In that frenetic, quick-shift, go,
drop-your-friends-possessions-roots-loyalties like throw-away
containers age, heroes, legends, archetypal figures, and values as
well, were disposable. They were as brilliant and ephemeral as the
butterflies of Old Earth. One day someone on the marches of science
might burst the pale and wrest from Nature a golden,
universe-rocking secret. A bold naval officer might shatter the
moment’s enemy. Either could be a hero, a legend for a
fleeting hour. And then he would become one with the dust of Sumer
and Akkad.
Who remembered on the seventh day?
Who remembered Jupp von Drachau’s raid in the Hell Stars?
Mention his name. Blank stares would turn your way. Or someone
would say, assuming memory, “He’s too old,”
meaning too long gone. Von Drachau had been relegated to the
historical toy box with the Caesars, Bonapartes, and Hitlers. Half
a year, Confederation standard, had passed. The Now People had
abandoned him. The yesterday people, the Archaicists, would not
pick him up for a hundred years.
Luckily, benRabi thought, Jupp did not need the adulation.
The Now People, the down-planet people, who rode the screaming
rockets of technological and social change, bought their values
plastic-packed, to be disposed when their usefulness was done.
BenRabi found no satisfaction in that. He could hold on to nothing
long enough to wear the rough edges off, to make it comfortable
with time, like an old couch after years of use.
He thought those things as, toolcase in hand, he wandered toward
the gate of Carson’s Blake City spaceport. The name he wore
felt a size too small, yet it could become a burden heavier than
the cross the Christian god had borne.
He was going to hate this. He loathed pipes and plumbing.
He wore a union-prescribed commercial spacer Liquids Transfer
Systems Technician’s uniform. It consisted of tight, dull
grey coveralls with green and yellow piping. His sleeves boasted
three red hashmarks where Servicemen wore chevrons. They indicated
that his union rated him a Master.
He did have the training, though his acquisition of it lay
nearly forgotten amid that of countless exotic skills.
His teaching-couch days seemed part of another age. Still in his
thirties, he felt the weight of a thousand years. Lifetimes worth
of knowledge had been pressure-injected into his skull. And the
education would never end.
The Bureau was his surrogate mother, father, and wife. It
insisted he be ready for anything. Just in case.
The Bureau was a family without love. It left him with
dissatisfactions that could easily grow into hatreds. The things
they did to him . . .
They never justified. They never explained.
But lately he had been dissatisfied with everything. The image
of the gun had become merciless. He had developed a crying socket
of soul-need into which nothing seemed to fit.
And there were the aches and pains.
He hurt.
Within him he bore a second set of nerves. They had implanted a
complete instel radio powered by bio-electricity. A small, dying
pain surrounded a knot behind his left ear. That was the largest
lump of the radio.
He had other pains. His ulcer. A little finger he had bruised
playing handball. A hint of the headache that had been with him
most of his life.
Each slow step drove spikes of agony up the bones of his legs.
They had been lengthened six centimeters, hastily. His arm bones
felt no better. The skin on his stomach itched where they had
trimmed off twenty pounds.
His fingers, toes, and eyes itched too. His fingerprints,
toeprints, and retinal patterns had been too quickly changed.
Carson’s was as back of beyond a world as he had ever
seen.
The damned ulcer . . . The fast-push to
Carson’s had reawakened it. It was a hurry-up job from the
go.
But, then, they all were. How long had it been since he had had
time to catch his breath, to relax, play with his collections, or
just loaf around that house he owned, unshared, on the quiet
government retirement planet called Refuge? Or to tinker with his
literary opus, All Who Were Before Me in Jerusalem?
There was no time to loaf. Nor to plan operations in advance. In
a rush of maddening changes, civilization seemed to be hurtling
toward an apocalyptic crisis. Nothing was permanent. There were no
fixed points on which to anchor.
Moyshe benRabi’s life had become like the flash floods of
Sierran rivers in Thaw Time, roaring and cascading past too
swiftly, too liquidly, for any part to be seized and intimately
known.
But wait! In the river of life apassing there were a few solid
rocks. They were the long-lived legends lying heavy on his mind.
Like the boulders in the turbulence, they had endured a forever
compared to anything else of his age.
Something was missing: fixtures, solids, foundations for his
life. There had to be something for him, something
real . . . I want, he cried to the corners of
his soul. And here came the image of the gun, that sprang to mind
at the oddest time. Bow, howitzer, rifle, pistol, whatever, always
unmanned, usually in profile and firing. What did it mean? A goal?
Some sexual symbol? An expression of his sometime want for heroism?
A sign of a secret urge to kill?
Memories returned, of the day he had entered Academy. He had
been nervous and polished and proud to be part of Navy, proud to be
one of the rare Old Earth appointees, and scared they would hold
that against him. A bee of uncertainty had buzzed his butter soul
even then. He had taken his oath with private reservations. He had
devoted a quarter of his short life to winning the appointment, and
success had left him with the feeling that something was missing.
But Navy had seemed to promise what his want demanded.
The Academy years had not been bad. Hard work, hard play, not
much time for introspection. But the first few months of line
service had brought the hurt back stronger than ever. Casting about
desperately, he had put in for intelligence training without
understanding his own motivation. He had told his wardroom
acquaintances that he wanted more adventure.
Even then his words had rung false. There was adventure enough
in the line hunting Sangaree and McGraws.
All of which had come to a head in the now, with Moyshe benRabi,
a flying knight, being sent to find a dragon hiding behind the eyes
of the night.
Ahead, he spotted his small, brown, Oriental, Manchu-mustached
partner, Mouse. Making no sign, he entered the gate behind the
man.
He slowed momentarily, staring across the field. The lighter
from the raggedy-assed Freehauler that had brought them in from
Blackworld was still on the ground. It should have lifted last
night. They had caught the Freehauler at the end of a fast-shuffle
through a procession of ships designed to cover their
backtrail.
Mouse saw it too. Nothing escaped Mouse’s little devil
eyes. He shrugged, lengthened his stride so benRabi would not
overtake him.
They were not supposed to be acquainted this time. That left
Moyshe without any anchor at all. He did not need lots of people,
but he felt desolate when he had no one.
He daydreamed about Stars’ End and the High Seiners, the
unchanging boulders that had ghosted across his mind before he had
become distracted by his own past.
Sheer mystery was Stars’ End, a fortress planet beyond the
galactic rim, bristling with automatic, invincible weapons that
slaughtered everyone fool enough to come in range. Not one of a
dozen expeditions had produced a shred of why.
In the lulls, the deep, fearful lulls when there was nothing to
say and nothing being said, people seized on Stars’ End as
strange country to explore, in litanies meant to exorcise the
dreadful silence. They were intrigued by the godlike power there.
Theirs were the eyes of the godless seeking gods in a majestically
powerful unknown, a technological equivalent of an Old Testament
Jehovah.
Or, if Stars’ End was momentarily passé, they turned to
the High Seiners. The Starfishers.
The Starfishers should have been no mystery. They were human.
Stars’ End was just a dead metal machine voice babbling
insanities in non-human tongues, the toy of gun-toting pyramid
builders so long gone no extant race remembered them. But, because
of their humanness, the Seiners had become the greater, more
frightening puzzle.
Landsmen did not comprehend the quiet, fixed culture of the
Starfishers at all. They yearned for the Starfishers’ obvious
peace, yet hated them for their blissful stasis. The Seiner trail
was a perilous one, wending tortuously among yin-yang pitfalls of
envy and jealousy.
His thoughtful mood departed. Work came first. He had to be
alert. Lives could hinge on his slightest misstep, and the life at
the head of the list was his own.
He entered the Blake Port terminal. It was a massive plastic,
glass, and steel cavern. Its vast floor was a crossroads of color
and movements, its entrances and exits the mouths of tunnels
opening on other worlds.
Moyshe had wanted to be a poet once, a spacefaring Homer like
Czyzewski. A child’s dream, that had been. Like the one about
having secret powers if only he could find their handle.
An instructor had made him read Czyzewski critically, then had
forced him to examine his own secret images of space and night and
the womb. That had been a broomstick fly. Strictly from hunger. The
backs of beyond in the shadowy reaches of his mind were lands of
corruption and horror he would never journey again. His muse had
abandoned him for brighter skies. Now he played with prose, All Who
Were Before Me in Jerusalem.
This mission should give him time to polish it.
Light surrounded him. Human scent hung heavy around him. People
rushed hither and thither like swarming bees who had lost track of
their queen. Their effluvia was too much for the air fresheners. It
was the same in every terminal he had ever visited.
The citizens were there in their multitudes, dancing atoms
pursuing the rituals of terminals. The costumes of a dozen worlds
mixed in a kaleidoscopic choreography.
A small, subdued crowd occupied one backwater of the waiting
room floor. A long table had been set up there. Behind it a
half-dozen men in off-white, undecorated jumpsuits fiddled with
forms and questionnaires. A girl at table’s end, armed with
an arsenal of secretarial gizmos, reduced the forms for
microstorage. She was pale, had blondish hair that hung to her
shoulders. He noticed her because her hair was unusually long for a
spacegoer.
The men, though, conformed to the spacer stereotype. Their hair
was cropped to a centimeter’s length. “Like induction
day at boot camp,” Moyshe muttered.
These people would be his new employers. The ones he had been
sent to betray.
Mouse passed, small and brown, with a wink. Why he had that name
benRabi did not know. He had carried it for years, and seemed to
like it, though for lookalikes Weasel would have done better. A weird one, my partner, benRabi thought. But we get along.
Because of commensality of obsession. In some areas.
Mouse was a mad collector too: postage stamps from the days when
they had been used, coins, bottles, mugs, wrought-iron, almost
anything old. But the ends they were after varied.
BenRabi collected for escape, for relaxation, as a means of
learning. Mouse had gone mad Archaicist during his recent stay in
Luna Command. His collecting had become a means of slipping into
the gestalt of departed life styles. He had fallen in love with the
twentieth century, the last with a real spectrum of class, ethnic,
and cultural differentiations.
BenRabi did not comprehend Archaicists at all. His opinion of
them was, to use Mouse’s words, lower than a snake’s
butt.
The old distinctions had changed. Race, sex, wealth, style, and
manner of speech no longer set a person apart. Prejudices pivoted
round origins and profession, with Old Earthers the niggers of the
age, and Service personnel the aristocracy.
BenRabi, under his other names, had known Mouse a long time. But
he just did not know the man. Professional acquaintance and even a
budding friendship had done nothing to break down Mouse’s
defenses. BenRabi was Old Earther. Mouse was Outworlds and third
generation Service. That was a barrier across which little could
trickle.
BenRabi studied other faces, saw bewilderment, determination,
malaise. A lot of these people were not sure why they were here.
But he was looking for the nonchalant ones, the ones who did know.
They would be the competition and beekies.
The Bureau was far from unique in its interest in Starfish. Half
these people, probably, were
spies . . . “Uhn!”
“Excuse me, please?”
He turned. A small blue nun had paused beside him, startled by
his grunt. “Pardon, Sister. Just thinking out
loud.”
The Ulantonid woman wobbled off wearing a perplexed frown,
perhaps wondering what sort of mind thought in dull monosyllables.
BenRabi frowned himself. What had become of the human need for
faith? The Christians he encountered were almost always conquered
aliens.
His curiosity faded. He returned to that disturbing face.
Yes, it was Marya, though she had changed as much as he. Her
hair, skin, and eyes had all been darkened. She had put on twenty
pounds. There were other changes, too. They were subtler, but did
not prevent his recognizing her. She had not disguised her ways of
moving, speaking, listening.
She never was much of an actress, he reflected.
She did have a talent essential to their profession. She
survived despite the odds.
She noticed him looking. Her eyebrows rose a millimeter, then
puckered in consternation. Then she smiled a wicked iron smile. She
had recognized him, too.
How big a demotion had she earned for failing on The Broken
Wings? How much had it cost, beyond the cruel, slow deaths of her
children? . . .
Frost mites danced between his shoulder blades. She would be
doing score-evening calculations already.
She nodded ever so slightly, politely.
It was a vast universe. There was no way he should have run into
her again, ever. He was too stunned for rational thought.
Nothing could have shaken him more than her presence.
He did not fear her. Not in a cold sweat way. She would see
Mouse. She would know she had to let be, or die, or make damned
sure she got them both with the same hit.
Several other faces teased his memory. Trace recognitions
trickled back from his studies of Bureau files. None of them were
outright enemies. They were competitors, beekies from the
Corporations. Or possibly McGraws.
He tried to view the crowd as an organism, to judge its
composition and temper. It was smaller than he had expected. Not
more than two hundred. The Seiners had advertised for a thousand,
offering bonuses and pay scales that approached the outrageous.
They would be disappointed.
He supposed there weren’t many techs romantic enough, or
hungry enough, to plunge into an alien society for a year. That
might mean returning to a home changed beyond recognition. After
the lighters lifted there would be no turning back. No one would be
able to quit because he did not like his job.
Moyshe shuffled into the check-in line four places behind his
partner. Mouse was shaking.
Moyshe never ceased to be amazed. Glacial. Glassteel.
Conscienceless. Stonedeath. He had thought Mouse many cold, hard
things. Yet there were unpredictable moments when the man let slip
the humanity behind the facade of adamant. BenRabi watched as if
witnessing a miracle.
This might be the only time during the operation that Mouse
would let the hardness fall. And that only because he was poised on
the brink of a shuttle fly.
Liftoffs terrified him.
“Dr. Niven.” A whisper. Warmth caressed
benRabi’s arm. He looked down into eyes as hard and dark as
Sangaree gunmetal coins.
“Pardon, ma’am?” He put on his disarming
smile. “Name’s benRabi. Moyshe benRabi.”
“How quaint.” She smiled a gunmetal smile.
“Candy, even.”
She must be more widely read than he had suspected.
Moyshe benRabi was the protagonist of Czyzewski’s sole and
almost unknown trial of the novel, a cartoon caricature painted in
broad strokes of Gargantua and Don Quixote. The critics had said
too much so, stopping only on the edge of accusations of
plagiarism.
Strange that a Sangaree should be familiar with His Banners
Bright and Golden . . .
Sangaree. He had to remind himself. He had shared her bed. There
had been feeling in it during those hungry days on The Broken
Wings.
She might willingly share beds again,
but . . .
In the end she would drink his blood. Sangaree nursed their
hatreds forever. For generations, if rumor was true.
“And the Rat, too, eh?” Meaning Mouse. She would
have a special hell set aside for him. But the feeling was mutual.
BenRabi knew Mouse would plain love a date with her in a medieval
torture chamber. “All you Confies and beekies and McGraws
pretending you need Seiner money . . . Orbit in
an hour, Gun. See you upstairs.”
More gunmetal smiles as she took her gunmetal-hard body toward
the Ladies.
She would see him upstairs.
No doubt. He wondered if he could conjure up a Mark XIV Combat
Suit real quick. Or spider’s eyes so he could watch his back.
This mission was going to be Roman candle all the way.
And he had hoped for a vacation operation. For nothing to do but
loaf and work on Jerusalem.
In that frenetic, quick-shift, go,
drop-your-friends-possessions-roots-loyalties like throw-away
containers age, heroes, legends, archetypal figures, and values as
well, were disposable. They were as brilliant and ephemeral as the
butterflies of Old Earth. One day someone on the marches of science
might burst the pale and wrest from Nature a golden,
universe-rocking secret. A bold naval officer might shatter the
moment’s enemy. Either could be a hero, a legend for a
fleeting hour. And then he would become one with the dust of Sumer
and Akkad.
Who remembered on the seventh day?
Who remembered Jupp von Drachau’s raid in the Hell Stars?
Mention his name. Blank stares would turn your way. Or someone
would say, assuming memory, “He’s too old,”
meaning too long gone. Von Drachau had been relegated to the
historical toy box with the Caesars, Bonapartes, and Hitlers. Half
a year, Confederation standard, had passed. The Now People had
abandoned him. The yesterday people, the Archaicists, would not
pick him up for a hundred years.
Luckily, benRabi thought, Jupp did not need the adulation.
The Now People, the down-planet people, who rode the screaming
rockets of technological and social change, bought their values
plastic-packed, to be disposed when their usefulness was done.
BenRabi found no satisfaction in that. He could hold on to nothing
long enough to wear the rough edges off, to make it comfortable
with time, like an old couch after years of use.
He thought those things as, toolcase in hand, he wandered toward
the gate of Carson’s Blake City spaceport. The name he wore
felt a size too small, yet it could become a burden heavier than
the cross the Christian god had borne.
He was going to hate this. He loathed pipes and plumbing.
He wore a union-prescribed commercial spacer Liquids Transfer
Systems Technician’s uniform. It consisted of tight, dull
grey coveralls with green and yellow piping. His sleeves boasted
three red hashmarks where Servicemen wore chevrons. They indicated
that his union rated him a Master.
He did have the training, though his acquisition of it lay
nearly forgotten amid that of countless exotic skills.
His teaching-couch days seemed part of another age. Still in his
thirties, he felt the weight of a thousand years. Lifetimes worth
of knowledge had been pressure-injected into his skull. And the
education would never end.
The Bureau was his surrogate mother, father, and wife. It
insisted he be ready for anything. Just in case.
The Bureau was a family without love. It left him with
dissatisfactions that could easily grow into hatreds. The things
they did to him . . .
They never justified. They never explained.
But lately he had been dissatisfied with everything. The image
of the gun had become merciless. He had developed a crying socket
of soul-need into which nothing seemed to fit.
And there were the aches and pains.
He hurt.
Within him he bore a second set of nerves. They had implanted a
complete instel radio powered by bio-electricity. A small, dying
pain surrounded a knot behind his left ear. That was the largest
lump of the radio.
He had other pains. His ulcer. A little finger he had bruised
playing handball. A hint of the headache that had been with him
most of his life.
Each slow step drove spikes of agony up the bones of his legs.
They had been lengthened six centimeters, hastily. His arm bones
felt no better. The skin on his stomach itched where they had
trimmed off twenty pounds.
His fingers, toes, and eyes itched too. His fingerprints,
toeprints, and retinal patterns had been too quickly changed.
Carson’s was as back of beyond a world as he had ever
seen.
The damned ulcer . . . The fast-push to
Carson’s had reawakened it. It was a hurry-up job from the
go.
But, then, they all were. How long had it been since he had had
time to catch his breath, to relax, play with his collections, or
just loaf around that house he owned, unshared, on the quiet
government retirement planet called Refuge? Or to tinker with his
literary opus, All Who Were Before Me in Jerusalem?
There was no time to loaf. Nor to plan operations in advance. In
a rush of maddening changes, civilization seemed to be hurtling
toward an apocalyptic crisis. Nothing was permanent. There were no
fixed points on which to anchor.
Moyshe benRabi’s life had become like the flash floods of
Sierran rivers in Thaw Time, roaring and cascading past too
swiftly, too liquidly, for any part to be seized and intimately
known.
But wait! In the river of life apassing there were a few solid
rocks. They were the long-lived legends lying heavy on his mind.
Like the boulders in the turbulence, they had endured a forever
compared to anything else of his age.
Something was missing: fixtures, solids, foundations for his
life. There had to be something for him, something
real . . . I want, he cried to the corners of
his soul. And here came the image of the gun, that sprang to mind
at the oddest time. Bow, howitzer, rifle, pistol, whatever, always
unmanned, usually in profile and firing. What did it mean? A goal?
Some sexual symbol? An expression of his sometime want for heroism?
A sign of a secret urge to kill?
Memories returned, of the day he had entered Academy. He had
been nervous and polished and proud to be part of Navy, proud to be
one of the rare Old Earth appointees, and scared they would hold
that against him. A bee of uncertainty had buzzed his butter soul
even then. He had taken his oath with private reservations. He had
devoted a quarter of his short life to winning the appointment, and
success had left him with the feeling that something was missing.
But Navy had seemed to promise what his want demanded.
The Academy years had not been bad. Hard work, hard play, not
much time for introspection. But the first few months of line
service had brought the hurt back stronger than ever. Casting about
desperately, he had put in for intelligence training without
understanding his own motivation. He had told his wardroom
acquaintances that he wanted more adventure.
Even then his words had rung false. There was adventure enough
in the line hunting Sangaree and McGraws.
All of which had come to a head in the now, with Moyshe benRabi,
a flying knight, being sent to find a dragon hiding behind the eyes
of the night.
Ahead, he spotted his small, brown, Oriental, Manchu-mustached
partner, Mouse. Making no sign, he entered the gate behind the
man.
He slowed momentarily, staring across the field. The lighter
from the raggedy-assed Freehauler that had brought them in from
Blackworld was still on the ground. It should have lifted last
night. They had caught the Freehauler at the end of a fast-shuffle
through a procession of ships designed to cover their
backtrail.
Mouse saw it too. Nothing escaped Mouse’s little devil
eyes. He shrugged, lengthened his stride so benRabi would not
overtake him.
They were not supposed to be acquainted this time. That left
Moyshe without any anchor at all. He did not need lots of people,
but he felt desolate when he had no one.
He daydreamed about Stars’ End and the High Seiners, the
unchanging boulders that had ghosted across his mind before he had
become distracted by his own past.
Sheer mystery was Stars’ End, a fortress planet beyond the
galactic rim, bristling with automatic, invincible weapons that
slaughtered everyone fool enough to come in range. Not one of a
dozen expeditions had produced a shred of why.
In the lulls, the deep, fearful lulls when there was nothing to
say and nothing being said, people seized on Stars’ End as
strange country to explore, in litanies meant to exorcise the
dreadful silence. They were intrigued by the godlike power there.
Theirs were the eyes of the godless seeking gods in a majestically
powerful unknown, a technological equivalent of an Old Testament
Jehovah.
Or, if Stars’ End was momentarily passé, they turned to
the High Seiners. The Starfishers.
The Starfishers should have been no mystery. They were human.
Stars’ End was just a dead metal machine voice babbling
insanities in non-human tongues, the toy of gun-toting pyramid
builders so long gone no extant race remembered them. But, because
of their humanness, the Seiners had become the greater, more
frightening puzzle.
Landsmen did not comprehend the quiet, fixed culture of the
Starfishers at all. They yearned for the Starfishers’ obvious
peace, yet hated them for their blissful stasis. The Seiner trail
was a perilous one, wending tortuously among yin-yang pitfalls of
envy and jealousy.
His thoughtful mood departed. Work came first. He had to be
alert. Lives could hinge on his slightest misstep, and the life at
the head of the list was his own.
He entered the Blake Port terminal. It was a massive plastic,
glass, and steel cavern. Its vast floor was a crossroads of color
and movements, its entrances and exits the mouths of tunnels
opening on other worlds.
Moyshe had wanted to be a poet once, a spacefaring Homer like
Czyzewski. A child’s dream, that had been. Like the one about
having secret powers if only he could find their handle.
An instructor had made him read Czyzewski critically, then had
forced him to examine his own secret images of space and night and
the womb. That had been a broomstick fly. Strictly from hunger. The
backs of beyond in the shadowy reaches of his mind were lands of
corruption and horror he would never journey again. His muse had
abandoned him for brighter skies. Now he played with prose, All Who
Were Before Me in Jerusalem.
This mission should give him time to polish it.
Light surrounded him. Human scent hung heavy around him. People
rushed hither and thither like swarming bees who had lost track of
their queen. Their effluvia was too much for the air fresheners. It
was the same in every terminal he had ever visited.
The citizens were there in their multitudes, dancing atoms
pursuing the rituals of terminals. The costumes of a dozen worlds
mixed in a kaleidoscopic choreography.
A small, subdued crowd occupied one backwater of the waiting
room floor. A long table had been set up there. Behind it a
half-dozen men in off-white, undecorated jumpsuits fiddled with
forms and questionnaires. A girl at table’s end, armed with
an arsenal of secretarial gizmos, reduced the forms for
microstorage. She was pale, had blondish hair that hung to her
shoulders. He noticed her because her hair was unusually long for a
spacegoer.
The men, though, conformed to the spacer stereotype. Their hair
was cropped to a centimeter’s length. “Like induction
day at boot camp,” Moyshe muttered.
These people would be his new employers. The ones he had been
sent to betray.
Mouse passed, small and brown, with a wink. Why he had that name
benRabi did not know. He had carried it for years, and seemed to
like it, though for lookalikes Weasel would have done better. A weird one, my partner, benRabi thought. But we get along.
Because of commensality of obsession. In some areas.
Mouse was a mad collector too: postage stamps from the days when
they had been used, coins, bottles, mugs, wrought-iron, almost
anything old. But the ends they were after varied.
BenRabi collected for escape, for relaxation, as a means of
learning. Mouse had gone mad Archaicist during his recent stay in
Luna Command. His collecting had become a means of slipping into
the gestalt of departed life styles. He had fallen in love with the
twentieth century, the last with a real spectrum of class, ethnic,
and cultural differentiations.
BenRabi did not comprehend Archaicists at all. His opinion of
them was, to use Mouse’s words, lower than a snake’s
butt.
The old distinctions had changed. Race, sex, wealth, style, and
manner of speech no longer set a person apart. Prejudices pivoted
round origins and profession, with Old Earthers the niggers of the
age, and Service personnel the aristocracy.
BenRabi, under his other names, had known Mouse a long time. But
he just did not know the man. Professional acquaintance and even a
budding friendship had done nothing to break down Mouse’s
defenses. BenRabi was Old Earther. Mouse was Outworlds and third
generation Service. That was a barrier across which little could
trickle.
BenRabi studied other faces, saw bewilderment, determination,
malaise. A lot of these people were not sure why they were here.
But he was looking for the nonchalant ones, the ones who did know.
They would be the competition and beekies.
The Bureau was far from unique in its interest in Starfish. Half
these people, probably, were
spies . . . “Uhn!”
“Excuse me, please?”
He turned. A small blue nun had paused beside him, startled by
his grunt. “Pardon, Sister. Just thinking out
loud.”
The Ulantonid woman wobbled off wearing a perplexed frown,
perhaps wondering what sort of mind thought in dull monosyllables.
BenRabi frowned himself. What had become of the human need for
faith? The Christians he encountered were almost always conquered
aliens.
His curiosity faded. He returned to that disturbing face.
Yes, it was Marya, though she had changed as much as he. Her
hair, skin, and eyes had all been darkened. She had put on twenty
pounds. There were other changes, too. They were subtler, but did
not prevent his recognizing her. She had not disguised her ways of
moving, speaking, listening.
She never was much of an actress, he reflected.
She did have a talent essential to their profession. She
survived despite the odds.
She noticed him looking. Her eyebrows rose a millimeter, then
puckered in consternation. Then she smiled a wicked iron smile. She
had recognized him, too.
How big a demotion had she earned for failing on The Broken
Wings? How much had it cost, beyond the cruel, slow deaths of her
children? . . .
Frost mites danced between his shoulder blades. She would be
doing score-evening calculations already.
She nodded ever so slightly, politely.
It was a vast universe. There was no way he should have run into
her again, ever. He was too stunned for rational thought.
Nothing could have shaken him more than her presence.
He did not fear her. Not in a cold sweat way. She would see
Mouse. She would know she had to let be, or die, or make damned
sure she got them both with the same hit.
Several other faces teased his memory. Trace recognitions
trickled back from his studies of Bureau files. None of them were
outright enemies. They were competitors, beekies from the
Corporations. Or possibly McGraws.
He tried to view the crowd as an organism, to judge its
composition and temper. It was smaller than he had expected. Not
more than two hundred. The Seiners had advertised for a thousand,
offering bonuses and pay scales that approached the outrageous.
They would be disappointed.
He supposed there weren’t many techs romantic enough, or
hungry enough, to plunge into an alien society for a year. That
might mean returning to a home changed beyond recognition. After
the lighters lifted there would be no turning back. No one would be
able to quit because he did not like his job.
Moyshe shuffled into the check-in line four places behind his
partner. Mouse was shaking.
Moyshe never ceased to be amazed. Glacial. Glassteel.
Conscienceless. Stonedeath. He had thought Mouse many cold, hard
things. Yet there were unpredictable moments when the man let slip
the humanity behind the facade of adamant. BenRabi watched as if
witnessing a miracle.
This might be the only time during the operation that Mouse
would let the hardness fall. And that only because he was poised on
the brink of a shuttle fly.
Liftoffs terrified him.
“Dr. Niven.” A whisper. Warmth caressed
benRabi’s arm. He looked down into eyes as hard and dark as
Sangaree gunmetal coins.
“Pardon, ma’am?” He put on his disarming
smile. “Name’s benRabi. Moyshe benRabi.”
“How quaint.” She smiled a gunmetal smile.
“Candy, even.”
She must be more widely read than he had suspected.
Moyshe benRabi was the protagonist of Czyzewski’s sole and
almost unknown trial of the novel, a cartoon caricature painted in
broad strokes of Gargantua and Don Quixote. The critics had said
too much so, stopping only on the edge of accusations of
plagiarism.
Strange that a Sangaree should be familiar with His Banners
Bright and Golden . . .
Sangaree. He had to remind himself. He had shared her bed. There
had been feeling in it during those hungry days on The Broken
Wings.
She might willingly share beds again,
but . . .
In the end she would drink his blood. Sangaree nursed their
hatreds forever. For generations, if rumor was true.
“And the Rat, too, eh?” Meaning Mouse. She would
have a special hell set aside for him. But the feeling was mutual.
BenRabi knew Mouse would plain love a date with her in a medieval
torture chamber. “All you Confies and beekies and McGraws
pretending you need Seiner money . . . Orbit in
an hour, Gun. See you upstairs.”
More gunmetal smiles as she took her gunmetal-hard body toward
the Ladies.
She would see him upstairs.
No doubt. He wondered if he could conjure up a Mark XIV Combat
Suit real quick. Or spider’s eyes so he could watch his back.
This mission was going to be Roman candle all the way.
And he had hoped for a vacation operation. For nothing to do but
loaf and work on Jerusalem.