Rork! (3 page)

“You’re enthusiastic. That’s not usual. That’s very much not usual. People today are not enthusiastic. They used to be. What did it get us. Three galactic wars. I’m ten, twelve years your senior. And the only things which ever make me even the least bit enthusiastic are this — ” he touched the bottle “ — and, sometimes,” he touched his fly, “ — this. But mostly just
this.
There’s nothing here or there’s nothing there and there’s nothing anywhere else that’s worth really getting bothered about. So … mmm … so …” He looked blankly at Lomar, blinked. Wet his lips. Moved his hands. Then a thought came to him, perhaps not the one which had just escaped his mind, but a welcome one nonetheless. “Finish your drink,” he urged. “Hey? Another…. Dead rorks!”

• • •

The long motor shed in which the Station’s twenty skimmers were kept had room for twenty hundred. It was obvious that even the ones on hand were scarcely used. What for? Inspecting? Exploring? Who had any interest in either. Ten of the vehicles, packed in protective, were up on racks. Five of them were being stripped down as Lomar, fuming and fretting, stalked in.

The Tock grease monkeys were slowly cleaning them off under the cold, fixed eye of the Motor Aide in the starched armor-stiff uniform that had given him his nickname. Another five skimmers stood, glistening and sharply clean, at the ready. One of these seemed to exude the sweet, spicy scent of whatever it was that the Station Officer used on his well-fleshed, well-kept body. Sure enough, his small banneret hung at the fantail.

The departure of the Q seemed to have abated something of Manton’s obsessive preoccupation. He no longer went around (or, as often, stood still) muttering,
First it’ll be, Have a drink … then it’ll be, Come aboard and look around … and then — noooo — nooo.
… He actually turned his head as Lomar entered, though only slightly. In a few months he would be relaxed enough to smile. It had only happened once in history that a Q Ship, once gone up, had returned. But not until the mere possibility had gone away would Manton begin to feel safe. Day by day and month by month he would become less obsessed … until the hands of the five-yearly clock swung past the half-way mark once more … and then, month by month and day by day he would sink beneath the weight of his fears again. No one knew what Q Days cost him, no one could do more than guess. Nor could any do more than conjecture whom it was he suspected of trying to lure him on board, or for what frightful end.

His eyes dismissed Lomar as an immediate danger, rolled back to observe the cleaners at work on the machinery. His body had not relaxed its stiffness sufficiently to wrinkle the rigidly starched uniform so inappropriate for the shed. He listened without expression to Lomar’s now less freely flowing plans. Without expression. Without comment.

Impatient, annoyed, but by no means without pity, Lomar asked after a short while, “Well, what do you say?”

Wait. Then, “About what?”

“About
what?
About using the skimmers for plowing and planting and tending and harvesting. Redwing. All we’d need are simple attachments that can be made here. Set the skimmers low enough, a few inches, a few feet — we can figure out the details as we go along — learning by doing — then we won’t need to be dependent on the Tockies, don’t you see. We can set our own production schedules, and…. Well, what do you
say
?”

Manton said, “No.”

Lomar felt a slight, very slight recurrence of the start of the dreadful headache which had all but knocked him out those last few hours on the Q Ship. A nerve began to throb painfully. He felt his face grow hot. “Why
not?
” he demanded.

“It’s not my job. I have nothing to do with redwing.”

Lomar shouted. The tocks, faces smeared with sweat and greasy preservative, looked up. Nothing to do with
redwing?
— Ran shouted. When they all, every single person, had nothing to do with anything
but
redwing? Did Manton suppose that he was stationed here on this nothing place just to gum skimmers up and then clean them off again? Over and over and over again?

Manton said, “No … We have one aerospacecraft and one watercraft and I’m responsible for them, too.”

“But they’re not ends in themselves! — are they?”

The starched man nodded. “As far as I’m concerned. They’ve got to last us twenty years. Anything breaks down, wrecks — anything — no replacements. Can’t take chances. No.”

“You’re saving them. What are you saving them
for
?”

A shrug. “Not my business. Maybe an emergency…. My job is to keep them in shape. Not my job to risk them, use them for something they’ve never been used for before. Grow redwing. Never heard of a thing like that. Can’t use skimmers like that. That’s not the way we do things. No.”

No.

No.

No.

• • •

“My dear boy.” The Station Officer chuckled. Looked, smiling, at Lomar, obviously expecting him to chuckle or at least smile in return. The courtesy was not forthcoming. The full face grew a trifle bleak, then relaxed into its habitual amity. Words were lacking, paws waved, throat was cleared. “You are asking me to do what I’ve never done before. No one has ever done it before.”

“But it can be done — it
was
done once, raising redwing as a crop, before the First War — ”

No no no. Tut. Not what the SO meant. Not what he meant at
all.
“Upsetting things,” he said, vaguely, still gesturing. “Interfering. Charging around and changing things around. We don’t operate in that officious and tyrannical manner here. Pulling
rank?
I don’t pull rank. Never. Not even a teensy bit. Why, I don’t have to. Ev eryone knows what his job is. No one has to interfere. Reldon’s job is commerce. He does it.
Drinks
too much, oh, I grant you,” chuckle, “but we are liberal here. The flesh has its demands, you can’t put them in fetters of iron.
No.
Point is, he does his
job.
Whatever it is. Manton, poor dear funny fellow, he has
his
job. Motors. Keeps them all in tip-top shapey. I want my skimmer — ‘Manton. My skimmer.’ Zippetty-ping, here it is. Not a speck on it.
Well
… Now, I can’t go horsing over and interrupting and upsetting things … now,
can
I? Nooo. Of course I can’t. Same at the Residence. I don’t go into the kitchen, tell my Tocky boys, Fry this that way, braise that this way.
They
know what they have to do. They do it. They’d do an-y-thing for me, yes they would, cute: they’d die for me, they’d just die.
‘Die!’
that’s all I’d have to say, and they’d — ”

“Sir — ”

“ — roll over and drop dead — ”

“Sir!”

“You. Edran Lomar. Are raising. Your
voice.
Oh, yes, you are. I am broadminded. I am tolerant. Someone’s wife once came into my office without so much as an invitation and do you know what she
did
?
She
got down on her silly skinny knees and she
prayed
for me! Oh, I tell you, I did not know where to
look!
But I let her. Yes in-deedy. But there are limits. A simulated or assimilated rating of seven you may have. But I don’t wish to remind you. I am not a rating. It isn’t my way to refresh your awareness with the fact that I am an officer. But please, cute, please do not raise your
voice
to me. It is so coarse, don’t you see, doing that.

“Now, what you
can
do — ” Tan Carlo Harb raised his eyebrows and patted his lower lip with the tip of his fat flat tongue. “I am always willing to
listen.
Come to the Residency tonight. We will dine, we will drink, we will have liqueurs and all the latest fashionable goodies that they’ve sent me just bundles and
bales
of on the Q. No one will disturb us. The Tockies, those scamps, will clear off and clear out and leave us oh quite alone. And you will talk. And I will listen.”

He rose, smiling and rosy and bland and he patted Lomar’s shoulders and he put his arm around his waist and he walked him to the door. “Tonight, then, at ten?” he inquired.

“Tonight, then, at ten,” Lomar agreed, dispirited. The talking and listening, he was quite sure, would get him nowhere. The SO would almost certainly want to wrestle afterwards. And the way Lomar was feeling, he might not even bother to wrestle back.

Outside, in the wide street bordered with the huge taranth-trees which here seemed to attain a luxury of growth greater than on their native world, an old Tocky went by, a can on his head, his voice plaintive and faltering, peddling sea-quirks. Flowering pi-vines wound around the old trees, their fronds releasing tiny clouds of purple pollen when the breeze quickened and shook them. Station wives ambled along chatting to each other, servants behind them with baskets of wild and domestic produce sold in the open lot called “the market” by those Tocks lacking the inclination or the energy to hawk their goods through the long and quiet streets. Men in uniform were not lacking — so light were their duties that any excuse sufficed for a break or a visit to another’s post.

The daughter of Second Station Aide Arlan came down the street now and stopped in front of him and smiled at him.

This was perhaps the second or third time they had met since the night he had dined with her parents. So different was she at their second meeting, it was as if the girl on that initial evening at her home was only a blurred two-dimensional, black-and-white photograph. What had caused her to withdraw into the inner chamber of her cell that first night, he had not yet learned.

“Hello, Lindel,” he said.

There was nothing special about the girl, and yet he had never seen anything quite like her. A phrase, The Wild Colonial Girl, shot through his mind. She wasn’t really wild, of course, the way a feral beast was wild. There was something in and about her, though, that couldn’t exist on a planet with a traffic problem. A tunic blouse which might have been a tenth copy of a five-year-old pattern from Outside (the new ones as yet wouldn’t have had time to burst into transplanted bloom), though new enough to look still little worn, was tucked into a pair of field breeches modeled after the ones men wore, but obviously tailor-made to fit hips and haunches and a fetching little rump.

“Hi, Ran,” she said, taking his hand. They fell into step and she still held it. He had been grasped in more intimate places with less surprise … but the surprise quickly settled before a more intuitive understanding. She could have been no more than a child when she first came here, so it was natural enough for her to walk hand in hand with any man she met … and she had just kept on doing so. It wasn’t the custom Outside. No one ever said not to, or indeed ever spoke or even thought about it. But no one ever did it.

“Hi, Ran,” she said again, giving their joined hands a firm swing, and looking up into his face. A smile was there for him, her look seemed to say, but it must be earned. His smile came rather rustily, but it came nonetheless. She nodded, she smiled back. There were hints of her mother in her — little of her father but the eyes.

Lomar as yet did not love her in the full sense, but she was so new, so novel, so enchantingly fresh, she had the spice of youth still unstifled, that he was utterly attracted to her. And so, of course, he had already begun to love her, even if just a little bit.

• • •

The shore path paused at the top of a bluff. “So — that’s the Northern Sea,” he said. It was green, and frothy white in regular patterns as far as he could see, not with wind alone (he learned by and by) but from microscopic marine life form as well. The sea stretched on without an end.

“Yes,” Lindel said. She pointed far off, low down the horizon. “That’s North Cold.”

“What? Where? That smudge? Really?”

She laughed. “No, it’s a lie. Newcomers always get told that. North Cold, you can never see it from here. Those are just clouds. I think my father said you’re a three with a seven rating. That’s surely unusual. You know what, Ran? (“What?”) If you bring this job off — more redwing — you can skip four ratings. Yes, you can. The Directorate would do it, I bet. Make you a regular seven. Then you could pension out in fifteen years. If you wanted to. Look — ”

She stooped, scooped. “ — a sea-quirk. Old Daddy Toey must’ve dropped it out of his basket.” She squeezed it and it opened something which might have been a mouth and it went
quirk quiiirk queeerrrkkk
and then closed up again.

“We’ll have it with our supper….” She tugged at his hand. To the left he could see the beach club at no great distance, bath-house, dance house, games grounds; she tugged him to the right. The path dipped into a hollow, the sea vanished from sight, but not from scent. The sun-warm dust of the path, and the dusty plants it wound between, each had their own distinctive scents … dry, warm, sharp, good…. Suddenly she stopped. “If you don’t want to swim bare we can go to the club,” she said. “Some people don’t want to. They’ve got warts or something, you know….”

He spoke to the question in her voice. Only a few very small and inconspicuous warts were all he had, he said. She nodded in a grave, believing fashion which caught at his heart a bit, and his heart said, Go slow, Go easy, You don’t know what you really have here, You’re here for five more years and so is she, She’s so young, Don’t go leaping at her or on her. Not just yet, anyway. Not just yet …

He’d had better swims and known better swimming spots than that one on the Northern Sea. The bottom was rough where it wasn’t mucky-slimy, and the froth (for all the fun they had tossing handfuls of it at each other and posing with it here or there in mock modesty) was unpleasantly sticky stuff, not responding to plunges. In the end it was necessary to scrape it off with sand, and this left them both messy. Too, the high salt context of the quick-drying water left itchy scurfy patches on their skin.

“Well, that’s the admission charge,” Lindel said, watching him fiddling and plucking. “I hope you weren’t hoping very much to make love to me here.”

He said, “Well, I was, in a way.”

“It’s no fun when you’re like this. Later, when we’re clean, if we want to. What do you think of my body?”