Haldeman, Joe - SS - A Tangled Web.pdf - Joe Haldeman - przemosta

A !TANGLED WEB

Your spaceport bars fall into two distinct groups: the ones for the baggage and the ones

for the crew. I was baggage, this trip, but didn't feel like paying the prices that people who

space for fun can afford. The Facilities Directory listed under "Food and Drink" four

establishments: the Hartford Club (inevitably), the Silver Slipper Lounge, Antoine's, and

Slim Joan's Bar & Grill.

I went to a currency exchange booth first, assuming that Slim Joan was no better at

arithmetic than most bartenders, and cashed in a hundredth share of Hartford stock. Then I

took the drop lift down to the bottom level. That the bar's door was right at the drop-lift exit

would be a dead giveaway even if its name had been the Bell, Book, and Candle. Baggage

don't generally like to fall ten stories, no matter how slowly.

It smelled right, stir-fry and stale beer, and the low lighting suggested economy rather

than atmosphere. Slim Joan turned out to be about a hundred thousand grams of transvestite.

Well, I hadn't come for the scenery.

The clientele seemed evenly mixed between humans and others, most of the aliens being

!tang, since this was Morocho III. I've got nothing against the company of aliens, but if I was

going to spend all next week wrapping my jaws around !tangish, I preferred to mix my

drinking with some human tongue.

"Speak English?" I asked Slim Joan.

"Some," he/she/it growled. "You would drink something?" I'd never heard a Russian-

Brooklyn accent before. I ordered a double saki, cold, in Russian, and took it to an empty

booth.

One of the advantages of being a Hartford interpreter is that you can order a drink in a

hundred different languages and dialects. Saves money; they figure if you can speak the

lingo you can count your change.

I was freelancing this trip, though, working for a real-estate cartel that wanted to screw the

!tang out of a few thousand square kilometers of useless seashore property. It wouldn't stay

useless, of course.

Morocho III is a real garden of a planet, but most people never see it. The tachyon nexus

is down by Morocho I, which we in the trade refer to as "Armpit," and not many people take

the local hop out to III (Armpit's the stopover on the Earth–Sammler run). Starlodge,

Limited, was hoping to change that situation.

I couldn't help eavesdropping on the !tangs behind me. (I'm not a snoop; it's a side effect

of the hypnotic-induction learning process.) One of them was leaving for Earth today, and

the other was full of useful advice. "He"—they have seven singular pronoun classes,

depending on the individual's age and estrous condition—was telling "her" never to make

any reference to human body odor, no matter how vile it may be. He should also have told

her not to breathe on anyone. One of the byproducts of their metabolism is butyl nitrite,

which smells like well-aged socks and makes humans get all faint and cross-eyed.

I've worked with !tangs a few times before, and they're some of my favorite people. Very

serious, very honest, and their logic is closer to human logic than most. But they are strange-

looking. Imagine a perambulating haystack with an elephant's trunk protruding . They have

two arms under the pile of yellow hair, but it's impolite to take them out in public unless one

is engaged in physical work. They do have sex in public, constantly, but it takes a zoologist

with a magnifying glass to tell when.

He wanted her to bring back some Kentucky bourbon and Swiss chocolate. Their

metabolism parts company with ours over proteins and fats, but they love our carbohydrates

and alcohol. The alcohol has a psychedelic effect on them, and sugar leaves them plastered.

A human walked in and stood blinking in the half-light. I recognized him and shrank back

into the booth. Too late. He strode over and stuck out his hand. "Dick Navarro!"

"Hello, Pete." I shook his hand once. "What brings you here? Hartford business?" Pete

was also an interpreter.

—Oh, no, he said in Arabic. Only journeying.

—Knock it off, I said in Serbo-Croatian. —Isn't your native language English? I added in

Greek.

"Sure it is. Yours?"

"English or Spanish. Have a seat."

I smacked my lips twice at Slim Joan, and she came over with a menu. "To be eating you

want?"

"Nyet," he said. "Vodka." I told her I'd take another. "So what are you doing here?" Pete

asked.

"Business."

"Hartford?"

"Nope."

"Secret."

"That's right." Actually, they hadn't said anything about its being secret. But I knew Peter

Lafitte. He wasn't just passing through.

We both sat silently for a minute, listening to the !tangs. We had to smile when he

explained to her how to decide - which public bathroom to use when. This was important to

humans, he said. Slim Joan came with the drinks and Pete paid for both, a bad sign.

"How did that Spica business finally turn out?" he asked.

"Badly." Lafitte and I had worked together on a partition-of-rights hearing on Spica IV,

with the Confederación actually bucking Hartford over an alien-rights problem. "I couldn't

get the humans to understand that the minerals had souls, and I couldn't get the natives to

believe that refining the minerals didn't affect their spiritual status. It came to a show of

force, and the natives backed down. I wouldn't like to be there in twenty years, though."

"Yeah. I was glad to be recalled. Arcturus all over.

"That's what I tried to tell them." Arcturus wasn't a regular stop any more, not since a ship

landed and found every human artistically dismembered. "You're just sightseeing?"

"This has always been one of my favorite planets." "Nothing to do."

"Not for you city boys. The fishing is great, though." Ah ha. "Ocean fishing?"

"Best in the Confederaci6n."

"I might give it a try. Where do you get a boat?"

He smiled and looked directly at me. "Little coastal village, Pa'an!al."

Smack in the middle of the tribal territory I'd be dickering for. I dutifully repeated the

information into my ring.

I changed the subject and we talked about nothing for a while. Then I excused myself,

saying I was time-lagging and had to get some sleep. Which was true enough, since the

shuttle had stayed on Armpit time, and I was eight hours out of phase with III. But I bounced

straight to the Hartford courier's office.

The courier on duty was Estelle Dorring, whom I knew slightly. I cut short the

pleasantries. "How long to get a message to Earth?"

She studied the clocks on the wall. "You're out of luck if you want it hand-carried. I'm not

going to Armpit until tomorrow. Two days on the shuttle and I'll miss the Earth run by half a

day.

"If broadcast is all right, you can beam to Armpit and the courier there can take it on the

Twosday run. That leaves in seventy-two minutes. Call it nineteen minutes' beam time. You

know what you want to say?"

"Yeah. Set it up." I sat down at the customers' console.

STARLODGE LIMITED

642 EASTRIVER

NEW YORK, NEW YORK 100992

ATTENTION: PATRICE DUVAL

YOU MAY HAVE SOME COMPETITION HERE. NOTHING OPEN YET BUT A

GUY WE CALL PETER RABBIT IS ON THE SCENE. CHECK INTERPRETERS

GUILD AND SEE WHO ' S PAYING PETER LAFITTE. CHANGE TERMS OF

SALE? PLEASE REPLY NEXT SAMMLER RUNRICARDO NAVARRO/RM

2048/MOROCHO HILTON

I wasn't sure what good the information would do me, unless they also found out how

much he was offering and authorized me to outbid him. At any rate, I wouldn't hear for three

days, earliest. Sleep.

Morocho III—its real name is !ka'al—rides a slow sweeping orbit around Morocho A, the

brighter of the two suns that make up the Morocho system (Morocho A is a close double star

itself, but its white dwarf companion hugs so close that it's lost in the glare). At this time of

day, Morocho B was visible low in the sky, a hard blue diamond, too bright to stare at, and

A was right overhead, a bloated golden ball. On the sandy beach below us the flyer cast two

shadows, dark blue and faint yellow, which raced to come together as we landed.

Pa'an!al is a fishing village thousands of years old, on a natural harbor formed where a

broad jungle river flows into the sea. Here on the beach were only a few pole huts with

thatched roofs, where the fishers who worked the surf and shallow pools lived. Pa'an!al

proper was behind a high stone wall, which protected it on one side from the occasional

hurricane and on the other from the interesting fauna of the jungle.

I paid off my driver and told him to come back at second sundown. I took a deep breath

and mounted the steps. There was an open-cage Otis elevator beside the stairs, but people

didn't use it, only fish.

The !tang are compulsive about geometry. This wall was a precise 1:2 rectangle, and the

stairs mounted from one corner to the opposite in a satisfyingly Euclidian 30 degrees. A

guardrail would have spoiled the harmony. The stairs were just wide enough for two !tang to

pass, and the rise of each step was a good half meter. By the time I got to the top I was both

tired and slightly terrified.

A spacefaring man shouldn't be afraid of heights, and I'm not, so long as I'm in a vehicle.

But when I attained the top of the wall and looked down the equally long and perilous flight

of stairs to ground level, I almost swooned. Why couldn't they simply have left a door in the

wall?

I sat there for a minute and looked down at the small city. The geometric regularity was

pleasing. Each building was either a cube or a stack of cubes, and the rock from which the

city was built had been carefully sorted, so that each building was a uniform shade. They

went from white marble through sandy yellow and salmon to pearly gray and obsidian. The

streets were a regular matrix of red brick. I walked down, hugging the wall.

At the bottom of the steps a !tang sat on a low bench, watching the nonexistent traffic. —

Greetings, I clicked and snorted at him. —It certainly is a pleasant day.

—Not everywhere, he grunted and wheezed back. An unusually direct response.

—Are you waiting for me?

—Who can say? I am waiting. His trunk made a philosophical circle in the air. —If you

had not come, who knows for what I would have been waiting?

—Well, that's true. He made a circle in the other direction, which I think meant What

else? I stood there for a minute while he looked at me or the ground or the sky. You could

never tell.

—I hope this isn't a rude question, he said. —Will you forgive me if this is a rude

question?

—I certainly will try.

—Is your name !ica'o *va!o?

—That was admirably close. —It certainly is.

—You could follow me. He got up. —Or enjoy the pleasant day.

I followed him closely down the narrow street. If he got in a crowd I'd lose him for sure. I

couldn't tell an estrus-four female from a neuter, not having sonar (they tell each other apart

by sensing body cavities, very romantic).

We went through the center of town, where the well and the market square were. A few

dozen !tang bargained over food, craft items, or abstractions. They were the most mercantile

race on the planet, although they had sidestepped the idea of money in favor of labor

equivalence: for those two ugly fish I will trade you an original sonnet about your daughter

and three vile limericks for your next affinity-group meeting. Four limericks, tops.

We went into a large white building that might have been City Hall. It was evidently

guarded, at least symbolically, since two !tang stood by the door with their arms exposed.

It was a single large room similar to a Terran mosque, with a regular pattern of square

columns holding 'up the ceiling. The columns supported shelving in neat squares, up to about

two meters; on the shelves were neat stacks of accordion-style books. Although the ceiling

had inset squares of glass that gave adequate light, there was a strong smell of burnt fish oil,

which meant the building was used at night. (We had introduced them to electricity, but they

used it only for heavy machinery and toys.)

The !tang led me to the farthest corner, where a large hay-stack was bent over a book,

scribbling. They had to read or write with their heads a few centimeters from the book, since

their light-eyes were only good for close work.

—It has happened as you foretold, Uncle.

—Not too amazing a prophecy, as I'd sent a messenger over yesterday.

Uncle waved his nose in my direction. —Are you the same one who came four days ago?

—No, I have never been to this place. I am Ricardo Navarro, from the Starlodge tribe.

—I grovel in embarrassment. Truly it is difficult to tell one human from another. To my

poor eyes you look exactly like Peter Lafitte.

(Peter Rabbit is bald and ugly, with terrible ears. I have long curly hair with only a trace

of gray, and women have called me attractive.) —Please do not be embarrassed. This is

often true when different peoples meet. Did my brother say what tribe he represented?

—I die. O my hair falls out and my flesh rots and my bones are cracked by the hungry

ta!a'an. He drops me behind him all around the forest and nothing will grow where his

excrement from my marrow falls. As the years pass the forest dies from the poison of my

remains. The soil washes into the sea and poisons the fish, and all die. O the embarrassment.

—He didn't say?

—He did but said not to tell you.

That was that. —Did he by some chance say he was interested in the small morsel of land

I mentioned to you by courier long ago?

—No, he was not interested in the land.

—Can you tell me what he was interested in?

—He was interested in buying the land.

Verbs. —May I ask a potentially embarrassing question?

Haldeman, Joe - SS - A Tangled Web.pdf

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