Charming, vicious, lovely young inhuman girls who, he suspected, would ambush him tonight. Pity they didn’t have a mother to keep them in check, or a brother to lend a little finesse to their outlandish behavior.
But life would be dull without them.…
«I am the captain of the sailcar Estrella del Oeste! ” Enri shouted suddenly to a group of rheas feeding harmlessly below the track. «I sail for distant cantons with a cargo of ripe tortuga which I will sell for enough money to buy the moon. Or at least, the Sister of the Moon,” he conceded, his mind wandering to a strange, gigantic dome-thing he’d once seen down the coast; a thing almost as big as a mountain, its top lost in the clouds. «One day I will be rich!» he shouted. «I’ll buy my own sailcar! I’ll have a fleet of sailcars!»
But the Estrella del Oeste didn’t even belong to him. It was an ancient Canton car, its days of fast passenger work long over, a broken‑down hulk with patched sails and frayed ropes eking out its last years as a track maintenance vehicle. In its time it had held twenty passengers in its cylindrical hull, but now the seats were gone, and the drapes and the luxuries, leaving only a bare cavern some ten meters long filled with the tools of Enri’s trade: wooden pegs, mallets, rope, bone needles and thread, a shovel, a flint spokeshave, and several barrels of stinking tumpfat for greasing the rails and bearings. Enri’s living quarters were there too; a tiny cabin with a bed, a table and a few possessions.
Enri rode on deck, behind the car’s single mast, gripping the mainsheet — the rope which controlled the angle of the sail to the wind — like any crewman on one of the prestigious Company craft, controlling the sailcar’s speed by the tension of the rope and by occasional judicious application of the brake. The wind was light tonight, and he didn’t have to use the brake much.
The Estrella del Oeste lumbered on while the Pegman dreamed of changing the course of history, and a small part of his mind — the professional part — gauged the state of the track by the feel of the deck’s motion through the seat of his pants. Soon the car slowed. He had reached the long climb past Camelback.
The wind chose that moment to slacken.
«Huff! Huff!» He shouted the traditional crewman’s cry and blew pointlessly into the limp sail. The wind dropped altogether.
The car was rolling to a halt.
He stood, a tall, thin figure in the moonlight, and shook the boom, inviting the wind. His mood of elation had evaporated. Now he saw himself as a broken‑down True Human in a broken‑down car. «God damn everything to hell!» he yelled. It would be morning before he reached Rangua at this rate.
The car stopped. He swung one-handed to the running rail and jammed a chock under the rear wheel to prevent the car rolling back down the grade and losing him what little ground he’d gained. Walking back to a crutch, he swung his mallet to check the security of the fastenings.
The mallet struck the crutch with a solid thunk. In the distance, the moon reflected pale silver on the sea.
«Sabotage!» he suddenly shouted, driving his fist at the sky. «I’m a saboteur and I’m going to remove a couple of pegs from this crutch, so that it will collapse when the dawn car from Torres hits it. Ten important people will die in the splintered wreckage. The southbound track will be damaged too, and the next car from Rangua will pile into the mess. More people will die!»
Obsessed by his vision of destruction he sat down, his imagination racing. The Canton Lord would be on the Torres car. Enri would be waiting near and would pull the Lord free, the instant before Agni struck the wreck into flames. The Lord would give him land and Specialists, whom he would set to building cars. Monkey-Specialists, with deft fingers and tiny minds.
And then.… And then he would search the whole world for Corriente, his love. And he would find her, and she would cling to him, and they would live happily ever —
The wind was blowing.
He walked slowly back to the Estrella del Oeste. There was no hurry, and he was lingering over the dream.
The rail trembled. A dry bearing squeaked like a rat.
Corriente, so warm, so loving.…
The Estrella del Oeste was moving!
It was impossible — yet the dark bulk of the old car was receding from him, wheels rumbling on the running rail, rigging straining to the fresh breeze. He began to run, awkwardly, one-armed and unbalanced on the narrow rail slippery with tumpfat.
«Yaah!» he shouted, like a felino trying to halt a shruglegger.
A burst of clear, feminine laughter answered him. Now he shouted at himself, calling himself a fool. The Tigre grupo had outwitted him again. He could see them now — four girls, leaning on the after-rail, waving. They had sheeted the sail in tight and now, for all he knew, were going to take the Estrella all the way to Rangua South Stage. «Stop!» he yelled.
«Not for a man who dreams of sabotage!» came the cry. «You ought to be ashamed of yourself — and you a pegman, too!»
Damned felinas! He ran on, muttering. Teressa was at the bottom of this. She’d put them up to it, the little bitch. Saba was too timid and Runa would see the consequences, and Karina … Karina was too nice. But Teressa could sway them all. She would grow up to be a bandida, that girl.
Somebody must have touched the brake — Karina probably — because he heard a scraping sound and the sailcar slowed. He reached the door and swung himself inside, blundered through the tools and stink and climbed the short ladder to the deck.
«Hello, Pegman!»
The four girls lay about the deck in attitudes of innocence, and Teressa was even mending a frayed rope. Helplessly he regarded them: cat-girls, descendants of some ancient genetic experiment, come back to haunt Man in the person of him, Enriques de Jai’a, pegman for the Rangua Canton. «I am human!» he suddenly shouted. «I am Mankind!»
«Of course you are, Enri,” said Karina. «So are we.» There was a slight reproach in her tone.
He’d meant no harm; he’d hardly been aware of his own outburst. «You’re goddamned jaguar girls,” he muttered.
«But you love us,” said Teressa, not even looking up from her work.
«Aah, what the hell!» To his intense embarrassment he found tears in his eyes and he turned away, facing north. The wind was strengthening with every moment and he must pull himself together. There was some difficult sailing between here and Rangua; the sailway turned inland for a short distance and cars had been known to jib in the sudden shift of wind. Last year, the Reine de la Plata had had her mast carried away and a crewman killed. Felinos and shrugleggers had towed the disgraced craft into Rangua, laughing derisively.
No, the Camelback Funnel, as it was called, was a difficult stretch for a man with one arm.
«And you couldn’t do without us,” said Runa seriously. «Not in this wind.» She handled the sheets, slackening them off while Saba eased the halliard and Karina, climbing to the lookout post, jerked the sail downwards. Teressa threaded a line through the cringles and in no time the sail was neatly reefed — a manoeuver he was totally unable to carry out himself. The car rode more steadily as the pressure on the lee guiderail eased.
«They shouldn’t expect you to do it all yourself,” said Karina.
«It’s this or no job at all.»
«Then don’t work. Plenty of people in South Stage don’t work. Other people look after them.»
«Listen!» he was suddenly bellowing, placing his hands at the side of his head like mules’ ears. «You’re talking about a felino camp! You people are different! You go around in grupos! True humans aren’t like that. We’re more.… solitary. The weak ones die. It’s good for the species.»
Karina said quietly, «Tonight a True Human helped me.»