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Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 66: Cooper 94
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Kondor 277
“Say the secret word and the duck comes down,” Cooper muttered to himself.
He was standing in front of a large statue of an alien woman who had apparently been a great leader in a previous age, simultaneously beautiful and grotesque, and had decided that it was not exactly a statue but some form of suspended animation, that she had expected to be entombed for millennia and then awakened. He had just decided not to awaken her early, and made a comment, one of those things you say for no reason, that she should continue to sleep. Abruptly a door opened and a glove shifted outward toward him.
It was evident that it was a glove, because the open end was toward him but he could see the fingers in the compartment--which he realized was dimly lit for that purpose. It was a left-hand covering of a material which seemed to be between cloth and leather but, he thought, woven in a way that suggested function rather than beauty.
Put it on, he thought. Don’t be daft, he answered. The technology of these people was so far beyond even that of his companions who hopped from planet to planet as traders, anything might happen. You could lose the hand. You could lose much more than the hand.
There was nothing to learn staring at the glove. He looked back at the face of the woman. In all that he had seen, there was nothing to suggest she was anything other than benign. She had been a good person, a good ruler who cared about her people. There might be danger to him here if he intended harm, but his expressed intention was not threatening.
On the other hand, just because she meant no harm did not mean this glove was safe. He thought it unlikely that it had been made for a human, that is, a terran, and although the alien was about as close to human in appearance as any of the aliens he had met--one reason she appeared grotesque, because a humanoid with a lizard-like visage would look like a lizardman, but a humanoid with human features distorted would look wrong--you could not be certain of physiology from appearance.
This, though, seemed to be a gift intended for him. It might be useful, a bit of alien technology that had some practical application. Besides, what harm could it do--kill him? He had never been overly worried about death, not since he had asked Jesus into his heart decades ago, and less so since he began this verser life and had died four times now. He sensed no evil here. He did not think it magic--more likely one of those technology-indistinguishable-from-magic objects that science fiction writer mentioned. It might be a bad choice here, but it was his choice.
Sheathing the sword, he slipped his left hand into the opening in the back of the glove and used his right hand to draw it on so that his digits slotted into its fingers.
He immediately noticed two things; he could not have said which he noticed first. The glove was form-fitting, comfortably snug on his hand and yet stretching with its movements such that it was never tight or constricting. Also, at the moment he donned it there was a brief feeling as of power, energy, passing through the fibers of the fabric. It did something; it had a function.
Holding up his hand, he gazed at it as he flexed his fingers, his wrist, his palm. He was rather certain it did something, but there was no instruction manual, so he was going to have to try it to find out.
“Say, Terri,” someone said, “what you got there?”
“I’ll let you know.”
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #529: Characters in Action. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
