Star Rigger's Way

by Jeffrey A. Carver

  The cynthian's whiskers curled, and he hissed, dipping his head, the words coming out in a sigh. "Caharleel—hyor com-ffusor noss hwork."

  Carlyle scowled. "Of course not . . . now. They'll work when they're installed in computer tanks. Right now they're just being kept alive for shipment."

  "D-heds now," Cephean insisted.

  Carlyle froze, eyeing the cynthian. What was that supposed to mean—dead? He shoved past Cephean and looked into the nearest cradle. The neural tissue of the core, visible beneath a clear dome, quivered faintly; it was dark and smoky. A glance at the cradle monitor confirmed that the core was indeed dead. He turned slowly, raising his eyes to the cynthian.

  Cephean's ears were flattened to the sides, the fur along their edges trembling. His whiskers twitched. "Hi h-make miss-thake," he hissed. His eyes darted about the room, his foreclaws extended and retracted quickly, clicking softly on the deck.

  Carlyle's breath escaped in gasps: "You . . . made . . . a mistake?" He caught the cynthian's eye and held it. "You what?" He glared, infuriated by Cephean's sullen gaze. "What did you try to do?"

  Cephean sputtered and pawed his nose. He half snarled an answer, incomprehensible. The riffmar lurched forward, rustling, then retreated. Carlyle was startled, but he demanded an answer. Cephean broke from his gaze and cried, "Hiss whoodens hans-ser h-me!" He hunched mournfully and shook his head. The golden flecks in his eyes gleamed like flames. Guilt, Carlyle thought scornfully.

  He circled around to check the other Lifecybe units. He found one more ruined and he returned, confounded, to Cephean. "Why are you wrecking my cargo?" he shouted. Even if the cargo didn't matter in the end, what did this creature think he was doing?

  Cephean sputtered. "Hi hask ssem."

  "The computer cores? Asked them what?"

  "H-insfor-m-hationss. H-abouss sshiff," he hissed. "H-how iss ffly."

  This was incredible. "What did you want to know? Why didn't you ask me? This is just a mass of nerve tissue—only works when it's part of a system. It's delicate! You can't just—it doesn't even have information! And what did you want to know, anyway?"

  The cynthian made no reply. Carlyle shook his head in disgust. The two cores were an expensive loss, but more appalling was Cephean's lack of understanding or of good sense—which probably went a long way toward explaining his incompetence in the net. Cephean peered at him. (Resentment, he felt.)

  "Damn it!" Carlyle said, making his decision. "Time we got some things straight!" Cephean looked startled, the color dimming from his eyes. (Apprehension crossed Carlyle's mind. Had the cynthian already guessed?)

  "Cephean, I'm not going to like this either—but when it's over, I think we're going to understand each other a little better." He took a deep breath. The riffmar squealed; he glared at them. "Follow me."

  Cephean obeyed and followed him out of the hold, ducking his head and hissing.

  Chapter 3: In the Dreampool

  The dreampool theater was lighted only by a deep-sea gloom. The pool was encircled by a smooth, padded ledge; the water itself radiated the ocean-blue light. The water was still, and its depth visually indeterminable. The water appeared simply to merge with the inner wall, and only the glow could be seen in its depths. Good place to dive and never come up, Carlyle thought, though of course the depth was illusory.

  The intensity of the light fluctuated as they moved about, varying inversely with their proximity to the water. "Whass?" Cephean queried, loping around the pool and coming back to eye Carlyle suspiciously. The riffmar fluttered to a halt.

  "Dreampool," Carlyle said. "Rigger crews use it to help develop rapport. Intimacy. I didn't want to use it because it was designed, really, for human minds—and frankly it can be pretty damn personal." He swallowed. "Well, we're going to test it between a human and cynthian."

  Cephean's flickering eyes seemed to turn inward. The riffmar shuddered sympathetically. "H-no-o, no-o!" he hissed. He glared at Carlyle and drew back defensively, his whiskers pointing forward.

  Carlyle exhaled through his teeth. He wasn't asking; he was telling. This was something that had to be done. "Cephean," he said sternly, "if you don't, we will be adrift in this spaceship for the rest of eternity. Now, maybe you wouldn't mind that for yourself, but how do you like the thought of looking at me until you die, eh?"

  Cephean shivered. Hissed.

  "That's what's going to happen, because we're not going to fly this ship again until we've had a session in the dreampool." He held his breath, keeping his anger and his uncertainty in check. How far did he dare assert himself?

  The cynthian muttered and, to his surprise, acquiesced. "Hyiss."

  Carlyle sighed gratefully, and explained the procedure. Then they sat at the pool's edge, ninety degrees apart from one another—Cephean having to splay his hind legs and sit stiffly upright to fit on the ledge. "Now," Carlyle said, "look straight into the water, and let your mind follow your eyes. Listen to my thoughts and do exactly as I do."

  The cynthian hissed an acknowledgment, and Carlyle let his gaze drift down to the center of the pool. He studied the luminous surface. He remained aware of Cephean's attention, and of his own worries; but as he stared into the water his tensions began to subside. His thoughts focused themselves, without guidance, onto the pool with its internal glow. Something began perturbing the water beneath its surface, causing a subtle wavering in the light. Soon it was the variations rather than the light itself which he watched—shimmerings in the cool sapphire-emerald bath. The flickering of an open flame, but without warmth—it was alive, and it reached out and entered his gaze with the energy of an alert, probing mind . . .

  * * *

  The first thoughts were his own memories, focused both through his own eyes and the eyes of another. Murky. Then deadly clear:

  Sedora's fluxfield chamber's secondary shield curved around him like a queer eggshell, sealing him into the serviceway between the outer shield and the main core baffling. The mutter of voices from the wall intercom barely reached him, and he worked at his chores with some relief at being alone and having his thoughts to himself. Not that he minded his four new crewmates, but he had only been with them for a few weeks, and that was hardly enough time for real relationships to develop. It was good to be off, to be out of the rig, to worry about simple machinery for a while.

  That anomalous reading, now, was probably a misalignment in one of the feedback elements, a bit too steep to be compensated for from the bridge. It was easily corrected, except for the awkwardness of just moving around in this damn chamber suit. He stooped and took a flow reading, turned a handscrew, and then backed it off a hair. There was a flow surge for some reason, but it only lasted a moment before the readings leveled off again. He played the screw back and forth very slightly; it wasn't a critical adjustment, but it was always good to have the flux-pile working as smoothly as possible. Finally (did he hear a ringing, an echo of some kind?—hard to tell, probably his own heartbeat pulsing in his ear), he moved over to check the other elements, one by one.

  When he finished the final adjustment, he rubbed his forehead against the suit faceplate, trying to scratch an itch over his eyebrow. It was time to be getting back to the bridge. And there was that ringing again—was it coming from the outside?

  The exit was on the far side of the pile, and it took him a few minutes to work his way around the circular catwalk. He stopped at the intercom. "This is Gev. Adjustments are all right in here. Has the power smoothed out in the net?" His voice was dull, a muffled echo inside the chamber suit.

  No answer. And there was that noise.

  Then the exit port opened, and clanging exploded around his head: general-alarm klaxon. Stunned, he sealed the hatch and hurried to the prep-room intercom. "Bridge! Bridge!" Still no answer; either no one was in the net, or communications circuits were out. The alarm meant a vital systems failure.

  He quickly checked the pile console; there was no danger here, but there was a massive interruption in the net
circuit. He headed for the bridge at a run. The suit still encumbered him; panting, he flipped open his visor for more air. He shouted into a corridor intercom, and this time he was answered by a hiss. The corridor illuminators flickered but remained alight.

  He mounted the ramp to the bridge—and gagged as he inhaled a lungful of smoke. Choking, he slapped his visor down and panted rapidly, hoarsely, to draw filtered air through the suit. The bridge was gloomy and filled with acrid haze. He moved cautiously, squinting and blinking tears and thinking: there is burning flesh in this smoke. The instrument panels were blackened but no longer burning. He turned to look at the rigger-stations in the outer circle of the bridge. His stomach dropped. His crewmates were dead in their alcoves; their bodies still smoldered in the rigger-seats. Marc, the com-rigger, his neck and cheeks collapsed, his eyes sunk in their sockets, smoking. Gayl, Abdul, Niesh—all the same. He stared at each one for the same long minute. Numbness blocked every nerve, every emotion, every thought except a detached awareness of horror.

  For a time he did not move at all. But gradually the haze began to clear from the bridge, and he knew what had to be done. He remained shock-calm, and though the stench continued to burn in his nostrils and his stomach threatened to convulse, he did not become sick. Garbed still in the chamber suit, he wrapped the four bodies and carried them to a small, unused freezer-hold. He ventilated and scrubbed the bridge, and he finally shut off the clamoring alarm. He examined the instruments and recorders, and he reconstructed and logged the accident to the best of his ability. And then he went to pieces.

  He stayed in the commons; he was afraid to leave. Through tears and shakes and stuttering outcries to an empty ship, he relived and relived the accident. It had been a freak happening: a Flux abscess. Uncontrolled energies from the Flux had flared through the net, cauterizing every delicate nerveway tied into it—including the space communicators, the neural foam of the rigger-stations, and the riggers themselves. What had caused it? There was no way to be sure. Perhaps a subjective firestorm, a nightmare brought to life by the fantasies of one of the riggers. Perhaps a gravity-abscess, an unexpectedly close approach to an analogue of a star or black hole from normal-space. Perhaps something altogether different, some uncharted phenomenon of the Flux. It was always so difficult to know; abscesses existed along that delicate boundary between fantasy and subjective reality, and few witnesses ever survived to tell.

  And might his own tinkering with the flux-pile have contributed to the accident? He thought not. He prayed not. But how could he be sure? Would he have to chase back the demon of guilt, too?

  It had been his luck that he had been out of the net, his luck that he had not died with the others.

  Luck? He was in a crippled ship, with fluxwave communications completely burned out. He was alone, more alone than he had ever been in his life, more alone than he had ever dreamed possible. And Sedora was a four-rigger freighter. Was it even conceivable that it might be flown by just one?

  Reliving the horror for the hundredth time, he tried to summon the living faces of his dead crewmates. But they were gone now; he could recall neither their faces nor their names. A mercy, perhaps—but lord, the emptiness of having forgotten the last humans he might ever see.

  (Whasss?)

  Eventually, though, other names returned to him: Janofer, Legroeder, and Skan. The names began to click through his head like the chatter of a rad counter, rhythmically: Janofer Legroeder and Skan. Janofer Legroeder and Skan.

  The faces came later, as he stalked the commons, battling with his thoughts—or as he moved dazedly about the bridge, watching the healers slowly regenerate the neural foam in the rigger-seats so that he could make the attempt to fly. The faces of friends, and their voices—along with the memories, the dread.

  Finally it was time to discover whether or not he could, in fact, fly. When the pilot-rigger station was ready for use, he suppressed his apprehension and entered Sedora's net. It glowed fuzzily about him, shimmering, reflecting his nervousness. Hours went by as he struggled just to become settled again in the net, to establish a basic vision. And when at last he did, he was astonished to sink his fingers into the stuff of space and to feel the ship moving at his bidding.

  Sedora, as it turned out, could be flown by one; but she was ponderous, and she flew as though laden with water. He could work only short, numbing shifts, and even then his endurance was strained. The ship moved on its course; but his thoughts flew ahead to the Hurricane Flume, the maelstrom to which all currents in this region of space led. There was no escaping the Flume. He could shape it to the image of his choice, but he could not make it less treacherous. He tried to consider alternatives; but there were no alternatives. The Flume danced constantly in his mind, and he was sure that he hadn't a chance in a thousand.

  Therefore hope, when it appeared, was exceedingly strange. It was in the fourth day after he began flying that he noticed the signal—a part of the windrush, the starsong of the net. But like a warbling bird it twittered incessantly and would not be ignored. Finally he decided that perhaps he was hearing a distress beacon. With nothing to lose, and with tightly suppressed excitement, he wheeled Sedora upward into the clouds to find the source of this distraction. The search very nearly drained him—ten hours, in all, of purring through crazy blue skies with golden veils and spun hair arching across the stars like a yellow-brick road.

  But in the end he found it: a flattened raisin of a spacecraft, drifting abeam of Sedora in the queer, atmospheric near-distance of the Flux. He grappled it in his net and took it spiraling up with him through layered images of space, through regressing visions, into spinning darknesses . . . until the stars exploded in bright pricks of light. Withdrawing from the net, he looked out through the clearplex port into normal-space.

  The ship drifting alongside Sedora was squat, strange. Alien.

  Suited, he left through the sidelock and floated across. He rested, enjoying weightlessness and gazing off into the galaxy; it was splendid and brilliant around him, exotically beautiful. From space, Sedora was silent, a gun-grey cetacean linked to him by a snaking lifeline. He turned, and his soles touched the alien hull. As he searched for an airlock he wondered who or what he might find—and whether, perhaps, the strangeness was only beginning.

  (Hyiss?)

  Before the disaster, though, was departure—boarding Sedora at Deusonport Field, with mixed and hurt feelings. It was Lady Brillig he wanted to fly. But if they said that a tour as helper-rigger on a slowship might teach him, then helper-rigger he would be. Deusonport Field: scattered clouds, blue-tinged sun, green hills and forest about the perimeter. Should be a cheery sight upon return. Relaxed, amidst the frenetic commerce of the Aeregian planets.

  But what should be so troubling about the leaving behind of friends? (Who asked that? Who is wondering?)

  Earlier still, Lady Brillig out of Jarvis on Chaening's World: Legroeder and Skan as usual; and Janofer, never quite stationary—her moods like air currents, never remaining simply petulant or contemplative or buoyant or depressed, but always a turbulent mixture, and her attention rarely focusing for long upon any one friend, but forever shifting from one to another to somewhere beyond thought. Why could he not have been closer to them? To her?

  But why desire closeness? Rejoice in isolation. (Who?) (Whass?)

  Before Lady Brillig there was only the training, the school. The buffeting among childhood peers. Homeless, familyless. (Hyiss!) (What?)

  And . . . earlier? . . . later? . . . the flight-shell of another spacecraft altogether: the battery of riffmar in turmoil, working to confused commands while he fought to control his fury and discover what was wrong. The riffmar were maddeningly inept, never mind that they responded directly to his control. Mindless plants! he shrieked soundlessly, but it was not a curse so much as a statement. Oh, why oh why had he come such a way to this nowhere place in space to be stranded? Why had he let Corneph get to him like that?

  A riffmar, confused by his unsur
e control, stumbled near. He swatted it with his left paw and flattened it. Six more left, by damn, and they'd better start flying! But they wouldn't, not unless he determined what was stalling the craft, and instructed them. If only he knew more about these things!

  (Strange, to be flying without knowing . . .)

  Bring me syrup, he ordered, and glared at the two riffmar scurrying to comply, wrestling between them a large stalk from the bin. He took it moodily in his jaws and sent the two off to tend the riff-bud cultures, and then to feed themselves. While they were wriggling their tendril toes into the nutrient beds, he crunched the sweet stalk and brooded.

  He had left Syncleya in a terrible fury. Actually, a tantrum. True, it wasn't his time yet to learn to fly (not for another four seasons), and he had taken the shell from the space-docks without knowing if it had been properly checked and prepared—all right, that was questionable judgment, admittedly, and perhaps he had compounded the error by heading for deep space rather than one of the worlds—but who would have thought that a simple shell could malfunction? Everyone knew that flying was bloody simple—use your riffmar to run the shell, nothing complicated, and let your mind steer the ship, like the interdreaming of the quarm, but with no other broil-damn minds cluttering up your thoughts.