by Glen Cook
The Starfish mind-burn another Sangaree, turn to run.
They’ve waited too long. Their central fires are seen. Chub’s sadness touches my mind as a dragon dies.
The Sangaree globe closes. Like a squeezing fist, they tighten up, pile up toward Star’s End. Their attack grows terrible. They begin pushing--and I see their goal, the confused sharks milling against the galaxy. I suppose they think we’ll give up before enduring that again....
“It works well,” my mindvoice says. “Is hard to think thoughts in bad commander. Sangaree heads twisted.” The Sangaree are thickly massed now, pushing hard. The sharks are more agitated. The Starfish are cruising their way, ready to cover if we retreat.
The trickle in the root of my brain waxes, becomes a flaming torrent. It hurts, my God; it hurts! Burning, the power surges through me. I’m scarcely able to observe.
Then the harvestships surge toward the Sangaree, all weapons firing--I think with no aim, just to hurl all destruction possible. The Sangaree push back--but waver, waver.
In pain, I sweep the night. Sangaree ships burn, service ships the same. A harvestship stops shooting. The Sangaree begin knocking it apart--they’ve lost all patience. I suffer another sadness, my own, for those were my people....
The Sangaree withdraw--not retreating, but pushed. We may not last long, but our ferocity is, for the moment, greater than theirs.
Something screams across my mind. It’s a mad voice babbling, shrieking fear, incoherencies. I sense little sense, but warning touches me, terror. Phantoms taunt, grotesqueries as of the worst medieval imagination gather in space before me, gargoyles and gorgons, Boschian nightmares writhing, fangs and talons and fire. They shriek, “Go away, or die!” Insanity. They’re not real. I’m trapped in the thoughts of a mad mind.... I scream.
Nightmare is after me like a drug dream (it’s like descriptions of stardust deprivation), burning now, with salamanders. I must escape this haunted place. Again, I scream. The madness deeply holds my mind.
Then the warm feeling comes, gently calms my soul, soothes my fear, pushes the terror and madness away. My dragon from the stars.... He tells me, “We succeed. Maybe win.” Then, darkly, “Fear is Star’s End mind-thing. Planet is mad machine. Mad machine use madness weapons.
“See!”
Shielded by his touch, I turn to Star’s End. The Sangaree
are silhouetted against the right planet. The face of the world is diseased behind them, spotted blackly, covered with sudden clouds.
I see we are no longer advancing. Indeed, the planet is receding. We’re running full speed, dispersing. I know that, if we could, we’d hyper. But we can’t on minddrive. Nor can the Sangaree while they’re combat-locked. A hundred miles closer than we, they’re scattering, breaking lock--too late! The mad machine’s weapons arrive.
“Close mind! Get out!” my dragon shrieks. “Not need power now.” I understand because of the earlier nightmares--Star’s End’s are weapons of a terrible kind, of the mind. I stop looking--though I have no eyes to close here
--lift the switch beneath my left hand.
I feel the helmet now, the couch, and loss. I miss my dragon, and, in missing him, I understand Starfishers a little better, why they enjoy being so far from the worlds of men. This Fish-Fisher thing is a whole new experiential frontier.... My body is wet with sweat, I’m shivering cold. The room is silent. Where are my techs? Am I alone? My head is a thundering migraine. Rational thought is impossible. I want free of the straps that bind my limbs....
Danion staggers, staggers, staggers. I hear screams--I’m not alone! Loose things racket around; I suffer momentary visions of beasts of hell. Terror grips me anew. The Star’s End weapons have arrived, and I’m pinned here, helpless....
Slowly, slowly, it fades. The screams die (some, I think, were my own), are gradually replaced by excited chatter--I can distinguish no words. My head is tearing itself apart. I was a kid the last time it was this bad. I shout. Someone finally notices me. The helmet comes off, a syringe stabs my neck. Tingles spread. The migraine begins to pass.
The room is cloaked in gloom. Stored power is almost gone, I guess. A drain, the fighting. But the faces I see are joyous--with the exception of those gruesomely vacant few of mind-techs who didn’t get out in time.
“We’ve won!” says the motherish half of my tech-team. “Star’s End killed them.” Not all, I suspect, though I say nothing. Some broke lock, and will carry a grudge....
“And four harvestships,” says a sad-faced man passing.
A Pyrrhic victory. We won, but there is nothing to celebrate. Our joy dies.
I’m ready for collapse, yet hours pass before I rest. First, I search for Mouse, find him in D. C. Central, un-
conscious on a stretcher, his arm crudely bandaged and splinted. Then it’s back to my team, patching pipes. There is so much to do, just to keep Danion alive. But power we eventually restore, life support we repair, drives we jury-rig. It’s not too hard. The damage is more to people than plant (over half the crew is gone). The surviving service ships are recovered. A watch for sharks is set, but those nightmares have gone to places of easier hunting.
There is no time for mourning, so fierce is the battle for life. We save Danion, but abandon the Star’s End project. The war with sharks may well be lost.
Months pass. Something dread approaches: time to return to Carson’s.
It is five months since I want drank of the blood of my soul. Five peaceful months. I belong, finally--but I’m afraid to ask to stay. For weeks I worry asking, decide, undecide. I’m so terribly afraid of being turned down; and a little afraid of being accepted.
Even the days are gone now. We’re down to the hours, and still I haven’t asked, still I haven’t found the courage to seize what I need. I think of creche days, of story time, of heroes who were never undecided, never afraid--all from the past. There is no room for heroes in the kaleidoscope universe of today. (Strange. I’m suddenly certain that was one of the things I’ve sought: heroism, to be a hero. The Broken Wings was as close as I came.... But that conjures visions of Maria.)
The ship for Carson’s departs in two hours. What can I do? I know what I should, but still I fear committal, rejection. I don’t want to leave, but what if staying is a mistake? The questions I ask myself would fill a book.
Finally, with just an hour remaining, I seek Mouse. He never has doubts, no matter how much he fears--paranoia has its rewards. Maybe he can help.
We’ve seen little of one another since the battle. I’ve spent most of my time in Operations Sector, still forbidden him (I’m being used as a mind-tech--are they expecting I’ll stay? Or is it just because they’re forced by circumstances?), so he is bright when I arrive. “Hey, how about chess while we’re waiting?” he asks. He is addicted. “Nobody else will play.” He is still an outcast.
Maybe a game will relax me. I nod. He’s very excited, shaking a little. I hardly notice. Over opening moves, I try to broach my problem. “Mouse, I want to stay....”
He looks at me strangely, as if with mixed emotions, as if he expected this, but was hoping for something else. “Let’s talk about it after the game. Drink? It’ll unwind you.”
A man about to undergo acceleration and temporary null-gravity shouldn’t, but I nod. He goes to a cabinet, gets a bottle of something pre-mixed. While he’s getting glasses, I look around. Everything that is Mouse is gone, except the chess set. So nice to be sure. My gear is packed, but I still haven’t sent it to the service ship....
A glass breaks. Mouse curses, gathers the pieces, curses again as he cuts himself. Wish he’d quit using his bad hand.... I see why. With his good he’s pushing gooey stuff into and over Security’s bug--we hunted it up one day after Star’s End, when we wanted to talk. He brings the drinks, returns to the game.
It’s a slow one. He studies each move so carefully. I down several drinks, grow relaxed, turn off the troublesome part of my mind. I get involved. I’m holding my own. Unusu
al. He’s far the better player, but he seems remote, disturbed. Time swiftly passes.
Sudden, rapid moves. My queen goes, then, “Check-mate!” The alcohol no longer helps. This defeat just adds to a growing depression, a small symbol of my big-time losing. A moment later, while boxing the pieces (he fumbles with his bad hand), he says, “I kept this out, hoping we’d play on the way back. You want to stay?” “Yes.”
“That’s why I’m here.” He turns. I see the fumbling wasn’t purposeless. In his good hand is a Fisher weapon. I groan.
“You should’ve figured, Moyshe. Wheels within wheels.” (Maybe I did down deep, and came to Mouse for an easy answer.) “Psych figured you’d fall, figured you’d get where I couldn’t. So they sent you out as a remote data-collecting device--and I’m your keeper. That is the worm gnawing around the core of all the rotten plans.” This is a long speech for Mouse. He’s doing something more than trying to explain--maybe he doesn’t like what he’s doing. “We’re friends, so let’s play it gentle, eh?”
Yes, gentle. As in chess, he outskills me here. I’m the half of the team who always does the “soft,” people stuff. He does the “hard.” He may like me, but he will, and easily can, kill me if I don’t cooperate. I look at his face. There’s pain there. There’s something he wants to tell me--maybe, just maybe, he doesn’t want to go himself. I’d best not push if he’s under stress. Hell overreact. My shoulders slump forward. I surrender. Back to being a chip in the stream.
Dread voice through Danion, godlike, calling us to the departure station for pay-off and check-out. Mouse pockets his weapon. “Sorry, Moyshe.”
“I understand.” But I don’t, of course.
He nods at the door. We go. I give him no trouble all the way, even when opportunity occurs. I’m sure I could do something in the crowd there. But I’ve surrendered all. No home. Guess I’ll never have one. Back to being a chip in a universe like Sierran rivers raging. Back to the beginning.
No home....
“Mr. benRabi?” Here’s a man coming through the press, my bags in his hands. “You left these.”
I know this man. He’s Security, the fellow who first took me into Operations Sector. He steps between Mouse and me. Landsmen mill excitedly around us, talking excitedly of home, rushing to the paymaster when their names are called. I don’t really notice in my shock.
“The gun, please?” There are several of them now, all around. Mouse surrenders his weapon meekly. “I told Beckhart it wouldn’t work.” He looks shattered.
“We’ll have to hold you.”
There’s a stir among the landsmen, a confused shout, screams. A Seiner twists past me, falling, an expression of incredible surprise on the unburned half of his face. Now there’s screaming, running, Security men plunging into the crowd....
“Wheels within wheels, and this was mine,” Mouse says. “I thought Beckhart would have a fail-safer aboard.” (Fail-safer. Trade term for a fanatic sent on a mission, unknown to the mission, to assassinate agents about to defect or be captured. Didn’t know we used them any more. Sure didn’t think Mouse and I were that important.) “Sorry, Moyshe. I couldn’t tell you. Had to have you thinking I meant what I was doing.” Did he? Or was he just bending with the breeze? “Had to spot him before we went over. Otherwise...” He shrugs, then smiles. So do I. I’ll believe him.
There’re more shots, then the Seiners catch their man--now we’re home free. Home, after all--and with a friend.
In the Wind
Here is a story set in a more distant future when humankind travels to far stars routinely.
Exobiology, the study of life forms beyond the earth, is a young enough branch of biology to be called “applied science fiction” as practiced by a science specialist of one kind or another.
Studies in this field include characterizing hypothetical planetary environments, the native life which might exist in such alien ecologies, and how such life might be observed, directly or indirectly. But short of actually traveling to the planets of other solar systems, the only life which we might be able to detect at a distance around other stars is intelligent life. Drawing on background from astrophysics, exobiology, planetary composition, Glen Cook creates an alien environment inhabited by intelligent life vastly different from us. And in what is also an exciting adventure story, he manages to raise serious ethical dilemmas about our possible relationship to such intelligences.
G. Z. (George Zebrowski)
I
It’s quiet up there, riding the ups and downs over Ginnunga Gap. Even in combat there’s no slightest clamor, only a faint scratch and whoosh of strikers tapping igniters and rockets smoking away. The rest of the time, just a sleepy whisper of air caressing your canopy. On patrol it’s hard to stay alert and wary.
If the aurora hadn’t been so wild behind the hunched backs of the Harridans, painting glaciers and snowfields in ropes of varicolored fire, sequinning snow-catches in the weathered natural castles of the Gap with momentary reflections, I might have dozed at the stick the morning I became von Drachau’s wingman. The windwhales were herding in the mountains, thinking migration, and we were flying five or six missions per day. The strain was almost unbearable.
But the auroral display kept me alert. It was the strongest I’d ever seen. A ferocious magnetic storm was developing. Lightning grumbled between the Harridans’ copper peaks, sometimes even speared down and danced among the spires in the Gap. We’d all be grounded soon. The rising winds, cold but moisture-heavy, promised weather even whales couldn’t ride.
Winter was about to break out of the north, furiously, a winter of a Great Migration. Planets, moons and sun were right, oracles and omens predicting imminent Armageddon. Twelve years had ticked into the ashcan of time. All the whale species again were herding. Soon the fighting would be hard and hopeless.
There are four species of windwhale on the planet Camelot, the most numerous being the Harkness whale, which migrates from its north arctic and north temperate feeding ranges to equatorial mating grounds every other year. Before beginning their migration they, as do all whales, form herds-which, because the beasts are total omnivores, utterly strip the earth in their passage south. The lesser species, in both size and numbers, are Okumura’s First, which mates each three winters, Rosenberg’s, mating every fourth, and the rare Okumura’s Second, which travels only once every six years.
Unfortunately...
It takes no mathematical genius to see the factors of twelve. And every twelve years the migrations do coincide. In the Great Migrations the massed whales leave tens of thousands of square kilometers of devastation in their wake, devastation from which, because of following lesser migrations, the routes barely recover before the next Great Migration. Erosion is phenomenal. The monsters, subject to no natural control other than that apparently exacted by creatures we called mantas, were destroying the continent on which our employers operated.
Ubichi Corporation had been on Camelot twenty-five years. The original exploitation force, though equipped to face the world’s physical peculiarities, hadn’t been prepared for whale migrations.
They’d been lost to a man, whale supper, because the Corporation’s pre-exploitation studies had been so cursory. Next Great Migration another team, though they’d dug in, hadn’t fared much better. Ubichi still hadn’t done its scientific investigation. In fact, its only action was a determination that the whales had to go.
Simple enough, viewed from a board room at Geneva. But practical implementation was a nightmare under Camelot’s technically stifling conditions. And the mantas recomplicated everything.
My flight leader’s wagging wings directed my attention south. From a hill a dozen kilometers down the cable came flashing light, Clonninger Station reporting safe arrival of a convoy from Derry.
For the next few hours we’d have to be especially alert.
It would take the zeppelins that long to beat north against the wind, and all the while they would be vulnerable to mantas from over the
Gap. Mantas, as far as we could see at the time, couldn’t tell the difference between dirigibles and whales. More air cover should be coming up...
Von Drachau came to Jaeger Gruppe XIII (Corporation Armed Action Command’s unsubtle title for our Hunter Wing, which they used as a dump for problem employees) with that convoy, reassigned from JG IV, a unit still engaged in an insane effort to annihilate the Sickle Islands whale herds by means of glider attacks carried out over forty-five kilometers of quiet seas. We’d all heard of him (most JG XIII personnel had come from the Sickle Islands operation), the clumsiest, or luckiest incompetent, pilot flying for Ubichi. While scoring only four kills he’d been bolted down seven times-and had survived without a scratch. He was the son of Jupp von Drachau, the Confederation Navy officer who had directed the planet-busting strike against the Sangaree homeworld, a brash, sometimes pompous, always self-important nineteen year old who thought that the flame of his father’s success should illuminate him equally-and yet resented even a mention of the man. He was a dilettante, come to Camelot only to fly. Unlike the rest of us, Old Earthers struggling to buy out of the poverty bequeathed us by prodigal ancestors, he had no driving need to give performance for pay.
An admonition immediately in order: I’m not here to praise von Drachau, but to bury him. To let him bury himself. Aerial combat fans, who have never seen Camelot, who have read only corporate propaganda, have made of him a contemporary “hero”, a flying do-no-wrong competitor for the pewter crown already contested by such antiques as von Richtoffen, Hartmann and Galland. Yet these Archaicists can’t, because they need one, make a platinum bar from a turd, nor a sociopsychological fulfillment from a scatterbrain kid...*
Most of the stories about him are apocryphal accretions generated to give him depth in his later, “heroic” aspect. Time and storytellers increase his stature, as they have that of Norse gods, who might’ve been people who lived in preliterate times. For those who knew him (and no one is closer than a wingman), though some of us might like to believe the legends, he was just a selfish, headstrong, tantrum-throwing manchild-albeit a fighter of supernatural ability. In the three months he spent with us, during the Great Migration, his peculiar talents and shortcomings made of him a creature larger than life. Unpleasant a person as he was, he became the phenom pilot.
