Northern Stars

by Glenn Grant

  :Zaf, there are no psych reports on the Amsu.:

  :There was no need for them as long as there was no danger.:

  :Did you never try to find out?:

  :Oh, I ask always, but she has not much to say. No language! In feeling it is always: nice, good, or: pain, heaviness. They reproduce slowly, very slowly, and of the two eggs Amsuwlle is carrying, one is malformed and will abort. Sometimes … there is almost something like “thank you.” They are not very strong for the terrible conditions they live in … look, here is a softness in the wall … I think she is developing an aneurysm. It may burst.:

  :Could that kill her?:

  :In the artery from the heart that feeds her principal ganglion, yes. This is not a serious one. We can have it fixed.:

  :But Zaf, don’t you realize—:

  :In a moment, Elena. Come with me.: He squeezed through a tiny opening and pulled her after.

  * * *

  Of the great and marvelous chambers Amsuwlle contained there was no end.

  For all the freakish richness of her nervous system, she was only the elaboration of a very simple animal found in small on many worlds. She was essentially a skin on the outside and an alimentary canal within; she had no limbs to move and her musculature was all visceral: it served mainly her hearts, intestines, blood vessels and reproductive organs. Between her gut and her horny epithelium were tremendous sinuses of almost liquid protoplasm, broadly netted with cables of nerve and vein and swimming with strange arrow-shaped creatures of pale mauve, a meter long and with luminous nuclei. :Mesenchyme,: Zaf said. :They do odd jobs and turn into specialized cells when Amsuwlle needs them.:

  To Elena the diaphanous swimmers seemed like choirboys serving an altar, and the vast cavity with its glimmering lights and pumping organ hearts trembled in the atmosphere of an ancient cathedral.

  :This is beautiful.:

  :Yes, even a Yefni may admire it.:

  :I wonder if it was an aneurysm that killed Amsutru.:

  :Oh, Elena, how you must spoil things! That kind of serious malfunction never occurs except in very old animals, and we never ride them beyond a certain age. A minor one such as she has now she could heal herself:

  :Still—:

  Something grabbed her hard round the middle and squeezed.

  Zaf swung his lantern round. A girdle of mauve iridescence, its nucleus elongated and writhing, was doing its best to divide her in two. Zaf bent his head and hooked it off with one horn, snicked a bladed claw from his tail and sheared it neatly in half. The halves, forgetting their errand, dashed off in opposite directions.

  Elena’s mask had slipped, she was doubled and choking. Zaf slapped it on true, and she howled inward a lungful of air. Then he dumped his light and scraper and looped a coil around her. A flock of devilish choirboys dove at them with solid thumps. Zaf twitched his blade, the arrows retreated a space and swiftly coalesced into an enveloping mantle to engulf foreign bodies. Zaf freed Elena and butted her away; she drifted outward through the light jelly till she found a handhold on a minutely pulsing capillary. Her own pulses were roaring, and she watched the battle through sparkles in her eyes, in the light of the mesenchyme itself. Protoplasm, no matter how ill-intentioned, was no worthy adversary for any Yefni. He ripped and slashed with horns and tail till they exploded in quivering spheres and expanded, a liquid nebula, outward to darkness.

  Still in a fury, he found Elena, coiled her, and spun her toward the valve. It did not open at his touch; he wrenched it viciously with his horns, and it shrank bleeding milky essence.

  * * *

  He watched in silence as she lay twisted on the cabin floor, vomiting.

  After a little while she pulled herself up and said, “I am better now. Get out and let me change.”

  “Change now. I am all modesty.” He shoved his head among his coils.

  She coughed and then sighed. “Oh, Zaf.”

  When she was dressed, she said, “I have started something and now it is too much, you know. I should not have come.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “But I am come, I am here. Now I better finish.”

  “Yes,” he said sadly.

  * * *

  Jones slaps his hand on the cool melon-wall, no favors asked and none given, old lady …

  finning his way through nave and apse while the hearts boom like organs, Roberts does not ask whether the whale loves Jonah, or consciously wish to write a poem or hymn rather than a paper on the alchemy of its digestive processes, but he does not hurry …

  Takashima, adored only son of the magnate, is free for the moment of that grim warlord of the assembly line, cheerfully navigates a monster of ancient myth and finds her curiously gentle …

  * * *

  Gentle.

  Elena sighed.

  “I must tell the men … something. They should leave, and I have no authority to force them off. Listen—I think the hearts are changing rhythm. I must be mistaken; I could not have gotten to know them that well.”

  “Oh, but you did. Everyone does. I told Amsuwlle to reroute the blood away from her weakened artery.”

  “That was kind of you, under the circumstances,” Elena said.

  “Under the circumstances we need all the safety we can get.”

  * * *

  “Lady, you must think we’re fools. We can’t leave the ore here for anybody to take.” Jones was working at keeping his voice down.

  “The Limbo is pacing us. She’ll make sure nobody takes the ore. Nobody has even tried for forty years.”

  “The Limbo? Spying?”

  “No. Only making sure we are safe. We are not safe. Amsuwlle has become a hostile environment. Zaf has told you.”

  “There was no hostility till you came,” Roberts said.

  “Then let us say she does not care for me. I am the wrong person for the job, and it was a mistake to send me. I cannot help that, but it seems to be true. I came in peace, but she seems to consider me a threat because I must ask you to leave if there is any danger here. She cannot bear that because she depends on you, perhaps too strongly. If that has made her hostile, then she is a threat, and I must ask you to leave even if it is my fault. I cannot force you. All I can do is ask, even beg. We must get off!”

  “Even at the cost of everything we’d have to leave?”

  She held out her hands. “I tell you, there is no other choice!”

  Roberts gave the table a hard slap. “Get off if you like, and take anyone you want with you. I waited three years for this chance, and I’m not giving it up now.” He got up and left. Jones followed with a dark angry face.

  Takashima shrugged in confusion. “I don’t know what is happening, but I like life. I help anyway I can.”

  “You can,” Zaf said. “Contact the Limbo by radio, tell them to alert the ESP and stand by. I will instruct you, but I think it best that I don’t try to do it myself right now.”

  “This is stupid.” Elena wiped her forehead. “Threyha’s one of the strongest ESPs in the Galaxy. She should be alert.”

  “You know how Khagodi are. She is far too busy to send her friend Zaf little messages of love. I am lucky if she gives me a tenth of her mind for a moment once in a while.” He did not have enough power to reach the ship by himself and was sensitive about it.

  “I am foolish and ungrateful. I did not thank you for saving my life.”

  “Disregard it. Just arrange your mind for me, please. It is confusion.”

  “I would like to arrange it for myself.”

  “If you wish to finish the work, my dear, and give Threyha a pro tem report, you had better do it before all hell explodes.”

  “Yes … I know.” The pulses and their cells were butting against the walls.

  Elena rapped her head with her knuckles. “When I came on board, the men realized they might have to leave, and they became quite upset … in the case of Roberts the journey was a great privilege, for Takashima a holiday he longed to have, for Jones his main livelihood.
That is reasonable. But then also, I believe, they suffered from the last twinges of an old Solthree superstition that a woman brought bad luck to a men’s working ship … and now, in a way, they have made it come true …

  “Amsuwlle has just enough sense to absorb this … and she dearly loves, as you say, to please them. You became the unconscious channel and reinforcement of their uneasiness—of course you cannot help that—and she became disturbed. She finds all of this feeling an irritant and wants to eject the cause of it, me, and the instrument, you. That is simple emotional mechanics.”

  “They are the ones whose emotions began this cycle, and she is not attacking them.”

  “I think you have a different relationship with her. Theirs is a more primitive male-female relationship, based on a psychodynamic concept of Solthrees and a few other races, they call it Edipo—oh, I am so tired I can’t remember what they call it in lingua—yes, Oedipus complex.”

  Zaf absorbed that for a moment and chuckled with a burble of gills. “How amusing.” He was an egg-laying hermaphrodite.

  “Yes, very.” She rubbed her eyes. “Has Takashima reached them?”

  “He is broadcasting. Go on.”

  “That is all there is to say about the situation here right now. It will clear up when we leave. But it is the future I am worried about. Men tend and use machines and think of them as if they are female; they ride and tend the Amsu as if they are machines—but Amsuwlle is no machine, she is living matter, she adapts for them, grows extra hearts, redirects her blood supply, her musculature, her liquids … not in normal evolutionary patterns, nor by the eugenic principles men use to breed cattle, but only because their attentions give her a feeling of well-being … she does not adapt for her survival, but for theirs. Will a redistributed circulatory pattern improve the quality of her offspring? If she synthesizes drugs, what will that do to her heart actions?… On Solthree they breed an animal called a dog for household pet, and sometimes a dog will attach itself so strongly to its owner that when he dies it will not eat or sleep but simply pine and languish until it dies as well. Then men write tearful songs about the faithfulness of the poor creature, but it has simply been destructive of itself and disturbed the evolutionary pattern of its species …

  “Fifty years ago there were between eighteen and twenty-two Amsu circling Apikiki. Every few years the breeding cycle slows down, and they conjugate to interchange genetic material—but fifty years in the progress of even such a big, slow animal should give you more than your present population of twenty-five with all the scraping of arteries and egg spraying and patching of aneurysms … only two eggs in this huge beast, and one is malformed. What does she care? Men are caring for her, and they are satisfied with what they get. Eggs can be placed anywhere, and if necessary men will lead her to the ice and the ores…”

  Before she could say another word they floated gently to the center of the room.

  What—

  And slammed against the side wall. Elena cried out at the bruising of her shoulder; Zaf had been driven into a knot and was struggling to untangle himself. Vibration pushed them jaggedly to the opposite wall, then sliding into the ceiling.

  :She has stopped spinning.:

  Zaf untwined himself; Elena wiped blood off her mouth from her bitten tongue, droplets hovered in a cloud round her face. “What?”

  Zaf grabbed at his tank, floating a meter away. :Breaking radio contact … shooting her jets in irregular vapor pattern.: He snorted an air bubble out of the tube. “White noise field.”

  “Do something, Zaf!”

  “Like what?”

  The hearts went boom, whicker, thack-thack; the mesenchyme cells butted their snouts on the walls; the waters roared all about them.

  “Takashima?”

  “He has air, but the radio is under a heap of wet gravel. The others are knocking about in the jelly near the egg chamber.”

  “Those things will get at them.”

  “She has no time to bother with that.” Zaf hooked himself onto a handhold, yanked open a locker door, and got out the cauterizer he would have used to repair the weakened artery. He slipped a new power cell into it.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Taking a precaution.” He ran the white-hot beam around the frame of the plastic cabin door.

  “But, Zaf, you’re sealing us—”

  “I am sealing her out.” The valve beyond opened, and water struck like a fist. The door buckled, shuddered, and held. “Just in time.”

  The lights went out. “Ventilation will go next,” Zaf said. “You will want oxygen.” He found tanks in the locker. The luminous arrows, colors of lightning, swarmed and swarmed outside the cabin.

  Elena sucked on the dead air of the tank. :It is a good thing you know what to do in emergencies, Zaf.:

  He said nothing to that, and perhaps it was not the time to ask how many such emergencies there had been. Amsuwlle’s entire orchestration of living matter, hearts, waters, cells, rock and ice fragments, was breaking against the frail plastic shell.

  Another lurch and the sealed door became their floor.

  :She is changing course.:

  :Can the Limbo follow?:

  :If Takashima made contact—oh, Great Heavens, she is expelling the faulty egg to lead them off course!:

  A wrenching shudder filled the whole body—

  :—and oh, the Heavenly Shell, the other has gone with it, it has gone…:

  The light came on, the air freshened, the internal tempest died down into the endless beating of hearts. Floor became floor, and Amsuwlle spun to her own unknown destination. She had made a choice and had chosen her crew.

  Zaf, in a rage, jittered up and down, bouncing on the spring of his body. “She has lost them both! She is shattered and wrenched, and I am done!”

  “Zaf, please!”

  “Everything is ruined, and I am lost! Oh, why could you not have stopped this?” He sprang toward her and ripped off her mask. “Why?”

  “Zaf!”

  “The eggs are gone, we are lost, going somewhere out into space where we will all starve before she lets us go—no Limbo, no radio, no base—all my responsibility—and no help! All you can do is say please, please!”

  Elena, completely disoriented, could only stare at him.

  His tail rose, the blade snicked and touched her shin. “Look at me. Have you ever read my psych report? You did not think it necessary? It says I am a man of great courage, intelligence and resourcefulness, very sympathetic to and fitted for work on Amsu. On Amsu. You understand? Do you see me sitting in an office at GalFed Central with my coils in knots and my sulfur mud dripping all over? Or hopping about city roads like—like your toy, a pogo stick? or flying an airship or starship—without hands? Do you?”

  She said nothing, and Zaf, her friend of twelve years, drew a light line with his blade under her chin toward the windpipe. “You do not understand.”

  She found a voice. “Do all those other ESP liaisons feel so lonely and unfitted on all those other Amsu, and patch them up and play down the reports, and ride them for their pride?”

  “I am the only man of my world to become a GalFed official.”

  “And my family worked half their lives to send one of them to the stars.” She put her hand on his head between the horns and pushed the sharp slicer out of her mind. “Oh, Zaf, you asked me to come.”

  “I asked you…” the blade did not waver, “and Par Singri is not sick; he is only a little man who thinks little square thoughts and feels he has done something brilliant when he fits them into a big square. I convinced Threyha to send you … because I saw how things were going … you were my friend … and I thought you would be able to stop it before everything got ruined.”

  She tried not to think of her husband at GalFed Central or her family who had worked so hard in a hard land; her hand rested lightly on his head. “I am sorry I have failed you. And I am sorry for Amsuwlle.”

  “I am not. She would not have cared if
she had killed me, and I have thought only of myself.” The blade withdrew and he bowed his head. “That is what is so terrible.” He flung his head from side to side. “The eggs are lost and we are going nowhere! And—oh, Elena, the men! They are still in the egg chamber!”

  * * *

  Both of them were clinging to the tattered rim of the chamber wall; their oxygen tanks were nearly empty, and they were shivering almost hysterically with chill. They would not have been there, or anywhere else, if part of Amsuwlle’s intestinal tract had not given way when the eggs were so violently ejected and filled the egg chamber and blocked the now flaccid ovipositor with rock, silt and coagulating protoplasm. The stuff had not quite stopped and was still pushing outward with slow but glacial force.

  Zaf wound his length about Jones and Roberts and hooked his way by head and tail like a climber of ice, in slow steps backward; his mind, wide open, broadcast his misery and despair.

  Back in the dayroom they stared at each other with haggard faces.

  “I suppose you were right,” Roberts said. “We should have tried to get off earlier.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Elena said dully. She sighed. “We’d better see if we can’t get Takashima.”

  The room was a mess; Zaf had used his blade to reopen the door, and no one worried about locks and valves any more. Locker doors had broken open with the violence of Amsuwlle’s writhings; tanks and canisters were dented or burst. “We don’t have much food,” Jones said. Packages had spilled, their contents fouled with splatters of mud. “It won’t matter for very long, will it?”

  :Oh, don’t give up hope quite so soon, my dears.:

  Jones yelped. “Ohmigawd, what’s that?”

  “Be at ease, gentlemen,” Zaf said without much relief. “That is Threyha.”

  Once again the spin stopped, and they floated; once again the siphon extruded dutifully and thumped on something hard, and down through it went the rush of waters. Amsuwlle was being obedient again.

  It was not easy to be anything but obedient to Threyha. In a few minutes she gave them her image in the sinus leading from the siphon. The floor sagged from her weight, upward of six hundred kilos, and there was no room for her height of three meters. She simply nudged the ceiling with her scaly pointed jaw and it shrank away, thumped the floor with her heavy tail and it firmed and flattened under her. :I am not coming any further or the poor thing will have another rupture.: She smoothed down her opalescent scales and stood properly erect. :And I must get back to my tank.: She was amphibian, but preferred water. :Collect Takashima and come to me.: