Starfishers Volume 2: Starfishers (17 page)

“Well. You make a striking officer,” Amy said when he returned from the bathroom. “If you had a beard you’d look a little like Robert E. Lee.”

“Yeah? Can you do something about this damned sword? How the hell did they get around without falling on their faces all the time?”

She giggled as she made adjustments. “What?”

“Just wondering how many Jewish generals there were in the Confederate Army.”

“There’re a lot . . . Oh, you mean that Confederation. I don’t get it. Why should that be funny?”

“You have to know the period.”

“Well, you’ve lost me. I only know it from military history at Academy. I can tell you why Longstreet did what he didn’t do at Gettysburg, but not what religion he was. Anyway, I’m not Jewish. And you know it.”

“What are you, then? Do you believe in anything, Moyshe?”

Poking again. Prying. For her own sake, he guessed. Fisher Security probably would not care about his religion.

He wanted to make a snappy comeback, but she had struck too close to the core of his dissatisfaction. At the moment he did not believe in anything, and himself least of all. And that, he thought, was curious, because he had not had these kinds of feelings since coming out of the line. Not till this mission had begun. “The Prophet Murphy,” he said.

“Murphy? I don’t get it. Who the hell is Murphy? I expected death and taxes.”

“The Prophet Murphy. The guy who said, ‘If anything can possibly go wrong, it will.’ My life has been a testimonial.”

She stepped back, shook her head slowly. “I don’t know what to make of you, Moyshe. Yes I do. Maybe. Maybe I’ll just make you happy in spite of yourself.”

“Blood from a turnip, Lady.” He had had enough talk. Taking her arm, he headed for the ball, for the moment forgetting that he did not know where he was going. Then he saw that she had brought an electric scooter. The Seiners used them whenever they had to travel any distance. There were places in
Danion
that were literally days away by foot.

Red-faced, he settled onto the passenger seat, facing backward.

They did not exchange a word during the trip. Moyshe suffered irrational surges of anger, alternating with images of the gun. That thing scared the hell out of him. He was no triggerman. It seemed to have less contact with reality than did his wanting.

He had become, on a low-key, reflexively suppressed level, convinced that he was going insane.

Time seemed to telescope. The unwanted thoughts would not go away. His hands grew cold and clammy. His mood sank . . . 

Amy swung to the passage wall, parked, plugged the scooter into a charger circuit. It became one of a small herd of orange beasts nursing electrical teats. “Good crowd,” he said inanely, taking a clumsy poke at the silence.

“Uhm.” She paused to straighten his collar and sword. “Come on.” Her face remained studiedly blank, landside style. It was a bit of home for which he was ungrateful.

The ball seemed a repeat of the morning’s get-together. The same people were there. Only a hundred or so were in appropriate costume. Twice as many wore every get-up from Babylon to tomorrow, and as many again wore everyday jumpsuits.

Moyshe froze just inside the doorway.

“What is it?” Amy asked.

“I’m not sure. I don’t have the right, but . . . I feel like something’s been taken away from me.” Had all those Vikings and Puritans and Marie Antoinettes stolen his moment of glory? Had he been bitten by the Archaicist bug?

“It’s our history, too, remember?” Amy countered, misunderstanding. “You said everybody’s roots go back to Old Earth.”

A hand took Moyshe’s left elbow. “Mint julep, sir?”

BenRabi turned to face Jarl Kindervoort, who wore buckskins and coonskin cap.
Dan’l Deathshead,
he thought.
Scair ’em injuns right out’n Kaintuck
.

“The damn thing fits you better than it does me,” Kindervoort observed.

“It’s your costume?”

“Yeah. Let’s see what they’ve got at the bar, Moyshe.”

Amy had disappeared. And Kindervoort’s tone implied business. Feeling put-upon, benRabi allowed himself to be led to the bar.

That was another unpleasantness. The setup was Wild West, with a dozen rowdy black hat types attached, busy making asses of themselves with brags and mock gunfights. Acrid gunsmoke floated around in grey-blue streamers.

Of all the period crap that Archaicists bought, Moyshe felt Wild West was the worst. It was all made-up history, a consensus fantasy with virtually no foundation in actual history.

His mother’s first Archaicist flier had been Wild West. It had come during his difficulties at Academy, when he had desperately needed an anchor somewhere. She had not given him what he had needed. She had not had the time.

To top it off, the Sangaree woman was there. She had assumed the guise of The Lady Who Goes Upstairs.

“Appropriate,” benRabi muttered. Her awesome sexual appetites had grown since The Broken Wings.

She was watching him with Jarl. Was she getting a little worried? Wondering when he would turn her in? He smiled at her. Let her sweat.

There was a stir at the door. “Jesus,” benRabi said. “Will you look at this.”

Mouse the attention-grabber and most popular boy in class, with no less than six beauties attached, had just swept in outfitted as a diminutive Henry VIII.

“We’re lucky this isn’t a democracy,” Kindervoort observed. “Your friend would be Captain by the end of the year, riding the female vote.”

Moyshe ignored the pun. Sourly, he said, “Aren’t you?” He was getting irritated with Mouse’s antics. The man was flaunting his successes . . . Envy was one of benRabi’s nastier vices. He tried to control it, but Mouse made that hard.

He faced the bar, found himself staring at some horrid-looking swill in a tall glass. “Mint julep,” Kindervoort explained. “We try to drink according to period at these things.” He sipped from a tin cup. The gunfighters were tossing off straight shots. At bar’s end a hairy Viking type waved an axe and thundered something about honey mead.

“Bet it all comes out of the same bottle.”

“Probably,” Kindervoort admitted.

“It’s your ballpark. What do you want, Jarl?”

Kindervoort’s eyebrows rose. “Moyshe, you’re damned hard to get along with, you know that? Now you frown. I’m getting too personal. How do you people survive, never touching?”

“We don’t touch because there’re too many of us. Unless you’re Mouse. He grew up with lots of elbow room and not wanting for anything. I don’t expect you to understand. You couldn’t unless you’ve lived on one of the Inner Worlds.”

Kindervoort nodded. “How would you like to get away from all that? To live where there’s room to be human? Where you don’t have to be an emotional brick to survive?” He took a long sip from his cup, watching Moyshe over its rim.

He had to wait a long time for an answer.

Moyshe knew what was being offered. And what it would cost.

The demons of his mind rallied to fiery standards, warring with one another in an apocalyptic clash. Ideals, beliefs, desires, and temptations stormed one another’s strongholds. He struggled to keep that armageddon from painting itself on his face.

He was good at that. He had had decades of practice.

It occurred to him that Kindervoort was Security, and Security men did not deal in the obvious. “Get thee behind me, Satan.”

Kindervoort laughed. “All right, Moyshe. But we’ll talk about it later. Go on. Find Amy. Have a good time. It’s a party.”

He vanished before Moyshe could respond. Amy appeared on cue.

“Rotten trick, Amy Many-Names, letting that vampire get ahold of me.” Kindervoort’s retreat raised his spirits. He felt benevolent toward the universe. He would let it roll on awhile.

“What did he do?”

“Nothing much. Just tried to get me to defect.”

She just stared at him, apparently wondering why he was not shrieking with joy. Seldom did a landsman receive the opportunity to become a Seiner.

It was human nature to think your own acre was God-chosen, he realized. And Amy’s was one he would not mind entering—though not on Kindervoort’s terms. He was not in love with Confederation or the Bureau, but he would never sell them out.

“Let’s dance,” Amy suggested. “That’s what we came for.”

Time drifted away. Moyshe began to enjoy himself. He discovered that he was spending the evening with a woman who mattered more than the bag of duffel with sex organs she had been when they had arrived.

Somewhere along the way one of Amy’s cousins invited them to a room party. No longer tense and wary, he said, “Why not? Sounds good.” A moment later he and Amy were part of a gay crowd on scooters, shooing pedestrians with rebel yells. The partiers were mostly youngsters recently graduated from the creche schools, almost as new to the harvestship as Moyse. In a small group, confined to a cabin, he found them less reserved than the older Seiners he met while working.

They seemed to have Archaicist tendencies oriented toward the late twentieth century youth cults. At least the cabin belonged to someone fond of the approximate period. Moyshe could not identify it for certain.

Liquor flowed. Smoke filled the air. Time passed. Quiet in a corner, with Amy most of the time but sometimes without, observing, he gradually settled into a strange mood wherein he became detached from his environment. The bittersweet smoke was more to blame than the alcohol. It was dense enough to provide a high without his having to toke any of the odd little cigarettes offered him.

Marijuana, someone called them. He vaguely remembered it from childhood, as something the older kids in his gang had used. He had never done dope himself.

His companions coughed and gasped and made faces, but persisted. The drug was part of the period cult. He drifted farther from reality himself, floating free, till he swam in a mist of uninhibited, irrational impressions.

The touch of a woman on his hand—sail on, silver girl—and the flavor of whiskey on his tongue. Dancing light, harsh in a distant corner, all shadows and angles beside him. His fingers slipped into the warm place at the back of Amy’s neck. She purred, moving from the arm of the chair into his lap. He thought sex . . . No. He was not drunk enough to forget Alyce. Fear arose. Shadows grew, beckoning. In their hearts lurked dark things, wicked spirit-reevers from the deeps of the past come to stalk him along the shores of the future. There was a magic at work in that room. He and Amy were suddenly alone amid the horde.

Alone among the golden people, all of them ten years their junior, each with a newly minted shiny innocence—on some becoming tarnished. He did not care.

They talked, she a little deeply, and he with scant attention. He was not ready to explore her yet. But it seemed, from hints she dropped, that their pasts might read like sides of the same coin. An unhappy affair lay behind her, and something physical, sexual, that she was not yet ready to yield, was troubling her now. He did not press. His own midnight-eyed haunts were lurking in the wings.

On. On. Near midnight, in a moment of clarity, he noticed her left-handedness for the first time because of the way she offered him a can of Archaicist-trade beer. Left-handed, pop the top, shift hands, offer with a bend of the wrist because he was right-handed. He marveled because he had not noticed it earlier. He was supposed to be an observant man. It was his profession. October thoughts died as his interest increased and he became aware of the intenseness of Amy’s every move.

She laughed a lot, usually at things that were not funny. Her own fanged shadows were closing in, memories that she had to exorcise with forced mirth. She was trying to keep her devil out of sight, but he found its shaggy edges familiar. It was a cousin of his own.

While a dozen people silently considered the songs of someones named Simon and Garfunkel, or Buddy Holly, he discovered how nicely they fit. She spent an hour in his lap without making him uncomfortable. His left hand touched the back of her neck, his right lay on the curve of her left hip, and her head rested nicely on his left shoulder, beneath his chin. Her hair had a pale, pleasant, unfamiliar scent.

Weren’t they a little old for this?

Shadows in the doorways, shadows on the walls. Don’t ask questions. He listened to her heartbeat, three beats for his two.

He shivered as his monster shuffled closer. Amy moved, wriggling nearer. She chuckled softly when he grunted from the pain-tweak of her bony bottom shifting in his lap.

The partiers began drifting out, off to their private places, to be lonely, or frightened, or together till the reality of morning swept them back to work and today. Soon there were just three couples left. Moyshe shivered as he lifted Amy’s chin. She resisted a moment, then surrendered. The kiss became intense. The shadows retreated a bit.

“Come on,” she said, bouncing up, yanking his arm. They darted into the passageway, boarded the scooter, and flew to his cabin. She went in with him, locking the door behind her.

But the time was not yet right. They spent the night sleeping. Just cuddling and sleeping, hiding from the darkness. Neither was ready to risk anything more.

She was gone when he awakened. And his wants and haunts were strangely quiet.

Where would they go from here? he wondered.

Twelve: 3047 AD
The Olden Days, The Mother World

Perchevski shuffled from foot to foot. He was too nervous to sit. He had not realized that going home would unleash so much emotion.

He glanced around the lounge. The lighter would be carrying a full load. Tourists and business people. The former were mostly Ulantonid and Toke. They huddled in racial clumps, intimidated by Old Earth’s xenophobic reputation, yet determined to explore the birth world of Man. The Toke nerved themselves with bold talk. Their every little quirk or gesture seemed to proclaim, “We are the Mel-Tan Star Warriors of the Marine Toke Legion. We are the Chosen of the Star Lords. The delinquents of a decadent world cannot frighten us.”

But they were scared.

No enemy could intimidate the Toke. The Toke War had proven that. Only the stroke of diplomatic genius that had made a place for them in Service, and a place for Toke in Confederation, as equals, had saved the Warrior Caste from extinction.