Starliner

by David Drake

  "Nope," he answered with a slow smile that began before his head turned to meet the gaze of his fellow officer. "Just wondering how long I need to keep this up. After all, it's not my regular watch."

  He cleared his throat. "And I don't know what you may have heard, but I don't mix business and pleasure. Right now, I'm an officer of the Empress."

  Ran looked back at the dance floor. Commander Kneale was there, with a woman of twice his age and girth . . . and very possibly enough money to buy the Empress, had Trident Starlines been willing to sell. Several Rialvans watched stolidly from the fringes, and a pair of K'Chitkans danced with exaggerated sways of their bodies.

  If Ran was correct about the K'Chitkans' crests, both dancers were male. He didn't even want to guess what that meant.

  Many of the human passengers wore period garb or more exotic costumes. A Terran female was draped in leaves like a medieval Wild Woman, and three male mining engineers from Hobilo wore suits suggesting carnivorous bipedal reptiles from their homeworld. The reptiles, at least as reproduced by the costumes, had prominent genitals.

  Brief masks were common. Passengers couldn't really hide their identities from one another, but the pretense of anonymity made it easier for some to get into the spirit of First Night.

  "For afterwards, then," Wanda prodded. She sounded amused. "When we're off duty on the ground."

  Ran sighed inwardly. A ship the size of the Empress of Earth was bound to have crewmen who'd served with Ran Colville in the past, and he supposed he did have something of a reputation. Still, it wasn't as though he'd ever made a set at a passenger. Not infrequently it worked the other way . . . and occasionally there'd been contact on the ground when he was off duty, that was true.

  But he didn't see it was anybody's business save his and the lady's. Not Lieutenant Holly's business, at any rate. He'd never so much as patted her hand!

  Aloud, Ran said, "You make it sound like a job that you have to work at, Wanda. If I felt that way about it, I'd . . . watch foot-racing instead."

  "Ah, Captain?" said a voice from behind the two officers. They both turned, uncertain whether the speaker was a throaty woman or a high-voiced man.

  A man, dressed as a Roman soldier: quite young, and quite obviously nervous,

  Wanda peeled off expertly to field him while Ran nodded and moved away. The Second Officer's cheerful "Welcome to First Night, sir," blended with the passenger's, "I was just wondering how often you've been shipwrecked?"

  Hard to tell whether the poor guy was worried, or if he thought a shipwreck was romantic. It wasn't romantic, though if a starliner's systems failed in the sidereal universe, there was at least a chance the lifeboats would save the people aboard her . . . .

  There was a stir from the entrance directly across the Social Hall where a party of Szgranians had appeared. The clan mistress, Lady Scour, was accompanied by four females of her entourage.

  Commander Kneale was walking his dance partner back to the table where her husband waited. Ran saw the commander miss a step, then regain his composure when he realized that no Szgranian warriors were present. They had a right to use any of the First Class facilities as they chose, but the potential for trouble that posed in the loose atmosphere of First Night was terrifying to anybody who felt responsible for the consequences.

  The orchestra was eleven pieces and live. Music synthesized by an artificial intelligence could be proven to be better by any number of objective criteria—but enjoyment was a subjective reaction, and the humans who made up the majority of the Empress's First Class passengers overwhelmingly preferred live performers on authentic instruments.

  The first violin acted as conductor. She glanced toward the doorway and called a direction to her fellows. The orchestra segued from a Franz Lehar waltz into a Szgranian tune in which the double bass rumbled the main melody while the other ten instruments, all strings, wailed in a complex and wholly separate pattern.

  The Szgranians froze for a moment. Then Lady Scour strode into the center of the area cleared for dancing. One of her attendants protested by flinging herself to the floor in front of her mistress, but the lady stepped onto her and over with an extra twist of her heel.

  It was a case of a little learning being a dangerous thing. The orchestra was playing Szgranian music, all right, but it was from a ritual which required both female and male participants . . . and there were no male Szgranians in the Social Hall. The load of hypno-chunked information which Ran's mind had received but not fully assimilated told him that much. He hadn't any idea what the result was going to be. He wasn't a Szgranian expert either.

  Lady Scour began to dance, waving her hands in a stylized pattern while her right leg beat time with the deliberation of a horse counting. She looked about the room, her gaze icy.

  What the hell. Ran walked across the floor and joined her.

  Lady Scour's eyes were the color of amethysts. The orbits were rounder than a human's, but the effect was exotic rather than freakish . . . to Ran Colville, at any rate.

  Their bodies came into synchrony, two meters apart Ran had been following the music, while the Szgranian clan mistress led the notes. She adjusted her timing to match the human norm before he even realized the cause of the initial disjunction.

  Ran didn't know the proper motions at a conscious level, but so long as he left matters to the instinctive where the hypnogogue had imprinted the knowledge, he was fine. At any rate, his arms were moving, and he supposed it was proper because Lady Scour looked a great deal more friendly than she had when she began dancing alone.

  The piece ended. "Lord have mercy!" Ran muttered, louder than he'd intended to speak.

  Spectators all around the room began to clap.

  Lord have mercy!

  "And you are Junior Lieutenant . . . ?" Lady Scour asked. The pale skin of her forehead was lightly frosted with perspiration. One of the attendants scampered up and used the tail of her sash to dry her mistress. Ran was shocked and amazed when another tiny Szgranian female wiped his forehead.

  "Randall Colville, ma'am," he said. Szgranian clan mistresses were supposed to be sharp, but most human passengers wouldn't have been able to identify the rank markings on an officer's uniform. "Third Officer, Staff Side."

  Lady Scour waved a hand before her face in a place-holding gesture, a sort of physical throat clearing. Close up, the six-armed torso was odd but not unpleasant to view. Her pale green tunic clung to her bosom. Bosoms.

  Her eyes focused back on Ran. "Oh promise me now Clerk Colville," she sang in a high, clear voice, "or 'twill cost ye muckle strife—"

  How had she known that old Terran ballad? But Ran knew it, knew it well from the loot his father brought back from the Long Troubles on Hobilo.

  "Ride never by the Wells of Slane, if you would live and brook your life."

  "Now speak no more my lusty dame," Ran sang back to her, and nobody'd ever claimed he had a singing voice, but you did what you had to do. "Now speak no more of that to me.

  "Did I never see a fair woman but I would sin with her body?"

  Both of them began laughing with an enthusiasm that must have sounded mad to onlookers; but the onlookers hadn't been in the dance, and the bond from that short ritual—an interlude from the harvest festival—was surprising.

  "You knew the song!" Lady Scour said. "I've found that your people never know your own songs."

  Ran shrugged. "Well, there's a lot of history," he said, a diplomatic answer. "How did you happen to know it?"

  Szgranian civilization had reached its present level long before humans began raising megaliths, much less pyramids. Szgrane hadn't changed since then, however, until contact with human starfarers forced the static society to adapt.

  The clan mistress smiled. "The same way you know The Dance of the Grubs Building Their Cocoon," she said. "When I learned one of the officers on the ship that would carry me was named Colville, I learned about Colvilles."

  The smile brightened. "Are you like your ancest
or, then?" Lady Scour added.

  "I don't know about ancestor . . . ." Ran said. One of the Szgranian attendants offered him a tiny tumbler of carved glass, Szgranian workmanship and worth the price of First Class passage on the Empress. Lady Scour drank from another, making the contents last for three minuscule sips.

  Ran carefully touched the liquid with his tongue. It was chilled water, poured from one of the muff-like portmanteaus all the attendants carried.

  "As I say," Ran resumed, "I don't claim the relationship . . . but it's been suggested that I like, ah, fair women, yes."

  For Clerk Colville had indeed gone to see the lady, mermaid rather, at the Wells of Slane; not the last man to go where his pecker led, nor the last to get in trouble for it

  The orchestra resumed playing. A circle of onlookers surrounded Ran and the Szgranians at a respectful distance. Lady Scour was a sight to be remarked on under any circumstances, and the bi-specific dance made that true in spades.

  If Lady Scour had researched "Colville," with Ran only assigned to the Empress of Earth seventy-two hours before undocking, then she'd certainly done the same with the names of all the other officers aboard the starliner. There wasn't anything unusual about that performance. Szgranian nobility had virtually nothing to do except consider literature, genealogy, and honor. From what the hypnogogue had "told" Ran, a decision about the garments to be worn to a festival could absorb days of a court's discussion.

  "I'm interested that you used only the upper-arms motions in the Cocoon Dance," Lady Scour said.

  Her four attendants fluttered their multiple hands in front of their faces. Flowing sleeves made the attendants' gestures look like the display behavior of butterflies.

  "Well, ma'am," Ran said. "I'm, ah, brachially challenged." He spread his two hands, emphasizing the obvious. "Frankly, the hypnogogue must have done the best it could with what was available. I didn't have a lot of conscious input."

  Lady Scour trilled another long laugh. She reached out with her upper pair of arms and touched her index fingers to Ran's. "So you didn't understand the significance of upper-arm gestures alone?" she asked.

  "No ma'am," Ran said.

  That wasn't in the data he'd been chunked. Maybe the information didn't exist in the system, maybe the way he'd been pulled out of the sequence to deal with the government types had cost him a piece of Szgranian custom that would have been really useful to know. He thought he could guess what it was now, though.

  "Come," said Lady Scour decisively. She put her left middle hand on the crook of Ran's right elbow, a human gesture which she had obviously learned for the purpose. "You will act as my escort tonight."

  "Yes ma'am," Ran said. His screw-up—his turning the ritual into a mating dance—might have put paid to his career with Trident Starlines. Lady Scour could ask Ran to turn backflips across the Social Hall without getting an argument from him.

  She walked toward the refreshment buffet. Ran kept pace, and the four attendants followed in pairs.

  "Normally custom wouldn't permit a person of my status to appear in public without a male escort," Lady Scour said conversationally, "but as I told Rawsl, 'I am the clan mistress.' Still, it's better to obey custom whenever circumstances permit. You will protect me, won't you?"

  She laughed.

  "Yes, ma'am," Ran agreed. "From whatever threatens."

  "Except from yourself," said the Szgranian, and she laughed again with overtones that Ran Colville had heard often in the flirting voices of human females.

  NEVASA

  The magnetic motors began to throb as Ran entered the Starlight Bar. Bridge was preparing to drop the Empress of Earth out of her parking orbit above Nevasa.

  The bar in the Empress's prow was more crowded than Ran had ever imagined he would see it. There were chairs for fifty, chromed frameworks that slid above the deck without friction but locked safely into place when a passenger sat down. A few seats were empty, but there were standees around the autobar also.

  Ran saw Wanda Holly near the center of the room, seated at a table with two drinks—clear, with lemon slices—waiting on it. He sat down in the seat the second drink saved and said, "Umm, what did you need, Wanda?"

  He wasn't out of breath, but he'd moved pretty fast from the main lounge when he got the call, Ms. Holly requests your presence in the Starlight Bar at your earliest convenience. Not an emergency, maybe, but it wasn't standard operating procedure either.

  "You've never been on Nevasa, have you, Ran?" Wanda asked. She raised her glass and offered him a silent toast. "Hope you like sparkling water," she added.

  "If it's wet, I drink it," Ran said absently. He didn't drink like he had on the Cold Crew, but he wouldn't have turned down something stronger. All crewmen were on standby during docking maneuvers, but Ran had been officially off-watch for the past thirty minutes.

  He considered the Second Officer's question. "No," he said, "I haven't been here before. Worried about the authorities because of the war scare, you mean?"

  Wanda shrugged. She was looking out the holographic panel that mimicked the curve of the starliner's bow. "That'll be a problem, sure. But right now, I just wanted you to see what it's like to land on Nevasa."

  She glanced around the bar. She wore her hair in a brilliant blond swirl today. Ran liked blondes, but he thought Wanda probably looked her best as the brunette her genes had made her. "That's what everybody's here for," she explained. "People who've landed on Nevasa before or talked to somebody who has."

  "Oh . . ." murmured a dozen throats.

  Ran looked through the clear forward bulkhead. The sky around the Empress of Earth was beginning to fluoresce.

  Streaks of bubbling color rippled through the stratosphere, similar to Earth's auroras but momentary and a thousand times brighter. The Empress was dropping slowly, at a shallow angle, so she made about as much motion forward as down. The light bloomed from her magnetic motors and those of the eight tugs which coupled the starliner in orbit, streaming back over the ship and her wake through the disturbed air.

  It was perhaps the most beautiful thing Ran had ever seen in his life.

  "Nevasa's atmosphere has a high proportion of noble gases," Wanda explained. "A high-density magnetic flux excites them. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life."

  A cold, green flare bathed the vessel, covering the bulkhead like a lambent curtain. Passengers gasped in awe and delight.

  Wanda looked at Ran. "The thing I don't understand," she said, "is . . ."

  Her voice trailed off as three pulses of topaz yellow followed the green, drawing her eyes by reflex.

  "Is . . . ?" Ran said softly.

  "Is how they can live here and rush into a war, not that the war's all their fault," she said to complete the thought

  "I suppose," Ran said as he stared wide-eyed at a light show the size of a continent, "they don't see things the way outsiders do. . . ."

  * * *

  "This war," cried Miss Oanh from the center of the family room, paneled with painted screens, "is evil!"

  "War with Grantholm," said her father gently, "is probably inevitable and certainly morally right."

  Mr. Lin knew his long service in Nevasa's Ministry of External Affairs was the cause of many of his family problems. His daughter had spent half of her eighteen years on foreign worlds with him. The three years on Earth, where Mr. Lin had been ambassador before being brought back to the ministry, had been particularly unfortunate in forming Oanh's attitudes regarding planetary honor—and filial piety.

  Lin cleared his throat and went on, "I realize that you feel you have a right to your own opinion, but please keep it to yourself for the time being. I become a plenipotentiary when I arrive on Tellichery. So long as we remain on Nevasa, I do not have the prerogative of overruling the security services."

  Mr. Lin's aides in the open, adjacent rooms which served as Lin's home office discretely avoided staring. The squad of gray-clad guards seemed equally focused on people other
than the minister and his daughter. They watched the aides and the petitioners waiting in the outer office. Many of the latter were foreign nationals.

  The three-meter area cleared around the perimeter of the family room's open doors was a result of the civilians' nervousness about the guards' openly carried weapons.

  Almost certainly some of the guards were members of the Counterintelligence Bureau. The chances were good that one or more of the personnel from Lin's own ministry reported to the bureau as well.

  "It's never morally right to kill other human beings!" his daughter snapped.

  Lin sighed inwardly. Oanh hadn't wanted to leave Earth, where her friends were, and she was even angrier to be uprooted again in less than six months. He would have preferred to leave her on Nevasa, since in most senses she was capable of looking out for herself—

  But Oanh's anger at the situation came out in the form of statements that were likely to be viewed as treasonous if war with Grantholm broke out.

  When war broke out. Mr. Lin wouldn't have been sent on this mission were war not inevitable and alliance, military alliance, with Tellichery not a crucial factor in that war's outcome.

  "There may be no war," he said aloud, in the calm voice that he knew grated on his daughter's nerves worse than a shriek would have done. Lin couldn't help it. In a tense argument he became preternaturally calm, which was a reason for his career success . . . but had driven his wife into the arms of a grain merchant on Skeuse and was looking as though it might drive his daughter away as well.

  Oanh sniffed.

  "And in any case," her father continued, "the behavior of the Grantholm military leaves it open to question whether they can be considered human."

  Lin's spacious home overlooked the heart of Nevasa City to the east, and Con Ron Landing, the starport, to the west. An incoming vessel and its tugs formed a blight ring above the family room's clear ceiling. The panels of smoked polycarbonate were mounted in flexible troughs so that they did not rattle audibly, but the starliner's roar made them vibrate and caused the image to quiver.