Podkayne of Mars (18 page)

So I’ve learned to say “thank you” in as many languages as possible and I always try to say it in the home language of the person I’m dealing with, if I can guess it, which I usually can. Doesn’t matter much if you miss, though; porters and clerks and taxi drivers and such usually know that one word in several languages and can spot it even if you can’t talk with them at all in any other way. I’ve written a lot of them down and memorized them:

Or “money tock” and Clark says this one means “money talks.” But Clark is wrong; he has to tip too high because he won’t bother to say “thank you.” Oh, yes, Clark tips. It hurts him, but he soon discovered that he couldn’t get a taxi and that even automatic vending machines were rude to him if he tried to buck the local system. But it infuriates him so much that he won’t be pleasant about it and that costs him.

If you say “tock” instead of “key toss” to a Finn, he still understands it. If you mistake a Japanese for a Cantonese and say “m’goy” instead of “arigato”—well, that is the one word of Cantonese he knows. And “obrigado” everybody understands.

However, if you do guess right and pick their home language, they roll out the red carpet and genuflect, all smiles. I’ve even had tips refused—and this in a city where Clark’s greediness about money is considered only natural.

All those other long, long lists of hints on How to Get Along While Traveling that I studied so carefully before I left turn out not to be necessary; this one rule does it all.

 

 

Uncle Tom is dreadfully worried about something. He’s absent-minded and, while he will smile at me if I manage to get his attention (not easy), the smile soon fades and the worry lines show again. Maybe it’s something here and things will be all right once we leave. I wish we were back in the happy Three-Cornered Hat with next stop Luna City.

ELEVEN

Things are really grim. Clark hasn’t been home for
two nights, and Uncle Tom is almost out of his mind. Besides that, I’ve had a quarrel with Dexter—which isn’t important compared with Brother being missing, but I could surely use a shoulder to cry on.

And Uncle Tom has had a real quarrel with Mr. Chairman—which was what led to my quarrel with Dexter because I was on Uncle Tom’s side even though I didn’t know what was going on and I discovered that Dexter was just as blind in his loyalty to his father as I am to Uncle Tom. I saw only a bit of the quarrel with Mr. Chairman and it was one of those frightening, cold, bitter, formally polite, grown-men quarrels of the sort that used to lead inevitably to pistols at dawn.

I think it almost did. Mr. Chairman arrived at our suite, looking not at all like Santa Claus, and I heard Uncle say coldly, “I would rather your friends had called on me, sir.”

But Mr. Chairman ignored that and about then Uncle noticed that I was there—back of the piano, keeping quiet and trying to look small—and he told me to go to my room. Which I did.

But I know what part of it is. I had thought that both Clark and I had been allowed to run around loose in Venusberg—although I have usually had either Girdie or Dexter with me. Not so. Both of us have been guarded night and day, every instant we have been out of the Tannhäuser, by Corporation police. I never suspected this and I’m sure Clark didn’t or he would never have hired Josie to watch his boodle. But Uncle did know it and had accepted it as a courtesy from Mr. Chairman, one that left him free to do whatever these things are that have kept him so busy here, without riding herd on two kids, one of them nutty as Christmas cake. (And I don’t mean me.)

As near as I can reconstruct it Uncle blames Mr. Chairman for Clark’s absence—although this is hardly fair as Clark, if he knew he was being watched, could evade eighteen private eyes, the entire Space Corps, and a pack of slavering bloodhounds. Or is it “wolfhounds”?

But, on top of this, Dexter says that they disagree completely on how to locate Clark. Myself, I think that Clark is missing because Clark wants to be missing because he intends to miss the ship and stay here on Venus where a) Girdie is, and b) where all that lovely money is. Although perhaps I have put them in the wrong order.

I keep telling myself this, but Mr. Chairman says that it is a kidnapping, that it has to be a kidnapping, and that there is only one way to handle a kidnapping on Venus if one ever expects to see the kidnappee alive again.

On Venus, kidnapping is just about the only thing a stockholder is afraid of. In fact they are so afraid of it that they have brought the thing down almost to a ritual. If the kidnapper plays by the rules and doesn’t hurt his victim, he not only won’t be punished but he has the Corporation’s assurance that he can keep any ransom agreed on.

But if he doesn’t play by the rules and they do catch him, well, it’s pretty grisly. Some of the things Dexter just hinted at. But I understand that the mildest punishment is something called a “four-hour death.” He wouldn’t give me any details on this, either—except that there is some drug that is just the opposite of anesthesia; it makes pain hurt worse.

Dexter says that Clark is absolutely safe as long as Uncle Tom doesn’t insist on meddling with things he doesn’t understand. “Old fool” is one term that he used and that was when I slapped him.

Long sigh and a wish for my happy girlhood in Marsopolis, where I understood how things worked. I don’t here. All I really know is that I can no longer leave the suite save with Uncle Tom—and must leave it and stay with him when he does and wherever he goes.

Which is how I at last saw the Cunha “cottage”—and would have been much interested if Clark hadn’t been missing. A modest little place only slightly smaller than the Tannhäuser but much more lavish. Our President’s Rose House would fit into its ballroom. That is where I quarreled with Dexter while Uncle and Mr. Chairman were continuing their worse quarrel elsewhere in that “cottage.”

Presently Uncle Tom took me back to the Tannhäuser and I’ve never seen him look so old—fifty at least, or call it a hundred and fifty of the years they use here. We had dinner in the suite and neither of us ate anything and after dinner I went over and sat by the living window. The view was from Earth, I guess. The Grand Canyon of El Dorado, or El Colorado, or whatever it is. Grand, certainly. But all I got was acrophobia and tears.

Uncle was just sitting, looking like Prometheus enduring the eagles. I put my hand in his and said, “Uncle Tom? I wish you would spank me.”

“Eh?” He shook his head and seemed to see me. “Flicka! Why?”

“Because it’s my fault.”

“What do you mean, dear?”

“Because I’m responsibu—bul for Clark. I always have been. He hasn’t any sense. Why, when he was a baby I must have kept him from falling in the Canal at least a thousand times.”

He shook his head, negatively this time. “No, Poddy. It is my responsibility and not yours at all. I am in loco parentis to both of you—which means that your parents were loco ever to trust me with it.”

“But I
feel
responsible. He’s my Chinese obligation.”

He shook his head still again. “No. In sober truth no person can ever be truly responsible for another human being. Each one of us faces up to the universe alone, and the universe is what it is and it doesn’t soften the rules for any of us—and eventually, in the long run, the universe always wins and takes all. But that doesn’t make it any easier when we
try
to be responsible for another—as you have, as I have—and then look back and see how we could have done it better.” He sighed. “I should not have blamed Mr. Cunha. He tried to take care of Clark, too. Of both of you. I knew it.”

He paused and added, “It was just that I had a foul suspicion, an unworthy one, that he was using Clark to bring pressure on me. I was wrong. In his way and by his rules, Mr. Cunha is an honorable man—and his rules do not include using a boy for political purposes.”

“Political purposes?”

Uncle looked around at me, as if surprised that I was still in the room. “Poddy, I should have told you more than I have. I keep forgetting that you are now a woman. I always think of you as the baby who used to climb on my knee and ask me to tell her ‘The Poddy Story.’ ” He took a deep breath. “I still won’t burden you with all of it. But I owe Mr. Cunha an abject apology—because
I
was using Clark for political purposes. And you, too.”

“Huh?”

“As a cover-up, dear. Doddering great-uncle escorts beloved niece and nephew on pleasure tour. I’m sorry, Poddy, but it isn’t that way at all. The truth is I am Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary for the Republic. To the Three Planets Summit. But it seemed desirable to keep it a secret until I present my credentials.”

I didn’t answer because I was having a little trouble soaking this in. I mean, I
know
Uncle Tom is pretty special and has done some important things, but all my life he has been somebody who always had time to hold a skein of yarn for me while I wound it and would take serious interest in helping me name paper dolls.

But he was talking. “So I used you, Flicka. You and your brother. Because—Poddy, do you really want to know all the ins and outs and snarls of the politics behind this?”

I did, very much. But I tried to be grown up. “Just whatever you think best to tell me, Uncle Tom.”

“All right. Because some of it is sordid and all of it is complex and would take hours to explain—and some of it really isn’t mine to tell; some of it involves commitments Bozo—sorry, the President—Some of it has to do with promises he made. Do you know who our Ambassador is now, at Luna City?”

I tried to remember. “Mr. Suslov?”

“No, that was last administration. Artie Finnegan. Artie isn’t too bad a boy . . . but he thinks he should have been President and he’s certain he knows more about interplanetary affairs and what is good for Mars than the President does. Means well, no doubt.”

I didn’t comment because the name “Arthur Finnegan” I recognized at once—I had once heard Uncle Tom sound off about him to Daddy when I was supposed to be in bed and asleep. Some of the milder expressions were “a head like a sack of mud,” “larceny in his heart,” and a “size twelve ego in a size nine soul.”

“But even though he means well,” Uncle Tom went on, “he doesn’t see eye to eye with the President—and myself—on matters that will come before this conference. But unless the President sends a special envoy—me, in this case—the Ambassador in residence automatically speaks for Mars. Poddy, what do you know about Switzerland?”

“Huh? William Tell. The apple.”

“That’s enough, I guess, although there probably never was an apple. Poddy, Mars is the Switzerland of the solar System—or it isn’t anything at all. So the President thinks, and so I think. A small man (and a small country, like Mars or Switzerland) can stand up to bigger, powerful neighbors only by being willing to fight. We’ve never had a war and I pray we never do, because we would probably lose it. But if we are willing enough, we may never have to fight.”

He sighed. “That’s the way I see it. But Mr. Finnegan thinks that, because Mars is small and weak, Mars should join up with the Terran Federation. Perhaps he’s right and this really is the wave of the future. But I don’t think so; I think it would be the end of Mars as an independent country and a free society. Furthermore, I think it is logical that if Mars gives up its independence, it is only a matter of time until Venus goes the same way. I’ve been spending the time since we got here trying to convince Mr. Cunha of this, cause him to have his Resident Commissioner make a common cause with us against Terra. This could persuade Luna to come in with us too, since both Venus and Mars can sell to Luna cheaper than Terra can. But it wasn’t at all easy; the Corporation has such a long-standing policy of never meddling in politics at all. ‘Put not your faith in princes’—which means to them that they buy and they sell and they ask no questions.”

“But I have been trying to make Mr. Cunha see that if Luna and Mars and Terra (the Jovian moons hardly count), if those three were all under the same rules, in short order Venus Corporation would be no more free than is General Motors or I.G. Farbenindustrie. He got the picture too, I’m sure—until I jumped to conclusions about Clark’s disappearance and blew my top at him.” He shook his head. “Poddy, I’m a poor excuse for a diplomat.”

“You aren’t the only one who got sore,” I said, and told him about slapping Dexter.

He smiled for the first time. “Oh, Poddy, Poddy, we’ll never make a lady out of you. You’re as bad as I am.”

So I grinned back at him and started picking my teeth with a fingernail. This is an even ruder gesture than you might think—and utterly private between Uncle Tom and myself. We Maori have a very bloodthirsty history, and I won’t even hint at what it is we are supposed to be picking out of our teeth. Uncle Tom used to use this vulgar pantomime on me when I was a little girl, to tell me I wasn’t being lady-like.

Whereupon he really smiled and mussed my hair. “You’re the blondest blue-eyed savage I ever saw. But you’re a savage, all right. And me, too. Better tell him you’re sorry, hon, because, much as I appreciate your gallant defense of me, Dexter was perfectly right. I was an ‘old fool.’ I’ll apologize to his father, doing the last hundred meters on my belly if he wants it that way; a man should admit it in full when he’s wrong, and make amends. And you kiss and make up with Dexter—Dexter is a fine boy.”

“I’ll say I’m sorry and make up—but I don’t think I’ll kiss him. I haven’t yet.”

He looked surprised. “So? Don’t you like him? Or have we brought too much Norse blood into the family?”

“I like Dexter just fine and you’re crazy with the smog if you think Svenska blood is any colder than Polynesian. I could go for Dexter in a big way—and that’s why I haven’t kissed him.”