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had fallen onto the table. She stepped back quickly, bumping into the wall
behind her.
The rest of us did the same even Gretchen, who hadn't heard the details of
Rosalind's death. There was something about those moist white nuggets that
made you shy away.
"I think," Myoko said, "we should ask Zunctweed where he got the helmet."
Nods all around. We tried not to leave the cabin in an undignified stampede.
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Up on deck, Oberon and Pelinor stood on either side of Zunctweed. The captain
was still folded into a peeled-potato lump, headless, legless, armless.
Impervia crouched beside the alien's origamied body and rapped on his bony
hide. "Open up! Now!"
A muffled voice answered, "Shan't."
"Shall,"Impervia told him. "Otherwise, we'll tie a rope around you and toss
you into the lake. Tucked in like this, you'll sink like a stone... and the
lake water here was ice a week ago. We'll leave you until you start drowning,
then we'll drag you out. We'll keep doing that again and again, leaving you
under a bit longer each time till you're ready to cooperate."
Annah gazed admiringly at Impervia. "You have such a gift for teaching."
Impervia almost broke into a smile... but her face went blank again quickly.
Impervia hated to seem too human.
We never got to see how Zunctweed responded to ice-water. Impervia trussed
him up with a rope Pelinor found I hoped the rope hadn't been attached to
something important and Myoko lifted the alien over the side by sheer force of
will. We could have done the lifting by hand, but we thought Zunctweed would
loosen up more if we went beyond the mundane: so Myoko put on an impressive
show, furrowing her brow with fierce concentration, spreading her hair into a
great intimidating sphere (hip-long tresses stretching to arm's length in all
directions), then shakily levitating Zunctweed off the deck, banging him
against the rail as he went over the edge, bumping him repeatedly against the
hull on the way down... at which point he moaned, "I know it won't help if I
beg for mercy; but consider how bad you might feel about this if someday you
acquire a conscience."
Myoko stopped his descent. Impervia called down to the hovering alien, "I
have a conscience; what I don't have is information. Where did you get the
orange helmet."
"Is that all you want to know? And you couldn't ask before this? No, I don't
suppose you could. It's more fun tormenting a slave than asking direct
questions. What if I answered them willingly? Then you'd have no excuse for
entertainment."
Oberon, standing by the rail, gestured impatiently with his pincers. "Shut up
and start talking."
"You self-righteous claw-thing," Zunctweed muttered. "Go back to licking your
mistress's boots."
"Stop whining," Gretchen said. "Are you going to tell us what we want?"
"Didn't I say I would?"
"No."
"Lift me up and I shall disclose the whole story."
"We'll get better answers," Impervia said, "if you stay where you are.
Provided" she turned to Myoko "you can hold him?"
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"For a little while," Myoko answered in a strained voice. "I'll manage if he
speaks quickly." She winked at us all; we'd seen Myoko hold a human in the air
for more than five minutes. But she let Zunctweed wobble a bit, just to center
his thoughts on cooperation.
"I said I'd tell!" he protested.
And he did.
Dainty Dinghyhad spent the winter offshore: far out in the lake where the
water didn't freeze. Zunctweed wasn't the only captain to anchor in that
neighborhood he was part of a small contingent, nine boats this year, that
spent the cold months afloat rather than going into dry dock or risking the
ice in the harbor. With the first snowfall,Dinghy and the other ships
offloaded all but a skeleton crew, filled their larders with provisions to
last till spring, and sailed out to meet each other at a spot reputed to be
the best winter fishing ground on the lake. The boats were lashed together in
a cozy floating village, then the crews passed the season amicably: fishing
with hook and line, playing endless games of Deuces High, and getting sozzled
on whatever rotgut they'd stowed in their holds.
Thus the flotilla passed winter's short days and long nights: taking a
holiday from smuggling rum and netting small-mouth bass. Gossip was shared
over the card table, including critiques of the Ring of Knives everyone loved
to expound on Warwick Xavier's stupidity but it was understood such opinions
would never be repeated back home. The winter anchorage was a time apart... a
season outside the real world, when you could tell your greatest secrets and
know they would never come back to haunt you.
There was one secret that never came out amidst all the drunken confessions.
Most of the company believed Zunctweed and a bevy of NikNiks were the only
aliens among them; but Zunctweed knew differently. To Zunctweed's inhuman
eyes, a captain named Josh Jode was clearly not native to Earth. Humans saw
Jode as the perfect skipper: a grizzled veteran, sunburned so thoroughly from
years on the lake that his skin was parched clay and his hair bleached to
dirty white. But Zunctweed's alien retinas perceived far outside the spectrum
visible to humans; he saw down into infrared and up to ultraviolet, at which
frequencies Josh Jode bore no resemblance toHomo sapiens.
Zunctweed had no words for the IR and UV colors that gleamed from Jode's
flesh. He could only say Jode's skin must have evolved on a very different
world than Earth: a world where a different atmosphere filtered different
wavelengths from the light of a different sun. Zunctweed instantly recognized
a fellow extraterrestrial... but he never revealed what he knew, to Jode or to
anyone else.
Zunctweed was an infuriating curmudgeon, but he wasn't stupid.
So Jode never realized Zunctweed knew his secret which is why Zunctweed was
still among the living and why the winter anchorage passed uneventfully until
five nights earlier.
In the darkest hour before dawn when the candles had guttered to blackness
and the only lamp still burning was close to running dry... when even those
who'd lost at cards were too tired to say, "One more hand, just one more"...
when the men and women of the winter anchorage had returned to their own
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