The Nail and the Oracle (28 page)

“He stood there with the back of his hands on his hips for a bit, not even breathing hard, watching the crying, cursing mix-up all over the alley pavement. I came up beside him. One, two got to their feet and ran limping. One of the women began to scream—curses, I suppose, but you couldn’t hear the words. I turned the light on her face and she shut right up.

“ ‘You all right?’ says the tall man.

“I told him, ‘Caved in my chest is all, but that’s all right, I can use it for a fruit bowl lying in bed.’ He laughed and turned his back on the enemy and led me the way he had come. He said he was Vorhidin from Vexvelt. I told him who I was. I said I’d been looking for a Vexveltian, but before we could go on with that a black hole opened up to the left and somebody whispered, ‘Quick, quick.’ Vorhidin clapped a hand on my back and gave me a little shove. ‘In you go, Charli Bux of Terratu.’ And in we went, me stumbling all over my feet down some steps I didn’t know were there, and then again because they weren’t there. A big door boomed closed behind us. Dim yellow light came on. There was a little man with olive skin and a shiny, oily mustache. ‘Vorhidin, for the love of God, I told you
not to come into town, they’ll kill you.’ Vorhidin only said, ‘This is Charli Bux, a friend.’ The little man came forward anxiously and began to pat Vorhidin on the arms and ribs to see if he was all right.

“Vorhidin laughed and brushed him off. ‘Poor Trettti! He’s always afraid something is going to happen! Never mind me, you fusspot. See to Charli here. He took a shot in the bows that was meant for me.’ The little one, Tretti, sort of squeaked and before I could stop him he had my shirt open and the light out of my hand switched on and trained on the bruise. ‘Your next woman can admire a sunset,’ says Vorhidin. Tretti’s away and back before you can blink and sprays on something cool and good and most of the pain vanished.

“ ‘What do you have for us?’ and Tretti carries the light into another room. There’s stacks of stuff, mostly manufactured goods, tools, and instruments. There was a big pile of trideo cartridges, mostly music and new plays, but a novel or so too. Most of the other stuff was one of a kind. Vorhidin picked up a forty-pound crate and spun it twice by diagonal corners till it stopped where he could read the label. ‘Molar spectroscope. Most of this stuff we don’t really need but we like to see what’s being done, how it’s designed. Sometimes ours are better, sometimes not. We like to see, that’s all.’ He set it down gently and reached into his pocket and palmed out a dozen or more stones that flashed till it hurt. One of them, a blue one, made its own light. He took Tretti’s hand and pulled it to him and poured it full of stones. ‘That enough for this load?’ I couldn’t help it—I glanced around the place and totted it up and made a stab estimate—a hundred each of everything in the place wouldn’t be worth that one blue stone. Tretti was goggle-eyed. He couldn’t speak. Vorhidin wagged his head and laughed and said, ‘All right, then,’ and reached into his pants pocket again and ladled out four or five more. I thought Tretti was going to cry. I was right. He cried.

“We had something to eat and I told Vorhidin how I happened to be here. He said he’d better take me along. I said where to? and he said Vexvelt. I began to laugh. I told him I was busting my brains trying to figure some way to make him say that, and he laughed too and said I’d found it, all right, twice over. ‘Owe you a favor for that,’ he says, dipping his head at the alley side of the room. ‘Reason two,
you wouldn’t live out the night on Lethe if you stayed here.’ I wanted to know why not, because from what I’d seen there were fights all the time, then you’d see the fighters an hour later drinking out of the same bowl. He says it’s not the same thing. Nobody helps a Vexveltian but a Vexveltian. Help one, you are one, far as Lethe was concerned. So I wanted to know what Lethe had against Vexvelt, and he stopped chewing and looked at me a long time as if he didn’t understand me. Then he said, ‘You really don’t know anything about us, do you?’ I said, not much. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘now there’s three good reasons to bring you.’

“Tretti opened the double doors at the far end of the storeroom. There was a ground van in there, with another set of doors into the street. We loaded the crates into it and got in, Vorhidin at the tiller. Tretti climbed a ladder and put his eyes to something and spun a wheel. ‘Periscope,’ Vorhidin told me. ‘Looks like a flagpole from outside.’ Tretti waved his hand at us. He had tears running down his cheeks again. He hit a switch and the doors banged out of the way. The van screeched out of there as the doors bounced and started back. After that Vorhidin drove like a little old lady. One-way glass. Sometimes I wondered what those crowds of drunks and queers would do if they could see in. I asked him, ‘What are they afraid of?’ He didn’t seem to understand the question. I said, ‘Mostly when people gang up on somebody, it’s because one way or another they’re afraid. What do they think you’re going to take away from them?’

“He laughed and said, ‘Their decency.’ And that’s all the talk I got out of him all the way out to the spaceport.

“The Vexveltian ship was parked miles away from the terminal, way the hell and gone at the far end of the pavement near some trees. There was a fire going near it. As we got closer I saw it wasn’t near it, it was spang under it. There was a big crowd, maybe half a hundred, mostly women, mostly drunk. They were dancing and staggering around and dragging wood up under the ship. The ship stood up on its tail like the old chemical rockets in the fairy stories. Vorhidin grunted. ‘Idiots,’ and moved something on his wrist. The rocket began to rumble and everybody ran screaming. Then there was a big explosion of steam and the wood went every which way, and for
a while the pavement was full of people running and falling and screaming, and cycles and ground cars milling around and bumping each other. After a while it was quiet and we pulled up close. The high hatch opened on the ship and a boom and frame came out and lowered. Vorhidin hooked on, threw the latches on the van bed, beckoned me back there with him, reached forward and set the controls of the van, and touched the thing on his wrist. The whole van cargo section started up complete with us, and the van started up and began to roll home by itself.

“The only crew he carried,” said Charli Bux carefully, “was a young radio officer.”
With long shining black wings for hair and bits of sky in her tilted eyes, and a full and asking kind of mouth. She held Vorhidin very close, very long, laughing the message that there could be no words for this: he was safe. “Tamba, this is Charli. He’s from Terratu and he fought for me.” Then she came and held him too, and she kissed him; that incredible mouth, that warm strong soft mouth, why, he and she shared it for an hour; for an hour he felt her lips on his, even though she had kissed him for only a second. For an hour her lips could hardly be closer to her than they were to his own astonished flesh
. “The ship blasted off and headed sunward and to the celestial north. It held this course for two days. Lethe has two moons, the smaller one just a rock, an asteroid. Vorhidin matched velocities with it and hung half a kilo away, drifting in.”

And the first night he had swung his bunk to the after bulkhead and had lain there heavily against the thrust of the jets, and against the thrust of his heart and his loins. Never had he seen such a woman—only just become woman, at that. So joyful, so utterly and so rightly herself. Half an hour after blastoff: “Clothes are in the way on ship, don’t you think? But Vorhidin says I should ask you, because customs are different from one world to another, isn’t that so?”

“Here we live by your customs, not mine,” Charli had been able to say, and she had thanked him, thanked him! and touched the bit of glitter at her throat, and her garment fell away. “There’s much more privacy this way,” she said, leaving him. “A closed door means
more to the naked; it’s closed for a real reason and not because one might be seen in one’s petticoat.” She took her garment into one of the state-rooms. Vorhidin’s. Charli leaned weakly against the bulkhead and shut his eyes. Her nipples were like her mouth, full and asking. Vorhidin was casually naked, but Charli kept his clothes on, and the Vexveltians made no comment. The night was very long. For a while part of the weight on Charli turned to anger, which helped. Old bastard, silver-temples. Old enough to be her father. But that could not last, and he smiled at himself. He remembered the first time he had gone to a ski resort. There were all kinds of people there, young, old, wealthy, working, professionals; but there was a difference. The resort, because it was what it was, screened out the pasty-faced, the round-shouldered lungless sedentaries, the plumping sybarites. All about him had been clear eyes, straight backs, and skin with the cosmetics of frost and fun. Who walked idled not, but went somewhere. Who sat lay back joyfully in well-earned weariness. And this was the aura of Vorhidin—not a matter of carriage and clean color and clear eyes, though he certainly had all these, but the same qualities down to the bone and radiating from the mind. A difficult thing to express and a pleasure to be with. Early on the second day Vorhidin had leaned close when they were alone in the control room and asked him if he would like to sleep with Tamba tonight. Charli gasped as if he had been clapped on the navel with a handful of crushed ice. He also blushed, saying, “If she, if she—” wildly wondering how to ask her. He need not have wondered, for “He’d love to, honey,” Vorhidin bellowed. Tamba popped her face into the corridor and smiled at Charli. “Thank you so much,” she said. And then (after the long night) it was going to be the longest day he had ever lived through, but she let it happen within the hour instead, sweetly, strongly, unhurried. Afterward he lay looking at her with such total and long-lasting astonishment that she laughed at him. She flooded his face with her black hair and then with her kisses and then all of him with her supple strength; this time she was fierce and most demanding until with a shout he toppled from the very peak of joy straight and instantly down into the most total slumber he had ever known. In perhaps twenty minutes he opened his
eyes and found his gaze plunged deep in a blue glory, her eyes so close their lashes meshed. Later, talking to her in the wardroom, holding both her hands, he turned to find Vorhidin standing in the doorway. He was on them in one long stride, and flung an arm around each. Nothing was said. What could be said?

“I talked a lot with Vorhidin,” Charli Bux said to the Archive Master. “I never met a man more sure of himself, what he wanted, what he liked, what he believed. The very first thing he said when I brought up the matter of trade was ‘Why?’ In all my waking life I never thought to ask that about trade. All I ever did, all anyone does, is to trade where he can and try to make it more. ‘Why?’ he wanted to know. I thought of the gemstones going for that production-line junk in the hold, and pure niobium at manganese prices. One trader would call that ignorance, another would call it good business and get all he could—glass beads for ivory. But cultures have been known to trade like that for religious or ethical reasons—always give more than you get in the other fellow’s coin. Or maybe they were just—
rich
. Maybe there was so much Vexvelt that the only thing they could use was—well, like he said: manufactures, so they could look at the design ‘sometimes better than ours, sometimes not.’ So I asked him.

“He gave me a long look that was, at four feet, exactly like”
drowning in the impossibly blue lakes of Tamba’s eyes, but watch yourself, don’t think about that when you talk to this old man
“holding still for an X-ray continuity. Finally he said, ‘Yes, I suppose we’re rich. There’s not much we need.’

“I told him, all the same, he could get a lot higher prices for the little he did trade. He just laughed a little and shook his head. ‘You have to pay for what you get or it’s no good. If you “Trade well,” as you call it, you finish with more than you started with; you didn’t pay. That’s as unnatural as energy levels going from lesser to greater, it’s contrary to ecology and entropy.’ Then he said, ‘You don’t understand that.’ I didn’t and I don’t.”

“Go on.”

“They have their own Drive cradle back of Lethe’s moon, and their own Guide orbiting Vexvelt. I told you—all the while I thought the planet was near Lethe; well, it isn’t.”

“Now, that I do
not
understand. Cradles and guides are public utilities. Two days, you say it took. Why didn’t he use the one at the Lethe port?”

“I can’t say, sir. Uh—”

“Well?”

“I was just thinking about that drunken mob building a fire under the ship.”

“Ah yes. Perhaps the moon cradle is a wise precaution after all. I have always known, and you make it eminently clear, that these people are not popular. All right—you made a Drive jump.”

“We made a Drive jump.” Charli fell silent for a moment, reliving that breathless second of revelation as black, talcdusted space and a lump moonlet winked away to be replaced by the great arch of a purple-haloed horizon, marbled green and gold and silver and polished blue, with a chromium glare coming from the sea on the planet’s shoulder. “A tug was standing by and we got down without trouble.” The spaceport was tiny compared even with Lethe—eight or ten docks, with the warehouse area under them and passenger and staff areas surrounding them under a deck. “There were no formalities—I suppose there’s not enough space travel to merit them.”

“Certainly no strangers, at any rate,” said the old man smugly.

“We disembarked right on the deck and walked away.”
Tamba had gone out first. It was sunny, with a warm wind, and if there was any significant difference between this gravity and that of Terratu, Charli’s legs could not detect it. In the air, however, the difference was profound. Never before had he known air so clear, so winy, so clean—not unless it was bitter cold, and this was warm. Tamba stood by the silent, swiftly moving “up” ramp, looking out across the foothills to the most magnificent mountain range he had ever seen, for they had everything a picture-book mountain should have—smooth vivid high-range, shaggy forest, dramatic gray, brown, and ocher rock cliff, and a starched white cloth of snowcap tumbled on the peaks to dry in the sun. Behind them was a wide plain with a river for one margin and foothills for the other, and then the sea, with a wide golden beach curving a loving arm around the ocean’s green shoulder. As he approached the pensive girl the warm wind
curled and laughed down on them, and her short robe streamed from her shoulders like smoke, and fell about her again. It stopped his pace and his breath and his heart for a beat, it was so lovely a sight. And coming up beside her, watching the people below, the people rising on one ramp and sliding down the other, he realized that in this place clothing had but two conventions—ease and beauty. Man, woman and child, they wore what they chose, ribbon or robe, clogs, coronets, cummerbunds or kilts, or a ring, or a snood, or nothing at all. He remembered a wonderful line he had read by a pre-Nova sage called Rudofsky, and murmured it:
Modesty is not so simple a virtue as honesty.
She turned and smiled at him; she thought it was his line. He smiled back and let her think so. “You don’t mind waiting a bit? My father will be along in a moment and then we’ll go. You’re to stay with us. Is that all right?”