Starfishers

by Glen Cook

  The whole thing had to be a brag show. Pure propaganda. It just had to be.

  He could not accept that ship as real.

  His normal, understandable operation-opening jitters cranked themselves up a couple of notches. Till that ship had declared itself he had thought he could handle anything new and strange. Change was the order of the universe. Novelty was no cause for distress.

  But this mission held too much promise of the new and unknown. He had been plunged tabula rasa into a completely alien universe.

  Nothing created by Man had any right being so damned big.

  Light returned. It drowned the dying hologram. BenRabi looked around. His jaw was not the only one hanging like an overripe pear about to drop.

  Despite prior warning, everyone had believed themselves aboard a harvestship. Cultural bias left them incapable of believing the Fishers could have anything better.

  Moyshe began to realize just how poorly he had been prepared for this mission. He had done his homework. He had devoured everything the Bureau had known about Starfishers. He had considered speculation as well as confirmed fact. He knew all there was to know.

  Too little had been known.

  “That’s all you’ll need to know about Danion’s outside,” the Ship’s Commander told them. “Of her guts you’ll see plenty, and you’ll have to learn them well. We expect to get our money’s worth.”

  They had the right to ask it, Moyshe figured. They were paying double the usual spacer’s rates, and those were anything but poor.

  The man talked on awhile, repeating the security officer’s injunctions. Then he turned the landsmen over to ratings, who showed them to their quarters. BenRabi’s nervousness subsided. He had been through this part before, each time he had boarded a Navy warship.

  He got a cabin to himself. The Seiner assigned to him helped settle him in. From the man’s wary replies, Moyshe presumed he could expect to be aboard for several days. Payne’s Fleet was harvesting far from Carson’s.

  Once the man had left and benRabi had converted his barren cubicle into a Spartan cell, he lay down to nap. After looking for bugs and spy-eyes, of course. But sleep would not come. Not with all the great lumpy surprises his mind still had to digest.

  Someone knocked. Mouse, he guessed. The man never used a buzzer. He made a crochet a means of identification.

  Yes. It was Mouse. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Masato Iwasaki. Oh. You’re in Liquids too? Good.” He stuck out a hand. They shook.

  “BenRabi. Moyshe. Nice to meet you.” Silly game, he thought. But it had to be played if they wanted people to believe that they had just met.

  “You wouldn’t happen to play chess?” Mouse asked. “I’m looking for somebody who does.”

  He was addicted to the game. It would get him into trouble someday, benRabi thought. An agent could not afford consistent crochets. But who was he to criticize?

  “I’ve been up and down the passage, but I haven’t found anybody.”

  No doubt he had. Mouse was thorough.

  “I play, but badly. And it’s been awhile.” It had been about four hours. They had almost been late to the spaceport because of a game. Mouse had been nervous about liftoff. BenRabi had been holding his own.

  Mouse prowled, searching for bugs. BenRabi closed the door. “I don’t think there are any. Not yet. I didn’t find anything.”

  Mouse shrugged. “What do you think?”

  “Broomstick all the way. Strictly from hunger. We’re riding the mythical nova bomb.”

  “The woman? Yeah. Pure trouble. Spotted a couple McGraws, too. You think she’s teamed?” He dropped onto the extra bunk.

  “I don’t think so. Not by choice. She’s a loner.”

  “It doesn’t look good,” Mouse mused. “We don’t have enough info. I feel like a blind man in a funhouse. We’d better fly gentle till we learn the traffic code.” He stared at the overhead. “And how to con the natives.”

  BenRabi settled onto his own bunk. They remained silent for minutes, trying to find handles on the future. They would need every advantage they could seize.

  “Three weeks,” Mouse said. “I can handle it. Then a whole year off. I won’t know what to do.”

  “Don’t make your reservations yet. Marya . . . The Sangaree woman. She’s one bad omen. Mouse . . . I don’t think it’s going to work out.”

  “I can handle it. You don’t think I want to spend a whole damned year here, do you?”

  “Remember what that character said down at Blake City? It could be the rest of our lives. Short lives.”

  “Bah. He was blowing smoke.”

  “Ready to bet your life on it?”

  BenRabi’s head gave him a kick. He was not sure he could take much more pain. And this compelling need . . .

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Headache. Must be the change in air pressure.”

  How the hell was he supposed to work with his body in pain and his mind half around the bend? There was something to be said for those old-time sword swingers who did not have to worry about anything but how sharp their blades were.

  “We’d better hedge our bets, Moyshe. Better start planning for the long haul, just in case.”

  “Thought you could handle it.”

  Mouse shrugged. “Got to be ready for everything. I’ve been poking around. These Seiners are as bad as us for special interests. They’ve got coin clubs and stamp clubs and Archaicist period groups . . . The whole thing. They’re crazy to get into the past. What I was thinking was, why don’t we start a chess club for landsmen? We’d have a cover for getting together.”

  “And you’d have an excuse to play.”

  “That too. A lot of Seiners play too, see. Maybe we could fish a few in so we could pump them socially.” He winked, smiled.

  The Seiners he was interested in hooking were probably female.

  BenRabi could not fathom Mouse. Mouse seemed happy most of the time. That was disconcerting. The man carried a load of obsessions heavier than his own. And somebody whose profession was hatchet work should, in benRabi’s preconceptions, have had a happiness quotient approaching zero.

  BenRabi never had been able to understand people. Everybody else seemed to live by a different set of rules.

  Mouse shrugged. “Fingers crossed? Hope Beckhart will pull it off? Wouldn’t bet against him.”

  BenRabi never knew where he stood in the Admiral’s grand, tortuous schemes.

  “Hey, I’ve been here long enough,” Mouse said. “No point attracting attention straight off. I saw you get pills from that girl. What was wrong? Head?”

  “Yeah. Might even be my migraine. My head feels like somebody’s been using it for a soccer ball.”

  Mouse went to the door. “A game tonight, then?”

  “Sure, as long as you don’t mind playing an amateur.” BenRabi saw him off, feeling foolish. There had been no one around to hear his parting speech.

  The public address system announced dinner for passengers. Mouse turned back. “Feel up to it?”

  BenRabi nodded. Though it had ached miserably seconds ago, the tracer was not bothering him at all now.

  Somebody was trying to impress them. The meal was superb. It was the kind Navy put on when important civilians came aboard. Everything was hydroponics and recycle, yet supremely palatable. Each mouthful reminded benRabi of the horrors of a Navy mess six months out, after the fresh and frozen stores were gone. From some angles the mission had begun to show promise.

  He looked for the Seiner girl, Amy, but did not see her.

  Lazy days followed. There was little to do in transit. He stayed in his cabin most of the time, loafing, toying with Jerusalem, and trying not to remember too much. Mouse, and a few others he had met, occasionally came to visit, play chess, or just bullshit about common interests.

  The landsmen began to settle in, to get acquainted. The unattached singles started pairing off. Mouse, never inclined to celibacy, found himself a girl the second day. Alre
ady she wanted to move in with him.

  Individual quarters had been assigned everyone but the married couples. There was room. The ship had been prepared to haul a thousand people.

  Mouse immediately established himself as a character and leader among the landsmen. His notion of a chess club, while no fad, caught on.

  One of the joiners was the Seiner who had striven to rattle them at Blake City.

  His name was Jarl Kindervoort. He did not hide the fact that he ranked high in Danion’s police department.

  BenRabi marveled again at the size of the harvestship. A vessel so huge that it had a regular police agency, complete with detectives and plainclothes operatives . . . Just incredible.

  They called themselves Internal Security. BenRabi saw nothing in what he learned of their structure to remind him of a security unit in the intelligence sense. The function was doubtless there, cobbled on in response to the arrival of outsiders, but the agency look was that of a metropolitan police force.

  Mouse’s club inspired a general movement. Half a dozen others coalesced. Each was Archaicist-oriented.

  In an age when nothing seemed as permanent as the morning dew, people who needed permanence had to turn to the past.

  BenRabi looked on the whole Archaicist movement with studied contempt. He saw it as the refuge of the weak, of moral cowards unwilling to face the Now without the strategic hamlets of yesterday to run to when the pressure heightened.

  Archaicism could be damned funny. BenRabi remembered a holocast of pot-bellied old men stamping through modern New York outfitted as Assyrian soldiery off for a sham battle with the legions of the Pharaoh of New Jersey.

  Or it could be grim. Sometimes they started believing . . . He still shuddered whenever he recalled the raid on the temple of the Aztec Revivalists in Mexico City.

  One morning he asked Mouse to read the working draft of his story. He had managed to push it all the way to an unsatisfactory ending.

  Mouse frowned a lot. He finally said, “I guess it’s all right. I don’t know anything about non-objective art.”

  “I guess that means it isn’t working. I’d better get on it and do it right. Even if you can’t figure out what the hell it’s about, it should affect you.”

  “Oh, it does, Moyshe.”

  His tone conveyed more message than did his words. It said that he thought benRabi was wasting his time.

  Moyshe wanted to cry. The story meant so damned much to him.

  Six: 3047 AD

  The Olden Days, Luna Command

  He waited patiently in the line outside Decontamination. When his turn came he went to Cubicle R. No one else had done so. A sign saying OUT OF SERVICE clung to the door beneath the R.

  That sign had been there more than twenty years. It was old and dirty and lopsided. Everyone in Luna Command knew that door R did not open on a standard decon chamber.

  The men and women, and occasional non-humans, who ignored the sign were agents returning from the field.

  He closed the door and placed his things on a counter surface, then removed his clothing. Nude, he stepped through the next door inward.

  Energy from the scanner in the door frame made his skin tingle and his body hair stand out. He held his breath, closed his eyes.

  Needles of liquid hit him, stung him, killing bacteria and rinsing grime away. Sonics cracked the long molecular helixes of viruses.

  A mist replaced the spray. He breathed deeply.

  Something clicked. He stepped through the next door.

  He entered a room identical to the first. Its only furniture was a counter surface. On that counter lay neatly folded clothing and a careful array of personal effects. He dressed, filled his pockets, chuckling. He had been demoted. His chevrons proclaimed him a Second Class Missileman. His ship’s patch said he was off the battle cruiser Ashurbanipal.

  He had never heard of the vessel.

  He pulled the blank ID card from the wallet he had been given, placed his right thumb over the portrait square. Ten seconds later his photograph and identification statistics began to appear.

  “Cornelius Wadlow Perchevski?” he muttered in disbelief. “It gets worse and worse.” He scanned the dates and numbers, memorizing, then attached the card to his chest. He donned the Donald Duck cap spacers wore groundside, said, “Cornelius Perchevski to see the King.”

  The floor sank beneath him.

  As he descended he heard the showers go on in the decon chamber.

  A minute later he stepped from a stall in a public restroom several levels lower. He entered a main traffic tunnel and walked to a bus stop.

  Six hours later he told a plain woman behind a plain desk behind a plain room, behind a plain door, “Cornelius W. Perchevski, Missileman Two. I’m supposed to see the doctor.”

  She checked an appointment log. “You’re fifteen minutes late, Perchevski. But go ahead. Through the white door.”

  He passed through wondering if the woman knew she was fronting. Probably not. The security games got heaviest where they seemed least functional.

  The doctor’s office made him feel like Alice, diving down a rabbit hole into another world.

  It’s just as crazy as Wonderland, he thought. Black is white here. Up is down. In is out. Huck is Jim, and never the Twain shall meet . . . He chuckled.

  “Mr. Perchevski.”

  He sobered. “Sir?”

  “I believe you came in for debriefing.”

  “Yes, sir. Where do you want me to start, sir?”

  “The oral form. Then you’ll rest. Tomorrow well do the written. I’ll schedule the cross-comparative for later in the week. We’re still trying to get the bugs out of a new cross-examination program.”

  Perchevski studied the faceless man while he told his tale. The interrogator’s most noteworthy feature was his wrinkled, blue-veined, weathered hands. His inquisitor was old . . .

  The Faceless Man usually was not. Normally he was a young, expert psychologist-lawyer. The old men in the Bureau were ex-operatives, senior staff, decision-makers, not technicians.

  He knew most of the old men. He listened to the questions carefully, but there was no clue in the voice asking them. It was being technically modified. He reexamined the hands. They offered no clues either.

  He began to worry. Something had gone broomstick. They did not bring on the dreadnoughts otherwise.

  His nerves were not up to an intensive interrogation. It had been a heavy mission, and the trip home had given him too much time to talk to himself.

  Debriefing continued all month. They questioned him and counterchecked his answers so often and so thoroughly that when they finally let him go he no longer really felt that the mission had been part of his life. It was almost as if some organ had been removed from him one molecule at a time, leaving him with nothing but a funny empty feeling.

  Five weeks after he had arrived at Luna Command they handed him a pink plastic card identical in all other respects to the white one he had received at Decontamination. They also gave him an envelope containing leave papers, money, bankbooks, and such written persona as a man needed to exist in an electronic universe. Included was an address.

  An unsmiling amazon opened a door and set him free.

  He stepped into the public tunnels of Luna Command. Back from beyond the looking glass. He caught a bus just like any spacer on leave.

  The room was exactly as he had left it—except that they had moved it a thousand kilometers from its former location. He tumbled into his bed. He did not get out again for nearly two days.

  Cornelius Perchevski was a lonely man. He had few friends. The nature of his profession did not permit making many.

  For another five days he remained isolated in his room, adapting to the books, collections, and little memorabilia that could be accounted the time-spoor of the real him. Like some protean beast his personality slowly reshaped itself to its natural mold. He began taking interest in the few things that made a unified field of his present and pas
t.

  He took down his typewriter and notebooks and pecked away for a few hours. A tiny brat of agony wrested itself from the torn womb of his soul. He punched his agent’s number, added his client code, and fed the sheets to the fax transmitter.

  In a year or two, if he was lucky, a few credits might materialize in one of his accounts.

  He lay back and stared at the ceiling. After a time he concluded that he had been alone enough. He had begun to heal. He could face his own kind again. He rose and went to a mirror, examined his face.

  The deplastification process was complete. It always took less time than did his internal mendings. The wounds within never seemed to heal all the way.

  He selected civilian clothing from his closet, dressed.

  He returned to public life by taking a trip to the little shop. The bus was crowded. He began to feel the pressure of all those personalities, pushing and pulling his own . . . Had he come out too early? Each recovery seemed to take a little longer, to be a little less effective.

  “Walter Clark!” the lady shopkeeper declared. “Where the hell have you been? You haven’t been in here for six months. And you look like you’ve been through hell.”

  “How’s it going, Max?” A self-conscious grin ripped his face open. Christ, it felt good to have somebody be glad to see him. “Just got out of the hospital.”

  “Hospital? Again? Why didn’t you call me? What happened? Some Stone Age First Expansioner stick a spear in you again?”

  “No. It was a bug this time. Acted almost like leukemia. And they don’t even know where I picked it up. You have anything new for me?”

  “Sit your ass down, Walter. You bet I have. I tried to call you when it came in, but your box kept saying you weren’t available. You ought to get a relay put on that thing. Here, let me get you some coffee.”

  “Max, I ought to marry you.”

  “No way. I’m having too much fun being single. Anyway, why ruin a perfectly good friendship?” She set coffee before him.

  “Oh. This’s the real thing. I love you.”

  “It’s Kenyan.”

  “Having Old Earth next door is good for something, then.”