by Glen Cook
“This’s all you’ll know of Danion,” says the Ship’s Commander, “of her exterior. Her guts you’ll know well. We’ll get our money’s worth from you there.”
And they will. Fifteen hours a day, teamed with Seiner technicians, we landsmen will labor to keep Danion alive and harvesting. Scarce four hundred of us will manage the work of a thousand--and, in our free time, we’ll repair the shark attack damage responsible for the original casualties. Daily, we’ll work to exhaustion, then stagger to our bunks too weary even to think about spying....
But there’re problems first, a time of distress two days after departure. The ship drops from hyper. I, and everyone, assume we’ve arrived. We gather in the common room, a custom of travelers, somehow expecting view-screens and a look at our new home. Shortly, however, the First Lieutenant appears.
“Please return to your quarters,” he says. He seems paler than the usual Starfisher. “We’re ambushing Confederation Navy ships following us from Carson’s.”
I’m dumbstruck. The Navy shouldn’t move in yet. Nor should Seiners so casually turn on pursuers--not, at least, on my Navy. I look around. The few angry faces I label “competition dismayed.” Across the room, Mouse appears bewildered. The Sangaree woman is in a rage, face red, fists clenched.
The First Lieutenant fields a few questions before retreating, all with a single explanation. “We’ve entered a hydrogen stream, taken station with a fleet. Starfish noise is being broadcast from scoutships. We often do this to cover the withdrawal of our vessels forced to enter ‘civilized space.’” He leaves us thinking.
We go too, Mouse and I glumly wondering if we’re now expendable.
The general alarm sounds. Engagement is imminent. I hope the admiral (I’m considering my own survival, not his comfort) recognizes the trap and gets out. I’m hoping the Seiners don’t do angry, rash things afterward.
I’ve hardly strapped in. The vessel rocks. Departing missiles. I’m amazed. She’s got batteries heavier than her appearance suggests.
I took this job expecting the total boredom of unchange, nul-novelty, but find surprises come almost too fast to assimilate.
The all-clear sounds shortly, and with it a buzz from my cabin door. It opens. A crewman asks, “Mr. benRabi? Come with us, please.” He’s polite, oh, polite as the spider inviting the fly. His teeth seem all white sharp and pointy. Behind him are ratings with angry guns. Yes, I’ll go with him.
As I join him in the passage, another door opens with a characteristic squeal. Yes. A group is collecting Mouse.
Done already, I think, and by space gypsies centuries behind the times. How?
“Ah,” says the Ship’s Commander as we enter his office, “Commander Igarashi, Commander McClennon.” My eyebrows rise. I didn’t know Mouse’s name, but Igarashi it might be. He’s got me nailed, though McClennon I haven’t used in fifteen years. “Please be seated.” I sit, glance at Mouse. He, too, is stunned.
“You’re wondering about your Navy friends? Decided discretion was the better part. Admiral Beckhart must be perturbed.” He chuckles. “But that’s not why you’re here. It’s those tracers you’ve got built in.”
This startles me. He’s talking plural. I thought I was the only one with a unit, and Mouse was along for the ride. Mouse, it seems, thought the same. Wheels within wheels, and I should’ve guessed. It’s the Bureau’s way.
“All biological, eh? Interesting development. Passed our detectors easily. But we’re a paranoid people--and think of everything.” Smugness. “We’ve watched the hyper bands since liftoff, had you pegged in hours. Dr. Du-Maurier....”
Hands seize me. The doctor examines me quickly, numbs my neck and the side of my head with an aerosol anesthetic. He produces an antique lase-scalpel.
The Ship’s Commander says, “This’ll be fast and painless. We’ll pull the ambergris nodes... and sell them back to the Navy next auction, I think.” He chuckles again. I smile. There’s a curious justice in it. Mouse and I, and others, are aboard in hopes of locating the great night-beasts which produce just that little item.
Ambergris, the High Seiner calls it. My studies say ambergris is a “morbid secretion” of Old Earth whales, very valuable. Others, landsmen, call the material star’s amber, spacegold, skydiamond, any of many names. It’s the wealth of our age. In the old tongues its name is hard, pithy. It’s the solid wastes of Starfish--crap, but crap without which interstellar civilization, as it exists, could not be. There would be no fast star-to-star communication.
In a way I don’t understand (having no knowledge of the physics), a tachyon flow is generated in a gap between as ambergris node and a Bilao crystal anode. These are the only materials that will do. Neither can be synthesized. Bilao crystal, mined on Sierra, is many times cheaper than ambergris. The tachyon stream is formed into a coherent beam which computers impress and aim at a receiver. Each tachyon carries an impressed hologramatic
portrait of the whole message. The receiver need catch but a few. Thus distance, diffusion, beam spread, small aiming errors are overcome.
Every planet in The Arm, of six races and countless governments (the Sangaree not included) is part of an instel net: military, government, or commercial. The demand for ambergris far exceeds the supply. Such a vast market can never be saturated.
Communication is the foundation of civilization. There are trillions of beings in The Arm, thousands of planets, millions of ships, all wanting instel--and all the Seiner fleets produce less than a hundred thousand nodes each year. No wonder the vultures gather.
Vultures. Mouse and I are vultures--no, rapacious birds, falcons hurled aloft to bring down game information. We’re to locate a herd, tell Navy where, let it be seized for Confederation. A better ownership than the Seiners’, who sell to anyone meeting their price. They’re too democratic, from Confederation’s viewpoint. Often, under their system, the stones go to belligerent, imperialistic governments, or unscrupulous corporations. We’re here to stop that. Uh-huh. Sometimes you tell yourself tall ones, else you ask questions, worrying no-matters like right and wrong.
My soul, slithering past morality shyly, merely mumbles I want. There is pain in it I can’t withstand. I must find my Grail, and soon, or abandon this secret quest. I’ve seen men so, in grim places on beautiful worlds, zombies with humanness gone, defeated by the universe, time, and all-too-rapid change, the little ones in madhouses, the big ones masters of corporations or governments in which people are the cattle of machines. Not for me, no.... My soul howls at an invisible moon.
“One down.” The doctor tosses the node-anode piece to the Ship’s Commander. I feel no pain. I’m glad he interrupts the thoughts. I’m on the edge of a scream. He turns to Mouse.
“We don’t like spies,” says the Ship’s Commander. We. Always these people say we. The worm within me squirms. This man touches my need. I try to seize something, to know, but like a wet catfish it easily wriggles from my grasp. “But Danion’s dying. We love her. We’ll keep you alive, keep our contracts, work you till you drop, till Danion can live without you, then we’ll send you away. Please be no more trouble than you’ve been. We need you desperately, but we’ll not be pushed too far.
Return to your quarters. We’ll get underway soon, for home.”
I rise, touching the small bandage behind my ear. There is no pain, but its presence makes me think of bigger cuts on my body and soul.
Mouse is done. We walk glumly along a passage, unescorted. There is nothing to say, so we’re silent. Finally, as we near my cabin, he asks, “What now?”
I shrug. We’re partners, neither senior, but I’ve been hoping he would decide. “Go for the ride, I guess. We have a year. Can they keep their guard up forever?”
Beyond Mouse I see the Sangaree lady. She smiles and waves. There’s a hint of gloating in her manner. She somehow helped betray us, probably by pointing out which men were Navy agents.
Mouse catches it too. “Should’ve killed her on the Broken Wings,” he mutt
ers. He’s shaking. His brown face wrinkles nastily. “Maybe this time.”
I shake my head. “Not here, not now. We’ve got enough trouble already.”
Mouse has never liked her. (I shouldn’t, but I haven’t his singular gift of hatred. Everyone, everything is too transient for more than mild aversion.) He frequently needs restraint. “She’d better move fast when we hit dirt.” I hope our year here will temper his feelings, but fear it won’t. His hatred’s beyond the usual. I think someone close was a Sangaree stardust addict (“the dream that burns, the joy that kills,” the poet Czyzewski said as he was dying). His assignments, he says, are all counter-Sangaree. Those I’ve shared, he prosecuted with fanatic zeal.
The Sangaree. Who, what are they? Like the Seiners and Star’s End, another legendary force, but satanic, one we seldom mention. Like the savage in the night before his fire, we withhold the name of the demon for fear of invoking his presence. After centuries of sullen, subdued conflict, we know little about them. They are humanoid, pass for human, even produce mule offspring on human women. They come from afar, planet unknown. Their numbers are limited, supposedly because their women conceive only under their native sun.
A particle from that sun, long ago, buzzed through space, atmosphere, flesh, ricocheted through a chromosome, rearranged DNA, obliquely fathered a race of brigands. All the worst characteristics of Mongol, Viking, Caribbean
pirate, Mafiosi, Chinese Tong hatchetman, name it, are stamped on Sangaree genes. For themselves they produce little. They raid, they steal, they deal in drugs and slaves and guns--anything profitable (in their own view, they do nothing wrong). They are cunning, hard to find, operate as shadow-masters of native syndicates complex as Minoan labyrinths--all as government agents. Crime is their racial industry.
They are considered a nuisance, prosecuted at opportunity--except by Man. In us the Sangaree inspire irrational hatred, deadly retaliation--I think because in them we see mirrored the demons lurking on the borders of our own benighted souls. Sangaree are what we would be if freed from social restraint. Thus Jupp von Drachau’s bloody action after Mouse and I located Sangaree headquarters for their human operations. Their privateers he destroyed, their drug farms and refineries, the laboratories where they force-grew pleasure slaves to the fantasy specifications of wealthy, evil men....
“I hope we find their world before I die,” Mouse says.
I feel a twinge of jealousy. Mouse ha_s his Grail. It’s a cup of blood and hatred, but I envy him his wholeness. Would that hate were simple enough for me.
We reach the harvestship. In the pressure of work I forget my screaming need. It haunts me only at night, or when I encounter the Sangaree woman, inevitable because air ducts and liquids pipes follow the same service passages. Then I’m ripped from my peace for, invariably, she’ll taunt Mouse (we work together for the convenience of Security Department), and the wholeness of being that permits him a predictable response reminds me of my own incompleteness.
“Well, Rat,” she may say, “killed anybody lately? Lots of non-Confeds here. Why not me? Or don’t you have the guts?” She knows he has, but thinks she can take him. She’s sure he’s a strike-from-behind man, but he’s much more. Mouse wants to demonstrate, but he fiercely represses temptation. She’s playing some game. We want the stakes and rules before getting in. She’s no actress. Her easy confidence gives her away.
During the passing months I learn of Starfish. Once they were just a wonderful concept. Now, with my contract half complete, I know that there are many forms of “life” in the hydrogen streams, though it’s life difficult to comprehend, consisting more in fields of force than in common
matter. A grandfather Starfish two hundred miles long and a million years old contains fewer atoms than a human adult, most unbound by molecular energies. They are more foci upon which forces are anchored, gravity and subtle electromagnetic forces which permeate the twists and folds of time and space surrounding a Starfish “body.” Within his vacuole universe, the creature supposedly exists as solidly real as we. What the Seiners sense with their instruments is but a fraction of the beast, like a shark’s fin seen cutting the surface of an Old Earth ocean.
They feed on hydrogen and the other elements in the fusion chain. Once I asked a Seiner why they don’t gather at stars. He said they can’t remain integrate in the field stresses about masses much greater than a harvestship, nor can they “digest” matter more complex than the water molecule.
Within a Starfish, surrounded by awesome fields and spread across all their many dimensions, is a fire violent as the heart of a sun. Atoms, primarily hydrogen, are fed in, fast-shuffled through dimensions and a fusion chain, are mixed with antimatter from another universe in which they simultaneously exist; there is annihilation. The energies they bind with dimensional shifts are truly fearsome.
Physics? I don’t know. Beside this, the goings-on in a supernova are kindergarten stuff. I understand only that some wastes are evacuated as the ambergris nodes used in instel transmitters.
The greatest, most unsettling surprise to date comes when I discover this is no man-cattle relationship, it’s a partnership. Starfish are intelligent and, via machinery whose sophistication we landsmen never suspected, Seiner techs maintain constant mental contact with members of the herds. Starfish produce ambergris, but demand a service in return: protection.
For they’re not alone out here. Like oceans, the hydrogen streams teem with life--some “carnivorous.” The Starfish have a natural enemy which, at the coming of Man, threatened to end their species. “Sharks,” the Seiners call them, after habits cruel as of those sea-killers of Old Earth. They’re smaller than Starfish and hunt in packs like wolves and men.
Both species hyper short distances.
Most herds are shadowed by shark packs which, at opportunity, cut a beast from the herd. The Starfish aren’t defenseless--they burp up balls of gut-fire and fling them
about like granddaddy nuclear bombs, but with sharks so fast and the burping so slow, they seldom get more than a single shot. The packs recently grew tremendously, why unknown. Herds dwindled, unable to cope. Man arrived.
The Starfish touched the minds of the early Seiners, explored them, contacted them, made the Bargain. (Sometimes they touch my mind, I think, though my imagination may play me tricks. In my dreams I see great swimming space as if with unhuman eyes. Each time I dream, I wake with a screaming migraine.) The Starfish would produce quantities of ambergris in return for protection.
Human guns serve, and missiles. Sharks’ binding forces are easily disrupted--then they are feasts for their attendant scavengers.
But sharks, in their slow fashion, are intelligent. They now associate high casualties with ships about the prey. An old fear became fact the day sharks turned on Danion. Now they hit harvestships before approaching a herd. So it’s war--Seiners won’t take attack stoically--a war to be lost. The Seiners are too few, the sharks too many, and the slow thought of the enemy seems the only hope.
The pale Seiner who explained this knew more, but when he was about to tell, suddenly fled. They often do. I’m the visible hand of another ancient foe: landsmen.
He was speaking of a need for more powerful weapons when he broke off, left me with a cold premonition. Something grim’s happening. I’ve felt it since coming aboard. This is no ordinary harvest. Danion has been under drive for months, sometimes in hyper, which isn’t ordinarily done. Near Starfish, a harvestship maneuvers only on “minddrive” (I’ve heard the term but once--the Seiner wouldn’t explain). Other drives harm the beasts.
Seven months have passed. Yesterday the Sangaree woman almost reached Mouse. Whatever her game, it’s in its final moves. She’s pushing hard. Wish I could figure her, but there’s no understanding a Sangaree mind.
The engines are two weeks dead. Wherever we were bound, we arrived. I know little. The Seiners are more closemouthed than ever, speak only when they must.
Nervousness and fear haunt the ship. I h
ear great shark packs are gathering. I sometimes see weary Seiners from our constantly busy service ships, wonder if they are fighting those packs, or are at something else. Though we landsmen are permitted little knowledge of it, there is
a great race on. In some desperate gamble, the Fishers are trying to finish something before the sharks finally throw themselves against us. My ignorance grows trying.
It’s evening. Mouse and I are playing chess. Despite ourselves, we grow increasingly close. We’re forced together. The Sangaree woman is one of the few who will speak. Others avoid us, fearing guilt by association.
My game’s bad. I’m piqued. The I want, so long played down in my soul, has burst upon me again, louder than ever, mocking, saying I’m at the threshold but too dense to recognize my discovery.
“I can’t hold off much longer,” Mouse says, capturing a pawn. “Next time she shows, or the next, I’ll bend her.”
Moving to protect my queen, “We’re almost in. Five months. Don’t ruin it.”
With a quick hand he slaughters a knight. “Platitudes coming?” I glance at his expressionless face, back to the board. I see disaster.
“Yield.” Another pattern of disaster grows clear. I know what she’s doing, and how. Unthinking, I stand abruptly. “We may have to!”
“Eh?”
“Bend her. Just figured how she’s doing it. Assume she’s got a tracer, broadcasting random bleeps....”
“Got you. Easy for the Sangaree to triangulate on, but a worm in her guts Danion might never pin down. Let’s not bend her, let’s chop it out.” Coldly, that, with anticipation of pain inflicted. He returns chessmen to their box, takes a wicked, homemade knife from beneath his mattress, says, “Let’s go.”
I have a hundred reasons for not, for his going alone, for many alternatives, but am able to articulate none. It’s time she was stalemated.
We’re halfway to her cabin when a notion strikes. “Suppose she’s got us bugged.” We assume the Seiners listen, but this is the first I think of spying by a third party.