Star Song and Other Stories

by Timothy Zahn

  They finished filing in, settled into their seats, and stopped rattling their programs. The house lights dimmed, the curtain went up, and the play started.

  And to my utter surprise and endless relief, it was great.

  I don't mean the ambassador was great as an actor. His Fuzhtian expressions and body language—if he had any—were completely opaque to the human audience. His singing voice as already noted was merely a much louder version of his speaking voice, and his speaking voice itself was no great shakes to begin with.

  Mark's play wasn't particularly impressive, either, though I have no doubt that it was the best Broadway play ever conceived and written in under fifty hours.

  Yet in some weird and inexplicable way, it all worked. What the ambassador lacked in acting ability he more than made up in sheer raw stage presence; his inability to sing his way out of a laundry sack created a strangely effective Yin/Yang with the rear-projected background singers; and over and through it all was woven the unceasing and surrealistic flow of pictures from the RebuScope.

  And when it was over, they gave him a standing ovation.

  "Well," Fogerty said, watching from the wings as the ambassador lumbered out for his fourth curtain call. "Thank God that's over."

  "Yes," I agreed, watching the ambassador do the Fuzhtian version of a bow, which to me looked more like a seriously deformed curtsy. "It was fun while it lasted."

  Fogerty gave me a look which would probably have been one of his famous glares if he'd had any emotional energy left to glare with. "You must be joking."

  "No, really," I insisted. "It felt good to be on Broadway again. I hadn't realized how much I'd missed it."

  "Missed the fawning and applause, you mean," he countered. Glares were out, but he could still handle snide. "Well, better tuck the greasepaint back in your suitcase. Time for you to go back to being anonymous again."

  "I'm not so sure about that, Mr. Fogerty," Angus said, coming up to Fogerty's side and showing us his RebuScope monitor. "Here's what the ambassador said right after his second curtain call." "At least it doesn't have the word 'Broadway' in it," Fogerty grunted. "You have a translation yet?"

  "I'm not sure," Angus said. "It seems to be 'eye w-ant to go on street.' "

  I sucked in my breath. "That's not street," I said carefully. "It's road."

  Fogerty frowned at me. " 'Go on road'? What in hell does that—?"

  And then, suddenly, he got it. But to my amazement, his face actually brightened. "On the road," he said. "He wants to take the play on the road."

  I threw Angus a look, saw my same surprise mirrored there. Fogerty, actually happy about this?

  "No, I'm not having a breakdown," Fogerty assured us. "We'll take it on the road, all right. But this play is too good to waste on humans. We're going to take it to the Fuzhtian worlds."

  He smiled with brittle slyness. "And along the way, I expect we'll finally get a

  look at some of this wonderful Fuzhtian technology we've been dying to see."

  He gestured across the backstage to Lee. "Start getting everything organized," he called over the applause from out front. "We're taking this show on the road."

  And we did. For three months we slogged across space in the ambassador's starship, stopping at star after star, planet after planet, theater after theater. Setting up, watching the ambassador play to packed houses, tearing down, and moving on again.

  For the rest of the crew and me it was a lot of work, though fundamentally not a

  lot different than doing a tour back in the States. Fuzhtian worlds—and there were a lot of them—each had their own peculiar odors and sounds and colors and climates; but when you get right down to it roast glimprik and mixed colfia vegetables tasted about the same everywhere you go.

  For Fogerty and the tech boys in the entourage, though, this tour was hog heaven. Every little gadget that fell into their hands, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant by Fuzhtian standards, had them salivating for hours as they carefully took it apart to see if they could figure out how it worked.

  In those three months they must have filled forty notebooks and at least that many multi-gigabyte CD-ROMs. Fogerty looked simultaneously more harried and more excited than I'd ever seen him, continually speculating about what we'd learn when we were able to get a look at their really interesting stuff.

  Unbelievable as it would have seemed to me when I first joined the group, the man was actually becoming a pleasure to be with.

  And he was like that right up until the other shoe finally dropped.

  I knew something was wrong the instant Angus sat down at my breakfast table and I got a look at his face. "What is it?" I asked, my courf melon cubes suddenly forgotten. "What's wrong?"

  "Have you seen Mr. Fogerty?" he asked, his voice under rigid control.

  "I don't think he's up yet—he and the tech boys were working late on that aroma-making gadget," I said. "What's wrong?"

  Angus turned his head to gaze out the window at the Fuzhtian city stretching out beneath our hotel. "We were wrong, Mr. Lebowitz," he said quietly. "Our Broadway star here wasn't an ambassador at all. Not really. He was—" He waved a hand helplessly. "He was a penguin."

  I set down my fork. "A penguin?" I asked carefully.

  "Oh, not a real penguin, of course," he said. "That's just the image that jumped to mind." He sighed and looked back at me. "You've seen the nature specials.

  Seen all those penguins gathering at the edge of an ice floe in their little black and white tuxedos, flapping their flippers, all set to start hunting for breakfast. Do you remember why they don't all just jump in and get on with it?"

  I glanced down at my own breakfast. "I must have missed that episode."

  "It's because they're not the only ones on the hunt." Angus picked up my fork and began absently stirring the courf cubes in my dish. "There may be killer whales or other predators lurking under the surface, you see. So you know what the penguins do?"

  "Tell me."

  He stirred the cubes a little more vigorously. "They all keep jostling together on the edge until one of them gets jostled enough to fall into the water." He flicked the fork, and one of my cubes flipped up over the edge of the dish and landed on the table. "If nothing eats him," he said, gazing down at the cube,

  "the rest know it's safe to start going about the day's business."

  I gazed at the piece of melon, watching the juice ooze onto the table. "All right," I said slowly. "So the ambassador was pushed into the water. But I'd have thought that we've treated him pretty well. Certainly no one's tried to eat him."

  Angus snorted. "Oh, we treated him well, all right. We treated him too damn well. He's done it, he's lived through it... and now they all want to do it, too."

  "Do what?" I asked, frowning. "Come to Earth?"

  He looked up at me with a haunted expression. "No," he said. "Star in a Broadway play."

  I felt my jaw fall open. "All of them?"

  He nodded. "All of them."

  We're on the last leg of the ambassador's tour now—two more planets, fifteen more shows, and then our ship will be heading back to Earth. Our ship, and two hundred more following right behind us. Packed to the gills with eager, star-struck Fuzhties.

  I don't know what the White House and UN officials said to Fogerty when he broke the news to them. I know that when he came out of the ambassador's communication room he had the grim look of a man who's just watched his career crash in ruins, in glorious full-color slow motion.

  Still, he may yet be able to pull this off. Assuming the officials accepted our suggestions, there should be hordes of workmen at this very moment scurrying around the Gobi, the Sahara, the Australian Outback, and a dozen other of the remotest places on earth. Building a hundred exact movie-lot-style replicas of Broadway for the Fuzhties to perform on. With luck, they'll all be ready by the time we get back. If not, the real Broadway will never be the same again.

  They say the Fuzhties have a great deal to
offer humanity. They had better be right.

  Star Song

  The woman was somewhere in her mid-fifties, I estimated, wearing a lower-middle-class blue-green jacket suit and a professional scarf of a style I

  didn't recognize. In one hand she held a boarding ticket; with the other she balanced the inexpensive and slightly scuffed carrybag slung over her shoulder.

  Her hair was dark, her features unreadable, and her stride, as she toiled up the steep gangplank toward me, stiffly no-nonsense with an edge of disdain.

  In short, she looked like any of the thousands of business types I'd seen in hundreds of spaceports across the Expansion. She certainly didn't look like trouble.

  But that's always the way with life, isn't it? It's right when everything's going along nice and smooth and you're all relaxed and bored that you suddenly discover that you're in fact eighty degrees off course with a dead stick, straked engines, and a comatose musicmaster.

  And everything right then was indeed going along nice and smooth. The flight deck had been showing flat green when I'd left three minutes earlier, Rhonda had the engines running at peak efficiency—or at least what passed for peak efficiency with those rusty superannuates—and Jimmy, while his usual annoying self, was very much awake.

  And yet, if I'd been paying better attention, I might have wondered a little as I watched the woman approaching me. Might have seen that her completely ordinary exterior wasn't quite matched by the way she walked.

  The way she walked and, as I quickly found out, the way she talked. "I'm Andrula Kulasawa," she announced to me in a no-nonsense voice that matched the stride.

  It was a voice that sounded very much like it was accustomed to being listened to. "I'm booked on your transport; here's my ticket."

  "Yes, Angorki Tower just informed me," I said, popping the plastic card into my reader and glancing at it. "I'm Jake Smith, Ms. Kulasawa, captain of the Sergei Rock. Welcome aboard."

  A flicker of something touched her face—amusement, perhaps, at the pilot of a humble Class 8 star transport calling himself a captain. "Captain," she said, nodding her head microscopically as a hooked finger pulled the scarf away from her throat. "And it's Scholar Kulasawa."

  "My apologies," I said, hearing my voice suddenly go rigid as I stared at the neckpiece that had been concealed behind the nondescript scarf.

  And if the walk and voice hadn't made me wonder, that should have. Scholars were one of the most elite of the upper/professional classes, and I'd never seen one yet who wouldn't freeze his or her throat in winter rather than wear something that would cover up that glittering professional badge. "The, uh, the Tower didn't—"

  "Apology accepted," she said, her tone somehow managing to carry the message that it was her graciousness, not my worthiness, that was letting me off the hook for my unintended social gaffe. "Has my equipment been loaded aboard yet?"

  "Equipment?" I asked, throwing a glance down the gangplank behind her. There was no other luggage there that I could see.

  "It's not back there," she said, an edge of strained patience in her voice now.

  "I have two Size Triple-F Monshten crates back at the loading ramp. Research equipment for my work on Parex. It's on the ticket."

  I looked at my reader again. It was there, all right. "I didn't know, but I'll see to it right away," I promised, stepping back and gesturing her through the hatchway. "In the meantime, may I help you get settled?"

  "I'll manage," she said, twitching the carrybag away as I reached for it.

  "Where is my seat?"

  "The passenger cabin is aft—back that way," I told her. "First hatchway on the left."

  "I do know what 'aft' means, thank you," she said shortly, brushing past me and disappearing down the passageway.

  I heard her carrybag scraping against the wall as she maneuvered her way down the narrow corridor. But she didn't call for assistance, so I just sealed the outer hatchway and headed straight up to the flight deck.

  The cramped room was empty when I arrived, but a glance at the status board showed the cargo hatch was still open. That would be where my copilot would be.

  Dropping into the pilot's seat, I keyed the intercom for the cargo bay. "Yo, Bilko," I called. "How's it going?"

  "Coming along nicely," First Officer Will Hobson's voice replied. "Got all the power lifters aboard, and it looks like we'll have room for most of that gourmet food, too."

  "Well, don't start figuring the profit per cubic meter yet," I warned. "Our passenger has a couple of Triple-F Monshtens on the way."

  "She has what?" he demanded, and I could picture his jaw dropping. "What is she, a rock sculptor?"

  "Close," I said. "She's a scholar."

  "So what, she's shipping her lecture hall to Parex?"

  "I haven't the foggiest what she's shipping," I told him. "You're welcome to ask her if you want."

  He snorted, a noise that sounded like a bad connection somewhere in the circuit.

  "No, thanks," he said. "I had my fill of the scholar class on Barsimeon."

  "Let me guess. Card tournament?"

  "Dice, actually. And man, those scholars are real poor losers. Wait a minute—here come her Monshtens now. Triple-F's, all right. Let's see... code imprint says it's Class-I electronics. Your basic off-the-shelf consumer stuff."

  That did seem odd. "Maybe she's running a holotape business on the side," I suggested.

  Bilko snorted again. "Or else she's bringing a podium sound system she could lecture in the Grand Canyon with," he said.

  Days afterward, I would remember that line. Right then, though, it just sounded like Bilko's usual brand of smart-mouthing. "What she's got in her luggage is none of our business," I reminded him. "Just get it aboard and secured, all right?"

  "If you insist," he said with a theatrical sigh.

  "I insist," I said, keying off. Bilko, I had long ago concluded, was privately convinced he'd been switched at birth with some famous stage actor, and he seldom if ever passed up a chance to get in some practice in his might-have-been profession. Personally, I'd always considered those attempts to be a continual reminder of the great contribution the hypothetical baby-switcher's action had made to live theater.

  I keyed the intercom to the engine room. "Rhonda?"

  "Right here," Engineer Rhonda Blankenship's voice came. "We in pre-flight yet?"

  "Just started," I told her. "Engines up and running?"

  "Ticking like a fine Swiss clock," she reported. "Or like a mad Bolshevik's bomb. Take your pick."

  "You're such a joy and comfort to have around," I growled. She'd been after me for years to get new engines or at least have the old ones extensively overhauled. "You might be interested to know we have a professional passenger aboard. A scholar."

  "You're kidding," she said. "What in space is a scholar doing here?"

  "Probably a study on the struggles of lower/working-class star transports," I told her. "No, actually, it's probably out of necessity. The Tower said she needed to get to Parex right away, and we were the only scheduled transport for the next nine days."

  "What, all the liners running full today?"

  "The liners don't take Monshten Triple-Fs as check-on luggage," I said. "And don't ask me what's in them, because I don't know."

  "I wasn't going to," she assured me. "If they look at all interesting, Bilko will figure out a way into them."

  "He'd better not even think it," I warned. As far as I knew, Bilko had never actually stolen anything from any of our cargoes, but one of these days that insatiable curiosity of his was going to skate him over the edge.

  "If he asks, I'll tell him you said so," Rhonda promised.

  "If he asks, it'll be a first," I growled. "You just concentrate on getting us into space without popping any more preburn sparkles than you have to, OK?

  Sending a middle-aged scholar screaming to the lifepods wouldn't be good for business."

  "At our end of the food chain, I doubt anyone would even notice," she s
aid dryly. "But if you insist, OK."

  I keyed off, and spent the next few minutes running various pre-flight checks.

  And finding ways to stall off the inevitable moment when I'd have to head back and talk to our musicmaster, Jimmy Chamala, about the details of our jump to Parex.

  It wasn't that I didn't like the kid. Not really. It was just that he was a kid, barely past his nineteenth birthday, and as such was inevitably full of the half-brained ideas and underbaked worldly wisdom that had irritated me even when I was a teenager myself. Add to that the fact that the musicmaster was the single most indispensable person aboard the Sergei Rock—and we all knew it—and you had a recipe for cocky arrogance that would practically find its own way to the oven.

  To be fair, Jimmy tried. And to be even more fair, I probably didn't try hard enough. But even with him trying not to spout nonsense, and me trying not to point out what nonsense it was, we still had a knack for rubbing each other the wrong way.

  Fortunately, by the time I finished the pre-flight—thereby running out of delaying tactics—Bilko called to say that the cargo was aboard and the hold secured. I called the Tower, found that our efficiency had gotten us bumped to three-down in the lift list, and gave the general strap-in order. Once we were in space, there would be plenty of time to go see Jimmy.

  We lifted to orbit—without popping even a single preburn sparkle, amazingly enough—dropped the booster for the port tuggers to retrieve, and headed for deep space.

  And now, unfortunately, it was time to go see Jimmy.

  "Double-check that we're on the Parex vector," I told Bilko, maneuvering carefully past the banks of controls and status lights in the slightly disorienting effect of the false-grav. The fancier freighters with their variable-volume speakers and delimitation plates could handle some limited post-wrap steering, but we had to be already running in the direction we wanted to go. "I'll see if Jimmy's ready yet."

  "Right-o," Bilko said, already busy at his board. "Be sure to remind him we're running heavy today. Probably need at least a Green, maybe even a Blue."