Fall of the White Ship Avatar

by Brian Daley

  Floyt saw that he was plainly in a working starship, not an overdecorated palace, but there was still an expansive feel to the big passageways. He'd learned enough in his travels to see that no labor or expense had been spared.

  In her thirty years of construction, the White Ship had been through work stoppages, major rebuilds, and radical design changes, been the cause of several near wars and an awful lot of corporate bloodletting. She'd been through assorted renamings, too: Culminator, Onward, Jilleroo, Firebird. But those never stuck and she was only and uniquely the White Ship. Floyt, who'd hated the whole concept of space travel only months before, now looked around him and understood on a glandular level why Alacrity was ready to fight and connive and even die in his campaign to win her.

  The tram eased to a stop outside a wide hatch. "The transactions terminal compartment, sir," the Ship said. Floyt followed Alacrity to the hatch, only to bump into his friend's back as Alacrity stopped short. Alacrity didn't move, so Floyt peered down under his arm, which was braced on the hatch frame.

  "Why, hello, Hobart." The voice was rich and musical. "And you, too, of course, Alacrity."

  "Hello yourself." Alacrity didn't move.

  She was sitting in a high-backed tech's chair before a workstation, in the most advanced accessing facility Floyt had ever seen. It was oddly appropriate that Heart, the Nonpareil, the most beautiful woman Floyt had ever beheld—he had a brief tussle with his loyalty to Paloma on that one—should be sitting there in a big, baggy coverall that hid her marvelous figure, with her chalk-blond hair gathered in careless doggy-ears, wearing a pair of scabrous shipside scuffs on her feet, and no makeup.

  She'd been called an ice sculptor's wet dream; Floyt knew that most of her cool appearance was a facade, the self-defense a stunning, enormously wealthy young woman needed to survive. Just then, though, she was simply a very easy-on-the-eyes female of nineteen or so who looked like she could use some sleep.

  What rattled Floyt was what had brought Alacrity up short and made his greeting so clipped. Heart was sitting with a man who was poised with one hip on a console, bent down to watch whatever Heart was doing at the terminal.

  And he made quite a first impression, an Adonis with ringlets of light-brown hair and beard, ruggedly classic good looks, and the build of a Xanadu muscle dancer well served by his revealing crimson suit-of-thongs. His proteus was in the shape of an artwear pectoral, a burnished, gemset crescent.

  Floyt hated him right away and could only imagine what was going through Alacrity's head. He let her go, and now she's gone and fallen for this damned demigod!

  Heart realized why they were staring and motioned to her companion. "Wulf and I were just trying to get the final point spread on the meeting. Have you two been briefed?"

  Floyt rallied first, peering under Alacrity's arm. "No, we're all at sea as usual, one jump ahead of reality, as it were."

  Wulf flashed a brilliant smile at that. Heart pointed to a couch near her. "Maybe you'd both better sit down right over here, and we'll fill you in."

  Alacrity's lips barely moved. "Not if we're interrupting."

  The Nonpareil's eyes suddenly went wide and her fingertips flew to her lips. "Oh-hhh!" The heroic vision named Wulf turned his head aside decorously, so as to mostly conceal the grin he couldn't suppress.

  Floyt heard Alacrity's teeth grinding. "Yeah; well. See you around."

  She sprang up, crossing the compartment to him in two athletic bounds. Her smile was devilish. "I should let you go, you know that?"

  She'd grabbed Alacrity's hand, but now she threw it down again. "In fact, go—go on, leave if you want to! But Hobart at least has a right to know what he's gotten into."

  She'd taken Floyt's hand, which instantly started to sweat. Floyt wasn't sure what to do but was appalled by the thought of struggling with her, so ducking under Alacrity's arm, he let himself be led into the compartment.

  Alacrity looked unresolved, then slouched after, telling himself, If you lost her it's your own fault. And if that's the price of the White Ship, so be it.

  "Wulf is Chief Operating Officer of the Haviland family," Heart explained, naming one of the most powerful of the Carousel clans. "He's voting their shares and he's on our side—or, at least, mine. Now sit; I'll have to give this to you in big bites."

  They sat, and she began bringing up displays, a data mosaic ten times bigger and more complex than the one back in the Whelk. And Floyt could see it was only a part of what the workstation could do; he followed the accessing procedures carefully, memorizing.

  "My father and his group—what we call the Old Guard—have the majority of active shares over us, but only by a little," Heart said. "You two know some of his allies: Baron Mason is here, and Praxis. They're all pretty much used to having what they want, and what they want now, and what they have a fairly good chance of getting after years and years of plotting and conniving, is to make a complete break with what the White Ship is supposed to be and make her completely theirs.

  "Except Reno Magusson changed everything on them when he went and left Dr. Higgins his stock. Sibyl's so radical, she's not even sure there ought to be a White Ship, much less one in the hands of the Old Guard."

  She stopped and swung her chair back toward them. "That Reno! I think he respected Doc Sibyl a lot and decided the board needed a counterbalance."

  Alacrity was only half listening, the other half being a void of longing for Heart. "But the Magusson shares—Dr. Higgins's—don't give you a majority?" Floyt said.

  The Nonpareil shook her head, the slightly frazzled doggy-ears swinging. "And that's in spite of the fact that a lot of other things changed, due to the Old Guard types who are out of the picture now because they were Camarilla members—grazie, Floyt and Fitzhugh!

  "Rules prohibit proxy voting of inactive shares, so that only leaves us in the New Faction a little out of the winner's circle."

  Wulf gestured to the workstation. "We feel that the White Ship and the company have certain obligations to the human race—to all species; to the common good, if that doesn't sound too florid. And so the New Faction is going to try to make its move."

  His voice was deep and sure. Wulf had a direct, searching gaze that Floyt found himself trusting. "So we're looking through everything we've got on every Old Guard member. If we can just leverage another vote or two our way, we'll bring it off."

  "But so far, nothing looks promising," Heart added. "And we're just about out of time. The Ship will be calling the meeting soon."

  Alacrity was staring down at the deck. "Listen, you never know. Something could break for us."

  Us! Floyt looked at the walls of systemry to hide his feelings; Alacrity had made his decision and, Wulf or no Wulf, was going to do right. Floyt's chest swelled with pride.

  Heart looked puzzled, a fine crease coming into view between the long, arched brows, the flawless curves of the lips parted and about to speak. As had happened to him before, seeing her mouth that way, Alacrity found that his own lips had opened. He clamped them angrily, just as the compartment's hatch opened again.

  Another man stood there, in the same striking crimson suit-of-thongs that Wulf wore, its stretched strands glittering like ice and blood. He was younger, not so filled out, but with the same cut and curl of beard and hair.

  "Wulf, Dr. Higgins wants to talk to you before she calls the rest together for a final war council prior to the board meeting." He was inspecting Heart, Alacrity, and Floyt as he delivered the message, with something Floyt couldn't quite put a name to, something that had undertones of suspicion. "She also managed to obtain a little of the Heavyset data. She wonders if Citizen Floyt and Master Fitzhugh would take a look at it."

  Wulf got up, squeezing the Nonpareil's hand affectionately and moving to the younger man, saying "Very well, Yester." Wulf put his olympian arm around Yester's shoulders reassuringly, kissing his forehead and cheek gently.

  And to Floyt he said, "Citizen? If you'd do us the favor of talking to Si
byl?"

  Floyt checked to see Alacrity's expression. It looked like somebody was standing on Alacrity's foot but he didn't quite know what to do about it. "Of course."

  "We'll be right along, Hobart, Wulf," Heart told them. Floyt readusted his Inheritor's belt and went off, trailing Yester and Wulf. They climbed into the tram Yester had brought.

  "You're the one who does those genealogies, right?" Yester smiled, jealousy assuaged, as the hatch closed. "You know, I've been meaning to do my family tree for a while now—"

  Heart turned back to her accessing. "Oh, and by the way, Alacrity: congratulations on your engagement, and the same to Hobart and La Minx. I expected you and Ho to be wearing lifts in your shoes, at the very least, or maybe flying harnesses."

  "C'mon, layoff; you know it was just a stunt! Ho-ino-wale, wahine! How could him and me live someplace where we had to stand on a stepladder to take a piss?"

  She laughed out loud, that full-throated melody he remembered from the first minute he'd met her. Then she gave him a rueful look, a tilt of the head that would've had a mischievous curl bobbing across one eye if her hair were free.

  "I'm glad the stunt worked and that you and Hobart got here safely, but I'm not letting you take over the New Faction or the White Ship, you know."

  "I have an idea: let's save this tub from your old man and his gang and then iron out the details. And just for the record, there're two things I want more than everything else combined: this Ship, and to make you love me again. Because I still love you."

  She was disarmed completely, blinking as though she'd taken an electrical shock. "Oh, but Alacrity! I still love you, too! We were going to mate for life, like swans, remember?"

  He moved to kiss her and she met him halfway. The kiss was harsh and drawing one moment, tender the next, and then harsh again, tongues gliding like mating constrictors then suddenly tentative as hummingbirds.

  After some minutes they moved, still clasped so that he was sitting on the couch, Heart maneuvering herself to straddle him, settling onto his lap. Her baggy suit was all seals and buckles and adjustment tabs, but there was a long convenience seam running from the navel region to the coccyx. She opened it down, under, around, and up while he threw the captain's jacket aside and worked the waistband on his trousers.

  * * * *

  Afterward, she lay draped along him, their arms around each other, touching noses and foreheads and lips and chins by turns, lapsing into long kisses and parting again to peer deep into lover's eyes.

  "I forgot how very, very—"

  "Yeah, me, too; I only thought I remembered." He let out a breath. "I worried about you all the time, even when I was busy worrying about myself."

  She drew her fingertips along his cheek. "Same here. After you and the rest made your break for Earth, and Victoria and I got the Astraea Imprimatur into Hawking, we did what we could for poor Janusz's injuries, then we patched up the ship and limped to a real fringe world called Easy Street. That's where Victoria told me you'd given her practically all those novaseed gems you had."

  He grinned, pleased with himself. "Figured you'd need 'em worse than me."

  She reached down, squirming a bit, to give him a very special caress. "Good guess. So, we got Janusz into a decent med facility and eventually got the Stray repaired, although we ended up having to sell off a lot of her beautiful fittings.

  "And we had plenty of other crises, too, some very rough spots, but later for those. Eventually Janusz and Victoria dropped me off on a planet where my credit account was good and flew off to lay low together for the next century or so. I knew there'd be no reconciliation with my father, so I've been rushing around trying to get ready for this showdown and find out what happened to you and Hobart after you ducked out of the party on Earth."

  It was good to hear that Janusz and his lover, the renegade Langstretch op Victoria Roper, were together and safe. But at the moment there were greater and more immediate joys to celebrate. He'd responded to her gentle stroking and moved his hips under hers, easing himself in …

  Just then the Ship's voice came into the compartment. "Shareholders Fitzhugh and Heart Dincrist, your presence is requested in the Vale by Shareholder Higgins."

  "That tight-ass voice is the first thing to go when the New Faction takes over!" Heart started to lever herself up and off, but he held her for another kiss.

  "So now I get to meet Sibyl Higgins?"

  "Um-hmm. She's really a great old dame under it all. I think. There's a small head off the compartment there; we'll have to freshen up one at a time—me first!"

  It was close, but he lost the race and lay laughing on the deck as she roared hysterically from within, over the sound of running water.

  Then his eye fell on the transactions terminal. Shaitan! I forgot all about it!

  He leapt for it, almost falling over his half-mast trousers. Getting himself slightly reorganized, he took off his proteus and fed Hecate's codes and passwords into the Snip's network, taking control of 340,000 shares without a hitch or a glitch, and was credited with accrued dividends in an amount that was more than he could quite picture.

  He set his own codes in place and was about to conclude the transaction when an interrogatory came up: QUERY TO LAST REMAINING FOUNDING SHAREHOLDER HEIR-DESIGNATE: CHANGE CODE FOR SAMPSON OPTIONS?

  He entered: DISPLAY MENU SAMPSON OPTIONS.

  He sat for long moments, face lit by the flaring displays. His expression flattened, went cold.

  Something has moved me along, all my life, to this moment. This is all as it is supposed to be. And the causality harp proves it, and that business with Hecate proves it, and now this confirms it. Like it or not, I'm just what Ho called me: the White Ship Avatar …

  Chapter 19

  Quantum Mutatus Ab Illo

  When Alacrity and Heart arrived, members of the New Faction were still circulating and chatting. Floyt was still glancing about him wonderingly.

  The Vale, like a lot of other amenities, had been installed in the White Ship on the assumption of a prolonged mission in inhospitable regions and the likelihood that the Ship's compliment would need a change from decks and bulkheads. In that respect she was like many vessels that had come and gone before, but Floyt doubted many of those had had an environmental compartment to match the Vale.

  In Floyt's mind the place was reminiscent of an elven glen out of Earth legend, miraculously set under a crystal dome in space. As that part of the Ship faced away from Spica or any other source of strong direct light, stars shone down.

  The Vale's flora all came, like the Vale itself, from Paradise, and was bioluminescent in pale blues, grays, and greens. Even fruits and blossoms, and what looked like insect chrysalises and huge gossamer nests, glowed.

  The trees resembled parasols, anchored balloons, pipe organs; shrubbery might be clouds around a sunset here, a flight of softly radiant birds there. The grasses underfoot were a phosphorescent fog, the curling, twisting blades infinitely fine.

  The sounds of the place were of tiny creatures trilling, birring, and chirping. And the lush "Forever Endeavor, Amen" played, the symphony whose theme was the Precursors great works and the long effort to penetrate their mysteries. Floyt had never heard it before he left Earth; it was becoming very familiar.

  A long table had been set out down in the center of the Vale, a score of tall chairs around it. Serving automata floated about, dispensing food, drink, and other refreshments, data, or whatever else the attendees might require. The shareholders already present were putting off the moment when they would sit; they faced a lot of long hours in those chairs.

  Floyt heard someone chafe that the board should adopt more modern meeting procedures: holographic conference linkups that would let people rest in comfort, for example. As an Earthservice functionary, Floyt himself had always found that the more comfortable people were at a meeting, the longer it went on and the less got done.

  He'd look over the other New Faction members. Sibyl Higgins was off to
one side with Wulf and Yester and a nonhuman of a species that called itself the Ghh'arkt, a furred, stork-legged thing. Busy with her young turk lobbying, Higgins barely accorded Floyt a nod of the head and a wristclasp, but various people appeared eager to introduce themselves.

  They accorded him a great deal of courtesy as he stood there in his snow-white tie and black tails, the Inheritor's belt gleaming, the first Terran any of them had ever seen in the flesh. In a fairly short time he received two sexual overtures, three inquiries about Terran genealogies, several compliments on his exploits as described in books like Hobart Floyt and Alacrity Fitzhugh Challenge the Amazon Slave Women of the Supernova, and at least a half-dozen requests for Circe Minx's autograph.

  And naturally in this gathering it took no more than a word or two to trigger diverse theories about the Precursors from assorted Interested Parties.

  An ascetic-looking young man called Chancellor Peale-Vuttruck, who claimed to have used part of his enormous inheritance to set up his own think tank devoted to Precursors matters, said he had proof that the Precursors still existed—and always had—in the realm of the neutrino and the tachyon. To them, humans and the substantial cosmos in general were a mist, intangible but perceived through certain secondary effects. The so-called Precursor artifacts were merely probes and efforts at communication.

  Yester's conclusion was that the Precursors' mass-mind conscience had obliged them to take themselves outside of ordinary reality, to give younger races a chance to develop. A quite striking dowager held that the Precursors had presumed to attempt to reorder Creation more to their liking and been banished for that by a Higher Power.

  * * * *

  Floyt could see from their faces that Alacrity and Heart were back on a truce footing and a lot more, the two wearing cream-in-whiskers looks.

  Heart had changed from the slop-around shipsuit and now wore a stupefying black sheath of high-sheen skin-film, not quite transparent, so sheer and taut that it seemed it must burst, molding parts of the Nonpareil that didn't really require molding. The chalk-blond hair was full and perfect again, weighty locks of it that framed her face and the wide, encased shoulders, and one curl that bobbed mischievously across her eye. Her spike-heeled evening slippers of smokey duraglaze chimed faintly with each step on the pathstones and made her Alacrity's height and more.