Ark of the Stars

by Frank Borsch

  The walk lasted almost half an hour. Too long for the Tenoy, who felt increasingly uneasy in the presence of the silent, mysterious Naahk; too short for Netwar, who wanted to enjoy his fleeting illusion of health and was reluctant to reach their destination.

  It couldn't be avoided. The small group arrived at a low-roofed shed constructed of plastic slats. "Here we are, Naahk," one of the Tenoy said, unnecessarily.

  Netwar stared at the shed; there were dozens like it on the Inner Deck. They provided storage for spare parts for the Nethack Achton's machinery, which was concentrated in the protected interior of the Ship. Light shone through the age-deformed slats; one shadow moved slowly, a second lay not moving at all.

  They will hear every word, Netwar thought. Every scream.

  The door of the shed opened. A man with gaunt features stepped out.

  "Launt, what are you doing here? There is no need for a Tenarch at this proceeding."

  "I want to speak with you, Naahk. Alone."

  "Of course." Launt was the most intelligent of the Tenarchs, a capable administrator. And a courageous man. No other would have dared to speak to the Naahk so directly.

  Netwar turned to the Tenoy. "Go! You have fulfilled your duty. I no longer require you."

  Hesitantly, the Tenoy withdrew. Netwar hoped that they wouldn't linger in the vicinity out of a sense of duty. It was not necessary for them to overhear his conversation with the Tenarch. And certainly not for them to hear the screams.

  "Speak!"

  "I must make an unusual request, Lemal. Perhaps it is even outrageous. But I am compelled to ask." Launt cleared his throat. "I ask you to release them. The traitors, the woman inside this shed, all the others. They pose no danger to the Ship."

  The request was unusual. But outrageous? Netwar considered. Yes, outrageous. The more so because it reflected his own desires. He didn't want to do what lay ahead of him, but that didn't change the fact that he had to do it. For the good of the Ship.

  "Not to you, personally," the Naahk said. "And not today or tomorrow, that is true. But what would happen if we let them go unpunished? They would promise never to dream of the stars again. A worthless promise. The traitors can't give up their dreams. When it becomes clear that there is nothing to fear, others would join them. Within decades, order within the Ship would break down. And we can't allow that. We have to think in terms of centuries, even millennia."

  Netwar did not speak the name the traitors had given themselves. Star Seekers. That name meant something to him a long time ago, so long ago that he often wondered if he had only imagined that time. Perhaps it was only an illusion he had created to justify himself. Launt's face flushed. "That is easy for you to say! You have—"

  "On the contrary. It is an extremely difficult decision, precisely because I know exactly what I am talking about. We must deal with these traitors now."

  Launt didn't move.

  "Launt, you are one of my best Tenarchs. I don't want to lose you. Go now, and I will forget this incident!"

  A vein throbbed in Launt's throat.

  "Please go!"

  The Tenarch trembled, but stepped out of the way. His head bowed, he disappeared between the machines of the Inner Deck without looking back at the Naahk.

  Netwar took a deep breath and went into the shed. A single unshaded bulb threw harsh shadows around the room. The Pekoy greeted him with a silent bow. He wore a mask with slits for the eyes and mouth, and a round hole for the nostrils. Even Netwar didn't know whether the mask concealed a man or a woman. The Pekoy's heavy apron revealed nothing about the wearer's body shape.

  The Net would know who was hidden behind the mask. If he asked, the Net would give him the answer: after all, he was the Naahk, but Netwar had never asked the Net for information about the Pekoy. Though he had questions—How did the Net select the Pekoy? Did the Pekoy (Netwar couldn't help it: he always pictured a male) exercise his office voluntarily? Out of a sense of duty toward the Ship and its mission? Or out of greed, for additional rations, his own house? And, perhaps the most important question: was it for the Pekoy as it was for him? Did the screams of his victims pursue him? Or did he go back to his Metach'ton afterward with the satisfied feeling of having done his job well? Some knowledge was easier to live without.

  In the middle of the shed, a young woman lay on a work table improvised from a rigid plastic sheet set across two stacks of crates. The traitor. Sweat had clumped her chin-length hair in damp strands. Plastic cords tied her to the table at her ankles and wrists. A wide strap passed around her neck, preventing her from raising her head more than a centimeter or two without choking.

  "Y-you're the Naahk?"

  Netwar nodded.

  "P-please ... help me. I didn't do anything bad." She spoke softly, and had to swallow more than once between words.

  "I am here to help you."

  Her clothes were torn. Not as a result of mistreatment—the Net would have informed him immediately if the Tenoy had overstepped their authority—but of the arrest. The woman had fiercely defended herself.

  "Thank you," the woman whispered. "Thank you. Please tell him"—her eyes rolled toward the Pekoy, who stood silently at the head end of the table—"that he should let me go."

  "I can't do that. I do not have that power."

  "But you're the Naahk!"

  "Yes indeed. I am the Naahk because I live up to my responsibility."

  "We all do that."

  "Not you. You betrayed us."

  "I didn't!" The woman coughed violently.

  "Then why did you try to go around the Tenoy's checkpoint?"

  "I wanted to go home. It was a long day in the fields. The Ship needs well-rested metach. And the line was long, so I wanted to avoid it."

  Netwar stepped closer to the table and cautiously sat down on the edge next to the woman. As usual, the Pekoy had been thorough: the sheet forming the tabletop was firmly anchored. Netwar studied the woman's features, and admitted to himself that the Net had been right. She was still a child. She didn't know what she had gotten herself into, the danger she was inviting onto the Ship.

  And now it was too late. She would very quickly become an adult and then die.

  "The Net recorded your arrest and your actions during the minutes prior to your capture. You were very nervous for a metach on the way home from work and annoyed by a delay."

  "I ... I had some trouble at work. A stupid argument with another metach."

  "That happens. But didn't something rather different disturb you as well? The report about the traitor Venron, perhaps?"

  The woman swallowed again. "Yes, of course. I was outraged. I was afraid."

  "Afraid of the traitors? Or afraid of being exposed as a traitor?"

  The woman's body writhed; she coughed and gagged. The Pekoy stepped closer, ready to turn her head in case she had to throw up. She must not choke to death on her own vomit. Not yet.

  "I ... had nothing to do with the traitors," she burst out. "I hate them."

  "Yes? Then prove it. Tell us the names of the other traitors."

  "But how can I know that?"

  "You knew Venron, didn't you? Then you know the others, too!"

  "That's a lie!"

  Netwar shook his head sadly. "I wish it were. The Net has eyes everywhere. It has recorded your encounters with the other traitors."

  That was a lie. Once, the Net did have eyes throughout the entire Ship, but most had failed over the centuries and there were no spare parts to repair them. But even if all the cameras had been working, the Ship's memory storage unit capacity had been sufficiently damaged by cosmic radiation that they could not be spared to store the data from the remaining cameras for any significant amount of time. The Net had recorded the activity at each of the Tenoy's checkpoints, but Netwar had made up the rest.

  A lie, but it served its purpose. That was what counted.

  The woman's pupils went wide as she realized her fate was sealed.

  "No," she moaned as
she shook her head. "No, no, no!"

  "Yes. You have put the Ship in incalculable danger. Did you not listen to your teachers? We must hide; we must never draw attention to ourselves."

  "Venron only wanted to see the stars. He didn't want anything bad to happen to anybody. He only ... "

  "He very nearly killed us all. Forty-three Tenoy paid for his madness with their lives."

  "He didn't want that!"

  "Of course not. But he did it. And perhaps it was only the beginning. Perhaps he put our enemies on the trail of the Ship. Perhaps—"

  A piercing scream interrupted the Naahk, turning into wailing. The woman shook, then twisted in her bonds. Her face turned red as she cut off her own air.

  Netwar took her hand. First she pulled away. Then she felt for his hand and clasped it.

  "Calm down," the Naahk said softly. "They aren't here yet. And you can help so it doesn't come to that."

  "How ... can I help?"

  She was a good metach. She only wanted what was best for the Ship.

  "What is your name?" Netwar asked.

  "Mika."

  "Mika," he repeated softly.

  Mika ... why did you let yourself be led astray? Why are you forcing me to do this to you?

  "You must tell me their names, Mika."

  "Their names?"

  "The names of the others. Venron was not alone. Dreamers like him are never alone. They must tell others about their dreams, draw them in as well. You were one. And his sister, certainly. But who were the others?"

  It's the best of us. Always the best. The ones who refuse to accept boundaries. The curious who want to know what lies beyond the Ship's wall. The ones we will need someday ... and the ones who until then must be eliminated.

  "The ... the ... " The woman gagged.

  "Please, Mika. Tell me their names. Surely you don't want the Ship to be destroyed?"

  "I ... "

  Her fingers, which had closed around his hand, clutched him so tightly that the pain overcame the barrier of the injection. Netwar suppressed a scream. Then her hand dropped back to the table.

  "Mika, tell me their names. You—"

  It was too late. She had closed her eyes, squeezing them shut with all her strength. Mika had made her decision.

  The Pekoy slowly shook his masked head.

  "Mika, tell me the names!"

  The woman didn't answer. She merely lay there, rigid with fear.

  "Mika, you must ... "

  The Pekoy set down his leather instrument bag on the work table. It must have been made in the Homeland, because there were no animals on board the ship from which it could have been made. The thought that someone assumed the necessary equipment for the Ship included a toolbox for torture made Netwar nauseous.

  The Naahk stood and took two steps back from the table. He wished that the pain would return to his joints and distract him from the pain that would be soon administered to this human being who lay helpless before him. But that merciful pain didn't come. Netwar saw what happened with absolute clarity.

  The Pekoy opened the bag and took out a tray on which had been mounted tools gleaming with clinical sterility. They resembled a surgeon's instruments. The Pekoy selected an instrument and applied it.

  Mika was strong. She held back her screams for a long time. But when they came, they came like a wave and swept aside the mental barriers Netwar had built against them.

  At last she named names. There were more than two dozen, more than Netwar had expected. Perhaps the corruption had spread further than he suspected, or perhaps Mika had named innocent people in her terror. The Tenoy would arrest them and find out the truth.

  With his free hand, the Pekoy entered the names into his picosyn, which relayed them at once to the Net.

  The Naahk left the shed. His task was finished. The Pekoy would do the rest.

  He met no one on his way back to the elevator. If the Tenoy or Launt had stayed in the area, they remained hidden.

  Just as well. He wanted to be alone with his thoughts. Netwar sensed that he had opened a new chapter in the chronicle of the Ship.

  He doubted he would ever find the strength or courage to write it down.

  10

  Solina Tormas was thoroughly sick of it.

  For months, the Akonian research ship Las-Toór had been cruising through this cursed nebula on the backside of the galaxy, traveling from one dead world to the next. The only life here, if you could call it that, was prospectors of every kind and affiliation. Akonians, Terrans, Blues, members of races whose names she had never heard and could not pronounce, and whose unappetizing appearance she could have done without.

  And what a gang of monomaniacs these prospectors comprised! All they had on their minds was money. Money and still more money. Solina's questions about the origins and fates of their immediate and remote ancestors they answered with, "Oh, I have something to do," then left her standing. A historian! Someone occupied with the past? Their prospecting instincts told them there wasn't any money to be made out of her.

  Not that her colleagues treated Solina Tormas any better. No, the ladies and gentlemen of the Yidari were simply more refined. "That is really quite interesting," said these people who called themselves scientists when Solina's area of specialization came up, which it did seldom enough. "We really need to find a quiet moment and give your important work the time for discussion it deserves. Unfortunately, I must go to an important meeting/there's an urgent experiment waiting in the laboratory/I have to write my report at once, you know the bureaucracy. But when we have a chance ... "

  And that was the end of it. No one was interested in Solina's work. Lemurians! "Aren't they the ones who've been dead for fifty thousand years or so?" her fellow Yidari had asked during the obligatory polite introductions in the first few days after the Las-Toór's departure. "Our ancestors whom those insolent Terrans want to claim for themselves?"

  She knew it was not an idle claim. The Lemurians are the common ancestors of Akonians and Terrans, Solina wanted to inform them. And of the Arkonides and the Ferronians and probably every other humanoid race in the galaxy! You know that as well as I do! she wanted to shout. You just refuse to accept them as they really were, preferring to venerate them as the glorious founding fathers whose courage you can parade around as if it were your own!

  Solina finally snapped. She took out her anger on a fat little geologist, the incomparably untalented offspring of one of the best families of the Blue system, a genuine Vakt'son, who had sympathetically patted her on the hip—he couldn't reach her shoulder—and advised her that she should transfer her field of research to a more useful era, such as the glorious battles against the Terrans after the first contact between the two races, or the underground war of the Condos Vasac against the Terrans' Solar Imperium.

  Solina had cursed so violently that the fat geologist had dropped his glass in terror and run off as though pursued by the notorious and deadly Energy Command.

  Since that incident, no one had spoken to Solina about her work. Not that it made any difference. A more useful era. The stupid little Vakt'son had hit her sore point. All the other Yidari on board were doing useful work. The astrophysicists were cataloging the Ochent Nebula, gaining new knowledge about the life cycles of stars and thus further developing the technology of tapping the energy of suns. The geologists of the Las-Toór were discovering planets and moons rich in valuable ores. That pursuit put them in direct competition with the private prospectors, but of course the Yidari were committed to the common good; the rights to their finds went to the Akonian state and so to all Akonians. On the worlds they visited, the metallurgists gained valuable knowledge about new alloys and element combinations that would contribute to keeping Akonian products competitive in galactic markets.

  Everyone did something useful. Even the lowest-ranking neelak could claim that his work contributed to keeping the Las-Toór operating at peak efficiency.

  And what did Solina Tormas contribute?

/>   She stuck her nose in old files and documents, and occupied herself for days at a time coaxing secrets out of ancient data storage crystals. And usually without success: without the appropriate reading devices, her experiments often turned the stored data into a jumble, or worse, destroyed it entirely.

  And what was the point of it all? To find out more about the Lemurians! The era when Akonian society collectively refused to recognize its common origin with the Terrans fortunately lay many centuries in the past. People were more enlightened in the Blue system now, or claimed to be. Even if Akonians and Terrans had common ancestors—it wasn't the line of descent that counted, or the genes, but what one did with them. And right now, things didn't look too bad. The Terrans' Solar Imperium, once the greatest power in the galaxy, was almost forgotten. These days, the Terrans set their sights considerably lower. They were an important power, but only one of many in the galaxy at the same level of influence.

  The Akonians no longer had reason to fear the Terrans. The more than one hundred systems settled by the Akonians had belonged for several decades to the Forum Raglund, one of the galaxy's most powerful political alliances. Membership in that elite group had allowed a political thaw to take place on the capital planet of Drorah and other Akonian worlds. Foreigners streamed into the Blue system, most only as tourists, but here and there colonies of aliens had established permanent settlements. It was a slow process and not without numerous conflicts, but one thing was indisputable: a fresh wind blew over Drorah.

  Solina believed that times had changed. Wasn't she living proof of it? She didn't come from the Blue system, but from one of the most unimportant worlds in the Akonian empire. She knew the nobility, the Vakt'son, only from the series on the tri-vid. Hers was such an undistinguished family tree that she stopped paying attention to it quite early on. It seemed impossible to make a good impression coming from a family of political dissidents, yet Solina had managed to win a place for herself at one of the most important Akonian research institutes on Drorah.