Читать книгу The Rakehells of Heaven - John Boyd - Страница 8

Time telescopes nearing the speed of light and ceases at the Minkowski Barrier, but the hiatus must be filled. For me, entering the one-space continuum meant mediation, the Scriptures, prayer and reading Navy Regulations. Red chose the four horsemen of romantic poetry, Keats and Shelley, Yeats and Fraze, reruns of soap operas procured from the culture bank and Navy Regulations.

Red spoke little of his marriage and in his infrequent references to Thelma she was “my little angel.” His term of endearment became suspect in my mind, however. Once I attempted to engage him in a discussion of the Christian concept of Heaven, but he dismissed the subject. “Lord spare me, Jack, from Heaven with its angels and deliver my soul to Fiddlers Green.”

Fiddler’s Green is the paradise of space sailors, a meadow whereon the brooks flow with whisky and maidens gambol in birthday dress.

Because I understood O’Hara, I made no attempt to convert him. Full well I knew that O’Hara was beyond the capabilities of any fledgling evangelist.

We had taken the Scout’s Oath and were pledged to spend a measure of the one-space in the study of Navy Regulations, particularly the codes governing the classification of alien humanids. Man was the standard of measurement in the universe, and if the aliens qualified as homo sapiens, their planet was exempt from occupation by the Interplanetary Colonial Authority. Alien status was determined by the high command on the basis of scouting reports.

Qualifications were strict, touching on many aspects of the alien, his person, his organizations and even his taboos. Humanid societies must use water closets (social), and there must be separate water closets for male and female (taboos). To be classified as homo sapiens, a humanid had to possess an opposing thumb, and a belief in a Supreme Being, such Supreme Being not to exceed a triune godhead, and statute law and order must exist among humanids. Reading over the qualifications, it struck me that the only item overlooked was that the postulant was not required to wear saddle oxfords.

Biological practice was a particularly vulnerable area for alien claimants to human status. An ability to cross-breed with Earthmen was an understandable requirement, but even that was invalidated if the gestation period was less than seven months or more than eleven. Coition must occur face-to-face. Group participation disqualified. Public nudity disqualified. Oral contact with primary erogenic zones disqualified. Reading over that list caused me to rock with laughter: Red O’Hara could not have qualified as a human being under the alien codes.

I took the biological section of the codes across the passage for Red to read. He read them gravely, closed the manual and handed it back to me. “No matter, Jack,” he said. “I’ll continue to think of you as a human being.”

Let him without sin throw stones.

As midshipmen, we had been exposed to the study of Navy regs, but the pressure of classes prevented any in-depth analysis and midshipmen habitually skipped footnotes. In the section concerning alien governments, there was a footnote that aroused my curiosity. It read: “Addendum. See Public Law 36824—I.C.A.”

With microfilms of Earth laws and legal systems in the ship’s culture bank, Red and I went below and flashed P.L. 36824—I.C.A. onto the viewer.

To qualify as members of the World’s Brotherhood, inhabitants of an alien planet must possess a defense system with capabilities for interspace warfare sufficient to relieve Imperial Earth of the responsibility for the aforesaid planet’s defense.

As I clicked off the viewer, Red commented, “The message from Earth is clear—if you can’t defend yourself, we’re coming after you. Jack, these codes aren’t designed to qualify a planet for brotherhood. They’re designed to disqualify.”

I disliked the subversive tone of Red’s remark. “Government policy is not our responsibility,” I said. “It’s not for us to question the law but to obey.”

“You’re absolutely right, Jack,” Red said, “for reasons of personal sanity. If you’re going to worry about the sins of the flesh as instrument of such policy, you’re as crazy as a man cleaning the ashtrays in a car careening through a crowded schoolyard.”

“ ‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,’ ” I quoted, but in truth I could not be too condemnatory. Already I was planning in my heart to do a little fudging on Caesar myself.

Throughout my inner turmoil within the hiatus, the flawless technology of Earth continued to function. Our laser thrust slowly died. Mass loss weight. For a little while, O’Hara and I floated free, playing basketball in the ship’s gym and using each other as balls. Then our retro-jets phased in and we returned to the deck as deceleration replaced acceleration. Finally we came again into light and time, but the configuration of the stars was strange. A new galaxy hung in the sky and the Milky Way was a point of light astern.

“The luck of the Irish” is no chimera. When we surveyed the galaxy on the screen, Red looked over the star cluster with the eye of a housewife selecting strawberries and said, “Now, there’s a likely-looking star.”

I brought it in and scaled it up, checking its planetary system. It was double the magnitude of the sun, so I bracketed in an area one-third again as large as Earth’s orbit, and lo, there on the outer rim of the screen floated a planet. We brought planet and star onto opposite rims and set the computer. In an hour we had an estimate: the planet had a thirteen-month year, a twenty-eight-hour day and water vapor. It had an axial tilt only ten degrees greater than Earth and polar icecaps.

“Red, you’re a genius.”

“Credit my polka-dot drawers,” he said and took over the helm.

From one thousand miles out, we saw a planet of greenery, blue water and clouds. As Red swung into our first orbit, our sensors picked up heat lines veining three land masses and reaching almost to the poles. We circled closer, dropping to the springtime, or Northern, hemisphere of the globe, and the signs were good. That grid had to be an artifact constructed by beings with a high degree of organization and engineering skills.

I went aft to the con, leaving Red at the helm, and switched on the viewer. Below me, I saw mountains and rivers and grassy plains, and once, over an ocean, I picked up the father of all hurricanes moiling the width of my frame. But there were no signs of cities, railroads, or roads, and no indication of why a gridwork of heat should lay over the continents. As we passed into terminator on our fifth orbit, sinking lower, my eyes caught the glint of an object on the west coast of the largest continent. Immediately, I locked the viewer in, enlarging. Below me in the early morning sun, I saw an artifact.

As it registered, I hit the “position fix” button and yelled into the intercom, “Red, I saw an observatory, plain as day. . . . An astronomical observatory.”

“Mark it, Jack. We’re going down.”

Red made a four-fifths orbit and retroed, mushing into the atmosphere as easily as falling onto a featherbed. He shifted to air jets, and the jets coughed, wheezed and bit in. Our lasers were burning oxygen.

“Yippeeee, yeeeow!”

“Erin go bragh.”

How beautiful the turbulence of air! How sweet the sounds outside of hulls! Once more for us, “up” was up and “down” was down without reference to the ship, and the pull of real gravity to the spaceman is as welcome as the arms of his beloved. More, as we planed lower into the thickening air, I saw herds of gazelle-like animals grazing on the plains, and once a string of copper needles stuck into a prairie, possibly communications relay towers of some sort. Suddenly I dropped to my knees on the control-room deck and offered up thanks for Red O’Hara’s green polka-dot drawers.

“Jack,” Reds voice interrupted, “none of these mountains top at more than six thousand, so I’m going down and level off at angels eight. ETA at the co-ordinates is twenty minutes, and I’ve got one helluva tailwind.”

“Roger.”

Out of the port, I could see the terrain below, looking for all the world like the Great Smokies and cut by winding streams. I could distinguish between the dark of evergreens on the northern slopes and the lighter green of deciduous trees on the southern slopes. These mountains were older than Earth’s, but the flora seemed very similar. All that was missing were signs of habitation.

“I see your observatory, Jack. South of it there’s a large cleared area. . . . Commencing approach circle.”

Red banked the delta wings and I got a glimpse of the observatory among the trees. A balcony circled its dome. Near the building, I spotted another of the copper needles peeking above the treetops. Now we were over the mountains again, turning back and leveling off, gliding down. I felt the nose tip up, heard the supercharger cut in and Red was standing the ship on its tail.

“Gyros!”

I cut in the vertical stabilizers, calling, “Gyros in.” The ship quivered from the torque. My seat tumbled in its gimbals, and the final approach panel was in front of me.

“Compressors.”

“Compressors in.”

The retro-jets bit into the air and the ship was falling, stern down, as gently as a leaf.

“Struts!”

“Struts extending.”

There was a clunk, a long creak and a final clunk as the struts extended and the pods locked. Without reference to panel, I could estimate our distance from the surface by the changing pitch of our jet whine, but I was reading the board with interest. Give or take a few pounds air pressure, a few percentile points favoring oxygen and a fractional difference in G forces, the life-support system of the planet was very similar to Earth’s, and the temperature reading told me that a balmy morning in late spring awaited us outside. As I heard the jet sibilance change to a roar and the roar grow muffled, I braced myself.

Except for a slight initial cant to the ship and a lurch as the landing struts righted it, the terror of the spaceman, touchdown on an alien planet, came off as smoothly as an elevator dropping to the lobby fioor. Not once had I burdened my Creator with prayers during the descent, so confident was I of the skills of O’Hara.

“All readings A-Okay, Red. Lay below to lower the ramp and roll out the carpet. I’ll rig the pavilion boom.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“And mind your manners, O’Hara. I’ve got a feeling Mother Earth will be getting a batch of new customers, today. . . . And, Red?”

“Yes, sir.”

“If the customers are quadrupeds, keep in mind Navy Regulation 3,683,432.”

“Which one is that, sir?”

“Bestiality—punishable by a confinement of not less than six months and not more than ten years.”

“Glad you have it memorized, sir.”

As I opened the hatch on the pavilion locker and swung out the boom, I smiled to myself. Red considered my words as banter, which I intended, but I had not roomed with Red O’Hara for four years without picking up a little of the con man’s art.

In a con game, the most spontaneous gesture should have long-range ends in view. With the hatch closed and the locker empty, the pavilion storage compartment was also a brig with an outside lock on the door and the bulkheads padded. In the event of stalker’s fever overtaking a crew member, the canvas tent could be jettisoned in flight and the lunatic confined. Shoreside, the compartment would serve beautifully as a brig.

When I opened the hatch to rig the boom, the compartment was flooded with the perfume of growing things, and as I stood in the hatchway I heard birds warbling from the woods. Below me a meadow, brightened with flowers, sloped to a natural amphitheater surrounding a flat field in the valley about 500 yards from the ship. Beyond the oval field, the valley rose again to a bare knob and beyond that hillock more trees. Through the trees, I could see with my binoculars what we had taken to be an observatory, a white circular building topped by a dome that was surrounded by a balcony.

Above us, a few clouds floated in the blue and off to the west, the ocean gleamed against the sweep of a wood-covered and far-jutting peninsula.

“Look alive, sailor,” Red called from the ground, thirty feet below.

I looked down. He had lowered the ramp and leveled the square of red carpet which would form the floor of our exhibition tent.

“There’s no door to the observatory,” I called as I swung out the exhibit case.

“Maybe it’s on the far side,” he yelled up. “They could see us land, so they should be coming over in a few minutes. Shake a leg.”

I lowered the container and then hauled out the tent, a pyramidal suspended from a telescoping boom a little thicker than an auto aerial, to let it balloon downward, and closed the hatch to preserve the symmetry of the ship. By the time I walked down the ramp, Red was anchoring the sides of the tent with dowlings.

Within fifteen minutes, the Earth exhibit was ready. We lolled in camp chairs beside the marquee of the pavilion, uniformed in dress silver with the blue lightning bolts on our epaulets, our silver ship behind us with its blue Navy stars on its wings, with the gold, blue and yellow stripes of the pavilion soaring to a point of stars above us.

Our display cases flanked the entrance with their assortment of beads, bracelets, earrings, toys and models, gifts for the natives. Inside, seats were arranged for the three-dimensional movies of Earth’s wonders, natural and technological. Placed unobtrusively behind us inside the tent, its viewing lens protruding through a flap in the canvas, our language computer was set up and waiting. From the apex of the tent, a concealed loudspeaker sent the jerk and jive melodies of the Grave Images rolling down over the meadow.

I was recording data orally into the captain’s log as Red scanned the treeline across the valley to pick up a sight of our first customers when he motioned me to turn off the recorder.

“Why don’t we tune down that racket?” he asked. “I can’t hear myself see.”

“Regulations,” I answered.

“Up regulations,” he snorted.

I returned to the log, recording observations I could make from where I sat. Then I clicked off the log and shoved it into my tunic case, joining Red in his scanning of the distant treeline. There was nothing alive out there. We waited—fifteen minutes, half-an-hour, forty-five minutes—and there was nothing.

“Why don’t I go over?” Red suggested. “At least I could get an idea what the building is.”

“Regulations,” I said. “You could walk into an ambush.”

He looked at me. “I never thought Jack Adams was a book officer.”

I am not an officer who goes strictly by the book, but I did not want Red to know it.

“You’re learning, boy,” I snapped. “Scan the sector from twelve o’clock to four o’clock.”

He lapsed into a disgusted silence as I continued to sweep a zone ahead of me with the glasses, twenty degrees to right, twenty degrees to left—procedures established by Navy Regulations.

We saw them simultaneously, bipeds at ten o’clock, that broke from behind the knob across the valley, rushing down the slope wearing primitive leg armor and brandishing clubs. As I clicked off the Grave Images, Red said laconically, “Thanks. It looks like your ambush couldn’t wait, or they don’t like the music.”

In the silence, we could hear their war whoops drift across the valley and Red said, “Better start some martial music—for us.”

He reached back to our Earth-gifts display case and drew our laser rifles from a concealed drawer. I laid the weapon he handed me across my lap as I counted the warriors, twelve in all, armored but running at a speed no loinclothed Apache of Earth could have matched as they charged down the slope.

Suddenly they stopped at the flat area in the amphitheater, apparently for a war conference, and spread out into a line of battle. They planted markers on each flank of their skirmish line, and, suddenly, they began to kick a ball around.

“Forget our war, Jack,” Red said. “It’s a soccer team.”

Not exactly soccer, I decided, as I put my weapon away. They were playing a combination of soccer, lacrosse and tenpins, kicking the ball with tremendous force toward a wicket of three pins guarded by a goalie who guarded with a stick. The object, apparently, was to score a strike on the pins behind the goalie, and one player succeeded as I turned the volume up on the Grave Images, hoisting it a few decibels to let it carry to the playing field.

But the players did not look up.

“Maybe they’re nearsighted,” I was saying when Red shouted, “Saints be praised, Jack. Look at that!”

Fifty yards below us and to the right, a girl had emerged from the line of woods.

“Jesus Christ!” I breathed—and I had not taken the Lord’s name in vain—as I swung my glasses onto her figure.

For an approximation of the girl’s stride, take the flow of a tiger’s pacing, the lilt of a springbok’s leap, and mix with the grace of a ballerina. Her whole movement was visible. She was less than five feet tall, but fully three of those feet were dedicated—no, consecrated—to legs. Bare feet, ankles, calves, knees and bare thighs swelled in diapasons to the glory of her buttocks, which swooped back and in to her narrow waist. Her dress, loosely gathered by a belt of ribbon, barely reached below her hips.

“This is no country for thigh men,” O’Hara sighed.

She walked toward the amphitheater at an angle that would carry her face beyond our view and I reluctantly lifted my attention upward along her torso. Twin mammae protruded from her chest in the configuration of homo sapiens and a near-human head was balanced on her neck. Her face was bare of fur, as were her arms and legs, and she had eyebrows arching above two dark eyes, larger and farther apart than a human’s. Her skin was white and her hair was black.

“ ‘All that’s best of dark and bright,’ ” Red said, “ ‘meet in her aspect and her eyes.’ ”

“And her arse,” I added, for the swing of her walk jostled the hemline of her skirt to reveal new prospects. Female she was, and not solely on the evidence of her breasts. She wore no panties.

“Homo sapiens,” Red gasped. “Proof positive!”

“Not by regulations,” I snapped, still studying the girl’s face. Not once had those eyes lifted toward us, and the guitars of the Grave Images beat against her unheeded. “She must be deaf,” I said.

“Who in hell wants to talk to her?” Red asked. “Look!”

An irregular host of the long-legged beings trailed behind her from the woods, all moving with the same grace, with females outnumbering males. All wore the same short tunic. They walked singly, and the females were without jewelry or make-up. None so much as cast a glance toward our ship or our gaudy pavilion. No one talked, no one smiled.

“They have no curiosity,” I said.

“Maybe they’re more interested in soccer than in space ships and the Grave Images,” Red answered.

“But there’s no animation on their faces. They don’t talk. They’re drifting along like a herd of gazelles. Perhaps they’re beasts, dumb brutes.”

“Animals don’t go to soccer games,” Red said. “Anyway it looks like we’re getting a couple of customers.”

We were indeed. Two of the beings had detached themselves from the group and were walking up the slope toward us. They were children, a boy and a girl, and Red reached back into the toy case, pulled out a basketball and inflated it with a cylinder. He was spinning it in his hands when they glided close and stopped, keeping about twelve feet away and ten feet apart, looking at us with wide, expressionless eyes.

They were the equivalent of eight-year-olds on Earth, with rosy cheeks that might have come from the north of England. Their tawny hair curled back from their forehead and we could see ears beneath the hair. Their eyes were the same brown color as their hair.

“If eyes are the windows of the soul,” Red said, “these beings must have great souls.”

He smiled at the children, and his words and gesture revealed that he was making the common error of a spaceman—personifying aliens. To an alien, a smile may be an expression of hostility—even on Earth a laughing hyena is not noted for its sense of humor—and a hand extended in friendliness to a nonhuman may result in a broken arm. And Red’s assumption that these beings had souls was against Navy Regulations.

“They appear to be evolved from lemur monkeys crossed with kangaroos,” I said.

Ignoring me, Red pointed to himself. “Red,” he said to the boy. Then, pointing to me, “Jack.”

The children merely watched.

“Boy,” he said, pointing to the boy. “Girl.”

The children watched.

“Here, boy. Catch!” He tossed the basketball toward the boy, who stuck out his hand, palm down, and slanted the ball to the ground, where he caught and balanced it on his extended toes. The little girl sidled away from the boy. He flicked the ball slightly upward with his toes, swung his foot aside and kicked the ball toward the girl, who returned it with a sidewise flick of her leg. Soon the ball was volleying between them as each stood on one leg, the other leg moving like a pendulum, with the ball sounding thud-thud between them, moving in a flattening trajectory.

As lightly as go-devils wheeling from dust, they capered before us, keeping the ball between them with a drumming that rose to a whirring as the ball grew blurred to our sight. Yet they continued to look at us, gauging the ball’s flight with their peripheral vision as they consumed more energy than long-distance sprinters. Finally the boy faltered. He struck the ball at an angle that drove it too high for the girl to return. She caught it in the crook of her knee, cushioned its recoil and swung it back to him in an easy arc.

He caught it with his instep, balanced it for a second atop his toes and tossed it gently upward and toward Red, saying plainly, “Here, Red. Catch!”

Then they turned and were running toward the soccer field at a speed I could not have matched.

Red held the ball and said, “They have vocal chords. These people are people.”

“Not at all,” I said. “They practice public nudity.”

“Because they don’t wish to hamper their hip movements,” he argued. “They’re not merely ambidextrous, they’re ambipedal.”

“Exactly,” I said, “which makes them upright quadrupeds rather than bipeds.”

“Don’t take the book too literally,” Red said. “We, too, are upright quadrupeds, and a fig leaf could qualify them for the human family.”

“Regulations are regulations.”

“But we make the scouting reports,” he argued, “and we can bend the report a little to fit regulations. . . . Look, the woods are full of them!”

Another cluster of the beings had emerged from the wood at the same spot as the first, moving with the same purposefulness toward the playing field, and none looked up at us.

“Jack, they’re all coming from the same direction.”

“Probably entire villages migrate as a group,” I said.

“I intend to follow that stream of traffic back and see if I can discover where it’s coming from, if you’ll mind the store.”

Using the ordinary prudence rule of spacemen, Red and I should have stayed together; but ordinary common sense told me these beings were more interested in the soccer game than in an ambush. Besides, I was curious, so I decided not to pull regulations on Red. I had set the tone I wanted, our “store” was about as popular as a kosher delicatessen at Mecca, and I, too, was curious. “Permission granted,” I said.

Red removed his boots and stood up to slip out of his trousers. His shirt was longer than the aliens’ tunics, but his green polka-dot drawers flashed beneath.

“You’re out of uniform,” I said.

“My silver breeks might frighten the bairns.”

Looking at his gnarled legs covered by the pink fuzz of hair, I let my sense of truth overrule my official manner. “I would take my chances with the trousers,” I said. “If they frighten the bairns, your legs will give them nightmares.”

But Red was gone, moving toward the point of woods where the walkers had emerged. No sooner was he out of sight than I turned off the Grave Images.

It was pleasant to sit in the sunlight and watch the procession pass. Though the inhabitants were indifferent, the planet was friendly. Balmy air drifted down the hillside pungent with the odor of greenery and a few clouds moved across the sky. On the slope of the hill beyond the valley, a steady but sparse flow of beings were moving toward the amphitheater to sit in rows on the slopes surrounding the field. Except for the absence of sailboats on the distant bay, I could have been in Oregon.

The game began and the procession from the woods dwindled and began to move faster. Watching through my glasses, it was difficult to follow the contest. A player would drive toward a goal and, when his shot was blocked, he would turn and block someone else’s shot toward the same goal. No bodychecks were thrown and there was less contact because of the agility of the players than there would have been in basketball on Earth. There was no scoreboard and no referee.

My mind grew vaguely troubled as I watched the scene. Give or take a few degrees of tilt, these beings were humanids. With facile toes and hands, they might well be trained to work a double-level production line, and the facility with which they handled their bodies in yonder game portended well for safety programs. On the basis of what I could report already, Earth would have a grade-A colony on this planet. Transistor-radio factories would rise among these woodlands. Earth’s Bureau of Home Appliances would set these beings to producing low-cost kitchen ranges. Their soccer games would be company-sponsored. But here, on a planet filled with insurable risks, my first chore would be to violate the Church-State Clause in the Alien Code.

And I would need Red O’Hara’s compliance.

My attention was distracted from the game by a female coming out of the woods. Heretofore they had come in groups, but she walked alone, and she moved so sedately in comparison with the animalistic swing of the others that she reminded me of a ballet dancer projecting the image of a queen. I focused my glasses on her, a handsome female with hair so black it had a bluish cast. When I lowered my glasses slightly, I saw that her stride was restricted because her hips were hampered.

Concupiscence and carnality!

Plainly visible beneath her tunic, skintight against her broader thighs, she was wearing the green polka-dot drawers of Red O’Hara.