Shipstar (10 page)

“If you keep caressing my leg, I’ll tell you.”

Cliff laughed and kept up a smooth, steady stroking of her tawny leg. He hadn’t noticed he was doing it. “I don’t see how we can find Beth or stay away from the Folk, much less figure out this place.”

Irma shrugged. “I don’t either. Yet.”

“What makes you think we can?”

“Well, for one thing, it’s us. And we have smarts.”

“Smarter than what built this contraption?”

“Well, there’s street smarts on Earth—remember that phrase? Means you can get around on your own. Maybe here we have planet smarts.”

“Which means?” A pretty obvious way not to give away what he thought, but people didn’t seem to notice it.

“This place seems to be deeply conservative. You have to be, to keep a contrivance like this running. Hell, even at first glance, I knew it wasn’t stable. If the Bowl gets closer to the star, the biosphere heats up
and
starts to fall toward the star. To correct that, I’d guess the locals have to fire up the jet stronger, propel the star away, and get back to the right distance for heating. Then there’s the problem of what to do if I stamp my foot and the Bowl starts to wobble. It must be they have correction mechanisms in place. On a planet, inertia alone, and Newton’s laws, keep you going if you do nothing. Not here.”

“Ah, the spirit of an engineer. You didn’t answer my question.”

She chuckled. “You noticed! I’d say stay here, try to get back in touch with
SunSeeker.
Let Redwing figure a way to help us.”

“He doesn’t seem to have a clue. Unless you’re down here, it’s hard to get a grip on the quiet, odd ways this place is so different from a planet.”

“Such as?”

“It’s impossibly big, but it’s mostly vacant. Why?”

“It suits the Folk mentality, must be. Lots of natural landscape—okay, not natural, but it’s shaped to feel natural. It’s a park, really. The Sil fit in here, too.”

“Nomad habits of mind, right. And the Bowl is a nomad, too. Wanderers living on a wandering artifact. A big, smart object.”

She pursed her lips. “Smart? Because it has to be managed all the time, kept from falling into its star?”

“It moves forward in a dangerous way, just like us. Any two-legged creature has to fall forward and catch itself. Aside from birds, there aren’t many Earthside animals that do that. The most common two-legged one is us.”

She considered this. “The Bird Folk are two-legged, in a way. Though I saw them move on all fours, too, since the forearms can help them for stability. Maybe they’re concerned about not falling, because they’re massive.”

“So they have the same gut instinct—move forward, even if it’s tricky. I—”

Shouting in the distance. Irma got up and pulled on her rather tattered uniform, stuck a head out through the curtain of her chamber. “Quert? What’s—?”

The alien came into the room in the quick, sliding way the Sil made look so liquidly graceful.

“Come … they.”

Cliff hauled out of the hammock, feeling his joints ache and eyes sticky. His fingers fumbled as he got dressed. Irma went with Quert. By the time he got to the entrance, they were all staring up at something humming in the sky. Not the balloon creature that had fired on them all, something smaller, faster. It skimmed low, wings purring. A slim, winged thing of feathers and a big crusty head that scanned the land below systematically. Its big glittering eyes saw the Sil settlement and turned toward them.

“Like a huge dragonfly,” Irma whispered.

Quert said, “Scout. Smart one. High value, so Folk must—”

The thing surged as it turned toward them. Cliff said, “Inside!”

The nearest building was ceramic coated with crusty, bronzed metal. He ran toward it as he looked back. Howard was watching with binoculars the slim body as it canted in the air, wings furious. “Howard!”

Quert was faster than the humans and got into the building entrance. It caught the big hinged door and swung it nearly closed as people ran under its arch. “Howard!” Cliff called, and then went in.

“We must be inside,” Quert said. “Scout smart with—”

A humming in the air washed over them. Cliff saw Howard jerk and grab with frenzied fingers at his head. A startled yelp from him turned to a high, shrill scream. Howard fell and was snatching at his legs, head, chest. His jaw yawned wide with a colossal cry. His eyes bulged white.

Quert slammed the heavy metal door closed and drove a latch into place, cutting off Howard’s shriek like a knife.

Cliff stood blinking at the big door, unable to push away the sharp image of Howard frantically slapping at invisible demons.

The humans looked around at the crowds, dazed. There were many Sil already inside, providing a chorus of their sliding speech, feet shuffling, eyes shifting uneasily at this latest attack. Others, though, slumped against walls and let their heads rest back, eyes closed, as if resigned to absorbing yet one more disaster.

“They get to shelter fast,” Irma noted. “Seem to be riding it out, pacing themselves.”

There were no windows in this place. Phosphors lit the narrow rooms. Cliff went through the Sil crowds, their eyes tracking him, and down a corridor, searching for a way to see out. The air hung thick and carried an odd, sour flavor.

He turned back and found Quert following him, who said, “Hurt come through glass.”

“You come here to get away from the Folk microwave weapon?”

Quert made the odd, waggling sign of assent. “They Folk change to do your kind.”

Irma had followed Quert through the claustro-corridors. “This time it hit Howard. The Folk must’ve found the right frequency or power levels.”

“Folk know technologies well. Adjust fast. Always have.”

“And sent it on that scout?” Cliff wanted to see how Howard was doing. “If I could get a look—”

“No window this place.” Quert made a hand gesture that they had learned, during the long days of burying the Sil dead, meant “rest peacefully, no cares.”

The Sil would not let Cliff find a way to look out. One of them came down a chute and, speaking quickly in the sibilant squirts the Sil used, through Quert reported that the fast-flying scout with the big gleaming eyes had circled until it tired, fired down randomly at some Sil, then flew away.

Irma said, “It’s come before?”

“Only metal stops hurt.” Quert looked weary, long lines running down its pale face and leathery neck. “Keep tight.”

Cliff knew that microwaves in the spectral region that plucked at the human nervous system were about three millimeters in wavelength. The Sil must be vulnerable to a different wavelength, since humans had not felt the pain gun used in earlier assaults. So the Folk must have developed something that hurt Howard a great deal, and done it within a short while. Something around a hundred gigahertz. Impressive.

Irma said, “So they must know you Sil very well—”

“The
aquladatorpa
knows us. It look for you.”

“You’ve been living a long time with the Folk. Under them, I should say. How do you bear it?”

Quert thought awhile and Cliff let him, not interrupting. Humans had a nervous, intrusive way of interrupting each other, a social gaffe of some consequence among the Sil. Then Quert sighed and said slowly, “You have word, ‘enchant,’ means our
ochig.
Or like it. Enchant comes from light, from sun and jet. Living essence, is enchant.
Ochig
comes down streaming. Plants, animals, Sil, and now human grow and learn and think from
ochig.
Bowl turns to keep us here so
ochig
can bring enchant passing through us. Sil in world, human in world, Folk more in the
ochig,
thick in
ochig.
Moving through world,
ochig
makes pattern. Folk see pattern. Get pattern wrong and Folk do wrong.”

“They don’t seem any better than you Sil.”

“Not better. But in right place.”

“They’re in the right place when they slaughter you?”

“Right will come.
Ochig
endures.”

This was the longest Quert had ever talked about anything, indeed the longest speech he had ever overheard among any of the Sil. They had an air of paying attention to the passing moment. He envied that.

Cliff wandered aimlessly, still seeing in his mind’s eye Howard slapping at himself and shrieking. He came upon Irma, who had found a little cranny and was sitting on the bare cold stone floor, sobbing. He sat beside her and took her shoulders in his hands and drew her close. Soon enough he was murmuring and clutching her, letting out emotions he did not wish to name. Just holding her helped. He kneaded the tight muscles in her neck and shoulders. She did the same for him and in the long dim time between them some comfort stole over their bodies and then deeper. He could not cry but she could, letting the soft sobs out one at a time. Time eased around them.

They spent more hours inside before the Sil unwrapped the shelter. They coiled up shiny sheets that they had triggered to cover all the door hinges. Intense electromagnetic waves with millimeter wavelengths can leak around slim edges, even those less than a millimeter wide.

Cliff looked out a small window and saw Howard curled up on the ground with no Sil within view. They came out a side door and surveyed the empty sky. Aybe rushed forward, unhooking the first-aid kit … and they all stopped where Howard sprawled.

Howard did not resemble a man now nearly so much as a twisted, red, roasted chicken. Lips blue and bloodless, arms a blotchy purple. His eyes peered up at them as though asking what had happened.

Cliff stared at the face a long time. This man had been under his leadership since they left the ship, since they went through the lock at their landing, and then across long weary paths and through sudden panics. Howard had a habit of getting hurt, missing jumps and landing wrong, some scrapes and sprains, despite his physical stats. The ground truth, as their training had told them, was the final fact, and no tests or training could tell you what happened when plans met reality in a usually brutal collision. Swift came reality, and it took no prisoners. Cliff had not seen this coming and Howard had lagged a step or two behind and so was now forever gone. On his watch.

Quert said quietly, “Is quick. Hurt is where beam hits.”

They buried Howard with the other Sil in the collective grave site. Cliff said little and they were walking back from the site when a faint hum filled the air. Heads turned. Sil nearby rustled with alarm.

The slim shape skimmed low, wings whirring in the sky. Sil began running. Their yellow eyes raced with jittery panic.

“Go time,” Quert said. They went.

PART III

S
TATUS
O
PERA

Scientists study the world as it is; engineers create the world that has never been.

—T
HEODORE
VON
K
ÁRMÁN

TWELVE

Memor watched the primate scream. She tried to lunge out of the beam and tripped. Sprawled. Gasped. The armaments team dutifully tracked her as the poor dim creature scrambled to crawl away. She kept up the sobbing little shrieks as the weapons crew tuned their large antennas further. It went on until Memor waved an impatient fan-display and the team cut off the pain beam.

The team was pleased, their feathers fluttering with joy, though they kept discipline and said nothing. They had correctly adjusted their weaponry and hit the right resonance for nerve stimulation in the alien.

“Tananareve,” Memor in her best learned accent, trying to address the primate by name in its own awkward tongue, “you can survive this level of agony for, you would say, how long?”

Free of agony, the primate leaped to her feet. Eyes narrow, mouth tight, voice high. “You torture me like a lab animal!”

“A legitimate use,” Memor said mildly, “in warfare.”

“War? We landed on your world-thing, tried to open negotiations—”

“No use to revisit the past, little one. We are on to other matters, and this experiment was useful to us.”

“How?” The primate sagged to her knees, than sat, wiping sweat from her forehead. “How can slamming me with that damn fire-beam help?”

“We need to know how to … negotiate … with those of your kind.”

“You mean
fight
them.”

“The opening struggle comes first, of course.”

Tananareve’s face took on an expression Memor had learned to interpret: cautious calculation. These primates managed to convey emotion through small moves of mouth, eyes, chin. They had evolved on some flat plain, apparently, without benefit of the wide range of expression that feathers conferred. Tananareve said slowly, “I’m very glad they’re still free. It means you don’t know how to deal with them.”

Memor disliked the sliding logic of this creature, but knew she had to get around it. “We need the means to bring them to order. Inflicting pain is much more … virtuous … than simply killing them, I think you will agree?”

Tananareve shot back, “Do you have anything you would die for? Your freedom to make your own way, for example?”

“No, dying seems pointless. If you die, you cannot make use of the outcome of the act.”

“Die to save others? Or for a belief?”

“I certainly would not die for my beliefs. I could be wrong.”

Tananareve shook her head, which seemed to be how these creatures implied rejection. “So you experiment on me, to see what power level of your beam works best?”

“That, and tunable frequency. How else are we to know?”

Thin lips, narrowed eyes. Anger, yes; Memor was getting used to their ways. “Don’t do it again.”

“I see no need to. You obviously felt a great terrible agony. That will suffice.”

“I need … sleep.”

“That I can grant.” In truth, Memor was tired of this exercise. She did not like to inflict stinging hurt. Yet her superior, Asenath, had commanded that a fresh weapon be developed, capable of delivering sudden sharp pain. The customary such radiator, which worked well on the Sil, had failed in the first, clumsy battle. Memor did not like to think of that engagement, which had killed the skyfish she rode in. Her escape pod had lingered long enough to witness the giant, buoyant beast writhe in air, its hydrogen chambers breached by rattling shots from the ground cannon below. Then the hydrogen ignited in angry orange fireballs and the skyfish gave a long, rolling bass note of agony. The mournful cry did not end until its huge cylindrical body crumpled, crackling with flames, against a hillside. What a fiasco!