Starfishers

by Glen Cook

  BenRabi’s defenses stood to arms. He did not dare open up. Two reasons: you just did not do that these days, and he was not sure what was happening himself. So he masked the shadowed walls of Festung Selbst behind a half-truth.

  “I’m just depressed. Maybe because I didn’t get my vacation. Maybe because of Mother . . . I had a bag full of things I wanted to take home. Some stamps and coins I picked up in Corporation Zone. Some stuff I managed to get back from The Broken Wings. This beautiful hand-carved bone trivet from Tregorgarth, and some New Earth butterflies that would be worth, a mint anywhere else . . . ”

  “Bullroar, my friend. Bullroar.” Mouse peered at him from beneath lowered brows. “I’m getting to know you, Moyshe benRabi. I can tell when something’s got you by the guts. You better do something. It’ll eat you alive if you keep it locked up inside.”

  Mouse was right about one thing. They were getting to know one another. Too well. Mouse was reading him now, and wanting to help. “Maybe. When’s your next chess thing? I’ll come lose a few games, tip a few brews with the troops.”

  Mouse frowned. He knew a light show when he saw one.

  Getting too damned close!

  Mouse glanced at Jerusalem, at which benRabi had been scribbling. “Well, I didn’t mean to porlock, Moyshe.” He rose. “I don’t know if we’ll have any more tournaments. Kindervoort says we’ll make Danion sometime tonight. That’s why I came over. Thought you’d want to know.”

  BenRabi brightened. “Hey, good.” He pushed the Jerusalem papers back, rose, started pacing. “The waiting is getting to me. A little work . . . ”

  The rendezvous with the harvestship was anticlimactic. There were no brass bands, and no curious crowds at the receiving bay. The only Seiners around were those who had been sent to show the landsmen to their quarters and brief them about their job assignments. No one of any stature came to greet them. Moyshe was disappointed.

  His guide did his work quickly and efficiently and told him, “You’d better turn in. This is the middle of our night. I’ll be back early to help walk you through your first day.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Paul.” Moyshe examined the man. Paul was much like the Seiners he had met before.

  The man examined him, too, and struggled with prejudices as he did so. “Good night, Mr. benRabi.”

  “See you in the morning.”

  But he did not. Amy showed up instead, and took both benRabi and Mouse under her wing.

  “Keeping an eye on us, eh?” Mouse asked.

  She colored slightly. “Yeah. Sort of. Jarl said he wanted to keep you together so you’d be easier to watch.”

  “You don’t have to be embarrassed. We understand.”

  “This isn’t my kind of thing, Commander Storm. I’m a plumber, not a counterspy.”

  “Call me Mouse. Please. Or Mr. Iwasaki.”

  “Whatever you want. Mouse. Are you ready for breakfast?” She turned to Moyshe.

  “I’m still Moyshe benRabi. All right? Yes. I could eat three breakfasts.”

  Work commenced immediately after tool issue and a brief class in how to find one’s way around the harvestship. It never let up.

  Moyshe forgot his screaming need in the pressure of the following week’s labors. The memories that had been gnawing the underbelly of his soul vanished from consciousness. He flew easy, not thinking, not observing, not questioning. He stayed too busy or too tired. The Seiners were true to their promise to work the landsmen hard.

  The mind-quirk he thought of as the image of the gun bothered him some, but only mildly, as he wandered through daydreams while replacing wrecked piping or damaged flow meters. He seized the vision, played with it, wrapped a few extended daydreams around it. It helped pass the time.

  Kept busy, he began to enjoy life again.

  “Something strange is going on here, Mouse,” he whispered once when Amy was out of hearing.

  “What’s that?”

  “This ship isn’t hurt as bad as they want us to think. Look around.”

  “I couldn’t tell. I never did any time in the line. All I know about ships is you get on, and after a while you get back off someplace else.”

  “What it amounts to is, there’s a lot of damage, but nothing that would put something this size out of action. They could’ve handled it themselves. Just might have taken them a couple of years.”

  “So?”

  “So, maybe we’re here for some other reason. My intuition has been sniffing around that ever since Carson’s.”

  “Why would they bring outsiders in if they didn’t absolutely have to?”

  “I don’t know. The only reason you overstaff a ship is so you have personnel redundancy in case you take battle casualties. But on a ship this big two hundred people, or even a thousand, don’t mean a thing. And who would the Seiners fight? Confederation? Not with a bunch of fifth columnists aboard.”

  “Give it time. It’ll come to the top. No matter what they hope, they can’t keep everything hidden forever.”

  “Can it. Amy’s coming.” Curious, he thought. Mouse did not seem interested in Starfisher motives at all.

  BenRabi’s first week did have its rough edges. Every encounter with the Sangaree woman became a crisis. And she could not be avoided. Her team, repairing air ducting, was working the same service passages as his.

  She would not leave Mouse alone. And the certainty of purpose which made Mouse’s responses predictable taunted benRabi with worries about his own incompleteness.

  She did not bait him. She knew that he would do nothing but look at her soulfully, reflecting the pain-giving back at her.

  She appeared from a cross-passage only seconds behind Amy.

  “Damn!” Moyshe swore. “Her again.”

  “Restrain me, Moyshe.”

  “You got it, partner. Be my ass in the fire, too.”

  “Well, the Rat again.” The Sangaree woman stood with her hands on her hips, defying him to act. Backing her were several idealistic youngsters. She had sold them a simpleminded anti-spy package. “What an unpleasant surprise. Butchered anyone lately, spy? There’re lots of non-Confies aboard. You ought to be as happy as a hog knee-deep in slop.”

  A curious metaphor, benRabi thought. She must have chosen it especially for the Tregorgarthian kids.

  The youths looked at one another, embarrassed. They shared her views, and were a rather rude bunch themselves, but their society had taught them that too much bluntness could get a person killed. Tregorgarth was a rough world.

  “You could start with me. You know what I think about your fascist military dictatorship. Or don’t you have the guts?”

  She knew damned well that he had, but assumed that he would not respond in front of witnesses—or that she could take him if he did. She was fooling herself there, benRabi thought. She believed Mouse strictly a strike-from-behind man. He was a lot more. Two decades of training and several thousand years of combat experience had gone into making him the perfect organic killing machine.

  Moyshe did not know of a weapon, or a system of close combat, that Mouse did not know as well as any man who had ever lived. Short of pulling guns, there was little she and her whole crowd could have done were he to lose his temper.

  BenRabi could sense the aching in Mouse, could feel Mouse’s need to show her. But his partner controlled himself. That, too, had been part of his training.

  BenRabi had to exercise some self-control himself. The woman’s behavior had eroded his compassion.

  She was playing a more dangerous game than she suspected. It would backfire on her if she did not ease up.

  BenRabi was sure the woman was working to some carefully prepared plan. Her acting had not improved. Her easy confidence betrayed.

  But she was vulnerable. Her Achilles Heel was her hatred. BenRabi was sure Mouse would exploit it . . .

  “Miss Gonzalez,” Amy said. “If you’re quite finished? We have work to do. And I suggest you return to yours before there’s cause for an inquiry into
the absence of your supervisor.”

  The Sangaree woman backed down. She was not ready to jeopardize her mission.

  “I feel like a fool,” benRabi muttered.

  Eyes downcast, Mouse said, “So do I. I can’t take it forever, Moyshe.”

  Then Amy told them, “I’m glad you restrained yourselves. Things are ugly enough without our getting physical.”

  She intrigued benRabi. He watched her a lot when she was not looking. He was glad she did not go for chest-pounders. He was not the type, and in the back of his mind he had begun formulating designs upon her.

  Over a flow chart thick with black X’s indicating trouble spots, while Amy was off requisitioning a special wrench, Mouse muttered, “It’s getting hard, Moyshe. I know what she’s doing, but . . . She’s trying to make us take ourselves out of the play.”

  “Hang on.”

  “One of these nights . . . ”

  Indefatigable Mouse. When benRabi finished work he had barely enough energy to eat, then tumble into bed. But Mouse got out and mingled, made new acquaintances (mostly female), and found new interests. He sponged up every bit of information that crossed his path.

  His latest thing was the Middle American football popular with Seiners. They had arrived just in time for the pre-season excitement. His interest gave him an excuse to move around.

  Moyshe was afraid. Having established his pattern of mobility, Mouse might arrange a fatal encounter with Marya somewhere far from the usual groundling stomping ground.

  Moyshe wondered if he should catch her alone and try to make her understand.

  He remembered The Broken Wings.

  He was her primary target. She was trying to get at him through Mouse. The hurt he had done her was more personal, more ego-slashing than what Mouse had done. By her reasoning, what had happened to the children could be laid at his doorstep. He could have prevented it.

  He would have to watch his back. Mouse was not the only one who could arrange an accident.

  “Is she alone?” Mouse asked. “They like lots of backup.”

  “I haven’t spotted anybody yet. They could be playing it close. What I want to know is, why is she here? Everybody else has tried something. But she just keeps on being obnoxious.”

  “She’s waiting.”

  “For what?”

  Mouse shrugged. “We’ll find out the hard way, I guess.”

  “Here’s a notion,” Moyshe said. “It just came to me. A way to warn her.”

  “How?”

  “Tomorrow’s recreation day, right?” They had been promised one day off a week. This would be the first.

  “And?”

  “Those kids. You know how Tregorgarthians are. They’re challenging everybody to meet them in a martial arts elimination tournament. Think you could manage them? Without hurting anybody?”

  Mouse thought. “I don’t know if I can pull the punches anymore.”

  “It would be good for the boys, too.”

  Tregorgarthians away from home tended to become bullies. Their homeworld schooled them to believe that those who did not fight at the drop of a hat were cowards. Smacked around a little, they civilized fast.

  “Might give them second thoughts about letting her suck them in,” benRabi mused. “They’ve got to know she’s up to something.”

  “They’d back off if they knew I was dangerous, eh?”

  “I’m hoping. Sex seems to be her main hold on them. I see one sneaking out of her room almost every morning.”

  “Who’s sneaking out of whose cabin?”

  Amy had returned. “Just gossiping,” Moyshe replied. “One of the girls has an assembly line going.”

  She bit. “Landsmen! They’re right about you being immoral.”

  Moyshe forbore observing that the Seiners seemed to be just as loose as his own people. Amy’s priggishness was personal, not cultural. She was the only Starfisher he knew who talked that morality nonsense.

  Mouse did not forbear. “When did you lose yours, Miss Morality?”

  “Huh? My what?”

  “Your cherry. You’re no more pure than Old Earth air.”

  She sputtered, reddened, mumbled something about all landsmen being alike.

  “You’re right. Satyrs and nymphs, the lot of us.” Mouse licked his lips, winked, asked, “What’re you doing tonight?”

  BenRabi grinned. Mouse was teasing her, as he had been all week long, but she did not realize it. He used a subtler approach when he really wanted a woman.

  Something within her clicked, as it did each time Mouse put her on the defensive. A different, colder personality surfaced long enough to carry her past the rough spot. “Sleeping. Alone. Did you decide where you want to cut that water main?” Then another quick change of subject. “Oh. Jarl said to tell you to sharpen your teeth. He’s bringing some people to play you tomorrow. You too, Moyshe.”

  Mouse had become chess champion of Service Ship Three. The Seiners had been excited about it. They were fond of the game and eager for new challenges.

  “Why me? I’m no good.”

  “Better than you think. Anyway, we like everybody to find their place in the pecking order.” Her hardness faded as quickly as it had come.

  “I wanted to go over to Twenty-three West. If I could get permission.” He pulled the excuse off the wall, for the salving of his ego. He did not like losing all the time, even at games. “I heard there’s a guy over there with some early English coins. Victorians.”

  She looked puzzled.

  Mouse laughed. “Didn’t you know? We’re both mad collectors. Coins and stamps mostly, because they’re easy to lug around.”

  Frowning over them, Amy reminded benRabi of Alyce. So many of their facial expressions were similar. “It looks like you’re mad everything. Chess. Archaicism. Collections. Football and women.”

  “That’s him, not me,” benRabi said.

  “What about people?” Amy asked.

  “Aren’t women people?” Mouse countered.

  She shook her head. She was a Starfisher, and Starfishers could not understand. Even Archaicism was just a hobby for them. Landsmen plunged themselves into things because they did not want to get involved with people. People hurt. The growing closeness between Mouse and benRabi, and the apparent friendships that had taken shape among the other foreigners, had confused Amy. She did not recognize their lack of temporal depth.

  A critical difference between Confederation and Starfisher relationships was that of durational expectancy. The idea of a close relationship that could be severed quickly, painlessly, as easily as it had been formed, would not occur to a Starfisher. But they lived in a closed, static culture where a severely limited number of people passed through their lives. Friendships were expected to last a lifetime.

  BenRabi was leery of the morrow. The isolation of the landsmen, far out in a remote residential cube, had minimized cultural friction during the week. But Kindervoort, for whom the outsiders had become a pet project, planned to make recreation day a gigantic college smoker, with floods of Seiners being exposed to landside ways.

  Still trying to gentle everyone in, Moyshe supposed. Kindervoort was a rather thoughtful, admirable cop. He might get to like the man yet.

  Ten: 3047 AD

  The Olden Days, A Victory Celebration

  “Max! You’re beautiful.”

  “Don’t sound so damned astonished, Walter.”

  “Oh. I didn’t mean . . . I just never saw you dressed up before.”

  “Quit while you’re ahead, friend. By the way. I notice you’ve changed a little too, Commander.” She stared pointedly at the double sunbursts on his high collar. “I thought you said you were a dip.”

  “Naval Attaché. You know that.”

  “No, I didn’t. Naval Attaché. Isn’t that the same thing as head spy? Bureau of Naval Intelligence?”

  Perchevski reddened. “Not always. Some of us . . . ”

  “Don’t mind me, Walter.” She smiled. “I’m just thinki
ng out loud. That would explain some of the mysteries about you.”

  “Mysteries? About me? Come on, Max. I’m as mysterious as a pumpkin. Here we are.”

  A Marine accepted his ID badge, poked it into a slot. He eyed a readout screen somewhere out of sight. “Thank you, sir. Is this Miss Travers, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  He consulted the screen again. “Thank you, sir. Have a nice evening, sir. Ma’am.” A door slid open.

  “Ma’am?” Max asked. “Do I look that old?”

  “Come on, Max.”

  “Isn’t he going to check me?”

  “He did. You’re all right. You don’t have a bomb in your purse.”

  “Thanks a lot. What do they do to you in Academy? Why can’t officers be polite like that nice young Marine?”

  “You were just complaining . . . Max, you’re sure contrary tonight. What’s the matter?” He handed his over-tunic to the Marine corporal in the cloak room, helped Max with her cape.

  “I’m scared, Walter. I’ve never even been near the Command Club. I don’t know how to talk to Senators and Admirals.”

  “Know something, Max?”

  “What?”

  “I’ve never been here before either. We’ll lose our virginity together. I’ll tell you this, though. Admirals and Senators put their pants on one leg at a time, same as us, and they’ll paw your leg under the table the same way I do.”

  “Male or female?” She seized his arm as they entered the huge Grand Ballroom. Her grip tightened.

  “Both, the way you look tonight.” He slowed. The place had no walls. An all-round animated hologram concealed the room’s boundaries. Portrayals of Navy’s mightiest ships of war lay every direction but downward. Perchevski automatically scanned the starfields. He saw no constellations he recognized.

  Max’s grip became painful. “I feel like I’m falling, Walter.”

  Local gravity had been allowed to decline to lunar normal to reinforce the deep-space effect.

  “Somebody’s really putting on the dog,” Perchevski grumbled.

  “Commander. Madam,” said another polite Marine, “may I show you to your seats?”

  The place was thronged. “Of course. How many people going to be here tonight, First Lance?” He was getting jittery. He still did not know why he was one of the elect.