Ark of the Stars

by Frank Borsch

  Perhaps he had been wrong about that last, Hartich admitted to himself. And who, blast it all, had been that Jere von Baloy? The communications officer? No, he didn't look like one. But then you could say that about Alemaheyu ... .

  "We have prepared quarters for you, Dr. Hartich van Kuespert," the Akonian said. "If you like, I can take you there and show you the ship on the way. You must be very curious."

  Am I ever! thought Hartich, the idea of a tour very nearly overcoming his disappointment at his minimal reception. "Well," he said, "I certainly wouldn't be opposed to a little tour."

  "Excellent! Baggage?"

  Hartich shook his head and raised the small bag in his left hand. "This is all."

  Jere led him out of the hangar to an antigrav shaft and graciously let his guest take the lead. The two men floated up several decks and then left the lift in the sector of the ship apparently reserved for crew quarters. The Las-Toór proved to be a thoroughly clean ship, as spotless as though it had just left the construction yards. Hartich inquired as to the ship's age.

  Jere laughed politely. "A flattering question. But no, the Las-Toór is not fresh from the factory. The Akonian government has realized in recent years that while military strength is certainly necessary in order to hold our own in the galaxy, scientific know-how must accompany it as well. The Las-Toór is the expression of that view made steel. It was completely refitted before our departure."

  That's certainly a deep analysis for a simple technician! thought Hartich, but since they had reached his quarters just then, he couldn't pursue the thought any further.

  The door slid to one side and revealed a series of sparsely but tastefully furnished rooms. Crystal mobiles glittered in the shine of hidden lamps and filled the rooms with a soft light.

  "This ... this ... " Hartich was at a loss for words.

  "Do you like it?" Jere asked with a satisfied smile that showed he already knew the answer.

  "Yes, very much!" Hartich had barely managed to avoid being assigned to a crawler when he joined the Palenque. Instead, he had been allotted a cabin that was so tiny and stank so overpoweringly that he preferred to spend all his time in the laboratory.

  "Are all the crew quarters on the Las-Toór so spacious?" he asked.

  "Naturally, not. This is the cabin of the first officer, who insisted that it be made available to our Terran guest." Jere's smile had changed. Was it now ... mischievous? Hartich found it difficult to read his facial expressions, even though the Akonians were just as human as the Terrans.

  Hartich laid down his bag—right by the entrance, since he feared not being able to find it again elsewhere in the wide-ranging rooms—and Jere guided him through the ship. The engine rooms were of slightly less interest to Hartich, as his curiosity concerned the principles on which the engines were based, not on the machinery itself, but his ears pricked when Jere recited their performance data. The Las-Toór was considerably superior to the Palenque when it came to acceleration and ultra-light capabilities. After that, Jere showed him the life-support and secondary systems, and finally the scientific sections.

  Here it became quite interesting. Hartich finally met other Akonians. Scientists, called Yidari in Akonian, and very much in keeping with his mental image of Akonians. Tall and slender with the velvet brown skin that made most Terrans look pale, and manners that in their perfection were worthy of a high culture tens of thousands of years old.

  And tiresome. During their introductions, it was clear that none of the Akonians wanted to forego presenting their privileged family trees in the proper light. If Jere hadn't firmly intervened—and why did the Yidari permit this?—every single introduction would have taken half an hour or more. Jere was Hartich's salvation, especially when one of the Yidari decided to ask him about his own family tree. The "van" indicated a title of nobility, didn't it? Not for him. It was simply the result of parents who were enthusiastic about early Terran history and reflected their enthusiasm when naming their child—a freedom of choice unimaginable in the Blue system. It was certainly not the answer the Akonians wanted to hear, and a white lie would have quickly collapsed under the detailed follow-up questioning.

  When they left the scientific sections, which he could see were equipped with the best money could buy, Hartich wished for nothing more than to return to his palace of a cabin, take a deep breath and put up his feet.

  Jere had other plans.

  "All right, now let's go to the control center!" he announced.

  "The control center?" Hartich couldn't hide his surprise. Sharita would be damned if she would allow a guest on her bridge; even Perry Rhodan had been permitted entry only after a loud hypercom discussion with the owners of the Palenque. And the Akonian would lead him into the ship's holiest of holies just like that? Jere didn't even look as though he would be allowed in.

  "Yes, of course. No tour would be complete without it."

  Curious glances met Hartich as the door to the domed control center slid open. The Akonian officers sat at their consoles on three levels—no, on two, Hartich corrected himself. The uppermost level, which must be reserved for the commander, was unoccupied.

  As they entered the control center, the officers bowed. A man stepped up to them, ignoring the Terran, and reported, "We've received a query from Fleet Command, Maphan. They want to know why we've been in dilation flight for so long. They've determined from our standard tracking signals that we're moving at relativistic velocity."

  "I expected that, Netkim," Jere said. "Answer them by saying that dilation flight is necessary for the moment in connection with hyperphysical experiments. As commander, I am not happy about it, but my task at present is to satisfy the ladies and gentlemen of the Yidari. And we all know what an incorrigible lot they are, don't we?"

  The officer saluted. Jere—Jere von Baloy, commander of the Las-Toór—turned one last time to Hartich. "Do you see over there on the second level, that short officer with the reddish brown hair who is staring rather intently at his console?"

  "Y-yes," Hartich stuttered, mortified by the faux pas he had committed. He had mistaken the commander for a technician! The status-obsessed Akonians would never forgive him for that!

  "That is Echkal cer Lethir, my first officer, and the man who insisted on letting you have his quarters. You should thank him." He winked at Hartich as though they were old friends. "Echkal is often somewhat shy in social situations. Don't let it bother you if he seems a little out of sorts. Just go on talking. At the bottom of his heart, he likes Terrans."

  With those words, Jere von Baloy left his guest and resumed his station as the commander of the Las-Toór.

  * * *

  "Be careful that you don't catch any infectious diseases!" her colleagues had joked when Eniva ta Drorar climbed aboard the Shift that would take her to the Terran ship, and Eniva had laughed heartily together with the other Yidari.

  That had been less than an hour ago, and already her time on the Las-Toór seemed to Eniva like an eternity in the past. She no longer felt in the least like laughing. The Terrans' ship was thick with dirt. If Eniva had even suspected what awaited her, she would have boarded the Palenque in a special spacesuit designed for extreme planetary environments, not in a simple leisure outfit chosen to complement the allegedly so-casual Terrans. Well, she had brought along a few suitcases with more appropriate clothing ... .

  The commander had met her right in the hangar. Sharita Coho wore a starkly tailored black uniform that no Akonian would ever have worn, even in the old days when the Energy Command constituted the secret government, and escorted her to her cabin.

  Her "cabin."

  Even murderers and those making fraudulent claims to noble titles were confined in better quarters on Drorah. The cabin was a rectangular space just big enough to contain a narrow bed. To the side of the bed, a passageway led to a hygiene cubicle. The door separating them didn't close properly, so there was a moldy smell in the air. Or perhaps there was another source of the stench: when E
niva had arranged her suitcases along the wall, she had discovered a dirty pair of men's underwear.

  Eniva had been too surprised to protest, and by the time she recovered, the Terran commander had already disappeared—though not without reminding her that as a "guest" on the Palenque she only had limited freedom, and she was best advised to remain in her cabin and keep quiet.

  Eniva understood what was meant by "best advised" as soon as she attempted to leave the cabin. A massive cleaning robot blocked the way. It was coincidentally occupied with cleaning her door, which in its opinion urgently needed a thorough scrubbing, since the scraping of its brushes simply wouldn't stop.

  I'll just try something else! Eniva decided, and occupied herself with the cabin's computer terminal. The Terrans had no idea who they had caught. Eniva was the Las-Toór's computer network expert and as such she was used to stretching out her feelers in a syntronic way. The Palenque's computer network had been the reason she had volunteered to be a hostage. When else would she ever have the opportunity to give a Terran network a thorough going over?

  Eniva sat upright on the too-soft bed, took a deep breath—through her mouth, in order to avoid the mold smell—and went to work. Five minutes. She didn't give the Terran computer more than that before it surrendered to her.

  Five minutes became fifteen, then half an hour. Eniva cursed to herself, at first in a low voice, then loudly, but it didn't help. Either the Terrans had guessed who they were dealing with after all or they were cautious sorts. In any case, the cabin syntron had been cut off from the ship's systems, not just on the software side—Eniva could have hacked a block like that—but physically.

  The cabin syntron was a self-contained system, and not a very intelligent one.

  It was essentially an improved tri-vid that offered her only two choices: unimportant tourist information about various LFT worlds or tri-vid films. In her desperation—Eniva had the feeling that she would die of boredom even before the mold fungus had poisoned her lungs if she didn't occupy herself with something—she surfed through the films. Without exception, they turned out to be cheap trash. Tales of secret agents in which heroic Terrans foiled the sinister plans of Akonians who were out to subvert Terran supremacy, or comedies in which Akonians were caricatured as horribly nasal Intercosmo-speaking fops who were just as vain as they were stupid.

  Is this what they really think of us? Eniva thought angrily. Why did I vote against blasting them out of space? We could have easily pulverized this garbage can, and I could now be investigating the Lemurian ship instead of rotting away here!

  Eniva turned off the syntron. Tears of rage and disappointment welled in her eyes. How could she have been so naive as to come here expecting to learn something? She would die here! The Terran commander had imprisoned her. If only something would happen that she—

  A buzzer sounded.

  Eniva jerked up, not certain if she had only imagined the noise. Now she noticed that the scraping of the brushes on the door had stopped.

  The buzzer sounded again.

  Eniva stood up, adjusted her clothes as well as the limp material would allow, rubbed the tears from the corners of her eyes and activated the door opening.

  The door slid to the side. In front of her stood a Terran who was uglier than anything she could have imagined in her worst fantasies.

  It was a man—or maybe a troll. The Terran was only as tall as her chest and was so thin that it was a miracle he hadn't snapped in half long ago. His skin was blacker than space, and his curly hair had grown out to a mane that made his head seem oversized. Two big, bright eyes looked at Eniva.

  "Hello," the troll said. "I'm Alemaheyu Kossa, the communications officer for this outfit. Sharita sent me." He bared two rows of shining white teeth as he smiled.

  "Sharita ... the commander?"

  "The one and only," the little man confirmed, smiling all the more brightly.

  "But why would she send you? She stuck me here with complete satisfaction."

  "Oh, she played her little game with you, did she?" The troll shook his mane reproachfully, as though they were talking about a misbehaving child. "Don't let it bother you. She does that to everyone. But afterwards she feels sorry about it. That's why she sent me. I'm supposed to look after you."

  Again the troll smiled.

  "And why you in particular?"

  "Oh, because I don't have anything to do at the moment. Communication with the exploration team has been broken off, and—"

  "Broken off?" Eniva interrupted him, horrified. "What happened?"

  "It's nothing to get excited about. I expected this would happen. Probably has to do with that Lemurian ship's hyperdetection shield. We haven't detected any energy emissions, and we certainly would have if there had been a fight or an accident." The troll pulled at the headband that kept his hair from falling over his eyes and blocking his vision. "So I'm at loose ends right now, and besides, I'm the most charming host you could find on the Palenque."

  "You're what?"

  "Still skeptical?" the troll asked and smiled again. "Come with me, you lucky stiff. You'll see!"

  Hesitantly, Eniva ta Drorar followed the Terran, suddenly wishing for nothing so fervently as to remain in her stinking cabin and watch wretched Terran movies.

  21

  The light caressed her face, beckoning her.

  Solina Tormas ignored Pearl Laneaux's cry of warning and climbed up the steep stairway toward the light. Her beamer hung in its holster, where she had stuck it to leave both hands free for her work on the Lemurian ship's computer network terminal.

  The stairs ended in a shelter whose roof had fallen away and blocked the view to one side. Solina blinked in the light. She couldn't make out a single source, no equivalent of a sun. The light shone evenly from the "sky" above her, a gentle reddish tone that was very different from the cold blue light she knew from Shaghomin or Drorah.

  And anyway, that "sky" ... Solina knew she was inside a gigantic cylinder, and stood on the inner surface of its hull. When she lifted her head, she really had to be seeing the opposite side. Instead, her searching gaze was lost in an intangible haze of the reddish light.

  "I think the builders put in several decks," Rhodan said. There was no reproach in his voice for her incautious plunge ahead. No criticism; the light of the ark seemed to soften even the immortal Terran's mood. Solina wondered why the Terrans seemed so nervous. Did they know something dangerous about the ark that they had kept to themselves? Solina couldn't imagine anything that would pose a danger. The ark's inhabitants lived at a low technology level; their spacesuits' defense screens would protect the visitors from any potential attack.

  "Possibly," Solina replied. "But perhaps we're simply looking at the center of the ark. I can't make out any details."

  "Nor can I. But there are at least three reasons that argue for several decks. First, if there weren't any, it would be an inexcusable waste of space, an enormous unused volume. I can't believe people who could construct such a ship would allow that inefficiency."

  "Sounds logical. And the other reasons?"

  "Another would be gravity. On this deck, the gravity is one and a half times that of Earth's. If they're trying to preserve the heritage of their home world, that isn't a very good solution. The ship's inhabitants would be forced to develop a new culture within a few generations in reaction to the changed environmental conditions." Rhodan looked down from the "sky" and at his multi-function armband. "And third is the radiation level. It wouldn't be dangerous to stay here, even for weeks. But over a span of years and decades, the effect of cosmic rays would be enormous, leading to an increased rate of genetic damage. If the ark's inhabitants lived continuously on this deck, they would be facing extinction before many generations."

  Solina had been listening to Rhodan's explanation with only half an ear. What he said sounded valid, but the next hour or two would show whether it was actually correct. People, whether they called themselves Akonians, Terrans, or even Lemu
rians, were not logical beings. Quite the opposite: the more Solina delved into history, the more her conviction grew that human societies based on logic were the exceptions. A certain amount of logic was to be found in all human societies that endured for any length of time, but only a certain amount. Often the seed of destruction lay in the premises on which a society was based. When those premises were erroneous, that society headed inevitably toward its downfall.

  What judgment could be made of the ark's society, they would find out as soon as they came across the first Lemurians. The ship was huge, but still too small for any such encounter to be long in coming. And Solina wanted to use the time until that happened to investigate the ship in a way that no encounter with the inhabitants, no instruments, however refined, could substitute for: she wanted to feel out the ship herself.

  Solina lowered her eyes from the sky and looked to either side. To her right and left, the ground rose evenly, as though she were in a valley. In a manner of speaking, she was: the ark's outer hull presented an evenly curved surface. No matter where she was on the ark, she would always find herself at the bottom of a valley. Like the bow and the stern, the evenly rising "cliffs" were lost in a haze.

  Was the haze an accident, an unintended side effect of the ark's ecosystem? Or had the builders planned it in order to give the inhabitants the feeling of distance they would have otherwise done without?

  The rest of the team had reached the surface of the deck. The hatch had closed behind them, but there was no cause for concern; it was an automatic security function. Pearl Laneaux and Hayden Norwell had drawn their beamers in order to protect the group. Pearl's face had turned red as she whispered constantly into her spacesuit's microphone. She didn't want to accept what had become obvious in the lower corridor: comm contact with the Palenque had broken off. Solina had a certain amount of sympathy for her anxiety; it could be disturbing to be on one's own in unfamiliar surroundings.