“Sorry I startled you.” A she-wolf’s grin made
it plain that the Sangaree woman felt no remorse whatsoever.
“I’m Maria Elana Gonzalez. Atmosphere Systems.
Distributions Methods. Sometimes I do a little Hydroponics Ecology.
I don’t have a Master’s for either, though. Too busy
with other things.” She smiled her gun-metal smile. Yes, benRabi thought, the lady has other interests. Stardust and
murder.
“Moyshe benRabi,” he replied, in case she had
forgotten.
“An unusual name.” She smiled that smile.
“Jewish?”
“So I’m told. I’ve never been in a synagogue
in my life.”
“You wouldn’t be a writer?” She knew damned
well that he was. Or that he pretended to be. He had whispered to
her about it . . . “The name sounds so
literary, somehow.”
“I try, yes.” Was she going to expose the Pale
Imperator?
No. She did not push it. Nor did she thrust with anything from
her arsenal of needles.
“What made you decide to sign up?” she asked.
“Unemployment.”
“A space plumber? You’re kidding. You must be on the
blacklist.”
“Yeah. Sort of. Somebody’s. What about
you?”
“The money.”
The vibrations of hatred had begun mellowing out. She was
controlling herself superbly.
BenRabi let it flow. He hurt too much to fence, or to probe
about her mission. The armed truce persisted till the lighter
reached the Starfisher.
Moyshe did not forget that she was Sangaree, that she would
drink his blood happily. He simply tabled the facts for the time
being.
Hundreds of her people had died because of him. Her children
were dying. She would do something. The Sangaree tradition of
honor, of Family responsibility, would compel
her . . .
But she would not act right away. She had come here on a
mission. She would complete that first. He could relax for a
while.
As introspective and morality-stricken as he sometimes became,
he could not feel guilty about The Broken Wings. Nor about its
aftermath. Humanity and Sangaree were at war, and the Sangaree had
fired the opening shot. That it was a subterranean war, fought at
an almost personal level, did not matter. Nor did the fact that
only humanity perceived a war, that the Sangaree were just in
business. Battles were battles. Casualties were casualties, no
matter how or why they went down.
Most of his associates and contemporaries hated the Sangaree,
but to him they were just people. People he had to hurt sometimes,
because of what they did and represented.
He snorted. The most bigoted man alive could say the same thing
and mean it.
The whole stardust trade turned his stomach.
“The trouble with me is, I don’t love or hate
anything,” he murmured.
“What?”
“Sorry. Thinking with my mouth in gear.”
His mood left nothing counting. Nothing could move him. The pain
tablets had kicked him into nirvana. Or into a depthless black pit
where the light of emotion simply could not shine. He was not sure
which.
He did not care. He did not give a damn about anything. Instead,
he immersed himself in the mystery he called Mouse.
BenRabi believed he knew Mouse better than did anyone but the
Admiral. A lot of one another had leaked across during their teamed
operations. These little flare-ups in the secret war were slowly
melting them, molding them . . .
And still Mouse remained a mobile enigma.
Mouse scared hell out of benRabi.
Mouse was the only man he knew who had killed someone with his
bare hands.
Killing had not become a social dodo. But the personal touch had
been removed. Murder had become mechanized, its soul and
involvement eliminated. It had been that way for so long that most
civilians could not endure the emotions they suffered if they
entered a killing rage.
Their brains shorted. They went zombie. And nothing
happened.
Anybody could push a button and hurl a missile to obliterate a
ship of a thousand souls. A lot of timid little anybodies had.
The same anybody could sleep without dreaming the following
night. The involvement was with the button, not the bang.
Ample opportunities arose in nice remote space battles with
Sangaree, McGraw pirates, or in the marque-and-reprisal antics of
minor governments, for that kind of killing. But to do a man face
to face, with hands or knife or gun . . . It
was too personal.
Confederation men did not like to get too close to anyone. Not
even to end a life. A man knew he was in too deep if the urge
arose.
The People of Now wanted no faces on their haunts.
BenRabi was free-associating, and unable to escape the flight of
his thoughts. Mouse. Interpersonal relationships. The two joined
forces to kick him into a pit of fear.
He had known Mouse as early as their Academy days. They had
shared their moments then, both in training and the play typified
by sunjammer racing in the wild starwinds of an old supernova. They
had crewed their sunjammer victoriously, and had shared
celebrations during leave. But they had refused, persistently, to
become anything more than acquaintances.
Friends were strange creatures. They became responsibilities.
They became walking symbols of emotional debits and personal
obligations.
He was getting too close to Mouse. Growing too fond of the
strange little man. And he suspected that Mouse was having the same
trouble.
Friendship would be bad for their professional detachment. It
could get them into trouble.
The Bureau had promised that they would not be teamed again
after the operation on The Broken Wings. The Bureau had lied. As it
always did. Or this really was a critical, hurry-up, top-man
job.
He wondered. The Admiral apparently would do or say, or promise
anything to get the work done.
Always there was a rush but he had no good reason to complain.
Hurry was inherent in the modern social structure. Change came
about so swiftly that policy, operational, and emotional
obsolescence developed overnight. Decision and action had to be
sudden to be effective.
The system shuddered constantly under the thundering impact of
precipitous error.
BenRabi was now involved in one of the Bureau’s few old,
stable programs. Catching a starfish herd had been a prime mission
before his birth. He suspected it would continue to be one long
after his death.
He might die of boredom here. He now saw little hope that he and
Mouse would be recalled early. The presence of Sangaree altered all
the rules.
He had abandoned all hope of enjoying the mission.
Somehow, sometimes, because of the Sangaree woman or otherwise,
he or Mouse would get hurt.
A clang rang through the shuttle. The vessel shuddered. BenRabi
ceased flaying himself with the tiny, dull knives of the mind.
The lighter nosed into its mother ship like a piglet to a
sow’s belly. Moyshe followed the crowd moving to board the
starship. He worked his way close to the pale Seiner girl. Could he
pick up where he had left off?
He wondered why she intrigued him so. Just because she had been
kind?
Guides led the way to a common room where several high-powered
command types awaited them. Another lecture, Moyshe thought. Some
more shocks set off by a lot of boredom.
He was half right.
Even before they were comfortable, one of the heavy-duty lads
said, “I’m Eduard Chouteau, your Ship’s
Commander. Welcome aboard Number Three Service Ship from
Danion, a harvestship of Payne’s Fleet.” That
was enough ceremony, evidently. He continued, “We’ve
contacted you as emergency replacements for technicians
Danion lost in a shark attack two months ago. Frankly,
Fishers haven’t ever liked or trusted outsiders. That’s
because outsiders have given us reason. But for
Danion’s sake we’ll do right by you till we
get our own people from the. schools. All we ask is that you do
right by us.”
BenRabi felt that little feather tickle again. Half-truths were
fluttering around like untamed butterflies. The man had something
on his mind. There was a smoke screen rolling tall and wide, and
behind it something he and Mouse just might find interesting. He
made a mental note.
The Seiner schools were unique. Most ground-siders knew a little
about them. They made romantic, remote settings for holonet
dramas.
Those shows, naturally, had borne little relation to
reality.
The Seiner creches were hidden in dead planetoids somewhere in
deep space. The old and the young of the Fisher fleets dwelt there,
teaching and learning. Only healthy Seiners of working age spaced
with the fleets and hazarded themselves against disasters of the
sort that had overtaken Danion.
Unlike Confederation parents, Starfishers yielded their children
to professional surrogates out of love. They did not see their
young as dead weight that might hamper them as they shot the rapids
of life.
BenRabi had never seen enough of his father to have developed an
emotional attitude toward him. And what could he think about his
mother? She could not help being what she was. His mother was the
child of her society, shaped by a high-pressure environment. The
years and prejudice had devoured their tenuous umbilical
link . . . They were of alien tribes now. The
barrier between them could no longer be breached, even with the
best will on both sides.
Visiting her had been a waste of leave time, but then there was
the kid.
How was Greta doing? Christ! He might not know for one hell of a
long time.
Why had his mother’s behavior so horrified him? He should
have known better than to have gone. He had come out of that world.
All Old Earth was a screaming rat warren packed with people seeking
new thrills and perversions as escapes from the grim realities of
narrow little lives.
“Lightsl” the Ship’s Commander snapped.
BenRabi returned from introspection. A hologram took form in the
center of the darkening common room. It developed like some fantasy
magician’s uncertain conjuration, flickering for several
seconds, then jerking into sudden, awe-inspiring solidity.
“The stars you see here we retaped off a standard Second
Level astrogation training module. Our holo people dubbed the ships
from models used in an engineering status display at Ship’s
Engineering Control aboard Danion. This is
Danion, your home for the next year.”
The name Danion rolled off his tongue, freighted with
everything the ship meant to him: home, country, refuge,
responsibility.
A ship formed against the imaginary stars. It was a weird thing,
making Moyshe think of octopi entwined. No. He decided it looked
like a city’s utilities systems after the buildings and earth
and pavement had been removed, with the leavings flung mad among
the stars. There were vast tangles of tubing. Here and there lay a
ball, a cone, a cube, or an occasional sheet of silverness
stretched taut as if to catch the starwinds. Vast nets floated
between kilometers-long pipelike arms. The whole mad construct was
raggedly bearded with thousands of antennae of every conceivable
type. The totality was spectacularly huge, and dreadful in its
strangeness.
In theory a deep-space vessel need not be confined in a
geometric hull. Most small, specialized vessels were not. A ship
did not have to have any specific shape, though the complex
relationships between drive, inertial-negation, mass increase
effect reduction, temporal adjustment, and artificial gravity
induction systems did demand a direction-of-travel dimension
slightly more than twice that of dimensions perpendicular to
line-of-flight in vessels intended to operate near or above the
velocity of light. But this was the first truly large asymmetric
ship benRabi had ever seen.
It was a flying iron jungle. The streamlined ship had been
preferred by mankind since space travel had been but a dream. Even
now designers felt more comfortable enclosing everything inside a
skin capable of generating an all-around defensive screen.
Even the wildest imaginings of novelty-hunting holo studios had
never produced a vessel as knotted and strewn as this mass of
tangled kitten’s yarn.
BenRabi’s astonishment was not unique. Silence died a
swift death in that room.
“How the hell does that bastard keep from breaking
up?” someone demanded.
“What I want to know is, how do you build something like
that without a crew from every holonet in the universe turning
up?”
Someone more technically smitten asked, “Ship’s
Commander—what sort of system do you use to synchronize
drives? You’d have to have hundreds on a ship that big. Even
with superconductor or pulse laser control systems your synch
systems would be limited to the velocity of light. The lag between
the more remote units . . . ”
BenRabi lost the thread. Another surprise had jumped on him
wearing hobnailed boots on all four feet.
He was aboard a ship he and Mouse had studied from the surface
of Carson’s. She was a typical interstellar vessel of an
obsolete class now common only among the Rim Run Freehaulers.
A similar vessel had appeared in the hologram. It was
approaching the harvestship.
The surprise was in their relative sizes.
The starship became a needle falling into an expanding, cosmic
ocean of scrap. The service ship retained its holo dimensions.
Danion swelled till she attained epic proportions.
Moyshe could not begin to guess her true dimensions. His most
conservative estimate staggered him. She had to be at least thirty
kilometers in cross-section, twenty thick, and sixty long. That was
impossible. There were countries on Old Earth smaller than
that.
And stretching far beyond the dense central snarl of the ship
were those spars spreading silvery sails and nets.
Did she sunjam on stellar winds?
She couldn’t. The Starfish stayed away from stars. Any
stars, be they orbited by settled worlds or not. They stayed way
out in the Big Dark where they could not be found.
The whole thing had to be a brag show. Pure propaganda. It just
had to be.
He could not accept that ship as real.
His normal, understandable operation-opening jitters cranked
themselves up a couple of notches. Till that ship had declared
itself he had thought he could handle anything new and strange.
Change was the order of the universe. Novelty was no cause for
distress.
But this mission held too much promise of the new and unknown.
He had been plunged tabula rasa into a completely alien
universe.
Nothing created by Man had any right being so damned big.
Light returned. It drowned the dying hologram. BenRabi looked
around. His jaw was not the only one hanging like an overripe pear
about to drop.
Despite prior warning, everyone had believed themselves aboard a
harvestship. Cultural bias left them incapable of believing the
Fishers could have anything better.
Moyshe began to realize just how poorly he had been prepared for
this mission.
He had done his homework. He had devoured everything the Bureau
had known about Starfishers. He had considered speculation as well
as confirmed fact. He knew all there was to know.
Too little had been known.
“That’s all you’ll need to know about
Danion’s outside,” the Ship’s Commander told them.
“Of her guts you’ll see plenty, and you’ll have
to learn them well. We expect to get our money’s
worth.”
They had the right to ask it, Moyshe figured. They were paying
double the usual spacer’s rates, and those were anything but
poor.
The man talked on awhile, repeating the security officer’s
injunctions. Then he turned the landsmen over to ratings, who
showed them to their quarters. BenRabi’s nervousness
subsided. He had been through this part before, each time he had
boarded a Navy warship.
He got a cabin to himself. The Seiner assigned to him helped
settle him in. From the man’s wary replies, Moyshe presumed
he could expect to be aboard for several days. Payne’s Fleet
was harvesting far from Carson’s.
Once the man had left and benRabi had converted his barren
cubicle into a Spartan cell, he lay down to nap. After looking for
bugs and spy-eyes, of course. But sleep would not come. Not with
all the great lumpy surprises his mind still had to digest.
Someone knocked. Mouse, he guessed. The man never used a buzzer.
He made a crochet a means of identification.
Yes. It was Mouse. “Hi,” he said. “I’m
Masato Iwasaki. Oh. You’re in Liquids too? Good.” He
stuck out a hand. They shook.
“BenRabi. Moyshe. Nice to meet you.” Silly game, he
thought. But it had to be played if they wanted people to believe
that they had just met.
“You wouldn’t happen to play chess?” Mouse
asked. “I’m looking for somebody who does.”
He was addicted to the game. It would get him into trouble
someday, benRabi thought. An agent could not afford consistent
crochets. But who was he to criticize?
“I’ve been up and down the passage, but I
haven’t found anybody.”
No doubt he had. Mouse was thorough.
“I play, but badly. And it’s been awhile.” It
had been about four hours. They had almost been late to the
spaceport because of a game. Mouse had been nervous about liftoff.
BenRabi had been holding his own.
Mouse prowled, searching for bugs. BenRabi closed the door.
“I don’t think there are any. Not yet. I didn’t
find anything.”
Mouse shrugged. “What do you think?”
“Broomstick all the way. Strictly from hunger. We’re
riding the mythical nova bomb.”
“The woman? Yeah. Pure trouble. Spotted a couple McGraws,
too. You think she’s teamed?” He dropped onto the extra
bunk.
“I don’t think so. Not by choice. She’s a
loner.”
“It doesn’t look good,” Mouse mused. “We
don’t have enough info. I feel like a blind man in a
funhouse. We’d better fly gentle till we learn the traffic
code.” He stared at the overhead. “And how to con the
natives.”
BenRabi settled onto his own bunk. They remained silent for
minutes, trying to find handles on the future. They would need
every advantage they could seize.
“Three weeks,” Mouse said. “I can handle it.
Then a whole year off. I won’t know what to do.”
“Don’t make your reservations yet.
Marya . . . The Sangaree woman. She’s one
bad omen.
Mouse . . . I don’t think it’s
going to work out.”
“I can handle it. You don’t think I want to spend a
whole damned year here, do you?”
“Remember what that character said down at Blake City? It
could be the rest of our lives. Short lives.”
“Bah. He was blowing smoke.”
“Ready to bet your life on it?”
BenRabi’s head gave him a kick. He was not sure he could
take much more pain. And this compelling
need . . .
“What’s the matter?”
“Headache. Must be the change in air pressure.”
How the hell was he supposed to work with his body in pain and
his mind half around the bend? There was something to be said for
those old-time sword swingers who did not have to worry about
anything but how sharp their blades were.
“We’d better hedge our bets, Moyshe. Better start
planning for the long haul, just in case.”
“Thought you could handle it.”
Mouse shrugged. “Got to be ready for everything.
I’ve been poking around. These Seiners are as bad as us for
special interests. They’ve got coin clubs and stamp clubs and
Archaicist period groups . . . The whole thing.
They’re crazy to get into the past. What I was thinking was,
why don’t we start a chess club for landsmen? We’d have
a cover for getting together.”
“And you’d have an excuse to play.”
“That too. A lot of Seiners play too, see. Maybe we could
fish a few in so we could pump them socially.” He winked,
smiled.
The Seiners he was interested in hooking were probably
female.
BenRabi could not fathom Mouse. Mouse seemed happy most of the
time. That was disconcerting. The man carried a load of obsessions
heavier than his own. And somebody whose profession was hatchet
work should, in benRabi’s preconceptions, have had a
happiness quotient approaching zero.
BenRabi never had been able to understand people. Everybody else
seemed to live by a different set of rules.
Mouse shrugged. “Fingers crossed? Hope Beckhart will pull
it off? Wouldn’t bet against him.”
BenRabi never knew where he stood in the Admiral’s grand,
tortuous schemes.
“Hey, I’ve been here long enough,” Mouse said.
“No point attracting attention straight off. I saw you get
pills from that girl. What was wrong? Head?”
“Yeah. Might even be my migraine. My head feels like
somebody’s been using it for a soccer ball.”
Mouse went to the door. “A game tonight, then?”
“Sure, as long as you don’t mind playing an
amateur.” BenRabi saw him off, feeling foolish. There had
been no one around to hear his parting speech.
The public address system announced dinner for passengers. Mouse
turned back. “Feel up to it?”
BenRabi nodded. Though it had ached miserably seconds ago, the
tracer was not bothering him at all now.
Somebody was trying to impress them. The meal was superb. It was
the kind Navy put on when important civilians came aboard.
Everything was hydroponics and recycle, yet supremely palatable.
Each mouthful reminded benRabi of the horrors of a Navy mess six
months out, after the fresh and frozen stores were gone. From some
angles the mission had begun to show promise.
He looked for the Seiner girl, Amy, but did not see her.
Lazy days followed. There was little to do in transit. He stayed
in his cabin most of the time, loafing, toying with Jerusalem, and
trying not to remember too much. Mouse, and a few others he had
met, occasionally came to visit, play chess, or just bullshit about
common interests.
The landsmen began to settle in, to get acquainted. The
unattached singles started pairing off. Mouse, never inclined to
celibacy, found himself a girl the second day. Already she wanted
to move in with him.
Individual quarters had been assigned everyone but the married
couples. There was room. The ship had been prepared to haul a
thousand people.
Mouse immediately established himself as a character and leader
among the landsmen. His notion of a chess club, while no fad,
caught on.
One of the joiners was the Seiner who had striven to rattle them
at Blake City.
His name was Jarl Kindervoort. He did not hide the fact that he
ranked high in Danion’s police department.
BenRabi marveled again at the size of the harvestship. A vessel
so huge that it had a regular police agency, complete with
detectives and plainclothes
operatives . . . Just incredible.
They called themselves Internal Security. BenRabi saw nothing in
what he learned of their structure to remind him of a security unit
in the intelligence sense. The function was doubtless there,
cobbled on in response to the arrival of outsiders, but the agency
look was that of a metropolitan police force.
Mouse’s club inspired a general movement. Half a dozen
others coalesced. Each was Archaicist-oriented.
In an age when nothing seemed as permanent as the morning dew,
people who needed permanence had to turn to the past.
BenRabi looked on the whole Archaicist movement with studied
contempt. He saw it as the refuge of the weak, of moral cowards
unwilling to face the Now without the strategic hamlets of
yesterday to run to when the pressure heightened.
Archaicism could be damned funny. BenRabi remembered a holocast
of pot-bellied old men stamping through modern New York outfitted
as Assyrian soldiery off for a sham battle with the legions of the
Pharaoh of New Jersey.
Or it could be grim. Sometimes they started
believing . . . He still shuddered whenever he
recalled the raid on the temple of the Aztec Revivalists in Mexico
City.
One morning he asked Mouse to read the working draft of his
story. He had managed to push it all the way to an unsatisfactory
ending.
Mouse frowned a lot. He finally said, “I guess it’s
all right. I don’t know anything about non-objective
art.”
“I guess that means it isn’t working. I’d
better get on it and do it right. Even if you can’t figure
out what the hell it’s about, it should affect
you.”
“Oh, it does, Moyshe.”
His tone conveyed more message than did his words. It said that
he thought benRabi was wasting his time.
Moyshe wanted to cry. The story meant so damned much to him.
“Sorry I startled you.” A she-wolf’s grin made
it plain that the Sangaree woman felt no remorse whatsoever.
“I’m Maria Elana Gonzalez. Atmosphere Systems.
Distributions Methods. Sometimes I do a little Hydroponics Ecology.
I don’t have a Master’s for either, though. Too busy
with other things.” She smiled her gun-metal smile. Yes, benRabi thought, the lady has other interests. Stardust and
murder.
“Moyshe benRabi,” he replied, in case she had
forgotten.
“An unusual name.” She smiled that smile.
“Jewish?”
“So I’m told. I’ve never been in a synagogue
in my life.”
“You wouldn’t be a writer?” She knew damned
well that he was. Or that he pretended to be. He had whispered to
her about it . . . “The name sounds so
literary, somehow.”
“I try, yes.” Was she going to expose the Pale
Imperator?
No. She did not push it. Nor did she thrust with anything from
her arsenal of needles.
“What made you decide to sign up?” she asked.
“Unemployment.”
“A space plumber? You’re kidding. You must be on the
blacklist.”
“Yeah. Sort of. Somebody’s. What about
you?”
“The money.”
The vibrations of hatred had begun mellowing out. She was
controlling herself superbly.
BenRabi let it flow. He hurt too much to fence, or to probe
about her mission. The armed truce persisted till the lighter
reached the Starfisher.
Moyshe did not forget that she was Sangaree, that she would
drink his blood happily. He simply tabled the facts for the time
being.
Hundreds of her people had died because of him. Her children
were dying. She would do something. The Sangaree tradition of
honor, of Family responsibility, would compel
her . . .
But she would not act right away. She had come here on a
mission. She would complete that first. He could relax for a
while.
As introspective and morality-stricken as he sometimes became,
he could not feel guilty about The Broken Wings. Nor about its
aftermath. Humanity and Sangaree were at war, and the Sangaree had
fired the opening shot. That it was a subterranean war, fought at
an almost personal level, did not matter. Nor did the fact that
only humanity perceived a war, that the Sangaree were just in
business. Battles were battles. Casualties were casualties, no
matter how or why they went down.
Most of his associates and contemporaries hated the Sangaree,
but to him they were just people. People he had to hurt sometimes,
because of what they did and represented.
He snorted. The most bigoted man alive could say the same thing
and mean it.
The whole stardust trade turned his stomach.
“The trouble with me is, I don’t love or hate
anything,” he murmured.
“What?”
“Sorry. Thinking with my mouth in gear.”
His mood left nothing counting. Nothing could move him. The pain
tablets had kicked him into nirvana. Or into a depthless black pit
where the light of emotion simply could not shine. He was not sure
which.
He did not care. He did not give a damn about anything. Instead,
he immersed himself in the mystery he called Mouse.
BenRabi believed he knew Mouse better than did anyone but the
Admiral. A lot of one another had leaked across during their teamed
operations. These little flare-ups in the secret war were slowly
melting them, molding them . . .
And still Mouse remained a mobile enigma.
Mouse scared hell out of benRabi.
Mouse was the only man he knew who had killed someone with his
bare hands.
Killing had not become a social dodo. But the personal touch had
been removed. Murder had become mechanized, its soul and
involvement eliminated. It had been that way for so long that most
civilians could not endure the emotions they suffered if they
entered a killing rage.
Their brains shorted. They went zombie. And nothing
happened.
Anybody could push a button and hurl a missile to obliterate a
ship of a thousand souls. A lot of timid little anybodies had.
The same anybody could sleep without dreaming the following
night. The involvement was with the button, not the bang.
Ample opportunities arose in nice remote space battles with
Sangaree, McGraw pirates, or in the marque-and-reprisal antics of
minor governments, for that kind of killing. But to do a man face
to face, with hands or knife or gun . . . It
was too personal.
Confederation men did not like to get too close to anyone. Not
even to end a life. A man knew he was in too deep if the urge
arose.
The People of Now wanted no faces on their haunts.
BenRabi was free-associating, and unable to escape the flight of
his thoughts. Mouse. Interpersonal relationships. The two joined
forces to kick him into a pit of fear.
He had known Mouse as early as their Academy days. They had
shared their moments then, both in training and the play typified
by sunjammer racing in the wild starwinds of an old supernova. They
had crewed their sunjammer victoriously, and had shared
celebrations during leave. But they had refused, persistently, to
become anything more than acquaintances.
Friends were strange creatures. They became responsibilities.
They became walking symbols of emotional debits and personal
obligations.
He was getting too close to Mouse. Growing too fond of the
strange little man. And he suspected that Mouse was having the same
trouble.
Friendship would be bad for their professional detachment. It
could get them into trouble.
The Bureau had promised that they would not be teamed again
after the operation on The Broken Wings. The Bureau had lied. As it
always did. Or this really was a critical, hurry-up, top-man
job.
He wondered. The Admiral apparently would do or say, or promise
anything to get the work done.
Always there was a rush but he had no good reason to complain.
Hurry was inherent in the modern social structure. Change came
about so swiftly that policy, operational, and emotional
obsolescence developed overnight. Decision and action had to be
sudden to be effective.
The system shuddered constantly under the thundering impact of
precipitous error.
BenRabi was now involved in one of the Bureau’s few old,
stable programs. Catching a starfish herd had been a prime mission
before his birth. He suspected it would continue to be one long
after his death.
He might die of boredom here. He now saw little hope that he and
Mouse would be recalled early. The presence of Sangaree altered all
the rules.
He had abandoned all hope of enjoying the mission.
Somehow, sometimes, because of the Sangaree woman or otherwise,
he or Mouse would get hurt.
A clang rang through the shuttle. The vessel shuddered. BenRabi
ceased flaying himself with the tiny, dull knives of the mind.
The lighter nosed into its mother ship like a piglet to a
sow’s belly. Moyshe followed the crowd moving to board the
starship. He worked his way close to the pale Seiner girl. Could he
pick up where he had left off?
He wondered why she intrigued him so. Just because she had been
kind?
Guides led the way to a common room where several high-powered
command types awaited them. Another lecture, Moyshe thought. Some
more shocks set off by a lot of boredom.
He was half right.
Even before they were comfortable, one of the heavy-duty lads
said, “I’m Eduard Chouteau, your Ship’s
Commander. Welcome aboard Number Three Service Ship from
Danion, a harvestship of Payne’s Fleet.” That
was enough ceremony, evidently. He continued, “We’ve
contacted you as emergency replacements for technicians
Danion lost in a shark attack two months ago. Frankly,
Fishers haven’t ever liked or trusted outsiders. That’s
because outsiders have given us reason. But for
Danion’s sake we’ll do right by you till we
get our own people from the. schools. All we ask is that you do
right by us.”
BenRabi felt that little feather tickle again. Half-truths were
fluttering around like untamed butterflies. The man had something
on his mind. There was a smoke screen rolling tall and wide, and
behind it something he and Mouse just might find interesting. He
made a mental note.
The Seiner schools were unique. Most ground-siders knew a little
about them. They made romantic, remote settings for holonet
dramas.
Those shows, naturally, had borne little relation to
reality.
The Seiner creches were hidden in dead planetoids somewhere in
deep space. The old and the young of the Fisher fleets dwelt there,
teaching and learning. Only healthy Seiners of working age spaced
with the fleets and hazarded themselves against disasters of the
sort that had overtaken Danion.
Unlike Confederation parents, Starfishers yielded their children
to professional surrogates out of love. They did not see their
young as dead weight that might hamper them as they shot the rapids
of life.
BenRabi had never seen enough of his father to have developed an
emotional attitude toward him. And what could he think about his
mother? She could not help being what she was. His mother was the
child of her society, shaped by a high-pressure environment. The
years and prejudice had devoured their tenuous umbilical
link . . . They were of alien tribes now. The
barrier between them could no longer be breached, even with the
best will on both sides.
Visiting her had been a waste of leave time, but then there was
the kid.
How was Greta doing? Christ! He might not know for one hell of a
long time.
Why had his mother’s behavior so horrified him? He should
have known better than to have gone. He had come out of that world.
All Old Earth was a screaming rat warren packed with people seeking
new thrills and perversions as escapes from the grim realities of
narrow little lives.
“Lightsl” the Ship’s Commander snapped.
BenRabi returned from introspection. A hologram took form in the
center of the darkening common room. It developed like some fantasy
magician’s uncertain conjuration, flickering for several
seconds, then jerking into sudden, awe-inspiring solidity.
“The stars you see here we retaped off a standard Second
Level astrogation training module. Our holo people dubbed the ships
from models used in an engineering status display at Ship’s
Engineering Control aboard Danion. This is
Danion, your home for the next year.”
The name Danion rolled off his tongue, freighted with
everything the ship meant to him: home, country, refuge,
responsibility.
A ship formed against the imaginary stars. It was a weird thing,
making Moyshe think of octopi entwined. No. He decided it looked
like a city’s utilities systems after the buildings and earth
and pavement had been removed, with the leavings flung mad among
the stars. There were vast tangles of tubing. Here and there lay a
ball, a cone, a cube, or an occasional sheet of silverness
stretched taut as if to catch the starwinds. Vast nets floated
between kilometers-long pipelike arms. The whole mad construct was
raggedly bearded with thousands of antennae of every conceivable
type. The totality was spectacularly huge, and dreadful in its
strangeness.
In theory a deep-space vessel need not be confined in a
geometric hull. Most small, specialized vessels were not. A ship
did not have to have any specific shape, though the complex
relationships between drive, inertial-negation, mass increase
effect reduction, temporal adjustment, and artificial gravity
induction systems did demand a direction-of-travel dimension
slightly more than twice that of dimensions perpendicular to
line-of-flight in vessels intended to operate near or above the
velocity of light. But this was the first truly large asymmetric
ship benRabi had ever seen.
It was a flying iron jungle. The streamlined ship had been
preferred by mankind since space travel had been but a dream. Even
now designers felt more comfortable enclosing everything inside a
skin capable of generating an all-around defensive screen.
Even the wildest imaginings of novelty-hunting holo studios had
never produced a vessel as knotted and strewn as this mass of
tangled kitten’s yarn.
BenRabi’s astonishment was not unique. Silence died a
swift death in that room.
“How the hell does that bastard keep from breaking
up?” someone demanded.
“What I want to know is, how do you build something like
that without a crew from every holonet in the universe turning
up?”
Someone more technically smitten asked, “Ship’s
Commander—what sort of system do you use to synchronize
drives? You’d have to have hundreds on a ship that big. Even
with superconductor or pulse laser control systems your synch
systems would be limited to the velocity of light. The lag between
the more remote units . . . ”
BenRabi lost the thread. Another surprise had jumped on him
wearing hobnailed boots on all four feet.
He was aboard a ship he and Mouse had studied from the surface
of Carson’s. She was a typical interstellar vessel of an
obsolete class now common only among the Rim Run Freehaulers.
A similar vessel had appeared in the hologram. It was
approaching the harvestship.
The surprise was in their relative sizes.
The starship became a needle falling into an expanding, cosmic
ocean of scrap. The service ship retained its holo dimensions.
Danion swelled till she attained epic proportions.
Moyshe could not begin to guess her true dimensions. His most
conservative estimate staggered him. She had to be at least thirty
kilometers in cross-section, twenty thick, and sixty long. That was
impossible. There were countries on Old Earth smaller than
that.
And stretching far beyond the dense central snarl of the ship
were those spars spreading silvery sails and nets.
Did she sunjam on stellar winds?
She couldn’t. The Starfish stayed away from stars. Any
stars, be they orbited by settled worlds or not. They stayed way
out in the Big Dark where they could not be found.
The whole thing had to be a brag show. Pure propaganda. It just
had to be.
He could not accept that ship as real.
His normal, understandable operation-opening jitters cranked
themselves up a couple of notches. Till that ship had declared
itself he had thought he could handle anything new and strange.
Change was the order of the universe. Novelty was no cause for
distress.
But this mission held too much promise of the new and unknown.
He had been plunged tabula rasa into a completely alien
universe.
Nothing created by Man had any right being so damned big.
Light returned. It drowned the dying hologram. BenRabi looked
around. His jaw was not the only one hanging like an overripe pear
about to drop.
Despite prior warning, everyone had believed themselves aboard a
harvestship. Cultural bias left them incapable of believing the
Fishers could have anything better.
Moyshe began to realize just how poorly he had been prepared for
this mission.
He had done his homework. He had devoured everything the Bureau
had known about Starfishers. He had considered speculation as well
as confirmed fact. He knew all there was to know.
Too little had been known.
“That’s all you’ll need to know about
Danion’s outside,” the Ship’s Commander told them.
“Of her guts you’ll see plenty, and you’ll have
to learn them well. We expect to get our money’s
worth.”
They had the right to ask it, Moyshe figured. They were paying
double the usual spacer’s rates, and those were anything but
poor.
The man talked on awhile, repeating the security officer’s
injunctions. Then he turned the landsmen over to ratings, who
showed them to their quarters. BenRabi’s nervousness
subsided. He had been through this part before, each time he had
boarded a Navy warship.
He got a cabin to himself. The Seiner assigned to him helped
settle him in. From the man’s wary replies, Moyshe presumed
he could expect to be aboard for several days. Payne’s Fleet
was harvesting far from Carson’s.
Once the man had left and benRabi had converted his barren
cubicle into a Spartan cell, he lay down to nap. After looking for
bugs and spy-eyes, of course. But sleep would not come. Not with
all the great lumpy surprises his mind still had to digest.
Someone knocked. Mouse, he guessed. The man never used a buzzer.
He made a crochet a means of identification.
Yes. It was Mouse. “Hi,” he said. “I’m
Masato Iwasaki. Oh. You’re in Liquids too? Good.” He
stuck out a hand. They shook.
“BenRabi. Moyshe. Nice to meet you.” Silly game, he
thought. But it had to be played if they wanted people to believe
that they had just met.
“You wouldn’t happen to play chess?” Mouse
asked. “I’m looking for somebody who does.”
He was addicted to the game. It would get him into trouble
someday, benRabi thought. An agent could not afford consistent
crochets. But who was he to criticize?
“I’ve been up and down the passage, but I
haven’t found anybody.”
No doubt he had. Mouse was thorough.
“I play, but badly. And it’s been awhile.” It
had been about four hours. They had almost been late to the
spaceport because of a game. Mouse had been nervous about liftoff.
BenRabi had been holding his own.
Mouse prowled, searching for bugs. BenRabi closed the door.
“I don’t think there are any. Not yet. I didn’t
find anything.”
Mouse shrugged. “What do you think?”
“Broomstick all the way. Strictly from hunger. We’re
riding the mythical nova bomb.”
“The woman? Yeah. Pure trouble. Spotted a couple McGraws,
too. You think she’s teamed?” He dropped onto the extra
bunk.
“I don’t think so. Not by choice. She’s a
loner.”
“It doesn’t look good,” Mouse mused. “We
don’t have enough info. I feel like a blind man in a
funhouse. We’d better fly gentle till we learn the traffic
code.” He stared at the overhead. “And how to con the
natives.”
BenRabi settled onto his own bunk. They remained silent for
minutes, trying to find handles on the future. They would need
every advantage they could seize.
“Three weeks,” Mouse said. “I can handle it.
Then a whole year off. I won’t know what to do.”
“Don’t make your reservations yet.
Marya . . . The Sangaree woman. She’s one
bad omen.
Mouse . . . I don’t think it’s
going to work out.”
“I can handle it. You don’t think I want to spend a
whole damned year here, do you?”
“Remember what that character said down at Blake City? It
could be the rest of our lives. Short lives.”
“Bah. He was blowing smoke.”
“Ready to bet your life on it?”
BenRabi’s head gave him a kick. He was not sure he could
take much more pain. And this compelling
need . . .
“What’s the matter?”
“Headache. Must be the change in air pressure.”
How the hell was he supposed to work with his body in pain and
his mind half around the bend? There was something to be said for
those old-time sword swingers who did not have to worry about
anything but how sharp their blades were.
“We’d better hedge our bets, Moyshe. Better start
planning for the long haul, just in case.”
“Thought you could handle it.”
Mouse shrugged. “Got to be ready for everything.
I’ve been poking around. These Seiners are as bad as us for
special interests. They’ve got coin clubs and stamp clubs and
Archaicist period groups . . . The whole thing.
They’re crazy to get into the past. What I was thinking was,
why don’t we start a chess club for landsmen? We’d have
a cover for getting together.”
“And you’d have an excuse to play.”
“That too. A lot of Seiners play too, see. Maybe we could
fish a few in so we could pump them socially.” He winked,
smiled.
The Seiners he was interested in hooking were probably
female.
BenRabi could not fathom Mouse. Mouse seemed happy most of the
time. That was disconcerting. The man carried a load of obsessions
heavier than his own. And somebody whose profession was hatchet
work should, in benRabi’s preconceptions, have had a
happiness quotient approaching zero.
BenRabi never had been able to understand people. Everybody else
seemed to live by a different set of rules.
Mouse shrugged. “Fingers crossed? Hope Beckhart will pull
it off? Wouldn’t bet against him.”
BenRabi never knew where he stood in the Admiral’s grand,
tortuous schemes.
“Hey, I’ve been here long enough,” Mouse said.
“No point attracting attention straight off. I saw you get
pills from that girl. What was wrong? Head?”
“Yeah. Might even be my migraine. My head feels like
somebody’s been using it for a soccer ball.”
Mouse went to the door. “A game tonight, then?”
“Sure, as long as you don’t mind playing an
amateur.” BenRabi saw him off, feeling foolish. There had
been no one around to hear his parting speech.
The public address system announced dinner for passengers. Mouse
turned back. “Feel up to it?”
BenRabi nodded. Though it had ached miserably seconds ago, the
tracer was not bothering him at all now.
Somebody was trying to impress them. The meal was superb. It was
the kind Navy put on when important civilians came aboard.
Everything was hydroponics and recycle, yet supremely palatable.
Each mouthful reminded benRabi of the horrors of a Navy mess six
months out, after the fresh and frozen stores were gone. From some
angles the mission had begun to show promise.
He looked for the Seiner girl, Amy, but did not see her.
Lazy days followed. There was little to do in transit. He stayed
in his cabin most of the time, loafing, toying with Jerusalem, and
trying not to remember too much. Mouse, and a few others he had
met, occasionally came to visit, play chess, or just bullshit about
common interests.
The landsmen began to settle in, to get acquainted. The
unattached singles started pairing off. Mouse, never inclined to
celibacy, found himself a girl the second day. Already she wanted
to move in with him.
Individual quarters had been assigned everyone but the married
couples. There was room. The ship had been prepared to haul a
thousand people.
Mouse immediately established himself as a character and leader
among the landsmen. His notion of a chess club, while no fad,
caught on.
One of the joiners was the Seiner who had striven to rattle them
at Blake City.
His name was Jarl Kindervoort. He did not hide the fact that he
ranked high in Danion’s police department.
BenRabi marveled again at the size of the harvestship. A vessel
so huge that it had a regular police agency, complete with
detectives and plainclothes
operatives . . . Just incredible.
They called themselves Internal Security. BenRabi saw nothing in
what he learned of their structure to remind him of a security unit
in the intelligence sense. The function was doubtless there,
cobbled on in response to the arrival of outsiders, but the agency
look was that of a metropolitan police force.
Mouse’s club inspired a general movement. Half a dozen
others coalesced. Each was Archaicist-oriented.
In an age when nothing seemed as permanent as the morning dew,
people who needed permanence had to turn to the past.
BenRabi looked on the whole Archaicist movement with studied
contempt. He saw it as the refuge of the weak, of moral cowards
unwilling to face the Now without the strategic hamlets of
yesterday to run to when the pressure heightened.
Archaicism could be damned funny. BenRabi remembered a holocast
of pot-bellied old men stamping through modern New York outfitted
as Assyrian soldiery off for a sham battle with the legions of the
Pharaoh of New Jersey.
Or it could be grim. Sometimes they started
believing . . . He still shuddered whenever he
recalled the raid on the temple of the Aztec Revivalists in Mexico
City.
One morning he asked Mouse to read the working draft of his
story. He had managed to push it all the way to an unsatisfactory
ending.
Mouse frowned a lot. He finally said, “I guess it’s
all right. I don’t know anything about non-objective
art.”
“I guess that means it isn’t working. I’d
better get on it and do it right. Even if you can’t figure
out what the hell it’s about, it should affect
you.”
“Oh, it does, Moyshe.”
His tone conveyed more message than did his words. It said that
he thought benRabi was wasting his time.
Moyshe wanted to cry. The story meant so damned much to him.