“Oh. Yes,” I said. “The tall, blonde, very tanned young man. Good muscles.”
“You perfect idiot,” she laughed. “Good muscles. He’s my son, MacDougall Bear. He adopted my family’s name. He’s twenty-nine, the same age I am, physiologically. That’s why I asked how you felt about older—”
“My god.” Relief coursed through my every capillary, “Anything else?”
She looked up at me, her eyes suddenly very big. “One more thing. An explanation, not an excuse. I’ve had one particular ordeal to face ever since I came out of stasis. Unfinished business. I thought I was all braced for it, every emotion I possessed shut down in preparation for ... and now this ... you. I was ready to go back, really I was, ready to ... the place where it all happened, where I was left for dead—”
“Sodde Lydfe,” I said. “Of course. Just because there is an advanced civilization there does not mean that there cannot be savages as well. Also, you make the same practice that we tried on Sca, landing in the hinterlands. Please forgive me, Lucille, I should have known.”
“That’s right, Whitey, you should. Now let’s talk about this Eleva ... person.”
-2-
“What I should like to understand,” Agot Edmoot Mav gazed out the window at the scurrying nine-legged soldiers below, “is why you did not employ this wondrous ‘broach’, to bring you directly to these chambers. Thus we should have been able to avoid all this noise and bloodshed.”
The elderly detective cast his third eye on Couper, who was busy examining the
kood
service on a low table in the center of the room. It had not been incense, as it had appeared, but was used socially like tea. The furry pseudo-crustaceans never took liquid directly, believing water a deadly poison. Mymy maintained that this was a myth, and that water was required by the lamviin metabolism as much as by ours.
“I should like very much to examine your wound, O’Thraight,” the alien physician waggled rher carpet bag at me. “Provided you do not object.”
Elsie had explained that Fodduans bore three names, one for each of their parents. My full name, so Mymy believed, was “Corporal Whitey O’Thraight”. Since I was male, I was to be called by the last third of it. I suppose that it could have been worse. Rhe was calling Lucille, “Olson”.
Couper thrust gloved hands into the pockets he’d programmed into his suit, “For a variety of reasons, sir,” he answered Mav’s question. “The first being that the other end of the broach is in orbit. You understand what that—of course you do. In any event, there are some limits to precision, A minor fluctuation in the mass-average beneath the ship might have opened a broach within the walls of this place—very messy. Now that we have coordinates, we’ll be leaving that way, however.”
“I see,” said the alien thoughtfully. “Mymy, my love, do please stop fluttering about! I’m sure the Corporal would be better off in the hands of his own people. After all, what can you know of his physiology?”
The detective’s surwife ... surhusband ... whatever rhe called rherself, stepped back from me abruptly, rher fur crinkling in an odd way.
“My dear husband,” rhe began. “I am well aware of my abysmal ignorance—which I had hoped to rectify while rendering aid to a fellow sapient being. My, but you are difficult for one so recently rescued.”
Rhe turned to me: “It is quite obvious something that troubles him. Yet he will not admit it forthrightly, male that he is, however sage. No, he would much rather bite my jaws off and those of your companions.”
Mav’s fur rolled into tight curls. In briefings aboard the
Tom Paine Maru
I had been taught that this indicated laughter. “Guilty as charged, my dear lurry. I throw myself upon the mercy of the court. Wholeheartedly, I might add, it has been rather a long time. Would that Vyssu had come with you. I suppose her
mifkepa
precluded such a journey?”
Mymy gave him a six-nostril snort. “And since when would even so serious a malady keep either of us from your side? We should have long since broken you out of this abominable place ourselves had you not forbidden—”
“Laughing” again, he strode across the room, his six walking legs clittering weirdly along the stone floor, to embrace the surmale physician.
“Nor do I recall lifting that prohibition even now,” he told rher. He turned to us. “Do not misapprehend. I am extremely grateful. Prison life was beginning to pall.” Back to Mymy: “Where, pray tell then, is she?”
A peculiar fur-swirling: “I cannot truly say at the moment, my dear.” Rhe made another half-hearted attempt to practice rher arts on me, picking at the front of my suit, then gave it up, closed rher black bag, then threw it on the “bed”—the sandbox in the corner of the room. “She and her old fellow-conspirator, Fatpa, have smuggled themselves out of the country. She said she’d an idea, but refused me any—”
“Fatpa the tax-collector?” He turned to me again. “She once paid him to remove misbehaving clients from her entertainment emporium. Dear me, what subversives we have all become! Ah well, Mymy, what you do not know, you cannot tell, even under the most stringent duress, correct?”
“My dear husband,” shocked scandal filled the surmale’s tone, even through our translation devices. “I simply cannot believe that our government—”
He sighed. It was a completely human sound. “History informs us, my overly-patriotic paracauterist, that if the first casualty of war be truth, then the second, only an instant afterward, is civilized behavior.”
He paused, “But I am remiss! I cannot offer you kood, since your environmental suits prevent its use. Nor, do I suspect, would you find my inhaling fluid to your liking—it is scarcely tolerable by my surwife (never marry a physician, Corporal). Do you possibly relish juicing?”
“Juicing?” I blinked.
Rogers had finished taking Mymy’s revolver apart, putting it back together. It used cartridges of brass, bullets of lead, some white, unidentifiable propellant. Now he looked up from his tinkering with interest.
“What’s juicing?” he asked.
“Second to deliberately inhaling the foul vapors of petroleum distillates,” Mymy volunteered with a disapproving crinkle in rher fur, “it is probably the nastiest habit known to lamviinity. It leads to—”
Mav had produced a small wooden box with a crank on the top and what looked like electrical terminals at either end. He seized these with his outside hands and gave the crank a turn with his middle hand. For a moment, he froze in place, and a tiny blue spark appeared at one terminal.
Mav said, “Unh!” and then, “Very smooth.”
“Simply shocking!” interrupted Howell to the groans of everyone present. Rogers handed the gun back to Mymy, who slipped it into rher holster.
Standing beside Howell, Elsie had been watching both Fodduans with silent interest. Her suit was a perfect miniature of everybody else’s, complete to belted pistol which she had used to good effect in the assault. A small dagger hung at her waist opposite the gun. Now she spoke:
“How come none of those people outside are trying to do anything about us? Shouldn’t we be getting ready for a counter-attack of some kind?”
The detective stepped to the balcony, shaded his huge eyes against the glare of the moonlight, then returned to rummage through a big carpet bag for an enormous brass telescope. He pulled it open with a
clack!
Elsie peeked over the railing to see what he had been looking at.
“I believe they are preoccupied, young human,” he said. “Though by what—”
I squeezed into the window beside them, activating the buttons on my arm. Within my field of view, the nighttime darkness vanished, the horizon zoomed nearer. With it, I saw an ominous dark circle growing closer.
“What is black,” I asked, “divided into segments, with a—?”
“By the Trine, a riddle!” Mav exclaimed. “I haven’t the mistiest notion, old fellow, but coming from that direction it will have been observed first at the other end of the island and its approach quickly reported telephonically. Which accounts for the disinterest of our—I see it now ... it’s ... good heavens, I should say we are being invaded!”
The window suddenly became very crowded.
Extracting Rogers’ elbow from my armpit, Lucille’s gun butt from my ribs, I noticed the soldiers below had lined up in orderly ranks, rifles pointed upward toward the dark object that continued to loom closer.
“What is it?” asked Lucille.
“Indubitably it is an airship of Podfettian manufacture,” Mav answered. “Possibly the
Onwodetsa
rherself—ironically enough, that means ‘word of hope’ in Podfettian, perhaps a salubrious omen. However, such a war-craft is capable of transporting octaries of troops, and a great deal in the way of ordnance. I’m afraid that our escape is about to be interrupted by the very war we had hoped to prevent.”
Word of hope—Asperance—Dungeon to dungeon. I had come full circle, A chill went down my spine that the smartsuit could do nothing for.
“Or possibly accelerated,” Lucille said grimly, checking her pistols. “This would make a terrific time to get the congress out of here!”
Gunshots rang out from what Mav called the “riflelamn” below us. Unperturbed, the airship continued on course, its gondola visible now as were the engine pods braced on stanchions away from the black fuselage.
Those aboard her were not returning fire.
Closer came the
Onwodetsa,
closer, closer ...
Even for those of us accustomed to the Confederate scale of doing things, the airship was huge. Its shadow in the triple moonlight cast a pall over the entire building. Its engines, driving many-bladed propellers the size of the room we stood in, filled the island with their roaring. Bullets whistled toward it, whizzing harmlessly off its sides. Mav began to say something about fiberglass resins. There was a
clank!,
the engine-noise died off, something began lowering from underneath.
“Attention, soldiers of Great Foddu!” shouted an amplified voice from the airship, “This is a bomb! It contains more explosives than any other bomb ever assembled. It is capable of blasting this end of the island and everything upon it down to sea level!” There was a pause, as if giving the soldiers time to consider. Then: “Drop your weapons!”
Smoke began to issue from one end of the bomb.
I do not know how the Fodduans took it. I was frightened. Progress seemed to have taken a somewhat different path on Sodde Lydfe. In many ways, their culture seemed old-fashioned, but their electrical science was far ahead of what it ought to be, judging from other artifacts scattered about. That caused me to wonder about their explosives technology.
There was some milling about, down below. Finally, one by one, we heard the clatter of rifles on hard pavement. The gunsmith inside me cringed and I saw a similar look on Rogers’ face. The Podfettian airship approached the prison. A gondola door popped open, a figure leaped—
—swinging as the slack in its rope was spent. For a moment, it looked like a huge, horrible spider. In a clean arc, a lamviin figure sailed to the balcony, seized the rail, climbed over, cast the rope away.
“I will be triple-damped!” the detective exclaimed. “Also highly delighted.”
He turned, presenting the newcomer to us. “Gentlebeings of the starship
Tom Paine Maru,
kindly permit me to introduce our wife, Vyssu!”
-3-
“Seven octaries, you say? Dear me, I’m afraid this complicates matters a bit.” Mav had resumed his pacing. The Fodduan ... triple? ... had greeted each other with a characteristically reserved enthusiasm.
In addition to the troops, Vyssu had brought news.
One item was that the combat dirigible outside had been stolen from the Podfettian Navy by its own officers. It was full of Mavist refugees, underground radio personalities, all of them armed “to the jaws”.
Another was that the terrible bomb still suspended beneath the
Onwodetsa,
keeping the Fodduan troops on their best behavior, was a fraud.
“Of course we should never have undertaken such a voyage, over land and sea, with that much extra weight, my dear,” the female observed.
She was bigger than Mymy, smaller than Mav. Any other differences were concealed by her clothing, basically a pair—a trio—of elbow length trousers, the legs (or sleeves) of which were connected by a span of fabric that concealed the underside of the carapace. Mymy had been dressed similarly, as had Mav, although the texture of the fabric varied.
“We needed the extra lift across the Arms of Pah. That is the range of mountains that embraces Foddu to the north and west, dear humans. So we emptied a bomb-casing we found aboard and stored food in it.”
“You know, Mav,” offered Rogers, “we could transport the Fodduan soldiers upstairs, via broach, and turn this whole island over to the refugees.”
“Who would all starve within a trinight,” countered Mav. “You see, the supply boat arrives daily from the mainland, a service, I greatly fear, that would be shut off immediately, in the circumstances you describe.”
Rogers shrugged. “Well, it was the only idea I had, at the moment.”
“Not a very good one,” snorted Couper. “I guess that also takes care of broaching your refuges up, Vyssu. We’d need an enormous cargo aperture, and for that, the courtyard below or the grounds outside the prison. Try that, and somebody down there’ll make a heroic move, discover that your bomb’s a hoax, and that’ll take care of emigration policy.”