The Sea is Full of Stars wos-6

by Jack L. Chalker

  Still, there he was at the boarding ramp, behind a small desk, smiling and checking out things on a computer screen. Something flashed on the board in front of him, and abruptly he was all business. They all put in what resembled little hearing aid devices, having no need to look at the cartoon graphic showing how to do it for all the races present that ran on the screen above the purser. After observing them, the purser picked up a small headset, put it on, and then punched in a code on the control board in front of him.

  “Citizens of the Realm, I welcome you to Flight A3744X5. This is a nonstop to Crella Six spaceport, then on to Hasimoto Junction. The time to Crella Six is eleven days six hours, and there will be a twelve hour layover there before proceeding for sixteen days ten hours to Hasimoto Junction. Those disembarking at Crella Six should have their passports and other travel documents in order and on their person, as they must be submitted to immigration authority here before you can board. Those going on to Hasimoto Junction will require only their through ticket, as the automated systems will not permit you to disembark at Crella Six.”

  The voice was pleasant, professional, friendly. It was being delivered in Asparant, the language of interstellar commerce and trade that was the standard on all the Junctions and spaceports. There it went to a computer, which translated it and sent it to each of the earpieces in the language and dialect of the individual wearer.

  “Once you submit your travel documents and/or ticket, and it is validated and approved,” the purser continued, “you will receive your cabin assignments and master keys, one for each person. These keys will operate only your cabin entrance, and after being used the first time, can be used only by the bearer. A map showing where your cabin is and how to get to it will be furnished with the key. Once you are approved, please collect key, map, and documents and proceed on board and to your cabin. All luggage should have been delivered there by now, so please check, and if anything is missing report it immediately via the ship’s phone. Once you leave, there is no telling how long it might be before we could get anything left behind to you!”

  The speech was stock and they’d all heard it before, but it was welcome nonetheless because it said that they were on their way.

  Angel Kobe looked over at the Rithian, who was shuffling through his document pouch and checking with the rest of his party, then she looked around for Kincaid. He was there, paying no heed to the purser—he hadn’t even inserted his little earpiece—and with ticket in hand, he also appeared to have little interest in his fellow travelers. Whatever he was doing on this run, it clearly had nothing to do with anybody else here.

  She couldn’t help but wonder if he thought of them at all, except as objects, perhaps. There were eight non-Terrans in the lounge, but the only really alien life-form was standing right there looking like a Terran man.

  What was he doing here? What was he doing, period? Was he pensioned and spending all his time hunting this monster, who must be well-hidden and well-protected and in a biome the hunter couldn’t ever really pierce? What would be the result if this creature was discovered living the good life down deep in some planetary ocean and giving orders to its minions? Kincaid would have to go down in an environment suit just for starters, and he’d be in unfamiliar territory against a probably well-guarded foe who felt completely at home there. Blow up the whole planet, perhaps? But then how would the hunter ever really know if the quarry was dead, or sheltered and ready to depart once conditions allowed, or, worse, had already left before the attack? She considered this while waiting not two people behind him in the queue for validation and boarding, and felt both curious and a bit sorry for the man. He was hunting Moby Dick and he didn’t even have a harpoon or a ship.

  She reached ticketing, inserted her documents, then placed her hand in a cavity inside the console. A slight tingling sensation resulted, and then she felt a swipe of something across her thumb as the boarding computer took some dead cells from the surface of her skin and compared the generic code to that registered on the documents. It took only a few seconds, and she received a green boarding arrow and her documents back, along with a map of the module and a small book with descriptions of the facilities available, the services, and the numbers to contact for any of her needs, with her own cabin number printed on the front.

  The boarding process was more than just a validation, though; it was also the cue to the documents and terminal computer to upload all the information it had on the passenger to the local computer governing the module itself. The computer would know who was who, what their requirements and preferences were, medical needs, everything, even the language and translation routines required. She would be automatically given access to her own cabin and to the corridors and public areas; she would be prevented from entering any area that might not be good for her health or the ship’s routines. In a sense, you were back in a sort of womb, and Mama was always around whether you wanted her there or not.

  For a mixed race module, it was nicely full service. You could have your meals in your room, or go to a pleasant, intimate little cafe where no race would be visible to you eating something that would make you lose your lunch. There was a bar and lounge, a small gymnasium with equipment for every physiology, and a holographic staff that couldn’t really do much but would provide company and conversation if need be.

  The cabin was quite spacious. She’d arrived on a more local type of vessel where passengers weren’t always the rule, and the quarters and amenities had been extremely cramped and limited in most ways. This was almost like a luxury hotel suite, with a sitting room, bedroom, full bath and shower, in-room entertainment, a direct virtual reality link for really going where you otherwise couldn’t and experiencing things you might not otherwise experience, and all the rest. There was even an octagonal window showing the immediate complex, although the window was really a wall screen that connected to external ports. For most of the trip it would be a mirror, and more useful for it.

  The bottom line was, passenger travel in the age of interstellar civilizations did what passenger services always did in times past: it provided as many ways as economy and technology permitted to kill time and give you the illusion that you weren’t just sitting around bored.

  Angel looked back at the cabin door and saw a display over it. Right now it was counting down toward 00:00:00, the time of departure, after which it would reset to the days, hours, and minutes until docking at the next stop.

  It was all so new to her, and so wonderful. She’d seen most of the technology, of course, but she’d never dreamed of this level of luxury travel. She only wished that some friends or family were here to enjoy it with her. That, however, couldn’t be, and was the one real drag on an otherwise wondrous journey that she nonetheless knew she’d remember the rest of her life.

  There was still almost an hour until departure. She decided to shower and freshen up and put on something lightweight and comfortable, then explore the module. It was, after all, going to be home for quite a while.

  She saw a glowing red light on her desk console, and, realizing it was a message alert, pressed it.

  “Captain Melak Dukodny of the City of Modar speaking to all guests,” came a pleasant if slightly stiff voice. “I welcome everyone who is joining us on this leg of our journey and invite you all to a reception in the main lounge. The reception will begin fifteen minutes before departure, but you may come down at any time after that, and I will join you shortly after we make the jump into null-space. Since this is a Junction board, none of you will be experiencing this for the first time, and I anticipate nothing you haven’t seen, heard, or felt before. Dinner will be served beginning one hour after jump, although, of course, you may order anything at any time from room service. At 2200 ship’s time tonight there will be a general talk in the lounge of all of the features available in your module, as well as information in case of emergencies. All passengers who have not attended a briefing aboard this ship are required to attend. Thank you, have a pleasant trip, and
I hope to greet each and every one of you later this evening.”

  The red light went out.

  It sounded like a full evening. Well, if she was going to shower and change and still go through it all, she’d better get started, she decided.

  She was startled to see that all of her clothing and toiletries had been unpacked and placed in drawers, closets, and the like. On the Queen of Tyre they’d just dumped the bags outside the door. There was even a ship’s clothing dispenser where you could get a basic utilitarian throwaway, loosely fitted, in case you didn’t want to mess anything up, but for social nights that was unthinkable.

  It hadn’t occurred to her that this module had come in with the ship from someplace else and that there might be continuing passengers. So it might well mean more people, and even more races. She wondered just how many were aboard.

  The lounge was more crowded than she’d anticipated. It was a very pleasant rounded and sunken space in the center of the mod, and with a nicely done but somewhat schizophrenic layout providing comfortable seats for all the races aboard, and indented areas along the curved walls offering various hors d’oeuvres carefully selected as delicacies for various races while being inoffensive-looking to others. The latter wasn’t always possible, but this company clearly knew its business.

  Likewise, there were different drinks tailored to the racial makeups, and in the correct proportions and containers. It wasn’t that hard; all food and drink aboard was actually created by small energy-to-matter converters using various authentic programs supplied by chefs of the various races. In fact, all of them were really eating and drinking the garbage, but it had been nicely reprocessed and one just didn’t think of that.

  Angel Kobe had been born and raised on a vast farm that used none of this technology, and its farmers only feared the widespread discovery of cheap and easy ways to do the synthesizing on a mass scale. Fortunately, it was expensive and high maintenance, and was only possible on spacecraft as a by-product of the life support and propulsion systems.

  Although she was in her fanciest evening clothes, she felt much the ugly duckling among the Terrans present. Her feeling of glamour when she’d dressed and made up in the cabin and examined herself in the mirror completely faded when she saw the competition. She would have been the belle of the ball back home, but in this company she was the rube at the prince’s ball. These people wore elegance like a comfortable pair of shoes.

  Worse, she felt conspicuously… well, alone. Most of the others seemed to be in pairs or small groups. It seemed she was the only single person on the ship.

  No, that wasn’t true, but the other one hadn’t shown up yet. Oddly, she almost wished that Jeremiah Kincaid would show up. Once he entered the room, nobody but nobody, would even remember that she existed.

  What had begun as an exciting taste of unaccustomed luxury had already turned into a miserable and lonely time, and she knew there was a long time to go yet.

  There was a countdown clock in almost every public area, and, as if tuned into her thoughts, it reached all zeros. Almost immediately a vibration ran through the entire module, and she felt momentary dizziness caused by the switch to internal power and ship’s versus station gravity. At the same time, the circular ceiling became a viewing screen showing the disengagement from the large space station. Angel took a glass of juice, sat down on one of the comfortable recliner chairs, and settled back to watch it. If she was going to be the rube anyway, she decided, she might as well do what she felt like doing.

  The grand, kilometers-long space station and freight yard looked utilitarian and not at all glamorous from the outside.

  It was big, though; a lot bigger than even she had thought. The freighter she’d come in on hadn’t had this kind of view. She was surprised to see, for instance, that the module was not actually part of the ship, and that the actual City of Modar wasn’t docked at all. It sat in a parking orbit off the station, along with a number of other ships, and was mostly engine and fuel containers. It looked like nothing anyone without knowledge of the system would expect; a gigantic cylindrical mass with huge ramjetlike scoops flanking it all around except right on “top,” where there was a large whale-shaped bulge and rows of lights around it. The rear area had a series of large steering jets arranged around a central yellowish core that seemed to pulse regularly. Forward, a seemingly endless row of modules almost the size of the ship itself were connected one to the other like children’s building blocks. All of them were basically contoured octagons, but the eight surfaces surrounded a cylindrical core. How long the train of modules went on, she couldn’t guess; it was longer than the vast space station she’d just left, that was for sure.

  The train wasn’t yet connected to the engines, but was held there by a couple of small ships using tractor beams. They were so tiny compared to the modules that they could only be seen by their anticollision lights blinking on and off.

  The tugs were basically used for maneuvering; out here, a ten-kilometer train of even the heaviest raw materials or finished goods weighed the same as a feather. The longer it was, however, the harder to manage, and there were surely other tugs well along the train to keep it in line.

  Their own module was certainly being carried by one or more similar tugs, although they were not visible on the screen.

  “You’d best look away if you get the least bit dizzy, until this docking is over,” a pleasant baritone voice commented.

  “Huh?” She looked away reluctantly and saw a man in shining brown formal wear with what looked to be a fortune in jewelry on him.

  “Sorry. I just saw you fascinated, and wanted to warn you. If you look up when they tilt the module, you’ll be disoriented. It catches many by surprise.”

  She was undecided whether to follow up this obvious opening right now or look back at the docking. “Thanks. I guess I can look away if it gets me. I’ve been pretty good about balance.”

  She stared back up, and almost immediately the module began to turn from camera angle, facing the gap between ship and train and the docking mechanism on the ship itself. It was slow, easy, but took up most of the field of view. Even though the gravity inside was artificial and constant, Angel suddenly felt as if she was falling off the chair onto the floor, and in an instant, that’s where she found herself.

  Several people turned and chuckled, infuriating and embarrassing her. The strange man, who looked to be middle-aged, with thick black hair and a very stylish goatee, tried not to say “I told you so” and instead offered his hand to her.

  “Don’t feel too badly,” he consoled. “I think we all did that the first time.”

  Still, she was mortified by what had happened to her, and only to her, and also because she’d spilled half the juice on her best suit. “Thank you,” she managed as best she could, only wanting to get out of there. “I think I’ll have to run back to my cabin and change.”

  Angel walked out of the lounge, but almost began running once out of sight of the crowd. She didn’t know how she could face them again. As she reached the emotional safety of her cabin, there was a shudder and an awkward jerking motion that almost dropped her to the deck. Bells and alarms were sounding somewhere, and for a moment she wondered if they’d collided with something or maybe cracked up against the ship. She almost hoped so.

  There was a second thump and another jerking motion, another set of alarms, and then, abruptly, it was quiet and stable once more.

  The module had docked with the ship just forward of the bridge, and then the train had been docked to it. Now, stabilizing devices, connectors, and long energy rods held it firm and straight, making the massive vessel less a collection of independent devices than a kind of mechanical organism, a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

  For a while there was nothing but the vibration and a sense of being so still it felt to Angel as if she were sunk in concrete. Then, when the bridge computer contacted and networked with the computers for each module, passenger and freight, and had check
ed all safety and stability items and passed everything off, a kind of unanimous vote was sent to the bridge stating that the ship was ready to move. It was the one thing the vessel’s Master did on a nonemergency basis. Only he could give the order to move out.

  Angel slipped out of her wet clothes and looked at herself in the mirror. She sighed, and removed the brown wig and put it back in its container, revealing a head that was perfectly shaped but now totally hairless. Lucky the wig didn’t come off, too, she reflected dourly, but though she had no problems with the way she looked, she was pleased deep down to have been spared that one little embarrassment. It was just God’s punishment, she thought, for her trying to pretend she was something that she was not.

  She rinsed off, reflecting that this was the second shower she’d had in three hours, but also only the second in many months. Afterward, she wiped off what makeup remained, removed the fake gold earrings and replaced them with the simple copper alloy ones she normally wore—a cross with curved wings set upon a hexagonal base, the same design as on the medallion she always wore around her neck, which had been concealed by the suit. The simple ring, also forged with the same design, went back on her ring finger. No more pretenses, she decided. She would be herself, and if they didn’t like it, well, how much worse off socially could she be?

  She took out a simple off-white cotton cassock and put it on, leaving the hood down, and looked at herself once more. The loose-fitting cassock disguised her thin figure, although it couldn’t disguise what was to her an overly-large nose and brown eyes too small for her face. She was reconciled to not being a beauty, and this felt almost normal and natural.

  A speaker came to life, startling her. “Your attention, please. We have cleared the traffic yard and will be punching into null-space in one minute. It is suggested for your own safety that everyone please take a seat or become still on the floor. Anyone experiencing discomfort beyond the all clear should signal for some mild medication. Thank you.”