Haldeman, Joe - A Tangled Web

VIP免费

2024-12-19 0 0 135.82KB 18 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

A !TANGLED WEB

Your spaceport bars fall into two distinct groups: the ones for the baggage and the ones

for the crew. I was baggage, this trip, but didn't feel like paying the prices that people who

space for fun can afford. The Facilities Directory listed under "Food and Drink" fou

establishments: the Hartford Club (inevitably), the Silver Slipper Lounge, Antoine's, an

Slim Joan's Bar & Grill.

I went to a currency exchange booth first, assuming that Slim Joan was no better a

arithmetic than most bartenders, and cashed in a hundredth share of Hartford stock. Then I

took the drop lift down to the bottom level. That the bar's door was right at the drop-lift exi

would be a dead giveaway even if its name had been the Bell, Book, and Candle. Baggage

don't generally like to fall ten stories, no matter how slowly.

It smelled right, stir-fry and stale beer, and the low lighting suggested economy rathe

than atmosphere. Slim Joan turned out to be about a hundred thousand grams of transvestite.

Well, I hadn't come for the scenery.

The clientele seemed evenly mixed between humans and others, most of the aliens being

!tang, since this was Morocho III. I've got nothing against the company of aliens, but if I was

going to spend all next week wrapping my jaws around !tangish, I preferred to mix my

drinking with some human tongue.

"Speak English?" I asked Slim Joan.

"Some," he/she/it growled. "You would drink something?" I'd never heard a Russian-

Brooklyn accent before. I ordered a double saki, cold, in Russian, and took it to an empty

booth.

One of the advantages of being a Hartford interpreter is that you can order a drink in a

hundred different languages and dialects. Saves money; they figure if you can speak the

lingo you can count your change.

I was freelancing this trip, though, working for a real-estate cartel that wanted to screw the

!tang out of a few thousand square kilometers of useless seashore property. It wouldn't stay

useless, of course.

Morocho III is a real garden of a planet, but most people never see it. The tachyon nexus

is down by Morocho I, which we in the trade refer to as "Armpit," and not many people take

the local hop out to III (Armpit's the stopover on the Earth–Sammler run). Starlodge,

Limited, was hoping to change that situation.

I couldn't help eavesdropping on the !tangs behind me. (I'm not a snoop; it's a side effec

of the hypnotic-induction learning process.) One of them was leaving for Earth today, an

the other was full of useful advice. "He"—they have seven singular pronoun classes,

depending on the individual's age and estrous condition—was telling "her" never to make

any reference to human body odor, no matter how vile it may be. He should also have tol

her not to breathe on anyone. One of the byproducts of their metabolism is butyl nitrite,

which smells like well-aged socks and makes humans get all faint and cross-eyed.

I've worked with !tangs a few times before, and they're some of my favorite people. Very

serious, very honest, and their logic is closer to human logic than most. But they are strange-

looking. Imagine a perambulating haystack with an elephant's trunk protruding. They have

two arms under the pile of yellow hair, but it's impolite to take them out in public unless one

is engaged in physical work. They do have sex in public, constantly, but it takes a zoologis

with a magnifying glass to tell when.

He wanted her to bring back some Kentucky bourbon and Swiss chocolate. Thei

metabolism parts company with ours over proteins and fats, but they love our carbohydrates

and alcohol. The alcohol has a psychedelic effect on them, and sugar leaves them plastered.

A human walked in and stood blinking in the half-light. I recognized him and shrank bac

into the booth. Too late. He strode over and stuck out his hand. "Dick Navarro!"

"Hello, Pete." I shook his hand once. "What brings you here? Hartford business?" Pete

was also an interpreter.

—Oh, no, he said in Arabic. Only journeying.

—Knock it off, I said in Serbo-Croatian. —Isn't your native language English? I added in

Greek.

"Sure it is. Yours?"

"English or Spanish. Have a seat."

I smacked my lips twice at Slim Joan, and she came over with a menu. "To be eating you

want?"

"Nyet," he said. "Vodka." I told her I'd take another. "So what are you doing here?" Pete

asked.

"Business."

"Hartford?"

"Nope."

"Secret."

"That's right." Actually, they hadn't said anything about its being secret. But I knew Pete

Lafitte. He wasn't just passing through.

We both sat silently for a minute, listening to the !tangs. We had to smile when he

explained to her how to decide-which public bathroom to use when. This was important to

humans, he said. Slim Joan came with the drinks and Pete paid for both, a bad sign.

"How did that Spica business finally turn out?" he asked.

"Badly." Lafitte and I had worked together on a partition-of-rights hearing on Spica IV,

with the Confederación actually bucking Hartford over an alien-rights problem. "I couldn'

get the humans to understand that the minerals had souls, and I couldn't get the natives to

believe that refining the minerals didn't affect their spiritual status. It came to a show o

force, and the natives backed down. I wouldn't like to be there in twenty years, though."

"Yeah. I was glad to be recalled. Arcturus all over.

"That's what I tried to tell them." Arcturus wasn't a regular stop any more, not since a ship

landed and found every human artistically dismembered. "You're just sightseeing?"

"This has always been one of my favorite planets." "Nothing to do."

"Not for you city boys. The fishing is great, though." Ah ha. "Ocean fishing?"

"Best in the Confederaci6n."

"I might give it a try. Where do you get a boat?"

He smiled and looked directly at me. "Little coastal village, Pa'an!al."

Smack in the middle of the tribal territory I'd be dickering for. I dutifully repeated the

information into my ring.

I changed the subject and we talked about nothing for a while. Then I excused myself,

saying I was time-lagging and had to get some sleep. Which was true enough, since the

shuttle had stayed on Armpit time, and I was eight hours out of phase with III. But I bounce

straight to the Hartford courier's office.

The courier on duty was Estelle Dorring, whom I knew slightly. I cut short the

pleasantries. "How long to get a message to Earth?"

She studied the clocks on the wall. "You're out of luck if you want it hand-carried. I'm no

going to Armpit until tomorrow. Two days on the shuttle and I'll miss the Earth run by half a

day.

"If broadcast is all right, you can beam to Armpit and the courier there can take it on the

Twosday run. That leaves in seventy-two minutes. Call it nineteen minutes' beam time. You

know what you want to say?"

"Yeah. Set it up." I sat down at the customers' console.

STARLODGE LIMITED

642 EASTRIVER

NEW YORK, NEW YORK 100992

ATTENTION: PATRICE DUVAL

YOU MAY HAVE SOME COMPETITION HERE. NOTHING OPEN YET BUT A

GUY WE CALL PETER RABBIT IS ON THE SCENE. CHECK INTERPRETERS

GUILD AND SEE WHO'S PAYING PETER LAFITTE. CHANGE TERMS OF

SALE? PLEASE REPLY NEXT SAMMLER RUNRICARDO NAVARRO/RM

2048/MOROCHO HILTON

I wasn't sure what good the information would do me, unless they also found out how

much he was offering and authorized me to outbid him. At any rate, I wouldn't hear for three

days, earliest. Sleep.

Morocho III—its real name is !ka'al—rides a slow sweeping orbit around Morocho A, the

brighter of the two suns that make up the Morocho system (Morocho A is a close double sta

itself, but its white dwarf companion hugs so close that it's lost in the glare). At this time o

day, Morocho B was visible low in the sky, a hard blue diamond, too bright to stare at, an

A was right overhead, a bloated golden ball. On the sandy beach below us the flyer cast two

shadows, dark blue and faint yellow, which raced to come together as we landed.

Pa'an!al is a fishing village thousands of years old, on a natural harbor formed where a

broad jungle river flows into the sea. Here on the beach were only a few pole huts with

thatched roofs, where the fishers who worked the surf and shallow pools lived. Pa'an!al

proper was behind a high stone wall, which protected it on one side from the occasional

hurricane and on the other from the interesting fauna of the jungle.

I paid off my driver and told him to come back at second sundown. I took a deep breath

and mounted the steps. There was an open-cage Otis elevator beside the stairs, but people

didn't use it, only fish.

The !tang are compulsive about geometry. This wall was a precise 1:2 rectangle, and the

stairs mounted from one corner to the opposite in a satisfyingly Euclidian 30 degrees. A

guardrail would have spoiled the harmony. The stairs were just wide enough for two !tang to

pass, and the rise of each step was a good half meter. By the time I got to the top I was both

tired and slightly terrified.

A spacefaring man shouldn't be afraid of heights, and I'm not, so long as I'm in a vehicle.

But when I attained the top of the wall and looked down the equally long and perilous fligh

of stairs to ground level, I almost swooned. Why couldn't they simply have left a door in the

wall?

I sat there for a minute and looked down at the small city. The geometric regularity was

pleasing. Each building was either a cube or a stack of cubes, and the rock from which the

city was built had been carefully sorted, so that each building was a uniform shade. They

went from white marble through sandy yellow and salmon to pearly gray and obsidian. The

streets were a regular matrix of red brick. I walked down, hugging the wall.

At the bottom of the steps a !tang sat on a low bench, watching the nonexistent traffic. —

Greetings, I clicked and snorted at him. —It certainly is a pleasant day.

—Not everywhere, he grunted and wheezed back. An unusually direct response.

—Are you waiting for me?

—Who can say? I am waiting. His trunk made a philosophical circle in the air. —If you

had not come, who knows for what I would have been waiting?

—Well, that's true. He made a circle in the other direction, which I think meant Wha

else? I stood there for a minute while he looked at me or the ground or the sky. You coul

never tell.

—I hope this isn't a rude question, he said. —Will you forgive me if this is a rude

question?

—I certainly will try.

—Is your name !ica'o *va!o?

—That was admirably close. —It certainly is.

—You could follow me. He got up. —Or enjoy the pleasant day.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

A!TANGLEDWEBYourspaceportbarsfallintotwodistinctgroups:theonesforthebaggageandtheonesforthecrew.Iwasbaggage,thistrip,butdidn'tfeellikepayingthepricesthatpeoplewhospaceforfuncanafford.TheFacilitiesDirectorylistedunder"FoodandDrink"fourestablishments:theHartfordClub(inevitably),theSilverSlipperLounge,...

展开>> 收起<<

Haldeman, Joe - A Tangled Web.pdf

共18页,预览4页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Haldeman, Joe - A Tangled Web

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: