Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  The stench came to Cliff as they strode down from the surrounding hills. It rose as they entered the ruined precincts. Terry made masks for them all that proved essential as they labored through the endless day.

  There was a code for burying the dead, something to do with recycling their substance into the Bowl’s sealed ecology. Especially here, water seemed scarce and the bodies went into a kind of pit that had a flexible blue cover and drains at the bottom.

  Cliff hated going into the buildings and avoided them. He came upon a big Sil body that had a family gathered around it. They were rolling it in a pale green sheet. They stepped back and looked at Cliff. They were short, thin, and probably could not easily carry the body. He nodded and squatted to pick up the stiff fragrant mass. He got it standing on the rigid legs, then tipped the body onto his shoulder. As he stood up, the pressure forced gas through the voice box and a ragged croak rattled out. It sent shivers down his back. For a long second he wondered if the alien was protesting. He made himself look into the contorted Sil face, gone rigid. A purple tongue stuck out between the small knobby Sil teeth. The eyes had burst and goo ran down the angular cheeks.

  Cliff looked away, stopped breathing. He took short jolting steps and the family followed him silently, all the way to the pit. He was sweating when he edged the body gently into the opening flap. The family just stared at the green sheet as it slid in, murmured to each other, then turned and walked slowly away. No sayings over the body, no ceremony. There was something dignified in the utter lack of ritual.

  None of the Sil had looked him in the eye. He wondered what that meant.

  The first day was hardest. After that, a numb resignation set in. The bodies got loaded on wagons and taken to parks—the only large, open areas in the city not filled with rubble. Some places the Sil got funeral pyres going, burning the bodies to keep them from stinking and from spreading disease. “Dirt takes not all,” Quert said. Cliff supposed that meant the soil processors were overloaded by such massive numbers.

  Many corpses were underground. The job became an elaborate Easter egg hunt, Irma remarked sourly. They would bust into a shelter where often Sil had taken refuge, sitting in orderly rows. The humans were just helpers beside the Sil who would gather up valuables from the Sil laps, where often the dead had held what they felt was most dear. The Sil did not attempt identification anymore. They just turned the valuables over to an escort team. Then Sil would come in with a tubular flamethrower and stand in the door and cremate those sitting rigid inside. Get the precious metals and jewelry out, Cliff supposed, and then burn everybody inside. An alien Belsen, he thought, and in the end, our fault.

  The first bodies the human team had carried out, they treated with care and respect, loading them onto stretchers provided to give some semblance of funeral dignity. But after the first day of working on the piles and acres of wrecked bodies, humans and Sil alike became more casual. Bodies got stacked and carried for convenience. After that, a rank callousness descended and they used racks to group the bodies, then drag them with electrical haulers like sleds of dead.

  The Sil called this entire bleak spectacle, the elegant stonework buildings smashed and seared brown and hard black, something that sounded like scleelachrhoft. But they all spoke little. In answer to questions, Quert mostly had an eye-move that meant “yes” or a side-nod that meant “no.”

  Then came the patient patrols through the gray stone rubble. Here a leg, there an arm. Just pickings at first, parts to bag, but then they hit a treasure vault of tragedy. A reeking hash of a hundred had assembled in a basement. Cliff stepped in and found the tiled floor was awash in a still-warm broth of rank water and viscera. When the burst water mains had erupted, Cliff deduced, some of them had tried to escape through a narrow exit in the back. Their bodies were packed in a tight passageway. The dead did not bear burns. From their stiff, bloated condition, he gathered they had died of the smoke or oxygen loss as the firestorm sucked it all away.

  Their leader had made it halfway up a ramp, only to be buried halfway up to her neck in a plaster goo and stone chips. She looked delicately young, smooth of skin still, though it was swollen and had begun to pucker with brown and blue welts. He carried her out himself.

  Humans were bigger and stronger and came from a higher-grav world, so they got assigned the harder jobs. When they went into a typical shelter, usually an ordinary basement, it looked to Cliff like a streetcar full of Sil who’d simultaneously had heart failure. Just sitting there in their chairs, all dead. A firestorm may occur naturally in forests, but in cities becomes a conflagration attaining such intensity that it creates and sustains its own wind system. Cliff had watched the first stages of it from a distance, as wind whirls darted among buildings like dust devils of pure yellow and burnt orange flame. Those danced among tall apartment buildings like eerie flame children having fun.

  Cliff became used to the hovering ruddy heat that seeped through the clouds still overhead. Smells came rising from the dead and made all the work gangs speed up their work. The bodies were not alike but strangely specific. Some clutched purses, others wore jewelry, and a few who had prepared for what they thought the worst wore rucksacks full of food. Some of the Sil work teams took these, and Cliff just looked away, not knowing what to say or do or whether to care at all. A young boy Sil had a pet, a four-legged furry thing Cliff had never seen the likes of—still leashed to the boy, eyes still gleaming.

  They were at their work, doggedly going from apartment to apartment, when a Sil woman suddenly appeared and hurled herself at Cliff. She shouted incoherent abuse and battered at him with tight fists. Another Sil rushed over and pulled her off him. She broke down sobbing, chanting, and was led away. He stood stolidly for a long while, emotions churning.

  Once some Sil work partners found a small cellar of what seemed to be a winelike drink. When Cliff passed by them a while later, carrying a Sil body, they seemed to be roaring drunk. He saw them later, too, and unlike those teams nearby were working energetically and maybe even enjoying it. So whatever they drank, it seemed a blessing.

  It went on and Cliff stopped even estimating the dead. The number was beyond thousands and probably in the tens of thousands and he did not want to think about it anymore. The fiery death penalty applied to all who happened to be in the undefended city—babies, old people, the zoo animals.…

  The teams talked less and less and the work days seemed to go on infinitely, down a dwindling pipe. A day toward the end, when they could see there were few streets left to cover, they were combing the shattered shells of the last buildings. With scarcely a whisper, a flittering craft came over and dropped filmy oval leaflets that drifted down from the sky. The curious script meant nothing to the humans, of course, but a Sil read it in broken Anglish:

  We destroyed you because you harbored the Late Invaders. They will damage our fragile eternal paradise and bring disease, unease, and horror to your lot, and to all who dwell beneath the Perpetual Sun in warm mutual company. We struck at the known location of Late Invaders and those helping them to elude our capture. Destruction of other than targets of high security value was unintended and an unavoidable consequence of the fortunes of safekeeping of our eternal Bowl.

  The Sil became angry when reading these notes. They hurled them to the ground, stomped on them. Then others gathered them up and marched off with piles of the filmy sheets. Cliff wondered at this and so followed. The Sil went to their collective lavatory. Since he was in need, he went in and found the propaganda stacked for use in wiping asses.

  He understood all this emotionally. Gathering up body parts in bushel baskets, helping a sorrowed male Sil dig with hands and shovels where he thought his wife might be … the events blended, endlessly.

  TEN

  Irma said, “You have a flat affect.”

  “Um, what’s that?” Cliff had just awakened from another long sleep. He looked out the narrow opening of the cave they called home. Beyond lay the same stark sunlit landscape o
f despair he had become accustomed to. He yawned. At least the halo effect in his vision had gone away. Not much else had.

  “It’s a failure to express feelings either verbally or nonverbally—that would be, just using your usual grunts and shrugs.”

  He kept watching the view out the cave opening and shifted uneasily on the inflatable bedding the Sil had given them. It was a bit small. “Can’t say much after what we’ve been through.”

  “I learned this in crew training. They gave it to us because we could go through traumas if we get to Glory—”

  “When we get there. This Bowl, this is an … interlude.”

  “Okay, when. There might be pretty heavy events to get through on Glory, our trainers said. So we trained to deal with shock, combat fatigue, stress disorders. Recognize the symptoms, apply a range of therapies. You’ve had low affect for days now.”

  He could not claim he didn’t feel differently, so he said nothing. That was always easier.

  “Look me in the eye.”

  Reluctantly, he did. Somehow it was easier to peer out at the blasted and sunny landscape … though now that he thought of that, it made no real sense. Still—

  Irma leaned forward, took his head in both hands, and looked fiercely into his eyes, shaking his head to get him to focus on her. “Good! Trust me, this is a problem and we both need to work on it. They told us to expect it especially when a subject—”

  “Now I’m a subject?”

  “Okay, a fellow crew member. It’s when people talk about issues without engaging their emotions.”

  “I’m … sorting things out.”

  “Another symptom is lack of expressive gestures, little animation in the face, not much vocal inflection.”

  “Um. Ah. So?”

  “Do you split your feelings away from events?”

  “Not … by design. I’m just trying to hold it together here.”

  “Taking pleasure in real things can help that.”

  “Um.”

  Pleasure. Good idea, quite distant from here …

  He looked out at the ever-bright sunshine that was beginning to weigh on him. The stellar jet cut across the sky, adding its neon glow to the hammering sunlight. They had experienced some darkness here and there on this long “expedition” through the strange, incomprehensibly large Bowl … and in his dreams now, he longed for more darkness. He dreamed of diving into deep waters, where a murky cool leafy world wrapped itself around him. He was always sorry to wake up.

  He was thinking of this when he realized she was deftly pushing his buttons. Her voice turned furry, intimate. Hands stroked, caressed. Pretty clearly she wasn’t being made wanton and reckless by his fabulous magnetism.

  This was therapy. Not that the fact mattered.

  It became a matter of silky moments and building readiness. Then a gliding delight, sweetly enclasped, and a long exultant shudder for both of them. The artful ease lasted him into a sliding sleep.…

  When he woke she took him through some softly worded moments he only later saw were exercises. Irma asked him in her soft, insistent voice to report the lurid dark nightmares he had. She walked him through those, tracing out moments like the rattling wheeze of corpses, the leaden weight of stiff bodies, the sharp acrid stench of rot … and then she asked him to watch her hand weave, left to right to left … a sway of motion that somehow called up calming spirits in him, let him lapse into a silent, quiet place where he could rest and feel and not swirl back down into those tormented whirlpools. She sighed and stayed with him while he sobbed silently, yet at least not alone. And slept again.

  He woke while Irma slept and reflected on good ol’ plain human sex among all this strangeness. Making love worked just fine here. He knew that aliens would have other such modes and they would be odd indeed. Earthside, male honeybee genitals exploded after sex; wasps turned cockroaches into zombie incubators; male scorpion flies produced wads of saliva to feed their mates—a nuptial gift that distracted her front end while her hind end mated. He had learned a basic lesson here: Expect the unexpected.

  More dozing. A lot later, it seemed, he asked vaguely, “We should go … somewhere.…”

  “The mass funeral festival of the Sil. We must go.”

  “When?”

  “Get dressed.”

  * * *

  She had gotten him into a halfway presentable mood with the most direct possible method. Smart, with talents he could not anticipate. He had always tried to work with people who were smarter, quicker, and more naturally adept than he was, plus those who had talents he could not even anticipate. Irma was all of that. In this incredible mess of an interstellar expedition, she kept her wits.

  He realized that he, on the other hand, had exceeded his limits. He had no combat experience and yet had somehow gotten through the first Folk assault with just a wound. That had nearly healed when the Folk came back with not one skyfish but six—to kill so many Sil that nobody could count them. No doubt the Folk hoped to catch the humans and burn them, too, but that could not have been the reason for the hours of unrelenting flame war.

  The Folk wanted discipline, and knew how to get it. Discipline meant punishment meant order meant stability meant this giant spinning contraption could go on its ancient trajectory, bound for Glory and stars beyond.

  Learn to think the way the Folk do, he thought. That was the only way to survive this bizarre, strange, and wonderful-but place.

  He slowly got from Quert a way to deal with all the violence. After all, loss was everywhere. Everyone on SunSeeker knew when they departed Earthside that they would never see family or friends again. Cliff tried to phrase what seemed to work. You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart, a wound that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.

  ELEVEN

  Cliff listened to the deep rolling music of the Sil dirge. This was an honor, he realized—to witness the public mourning of these lithe aliens, their voices soaring in a long, rolling symphony he could understand, at least emotionally. It was truly so—music had fundamentals common here. Their flowing melodic line had tricky interior cadences, subthemes, and as it gathered force, these merged to become a high, howling remorse laced through with beautiful, somber notes. In the carved rock amphitheater, the Sil stood as they sang, sat when they did not, their angular heads lifted up to show faces twisted with grief.

  They had lost many in the assault by the remorseless, hydrogen-fueled sky beasts. Those vast creatures had killed so many Sil almost as an afterthought, punishment for hiding humans. Apparently firing into crowds was permissible, and the Sil seemed unsurprised by these events.

  Cliff sat and thought of that as the music wrapped around him. It immersed them all—he could see this strong music had its effects on those beside him. The Sil had many subtle eye-gestures and the odd elongation of the flesh around the eyes apparently meant mourning. All because of the humans …

  His small band had been on the run for a long time, and now had met the sobering fact that those Folk who ran this huge, spinning machine would kill others just to stop a few humans. But … why were they important? It puzzled him and gave the slow, solemn proceedings of public mourning a gravitas he respected.

  Their song rose and fell; their long bass notes reverberating from elaborately carved walls. The Sil leader Quert stood tall and splayed arms to the sky as the large wind instruments among them—not separated, as in a human orchestra—joined in the deep notes, pealing forth as the longer wavelengths resonated with those reflecting from the walled basin. It was eerie and moving and Cliff let himself be drawn into it. Grief made its same choices for the Sil as among humans—gliding, graceful themes, deepening as the growing amplitude plowe
d into more somber courses. Then, suddenly, that ended in a stunning trill the voices held for a long while, as their instruments boomed forth.

  The silence. No applause. Just grief.

  They all—Howard, Irma, Terry, and Aybe—sat respectfully until told to move, as they had learned was considered polite here. Howard was nursing a bad cut and a bum knee, Terry and Aybe had burns and bound-up wounds, but altogether the humans had minimal damage. They kept their heads down, perhaps from politeness, but Cliff lowered his eyes because he did not want to look into the eyes of the Sil more than he had to. The Sil filed out, their slanted faces seeming even longer now, no one speaking. Their instruments caught Cliff’s eye. The laws of physics set design constraints for woodwinds and stringed players—long tubes, resonant cavities, holes for tuning—but the music that bloomed from these oddly shaped chambers and strings was both eerie and yet familiar. It had an artful use of counterpoint, moments of harmonic convergence, repeating details of melodic lines. There were side commentaries in other keys, too. Was music somehow universal?

  As they emerged from the stone bowl, he looked back at the now-empty crescents where the seats each had a slight rounded depression for sitting. Once in Sicily he had seen an ancient open theater that looked much like this. But here the stones were pale conglomerate, not limestone, and far older. Yet the same design emerged.

  Still obeying the code of silence, they walked into the sprawling community. This part of the Sil cityscape had escaped the fire bombing. It was a vast relief to be away from the charred precincts where he and the others had worked for … he could not even recall the count. At least a week, though now it seemed a boundary between a past where he had felt in control of his world, and now … this.…

  He pulled his mind away from the memories. Focus. His crew training made this possible, but not easy.