Star Spring

by David Bischoff

  “Wonderful. My mechanical preparations were well worth—”

  Todd finally managed to voice his difficulty. “Turn ... over!” He clung for all he was worth to the upside-down unit. Fortunately, he had hooked his knees firmly in place, or he would have plunged through the roof of one of the apartment complexes a hundred meters below. Wind screamed in his ears as Cog flipped over with deep apologies.

  Feeling as though his heart were going to pop from his chest if it beat any harder, Todd clamped himself firmly into place again on the saddle-like arrangement. “Sure. Wonderful preparations for you. You forgot a seat belt for me, though.”

  Cog did not reply directly. “Hmm. Let me see. Night shuttle launch for intersect with the Star Fall at two A.M. It’s now just a little before one A.M. According to my calculations, Maintenance Unit 432 should be on its way. I just have to locate access road F.” Cog’s mutter changed to a yelp of satisfaction. “There it is!”

  The flying cleaning unit swooped into a copse of trees beside a well-kept macadam road. Cog settled into a clump of grass by a tree. Todd collapsed onto the springtime softness of the ground. “Of course, we haven’t tickets. Mind-scans will find you out. If only I’d reached you sooner, it would have been so simple! Now if the entry computer gets a feel of your brain patterns and cross-indexes it with the law enforcement systems, red will be the predominant color on the light boards. They’ll toss you back in the clink. So. I fortunately sucked out the necessary information to provide this upcoming ploy a decent success ratio.”

  “Good for you,” Todd said, not even trying to show enthusiasm.

  “Aha. Here it comes.” Mechanical arms prodded Todd from his lethargy. “Up we go, my friend. Now, if you notice, there’s a singleton floater headed this way. Flag it down. Tell the driver you’ve had a crash in this tree clump. Bring him over. That’s all you have to do, Todd. I’ll take care of the rest.”

  “I certainly look like I’ve been in a crash,” Todd said, struggling up. He plodded to the roadside. An approaching headlight swept the curve. Todd waved. The floater, a single carrier model, pulled alongside, settling down gently on gravpads.

  “What’s up, fella? I got a shuttle to catch,” a scruffy young man said, poking his head from a window.

  “My car! Lost control!” He pointed toward the trees. “My pet orangutang! Oh God. Awful! Help!”

  “Geez! I’ll radio!”

  “Later, please! We just have to push the—uhm—rear end of the car off its head.”

  In the dim light provided by the vehicle’s control board, Todd saw a strange look flitter across the man’s face at these words that Cog had instructed him to use. Almost mechanically, he opened the door, got out and followed Todd back to where Cog waited.

  Strange paraphernalia had sprouted from the robot’s sides. Lights spattered in variegated patterns.

  Baffled, Todd watched as the technician approached Cog as though hypnotized.

  “Hey! What’s going on!” Todd said as the omnicleaner rolled his way.

  Cog did not answer. An extensor snaked from his front; Todd felt the stinging airburst of a hypo inject into his leg.

  He opened his mouth to complain, but his eyes closed into unconsciousness before he could say a thing.

  Fill in the blank.

  What is your name?

  __________________

  One of those awakenings where she asked herself that—but couldn’t produce an answer. She seemed newly hoisted from a muck of nothingness, of total disintegration. A dreamless quagmire, the protein soup of life from which this confused lungfish had just dragged herself, jumping billions of evolutionary years in an exhalation.

  In perfect relaxation, ideal repose, she lay in the grass and wondered who she was, how she had gotten here, and if she really cared.

  After all, the day was fine.

  The sun shone golden in an eggshell-blue sky, sending an almost stylized artist’s sunshine cascading among the drifting cumuli. Shafts of the stuff formed awesome columns of light among shadow, as though holding up a long bank of clouds. Solid reflections of the clouds, green-clothed mountains rolled into the distance. Nearby, a fresh brook murmured and purled, glistening, over rocks which cut ripples through the flow. Birds trilled in the surrounding forest. A sweet tang of new-bloomed flowers hung in the air.

  Something smelled good beside her. Hungry, she instinctively reached out and cropped a mouthful. Her tastebuds signaled satisfaction as she munched the grass.

  Grass?

  She spat.

  Why would she chomp a bunch of grass? A shiver passed through her. Still ... wasn’t bad stuff, really. What had passed down her esophagus seemed to be well enough accepted by her stomach, which gurgled with satisfaction. Ultimately a practical person, Angharad bent her head back to her feeding.

  After the third mouthful of the sweet-smelling stuff, mixed with a dandelion or two, she realized that planted firmly before her were a pair of black hooves.

  Her hooves!

  She realized that narrow legs thickly covered with brown hair rose up from the hooves. That directly in front of her shot forth a long brown snout, flaring nostrils at the end.

  Her legs! Her snout!

  She whickered with surprise. “What the hell?” Her voice was thick, slightly altered—but still held her familiar female emphasis and tone. Immediately she rose, feeling four legs leap to muscular obedience, pushing up a long torso. Startled, she swung her head around. A black stringy tail swished behind her, above genitals still female but decidedly changed from her previous set.

  A kind of numbness set in for long moments. The world seemed to halt with her shock.

  “Tracy Marshack,” she said, out loud, dredging up the name from memory. “No. No, not anymore. I’m Angharad. Angharad Shepherd, and I’ve been changed into some kind of beast!”

  Facts accepted, full memory flooded. The flash of the knife. The gleam of hypodermics. Light-streaked darkness, tubes and valves, the final shutter and now ... Now this.

  The insistent sounds of the stream prodded her back into the present. She glanced, saw that the coursing water provided a still, reedy pool, away from the bubbling current.

  Unsteadily, she clopped to the brook, perched her hooves upon a mossy bank, stared into the reflecting surface.

  Until now, her rigorous training had kept her emotions in check. However, one does not transform into a beast every day; she could not contain a whinny and a slight “hee haww,” nor a subsequent intake of breathy sound when the image below acquainted her fully with her new form.

  Sad, deep-brown eyes blinked back at Angharad Shepherd. Eyes set on either side of an equine head with long, drooping ears. A donkey, then. She had been changed into a donkey ... or her brain had been transplanted into a donkey. (But how could that be? Incompatible blood-type, tissue, brain-pan size. Impossible!)

  This, peripheral to the true surprise.

  Projecting from the crest of her head was a narrow cone-like piece of bone, white as ivory, almost gleaming in the sunlight. Pointed, it whorled to its base in her skull like some fancy wickless dinner candle.

  Disorientation dizzied as she whipped her head from the cool breath of the stream, as though to try to shake the sight from her mind. Can’t be, she thought. Uh-uh. Will not compute. A donkey with a unicorn’s horn?

  This was something ripped from fantasy—not reality. The notion keyed in the possibility: I’m in a real-fic. Somewhere my true body is harnessed to a Disbelief Suspender, making me believe that I’m an ass with a horn, standing bemused in the middle of gorgeous countryside.

  That didn’t sound right, though. Disbelief Suspenders placed you in a different character. Angharad, however, retained her sense of identity, her memories ... up to and including the attack in the neo-gothic hotel.

  Loose ends in her comprehension knotted together.
So. They had caught up with her, they had done something to her, they had placed her God-knew-where, God-knew-why.

  Considering, she bent her head and drank from the pool.

  Earnest Evers Hurt.

  Instead of destroying her, they were using her in his plan. Exactly what that plan was she had never precisely known in full. But she had gleaned enough inklings enough evidence to trouble Central sufficiently to delay the departure of the space liner Star Fall. At first it had been a routine-enough investigation. Piece of cake, she’d originally thought when HQ had dished out the assignment.

  INFILTRATE PRIVATE RESEARCH FACILITIES. EARNEST EVERS HURT, CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD, HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS CENTER, ARIZONA.

  DOSSIER, EARNEST EVERS HURT.

  “BORN” APRIL 15, 2299 A.D. TO HURT FAMILY. GENETIC CONTINUATION OF LINE (PERMISSION NUMBER: RW 94352), BRED FOR ASSUMPTION OF PATRIARCHAL ROLE IN GALAXY WIDE HURT ENTERPRISES (see attachment). HURT RESEARCH FOUNDATION, UNDER THE AEGIS OF EARNEST EVERS HURT, ESTABLISHED BREAKTHROUGH LONGEVITY PROGRAM.

  Which, in turn, allowed Hurt to live these 200-plus years, accruing power like a collector obtains stamps. Hurt literally had his fingers in every bubbling pot in the universe.

  Longevity treatments, of course, had been around even before the Big Explosion of the middle 21st century had set civilization back decades. However, they were extremely expensive, and only allowed the user to survive till about the age of 160, at which point, despite even the late developments in brain transferral to fresh bodies, the nerve and brain tissue began to deteriorate beyond salvaging, resulting in effective brain death as surely as if the blood or oxygen supply had been cut. What Hurt’s scientists had been able to accomplish was the ability to regenerate the cellular structures of the brain. Constant monitoring and treatment was necessary, at great expense, thus making it possible for only the richest to undergo the process.

  Earnest Evers Hurt apparently had contributed indirectly to the funding of the Star Fall from the very inception of the program. It was through his ministrations that a group of Morapns (not counting Ort Eath) had been persuaded to accompany the ship on its strange and fateful maiden voyage. After the political smoke had cleared away, Galactic Intelligence had learned that Hurt had quietly acquired full rights to the Star Fall. Hurt Starways Shipping now owned it lock, stock and barrel, taking control from the interplanetary military system devised after the seeming threat of the Morapn civilization had first loomed over a century before. This was not considered threatening. Although Hurt had a reputation for ruthlessness in business and political matters and had been indirectly linked to skullduggery and various revolutions on the colonies, his activities had never been fully proved, and he was not an official criminal.

  Several factors, however, had alerted the Central Intelligence Network that something unusual might be transpiring.

  For the past twenty years, Hurt had been deeply involved in an almost religious—or at least mystical—extension of his mind/brain researches. Before, the Human Consciousness Center had merely been regarded as a dying old man’s eccentricity. The Zeitgeist encouraged a technological, deterministic view of the universe, and was not particularly fond of spiritual research. That had gone out with the occult. Besides, unlike most cults, the Human Consciousness Center kept to itself. They made no move to proselytize people, to convert or evangelize the universe with some new gospel. Apparently, from the various papers published by the Hurt Foundation concerning the Centers, all the Center did was to perform benevolent inquiries into the nature of human awareness.

  Simple crackpot stuff, in the eyes of Central.

  What alerted them to possibilities of suspicious discrepancies was the particularly secretive manner in which the Center handled its new guests. These were group of Morapns who had traveled on the Star Fall from their world light-years distant, at the last minute assisting in thwarting Ort Eth’s machinations to destroy Earth and thus foster certain galactic war between the races.

  Since she’d been so instrumental in uncovering the true nature of Ort Eath’s activities, Central had assigned Angharad to become a research assistant and make sure everything was on the up and up. She’d been hired, complete with new identity, new qualifications and a new face. It had all seemed innocent enough on the surface. Her working companions all accepted their positions as regular, albeit, odd, computer-input technicians. They did a great deal of research and cross-referencing of strange, often arcane subjects.

  Religion. Mysticism. Clairvoyance. Psychic phenomena. The occult. Philosophy.

  All this was somehow linked up with the complex activities of Hurt’s Mind/Brain Research Center.

  Because Angharad had tested well on creative thought, she had been placed in the Personality Construct Department. For some reason, Hurt and his associates were taking the works and biographies of all the great thinkers of mankind, past and present, and creating possible schematics for their minds, structuring complex blueprints for individual identity analogs.

  A very strange sort of resurrection, lending verity to previous human notions to literary immortality in a totally unexpected manner. Certainly at first glance it was innocent. The personality matrices were encoded onto holographic crystals. Connection to a full complementary computer system would result in a personality simulacrum of a particular man—Shakespeare, perhaps, or Meister Eckhart, or Galileo—with the gaps filled in either from imaginative programming by the experts hired by the Consciousness Center, or by artificial intelligence subsystems. In action, these personalities were only copies and bore no self-awareness.

  However, Angharad had thought, what if they were run through an augmented real-fic system, piggybacking a functioning, self-aware human brain—

  She had snooped. She had correlated Hurt’s activities there at the Center in Arizona with his work on the Star Fall.

  Bonded by her knowledge of the implications of the Star Fall’s real-fic systems, the two mixed like nitro and glycerin.

  The Extra-Reality Fabrication.

  I must be aboard the Star Fall, Angharad realized.

  An overwhelming flood of indecision and anxiety swept her.

  Do something, she told herself. Walk. Eat grass. Anything, but don’t let the shock take you over.

  She ran.

  She splashed through the shallow brook, letting the cold water slap her underside bracingly, soaking her in chill sensation. She let the wind of her passage blow her shaggy mane behind her like a short flag. She immersed herself in the sensations of exercising her four muscular legs, her thick trunk, snorting furiously as she desperately cavorted.

  Damn him, she thought, clutching on to her anger for sanity’s sake. Damn him for doing this to her.

  She could feel her horn cutting furiously through the air like a lance, and wished it were driving through Hurt.

  Cresting a rise, she paused. She overlooked a green field, spotted with boulders. On the slope of a nearby mountain, a castle boldly raised towers and parapets toward a mild sky. Banners of various colors fluttered in the breeze.

  However, of more immediate notice, below her, seated on a flat rock, wiping perspiration from his brow with a white linen handkerchief, was a strongly built, middle-aged man wearing spectacles.

  Angharad clopped down to attempt communication.

  At the sound of her hooves stamping the ground, her breath snorting, the man looked up, startled. Immediately, Angharad halted in her tracks to make sure the man didn’t think she meant any harm. But his expression bore no fear, only surprise.

  “Well, I’m glad I’m not the only being on this world,” Angharad said, trying to get used to the new sound of her voice.

  “Good lord,” the man said. He took off his wire-rim spectacles, wiped them on his Swiss alpine shorts and excitedly fitted them back on nose and ears. “A donkey with a unicorn’s horn!”

  “Temporary condition. Hardly co
ngenital. Besides,” Angharad said, “I’d prefer to think of myself as a unicorn with a donkey’s body.”

  “The donkey. The ass,” the man muttered to himself, absently patting his pockets as though in search of a nonexistent pipe. “Combined with the unicorn. Fascinating juxtaposition of symbols.”

  “How so?” Angharad said curiously, approaching him.

  “Hmm? Oh! Sorry.” The man spoke standard archaic English spiced with a Middle European accent. “Just woke up here, and I spotted that castle, which I’m presently headed for. I immediately reckoned—American slang, you know; I like American slang—I immediately reckoned the meaning of this place when I saw that castle. Castles, of course, represent something that must be obtained. A spiritual testing. Perhaps it contains a treasure. I hope we’ll get some kind of explanation for this new existence there. Perhaps that’s the treasure.”

  “Symbols,” Angharad said. “Of course. Rampant, active symbolism. A fabricated extra-reality of symbols. But why? I still don’t understand that clearly.”

  “Yes,” the man murmured, quite caught up in gazing at Angharad’s present form. “The unicorn is a standard symbol of many cultures. It’s the lunar principle, you know. Feminine. You’re quicksilver in alchemy, you know.” The man grinned. “I like alchemy.”

  “Go on,” Angharad said.

  “Yes, well, let me see if I can’t remember. Unicorns—in the Western medieval mind anyway—stood for purity, perfect good, strength and chastity.”

  “Well, I can see now why I didn’t make it all the way,” Angharad mused wryly.

  “A bit of a unicorn’s horn is supposed to be an antidote to poison, since it represents Christ’s salvation. The donkey, however, represents patience, humility and peace—but also stupidity.”

  “Makes sense. If I hadn’t been so stupid, I wouldn’t be here. Hurt’s little joke.”

  “There’s more. I can give you the Greek, Chinese, Hebrew, Babylonian and Inca versions—all curiously similar.”