“What a decrepit piece of trash,” Rakil muttered when he and Lank got their first look at the vessel which they were scheduled to board. “I sure hope she’s safe in space.”
The Marta did look like it had been through a war, or another type of a major disaster.
“The Port Authorities have certified it safe for travel,” said Lank, smiling. “The Lamanian Port Authorities are reputed to be incorruptible, so I don’t worry about safety. However, it’s probably cramped and inconvenient inside, so this trip isn’t going to be much fun. Probably all the owner’s funds are going into keeping her space-worthy.”
“This leg of the trip wouldn’t be much fun on the fanciest vessel in the Space Lanes,” Rakil muttered. “Not when we’re making like penniless space hoboes, picking up whatever transportation we can, for whatever work the Captain might have for us. If you’re lucky they’ll have you mopping the galley, maybe chopping up the salad greens—assuming that they feed the crew salad. Me, I’ll be doing physical labour in the cargo hold, count on it.”
“The Borhquan ape with the strong back, no?” Lank asked, his grin crooked.
“Yeah. The Captain isn’t going to query after my intelligence scores—nor yours.” Rakil shifted his pack of belongings on to his other shoulder. “Even though between the two of us we’d probably have the whole crew beat.”
“We’ll practise our entertainment routine on this bunch, at the end of the ship days,” Lank said cheerfully. “Likely what works with them will work on Vultaire.”
“Good point. That Morhinghy couple weren’t the brightest lights in the universe either.”
*****
In the end their luck was better than expected. When Captain Gannon introduced them to the rest of Marta’s small crew, the vessel’s Engineer, a young man who looked like the smartest crewmember, and was no doubt the reason why the Marta had a good safety record, eyed the newcomers critically and turned to his Captain.
“I realize that Manny will want the Borhquan with him in Cargo, but can I have the youngster with me in the Engines?” he asked. “He looks like he’s got a half-a-brain. I don’t usually want any short term hires with me, since it can take days for them to figure out how this tub gets from Port to Port, but these guys look a cut above the usual dorks that you foist on us.”
“Sure, if you think he’ll make your life in the Engines easier during the week that he’s with us, go right ahead and take him there,” Captain Gannon replied, not reacting to the jibes. “Linny can mop the galley floor herself, like always.”
“Doesn’t bother me none,” said Linny, a raven-haired, slim woman who would have been fetching if one side of her face had not been badly scarred.
Rakil wondered what had happened to her, and why nothing had been done about the scars. Had she chosen to stay in The Second City, the Social Services would have sent her to a Healing Centre to be administered to by a trained healer, a Shelonian Healer, if necessary, but, for whatever reason, she was working on a decrepit Trader Ship with nothing in the way of medical facilities.
“And yes, I can use the big shoulders of the Borhquan,” said Manny. “And if these newcomers will drop off their packs in the cabin assigned to them, maybe he can begin his ship board work life by helping me get our cargo stowed for the trip. Then, Captain, you and Flex can fly this old bird to our next stop.”
Flex, the Engineer, and Manny showed Rakil and Lank their claustrophobic quarters, where they dropped their packs on the bunks. Flex, then, took Lank to Engineering, and Rakil followed Manny into the hold, which at the moment was a mess of crates and boxes of all sizes, though not even close to full.
“We usually bring more stuff here than we pick up,” Manny said to explain the extra space. “This time we’re going to make a quick stop at the Space Station above Shelonia, to fill up with their clever gadgets and electronics; we never have any trouble trading them at profit. But we have to arrange the wares that we already have in such a manner that we can get to them when we need to drop them off.”
He showed Rakil the inventory list which was stored on “a clever Shelonian gadget” with which Rakil happened to be familiar, having been entrusted with his Tree Family’s Procurement of Requirements function during one unbelievably boring year. He thought back to that year now with a shake of his head. Who would have known that that particular experience would come useful, as soon as he had left Borhq for the wider galaxy?
*****
During the week that Rakil and Lank spent on the Marta, Lank learned a lot about the engines of old trading ships. Actually, the engines of the Marta were not old; Captain Gannon had the shrewdness to pour money into his vessel’s most important part, even though he tended to neglect aspects which he judged to be merely cosmetic.
“You can’t expect a baby like this to do what we expect of her, unless we treat her right,” Flex would say, patting the gleaming exterior of the console that contained the mechanical heart of the ship.
He showed Lank how to check all the connections which fed the power that the engine generated, into the ship’s systems, and explained to him the principles by which the whole operated. To his own surprise, Lank found that he was fascinated by the topic, and asked dozens of questions to clarify matters whenever Flex broached subjects with which he had no familiarity. He discovered that he had the ability to understand how the space-going vessels made their way across the vast distances which they covered in paradoxically short intervals.
“You’ve got the mind for space ship engineering,” Flex told him one day. “Not everybody does. Most people don’t, as a matter-of-fact. When I heard that you were a musician from Tarangay, I thought that I’d check out your abilities. Musicians sometimes have an affinity for space-travel engineering.”
He grinned broadly at Lank.
“Now you know that if the music business gets bad you can always apprentice to a Ship Engineer, or talk yourself into the Engineering School on Shelonia—they’re always looking for promising young prospects.”
“It’s good to have options,” Lank agreed.
“What the hell are you and your Borhquan buddy going to Vultaire for anyway?” Flex asked then. “Nobody goes there voluntarily.”
“It’s all very hush, hush,” Lank said quietly. “About all I can tell you is that we’re meeting a couple of people there to investigate something. We’ll be working undercover, so I can’t say anything more.”
“Ah, so someone has finally taken note of the shit that’s been going on there,” Flex said. “About time; I never could figure out why the Federation’s been turning a blind eye on all the violations of their rules.”
Lank straightened up, and stared at Flex.
“So there are violations going on?” he queried. “And people like you know about them?”
“We stop there regularly, although we don’t have much this time for them, just some Shelonian electronics. We wouldn’t have bothered with those, either, if we weren’t dropping you and Rakil off, but they do give us an excuse for the stop. Usually they get shipments from the Fringe Worlds, and send stuff back to them. Once we took a cadre of Klensers, you know, those people who can transmute pollutants into harmless substances with their bodies, to a Fringe World—don’t remember the name of it off-hand—but Captain Gannon doesn’t like to carry passengers because we don’t have the facilities for them. The Exalted dork who paid the passage said it didn’t matter; those people could be accommodated in the hold as long as we could provide a toilet and rations, but after that one experience, the Captain said: never again. It was just too cruel to those poor bastards, cooping them up in the hold for two weeks, with no proper facilities. Manny hated it too; he’s used to dealing with things, not people, and I don’t care what the Exalted Vultairians say, those Klensers were people, just like you and me.”
Rakil growled when Lank told him Flex’s tale.
“I’ll see if I can get Manny to talk about it,” he said.
He had worked his way into Man
ny’s good books by making use of his Borhquan experience. He had reorganized Manny’s inventory system according to the principles that his Aunt had taught him in the storage quarters of the Tree Family. He had changed the arrangement of the hold contents so that it was easier to use the little forklift with which Manny moved larger crates, thereby eliminating some back-breaking manual labour. Whereas Flex had impressed Lank with his cleverness, Rakil had found himself awed by Manny’s very lack of the same. The Cargo Master somehow managed to handle the ship’s intake and outgo of cargo adequately in spite of the fact that he seemed to be, very simply, stupid. He had been doing things the way he had learned to do them when he had first hired on to Marta, never thinking to change or improve anything. He was genuinely delighted that Rakil’s improvements noticeably bettered his working conditions.
“It has me wondering,” Rakil said to Lank one night when they were exchanging impressions about their shipmates, “whether he’ll just go back to the old ways as soon as we’re off this tub.”
“You’d think his node would help him remember,” Lank objected.
“You’d think. I’d wonder whether he has one, if it wasn’t for the fact that I can see the implant beneath his ear.”
Thus, he was not particularly surprised when Manny had little to say about the Klensers that had ridden in the ship’s hold during one trip.
“I didn’t like it,” Manny said, “and I told the Captain as much. There were about twenty people and the only toilet is the one that’s here for our use. And there’s no shower so the crew had to allow them to use our showers, just to keep the smell from getting horrible. Apparently the Klensers can keep themselves clean without facilities, but the Exalted Vultairians didn’t want them wasting their energies doing that on the ship, because they wanted them to be ready to work as soon as they got to where they were going. Their food was the rations that the Vultairians sent with them, that tasteless paste in tubes which provides what your body needs but is otherwise horrible.”
“Did someone come with them to supervise?” Rakil asked Manny.
Manny shook his head.
“No. They were just cargo, and we hauled them, and turned them to the people who were waiting for them on that Fringe Planet. They seemed to be used to that, didn’t fight it, or anything.”
Manny finished his explanation with a shrug. “The Captain said afterwards that he’d never carry that kind of cargo again. He said it creeped him out, and we didn’t need the premium the Vultairians paid, badly enough.”
*****
During the ship evenings, Rakil and Lank brought out their musical and juggling paraphernalia into the common room where the crewmembers gathered in their off hours. Lank played the flute while Rakil juggled and recited Borhquan poetry. When Rakil began to drop the balls too often, Lank put his flute away and handed a small drum to him. He had taught Rakil to play it, simple beats at first, but with time, he said, he expected Rakil to get better, and to manage more complex rhythms. Even the simple beats provided an adequate accompaniment to the Tarangay sing-along songs that Lank chose for this part of the show, lusty chants that had been popular in the ocean side bars of the islands of the Long Archipelago where he had lived for the first fifteen years of his life.
He had known the bars well, even though it was not really acceptable on Tarangay for a child to spend time in drinking establishments. His mother had been a prostitute who picked up customers in the bars, and, having had no-one with whom to leave the boy, had brought him with her. The bar staffers had pitied the child, and had usually kept him there when his mother left with a customer. Many of these workers had been genuinely concerned; they had seen that the boy was a bright child even though his father was a mystery, and his mother, terribly damaged. There was always music in the bars of Tarangay and it had been a middle-aged flautist who had gifted Lank with a flute and had taught him to play it. Lank remembered the lessons with pleasure, and the care and kindness that the flautist had shown him, with amazement. It was this musician who had suggested that Lank ship out into the Space Lanes, from Tarangay’s single, tiny Space Port, after his mother had been murdered by one of her customers.
“You can always make a living with your music along the Space Lanes,” the flautist had told the boy who had been in emotional knots with anger and grief. “I know because I spent a good number of years doing it myself. There are always ears for music, and Tarangay sing-along songs were a great hit with the people I introduced them to. And you need to get away, my boy; you’re going to fall apart and end up a mess if you stay here, wanting vengeance for your mother’s fate. The local authorities don’t care a rat’s ass about a dead whore, but if you take out the guy who killed her, they’ll be sure to come after you.”
Lank had agreed that the musician had the right of it, and had allowed him to use his connections to find a ship that would take him on if he worked as crew during the dayshift, and played music in the evenings. The ship had been nicer than the Marta, but he had been stuck working in the galley with the cook. Still, the work had kept him busy, and what with entertaining the crew in the evenings, he had not had much time to think about his past. When, several months later the vessel had set down on Lamania, the cook had kindly told him to grab the opportunity to stay in The Second City. It was the best place in the Star Federation for a Wilder to alight, the cook had told him; he would be housed, fed, and implanted with a translation node, all with no demand of payment. The Lamanians assumed that people wanted to contribute to society once they were a part of it, and only asked of each person that he spend two days out of a six-day week doing necessary work.
Lank had packed his meagre possessions, including his flute, and had left the ship, showing up at the Transient Quarters, requesting housing, only hours later. The matter-of-fact way in which he was accepted into the life of The Second City had awed him. In his case the lackadaisical attitude that Caryn r’pa Voris and Londes r’pa Fortes had had towards their responsibilities, had actually contributed to his comfort; nobody had queried after his Tarangay biography, or asked about his connections there. No-one had pitied him as a whore’s son; nobody had known, or cared. He had delighted in the opportunities The Second City had offered him. And now he had become a member of an important investigative team, on his way to another world. He had made some amazing friends, and he was teaching the ropes of entertaining to one of them, a man several years older than he was. And Flex had told him that he could be a Space Ship Engineer if he wanted to, that he had what that took! Lank’s cup was full, and he was a cheerful lad during the trip on Marta, never mind that the vessel was a tub.
“Lad, you’re going to have to put on a longer face if you want the Vultairians to believe that you left the Marta in a huff,” Captain Gannon said to him the day the ship put down on Vultaire.
“Yeah, I guess I better get my acting chops ready, like my friend Kati would say,” Lank agreed with a laugh. “I guess I better go and collect my belongings, and see if I can’t get the proper expression on my face while I do that.”
He had already said his farewells to Flex who had wished him all the best in his endeavours, and had warned him not to trust the people in Port City.
“Vultaire’s a snake pit,” Flex had said with a shake of his head. “Even the off-worlders, as they call them here, can be cheats and liars. I guess they wouldn’t survive among the locals if they didn’t play the game their way.”
These words caused Lank to worry about Kati and Joaley, only not overly much. Kati, after all, was the heroine of Makros III, and Joaley, during the time he had known her, had shown herself to be a resourceful young woman. Still, they had not had the experiences he had had, on the islands of the Long Archipelago. He had survived even though his only parent had been pretty incapable of looking after him. He had learned to hide from bullies who liked to taunt him about his mother’s profession. He had early learned to steal some of his mother’s earnings, hiding the money on his own person, so that she could not spen
d it all on dream-dust and wine. Thus, they had eaten when otherwise they would not have, and his mother had never known the difference. He had learned to slip away from their tiny rooms to the bar where Conny played the flute, when the landlord came to collect the rent—which in their case was a weekly professional session with his mother. He had learned to lie, cheat and steal in order to stay alive, and to keep his mother alive for as long as he could. Now he was ready to put these talents to use in the service of the Unofficial Investigation of Vultaire.
Rakil was already in their cabin when Lank got there, busily stuffing his belongings into his pack. It was a good thing, Lank thought to himself, that he was skinny; otherwise he and Rakil would never have managed to share the small quarters. The Borhquan took up most of the meagre space as he tossed things into the bag, and Lank had to slip around him to get to his own stuff.
“I’ll be out of your way in a moment,” Rakil said good-naturedly as Lank slipped by him. “Do you want me to pack the drum and the sticks, or would you prefer to keep them with you?”
“You may as well hang on to them,” Lank replied, “assuming that you have room in your pack. You’re the one who’ll be using them.”
“Oh, I’ve got room,” Rakil averred. “The boss said to pack light and so I did. I’m counting on being able to obtain things on planet should I have unexpected requirements.”
“I should imagine that we can buy, beg, borrow or steal if we have needs that we’re not prepared for,” Lank responded airily.
“I’m good with the buying, begging and borrowing,” Rakil said, closing up his bag. “The stealing I’m not sure that I can manage. The Tree Family Aunts were pretty moralistic about thievery. I can remember a time when I was five years old and I was given a ‘time out’ of twenty minutes for stealing a cookie. One cookie! You have any idea how long twenty minutes is to a five-year-old?”
He opened the door while Lank laughed.
On Assignment to the Planet of the Exalted Page 16
