New Celebrations: The Adventures of Anthony Villiers (18 page)

3

Y
AGOOTS AND THEIR OTHERWISE-NAMED BRETHREN
are a historic commonplace. They are the walking horses of a prosperous society—decorative but useless.

They are gentry playing town or maison. Where they are many, they dress down. Where they are few, they dress up. In either case, they mainly occupy themselves by rolling hoops or flying kites.

But this isn’t fair. The elaborately dressed young lout who boxes the Watch or plays catahouch with old men in the street is a stereotype. There is more to yagootry than incomprehensible nihilism. Sai Din the Mundu was a yagoot, and Duncan McGub, and J. W. v. Goethe. They all rose to better things.

Yagoots are primarily a symptom of societal malaise. Those who become yagoots are both those who can offer nothing to society and those to whom society offers nothing. Because yagootry is a game of Let’s Pretend, most yagoots eventually come to terms with society, making the best compromise they can manage. On the other hand, on rare occasions it is society that has had to make the compromise.

* * *

His wife having given him permission, Admiral Beagle fancied himself a strong man, and he sometimes passed for one outside her company. In fact, however, she ruled him.

When the cook signaled that she might, Irma Beagle took charge of her husband’s lunch. It looked tasty, but she didn’t stop to sample. She carried it smartly in to her husband and then stood two respectful paces behind his chair while he tasted it gingerly and then began to eat. It was kulaby, quite good.

“Walter,” she said. She was no common Shiawassee wife. After thirty-five years of Navy life and many meals eaten according to General Empire custom, she still might not sit comfortably at the same table, but she was perfectly capable of speaking while he ate.

“Do you know where Ralph has gone? Rosalie is so worried.” Rosalie was her sister and Ralph’s mother.

“And well she should be with that scapegrace for a son,” the Admiral said.

“Walter, that isn’t charitable. You’ve never given Ralph a chance.”

“It only takes one bite to know that an apple is rotten,” the Admiral said. He talked like that when he remembered to. He kept a notebook of pithy quips and some of them were good enough to stand repetition. He’d used one three times in the same day in the presence of the Trust Administrator, and been threatened with loss of his position as a consequence, but that was a rare reaction. Most people never counted.

“Walter, don’t be silly.”

“He had reason to run. He was consorting with an impudent and obscene alien.”

This meant next to nothing to Irma, who limited herself to a handful of real concerns, of which one was relations with her sister.

“Walter, do you know where Ralph has gone?”

He looked at his food. “He’s gone to Pewamo. My agents found out that much.”

“Oh, you must really have frightened the boy. Well, somebody will just have to go to Pewamo and bring him home. You know that Rosalie is all alone in the world and Ralph is her only strength.”

Admiral Beagle shook his head. He knew whom his wife had in mind. “Let Ralph come home by himself. If Rosalie wants him sooner, let her bring him home.”

“You know Rosalie can’t go to Pewamo by herself. Walter, really. Must
I
go?”

He said nothing, but continued eating. Characteristic. However, she said nothing, and that was uncharacteristic, so after several minutes of silence he turned and she was gone. He thought of a pithy quip, but didn’t dare say it even to the empty room. He did repeat it in the sanctity of his mind.

He couldn’t afford to let his wife go to Pewamo. That would give her too great a moral advantage. On the other hand, he had no desire to find his nephew, forgive his manifest and manifold transgressions, and ask him to come home. That, too, would be to yield moral advantage.

“Bring Ralph home from Pewamo?” he said aloud. Yes, by Heaven; with a grip on his ear. “All right. I will.”

His wife appeared in the door. “Thank you, Walter,” she said.

So he was off to Pewamo. Ah, reconciliation.

* * *

Solomon “Biff” Dreznik crouched in a jungle thicket ready to pounce. Tawny heat surrounded him. Dust motes swam lazily in the sunlight. He waited, close now to Villiers’ trail.

Most people live limited lives. Farmers spend their lives on farms. Merchants spend their lives in stores. Actors spend their lives in agents’ offices. Assassins, however, see the green and the brown of life. They taste the sweet dripping fruit that most men only know as a pale artificial flavor. The chance to walk widely and observe men of all conditions was one of Dreznik’s reasons for becoming an assassin.

Dreznik’s wide experience of the ambiences of life permitted him to legitimately make surmises that a farmer, merchant, or actor would lack the competence to proffer. For instance, a professional jardinier would say with confidence what Dreznik might say less surely: that Lord Broccoli had lost interest in maintaining the order of his gardens. However, it would clearly not be proper for men less worldly to suggest, as several had, that the gardens were falling to rack and ruin.

Let be. They provided Solomon “Biff” Dreznik a place to crouch and observe. Two sounds were the only sign of his presence—the faintest of breathing and the humanly inaudible hum of his personal air-conditioning unit.

He knew the routines of the household. At any moment Lord Broccoli’s faithful family robot Morris would come down the great stone steps from the maison, cross the lawn with tinny dignity, and fill the bladder bat feeding station with a select mixture of sixty-two percent farofa, thirty-three percent seeds and nuts, and five percent candy and surprises. Dreznik had analyzed the mixture and found it in these proportions on three consecutive days.

Any objective man would say that Dreznik was rotten. He killed people for money and sometimes for pleasure. His card said: “Contact Dreznik—Livermore.” There was a drawing of a skull with a rose through the eye, and in the lower left corner it said, “Solomon ‘Biff’ Dreznik,” and gave his agent’s address.

He waited now for Morris to come. In his hand he held tinsnips. His appearance was bleak and morbid.

Dreznik was highly rated in most directories, but some few held reservations. His contract completion record was good, but he had been killed three times when once was generally considered a limit for luck. His deaths seemed to have had no effect except to make him more bleak and morbid.

Bladder bats, brown and white and gray, began to drift down out of the skies and Dreznik gathered himself, his mind finding the rhythm of attack that lions express with a metronomic beat of the tail. Morris walked slowly between the wild garden rows and chirped to the bladder bats. He suspected nothing.

Dreznik waited until the right moment, until Morris was abreast of him and a step beyond, and then slipped out of the bushes. Slipping was not what he had intended, but his left foot had been less securely placed than was necessary for an effective charge. He fell on his face in the grass.

Morris, with obvious pride in the irrationality that made him more than a machine, fled shrieking. The stories robots tell at night are even more frightening than those told by twelve-year-old boys, and Morris was an old robot.

To be visible from the house, Morris needed to reach the end of the garden row. Dreznik was up and after the little robot instantly, ignoring a twisted ankle that a less well-schooled man would have been unable to walk upon. The bladder bats spread themselves thin and rose on the air. Their alert black eyes watched the chase through the garden with a neutrality that showed small appreciation for their daily farofa. They did produce occasional flatulent squeaks, but these were more in the nature of commentary than calls for succor.

No help arrived. Dreznik overtook Morris with twenty feet to spare in a final hop and felled him with a ruthless blow to the command center. He bent over the robot and limbered his tinsnips.

“I know how to get information out of you,” he said.

Not content with knowledge of Villiers’ whereabouts, Dreznik left Morris a metal rubble heap, a crazy tangle of disconnected arms and legs and pieces of torso, with his head on top as the
pièce de résistance
. Dreznik made his escape as he had come, over the high brick wall at the foot of the garden. Some minutes after he had gone, a curious piebald bladder bat drifted down to hover by the rose that Dreznik had left sticking out of Morris’s left eye. “Shoo,” Morris said weakly, and the bladder bat produced an abruptly terminated bagpipe honk and rose again.

At Shiawassee Spaceport, Dreznik bought a ticket to Duden and settled with endless patience to wait for his ship. His ankles were mismated and he limped when he walked, but that was nothing to this bleak, morbid, inevitable man. He sat squarely, observing the world and waiting for his ship.

* * *

Fillmore Djaha was as stimulated by his encounter with Torve the Trog as Ralph and John had been. When he walked from the park in early dawn with
Color Selection in Galactic Pantography
held beneath his coat by elbow pressure, he, too, was unready to have the night end. Consequently, when he reached home still skipping he opened the book he had swiped and began to read it.

Fillmore was a constantly busy person, his mind and hands always occupied to good purpose. He was a doer, which is rare and good. That was
à droite
. À gauche, he did things as he came to them with no hierarchy of value, no perceptible order of progression, and no visible impact on himself. He had found his way to yagootry, and if past history was any guide would find his path away again.

Given their offspring, Fillmore’s parents had only the usual choice of acceptance or rejection. They had settled on acceptance. They irritated their neighbors by not only condoning their son’s behavior, but insisting that given time he would turn out to be as successful as any of their children. They irritated their friends by admitting privately that they didn’t particularly care whether he did or not. And they made no comment when he came home early in the morning and began to read a book. It was Fillmore’s life and Fillmore’s way.

Such were Fillmore’s peculiar powers of concentration that he was not plagued with the sleepiness that had bothered Ralph and John. Such was the stimulation of Morgenstern that he remained with the book until he had turned the final page, warmed as he read by an ever-growing excitement.

Morgenstern is really not that good. The thesis is adequate, but the style is mediocre. However, successful books need not be good—they must merely arrive at the proper moment.

This book was successful. At the moment he finished it, Fillmore thought it was easily the most stimulating book he had ever read. At that moment he wanted nothing more than to start at the beginning and read it all over again, but he restrained the impulse the better to torture himself with delicious anticipation.

Fillmore sat down under the force of an irresistible impulse and wrote a letter to Morgenstern. He said ordinary things in less-than-ordinary words. He said that he had read the book in one sitting and that he had liked it a lot, and that things had been dull lately but this book changed all that. However, such was his fire that the letter seemed to say, “Some books are to be swallowed,” and “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” and “Days of troubles been weighing on my mind, but I just looked up and the sun’s begun to shine.”

He had just finished the letter and was reading it over for sense and sound when Ralph called from the spaceport.

“Ralph, listen to this.”

“I haven’t time,” Ralph said. “My ship is about to leave.”

A curious thing for him to say, but such was Fillmore’s single-mindedness that he took no notice, but simply began to read. After an initial token protest, Ralph listened. Ordinarily he would not have, but he
was
in a hurry. When Fillmore was finished, Ralph told him of the trip to Pewamo, and the news finally sank in.

“Come on over,” Ralph said. “The more the merrier.”

“To Pewamo?”

“It isn’t in style, but that’s where we’re going. That’s where things are happening.”

“On to Pewamo,” Fillmore said. “I’ll be there tomorrow.”

He rang off the vid in the upward surge of a manic fit. He danced around the room warbling, “Pewamo, Pewamo, Pewamo, Pewamo, Pewamo, Pewamo.”

There was so much emotion within him that he had to find an outlet. It was an itch, a compulsion, a
folie
to do. The madness led his mind to make a jump of a kind that it had never made before, and he was impelled to resurrect a previous interest to serve a present one. Thus do we rise to meet occasion.

He yelled a question about his dup equipment to his mother, and before she could answer remembered where it had been stored. He dug it out, necessarily replacing what he moved in order to give himself room to work. He cleaned up the equipment, replaced a broken guide light, and went out to buy the necessary inventory of supplies.

He had in mind making a copy of the Morgenstern book for himself. If he was going to see Villiers again, he thought it would only be politic to return his book.

When he finished making one copy, he didn’t stop. He made another. He thought of somebody to give it to, and made another copy, and thought of somebody to give it to. After ten copies he had to go out for more supplies.

He didn’t sleep. He worked well into the night copying Morgenstern. When he ran out of supplies again, he had seventy-three copies, and somebody to send each copy to. Without pause, he prepared the books for mailing. He mailed them just after dawn along with his letter to Morgenstern.

His father was eating breakfast when he returned to the house. He sat down tiredly.

“I’m very sleepy,” he said. “Will you take me to the spaceport and put me on the Pewamo Excursion?”

His father, who was very nice people, did as he asked. And that was another bound for Pewamo.

* * *

As Villiers had been able to perceive, Sergei Gilfillian was a likable young man with no harm in him. It is ironic that his mother, who knew him far better than Villiers was ever likely to, distrusted her own judgment so strongly as to need Villiers’ assurances. But then Sergei had been acting in a way she didn’t understand lately. What could she do but think the worst?