The Last Starfighter

by Alan Dean Foster

  “Rumors to that effect circulate in occasional command transcripts, yes,” the officer admitted. “But somehow this particular one doesn’t look the part of the battle-ready berserker.”

  “What’s he saying?” Alex finally asked.

  “He’s explaining how delighted he is that you’ve come, and how anxious they are to show you around.”

  “I see.” Alex subsided again and let his attention drift to the numerous and extraordinary life-forms circulating through the chamber.

  “What did he say?” the officer demanded to know.

  “He’s getting bored with all this inactivity and wonders how soon he can leap into battle.”

  “Hmmm.” The Rylan made it sound like a stoned honeybee. “You personally guarantee this one’s abilities?”

  “I told you, he was chosen by my own special testing system. His reflexes are inherited, not learned, and he’s just primitive enough to know how to apply those abilities instinctively. He’ll do the League proud.”

  The officer hesitated a last moment, then sighed breathily. “All right. I suppose I’ve no choice but to give him a chance. We need all the help we can muster, and if he’s checked out on gunstar fire control . . .”

  “Brilliantly, brilliantly.”

  “. . . then I guess we have to give him a chance to show what he can do. Auwar knows it’s time to try the unexpected. I’ve been surprised by the abilities of primitives before. Perhaps this is to be another time. I’ll give the necessary orders.”

  “Excellent! I’ll inform him. I know how pleased he’ll be. He can’t wait for his first firefight, to bring forth blood and destruction.” He turned back to Alex and switched easily from Rylan to English.

  “Good luck to you, my boy. May the luck of the seven psions of Gulu be with you at all times.”

  “What’re they?”

  “Never mind that now. Just hope that they’re with you.”

  “Why? Where are you going?”

  “First, to the john. After that, elsewhere. Don’t worry, you’re in good tentacles . . . hands.” He glanced up at the thoughtful officer.

  “Someday you cheapskates will thank Centauri. Trust me on this one.”

  “As I’ve said, we’ve little choice.” He watched Centauri stride toward the far doorway. “And when I’m broken in rank for listening to you, rest assured I’ll find you.”

  “Hey, come back!” Alex called. A hand came down on his shoulder. It was gentle but insistent. He looked up to see the Rylan face staring sternly down at him. “Okay, so what now?” he asked the alien.

  Evidently the decision had been made to move him along. The first female Rylan he’d encountered at Centauri’s ship appeared and conveyed him to an elevator. Once inside Alex stumbled and had to catch his balance as unexpected acceleration sent him toward a wall. The Rylan barely glanced in his direction but he resolved not to stumble a second time.

  It was a hard resolution to keep, since the elevator behaved more like a runaway motorcross bike than a normal lift, bucking and twisting as it traveled through a series of interconnections that ran sideways and backward as well as up and down.

  They finally stopped and the doors slid apart. The Rylan nudged him out into another hangar. This one was much bigger than the place where Centauri had parked his ship, and a hive of activity.

  Creatures of varying shape and size worked on ships that were strange because they were so recognizable. Sealed behind a transparent wall at the far end of the cavernous room was a waiting area filled with seats of exotic design, created to accommodate exotic backsides. Beyond the seats lay a semicircular chamber alive with lights and glowing screens. Some of the images appeared to hang in the empty air.

  As they moved nearer he was able to make sense of some of the images. There was a detailed schematic of a solar system with more than nine planets, a large floating globe which he guessed (correctly) to be Rylos, images of other systems, and a drifting starmap of a portion of one galactic arm. Scattered among these larger projections were graphs and symbols and charts, underscored with scratchings that he imagined to be letters in Rylan or some other alien language. Rylans predominated in the chamber, as they did in the hangar he was walking through. That might be because they were the dominant life-form in this section of space, or simply because this was their home world. Alex still had precious little hard information on which to base his suppositions.

  A musical tone sounded repeatedly. His guide gently pulled him aside while a massive ship was shunted past. One thing he did know for certain was the identity of this and the other ships in the hangar. They were identical to those he’d manipulated so casually in computer-generated space on the screen of the videogame back home. They were the same even to the identifying logo on their flanks. It matched the symbol painted on the side of the game console.

  “Gunstars. I gotta be dreaming. I gotta be.”

  As his mother would so often assure him, wishful thinking would get him nowhere. Wishful thinking, and a nickel. Well, here were the visions of his wishes made whole. They were lined up in even ranks within the hangar, facing a gap which looked out over forest and mountains. Shining like a big fat peridot in the sky outside was the green moon he and Centauri had shot past on their precipitous descent to the surface of this world. That moon was real. As real as Rylos, as Centauri, as the fighting ships standing in silent array before him.

  As real as the gulf that lay between this place and home.

  Another Rylan beckoned them over and chatted with Alex’s escort. Alex had the feeling he’d been weighed and found wanting. He had no way of knowing that they were even talking about him, of course. It was just a feeling he received. His confidence was not raised.

  Then the new Rylan spoke to him.

  Alex shrugged. “Sorry. I never was much good at languages. Como se llama? Sprechen Sie deutsch?”

  The Rylan muttered to himself, burrowed through a circular drawer that popped neatly out of the wall on verbal command. Extracting something small and brightly colored, he moved toward Alex with one hand outstretched.

  Alex took a wary step backwards, but his guide was there to restrain him. She spoke anxiously while the other Rylan waited patiently. Waiting for this terrified primitive to get control of himself, no doubt, Alex thought. Angry at himself he stood and waited for whatever was coming.

  The Rylan pinned something on Alex’s shirt, then reached toward his head. Alex steeled himself and watched. If these people wanted to do something to him there wasn’t anything he could do to prevent it.

  Carefully the Rylan inserted a small button of soft plastic in Alex’s right ear and then stepped away.

  “Now what?” Alex gingerly touched the object that had been inserted in his ear. It was so small he could hardly feel it but it didn’t seem inclined to fall out. “Look, this has been a mistake. I don’t belong here.”

  “Your modesty becomes you,” said the officer who’d performed the insert. “Welcome to Starfighter Command.”

  Alex blinked, still feeling his ear while trying to balance the awkward bundle of clothing with his other hand. The alien’s words had come through to him clearly, in unaccented English.

  “You speak English? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I agree, but I am not speaking your language,” the Rylan informed him. “Your mind interprets my words via the translator button.”

  The tiny disc clung securely to the inside of his ear. He let his hand fall. “That doesn’t make any sense either. What would you be doing with a translation of my language? Do you have others of my kind here?”

  “No,” said the Rylan. “The button does not actually translate word for word. It adapts to your own thoughts, transcribing the sense of what I say rather than executing a literal transcription. We have discovered that within a certain range, the internal physical makeup of most intelligent species is sufficiently similar to make such devices practical. Structures may differ, but the transmission of ideas still involv
es the movement of electrical impulses within brains of varying size. The translator reads the current in your brain and works directly from it, as opposed to intercepting the verbalizations which are the translations of those same impulses into sound by your vocal mechanism.”

  “Goes right to the source,” Alex murmured.

  “In essence. That is a simplified explanation. Cerebral engineering is not my field. My concerns are with destruction, not interpretation. As are yours.”

  “They are? I mean, are they?”

  “All will be explained.” The Rylan spared a quick glance for some instrument he wore inside a shirt pocket. “But not by me. You have to hurry. We don’t have much time. There have been reports pouring in that are most disturbing in nature and frequency. Decisions of great import are about to be made.

  “Besides, the briefing begins shortly.”

  “Briefing? What briefing?”

  “The briefing wherein many of your questions will be answered.” Schemal, the Rylan thought, what has Centauri brought us this time? Don’t these creatures ever stop asking questions? Such unrestrained curiosity was sometimes an indication of great flexibility. The Rylan hoped fervently this was so. This late adolescent specimen was going to need all the flexibility it could muster in the coming action.

  “Now come along and join the other recruits.” He started across the smooth floor toward the large glass-enclosed room at the far end. Alex trotted along in his wake, not knowing what else to do, hugging his burden of clothing tightly to his chest.

  “Recruits? What was that about ‘other’ recruits?” He tapped his ear lightly. “You sure this thing is working right? I could’ve sworn you said ‘other recruits.’ Or is this gadget reading my pulses wrong? Hey, I’ve got it! You folks are AC and I’m DC, right? I’m mixing up your meaning, right?”

  The Rylan stopped, indicating a doorway leaning inward.

  “In there?” Alex asked. The Rylan made a gesture Alex couldn’t make up or down of. The button didn’t translate gestures. The movement was repeated.

  “Of course in there. Where else did you expect to end up?” Then the Rylan turned and strode off down a hallway.

  “Hey, wait a minute.” Alex hesitated, then shrugged. Machinery thrummed around him. “What the hell.” He headed for the door, which opened noiselessly for him.

  A dozen nightmares turned in the briefing room to give him a quick glance. Their inspection was cursory and they soon turned back to their interrupted chatter, for which he was grateful.

  Many of them wore uniforms identical in color and design, if not in shape, to the one he held in his arms. Others were clad in different attire. Two different ranks, he thought, or different classes. Most of the talkers were humanoid, though a couple were alien to the point of unrecognizability. One wore a complex mask across the lower half of his/her/its face. This was connected by a flexible tube to a square tank strapped across a broad back. Another creature didn’t appear to be breathing at all.

  The chairs were not lined up neatly and everyone sat according to individual whim. Two of the talkers disdained the use of the furniture altogether and squatted side by side on the floor. No one objected to this choice of unconventional seating, which was after all a matter of personal comfort and not discourtesy. There were more Rylans present than any other species.

  A voice blared over a hidden speaker. “Attention, attention! Ambassador Enduran of the League is here! He will deliver the final address. Please to devote your full attention to the words of the honored ambassador.”

  Muttering in a dozen languages filled the room. Overwhelmed, the button in Alex’s ear could only produce a kind of verbal static. He started forward, letting the door close itself behind him.

  The being who entered from the far side of the room and walked slowly toward the small rostrum conveyed a feeling of great age despite his erect bearing and fluid stride. He was humanoid, quite human in fact, as much if not more so than the Rylans. From the instant silence that greeted his appearance Alex presumed him to be the just announced visiting ambassador.

  He paused in front of the eclectic collection of creatures, all united in common cause, and scanned them slowly. He overlooked Alex, perhaps by choice, perhaps because Alex was standing apart, or possibly because Alex still carried his uniform instead of wearing it. The ambassador was a powerful presence and Alex found himself waiting anxiously for whatever he might have to say. There was also about Enduran a strong feeling of resigned sadness.

  But he stood tall, the single backbone that he shared with most of the chamber’s inhabitants unbent by age. Stood surveying them and listening to something only he could hear. Alex wondered if he wore something more advanced than a simple translator button, perhaps some ultraminiaturized device that enabled him to stay in constant communication with his own superiors.

  The ambassador’s hesitation gave Alex a chance to move without attracting undue attention. Trying to keep an eye on Enduran and his path at the same time, Alex started working his way through the scattered seats.

  “Excuse me . . . sorry . . . pardon me . . .” He could only hope his apologies were being properly conveyed through the many translators in use in the room. To his dismay he seemed to be drawing more attention than he’d hoped to. This was due as much to his nervousness as to his inability to negotiate the sprawling limbs of various non-human listeners.

  His usual agility deserted him utterly when he stumbled over a chair support, only to step back on something the size and shape of a garden hose. The hose whipped back like a retreating anaconda, throwing him off balance and toppling him into the lap of something with a face like a tormented cantaloupe.

  Strong hands caught him and kept him from hurting himself. Alex got a good close look at them as they eased him back to a standing position. They were almost normal hands, if you ignored the peagreen color and the translucent webbing that joined the fingers. Dull red veins marbled the webbing.

  The bulk that heaved behind him did not belong to those friendly hands, however, but to the owner of the bruised hose. Several identical hoses twisted and curled in anger, coddling the one Alex had stepped on. They looked capable of ripping pilings away from piers.

  Neither a translator nor an intimate knowledge of alien expression was required to see that he’d stepped on the wrong toe . . . uh, tentacle. Skin rippled on the alien’s face and the fury in its eyes was clear enough to anyone who cared to look. Alex didn’t care to, but his retreat was cut off and he didn’t want to risk offending anything else in the room.

  As conveyed by the translator button, there was nothing ambivalent about the alien’s tone, either.

  “Biped of a thousand heavy pods! I should grind you to g’run dust!” A sweeping tentacle barely missed Alex’s face.

  He didn’t know what g’run dust was but was positive his present condition was preferable. Swallowing, he fought to compose a suitable reply.

  “I’m real sorry, uh, sir.” He let out a mental sigh of relief when the creature didn’t react. At least he’d gotten the sex right. “It was an accident. I didn’t mean it. I’m a stranger here. Just got in.” He raised the armful of clothing. “See? I haven’t even had time to change over yet, and I didn’t want to miss the briefing.

  “Anyway, we’re all here because we’re on the same side, aren’t we? No point in fighting among ourselves, is there?”

  The big alien glared at him a moment longer. Then it brought forth a prodigious grunt and sloshed back into its chair, muttering one last phrase about “clumsy bipeds” and their propensity to trip over everything in sight. But the initial anger had dissipated.

  Carefully Alex resumed his course toward the empty chair he’d spotted from across the room. It happened to lie next to the friendly, web-handed alien who’d caught him when he’d first tripped.

  “It was an accident,” he mumbled.

  “I’ve no doubt of that,” his new-found acquaintance whispered back at him. “Only a true fool would do such a
thing deliberately. You just don’t trifle with a Bodati. They just love to fight. That’s why so many of them have volunteered to participate in this war, although I understand that the majority of them have to be kept in the rear echelons, employed in support and logistics. They’re much too impulsive and reckless to be trusted with a gunstar. They have a racial tendency, so to speak, to shoot themselves in the foot. But it’s nice to know they’re around in case it becomes necessary to go to a suicide defense.”

  Alex digested this information and quickly locked in on the operative word.

  “Excuse me, but you did say ‘this war’?”

  The alien eyed him uncertainly, its gaze traveling from Alex’s face down to the uniform he still carried.

  “But of course. Why else do you think you’re here?”

  “I don’t know. I was told,” he said slowly, “that I was to receive some sort of honor.”

  “Ah.” The webbed alien looked satisfied. “A small problem in semantics. Not that your appointment is anything but an honor, though much depends on your racial mentality. You really don’t know what’s going on, do you?”

  “Not really.”

  The alien took a gargling breath. “You’ve been recruited by the League to . .

  That was more than enough to trigger Alex’s memory. The rest he knew by heart. He knew it by heart because he’d listened to a monotone mechanical voice recite the same words over and over with the same inflection each time, speaking from just beneath the surface of a wooden box. A box that sat innocently on the porch in front of the Starlight Starbright Trailer Park.

  That familiar videogame voice was very far away now, as was the trailer park and everything else he could call familiar. It was unnerving to hear those same words spoken by the slick-skinned alien seated next to him, though he should have expected it.

  His first thought was for Centauri. For the first time in his young life he considered wringing an adult’s neck. If that was a sign of maturity, then he was maturing at an astonishing rate. But Centauri was nowhere to be seen. Alex wondered if he’d ever see the old man again.