“You mean whores?” Montrose uttered a laugh and slapped his knee. “Hee-howdie! That would have been a hoot. Playing belly-thumper all the way to Centauri and back. If’n I were a jane, I’d’a gone for it. Wait … you’re serious? You’re not serious.”
The doctor certainly looked serious. Of course, he probably looked that way most times.
Montrose guffawed. “Who told you we had strumpets aboard? Where was they stowed? Every square half-centimeter of space was accounted for. Or were the hussies just clinging to the outside of the hull like a remora fish on a submarine? That’d be quite a bit of clinging, considering that the ship’s carousel was spun for gravity. Hanging by your hands with the stars under your toes for fifty years, and the boys would have to be pretty lonely for you, cause you’d be older than grandma by the time the johns thawed out. Pee-shaw. Who came up with that stretch of baloney?”
“These women, arrested for breaches of public decorum laws in Argentina, were given the opportunity to escape the Decency Inquisition the newly-reconstituted Spanish Crown had initiated, by doing community service. Essentially they were volunteering for permanent exile. The women were smuggled aboard because one of the high-level expedition organizers thought it would be a good idea, necessary for the sanity and well-being of the all-male crew, to send along…”
Menelaus just shook his head, smirking in disbelief.
The doctor looked offended. “Would you accuse the Nobilissimus Lord Regent Del Azarchel himself of perpetrating a lie? Be warned!”
“Would you accuse Captain Grimaldi of being so jackass loco yack-stupid as to lock up three warm-blooded señoritas in a canful of two hundred ten lusty young men and lonely old professors? Be warned yourself, Doc. Be warned not to believe any tin-plate panner-junk they try to palm off on you. Del Azarchel should’ve asked me. I would’ve come up with a better whopper than that one. Space whores!” He shook his head, unable to suppress a smile. “That’s cracked.”
Dr. Kyi favored him with a cold look. “You were in a coffin the whole time. You have no knowledge of what occurred.”
“Impossible. Im—poss—see—bull. And the emphasis is on the bull.”
“Why are you so certain, Mr. Montrose?”
“Do you think someone could have just up and added an extra biosuspension unit aboard? How about three? The ship was designed for ninety-five percent of lightspeed. Do you want to see the figures on how much oomph it costs to accelerate even a single gram of mass to that velocity? The crew had to slim down like wrestlers training for a weight class too light for us. We were shaving our heads bald because two hundred ten crewhands’ worth of hair—I am talking about the weight of the hair—’tweren’t worth the cost of fuel to boost. Our uniforms was tissue paper, and it was more lightweight to paint our feet with insulator goop than to carry socks. We didn’t have shoes! Pox and plague, man! They had little plastic bags we were meant to pee into before docking, and we were going to leave them on the punt before we boarded, so that we’d be that much lighter before weigh-in. Each gram of urine counted.”
Dr. Kyi looked puzzled, even disturbed. Obviously Montrose’s words had struck doubt into him. “The history files are not clear. A large mass of data was lost when the Coptics and Voortrekkers aligned with the Chinese and came to power: One of the cybernetic battles—I cannot recall the historian’s name and number code for which microsecond it happened in—was called the Aneurysm.”
“Well, I can tell you that security aboard the ship was as airtight as the ship herself. Our biometrics were all on file in a separate back-up computer called Little Big Brother that was not even physically connected with the mainframe. Little Big Brother were these little black boxes dotting the inner hull that made sure no one entered or left officer’s country or the engineering deck where the manipulator-field controls were locked. You understand, we were going out there to mine antimatter, and nine-tenths of the ship’s complement was going to be cold slumber. It was not the kind of ship where a person could just hop around from deck to deck with no one looking. Only the captain had access to Little Big Brother, and the First Mate if and only if Brother thought the Captain was dead. You going to tell me Captain Grimaldi smuggled some painted trollops aboard and left behind needed crew? Not him. Never. You are talking about men I knew, a ship I served on—well, nearly.”
“But you were not privy to the decisions of the command. Or so the histories say. You were the only man from your nation aboard, and the world still regarded the Norteamericano with suspicion and contempt.”
“Well, shoot, I regards your tall tale here with suspicion and contempt. It don’t hang together. Where’re these women now?”
“They did not survive the voyage.”
“Convenient. Where’re the bodies?”
“Prince Rainier married all three, to remove the women from the use of the crew, and this contributed to the rebellion.”
Menelaus stared up at the roof of the chamber or, rather, the car. “There is no way the Captain Grimaldi I knew would have turned polygamous—his people had no love for the Jihadi, and keeping spare wives around was their knack, not a Monegasque thing at all. Speaking of which, the crew was one-third Indosphere, one-third Hispanosphere, and one-third were odds and ends, mostly from the Sinosphere—including me, since Oddifornia was Sino back in the day. How many of the expedition survivors were from the Spanish-speaking parts of the world?”
The doctor said stiffly, “These days, it is considered impolite to look into a man’s language loyalties or enthophylum. We do not take in account…”
“So they were all Beaneaters? All the ones who lived?”
“We do not use that kind of language—it is regarded as a matter of insult to…”
“Yeah, well, I damn well regard it as a matter of insult to tell a lie. In my day, your primary loyalty was to whoever talked like you. Not to your Church, like in the days of the Jihad, and not to your King, like in the First Dark Ages, not to your race, like in the Second—in my day, the lines were drawn between Anglosphere, Gallosphere, Hispanosphere, Sinosphere, and so on. Del Azarchel was Spanish. He would not have killed Argentine women. It never happened. There weren’t no women.”
The doctor regarded him with narrowed eyes. “Your suspicions have no ground.”
“Oh, I think the grounds are in what you said about the space battle. Sounds as if the Hermeticists outsmarted their opponents. Like a man outsmarting a monkey. And this girl just talked everyone into surrendering, did she? And the crew—by any chance, did they do any reconfiguring on the ship’s electronic brain while they were at V 886 Centauri? Never mind. You wouldn’t know the answer to that, would you? Anyhow, they are still outsmarting you.”
“In what regard?”
“You want to know how to sniff out a lie? Lies are told with a particular audience in the sites, see? If you understand the audience, you understand the lie. Your little story about three crewmen being too dishonored to be willing to admit they flunked out of the space expedition—you believe it, because that is the way you’d act, the way your generation expects people to act. I haven’t seen more than a glimpse of y’all in this time, but you are a military culture, and militant cultures have a cult of honor. Always have. People of my day did not act that way. We were a free-market culture. A guy who flunked out of Space Camp would have done pixies, maybe wrote a book, walked the lecture circuit. Because we cared about money, not honor so much, on account of the world was in a depression, and every penny counted. See what I mean? Time changes people, don’t it? That’s one reason why lies do not last.”