Rogue Star

by Frederik Pohl

  "Why?" Quamodian shivered again. "Why me?"

  "The guardians lack adequate files on the irrational patterns of self-destruction prevalent among your species," the flyer droned. "They can only .answer your question with another. Who has any reason to stop your trip to Earth?"

  "Cliff Hawk, perhaps." Quamodian scowled. uncertainly. "I can't think of anybody else. But he's a good many galaxies away from here. The whole thing baffles me."

  The flyer hummed for two seconds.

  "The guardians will continue working on the case," it said. "They report many factors which still resist logical resolution. However, they do have advice for you, based on a first analysis of the available data."

  "So?"

  "If you return to. your dwelling and remain inside, the computed probability of your premature termination is only point-o-two. If you continue your trip to Earth, however, the. computed probability of an illicit termination of your life is point-eight-nine. The guardians advise you to go home."

  "Thank the guardians," Quamodian said. "But Molly needs help." He sat up straighter. "Call the dome," he said. "Ask about my priority to Earth."

  Chapter 4

  The control dome reported that his priority request had been duly transmitted to Almalik, spokesman star for the citizen Cygnus, No priority had yet been issued.

  "Be patient, sir," the flyer added sympathetically. "The sentient suns are hard to hurry. With life spans of many billion years, they have then- own scale of time."

  Quamodian grumbled and waited, watching the robot guardians remove the dead man and his rusted spacecraft. Contemplating the computed probability of his own early termination, he grappled with the riddle of Solo Scott

  Scott's little sermon about association, taken by itself, made a weird kind of sense. Thinking back to his boyhood, Quamodian could see its truth in his own experience. The arrival of the fusorians on Earth had ended ages of competition and opened a new era of association. Ah" his life, Quamodian had been torn between the two.

  It struck him now that Scott was probably right. Self-interest may have been a necessary law of the jungle, but even the most primitive hunters had learned to work together. Competition had become a deadly sickness of higher civilization. The harshest therapy of the old Plan of Man couldn't cure it—not even with an explosive iron collar around the neck of every self-directed individual. When the fusorians came, most men welcomed them.

  But Quamodian had p elected not to join his parents in the new symbiotic union. Growing up in the disturbing transition years, he had come to love both ways of life. He yearned to keep his own individual freedom, however dangerous. But he also yearned, just as keenly, for the absolute security and peace the fusorians had brought.

  With a sharp conflict of emotions, he had watched the end of man's old civilization. Sometimes sadly, he had seen almost every feature of it—religion and philosophy, politics and business, social custom and private habit—proved needless or silly or just plain wrong. Often approving, he had observed the end of war, of want, of man's old cruelty. He found that he loved both the old and the new too much to abandon either.

  Forced to make his own decision when his parents accepted membership in Cygnus, he chose at first to compete. Struggling for academic marks, he won a Starscout scholarship that lifted him off the confused, and crowded Earth into a more intense and complex existence in the transgalactic civilization—that must have .been twenty years ago, if he converted universal time into the old solar periods.

  In his own life, .he reflected, the old jungle law had clearly gone wrong. Competing with robots and multiple beings and human symbiotes, he had failed his graduate finals. He had failed in a dozen pathetic little business enterprises. Reaching Exion as a sort of experimental animal, he had failed to beat Cliff Hawk, failed to win Molly Zaldivar..

  Only now, working with the Companions of the Star, had he found his own small but satisfying place in society. Not so final as the total self-surrender of symbiosis, it was still a useful social service. It was association enough for him—unless Molly changed her mind.

  "Attention, sir." The flyer's drone broke into his brown introspection. "The control dome is calling us back to the ramp."

  "Oh, .sorry." Relieved, he gave instructions. The flyer swam back into the stream of traffic. A stalked horror of a citizen with members like bamboo shoots and a frond of brain tissue like a skirt around its waist had paused to let him move into the line of traffic on the ramp.

  "Traffic control to Andreas Quamodian," the dome was flashing. "The multiple citizen Cygnus is fully qualified to issue priorities for intergalactic transit. Almalik, spokesman star for the citizen, has approved your application for a reservation number. You may enter the transflex cube."

  Quamodian grumbled his thanks, and the flyer carried him toward the cube. The veteran of a good many inter-galactic transits, he had never learned to enjoy them. The effects of transflection varied with the individual. Some felt nothing; a few reported pleasure or exhilaration. Most, to whom transit was unpleasant or terrifying, eased the strain of passage with drugs or hypnosis. Quamodian merely endured it.

  Before they reached the cube, the. flyer paused.

  "Sir, the guardians are calling again. On the basis of a new analysis they have recomputed the probability of your early termination at point-nine-three. They still advise you to go home."

  "Thank the guardians," Quamodian said. 'Tell them I'm going on to Earth—and Molly Zaldivar."

  "At least you are statistically safe until we reach our destination," the flyer assured him brightly. "A billion passengers arrive safe for only six who don't. Three of the six suffer nothing worse than dimensional rotation, with left sides exchanged for right. Two others undergo displacement of body tissue or prolonged psychosis. Only one passenger per billion is unaccountably lost. Even that one is statistically replaced. One passenger per billion is physically reduplicated through anomalous subspace refraction, so that the net loss is zero ..."

  "Shut up!" Quamodian growled. "I'm quite familiar with those statistics. As a monitor, I was once assigned to discover what becomes of that one lost passenger. I never solved the problem, and I prefer not to think about it now."

  Sulkily silent, j the flyer swam into the cube. Quamodian watched the diaphragm contract behind him, shutting out the endless file of waiting citizens. At once the flyer rocked and veered. Rotated out of space and time, routed by computation through a dozen or a hundred congruent folds of hyperspace, he felt as he always did: lost, stunned, and queasy.

  The blue walls flickered and dissolved into a darkening, grayish haze. A queer roaring came hollowly from nowhere, swelling in his ears. Numbing cold drove through him, as if every tissue of his body had somehow been plunged into the dark zero of the space between galactic clusters.

  Quamodian sweated and suffered. Transcience flight always did something to his location sense—researchers had experimented with the effect, but never explained it.

  "Here we are, sir!" the flyer piped at last. "Was that so bad ..."

  Its cheery voice was cut abruptly off. It spun and pitched and Tell. Quamodian saw streaks of blood-colored fire. He buried his wet face against his quivering knees and waited for his sense of place to adjust itself, it didn't. But after endless sickening seconds, he felt the flyer break out of that wild dive, and into level flight.

  "Reporting trouble, sir," it whined. "Malfunction in all communication and navigation gear.'" It whirred and clicked and added blackly, "If somebody wished to keep us off the Earth, they have scored a point."

  Chapter 5

  Quamodian raised his head and saw the sun. An unfamiliar star, blood-red and huge, too dull to hurt his eyes. It floated low in a dead-black sky, swelling across many degrees. Dark spots and streaks and convolutions covered its two enormous hemispheres, with almost the pattern of a naked human brain. Thick ropes of red plasma coiled away from both its polar coronas, brighter than its mottled face.

  "It's sentient
!" he whispered to the flyer. "I'm sure it's sentient. When neuroplasmic structures interfere with normal energy, flow, a star gets that bloated look."

  "No data," the flyer answered. "I'm scanning all my stellar files, but observable indices don't identify this star on my complete file of galactic charts. Possible inference: its location is outside the charted cluster."

  With a spasmodic effort, Quamodian broke away from the hypnotic glare of that snake-wreathed star. He caught a rasping breath and glanced at the world beneath.

  "It certainly—certainly isn't Earth." He gulped at a great lump of terror in his throat. "It looks like we were caught by that billionth chance!"

  The flyer hung high above a fiat and endless beach. To the north—or was it north—a vast sea lay flat and thick as blood beneath that dreadful sun. To the south— if that was really south—black cliffs rose above the level of the flyer.

  That endless mountain wall was curiously sheer, curiously uniform, and curved very slightly toward the sea. Perhaps, he thought, t it was an ancient crater rim, a thousand-mile bowl for that flat sea which seemed so dead that he wondered when its tides had ever worn its beaches smooth.

  All around the twilight horizon, red auroras played. They writhed and coiled like blood-colored snakes, and struck their red reflections in the glassy sea. They sifted red fire beyond the walling peaks. .With an unpleasant start, Quamodian found that he could trace the star's plasma tentacles across that sullen sky, all the way from the polar coronas down to the little misty fingers reaching toward the beach, as if the sentient sun held sky and sea In a visible grasp.

  "Lower," he told the flyer. "There's something on the sand I want, to see."

  Flakes of lighter color sprinkled the wide black beach, taking form as the flyer sank. Gray of weathered metal. Gleam of fading paint. White of naked bone. Dead citizens and their wrecked machines cluttered a three-mile circle of sand.

  "I think we've found what becomes of those missing passengers," he said. "Call the guardians and file a report"

  "Sir, I've been calling!" The flyer's shrill tone seemed deeply aggrieved. "I've been calling on all the transgalactic channels, with full emergency power. For some reason, I can't get a reply."

  "Keep on calling. By the way—uh—how is our power supply?"

  "Our emergency power pack is half depleted, sir," the flyer reported. "Shall we land to conserve it?"

  "Not yet," He shaded his eyes against the cold red sun, to search that endless beach. "There! Toward the foot of the cliffs. Something I want to see. A little to the right. Those four queer towers. Land as close as you can."

  The towers intrigued him. Spaced at the corners of a square, they were half crude masonry, built of unsmoothed rocks laid together with clay. The higher halves were salvaged metal from the wrecks, welded crazily.

  As the flyer settled, he discovered a web of cables stretched between the towers: a skeleton cube, outlined in taut bright wire; a second, smaller cube, suspended inside the first with tight wires which themselves outlined six tapered hexahedrons.

  "A tesseract!" Wonder hushed his voice. "The essential circuitry of a transflex cube. What would that mean?"

  "Relevant information unavailable. Data observable on this planet shows no logical relationship to any system or program of action in my files." The flyer hummed for three (seconds and added sadly, "I'm sorry sir. I was not prepared for this."

  "Keep trying," Quamodian said. "We've got to reach the Earth and Molly Zaldivar, in spite of—whatever it is!" He glanced at that surly sun and tried not to shiver. "How's the air?" he asked. "Fit for me?"

  "Oxygen, thirty-point-seven-nine per cent," the flyer said. "Diluents, noble gases. Helium, neon, argon. Temperature and pressure toward the lower limits of human tolerance. You won't like it, but it won't kill you."

  'Thanks," he said. "Open—no, wait!"

  An odd little procession came marching down the beach from a black round cave which he saw now above the rubble at the foot of the cliffs. Half a dozen tattered citizens. Three of them robots, badly damaged. Two yellow-crusted multipeds with missing legs. A single human being, leading them all, waving a white rag on a stick.

  The human was visibly a woman, in a faded garment made for a larger citizen of a very different race. Her thick dark hair had been clumsily haggled off, and black dirt splotched her visible skin.

  Quamodian scrambled out of the flyer, ran a little way to meet her, and paused in wonder. Beneath the alien garb and the grime, she was not only beautifully human. In some way her loveliness was hauntingly familiar. He nailed her breathlessly, in old Earth English.

  "Hello..."

  "Stop!" She cut him off sharply, in the universal tongue. "Stand where you are. Identify yourself."

  Her voice was brisk and cold, but something in its rich timbre reminded him—reminded him of Molly Zaldivar! That was what had teased his sense of recognition. The likeness sent a chilly prickling down his spine. Scrub off the dirt, replace her butchered hair, put her in human garb, feed her a few square meals, and she would be a dead ringer for Molly Zaldivar.

  "I'm waiting:" Sternly, she raised that tantalizing voice. "Let's have your standard identification code."

  He made some vague, bewildered sound.

  "Speak out!" She waved a signal, and the robots darted out around him. "I'm the authority here."

  Stammering a little, he recited his universal identification pattern.

  "Thank you, Monitor Quamodian." She nodded briskly. "I am also with the Companions of the Star. Senior Monitor Clothilde Kwai Kwich." She stressed the Senior. "What's the date, outside?"

  He gave her the universal date.

  "Thank you, Monitor." Calculating, she made an appealing little frown that belonged to Molly Zaldivar. "That means I've been here five years—five years too long!"

  She nodded at the bloated sun.

  "Time's hard to follow here," she added. "Because the day and the year on this planet are the same. The sun never moves in the sky. We can't even count the local years, because we can see no stars for reference points."

  Listening, Quamodian closed his eyes. Except for its brisk authority, her rich voice was altogether Molly's.

  "Wake up!" she snapped. "How did you get here?"

  "I was in transflection transit from Exion Four to Earth," Quamodian said. "With travel priority from Cygnus to answer a trouble call from a girl named Molly Zaldivar." He saw no change in her dark-smudged face when he spoke the name, but he couldn't help asking, "You don't happen to have a twin named Molly?"

  "Certainly not. Don't waste my time with idle talk. Monitor, you'd better wake upl We've all facing unprecedented problems here. Every effort must be directed toward their solution. As your superior Companion, I'll require you to cooperate. My subordinates may now identify themselves."

  Speaking in unison, the three robots intoned a voice pattern which identified them as traffic safety inspectors. Curiously, all three gave the same serial number. The two yellow-shelled multipeds spoke in turn, but they were both assistant traffic safety inspectors and then- identification codes were identical.

  "They arrived a year after I did," Clothilde Kwai Kwich explained. "I had been assigned to discover what becomes of the statistically small number of passengers lost in transflection transit. Their assignment was to find what became of me. They entered the headquarters terminal as a team of two—an inspector and his robot assistant. I had been in route to Exion Four, and that was their destination." Staring at the three damaged robots and the two crippled multipeds, Quamodian felt cold breath on the back of his neck.

  "You see what happened," she went on. "The inspector was duplicated in transit. The robot assistant was triplicated. What is even more confusing, their identities were switched. All the robots now have the minds and memories of the original inspector. The duplicated original inspector has the logical programs and the memory banks of the robot assistant. Finally, they were all dropped here."

  Her brisk voice cr
acked. "And that—" For a moment, beneath her commanding self-assurance, he heard the quaver of naked terror. She stiffened at once, recovering herself. "Monitor Quamodian, that's the sort of problem we face here."

  "What about you?" He couldn't stop that impetuous question. "Did you notice any change in yourself?"

  She flushed and trembled. Familiar auburn lights glanced in her short dark hair as she turned to gaze along that endless beach. Abruptly she swung back, her chin lifted in a small gesture of anger that stirred his most painful recollections.

  "I resent personal questions," her voice was strained and quivering. "If you want objective information—I have seen evidence of some slight physical anomalies, which I prefer not to discuss. Let's get on to questions of survival."

  "Agreed," Quamodian said. "Can you explain how we got here?"

  "We've been collecting facts and putting hypotheses together." Uncertainty seemed to slow her voice. "Of course you understand that any firm conclusions will have to wait for the full analysis of data that I still hope to make when we get back to headquarters—if we do get back."

  She shrugged angrily in that grotesque garb, as if to free herself from clutching fear.

  "I'll tell what our evidence suggests." She nodded toward the dark-mottled sun, "I think that's a rogue star. I think it is systematically tampering with transflection traffic. The dated documents in the oldest wrecks show that they were highjacked many centuries ago, but the rate of this activity seems to have increased recently—about the same time that Solomon Scott set up his stellar project on Exion Four to investigate rogue stars."

  "So the rogues are watching us!" He shivered in spite of himself in the steady wind that blew across the black beach toward that sullen sun. "Has Solo Scott been here?"

  "No," she said. "We've checked all the wrecks and made up a register. All except a few very early victims have been identified. There are a few humans on the list. None that could be Scott." She gave him a probing look of Molly's. "Why do you ask?"