The Ship Who Saved the Worlds

by Anne McCaffrey

"This is harassment," Keff said, all his protective tendencies coming out at once. "We should report it to SPRIM and MM." SPRIM was the Society for the Protection of the Rights of Intelligent Minorities, and MM, Mutant Minorities, two agencies that spoke up on behalf of shellpeople who ran into difficulties with unshelled bureaucracy. Dr. Sennet Maxwell-Corey, a psychiatrist by training and a nuisance by avocation, was a particular bugbear to both of them, but he had a special animus toward Carialle. He had never been convinced she had recovered from being marooned. The fact that she and Keff took a lighthearted view toward the naming of the indigenous species they encountered on their missions for Exploration, and their devotion to playing Myths and Legends, made her sanity all the more suspect to the unimaginative bureaucrat.

  "I am composing something scathing right now," Carialle said, "while I destroy the implant with extreme prejudice." Her self-repair facilities, micromachines of various designs, crawled along the electronic neural extenders and yanked the filaments out of her tanks and filled in the drillmarks. Others traced down the filaments to the control boxes carefully hidden in deadware like the bottom of her waste tanks.

  "Don't send the message without my input," Keff insisted. He got up from his chair and paced back and forth in front of her pillar. "I have something to say about imperiling my partner's well-being. And I want to tell them just what I think of his big-brotherism." He smacked one fist into the other palm. Tall Eyebrow and the other two globe-frogs jumped away from him. He was sorry to frighten them, but he was unspeakably angry.

  "Why did it happen?" he asked, stopping short and looking up into her nearest camera eye.

  "We're in P-sector," Carialle said flatly.

  Keff's eyes went wide. He knew all about her history, and always had been extremely supportive in helping her heal from her traumatic experience. "Are we . . . there?"

  "Yes."

  Keff noticed the emergency lights on the console board, and went to shut off the alarms. "Are you all right now?"

  "Yes." Carialle's voice was thin with anger. "Damn him! I passed my last six psych tests, two of them—two!—since our trip to Ozran. I feel violated. There's a message box in my memory, with all kinds of circumventions to make certain I couldn't detect it. Planted among the microdiodes at the same time as the uninitialized chips. Nowhere near the new stuff, which the wily bastard knew would be the first things I'd suspect. It's a custom job, too . . ."

  Keff interrupted. "But why would you have reacted like that? Why would you have set it off at all?"

  "I know every inch of this parsec," Carialle said unhappily. "I spent an eternity here, Keff. Not that far from here is where my fuel tanks blew up. There." A holoview of the sector appeared, with their path indicated in blue. A red X blossomed at a distance from their present location and floated toward them, crossing the blue line and passing toward a cluster of stars to their starboard stern. She squared up their current location on the tank, and Keff looked at it solemnly. "I was disabled here for weeks. And just for a moment, I was reliving that experience. I was counting, counting the seconds to keep from going insane. Then I remember feeling those footsteps on my hull, feeling those hands dismembering my components, stripping what they must have thought was a wreck, and hearing myself screaming. 'Who are you?' " she wailed.

  Keff shuddered and covered his ears. "But it's been almost twenty years, Cari."

  "You know what my memory is capable of. The sensation is as clear and intense as if it was just this minute for me! I was desperately afraid those unknowns would break open my shell and leave me to die in space. I was helpless! It affected me so deeply that no matter how well I think I am, subconsciously I have never gotten over it. I never found out who was performing salvage on my skin. The headshrinkers still don't believe that there was anyone there. M-C still must think I had a psychotic episode, dreamed the whole thing. That's why he's has been dogging me all these years. He's been so sure I would flip out. And he made doubly sure I would launch a message probe to him if ever I did, so he could drag me out of my ship and lock me in a padded room. I wonder what else is buried in there," she added bitterly.

  "Nothing," Keff said, firmly. "He's not that imaginative. There won't even be a backup mechanism in case that failed. Look, Lady Fair." Sheathing his light sword, he stepped forward to plant both palms earnestly on her pillar. He looked up at the nearest camera eye. "When this is over, we'll find an independent, trustworthy memory doctor and have you scoped for other intruders. I'll stay there the whole time, if you want. I promise."

  "I thank you for your courtesy, good Sir Knight."

  The lady's face appeared and smiled at him, but the image wavered slightly. Carialle's heart wasn't in it. Keff's insides twisted with sympathy.

  "We'll find those bastards one day," he promised her.

  "Game is ended?" Tall Eyebrow piped up from behind him. "Enjoy games. Interruptedness?" The little alien stood in the passage opening, looking disappointed. Keff gave his forgotten playmate a rueful grin.

  "Sorry, TE," Keff said. He moved away from the pillar, but kept an eye on it, wishing there was something he could do for her.

  "I apologize," Carialle said contritely. "I didn't mean to let everything drop. Computer malfunction. Minor. It won't happen again." In a moment, the castle corridor rose around Keff again, and a three-dimensional letter puzzle appeared between them. Tall Eyebrow happily waddled over to it. As he moved his finger through the image of each two- or three-letter piece, it enunciated its sound. Some of them were syllables, and some were just noises, thrown in by Carialle for fun. With a delighted chuckle, the globe-frog began to construct Standard words out of the assorted noises, touching them again and again.

  "Ook." "Hind." "Honk!" "Eeuu." "Be." "Aaa-OOO-ga!" "Be." "Loo." Ding!" "Ook." "Loo-ook," emerged from the audible babble as Tall Eyebrow found a match. Keff grinned.

  "When all this is over, let's go find the parasites who were hacking you up, Cari," Keff said, making use of the sublingual implant in his jaw so the others couldn't hear him. "What with the bonuses from Ozran still in the bank, and the booty from this trip, we can afford to take even a year off."

  "I hope the answers are still there to find," Carialle said in his aural implant.

  "Look-be-hind-you," Tall Eyebrow spelled out aloud. "Look behind you," he signed suddenly to Keff. He spun in a circle, clutching his amulet in his long fingers.

  "He's good," Carialle said. "Twenty-eight seconds, and it's not his native language."

  More villains began to pour into the newly reconstructed great hall. Some were humans, brandishing weapons at Keff. Some were waist-high foes, snarling as they sought to surround Tall Eyebrow. Keff drew his sword, then hesitated, blade in midair. TE stood, gazing curiously at Keff, wondering why the man wasn't charging. The brawn looked at him, feeling as if he had seen them just now for the first time.

  "I just had a horrible thought," Keff said, subvocally to Carialle. "What if it was TE's people, the Cridi, who were the ones stealing your components?"

  "Don't think it hasn't occurred to me," Carialle said, her voice crisp in his ear. "I hope not. I'm going to be watching them like a bank guard every minute. But I so hope not."

  "I hope not, too. I wouldn't be able to behave the same towards them if they almost killed you, inadvertently or not."

  "I refuse to theorize in advance of the facts, as someone once said," Carialle stated firmly. "Right now the important thing is to get TE and his party safely to Cridi. When this is over, we'll go and find out the truth."

  "When you will and where you will, my lady," Keff said, swallowing his concern. His partner was under control again. If he pushed for more details he might risk making her relive her ordeal. He raised his sword before his face in salute and, with a gallant bow toward her holographic image, charged into the fray.

  "Well, come on, TE!" he shouted at the surprised globe-frog. "You're on the threshold of your first big battle. Hop to it!"

  Chapter Two

 
A few days later, Carialle interrupted the game and darkened the room to fill all the walls with views from her external sensors. The bright yellow-white, blue-white, and dull red dots of stars glimmered into view. Subtly, a white grid of low intensity divided the blackness into cubes.

  "Gentleman and amphibians," she announced brightly. "Best visuals coming up. You see overhead on Y-vector the border between Sectors P and R. Imaginary, of course, visible only on benchmarking programs, but enhanced for your viewing pleasure. Beside us to starboard is a pentary of five stars known to Central Worlds as The Ring, a source of infernal radio interference to all space travelers hereabout. Below and to port, other constellations, brought in at treeemendous expense to the management. No shoving, please move along in an orderly fashion. And the entity ahead of us, frogs and sir, is star PLE-329-JK5, half of a binary otherwise known as your home system. And there, in that spot," she highlighted a single, dim yellow dot, two-thirds of the way around the ecliptic from them, "is your first real view of the planet Cridi. Welcome home, my friends."

  "Hallelu!" Keff carolled, picking up datasheets and throwing them in the air.

  Tall Eyebrow and Long Hand did a joyous dance together in midair around Keff's head. Small Spot bounded lightly from weight bench to wall to console and to Carialle's rack of paintings and back again, narrowly missing everyone else. They were all laughing in their shrill voices.

  "How long until we make planetfall, Cari?" Keff called. He couldn't force himself to stop grinning. The corners of his mouth stayed glued up near his ears. He slapped his small friends on the back and shook their hands.

  "A while yet," Carialle said. "I'm dumping velocity so I can drop into orbit at under 1,000 kilometers per hour. In the meantime, take a good look, folks. We made it."

  The globe-frogs peeped and chirped to one another in high excitement, gesturing frantically at the holographic display.

  "It is different from Ozran," Long Hand signed. "Orbit much wider. Cold?"

  "Not recorded. We shall cope," Small Spot said. "See how warm the sun is! How lovely gold red."

  "Who shall we meet?"

  "Who indeed?"

  Tall Eyebrow looked up at Keff in despair.

  "What shall we say to one another? How different will we be from them?" he signed. "How will we interact?"

  "Well," Carialle said, thoughtfully, "you've had a very small and limited gene pool to work with for ten centuries. I wouldn't be surprised if there hasn't been the beginnings of genetic shift, but it's unlikely to make any real difference. At worst you might need artificial assistance to interbreed with the majority population. We could offer Central Worlds' expertise in that department. Our scientists have no trouble fitting tab A into slot B, particularly with our knowledge of the confluent species that resembles yours in our biosphere. On the other hand, if you're just worried about your past experiences differing, I'd suggest you just be yourselves. They won't be expecting identical lines of development."

  "Carialle!" Keff said in exasperation. Once a scientist, always a scientist. He turned to the aliens. "They'll just be glad to see you, TE."

  "I do not know," Tall Eyebrow said, seeming dazed, staring at the tank. "It was not real until now."

  "Well, it certainly is real," Keff said. He spotted an artifact ahead of them in the holoview. Its surface was too smooth to be natural. "What's that, Cari? Tracking stations? Signal beacon?"

  "A little of each, I'd say. I'm getting a scan from it. Lots of subspace transmissions. I am recording them and attempting to translate."

  "Feed it to me when you get something, please."

  Keff sat down in the crash seat before the console and stared at the screen. He drummed his fingers on the console and tapped his toes in anticipation, feeling perfectly happy. This was a bonus, on top of the payoff for finding the civilizations on Ozran. To be able to observe an anthropological phenomenon heretofore unknown in human history: the first meeting of two different groups of the same race, divided for over a millenium. The linguistic diversity alone would provide him with the material for at least one blockbuster academic paper. Tall Eyebrow waddled over and hopped up to perch on the chair arm to watch with him.

  "Anything yet?" Keff asked Carialle. "How about particle scans? How much activity is their spaceport seeing?"

  "Patience, please. All I am seeing out there is a little debris, and some very old ion trails," Carialle said. The screen lit up with an overlay of green dust streaks that were scattered and stretched by the orbits of the planets in between. "I'd say no one's come through here in a long while."

  "Always underfunded," Tall Eyebrow offered, with his hands turned slightly upward to show apology. "It is in the records. Resources small offered. Metal scarce. Volunteer work never enough, raw materials always short. Mission to Ozran one of three major projects to be funded in ten revolutions around the sun when my many-times ancestors had prepared for the journey to Ozran."

  "Bureaucracy never changes anywhere," said Keff, sympathetically. Then he sat up straighter. "You don't mean you have memos dating from a thousand years back?"

  "For every day," said the Frog Prince, with a satisfied gesture. "In all our troubles, that was never neglected. We have brought them with us for the perusal of the Cridi government."

  Keff felt his jaw drop. The globe-frogs had loaded only a few containers into the cargo hold, and most had contained gifts. "In those little boxes you have a thousand years of records?"

  "Communication system is kept frugally," Tall Eyebrow signed.

  "I'm impressed with your systems," Carialle said.

  "So am I," Keff said, with a whistle, promising himself a good rootle through the boxes when they were offloaded. "Talk about microstorage."

  "Aha," Carialle announced. "It's sensed us. I'm receiving a hail from the orbiters."

  She ran the data patterns through digital analysis, dividing the sum of on/not-on pulses by a range of prime numbers, formulae and logarithms, until she came up with a coherent 1028-unit wide digital signal. It wasn't a computer program, but a video transmission of an amphibioid wearing a glittering silver collar.

  "Take a look at this," she said, and relayed it to the cabin screens. Keff was fascinated, but the three Ozranian globe-frogs were dumb with amazement.

  "Not much obvious genetic difference, Cari," Keff said, staring at the image, looking at every detail. "Thank goodness for that."

  The camera was centered on the Cridi's hands, rather than its face, which remained expressionless and still, staring at the video pickup with fixed, black eyes. The long hands snapped out signs in a quick sequence, then repeated it over and over again.

  "I can read that. 'Identify yourself,'" Keff translated. " 'Do not proceed further.' "

  "There's a spoken language, too," Carialle said. "Transmitted on either sideband of each copy of this signal on every frequency I tune into: wide band, narrow band, microwave, datasquirt, even a form of tight-beam. Very thorough. They want to make certain you don't miss it. Very musical, too. Listen." She put the sound over the cabin speakers. A pattern of peeps, creaks, chirps, and trills repeated over and over again. Keff squinted with concentration as he listened to the rhythmic squeaking.

  "I bet it says exactly the same thing as the hand-jive." Keff's eyes gleamed. "Record it, please, Cari, and run it through the IT."

  Keff's Intentional Translator program had been of assistance in learning the Cridi's sign language back on Ozran. He was constantly updating the system, which theoretically contained full grammar and vocabulary for every alien language that the Central Worlds had yet discovered. The program functioned with indifferent success most of the time. It rarely provided them with the key to an alien language when an explorer needed it. More often, someone found a key first, then used IT to build up a translation system from collected data. The IT was still full of bugs, Carialle thought cynically, but Keff never seemed to be bothered by them. Still, he had been improving its interpretation of the Cridi signs.

  "A
h," Tall Eyebrow signed, his black eyes shining, "the language of science! We have all but forgone its use in the arid atmosphere of Ozran. The waters and the globes prevent sound from carrying, and we have had no amulets to broadcast it, so we let it drop except infrequently, in conclave."

  "Interesting cultural redundancy," said Keff.

  "Not at all. It makes sense for a technologically advanced race to develop some kind of oral language," Carialle said, thoughtfully. "Having to manipulate starship controls while signing home to mission control seemed to me like a difficult combination."

  "But they had created remote power control," Keff protested.

  Carialle's voice was sugared with sweet and insufferable reason. "What did they do before the amulets came along?"

  "Sign is older," Long Hand explained, waving her hands for attention and interrupting the argument. "It was our first true trait of civilization. The small voice," here her hands went to her throat, and indicated diminuition with a finger and thumb, "does not carry as well as long sight. It came useful when science reached us, but not during our earliest years. Silence was essential to hunting together in the earliest days. We have good eyes and poorer ears. The wild food animals had good ears, but bad eyes. We must show silently to one another our intent. To us it meant survival."

  "To which condition we were reduced on Ozran," put in Tall Eyebrow. "It has been so many generations since we did anything but survive. I am glad to see in the last year we have not forgotten how to think, how to invent with our hands. I shall not be ashamed to face my ancestors' other descendants." But the Frog Prince looked nervous all the same.

  "But can you translate it?" Keff asked, almost bouncing with excitement. He gestured toward the screen where the silver-torqued amphibioid was still signing his message.

  "If it has not changed since the mission to settle Ozran," Tall Eyebrow signed, "we may be able to." His hand waggled sideways to show uncertainty.

  "This is a job for my all-purpose, handy dandy translating program." Keff flew to his console and opened the file. He sat listening avidly to the excerpt, keying in notes.