Orbit 8 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  Next, Starfinder visualizes the whale as the freighter it is destined to become in the near future. He pictures its holds brimful of raw materials, and he pictures a surly commander standing on its bridge, a beetle-browed mate pacing its main deck, an obese astrogator poring over charts in its chartroom, a sullen chef cooking in its galley, and a slovenly crew scattered throughout its interior. Finally, to make certain the whale gets the message and understands that of the two alternatives the first is far preferable to the second, Starfinder visualizes the drive-tissue chamber as it will look after the outside power source has been installed and is in operation—concrete proof, were any needed, that man will have taken over and that the whale will be dead.

  Then he waits.

  As he waits, he realizes belatedly that he has made a bargain with the whale. He has implied that if it will reveal the location of the second ((*)), he, Starfinder, will repair whatever damage has been done to it, and that in return the whale must become his personal property and obey his every command. In his eagerness to trap the whale, he has trapped himself.

  But this is ridiculous. Men cannot enter into bargains with animated asteroids that however human they may sometimes seem are nothing of the sort. Besides, how can a spacewhale—any more than a man—be trusted? And all of this is futile speculation anyway, because the whale will not accept such bondage, no matter how desperate it may be, no matter how reluctant to die—

  The hieroglyphic image that abruptly appears in Star-finder’s mind can be indicated thus:

  Starfinder is stunned.

  The whale will enter into bondage.

  Clearly, death to a spacewhale is as dreadful a prospect as death is to a man.

  The second ganglion is located just beneath the first in a natural chamber the converters have overlooked, probably because of its proximity to the whale’s skin. Now that he knows its location, Starfinder must tell the shift leader. Any other course of action would be insane.

  Since the machine shop itself is close to the whale’s skin, the deck separating the shop from the chamber below cannot be more than three or four feet thick. Transsteel, which constitutes the whale’s subtissue, is a super-hard organic-metallic two-phase material, but it yields readily to the hyperacetylene flame which the Altair IV shipyards developed to cope with it. Since the deck is of a much softer material, burning through it will take but a few minutes; blasting the rose into extinction will require but a few more. It is one thing to dream of commanding a spacewhale and holding the past in the palm of your hand; it is quite another to make such a dream a reality when to do so will mean ostracizing yourself forever from your adopted society and alienating yourself completely from the woman you adore. Starfinder realizes that up until this moment he has been quite mad. Now, thankfully, sanity has returned.

  * * * *

  Starfinder quits the machine shop and seals the door behind him. It is his intention to seek out the shift leader and reveal that the whale is not dead. Why, then, does he turn right instead of left and continue down the corridor to the drive-tissue chamber? The reason is that the shift leader can just as well be apprised of the second ganglion during the lunch break as now, because in its present condition it does not represent a true hazard.

  Starfinder resumes work where he left off yesterday. It is his job to adapt the original structure so that those aspects of it which are incomprehensible to man can be bypassed. This requires a certain amount of hyper-acetylene surgery (none of which he has performed as yet) and it is a terribly complicated operation.

  As Starfinder works, he thinks of how the ancient Carthaginians used to convert elephants into war machines. How they attached armor to the beasts’ flanks and forelegs; how they built towers atop the beasts’ ungainly backs; how they taught the huge animals to charge and trample the enemy.

  For some reason he cannot get these Carthaginian elephants out of his mind, and he thinks of them all morning long. When the lunch-break bell sounds over the intercom, he leaves the drive-tissue chamber and walks down the corridor toward the foot of the companionway. He hurries past the machine-shop door, but not quite fast enough to avoid having a pair of roses implanted in his mind—a living and a dead one.

  The dining room is on the second deck, directly above the galley. The galley has been stocked for the ship-to-be’s trial voyage, but the working crew’s fare is meager. However, Starfinder isn’t hungry and hardly notices. There are elephants milling about in his mind, trampling his thoughts, and every now and then a rose appears incongruously among the huge ungainly beasts, and he knows he cannot go on like this, that he must either get rid of his burden or shoulder it in earnest, and since that is out of the question, he approaches the shift leader, who has finished eating and is sitting at his personal table, picking his teeth.

  Starfinder has every intention of stopping at the table, and he very nearly does so. But at the last moment the shift leader glances up at him, and Starfinder is reminded by those bleached blue eyes that the shift leader is not only aggressive, domineering, and insensitive, but is frustrated as well. There is nothing that would please him more than to have Starfinder tell him that the whale is still alive, because then he would be able to relieve that frustration, temporarily at least, by destroying the second ganglion.

  But Starfinder wants the second ganglion destroyed by someone other than himself, doesn’t he? Apparently not, for he walks past the shift leader without a word and descends the companionway to the third deck. Here, in the main supply room, he procures an anti-2-omicron-vii suit. Both the supply room and the third-deck corridor are deserted, and in moments he has reached the lowest deck and is heading for the drive-tissue chamber. He drops off the suit by the machine-shop door, picks up his hyperacetylene torch and tanks in the drive-tissue chamber, and returns. Then he is in the machine shop, the door sealed behind him*

  He marks off the center of the shop, dons the anti-2-omicron-vii suit and begins burning through the deck.

  The machine-shop door is constructed of transsteel filched from the whale’s subtissue and is six inches thick. Even radiation from a healthy ganglion would be unable to penetrate it; hence Starfinder has no fears on that score.

  Hyperacetylene does not melt metal—it vaporizes it. A depression three feet in diameter begins to take shape.

  Starfinder’s mind wanders as he burns...The towers the Carthaginians built atop their war beasts housed bowmen, and when the enemy was within range the bowmen unleashed their arrows from the safety of their portable forts, killing many of their foes and wounding others. Astride each elephant’s neck sat a pilot armed with a sledgehammer, with which to smash the animal’s vertebrae should it panic and go berserk. The Carthaginians were master converters. They thought of everything.

  Much later in his history, as he grew more civilized, man devised subtler means of converting animals. The dolphins are a classic example. While publicly making friends with a few of them, man privately trained others to carry explosives to the hulls of enemy ships and to detonate both the explosives and themselves at exactly the right moment. The Technologists were master converters too.

  Thoughts of the dolphin lead ineluctably to thoughts of the whale that once flourished in the seas of Earth. For a time, Starfinder’s mind dwells upon Moby Dick, which he read while he was blind, and he wonders whether Melville meant evil to be symbolized by the whale, as so many scholars seem to think, or by Captain Ahab?

  What does this whale symbolize?

  Freedom? Death? Both?

  What do I, Starfinder, symbolize?

  Burn, Starfinder—burn! Leave your soul alone. You did not create the elephant. You did not create the dolphin. You did not create the whale. You did not create this whale. And above all, you did not create man. Burn, burn, burn!—and when you see the rose, burn that too!

  But when he sees the rose he does not burn it. Instead, he extinguishes the torch and lowers himself into the second-ganglion chamber. It is surprisingly large, and its walls emit th
e same pale phosphorescence that illumines the rest of the whale’s interior. The rose is huge, but although its radiation is still deadly, its blueness is not the blueness of the other roses he has known—the roses he has killed...

  Starfinder kneels, and examines the stem. It is cracked—probably from the shock waves of the explosion that destroyed the first ganglion—and the energy stored in the whale’s transsteel subtissue cannot reach the rose in sufficient quantities to sustain it

  But the injury is a minor one. Starfinder can repair the damage in a matter of minutes. Both the stem and the rose consist of transsteel: all he needs to set them right are a welder and a packet of transsteel welding rods, both of which items are no farther away than the drive-tissue chamber.

  But, damn it!—he didn’t come here to fix the rose. He came to destroy it

  Why, then, didn’t he bring the special explosives that alone can do the job? Only Jonah’s charges can effectively eradicate a rose, and there is a whole box of them in the supply room.

  Slowly Starfinder straightens. As though to make his burden heavier yet, the whale transmits a new combination of hieroglyphs:

  At first Starfinder doesn’t understand the meaning of the message. Then he realizes that the whale is referring to their bargain. represents the rose in its present damaged condition; the stickman represents Starfinder. ((*)) stands for the rose after Starfinder shall have repaired it, and the resultant oneness of Starfinder and the whale can mean only one thing; spacetime, the three-sided figure signifying space, and , with its abrupt descent, time.

  There is a long silence. Then the whale, as though afraid it has failed to make itself clear (and perhaps growing desperate because it is so close to death) discards its pride and spells out its acceptance of the bargain in a single hieroglyph which Starfinder cannot fail to understand:

  And Starfinder? He climbs out of the second-ganglion chamber, picks up his hyperacetylene torch and tanks, quits the machine shop and seals the door behind him. Then he returns to the drive-tissue chamber, removes the anti-2-omicron-vii suit and goes back to work. Somehow he manages to get through the rest of the day.

  * * * *

  Lying abed, hands clasped behind his head, Starfinder gazes up at the celestial ceiling of his room. His whale is the evening star.

  It is distinguishable from the others because its surface is burnished, causing it to reflect even more of the rays of Altair than its dead brothers. It is the brightest object in the heavens.

  Lying on his bed, waiting for the angel Gloria Wish, he watches it rise and set, and he wonders how he will be able to live with himself after he tells her that the whale is still alive and that he has made a bargain with it.

  He does not need to wonder how she will react when he does tell her. He knows. She will say, “Starfinder, are you insane? Get hold of the shift leader and go up there and kill it at once!”

  And Starfinder will say, “Very well, Gloria Wish—I will do as you command.”

  He will say this because Gloria Wish is stronger than he. She is neither god nor goddess, but she comes very close to being both. It has taken only three centuries for modern Terraltairan woman to evolve, but she is the culmination of everything womankind ever wanted to be. She is the glory of womankind incarnate. To look at a Terraltairan woman is to fall in love.

  But seldom is that love returned in kind. It cannot be on a planet where there are so many men. Starfinder knows how lucky he is, and he is grateful. It is true that Gloria Wish will outlive him, then she will become 1 with many lovers after he is dead. But right now she is his, and his alone. Only he can have her. The appeasing of her appetite is his responsibility alone.

  But can he appease that gargantuan appetite? Can he alone—even with the assistance of priapean injections —perform a task that up till now has required the energies of twenty men?

  There are two sayings on Altair IV that crop up regularly during barroom conversations and appear periodically on rest-room walls. The first one rises to poetic heights of a sort, and goes like this:

  With this rib I do thee wed;

  In ten more years I shall be dead.

  The second is a simple statement of fact, and goes like this:

  The only old men on Terraltair are queers.

  Lying on his bed waiting for Gloria Wish, Starfinder stares straight up into the black and infinite immensities where yesterday is the sparkle of a distant star and tomorrow the twinkle of another and today a drop of darkness; he sees the climbing into heaven of the dead whales, the sad promenade of the ((*)) less leviathans across the face of ; he sees the yellow mote of the Earth Mother and he visualizes the filmy-nightgowned Earth waiting with all her treasures—Earth Past, the great green orb with all her seas and the ships upon them, and the ancient armies marching over her lands; the path of history, queens and kings, a pageant colorful and cruel—all this I hold in the palm of my hand; all this is mine for the taking—

  Enter Gloria Wish, bearing a basket of kisses:“Starfinder, my starfinder—why are you so pale?”

  She divests herself of gossamer lace, puts out the lights and sits down on the edge of the bed. Her breasts are like twin pale hills looming above him, and beyond them hovers her face. Its beauty intensifies as he looks up at it, outshines the stars themselves. She is like a wind that has come up from the south, and the wind is warm upon him as the pale hills descend toward his face. Famished, he feeds. And now the wind grows wanner, enveloping him and lifting him into the sky, the stars shine brightly as they pinwheel in the night, and the wind lifts him higher yet, and now he is among the pinwheeling stars. One by one, they nova around his head and fall like flowers past his face, down, down, down ... Dimly he feels the faint prick of the first hypodermic, wakes to the quickening of his blood; the wind, a hot and searing blast now, whips him aloft again, and now there are supernovas in the heavens, he can see them from the Aurignadan plain across which he is walking, weaponless and alone. Once again the great gaunt beast leaps out of the shadows of the copse and bears him to the earth. Once again the Cyclopean jaws spread wide. Foul saliva drips upon his face. His lungs are a holocaust of pain. Growls of anticipation reverberate in the beast’s throat as it lowers its face for the feast.

  If he could but move. He tries to break the invisible bonds that hold him helpless to the earth. He tries with every shred of himself, with every molecule, with every atom—break! break! break!...and suddenly there is a terrible rending within him, a spasm of incomprehensible pain, and then his arms are free and rising, his fingers are sinking into the tawny throat. Deeper still, and deeper, and now the growls have given way to screams; but the screams do not remain long, Starfinder’s fingers drive them away. He rises to his feet with a strength that amazes him, and shakes the dying sabertooth as though it were an empty sack. And shakes and chokes and shakes and chokes. Then he realizes that his eyes are tightly closed, and opens them...and sees the face of the angel Gloria Wish, and even then his fingers do not fall away, although the blueness of her face testifies that she is dead.

  * * * *

  Up the ladder into heaven climbs Starfinder once again. This time he climbs alone.

  He docks the shuttleship against the flank of the whale and passes through the boarding tube into the whale’s belly. He overpowers the watchguard and carries him back into the shuttleship. He programs the automatic pilot to orbit the ship three times and then go in for a landing. He reenters the belly of the whale and proceeds directly to the lowest deck. He waits till his hands have stopped trembling; then he repairs the rose.

  After sealing the machine-shop door from the outside, he makes his way to the bridge. He gives the rose time to absorb the energy it needs, then says, “Deorbit, whale —break free!” And the whale disengages itself from the oribital shipyards of Altair IV, which are both a source of beauty and a source of prosperity to the planet’s inhabitants, and parts company forever with its dead brothers.

  Ravenous after months of starvation, it feeds upon
the dust and debris of space. Its interior phosphorescence takes on a brighter hue; a throbbing comes from below as its drive tissue comes to life. Replenished, the whale floats upon the surface of the sea. “Now,” Starfinder says, and the whale gathers itself for the plunge, “Now, whale.” The throbbing of the drive tissue becomes a powerful pulse. “Dive!” And the whole dives, deep into , and and the go free.

  <>

  * * * *

  ROBERT E. MARGROFF

  AND ANDREW J. OFFUTT

  THE BOOK

  The book lay on a rough stone shelf, its pages and golden script unfaded by the sun. To the near-man crouched over the pages he really could not comprehend, the book seemed the answer to all wants and longings.

  He crouched there, drooling slightly from the corners of his mouth. His skin was goosefleshed from the morning cold; his joints were swollen. His name was Brandon.

  He went back on his heels to cough and choke. From the cave’s entrance, greasy smoke had backed to fill his lungs and redden his eyes.