John Maddox Roberts - Spacer: Window of Mind Page 3

  The ship was old, she could see that. The bulkheads lining the passageway and even the ceiling overhead were covered with a network of deep scratches, still visible under the paint. She didn't know much about ships, but she had been to the port enough times, and heard enough spacer's talk, to know that ships like this hadn't been built in a couple of generations.

  Torwald stepped from a cabin into the passageway and spotted Kiril. "You lost?" he asked.

  "Just taking my time," she said, defensively. "What are those scratches all over everything?"

  "This is an old ship. She was built before the grav field was standard. In those days spacers wore magnetic plates on their boots. The plates made the scratches. No up or down on a ship in space in those days."

  "Must have felt funny."

  "Sometimes I wish the field hadn't been invented. I think it must have made for a more intimate relation between spacer and ship when there was no gravity." He stroked the battered bulkhead affectionately.

  "Yeah, I guess so." Kiril had no idea what he was talking about. She decided Torwald was a little weird, like most spacers. He left her at the galley hatch. Inside, she found that most of the crew had eaten and gone.

  "You're late," said Michelle. She and Bert were the room's only inhabitants. "Don't worry, I saved something for you. We'll still keep it light." She set out a plate of food. Kiril wasn't sure what it was, but it smelled good. There was somewhat more solid fare than in her dinner the night before. She tore into it.

  "I was looking around," Kiril said. "I won't be late again."

  "You'll know your way around pretty soon," Bert said.

  "What's the room full of plants? Hydro something or other."

  "Hydroponics," said Bert, immediately shifting into pedantic mode. "That's where we grow vegetable matter to take up the carbon dioxide in our air and produce oxygen. Many of these plants have been specially gene-tailored for just this purpose. It also provides fresh vegetables to supplement our rations and helps to recycle some wastes. Besides, it's more homey to have growing plants around. I take it that you can read, then?"

  "Some," Kiril said around a mouthful of food. "There was an old guy in Civis Astra. He was sick with something and needed drugs to kill the pain. I used to hustle the stuff for him, and in return he taught me a little reading and numbers. He died about a year ago, I guess. I really missed him."

  "Well," said Bert, "we'll see if we can't improve your education a bit. You can begin your duties by helping me sort out the cargo records, and you'll learn a few things in the process. How does that sound Michelle, my sweet?"

  "Fine," Michelle said. "She's on light duties until I say otherwise. Here, Kiril, drink this." Michelle handed Kiril a tall beaker filled with a thick, foamy liquid.

  "It's basically milk and sugars, with a couple of eggs and a lot of vitamins and nutrients. It'll help you put on weight and dear up your deficiency conditions. Drink it slowly, over the next hour or so. From now on you'll drink three liters of this each day until I discontinue it." Kiril sipped at the stuff gingerly. It was intensely sweet, but not unpleasant. It was a temptation to drink it fast. She had never been able to get enough of sweets before, and her body craved sugar.

  When she finished eating, Kiril followed Bert to his cabin-office combination on the lower level. The two small rooms were crammed with the souvenirs of a long life spent in space, but the area devoted to business was perfectly neat and orderly. While Bert called up his records on a little desk console, Kiril examined odd bits of rock, shells, plates containing three-dimensional images of alien landscapes and seascapes, odd fabrics and jewels. "This place looks like one of those curio shops for spacers."

  "These aren't just for looks," said Bert, picking up a cube of transparent glassite in which was embedded something that looked like a lobster with wings. "Every item here has a story behind it, some connection with my life and travels. I've never felt comfortable with keeping a diary. It feels too much like talking to myself. This is my substitute." The screen lit up with columns of figures and words. "Now, my dear, you are going to learn the mysteries of bills of lading."

  Kiril leaned over his shoulder, sipping at her beaker and studying the screen.

  "These are the food troughs," Michelle said. They were in the hydroponics room, amid high humidity and the smell of growing things. This was a wonderland. Civis Astra had had no parks and Kiril had never been into the countryside. She had seen few plants in her life except for weeds growing in vacant lots and occasional decorative plants growing high on the balconies of rich peoples' housing.

  In a long, transparent trough, dozens of small, green apples grew from a single, thin stem which ran along the bottom of the trough. "A couple of centuries ago," Michelle told her, "we'd have needed a whole tree to grow these. Master stem fruits and vegetables were developed around the time of early space settlement. People just never got used to fully artificial food. In an HP room this small we can't grow enough to feed everybody, but it makes a nice supplement for preserved foods."

  The last few weeks had been like this: Kiril helped one crewperson after another, getting instruction in most of the ship's jobs and other, related subjects. Bert polished up her reading, Nancy and Finn gave her progressively more advanced mathematical instruction. Torwald versed her on the ins and outs of a spacer's existence, about which he seemed to know more than any honest spacer should. He was, as advertised, a self-proclaimed expert on everything. The odd thing was, he really seemed to be almost as knowledgeable as he said he was.

  The only places where she wasn't receiving instruction were the bridge and the engine room. She would need years more education and experience before she could begin to study for a bridge officer's job. The engine room, domain of Achmed and Lafayette, Michelle had ruled off limits as too subject to extremes of heat when under conventional drive, and the work to be done there too heavy.

  "You think I lived in a controlled environment back on Thoth?" Kiril protested. She had been learning lots of new terms like that.

  "I'm the doctor," Michelle answered, and that was that.

  When they were far enough from Thoth's primary star to use the Whooppee drive, Michelle had Kiril endure the ordeal in the infirmary, strapped into a therapeutic chair and wired from toes to scalp. She would have gone through Whooppee transition with Kiril. but at that time she was in no better shape than anybody else.

  The transition from "real" space to hyperspace by Whooppee drive was accompanied by physical convulsions as ail bodily functions cut loose at once. Much worse, the convulsions were followed by several minutes of hallucinations; horrors dredged up from the most hidden recesses of the traveler's subconscious. It was the "Whooppee horrors" that caused many to swear off spacing forever. Kiril came through shaken but sound, with only a vague memory of unbearable terrors during the immeasurable time of transition. Michelle considered it a tribute to her psychological toughness and resiliency.

  they emerged in real space in the void between the orbits of jupiter and Saturn. They still had a long way to go to reach their destination in Earth orbit. As soon as Kiril was over her post Whooppee shakiness, she went to the supply room to help Torwald with his scheduled inventory and maintenance: inspecting each piece of equipment on the storeroom's manifest and making sure that each was serviceable. They had been at this i.r.k lor an hour when Finn stuck his head through the hatch.

  "Torwald, my jewel, we have new orders: We're not to land on Earth after all, we're to rendezvous with navy station Leyte. She 's orbiting off Luna just now,"

  "Leyte?" said Torwald, eyebrows shooting up. "You're sure?"

  "Certain. Nancy picked up the signal as soon as we left hyper. It came by Priority One Secret beam." He paused dramatically to let it sink in.

  "What's that?" Kiril asked.

  "It's a beam that hasn't been used, to my knowledge, since the end of the War. How long before we get there?"

  "Skipper says a couple of weeks. We were lucky with the alignment of
the planets. Coming out where we did, it could have taken us eight weeks or more to reach Luna."

  "I know about Earth," Kiril said, "but what's Luna?"

  "Earth's moon," Torwald told her. "A barren hunk of rock with all its settlements underground. It's pretty from Earth, but not from close up."

  "Sorry, m'love," Finn said to Kiril. "You won't get to see the fieshpots of Earth this trip, it seems."

  "Suits me," Kiril said. "Cities've been nothing but a pain to me, anyway . I've had enough of them." She meant every word. The ship had come to mean safety and security to her. If she had her way, Kiril would never leave the ship for the rest of her life.

  "You won't be missing much," Torwald assured her. "The cities there are mostly slums not much better than Civis Astra. Except for a few resorts in Africa and South America, the greenery is mostly gone. They even have to keep the atmosphere replenished with artificial systems."

  "Even Ireland isn't very green any more." said Finn sadly.

  "You two just wring my heart," said Kiril. "Almost the only plants I ever saw in my life are down there in the HP room. If those are the only ones I ever see, I'll be happy." By now Kiril trusted both men, even liked them to a certain extent, but she wouldn't pass up a chance to needle Finn's Celtic sentimentality or Torwald's complacent expertise. Men had to be kept in their place.

  She was down to one liter of the concentrated nutrient per day now. She had gained at least twenty pounds, but she still looked thin. She picked up her ever-present beaker and downed the last of it, making a face at the cloying sweetness. It hadn't taken long for the sugary taste to pall on her.

  "Something very hush-hush is going on," Torwald said after Finn had left. "And we're in the middle of it."

  "No kidding," said Kiril, touching the edge of a heavy-jungle knife. She hefted the knife by its alumisteel handle. "This thing has no balance at all. A good hand with a sticker could gut you in the time it took you to crank up for a cut. And it's too point-heavy to throw."

  "Don't be so relentlessly bloody-minded," said Torwald. "It's a tool, primarily, not a weapon. For cutting brush and vines and stuff."

  "What're vines?"

  "Stringy plants. I'll show you pictures sometime. And don't underestimate its capabilities as a weapon." He took the knife and held it dangling at his side. Suddenly the blade flashed out and Kiril felt the breeze of its passage by her ear. A tiny wisp of her hair drifted to the deck. She hadn't flinched or even blinked.

  "Show-off," she snorted.

  Kiril left the galley late. She had helped Michelle clean up, then had taken a pitcher of coffee up to the bridge for the two on watch. She had tried the coffee once and found it to be repellently bitter. The others, however, seemed to live on the awful stuff. She'd taken the empty pitcher back to the galley, rinsed it and put it away. They were still a few days from their destination, there was little to do at the moment, and everybody except Kiril and the watch had turned in, or so she thought.

  As she closed the hatch to the galley and mess room, she heard an unfamiliar sound. It was so faint that it was almost subliminal, but her hearing was keener than most. Something about the sound tugged at her. It was coming from above, somewhere in the vicinity of the bridge. She went up the companionway and turned back down the narrow passage at the top. She could move as silently as a ghost when she wanted to, and the two on watch never noticed her. The sound was louder now. It was music, and it was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard. The music she was used to was the loud, abrasive noise played in the bars and houses where she had cleaned and run errands for meals. This was something entirely different. It was coming from Finn's navigation chamber.

  Silently, she opened the hatch. The navigation chamber was empty, its lights out. The music was coming from somewhere beyond. She saw a vertical line of dim light at the far side of the chamber. It was coming from a hatch she had never noticed before. She crossed the chamber and put her eye to the crack between hatch and jamb. Beyond was a room, its deck carpeted and roofed with a transparent bubble. Through it shone a multitude of stars. It struck Kiril that she had been in space for weeks now and had never seen the stars except on the screens in the bridge and navigation chamber. The room she was looking into had no instruments or furnishings of any kind, but there were marks where fixtures had been removed. Nancy Wu was sitting cross-legged on the deck, and she was making the music.

  Nancy held a stringed instrument to one shoulder, her cheek laid along its base and the fingers of her left hand magically manipulating the strings along its neck. Her other hand slid a long stick gracefully up and down, across the strings. The music tugged at Kiril's heart in a way she had never experienced before. At the same time, she felt she was intruding on something private, but she couldn't make herself turn away from the beautiful sounds. Nancy was the hardest of all the crew to talk to. She spoke briefly and to the point, always about the work at hand or instructions when she was teaching Kiril something. She never took part in the others' conversations. It struck Kiril that she was hearing Nancy talk for the first time.

  Nancy swayed where she sat, in time with the music. Once she half turned, her face slightly toward the hatch, and Kiril stepped back into the dimness. She saw that it was unnecessary;

  Nancy's eyes were shut and she was oblivious to all around her. Reluctantly, Kiril backed away and left the navigation chamber. Back in her bunk the image she had last seen stayed with her: It was Nancy Wu's face, rapt with the spell of her music, bright tears making long tracks from her closed eyes down her cheeks.

  Navy station Leyte was a small facility; a wheel-shaped main pod surrounded by floating docks for servicing naval vessels up to medium cruiser size. There were no cruisers there now. The Angel's crew could see that much on the main screen. There were only two ships visible, and both were much too large for the station's docks.

  "What are those two ships?" asked Kiril. She was disturbed at her shipmates' alarmed expressions. The entire crew were crammed into the ship's bridge, trying to second-guess their fate.

  "One is a Navy Task Force Command Ship," said Michelle, who stood next to her. "They've been demobilized since the War ended—too expensive to run. They must've taken this one out of mothballs. The other I don't recognize. It has Satsuma markings, but it's bigger than any line ship I've ever seen. You recognize it, Skipper?"

  "I've just seen pictures," said the skipper. "It's got to be Satsuma's new Supernova, the ship that's going to replace the old Class Ones. The Supernova wasn't supposed to be spacing for another couple of years, though—still in the testing stage."

  " 'Curiouser and curiouser,' " Bert said.

  "If it's Satsuma's only working Supernova, there's only one man they'd put in command of it," said the skipper, her face set in a vicious scowl.

  "Izquierda," said Ham. Kiril glanced at him. His big moon face was as bland as ever, but she knew rage when she heard it.

  "Hey, now, the War's over," Torwald said. Obviously he didn't like the tone of his commanders.

  "Well, lookee here," said Finn. He had zeroed a screen on the nose of the naval vessel. The closeup displayed a plaque of bright gold, bearing a triangle of three silver comets.

  "An Admiral of the Gold," Torwald said. He was im-pressed. "They've never had one of those in peacetime. Think there's a war on?"

  "It's got to be Nagamitsu," said the skipper. "They must have called him out of retirement." Even Kiril knew that name. Nagamitsu had been the most illustrious commander of the War. Toward the end he had been appointed Grand Admiral of Allied Fleets, the only man ever so honored.

  "What is this?" asked Michelle, of nobody in particular.

  "We're about to find out," the skipper said.

  "Maybe there will be fighting!" K'Stin said eagerly. Bert had told Kiril that the Viver race was so obsessed with survival, both personal and racial, that they usually avoided other peoples' fights. These two, however, were in their testing period, an unspecified number of years when young Vivers
wandered, seeking adventures and wars to take part in, to prove themselves fit to propagate their species.

  A face appeared on the ship-to-ship screen, accompanied by a voice. Face and voice belonged to a middle-aged woman wearing a navy uniform. At her collar was the insignia of the Security Corps.

  "Freighter Space Angel: You will dock in the main bay of the Task Force Command Ship Sic Semper Tyrannis. You will attempt no communication with any personnel except those wearing Special Security tabs." She touched her own; a disk attached to the collar of her uniform.

  "By authority of Grand Admiral Nagamitsu, acting in direct subordination to the Security Council under the State Emergency Military Bypass Act."

  Torwald gave a low whistle. "The government's cut out the whole military superstructure." He added with satisfaction: "We were right about Nagamitsu."

  "Please place your ship's controls on remote," said the navy woman. "Docking Authority will guide your ship to its berth." Despite her dry, official tone, the woman managed to give a slightly ironic twist to the word "ship."

  "Sic Semper Tyrannis," mused the skipper, lighting one of her noxious cigars. "I served in that old bucket when I was a cadet. We called her the Sick Tyrant in those days."

  "Are we actually going inside that thing?" asked Kiril. "It can't be that big!"

  "One of those bays will hold six ships the size of the Angel," said the skipper. "A TFCS is really a free-roving space station." The bay entrance loomed ever larger in the screen. "Look at that bay." she continued. "Completely empty. I can't believe they're staging all this for us. Come on. let's go to the gangway and see what this is all about."

  "This is most exciting," said Homer. "I foresee fine epic materia! in the offing." Kiril patted his shell. The crustacean had been teaching her a variety of subjects. In spite of, or perhaps because of, his alien appearance, she found it much easier to trust Homer than to trust the humans. They were now fast friends.