The Avengers of Carrig (8 page)

“According to reliable report however, an outsider recently did go in for the contest and
won.
The story goes that he wielded a bolt of lightning! Slee, who’s our nearest surviving agent to Carrig, suspects that someone may have invented gunpowder, because there are plenty of deposits of sulfur in the volcanic region, and parradile guano is very rich in sodium and potassium nitrates—exactly what you need for a simple explosive. If he’s figured out how to make elementary bombs, or worse yet some sort of rocket missile, this outsider may be all set to launch Carrig on a war of conquest.”

“And you want me to go and find out if this is true?”

“Exactly,” said Langenschmidt—not without sympathy. “I wish you luck. But luck, believe me, isn’t going to be nearly enough.”

The effect of being one kind of person for twenty-five years could not be wiped out overnight. Many times in the course of the intensive instruction she had to take to fit her for the job on ZRP 14, Maddalena gave way to the old discontent, the old rebellion. The last time, however, was the time Gus Langenschmidt lost his temper and barked at her, “What the hell are you in the Corps for anyway?”

“The pay!” she shot back.

“What use are you going to put an extra lifetime to if you can’t make proper use of the first one?”

The insult cooled her down; after a while she brought herself to apologize, and things went more smoothly. But total reform was going to take a very long time indeed.

What helped most of all was that underneath his gruff exterior and often sarcastic manner Langenschmidt proved to be closer to the glamorized Earthside ideal of a corpsman than anyone else she had met in her year and a half of service. Subconsciously she seemed to have assumed that the administrative work she had been doing since she was posted here was all the Corps ever did. It made her ashamed to discover that Langenschmidt was virtually a polymath, able to hoist from his memory snatches of the languages spoken on Fourteen, rules regarding their relationship to each other and to the parent tongues, bits of the hypothetic ur-dialect developed from Galactic and the second language spoken on Zarathustra before its destruction, which was Irani … He had by his own admission been on Fourteen three times only: twice to get subspace communicators to agents who had had theirs accidentally
destroyed; once in company with a student of social analysis who wanted more detail about religious ritual than the resident agent, a nonspecialist, could provide. And yet he probably knew more about Fourteen than the best-educated native of the planet.

Maddalena was proud of her linguistic ability, and had believed herself well grounded in etymology. But the difference between paper analysis of language, and learning to speak three distinct tongues each with four or five local dialects well enough to pass for a native in any of them, seemed completely terrifying.

Things became worse still when she had to go aboard Langenschmidt’s cruiser for the trip to Fourteen itself. Half his crew was due to be rotated and take a long leave; this time, although none of them was Earthborn, they had elected to opt for a refit on Earth and spend their furlough there. Ten years on Patrol had wearied them to the limit of endurance, and now the conclusion of their tour had been postponed to allow for her delivery to Fourteen. None of them put their common thought into words, but she could feel it in the air of the ship—the unspoken comment:
You’d better make the trouble we’ve taken over you worthwhile.

Outwardly, of course, they treated her exactly like any agent being delivered to a new assignment, with flawless politeness, and that, if anything, was even harder to bear.

She needed to spend most of the voyage revising her knowledge of the planet’s societies and perfecting her ability to speak its languages. That kept her from having to make light conversation with the crew all the time, and she was duly grateful.

In particular she passed many hours playing over and over the disinhibiting tapes which psychologists at the base had prepared for her. Langenschmidt had been brutally straightforward about the problems implicit in having to assign a woman to this task. He had pointed out that like most cultures at a similar level, Carrig was masculine-dominated and women were relegated to a secondary position. However, there was always one weapon a woman could use to acquire influence over men: her body. It was highly likely, therefore, that in order to establish herself in a really secure situation in Carrig she would need to
make herself the mistress of some local notable, perhaps a clan-chief. So she would have to rid herself of her instinctive distaste for the population of Fourteen as dirty barbarians. They were dirty, true. They were barbarians, also true. Which meant that reconciling herself to the prospect required a deep restructuring job on her prejudices.

Just how ingrained those prejudices were, she had discovered when she was first told what her cover was to be. Evidence that it was the most convenient and most reliable one available simply bounced off her frigid armor of preconception, and even as the ship closed with its destination she was having difficulty adapting to the role.

It had been suggested by the nearest of the surviving on-planet agents, Slee, whose own cover was the trade usually translated as “hetaira manager” but which a blunter age would have named “pander.” In the territory south of Carrig something resembling a cross between the Japanese geisha system and the acknowledged-mistress system of ancient Greece had evolved; high-class courtesans favored not less for their skill at music, dancing, and conversation than for their amorous talents were a regular part of a rich man’s retinue; and those who could not afford to keep a hetaira on a full-time basis were catered for by managers with several girls under contract This profession—a perfectly respectable one into which parents among the poorer classes were delighted to send their daughters for the sake of the upper-class manners they would acquire—was eminently suitable for present needs. Already Slee’s girls had established for him an extensive grapevine which brought him news and gossip from all parts of the continent; it was through them that he had been able to piece together an outline of events at Carrig far to the north.

Recently, so Slee reported, it had become fashionable in Carrig also to keep or rent hetairas. What more natural than that Maddalena should be sent to Carrig as a supposed employee of his testing the possibility of opening a branch of his business there? Moreover, there was not so much contact between Carrig and the southland that she would be unable to pass off her accent and lack of familiarity with local mores as due to her southern origin.

She had to concede the logic of the scheme eventually.
But she also had to play over the psychologists’ tapes several times a day to condition her into acceptance of it.

One thing,
Maddalena thought as she stood before the mirror in her cabin studying her disguise for flaws:
one good thing is my hair.
They had injected her scalp with trichogibberellins, and since leaving the base her hair had practically streamed back to its natural shoulder-length. Now it was tied and braided into an openwork cap of white lace. A skin-tight bodice of the same white lace and leotards of red lace—both garments oddly comfortable—clasped her body as closely as a lover; over them came a tunic and loose breeches of black embroidered with yellow and green, then a sort of cape of yellow into which a green design was woven; and for street-wear and traveling a voluminous cloak which could be caught up by a drawstring if she had to walk on muddy ground. There was a hood attached to it against rain. On her feet were red slippers, and to go with the cloak she had huge wood-and-leather overshoes lined with a sort of sponge.

It was the acquisition of this wardrobe she had suddenly acquired which had for the first time made her
feel
—all the way down—the resources that the Corps commanded. There had been the suggestion that she pose as a visiting hetaira, made over the subspace communicator from Fourteen by Slee, whose “employee” she was going to be. The suggestion was approved. They sent to the library. In ten minutes Langenschmidt was playing over a tape labeled “ZRP 14—South Civilized Territory—Female Costume Group 3: Leisured and Non-Artisan Classes.”

Within an hour she was trying the outfit on, and it didn’t even need alterations to make it fit her.

She turned from the mirror to review the rest of her gear. One wooden trunk of authentic native pattern—the wood was synthetic, but the grain had been checked from another recording, this time an account of the timbers used for carpentry in Fourteen’s northern subtropical zone. It would pass the closest inspection short of advanced chemical analysis. In the trunk were five or six more costumes, cosmetics, a subspace communicator hidden under a false bottom, a comprehensive medical kit disguised as a sewing-box, and a case of herbal ointments.

Plus one musical instrument, a sort of panpipe turned on its side and blown by means of a bellows. Another recording had supplied not merely blueprints of the instruments and instructions for playing it, but thirty popular tunes to be rendered on it and the words of a dozen traditional songs, all very long indeed, which she had had diligently to commit to memory under light hypnosis.

Plus a brush-pen, a cake of ink, and a booklet of coarse native paper, because a hetaira was expected to be able to compose flattering quatrains about her employers.

Plus a jeweled box—tightly locked—with religious ideograms on the lid invoking a terrible fate on anyone who opened it without permission, ostensibly containing relics of her ancestors, but in fact holding a well-charged energy gun which, if the lock were forced, would melt into a sizzling amorphous puddle of metal and plastic.

She picked up the musical instrument—it was called a “piap’r” and the name simply meant “piper,” indeed was derived from that originally—and pumped the bellows. By stopping the tubes of the panpipes she played a short plaintive melody. Halfway through, her hand began to shake so badly that she missed several notes.

She was absolutely scared stiff.

Well, there were tranquilizers to take care of that. But the tension would still be there, masked but nonetheless acute, until she was actually on the planet and had convinced herself that her fake identity was proof against the natives’ scrutiny. Every precaution had been taken, even down to analyzing the history of the Carrig clans to determine which were the most progressive and hence the likeliest to adopt the southern fashion for engaging hetairas.

Yet no matter how often she reassured herself, she was still in the grip of a sense of imminent doom.

A call from Langenschmidt interrupted her depressed brooding, asking her to go forward to the bridge of the cruiser, and she headed straight there in her native costume. On her entry the major looked up from a tape that had just reeled out of the communicators and gave an approving but absentminded nod.

“You look the part perfectly, as far as I can tell,” he
said. “You even walk correctly. Well, sorry to drag you up here just before planetfall, but we received this from Slee a short time ago, and I think I ought to play it for you.”

He dropped the cassette into its slot. At once Slee, exotic in a costume almost as gaudy as Maddalena’s, looked out of the screen adjacent. Having a permanent station on Fourteen, unlike Heron, he was able to maintain a vision circuit as well as voice. He sounded worried.

“Gus, I’ve had some disturbing news. As you know, I’ve been trying for some time to get accurate news of Heron’s death. His house was burnt down, which was fortunate in that his communicator was destroyed, but a damnable nuisance in that it meant all the physical evidence was shoveled up as garbage and we have nothing to go on but what the servants recounted, and they were in a wild panic. And Carrig is too far from here for me to get more than rumors, anyway.

“Something’s come up which ties in closely with what people are saying about this stranger Belfeor who’s made himself ruler of Carrig, though. You’ll recall that he was said to have killed the king-parradile with a lightning bolt, which I interpret as meaning some sort of primitive gunpowder rocket.

“Well, according to a former servant of Heron’s who’s just been released from a bedlam where they locked him for alleged insanity after his master’s death, it was Belfeor who killed him—and what’s more, by throwing a lightning bolt at him. One can presume that Heron got wind of Belfeor’s plans, and to forestall his interfering, Belfeor set a mine or something in Heron’s house, blowing it and him up. I don’t see any other reasonable explanation. It’s the devil’s own job sorting fact from fantasy in these tales, even when you know pretty well how the natives’ minds work. We
must
get an agent into Carrig again, soon, to see if this is true or not. I’ve even been trying to invent a reason why I should go there myself—perhaps I ought to trek north with a caravan of pilgrims, or something, even though it’ll puzzle the hell out of my friends who take me for an incurable sceptic. I wish to goodness the standard of living would rise to the level where they invent the notion of tourism!”

Langenschmidt shut the recording off. He looked at Maddalena. “Sounds as though you’re really needed down there,” he murmured. “Are you all ready to go? We’re due to break into real space soon—we’re just maneuvering out to the night-side of the planet.”

Maddalena nodded. Her throat felt terribly dry.

“Get your suit on, then, and have your gear put in the landing-craft. I’ll join you in a minute.”

“You’re taking me down yourself?”

“I’ve done it before,” Langenschmidt grunted. “Move it along!”

Seated behind him in the needle-shaped boat that would sneak them unobtrusively down to the surface of Fourteen, Maddalena struggled to get her awkward clothing organized inside her spacesuit, and listened to the exchange between Langenschmidt and the pilot of the cruiser as they ran down the preflight checklist. You didn’t go aboard a landing-craft without a spacesuit and helmet—it was far too risky.

The checks on the landing-craft completed, the pilot gave the standard all-hands warning about breaking through into real space, and they braced themselves for the peculiar shuddering-grinding sensation that always accompanied dropping out of hyperphotonic drive. One moment later the pilot was speaking again, his voice half-strangled with astonishment.

He said, “Of all the—! That’s a
ship
out there, in orbit around Fourteen!”

Maddalena froze. Langenschmidt snapped, “A ship? What kind of—?”

He got no further. There was a huge cracking sound followed by a rending of metal, and Maddalena’s last thought before she passed out was that she was probably going to die.