The Starkahn of Rhada

by Robert Cham Gilman

  “Ariane Cyb-ADSPS 339,” I said, not realizing how my matter-of-fact statement might startle one knowing nothing of starship cyborgs.

  “Your vessel is alive?” Marissa’s expression showed clearly she thought such a thing impossible, almost unthinkable.

  “Surely you know of cyborgs,” I said. “There were humanoid cyborgs--?” I almost said “in your time” but curbed myself.

  She looked about her at the curving bulkheads of the pod. Erit permitted herself a weary smile.

  “A living starship,” the girl said almost to herself, filled with a sense of wonder.

  “For our work it is the only possible arrangement,” I said. “We spend months--sometimes years--alone in deep space. One needs--a companion. You should understand that.”

  “A robot?” Her fright had passed swiftly, and her scientific curiosity was aroused. I thought that marvelous.

  “Not a robot,” Ariane said crisply. “A cyborg. Quite a different thing. A cyborg and a citizen.”

  “It is a time of wonders,” the Magellanic girl said in her archaically accented lingua spacia.

  “It is a time of great danger,” Erit said. “And the danger is from your vessel.”

  “Where is my ship?” the girl asked suddenly. “What has been done with the Death?”

  “Nothing has been done with it,” I said, with sinking heart. “And we hoped that you would know where it is and how it can be stopped. That is why we took you from the warlocks on Gonlanburg. That, too, is why the Navigators want you. Is it possible you don’t know what the Death’s mission was?”

  The girl’s face darkened. “The mission was to kill.”

  “That, I know. I saw what your weapons did to the Delphinus sun.”

  “The Death is functioning?”

  “Too well. It attacked Sigma Libra. There was a Fleet outpost on an outermost Sigma planet. It is vapor now.” Now it was her turn to feel my emotions, and they were laced with anger, bitterness, and frustration. I had been so certain that the girl would be the key to unlock the mystery of the murderous starship, and now I was unsure.

  It evidently puzzled her and took a moment for her to understand we meant nothing occult when we used the word “warlock.” I explained. “Scientists. Since the Interregnum we have been speaking of them so. They were sometimes burned for researching. Gonlanburg is a province of my nation, Rhada. It was from the university there we took you. They were going to turn you over to the clergy.”

  “Are you still savages, then?”

  “Somewhat,” I said drily. “Most particularly when there is a doomsday machine loose in the galaxy.”

  Marissa turned to Erit. “You are--a Vulk?”

  “I am,” Erit said.

  “You are different. Yet you’ve been allowed to live? Among men?”

  “We have had troubles. But that was long ago. We live without fear now.”

  Damn, I thought. Was the girl actually testing human tolerance? Here and now? But what better time, I considered. A human being, a Vulk, and a cyborg--working and living as one. And now, hopefully--desperately--a Magellanic?

  “The teachings of a lifetime are not easily put aside,” the girl said. “And I am a Watcher. My indoctrination was very firm.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” I said. “But your enemies are dead. And your ship is killing my people. It must be stopped.”

  The girl regarded me curiously. “Are you perhaps a cyborg, too?”

  She was looking at the blunt ends of the stoppered gill implanted in my chest.

  “No,” I said impatiently. “It is an implant. I was on a water world, and the implant allows me to breathe water--that is all. It will come out when I have time to have it removed.”

  Marissa shook her head wonderingly and said, “ ‘O brave new world that has such people in’t!’ ”

  Lord Star, Ruler of the Universe! I thought. We stand on the brink of annihilation and the girl quotes Dawn Age poets to me. But it was a remarkable and wonderful thing to do, really. I was certain I had never met anyone with such equanimity and courage. Yes, she was brave. Maybe one became that way by sharing himself or herself with his or her fellow beings. It was something to think about--even here and now.

  “Lady Tran Wyeth--” I began formally, but she interrupted me with the first real smile I had seen from her: a lovely sight, too. “There were no Imperial titles and townsman’s speech where I came from. There is no need for them here. My name is Marissa.”

  “Marissa, then.” I began again and told her all that I thought she might not know of what had happened since Ariane and I discovered her and her grimly named vessel in Delphinus. When I had done, I said, “There is nothing in the Grand Fleet that can stand against your ship if it is programmed to fight--”

  “It is,” she interrupted quietly. “The function of a Watcher was only to start the battle computers after the intergalactic flight. And to see that all else is in order.”

  “And then?”

  Her eyes lightened momentarily with that communal fervor. “Why then, the Watcher dies. We have a Cause.”

  “You had a Cause,” I said heavily. “What you have now is a duty.”

  “A duty? To what? I did not ask to be brought here.”

  “You have a duty to the people who will die if you do not stop your vessel--people who have done you and yours no harm. These are a generation thousands of years unborn when you left the Cloud.”

  She lowered her head and rested in silence, once more alone, a creature far out of her time and place.

  Presently she said, “Have you star charts?”

  “Ariane,” I said. Instantly, the pod darkened, and Ariane projected a holograph of Delphinian space before us. Once again, the Magellanic girl stared in surprise.

  “It is the Dolphin,” she said in a hushed tone, looking at the constellation in miniature.

  “A projection from the region of the constellation of Sagittarius--where Earth is located,” I said. “Do you want to see it from another angle?”

  The girl shook her head slowly. “It would do no good--What did the small creature call you? I have forgotten your name--” She sounded suddenly very tired, and I realized she was still not strong after her long sleep in the capsule. We would have to treat her gently.

  ”I am called Kier Veg-Rhad,” I said.

  “Kier.” She spoke the name curiously. “Kier, I cannot read these stars. Have you no maps?”

  “We don’t use maps,” I said. “Ariane could make some, I suppose. But it would take some time.”

  We seemed to have reached an absurd impasse. The vast gulf between her technology and ours separated us. She wanted what were, to Ariane and me, fantastically outmoded aids to stellar navigation.

  “There is no time,” she said. “The Death has begun its program if it struck the Dolphin star. But the next--you called it ‘Sigma Libra’? It should have been the Craddock Sun--”

  My odd store of historical oddities came to my rescue again. “Sigma Libra was once called Craddock--it was named by a First Empire survey man.”

  “There was a Genie colony there when my great-grandparents took the Long Death,” Marissa said. “The Death was programmed to strike it down.”

  “What colonies there were in Sigma Libra were abandoned generations ago when the ice covered the only inner planet rich enough to warrant exploitation. All that was left was the Fleet station on the outermost world.” I couldn’t help adding, “There were brave men and women there, doing a lonely job. Your vessel killed them.”

  “We will achieve nothing by stirring up new enmities, Starkahn,” Erit murmured.

  Marissa, however, did a strange thing. She touched my hand in what seemed some sort of ritual gesture and said, “For the death of your comrades, my death, if you will it.”

  “I don’t want your death, girl,” I said exasperatedly. “I want your help, and quickly.”

  “It is our way of making amends,” she said softly.

  I couldn’t help
asking, “And did they often take up the option, your communal brothers and sisters?”

  She shook her head slowly. “Never. Only the state had the right to kill--for the good of the commune.”

  What glimpses of a strange, disciplined, frightening--and yet stirring--world she gave me. A people in love with death.

  “Kier,” Ariane said. “If she can give me the attack program and we can translate the old names of the stars, we can find the starship.”

  “If we find it, Marissa,” I asked, “can we stop it?”

  “I can.”

  “You? Only you?”

  “The ship will accept only a Watcher. When the capsule is broken, the program is complete.”

  “Ariane,” I said in a fever of anxiety. “Get the names. And, Erit--the planet below has turned. Will you want a commo assist to reach Gret?”

  I had turned away from Erit for a moment only, but when I looked back, my heart sank, for the small Vulk had sunk to the deck of the pod in rigid silence in the position of mourning.

  Only once before had I ever seen a Vulk in that formalized position: knees bent and together, body contracted with supple grief, head hidden in folded arms. In Triad with Gret-Erit, I had crossed time and space to a world that no longer existed, Vulka. And there, through the minds and memories of my tri-symbiotes, I had witnessed the death rituals of the Vulkish people. In that posture alone did the Vulk mourn their dead. Once they had kneeled so in thousands as the humans butchered them in the great Vulk pogroms of the Interregnum.

  Now it could mean only one thing, and the sense of loss that washed over me was almost too much to bear. Five thousand years of Rhadan history rested there on Ariane’s deck, five thousand years of the history of my family and their world and all the worlds they helped to win and hold for the Galactons of Nyor. That, and much more, for the Vulk were virtually immortal. Virtually, but not quite. The world below us had turned, and Erit’s mind had reached out eagerly to her brother-husband--to find only emptiness.

  That was why Erit mourned. Below, in a chamber in a house by a pounding sea, memories of Kier the Rebel and Kynan the Navigator had ceased. Gret, the Royal Vulk of Rhada, was dead.

  Chapter Eleven

  Some life of men unblest

  He knew, which made him droop, and fill’d his head.

  He went; his piping took a troubled sound

  Of storms that rage outside our happy ground;

  He could not wait their passing, he is dead.

  Matthew Arnold, Thyrsis, Dawn Age poet,

  from a printed book discovered near Biblios Brittanis, Mars, early Confederate period

  Of this be sure, my friend and wife, brother-sister, son and father: Where you are, there will I be also. For I cannot die while you remember me. So say the mists, and the sea, and the golden, golden suns of Home.

  Vulk lament, authorship unknown,

  period unknown

  Men found a single being among all the stars, and he persecuted him, and killed him in thousands, and used him. And Vulk called Man: Friend.

  St. Emeric of Rhada, Grand Master of Navigators,

  early Second Stellar Empire period

  For a moment all was forgotten in our grief. I shared Erit’s loss, and the girl from the Cloud shared mine--the Magellanic Mutation did not spare her--and Ariane, too, remembered Gret.

  Below us, I knew, all of Rhada was deep in mourning, and I wanted desperately to leave orbit and go down to my family and my people. I could almost hear the funeral drums and see the buildings draped in somber white, for that is how we Rhadans honor our history, and the ancient Vulk who died that day was certainly part of our past. He had been the first star king’s fool, and the second king’s friend, and the friend and servant and teacher of all the Rhadan kings who came after.

  But we dared not go down, not even to take Erit to the side of the sepulcher, not even for that. Instead, I threw caution aside and used the communicator. If I could not honor my teacher, at least I could risk that much.

  My mother’s tear-stained face appeared in the holograph, and that gave some indication of the spasm of sadness that was wracking our homeland. I had never before seen the Lady Nora Veg-Rhad shed tears, never.

  She said sadly, “The nation is in mourning. And where are you, Starkahn? Your place is here.”

  “I cannot come,” I said regretfully.

  My mother’s patrician face turned hard beneath her grief. “You dishonor your friend, Kier,” she said bitterly.

  “Gret would understand the need,” I said, wanting, really, to tell her that I was still, in a sense, acting under the Vulk’s instructions.

  “Gret is dead, Starkahn,” Lady Nora said. “After five thousand years in the service of the Rhad, he is dead and in his bier. And you cannot abandon some wild, unsanctioned scheme to pay him respect?”

  To call what we were about “unsanctioned” was a typically Noraesque flight into what I sometimes, in my more rebellious moments, called “parentally controlled reality.” I was engaged in something not only unsanctioned but also dangerous, illegal, and quite possibly impossible. I was at odds with the authorities on Gonlan, with my superiors in the Fleet, with the council of Rhada, with the Order of Navigators, and, apparently, with my mother. But she, noblewoman of the Empire, could not admit that her son was a fugitive and kidnaper, and, to some, a deserter. My actions, therefore, were “unsanctioned.” Come home, do the expected thing, be conventional--and (with Lady Nora’s influence at work) all will be forgiven the Starkahn of Rhada.

  Except that the Starkahn and give or take a few billion other people would very likely be dead within the year, incinerated by an exploded sun.

  “I cannot come down to Rhada, Lady,” I said again. “Not yet.”

  Lady Nora seemed genuinely distressed. Her holograph shivered slightly as she impatiently worked the sensors of her unit to clear my image. “Where are you, Kier?” she demanded.

  I shook my head. “Within commo range. That is all I can tell you.”

  I could see the sudden flush of anger mingling with her already aroused emotions. The Lady Nora Veg-Rhad--who in other times would have been Queen of Rhada--did not like to be balked, and most particularly not by her son.

  “The authorities are very angry, Kier,” she said. “I can’t blame them or even stop them from taking action if you do not return to Rhada at once.”

  “I’m sorry, Mother,” I said.

  Lady Nora’s expression changed, grew haughty and scornful, and she said, in a voice that used to terrify me when I was a child and still sometimes brought tremors of self-doubt, “Ah, then. You, in your wisdom, in your mature judgment, have concluded that your superior officers in the Fleet, the learned warlocks of Gonlanburg University, the local Imperial administration, and the Order of Navigators are all wrong and you are right. Only you know what is to be done about that thing you discovered in space. I can’t believe my ears.”

  I swallowed hard and said, “I’m not the only one, Lady Nora.”

  “Naturally, I had forgotten your cyborg.” It wasn’t often that Lady Nora’s deeply buried thread of anticybism surfaced. And in fairness, she regarded Ariane highly, even felt some affection for her, and was, under certain circumstances, willing to commit me to the cyborg’s care. Yet when she grew really angry or when she was frustrated and prevented from obtaining the instant compliance with her commands she thought was her due, she became very like other human women when confronted with “those SW pilots and their cyborgs.” Perhaps, I thought, given the nature of human beings, it was natural to think a close human-cyborg affinity unnatural.

  “Ariane,” I said quietly. “You’ll forgive my mother. She is understandably upset with us.”

  Lady Nora knew, of course, that Ariane being part of the commo link and the source of the power for it, would quite naturally monitor all conversations and transmissions. (Perhaps, I thought distractedly, that was one more ingredient to pour into the pot of simmering resentments: Ariane was alw
ays there. Almost a part of me.) But Lady Nora wasn’t a high-chinned Great Vegan for nothing. She said, like a queen, “I am sorry, my dear Ariane”--and one knew that she wasn’t in the least sorry--”but my son provokes me.” And then the feminine flick with the knife, the trick of queen or coho-girl: “Of course if you could ever have a son yourself, you would understand this better, my dear.”

  Mercifully, Ariane did not reply.

  Through the holographic screen came the faint sounds of muffled funeral drums, and I thought for a moment more about Gret and how--even as he lay dying (for he must have known he would not last long), he sent away Erit, his companion-friend-sister-wife--everything--to Gonlan, to serve his friends and “masters,” the Rhad. He had sent Erit and he had begun a plan for me, and all the while he must have felt the long, long life slipping away from him. But he had thought of me, of my family, of the Rhadan folk among whom he had lived so long, of all the inhabitants of the Empire. His concern had been for us and those who would die if Marissa’s Death Three were not found and rendered harmless. That thought made it a bit easier to stand against my mother’s scathing attacks on my self-confidence, which continued unabated by her grief or mine or all Rhada’s.

  “Admiral Morag has been here, Kier,” Lady Nora said, striking with her secondary armament. (It had always been easier to face my mother when I understood that she thought and fought like a soldier, with her friends and family and all the common people of Rhada as the unruly sometime-enemy.)

  When I did not respond, she said, “She told me that there is still time to keep your infractions of the Fleet regulations within her jurisdiction. Provided that you return to Rhada at once.”

  “What else, Mother?”

  “Ariane will be disciplined as well.”

  “What else?”

  “The foreigner will be surrendered to the Navigators, naturally.”

  “Naturally,” I said. “What will become of her?”

  “She will be examined by the priesthood. It is obvious the warlocks can’t pry information from her.”