Second Star (Star Svensdotter #1)

by Dana Stabenow

  Elizabeth looked from me, to her father, to her mother, to the black, glowing orb. “Could I take Macavity with me?” she asked, and I had my answer.

  “Macavity?” the Librarian said.

  “Think of what he looks like,” I told little Elizabeth. I stood and faced the Librarian and formed a picture of the kitten in my mind.

  “Another being?” the Librarian said, sounding disapproving.

  “Two,” I told her, and said to Elizabeth, “We don’t know how long you’ll be gone. Take Jennyanydots, too.” To the Librarian I said, “If you’re in a hurry you’d better bring them here.”

  The Librarian said nothing.

  I took a deep breath. “Librarian, where she is going the Esther Elizabeth Quijancc-Turgenev will be completely cut off from her own kind. Her… aloneness, her solitude, her isolation from her race will impair her ability to think and grow. That would be a waste.” From the corner of my eye I saw Elizabeth grin. “The kittens will help prevent that waste.”

  The black mass beat. We waited. “Very well,” the Librarian said at last. “Where are these beingth?”

  Elizabeth and I joined hands and visualized one image after another our solar system, Terra, Ellfive, the South Cap, the Big Rock Candy Mountains, my house, the two kittens. It was easy enough, as Jennyanydots was the only calico in the litter and Macavity the only gray. Our arms were suddenly filled with tiny, squirming bundles of fur, their eyes barely open. Elizabeth handed me Macavity and ran into her parents’ home for the last time.

  “The Esther Natathha Sventhdotter,” the Librarian said. “You are thinking and growing. Will these small beingth mate and reproduthe and grow old and die?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “It will be interesting to observe.”

  “Yes,” I said again, juggling the kittens to swipe at my wet eyes. The kittens’ tiny claws scraped at my skin.

  Elizabeth trotted out of the house, clad in shorts and the Aran sweater I had knitted her and carrying a knapsack. She opened the front pocket and we knelt to stuff the kittens inside. She paused, and asked the Librarian, “Can you feed the kittens?”

  “Feed?” The Librarian turned the word around in the air, savoring the sound of it. “To provide something necessary for the growth or existence of, to nourithh. Nourish. Yes. We can feed the kittens.”

  Then Elizabeth had a truly appalling thought and said apprehensively, “Can you feed me?”

  “Yes. A special place aboard our ship has already been prepared for you. We have houthed alien life forms before. Waste is not permitted, Esther Elizabeth Quijance-Turgenev. If you were not fed, you would cease to think and grow. That would be waste.”

  “Not the most sparkling conversationalist, is she?” I said, fighting for calm.

  Elizabeth threw her arms around me in the same fierce embrace she had given me the night we returned from EVA. She must have known somehow, even then, that she would be leaving soon. “I love you, Auntie Star.”

  “I love you, too, darling.”

  “Tell Dad and Mom—” Elizabeth’s smile wobbled and she said, “You know what to tell them.”

  Sure I did. “Yes, I do. Don’t worry, Elizabeth. I’ll make them understand.”

  One tiny hand wiped carefully at the tears streaming uncontrollably down my cheeks. I felt my shoulders start to shake. With a great effort I pushed her gently from me. “Go now, quick, before the Librarian changes her mind and leaves you behind.”

  “She wouldn’t,” Elizabeth whispered. “She’s as big a pushover as you are, Auntie Star.”

  All the same, she stepped back. She picked up her knapsack and slung it over her shoulders. Macavity and Jennyanydots squeaked with alarm. Elizabeth cast one long, backward look at her parents. “I love you,” she called, raising her voice. “I do love you, but I have to do this. Good-bye!”

  I didn’t look around at Simon and Charlie. I didn’t dare. Elizabeth lifted one hand in farewell before turning to step forward to the water’s edge. Her voice was firm and steady. “I’m ready, Librarian.”

  The black mass flickered, once, as if the door to the cave had cracked open for a split second, and then as quickly slammed shut. I thought I saw her look back for just a moment. In the next second the Librarian and Elizabeth were gone.

  · · ·

  I stepped back from the edge of the lake, staggering. Released from the circle, the first person I saw was Rex. “Paddy?” I said.

  He shook his head, his face twisted with remembered grief.

  I closed my eyes and tried to still the trembling of my knees. When I opened them again no one had moved, the whole crowd still standing motionless outside the invisible perimeter of the semicircle. Charlie looked catatonic, Simon no better. I averted my eyes and shivered. “Would someone find me something to wear, please?” Petra started toward the cottage, and with her movement the crowd began to regain its senses and an excited buzz rose.

  “Caleb?” I said in a low voice.

  He looked at me, and his eyes were as clear and as perceptive as the Librarian’s thoughts. He already knew what I wanted to say. Still, I owed him the words. “I’m sorry I was angry. And thanks.”

  “Have to earn my keep,” he said.

  “Caleb?” I said again, and then my legs did give out and he caught me as I pitched forward into his arms.

  — 9 —

  Saturday’s Child Has to Work for a Living

  “Second to the right,” said Peter, “and then straight on till morning.”

  —James M. Barrie

  WHEN I WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD, much to my mother’s distress, I started hiking alone the two miles straight up to the Seldovia dam, there to lay among the burnt offering of the fireweed and lose myself in the sky. A cloud would come over the sunlit arch with a blue-white splendor that was massive and ethereal at the same time. Lying there, staring up, I would imagine I could feel Terra herself moving beneath my back, journeying toward the welcome night when I could see the stars.

  When Orion climbed up over the Kenai Mountains I would count all the stars in his knife and belt just to make sure they were still there, where they belonged, where I was certain even then that I belonged, too. When it got too cold, shivering and reluctant I would go back down the hill and home. Charlie would be hunched over the kitchen table, her lips moving as she reread The Physician’s Desk Reference to Pharmacology for the third time. My father, if he had returned from his latest fishing trip to the Bering Sea, would be writing another nasty letter to the Internal Revenue Service, and my mother would be retyping her doctoral thesis on her battered Olivetti. There was warmth and life and laughter behind our front door, but my heart stayed on the mountain with the stars.

  When the Soviet-American Mars Mission fell through over the U.S. invasion of Nicaragua, I was outraged by the shortsightedness of politicians on both sides who allowed another picayune border dispute to delay the destiny of mankind. After the Beetlejuice Message, when the American Alliance was formed between Japan and the United States, when Canada joined reluctantly and Mexico had to be persuaded before the rest of Central and South America fell into line, I was in a fever of impatience. Did these myopic fools think the galaxy was organized around Terra and its inhabitants? Couldn’t they see? That measured against the universe and its myriad intelligent races just waiting for contact, the disparities between Terran life forms would seem as nothing, would in fact only serve to draw humanity closer together? When Helen finally yanked me out of the Navarin Basin to strawboss Ellfive, all I could say was, “What took you so long?”

  Once, consumed with the fervor of youth and the necessity of passing a literature course I wrote a poem in heroic couplets about those trips to the dam:

  …It was a place to lay

  And watch clouds cross our little star by day

  And cloak Perseus and Orion by night.

  I raged against the dying of the light

  Even then…

  Does reach exceed my grasp?

&nb
sp; What’s a heaven for?

  Not for dreaming, but as an open door.

  Derivative, the teacher decided, if not outright plagiarism, and gave me the benefit of the doubt and a C.

  I don’t think I knew what I meant by those words, not then.

  I do now.

  Everyone who wants a Roc’s egg, step to the front of the line. No pushing, please. At long last, there are enough Roc’s eggs for us all.

  I don’t do things by halves. When I went out in Caleb’s arms I stayed out. Caleb and Simon stepped in and organized boarding parties and took possession of four of the Goshawks. The pilot of the fifth, demoralized by the Librarian’s sudden arrival and equally sudden departure, ran for Orientale and crashed on landing.

  The Patrol had been surprised by the amount of resistance they met with during their invasion. They had expected us to roll over and play dead, and I may say here and now that not one Fiver did anything of the kind. The Tengu and the Griffin surrendered without a fight after they saw what happened to the Thunderbird. Rex was wounded on the Thunderbird, not seriously, and blamed himself for being clumsy. I was told the Patrolman who failed to kill him did not survive the attempt, which didn’t surprise me a great deal. All on their own the Frisbeeites accounted for thirteen Patrolmen dead and another fifty or so wounded. I don’t like to think of myself as vindictive, but I couldn’t help but notice that the score for Paddy, Conchata Steinbrunner, the seven at the Frisbee, the five security guards, and the two longshoremen at the hangarlock was beginning to even up. Jefferson, rationalizing the Reign of Terror, said it best: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

  Simon had been the first to see, and the first to make me face up to it. My dream of a peaceful, commercial society, affiliated with but not governed by a patriarchal, tradition-bound Terra, had been irrevocably altered. Half the Terran population would probably have backed an Ellfive takeover by the Space Patrol if Lodge had bothered to ask them. When they heard of his death the American Alliance would never again regard Ellfive as a simple investment, a space-borne extension of the national industrial establishment. It was our job now to see that they dealt with us not as a rebellious colony to be brought to heel, but as a separate political entity, capable of autonomy and self-determination. And acts of war. Caleb and Simon were merely driving the lesson home.

  There were other developments. As Caleb later pointed out to me, just because the Librarian had not harmed Ellfive Saturday night didn’t mean she didn’t have the power to do so Sunday morning, should she so choose. There was a lot of traffic over the scrambler, and then Helen bribed herself upstairs by way of a Space Services TAVliner from Kau Spaceport on Hawaii to LEO Base. Crip hijacked a rocketsled and brought her the rest of the way, evading the Terran ban on travel to Ellfive very neatly, and I woke up to a pedestal made of titanium bonded to an aluminum-lead alloy planted in the center of Heinlein Park. There was a message engraved on it from the Librarian, in Librarian. The message was to the effect that if Archy’s consciousness was ever tampered with in the future, the pedestal, acting as a monitor and a beacon, would alert the Library. Whereupon the Librarian would dispatch a ship to swat Terra out of the sky and remove Archy to a civilization worthy of his talents.

  Frank, arriving the following day as a member of the official American Alliance congressional delegation named to investigate the recent disturbing events at Lagrange Five Space Habitat, Island One, graciously translated the message for the rest of the committee. It was not as difficult a task as it might have been, since Helen managed to slip him a copy in System English beforehand.

  The American Alliance ground its collective teeth, looked at the beacon, looked at the four Goshawks bearing brand-new, hastily applied Ellfive insignia, and looked again at the recordings of the Librarian’s arrival and departure. Grudgingly, they agreed that Commodore Lodge might just possibly have overstepped the bounds of his authority, thereby making his death, if not inevitable, at least acceptable. This cleared the way for recognition of Ellfive as a separate political entity. The post of American Alliance Ambassador to the Independent Republic of Lagrange Five was created on the spot. They offered it to Frank, who after some modest demur was persuaded to accept.

  There really wasn’t much else the American Alliance could do. Archy had all that delicious information on our new galactic neighbors in his data banks, and since every satellite tracking station on Terra had seen the Librarian’s dramatic arrival and departure this time, it was a safe bet that the secret of a faster-than-light drive was included therein. Certainly the independent confirmation of the existence of tachyons all by itself stirred the scientific community to heights of hysterical anticipation not reached since Ellfive made the comet trap work. No more messy and time-consuming tests with Cerenkov radiation. I think I heard Albert Einstein sit up and swear.

  Any drive that obliged its ship to plug into the nearest star when the needle hit “Empty” was not a drive that would be built tomorrow, at least not by us. I was more interested in the Librarians themselves. According to Archy they weren’t from Betelgeuse at all, although it was one of their refueling stops and they occasionally visited the fifth planet in the Betelgeuse system for rest and recreation. Archy was a little vague as to exactly what or who was on Betelgeuse Five, so we would have to wait until we got there to be certain. I wondered if Archy’s vagueness was by his design or by the Librarian’s. He was a little hazy on the location of the Librarian’s home planet, too. At any rate the message the Martians had intercepted from Betelgeuse was real enough: An acknowledgment of the Librarian’s ship’s arrival at the Sol Service Station, and the standard caution not to stir up the natives.

  How had we intercepted this message? Frank shrugged, and said it was reassuring to know that even someone as capable as the Librarian slipped up occasionally.

  At any rate, the caution came far too late. The natives were already restless.

  The Librarians held life sacred, yes, but knowledge was something beyond sacred. Taking it to its lowest common denominator, a human being who could read and didn’t would have been an abomination to a Librarian. If one of their ships had been in our vicinity when the Library of Alexandria was torched, Archbishop Cyril might have succeeded to sainthood immediately thereafter. Knowledge was vocation and avocation to the Librarians; in knowledge love and need were one.

  Their home planet was one vast Encyclopedia Galactica, where the card index alone made fascinating reading. The Librarians had the catalogue of life forms divided into carbon-based life and silicon-based life, with a separate listing for rarer categories. Species were listed as animal, vegetable, or mineral, with families divided by the size of the brain—was it bigger than a breadbox? According to the Librarian good old Homo sapiens had one of the largest brains around, with some of the most advanced psychobiology in the galaxy, and yet we ran it at less than twenty percent capacity. With their attitude toward waste, it was no wonder they’d been in such a hurry to shake Terran dust from their feet.

  Beings visited the Encyclopedia Galactica from all over the galaxy to consult the records there and, if the ship the Librarian traveled in was any indication, paid through the nose for the privilege. It made me wonder when the bill would come due for the information lodged with Archy.

  For now, it was enough to know we weren’t alone. Beetlejuicers, Librarians, or !tang haystacks, there was life in them thar stars.

  · · ·

  The result of my second contact with the Librarian was more than four helpings of chicken adobo and sweet-and-sour spareribs and sticky rice would cure. I slept for twenty-four hours, woke the next evening to gulp down a liter of water and clean out a jar of peanut butter, and went right back to sleep. It was days before I moved without stiffness. I felt as if I’d been frozen and was thawing out slowly, still wrapped in layers of freezer paper. The layers were invisible but very, very thick.

  On the fourt
h day of my convalescence, at their request I met Frank and Helen in Heinlein Park. The now infamous pedestal stood in the center of the park, a miniature Cleopatra’s Needle surrounded by oak saplings. Soon enough, laughing children would bounce balls off it and climb over it and use it for base in kick-the-can. That afternoon it stood slender and silent and alone in the stillness of the park.

  “The language is the same as the original message,” Helen said with pardonable pride. “A combination of Sanskrit, Old English, and Tolkien’s Elvish runes, with a dash of Egyptian hieroglyphics for pretty.”

  I inspected the tablet. It was very impressive, a square block of deep black metal set high on a silvery, four-sided column, carved with what looked to me like the bastardized offspring of musical notation and bird scratchings. although I may have been doing the birds a disservice. “Well,” I said with a sigh, “I sure hope no one on Terra finds out that the Librarians don’t have a written alphabet.”

  Helen and Frank exchanged startled glances. “They don’t?”

  “They don’t take notes or write anything down the way we do, they think them onto some kind of data recorder,” I said. “Don’t worry. All the information on the Beetlejuicers comes through Archy. I’ll tell him to sit on it. Better yet, I’ll tell him to study the tablet and the original message and use them for literary models.”

  I turned to leave, and Helen stopped me. “Look at the other side of the column first.”

  It was another plaque, a long, rectangular one made of copper that would eventually oxidize and turn green in Ellfive’s humid air. At the top of the plaque within a carved border of four-leafed clovers was inscribed a verse:

  Stand your ground, it is too late

  The excise men are at the gate

  Glory be to heaven but they’re drinking it neat