“It’s going to be the trip of your life, man!” I said.
Fazio nodded. His eyes looked a little glazed, and his nostrils were flaring.
Elisandra hit the prelaunch control. The sled’s roof opened and a recorded voice out of a speaker in the dropdock ceiling began to explain to Fazio how to get inside and make himself secure for launching. My hands were cold, my throat was dry. Yet I was very calm, all things considered. This was murder, wasn’t it? Maybe so, technically speaking. But I was finding other names for it. A mercy killing; a balancing of the karmic accounts; a way of atoning for an ancient sin of omission. For him, release from hell after ten years; for me, release from a lesser but still acute kind of pain.
Fazio approached the sled’s narrow entry slot.
“Wait a second,” I said. I caught him by the arm. The account wasn’t quite in balance yet.
“Chollie—” Elisandra said.
I shook her off. To Fazio I said, “There’s one thing I need to tell you before you go.”
He gave me a peculiar look, but didn’t say anything.
I went on, “I’ve been claiming all along that I didn’t shoot you when the synsym got you because there wasn’t time, the medics landed too fast. That’s sort of true, but mainly it’s bullshit. I had time. What I didn’t have was the guts.”
“Chollie—” Elisandra said again. There was an edge on her voice.
“Just one more second,” I told her. I turned to Fazio again. “I looked at you, I looked at the heat gun, I thought about the synsym. But I just couldn’t do it. I stood there with the gun in my hand and I didn’t do a thing. And then the medics landed and it was too late—I felt like such a shit, Fazio, such a cowardly shit—”
Fazio’s face was turning blotchy. The red synsym lines blazed weirdly in his eyes.
“Get him into the sled!” Elisandra yelled. “It’s taking control of him, Chollie!”
“Oligabongaboo!” Fazio said. “Ungabanoo! Flizz! Thrapp!”
And he came at me like a wild man.
I had him by thirty kilos, at least, but he damned near knocked me over. Somehow I managed to stay upright. He bounced off me and went reeling around, and Elisandra grabbed his arm. He kicked her hard and sent her flying, but then I wrapped my forearm around the throat from behind, and Elisandra, crawling across the floor, got him around his legs so we could lift him and stuff him into the sled. Even then we had trouble holding him. Two of us against one skinny burned-out ruined man, and he writhed and twisted and wriggled about like something diabolical. He scratched, he kicked, he elbowed, he spat. His eyes were fiery. Every time we forced him close to the entryway of the sled he dragged us back away from it. Elisandra and I were grunting and winded, and I didn’t think we could hang on much longer. This wasn’t Fazio we were doing battle with, it was a synthetic symbiont out of the Ovoid labs, furiously trying to save itself from a fiery death. God knows what alien hormones it was pumping into Fazio’s bloodstream. God knows how it had rebuilt his bones and heart and lungs for greater efficiency. If he ever managed to break free of my grip, I wondered which of us would get out of the dropdock alive.
But all the same, Fazio still needed to breathe. I tightened my hold on his throat and felt cartilage yielding. I didn’t care. I just wanted to get him on that sled, dead or alive, give him some peace at all. Him and me both. Tighter—tighter—
Fazio made rough sputtering noises, and then a thick nasty gargling sound.
“You’ve got him,” Elisandra said.
“Yeah. Yeah.”
I clamped down one notch tighter yet, and Fazio began to go limp, though his muscles still spasmed and jerked frantically. The creature within him was still full of fight; but there wasn’t much air getting into Fazio’s lungs now and his brain was starving for oxygen. Slowly Elisandra and I shoved him the last five meters toward the sled—lifted him, pushed him up to the edge of the slot, started to jam him into it—
A convulsion wilder than anything that had gone before ripped through Fazio’s body. He twisted half around in my grasp until he was face-to-face with Elisandra, and a bubble of something gray and shiny appeared on his lips. For an instant everything seemed frozen. It was like a slice across time, for just that instant. Then things began to move again. The bubble burst; some fragment of tissue leaped the short gap from Fazio’s lips to Elisandra’s. The symbiont, facing death, had cast forth a piece of its own life-stuff to find another host. “Chollie!” Elisandra wailed, and let go of Fazio and went reeling away as if someone had thrown acid in her eyes. She was clawing at her face. At the little flat gray slippery thing that had plastered itself over her mouth and was rapidly poking a couple of glistening pseudopods up into her nostrils. I hadn’t known it was possible for a symbiont to send out offshoots like that. I guess no one did, or people like Fazio wouldn’t be allowed to walk around loose.
I wanted to yell and scream and break things. I wanted to cry. But I didn’t do any of those things.
When I was four years old, growing up on Backgammon, my father bought me a shiny little vortex boat from a peddler on Maelstrom Bridge. It was just a toy, a bathtub boat, though it had all the stabilizer struts and outriggers in miniature. We were standing on the bridge and I wanted to see how well the boat worked, so I flipped it over the rail into the vortex. Of course, it was swept out of sight at once. Bewildered and upset because it didn’t come back to me, I looked toward my father for help. But he thought I had flung his gift into the whirlpool for the sheer hell of it, and he gave me a shriveling look of black anger and downright hatred that I will never forget. I cried half a day, but that didn’t bring back my vortex boat. I wanted to cry now. Sure. Something grotesquely unfair had happened, and I felt four years old all over again, and there was nobody to turn to for help. I was on my own.
I went to Elisandra and held her for a moment. She was sobbing and trying to speak, but the thing covered her lips. Her face was white with terror and her whole body was trembling and jerking crazily.
“Don’t worry,” I whispered. “This time I know what to do.”
How fast we act, when finally we move. I got Fazio out of the way first, tossing him or the husk of him into the entry slot of the Corona Queen as easily as though he had been an armload of straw. Then I picked up Elisandra and carried her to the sled. She didn’t really struggle, just twisted about a little. The symbiont didn’t have that much control yet. At the last moment I looked into her eyes, hoping I wasn’t going to see the red circles in them. No, not yet, not so soon. Her eyes were the eyes I remembered, the eyes I loved. They were steady, cold, clear. She knew what was happening. She couldn’t speak, but she was telling me with her eyes: Yes, yes, go ahead, for Christ’s sake go ahead, Chollie!
Unfair. Unfair. But nothing is ever fair, I thought. Or else if there is justice in the universe it exists only on levels we can’t perceive, in some chilly macrocosmic place where everything is evened out in the long run but the sin is not necessarily atoned by the sinner. I pushed her into the slot down next to Fazio and slammed the sled shut. And went to the dropdock’s wall console and keyed in the departure signal, and watched as the sled went sliding down the track toward the exit hatch on its one-way journey to Betelgeuse. The red light of the activated repellers glared for a moment, and then the blue-green returned. I turned away, wondering if the symbiont had managed to get a piece of itself into me, too, at the last moment. I waited to feel that tickle in the mind. But I didn’t. I guess there hadn’t been time for it to get us both.
And then, finally, I dropped down on the launching track and let myself cry. And went out of there, after a while, silent, numb, purged clean, thinking of nothing at all. At the inquest six weeks later I told them I didn’t have the slightest notion why Elisandra had chosen to get aboard that ship with Fazio. Was it a suicide pact, the inquest panel asked me? I shrugged. I don’t know, I said. I don’t have any goddamned idea what was going on in their minds that day, I said. Silent, numb, purged clean, think
ing of nothing at all.
So Fazio rests at last in the blazing heart of Betelgeuse. My Elisandra is in there also. And I go on, day after day, still working the turnaround wheel here at the Station, reeling in the stargoing ships that come cruising past the fringes of the giant red sun. I still feel haunted, too. But it isn’t Fazio’s ghost that visits me now, or even Elisandra’s—not now, not after all this time. I think the ghost that haunts me is my own.
THE SHIP WHO RETURNED
ANNE MCCAFFREY
Anne McCaffrey is a winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Award, a SFWA Grand Master, and an inductee into the SF Hall of Fame. Her work is beloved by generations of readers. She is best known for authoring the Dragonriders of Pern series, but she has also written dozens of other novels. She was born in Cambridge, Mass. in 1926 and currently makes her home in Ireland, in a home named Dragonhold-Underhill.
“The Ship Who Returned,” which first appeared in the anthology Far Horizons, is a sequel to The Ship Who Sang, part of McCaffrey’s Brain and Brawn Ship series. This story follows Helva, a sentient spaceship with the mind of a human girl, as she deals with the death of her human partner and an emergency return to the planet she had saved years before.
Helva had been prowling through her extensive music files, trying to find something really special to listen to, when her exterior sensors attracted her attention. She focused on the alert. Dead ahead of her were the ion trails of a large group of small, medium and heavy vessels. They had passed several days ago but she could still “smell” the stink of the dirty emissions. She could certainly analyze their signatures. Instantly setting her range to maximum, she caught only the merest blips to the port side, almost beyond sensor range.
“Bit off regular shipping routes,” she murmured.
“So they are,” replied Niall.
She smiled fondly. The holograph program had really improved since that last tweaking she’d done. There was Niall Parollan in the pilot’s chair, one compact hand spread beside the pressure plate, the left dangling from his wrist on the armrest. He was dressed in the black shipsuit he preferred to wear, vain man that he’d been: “because black’s better now that my hair’s turned.” He would brush back the thick shock of silvery hair and preen slightly in her direction.
“Where exactly are we, Niall? I haven’t been paying much attention.”
“Ha! Off in cloud-cuckoo land again . . . ”
“Wherever that is,” she replied amiably. It was such a comfort to hear his voice.
“I do believe . . . ” and there was a pause as the program accessed her present coordinates, “we are in the Cepheus Three region.”
“Why, so we are. Why would a large flotilla be out here? This is a fairly empty volume of space.”
“I’ll bring up the atlas,” Niall replied, responding as programmed.
It was bizarre of her to have a hologram of a man dead two months but it was a lot better—psychologically—for her to have the comfort of such a reanimation. The “company” would dam up her grief until she could return her dead brawn to Regulus Base. And discover if there were any new “brawns” she could tolerate as a mobile partner. Seventy-eight years, five months and twenty days with Niall Parollan’s vivid personality was a lot of time to suddenly delete. Since she had the technology to keep him “alive”—in a fashion, she had done so. She certainly had enough memory of their usual interchanges with which to program this charade. She would soon have to let him go but she’d only do that when she no longer needed his presence to keep mourning at bay. Not that she hadn’t had enough exposure to that emotion in her life—what with losing her first brawn partner, Jennan, only a few years into what should have been a lifelong association.
In that era, Niall Parollan had been her contact with Central Worlds Brain and Brawn Ship Administration at Regulus Base. After a series of relatively short and only minimally successful longer-term partnerships with other brawns, she had gladly taken Niall as her mobile half. Together they had been roaming the galaxy. Since Niall had ingeniously managed to pay off her early childhood and educational indebtedness to Central Worlds, they had been free agents, able to take jobs that interested them, not compulsory assignments. They had not gone to the Horsehead Nebula as she had once whimsically suggested to Jennan. The NH-834 had had quite enough adventures and work in this one not to have to go outside it for excitement.
“Let’s see if we can get a closer fix on them, shall we, Niall?”
“Wouldn’t be a bad idea on an otherwise dull day, would it?” Though his fingers flashed across the pressure plates of the pilot’s console, it was she who did the actual mechanics of altering their direction. But then, she would have done that anyway. Niall didn’t really need to, but it pleased her to give him tasks to do. He’d often railed at her for finding him the sort of work he didn’t want to do. And she’d snap back that a little hard work never hurt anyone. Of course, as he began to fail physically, this became lip service to that old argument. Niall had been in his mid-forties when he became her brawn and she the NH-834, so he had had a good long life for a soft-shell person.
“Good healthy stock I am,” the hologram said, surprising her.
Was she thinking out loud? She must have been for the program to respond.
“With careful treatment, you’ll last centuries,” she replied, as she often had.
She executed the ninety-degree course change that the control panel had plotted.
“Don’t dawdle, girl,” Niall said, swiveling in the chair to face the panel behind which her titanium shell resided.
She thought about going into his “routine,” but decided she’d better find out a little more about the “invasion.”
“Why do you call it an invasion?” Niall asked.
“That many ships, all heading in one direction? What else could it be? Freighters don’t run in convoys. Not out here, at any rate. And nomads have definite routes they stick to in the more settled sectors. And if I’ve read their KPS rightly . . . ”
“ . . . Which, inevitably, you do, my fine lady friend . . . ”
“Those ships have been juiced up beyond freighter specifications and they’re spreading dirty stuff all over space. Shouldn’t be allowed.”
“Can’t have space mucked up, can we?” The holo’s right eyebrow cocked, imitating an habitual trait of Niall’s. “And juiced-up engines as well. Should we warn anyone?”
Helva had found the Atlas entries for this sector of space. “Only the one habitable planet in the system they seem to be heading straight for. Ravel . . . ” Sudden surprise caught at her heart at that name. “Of all places.”
“Ravel?” A pretty good program to search and find that long-ago reference so quickly. She inwardly winced at the holo’s predictable response. “Ravel was the name of the star that went nova and killed your Jennan brawn, wasn’t it?” Niall said, knowing the fact perfectly well.
“I didn’t need the reminder,” she said sourly.
“Biggest rival I have,” Niall said brightly as he always did, and pushed the command chair around in a circle, grinning at her unrepentantly as he let the chair swing 360 degrees and back to the console.
“Nonsense. He’s been dead nearly a century . . . ”
“Dead but not forgotten . . . ”
Helva paused, knowing Niall was right, as he always was, in spite of being dead, too. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea, having him able to talk back to her. But it was only what he would have said in life anyhow, and had done often enough or it wouldn’t be in the program.
She wished that the diagnostics had shown her one specific cause for his general debilitation so she could have forestalled his death. Some way, somehow.
“I’m wearing out, lover,” he’d told her fatalistically in one of their conversations when he could no longer deny increasing weakness. “What can you expect from a life-form that degenerates? I’m lucky to have lived as long as I have. Thanks to you fussing at me for the last seventy years.”
“Seventy-eight,” she corrected him then.
“I’ll be sorry to leave you alone, dear heart,” he’d said, coming and laying his cheek on the panel behind which she was immured. “Of all the women in my life, you’ve been the best.”
“Only because I was the one you couldn’t have,” she replied.
“Not that I didn’t try,” the hologram responded with a characteristic snort.
Helva echoed it. Reminiscing and talking out loud were not a good idea. Soon she wouldn’t know what was memory and what was programming.
Why hadn’t she used the prosthetic body that Niall had purchased for her—reducing their credit balance perilously close to zero and coming close to causing an irreparable breach between them? He had desperately wanted the physical contact, ersatz as she had argued it would be. The prosthesis would have been her in Niall’s eyes, and arms, since she would have motivated it. And he’d tried so hard to have her. He had supplied Sorg Prosthetics with the hologram statue he’d had made long before he became her brawn, using genetic information from her medical history and holos of her parents and siblings. Until he’d told her, she hadn’t known that there had been other, physically normal children of her parents’ issue. But then, shell-people were not encouraged to be curious about their families: they were shell-people, and ineffably different. He swore blind that he hadn’t maximized her potential appearance—the hologram was of a strikingly good-looking woman—when he’d had a hologram made of her from that genetic information. He’d even produced his research materials for her inspection.
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