“What?”
“Precisely. No one has an office. There are no stenographers, no clerk-typists, no filing cabinets, no telecommunications devices, save for the ubiquitous wall-displays, or the makeshift arrangement that we witnessed in that canteen aboard Tom Lehrer Maru. Whitey, there is no engine room! Just restaurants, shops, parks, other recreational or training areas—some machine shops, if that is what they really are.”
I shook my head, my own purely mental filing cabinet of bizarre facts filled to overflowing. Outwardly, I just trod grimly to our destination.
Who were these people, anyway?
Now, while we sipped tea as if nothing out of the ordinary were going on, Francis Pololo grimaced, “Well, don’t keep them in suspense, dear. Otherwise, you’ll wind up treading on the punchline. It’s almost O-hour.”
The female gorilla shrugged, causing the pink ribbons in her hair to bob comically. “Lieutenant Sermander, I’m told that you’ve been looking all over for the captain of Tom Paine Maru. I understand that you even rented a diving-rig this morning, and dropped in on the Orca settlement at Seahunt. Well, I have a message from the captain: don’t bother any more. She doesn’t wield any power you’d be interested in.”
“She?” It was a disappointed croak.
“Satisfied?”
He opened his mouth, a puzzled expression on his face, then shut it.
Koko continued, addressing me, “You’ve been wondering about the mission of Tom Paine Maru. I wish I could say that I’ve arranged events to show you, Whitey. It’s all going to look disappointingly simple. But what you’re about to witness has been under consideration for eighteen years. I did arrange this tea-party, though. Will that do?”
Overhead, the ceiling starscape cleared.
“Obsidia,” Howell announced, indicating the yellow-orange globe above our heads. “We share the viewpoint of a scoutship making her way toward the surface. Williamson’s Little Tom, in fact, if I’m not mistaken.”
It was a dazzlingly brilliant day, the local sun baked down on a dusty continent toward which the little scout ship was now falling. Suddenly, the viewpoint seemed to zoom ahead to a city, primitive but impressive, made of huge stone pyramids. At the flattened top of the tallest of them, a ceremony was in progress, witnessed by tens of thousands who stood on the stepped flanks of the building, looking upward.
“Here we go, folks” Koko chuckled. “I’ve been looking forward to this—”
A solitary individual, his humanity all but disguised in elaborate feather trappings, stood beside a bed-sized stone across which lay stretched the supine naked form of a young man. In his hand, the gaudily-dressed official held a black dagger raised above the youth’s unprotected chest. It glinted as the sun caught its faceted glassy surface.
“Ev should be in range just about any moment, now,” said Pololo, excitement overpowering even the well-collected Healer, “I think we should—”
“—of the Sun who is the Sun!” the priest shouted. “We beseech you to accept this unworthy offering from thy miserable and humble servants!”
There followed a great deal of indistinguishable mumbling as the congregation below him made their memorized response. The priest held the glassy knife high. Oddly, his intended victim seemed unalarmed at the prospect of being made into an unworthy offering. Suddenly, a black, circular shadow dozens of meters in diameter—just right for a ship the size of Little Tom—fell across the truncated pyramid top.
“hear thou the word of the lord, thy god!”
It was Elsie’s voice. The child grinned sheepishly at me from across the room. “They offered me the chance, Whitey. I just couldn’t resist.”
“thou shalt cease this abominable practice immediately and from this day forward!”
The priest dropped his knife. It missed its reprieved victim by a less than a millimeter, clattering on the altar beside him, shattering into pieces. He fell to feather-draped knees, hands wringing together heavenward. Everybody else on the pyramid had eyes only for the scout saucer.
“i tell thee this day that i am going away!” A low moan swept through the crowd, down the sides of the pyramid, dissipating in the crowd on the ground. “from this day forward shalt thou help thyselves, neither shalt thou worship any god. instead shalt thou respect my law, that thou mayest someday be like unto gods thyselves. hear, now, the law:
“there shall be no god but man.
“man hath the right to live by his own law.
“man hath the right to live in the way that he willeth to live.
“man hath the right to dress as he willeth to dress.
“man hath the right to dwell where he willeth to dwell.
“man hath the right to move as he willeth upon the face of the planet.
“man hath the right to eat what he willeth.
“man hath the right to drink what he willeth.
“man hath the right to think what he willeth.
“man hath the right to speak as he willeth.
“man hath the right to write as he willeth.
“man hath the right to mould as he willeth.
“man hath the right to carve as he willeth.
“man hath the right to work as he willeth.
“man hath the right to rest as he willeth.
“man hath the right to love as he willeth, where, when, and whom he willeth.
“man hath the right to kill those who would thwart these rights.”
-4-
“But this is fomenting sheer anarchy!” the Lieutenant exclaimed, “It is nothing but a declaration of war against everything we know as civilization!”
“Exactly,” Elsie said, somehow curtseying while sitting down.
The picture in the camera-eye wheeled as the saucer banked, whirled away heavenward toward its niche in the belly of the mother ship.
The Obsidians were on their own.
“Freely adapted from ‘the Great Beast’, Aleister Crowley,” Howell observed. He bent to lap at his drink. “And omitting—against my specific advice—the Non-Aggression Principle, on the grounds that the Obsidians need to develop that for themselves, which I doubt they will.”
“Howell,” argued Doctor Pololo, “People can change, a fact of which governments are abysmally ignorant. People can get both smart and ethical in a big hurry when they clearly see a chance to gain by it.”
Koko chimed in, “Yes, and Mr. Crowley’s ‘commandments’ ought to help them accomplish all of that and more. All that is necessary to establish the right conditions for that to happen is for oppressive religion—”
“And,” insisted the little girl, “government of any kind.”
“—which actively prevents such personal growth—” added Pololo.
“It has a great interest in doing so,” said Elsie.
“—to go away.” Koko finished.
“Which fails to explain why Crowley himself,” the coyote growled, “lacking the Non-Aggression Principle, became an admirer of the fascists.”
“Them again?” I groaned.
Howell sighed, “Ah, well, perhaps the praxeologists know what they’re doing, although I wouldn’t attest—I say, what’s the matter?”
“You animals!” It was the Lieutenant. He had dropped his cup on the floor, jumped up from his chair. He stood now in a rigid posture, his fists clenched at his sides. “You are nothing but criminals! I have watched you! I know what you are doing! I see the revolts that you are preparing to inflict upon the governments of innocent nations! No wonder that you have no captain! You have probably murdered him in his—”
Howell yawned. “Well, at least the man didn’t say ‘innocent governments’.”
“You’re dead wrong, Lieutenant, we do have a captain,” It was Koko speaking. “She’s more of a manager, really. After all, this vessel is a complex enterprise which she supervises on behalf of its owners. In some senses, they are everyone and anyone, here and there, on or off the ship. TPM is a corporation and the property of a corpo
ration, actually commanded by the scientific staff who determine her course and—”
“The captain, a female!” Wounded disbelief was plain again in his voice.
“And a gorilla—me. It’s a family illness. The uncle who raised me was the last President that the North American Confederacy ever had.”
The Purple heart approach
“Ungh!”
The front snap-kick was slow, aimed at my solar-plexus. I swiveled my hips slightly, to take the tender arch of the Lieutenant’s right foot on my elbow. It was risky, but a very effective maneuver when it works.
This time, it worked.
Hopping furiously on his left foot while cradling the insulted right, the Lieutenant let a single tear of agony escape from beneath each eyelid. “Corporal O’Thraight!” he exclaimed, once he was through complaining to the ghost of Alexander Hamilton, “This is supposed to be practice!” He was so short of breath he could hardly get the words out.
I shook my head to clear away the angry fog. “Very sorry, sir, I guess I got a little too enthusiastic.” Despite what had happened on the beach or for three days afterward, the underlying hostility that Lucille had earlier expressed toward me had remained, inevitably to blow up into a terrible fight. It had been idiocy to imagine, even for the briefest moment, that the two of us would ever be anything but enemies.
Taking a series of deep breaths, myself, I tried hard to relax now, realizing that I had been taking all my frustration out on the wrong—
Baaapp!!
Knuckles seemed to come out of nowhere, smashing into the side of my unguarded head above the right ear. I might as well have been sound asleep. Ordinarily, the Lieutenant was so slow he couldn’t surprise a freeze-dried rock toad. I stumbled backward, belatedly raising my guard as the Lieutenant moved like winter cactus sap for a second turning back-fist. It glanced harmlessly along the diagonal of my forearm.
“Let that be a lesson to you, Corporal,” sniggered my superior. He leaned on a hip-high mushroom protuberance extruded from the mat. The obscenely-shaped things, occurring at random, disappearing in the same way, were intended to make the martial arts practice more demanding. “Proficiency may be a virtue, but it is no substitute for remembering one’s place. You have grown lax in this undisciplined environment. You will thank me, I believe, for teaching you better, once we return to Vespucci.”
“No, sir.”
My head throbbed, a bump began rising where I had been struck. Lucille had offered me exactly the same warning: I risked becoming everything that Vespucci hated. Suddenly, a physical ache to be home, where I knew what was expected of me, overwhelmed me. Without summons, two faces arose in my mind, side by side: Eleva, Lucille. I needed to be home, desperately. Prospects with the girl I had left behind might be unpromising. They were less uncomfortable than whatever I was being inexorably drawn into with this violently unpredictable Confederate female.
Damn her, anyway.
“What is that, Corporal?”
“I meant, yes, sir.” Threading around the practice-obstructions, we stepped off the mat together, heading across the gymnasium toward the showers. The place was like an aircraft hangar, with dozens of other pairs sparring, one complement assigned to Sodde Lydfe in heavy desert gear. Lights flashed at random intervals, from random angles, simulating the confusion of battle amidst unpredictable recorded explosions. Many here were practicing blindfolded, perhaps for night operations.
I weighed the advisability of following their example. Sudden flight might bring about the need for such a skill at any time. I had begun to examine everything from one angle: how can it help us get home?
Apparently the Lieutenant had come to much the same conclusion. We stepped through a series of membranous cleansing-curtains on the way to the unnecessary but refreshing showers. Individuals valued privacy aboard this ship. There were no ganged sanitary facilities of the kind military boarding school had accustomed me to. No tiled showers the size of a gameball court. A hundred private cubicle-doors faced us on the other side of the curtains. There was no familiar locker-room smell.
The Lieutenant stopped short of the shower-cabinets.
“Whitey, I have spent days looking for a way off-ship.” he stated flatly, in a half-whisper. He glanced around suspiciously. “All of the auxiliary craft are also residences, occupied continuously, defended jealously. Moreover, every one is privately owned, if you can credit that.”
I could not think of anything I had seen here that was not. I said so.
“Yes,” he answered in bad humor. “But more to the point, Corporal, none of these vessels are for hire at any price we can afford. If that were not enough, checking for possible alternatives, as I have told you, I have determined that there is no other point of vulnerability, no engine-room, for example, that we might occupy and threaten to destroy—”
“Not even any engines.” I was repeating something that Owen Rogers had told me earlier that morning. I was not sure whether I believed it.
“Nor even any engines. Whitey, if you are taking measures of your own—”
“I—” I had not been, in fact.
“No, do not tell me. If necessary, make your own way back home to Vespucci with what we know. Meantime, take comfort that I am working, too, toward our liberation, and the eventual salvation of our beloved planet.”
“Sir?”
“I have arranged for an appointment with the Chief Praxeologist, Edwina Olson-Bear. You will accompany me, but only initially. She is said to be unattached, so I have every confidence that my subsequent, er ... meetings with the lady will afford me opportunity to learn something of practical use.” He leered suggestively. “And if certain rumors also prove reliable, then considerably more than that may be accomplished.”
He was the Lieutenant, but I had no idea what he was talking about. “Yes, sir.” We went to our separate cubicles, agreeing to meet afterward.
My head still hurt when I was through in the shower.
-2-
Plastic eight millimeter cartridges squeezed from the strangely permeable face of the autofabricator into the transparency-covered hopper.
“One molecule at a time,” observed Owen Rogers proprietarily, “If you could see inside, they start as a faint triangular—pardon me, trochoidal—streak in the matrix, building up in three-dimensions, maintaining a perfect cross-section until closure at the end of the cartridge.”
“But how,” I asked, not without ulterior motivation, “does it work?”
“There are a hundred and some-odd naturally-occurring elements,” said the part-time gunsmith. “I lost track somewhere of exactly how many. From the dawn of time, Mindkind has been limited to permutations and combinations of those few elements to create his entire material civilization.”
Some more of the physics, I thought to myself, that everybody said I needed. So be it. I would learn whatever I could, for the immediate project I had in mind, also in the interest of certain longer-range considerations.
“Just as protons, electrons, and neutrons are the building-blocks of atoms, quarks are the building-blocks of protons and neutrons, and therefore of the atomic nucleus. The electrons fill orbital positions around the nucleus, determining the chemical attributes of any given element.”
“I understand,” I lied. “But what has this to do with your fabricator?”