Space Is Just a Starry Night

by Tanith Lee

  Lions drink blood, not roses.

  Something loosened inside me then. It was probably the final submission, the final surrender of the fight. Presumably I’d been fighting her subconsciously from the start, or I wouldn’t have gained the ragged half-freedoms I had. But now I was limp and sodden, so I could ask humbly: “The plant was salad. But a man — what was he?”

  “You don’t quite get it, darling, do you?” Carla said. She stroked my hair friendlily. I didn’t shudder anymore. Cowed dog, I was relaxed under the contemptuous affection of my mistress. “One was green and vegetable. One was black, male, and meat. Different forms. Local dishes. I had no inclination to sample you, you comprehend, since you were approximate to my own appearance. But of course, others who find themselves to be black and male may wish to sample pale-skinned females. Don’t worry, Tacey. You’ll be safe. You entertain me. You’re mine. Protected species.”

  “Still don’t understand, Carla,” I whispered meekly.

  “Well, just clear up for me, and I’ll explain.”

  I don’t have to apologize to you for what I did then, because, of course, you know all about it, the will-less indifference of the absolute slave. I bundled up the relics of Carla’s lover-breakfast and dumped them in the waste-disposal, which dealt with them pretty efficiently.

  Then I cleaned the bedroom and had a shower and fixed Carla some coffee and biscuits. It was almost noon, the hour when the four thousand and ninety were going to be roused and to step from their frost boxes in front of seven-eighths of the world’s Spatial-viewers. Carla wanted to see it too, so I switched on my set, minus the sound. Next Carla told me I might sit, and I sat on a pillow, and she explained.

  For some reason, I don’t remember her actual words. Perhaps she put it in a technical way, and I got the gist but not the sentences. I’ll put it in my own words here, despite the fact that a lot of you know now anyway. After all, under supervision, we still have babies sometimes. When they grow up they’ll need to know. Know why they haven’t got a chance, and why we hadn’t. And, to level with you, know why I’m not a Judas, and that I didn’t betray us, because I didn’t have a chance either.

  Laziness, optimism, and blind stupidity.

  I suppose optimism more than anything.

  Four thousand and ninety-one persons lying down in frozen stasis, aware they didn’t have souls and couldn’t otherwise survive, dreaming of a future of cures, and of a reawakening in that future. And the earth dreaming of benevolent visitors from other worlds, father-mother figures to guide and help us. Sending them buzz-whuzzes to bleep, over and over, Here we are. Here. Here.

  I guess we do have souls. Or we have something that has nothing to do with the brain, or the nerve centers, or the spinal cord. Perhaps that dies too, when we die. Or perhaps it escapes. Whatever happens, that’s the one thing you can’t retain in Cryogenic Suspension. The body, all its valves and ducts and organs, lies pristine in limbo, and when you wake it up with the correct drugs, impulses, stimuli, it’s live again, can be cured of its diseases, becoming a flawless vessel of — nothing. It’s like an empty room, a vacant lot. The tenant’s skipped.

  Somewhere out in the starry night of space, one of the bleeping buzz-whuzzes was intercepted. Not by pater-mater figures, but by a predatory, bellicose alien race. It was simple to get to us — hadn’t we given comprehensive directions? But on arrival they perceived a world totally unsuited to their fiery, gaseous, incorporeal forms. That was a blow, that was. But they didn’t give up hope. Along with their superior technology they developed a process whereby they reckoned they could transfer inside of human bodies and thereafter live off the fat of the Terrain. However, said process wouldn’t work. Why not? The human consciousness (soul?) was too strong to overcome, it wouldn’t let them through. Even asleep, they couldn’t oust us. Dormant, the consciousness (soul?) is still present, or at least linked. As for dead bodies, no go. A man who had expired of old age, or with a mobile on top of him, was no use. The body had to be a whole one, or there was no point. Up in their saucers, which were periodically spotted, they spat and swore. They gazed at the earth and drooled, pondering mastery of a globe and entire races of slaves at their disposal. But there was no way they could achieve their aims until — until they learned of all those Cryogenic Suspensions in their frost boxes, all those soulless lumps of ice, waiting on the day when science would release and cure them and bring them forth healthy and void.

  If you haven’t got a tenant, advertise for a new tenant. We had. And they’d come.

  Carla was the first. As her eyes opened under the crystal, something looked out of them. Not Carla Brice. Not anymore. But something.

  Curious, cruel, powerful, indomitable, alien, deadly.

  Alone, she could handle hundreds of us humans, for her influence ascended virtually minute by minute. Soon there were going to be four thousand and ninety of her kind, opening their eyes, smiling their scornful thank-yous through the Spatials at the world they had come to conquer. The world they did conquer.

  We gave them beautiful, healthy, movable houses to live in, and billions to serve them and be toyed with by them, and provide them with extra bodies to be frozen and made fit to house any leftover colleagues of theirs. And our green depolluted meadows wherein to rejoice.

  As for Carla, she’d kept quiet and careful as long as she had to. Long enough for the tests to go through and for her to communicate back, telepathically, to her people, all the data they might require on earth, prior to their arrival.

  And now she sat and considered me, meteoric fiery Carla-who-wasn’t-Carla, her eyes, in the dark, gleaming topaz yellow through their copper irises, revealing her basic inflammable nature within the veil of a dead woman’s living flesh.

  They can make me do whatever they want, and they made me write this. Nothing utterly bad has been done to me, and maybe it never will. So I’ve been lucky there.

  To them, I’m historically interesting, as Carla had been historically interesting to us, as a first. I’m the first Slave. Possibly, I can stay alive on the strength of that and not be killed for a whim.

  Which, in a way, I suppose, means I’m a sort of a success, after all.

  You Are My Sunshine

  (Tape running.)

  –For the record: Day two, Session two, Code-tape three. Earth Central Investigation into the disaster of the S.S.G. Pilgrim. Executive Interrogator Hofman presiding. Witness attending, Leon Canna, Fifth Officer, P. L. Capacity. Officer Canna being the only surviving crew member of the Pilgrim. Officer Canna?

  –Yes, sir.

  –Officer Canna, how long have you been in the Service?

  –Ten years, sir.

  –That would be three years’ service in exploration vessels and seven in the transport and passenger class. How many of those seven years with Solarine Galleons?

  –Six years, sir.

  –And so, you would know this type of ship pretty well?

  –Yes, sir. Pretty well. .

  –And was the Pilgrim in any way an unusual ship of its kind?

  –No, sir.

  –Officer Canna, I’m aware you’ve been through a lot, and I’m aware your previous record is not only clear, but indeed meritorious. Naturally, I’ve read your written account of what, according to you, transpired aboard the Solarine Space Galleon Pilgrim. You and I, Officer Canna, both know that with any ship, of any class or type, occasionally something can go wrong. Even so wrong as to precipitate a tragedy of the magnitude of the Pilgrim disaster. Now I want you to consider carefully before you answer me. Of all the explanations you could have chosen for the death of this ship and the loss of the two thousand and twenty lives that went with her, why this one?

  –It’s the truth, sir.

  –Wait a moment, Officer Canna, please. You seem to miss my point. Of all the explanations at your disposal, and with ten years intimate knowledge of space, the explanation you offer us is, nevertheless, frankly ludicrous.

  –Sir.

 
; –It throws suspicion on you, Officer Canna. It blots your record.

  –I can’t help it, sir. Oh sure, I could lie to you.

  –Yes, Officer Canna, you could.

  –But I’m not lying. Suppose I never told you this because I was afraid of how it would reflect on me. And then suppose the same situation comes up, somewhere out there, and then the same thing happens again.

  –That seems quite unlikely, Officer Canna.

  (A murmur of laughter.)

  –Excuse me, but I don’t think this thing should be played for laughs.

  –Nor do I, Officer Canna. Nor do I. Very well. In your own words, please, and at your own pace. Tell this investigation what you say you believe occurred.

  The girl came aboard from the subport at Bel. There were thirty-eight passengers coming on at that stop, but Canna noticed the girl almost at once. The reason he noticed her was that she was so damned unnoticeable. Her clothes were the color of putty, and so was her hair. She had that odd, slack, round-shouldered stance that looked as though it came from .a lifetime of sitting on her poor little ass, leaning forward over a computer console or a dispensary plate. Nobody had ever told her there were machines to straighten you out and fine you down, and vitamins to brighten your skin, and tints to color your hair, and optic inducers to stop your having to peer through two godawful lenses wedged in a red groove at the top of your nose. Nobody had ever presumably told her she was human either, with a brain, a soul, and a gender.

  Watch it, Canna. A lost cause is lost. Leave it alone.

  Trouble was, it was part of his job to get involved.

  P.L. — Passenger Link — required acting as unofficial father, son, and brother to the whole shipload; sometimes you got to be priest-confessor and sometimes lover too. It took just the right blend of gregariousness coupled to the right blend of constraint. Long ago, the ships of the line had reasoned that passengers, the breadwinning live cargo that took up half the room aboard a Solarine Galleon, were liable to run amok without an intermediary between themselves and the crewing personnel topside. The role of P.L. was therefore created. Spokesman and arbiter, the P.L. officer knew the technical bias up top, but he represented the voice of the nontechnical flock lower side. He related to his flock what went on behind the firmly closed doors of the Bridge and Engine Bay. If he sometimes edited, he took care not to admit it. He belonged, ostensibly, to the civilians, and that way he stopped them rocking the boat.

  To do this job at all, you had to be able to communicate with your fellow mortals, and they had to be able to communicate with you. In that department, Canna did excellently. Sometimes better than excellently. Dark, deeply suntanned, as were all Solarines, and with a buoyant, lightly sardonic good humor, he had found early on that women liked him very well, sometimes too well. This had been one of the score of reasons that had driven him off the exploration vessels, where for one or two years at a stretch, you rubbed shoulders with all the same stale passions and allergies. The EVs took on no passengers to provide diversion, stimulus and, in the most harmless of ways, fair game. Conversely, the Solarines had a low percentage of female crew: since women had realized their intellectual potency, they tended to go after the big-scale jobs, which pleasure cruisers didn’t offer. However, the passengers provided plenty of female scenery, women who came and went, the nicest kind. For the rest, the grouses of transient passengers Canna could easily stand because next stop the grousers got off. Canna’s trick was that he found it easy to be patient, appreciative, and kind with all birds of passage.

  So there was that little gray dab of a girl no one had ever been kind to, creeping into the great golden spaceship. Canna reminded himself of the story of the man who would go up to drab women on the street and hiss suddenly to them: “You’re beautiful!” For the strange ego trip of seeing the dull face abruptly flare into a kindling of brief surprised loveliness: the magic a woman would find in herself with the aid of a man. Watch it, Canna. There were two day-periods and a sun-park of twenty before they turned for Lyra and this live cargo got off.

  S.S.G.s operated, as implied, on stored solar power. Their original function was transport, and with a meton reactor geared into the solar drive, they had been the hot rods of the galaxy. The big suns, any of a variety of rainbow dwarfs, provided gas stations for these trucks. Parked in Orbit around the furnace, shields up and Solarine mechanisms gulping, the truck became a holiday camp. The beneficial side effects of S.S.G.s were swiftly noted. Golden-skinned crews, whose resistance to disease was 99 to a 100 percent, gave rise to new ideas of the purpose of the galleons. Something about the Solarine filter of raw sunlight acted like a miracle drug on the tired cells of human geography. Something did you a world of good, and you might be expected to pay through the nose to get it. From transport trucks, S.S.G.s became the luxury liners of the firmament, health cures, journeys of a lifetime, the only way to travel. The Solarina sun decks were built on, the huge golden bubbles that girdled the ship, wonderlands of glowing pools, root-ballasted palms and giant sunflowers, lizardia blooms and lillaceous cacti, through which poured the screened radiance of whichever sun the ship was roosting over, endless summer on a leash.

  The sun between Bel and Lyra was a Beta-class topaz effulgence, a carrousel of fire.

  The third period after lift-off, the “day” they settled around the sun, the little gray-putty girl was sitting in the sun lounge that opened off the entry-outs of the Solarina. Not sitting precisely, more crouching. Canna had checked her name on the passenger list. Her name was Hartley. Apollonia Hartley. He had guessed it all in a flash of intuition; though if he was right, he never found out. The guess was someone had died and left her some cash, enough to make a trip some place. And someone else had said to her: Gee, Apollonia honey, with your name you have to have a Solarine cruise. Apollo’s daughter, child of a sun-god (they must have maliciously predicted she’d turn out this plain to crucify her with a name like that), could bask in the sun under the ballasted ballsy palms and fry her grayness golden. Except that she wasn’t doing that at all. She was sitting-crouching here in the lead-off lounge, with a tiny glass of champazira she wasn’t even sipping. A few people were going in and out, not many. Most of them were placed to grill like tacos within the outer-side bubble.

  “Hi, Miss Hartley,” said Canna, strolling up to her. “Everything OK?”

  Apollonia jumped about ten centimeters off her couch and almost knocked her champazira over.

  “All right, thank you,” she muttered, staring at her knees.

  It was a formula. It meant: Please go away; I’m afraid to talk to you. That was a professional slight, if nothing else. People had to want to talk to Leon Canna. It was what he was there for.

  “Had enough of the Solarina for today?” he asked.

  “Oh yes. That is — yes,” said Apollonia. She must be seeing something about her knees which no one but she ever would.

  He sat on the arm of the couch beside her.

  “You haven’t been out there at all, have you?” Silence, which meant go away, go away. “Why’s that?” Silence, which had become an abstract agony. “Maybe you’ve got sun fright. Is that it? It’s quite common. Fears of strong radiation. But I can assure you, Miss Hartley, it’s absolutely safe. Do I look sick, Miss Hartley?”

  Inadvertently, she glanced at him. Her eyes got stuck somewhere on the white uniform casuals, the sun blaze over the pocket. Black hair and eyes and cleft golden jaw and the golden hands with their fine smoke of black hirsuteness, these she avoided.

  “I’m not,” she said, “that is, there are so many-people out there.” She might have said lions, tigers.

  “Sure. I know,” he said. He didn’t know. People to him were a big fun game. “But I’ll tell you what, you know when it gets really quiet in the Solarina?”

  “When?” Whispered.

  He liked that. He understood what was happening. Fascinated by him, she was beginning to forget herself.

  “Twenty-four midnight by the e
arth clock below. Come back then, you’ll get a good three or four hours, maybe alone.” She didn’t speak. “Or I might come up,” he said. Christ, Canna, what did I say to you? He could see her breathing, just like a heroine in an old romance, bosom, as they said, heaving. “Why don’t you drink your champazira?” he said.

  “I don’t — I only — ”

  “Ordered it for something to play with while you sat here,” he said. “I didn’t see you at dinner the last two night-periods.”

  “I ate in my cabin.”

  “Oh, Miss Hartley — Apollonia, may I? — Apollonia, you’ll get the Pilgrim a bad name. You’re supposed to get something out of your voyage. Come on, now. Promise me. The Solarina at midnight. I have to make certain our passengers enjoy themselves. You don’t want me to lose my job, do you?”

  Startled, her eyes flew up like birds and collided with his jet-black ones. Her whole face stained with color, even her spectacles seemed to glaze with pink. “I’ll try.”

  “Good girl.”

  Good God.

  He told himself not to go up to the Solarina after midnight. Of course, he’d met women out there before, who hadn’t. But not women like Apollonia.

  At twenty-four thirty by the earth clock, he walked through the sun lounge. The passenger section of the ship was fairly still at this hour, as he had assured her. The Solarina was empty except for its flora and its light. In the sun lounge, Apollonia was huddled on her couch, without even the champazira to keep her company.

  “I didn’t think — you would come. I was,” she said, “afraid to go through on my own. Is it — all right?”

  “Sure it is.”

  “Will the doors open?”

  “I have a tab if they don’t.”

  “It looks so — bright. So fierce.”

  “It’s like a hot shower or the sea at Key Mariano. You ever been there’?” He knew she had not. “Just above blood heat. The fish cook as they swim. Come on.” She didn’t move, so he moved in ahead of her, into the glowing summer, sloughing his robe as he went. He understood perfectly what he looked like in swim trunks. If he hadn’t, enough women had told him, using the analogies of Greek heroes, Roman gladiators. “The harmful rays are filtered out by the Solarine mechanism,” he said. Encouraged, mesmerized, she slipped through, and the wine water closed over her head.