The man who came for Moyshe, when he arrived meteorically on a
fast orange scooter, wore a jumper of a style Moyshe had never
before seen. It was black, trimmed with silver, instead of being
the off-white of the technical groups. It was an Operations group
uniform.
The man looked and smelled as if he had not changed for a
week.
“Trying to find a man name
of . . . ” He checked a card.
“BenRabi. Moyshe benRabi. What land of name is
that?”
“A literary allusion,” Amy replied.
“This’s him here.”
“Right. Teddy Larkin, Contact Support. Who’re
you?” He was brusque. And tired. He appeared to be on the
verge of collapse. Moyshe felt sympathetic. He was on his last legs
himself.
“Amaranthina Amaryllis Isolte Galadriel de Coleridge y
Gutierez. Security,” she snapped.
“Oh. All right, let’s go, benRabi.” He headed
for his scooter.
Moyshe did not move. He was fighting his temper. Larkin’s
rudeness might be excused, intellectually, because he was tired,
but emotionally Moyshe could not let it slide. He had the feeling
that Larkin was this way all the time.
Larkin reached his vehicle, noticed that Moyshe was not tagging
along dutifully. “Come on, grub. Get your
ass . . . ”
BenRabi was there. And Teddy was yon, seated on hard steel deck
plating wondering what had hit him.
There was no forgiving his remark. “Grub” was the
Seiner’s ultimate epithet for landsmen. BenRabi moved in. He
was ready to bounce Larkin all over the passageway.
Amy’s touch stopped him. “Go gentle, you ape,”
she snarled at Larkin. “Or yours will be the second big mouth
he’s shut today.”
Larkin took it as a wisecrack, started toward Moyshe.
BenRabi bounced him off the bulkhead and floor a couple of
times.
“I meant what I said,” Amy told Larkin. Her badge
was showing now, literally. “How was your air supply this
afternoon?”
“Eh?” Larkin’s eyes widened. His face grew
pale.
“Yeah. You see what I mean,” Amy told him.
Moyshe slowly relaxed. “Have the covers turned down when I
get home, Love,” he said, blowing a kiss. He did it to
irritate Larkin. Would you want your sister to marry one?
“I’m going to sleep for a week.” He settled
himself on the scooter’s passenger seat. “Ready when
you are, Teddy.”
He had to hang on for his life. The scooter seemed designed for
racing. Its driver was a madman who did not know how to let up on
the go-pedal.
“What’s the hurry?”
“I get to get me some sleep when I deliver you.”
A big airtight door closed behind them the instant they entered
Operations Sector. Sealed in, Moyshe thought. An instant of panic
flashed by. Nervous, he studied his surroundings. Ops seemed
quieter, more remote, less frenzied than his home sector. It looked
less touched by battle. There was no confusion. People seemed more
aloof, more calm, less harried. He supposed they had to be. They
had to think Danion past defeat. The fighting may have
stopped, but it was not finished.
Larkin braked to a frightening, squealing stop that almost threw
Moyshe off the scooter. Larkin led him into a large room filled
with complex electronics. “Contact,” Larkin muttered by
way of explanation.
The battle had reached this place. Acrid smoke hung thick here.
It still curled up from one instrument bank. Ozone underlay the
stench. Casualties awaiting ambulances rested along one wall. There
were at least a dozen stretchers there. But the hull had remained
sound. There were no suits in evidence.
Larkin led Moyshe to the oldest man he had yet seen aboard
Danion. “BenRabi,” he said, and instantly
disappeared.
Moyshe examined his surroundings while waiting for the old man
to acknowledge his presence. The vast room looked like a crossbreed
of ship’s bridge and lighter passenger compartment. The walls
were banked with data processing equipment, consoles, and screens
whose displays he could not fathom. Seiners in black, seated
shoulder to shoulder, manipulated, observed, and muttered into tiny
mikes. The wide floor of the room was occupied by corn-rows of
couches on which more Seiners lay, their heads enveloped in huge
plastic helmets which twinkled with little telltale lights. Beside
each couch stood a motionless pair of Seiners. One studied the
helmet lights, the other a small, blockish machine which looked
uncomfortably like a diagnostic computer. A constant pavanne of
repairmen moved among the couches, apparently examining the empties
for defects.
BenRabi finally spied something familiar. It was a spatial
display globe that lurked blackly in a far corner. Centered in it
were ten golden footballs apparently representing harvestships. He
supposed the quick, darting golden needles represented service
ships. They were maneuvering against scarlet things which vaguely
resembled Terran sharks. The tiny golden dragons at the far
periphery, then, should represent distant starfish. Stars’
End would be the deeper darkness biting a chunk from the
display’s side. He saw nothing that could be interpreted as
Sangaree. He hoped they would stay gone, though it was not their
style and he did not expect it.
“Mr. benRabi?” The old man said.
“Why dragons?”
“Image from our minds. You’ll see.”
“I don’t understand.”
Instead of responding, the old man plunged into a prepared
speech. “Nobody explained this to you, did they? Well, our
drives are dead, except for minddrive. The sharks can’t kill
that till they get to us here, or till we stop getting power from
the fish. But we’re in trouble, Mr. benRabi. We do have
minddrive, but the sharks mindburned most of my techs.” He
indicated the nearest stretcher. A girl barely out of creche smiled
in vacant madness. “I’ve lost so many I’m out of
standbys. I’m drafting marginal sensitives from the crew.
You’re subject to migraine, aren’t you?”
Moyshe nodded, confused. Here they came with the headaches
again.
He had suspected for several months
now . . . But the implications were too
staggering. He did not want to believe. The psi business had been
discredited.
Maybe if he remembered that hard enough this man and place would
go away.
“We want you to go into rapport with a fish.”
“No!” Panic smote him. He did not entirely
understand his response.
A niggling little demon named Loyalty, to whom he seldom
listened, urged him to surrender for the sake of information.
Beckhart would reward him with a shovel full of medals.
He thought of sudden, terrible headaches, and of frightening,
haunting dreams. He recalled his fear that he had made involuntary
contact with the starfish. “I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know how.”
“You don’t need to. The techs will put you in. The
fish will do all the work. All you do is serve as a
channel.”
“But I’m tired. I’ve been up
for . . . ”
“Tell me a story. So has everybody else.” He
gestured impatiently. A couple of technicians, hovering nearby,
approached. “Clara, put Mr. benRabi in Number
Forty-three.” Both techs nodded. “There’s nothing
to be afraid of, Mr. benRabi.”
Moyshe wanted to protest being pushed around, but lacked the
will. The technicians pressed him into a couch. He surrendered.
Undoubtedly he had been through worse.
The technician whom the old man had called Clara reminded him of
the professional mother of his childhood. She was grey-haired,
cherry-faced, and chattered soothingly while strapping his arms to
those of the couch. She placed his fingers on grip-switches before
she started on his legs.
Her partner was a dark-haired, quiet youth who efficiently
prepared Moyshe’s head for the helmet. He began by rubbing
Moyshe’s scalp with an unscented paste, then he covered
benRabi’s short hair with a thing like a fine wire hairnet.
Moyshe’s skin protested a thousand little tingles that
quickly faded. I’m taking this too passively, he thought. “Why are
you strapping me down?” he demanded.
“So you can’t hurt yourself.”
“What?”
“Take it easy. There’s nothing to be afraid of.
It’s just a precaution,” the woman replied. She smiled
gently. Damn, he thought. Better be two shovels full of medals.
“Lift your head, please,” the younger Seiner said.
Moyshe did. The helmet devoured his head. He was blind.
His fear redoubled. A green ogre with dirty claws shoved nasty
hands into his guts, grabbed, yanked. His heart began playing a
theme for battle drums. Words came echoing through his mind,
Czyzewski’s, from his poem “The Old God”:
“ . . . who sang the darkful deep, and
dragons in the sky.” Had Czyzewski had starfish in mind?
Moyshe felt his body growing wet with fear-sweat. Maybe the
contact wouldn’t work. Maybe his mind wouldn’t be
invaded. That had to be the root of his terror. He did not want
anything looking inside his head, where the madness lay behind the
most fragile of barriers.
It had taken him all year to get it under
control . . . Guns, dragons, headaches,
improbable, obsessive memories of Alyce, continuous
instability . . . He did not dare go under. His
balance was too delicate.
Guns! Did the image of the gun have anything to do with the
Stars’ End weaponry? Was it some twisted symbol his mind had
created for a part of the mission that Psych had not wanted him to
remember?
Somewhere, a voice. “We’re ready, Mr.
benRabi.” The old woman. It was an ancient trick for calming
a man. It worked, a little. “Please depress your right side
switch one click.”
He did. He lost all sensation. He floated. He saw, smelled, felt
nothing. He was alone with his tortured mind.
“That’s not bad, is it?” She used the voice of
the professional mother this time. His cunning, frightened mind
made it that of the woman of his youth. He remembered how she had
comforted him when he had been afraid.
“When you’re ready, depress your right switch
another click, then release it. To withdraw you have to pull up on
your left switch.”
His hand seemed to act on its own. Down went the switch.
The dreams he had been having returned space swimming, the
galaxy wrong in color, Stars’ End strangely misty yet bright.
Things moved around him. He remembered the situation tank. This was
like being bodiless at the heart of the display. The service ships
were glimmering needles, the harvestships glowing tangles of wire.
The sharks were reddish torpedoes in the direction of the galaxy.
Far away, the starfish looked like golden Chinese dragons. They
were drifting toward him.
Moyshe’s fear faded as though a hand had erased it from
the blackboard of his mind. Only an all-encompassing wonder
remained.
Gently, warm, friendly as a loving mother, a voice trickled into
his mind. “I do it. Starfish, Chub.” There was a
wind-chimes tinkle of something like laughter. “Watch. I show
me.”
A small dragon rose from the approaching herd, did a ponderous
forward roll. Shortly, “Oh, my! Old Ones don’t like.
Dangerous. This no time for fun. But we winning, new man-friend.
Sharks afraid, confused. Too many man-ship. Running now, some. Many
destroyed. Big feast for scavenger things.”
The creature’s joy was infectious, and Moyshe supposed he
had cause—if the sharks were indeed abandoning herd and
harvestfleet.
Funny. His conscious mind was not questioning, just
accepting.
His fear remained, down deep, but the night creature held it at
bay, infecting him with its own excitement. When did the power
thing start? he wondered. It had already, the starfish told him. He
did not feel anything other than this creature Chub exploring the
ways of his mind like a kid on holiday exploring a resort
hotel.
“Shark battle won, mind battle won,” the starfish
said after a while, when Moyshe finally had himself under control.
“But another fight coming, Moyshe man-friend. Bad one,
maybe.”
“What?” And he realized, for the first time, that he
really was talking with his mind.
“Ships-that-kill, evil ones, return.”
“Sangaree. How do you know?”
“No way to show, tell. Is. They come, hyper now. Your
people prepare.”
BenRabi did not want to be out here during combat. He felt
exposed, easy prey. Panic began to well up.
The starfish’s control did not slacken. He soon forgot the
danger, became engrossed in the wonders around him, the rippling
movements of retreating sharks, the ponderous approach of dragons,
the maneuvers of the shimmering service ships as their weary crews
prepared for another battle. The galaxy hung over everything like a
ragged tear in the night, vast in its extension. How much more
magnificent would it be if it could be seen without the
interference of the dust that obscured the packed suns at its core?
Nearby, Stars’ End waited, a quiet but furious god of war as
yet unconcerned with the goings-on around it. Moyshe hoped no one
aroused its wrath.
“Coming now,” his dragon told him. Spots appeared
against the galaxy as Sangaree raidships dropped hyper. Down in his
backbrain, behind his ears, Moyshe felt a gentle tickle.
“More power,” Chub told him.
The raidships radiated from their drop zone in lines, like the
tentacles of a squid. They soon formed a bowl with its open side
facing the harvestfleet. It was an obvious preliminary to
englobement.
The distant, decimated shark packs milled uncertainly. They
withdrew a little farther. They were not yet wholly defeated.
A ball of light flared among the Sangaree. A lucky mine had
scored. But it made little difference. The power and numbers
remained theirs.
Only a handful of service ships remained combat-worthy. Even the
halest of the harvestships had lost some main power and drive
capacity to shark attack. Minddrive and auxiliary power were
insufficient for high-stress combat maneuvering.
BenRabi sensed something changing. He cast about, finally saw
the great silver sails that had been taken in before the earlier
fighting spreading between Danion’s arms and spars. The ship
looked so ragged, so injured, so
vulnerable . . . A blizzard of debris drifted
about her, held by her minuscule natural gravity.
The Sangaree maneuvered closer but held off attacking.
“Trying to talk First Man-friend into surrender,”
Chub to benRabi. “Creatures of ships-that-kill want herd
without fight.”
“Payne won’t give up,” he thought back.
“Is true, Moyshe man-friend.”
The starfish drifted closer. They were almost upon the Sangaree.
They meant to join the battle this time, though cautiously. Their
enemies still watched from afar, looking for another chance to
savage fleet and herd.
“Fight soon, Moyshe man-friend.”
The slow, stately dance of enmity ended. The negotiations had
broken down. The Sangaree struck fast and hard, firing on the
service ships to show their determination. The service ships
dodged. Suddenly, there were missiles everywhere, streaking around
like hurrying wasps. Beam fire from the harvestships wove gorgeous
patterns of death.
And Moyshe became depressed. He had done his Navy fleet time. He
could see the untippable balance written in the patterns. There was
no hope of victory.
Chub chuckled into his consciousness. “You see only part
of pattern, Moyshe man-friend.”
In the far distance a starfish crept close to a raidship. The
vessel’s weapons could destroy the dragon in an
instant—but the ship stopped attacking. It simply drifted, a
lifeless machine.
“We do mind thing,” Moyshe heard. “Like
Stars’ End, with much power. We stop ships-that-kill like
human eyeblink, so fast, if no guns, no drive field to
fear.”
A second raidship fell silent, then a third and a fourth. Moyshe
felt less pessimistic. The raidships would be locked into an
overcommand directed by a master computer aboard the
raidmaster’s vessel. That master computer would be burning up
its superconductors trying to adjust fire fields to accommodate the
losses. If it became the least hesitant, the least unsure of its
options . . .
A too-cautious starfish burped a ball of gut-fire. The micro-sun
rolled through space sedately, devoured another raidship.
“Bad, Moyshe man-friend. Old Ones angry. Will give away
unsuspected attack.”
The Sangaree hemisphere closed steadily. Its diameter rapidly
dwindled. The harvestships threw everything they had, fire heavier
than anything benRabi had ever witnessed, yet were barely able to
neutralize the incoming. Offensive capacity seemed to have been
lost.
The starfish mindburned another raidship, and proved Chub and
the Old Ones right. The fireball had given them away. Moyshe felt
the deep sadness of his dragon as one of the herd perished beneath
Sangaree guns.
The starfish threw a barrage of fireballs before beating a hasty
retreat. Sangaree missiles broke up most of them.
The globe closed around the harvestfleet. It tightened like a
squeezing fist. A desperate ship’s commander, piloting a
three-quarters dead service ship, knocked a small hole in the globe
by ramming a raidship and blowing his drives.
“They’ll know they were in a fight,” Moyshe
thought. There was no response from Chub.
The Sangaree stepped up the attack. Their ships began piling up
toward Stars’ End. Moyshe suddenly intuited their strategy.
“They’re going to push us into the sharks!”
Again there was no response from his dragon, unless it were that
wind-chime tinkle he caught on the extreme edge of his
sensitivity.
The Sangaree seemed to have managed some equipment adjustments
during their absence. They appeared to have no trouble detecting
the sharks now. And, since detecting the starfish attack, they were
having no trouble keeping the dragons at bay.
Chub returned to his mind suddenly. “It works well, Moyshe
man-friend. Be patient. Will have little time to chat. Is hard to
think thoughts in commanders of ships-that-kill, and in
machines-that-think. Sangaree minds twisted. Different than
man-minds.” The dragon faded away.
What was this? he asked himself. Were the fish trying to control
the Sangaree?
The raidships massed thickly, then pushed hard. The sharks grew
agitated, as if dimly aware that they were about to be drawn into
the inferno. The starfish began drifting their way, as if to cover
the fleet’s retreat.
“Be ready, Moyshe man-friend!” It was a sudden
bellow, and all the warning he received.
The trickle in the root of his brain suddenly became a flaming
torrent. It hurt! God, did it hurt! Searing, the power boiled
through him, into whatever Danion used to control and
convert it, and out to the silvery sails. Moyshe followed the flow
for an instant, then became lost in an ocean of pain.
The harvestship began moving toward the massed raidships, all
weapons firing, not aiming, simply trying to erect an irresistible
wall of destruction. The compacted Sangaree were unable to bring
all their firepower to bear. They wavered, wavered.
A raidship blew up. It left a momentary hole in the fire
pattern. Another vessel began to come apart.
Service ships were doing the same. One harvestship ceased
firing. Her auxiliary power was exhausted. Sangaree missiles began
picking her apart.
BenRabi felt that infinite sadness again.
The enemy drifted backward, not really retreating, just being
pushed inexorably. It could not last, but the harvestfleet’s
ferocity, for the moment, was greater than the
raidfleet’s.
Afar, the starfish suddenly struck at the sharks, who scattered
in dismay. The strike was pure bluff on the dragons’ part. A
determined shark attack would have destroyed the herd in
minutes.
Something screamed across benRabi’s mind, a mad voice
babbling, shrieking fear and incoherencies. Its power was such that
it inundated his pain. He made no sense of the mind-touch, other
than warning and terror.
Phantoms, grotesqueries from the most insane medieval
imagination, gathered in space around him. Things that might have
been gargoyles and gorgons, Boschian nightmares writhing, all fangs
and talons and fire, became more real than the battleships. Every
one of them shrieked the message, “Go away or die!” I’ve gone completely insane, he thought. My mind has
snapped under contact pressure. They can’t be real. He
screamed.
Then the warm feeling came, soothing, gently calming his terror,
pushing the madness away. His dragon told him, “We succeed,
Moyshe man-friend. Maybe win.” Then, darkly, “Monsters
are Stars’ End sending. Fear and visions are Stars’ End
mind-thing. Planet machine is mad. Mad machine uses madness
weapons. Soon, other weapons.
“Look, Moyshe man-friend!”
Shielded by Chub’s touch, Moyshe turned his attention to a
Stars’ End grown huge with their approach. The Sangaree were
silhouetted against the glowing planetary disk. The face of the
world had become diseased behind them. It was spotted blackly in a
hundred thousand places.
The disk was receding. The harvestfleet was on the run,
scattering as fast as it could. Moyshe suspected that, had any been
able, the harvestships would have gone hyper. That could not be
accomplished on minddrive.
The Sangaree could not jump out while locked into their master
battle-computer. Breaking lock and getting up influence took
time.
Two thousand kilometers closer to the fortress world’s
weapons, they were trying. With the desperation of the condemned
they were breaking lock, scattering, throwing out defensive
missiles, trying to get up influence.
They did not have time. The mad world’s weapons reached
them first.
“Close mind!” Chub shrieked. “Get out! Not
need power now. Save mind!”
How? He couldn’t remember. It became another nightmare, of
the sort where all efforts to elude pursuit were vain.
Feeling returned to his left hand. Another hand rested upon it,
pulling upward. The reality of the Contact Room returned.
He could feel his helmet, the couch beneath him—and a
tremendous sense of loss. He missed his dragon already, and in
missing Chub he understood Starfishers a little better. Maybe the
contact was one reason they stayed so far from the worlds of men.
The fish-Fisher thing was a unique experiential frontier.
Perhaps only one in a thousand Fishers would ever experience
contact, but that one could share the vision with his blind
brethren . . . He had suffered a range of
emotions out there. Only one thing had been missing while Chub was
in his mind. The ordinary, everyday insecurity which so shaped
human life.
He was drowning in his own sweat. And he was shivering cold, as
if his body temperature had dropped while he was linked. The room
surrounding him was silent. Where were his technicians? Was he
alone? No. Someone had helped him get out.
The thoughts, reflections, fears flashed by in scant seconds.
Then:
His head exploded in a thundering migraine, the most sudden and
terrible of his experience. It obliterated all conscious control
and thought. He screamed. He fought the straps that held him, the
helmet that stole his vision. He became pure trapped animal. Danion shuddered, staggered, staggered. Vaguely,
through the agony, he heard screams. Loose objects rattled around.
Gravity surged and faded. Mind monsters momentarily broke through
the pain, taunting him with visions of Hell.
The Stars’ End weapons had found the Sangaree. The fringes
of their fury had brushed the harvestfleet like the cold breeze of
the passing wings of death. And he was pinned here, helpless, in
agony.
Slowly, slowly, the breeze faded. The screams died with
it—all but his own. Excited chatter surrounded him. He could
distinguish no words. His head was tearing itself apart. Once, when
he was a kid, it had been almost this bad. He had nearly killed
himself smashing his head against a wall.
Someone finally noticed him. His helmet came off. A needle stung
his arm. The pain began fading.
The room was nearly dark, so weak were the lights. Gravity had
been reduced to half normal. Danion was rationing
power.
The faces crossing his field of vision seemed unconcerned with
Danion’s condition. They were exuberant. There was laughter. Little
jokes flew.
“We’ve won!” motherly Clara told him.
“Stars’ End killed them.” Not all, Moyshe thought, though he said nothing. One or two had
made hyper in time.
The Seiners had just moved up the Sangaree vendetta list,
perhaps surpassing Jupp von Drachau.
“But we lost four harvestships,” the younger half of
his tech team told him. “Four harvestships.” He was
having a hard time believing that.
It was a victory day, all right, but one which left the Seiners
little to celebrate.
Blessed darkness enfolded Moyshe. He fell into the blissful
sleep of the needle, a sleep untroubled by fearful dreams.
The man who came for Moyshe, when he arrived meteorically on a
fast orange scooter, wore a jumper of a style Moyshe had never
before seen. It was black, trimmed with silver, instead of being
the off-white of the technical groups. It was an Operations group
uniform.
The man looked and smelled as if he had not changed for a
week.
“Trying to find a man name
of . . . ” He checked a card.
“BenRabi. Moyshe benRabi. What land of name is
that?”
“A literary allusion,” Amy replied.
“This’s him here.”
“Right. Teddy Larkin, Contact Support. Who’re
you?” He was brusque. And tired. He appeared to be on the
verge of collapse. Moyshe felt sympathetic. He was on his last legs
himself.
“Amaranthina Amaryllis Isolte Galadriel de Coleridge y
Gutierez. Security,” she snapped.
“Oh. All right, let’s go, benRabi.” He headed
for his scooter.
Moyshe did not move. He was fighting his temper. Larkin’s
rudeness might be excused, intellectually, because he was tired,
but emotionally Moyshe could not let it slide. He had the feeling
that Larkin was this way all the time.
Larkin reached his vehicle, noticed that Moyshe was not tagging
along dutifully. “Come on, grub. Get your
ass . . . ”
BenRabi was there. And Teddy was yon, seated on hard steel deck
plating wondering what had hit him.
There was no forgiving his remark. “Grub” was the
Seiner’s ultimate epithet for landsmen. BenRabi moved in. He
was ready to bounce Larkin all over the passageway.
Amy’s touch stopped him. “Go gentle, you ape,”
she snarled at Larkin. “Or yours will be the second big mouth
he’s shut today.”
Larkin took it as a wisecrack, started toward Moyshe.
BenRabi bounced him off the bulkhead and floor a couple of
times.
“I meant what I said,” Amy told Larkin. Her badge
was showing now, literally. “How was your air supply this
afternoon?”
“Eh?” Larkin’s eyes widened. His face grew
pale.
“Yeah. You see what I mean,” Amy told him.
Moyshe slowly relaxed. “Have the covers turned down when I
get home, Love,” he said, blowing a kiss. He did it to
irritate Larkin. Would you want your sister to marry one?
“I’m going to sleep for a week.” He settled
himself on the scooter’s passenger seat. “Ready when
you are, Teddy.”
He had to hang on for his life. The scooter seemed designed for
racing. Its driver was a madman who did not know how to let up on
the go-pedal.
“What’s the hurry?”
“I get to get me some sleep when I deliver you.”
A big airtight door closed behind them the instant they entered
Operations Sector. Sealed in, Moyshe thought. An instant of panic
flashed by. Nervous, he studied his surroundings. Ops seemed
quieter, more remote, less frenzied than his home sector. It looked
less touched by battle. There was no confusion. People seemed more
aloof, more calm, less harried. He supposed they had to be. They
had to think Danion past defeat. The fighting may have
stopped, but it was not finished.
Larkin braked to a frightening, squealing stop that almost threw
Moyshe off the scooter. Larkin led him into a large room filled
with complex electronics. “Contact,” Larkin muttered by
way of explanation.
The battle had reached this place. Acrid smoke hung thick here.
It still curled up from one instrument bank. Ozone underlay the
stench. Casualties awaiting ambulances rested along one wall. There
were at least a dozen stretchers there. But the hull had remained
sound. There were no suits in evidence.
Larkin led Moyshe to the oldest man he had yet seen aboard
Danion. “BenRabi,” he said, and instantly
disappeared.
Moyshe examined his surroundings while waiting for the old man
to acknowledge his presence. The vast room looked like a crossbreed
of ship’s bridge and lighter passenger compartment. The walls
were banked with data processing equipment, consoles, and screens
whose displays he could not fathom. Seiners in black, seated
shoulder to shoulder, manipulated, observed, and muttered into tiny
mikes. The wide floor of the room was occupied by corn-rows of
couches on which more Seiners lay, their heads enveloped in huge
plastic helmets which twinkled with little telltale lights. Beside
each couch stood a motionless pair of Seiners. One studied the
helmet lights, the other a small, blockish machine which looked
uncomfortably like a diagnostic computer. A constant pavanne of
repairmen moved among the couches, apparently examining the empties
for defects.
BenRabi finally spied something familiar. It was a spatial
display globe that lurked blackly in a far corner. Centered in it
were ten golden footballs apparently representing harvestships. He
supposed the quick, darting golden needles represented service
ships. They were maneuvering against scarlet things which vaguely
resembled Terran sharks. The tiny golden dragons at the far
periphery, then, should represent distant starfish. Stars’
End would be the deeper darkness biting a chunk from the
display’s side. He saw nothing that could be interpreted as
Sangaree. He hoped they would stay gone, though it was not their
style and he did not expect it.
“Mr. benRabi?” The old man said.
“Why dragons?”
“Image from our minds. You’ll see.”
“I don’t understand.”
Instead of responding, the old man plunged into a prepared
speech. “Nobody explained this to you, did they? Well, our
drives are dead, except for minddrive. The sharks can’t kill
that till they get to us here, or till we stop getting power from
the fish. But we’re in trouble, Mr. benRabi. We do have
minddrive, but the sharks mindburned most of my techs.” He
indicated the nearest stretcher. A girl barely out of creche smiled
in vacant madness. “I’ve lost so many I’m out of
standbys. I’m drafting marginal sensitives from the crew.
You’re subject to migraine, aren’t you?”
Moyshe nodded, confused. Here they came with the headaches
again.
He had suspected for several months
now . . . But the implications were too
staggering. He did not want to believe. The psi business had been
discredited.
Maybe if he remembered that hard enough this man and place would
go away.
“We want you to go into rapport with a fish.”
“No!” Panic smote him. He did not entirely
understand his response.
A niggling little demon named Loyalty, to whom he seldom
listened, urged him to surrender for the sake of information.
Beckhart would reward him with a shovel full of medals.
He thought of sudden, terrible headaches, and of frightening,
haunting dreams. He recalled his fear that he had made involuntary
contact with the starfish. “I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know how.”
“You don’t need to. The techs will put you in. The
fish will do all the work. All you do is serve as a
channel.”
“But I’m tired. I’ve been up
for . . . ”
“Tell me a story. So has everybody else.” He
gestured impatiently. A couple of technicians, hovering nearby,
approached. “Clara, put Mr. benRabi in Number
Forty-three.” Both techs nodded. “There’s nothing
to be afraid of, Mr. benRabi.”
Moyshe wanted to protest being pushed around, but lacked the
will. The technicians pressed him into a couch. He surrendered.
Undoubtedly he had been through worse.
The technician whom the old man had called Clara reminded him of
the professional mother of his childhood. She was grey-haired,
cherry-faced, and chattered soothingly while strapping his arms to
those of the couch. She placed his fingers on grip-switches before
she started on his legs.
Her partner was a dark-haired, quiet youth who efficiently
prepared Moyshe’s head for the helmet. He began by rubbing
Moyshe’s scalp with an unscented paste, then he covered
benRabi’s short hair with a thing like a fine wire hairnet.
Moyshe’s skin protested a thousand little tingles that
quickly faded. I’m taking this too passively, he thought. “Why are
you strapping me down?” he demanded.
“So you can’t hurt yourself.”
“What?”
“Take it easy. There’s nothing to be afraid of.
It’s just a precaution,” the woman replied. She smiled
gently. Damn, he thought. Better be two shovels full of medals.
“Lift your head, please,” the younger Seiner said.
Moyshe did. The helmet devoured his head. He was blind.
His fear redoubled. A green ogre with dirty claws shoved nasty
hands into his guts, grabbed, yanked. His heart began playing a
theme for battle drums. Words came echoing through his mind,
Czyzewski’s, from his poem “The Old God”:
“ . . . who sang the darkful deep, and
dragons in the sky.” Had Czyzewski had starfish in mind?
Moyshe felt his body growing wet with fear-sweat. Maybe the
contact wouldn’t work. Maybe his mind wouldn’t be
invaded. That had to be the root of his terror. He did not want
anything looking inside his head, where the madness lay behind the
most fragile of barriers.
It had taken him all year to get it under
control . . . Guns, dragons, headaches,
improbable, obsessive memories of Alyce, continuous
instability . . . He did not dare go under. His
balance was too delicate.
Guns! Did the image of the gun have anything to do with the
Stars’ End weaponry? Was it some twisted symbol his mind had
created for a part of the mission that Psych had not wanted him to
remember?
Somewhere, a voice. “We’re ready, Mr.
benRabi.” The old woman. It was an ancient trick for calming
a man. It worked, a little. “Please depress your right side
switch one click.”
He did. He lost all sensation. He floated. He saw, smelled, felt
nothing. He was alone with his tortured mind.
“That’s not bad, is it?” She used the voice of
the professional mother this time. His cunning, frightened mind
made it that of the woman of his youth. He remembered how she had
comforted him when he had been afraid.
“When you’re ready, depress your right switch
another click, then release it. To withdraw you have to pull up on
your left switch.”
His hand seemed to act on its own. Down went the switch.
The dreams he had been having returned space swimming, the
galaxy wrong in color, Stars’ End strangely misty yet bright.
Things moved around him. He remembered the situation tank. This was
like being bodiless at the heart of the display. The service ships
were glimmering needles, the harvestships glowing tangles of wire.
The sharks were reddish torpedoes in the direction of the galaxy.
Far away, the starfish looked like golden Chinese dragons. They
were drifting toward him.
Moyshe’s fear faded as though a hand had erased it from
the blackboard of his mind. Only an all-encompassing wonder
remained.
Gently, warm, friendly as a loving mother, a voice trickled into
his mind. “I do it. Starfish, Chub.” There was a
wind-chimes tinkle of something like laughter. “Watch. I show
me.”
A small dragon rose from the approaching herd, did a ponderous
forward roll. Shortly, “Oh, my! Old Ones don’t like.
Dangerous. This no time for fun. But we winning, new man-friend.
Sharks afraid, confused. Too many man-ship. Running now, some. Many
destroyed. Big feast for scavenger things.”
The creature’s joy was infectious, and Moyshe supposed he
had cause—if the sharks were indeed abandoning herd and
harvestfleet.
Funny. His conscious mind was not questioning, just
accepting.
His fear remained, down deep, but the night creature held it at
bay, infecting him with its own excitement. When did the power
thing start? he wondered. It had already, the starfish told him. He
did not feel anything other than this creature Chub exploring the
ways of his mind like a kid on holiday exploring a resort
hotel.
“Shark battle won, mind battle won,” the starfish
said after a while, when Moyshe finally had himself under control.
“But another fight coming, Moyshe man-friend. Bad one,
maybe.”
“What?” And he realized, for the first time, that he
really was talking with his mind.
“Ships-that-kill, evil ones, return.”
“Sangaree. How do you know?”
“No way to show, tell. Is. They come, hyper now. Your
people prepare.”
BenRabi did not want to be out here during combat. He felt
exposed, easy prey. Panic began to well up.
The starfish’s control did not slacken. He soon forgot the
danger, became engrossed in the wonders around him, the rippling
movements of retreating sharks, the ponderous approach of dragons,
the maneuvers of the shimmering service ships as their weary crews
prepared for another battle. The galaxy hung over everything like a
ragged tear in the night, vast in its extension. How much more
magnificent would it be if it could be seen without the
interference of the dust that obscured the packed suns at its core?
Nearby, Stars’ End waited, a quiet but furious god of war as
yet unconcerned with the goings-on around it. Moyshe hoped no one
aroused its wrath.
“Coming now,” his dragon told him. Spots appeared
against the galaxy as Sangaree raidships dropped hyper. Down in his
backbrain, behind his ears, Moyshe felt a gentle tickle.
“More power,” Chub told him.
The raidships radiated from their drop zone in lines, like the
tentacles of a squid. They soon formed a bowl with its open side
facing the harvestfleet. It was an obvious preliminary to
englobement.
The distant, decimated shark packs milled uncertainly. They
withdrew a little farther. They were not yet wholly defeated.
A ball of light flared among the Sangaree. A lucky mine had
scored. But it made little difference. The power and numbers
remained theirs.
Only a handful of service ships remained combat-worthy. Even the
halest of the harvestships had lost some main power and drive
capacity to shark attack. Minddrive and auxiliary power were
insufficient for high-stress combat maneuvering.
BenRabi sensed something changing. He cast about, finally saw
the great silver sails that had been taken in before the earlier
fighting spreading between Danion’s arms and spars. The ship
looked so ragged, so injured, so
vulnerable . . . A blizzard of debris drifted
about her, held by her minuscule natural gravity.
The Sangaree maneuvered closer but held off attacking.
“Trying to talk First Man-friend into surrender,”
Chub to benRabi. “Creatures of ships-that-kill want herd
without fight.”
“Payne won’t give up,” he thought back.
“Is true, Moyshe man-friend.”
The starfish drifted closer. They were almost upon the Sangaree.
They meant to join the battle this time, though cautiously. Their
enemies still watched from afar, looking for another chance to
savage fleet and herd.
“Fight soon, Moyshe man-friend.”
The slow, stately dance of enmity ended. The negotiations had
broken down. The Sangaree struck fast and hard, firing on the
service ships to show their determination. The service ships
dodged. Suddenly, there were missiles everywhere, streaking around
like hurrying wasps. Beam fire from the harvestships wove gorgeous
patterns of death.
And Moyshe became depressed. He had done his Navy fleet time. He
could see the untippable balance written in the patterns. There was
no hope of victory.
Chub chuckled into his consciousness. “You see only part
of pattern, Moyshe man-friend.”
In the far distance a starfish crept close to a raidship. The
vessel’s weapons could destroy the dragon in an
instant—but the ship stopped attacking. It simply drifted, a
lifeless machine.
“We do mind thing,” Moyshe heard. “Like
Stars’ End, with much power. We stop ships-that-kill like
human eyeblink, so fast, if no guns, no drive field to
fear.”
A second raidship fell silent, then a third and a fourth. Moyshe
felt less pessimistic. The raidships would be locked into an
overcommand directed by a master computer aboard the
raidmaster’s vessel. That master computer would be burning up
its superconductors trying to adjust fire fields to accommodate the
losses. If it became the least hesitant, the least unsure of its
options . . .
A too-cautious starfish burped a ball of gut-fire. The micro-sun
rolled through space sedately, devoured another raidship.
“Bad, Moyshe man-friend. Old Ones angry. Will give away
unsuspected attack.”
The Sangaree hemisphere closed steadily. Its diameter rapidly
dwindled. The harvestships threw everything they had, fire heavier
than anything benRabi had ever witnessed, yet were barely able to
neutralize the incoming. Offensive capacity seemed to have been
lost.
The starfish mindburned another raidship, and proved Chub and
the Old Ones right. The fireball had given them away. Moyshe felt
the deep sadness of his dragon as one of the herd perished beneath
Sangaree guns.
The starfish threw a barrage of fireballs before beating a hasty
retreat. Sangaree missiles broke up most of them.
The globe closed around the harvestfleet. It tightened like a
squeezing fist. A desperate ship’s commander, piloting a
three-quarters dead service ship, knocked a small hole in the globe
by ramming a raidship and blowing his drives.
“They’ll know they were in a fight,” Moyshe
thought. There was no response from Chub.
The Sangaree stepped up the attack. Their ships began piling up
toward Stars’ End. Moyshe suddenly intuited their strategy.
“They’re going to push us into the sharks!”
Again there was no response from his dragon, unless it were that
wind-chime tinkle he caught on the extreme edge of his
sensitivity.
The Sangaree seemed to have managed some equipment adjustments
during their absence. They appeared to have no trouble detecting
the sharks now. And, since detecting the starfish attack, they were
having no trouble keeping the dragons at bay.
Chub returned to his mind suddenly. “It works well, Moyshe
man-friend. Be patient. Will have little time to chat. Is hard to
think thoughts in commanders of ships-that-kill, and in
machines-that-think. Sangaree minds twisted. Different than
man-minds.” The dragon faded away.
What was this? he asked himself. Were the fish trying to control
the Sangaree?
The raidships massed thickly, then pushed hard. The sharks grew
agitated, as if dimly aware that they were about to be drawn into
the inferno. The starfish began drifting their way, as if to cover
the fleet’s retreat.
“Be ready, Moyshe man-friend!” It was a sudden
bellow, and all the warning he received.
The trickle in the root of his brain suddenly became a flaming
torrent. It hurt! God, did it hurt! Searing, the power boiled
through him, into whatever Danion used to control and
convert it, and out to the silvery sails. Moyshe followed the flow
for an instant, then became lost in an ocean of pain.
The harvestship began moving toward the massed raidships, all
weapons firing, not aiming, simply trying to erect an irresistible
wall of destruction. The compacted Sangaree were unable to bring
all their firepower to bear. They wavered, wavered.
A raidship blew up. It left a momentary hole in the fire
pattern. Another vessel began to come apart.
Service ships were doing the same. One harvestship ceased
firing. Her auxiliary power was exhausted. Sangaree missiles began
picking her apart.
BenRabi felt that infinite sadness again.
The enemy drifted backward, not really retreating, just being
pushed inexorably. It could not last, but the harvestfleet’s
ferocity, for the moment, was greater than the
raidfleet’s.
Afar, the starfish suddenly struck at the sharks, who scattered
in dismay. The strike was pure bluff on the dragons’ part. A
determined shark attack would have destroyed the herd in
minutes.
Something screamed across benRabi’s mind, a mad voice
babbling, shrieking fear and incoherencies. Its power was such that
it inundated his pain. He made no sense of the mind-touch, other
than warning and terror.
Phantoms, grotesqueries from the most insane medieval
imagination, gathered in space around him. Things that might have
been gargoyles and gorgons, Boschian nightmares writhing, all fangs
and talons and fire, became more real than the battleships. Every
one of them shrieked the message, “Go away or die!” I’ve gone completely insane, he thought. My mind has
snapped under contact pressure. They can’t be real. He
screamed.
Then the warm feeling came, soothing, gently calming his terror,
pushing the madness away. His dragon told him, “We succeed,
Moyshe man-friend. Maybe win.” Then, darkly, “Monsters
are Stars’ End sending. Fear and visions are Stars’ End
mind-thing. Planet machine is mad. Mad machine uses madness
weapons. Soon, other weapons.
“Look, Moyshe man-friend!”
Shielded by Chub’s touch, Moyshe turned his attention to a
Stars’ End grown huge with their approach. The Sangaree were
silhouetted against the glowing planetary disk. The face of the
world had become diseased behind them. It was spotted blackly in a
hundred thousand places.
The disk was receding. The harvestfleet was on the run,
scattering as fast as it could. Moyshe suspected that, had any been
able, the harvestships would have gone hyper. That could not be
accomplished on minddrive.
The Sangaree could not jump out while locked into their master
battle-computer. Breaking lock and getting up influence took
time.
Two thousand kilometers closer to the fortress world’s
weapons, they were trying. With the desperation of the condemned
they were breaking lock, scattering, throwing out defensive
missiles, trying to get up influence.
They did not have time. The mad world’s weapons reached
them first.
“Close mind!” Chub shrieked. “Get out! Not
need power now. Save mind!”
How? He couldn’t remember. It became another nightmare, of
the sort where all efforts to elude pursuit were vain.
Feeling returned to his left hand. Another hand rested upon it,
pulling upward. The reality of the Contact Room returned.
He could feel his helmet, the couch beneath him—and a
tremendous sense of loss. He missed his dragon already, and in
missing Chub he understood Starfishers a little better. Maybe the
contact was one reason they stayed so far from the worlds of men.
The fish-Fisher thing was a unique experiential frontier.
Perhaps only one in a thousand Fishers would ever experience
contact, but that one could share the vision with his blind
brethren . . . He had suffered a range of
emotions out there. Only one thing had been missing while Chub was
in his mind. The ordinary, everyday insecurity which so shaped
human life.
He was drowning in his own sweat. And he was shivering cold, as
if his body temperature had dropped while he was linked. The room
surrounding him was silent. Where were his technicians? Was he
alone? No. Someone had helped him get out.
The thoughts, reflections, fears flashed by in scant seconds.
Then:
His head exploded in a thundering migraine, the most sudden and
terrible of his experience. It obliterated all conscious control
and thought. He screamed. He fought the straps that held him, the
helmet that stole his vision. He became pure trapped animal. Danion shuddered, staggered, staggered. Vaguely,
through the agony, he heard screams. Loose objects rattled around.
Gravity surged and faded. Mind monsters momentarily broke through
the pain, taunting him with visions of Hell.
The Stars’ End weapons had found the Sangaree. The fringes
of their fury had brushed the harvestfleet like the cold breeze of
the passing wings of death. And he was pinned here, helpless, in
agony.
Slowly, slowly, the breeze faded. The screams died with
it—all but his own. Excited chatter surrounded him. He could
distinguish no words. His head was tearing itself apart. Once, when
he was a kid, it had been almost this bad. He had nearly killed
himself smashing his head against a wall.
Someone finally noticed him. His helmet came off. A needle stung
his arm. The pain began fading.
The room was nearly dark, so weak were the lights. Gravity had
been reduced to half normal. Danion was rationing
power.
The faces crossing his field of vision seemed unconcerned with
Danion’s condition. They were exuberant. There was laughter. Little
jokes flew.
“We’ve won!” motherly Clara told him.
“Stars’ End killed them.” Not all, Moyshe thought, though he said nothing. One or two had
made hyper in time.
The Seiners had just moved up the Sangaree vendetta list,
perhaps surpassing Jupp von Drachau.
“But we lost four harvestships,” the younger half of
his tech team told him. “Four harvestships.” He was
having a hard time believing that.
It was a victory day, all right, but one which left the Seiners
little to celebrate.
Blessed darkness enfolded Moyshe. He fell into the blissful
sleep of the needle, a sleep untroubled by fearful dreams.