“Okay, Kimmelman.” He turned to the two security men who were now standing next to Harvey. “Come on, men, we’re outta here.”
The two men followed their chief to the door, where he turned and gave Harvey a last glowering look.
“I’ll be back for the bug box, Kimmelman,” he said, then turned and left the Club.
Frosty came over from behind the bar and sat down next to Harvey. “Are you going to be all right?” she asked, stroking the back of his neck.
Harvey stretched his injured arm. The medic had done a good job repairing the broken bone, and aside from the tickle of the current and a twinge of pain as he pulled Frosty closer to him, Harvey could tell that he’d be fine in a few hours.
“Better than ever,” he said, giving Frosty a smile and a little squeeze. “Now, why don’t you show your partner-to-be the playroom?”
Frosty cooed with delight.
OLD GRUDGES
Elsewhere on the Stephen Hawking there were the sectors owned by those corporations rich enough to have purchased their own floor or wing. Along with the megamerchants were a number of companies financed by the governments of their respective worlds. Among them perhaps the most unusual, and certainly the most flamboyant, was that of the Baratarians.
Barataria was actually a group of asteroids that had originally harbored fugitive Khalians who had refused to accept their defeat by the Fleet. Eventually, like most Khalians, they realized that the Families, and the Schlein family in particular, had used them, and used them badly. This led to a grudge that was passed on undiminished to the next generation of Baratarians. Like the pirates of Earth, many of the Khalian pirates found legitimate or somewhat legitimate ways to invest the wealth taken from both Fleet and Family ships. This wealth gave them considerable leverage in the chaotic period after the war when the Khalian and Family economies were in shambles. As a result the Baratarians became prosperous merchants and dubious, but valued, members of the Alliance.
Their leader had been a misshapen human known to them only as Globin. His warped exterior hid one of the best minds in all humanity. Globin’s decision to retire after almost seventy years came as a relief to the Fleet sector commander. There is nothing like having an only mildly socialized genius and ex-pirate under your command to keep things lively. Globin’s decision to spend his “retirement” as the head of the Baratarian mission on the Hawking presented the battlestation’s commander, Anton Brand, with some perplexing problems.
HEARING
by Christopher Stasheff
Selena Schlein dreamed. She lay in cold sleep, very cold and very deep, so cold that her mind had the illusion of warmth, so cold that the stream of life had ebbed to a trickle—and as she slept, she dreamed a nightmare.
For she dreamed of the Fleet, whose ships chased those of her family over the sky—which couldn’t be; they didn’t know of the Schlein family. At least, so far as anyone knew, they didn’t know of the Families—but there was no telling what their spies had ferreted out, and in her dream, the Fleet had found them, and had chased Selena’s exploration ship to the center of the galaxy, even though they couldn’t have, even though part of her shouted silently, No! It wasn’t that horrible Fleet, it was those implacable insects!
But in the nightmare, the pursuing ship loomed larger and larger in their viewscreen, and her husband Hans was shouting, “Get the women into the lifeboats!” but she was protesting that, no, she would rather remain there by him, to die with him if it was necessary, but the whole ship shuddered as the Fleet vessel grappled it, one of the bulkheads fractured and split open like an egg, and an alien form slipped through, but it wasn’t the dreaded Fleet uniform, nor one of those horrible bugs, it was even more horrible, it was one of those vicious, savage Weasels, the Khalians, whom the Families’ agents had so successfully suborned into attacking the Alliance, but now it was a Khalian, but Dobie and Harl who were carrying her away to stuff her into the life-pod, strapping the tubes with the needles to her wrists, and she was screaming, “No! I can fight, too!” but the drugs were taking effect, the world was growing dim, then vague and fuzzy, then totally dark, and she relaxed with a flood of relief, safe in the darkness even as her heart ached for Hans, frantic with worry for him, but her fear and worry were distanced somehow by the darkness. . . .
But the blackness was lightening, her eyelids trembling, trying to open. She fought to keep them closed, keep the safe warm darkness wrapped about her, but it wasn’t warm anymore, it was chilly, and she shivered, it was cold, so cold, and her eyelids opened all by themselves, to look for warmth . . .
And the nightmare slammed back, her two worst fears coupled together, for there, not two feet from her face, hung the monstrous Khalian face under the Fleet uniform cap, its furry snout split in an evil, gloating grin, and Selena screamed, thrashing about, trying to escape, but horrible soft arms held her imprisoned, and she screamed and screamed and screamed, until the warm fuzzy darkness came back to shield her, and free her from the responsibility of wakefulness.
Globin looked up at his secretary. “But how would it be if the Gersons had been a sentient race that had nothing in common with us, Plasma? If they had been, let us say, thinking plants—or living stones?”
“Speak only of what is possible, Globin,” Plasma said with a rare show of real anger. “This we know: Giant bugs seek to destroy beings like us, with warm blood, and that is all we need to know.”
“So it comes down to like and unlike,” Globin sighed. “Is there no more to Right and Wrong than that?”
“Of course not, Globin! The Ichtons seek to slay the folk of other races and take their planets, as they slew the Gersons and laid waste their home!”
“That is true,” Globin said, nodding, “and surely it is wrong to steal and murder—but right to defend, and kill in defense of others’ lives.”
He was quite well aware that the Ichtons must surely believe—if they were truly thinking beings, rather than mere biological calculators evolved to solve technological problems of slaughter—believe that their own conquests and genocides were right, and that men of his own species had once believed the same. It did not make the Ichtons any more morally sound, but it did make Globin wonder.
He wondered even more that he should wonder. Who was he to ponder questions of right and wrong—he, Globin, traitor to his own kind, pirate king, space-thief, and murderer, responsible for the deaths of many who had been killed when their ships had been taken by his men—more accidentally than intentionally, true. His orders had always been to take without killing if possible, but to kill if it was necessary, but responsible nonetheless. So he was a murderer, yes, and could not deny it. His only justification was loyalty to the Khalian pirates who had adopted him when men of his own kind sought to slay him, and that had always sufficed—till now.
Why did it suddenly bother him? he wondered. Now, when he had lived one hundred years out of a probable hundred thirty—now, when he had turned his pirates into legal merchants and made their peace with the Alliance; now, when he had resigned his place among the Baratarian Khalians and taken a horde of young and eager volunteers to help defend the weaker races at the Core of the galaxy, against a marauder who annihilated all in its path, without reason or cause save its own greed. Surely there could not be a cause more right, nor a moral issue less ambiguous!
But Globin was keenly aware that the Ichtons, more alien than any species he had yet encountered, could hardly be said to think as human beings did, nor even as mammals did—and he was also aware that learning how they thought was the only real path to stopping them. Defeating them completely was improbable—there were simply too many of them, too many ships, too many conquered planets, and more disappearing into their collective maw all the time. It would be as much a feat of diplomacy as of war to make them stop, as it had always been—as MacArthur had helped the Japanese to realize that commerce was a more certain path to dominion than military conquest, and Gorbachev had played peacemaker between the Unite
d States and China.
But when he began to try to learn how the Ichtons thought, he began to wonder about their own ideas of morality—and thus, so late in life, had begun to ponder the issues that had for so long been clear. Oh, they still were—clear for him, clear in terms of what he must immediately do; but on the cosmic scale?
The viewscreen on the wall lit, and an excited Khalian looked out at him, tense with the enthusiasm of youth. “Globin! Plasma, tell Globin at once! There is a life-pod! Our scoutship has caught it!”
Globin was on his feet. He would have to move fast; any such detritus brought in was common property of the whole ship, and the humans of the Fleet would have overheard Platelet’s message. “What is in the life-pod, Platelet?”
“Terrans! Females! Globin, come and see!”
Globin stood stunned. “Terrans? Here? So far from home, from any Terran home? How could they have come? None are being sought by the Hawking.”
“Ask it of them yourself!” Plasma was already halfway to the door. “Globin, come quickly!”
The life-pod was clamped to the underside of the Khalian scoutship, seamed and cratered with the impacts of space junk. But its cargo had already been transferred to the Khalian ship, and were now being carried through the airlock—
On stretchers.
“They screamed when they saw us, Globin.” Platelet looked up, his eyes huge, for a Khalian. “Screamed, and called us monsters, and begged for mercy. They would not be quiet no matter how much we reassured them, so we sedated them. It is best if they see you first, when they waken.”
But one last Terran woman came walking, behind the stretchers of her mates. Globin caught his breath; she was beautiful, even under the dirt and caked sweat of a long sojourn in the life-pod, even with the strain ravaging her face, and her golden hair dulled by dirt. But her eyes were huge, and frightened.
Plasma nudged him, and Globin came out of his reverie. He stepped over to her. She looked up, terrified, like a doe about to run at sight of the hunter—then saw a human face, and relaxed.
Almost collapsed.
She sagged against Globin’s chest. It was unexpected, and he fell back a step, then braced himself and took her in his arms, making soothing sounds. ”There now, the ordeal is over, you have come to safe harbor, you will be all right. . . .”
She seemed to melt against him, but made no reply.
Emboldened, he held her away just a little, and said gravely, “But you must tell me, child. How did you come to be here, so far from human space?”
The girl watched his face intently, with a little frown. There was something odd about that gaze, something troubling, but Globin set it aside for later analysis and said again, “How did you come to be here?”
“Speak more slowly,” the girl said in an odd flat voice. Globin would have interpreted that as sarcasm, but the intentness of her gaze made him realize that it wasn’t.
“How . . . did . . . you . . . come . . . to . . . be . . . here?” he asked. “What . . . happened . . . to . . . your . . . ship?”
Then he realized, with a shock, what was odd about her gaze. She wasn’t making eye contact. Her gaze was lower, watching his lips. A strange feeling went through Globin, a shivering thrill at the strangeness of it.
“We came to study the Core,” she said. “Men and women, many married.”
“The Dunholme Expedition,” Globin breathed. He remembered the story, discovered in the Schlein family archives after the surrender, and released to the media. Even in the Alliance’s triumph, the expedition had been heralded as an example of devotion to science. A dozen couples had embarked on a virtual suicide mission, for the Core was so far away, at the speeds attainable a century and a half before, that there was very little chance the people would come back alive. The ship would, but they would not. It was a monumental case of self-sacrifice, choosing to spend virtually their whole lives cooped up in a single ship—never mind that the ship was so large as to be a tiny world in itself—and forswearing having children, for they had no right to commit unborn people to such an existence.
Of course, some of the critics had noted, these were people to whom science was so important, so thrilling, that what they were giving up was balanced by the opportunities they were gaining. Others had noted the psychological profiles of the people aboard: they were mostly misanthropes, who had felt rejected by others, and rejected society in turn (How well Globin had understood that!), though they got along well enough with one another, enjoying the society of fellow rejects; and none of them really wanted to have children. The two qualities seemed to go together, somehow.
But they had never come back. Oh, they hadn’t been expected to, not for a hundred years—but they had set out a hundred fifty years before, sent by the wealthy and ambitious Schlein family, striving for more wealth and greater power among the Merchant Families, sent to find some secret of Nature that would give them a huge edge over their rivals. But the long-delayed war had come to the Schleins, and cut them away, and Globin had grown old waiting for the Dunholme to come back, grown to the age of eighty yearning for the knowledge they would bring, had set off with the Hawking for the very core to which they had gone, fuming at them for not having sent back their data.
But when they had confronted the Ichtons, he knew what had happened to them—or guessed. Now he had merely to confirm it.
“The Dunholme Expedition?” he asked the girl again, then remembered to say it a third time, slowly. He was beginning to realize what was wrong with her.
She nodded. “We were attacked by the insects, but we escaped—and the FTL drive was damaged. We fled for months, fleeing at light speed, but their pursuit ship finally caught us and disabled our engines completely. The men put all the women in a cryogenic chamber, this life-pod in which you found us, while they worked to make the ship come alive again, knowing they would probably die trying. The last one alive was to release the pod, so that we at least would have some hope of rescue—and praise Heaven it has come!”
“But they were all mature men and women on that expedition,” Globin protested, “in their thirties or forties, and you are scarcely twenty, if that.”
The girl nodded, her eyes huge and luminous—and Globin felt his heart twist. He berated it silently, and himself for an old fool, and made a conscious effort to focus on her words, not her face alone.
“They had agreed not to reproduce,” the girl said, “but had not forsworn lovemaking, and most of them were married. What went wrong with the contraceptives, I do not know—but there was an accident, and I was born.”
Globin frowned. “That was dangerous. With so little space, if others had followed your mother’s example . . .”
“But they did not,” the young woman said firmly. “Everyone deplored the bad luck, my mother most of all—but with every breath of condemnation, she smiled with secret delight. At least, that is what my father said, as well as all my aunts, with a touch of envy. You see, they had all reared families already, but they tell me that nothing raises the desire for one last child so much as seeing someone else pregnant.”
“So you grew up aboard ship,” Globin said, frowning, “and never knew what it was to live on a planet.”
“Never,” she said, “until now.”
Globin resisted the smile of amusement that pushed at his lips. “This is no planet, child, but only a ship, albeit a very large one.”
“And I am no child,” she said firmly, “albeit I am much younger than you.”
Globin gazed at her a moment, then inclined his head. “Your pardon, fair lady.”
“Of course.” She smiled, and her face was a sun.
Globin held his gaze on her while he waited for his blood to stop effervescing. Then he said, “So you never knew of the Khalian War.”
“They have told me of it,” she said evenly, “and have showed me the holocines shot during the worst of the battles. The Khalians looked terrible, then. They do not look so monstrous now.”
“Y
ou are not seeing them in combat,” Globin pointed out. “Did your parents not tell you of the horrible things they had done?”
“Yes, but I could understand only the broad outline.” The girl tapped her ear with a forefinger. “I am deaf, you see.”
She said it matter-of-factly, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Globin sat immobile as his hardened old heart softened amazingly with pity; she had adjusted admirably, or developed iron-hard emotional defenses.
Unless . . .
Unless it were the most natural thing in the world.
“Deaf from birth?” he asked.
The young woman nodded. “Cosmic radiation, we think—the ship was not entirely proof against it. Though Heaven knows, there were enough other sources available. It took them a year to understand why I did not respond to sounds, but only moved my lips. Then, slowly and painfully, they taught me to speak—but by the time I could understand a large enough vocabulary to comprehend the accounts of Khalian atrocities, I was old enough to be skeptical, too, and to think that no living being is inherently evil.”
So that was why she had been afraid, but not terrified. What the other women knew as contemporary terror, she had known only as history—and could not have been raised with species hatred, for she had not comprehended the gory details.
“I would have said so, too, at one time,” Globin said grimly. He was thinking of some of the more unpleasant examples of his own species.
The young woman misunderstood. She frowned. “Do you speak of the insects?”
Globin had to consider that before he answered. “I do not think they are evil in their own minds,” he said, “assuming they have minds, as we know them. But as a species, they are as evil as a cancer.”
“But no more than a cancer,” she pointed out. “After all, a cancer has no mind, no will; it does not intend to cause pain.”
Admiration for her mind kindled in Globin now, and he warned himself to beware. “Exactly. It does evil, but it may not be evil. As with the Ichtons—that is what we call these marauding insectoids. For now, though, we must fight them.”
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