The scene is the belly of one of the orbiting whales. It is a pleasant scene, because this particular whale is nearing apotheosis, which is to say that most of its honeycombed interior has been converted into compartments, holds, corridors, and companionways, that its fissured and meteor-cratered skin has been inlaid with numerous portscopes and burnished to the smoothness of a woman’s thigh, that its asymmetrical lines have been made symmetrical, that locks have been installed in its transsteel flanks, and that artificial gravity and a thermostatically controlled atmosphere now supplant near weightlessness and an absolute-zero vacuum,.
An alien image has come unbidden into Starfinder’s mind and has caused him to pause in the phosphorescent corridor along which he has been walking. The corridor runs the length of the lowest deck and gives access to the two major holds, the machine shop, a dozen compartments, and three storage areas. In addition, it gives access to the drive-tissue chamber where Starfinder has been working all day adapting the whale’s natural propulsion unit to an outside power source. He has been working on the drive tissue ever since conversion began, and it will take him at least another week to finish the job.
The Image that has appeared in his mind can be indicated thus:
((*))
Starfinder is nonplussed. He has been thinking of the angel Gloria Wish, and he can see no connection between ((*)) and his thoughts.
Presently ((*)) fades away, and he resumes walking down the corridor toward the companionway which leads up to the main deck and the boarding locks. The twelve-hour workday is done, and like Jonah he is eager to be regurgitated from the belly of the whale; eager to see the angel and ride down with her on a starbeam to the city he has come to call Home.
Perhaps this is why the image has appeared in his mind. Because he is tired from too much work and too much Gloria Wish. Perhaps this is why it appears again, this time in duplicate:
((*)) ((*))
Again Starfinder comes to a halt. He is abreast of the machine-shop door; the base of the companionway is just around a bend in the corridor. He knows fear now, as well as mystification. He has had good reason once before to doubt his sanity; now he doubts it again.
The double ((*)) does not remain long, but no sooner does it fade than it is replaced by another. This one is slightly different:
((*))
Moreover, words accompany it; but the words come from within Starfinder’s mind:
Morning a thousand Roses brings, you say; Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday? And this first Summer month that brings the Rose Shall take Jamshyd and Kaikobad away.
The first image, then, denotes a rose; the second, two roses; and the third, a dead rose and a living one. Starfinder’s subconscious knows what the hieroglyphs stand for, if Starfinder does not.
His subconscious supplys yet another clue:
Roses are blue.
Starfinder is staring at the machine-shop door now. The machine shop formerly constituted the whale’s ganglion chamber. Here in its ganglion the whale kept its memories; here the whale thought its thoughts; here the whale made its decisions; here the whale dreamed its dreams. And the ganglion, like all such ganglions, was shaped like an enormous rose—
An enormous blue rose.
It makes sense now. Roses are blue.
Breaking free from his inertia, Starfinder rounds the bend in the corridor and starts up the companionway steps. By the time he arrives on the main deck the heiroglyphs have faded completely from his mind. None come to take their place; nevertheless, he is still shaken when he joins the other converters, all clad in gray coveralls like his own. One of them is the shift leader. He stands nearest the locks, awaiting like the others the arrival of the angel Gloria Wish. Starfinder does not like him. The shift leader is aggressive, domineering, and insensitive. No doubt this is why he is a shift leader.
* * * *
The arrival of Gloria Wish is greeted with cheers, although she appears every evening at this time to post the watchguard and to take the converters home. Starfinder has slept with her; so have most of the other converters whom she ferries to and from their whales. But with Starfinder it is different, because it is he whom she has chosen to be made 1 with. Her silvery skin-tight coveralls enhance the fullness of her breasts, the paps of which protrude through little peepholes made especially for the purpose. She has wide but wiry hips and long slim legs. Her ageless face is of classic cut; beauty radiates from its smooth clear skin, iridesces in her eyes. Her hair is coiffed to form a sunbright halo round her head.
Not only does she own her own shuttle service, but she is a major stockholder in the company that owns the shipyards. This is not unusual on Altair IV. Terraltairan women have climbed the evolutionary ladder faster than Terraltairan men and during the ascent have acquired not only surpassing beauty but surpassing business acumen as well. Unfortunately, the faster they climbed the more of them fell off, and on Altair IV the males now outnumber the females four to one, which makes premarital promiscuity a must. Few men on Altair IV have the good fortune to be able to call a woman exclusively their own, as Starfinder shortly will be able to do. In less than a week now one of his ribs will be removed and fashioned into a circlet for Gloria Wish’s neck as a symbol of their 1-ness.
The converters file through the boarding tube into the shuttleship, and the watchguard takes over the whale. The angel sends the little ship dropping dizzily toward the blue-greenness of Altair IV; on all sides pulse the stars, and up above the whale turns into an ovoid moon; down, down, down falls the ship out of heaven, and the cities of the plain can be seen sparkling beyond Altair TV’s twilight belt, and now the belt advances to meet the plummeting ship, and there, advancing also, is Starfinder’s city; but he has no eyes for it, he is looking up through the overhead spacescope at the dead whales in the sky and at the stars beyond them blooming in the space-time night. In the vast distances forget-me-nots grow, and parsecs to their right glow daffodils; over there are bluebells, lilies of the valley...Someday I will go a-Maying in the heavens—touch a bluebell, breathe the fragrance of a lily, pluck a ((*))...
* * * *
The angel Gloria Wish sees him home in her late-model flyabout as she does every night. She has offered to buy him a flyabout of his own, but he has refused. This is because he is new to Terraltairan culture and has not wholly accepted its ways. But sooner or later he will accept them.
At the base of the tall bright building where he lives she bids him good-night and tells him she will see him later on after she has totaled the day’s receipts. He waves goodbye to her as she flits away.
His apartment comprises three rooms, but they share a single ceiling, as the partitions are only waist-high. The ceiling is the sky. Like all the other ceilings in the building it is televised from the building’s roof, but the picture is flawless and indistinguishable from the reality. Centered in it at the moment is the faint yellow pinpoint of the Earth Mother. Earth herself of course is not visible, but she can be sensed if not seen. Even Starfinder, who has never laid eyes on her, senses her presence. An umbilical cord light-years long stretches from his navel to her storied shores; like all his contemporaries he is as much of Earth as though he had been born there; they and he are the children of Earth—the inheritors of her ethos.
He undresses, showers, shaves, dons a lounge-around ensemble. He sits down and dials his evening meal. The apartment’s 3V screen has come on the minute he walked in the door; as he dines, he glances at it now and then. In it, a man and a woman are copulating, but he hardly sees them. Instead, he sees the rose—
((*))...
“So, whale, you are not dead after all,” he says to the four walls and the three half-walls of the subdivided room.
After his meal, he lies down on the bed and stares up at the televised heavens. A whale has risen in the east and is climbing toward zenith. It transits the Earth Mother, begins its downward journey. However, it is not Starfinder’s whale. It is a different leviathan,,
He
thinks of the final hieroglyphs, pictures them in his mind—
((*))...
The message is clear enough. The whale, unknown to the Jonah who deganglioned it, had two ganglions. The Jonah destroyed only one of them. The other?
Clearly, it was damaged. Else the whale would have dived long ago and resurfaced elsewhere.
Starfinder has heard of biganglioned whales. They are extremely rare, but they exist. But the ganglions in the cases he has heard of have been located side by side, and when one was destroyed, the other was destroyed also. Obviously this whale’s second ganglion is in a different compartment from the first—a natural chamber that has gone undiscovered by the converters. Probably it is close to the machine shop, though not necessarily. The Jonah’s explosives could have damaged the second ganglion by shock waves alone, regardless of its location.
However, Starfinder has never heard of a whale trying to communicate with a human being. It is an established fact that they can and do communicate with each other, sometimes across light-years. But with a human being? It is unthinkable.
Still, this whale has had a long time to mull things over. Maybe it has decided there are worse ignominies in the universe than asking one of its mortal enemies to repair its ganglion. Death, for instance.
Suddenly Starfinder grins. “What will you give me, whale, if I fix it for you?”
Abruptly he realizes what the whale can give him, and a tightness afflicts his throat and he lies immobile on the bed, staring starward. But he does not see the stars, they are occulted by a leviathan vessel that is part spacewhale and part spaceship; he sees himself standing on the bridge of the great whale vessel and he hears himself say, “Dive, whale—dive!”...and the whale plunges beneath the surface of the space-time sea and plummets into the past; the stars move backward in the spacescopes and the constellations subtly change...down, down, down into the mists of mankind’s yesterdays the whale travels, and then, as suddenly as it began, the dive ends and the whale surfaces light-years away and eons ago, and nearby in the black vastness the golden Earth Mother glows, her brood not far away; he sees the blue Earth wearing her filmy nightgown of clouds, he glimpses the naked moon, he says, “Go in closer, whale—I want to see the clods who called themselves kings, the ancient empires; I want to see the armored elephants of Carthage, Hadrian at work on his wall, I want to see Attila riding over a hill, his hideous horde behind him ...I want to see all the things I read about when I was blind—when you blinded me, whale —no, not you, your brother.”
Sweat shines on Starfinder’s forehead; there is a terrible ache in his chest. “If you would give me that, whale—”
A chime sounds, and a cathode tube comes to life. In it is the radiant face of the angel Gloria Wish. “Let me in, my love. I’ve brought you a basket of kisses.”
She is wearing skin-tight gossamer lace through which her paps peep like a pair of roses. With goddess mien she sweeps into the room, putting the drab appointments to shame. She deactivates her single garment and it slips from her to the floor. She is like a table spread before him, and he is a traveler from a far land, eager to taste the viands upon which he gorged himself the night before.
She extinguishes the lights and takes him in her arms; the stars look coldly down upon their lovemaking. As coldly when, her lover spent, she takes one of the priapean hypodermics she always carries with her and injects its contents into his bloodstream...insatiably she climbs upon him, goddess-beast, angel fallen from heaven, this is the day of Starfinder; thus womankind has become.
* * * *
This is the way it is with Starfinder: as a cabin boy on an ore freighter that was once a whale he was blinded by 2-omicrorirvii radiation seeping from the residue of an incompletely destroyed ganglion, and he stayed blind for two years, during which time he learned Braille and, ironically, read all the books he had ignored when he could see, and he swore that when his sight returned he would kill all spacewhales, and when it did return he became a Jonah and entered into the bellies of many whales and deganglioned them, which is to say blew out their brains, but the killing affected him strangely, afflicting him with a malaise of the mind from which he recuperated only after a certain experience caused him to give up killing spacewhales, but he could not give them up altogether, because they were all he knew, so he came to Altair IV and went to work in the orbital shipyards, and lo!—an angel appeared in the heavens and Starfinder fell in love.
Gorged, yet strangely empty, Starfinder sinks into a fitful sleep. During it, he dreams an atavistic dream that he has dreamed increasingly often of late. In the dream he is a Cro-Magnon savage walking weaponless across a starlit plain. Just ahead of him and to his right is a small shadow-filled copse. He dreads the copse and wishes to give it a wide berth, but he seems to have no control over his legs and continues walking in a straight line. As he comes abreast of the copse a huge saber-toothed tiger leaps out of the shadows and bears him to the ground. It crouches above him, its massive forelegs resting on his chest, shutting off his breath, its horrible tusked face grinning down into his own. Growls emanate from deep in the beast’s bowels; its fetid breath overwhelms him. Slowly the jaws part. They part to an incredible width to accommodate the long yellowed tusks. Slowly the face descends—
Starfinder knows that in a moment he will be dead, and yet he cannot move. TMs, far more than the tiger, constitutes the nightmarish quality of the dream. This numbing paralysis that grips him, that makes it impossible for him even to try to save himself. His arms lie like lead at his sides. He cannot so much as lift a single finger. All he can do is lie there helplessly and wait for those gaping jaws to complete their relentless journey, and close.
He wills his arms to rise; he wills his fingers to sink into the tiger’s tawny throat. But his arms do not stir; his fingers do not even tremble. The great face occults the entire heavens. The jaws, which have opened to a 45° angle, begin to close. One of the tusks pricks Starfinder’s jugular vein, wrenching him awake—
He wakes sweating. Beside him, Gloria Wish sleeps. Above him pulse the stars.
He lets his gaze roam the body of the woman he loves, and presently the last dregs of the dream dissolve. What masochistic quirk of his subconscious, he wonders, caused it to occur?
Gloria Wish’s eyes have opened, and she is smiling at him in the starlight. Suddenly he remembers the whale, and realizes that he must tell her it is not dead. As a major stockholder in the company that owns it she is responsible for the potential danger its second ganglion represents. Besides, there should be no secrets between them, for soon they will be 1.
But he doesn’t tell her, lying there beside her in the starlight, nor does he tell her afterward as they loll before the 3V screen and chat. Tomorrow he will tell her, he promises himself—after he makes certain that the whale really does have a second ganglion.
Or better yet, he will tell the shift leader. But first he must make sure that his mind is not playing him false.
Back in the belly of the whale the next morning, Starfinder descends the companionway to the lowest deck, just as he does each working day. He is tired, but no more so than usual. The only aspect of his appearance that betrays both his fatigue and his suppressed excitement is the slightly heightened color of the 2-omicron-vii scar on his right cheek.
He enters the machine shop warily. Little is known about 2-omicron-vii radiation save that it is deadly, as his erstwhile blindness and the scar on his cheek testify. But clearly the second ganglion is safely sealed off from the rest of the whale; if it were not, he and the other converters would have long since been reduced to ashes.
He closes the machine-shop door behind him. He “listens.” He “hears” nothing. Then he concentrates on the whale’s first message, visualizing it in his mind—
((*))
At first, he receives no answer. Then:
((*))
Starfinder concentrates again:Where?
This time there is no response.
Starfinder is no
t surprised. How can a mere word convey anything to a spacewhale? So for the moment Starfinder forgets words and concentrates successively on the nearest hold, on the nearest compartment, and finally on the drive-tissue chamber, visualizing each with a ((*)) in it. Then he blanks his mind and waits.
He feels a shadow. It is pale, and cold as death, and vanishes the moment he becomes aware of it. He has no difficulty interpreting it. It is fear. Desperation has driven the whale into revealing the existence of its second ganglion, but desperation is not enough to overcome its distrust of man.
Strategy is called for. Starfinder must somehow trap the whale into revealing the location of the second ((*)). So he visualizes the whale much as he visualized it in his daydream the previous night, fully converted, except for its drive tissue, and with himself in full command. “Now dive,” he says in his mind, cementing “the words in the whale’s awareness. “Damn you, whale—dive!” And in his mind the whale dives, bearing him, its sole passenger, into the past. “Resurface, whale!” he says. “Return to when we were,” and the whale does so, reemerging into the present.
Orbit 8 - [Anthology] Page 11