Starfishers

by Glen Cook

  “Those were the days,” Mouse said, ignoring Max. “Wish we could be kids forever. Think we could do it again?”

  “Getting too old.”

  “Nah. I think I’ll check it out. Just for the hell of it. Want to try it? If I can find a ship?”

  Perchevski laughed. “Better find the time off, first. We’re almost there.” The capsule had begun decelerating. “I’ll wake the girls.”

  They reached the digs an hour later.

  The one-time alien base was being unearthed, studied, and explored at a snail’s pace. The xenoarchaeologists had been working for decades, and might be at it for centuries. They sifted every grain of lunar dust, and preserved it. They did not want to miss a thing, even through ignorance.

  Thus far the base had revealed more about humanity’s past than it had about its builders.

  The scientists had concluded that the station had served both scientific and military purposes, and had been occupied continuously for at least ten millennia. It seemed to have been abandoned approximately eleven centuries before its discovery, just as Mankind teetered on the brink of its first tentative step into space.

  Perchevski and his companions began with the museum of recovered artifacts, most of which were everyday items comparable to human combs, tableware, worn-out socks, pill bottles, broken furniture, and the like. The aliens had taken their fancy hardware with them.

  “Ooh!” Greta said as they approached a group of wax figurines. “They were ugly.”

  “Notice anything about them, Greta?” Perchevski asked.

  “Besides ugly?”

  “Yes. Look at how they’re dressed. Think. All the legends about little people. Gnomes, dwarves, elves, leprechauns . . . The kobolds, where you come from.” The largest alien figurine stood just a meter tall.

  “Yeah. You’re right. You know there’re still people that believe in them? One time, I guess I was ten, we went on a field trip to the Black Forest. There was this old caretaker, a kind of forest ranger, who told us all these stories about the kobolds in the woods.”

  Max interjected, “I think it’s more interesting that they resemble the spacemen of the UFO era.”

  Everyone looked at her. “Oh, it’s not my idea. I just liked it. It was on the educational channel one time. In the old days people used to see what they called flying saucers. Sometimes they claimed that space people talked to them. They described them like this. But nobody ever believed them.”

  “Where are they now?” Leslie asked.

  “Nobody knows,” Perchevski replied. “They just disappeared. Nobody’s found any other traces of them, either. Ulant got into space before we did, and they never ran into them.”

  “What if they’re still watching?” Mouse asked.

  Perchevski gave him a funny look.

  “Spooky idea, isn’t it? Let’s look at that new chamber. Max says they found some stuff there that isn’t just cafeteria or rec room equipment.”

  Maybe not. Perchevski could not guess what it might have been. The chamber was large and well-preserved, with most of its furnishings intact and in place. “Parallel function ought to result in parallel structure,” he said. “Meaning you ought to be able to figure what this stuff is.” All he recognized were the faded mural walls, which looked somewhat Minoan. He would have bet his fortune they had been done by human artists. Those he could see seemed to tell some sort of quest story.

  “It’s a solarium,” Greta said. “Without sun.”

  “A hydroponics farm?”

  “No. That’s not right. Hydroponics is different.”

  “What?”

  “What I mean is, it’s almost like the Desert House at the State Botanical Gardens in Berlin. See how the beds are laid out? And those racks up there would hold the lights that make plants think they’re getting sunshine.”

  Mouse laughed. “By Jove, I think the lady has something.” He indicated a small sign which proposed a similar hypothesis. It also suggested that the painters of the murals might have been humans who had become proto-Sangaree.

  Mouse suddenly gasped and seized his left hand in his right.

  Perchevski nearly screamed at the sharp agony surrounding his call ring.

  “What’s the matter?” Max and Greta demanded.

  “Oh, hell,” Perchevski intoned. “Here we go again.”

  “Let up, you bastards,” Mouse snarled. “We got the message. We’re coming, for Christ’s sake. Business, Max. We’ve been called in. And I mean in a hurry. Thomas?”

  “I’ll kill him. Just when . . . Max . . . I’m sorry.”

  “What’s going on?” she asked again.

  “We have to report in. Right now. Could you take the girls back to barracks?”

  “Business?” She sounded excited.

  “Yeah. The bastards. Mouse, they said no more team jobs.”

  Mouse shrugged.

  “I’ll get them home,” Max promised.

  Perchevski kissed her, turned to Greta. “I’ve got to run out on you, Honey. I’m sorry. I really am.”

  “Thomas, come on. The Old Man means it.”

  “Wait a minute, damn it! I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, Greta. If you need something, call my number. Or get ahold of Max. Okay, Max?”

  “Sure.” Max did not sound enthusiastic.

  “Thomas!”

  He waved a hand, kissed Max again, then Greta, and trotted off after Mouse. Greta called a sad, “Good-bye, Commander.”

  He was angry. He was ready to skin Beckhart with a butter knife.

  The chance never came. He and Mouse were seized by Mission Prep the instant they hit Bureau territory.

  The training was intense and merciless, and the explanations impossibly far between. It went on around the clock, waking and sleeping, and after a few weeks Perchevski was so tired and disoriented that he was no longer sure who he was. Tiny, unextinguishable sparks of anger were all that kept him going.

  Education passed him to Psych. Psych eventually passed him to Medical. For a week every opening of his eyes meant he was fresh off another operating table. Then Education took another go at him. While he recovered he had to read. And when he slept computers pressure-injected information directly into his brain.

  Dragons in the night. Golden chinese dragons. Starfishers . . . What the hell was it all about? Who was Moyshe benRabi? What was becoming of Cornelius Perchevski?

  Sometimes he screamed and fought them, but they were as stubborn as entropy. They kept right on rebuilding their new man.

  This was the most intensive, extensive prep he had ever undergone.

  He saw Mouse just twice during the whole prep period. They shared the intense hypo-teaching sessions briefing them about Starfishers, but did not intersect again till they met in their master’s office. Perchevski thought they were prepping for different missions. Till the Admiral got hold of them personally.

  “Boys,” Beckhart said, “you’ve just gone through hell. And I did it to you. I’m not proud of it. It hurt me as much as it hurt you. I don’t like operating this way. You’ll just have to take my word that it’s necessary. And I know what you think about that, Tommy. I don’t blame you. But give me the benefit of the doubt, and try to trust me when I tell you that it’s imperative that we bring the Starfishers into Confederation as soon as possible.”

  Such was the opening barrage in a one-way discussion lasting more than three hours. Beckhart talked endlessly, and never answered even one of the questions Perchevski thought pertinent.

  He once protested, “You promised no more team jobs.”

  “And I meant it when I said it, Tommy. But this is the most hurried hurry-up job we’ve ever had. The CNI told me to put my best men in. She picked you. My God, Tommy, it’s only for a couple of weeks. You can’t put up with Mouse that long?”

  “It’s the principle . . . ”

  Beckhart ignored him, veering instead into another track.

  Almost before he knew what was happening Perchevski found him
self aboard a warship bound for the nether end of The Arm. For a world that was, galactically, only a stone’s throw from The Broken Wings.

  He did not like that. It seemed to be tempting fate too much.

  There wasn’t a thing he did like about this mission.

  They hadn’t even let him say his good-byes. Bureau thugs had surrounded him from the moment he had departed Beckhart’s office . . .

  “Hey, Moyshe,” Mouse said cheerfully, within an hour of their going aboard, “let’s go up to the wardroom and play some chess.”

  Fifteen: 3048 AD

  Operation Dragon, Danion

  Danion became as comfortable as an old, well-worn shoe.

  “Fact is, it’s getting downright dull,” Mouse complained toward the end of the third month.

  “What?” benRabi demanded. “All those ball games, and you up to your ears in women, and you’re bored?”

  “You got it, partner. Like the man in the joke said, women are fine, but what do you do the other twenty-three hours of the day?”

  Amy made a remark that Moyshe did not catch.

  “If that’s how you feel,” Mouse replied, laughing, “you can carry your own damned books.”

  They were moving her into Moyshe’s cabin. BenRabi was not overwhelmed by the idea. Nor was he sure how it had come about. It had just sort of fenced him in, pushed by Amy and Mouse till the move actually began and he still had not said “No!”

  He preferred living alone. Sharing struck him as synonymous with imposition. Amy’s mere presence foreordained increased demands . . . At least he would have someone around when the headaches came.

  Mouse and Amy kept bickering. Mouse was teasing, but Amy sounded serious. She did not like Mouse much.

  BenRabi’s migraines came several times a week now. He was scared. The voices and visions . . . He thought it might be a tumor, but the Seiner doctors would not take him seriously. They gave him pain pills and told him not to worry.

  He had been on continuous medication the last ten days. He was pale, dehydrated, weak, and shaky.

  Amy seemed to be the only one who cared, and she would not say why.

  His old downdeep fear that he was going mad seemed ever more creditable.

  This is a hell of a time to take a live-in lover, he thought, dumping an armload of clothing. The relationship was paraplegic.

  The inexplicable recurring memory of Alyce did not help. It frightened and disoriented him.

  There was no reason for that old, dead affair to obsess him.

  It was just another symptom of whatever was happening to him. But it was damned scary.

  On The Broken Wings he had, almost, been the tough, hard character he had been portraying. Now, less than a year later, he was a spineless, whimpering . . . Disgusted, he tried to kick a chair across the cabin. It did not move. All shipboard furniture was bolted down.

  He resumed work in grim silence.

  “Moyshe, I need your help,” Mouse said a month after the move, voice sounding a plaintive note.

  “What? How? I’ll do whatever I can.” He glanced over his shoulder to make sure Amy remained in the women’s head. He was surprised. This tone did not fit his partner at all.

  “Figure out a way to keep me from killing her.”

  BenRabi followed Mouse’s gaze. It was fixed on the Sangaree woman like the cross hairs of an assassin’s rifle scope.

  “She’s working on me, Moyshe. She’s got me working on myself. I’ve been having trouble sleeping. I just lay there thinking up ways . . . Thinking about her being right down the passage. It’s because of the mess on Blackworld. I can’t get it out of my head. And I thought I had it under control.”

  “You too? What the hell did Beckhart do to us?”

  Amazing, Mouse’s finally owning up to a connection with the Shadowline War. He must be under real stress.

  “Self-discipline, Mouse. That’s the only answer I’ve got. And maybe the notion that you ought to save yourself for a bigger target. She’s not worth getting burned over.”

  “She’s the queen in the game. And the stakes are as big as they can get, Moyshe. Watch her. I’ve never seen anybody so sure they had a winning hand. She’s got a royal flush in spades look.”

  “You’re mixing metaphors.”

  “Metaphors be damned, Moyshe. I need help.”

  Jesus, benRabi thought. Here I am halfway to the psycho ward and my partner is crying for me to keep him out. Are we going to have one nut stand guard over the cracks in the other’s noggin? “Let’s take it to Kindervoort, then.”

  “Oh, no. This stays in the family. Jarl doesn’t get anything free. How’s your head doing?”

  “The docs keep saying there’s nothing wrong. It don’t sound right. I mean, how come I hurt so goddamned much? But maybe it’s true. For a while I thought it was a tumor and they were just jollying me so I wouldn’t panic. But the scans didn’t show anything when I finally got them to let me see them. Now I think something external is causing it.”

  “Allergy?”

  “No. I can’t explain yet. It’s just barely a suspicion so far.”

  That suspicion did not leaf out, blossom, and bear fruit for months.

  Time lumbered forward. Mouse worked himself into the shipwide chess finals. BenRabi had a falling out with the collector crowd, among whom he had been a brief, bright star. They were older, more prejudiced people, and unable to tolerate his alienness indefinitely. He trudged onward in his laborious relationship with Amy.

  He tried to make it work. He sincerely believed he was giving it an honest go, and for a while the curious Alyce memories and attendant mental oddities withdrew, but he never saw any long-term hope.

  He even abandoned his writing in order to give her more time. “I just don’t feel like writing,” he lied. “It isn’t me anymore.”

  She protested, but with such restraint that he began to resent her presence during moments when he could have written.

  Turn around twice and there went another month into the file cabinets of time. And here was Mouse with another. “Moyshe, I think I need help.”

  “Stay out of her way.”

  “Not the Sangaree woman this time, Moyshe. Another one.”

  “What else?”

  “Carrie just gave me the word. That Sally I was going with . . . She’s peegee.”

  “Come on. You’re shitting me. People don’t get pregnant unless . . . Oh, my.”

  “Oh, my, yes. Unless they want to.”

  Moyshe fought a grin.

  “You laugh and I’ll kick your head in.”

  “Me? Laugh? I’m sorry. It’s just that . . . What do you want me to do?”

  “Shee-it, Moyshe. I don’t know. Talk to me. I’ve never been up this tree before.”

  “What is it? She figure you’d do the honorable thing?” Why are you doing this to me, Mouse? I had a handle on the Alyce thing.

  “That’s the name of the game. That’s the way they do things here. And the way they lay their little traps. Straight from Century One.”

  “No law says you’ve got to give her what she wants, though. Kiss her good-bye.” That was how he had failed Alyce, so long ago. He had not found the strength to say no until it was too late.

  “I don’t like to hurt anybody’s feelings.”

  “That’s the chance she took, isn’t it?” How come it was so easy to say, but so hard to do? “I don’t see how anybody could believe in a marriage that started out that way anyway. Go on. Tell her to kiss off.”

  “Easier said than done, Moyshe.”

  “I know. Advice is that way. Here’s some more, while we’re at it. Take your own precautions so it doesn’t happen again.”

  “That much I figured out for myself.” Mouse went away. He returned within the hour, shaking his head. “She couldn’t believe that landsmen don’t give a damn if a kid’s parents are married or not. But I think I finally got through to her.”

  For a while Mouse’s social calendar was less crowd
ed. But only for a while. The ladies seemed incapable of remaining away.

  “Tell me something, Amy,” benRabi said one afternoon. “Why are we here?”

  She started giving him the standard story.

  “That’s not true. Danion didn’t really need us. Certainly not a thousand of us. Even with only two hundred we’ll finish up six months early. Your own Damage Control people wouldn’t have taken much longer. So what’s really going on?”

  She would not tell him. She even refused to speculate. He suspected, from her expression, that she might not know, that she was beginning to ask herself the questions that were bothering him.

  His came of a long line of thinking sparked by snippets of information and flashes of intuition that had begun accumulating on Carson’s.

  “Correct me if you can fault this hypothesis,” he told Mouse when Amy was out of hearing. “We’re guinea pigs in a coexistence experiment. They’ve got something big and dangerous going and they thought they could hire outside help to get through it. I’d guess they expect heavy fighting. Our job descriptions all deal with damage control. But the experiment was a failure. No takers.”

  “I wouldn’t know, Moyshe. You’ve got your head working. Who were they going to fight? Not us.”

  “Sharks?”

  “Maybe. But it doesn’t add up. Still, I’m not much good at puzzles. How’s your head doing?”

  “Real good. Why?”

  “I thought so. You’re more like the old Moyshe lately.” They completed the last scheduled repair three weeks later. From then on there was little to do.

  One day a long-faced Amy announced, “They just told me. Starting Monday you’ll be assigned to Damage Control. To the emergency ready room at D.C. South. I’ll take you over and introduce you.”

  “Breaking up the team, eh?” Mouse asked. “Where are you going?”

  “Back to Security.” She did not sound pleased.

  BenRabi felt a guilty elation. Though he loved Amy, he did not like having her around all the time. He felt smothered.

  The damage control assignment was a crushing bore. “A fireman in a steel city would have more to do,” Mouse complained. A few days later, he cornered benRabi in order to update him on his own snooping.