The Sheriff of Yrnameer (6 page)

“You’re not Teg!” said Whiny Man. “Are you?”

Cole caught a glance of himself in the reflective visor of the helmet. Seeing the condition of his face, he understood Whiny Man’s confusion. He tossed the helmet to him.

“Teg hurt his back. I’m his second in command,” said Cole. What did this switch do?

“RQ compensator engaged.”

Yes.

The Benedict 80 started to rise unsteadily off the tarmac.

“We’re not going anywhere with you, pal,” said Hard Woman.

“Look, can you fly this thing?”

She glared back at him. He turned to Whiny Man. “How about you?”

Whiny Man dropped his gaze. “I didn’t think so,” said Cole. “Well, as you can see, I can.”

There was a crashing, screeching noise as they scraped along the side of another parked spacecraft. The other two stumbled, nearly falling. Cole hurriedly readjusted the controls, and they started to rise above the S’Port and the city.

Hardy and Whiny dragged themselves to the unoccupied seats and strapped in. Hard Woman was still pointing the gun at Cole.

“You’re going to land this thing.”

“Uh-huh. You’re going to shoot me and make us crash?”

“Five,” she said.

“Oh, stop it.”

“Four,” she said.

“I’m telling you, save your breath. You can’t bluff—”

“Three.”

“You’re
not
going to shoot me.”

She placed her other hand on the gun to steady her aim.

“Two.”

“Hold on now, hold on, let’s talk about this—”

Bam!
The explosion shook the ship, the concussion stunning them, the noise setting Cole’s ears ringing. Red lights flashed. Alarms whooped. Whiny Man said,
“Eeeeee
!”

“What the hell was that?” asked Hard Woman.

Cole looked at a blip on the display and swore.

“That,” he
said, “is Kenneth.”

“Yrnameer is less a location than an idea,” said Stirling, to general nodding and noises that signaled concurrence. Stirling was pleased. He wasn’t quite sure that he believed his own statement, or even understood it, but it was the first time he’d dared to make a contribution to the Moonday evening discussion, and it was nice to have it both acknowledged and taken seriously.

“Yes, but I’d like to offer a refinement,” said Orwa. Stirling grimaced, or at least would have, if he were in his old body. Hard to grimace now in his new form.

“Yrnameer,” continued Orwa, “is both locality and idea, in fact idea qua locality, a place-conception whose very ontology has been realized and made manifest precisely through the act of conceptualization,” added Orwa, “as if by the process of protoideation it has occasioned its own essentialism.”

More nodding and noises from the ten other participants. Stirling resisted rolling his eyes. That was one thing that he could still do in his new body, but with lidless eyes the size of billiard balls it was hard to do so with any degree of subtlety.

“While I agree to a certain extent, I have to take issue with your post-Apsian analysis.” This was Reff, who had considerably more cognitive capacity than one might expect from what appeared to be a thick purple shag rug.

“Cluck,”
said the chicken.

Stirling wasn’t sure about the chicken, who attended each session and never contributed anything beyond that simple vocalization. But no one else ever commented on it, so he wasn’t going to start.

Stirling rose to his several feet and leaned in to take the bowl off the table. “I’m gonna get some more chips,” he said. “Anyone need anything? Orwa? You want a beer, Souff? Mayor? Beer?”

“I’ll take another beer,” said Mayor Kimber, a rumpled, genial type with gray hair and a furrowed brow.

“You got it.”

Stirling trundled into the kitchen area carrying the chip bowl and a few empties. He’d been hosting the salon for about six weeks now, and generally enjoyed it—it was certainly different from anything he’d ever done before—but
man
, could those guys talk. Especially Orwa, who could be a real bag of hot wind, and Stirling wasn’t just thinking of Orwa’s appearance, what with all the translucent gas bladders and everything. Not that Stirling would make fun of how anyone looked—he was looking pretty weird himself these days. But it was worth it.

He dumped some more chips into the bowl, and grabbed a few fresh beers from the fridge. One thing was for sure—four arms were better than two when you were hosting. He could have gotten one of the servicebots to help him out, but the folks in Yrnameer could get a little preachy about relying too much on technology. Not that anyone complained about gathering in his climate-controlled living room and drinking his cold beer.

Again, he didn’t mind. He liked them all, even Orwa. It made sense for him to host the gathering: his house, set back on a cul-de-sac, was easily the largest in the community. When Stirling had shown up he had a team of constructionbots that built his home in just over a day. There’d been some frowns and muttering, but folks mostly welcomed him. He brought along a vast surplus of supplies—tools, building materials, protozoac solar panels—and he shared everything freely. No one asked him any uncomfortable questions, not even when he burned his spaceship.

He reached back over his shoulder and pried open a beer on his carapace. There was
another
advantage of being a sembluk instead of a human. When you thought about it, it was strange: you had, on the one hand, your standard human being. On the other hand, you had a sembluk, with a body like a four-legged, four-armed slug, three big eyes, and a shell on its back; and yet if you looked at the DNA, the two species were nearly indistinguishable. Closer even then humans and chimps, or sembluks and gembluks. Alter a few select locations on the human genome, and you got a massive and
dramatic transformation. And how many other extensive mods could you do without ending up like all those poor slobs on Qualtek 3, turn yourself into a cannibal? None, that’s how many.

If you wanted to get away from it all, and you weren’t particularly bothered by the idea of becoming a gastropod, it was ideal.

He thought about going to the back room to check on his treasure. The tiny object was his only link to his past life, before he’d thrown it all away, gotten rid of all of his riches. Before he’d decided to live a simpler, more spiritual life—
in
quisitive instead of
ac
quisitive, as he liked to think of it. Out of the spotlight, anonymous.

“Geldar!” It was a voice from the other room, probably Mayor Kimber. Geldar was how they knew him here. “Where’s the chips?”

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” he shouted back. Forget it. He’d check on his treasure later. In a few hours everyone would be content, sated from a feast of inquiry into the nature of Truth and Happiness and Beauty. His guests would head home, their minds already forming their arguments for next week’s gathering, and Stirling would go spend some quality time with the diamond.

The Bad Men were almost across the plains.

They weren’t coming for the diamond. They didn’t know about it. What they did know is that the people of Yrnameer had food.

They knew it because the villagers had given it to the bandits two years ago, when the bandits’ stolen spaceship crashed and burned a few short kilometers from the community. The village virtually emptied as the citizens rushed to help, rescuing those caught in the wreckage and treating the many injured. They took them in and fed them. They helped them bury their dead. They didn’t know whom they were helping or where they were from. They didn’t ask. That wasn’t their way.

Runk, still injured and stupefied from the crash and fearing pursuit, ordered his men to move on after a few short days. The people of Yrnameer sent them on their way with a generous helping of their own harvest, enough to last for months. And after a while they forgot about Runk and his bandits.

Runk and his bandits didn’t forget about them.

A hard, lean year of living off the land passed, and another was looming. Runk decided there was an easier way to fill their bellies.

He knew it was likely that, if asked, the people of Yrnameer
would willingly share what they had. But what’s the point of being bad if you’re not being bad?

So the Bad Men were moving grimly toward Yrnameer with their message. They were traveling faster then they had expected, mostly due to the fact that there were only nine of them left. The most recent casualty had been a terrible rider who had slowed them down.

It had happened the previous evening when they stopped to make camp. They had been lucky enough to find a small grove of Oni trees, whose bright red fruit was packed with nutrients. The fruit was best cooked, but lacking the means to ignite the temperamental Krager stove, they ate them raw. That was fine: the fruit could be enjoyed either way—unless you were Taknean. If you were Taknean, you had to cook the Oni fruit thoroughly to destroy a certain rare protein, or you were essentially eating a deliciously sweet, fist-size suicide pill.

The tenth Bad Man was Taknean. He didn’t know about the protein.

The others roared with laughter as he leaped up from the rock he had been sitting on and ran giggling in circles, flapping his triple-jointed arms. They laughed even harder as he began manically describing the instructions he was receiving from the giant, invisible filbert, apparently a female.

“She’s right there!” he babbled. “And she needs me to reshingle her schnauzer’s chewing-gum hat!”

He then seized a stick and commenced furiously scribbling something in the dirt, underlining and circling certain parts with great vigor.

“There,” he said with evident satisfaction, “that’s better.”

Then he collapsed, dead.

Later on, a tumbleweeg, looking for all intents and purposes like a large ball of dried twigs, was carried by the wind past the scribbles. Huh, thought the tumbleweeg, whose name was Reg, that looks like a pretty viable solution to the Riemann hypothesis. I really should mention this to someone, thought Reg, and then the wind blew him away and he forgot about it, as he had a tendency to do.

No one would have been more surprised than the dead Taknean—who had trouble counting to three on his three digits—that
his scribbles would have earned him a Fields Medal for Mathematics. It’s doubtful his companions would have cared even if they’d known about his achievement—they were more concerned with the fact that he’d crushed the compass when he fell, and they made their displeasure known with several pointless kicks to his insensate corpse. Then they rode on.

“Who is Ken—” said Hard Woman, and then they were jolted sideways as another violent explosion shook the ship.

The RO communicator crackled to life.

“Hello, Teg,” said Kenneth. “Sorry about that. Just a warning shot to let you know I’m serious. I’m a
huuuge
fan, you know.”

“He’s flying a lobster,” said Whiny. He seemed somewhat dazed.

Cole glanced at the three-dimensional display. Kenneth’s ship did look very much like a lobster.

“So, Teg,” said Kenneth, “it would be quite helpful if you’d hand over Cole—Karg is very cross with him.”

“Are you Cole?” asked Hard Woman.

“Absolutely not,” said Cole.

Hard Woman grabbed the communicator handset.

“Listen. Cole is here. I don’t know who the farg you are or what you want, but believe me, we’d be very happy to hand over—”

Cole tore the handset from her grip and smashed it several times against the control panel.

“Hey!”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that,” came Kenneth’s voice. Cole smashed it again. “Please repeat—”

Smash.

“—your previous—”

Smash.

“—transmission.”

Smash smash smash.

“Give me the transmitter,” said Hard Woman. She had the gun out again.

Cole sighed, hesitated, went to hand it to her, then abruptly smashed it a few more times.

“Hey!
Hand it over!”

He did.

“Hold on,” he said as she was raising the handset up to speak. “Before you say anything, just hear me out.”

“Hi, Teg,” interrupted Kenneth. “Kenneth here again. Like I said, I’m a
huuuge
fan, but I’m going to have to put a cannon round right through your ship if you don’t answer me soon.”