BOOK FIVE - !JOB¡
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - “FEATHERS!”
“Al…
Al, from down the hall here. Just talkin’, guy
like you i can trust not to run to the shurts and there’s a jammin’ tale
to tell. Unnecessary. But enlightening, all the same…
“Now if he'd bothered to ask me… I'd
have told him that all Doobydie's in a hitchhiking
panic… been so for about six months, Terran, due to
one of those crime waves, happens every now and again. Grisly rawth! I mean…
there's no creature lower than the body as depends on the kindness of
strangers, then uses that to rob or kill them. Broonzy
was lucky that the weather was bad, and the highway shurts
had other problems to deal with…then again, maybe it would've been better if he
had been picked up, and the whole mess gotten called off. I'm a retired jim… I don't question
circumstances – that’s a job for another, Hai Rassoul!. But faq
for yourself…”
Broonzy
takes leave of the monge truck an hour and drizzit later, catches a quick
ride in a hovercar… but only a short hop, leaving him
waiting in blowing snow while the minutes turn to hours and the sleet to
daggers.
In the deep, ruddy twilight, as near to actual night as Doobydie gets, another truck deposits Broonzy
another hundred klicks north at a secondary
crossroads, the veritable intersection of nothing and nowhere. The three suns… Dhubaaht, the homesun, Ankhubaaht and Yamsu circle
dimly. A battered hovercar finally slows after it has
passed Broonzy, who picks up the briefcase and begins
to run. When he's almost reached it, the vehicle roars off with peals of
teenage laughter. A bottle flies out of the backseat... Broonzy
picks it up… empty. He falls on his back, making a bloody angel in the crimson
snow.
Far from the city, a pair of headlights approaches. Broonzy rises out of the snowdrifts like a ghost. It's a cargotruck, a new Marrack Zipster with a big red Snoerlessen logo and,
retrieving the briefcase, Broonzy approaches warily
as it groans to stop at the side of the road.
The driver, urso-vulpic with plenty of
hair showing under a tattered plaid shirt, calls out with a wide grin, “Where
you headed, bro?”
“Away from here.
Anywhere!” Broonzy
shivers. “Just away!”
The driver nods, “Headed to town for a bite, then out
the cargoway to Marrack.”
Broonze
adopts a pokerface – not hard to do in the cold, red
drizzle that Die has thrown up against him.
“That'll help. Food
any good?”
“At Minnie's? The best!
“Well,” Broonzy tries to close the
deal, “dinner's on my card if you can get me into Marrack.
When do we arrive?”
“'Bout ten in the morning.” The drive extends a meaty, hairy paw. “I’m Cason…”
“Broonzy! Been a snaker, but
I can drive a Zipster, too, you want to take a nap
later on…”
“Aayayy,” Cason answers, then points
to the briefcase. “You
some kind of salesman?”
“That's me. Parts.”
The gorple at Minnie’s is as good as
advertised and then Cason hits the road… klicks and klicks of nothing and nothing almost all the way to Marrick. Broonzy gives the driver two hours’ relief between oh two
and oh four, and is snoring in the truck, the dashboard clock reading 0500
hours, when his sleep is abruptly interrupted by sirens…
“Uh oh… spot of trouble here,” Cason warns. “Hate bored shurts…
nothing to do but drive around wasting meth and shaking down honest taxpayers…”
“You're an honest taxpayer?”
“Long as they don't look in the trailer…” Cason grins, before
putting on his game face to face the law.
The shurts force them over… there are
two cars, boxing in the zipster. Two predatory officers in one,
related probably… they have the sharp, suspicious eyes and extended beaks and
claws of raptors… a lady shurt in the other. Short hair, bristly like a
porcupine up top. Cason smiles
innocently as the lady porcupine approaches.
“What can I do you gentlemen and lady for this early in the morning. Ma'am?”
The lady officer, clearly outranking the two avians,
does not share the trucker’s early morning jollity. “Taking a chance, driving under these
conditions are we?”
“Never a time up this way when I'm not,” Cason
explains. “Carrying plenty of
weight, though, I’ll be alright.”
“And just what are you carrying, if you don't mind my asking?”
she presses him.
Cason gives what he hopes is a faux-rueful smile. “Fertilizer.”
The shurts hesitate, noses wrinkling,
but the senior officer mounts the truck's running board, her head drawing even
with the driver and with his passenger… whom she appears to notice for the
first time.
“License and registration, sir.” Cason shrugs, flips
down the sunshield… a conceit, dating back centuries as impossible to account
for as the three suns of Die. As he
assembles his paperwork, the porcupine shines her lume
into Broonzy’s eyes, scowling. “You… are you a relief driver? Let me see your papers,” she orders,
rewarding the snaker with something that might pass
as a smile. “Need I remind the both of
you that it is a criminal offense to solicit or offer rides in a commercial
vehicle?”
“He's a salesman…” the driver blurts out, unbidden…
“Attorney,” Broonzy corrects him. “Actually, I do sell my services… company
hires me to check out its drivers’ compliance with the local traffic
regulations and rules of the road.
Safety at any price,” and he rewards her with a salesman’s smile. “My supervisor at Smorlissn…”
He hands over the business card of the lawyer that Clegg had
recommended to the lady officer, who has stepped down off the running board,
circled the truck and re-emerged in his window.
She merely stares at him, chewing… gum, probably, or maybe
bah-roar. One of the officers elbows the
other with a hawklike grin…
“One hauls the rawth, the other
defends it!”
“Man who has to drive around with a lawyer in his truck interests me. Get out, the both of you!
I'm going to have a look in that trailer…”
Broonzy
and the driver step out into ankle deep snow on the cargoway
embankment, with more drifting flakes making the early morning vision
tentative. Cason opens his mouth to ask
the officer’s name… humanize the situation… but sees that dark tape has been
applied over her badge. Leaving the
nameless senior shurt to monitor them, the other two
go back to slide the trailer open…”
“Well, well, well, will you look at that!” one crows from behind
the transport.
Broonzy,
clutching the briefcase that he’d removed from the cab, makes a split-second decision
to bolt. He starts running down the embankment, slips, and rolls to the bottom
as the shurts atop it start calling out “Stop! Stop!”, then flounders through the snow
towards several dark buildings that loom up ahead in weak light, like phantoms.
“A blue laser beam, erratically aimed,
sets a dry, dead bush on fire several meters ahead of and to the left of the
fugitive… Broonzy darts between the nearest
structures, panting, hurls himself through the door of a smaller nearest
building without further peril. It's a holding pen for poultry… maels, somewhat larger than chickens, smaller than turkeys…
thousands of them, ugly and aroused and cackling. Broonzy scuttles
across the filthy floor and huddles in a corner behind a pile of feedbags until
the door is opened and a voice cries out… a female voice, but high-pitched,
elderly, avian like the junior officers, not the rodent…
“Anybody in there?”
The two avian shurts on the cargoway slip and slide down the embankment, the senior
officer closing the trailer in disgust. Broonze hears them opening and closing doors and asking
questions of the unseen old lady – the door flung open again,
“Rassoul!” a shurt
cries out, “what a stink!”
“Nobody in here but us maels,” the other remarks. The door slams shut.
“Told you it was fertilizer,” Cason screws up the courage to
tell the senior shurt on the embankment above.
“Get it out of here,” she points. And then, anticipating his next question, she
rasps “…leave the jammin’ lawyer behind. You’re not going to miss him, are you?”
“Rawth, no!”
Cason adopts a pleading tone, seeing that the shurt
has taken out the little com they use to write up tickets. “Company made me take that guy! Honest!
Looked like a salesman… if i knew he was a lawyer, I’d
have pitched him out to freeze!”
“It’s not a crime to have attorneys ride along in a commercial
transport,” the nameless shurt allows, “although it
should be. Well, he’s gone now. Tell me Mister… Cason?” she pretends to have
trouble pronouncing his name, “can we come to some sort
of accommodation on this?”
The barn is dark and heated so, despite the stink and noise, Broonzy dozes; most of the birds go back to sleep too…
until the door is thrown open and the old woman storms in, leading three knafes on a chain; these of course, start howling and lead
her directly to a rumpled, befeathered snaker.
“Who the jam are you… and what the jam
are you doing?”
As the grinding of gears and a whistle herald the departure of
the transport, followed by the shurts… sirens
blaring… Broonzy rises, briefcase in hand, extending
his magic attorney's card as he glances around the mael
shed, eyes briefly lighting on more bags stacked up against a far wall. “Ma'am, our firm is filing a class action
against Snoerlessen fertilizer and implements, and
I'd like to know if you'd be a party…”
“Get off my property!” the old woman screams, extending the
chain and allowing the demented, furious knafes to
lunge closer to the snaker.
“Uh, if you're not interested… certainly… but can I, uh, purchase
a couple of eggs? Time for breakfast,
you know… I’ve got a soycard…”
The decidedly avian maelkeeper
takes a closer look at Broonzy in the dim light and
apparently likes what she sees… pulling the khafes
back, just a little…
“Well, I think we might be able to work something out,” the old
woman ventures.
“And a cuppa caffa?”
From a darkened room, twenty minutes later, bedsprings squeak…
then, a pause…
“Uh… ma'am…” Broonzy worries, brushing
a cluster of mael feathers from the lapel of his
overcoat, “is there any chance of your husband hearing this? I wouldn’t want to be responsible for… you
know…”
“Oh just don't you worry your pretty ol’
horse’s head, Secretariat! He's lazy and he’s no good, and I got his hearing
aid and unilator, both! Right over there. When he wakes up, you just hand out that old
line about being Mister Big Shot Attorney here to look into our troubles with
the rendering firm and Ted’ll go along, nice and
easy-greasy.
Ten more minutes and Broonze is seated
at a kitchen table with an old-fashioned oilcloth ahroud,
listening to blue mael-eggs with white yolks fry in a
cast iron skillet. With a nod and a smile, Broonzy
pushes away from the kitchen table, rising to shake the farmer’s hand… a
porcine little fellow with a quivering pug nose and a mien of greed as his wife
waves her spatula and sets a plateful of the vittles in front of him; Ted
slurping up the yolks, mopping the plate with bread, fingering his false teeth…
“You be sure to mail us one of them
contracts? Never did like Snoerlessen…” the farmer snaps, “their wares are cheap, but
I have doubts as to their u-tility,” he draws out the
word. “You say you can win us a lot of skilk? I got
receipts… well, the card company can get ‘em for me, down to the drizzits…”
“Plenty of skilk!” the snaker assures him, More feathers float from his hair and
his clothes like greasy, oblong snowflakes.
“Sorry I don't have any blank contracts left… used 'em
all up! Got to get back to Marrack for more…”
“Well,” the farmer said, suddenly helpful, “well, you go six klicks up the cargoway to town…
that's North Dixon, bigger than Dixon tell Rassoul’s
own truth, you can get from there a hundred and fifty klicks
to Marrack easy, sooner or late. I'd drive you in,
but I got birds to feed, eggs to collect…” his voice trailed off,
apologetically.
The family doesn’t believe in napkins, apparently, so Broonzy wipes his lips with bread. “Understand!” he says. In short order, he’s floundering heavily
through the snow towards
“Where do I get off to get to the maximag
station,” he asks the driver…
“Downtown.
“Dee naa mee,”
Broonzy smiles.
He takes a seat with the briefcase held tightly between his
ankles, smiling absently as any temporarily reformed sinner who has just
narrowly escaped a horrible end and the fires of Hell. In only a few more minutes, he’s navigating
the snowblown streets of downtown North Dixon, eyes
fixed on a clocktower that informs him it's oh eight
thirty! He quickens his pace, passing three heathers
huddled in a doorway… it's another jammin’ Andromeda Hotel! They’re a jammin’ chain! Shaking his head, he makes for the blue
neon of the maximag station! The building is open, but the
ticket window is closed. He bangs on it until a thin, balding clerk opens
the office door at the end of the counter.
“Gotta get to Marrack!”
“Too late!
Morning mag took off fifteen minutes ago! Usually
it'd be late in weather like this, but it's our lucky day. Yours, maybe not. Late afternoon mag
leaves at eighteen hundred hours, night mag at twenty
one.” The clerk wipes some imaginary
dust off the counter and closes his window.
Too late to meet Pflogel. Rawth!
Broonzy
heads back towards downtown, Clegg's briefcase suddenly heavy in his hand. His
route takes him back past the other Andromeda, giving him an inspiration as one
of the freezing heathers winks at him, tiredly, her friends not even bothering
to try…
“Hey, good lookin'… know where I can
get a hover?
“You a shurt?” inquires the bold
one. “Whatcha
had have in mind – back seat, like a coupla kids?
“Lora doesn't do cars…” says another of the heathers with the
protruding jaw and overbite of a rodent – tho’ not,
fortunately, with the porcupine-spiky hair…
“Cold weather discount, Spimmy? Got my
own room…
“Anna boyfriend,” says another with a hostile smirk, “knock you onna head, jammin' shurt…”
“I’m not… no, thanks,” Broonzy raises
Lucille’s briefcase in a salute. “Just
thought of something…”
He presses on towards the mag, Lora
shouting after him. “Loothee! Looth!”
Speaking about makhbool,
the Dixon passport had rawth for security, but Broonze was either too stupid or too afraid to try to find
a flight out before his deadline for the meet with that fellow with the queer name
in Marrack later that afternoon. As he told it to me… anyway, a ticket
would've cost him more than he was being paid for the job, more than a ticket
from
go
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