Tom Paine Maru - Special Author's Edition (22 page)

“Grrr!” The Lieutenant did not actually say that, but it was something close. “These are childish semantic games! Of
course
the universe is determined, my good doctor. Free will is a pathetic illusion!”

“Well,” chuckled the other voice. “You could have fooled me. But then, I suppose that’s what illusions are all about. Hello, darling. Hello, everybody! I’m attempting to introduce Lieutenant Sermander to the many wonders of praxeology, but he’s resisting my blandishments manfully.”

“Darling” turned out to be Koko. She reached a big hand upward to an even bigger one, while its owner bent down to give her a peck on the cheek. In the rapidly-gathering darkness, it was difficult to see precisely who this friend of hers was. A gorilla, certainly, male to judge from his size. He wore a sleeveless short-pantsed outfit in pale green with a large red circled cross on the left shoulder. He also wore light, wire-rimmed spectacles. He held a brown cigarillo in one hand.

He plumped down on the sand beside Koko.

“Francis,” the gorilla began, “you know everybody except for the Corporal, here, Whitey O’Thraight. We went sailing this morning, while you were in surgery. Whitey, this is Francis W. Pololo, H.D., my husband.”

Transferring the cigar to his left hand, he swallowed mine with his massive right. “Pleased to meet you, Corporal, did you like sailing?”

I was glad he could not see me blushing in the dark.

“Francis,” said Koko, “you’ve made him blush! He did very well, for a first-timer. Where he comes from, they haven’t any open water at all.”

Now how had she known that? The people of
Tom Paine Maru
seemed almost telepathic at times, clairvoyant at others, sharing information and experience with each other without speaking, gazing at the ceiling and suddenly knowing. Now, apparently, they could also see in the dark.

“Nor praxeologists, I gather,” Pololo observed, looking at the Lieutenant.

“That’s obvious!” snorted a sarcastic voice the other side of Koko.

“Hello there, Lucille, how have you been?” Pololo responded, “I take it that you’ve been teaching Corporal O’Thraight the finer points?”

“Only of ‘feudin’, fussin’, and fightin’,” Howell scratched himself idly with a back leg, “They haven’t gotten to praxeology, yet.”

“What in the name of Hamilton’s ghost is praxeology?” I demanded. I had been trying to get Lucille to answer that very question for days.

“Properly,” intoned the gorilla, “it’s the study of human action—and by extension,” he brushed a hand over his pelt, patted Howell, “of the actions of all Mindkind, taking in everything from ethics and epistemology, through sociology and anthropology, to politics and economics.”

“Are you a teacher of this subject?” I asked.

“Dear me, no,” said Pololo. “I’m a physician, Corporal, a Healer, which is not a praxeological discipline, but a physio-mechanical one. It’s simply an interest of mine, as it is with many—otherwise, soap operas would soon lose their lucrative appeal. I met your Lieutenant, here, while he was attempting to find the ship’s captain.” He grinned at his wife who looked down at the sand, shaking her head. “I’ve been trying ever since then to explain to him why that’s such a difficult undertaking.”

Even in the dark, I could sense the Lieutenant’s exasperation. “The good doctor assures me that there is, indeed, a captain. Yet no one will conduct me to the bridge, to the control-room, or even to the captain’s cabin. I have been assured that this personage may be found at unpredictable times in private quarters—which do not appear to exist—or in a certain forest. I wandered that forest for three hours this morning, witnessing nothing more than several groups of picnickers!”

Koko laughed. “You might have seen me there, any morning. I like picnics.”

-5-

Before us on the beach, the fire burned low, no longer reflected by the moon-glistening waves rolling up onto the sand. One by one, the celebrators had departed, first the strangers who had built the fire, played games, eaten primitively-cooked food, sung several songs as we listened to them. Then Koko, her husband, the Lieutenant, muttering about “getting an early start”. Finally the Nahuatls, Howell and Elsie.

The evening was warm. Breezes off the water were moisture-laden. Even Lucille, who had remained behind, seemed not at all unpleasant, breathing close beside me in the darkness. She graced the air with a fragrance all her own, that had everything to do with being female, and nothing at all to do with perfume. Eleva, Vespucci, the Navy, my duty, all seemed very far away at the moment. Thoughts of witchery, dangerous, often unbearable—but oh, so stirring—crowded into my mind.

“What?” I asked, jolted out of my reverie.

Lucille, however, could never just leave things alone. “I said, ‘a permanently powerless underclass’. Why don’t you ever pay attention Corporal? That’s what you come from, you know, without hope, without a future. What’s it like to spend your whole life, cradle-to-grave,
in grade?”

I began to feel different, less pleasant emotions. “This is not strictly correct, Lucille. I am a corporal, now, but we are all born privates.” Except, of course, for officer class children like the Lieutenant.

She said, “I’ll refrain from the dirty double-entendre that inspires.”

“That is uncommonly decent of you, Lucille. Are you sure you feel well?”

“Aha!” she exclaimed. “The worm turns at last! You’re learning bad habits with us here, Whitey. Sassing back. Disrespect for authority. Hell, I thought you were actually going to hit me, back there for a minute.”

“I do not hit women,” I told her. Not even small, nasty-tempered ones who needed it, I thought to myself. Despite the edge in her words, Lucille’s had softened with the last few phrases, dropped half an octave. It was the first time she had ever called me by my given name.

I wondered what she wanted.

She snorted: “I understand. It would be discourteous. Unmilitary. ‘Duty, Honor, Country’. Is that all you really want out of life, Corporal?”

Even in the darkness, I could imagine the arch of her eyebrows. If anyone could manage a come-on sneer, it would be Lucille, I thought. Me, I wanted to go home to Eleva. Now, more than at any other moment, even in the dungeons of Sca, I wanted—I needed—to go home to Eleva.

“Come on, Corporal, tell us what you really want. To save glorious Vespucci—what a name!—from us bad, nasty anarchists? Is that what you want? Well, I’ve got some news for you. It’ll take a better man than you are to do it—and he won’t want to! You’d have to do a heap of growing, all in the wrong direction, as far as your culture’s concerned.”

“What do you mean by that?” I snapped.

“Nothing much. Except that at this moment, in order to serve the best interests of Vespucci as you conceive them, you’re going to have to overcome what it created in you: passivity, resignation, overawe for the high and mighty. It’s ironic, but far from surprising. To save your precious culture, you’ve got to become what it least wants you to be.”

“What is that? You were going to say ‘a man’, were you not? Not very original. Nor very true, although I do not expect you to see it. Your friends are all afraid to say it, but you do not see very much of anything, Lucille, except the mixed-up angry garbage inside your own head.”

Craaack!

My mouth stung where she had backhanded it. I had known it would happen, sooner or later. Grinning, I spat out a drop of blood, feeling as if my arteries were charged with something carbonated. “What is the matter, little girl? You can ration it out, but you cannot take it yourself?”

Lucille leaped up, turning to stamp away. In the last flicker of firelight, I seized her by the ankle, twisting my wrist. She slammed back onto the ground, spitting sand as I had been spitting blood just an instant before. In the heat of the moment, she seemed to forget what she knew of real combat, raining ineffectual blows on my chest and shoulders as I crawled alongside her, holding her down. I grabbed her wrists, held them together with one hand. Her face was flushed—I could feel the warmth of it on my own—her breath came in harsh gasps.

Then she composed herself: “Okay, let’s do something military,” she said sarcastically. “How about a little rape to round out the evening’s—”

I pressed my free hand hard over her mouth—her eyes had gone wild—“Lucille,” I told her, “with you, I suspect that would be impossible.”

She would have hit me again, but by then I had skinned her suit down over her upper arms, binding her. In another moment, she was free again, completely, as was I. Her small, naked breasts were crushed against my chest. Her mouth half open, her eyes rolled back in her head, she moaned, almost screamed as I penetrated her. Her back arched, her arms locked rigidly around me, pulling me deeper inside her. She thrust her flat, hard belly against me, climaxing before I did.

An unbearable light flared within my brain, a brilliant, all-consuming white light that left little violet sparks behind when it faded.

Eventually, they faded, too.

For a moment, it had felt to me as if I knew the secrets of the universe, the answer to every problem men had ever confronted. As she lay in my arms, breathing hard, her voice, very low now, husked in my ear.

“What took you so fucking long, Whitey?”

The wrath of koko

“More coffee, Corporal darling?”

The swimming-pool session, the Lieutenant’s argument with Pololo, were neither the first educational experiences I was subject to aboard
Tom Paine Maru,
nor by any means the last. There were moments when the entire ship felt like some vast stargoing campus, but it was always difficult distinguishing teachers from students, or schooltime from recess. Maybe that had something to do with the utter absence of books.

Recess did have its moments, however. “No, thank you,” I answered her. “I believe that I will just lie here for a while, gathering my strength.”

The low buzz of something called a “bumblebee” distracted me for a moment. As it faded, I could hear the trilling of something called a meadowlark.

I leaned over to kiss Lucille in the hollow of her beautiful collarbone. She ducked her head—it turned out she was very ticklish—grinned, then grabbed me around the neck, wrestling me down on my back.

Everybody seemed quite anxious that I should learn ... whatever it was they wanted me to learn. I was aware that the Lieutenant was going through much the same thing. I liked most of the individuals I came to know, human or otherwise, very much. They were almost unanimously warm, kindly, generous with everything. How they could embrace a cold, unfriendly, discredited philosophy like capitalism was beyond me. But if I had heard “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” once in my first few days aboard
Tom Paine Maru,
I had heard it a thousand times.

Of course, it was possible that one pose or another was a lie.

“Well, you lazy bum,” she shook my shoulders. “I do!”

“What? Oh—coffee—please go ahead without me.”

One consistency remained. The focus of nearly every conversation was the planet Sodde Lydfe. Every anthropology seminar I was pressed into attending by Howell, Elsie, Koko, or Lucille, lectures about psychology, geography classes, economic dissertations, all were aimed at analyzing strange cultures that, in turn, were compared to others I had never heard of: Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Socialist England—a similar place called Denmark—Nortonian California, Occupied Hawaii.

Occupied by whom?

Lucille tried to help: “Nazis are a local brand of fascist,” she explained with ill-concealed impatience. Coffee or not, I felt she had something other in mind that morning—again—than discussing politics. “From that first place I ever told you about—remember ‘groupies’?”

Unselfconsciously naked, she rolled onto one side, ran a finger in a circle over the middle of the bed between us. Not for the first time, I thought that I had seen celebrated paintings at home that were less heartbreakingly beautiful than Lucille was, with her small but perfectly formed breasts, her slender waist, her narrow, almost boyish hips, her long, flawless legs. The surface firmed between us. She took her cup off the nightstand where it had filled itself, set it on the mattress, then reached back for a cigarette rising through the tabletop.

“I remember.” I tried to avoid sneezing when the first tendril of tobacco smoke drifted toward my face. “Also that you called my uniform ‘fascist modern’.” I thought back over the history lessons inflicted on me over the last few days. “The Nazis were United Statesians, then?”

It was strange, waking up in a forest clearing. Breezes stirred the evergreens a hundred meters away, rippled uncut grass that lay between them and us. The field was littered with upjutting boulders, covered with gray-yellow lichen, outcroppings of prickly-pear whose blossoms were attended by flying insects. Our bed was being circled, high above, by a broad-winged raptor that passed overhead as if he could not see us—which he could not, since he was a holographic recording, just like everything else displayed on Lucille’s apartment walls.

She wrapped the sheet about her, depriving me of the room’s most scenic view. “Good memory, for a Kilroy, Whitey, but in that era, the entire world was controlled by fascism: Nazis in a nation-state called Germany,
Fascisti
in Italy, Shinto in Japan, the New Deal in the United States. similar things elsewhere, though people didn’t always realize what philosophy was in the driver’s seat. Check into Zionism sometime.”