A strapping female who wore pink ribbons in her dark, curly hair, Koko kept a small four-stringed “ukulele” in a waterproofed custom smartsuit-fabric case somewhere belowdecks in this seagoing deathtrap. On a stout belt at her waist, replacing the plasma pistol favored by most Tom Paine Maru personnel, she lugged a monstrous antique reciprocating bullet-gun. It was a fifty-caliber Gabbet-Fairfax, she told me—about twelve millimeters—a gift from “a dear and trusted friend”.
Oh yes: Koko was also a gorilla.
This might be why she quickly became one of the few individuals I felt sure about aboard ship—the big star-traversing one, not the wallowing marine disaster of this afternoon. Koko had been the person with the sling on her arm that morning beside the swimming pool. She was also the roller-skating gum-bubbler I had seen aboard Tom Lehrer Maru. Off on a “mission simulation” somewhere else, she had returned to her own vessel, after having broken her arm during a practice climb.
With nothing but Vespuccian experience to guide me, never having met people like these, I was uncertain how to read them. Couper seemed like a man you could lean on, big, tough, ugly. On Vespucci, officers like him routinely ordered other men to certain death, all the while assuring them that everything was just fine. Owen Rogers was a fellow artisan, but with a distinctly Confederate attitude, whatever that ultimately implied. Howell, just like Koko, was not human, but I liked him.
On the other hand, I trusted that little witch Lucille no further than I could throw her. Probably not far at all, the way she had been trained.
Earlier that terror-filled morning, I spoke with the Lieutenant once again. He was fascinated with this great ship, with everything aboard her, with her obvious dedication to a cause. He seemed avid to possess what Rogers called “a piece of the action”. How could a mere corporal insist that his superior consider more carefully what little we actually knew about this “action” that he so badly wanted a piece of?
-2-
“Corporal, do not be a fool.”
We were in the Lieutenant’s quarters—a four-compartment suite featuring tall, broad windows overlooking Tom Paine Maru’s answer to an ocean. Up to my ankles already in his sandy-colored wall-to-wall carpet, I looked down several dizzying stories, onto that dangerous, foam-flecked, shattered mirror, dazzling under the ship’s artificial sun. Already I was anticipating this morning’s new experience with dread.
Even this early, coming here, I had run across groups of people taking inhuman-sounding language lessons under the brilliant sky. I had seen peculiar equipment being manufactured in rooms I passed, or clothing being fitted or tried out. Repeatedly I had been told, “Oh, that’s just for Sodde Lydfe—” Followed by an abrupt change of subject.
I needed to compare notes with my boss, to learn what he had discovered.
Lacking any artistic bent of his own, Sermander, whose talents lay more in persuading others to do things, had badgered Howell’s little girl Elsie into selecting a 360-degree hologram of some less deadly desert than Sodde Lydfe, from a lengthy Confederate catalog of such images. This, apparently, was a planet called “Wyoming”. Three walls were given over to it, creating an illusion of furniture grouped amid sandy scrub. They had dimmed the sun, edited visible vegetation, until it was indeed like the Central Oasis at what passed for springtime on Vespucci.
I cannot say it made me feel homesick. I had seen a battle fought in this place, during the Final War. Ten thousand dead. The facsimile only made me feel guilty—mainly for not thinking about Eleva all morning.
Koko, I had met formally last evening at a “dinner theater” my praxeologist friend had insisted attending, Tom Paine Maru’s amateur musical production of Loose Lips, based on an ancient classic about a young mutant, the physician who taught her to capitalize upon her peculiarity, the many men whose problems her unique talents helped solve.
I blushed through the entire performance.
Recognizing Koko, I made the mistake of telling her how much I had enjoyed the swimming pool schoolroom. Her broken limb was fine now, in only a few days’ time, thanks to the Confederacy’s medical technology. She intended to celebrate by risking its integrity all over again, on the high seas. Distracted by the play, I found myself conscripted into going sailing along with her. Before keeping my dubious appointment with the ocean-going gorilla this morning, I was grimly determined to convey my doubts to the Lieutenant, in order to ask him what he thought.
He told me.
“Corporal O’Thraight, this vessel is over twelve kilometers in diameter. Twelve kilometers! These people—if we must call them that—are only a small part of something unthinkably more enormous. Just imagine the industrial establishment capable of such construction! Imagine the energy sources! Simply the place-names that we hear, the products that we sample, betray an empire vaster than Vespucci ever dreamed!”
He strode to a cabinet built into the bulkhead beside the door, poured himself a drink, tossed it back, then poured another. “This is so much larger than your petty misgivings, Corporal, so much larger than you are, yourself. But it is not, I assure you, larger than Enson Sermander!”
For some reason, he seemed uncomfortable on the glass-fronted side of the room. The view was somewhat daunting. Far across the water, cloaked in haze, nearly at the horizon, there appeared to be a city, with tall buildings gleaming. He paced the carpet in front of a sofa near the claustrophobic safety of the hallway door, one hand thrust into his pants pocket, the other locked around his drink. He seemed to mutter at the floor, rather than at me: “Yes, yes, I know what that must sound like. But let us try to face the facts, Corporal, let us be realistic.”
“Yes, sir,” I answered, my gaze distracted momentarily. Outside, several individuals of at least two species, wearing big multicolored triangular wings, soared above the pounding waves. “That is what I am attempting to do, sir. I am not comfortable, being friends with people I do not understand. I wish to know if you believe that they can be trusted.”
“Entirely immaterial, Corporal—Whitey. They can be trusted to be whatever they are, to do what they have already done, to create a stellar hegemony with unimaginable resources to draw upon. Think, man: when they confront our puny world-state, Vespucci will not last a microsecond!”
“I admit I have been thinking much the same thing, Lieutenant. But is that not scandalously disloyal, shamefully unpatriotic, maybe even treasonous?”
“Think, Corporal!” the Lieutenant demanded again. “What does true loyalty to Vespucci demand of us? We must survive. We must learn what we can. We must return upon the day of confrontation with a complete understanding of these people, an ability to negotiate, to intercede, to ... ”
To rule, he was thinking. The Lieutenant imagined himself the Confederate viceroy on Vespucci, destroying our independence to save it.
“But, sir, I—!”
“But nothing, Corporal!” He sighed dramatically: “Oh how true the observation is, that it is invariably the underclasses who defend the system and their place within it most vehemently. However, Corporal—Whitey—I am attempting to make an appointment with the captain of this vessel, whoever that may be. I await his call at any moment. I shall offer my knowledge of our planet, offer my wisdom in promoting peaceful contact between the two civilizations. Vespucci needs her strongest minds at this moment, her strongest hands, her strongest resolve—”
Her strongest stomachs. I had first heard a speech like this at the age of five, when they announced a reduction in the milk ration. I told myself that he could not help himself. He was an officer, after all.
“—in order to survive!” he was going on. “Trust them? In the long run, it is an investment. Work with them, relax with them, eat with them, sleep with them, if that is your inclination. I shall see you are awarded a medal for duty beyond the call. You can remain my aide, if that is your desire, or be a provincial governor, once we get home.”
Once we get home.
Already, it had begun to sound like an una
ttainable fantasy. The Lieutenant was correct about one thing. We were helpless on our own, totally dependent on Confederate generosity for our eventual return to Vespucci, for our day-to-day survival, even for the clothes we were wearing.
“Yes, sir,” I said, “If you say so, sir.” I think I actually meant it. He scowled at me, then winced when his line-of-sight took in the far horizon, the vast agoraphobic chasm outside the floor-to-ceiling windows.
“Sir,” I offered. “You can shut these windows off, if you want to. Just turn this knob at the base. They showed me how to do it when I was given my room downstairs.” I demonstrated. The windows quickly faded to opaque. Just as quickly, the desert landscape wrapped around the room, enclosing us securely in the pseudo-familiar. The Lieutenant seemed to breathe easier. He finished off his drink, poured himself another.
“Thank you, Whitey. Now get out of here. Go—what did you call it?—‘sailing’? Perhaps it will take some of the starch out of that overly-stiff collar of yours. And while you’re sailing, Corporal, think upon what part you might play in a New Confederate-Vespuccian Order.”
I could actually hear the capital letters.
I got.
-3-
For days, sitting around, I am waiting for your call,
Hope my face won’t fall—off the wall.
And the daisies in the ground are around ten feet tall,
Though they started pretty small, half-past Fall ...
Butterfly, how come why I never see ya?
Have your fun, when you’re done,
I wouldn’t wanna be ya!
’Cause I’m through sitting around, getting rusty on the shelf—
I can be lonely, by myself, without your help ...
Koko started over again at the bridge, “Butterfly, how come why ... ”, repeating the final line. By the finish, I had figured out the chords—you mashed your fingers down on the strings between the inset wires, just as if they were buttons. Primitive, compared to the mandolar I was used to, but satisfactory. I was anxious to try it for myself.
She passed me the little box. It was a remarkably unsophisticated artifact for so technically advanced a culture. I found that I could omit the fingering-positions for the last two mandolar-columns, to play a creditable C, F, or G7, strumming the strings where they passed an acoustic aperture in the body, just as if they were control-vanes. The resulting sound was crude, yet somehow wistfully appealing. Koko promised to show me a tune called “Ukulele Lady”. As I experimented with her ukulele, the lady extracted a cigar from a pocket on her gunbelt, lit it, then lay back in the sand, watching the waves roll in.
We sat on a dune at the margin of the water. The “shore”. It is only called a “beach” when there is sand. Her little boat was hauled up, its brightly colored sail furled. In the “west”, the artificial sun was setting as spectacularly as any ever did, except, perhaps, on Sca.
I was still thinking about my earlier conversation with the Lieutenant. A year ago, perhaps even a month, I would have found his blatant opportunism normal, if not exactly admirable. Half of the conquests in Vespuccian history had been initiated in the name of advancing “international understanding”. The pragmatism offered afterward—often in the name of the legendary philosopher MacVelly—as an excuse for duplicitude and treachery was standard classroom fare.
Now, having met these people of Tom Paine Maru and the Galactic Confederacy, I was no longer sure. They were powerful, accomplished, wise, but naive. The Lieutenant’s intentions would have disappointed them.
Koko and I were not alone on the beach, although Confederates give each other lots of elbow-room unless otherwise invited. Other people watched the sunset. Several were assembling scraps of water-worn wood, for a fire—deliberately set aboard a starship, I reminded myself. A larger number stretched a net between poles thrust into the sand, then batted a ball over it, using their hands, their heads—even their feet.
One of these impressive kickers proved to be the injured Norris from yesterday’s “class”, late of the Peter LaNague. Blond, bearded, stocky, he was also short, almost tiny. Despite the dressing on his leg (I shuddered to contemplate what sort of wound required two weeks to heal in this society) he gave a good account of himself, spinning, twisting, lashing out with a good foot that was probably a lethal instrument.
I turned to Koko: “Tell me about Obsidia.”
“Zzzzz—what?” She started awake in time to avoid a cigar burn to her pelt. “Where’d you hear about that? Oh, yes. It’s just another primitive planet, Whitey, our next stop, according to the scientists. The name is one we assigned it, appropriate to its tech-level. People there don’t know what a planet is, let alone that they live on one. There’s about a zillion tribes, nations, empires, all of which call the place “Dirt” in their native languages. Conditions there are your standard ‘nasty, brutish, and short’, thanks to widespread sapient sacrifice, and a ruling priesthood in what we laughingly regard as the leading culture, very similar to the ancient Aztecs. If that means anything.”
It did not.
“In any case, our work is almost done there, and it’s our final visit for a while. Then on to Sodde—hold on, isn’t this Howell coming?”
Koko must have had fantastically sensitive hearing. It was many seconds before I heard their voices, coming from the other side of a dune behind us, even longer until they were in sight. It was little Elsie I noticed first, chattering gaily, skipping barefoot alongside her father. Then I could not help but notice Lucille. Her costume may have begun as a smartsuit. Opaque here, transparent there—mostly transparent there—it was a tribute to Confederate technology. A while later, I remembered—with some annoyance at myself—to breathe.
They stopped, Koko exchanging greetings with the females. Elsie ran off at once to play in the water. The gorilla scratched the coyote behind an ear, careful not to disturb the dark glasses he was wearing. He extended a friendly paw to me. “Well, old fellow, how did you like sailboating?”
I reddened. “The porpoises would thank me if I gave it up.”
I did not think until later to ask myself how he knew what we had been doing. Something inside me had begun to grow accustomed to the way these people seemed to read each other’s minds, to know things without perceptible reason, to share information, experience, without speaking.
Koko laughed, not without sympathy. Howell admitted that he felt much the same about the sport. Lucille sat gracefully on the sand beside them, as far away from me as possible. She took a cigarette from a small case she carried—somehow it dispensed itself already lit—then gazed out, wordless, past its orange-glowing coal at the slowly darkening water. Less than a dozen yards away, someone set the head-high heap of wood afire. I felt its radiation on my face almost immediately.
Or maybe it was just my imagination.
“I’m glad we can offer something to offend everyone, Corporal.” Lucille peered around the gorilla’s impressive bulk, also the lesser obstruction of the coyote, to give me one of her most malicious grins. “You know it may surprise you to learn that there are individuals aboard this ship—the two legged kind and otherwise—with exactly the same instinctive reaction to your kind as you say you have to sailing.”
She expelled smoke as if it were a bad memory. Then she took in another deep puff, let it drift from her half-open mouth, and inhaled it into her nostrils. For some bizarre reason, I found it horribly attractive.
But I was rapidly getting tired of her attitude. “Precisely what is my kind, Miss Olson-Bear, or are you not prepared to be specific?” My hands shook to match the racing of my heart. My words came from between gritted teeth—with anger or with what, I could not have said.
“Oh, our little Lucille is always prepared to be specific,” Howell offered blandly. “Although somewhat less often to be courteous to our guests.”
“Guests?” snorted the girl. “Is that what you call them, Howell? I’d use another word, myself! Your kind—since you ask, Corporal O’Thraigh
t—is the uniformed, goose-stepping soldier-boy kind who wants to ‘fight and bleed and kill and die’, in the words of the poet, for an evil institution that hasn’t any more right to exist than he has!”