The Coral Sands Hostel was one of a cluster of tourist accommodations on the main reef of Zodiac Bay. The guest chambers honeycombed the reef, and the public rooms, wet and dry, were extensive and quite luxurious for the Rim.
There were perhaps eight hundred to a thousand guests at Zodiac Bay, and of this number more than half were unattached women from every nation of the Empire. For some reason it is traditional in our time for women from the galactic center to flock to the Rim, hoping to find marriageable males. Group marriages have become very much the thing in the Inner Nations, and there are always women who seek the more old-fashioned morality of the Rim, where one husband to one wife is still the general rule.
But the girls at the Coral Reef soon identified me as an SW officer vacationing with my cyborg, and consequently they pointedly avoided me. Women who lead approximately normal lives seldom can understand the relationship between a man and a cyborg and soon conclude that the man (mentally addled by long periods in deep space, probably) is in love with (or at least infatuated with) a fifteen-ton creature of metal and tissue resembling a giant devilfish. The result is not conducive to easy relationships between SW pilots and women seeking husbands or lovers.
On our third morning of diving together, I headed for the sea-lock and a swim in company with Ariane. As I swam out to meet her, the clean, vaguely salty seawater flowed through the gills of my implant. The light at this depth was mostly blue-green, and shoals of firefish darted brilliantly across the shimmering coral of the reef. My worries about Gonlanburg and what I must do there were fading in the beauty of the sea. The nitrogen content of the Gonlan Sea is low, but at a depth of more than two hundred meters, the effect of the gas concentration is slightly euphoric. This “rapture of the depths” was once a serious problem to divers on all the water planets. But, with the discovery of the cryogenic rebreathing implants--the “gills”--that permit air-breathing mammals to breathe water at ambient pressure, any damage from the “rapture” almost vanished. Today it is a relaxing phenomenon more popular than alcohol or drugs.
In the sapphire distance I could make out Ariane’s manta form. She was swinging slowly about in circles, waiting for me. Quite suddenly I was reminded of the way she looked in deep space, with the light of the now murdered Delphinus star on her, and I wasn’t so euphoric any more.
But Ariane was a pleasant sight, silently gliding through the deep, clear water at swimming pace. The cyborg, who could move in the void at speeds that were multiples of the velocity of light, was swimming lazily, spiraling down, rolling, hanging weightless in the abyss, all with the grace of a ballet dancer.
The waters of the Gonlan Sea near Zodiac Bay are reasonably warm, but there are some deep trenches in the sea bottom off the continental shelf, so that there are many currents of much colder water flowing through the bay. These can be seen as streaks of murky green, rivers of dull color flowing through the cobalt and sapphire depths.
Ariane would penetrate one of these green torrents and slip into the lower abyss, into areas of pressure far too great for a man, even one equipped with gills. For a time she would vanish, and then she would come jetting up through the warmer layers, her sleek flanks roiling the water in shock waves so that she seemed wreathed in silver.
Pressing the base of my skull against the encephalophone pickup, I subvocalized, calling Ariane across the intervening sea. “Very pretty. Now slow down and let me join you.”
“Come along,” Ariane said. “Do you want to ride or swim?”
I kicked closer to her with my jet fins, enjoying the silky feel of the cool sea on my skin through my sea suit. “I’ll swim, thanks. We may not have much chance to do this again later on.”
Ariane coasted slowly through the blue water, with me swimming just over her titanium prow, for all the world like the remora fish of the terrestrial ocean.
“Have you heard from Erit?” I asked, after a lazy interval. “Wait until we are farther from the reef. The Navigators have been known to monitor short-range encephalophone conversations.”
We swam in silence out into the center of the bay until we were englobed by empty water, miles of it, free even of fishes, which disliked the frigid waters rising from the deepsea trenches.
“You had better come aboard,” Ariane said. “I don’t want to discuss this on external circuits.”
I was reluctant to leave the sea: carrying an implanted gill creates a psychological dependence on the ocean--the great mother of life and all that. But Ariane opened the airlock invitingly, and I moved a bit up the evolutionary scale and came aboard to stand, dripping, in the lock as she pumped the water back into the sea.
I hadn’t been aboard Ariane since returning from our last ill-fated deep space probe, and she had been partially refitted since then. I was soon to discover why, and it came as a real shock to me. But for the moment I merely stood, shivering a little at the air on my skin and gasping a little as the medium in my lungs changed from water to Ariane’s oxygen-rich gas mixture. I felt a little heady as the stuff speeded up my metabolism. I stepped from the lock into Ariane’s bridge. I kicked away my fins, but with the tubing of the cryogenic gill still protruding from my chest, I felt a bit like a cyborg myself.
I sank down onto the familiar comfort of the acceleration couch and--Only, somehow, it wasn’t quite as comfortable as it should have been. The contours were wrong, unfamiliar. I didn’t like it. It was a surprise in circumstances where there should have been nothing but the deliciously comforting touch of the accustomed.
Ariane’s voice came clearly to me: “So you’ve noticed.”
“What have the refitters done here?” I demanded.
“Those aren’t your measurements in the control couch, are they?”
“No. Definitely not.” I felt angry and cheated, somehow. No one had the right to make changes like this. The relationship between SW team pairs was so close, so unique, that unauthorized modifications were like interference between a man and wife--and on the most intimate level.
“I couldn’t be sure before,” Ariane said. “I had no way to measure the changes they made during the refit.”
“You couldn’t be sure of what?” I asked.
“Did the Court of Inquiry release all of its findings?” she asked.
“They announced the reprimand in the All Fleets,” I said.
“Well, they wouldn’t mention a change of assignment until it was actually made, would they?” she said.
I was dense enough to fail to understand her.
“Look around you,” Ariane said. “Any other changes?”
I did as she told me and moved about the tiny bridge with increasing consternation. “My reading tapes are gone. So are all the rest of my personal belongings. What’s the meaning of this, Ariane? Why didn’t you say something to me?”
“I wasn’t sure,” she said. “After all, if a surgeon went to work on you, could you say for sure what he took out?”
The accuracy of that homey analogy was beyond my disputing.
“The Bureau of Personnel is going to break us up,” I said, aghast. Not that the military gods and goddesses lacked the right and authority to change our assignments. That was unquestioned. But it was a thing almost never done; unheard of in the Fleet, actually. SW teams were, by custom, sacrosanct. Then why were Ariane and I being reclassified?
“It is something to think about, isn’t it, Kier,” she said. “We come back from a probe with the first specimen of what could be a lost branch of homo sapiens, with news of a doomsday machine loose in the galaxy--and what happens? You are nearly court-martialed, and I’m sent off to play in the sea, and neither of us are told that we are being reassigned. Now who had the power to do something like that, Starkahn? Tell me who?”
I threw myself disconsolately onto the now-ill-fitting contour couch and said, “You tell me, Ariane--”
“I can’t. This is human behavior. No cyborg ever behaved so sneakily. I can’t help you. But I can guess that it was someone who wan
ts no further investigation of the black starship or, quite possibly, the girl in the support capsule.”
“But that’s absurd, Ariane. To do something like this, a person would have to have tremendous influence in Imperial circles--among high officers of the Fleet at Nyor. And he--or she--would have to be almost paranoiac about investigating spatio-historical probabilities . . .“ My voice trailed off into uncertainty because it sounded vaguely as though I were describing someone I’d heard about recently--an influential fanatic.
“I know what you are thinking,” Ariane said. “But there is another possibility.”
“There are dozens of possibilities,” I said irritably. “Maybe hundreds. It’s just that we don’t know about any of them. We are only guessing.”
“Nav Peter of Syrtis,” Ariane said. “Or Lady Nora.”
I grew really angry at that: Ariane grouping the fanatic Navigator with my mother.
“Think about it,” Ariane said. “An Inquisitor a few thousand years out of his time and yearning for the good old days could do something like this. We found the alien, after all. The black starship could be the scourge of God, the sword of the holy Star, in his mind. You name it. Your history is filled with that kind of thinking. And when you are a fanatic, you don’t investigate growing legends--you encourage them.... They are the way to power. And remember--the Fleet can send out a hundred cruisers--but the only ones with any real chance of locating the black ship again are you and me. There is one possibility. Has the monk enough influence with the Galacton to pull the right wires and separate us?”
“He might well have,” I said, still angry. “But that’s only your first guess. What about Lady Nora?”
“That is a different matter,” Ariane said. “We both know her. We both know her ambitions for you. She could put up with our relationship to one another as long as you were just a frustrated historian--yes, it’s so, and there is no denying it, so don’t try. I have the greatest admiration for the Lady Nora Veg-Rhad, and we have a great many things in common. Our wishes for you, for example. But she wants to bring back the past on Rhada. She wants to build a great, antique social pyramid and put you, the Starkahn, on the top of it. Now that you are a hero to the Rhada, a source of concern to the Imperials and the clergy, too, I wouldn’t be surprised, why the thing to do is obvious. Make dead certain you stay on Rhada to play politics. How better to do that than pull some strings and have one of her friends in the Fleet--that lady admiral, for example--arrange a discreet shuffle of computer cards in Bu Personnel?”
“She wouldn’t do that,” I protested. But, of course, I knew that she would. And she would with only the best will in the world. My Lady Mother, sad to relate, would happily dismantle my entire life and career to serve some mystical sense of noblesse and family ambition. Ariane knew it, and so did I.
“That is why,” the cyborg said matter-of-factly, “I have no intention of returning to the Fleet base at New Kynan when my leave is up. At least not until we’ve delivered that silver-eyed creature to Gret-Erit and found her ghastly machine as well.”
I assimilated that with difficulty. There has not been an authenticated case of mutiny in the Fleet since the Interregnum, and I was about to start reading the Articles for the Governance of the Fleet to Ariane when I realized that she was absolutely right and functioning with direct cyborg honesty and logic. The threat of random destruction of stellar systems had to be met with intelligence, not with greater force--for there was no greater force, not in any nation that we knew, nearby or across the spiral arms of the galaxy.
“All right,” I said finally. “When do we begin our short happy careers as mutineers?” Before she replied, I knew the answer.
“Erit is waiting for us in Gonlanburg now” Ariane said.
“So my question is academic?” I said, half resentfully.
“The decision is really yours to make, Kier,” Ariane said.
“They have revived the alien?”
“This morning. So Erit says.”
I didn’t ask how Ariane knew. If she said she did, then she knew. It came as no surprise that there could be a telepathic bond between Vulk and cyborg. Both of their minds were, in that sense, more highly developed than man’s.
“Then,” I said, “I suppose the time is now.”
“Yes,” Ariane said, and I felt her leap from the darkness of the sea.
Chapter Seven
Kier, the king, and Ariane, the silver princess,
Rode the night wind, and in their hands were truth swords,
And righteousness mantled their shoulders,
And honor was in their heads--
Yet the way was difficult. So it is.
Even for heroes.
Guest Song, authorship unknown,
early Second Stellar Empire period
Wjen Ey be dead And long forgotten, then lyt it be Syd of me that Ey dyd my duty to My People; wielding in Thyr Name thye myghtiest Engines and Weapons of destruction thyt Men hyve yyt Conceived and using thyr own Scyence that thyye have corrupted for the
Banishment of all that is best and Fynest among Thye People....
Oath administered to Watchers of each of the three Deaths before their departure from the Communes of Magellan.
Engraving found on the bulkhead wreckage of Death Two during the early Confederate period
So I came back to Gonlanburg: a naked man with the tubes of an artificial gill still jutting from my chest, aboard a cyborg ship already allotted to some other Survey pilot.
The change in assignments, Ariane and I surmised, was not yet official, so there was no immediate problem about our whereabouts and whether or not we were together. Thus it was possible for her to remain quite openly at the civil spaceport while I, playing the bookish Starkahn, had a haberdasher come aboard to outfit me in a tunic and kilt of the sort worn by students at the university. I bought a wig from the man, too, so that I could wear the encephalophone contacts on my mastoid bones without causing too much curiosity among the school people. Long hair is far more common in the colleges of the Rim than are bits of SW equipment such as E-phones.
It was nearly evening when I was finally ready to leave the port and go searching for Erit in the university gardens. Ariane’s presence in the civil docking area was causing more of a stir than either of us thought safe or suitable: the merchant fleets have nothing comparable to the ADSPS cyborgs. It was only a matter of time until someone, the Lady Nora perhaps, or the Fleet authorities, or even some misguided Navigator working for the Zealots, would locate us and become interested in what it was brought us to the same city as the alien we had discovered in Delphinus. So we filed a flight plan for Ariane back to Rhada, and as I left the port in a rented hovercraft, I caught a glimpse of Ariane’s manta silhouette rising above the jumble of gantries, hangars, and veetols docked in the port.
We had deliberately filed for a free-fall course out to Gonlan-Omicron’s orbit, and then translight to the Rhada sun. This would leave Ariane unreported for the better part of eleven hours--which was enough time for her to establish herself in synchronous orbit directly over Gonlanburg and wait for my E-phone call. She could act as commo satellite between me and Erit, as well, if conditions for Vulk-to-cyborg telepathy were good.
Filing a false flight plan was a reprogramming offense for both Ariane and for me, but it seemed that the more deeply we involved ourselves in the recovery of the alien girl, the more we found ourselves in conflict with the establishment and the law. I am not, as my famous ancestor was, a rebel by nature. But when every instinct warns me that the powers-that-be are handling something important in a rash and ill-considered way, then I will take personal action. I am, after all, the Starkahn and a Rhad. I explained many transgressions that way in my lifetime. But I had a feeling that if things went badly now, the explanation wouldn’t save me.
Yet there was something else to consider, as a mental discipline only, because it is quite impossible for a man--one single man--to come to terms, actual terms
, with the destruction of whole solar systems. As a soldier, one might readily understand the sort of death and havoc created by a laser rifle, or even nuclear torpedo. But carnage on a planetary scale, let alone on a stellar one, is simply impossible to conceive, except as an abstract notion. I personally had witnessed the destruction of the Delphinus star, yet I had no genuine grasp of the meaning of such power, such genocide plus. Nor, I suspected, did the unknowns who constructed the black starship. By such minds were pogroms launched and epidemics started in the murk of human history.
I was certain that no single human being could come to working terms with the meaning of a real doomsday machine. What did that leave, then, as the markers of it? True aliens? I thought of the girl’s silver eyes and wondered if that were her only “difference.” Or the mass hysteria of some rabid human organization so maddened with self-amplifying hate that it would contrive the random death of stars--and in so doing consign to glowing plasma billions of living things?
The result of this soul-searching was to make it crystal clear that my potential personal troubles were academic. If the black starship came to Rhadan space (and why should it not?), then the local authorities, the Rhadan units of the Fleet, a few hundred civilian starships, Gret, Erit, my mother, the alien girl, Ariane, the faculty warlocks of Gonlanburg, Nav Peter the Fanatic, the Rhadan Royalists (and the Rhadan Republicans, Collectivists, Anarchists, Disciplinarians, and so on), this city and all the other cities in Rhada, together with Sublieutenant the Honorable Kier Kynan Emeric Veg-Rhad, Starkahn of Rhada, would be superheated molecules of gas in free space, driven into the intergalactic void by light-pressure from a swollen and dying star. That much, I knew. The knowledge didn’t allow much room for maneuver.
The Starkahn of Rhada Page 6
