Starfishers Volume 2: Starfishers (8 page)

He looked for the Seiner girl, Amy, but did not see her.

Lazy days followed. There was little to do in transit. He stayed in his cabin most of the time, loafing, toying with
Jerusalem
, and trying not to remember too much. Mouse, and a few others he had met, occasionally came to visit, play chess, or just bullshit about common interests.

The landsmen began to settle in, to get acquainted. The unattached singles started pairing off. Mouse, never inclined to celibacy, found himself a girl the second day. Already she wanted to move in with him.

Individual quarters had been assigned everyone but the married couples. There was room. The ship had been prepared to haul a thousand people.

Mouse immediately established himself as a character and leader among the landsmen. His notion of a chess club, while no fad, caught on.

One of the joiners was the Seiner who had striven to rattle them at Blake City.

His name was Jarl Kindervoort. He did not hide the fact that he ranked high in
Danion
’s police department.

BenRabi marveled again at the size of the harvestship. A vessel so huge that it had a regular police agency, complete with detectives and plainclothes operatives . . . Just incredible.

They called themselves Internal Security. BenRabi saw nothing in what he learned of their structure to remind him of a security unit in the intelligence sense. The function was doubtless there, cobbled on in response to the arrival of outsiders, but the agency look was that of a metropolitan police force.

Mouse’s club inspired a general movement. Half a dozen others coalesced. Each was Archaicist-oriented.

In an age when nothing seemed as permanent as the morning dew, people who needed permanence had to turn to the past.

BenRabi looked on the whole Archaicist movement with studied contempt. He saw it as the refuge of the weak, of moral cowards unwilling to face the Now without the strategic hamlets of yesterday to run to when the pressure heightened.

Archaicism could be damned funny. BenRabi remembered a holocast of pot-bellied old men stamping through modern New York outfitted as Assyrian soldiery off for a sham battle with the legions of the Pharaoh of New Jersey.

Or it could be grim. Sometimes they started believing . . . He still shuddered whenever he recalled the raid on the temple of the Aztec Revivalists in Mexico City.

One morning he asked Mouse to read the working draft of his story. He had managed to push it all the way to an unsatisfactory ending.

Mouse frowned a lot. He finally said, “I guess it’s all right. I don’t know anything about non-objective art.”

“I guess that means it isn’t working. I’d better get on it and do it right. Even if you can’t figure out what the hell it’s about, it should affect you.”

“Oh, it does, Moyshe.”

His tone conveyed more message than did his words. It said that he thought benRabi was wasting his time.

Moyshe wanted to cry. The story meant so damned much to him.

Six: 3047 AD
The Olden Days, Luna Command

He waited patiently in the line outside Decontamination. When his turn came he went to Cubicle R. No one else had done so. A sign saying OUT OF SERVICE clung to the door beneath the R.

That sign had been there more than twenty years. It was old and dirty and lopsided. Everyone in Luna Command knew that door R did not open on a standard decon chamber.

The men and women, and occasional non-humans, who ignored the sign were agents returning from the field.

He closed the door and placed his things on a counter surface, then removed his clothing. Nude, he stepped through the next door inward.

Energy from the scanner in the door frame made his skin tingle and his body hair stand out. He held his breath, closed his eyes.

Needles of liquid hit him, stung him, killing bacteria and rinsing grime away. Sonics cracked the long molecular helixes of viruses.

A mist replaced the spray. He breathed deeply.

Something clicked. He stepped through the next door.

He entered a room identical to the first. Its only furniture was a counter surface. On that counter lay neatly folded clothing and a careful array of personal effects. He dressed, filled his pockets, chuckling. He had been demoted. His chevrons proclaimed him a Second Class Missileman. His ship’s patch said he was off the battle cruiser
Ashurbanipal
.

He had never heard of the vessel.

He pulled the blank ID card from the wallet he had been given, placed his right thumb over the portrait square. Ten seconds later his photograph and identification statistics began to appear.

“Cornelius Wadlow Perchevski?” he muttered in disbelief. “It gets worse and worse.” He scanned the dates and numbers, memorizing, then attached the card to his chest. He donned the Donald Duck cap spacers wore groundside, said, “Cornelius Perchevski to see the King.”

The floor sank beneath him.

As he descended he heard the showers go on in the decon chamber.

A minute later he stepped from a stall in a public restroom several levels lower. He entered a main traffic tunnel and walked to a bus stop.

Six hours later he told a plain woman behind a plain desk behind a plain room, behind a plain door, “Cornelius W. Perchevski, Missileman Two. I’m supposed to see the doctor.”

She checked an appointment log. “You’re fifteen minutes late, Perchevski. But go ahead. Through the white door.”

He passed through wondering if the woman knew she was fronting. Probably not. The security games got heaviest where they seemed least functional.

The doctor’s office made him feel like Alice, diving down a rabbit hole into another world.

It’s just as crazy as Wonderland
, he thought.
Black is white here. Up is down. In is out. Huck is Jim, and never the Twain shall meet
 . . . He chuckled.

“Mr. Perchevski.”

He sobered. “Sir?”

“I believe you came in for debriefing.”

“Yes, sir. Where do you want me to start, sir?”

“The oral form. Then you’ll rest. Tomorrow well do the written. I’ll schedule the cross-comparative for later in the week. We’re still trying to get the bugs out of a new cross-examination program.”

Perchevski studied the faceless man while he told his tale. The interrogator’s most noteworthy feature was his wrinkled, blue-veined, weathered hands. His inquisitor was old . . . 

The Faceless Man usually was not. Normally he was a young, expert psychologist-lawyer. The old men in the Bureau were ex-operatives, senior staff, decision-makers, not technicians.

He knew most of the old men. He listened to the questions carefully, but there was no clue in the voice asking them. It was being technically modified. He reexamined the hands. They offered no clues either.

He began to worry. Something had gone broomstick. They did not bring on the dreadnoughts otherwise.

His nerves were not up to an intensive interrogation. It had been a heavy mission, and the trip home had given him too much time to talk to himself.

Debriefing continued all month. They questioned him and counterchecked his answers so often and so thoroughly that when they finally let him go he no longer really felt that the mission had been part of his life. It was almost as if some organ had been removed from him one molecule at a time, leaving him with nothing but a funny empty feeling.

Five weeks after he had arrived at Luna Command they handed him a pink plastic card identical in all other respects to the white one he had received at Decontamination. They also gave him an envelope containing leave papers, money, bankbooks, and such written persona as a man needed to exist in an electronic universe. Included was an address.

An unsmiling amazon opened a door and set him free.

He stepped into the public tunnels of Luna Command. Back from beyond the looking glass. He caught a bus just like any spacer on leave.

The room was exactly as he had left it—except that they had moved it a thousand kilometers from its former location. He tumbled into his bed. He did not get out again for nearly two days.

Cornelius Perchevski was a lonely man. He had few friends. The nature of his profession did not permit making many.

For another five days he remained isolated in his room, adapting to the books, collections, and little memorabilia that could be accounted the time-spoor of the real him. Like some protean beast his personality slowly reshaped itself to its natural mold. He began taking interest in the few things that made a unified field of his present and past.

He took down his typewriter and notebooks and pecked away for a few hours. A tiny brat of agony wrested itself from the torn womb of his soul. He punched his agent’s number, added his client code, and fed the sheets to the fax transmitter.

In a year or two, if he was lucky, a few credits might materialize in one of his accounts.

He lay back and stared at the ceiling. After a time he concluded that he had been alone enough. He had begun to heal. He could face his own kind again. He rose and went to a mirror, examined his face.

The deplastification process was complete. It always took less time than did his internal mendings. The wounds within never seemed to heal all the way.

He selected civilian clothing from his closet, dressed.

He returned to public life by taking a trip to the little shop. The bus was crowded. He began to feel the pressure of all those personalities, pushing and pulling his own . . . Had he come out too early? Each recovery seemed to take a little longer, to be a little less effective.

“Walter Clark!” the lady shopkeeper declared. “Where the hell have you been? You haven’t been in here for six months. And you look like you’ve been through hell.”

“How’s it going, Max?” A self-conscious grin ripped his face open. Christ, it felt good to have somebody be glad to see him. “Just got out of the hospital.”

“Hospital? Again? Why didn’t you call me? What happened? Some Stone Age First Expansioner stick a spear in you again?”

“No. It was a bug this time. Acted almost like leukemia. And they don’t even know where I picked it up. You have anything new for me?”

“Sit your ass down, Walter. You bet I have. I tried to call you when it came in, but your box kept saying you weren’t available. You ought to get a relay put on that thing. Here, let me get you some coffee.”

“Max, I ought to marry you.”

“No way. I’m having too much fun being single. Anyway, why ruin a perfectly good friendship?” She set coffee before him.

“Oh. This’s the real thing. I love you.”

“It’s Kenyan.”

“Having Old Earth next door is good for something, then.”

“Coffee and comic opera. Here’s the collection. The best stuff is gone already. You know how it is. I didn’t know when you’d show up. I couldn’t hold it forever.”

Perchevski sipped coffee. He closed his eyes and allowed the molecules of his homeworld to slide back across his taste buds. “I understand. I don’t expect you to hang on to anything if you’ve got another customer.” He opened the ancient stamp album.

“You weren’t out to the March of Ulant, were you, Walter?”

“Ulant? No. The other direction. Why?”

“Because of the rumors, I was curious. You know how Luna Command is. They say Ulant has been rearming. The Senators are kicking up a fuss. High Command keeps telling them it’s nonsense. But I’ve had a couple of high-powered corporate executive types in and they say the Services are smoke screening, that there’s something going on out there. A lot of heavy ships moving through here lately, too. All of them moving from out The Arm in toward the March.”

“It’s all news to me, Max. I haven’t had the holo on since I got back. I’m so far behind I’ll probably never catch up. These Hamburg . . . The notes all over the page. What are they?”

“Jimmy Eagle did that. Right after I picked up the collection. Lot of them are forgeries. The cancellations. Most of the stamps are good. He marked the reprints. You haven’t heard any news at all?”

“Max, by the time I got back from Illwind I was so sick I couldn’t see. I didn’t care. I don’t know why we’ve got an embassy on that hole, anyway. Or why they sent me there. The only natives I ever saw were two burglars we caught trying to blow up the Ambassador’s safe. They need a military assistance mission like Old Earth needs another Joshua Ja. Their methods of killing each other are adequate already.”

“Then you haven’t even heard that Ja is done for?”

“Hey? What happened? This I got to hear about.”

Joshua Ja was one of Old Earth’s more noxious public figures. The holonet newscasters had dubbed him the Clown Prince of Senegal. The nets followed his threats and posturing faithfully, using him as humorous leavening for their otherwise grim newscasts.

The self-proclaimed Emperor of Equatorial Africa was no joke to his subjects and neighbors. His scatterbrained projects and edicts invariably cost lives.

“He invaded the Mauritanian Hegemony while you were gone.”

Perchevski laughed. “Sounds like one gang of inmates trying to break into another’s asylum.”

Old Earth was a nonvoting member of Confederation. Both Confederation itself and the World Government refrained from interfering in local affairs. World Government held off because it had no power. Confederation did so because the costs of straightening out the home-world were considered prohibitive.

Earth was one of the few Confederation worlds supporting multiple national states. And the only one boasting an incredible one hundred twenty-nine.

World Government’s writ ran only in those countries deigning to go along with its decrees.

Centuries earlier there had been but two states on Earth, World Commonweal and United Asia. United Asia had remained impotent throughout its brief, turbulent history. World Commonweal might have created a planetary state, but had collapsed at Fail Point, so called because at that point in time agro-industrial protein production capacity had fallen below the population’s absolute minimum survival demand.

“You missed the best part of it, Walter. During the first week the Mauritanians shot down half of their own air force. And the Empire lost a whole armored brigade in a swamp because Ja ordered them to march in a straight line all the way to Timbuktu. The holonets had a field day. That’s the lilac brown shade there. We’ve got a Foundation certificate for it.”