I took another sip. Wine. I certainly found it more to my taste than Scotch, although, compared to potables available to the enlisted classes back home, even that was smoothly agreeable to the palate. I wondered: were we eating alien-food, or was Williamson politely dining Earthian tonight. Or was it some eclectic mixture? I had not heard of a single thing on the table before me. Each bite was a new adventure. Or a risk, as I discovered when I tried eating one of those little red things.
Embarrassing afterward, too.
There were thick, savory sections of grainy-textured protein they called “beef”, rather akin, they told me, to Scavian pulling-animals, but bred by Earthians for slaughter only. Their culture had no need for beasts of burden. The most highly-valued varieties of beef came from two planets, as I understood it, one called “Alamo”, one called “Newer Zealand”. Nobody thought to mention what had become of Older Zealand.
I was given a creature about the size of a roof rabbit (familiar Vespuccian fare I would have welcomed as a relief from culture-shock), but shaped much differently. “Squab”. Ugly name for such a delicious thing.
There was another menu item, too, served in impossibly monumental slices. lightly spiced. It was the correct pinkish-orange color, too, but ... Well, if ham does not come from a hamster, where does it come from?
Many vegetables, none recognizable, took the place of Vespuccian turnips, palmetto, or cabbage. Salt was offered in perfectly ordinary shakers. It was seemingly inseparable from some black-white speckled substance that felt worse on the tongue than Williamson’s little red things. However, exactly the same flavoring, somehow formed into a thick crust that was cooked onto the beef in an oven, was absolutely wonderful.
Beside a gigantic bowl of sugar, double-fist sized, grand enough to grace an Admiral’s table, rested a second, delicious powdery-brown condiment that some of my companions stirred into a hot black bitter drink, along with enough milk to dry up the community hutches for a week. “Coffee”, they said of the black drink, some of it brewed with cinnamon, a spice greatly favored on a planet they called “Mexico”, as was the brown powdery “chocolatl” they used with it. Couper vied with Williamson expressing delight in an even more esoteric substance, “chicory”, at which Lucille wrinkled up her pretty nose, simply at the mention.
What she said of it, oddly, were things I had been thinking about her.
-3-
I am not certain what I had been running on, thus far.
I had drifted through all that had happened so far rather numbly. Matter-of-factly. Now, reality was catching up, giving everything that occurred at that table a dreamlike quality. It all required effort, concentration, to focus on any given object, or any specific moment in time.
Conversation was lapping around me like that stream on Sca, words, phrases, sentences making no more sense than its babbling waters. Even my palate was overwhelmed. So many new things, so much of it. If these people were nothing else, they were fabulously rich. This holiday feast was nothing more to them, I realized somewhere along the line, than a hearty farmhand’s supper. At home, for example, custom reserves milk for babies or toothless ancients. These people fairly swam in the stuff.
Having tried coffee without satisfaction, I somewhat diffidently asked them whether they might ever have heard of something called tea. They answered me with a list of thirty or forty different varieties, enumerated on a ColorCom screen that somehow oozed out of the table’s surface.
“Just tea,” I pleaded, beginning to shake all over.
Williamson brought me “liptons”, inoffensively sweet, wonderfully aromatic. I accepted the cup from him, then found that I had drifted off somewhere again. When I went to sip at it, the tea was already cold.
I do not believe that I will even mention dessert. Back home on Vespucci, they arrest people for things like that. I am not entirely certain how real any of it—or anything else that evening—was, anyway.
Toward the end, the dishes, fine delicate porcelain embossed with the name of the little starsailing vessel we occupied, mysteriously cleared themselves away somehow, along with the silver, when I was not looking.
Geoffrey Couper, still resplendent in his quasimilitary attire, poured himself another glass of wine. Others had been passed around without my having noticed. Following Rogers’ earlier example, he chose a small white paper tube from a container on the table, placed it in his mouth, set the free end afire, drawing smoke from it with obvious relish. The container was passed. Lucille, with the praxeologist—his suit still garish plaid, his bushy hair and beard parted formally down the middle—joined their commander in this weird ritual. Not all of the little paper tubes were white, nor of quite the same size or shape. Some of the fumes smelled roasty, nutlike, some of it grassy-sweet.
“Now, son,” Couper began once these postprandial ceremonies had been attended to. He exhaled smoke. “You have a lot of questions to ask us. I know you’re tired, but—well, we have a lot of questions, too.”
“Yeah,” Lucille chimed in. “Like what in Hamilton’s Hades were you and your people doing on that medieval scumball in the first place?” She flicked a cylinder of accumulated ash from the end of her burning tube into a small glass dish. Hers was one of the sweet-smelling variety.
I blinked. “Why, I had been planning to ask you exactly the same thing!”
She inhaled another lungful, trying, for some peculiar reason, to speak while holding her breath. “Yeah, Corporal-baby, but we asked first!”
Couper gave her a low, fatherly growl of admonition, then grinned, letting it fade. “Lucille is right, I’m afraid. If you don’t mind, son.”
So, to the faint but welcome accompaniment of unfamiliar recorded music drifting down from somewhere in the area of the ceiling, I told them all about the voyage of the Asperance, the shocking massacre at its end, how we wound up in that cesspool of a dungeon where they had found us, the mission’s only survivors. It did not take very long. I did not tell them about Eleva. To my somewhat guilty astonishment, it was the first time I had thought of the Lieutenant in a couple of hours.
I caught a riffle of melody from the overhead speakers that might have been composed especially for the mandolar. Suddenly I realized that I had not heard music of any kind, aside from the inside of my own head, or my demented humming in the dungeons, for what seemed an eternity.
Couper sipped at his wine contemplatively. It was a thick, sticky liquid whose flavor seemed to crawl all over the tongue like lukewarm fire. “What surprises me is that they let you live, after what you did to—”
“But we never did anything to them! I told you, we all tried to avoid—!”
“What our peerless leader means, Whitey,” Rogers laughed, “is that you—second person non-plural you—singlehandedly disposed of ... what did it come to in the end, Boss? You did the field-interviews for me.”
Couper shook his head with what appeared to be rueful admiration. “Well, it all depends on which village the information came from. I make it seventeen heavily-armored knights, with weapons not terribly more primitive than your own, Corporal O’Thraight. Yes, no matter what you or those Scavians may think, not terribly more primitive at all. Understand that administering steel by hand, or lead by means of expanding chemical gases, largely comes down to a matter of aesthetic preference.”
He took—a sip?—from his smoking-tube, tapped ashes off of its end into Lucille’s bowl. “You’re something of a legend back there already, son, one I fear is going to prove troublesome for us in the future.”
There was a lapse in the conversation that lasted for several heartbeats.
“How many projectiles,” asked Rogers, demonstrating professional interest at last, “do those quasi-rotary slug-chuckers of yours carry, anyway?”
I felt the temperature rising in my cheeks. “Er, fifteen apiece, in the magazine,” I mumbled, keeping my eyes down on the tabletop. “Seventeen—I suppose that I could have used them to better effect. I had two of the weapons, all I cou
ld manage to get loaded before we were attacked. If only I had been more conscientious when we first landed, my people might have ...” I found it hard to choke back the tears that threatened to humiliate me even further in front of these strangers.
Couper leaned over to place a big hand on my shoulder. “Those fancy-britches with their boughten commissions wouldn’t likely have been much help, even if you’d loaded a hundred weapons for them, son. You still don’t realize, do you? Great Albert’s ghost, boy, half the reason those Scavians tortured you was simply to reassure themselves that you were really human!” He crushed his smoking-tube out in the ash-bowl. “You’ll be a legend all over again when we get back to the ship!”
“He’s right,” the Chimpanzee agreed. “Find yourself the right pubcaster, and you won’t have to worry about no free lunches for decades!”
“Get back?” I looked all around me: this wonderful spacecraft of theirs was at least twice the size of the late Asperance. All I had seen so far was the upstairs. “You are trying to tell me that this is not—”
“This is Little Tom, son, a private auxiliary with some amazing capabilities, but an auxiliary nevertheless. Begging your pardon, Captain.”
The furry alien lifted a negligent paw. “A small thing but mine own, as I told a young female acquaintance recently. Everyone to his own vine and fig tree, whatever the crap that’s supposed to mean.” He fumbled with the container on the table, extracted a very large green burning tube. The smell, different from Couper’s or Lucille’s, was horrible.
“But how—” I began.
“Wait and see,” Couper answered, not answering anything at all. “As to what we were doing on Sca,” he looked around the table, they looked back at him. “In a manner of speaking we were—still are, for all that—conducting a preliminary survey of the planet and its many and—”
“—and not-very-diverse—”
“Thank you, Lucille, when I desire your help, I’ll lift up your rock and ask for it. Yes, its not-very-diverse cultures.” As if his own smoke had not been enough pollution in his lungs, he took the smaller tube from Lucille’s fingers, drew from it, closed his eyes, held it for a while before expelling it. “Not very damned diverse at all!”
I thought about that guilty-looking glance they had all shared. “Preliminary survey? Preliminary to what? With exactly what object in mind?”
Rogers the praxeologist spoke: “Need there be any particular purpose for scientific inquiry? Isn’t knowledge valuable in and of itself?” He ground his own burning-tube out, then immediately lit another.
“So sayeth the guy who doesn’t pay the bills!” Lucille retorted, “We’re free-roving traders, Corporal-darlin’, privateers desperately looking for a fast ounce any way we can get it, by hook or by ...” She patted the weapon on her hip suggestively. “You know you can get more with a smile—and a plasma gun—than you can with just a smile.”
“Arrh!” agreed the gunsmith in a funny croaking voice. “An’ Oi’m the Jolly Rogers hisself!” He covered one eye, rolled the other one and leered obscenely, folding his free hand into a big fist, except for the middle finger which he crooked, clawing half-blindly at the girl.
She giggled, looked suddenly startled, then peered suspiciously at the tube between her fingers. It was the first time I ever saw her relax.
Williamson shook his head. “Oh, for Spooner’s sake, Coup, set the poor devil straight before these two have him thinking that we’re going to make him walk the plank. You know he isn’t a bad guy for a Kilroy.”
Most of what he said was utterly meaningless. Kilroy again. I had to struggle with that drowsy, drifting feeling stealing back over me. In addition, I was becoming increasingly self-conscious about the fact that I was the only one here who had not bathed recently. I did not count the sketchy washup in the creek. What was so bad about walking on a plank, anyway? If Lucille was trying to make me think that they were all cutthroats of some kind, the fact that they had gone out of their way to rescue me—also the Lieutenant—spoiled her story a little.
“They manufacture a wine on Sca,” Couper declaimed with sudden incongruity, holding his glass to the light, “remarkably disgusting in every respect, except that it possesses peculiarly potent antibiotic properties against a disease that dolphins frequently contract in Europa.”
I could see that. I could see anything. “What is a dolphin?”
This time they all blinked somewhat foolishly at one another. One of them muttered something about “impossible things before breakfast”. This conversation seemed to be making less and less sense to me all the time. I began to suspect it was the wine. Or possibly the burning-tubes.
“Another kind of non-human intelligence,” Rogers supplied finally, giving Williamson a courteous nod. “Good friends of ours, for a long time.”
“Yeah,” said Lucille, “some of my best friends are dolphins.” From a well-hidden pocket, she took what looked like a small flat stone, inserted the last centimeters of her smoking-tube, drew heavily on the other end. There was a sharp crack!, sparks flew from the object.
“Seed,” everybody said at once.
“Bet you think I did that on porpoise,” she winked.
Music continued playing. Unable to think of anything better to say, I asked, “This planet the dolphins are from, this ‘Europa’ you mentioned ...?”
Couper ignored me: “The point, son, is that we explore sinkholes like Sca, hoping to discover new materials, new ideas, manufactured goods occasionally. We heard about you two—the ‘sky demons’—in marketplaces for two hundred miles’ radius around that pile of dung and incompetently-chipped rock where they were keeping you. At first we thought you might be one of our own we’d somehow lost track of. There are quite a few of us out here. Later, when it developed that you couldn’t be, it was even more important to pull you out in one piece.”
“Why was that?” I asked.
More embarrassed silence, then: “Because,” said Rogers, assuming his grim professional expression (I liked him better as a gunsmith), “yours is the first independent star-traveling civilization we’ve ever discovered.”
“Human.” Williamson rose, excusing himself to attend to some technical matter. He took three paces, sank right through the floor, disappearing.
“The first independent human star-traveling civilization?” I asked.
None of them seemed very delighted at the prospect. Watching the pseudostars drift by “outside”, gave me something else to ask about. Now seemed as good a time as any. Or bad. “Speaking of star-traveling, I ... I mean I have sort of been wondering what your plans are. You see ...”
“He wants to go home, Coup,” Rogers interrupted, “A perfectly natural, easily-understood request. We should have talked this over earlier.”
“I told you—” Lucille began.
Coup stopped her. “Son, I admit I’ve been putting this moment off for as long as I could manage. There are reasons, all of them highly sensible although I don’t expect you to see it that way, why we can’t just—”
“Orders.” Lucille stated suddenly, flatly.
“Hunh?” responded the older man, a whole flock of uncomprehending wrinkles furrowing the space between his eyebrows. She had surprised him.
“The Corporal is a soldier, Coup—or a sailor. I’m not sure I’ve gotten that part quite straight yet. Anyway, orders are something he understands.”
She turned to me, addressing me as a human being for the first time. “Whitey, we’re expected at a Rendezvous. We just can’t take any unexpected sidetrips until we report in.” She paused, looking from me to Couper in an expectant manner. “I don’t think it’ll hurt anything to tell you this much about it: the discovery of another culture with faster-than-light capabilities was a severe shock to us all. And it’s a matter of very serious concern to us. Policy has to be generated, dig?”