Read Online L. Neil Smith - North American Confederacy 02 by Nagasaki Vector - Free Book Online Page A

stared, flame-blinded, into the fathomless night.
    I’d given up on Color, Charm, and Spin for intelligent conversation. Dirty jokes involving seventeen sexes hafta be spelled out for unfortunates with only two. Likewise, they didn’t get “The Sleeve-Job,” even after I’d explained it, and considered “The Green Horse" just plain dumb. All they could blabber about was how Gruenblum had invented coffee-nerves, thus saving Yamaguchikind from destruction. I’d heard the story before.
    It was more diverting just observing the little critters— reminding myself sourly that’s how I’d gotten stuck with ’em in the first place. Now they had names, seemed I could tell ’em apart more reliably. English was their only language, cribbed offa cornflake boxes an’ suchlike I’d had in my garbage along with the teabags and coffee grounds. Among themselves they revved it up to 78 RPM.
    That eye of theirs could focus telescopically, I discovered; each of them could see a thousand stars in the Seven Sisters and insisted on naming every one of ’em, until I put a stop to it. At the opposite end of the scale, they were fascinated at the minute protozoans t’be found under every leaf and in the rain-filled hollows, even as they munched ’em down and swallowed. They were dismayed when it turned out, in the gathering twilight, that I could only see in the narrow spectral band that they called ultrared to infraviolet.
    Some kinda god I was turnin’ out t’be!
    So here I sat before my tiny, ineffectual fire, weary and bored, shivering and soaking wet as usual (never seemed t’get dry in those woods), listening to the local coyotes praying to the moon, and my own minuscule worshippers debating the question: since Gruenblum is Omniscient, Omnipotent, and Benevolent, how come were we lost?
    Simple: I was Stupid, too.
    Suddenly, all conversation stopped. Three straining eye-stalks pointed toward a wild thrashing in the bushes that defined our little clearing. Blinded by firelight, I drew my Colt, seeking a target in the leafy gloom. Over the tromping and crashing, which grew louder, came a clamor like a Canada goose being molested by a set of bagpipes.
    I thumbed the hammer back. Adding a shaky left hand to the shaky right hand on the pistol grip, I pointed its garbage-can snout in the direction of the disturbance. Mountain lions, sabertooth tigers, black bears, grizzlies-—only Ochskahrt knew, and he was dead —this animal was real sick, maybe rabid.
    The Freenies stretched their necks, peering into the darkness.
    Abruptly, two huge hairy paws thrust through a housesized raspberry bush not ten feet away. I placed my front sight right between them, waiting tensely to see more. Something cylindrical and queerly flexible swung between the claws.
    The racket ceased. Over a moist, fur-covered ebony muzzle, a pair of savage eyes blinked at me. I blinked back, wetting my lips. Each massive shoulder of the gigantic ursine monster bore a brightly-colored stripe—connected to a day-glo yellow knapsack! At the ponderous, blackly-furred waist lay a broad leather belt; at the right hip, carried diagonally forward in the “appendix” position, hung an automatic hand-cannon that made my pistol suddenly feel like a bracelet charm.
    The creature's gaze calmly took in the palsied quivering of my .45, the little fire-camp I’d built, the three funny-looking organisms presently crowding each other behind my back.
    It opened its cavernous mouth, revealing hideously gleaming fangs.
    “Please don’t shoot me. Mister,” the gorilla said. “I’m the President’s only niece, and he wouldn’t like it.”

6  The Jape of the Ape
    SO IT’S 123 B.C. — THAT’S 630 A.U.C. TO US CITIzens-— an’ I’m decked out in my snazziest gabardine toga, swappin’ conversational Latin at a lie-down dinner for two with this left-wing Tribune, Caius Sempronius Gracchus, I ran into at the corner of Vth and Esquiline, playin' bocci in an S&M bar.
    In the