An Exaltation of Stars (1973) Anthology

by Terry Carr (Ed. )

  I might as well look around a bit more. Yes, I decided, I would.

  I withdrew a cigarette and moved to light it. Then the flame caught my attention.

  I stared at the flowing tongue of light, illuminating the palm and curved fingers of my left hand, raised to shield it from the night breeze. It seemed as pure as the starfires themselves, a molten, buttery thing, touched with orange, haloed blue, the intermittently exposed cherry-colored wick glowing, half-hidden, like a soul. And then the music began…

  Music was the best term I had for it, because of some similarity of essence, although it was actually like nothing I had ever experienced before. For one thing, it was not truly sonic. It came into me as a memory comes, without benefit of external stimulus—but lacking that Lucite layer of self-consciousness that turns thought to recollection by touching it with time—as in a dream. Then, something suspended, something released, my feelings began to move to the effect. Not emotions, nothing that specific, but rather a growing sense of euphoria, delight, wonder, all poured together into a common body with the tide rising. What the progressions, what the combinations—what the thing was, truly—I did not know. It was an intense beauty, a beautiful intensity, however, and I was part of it. It was as if I were experiencing something no man had ever known before, something cosmic, magnificent, ubiquitous yet commonly ignored.

  And it was with a peculiarly ambiguous effort, following a barely perceptible decision, that I twitched the fingers of my left hand sufficiently to bring them into the flame itself.

  The pain broke the dream momentarily, and I snapped the lighter closed as I sprang to my feet, a gaggle of guesses passing through my head. I turned and ran across that humming artificial islet, heading for the small, dark cluster of buildings that held the museum, library, offices.

  But even as I moved, something came to me again. Only this time it was not the glorious, music-like sensation that had touched me moments earlier. Now it was sinister, bringing a fear that was none the less real for my knowing it to be irrational, to the accompaniment of sensory distortions that must have caused me to reel as I ran. The surface on which I moved buckled and swayed; the stars, the buildings, the ocean—everything—advanced and retreated in random, nauseating patterns of attack. I fell several times, recovered, rushed onward. Some of the distance I know that I crawled. Closing my eyes did no good, for everything was warped, throbbing, shifting, and awful inside as well as out.

  It was only a few hundred yards, though, no matter what the signs and portents might say, and finally I rested my hands against the wall, worked my way to the door, opened it, and passed within.

  Another door and I was into the library. For years, it seemed, I fumbled to switch on the light.

  I staggered to the desk, fought with a drawer, wrestled a screwdriver out of it.

  Then on my hands and knees, gritting my teeth, I crossed to the remote-access terminal of the Information Network. Slapping at the console’s control board, I succeeded in tripping the switches that brought it to life.

  Then, still on my knees, holding the screwdriver with both hands, I got the left side panel off the thing. It fell to the floor with a sound that drove spikes into my head. But the components were exposed. Three little changes and I could transmit, something that would eventually wind up in Central. I resolved that I would make those changes and send the two most damaging pieces of information I could guess at to the place where they might eventually be retrieved in association with something sufficiently similar to one day cause a query, a query that would hopefully lead to the destruction of that for which I was presently being tormented.

  “I mean it!” I said aloud. “Stop right now! Or I’ll do it!”…And it was like taking off a pair of unfamiliar glasses: rampant reality.

  I climbed to my feet, shut down the board.

  The next thing, I decided, was to have that cigarette I had wanted in the first place.

  With my third puff, I heard the outer door open and close.

  Dr. Barthelme, short, tan, gray on top and wiry, entered the room, blue eyes wide, one hand partly raised.

  “Jim! What’s wrong?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I replied. “Nothing.”

  “I saw you running. I saw you fall.”

  “Yes. I decided to sprint over here. I slipped. Pulled a muscle. It’s all right.”

  “Why the rush?”

  “Nerves. I’m still edgy, upset. I had to run or something, to get it out of my system. Decided to run over and get a book. Something to read myself to sleep with.”

  “I can get you a tranquilizer.”

  “No, that’s all right. Thanks. I’d rather not.”

  “What were you doing to the machine? We’re not supposed to fool with—”

  “The side panel fell off when I went past it. I was just going to put it back on.” I waved the screwdriver. “The little setscrews must have jiggled loose.”

  “Oh.”

  I stooped and fitted it back into place. As I was tightening the screws, the telephone rang. Barthelme crossed to the desk, poked an extension button, and answered it.

  After a moment, he said, “Yes, just a minute” and turned. “It’s for you.”

  “Really?”

  I rose, moved to the desk, took the receiver, dropping the screwdriver back into the drawer and closing it.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “All right,” said the voice. “I think we had better talk. Will you come and see me now?”

  “Where are you?”

  “At home.”

  “All right. I’ll come.”

  I hung up.

  “Don’t need that book after all,” I said. “I’m going over to Andros for a while.”

  “It’s pretty late. Are you certain you feel up to it?”

  “Oh, I feel fine now,” I said. “Sorry to have worried you.” He seemed to relax. At least, he sagged and smiled faintly. “Maybe I should go take the trank,” he said. “Everything that’s happened…You know. You scared me.”

  “Well, what’s happened has happened. It’s all over, done.”

  “You’re right, of course…Well, have a good time, whatever.”

  He turned toward the door and I followed him out, extinguishing the light as I passed it.

  “Good night, then.”

  “Good night.”

  He headed back toward his quarters, and I made my way down to the docking area, decided on the Isabella, got in. Moments later, I was crossing over, still wondering. Curiosity may ultimately prove nature’s way of dealing with the population problem.

  It was on May Day—not all that long ago, though it seems so—that I sat to the rear of the bar at Captain Tony’s in Key West, to the right, near to the fireplace, drinking one of my seasonal beers. It was a little after eleven, and I had about decided that this one was a write-off, when Don came in through the big open front of the place. He glanced around, his eyes passing over me, located a vacant stool near the forward corner of the bar, took it, and ordered something. There were too many people between us, and the group had returned to the stage at the rear of the room behind me and begun another set, with a loud opening number. So, for a time, we just sat there-wondering, I guess.

  After ten or fifteen minutes, he got to his feet and made his way back to the rest room, passing around the far side of the bar. A short while later, he returned, moving around my side. I felt his hand on my shoulder.

  “Bill!” he said. “What are you doing down here?”

  I turned, regarded him, grinned.

  “Sam! Good Lord!”

  Wc shook hands. Then, “Too noisy in here to talk,” he said. “Let’s go someplace else.”

  “Good idea.”

  I send one Christmas card each year. Instead of a signature, it bears a list of four bars and the cities in which they exist. Easter, May Day, the summer solstice and Halloween, I sit in those bars, from nine until midnight. I never miss two in a row. Neither does Don Walsh.

&nb
sp; I always pay cash wherever I go because I do not exist, officially. There is no credit card, birth record, or passport for me. Some years back, when everything and everybody was being documented and recorded, I was part of the International Data Bank project. I suffered the Frigid Quicksand Effect—cold feet and a sinking feeling—at the last moment. So I tore up my punch cards, changed my face, and dropped out of existence.

  It wasn’t all that simple, of course. But I took advantage of my position; I employed my special skills. I worked things out most carefully.

  There is a real world, which exists about us, within us, and there is its analogue, which exists in the data bank. The latter approximates the former with great consistency and an amazing profusion of accurate detail.

  There are, of course, many points at which this image is somewhat less than perfect. Not everything is described, recorded, with total accuracy. There are tolerance rules, allowances for this situation, built into the system. I know because I helped put them there. There are also ways of getting information accepted into the system bv means other than the normal input channels, ways that a knowledgeable person could even use to set up a temporary identity. I know this for the same reason.

  And why? Why am I here, rather than here and there too? I guess I chose this way of life, sacrificing the real benefits of the programmed condition—and there are many—because I hated that other guy: the image, the parody of myself—economic, medical, social, mental, everything quantifiable—who would dance to the binary waltz like a windup doll with a painted-on smile until he stopped, at which time that too would be noted and united with the Great Statistic. And I hate him because I fear that I could easily become him, my smile also as predictable as a curve on a graph.

  So now I have to make my living around the edges of things; and Don, who heads the second-largest detective agency in the world, is one of the means I employ.

  After a time, we found ourselves on a dim and deserted stretch of beach, smelling the salty breath of the ocean, listening to it, and feeling an occasional droplet. We halted, and I lit a cigarette.

  “Did you know that the Florida current carries over two million tons of uranium past here every year?” he said.

  “To be honest, no,” I told him.

  “Well, it does. What do you know about dolphins?”

  “That’s better,” I said. “They are beautiful, friendly creatures, so well adapted to their environment that they don’t have to mess it up in order to lead the life they seem to enjoy. They are highly intelligent, they’re cooperative, and they seem totally lacking in all areas of maliciousness. They—”

  “That’s enough.” He raised his hand. “You like dolphins. I knew you would say that. You sometimes remind me of one—swimming through life, not leaving traces, retrieving things for me.”

  “Keep me in fish. That’s all.”

  “A couple thousand for this one, varying upward in accordance with its complexity. But it should be a relatively easy, yes-or-no thing, and not take you too long. It’s quite near here, as a matter of fact, and the incident is only a few days old.”

  “Oil? What’s involved?”

  “I’d like to clear a gang of dolphins of a homicide charge,” he said.

  If he expected me to say something, he was disappointed. I was thinking, recalling a news account from the previous week. Two scuba-clad swimmers had been killed in one of the undersea parks to the east, at about the same time that some very peculiar activity on the part of dolphins was being observed in the same area. The men had been bitten and chewed by something possessing a jaw configuration approximating that of Tursiops truncatus, the bottle-nosed dolphin, a normal visitor and sometime resident of these same parks. The particular park in which the incident occurred had been closed until further notice. There were no witnesses to the attack, as I recalled, and I had not come across any follow-up story.

  “I’m serious,” he finally said.

  “One of those guys was a qualified guide who knew the area, wasn’t he?”

  He brightened, there in the dark.

  “Yes,” he said. “Michael Thornley. He used to do some moonlighting as a guide. He was a full-time employee of the Beltrane Processing people. Did underwater repair and maintenance of their extraction plants. Ex—Navy. Frogman. Extremely qualified. The other fellow was a landlubber friend of his from Andros. Rudy Myers. They went out together at an odd hour, stayed rather long. In the meantime, several dolphins were seen getting the hell out, fast. They leaped the ‘wall,’ instead of passing through the locks. Others used the normal exits. These were blinking on and off like mad. In a matter of a few minutes, actually, every dolphin in the park had apparently departed. When an employee went looking for Mike and Rudy, he found them dead.”

  “Where do you come into the picture?”

  “The Institute of Delphinological Studies does not appreciate the bad press this gives to their subject. They maintain there has never been an authenticated case of an unprovoked attack by a dolphin on a human being. They are anxious not to have this go on record as one if it really isn’t.”

  “Well, it hasn’t actually been established. Perhaps something else did it. Scared the dolphins too.”

  “I have no idea,” he said, lighting a cigarette of his own. “But it was not all that long ago that the killing of dolphins was finally made illegal throughout the world, and that the pioneer work of people like Lilly came to be appreciated, with a really large-scale project set up for the assessment of the creature. They have come up with some amazing results, as you must know. It is no longer a question of trying to demonstrate whether a dolphin is as intelligent as a man. It has been established that they are highly intelligent—although their minds work along radically different lines, so that there probably never can be a true comparison. This is the basic reason for the continuing communication problems, and it is also a matter of which the general public is pretty much aware. Given this, our client does not like the inferences that could be drawn from the incident—namely, that powerful, free-ranging creatures of this order of intelligence could become hostile to man.”

  “So the Institute hired you to look into it?”

  “Not officially. I was approached because the character of the thing smacks of my sort of investigation specialties as well as the scientific. Mainly, though, it was because of the urgings of a wealthy little old lady who may someday leave the Institute a fortune: Mrs. Lydia Barnes, former president of the Friends of the Dolphin Society—the citizen group that had lobbied for the initial dolphin legislation years ago. She is really paying my fee.”

  “What sort of place in the picture did you have in mind for me?”

  “Beltrane will want a replacement for Michael Thornley. Do you think you could get the job?”

  “Maybe. Tell me more about Beltrane and the parks.”

  “Well,” he said, “I guess it was a generation or so back that Dr. Spence at Harwell demonstrated that titanium hydroxide would create a chemical reaction that separated uranyl ions from seawater. It was costly, though, and it was not until years later that Samuel Beltrane came along with his screening technique, founded a small company, and quickly turned it into a large one, with uranium-extraction stations all along this piece of the Gulf Stream. While his process was quite clean, environmentally speaking, he was setting up in business at a time when public pressure on industry was such that some gesture of ecological concern was pretty much de rigueur. So he threw a lot of money, equipment and man-hours into the setting up of the four undersea parks in the vicinity of the island of Andros. A section of the barrier reef makes one of them especially attractive. He got a nice tax break on the deal. Deserved, though, I’d say. He cooperated with the Dolphin Studies people, and labs were set up for them in the parks. Each of the four areas is enclosed by a sonic ‘wall,’ a sound barrier that keeps everything outside out and everything inside in, in terms of the larger creatures. Except for men and dolphins. At a number of points, the ‘wall’ poss
esses ‘sound locks’—a pair of sonic curtains, several meters apart—which are operated by means of a simple control located on the bottom. Dolphins are capable of teaching one another how to use it, and they are quite good about closing the door behind them. They come and go, visiting the labs at will, both learning from and, I guess, teaching the investigators.”

  “Stop,” I said. “What about sharks?”

  “They were removed from the parks first thing. The dolphins even helped chase them out. It has been over a decade now since the last one was put out.”

  “I see. What say does the company have in running the parks?”

  “None, really. They service the equipment now, that’s all.”

  “Do many of the Beltrane people work as park guides too?” “A few, part-time. They are in the area, they know it well, they have all the necessary skills.”

  “I would like to see whatever medical reports there were.”

  “I have them here, complete with photos of the bodies.”

  “What about the man from Andros—Rudy Myers? What did he do?”

  “He’d trained as a nurse. Worked in several homes for the aged. Taken in a couple times on charges of stealing from the patients. Charges dropped once. A suspended sentence the second time. Sort of blackballed from that line of work afterward. That was six or seven years back. Held a variety of small jobs then and kept a clean record. He had been working on the island for the past couple of years in a sort of bar.”

  “What do you mean ‘sort of bar’?”

  “It has only an alcohol license, but it serves drugs too. It’s way out in the boonies, though, so nobody’s ever raised a fuss.”

  “What’s the place called?”

  “The Chickcharny.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “A piece of local folklore. A chickcharny is a sort of tree spirit. Mischievous. Like an elf.”

  “Colorful enough, I guess. Isn’t Andros where Martha Mil-lay, the photographer, makes her home?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I’m a fan of hers. I like underwater photography, and hers is always good. In fact, she did several books on dolphins. Has anyone thought to ask her opinion of the killings?”