Star Fall

by David Bischoff

  He spasmed away from the fearful, floating thing, losing hold of the energy rungs, toppling backward.

  The thing pursued ... closed in ... and it began to transform.

  Slowly, like a glacial crawl of ectoplasmic ice, the skin began to puff Features began to form. And he recognized it ...

  And he hit the ground, hard.

  He found himself lying on the rug of his cabin, dazed with the power of the dream. He lay there, feeling drugged, disoriented. Slowly, he became aware of the huge weight upon his soul. He thought of what his life had been. Thought of all the things he had done. The lives he had ended.

  Suddenly, he had a vision, within, of himself, writhing in the flames of hell.

  A free-floating anxiety had enveloped him. He staggered to the food-unit and punched for a trank and a glass of water. What the hell was going on? The psych-boys had pretty much programmed all his personal guilt away, blotting it out, transforming him to the amoral condition necessary to make war efficiently. But now, suddenly, his conscience seemed to have returned, awkwardly, crushingly, fully. He popped the trank, swallowed some water, and wobbled to the couch.

  And that face ... that strange woman’s face.

  It looked like the face of the woman who’d tried to stop him at the Deadrock Starport.

  The woman who had fallen down the escalator after he’d pushed her away from him screaming, “Todd! Todd!”

  Hers was the face that haunted him now ... and of all the crimes he’d committed in his life, all the murders, all the robberies, all the heinous things he had done for no rational reason, that pushing away of the fat lady seemed the most reprehensible.

  Guilt clung inside him like glue. Suddenly, he realized he was doing something he’d not done since his parents had been killed.

  He was crying.

  “DON’T LOOK NOW, Mr. Spigot,” said the little buzz-unit in an excited squeal. “But isn’t that a giant squid behind us?”

  They stood on the bottom of a miniature sea by the wreck of a Spanish Galleon overflowing with spilled treasure. Golden doubloons glinted in the murky light streaming from overhead. Necklaces of pearls and diamonds were hung on pink, twisted coral, Schools of fish finned through barnacled windows and bare ribs of strewn skeletons. Bubbles from the grav-pressure suit squiggled toward the sunny surface. The compact machine about Todd’s waist served two purposes. It radiated a twelve-inch grav-force all around like an invisible diving suit; and it filled that with breathable air. Most ingenious, Todd had thought. But why had Mercury taken him down here? The buzz-unit hummed cheerfully alongside of his ear now, well within the interface of water and air. “Gee, they didn’t tell me about these things.”

  Hunk finally turned his head around.

  No. It wasn’t a giant squid.

  It was a giant octopus.

  A livid-suckered tentacle thick as Todd’s former torso quested tentatively toward them. The giant eyes set in the gray-skinned head sack regarded them impassively. “Uhrnrn ... I don’t think there’s anything to worry about,” said Mercury. “I’m sure it’s programmed not to ...”

  The tentacle streaked around them, curling tight over the grav-field.

  “... hurt anything ...” Merc’s unconvinced voice trailed off. Quickly, it strengthened the grav-force with a coded squeal. The tentacle lifted them off the sea floor. Kelp and sea fronds waved goodbye languidly as the tentacle dragged them toward a giant white beak at the intersection of all eight arms.

  Todd was not overly upset. “Do something, Merc,” he thought.

  “Do something! Do something!” squeaked the little thing. “I can’t raise Control on my radio link. Something must be wrong. Oh dear!”

  Closer and closer the curled tentacle pulled them, suckers mashed against the grav-force as though it were a shield of plasglass. That gaping beak looked quite powerful ... Todd wondered vaguely if it could pierce a force screen.

  Mercury seemed to fear so.

  Todd was getting concerned too. What was Hunk doing? Nodding off? The monster sure looked like it meant business.

  Abruptly sensation swirled in on Todd. He felt the cool of the sea, the throb of the force-bubble. He tasted the salt sea. He smelled the electric scent of Mercury. And he was aware of the heavy weight of the barbed power-spear in his right hand.

  He had the body back again, of all times!

  Almost instinctively, Todd pulled the heavy gun up. It was geared so that it could safely pierce the force-bubble, thank God, or they’d have the whole ocean pouring in. Todd swung the spear about, felt the trigger, aimed at that ominous eye and fired ...

  With a swirl of air bubbles, the spear streaked forward, straight into the creature’s eye. Like a suddenly cracking whip, they were flung away by the tentacle. The creature convulsed and suddenly streamed away on a water-blast forced through its anterior ... leaving behind clouds of roiling, jet-black ink.

  “Close,” Mercury twittered. “Good job. Let’s leave. I’ve had enough.” They drifted down to the sea floor again, and Todd began walking back the way they’d come.

  “So have I,” said Todd, reveling in the use of his mouth again. What a pleasure to communicate!

  “Hey ... you’re answering me,” said Mere, “You’re actually talking to me!”

  “You bet. And have I got a few things to say. Listen ... all I want to do is to get to my cabin. I’ve had a hard day. Maybe we can see the sights some other time.”

  “Okay, okay,” sulked Mercury. “What a shame, though. I can assure you that the other things we’d see wouldn’t be as frightening as this experience.”

  “I should hope not!”

  Todd slogged his way slowly through the sloping sea bed, through the seaweed and skittering crabs to finally break surface and walk up to the beach, where the equipment house was located. The artificial sea, blue as any worldly body of water, stretched out in the distance.

  Gulls swooped lazily on air-currents, squawking and diving for fish. Onto the white-sanded beach, Todd collapsed the force field and breathed deeply of the brine-scented air. Although his mind was yet in turmoil, he felt physically marvelous ... aware of every sinew of this strange body.

  As he walked with sure steps toward the wooden beach house, he wondered what he would do. Find Amber and confront him? And in the meanwhile, certainly, avoid Alexandra Durtwood. Report himself to the authorities here and get their aid? What about Hunk. Would he (it?) be content in dormancy? And until when?

  Well, he’d try to figure things out over some food in his cabin. Then he’d have to sleep for a while before he actually did anything.

  The beach house, on the exterior, was a ramshackle affair, shaded by breeze-swayed palms. Cracked wooden eaves creaked leisurely beneath the weathered gray frond-thatched roof. Todd tramped across the bleached sand to the buckled porch decked with twisted driftwood designs. The sea breeze sighed and whistled through vacant knotholes. Todd, followed by an unnaturally quiet Mercury, pounded through the door into an air-conditioned interior. Unwrapping his force field pressure unit, he handed it to the servo, which crammed the machine into a storage orifice. Todd went to a food-service device and punched out a beer. His mother had never permitted him to drink. But in the past couple years he’d been slurping them on the sly, doing his weight problem no good but effecting wonders on his dark moods and his self-image. It was in the dim confines of a beer-bar next to the mine computer complex that he had first pored over the Star Fall literature he had found in the single squalid travel agency that served his neighborhood. The folder had been opulent with promise, and Todd found it haunting him.

  Ordering a second beer, he turned to Mercury. “Would it be possible for you to help me contact the authorities—the very highest, mind you—aboard this ship?”

  “Heavens. What for? Aren’t you happy?”

  “I just have to report something. And
as soon as possible, I suppose. I have the feeling that there’s not a whole lot of time to play around with ...”

  He swiveled around in mid-sentence, and broke off when he saw the two security officers standing in the doorway. Azanitins, both of them, just like the ones in the adventure sample provided them in the orientation. But these two wore different uniforms on their rock-thewed forms. Black boots, slick with shine, rose up high as Wellingtons. Severely steel-gray, functional slacks belled out about the thighs, ending in thick black belts buckled with gem-encrusted metal. Their six-fingered hands clutched massive handguns that pulsed with an inner golden light that seemed to squirm about the hairy hands like rippling jellyfish.

  The single eyes glittered like light-dabbled milk quartz, seeming to reflect murky thoughts filled with dark violence.

  One stood slightly aside to sweep the beach with his weapon. Satisfied, it shook its head and gestured inside.

  The other nodded and raised its weapon toward Todd.

  * * *

  The woman’s skull hung open like a door, hanging on hinges of skin.

  Shorn red tresses lay scattered on the floor. Her nude body lay on the table, stuck through with needles, wires. Her chest rose and fell with slow regularity; bodily functions were controlled by a computer analog, which snaked into her cranial cavity and down her spine, perfectly linked with her nervous system.

  Ort Eath stood placidly by, watching his robots work. A sine wave tranquilly oscillated on his orgabox screen, moving in casual counterpoint to the flowing sweep of Das Rheingold, which filled the air with operatic grandeur, masking the hums and whirs of the abundant machinery.

  His cold eyes took the woman’s form in for a time, and then turned away, trying to shut out something that had entered his thoughts at the sight of the finely formed body. No, he told himself. Be strong. Strength of will is all I need. The torment will cease, Great one. Soon I shall be vindicated ...

  It has been so long, but now the time draws near.

  He shut his nictitating membranes, blocking out the scene before him. He concentrated on the orchestra-girded words sung by Wotan:

  Wie doch Bangen mich bindet!

  Sor und Furch resselen den Sinn

  How they seemed to echo his own feelings. Wagner, Wagner! The strength in your humanity is the weakness of my Morapn ancestry! He had studied the Norse mythology upon which the Ring der Nibelungen had been based, and even now a verse from “Odin’s Runic Poem” wailed in his mind:

  I’m aware that I hung

  on the windy tree

  —swung there nights all of nine;

  gashed with a blade

  bloodied for Odin,

  myself an offering for myself

  knotted to that tree

  no man knows

  wither the root of it runs.

  How I suffer to assume godhood, thought Ort Eath. But it will come. It will come.

  The grating voice of the mobile surgery unit interrupted his brooding. “All is in readiness, sir.”

  He swung his attention to where his robot stood, glinting in the speckled lighting. Like darting mandibles of some sea creature, armatures, affixed with surgical tools, articulated hands and blunt instruments, swung and dove and stabbed at a console of a regulator computer and attachments clinging to a round tub of transparent plasteel, filled with mucousy-green nutrient fluid. The tank bubbled spastically as the robot adjusted the oxygen infuser.

  In the center, hanging in the liquid like a pickle with a trailing-stem umbilicus, were the brain and spinal cord of the woman.

  “You’ve established interface with the interrogation computer system?” inquired Ort Eath through his orgabox. He began walking toward the tub and the three-legged thing stalked nimbly behind like a squat reflection of himself.

  “Affirmative,” responded the meter-and-a-half-high robot. “You need only direct your vocal questions into the computer. However, please specify whether you want the answers in the subject’s voice, written in the readout screen, or visualized in the vu-tank.”

  “Understood. Signal when subject is conscious.”

  “Yes.” The thing delicately beckoned the woman’s consciousness from its watery grave with a twist of knobs, the push of buttons.

  How fortunate to have machines to serve in such situations, thought Ort Eath.

  “She is awake,” declared the machine.

  Despite the transition evidenced by the robot, Ort Eath noted no change in the visual aspects of the scene. No extra effervescence in the tub, no movement of the lob of flesh that was the essential stuff of the woman. Perhaps they should have left the eyes attached. That would have made things seem more like true interrogation.

  But there was no time for such, Ort Eath mused. The high seriousness of the woman’s activities precluded such. No time for aught but concentration, cold and simple directness.

  He strode to the nearby console chair and sat, his robes whispering about him against the floor. A microphone arched up from the console desk like a blind eyestalk. He tapped out a code onto the machine and immediately was rewarded by the appearance of the info-sheet on the woman from the ship’s microfiles.

  Ginterron, Blicia

  Age: 29, Earth standard

  Unimportant trivia flowed; no doubt all fabricated, if Eath’s suspicions were true. But then, it was quite possible that the woman had stumbled upon that hangar-deck scene entirely by accident, as she said. Perhaps she viewed the entire affair as a particularly nightmarish adventure, engineered by some vicious programmer.

  How could she have possibly known about the antimatter transfer? He had kept it so meticulously quiet. Even that lout MacNeil had no idea of its true importance, no concept of its magnitude. And of course MacNeil didn’t know that the space miner had been disposed of without a trace, the ship scrapped, its components absorbed into the Star Fall, the body and bearer of his dreams.

  Cursorily, he inspected the date in the screen once more, then punched up direct vocal communication and bent the comstalk down to the orgabox speaker.

  “Who are you?” he intoned, investing the words with threatening subsonics for the utmost effect.

  A disembodied voice answered, “Where am I? I—I can’t see. I ... oh God, I’m blind, I can’t feel. I can only hear a voice. I can’t even scream.”

  “Your emotive properties have been curtailed. You need only answer these questions I have for you and cooperate in extending to us full control of the holistic properties of your brain’s memory storage. Then ... then you shall be restored to your body, selectively mem-wiped.”

  “I ... I’m not in my body? Is this a real-fic’?”

  “You may view it in any manner you care to,” answered Ort Eath. “If you’d like, you may see it as merely a bad dream. Only relax and cooperate. If you do, I can assure you that you will wake up. And if not ... Well, sleep can be very long. Very long indeed.”

  “I see. I will cooperate then.”

  “Excellent. All you have to do is visualize. Think about the things I ask you, consider how they looked. Words can lie. Visual memories are less stable and can play into our hands more easily.”

  “Who are you?” The words were an exact representation of the woman’s physical speech patterns, formed by the computer after analysis of her body’s vocal cords and a scan of the processes she used in her speech—the patterns, inflections, accents, and rhythms. All now electronically reprocessed into a facsimile of Blicia Ginterton’s voice.

  “I think we need not go into that at this point.” Ort Eath sat back, composing himself. Concentration was all. “Why were you present in Hangar Deck Thirty-Four Sigma?”

  “I was merely exploring, as invited to.”

  Eath leaned over and punched on the truth override button, making conscious lying impossible, eliciting vocal truth. For this device to work, the entire brain h
ad to be extracted.

  He repeated the question.

  Received the same answer.

  “Please initiate visual aspects of our inquiry,” he commanded the robot. Instantly, a spotty, blurry, waving image appeared in the holo-tank.

  Hangar Deck Thirty-Four Sigma from the point of view of Blicia Ginterton. From a soft focus, the image tightened. The three-dimensional effect was bad, of course, but the composition and depth of field were extraordinarily well depicted. And the detail was quite perfect. Startlingly so. Either the woman had a marvelously faithful memory—or it was augmented. There were the thick plasteel girders and supports—the hovering observation booths, the crablike maneuvering cranes and rods. There was the dilapidated chunk of space flotsam of that Deadrock miner, Jim Dandy lettered on its port bow in peeling letters. And there, speaking with the craggy miner himself, was his own Captain MacNeil adjusting another cigarette into his ridiculous contraption.

  “... bring up the audio on that,” Ort Eath instructed. And immediately the conversation of the two flowed from the speakers, with the echoey hollowness of volume magnification.

  “... that advice is free.” MacNeil was saying in his usual prissy tone.

  “Yah. Yah, free. Shove it up your—”

  “No, Miss Ginterton. All the way from the beginning. I wish to hear what you heard about the antimatter. I want to understand how much you comprehend ...”

  The image jump-cut through a zigzag of pictures—still images. The antimatter box being unloaded. The hapless Jox exploring the aft of his boat and stumbling into the waiting Zism. The grisly results.

  Well, all that was easy enough to erase from her mind. No cause to destroy her now simply because she had stumbled onto something she should not have seen. No, what Ort Eath needed to know was if Blicia Ginterton comprehended the import of what she’d heard—if, indeed, she’d stationed herself to view the scene.