Crompton Divided (15 page)

The crystals rattled; a lucky spin trapped them in the blue spiral gravure, scoring a top twenty for Loomis and leaving him victor.

The ziernie driver turned pale under the sparse yellow fuzz on his face. He had been relying on the well-known luck of the grooks, and it had turned back on him, as usual. The grooks didn’t have any luck because they were too stupid to realize that they just weren’t lucky. Since the ziernie driver could not pay, that would mean extreme chastisement at the hands of Old Rukth, the strongest and most stupid of the expedition’s grooks, whose ritual function was to enforce the grooks’ hallowed concepts of racial inferiority.

‘Listen, mister,’ the grook whined, ‘I’ve got something better for you than money. I’ve got secret information that a gentleman of your obvious intelligence would find of considerable interest and perhaps of practical value as well.’

‘Can’t pay, huh?’ said Loomis. He eyed the ziernie driver keenly. A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth until he brushed it away and he saw it land on the corner of someone else’s mouth. ‘Well, hell, it doesn’t matter. What is this information?’

The grook leaned forward and whispered in Loomis’s ear. Loomis’s eyes widened. A frown crossed his face and he quickly brushed it off but allowed the smile to tug once again at the corner of his mouth.

‘Interesting indeed,’ he said, ‘if true.’

‘Me no lie, effendi!’ the grook squawked, in his panic relapsing absurdly into the patois of a people he could not even claim as his ancestors.

Crompton woke up abruptly. ‘What’s going on?’ he demanded.

Loomis gracefully relinquished control of the body. ‘Nothing much. I was just having a chat with this fellow here.’

The ziernie driver cringed and scraped, then hurried away.

‘Did you give our body a rubdown after its walk?’ Crompton demanded.

‘Of course! What do you take me for?’

‘We won’t go into that now,’ Crompton said. ‘How soon does the expedition get moving again?’

‘Soon,’ Loomis said. ‘You know, Al, you’re not looking so good.’

Loomis was not referring to the objective facial appearance of the body they shared. He was speaking instead of the self-image which each of them projected to the other as his patent and indivisible individuality, and by means of which they communicated.

Crompton’s self-image was visibly depleted, overworked, strained. He had taken upon himself many of the chores which slow down expeditions. Aside from his own chores, he had planned out a perimeter defense against anhidis, the creeping dragon-grass that sometimes claims ten percent of an expedition. And he had organized the nightly distribution of the prized red points among the bearers, which formerly had been carried out in a haphazard manner with much cursing.

Loomis had remained faithful to his decision not to help. His own idea of how to find Dan Stack was to sign into a comfortable resort hotel somewhere and write Stack a letter. If that failed, they could always hire a detective agency.

Even Crompton lost track of how many days he had been in the swamp, hearing the incessant bat-shrill of the boo-hoo bird, the wet slapping grunt of the brown dotted crocopod, and the never-ending staccato of the compressed air extractors. They had beaten back two minor attacks by renegade and degenerate Ygga tribesmen disguised as patriots. Three children had been born to female members of the expedition, and scurvy was beginning to show up among the older unmarried males. The commissary had run out of tapioca pudding and was even forced to ration the oatmeal cookies.

Yet spirits were high, and the expedition moved onward, a complex microcosm traversing a wet spot.

At last, through a break in the lowering cloud cover, a high promontory was spied to westward. Soon you could make out the shale huts and white picket fences of Inyoyo.

The expedition had won through safely to its destination. All that remained was the question of who would get the first shower.

26

Inyoyo was a small place. Crompton made inquiries at the white clapboard post office just past the livery stable, and was directed at once to a weatherbeaten frame and shingle house on the edge of town. There, on a sagging veranda, he found two old people who acknowledged that they were Dan Stack’s foster-parents.

‘It’s a fact,’ said the hard-bitten, deeply tanned old man with the prominent Adam’s apple and the piercing faded blue eyes set in a bony high-cheekboned face. ‘I war the father, and she war the mother.’

‘And little Dan’l war a good boy,’ the old woman said.

‘Well,’ said the old man.

‘Well, it’s true!’

‘There war the incident of Mr. Wintermute’s horse,’ the old man reminded her.

‘They never proved that! You oughtn’t to talk so sure less’en you hear the other side.’

‘But the horse can’t talk now, Martha,’ the old man said.

‘I didn’t mean the
horse
, you simple-minded old greasebag! I meant that nobody’s heard Dan’l’s side.’

‘I reckon maybe that’s cause he ran out of town like a thief in the night,’ the old man said, speaking with that exquisite precision that the uneducated sometimes attain after too much black coffee.

‘Well, of course he run!’ the old woman said indignantly. ‘He had to run, on account of they were trying to frame him with that bank robbery thing!’

‘Do you happen to know where I could find him now?’ Crompton asked.

‘Couldn’t rightly say,’ the old man said. ‘He never wrote us. But Billy Davis saw him Ou-Barkar that time he drove his semi there with a load of seed potatoes.’

‘When was that?’

‘Five, maybe six years ago,’ the old lady said. ‘He could be anywhere now. Clorapsemia is a big continent, even if it is deckle-edged. You got a good face, mister! Go find him and straighten him out!’

She buried her face in her apron and cried. The old man accompanied Crompton past the old oak tree to the edge of the old plank road.

‘You’ll have to excuse my wife,’ he told Crompton. ‘Ever since Dan’l left, taking our tiny nest egg along with anything else of value he could lay his hands on, Ma just hadn’t been the same.’

‘I understand,’ Crompton said. ‘I want you to know that I am going to find Daniel and make a whole man out of him.’

‘Piss on him,’ the old man said, spitting on his gnarled left fist in a gesture of uncertain ethnic origin, then turning and returning to his sagging veranda.

‘This Stack guy really sounds like a fun person,’ Loomis commented. ‘Al, what are you getting us into?’

‘He does sound a bit – unsavory,’ Crompton admitted. ‘But we really don’t have any choice in the matter. Without him we can’t Reintegrate.’

Loomis sighed. ‘Where is this Ou-Barkar, anyhow?’

‘It lies to the south,’ Crompton said, ‘in the deep unknown interior of this primeval planet.’

‘Oh, Christ! Not again!’

‘I will get us there,’ Crompton said. ‘I have complete confidence in my ability to persevere despite straitened circumstances.’

‘I know, I know,’ Loomis said. ‘Wake me when it’s all over.’ He went to sleep.

27

Ou-Barker was a cluster of plantations where fifty Terrans supervised the work of two thousand aboriginals, who planted, tended, and harvested the li trees that grew only in that sector. The li fruit, gathered twice a year, was the basis of elispice, a condiment considered indispensable in Cantonese cooking.

Crompton met the foreman, a huge, red-faced man named Haaris, who wore a revolver on his hip and a blacksnake whip coiled neatly around his waist.

‘Dan Stack?’ the foreman said. ‘Sure, Stack worked here nearly a year. Then he left, sorta sudden-like.’

‘Do you mind telling me why?’ Crompton asked.

‘Don’t mind at all,’ the foreman said. ‘But let’s do it over a drink.’

He led Crompton to Ou-Barkar’s single saloon. There, over a glass of local corn whiskey, Haaris talked about Dan Stack.

‘He came up here from East Marsh. I believe he’d had some trouble with a girl down there – kicked in her teeth or something. But that’s no concern of mine. Most of us here aren’t exactly gentle types, and I guess the cities axe damned well rid of us. I put Stack to work overseeing fifty Yggans on a hundred-acre li field. He did damned well at first.’

The foreman downed his drink. Crompton ordered another and paid for it.

‘I told him,’ Haaris said, ‘that he’d have to drive his boys to get anything out of them. We use mostly Chipetzi tribesmen, and they’re a sullen, treacherous bunch, though husky. Their chief rents us workers on a twenty-year contract, in exchange for guns. Then they try to pick us off with the guns. But that’s another matter. We handle one thing at a time.’

‘A twenty-year contract?’ Crompton asked. ‘Then the Yggans are practically slave laborers.’

‘Right,’ the foreman said decisively. ‘Some of the owners try to pretty it up, call it temporary indenture or feudal-transition economy. But it’s slavery and why not call it that? It’s the only way we’ll ever civilize these people. Stack understood that. Big, hefty fellow he was, and handy with a whip. I thought he’d do all right.’

‘And?’ Crompton prompted, ordering another drink for the foreman.

‘At first he was fine,’ Haaris said. ‘Laid on with the black-snake, got out his quota and then some. But he hadn’t any sense of moderation. Started killing his boys, and replacements cost money. I told him to take it a little easier. He didn’t. One day his Chipetzis ganged up on him and he had to gun down about eight before they backed off. I had a heart-to-heart talk with him. Told him the idea was to get
work
out, not to kill Yggans. We expect to lose a certain percentage, of course. But Stack was pushing it too far, and cutting down the profit.’

The foreman sighed and lighted a cigarette. ‘Stack just liked using that whip too much. His Chipetzis ganged up again and he had to kill about a dozen of them. But he lost a hand in the fight. His whip hand. I think a Chipetzi chewed it off.

‘I put him to work in the drying sheds but he got into another fight and killed four Chipetzis. That was too much. Those workers cost money, and we can’t have some hothead idiot killing them off every time he gets sore. I gave Stack his pay and told him to get the hell out.’

‘Did he say where he was going?’ Crompton asked.

‘He said we didn’t realize that the Yggans had to be wiped out to make room for Terrans. Said he was going to join the Vigilantes. They’re a sort of roving army that keeps the unpacified tribes in check.’

Crompton thanked the foreman and asked the location of the Vigilantes’ headquarters.

‘Right now they’re encamped on the left bank of the Rainmaker River,’ Haaris said. ‘They’re trying to make terms with the Seriid. You want to find Stack pretty bad, huh?’

‘He’s my brother,’ Crompton said, with a faint sinking sensation in his stomach.

The foreman looked at him steadily. ‘Well,’ he said after a while, ‘kin’s kin. But your brother’s about the worst example of a human being I’ve seen, and I’ve seen some. Better leave him alone.’

‘I have to find him,’ Crompton said.

Haaris shrugged fatalistically. ‘It’s a long trek to Rainmaker River. I can sell you pack mules and provisions, and I’ll rent you a native kid for a guide. You’ll be going through pacified territory, so you should reach the Vigilantes all right. I
think
the territory’s still pacified.’

28

That night, Loomis urged Crompton to abandon the search. Stack was obviously a thief and murderer. What was the sense of taking him into the combination?

Crompton felt that the case wasn’t as simple as that. For one thing, the stories about Stack might have been exaggerated.

But even if they were true, it simply meant that Stack was another stereotype, an inadequate and monolithic personality extended past all normal bounds, as were Crompton and Loomis. Within the combination, in fusion, Stack would be modified. He would supply the necessary measure of aggression, the toughness and survival fitness that both Crompton and Loomis lacked.

Loomis didn’t think so, but agreed to suspend judgment until they actually met their missing component.

In the morning Crompton purchased equipment and mules at an exorbitant price, and the following day he set out at dawn, led by a Chipetzi youngster named Rekki.

Crompton followed the guide through virgin forest into the Thompson Mountains, up razorback ridges, across cloud-covered peaks into narrow granite passes where the wind screamed like the tormented dead; then down, into the dense and steamy jungles on the other side. Loomis, appalled by the hardships of the march, retreated into a corner of himself and emerged only in the evenings when the campfire was lit and the hammock slung. Crompton, with set jaw and bloodshot eyes, stumbled through the burning days, bearing the full sensory impact of the journey and wondering how long his strength would last.