Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  “Like a huge dragonfly,” Irma whispered.

  Quert said, “Scout. Smart one. High value, so Folk must—”

  The thing surged as it turned toward them. Cliff said, “Inside!”

  The nearest building was ceramic coated with crusty, bronzed metal. He ran toward it as he looked back. Howard was watching with binoculars the slim body as it canted in the air, wings furious. “Howard!”

  Quert was faster than the humans and got into the building entrance. It caught the big hinged door and swung it nearly closed as people ran under its arch. “Howard!” Cliff called, and then went in.

  “We must be inside,” Quert said. “Scout smart with—”

  A humming in the air washed over them. Cliff saw Howard jerk and grab with frenzied fingers at his head. A startled yelp from him turned to a high, shrill scream. Howard fell and was snatching at his legs, head, chest. His jaw yawned wide with a colossal cry. His eyes bulged white.

  Quert slammed the heavy metal door closed and drove a latch into place, cutting off Howard’s shriek like a knife.

  Cliff stood blinking at the big door, unable to push away the sharp image of Howard frantically slapping at invisible demons.

  The humans looked around at the crowds, dazed. There were many Sil already inside, providing a chorus of their sliding speech, feet shuffling, eyes shifting uneasily at this latest attack. Others, though, slumped against walls and let their heads rest back, eyes closed, as if resigned to absorbing yet one more disaster.

  “They get to shelter fast,” Irma noted. “Seem to be riding it out, pacing themselves.”

  There were no windows in this place. Phosphors lit the narrow rooms. Cliff went through the Sil crowds, their eyes tracking him, and down a corridor, searching for a way to see out. The air hung thick and carried an odd, sour flavor.

  He turned back and found Quert following him, who said, “Hurt come through glass.”

  “You come here to get away from the Folk microwave weapon?”

  Quert made the odd, waggling sign of assent. “They Folk change to do your kind.”

  Irma had followed Quert through the claustro-corridors. “This time it hit Howard. The Folk must’ve found the right frequency or power levels.”

  “Folk know technologies well. Adjust fast. Always have.”

  “And sent it on that scout?” Cliff wanted to see how Howard was doing. “If I could get a look—”

  “No window this place.” Quert made a hand gesture that they had learned, during the long days of burying the Sil dead, meant “rest peacefully, no cares.”

  The Sil would not let Cliff find a way to look out. One of them came down a chute and, speaking quickly in the sibilant squirts the Sil used, through Quert reported that the fast-flying scout with the big gleaming eyes had circled until it tired, fired down randomly at some Sil, then flew away.

  Irma said, “It’s come before?”

  “Only metal stops hurt.” Quert looked weary, long lines running down its pale face and leathery neck. “Keep tight.”

  Cliff knew that microwaves in the spectral region that plucked at the human nervous system were about three millimeters in wavelength. The Sil must be vulnerable to a different wavelength, since humans had not felt the pain gun used in earlier assaults. So the Folk must have developed something that hurt Howard a great deal, and done it within a short while. Something around a hundred gigahertz. Impressive.

  Irma said, “So they must know you Sil very well—”

  “The aquladatorpa knows us. It look for you.”

  “You’ve been living a long time with the Folk. Under them, I should say. How do you bear it?”

  Quert thought awhile and Cliff let him, not interrupting. Humans had a nervous, intrusive way of interrupting each other, a social gaffe of some consequence among the Sil. Then Quert sighed and said slowly, “You have word, ‘enchant,’ means our ochig. Or like it. Enchant comes from light, from sun and jet. Living essence, is enchant. Ochig comes down streaming. Plants, animals, Sil, and now human grow and learn and think from ochig. Bowl turns to keep us here so ochig can bring enchant passing through us. Sil in world, human in world, Folk more in the ochig, thick in ochig. Moving through world, ochig makes pattern. Folk see pattern. Get pattern wrong and Folk do wrong.”

  “They don’t seem any better than you Sil.”

  “Not better. But in right place.”

  “They’re in the right place when they slaughter you?”

  “Right will come. Ochig endures.”

  This was the longest Quert had ever talked about anything, indeed the longest speech he had ever overheard among any of the Sil. They had an air of paying attention to the passing moment. He envied that.

  Cliff wandered aimlessly, still seeing in his mind’s eye Howard slapping at himself and shrieking. He came upon Irma, who had found a little cranny and was sitting on the bare cold stone floor, sobbing. He sat beside her and took her shoulders in his hands and drew her close. Soon enough he was murmuring and clutching her, letting out emotions he did not wish to name. Just holding her helped. He kneaded the tight muscles in her neck and shoulders. She did the same for him and in the long dim time between them some comfort stole over their bodies and then deeper. He could not cry but she could, letting the soft sobs out one at a time. Time eased around them.

  They spent more hours inside before the Sil unwrapped the shelter. They coiled up shiny sheets that they had triggered to cover all the door hinges. Intense electromagnetic waves with millimeter wavelengths can leak around slim edges, even those less than a millimeter wide.

  Cliff looked out a small window and saw Howard curled up on the ground with no Sil within view. They came out a side door and surveyed the empty sky. Aybe rushed forward, unhooking the first-aid kit … and they all stopped where Howard sprawled.

  Howard did not resemble a man now nearly so much as a twisted, red, roasted chicken. Lips blue and bloodless, arms a blotchy purple. His eyes peered up at them as though asking what had happened.

  Cliff stared at the face a long time. This man had been under his leadership since they left the ship, since they went through the lock at their landing, and then across long weary paths and through sudden panics. Howard had a habit of getting hurt, missing jumps and landing wrong, some scrapes and sprains, despite his physical stats. The ground truth, as their training had told them, was the final fact, and no tests or training could tell you what happened when plans met reality in a usually brutal collision. Swift came reality, and it took no prisoners. Cliff had not seen this coming and Howard had lagged a step or two behind and so was now forever gone. On his watch.

  Quert said quietly, “Is quick. Hurt is where beam hits.”

  They buried Howard with the other Sil in the collective grave site. Cliff said little and they were walking back from the site when a faint hum filled the air. Heads turned. Sil nearby rustled with alarm.

  The slim shape skimmed low, wings whirring in the sky. Sil began running. Their yellow eyes raced with jittery panic.

  “Go time,” Quert said. They went.

  PART III

  STATUS OPERA

  Scientists study the world as it is; engineers create the world that has never been.

  —THEODORE VON KÁRMÁN

  TWELVE

  Memor watched the primate scream. She tried to lunge out of the beam and tripped. Sprawled. Gasped. The armaments team dutifully tracked her as the poor dim creature scrambled to crawl away. She kept up the sobbing little shrieks as the weapons crew tuned their large antennas further. It went on until Memor waved an impatient fan-display and the team cut off the pain beam.

  The team was pleased, their feathers fluttering with joy, though they kept discipline and said nothing. They had correctly adjusted their weaponry and hit the right resonance for nerve stimulation in the alien.

  “Tananareve,” Memor in her best learned accent, trying to address the primate by name in its own awkward tongue, “you can survive this level of agony for, you
would say, how long?”

  Free of agony, the primate leaped to her feet. Eyes narrow, mouth tight, voice high. “You torture me like a lab animal!”

  “A legitimate use,” Memor said mildly, “in warfare.”

  “War? We landed on your world-thing, tried to open negotiations—”

  “No use to revisit the past, little one. We are on to other matters, and this experiment was useful to us.”

  “How?” The primate sagged to her knees, than sat, wiping sweat from her forehead. “How can slamming me with that damn fire-beam help?”

  “We need to know how to … negotiate … with those of your kind.”

  “You mean fight them.”

  “The opening struggle comes first, of course.”

  Tananareve’s face took on an expression Memor had learned to interpret: cautious calculation. These primates managed to convey emotion through small moves of mouth, eyes, chin. They had evolved on some flat plain, apparently, without benefit of the wide range of expression that feathers conferred. Tananareve said slowly, “I’m very glad they’re still free. It means you don’t know how to deal with them.”

  Memor disliked the sliding logic of this creature, but knew she had to get around it. “We need the means to bring them to order. Inflicting pain is much more … virtuous … than simply killing them, I think you will agree?”

  Tananareve shot back, “Do you have anything you would die for? Your freedom to make your own way, for example?”

  “No, dying seems pointless. If you die, you cannot make use of the outcome of the act.”

  “Die to save others? Or for a belief?”

  “I certainly would not die for my beliefs. I could be wrong.”

  Tananareve shook her head, which seemed to be how these creatures implied rejection. “So you experiment on me, to see what power level of your beam works best?”

  “That, and tunable frequency. How else are we to know?”

  Thin lips, narrowed eyes. Anger, yes; Memor was getting used to their ways. “Don’t do it again.”

  “I see no need to. You obviously felt a great terrible agony. That will suffice.”

  “I need … sleep.”

  “That I can grant.” In truth, Memor was tired of this exercise. She did not like to inflict stinging hurt. Yet her superior, Asenath, had commanded that a fresh weapon be developed, capable of delivering sudden sharp pain. The customary such radiator, which worked well on the Sil, had failed in the first, clumsy battle. Memor did not like to think of that engagement, which had killed the skyfish she rode in. Her escape pod had lingered long enough to witness the giant, buoyant beast writhe in air, its hydrogen chambers breached by rattling shots from the ground cannon below. Then the hydrogen ignited in angry orange fireballs and the skyfish gave a long, rolling bass note of agony. The mournful cry did not end until its huge cylindrical body crumpled, crackling with flames, against a hillside. What a fiasco!

  Now Memor had to redeem herself. She could do so by developing and delivering quickly a pain projector, one that could damage the primates without overloading their nervous systems, and thus killing them. And now she had. Further, at the insistence of the weapons shops, Memor’s stroke of insight had been to carry out earlier testing on small tree-dweller primates, gathered from the Citadel Gardens for the purpose. They seemed to have similar neurological systems and vulnerabilities, and so were the optimal path to this success.

  Memor swelled with pride. The trials on the Sil city had been preliminary, and it was difficult from the skyfish to discern if humans had been affected at all. But these tunings made that probable. The Sil had needed discipline, and the possibility of death-stinging the humans hiding among them was a bonus, of course.

  “We will speak later,” she told the primate. “I have more interesting experiments in mind for us to work upon together.”

  The primate made a noise of deep tones—nothing more than grunts, really—perhaps some symptom of a residual pain. Memor thought it best not to notice this as she departed, her small attendants and the weapons team following dutifully.

  THIRTEEN

  Memor hated when her insides wanted to be her outsides.

  She did not like the testing of new weapons upon her charge, the primate. To do so made her nauseated, her acids run sour. Yet Asenath had ordered quick results quite clearly, and to preserve her position Memor had to comply. She accepted the logic, however distasteful the experience.

  Looked at another way, the slap of pain did not merely withhold: the slap imparted. It conveyed precisely the knowledge of greater power withheld. In that knowledge lay the genius of using, the deep humiliation it imposed. It invited the victim to accept a punishment in pursuit of a larger purpose, one that might have been worse—that would in fact be worse if the use wasn’t accepted. The pain-slap required that the higher goal be understood.

  Of course, the primates could not understand this, but in time with their Adoption that would come. If they could not be so opened, then they would have to be extinguished, well before their vagrant abilities could be a threat.

  Memor relaxed a bit by regarding the aged wonders nearby as she passed down corridors and through yawning archways. The teeth of time wore long on the Bowl. By its nature it must run steadily. Engineer species must fix problems without the luxury of trial and error experimenting. That meant engineer teams relied on memory, not ingenuity. Intelligence was less vital than ready response to situations that had occurred before, and so were lodged in cultural recollection. Species had their mental abilities shaped to do this. It was the Way.

  Memor thought on this as she watched some mutants being culled. They were small variants on the repair snakes, long ago acquired from a world with rapid tectonics. They had evolved swift, acute responses to those treacherous lands, a driver of their crafty intelligence. Memor had witnessed the underground cities this kind built, when allowed, in the underskin of the Bowl—labyrinths of elegance and deft taste she had been much impressed by. Memor remained surprised that these snakes had subsections of their genome that made them resist the nirvana of the Bowl. Surely here they should be endlessly joyful, for they were free of the frightening ground-quakes, foul volcanoes, and hammering ocean waves that often dashed their hopes and their subsurface homes to oblivion?

  These, however, had a touch too much of their crafty independence. They were in a nearby chamber with transparent walls, where another research team had tried to correct the mental errors in the snakes. Apparently, this corrective experiment had failed. The researchers were exterminating them by gas, and Memor paused to watch the agonies of these smart serpents, who under duress flung themselves into twisting knots. It was revolting, writhing bodies and pain-stretched mouths. At least she could not hear them, as she had Tananareve’s shrieks. Gazing through the wall at this, she could not help but reflect upon the fate of the primates, should they continue to provoke.

  They would face the fate of the Sil, whose rebellion had united with the renegade primates and brought down Memor’s skyfish. That had made the reprisal destruction of the Sil city inevitable—though it came first as an idea sprung from the slim though weighty head of Asenath, the reigning Chief of Wisdom.

  Memor sighed and trudged on, putting the image of the snake agonies behind her. Now she must go to Asenath and confer, though she sorely disliked and feared the Chief of Wisdom, who was known to be capricious.

  An oddity of long history had placed the confinement and punishment chambers together with ancient honoring sites. They were all now encased in a great Citadel that loomed above the lush green landscapes here. She lumbered past large, luxuriant stone structures of vast age, moss clinging to the doorways of crypts polished by time. Some bore blemishes of tomb raiders, but even those harsh, jagged edges had smoothed. These chambers held ancient dead who had been allowed burial, in a far-distant time when that was possible, and before the realization that all mass and vital elements must be reprocessed. Surely that was the highest honor, to be
part of life eternally, not a mere oxidized relic. The bodies inside had long returned to the air, of course, with only shriveled bones remaining as a small, unharvested calcium deposit. No doubt the grave goods—ornaments and valuable family remembrance-coffers that some added to the sepulchers of that age—had disappeared long ago, at the hands of vagrant intruders. The past was the easiest venue to rob, after all.

  Though not to fathom, came a vagrant sliver of thought. Memor stopped, shocked. Her attendants rustled, unsure what to do. With a feather rattle Memor bade them stand away. The sudden thrust of not to fathom carried guilt and fear wrapped around it. Memor felt the thought-voice and knew it had come lancing up from her Undermind. Something had festered there, and now propelled out, calling to her. She would have to deal with the unruly, understand what this shaft of emotion meant. But not now. She forced herself to resume her stroll, not letting her aides see her vexed condition. Best to rattle her feathers, sigh, casually move on.

  She noted there were pointless messages for the unknowable future, here: TO BE READ UPON YOUR WAKING, from some lost age when minds stored in silica or cryo could, they hoped, work forth from their decay into some future with vaster, smarter resources. None awoke, for there was no shortage of minds in the Bowl. Nor of bodies, for the number of walking, talking minds was a matter of stability, not wealth. Minds were not the point of the Bowl, but the long-run destiny of the Folk was … and of course, of those lucky species who came onboard through countless Annuals of time, to help make the Bowl sail on, sail on, to witness and grasp the great prospect offered by the whole galaxy’s own vast, strange, ponderous assets. Whoever or, indeed, whatever wrote TO BE READ UPON YOUR WAKING lived in some illusion of past times. They now drifted as fragrant dust beneath Memor’s great slapping feet.