Battlestations

by S. M. Stirling

  At first, Brand and Omera opposed letting McCaul sign Lyseo, and especially under the terms he demanded. Lyseo’s contract allowed for periodic renegotiation, which they saw as a lever to extort privileges using the threat of nonappearance, but McCaul, who had had Lyseo investigated, knew there was nothing to worry about. Lyseo would never remain as a dead weight for any appreciable length of time. He was a workaholic. He might go off and sulk for a few days when he was on an ego trip, but then he would put on some marvelous heartrending or hilarious spectacle that would have everyone riveted to the trivid tanks. Throughout a forty-year career, he had a better attendance record than any aspiring performer, however motivated and half his age.

  Publicly, he was magnificent. Whole audiences had been known to collapse into laughter at a single quirk of the dramatic black brows, such a contrast against his shock of prematurely white hair. A man of above average height, his frame sculpted into the long, thin lines appropriate to comedy or tragedy, he retained the suppleness of youth, both physically and mentally. Lyseo remained a current favorite when many of his contemporaries had fallen into the category of “classic” because he kept up with events, and was not shy about presenting his opinions of any of them.

  “What an opportunity,” he had announced at his final press conference before the Hawking blasted out of system, “to open up the rest of the galaxy to itself through the medium of my art.”

  The pronouncement pleased the top brass, who realized at last that having one of the preeminent human stars aboard and in favor of their cause meant that continuing interest in the battle cruiser would be maintained, even at the distance from the Alliance to the heart of the galaxy. That could prove vital to future funding of Fleet projects.

  Every day, the slot on the entertainment network at sixteen hundred hours was set aside for Lyseo’s daily performance. By written agreement it was guaranteed to last no less than a minute and no more than an hour, except by prearrangement with the Morale Office. His contract contained a clause that all of his performances would be recorded and sent back to the Alliance. No matter that it would take longer and longer for each message torpedo to reach its destination as the Hawking flew farther into the heart of the galaxy. It was meant, along with the factual news reports, to be a record of the journey, which would be of immense historical value. Lyseo vowed to reproduce through his art the feelings, hopes, aspirations, fears, losses, and discoveries of the warriors, merchants, and civilians aboard the Stephen Hawking. It was understood, though not officially condoned, that all activity stopped or slowed at 1600 so that everyone could see his newest work.

  He had the best special effects holograms could produce, his own crew, and top-of-the-line production equipment, and a clothing synthesizer programmed with every garment worn by every being of any ethnicity, nationality, or planetary origin since the beginning of recorded memory. He was permitted to go where he wanted, whenever he wanted, within the ship, to gather impressions of everyday life. One further clause in his agreement that had nearly scuttled the whole arrangement was that he would be entitled to whatever quantity of power he needed, or claimed he did, to run his effects or synthesizers. His library of literature and music, when it was added to the Hawking’s complement, doubled the size of the memory needed to hold it.

  “It is my legacy to the galaxy,” Lyseo said. “Since I will not survive into the ages, my work and my philanthropy will have to speak for me to future generations.”

  Privately, he was nervous, easily depressed, and required constant reassurance that he was not wasting the universe’s time. During these fits of insecurity, he called himself Hambone, and referred to his vast talent as a quirk.

  After his first performance, Lyseo retired into his dressing room and locked the door, refusing to come out or answer communications signals.

  The technicians on duty in the entertainment center sent for Jill. It was her job to handle her most famous passenger when he became difficult, a task that she did not find easy. From the time she was a teenager, she had admired Lyseo. She had watched every performance of his she could find on disk or cube. When she was informed by her boss that Lyseo was going to be coming on board, she was uncharacteristically nervous. At first, she was taken aback by the periodic snits and constant fretting exhibited by the artist whose public face she adored so much, but underneath the facade, she found a likable man. He was engaging and intelligent, and he genuinely cared for the people for whom he performed. Jill discovered that Lyseo would listen to criticism, truly listen, and apply it to himself if he found it honest. If not, it was as likely to send him into an explosive rage or an achingly pathetic depression. Lack of feedback had the potential to affect him the same way.

  “It’s just reaction,” Kem Thoreson, Lyseo’s manager, assured her as they waited at the door. “Come on, Ari, open up. You were fantastic! Everyone loved you.” He kept up a steady rapping with his knuckles that Jill felt had to be as painful as it was irritating to listen to.

  After a long pause, the door slid open, and Lyseo loomed over them. His eyes were mournful in the mottled mask of half-erased makeup.

  “My greatest opportunity,” the magnificent baritone voice intoned mournfully, “for the greatest audience a being ever had, and as you would so rightly say, I blew it.”

  Thoreson socked him playfully in the arm. “What are you talking about, Hammy? You were good! Wasn’t he, Jill?”

  Jill felt that instead of remembering, she was reliving his performance. Lyseo had enacted the chaotic arrival of the Core ship on the Alliance frontier, followed by the flurry of activity as the human and Khalian senates had decided what to do. With only changes in posture and gesture, he had gone from human to Nedge to Khalian, and back again, arguing the rightness of aiding the Core systems, while drawing the invisible sphere of the battlestation within the heart of his stage space. At the height of dramatic tension, he had held his hands framed, and a hologram of the Hawking appeared between them, as if he had evoked it from the depths of his self.

  “It was . . . indescribable,” Jill said at last, feeling overwhelmed.

  Lyseo regarded her. He dabbed at a bit of makeup on his cheek with the towel slung around his neck. “That bad, eh?”

  “No! It was wonderful! I . . . how did you manage to be so many people at once?”

  “We are all many people,” he said, waving a dramatic arm. “Sometimes I can’t sleep because of the crowd. It’s all tricks. Do you see, if I turn my head this way, you follow the line of my head, and the dark stripe along my cheekbone suggests a Nedge beak?”

  “Why, that’s incredible,” Jill said, looking more closely. “And the dark smudges there and there under your eyes look like a Khalian muzzle.”

  Lyseo nodded. “You see how simple?”

  “But it isn’t simple at all,” Jill argued. “It’s marvelous.”

  Thoreson, seeing that his client’s ill mood was breaking, shepherded him back into the dressing room and sat him down on a couch, talking all the while he cleaned the makeup off Lyseo’s face. The great man made no protest.

  “There you go,” Kem said, slapping him on the back. “Good as new. You get some rest, and you’ll be all ready for your next show tomorrow.”

  The expressive eyes met Jill’s in the mirror, and the brows raised sadly. “To think of pouring out my whole soul every day, to an uncomprehending mass,” the magnificent voice rumbled. “Old Hambone reduced at last to the status of the evening news.”

  Lyseo’s self-deprecation was for Jill and Kem only. Once he stepped outside the dressing-room door, he was once again the star. Over the course of the next six months, he alternated performances based on the exigencies of ship life with items from the classics. A sly sense of humor jibed at the constant warring between the factions on board. When one cruel and much quoted parody of the most prominent Nedge merchant executives provoked a demand for an apology, Lyseo laughed it off.

  “The nature of my art allows no artificial defenses to stand in
the way. More to the point, my contract allows for it. Sue and be damned.”

  He was unassailable from everywhere but within. McCaul sent Jill to talk the merchants back into a good humor. It took some time to smooth out literally ruffled feathers. Privately Jill agreed with Lyseo’s assessment of the Nedge, but since they all had to live together for a long time, it was necessary to make peace.

  “You should be honored, good sirs and madam,” Jill explained during their meeting. “The great Lyseo doesn’t immortalize just anyone.”

  The Nedge looked at one another, the round eyes bright on either side of the expressionless beaks. “Perhaps there is something in what you say,” Braak Rokoru mused, turning back to Jill. “But he must not do it again. My hatchlings back on Eerrik III will see, when the broadcast reaches them, and be ashamed.”

  “Certainly they won’t see it in that light,” Jill suggested. “If my parent were so featured, I would be flattered, for myself and for my nest. You could message them about it. They might want to make a permanent recording.”

  The Nedge inclined his head slowly, openly considering Jill’s enthusiasm. “Perhaps it is only that we do not understand the human sense of humor.”

  Inwardly, Jill let out a sigh of relief. “Perhaps not, honored sir. I can assure you that everyone else on the ship found it funny.”

  Solemnly, the Nedge bowed to her. “Then we will do what you suggest. We are most grateful for your explanation.”

  As soon as she could possibly excuse herself, Jill fled, and had a good laugh in her office with the intercoms turned off. Lyseo’s imitation of the ponderous Nedge had captured them exactly. It had been tickling at her ribs throughout her meeting, and she could wait no longer to let it out. She longed to tell Lyseo about the meeting, but suspected that once he knew, the Nedge would appear again on a 1600 show, and she didn’t think she could placate them again.

  Lyseo continued to fascinate her as much as he had when she was young. Whenever Jill had the time, she sat just outside of camera range in his studio and watched him work live. She regretted that it was impossible for everyone to see him this way. His personal magnetism enveloped her, drew her along in the fantasies he created, making her believe in them. A mere video of him seemed almost out of context.

  Unexpectedly, the soaring audacity fell wing-clipped when the Hawking entered the system of the first Core world to beg for help. No planetary communication on Gerson answered any of their hails. Concerned, Commander Brand sent single-seat fighters in to do video reconnaissance. The data they sent back to base was horrific. Every population center, every domicile, every supply store, had been stripped or blasted. The carnage was evident even at a hundred fifty thousand meters. Sensors found no signs of life above animal intelligence. Word of the genocide and destruction below spread swiftly throughout the ship. The Gerson on board went crazy with grief and had to be put in restraints. After that, Jill had to put out a lot of emotional fires, and found she was counting on Lyseo’s daily performance to cheer her up.

  Apparently, so was everyone else. The ratings numbers showed that a record number of viewers tuned in to that day’s broadcast. What they saw only deepened their feelings of hopelessness.

  Lyseo, for once stripped of makeup and clever artifice, sat hunched in the middle of his stage on the floor, as the camera revolved around and around him. Arms gathering his knees protectively to his chest, Lyseo was the personification of despair. After what felt like an eternity, he lifted his head and stared hopelessly at the ceiling.

  “Why did I ever leave the Alliance?” he moaned. “I was safe there. I had my friends, my family, all my comforts. I joined this fool’s chase to the center of the galaxy, and for what? In aid of strangers, people who are already dead. Perhaps they are all dead, and we have come here for nothing. I will never see my birth world again. We are moving forward into the depths of the void!”

  Jill, watching from a rec lounge on Orange level 2, felt her heart sink. She noted a shocked silence fall over her fellow viewers. Some of the humans sat with nervous grins on their faces, waiting for Lyseo to crack the joke. When he remained serious, they stared at him, uncomfortable and angry. After the screen faded, no one spoke for a long moment, then everyone burst out at once, most of them shouting to dispel their rage.

  Jill stood up on a chair. “Now, simmer down, people,” she called, signaling for attention. She tried several times to interrupt the furious chatter. No one listened. She climbed down and made her way smartly to the nearest control room. Something in the order of video sedatives was called for.

  “Well, you’ve certainly got them talking,” Jill said. Things looked bad. Lyseo was in a deep depression, and this time she couldn’t use the lure of public acclaim to pull him out of it. He’d already been informed of complaints coming from the highest brass. Instead of provoking a roar of approval or a round of informed discussion, he had exposed primary fears that made most people curl up on themselves. The paladins reported no abatement in the number of frightened callers who just wanted to talk with a calm voice. She suspected that not all of them were civilian passengers.

  Anticipating Kay McCaul’s instructions, Jill had ordered a program of perky music, and the video terminals showed Fleet recruitment films and morale-boosting, mindless adventure sagas reaching back into a thousand years of mass entertainment. Then she went to visit the source of the trouble in his dressing room.

  “I am fundamentally disappointed in the response of my audience,” Lyseo said, mopping his face with his sodden tunic. “I re-create their very moods, and they turn on me. What do they want of me?”

  “You frightened them,” said Jill, squatting down beside his chair. “You reminded them how vulnerable they are out here.”

  “It was an honest assessment of the emotional sense on board this ship,” Lyseo said. “I only told the truth.”

  “They’re not prepared to deal with the truth,” Jill said. “Everything that is happening is completely new to them. They are afraid of what’s out there. The unknown scares them. You just reminded them of what they’ve been trying to suppress so they can deal with their day-to-day tasks. You’re making that very difficult.”

  Arend Lyseo thought deeply for a moment, and sighed. “It was not my intention. I must have erred in my performance.”

  “Not at all,” Jill assured him. “It was truly brilliant. But it wasn’t what they needed to see. I’m scared, too, if you must know. I’m frightened rigid by whatever’s out there!”

  Lyseo stared down at her. “How miserably insensitive of me,” he said. “What I do cannot make the slightest iota of difference in anyone’s life if I am making it impossible for them to function. How presumptuous of me, a mere entertainer, to paralyze my viewers into immobility. I am an utter barbarian and a wretch and blind, blind, blind!” He pounded his hands on his dressing table.

  Jill stood up and put her hands on her hips. “Well, at least you’re not a hypochondriac,” she said. “That’s the one thing I just can’t stand.”

  Lyseo gaped at her in open astonishment. Slowly, a smile crept across his lips, and he began to laugh. Jill relaxed, and grinned at him. He stood up and took her into his arms, and kissed her. Jill felt her bones melt. No matter how casually she tried to behave toward him, he was still her idol.

  “You are the only thing that keeps me from despair, raven-winged maiden,” he murmured into her hair. “It is your presence, your honesty, which allows me to believe that no matter what mistakes I make, it will all turn out right in the end.” She raised her face to look into his eyes, needing assurance of the sincerity of his words. This man could imitate any emotion, create spun sugar out of air; it could be mere praise. She saw no artifice now, only affection and respect. He bent to kiss her again, and she responded with all her heart.

  In a moment they were making love. Jill kept thinking that it was impossible, that this was one of the videos, not actual life, and certainly not hers.

  “Okay, talk to me,” D
riscoll Strind said, picking up another comlink line. Strind, one of the most popular of Jill’s paladins, had been fielding questions and frantic calls nonstop since 1615, when Lyseo’s broadcast came to an end. Four hours had passed, but there were still people who needed to work out their anxiety.

  “He was right!” the caller burst out shrilly, without identifying herself. “Lyseo was right. Everything he said—I felt that way. Are we going to die out here?”

  “Suppose we could, citizen,” Strind said calmly. “Space travel’s uncertain even in this day and age.”

  “No! I mean could we be blown up, like those people down there? I never thought about it. I mean, when I went through the psychological tests, they asked me if I could live with never going back to my home system again. They never asked how I felt about being shredded by an alien enemy.”

  “You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, citizen. This is a warship. There’s never been any secret about that. We’re going to find the bad guys and shoot at them, and they will probably shoot back.”

  “But I’m a civilian! I don’t want to die. Doesn’t anyone care what happens to me?”

  “We all do,” Strind said. “It’s the responsibility of the commanders to do their best to see that nothing happens to you. As for civilians getting caught in crossfire, what do you think happened to the people down there? They weren’t all in the military.”

  “I wasn’t frightened before,” the caller admitted. “But I am now.”

  “Lyseo brought it home to you, didn’t he?” Strind said, nodding into his headset as he disconnected that caller. “Well, we all want to talk about it. I asked Commander Brand to take a few minutes out to talk to us. He’s here now.” Strind nodded to the commander, who sat across the broadcast console from him in the semicircle of padded couch that served as Strind’s studio. “You’ve been listening to the voice of the people, Commander. Can we have your feedback? Are we sacrificing ourselves needlessly?”