from an otherwise wasted morning,” complained the Lieutenant. But he rose, following the child down the path with a confused expression on his face.

  “Howell,” I asked diffidently, as we left the brick-floored clearing for the deep woods again, “there is one thing you could explain ...”

  He laughed. “Surely not that Elsie is adopted ... ?”

  “No.” I admitted how little of the morning’s intellectual exercise I had understood, He assured me once again that, in time, all would become crystal clear. I had not believed it the first time he had said it.

  “But Howell, I am most embarrassed to confess that I do not even know who the teacher at this morning’s session was supposed to have been!”

  The coyote stopped on the path, looking up at me. “Whitey, the principle focus this morning was on you—and the Lieutenant, of course.”

  “On us?”

  “And you did perfectly splendidly. Take my word for it!”

  nobody hears the mandolar

  It is one thing to look at water, to appreciate the miracle of it, to sit on a bank dangling your feet luxuriously as it slips between your toes. It is quite another to ride on top the stuff, piled dozens—hundreds—of times higher than your head, grimly pretending you are enjoying yourself. In that respect, I shared the prejudices of chimpanzees.

  “Wahoo!” a voice from somewhere shouted, as a curved, glistening, transparent wall of liquid threw itself against our boat, trying to overturn it. Overhead, a great white bird made noises like a rusty hinge.

  “I knew you’d like this, Whitey!” said the same voice.

  “Ulp!” I answered politely, giving the voice a sickly smile.

  The wave passed—the water-wave, not the wave of nausea it had provoked—depositing cold salt spray down the neck of my borrowed nautical jacket. Koko Featherstone-Haugh, my sailing-companion for the afternoon, worked mysteries upon a bunch of ropes, then hollered at me to duck! The spar at the bottom of the sail swung suddenly around, just brushing the top of my head with only a hint of its potential for destruction.

  The boat pitched over in the opposite di
rection.

  As did my stomach. I threw up.