Starfishers

by Glen Cook

  He nodded. Yes. Kindervoort would want to know all about it. Old Doctor Deathshead would poke and prod and try to pry open the lid of his soul. Even on a battle day Kindervoort would want to keep an eye on the blood of his ship. That was all people were to Danion. The harvestship was the real living thing here. The folks inside were just specialized cells.

  He let Amy lead him away, but looked back at Marya as he went. They were taking pictures and nattering into recorders. Medics were piling bodies onto stretchers. Techs were weeping over the damaged console and impatiently trying to cajole readouts on atmospheric quality . . . But he had eyes only for Marya.

  Marya. She was dead now. He could ease up and let her be more than just “the Sangaree woman.”

  He did not know why or how, but he must have loved her in some odd, psychotic way. Or maybe he was in love with the death she had symbolized. But, now that she was lying there, sprawled inelegantly, brokenly, he felt a little freer. And a little sadder.

  Kindervoort’s office was hectic. People came and went hastily, crowding its outer reaches. The chaos was probably typical of every office aboard, Moyshe thought. There would be plenty of work for everyone.

  Kindervoort pushed through the crowd. “Moyshe. Amy. Come on in the office.” He broke trail. Settling behind his desk, he said, “Thank God for this lull. I was in-suit for eleven hours. The damned things drive me crazy. Give me claustrophobia. You all right now, Moyshe? You look a little pale.”

  BenRabi sat with his elbows on his knees, staring into infinity. He shrugged.

  “For a long time you had me worried, Moyshe,” Kindervoort said. “You seemed so solitary, so introspective, so ineffectual. Not exactly up to advance billing. I don’t know what I expected Beckhart’s top man to be, but you weren’t it. Not till today. Then you acted when you had to. Intuitively, quickly, correctly, efficiently. The way I was told to expect. And in character. All on your own. Except maybe you told Mouse?”

  Kindervoort had steepled his fingers in front of his mouth. He seemed to be thinking out loud. “Now tell me what happened. An unedited version.”

  Moyshe started talking. It helped. He began at the beginning and told the whole story, presuming Jarl had enough details to catch any major deletions. He tried to be objective.

  Kindervoort nodded, occasionally doodled, once made a call for corroboration. He asked Moyshe to go over several things twice. It was a brief and gentle holiday compared to a Bureau debriefing. He had Amy call to make sure Mouse was getting medical attention.

  BenRabi left out nothing but the hiding of the weapons.

  When he concluded, Kindervoort asked, “Did today change anything for you? You ready to cross over now?”

  Moyshe considered it. Hard. He wanted to be part of what he had found here. But he could not. Not on Kindervoort’s terms. “No, Jarl. I can’t.”

  Amy was disappointed. He expected her to be. The signs were unmistakable. She had plans. Bells and white satin, a regular Archaicist extravaganza.

  “Why’d you go after Gonzalez, then? We would’ve gotten her eventually. Maybe too late to have saved Ops, though,” he conceded.

  BenRabi could not bring himself to answer truthfully. Landsmen did not avenge friends. They had no friends to avenge. And he did not want them to know that a prime rule of the Bureau was that you let no blow against one of its people slide. “That’s why. It meant my neck too.” Briefly, he sketched what had happened on The Broken Wings.

  “I wish you’d done it for us . . . If you change your mind . . . I really want you on my team, Moyshe.”

  “Not on your terms.”

  Kindervoort looked perplexed. He started to say something, but was interrupted by a comm buzzer. He pressed a button, said, “Kindervoort, Security.” He stared at Moyshe, frowning.

  “LeClare, Contact,” a tiny voice said. “You got a landsman named . . . let’s see . . . benRabi, Moyshe benRabi, down there?”

  “Right. He’s here with me now.”

  “Good. Been trying to track him down all over. He the one with the headaches?”

  “The same.”

  “Has he been Warner tested, do you know?”

  “No. He’s landside.”

  “But he’s a marginal?”

  “I’d guess a strong full. Looks to me like repeated and intense spontaneous contact reaction.”

  Moyshe began to feel like a sample on a microscope slide.

  “Good. I’m sending a man to pick him up. Priority Alpha. The Old Man’s okay. The paperwork will come down later. Off.”

  “Off,” Kindervoort said, puzzled. He leaned back, studied Moyshe speculatively, finally said, “Well. Things change. Desperate times, I guess. I just hope they know what they’re doing. Moyshe, when you’re finished in Contact I want you to get plenty of rest. Amy, see that he does. Then report back here.”

  Moyshe looked from one to the other. Both seemed shaken, disturbed.

  What the hell was going on? That comm exchange made no sense at all, but it had gotten these two as antsy as a cat in heat. What was a Warner test? Why were his migraines so important? He studied Amy. His thoughts drifted back to the attack he had suffered after being switched on. She had become as nervous then.

  He had tried a dozen times to discover why she thought his migraines important. She would not tell him.

  They were important to him, heaven knew. They had become one of the central features of his life. He had had scores since coming aboard. So many that he had become conditioned to recognize the slightest warning symptom. He gulped his medication instantly.

  For a while, though, he had not been bothered much. Till Danion had come here. He had been eating the pills like candy the past few days, at regular intervals, not waiting for symptoms to begin. What did it mean?

  “Well,” Jarl said, “I’ve got a ton of work. Have to sort things out, count the bodies, inform the next of kin. Amy, turn him over to Contact, then get some sleep. This break probably won’t last.”

  She took benRabi’s hand, guided him to the door. Why was she so quiet? Because of Marya?

  As he was about to close the door behind him, Kindervoort called, “Moyshe? Thanks.”

  Seventeen: 3049 AD

  Operation Dragon, Mindteching

  The man who came for Moyshe, when he arrived meteorically on a fast orange scooter, wore a jumper of a style Moyshe had never before seen. It was black, trimmed with silver, instead of being the off-white of the technical groups. It was an Operations group uniform.

  The man looked and smelled as if he had not changed for a week.

  “Trying to find a man name of . . . ” He checked a card. “BenRabi. Moyshe benRabi. What land of name is that?”

  “A literary allusion,” Amy replied. “This’s him here.”

  “Right. Teddy Larkin, Contact Support. Who’re you?” He was brusque. And tired. He appeared to be on the verge of collapse. Moyshe felt sympathetic. He was on his last legs himself.

  “Amaranthina Amaryllis Isolte Galadriel de Coleridge y Gutierez. Security,” she snapped.

  “Oh. All right, let’s go, benRabi.” He headed for his scooter.

  Moyshe did not move. He was fighting his temper. Larkin’s rudeness might be excused, intellectually, because he was tired, but emotionally Moyshe could not let it slide. He had the feeling that Larkin was this way all the time.

  Larkin reached his vehicle, noticed that Moyshe was not tagging along dutifully. “Come on, grub. Get your ass . . . ”

  BenRabi was there. And Teddy was yon, seated on hard steel deck plating wondering what had hit him.

  There was no forgiving his remark. “Grub” was the Seiner’s ultimate epithet for landsmen. BenRabi moved in. He was ready to bounce Larkin all over the passageway.

  Amy’s touch stopped him. “Go gentle, you ape,” she snarled at Larkin. “Or yours will be the second big mouth he’s shut today.”

  Larkin took it as a wisecrack, started toward Moyshe.

  BenRabi bounced him
off the bulkhead and floor a couple of times.

  “I meant what I said,” Amy told Larkin. Her badge was showing now, literally. “How was your air supply this afternoon?”

  “Eh?” Larkin’s eyes widened. His face grew pale.

  “Yeah. You see what I mean,” Amy told him.

  Moyshe slowly relaxed. “Have the covers turned down when I get home, Love,” he said, blowing a kiss. He did it to irritate Larkin. Would you want your sister to marry one? “I’m going to sleep for a week.” He settled himself on the scooter’s passenger seat. “Ready when you are, Teddy.”

  He had to hang on for his life. The scooter seemed designed for racing. Its driver was a madman who did not know how to let up on the go-pedal.

  “What’s the hurry?”

  “I get to get me some sleep when I deliver you.”

  A big airtight door closed behind them the instant they entered Operations Sector. Sealed in, Moyshe thought. An instant of panic flashed by. Nervous, he studied his surroundings. Ops seemed quieter, more remote, less frenzied than his home sector. It looked less touched by battle. There was no confusion. People seemed more aloof, more calm, less harried. He supposed they had to be. They had to think Danion past defeat. The fighting may have stopped, but it was not finished.

  Larkin braked to a frightening, squealing stop that almost threw Moyshe off the scooter. Larkin led him into a large room filled with complex electronics. “Contact,” Larkin muttered by way of explanation.

  The battle had reached this place. Acrid smoke hung thick here. It still curled up from one instrument bank. Ozone underlay the stench. Casualties awaiting ambulances rested along one wall. There were at least a dozen stretchers there. But the hull had remained sound. There were no suits in evidence.

  Larkin led Moyshe to the oldest man he had yet seen aboard Danion. “BenRabi,” he said, and instantly disappeared.

  Moyshe examined his surroundings while waiting for the old man to acknowledge his presence. The vast room looked like a crossbreed of ship’s bridge and lighter passenger compartment. The walls were banked with data processing equipment, consoles, and screens whose displays he could not fathom. Seiners in black, seated shoulder to shoulder, manipulated, observed, and muttered into tiny mikes. The wide floor of the room was occupied by corn-rows of couches on which more Seiners lay, their heads enveloped in huge plastic helmets which twinkled with little telltale lights. Beside each couch stood a motionless pair of Seiners. One studied the helmet lights, the other a small, blockish machine which looked uncomfortably like a diagnostic computer. A constant pavanne of repairmen moved among the couches, apparently examining the empties for defects.

  BenRabi finally spied something familiar. It was a spatial display globe that lurked blackly in a far corner. Centered in it were ten golden footballs apparently representing harvestships. He supposed the quick, darting golden needles represented service ships. They were maneuvering against scarlet things which vaguely resembled Terran sharks. The tiny golden dragons at the far periphery, then, should represent distant starfish. Stars’ End would be the deeper darkness biting a chunk from the display’s side. He saw nothing that could be interpreted as Sangaree. He hoped they would stay gone, though it was not their style and he did not expect it.

  “Mr. benRabi?” The old man said.

  “Why dragons?”

  “Image from our minds. You’ll see.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Instead of responding, the old man plunged into a prepared speech. “Nobody explained this to you, did they? Well, our drives are dead, except for minddrive. The sharks can’t kill that till they get to us here, or till we stop getting power from the fish. But we’re in trouble, Mr. benRabi. We do have minddrive, but the sharks mindburned most of my techs.” He indicated the nearest stretcher. A girl barely out of creche smiled in vacant madness. “I’ve lost so many I’m out of standbys. I’m drafting marginal sensitives from the crew. You’re subject to migraine, aren’t you?”

  Moyshe nodded, confused. Here they came with the headaches again.

  He had suspected for several months now . . . But the implications were too staggering. He did not want to believe. The psi business had been discredited.

  Maybe if he remembered that hard enough this man and place would go away.

  “We want you to go into rapport with a fish.”

  “No!” Panic smote him. He did not entirely understand his response.

  A niggling little demon named Loyalty, to whom he seldom listened, urged him to surrender for the sake of information. Beckhart would reward him with a shovel full of medals.

  He thought of sudden, terrible headaches, and of frightening, haunting dreams. He recalled his fear that he had made involuntary contact with the starfish. “I couldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “You don’t need to. The techs will put you in. The fish will do all the work. All you do is serve as a channel.”

  “But I’m tired. I’ve been up for . . . ”

  “Tell me a story. So has everybody else.” He gestured impatiently. A couple of technicians, hovering nearby, approached. “Clara, put Mr. benRabi in Number Forty-three.” Both techs nodded. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, Mr. benRabi.”

  Moyshe wanted to protest being pushed around, but lacked the will. The technicians pressed him into a couch. He surrendered. Undoubtedly he had been through worse.

  The technician whom the old man had called Clara reminded him of the professional mother of his childhood. She was grey-haired, cherry-faced, and chattered soothingly while strapping his arms to those of the couch. She placed his fingers on grip-switches before she started on his legs.

  Her partner was a dark-haired, quiet youth who efficiently prepared Moyshe’s head for the helmet. He began by rubbing Moyshe’s scalp with an unscented paste, then he covered benRabi’s short hair with a thing like a fine wire hairnet. Moyshe’s skin protested a thousand little tingles that quickly faded.

  I’m taking this too passively, he thought. “Why are you strapping me down?” he demanded.

  “So you can’t hurt yourself.”

  “What?”

  “Take it easy. There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s just a precaution,” the woman replied. She smiled gently.

  Damn, he thought. Better be two shovels full of medals.

  “Lift your head, please,” the younger Seiner said. Moyshe did. The helmet devoured his head. He was blind.

  His fear redoubled. A green ogre with dirty claws shoved nasty hands into his guts, grabbed, yanked. His heart began playing a theme for battle drums. Words came echoing through his mind, Czyzewski’s, from his poem “The Old God”: “ . . . who sang the darkful deep, and dragons in the sky.” Had Czyzewski had starfish in mind?

  Moyshe felt his body growing wet with fear-sweat. Maybe the contact wouldn’t work. Maybe his mind wouldn’t be invaded. That had to be the root of his terror. He did not want anything looking inside his head, where the madness lay behind the most fragile of barriers.

  It had taken him all year to get it under control . . . Guns, dragons, headaches, improbable, obsessive memories of Alyce, continuous instability . . . He did not dare go under. His balance was too delicate.

  Guns! Did the image of the gun have anything to do with the Stars’ End weaponry? Was it some twisted symbol his mind had created for a part of the mission that Psych had not wanted him to remember?

  Somewhere, a voice. “We’re ready, Mr. benRabi.” The old woman. It was an ancient trick for calming a man. It worked, a little. “Please depress your right side switch one click.”

  He did. He lost all sensation. He floated. He saw, smelled, felt nothing. He was alone with his tortured mind.

  “That’s not bad, is it?” She used the voice of the professional mother this time. His cunning, frightened mind made it that of the woman of his youth. He remembered how she had comforted him when he had been afraid.

  �
�When you’re ready, depress your right switch another click, then release it. To withdraw you have to pull up on your left switch.”

  His hand seemed to act on its own. Down went the switch.

  The dreams he had been having returned space swimming, the galaxy wrong in color, Stars’ End strangely misty yet bright. Things moved around him. He remembered the situation tank. This was like being bodiless at the heart of the display. The service ships were glimmering needles, the harvestships glowing tangles of wire. The sharks were reddish torpedoes in the direction of the galaxy. Far away, the starfish looked like golden Chinese dragons. They were drifting toward him.

  Moyshe’s fear faded as though a hand had erased it from the blackboard of his mind. Only an all-encompassing wonder remained.

  Gently, warm, friendly as a loving mother, a voice trickled into his mind. “I do it. Starfish, Chub.” There was a wind-chimes tinkle of something like laughter. “Watch. I show me.”

  A small dragon rose from the approaching herd, did a ponderous forward roll. Shortly, “Oh, my! Old Ones don’t like. Dangerous. This no time for fun. But we winning, new man-friend. Sharks afraid, confused. Too many man-ship. Running now, some. Many destroyed. Big feast for scavenger things.”

  The creature’s joy was infectious, and Moyshe supposed he had cause—if the sharks were indeed abandoning herd and harvestfleet.

  Funny. His conscious mind was not questioning, just accepting.

  His fear remained, down deep, but the night creature held it at bay, infecting him with its own excitement. When did the power thing start? he wondered. It had already, the starfish told him. He did not feel anything other than this creature Chub exploring the ways of his mind like a kid on holiday exploring a resort hotel.

  “Shark battle won, mind battle won,” the starfish said after a while, when Moyshe finally had himself under control. “But another fight coming, Moyshe man-friend. Bad one, maybe.”