Sargasso of Lost Starships Rehidden

by Poula Anderson

that for us.'

  'We go back there?' Wocha stirred uneasily. 'I don't like, boss. It's toombar. Bad.'

  'Yeah, so it is.'

  'Better we stay home. Manor needs repair. Peasants need our help. I need beer.'

  'So do I. I'll see if we can't promote some from the quartermaster. Old Joan can look after the estate while we're away, and the peasants will just have to look after themselves. Maybe it's time they learned how.' At a knock on the door: 'Come in.'

  Tetsuko Takahashi, the ship's exec, brought her small sturdy form around Wocha and sat down on the edge of the bunk. 'Your slave has the Old Sir hopping mad,' she grinned. 'She'll eat six times a woman's ration.'

  'And drink it.' Donovan smiled back; she couldn't help liking the cocky little Terran. Then, with a sudden renewed bitterness: 'And she's worth it. I couldn't be without her. She may not be so terribly bright, but she's my only proof that loyalty and decency aren't extinct.'

  Takahashi gave her a puzzled look. 'Why do you hate us so much?' she asked.

  'You came in where you weren't asked. Ansa was free, and now it's just another province of your damned Empire.'

  'Maybe so. But you were a backwater, an underpopulated agricultural planet which nobody had ever heard of, exposed to barbarian raids and perhaps to nonhuman conquest. You're safe now, and you're part of a great social-economic system which can do more than all those squabbling little kingdoms and republics and theocracies and God knows what else put together could ever dream of.'

  'Who said we wanted to be safe? Our ancestors came to Ansa to be free. We fought Shalmu when the greenies wanted to take what we'd built, and then we made friends with them. We had elbow room and a way of life that was our own. Now you'll bring in your surplus population to fill our green lands with yelling cities and squalling people. You'll tear down the culture we evolved so painfully and make us just another bunch of kowtowing Imperial citizens.'

  'Frankly, Donovan, I don't think it was much of a culture. It sat in its comfortable rut and admired the achievements of its ancestors. What did your precious Families do but hunt and loaf and throw big parties? Maybe they did fulfill a magisterial function--so what? Any elected yut could do the same in that simple a society.' Takahashi fixed her eyes on Donovan's. 'But rights and wrongs aside, the Empire had to annex Ansa, and when you wouldn't come in peaceably you had to be dragged in.'

  'Yeah. A dumping ground for people who were too stupid not to control their own breeding.'

  'Your Ansan peasants, my friend, have about twice the Terran birth rate. It's merely that there are more Terrans to start with--and Sirians and Centaurians and all the old settled planets. No, it was more than that. It was a question of military necessity.'

  'Uh-huh. Sure.'

  'Read your history sometime. When the Commonwealth broke up in civil wars two hundred years ago it was hell between the stars. Half savage peoples who never should have left their planets had learned how to build spaceships and were going out to raid and conquer. A dozen would-be overlords scorched whole worlds with their battles. You can't have anarchy on an interstellar scale. Too many people suffer. Old Manuela I had the guts to proclaim herself Empress of Sol--no pretty euphemisms for her, an empire was needed and an empire was what she built. She kicked the barbarians out of the Solanr System and went on to conquer their home territories and civilize them. That meant she had to subjugate stars closer to home, to protect her lines of communication. This led to further trouble elsewhere. Oh, yes, a lot of it was greed, but the planets which were conquered for their wealth would have been sucked in anyway by sheer economics. The second Argolid carried on, and now her daughter, Manuela II, is finishing the job. We've very nearly attained what we must have--an empire large enough to be socio-economically self-sufficient and defend itself against all comers, of which there are many, without being too large for control. You should visit the inner Empire sometime, Donovan, and see how many social evils it's been possible to wipe out because of security and central power. But we need this sector to protect our Sagittarian flank, so we're taking it. Fifty years from now you'll be glad we did.'

  Donovan looked sourly up at her.

  'Why are you feeding me that?' she asked. 'I've heard it before.'

  'We're going to survey a dangerous region, and you're our guide. The captain and I think there's more than a new radiation in the Black Nebula. I'd like to think we could trust you.'

  'Think so if you wish.'

  'We could use a hypnoprobe on you, you know. We'd squeeze your skull dry of everything it contained. But we'd rather spare you that indignity.'

  'And you might need me when you get there, and I'd still be only half conscious. Quit playing the great altruist, Takahashi.'

  The exec shook her head. 'There's something wrong inside you, Donovan,' she murmured. 'You aren't the woman who licked us at Luga.'

  'Luga!' Donovan's eyes flashed. 'Were you there?'

  'Sure. Destroyer North Africa, just come back from the Zarune front--Cigarette?'

  They fell to yarning and passed a pleasant hour. Donovan could not suppress a vague regret when Takahashi left. They aren't such bad fellows, those Impies, They were brave and honorable enemies, and they've been lenient conquerors as such things go. But when we hit the Black Nebula--

  She shuddered. 'Wocha, get that whiskey out of my trunk.'

  'You not going to get drunk again, boss?' The Donarrian's voice rumbled disappointment.

  'I am. And I'm going to try to stay drunk the whole damn voyage. You just don't know what we're heading for, Wocha.'

  Stranger, go back.

  Spaceman, go home. Turn back, adventurer.

  It is death. Return, human.

  The darkness whispered. Voices ran down the length of the ship, blending with the unending murmur of the drive, urging, commanding, whispering so low that it seemed to be within women's skulls.

  Basille Donovan lay in darkness. Her mouth tasted foul, and there was a throb in her temples and a wretchedness in her throat. She lay and listened to the voice which had wakened her.

  Go home, wanderer. You will die, your ship will plunge through the hollow dark till the stars grow cold. Turn home, human.

  'Boss. I hear them, boss. I'm scared.'

  'How long have we been under weigh? When did we leave Ansa?'

  'A week ago, boss, maybe more. You been drunk. Wake up, boss, turn on the light. They're whispering in the dark, and I'm scared.'

  'We must be getting close.'

  Return. Go home. First comes madness and then comes death and then comes the spinning outward forever. Turn back, spacewoman.

  Bodiless whisper out of the thick thrumming dark, sourceless all-pervading susurration, and it mocked, there was the cruel cynical scorn of the outer vastness running up and down the laughing voice. It murmured, it jeered, it ran along nerves with little icy feet and flowed through the brain, it called and gibed and hungered. It warned them to go back, and it knew they wouldn't and railed its mockery at them for it. Demon whisper, there in the huge cold loneliness, sneering and grinning and waiting.

  Donovan sat up and groped for the light switch. 'We're close enough,' she said tonelessly. 'We're in their range now.'

  Footsteps racketed in the corridor outside. A sharp rap on her door. 'Come in. Come in and enjoy yourself.'

  3

  Donovan hadn't found the switch before the door was open and light spilled in from the hallway fluorotubes. Cold white light, a shaft of it picking out Wocha's monstrous form and throwing grotesque shadows on the walls. Commander Jansky was there, in full uniform, and Ensign Jeanne Scoresby, his aide. The younger boy's face was white, his eyes enormous, but Jansky wore grimness like an armor.

  'All right, Donovan,' he said. 'You've had your binge, and now the trouble is starting. You didn't say they were voices.'

  'They could be anything,' she answered, climbing out of the bunk and steadying herself with one hand. Her head swam a little. The corners of the room were thick with shadow.<
br />
  Back, spacewoman. Turn home, human.

  'Delusions?' The woman laughed unpleasantly. Her face was pale and gaunt, rough in the bleak radiance. 'When you start going crazy, I imagine you always hear voices.'

  There was contempt in the gray eyes that raked her. 'Donovan, I put a technician to work on it when the noises began a few hours ago. She recorded them. They're very faint, and they seem to originate just outside the ear of anyone who hears them, but they're real enough. Radiations don't speak in human Anglic with an accent such as I never heard before. Not unless they're carrier waves for a message. Donovan, who or what is inside the Black Nebula?'

  The Ansan's laugh jarred out again. 'Who or what is inside this ship?' she challenged. 'Our great human science has no way of making the air vibrate by itself. Maybe there are ghosts, standing invisible just beside us and whispering in our ears.'

  'We could detect nothing, no radiations, no energy-fields, nothing but the sounds themselves. I refuse to believe that matter can be set in motion without some kind of physical force being applied.' Jansky clapped a hand to his sidearm. 'You know what is waiting for us. You know how they do it.'

  'Go ahead. Hypnoprobe me. Lay me out helpless for a week. Or shoot me if you like. You'll be just as dead whatever you do.'

  His tones were cold and sharp. 'Get on your clothes and come up to the bridge.'

  She shrugged, picked up her uniform, and began to shuck her pajamas. The men looked away.

  Human, go back. You will go mad and die.

  Valdum, she thought, with a wrenching deep inside her. Valdum, I've returned.

  She stepped over to the mirror. The Ansan uniform was a gesture of defiance, and it occurred to her that she should wash her face if she wore it in front of these Terrans. She ran the facewasher over cheeks and chin, pulled her tunic straight, and turned back. 'All right.'

  They went out into the hallway. A spacewoman went by on some errand. Her eyes were strained wide, staring at blankness, and her lips moved. The voices were speaking to her.

  'It's demoralizing the crew,' said Jansky. 'It has to stop.'

  'Go ahead and stop it,' jeered Donovan. 'Aren't you the representative of the almighty Empire of Sol? Command them in the name of Her Majesty to stop.'

  'The crew, I mean,' he said impatiently. 'They've got no business being frightened by a local phenomenon.'

  'Any human would be,' answered Donovan. 'You are, though you won't admit it. I am. We can't help ourselves. It's instinct.'

  'Instinct?' His clear eyes were a little surprised.

  'Sure.' Donovan halted before a viewscreen. Space blazed and roiled against the reaching darkness. 'Just look out there. It's the primeval night, it's the blind unknown where unimaginable inhuman Powers are abroad. We're still the old half-ape, crouched over her fire and trembling while the night roars around us. Our lighted, heated, metal-armored ship is still the lonely cave-fire, the hearth with steel and stone laid at the door to keep out the gods. When the Wild Hunt breaks through and shouts at us, we must be frightened, it's the primitive fear of the dark. It's part of us.'

  He swept on, his cloak a scarlet wing flapping behind him. They took the elevator to the bridge.

  Donovan had not watched the Black Nebula grow over the days, swell to a monstrous thing that blotted out half the sky, lightlessness fringed with the cold glory of the stars. Now that the ship was entering its tenuous outer fringes, the heavens on either side were blurring and dimming, and the blackness yawned before. Even the densest nebula is a hard vacuum; but tons upon incredible tons of cosmic dust and gas, reaching planetary and interstellar distances on every hand, will blot out the sky. It was like rushing into an endless, bottomless hole, the ship was falling and falling into the pit of Hell.

  'I noticed you never looked bow-wards on the trip,' said Jansky. There was steel in his voice. 'Why did you lock yourself in your cabin and drink like a sponge?'

  'I was bored,' she replied sullenly.

  'You were afraid!' he snapped contemptuously. 'You didn't dare watch the Nebula growing. Something happened the last time you were here which sucked the guts out of you.'

  'Didn't your Intelligence talk to the women who were with me?'

  'Yes, of course. None of them would say more than you've said. They all wanted us to come here, but blind and unprepared. Well, Miss Donovan, we're going in!'

  The floorplates shook under Wocha's tread. 'You not talk to boss that way,' she rumbled.

  'Let be, Wocha,' said Donovan. 'It doesn't matter how he talks.'

  She looked ahead, and the old yearning came alive in her, the fear and the memory, but she had not thought that it would shiver with such a strange gladness.

  And--who knew? A bargain--

  Valdum, come back to me!

  Jansky's gaze on her narrowed, but his voice was suddenly low and puzzled. 'You're smiling,' he whispered.

  She turned from the viewscreen and her laugh was ragged. 'Maybe I'm looking forward to this visit, Hal.'

  'My name,' he said stiffly, 'is Commander Jansky.'

  'Out there, maybe. But in here there is no rank, no Empire, no mission. We're all humans, frightened little humans huddling together against the dark.' Donovan's smile softened. 'You know, Hal, you have very beautiful eyes.'

  The slow flush crept up his high smooth cheeks. 'I want a full report of what happened to you last time,' he said. 'Now. Or you go under the probe.'

  Wanderer, it is a long way home. Spaceman, spacewoman, your sun is very far away.

  'Why, certainly.' Donovan leaned against the wall and grinned at him. 'Glad to. Only you won't believe me.'

  He made no reply, but folded his arms and waited. The ship trembled with its forward thrust. Sweat beaded the forehead of the watch officer and she glared around her.

  'We're entering the home of all lawlessness,' said Donovan. 'The realm of magic, the outlaw world of werebeasts and nightgangers. Can't you hear the wings outside? These ghosts are only the first sign. We'll have a plague of witches soon.'

  'Get out!' he said.

  She shrugged. 'All right, Hal. I told you you wouldn't believe me.' She turned and walked slowly from the bridge.