Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III (54 page)

And now it was late evening.

A fire was burning in the centre of the clearing, now little more than glowing coals. Over it, on a crude spit, the carcass of some animal, possibly a small deer, was roasting. The hot coals flared fitfully as melted fat and other juices fell on them. (Grimes remembered, all too vividly, some of the things that he had witnessed during his incarceration in the Snuff Palace. He did not think that he would want any meat when the meal was ready.) There were crude earthenware mugs of some brew that could almost have passed for beer. Grimes had no qualms regarding this.

“You’re as safe here, cobber,” said the grizzled Mal, who appeared to be the tribe’s leader, “as anywhere else on this world.
They
don’t bother us. They leave us be. An’ we could use a bastard like you, with a bit o’ mechanical knowhow. An’ Shirl an’ Darleen’ll be good breedin’ stock. They’re young . . .” He looked over the rim of his mug at Fenella. “About you, lady, I ain’t so certain . . .”

She laughed shortly. “And I ain’t so certain about you, Mal. But could I have your story again? Everybody was so busy during the day that they couldn’t find time to talk to me . . .”

“We’re Matilda’s Children,” Mal told her. “We come from New Alice. We were brought here by a man called Drongo Kane who said that he was one of us, although he came from another planet. He promised us loads of lolly if we’d work on this world. An’ there was loads of lolly, at first. An’ then we, the first ones of us, started gettin’ old. The fat, rich bitches from all over, an’ their husbands, wanted younger meat. Nobody wanted us anymore. Not for
anything.
An’ we had no skills apart from rogering. An’ there was no way, no way at all, of gettin’ back to where we belong . . .

“We were just turned loose . . .

“We found this valley. Over the years others of our people have joined us, some of them too old to work among the red lights any more, some of them escaped from places like the Colosseum. We get by.”

“And why do you call this place Kangaroo Valley?” asked Fenella,

“It’s a tradition, sort of. Whenever our people have lived together in a strange city, on a strange world, it’s called Kangaroo Valley . . .

And there was a Kangaroo Valley in London, on Old Earth, thought Grimes. In a place called Earls Court. His father had told him about it when he was doing research on a historical novel the period of which was the Twentieth Century, Old Style. But the people living there had not been descended from kangaroos . . .

“But why Kangaroo Valley?” persisted Fenella. “What
is
a kangaroo?”

“An animal from our Dream Time,” said Mal. “An animal that lived in Australia, on Earth, where our forefathers came from. On New Alice the kangaroo hunt is one of our traditional dances. It is performed here, for money, on New Venusberg.”

“I’ve seen it,” said Fenella.

“I’ve been it,” said Shirl.

***

A humpy, a rough shelter of leaves and branches, had been allocated to Grimes and Fenella as their sleeping quarters. They retired to this after the feast. Grimes, unable to face the barbecued meat, had dined on rather flavourless but filling roots that had been roasted in the ashes. Fenella, in many ways tougher than he, had enjoyed the venison.

Settee cushions, salvaged from the camperfly, were their beds. They stretched out on these, each with a cigar from the aircraft’s now much-depleted stock.

“Poor bastards,” whispered Fenella. “Poor bastards, thinking themselves human when they’re so obviously not. That reversion to their ancestral characteristics with age . . . In only a few years’ time your precious Shirl and Darleen will look just like the older women. All that
they
lack is tails . . .”

“They’re still victims of a white slave trade,” said Grimes.

“Yes. But legally only animals. How do you think they started?”

“It must have been very similar to what happened on Morrowvia. One of the old guassjammers, driven off course by a magnetic storm, lost in Space and making a landing on the first world capable of supporting our kind of life . . . Probably a crash landing, with very few survivors, among them a genetic engineer . . . Fertilised kangaroo ova—but the Odd Gods of the Galaxy alone know why!—in the ship’s plasma bank . . .”

“Mankind,” she said, “has made a habit of spreading its own favourite animals throughout the galaxy . . .”

“True. There are kangaroos on Botany Bay. Well, anyhow, the era of the gaussjammers was also the era of the underpeople. It got to the stage when the politicians, bowing to the pressure exerted by the trade unions, whose members found their livelihood being taken away by physically specialised underpeople, brought in legislation to make the manufacture of imitation human beings illegal. Of course, it was the imitation human beings themselves who were the main sufferers. And after all these many years the prejudice still persists . . .”

“Tell me,” she asked, “have you ever conquered
your
prejudice against underpeople? In bed, I mean . . .”

“I don’t think that I have any such prejudice.”

“And did you and Shirl . . . Or Darleen . . . ?”

“No,”
he said.

“The way that they look at you I thought that you and they must have been having it off. But you have this odd hang-up, don’t you? You’re afraid that when it’s open and ready for you it’s going to bite you . . .”

Yet her words did not wound, were not intended to do so. It was not what she was saying but the way that she was saying it that robbed them of their sting. The old Fenella Pruin—temporarily at least—was dead. This was a new one, engendered by the perils that they had faced together. The intimacy of this crude humpy was hardly greater than the intimacy of
Little Sister’s
living quarters, and yet . . .

He heard the rustle as she removed the dress that was her only clothing. He was not ready for her when she came to him but was aroused by the first kiss, by the feel of her body against his. She mounted him, rode him, rode him into the ground, reaching her climax as he reached his, as his body purged itself of the months of humiliations and frustrations.

She spoiled things—but only a little—when she murmured, “I got you before those two marsupial bitches did!”

But what would it be like, he wondered as he drifted into sleep, with Darleen?

Or Shirl?

Chapter 25

GRIMES EXPECTED
that Fenella Pruin would be all sweetness and light the following morning. She was not. She started almost as soon as she opened her eyes. To begin with it was the toilet facilities—a unisex trench latrine in the bushes, a cold bath in the billabong using a crude, homemade soap that would have been quite a good paint remover. Then it was breakfast—the remains of the previous night’s feast, not even heated up, with only water to wash it down.

Then, puffing furiously at the last cigar, she led Grimes on a tour of inspection of the camp. She complained bitterly about the lack of a camera or other recording equipment and was more than a little inclined to blame Grimes for this deficiency. Grimes told her that she’d just have to make a thousand words worth one picture. She did not think that this was funny.

They were joined by Shirl and Darleen, who seemed to be in little better temper than Fenella. Shirl muttered, “They live rough, these people. Too rough . . .” Darleen said to her, “We should have got our paws on to some of those cushions . . .”

“There were plenty of cushions in the camperfly,” said Grimes.

“And Mal’s got them. Him and his wives,” was the reply.

Fenella Pruin said something about male chauvinist pigs.

“Rank has its privileges,” said Grimes.

She stalked on, stiff-legged, the others tailing after her. They came to what seemed to be an open air school. There were the children, squatting on the ground around their teachers. One of these, an elderly woman, was fashioning throwing spears, using a piece of broken glass to shape the ends of the straight sticks to a point. Another one, a man, was demonstrating how to make fire by friction, rubbing a pointed piece of hard wood up and down the groove in a softer piece that he held between his horny feet.

This teacher was Mal.

“Good morning,” said Fenella, implying by the tone of her voice that it wasn’t.

Mal looked up. “Gidday. I’ll find jobs for yer soon as I’ve finished with this mob.”

Fenella ignored this offer. She asked. “These children . . . Were they born here? In Kangaroo Valley?”

“Most of ’em. But all born on this world.”

“Were they all conceived here?” She was looking hard at one of the naked boys, who seemed to be in his early teens.

“Conceived?” asked Mal.

“Started.
You
know . . .”

“Oh. That. Some here. Some on the way here, from New Alice . . . Like Kev.”

Grimes looked at Kev. There was something vaguely familiar about the youth’s appearance. Physically he would not have attracted much attention on a bathing beach.

“And what ships did you come here in?” persisted Fenella Pruin.

“Just . . . ships.”

“They must have had names.”

“Yair. Lemme see, now. I came in one called Southerly something.
Southerly Buster.
Yair. That’s it. Some o’ the others in
Willy Willy.
An’
Bombora . . .
But yer wastin’ my time an’ it’s time you did somethin’ to earn yer own keep. What do yer do?”

“I’m doing it,” she told him. “Now. I want to help you, Mal. You and your people . . .”

“You can help by bringin’ in some firewood.”

“You can help—yourself as well as us—by telling us how to get back to Port Aphrodite.”

“You must be round the bend.”

“I’m not. I have friends in Port Aphrodite. John Grimes has a ship there. Get us there and we’ll be able to lift the lid off this planet.”

“An’ what good will it do
us?”

“Plenty, I assure you. You’ll be repatriated to your own world, if you so desire . . .”

“Rather stay here. I’m somebody here. A chief.”

“But wouldn’t you like to be recognised as such by the New Venusberg government? With rights, definite legal rights, for you and your people?
Look
at the money you could make from tourists, money that you could spend on little luxuries . . . Decent beer instead of the muck you brew yourselves from the Odd Gods of the Galaxy alone know what . . .”

“Nothin’ wrong with
our
beer . . .”

But Mal, Grimes knew, had promptly commandeered the remaining bottles of Venuswasser from the wreck of the camperfly.

“An’ there’ll be women, Mal. Tourist women . . .”

“You’re too skinny,” he told her.

“Maybe I am. But before you were too old to perform in the house where you worked you must have enjoyed all the foreign pussy.”

“I’m not too old!” he roared. “If you weren’t such a bag o’ bones I’d soon show yer! I was caught on the nest with the boss’s wife—that’s why I’m out here!”

“I never really thought that you were too old,” said Fenella Pruin placatingly. She had moved so that she was between the morning sun and the chief, so that the strong light revealed the outlines of her body under the single, flimsy garment.

“Too bloody skinny,” muttered Mal. “No bloody thanks!”

“Skinny perhaps,” she said. “But rich certainly. Help us and I’ll pay.”

“What with?” he asked sceptically.

“I’ve money, plenty of money in the safe aboard Captain Grimes’ ship.”

“But it ain’t here.”

“I’ll make out a promissory note . . .”

“There’s only one thing that such a piece of paper would be any use for here.”

“My word is good,” she said. “And I have a name, a famous name . . .”

“Not to me it ain’t.”

Grimes was aware that Darleen was tugging at his sleeve. She had something to say to him, in private. He followed her into the bushes. Shirl accompanied them.

As soon as they were concealed from view, out of hearing from Mal and Fenella, she opened the shoulder bag that she was carrying, extracted a purse. It was very well filled, with notes of large denominations. So was the purse produced by Shirl. Evidently the dead women whose personal effects the New Alicians had appropriated had not believed in credit cards.

Grimes counted the money. It came to twelve thousand, three hundred and fifteen Federation Credits.

“You take it,” said Darleen. “On our world women do not handle business.”

Grimes stuffed the notes into his sporran, walked back to where Mal and Fenella were still arguing.

“How much do you want to help us?” he asked bluntly.

Mal looked at him. “I was wonderin’ why the hell you were lettin’ this skinny bitch do all the dickerin’. How much have yer got?”

“How much do you want? A thousand?”

“Fifteen hundred. For you. But the tribe could do with three new women.” He laughed nastily. “The ones we’ve got wear out pretty soon.”

“The woman . . .” He corrected himself when he saw the way that Shirl and Darleen were looking at him. “The women come with me.”

“That will cost yer, mister.”

“Then an extra five hundred for each woman.”

Mal spat. “Surely they’re worth more to you than that. There’s years o’ wear in each of them.”

“This is degrading!” flared Fenella Pruin.

“Isn’t it?” agreed Grimes. “But keep out of this, will you?” Then, to Mal, “They aren’t worth more than six hundred apiece.”

“She
ain’t. All she’s good for is collectin’ firewood. But the other two sheilahs . . . Good breeders, by the looks of ’em. An’ they’re from my world. They’re Matilda’s Children, like me. So they’ll be hunters. They’ll be able to pull their weight.”

“Six hundred for
her,
then . . .”

“You bastard!” snarled Fenella.

“Shut up! And a thousand each for the other two.”

“Two thousand each.”

Until now Grimes had been enjoying the chaffering. Now he was annoyed. “You mean,” he demanded, “that they’re worth more than me?”

“Too bloody right, mate. I need a spaceman in this camp like I need a hole in the head.”

“Fifteen hundred each.”

“No go. Two thousand. Cash on the nail and no bits of useless bumfodder.”