Starfarers (27 page)

“Usually not much,” he admitted. “The computer handles the data; the navigator’s in case of emergency. But need for a human can arise. No two routes are ever identical, you see, because the stars move—not negligibly in the course of centuries. Likewise dark dwarf nebulae, black holes, or rogue planets. They’re extremely few and far between, but for that very reason they haven’t all been identified, and encountering any would be fatal. Comparing the high-velocity and low-velocity starscapes gives clues to possible hazards ahead—spectral absortion lines or gravitational lensings, for instance. But interpreting them can take more, well, creative imagination than a computer program has. Twice in my time, a navigator’s called for a course change. And, oftener, he or she’s decided it wasn’t necessary, the alarm was false.”

“So that’s your work here, Kenri Shaun?” She smiled anew. “Yes, I can well picture you, with that funny tight expression, as if the problem were your personal enemy. Then you sigh, rumple your hair, and put your feet on the desk to think for a while. Am I right?”

“How did you guess, Freelady?” he asked, astounded.

“I’ve thought about you quite a lot lately.” She stared away from him, at the lurid blue-white clustering ahead.

Her fists doubled. “I wish you didn’t make me feel so futile,” she gasped.

“You—”

She spoke fast. The words blurred on her lips. “I’ve said it before. This is life, this is reality. It’s not about what to wear for dinner and who was seen where with whom and what to do tonight when you’re too restless and unhappy to stay home. It’s not about traffic in goods and information, either. The laser beams only bring news from the settled worlds, and only what the senders choose to transmit. You bring us the news from beyond. You keep alive—in some of us—our kinship with the stars. Oh, I envy you, Kenri Shaun. I wish I were born into the Kith.”

“Freelady—”

She shook her head. “No use. Even if a ship would have me, I couldn’t go. I’m too late. I don’t have the skills or the character or the tradition that you took in with your mother’s milk. No, forget it, Nivala Tersis from Canda.” She blinked at tears. “When I get home, knowing now what you are in the Kith, will I try to help you? Will I work for common decency toward your people? No. I’ll realize it’s useless. I won’t have the stubbornness. The courage.”

“Don’t say that, Freelady,” he begged. “You would be wasting your effort.”

“No doubt,” she said. “You’re right, as usual. But in my place, you would try!”

They looked at one another.

That was the first time she kissed him.

The guards
at the main entrance were giants bred, 230 centimeters of thick bone and boulderlike muscle. Their uniforms were sunburst splendor. Yet they were not ornaments. Stunners and fulgurators rested at their hips. A monogrammed plate in the paving between them could withdraw to let a cycler gun rise.

Kenri’s pain had subsided to a background ache. He
approached fast, stopped, and craned his neck upward. “The Freelady Nivala from Canda is expecting me,” he said.

“Huh?” exploded a basso. “You sold your brain, tumy?”

Kenri extended the card she had given him. “Scan this.” He decided it was wise to add, “Please.”

“They’ve got a party going.”

“I know.”
When I called her confidential number, she told me. I’d have waited till tomorrow, but she insisted this is actually a chance we should seize. Don’t hang back, Shaun. She’s counting on you.

The titans exchanged a glance. He guessed their thoughts.
Could it be a stunt, a farce for the guests? Or could he be a secret agent or something? If he’s lying, do we arrest him or pulp him here and now?
The one who held the card put it in a scanner. The screen came alight. He read, shook his head, and gave the card back. “All right,” he grumbled. “Go on in. First ascensor to your left, sixtieth floor. But watch yourself, tumy.”

It’d be pleasant, later, to summon him and make him crawl. No. Why?
Kenri passed under the enormous curve of the doorway, into a vaulted reach of foyer where murals displayed bygone battles and honors. Most of that history had happened within his lifetime. Uniformed Standard servants goggled at him but drew aside, as if from his touch. He stepped onto the ascensor and punched for 60. It lifted into the shaft through a stillness beneath which his heartbeat racketed.

He emerged in an anteroom of crimson biofabric. More servants struggled not to gape. An arch gave him a view of motion, dance, a blaze of color. Music, talk, sporadic laughter bubbled out. As he neared, a footman mustered decision and blocked his way. “You can’t go in there!”

“I certainly can.” Kenri flashed the card and walked around him. Radiance poured from faceted crystals. The ballroom was huge and thronged. Dancers, waiters, performers—He stopped in confusion.

“Kenri! Oh, Kenri, dearest!”

Nivala must have been keeping herself nearby, alert for
his arrival. She ran straight to his arms. He wondered for a second whether that was shamelessness or ordinary upper-class behavior these days. Then they were embraced and kissing. Her misty cloak swirled about them. Her perfume smelled like roses.

She drew back. Her smile trembled away. He saw that she’d lost weight, and shadows lay below the silver-blue eyes. It struck him in the gut:
This past couple of weeks, since
Fleetwing
took orbit, were worse for her than for me.
“Maybe I’d better go,” he said.

“Not now,” she answered, stammeringly urgent. “I—I hoped you’d land earlier, but w-we have to meet them sooner or later, and a bold stroke—Come.” She caught his hand and tugged. With forlorn gaiety: “I want them to see the man I’ve got me.”

Side by side, they advanced. The dancers were stopping, pair after pair, awareness spreading like a wave from a cast stone, turning faces and faces and faces around. Voices choked off. The music persisted. It sounded tinny.

Nivala led Kenri to a dais. They mounted it. A troupe of erotic performers scampered aside. She lifted her head and beckoned to the amplifier pickup. Her voice rang as loud as the voice of some ancient storm goddess. “Stars and Standards, kindred and friends, I … I wish to announce—to present my … my affianced, … Lieutenant Kenri Shaun of the starship
Fleetwing.”

For a time that dragged, nobody moved. At last someone made the ritual bow. Then someone else did, then all the rest, like jointed dolls. No, not all. A few turned their backs.

Nivala’s thunder went shrill. “Carry on! Enjoy yourselves! Later—” The music master took his cue and activated a bouncy tune. Couple by couple, the guests slipped into a figure dance. They didn’t know what else to do.

Nivala looked back at Kenri. “Welcome home.” She had forgotten the amplifier. Her words boomed. She guided him off the dais and around the wall.

“It’s been too long,” he said for lack of anything else.

A doorway gave on a corridor. It ended in a room screened off by trellises where honeysuckle climbed, a twilit room with a screen playing a view of moonlight on a lake. The music reached it, but faintly, not quite real.

Again she came to him, and now they had no haste. He felt how she shivered.

“This is a hard situation for you, isn’t it?” he said when they stood holding hands.

“I love you,” she told him. “Nothing else matters.”

He had no response.

“Does it?” she cried.

“We, uh, we aren’t alone on our private planet,” he had to say. “How’s your immediate family taken this?” The call in advance had amounted to endearments and the invitation.

“Some howled. But the colonel curbed them. My uncle, the head of us now Father’s gone. He ordered them to behave themselves till they see what happens.” Nivala gulped. “What happens will be you’ll show them, you’ll show everybody what you’re worth, till they boast about your being one of us.”

“One of you—Well, I’ll try. With your help.”

They sat down on a biopadded bench. She nestled close. His right arm was about her, his left hand closed over hers, and he breathed the sunniness of her hair. From time to time they kissed. Why did his damned thoughts keep straying?

I’ll try—what? Not to plan parties or purvey gossip or listen politely to idiots and perverts. No, that’s not for her, either. What can we do?

A man can’t spend all his waking hours making love.

They’d talked about it aboard ship, though he realized now how desultory the talk had been. He could join a trading firm. (Ten thousand pelts from Kali recd. pr. acct., arrange with Magic Sociodynamics to generate a vogue for them, and lightning flared above those wild hills. Microbes, discovered on Hathor, their metabolism suggesting certain useful variations in nanotechnics, and the jungle was a geometries of mystery. Intriguing customs and concepts recorded on a
recently discovered world, and the ship had raced among foreign stars to a fresh frontier.) Or perhaps the military. (Up on your feet, soldier! Hup, hup, hup, hup! … Sir, this intelligence report from Mars. … Sir, I know the guns aren’t to spec, but we can’t touch the contractor, his patron is a Star-Free. … The General commands your presence at a banquet for the Lord Inspector. … Now tell me, Captain Shaun, how
really
do you think they’ll handle those rebels, you officers are so
frightfully
closemouthed. … Ready! Aim! Fire! So perish all traitors. Long live the Dominant!) Or the science centers. (Well, sir, according to the text, the formula is—)

“Otherwise, how do you like being back?” he asked.

“Oh, it’s, aside from the family trouble, it’s, oh, cordial.” She smiled uncertainly. “I am a romantic figure, after all. And finding my way around in the new generations, that’s a challenge. You’ll enjoy it, too. And you’ll be still more glamorous.”

“No,” he grunted. It was as if his tongue spoke on its own. “I’m a tumy, remember?”

“Kenri!” She stiffened beneath his arm. “What a way to talk. You aren’t, and you know it, and you won’t be if you’ll just stop thinking like one—” She drew up short. “I’m sorry, darling. That was a terrible thing to say.”

He stared at the lake view.

“I’ve been … reinfected,” she said. “You’ll cure me.”

Tenderness welled in him. He kissed her again.

“Ahem! I beg your pardon.”

They pulled apart, dismayed. Two men had entered. The first was gray, gaunt, erect, his night-blue tunic agleam with decorations. After him trailed a young person, pudgy, gaudily clad, not overly steady of gait. Kenri and Nivala rose. The Kithman bowed, arms crossed on breast.

“Oh, how nice.” Nivala’s voice had gone thready. “This is Kenri Shaun. Kenri, my uncle, Colonel Torwen Jonach from Canda, of the Supreme Staff. And his grandson, the Honorable Oms.” Her laugh jittered. “Fancy coming home to find you have a cousin twice removed, your own age.”

“Your honor, Lieutenant.” The colonel’s tone was as stiff as his back. Oms giggled.

“You will pardon the interruption,” from Canda proceeded. “I wished to speak to Lieutenant Shaun as soon as possible, and must leave tomorrow for an … operation that may take many days. You will understand that this is for the good of my niece and the entire family.”

Kenri’s armpits were wet. He prayed they wouldn’t stink. “Of course, sir. Please be seated.”

From Canda nodded and lowered his angular frame to the bench, beside the Kithman. Oms and Nivala took opposite ends. “How ’bout we send for wine?” Oms proposed.

“No,” from Canda told him. The old man’s eyes, winter-bleak, sought Kenri’s. “First,” he said, “I want to make clear that I do not share the prejudice against your people. It is absurd. The Kith is demonstrably the genetic equal of the Star families, and doubtless superior to a number of their members.” The glance went briefly to Oms. Contemptuously? Kenri guessed that the grandson had tagged along, half drunk, out of curiosity or whatever it was, and the grandfather had allowed it lest he make a scene.

“The cultural barrier is formidable,” from Canda went on, “but if you will exert yourself to surmount it, I am prepared in due course to sponsor your adoption.”

“Thank you, sir.” Kenri felt the room wobble. No Kithman had ever—That
he
—He heard Nivala’s happy little sigh. She clutched his arm.

“But will you? That is what I must find out.” From Canda gestured at something unseen. “The near future will not be tranquil. The few men of action we have left shall have to stand together and strike hard. We can ill afford weaklings among us. We can absolutely not afford strong men who are not wholeheartedly loyal.”

“I … will be, sir. What more can I say?”

“Better that you ask what you can do. Be warned, much of it will be hard. We can use your special knowledge and your connections. For example, the badge tax on the Kith is not mainly to humiliate them. The Dominancy’s treasury is low.
This money helps a little. More importantly, it sets a precedent for new levies elsewhere. There will be further demands, on Kithfolk as well as subjects. You can advise our policy makers. We don’t want to goad the Kith into forsaking Earth.”

“I—” Kenri swallowed a lump. It was acid. “You can’t expect—”

“If you won’t, I cannot compel you,” said from Canda. “But if you cooperate, you can make things easier for your former people.”

It surged in Kenri: “Can I get them treated like human beings?”

“History can’t be annulled by decree. You should know that.”

Kenri nodded. The motion hurt his neck.

“I admire your spirit,” the colonel said. “Can you make it last?”

Kenri looked down.

“Of course he can,” said Nivala.

The Honorable Oms tittered. “New tax,” he said. “Slap a new tax on, quick. I’ve got a tumy merchant reeling. New tax’ll bring him to his knees.”

“Hold your jaw,” from Canda snapped.

Nivala sat straight. “Yes, be still!” she shouted. “Why are you here?” To her uncle, desperately: “You will be our friend, won’t you?”

“I hope so,” said from Canda.

Through rising winds, Kenri heard Oms:

“I got to tell you ’bout this. Real funny. This resident merchant in Kith Town, not a spacer but a tumy just the same, he lost big on a voyage. My agent bought the debt for me. If he doesn’t pay, I can take his daughter under contract. Cute little piece. Only the other tumies are taking up a collection for him. Got to stop that somehow. Never mind the money. They say those tumy girls are really hot. How ’bout that, Kenri? Tell me, is it true—”