Starfishers Volume 3: Stars End (10 page)

His fourth morning of teaching was interrupted by Kindervoort. “Moyshe. Sorry. Got to take you off this today. They’ve got a tour planned for citizenship applicants.”

“Can’t it wait? This auction won’t, and these clowns are so bad they couldn’t hurt themselves.”

“I argued. I got shouted down. I guess they think it’s important that you know what you’re fighting for.”

“Yeah? I never did before, and I did my job . . . ”

“Oh. You’re bitter today.”

“Just frustrated. The more I see, the worse it looks. We’re going to get hurt if this thing goes Roman candle, Jarl. We won’t be ready.”

“Do the best you can. That’s all you can ever do, Moyshe.”

“Sometimes that’s not enough, Jarl. I want to do enough.”

“Make a vacation out of today. Just relax. I don’t think it’s that important. They’re supposed to show you what life’s like for Starfishers who don’t live on harvestships. Probably do you good to get away from Amy, too. I don’t know what’s the matter with her. She’s even bitchy around the office anymore.”

“You’ve known her longer than I have. You figure it out. You tell me.”

Mouse stalked in. “You ready, Moyshe? I scrounged a scooter. Let’s go before somebody liberates it back.”

Eight: 3049 AD
The Contemporary Scene

Hel did not belong. It was a Pluto-sized twerp of a straggler planet which, like an orphaned puppy, had taken up with the first warm body it had come across. When it did so, it set up for business too far from the unstable Cepheid it adopted. Even at perihelion in its lazy, eggy orbit it did not receive enough warmth to melt carbon dioxide.

Hel was a black eight ball of a world silver-chased by ice lying in the canyons of its wrinkled carcass. Its sun was but the brightest of the stars in its sky. No one would expect such a planet to exist, and no one would want to visit it if a suspicion of its existence arose.

Those were the reasons Confederation’s Navy Bureau of Research and Development considered Hel the perfect site for a bizarre, dangerous, and ultra-secret research project.

Hel Station lay buried in a mountain like a clam in sand. Its appendages reached the surface at just two points.

The Station was not meant to be found.

“Ion?”

Marescu was a sight. His waistcoat was soiled, ragged, and wrinkled. His hose was bagged and falling. His wig was askew. His facial makeup was caked and streaked.

“Ion?” Neidermeyer said a second time, catching his friend’s elbow. “You hear the news? Von Drachau is coming here.”

Marescu yanked his arm away. “Who?” At the moment he did not give a damn about anything, Paul’s news included. The agony was too much for mortal man to bear. He yanked a grimy silk handkerchief from a pocket, cleared the water from his eyes. Paul should not see his tears.

“Von Drachau. Jupp von Drachau. The guy who pulled off that raid in the Hell Stars a couple of years back. You remember. The commentators called him High Command’s fair-haired boy. They talked like he’d be Chief of Staff Navy someday.”

“Oh. Another one of your militarist heroes.” Marescu could set in abeyance the worst blues for a good fight about the Services. “Fascist lackey.”

Paul grinned, refused the bait. “Not me, Ion. I know you too well.”

No fight? Marescu faded off into his internal reality. Damn her eyes! How could she have done it? And with that.. . that
blackamoor!

“Hey. Ion? Is something wrong?”

More than normal? Ion Marescu was Hel Station’s resident crank and grouch, its leading Mr. Blues and Vinegar. Most people shunned him unless work forced contact. He had one real friend, astrophysicist Paul Neidermeyer, a lady love named Melanie Bounds, and managed a certain strained formality with his boss, Kathe the Eagle. Everybody else was fair game for his vituperation.

“Von Drachau? He’s Line, isn’t he? Why would they tell a Line officer about this place? They planning on locking him up?”

“Ion. Man, what’s wrong? You look bad. Why don’t we take you down and get you a shower and a clean jumper?”

One of the curiosities of Ion Marescu was that he appeared to change personalities with his clothing. When he wore standard Navy work clothing he was almost tolerable. When he donned his Archaicist costume he became arrogant, argumentative, viper-tongued, and abnormally misty, as if half the time half of him truly did exist in eighteenth-century England.

Marescu paused before a mirror inset in the passage wall, ignoring the people trying to pass. “I do look a little ragged, don’t I?” he muttered. He adjusted his wig, straightened the ruffles at his throat, thought, I wish this
were
Georgian England. I could call the bastard out. Settle this crap with steel.

But you would not have done that with a Negro, would you? You’d have gotten some friends together and played dangle the darky from a tree limb. If you could have stood the shame of confessing to your friends.

Marescu was not one of Hel Station’s more polished Archaicists. The others had brought their costumes and research materials with them. He had taken up the hobby only after the isolation had begun to grind him down. He had sewn his own costume, with Melanie’s help.

He was more devoted than most Station Archaicists. He prided himself on that, as he prided himself on his contrariness, his crotchets, and the perfection of his work with the test programs. He liked to think that he was the best at whatever he did—including at making himself obnoxious. He seldom noticed the compensatory sloppiness he expressed in his personal habits and hobby.

He had not researched his period thoroughly. He winged most of it. His hobby-era values and beliefs were based on hearsay.

There were those who thought the dichotomy between a perfectionist work life and slovenly play life, taken far too seriously, was indicative of deep disturbance. Admiral Adler disagreed. She felt Marescu was all showoff.

Marescu started walking. He had forgotten Paul. Neidermeyer seized his arm again. “Ion, if I can’t help, who can? We’ve been friends for years.”

“It’s not something anybody can help with, Paul. It’s Melanie. I got off shift early. The quark tube was acting up. The strange positives and bottom negs were coming off almost a milli-degree out of track. They couldn’t inject them into their orbital shells . . . They shut down. She had Mitchell with her.”

Neidermeyer murmured an insincere, “I’m sorry.” He thought, so what? and wondered if Marescu was not getting a little too far out of touch. Maybe the staff psychologists should hear about this.

A man who started confusing the mores of now with those of his hobby period was more than a little unstable.

Ion always had been neurotic. Now he seemed to have become marginally psychotic.

“How could she do it, Paul?”

“Calm down. You’re shaking. Follow me, my son. What you need is a little firewater to settle the old nerves. Eh! None of that, now. Doctor’s orders. Drink up, then tell me about it and we’ll scope something out.”

“Yeah. A drink. Okay.” Marescu decided to get blotted. “Tell me about this von Dago.”

“Von Drachau. Rhymes with Cracow, like in Poland.”

“Poland? Where the hell is Poland?”

“Where they raise the Chinese pigs.” Neidermeyer grinned.

Marescu stopped walking. His thin little face puckered into a baffled squint. Seconds passed before the intuition that made him one of Confederation’s better test programers clicked. “The non sequitur game? We haven’t played in ages, have we? Poland. Chinese pigs. Poland China hogs . . . Isn’t that the strain they were talking about on that ag show the other day? They want to breed back to something extinct?”

“I don’t know what they smell like.”

“Okay, Paul. I’m all right now. Ease up. That was a weak one, anyway. Just give me the story on your mercenary hero.”

Neidermeyer refused the challenge. “I don’t know much. It’s just something I overheard at Security. They were chasing their tails getting ready. Guess it took them by surprise. We’re here. What’re you drinking?”

They stepped off the escalator into soft luminescence just bright enough to prevent stumbling over furniture.

The lounge had been designed to give an impression of being open to Hel’s surface. Its protective dome was undetectable. The lighting was too diffuse to glare off the glassteel. The dome itself pimpled from the flank of a mountain, overlooking dark peaks and cruel gorges. The Milky Way burned above, a billion-jeweled expanse of glory.

“Ever notice how it seems colder up here?” Marescu asked, for at least the hundredth time in their acquaintance. He stared out at the poorly illuminated skin of the dead world. The inconstant Cepheid sun hung behind a peak, limning it with a trace of gold. In its off moments that sun was little more noticeable than the brighter neighboring stars. “You pick it, Paul. I’m not particular today. But build it big.”

Neidermeyer collected brandy and glasses from behind the bar. “Francis must have gone down for the Security festival,” he said. A Marine with an unpronounceable Old Earther name, dubbed Francis Bacon by the research staff, usually tended bar. Security had very little to do most of the time, so filled time by trying to make the Station more endurable for everyone.

People came to Hel on a one-way ticket. Only the Director of Research and Chief of Security ever ventured off world. For security reasons there was no instel comm system available. Isolation was absolute.

“Brandy?” Marescu asked, startled. Paul was a whisky man.

“Old Earth’s best, Ion. Almost makes being here worthwhile.”

Marescu downed half a snifter at a gulp. “They ought to turn us loose now, Paul. We built their damned bombs. All we’re doing now is piddling around with make-work.”

“They won’t, though. Security. Won’t be any leaks as long as they keep us here.”

“Paul, how could she?”

“You knew she was . . . ”

“When I got involved? I know. I keep telling myself. But that doesn’t make it hurt any less, Paul.”

“What can I tell you?”

Marescu stared into his empty snifter.

“Ion . . . Maybe you ought to ease up on the Archaicist thing. Try to get your perspective back.”

“The modern perspective sucks, Paul. You know that? There’s no humanity in it. You probably laugh at me because of this outfit. It’s a symbol, Paul. It’s a symbol of times when people did have real feelings. When they cared.”

“I’ve got feelings, Ion. I care about you. You’re my friend.”

“You don’t. Not really. You’re just here because having feelings bothers you.”

Neidermeyer glared. There were times when being Ion’s friend was work. Marescu refused to apologize. Paul took his brandy to the side of the dome. He stared at the indistinct hide of Hel. The critical question glared back from the serpent eyes of his own weak reflection.

Should Marescu be reported? Was he that far gone?

Nobody wanted to turn in a friend. The Psych people could lock him up forever. Their zoo of Hel-born mental mutations was a blue-chip growth industry.

The project was too delicate to risk its compromise by the unbalanced.

But the production team needed Ion. Nobody had his sure, delicate touch with the test systems. Best let it ride and hope he would come around. This thing with Melanie could be a positive if it jarred him back to reality.

Paul turned. He looked at a thin, short, weary little man who had a thousand years etched into his face and a million agonies flaring from his narrow little black eyes. Right decision? Those eyes were lamps of torment backfired by incipient madness.

Something rattled the foundations of the universe.

The snowy landscape glowed a deep, bloody red. The glow faded quickly.

Marescu turned an ashen color. He stumbled to the dome face, caressed it with shaking fingers. “Paul . . . That was damned close. They could have destabilized one of the test cores. We’d have been blown into the next universe.”

Fear had drained Neidermeyer’s face too. He mumbled, “But nothing happened.”

“I’m complaining anyway. They ought to have better sense.” Feeling the breath of the angel on his neck had snapped his streak of self-pity.

He stared into the darkness outside. A pale new light had begun etching the shadows more deeply. One brilliant point of light slid across the screen of fixed stars, growing more intense.

“They’re coming in fast.”

Hel’s surface was screaming under a storm of violet-white light when the dome polarized. The glass continued to respond to the light beating against it, its inner surface crawling with an iridescence like that of oil on water.

“Doctor Neidermeyer? Mister Marescu? Excuse me a moment.”

They turned. Marine Major Gottfried Feuchtmayer stood at the escalator’s head. He was Deputy Chief of Security, and a man who appeared to have just stepped out of a recruiting commerical. He was the quintessential Marine.

“Bet he wakes up looking like that,” Marescu muttered.

“What is it, Major?” Neidermeyer asked.

“We need your assistance in the arsenal. We need two devices for shipboard installation.”

Marescu’s stomach went fluttery. The butterflies donned Alpine boots and started dancing. “Major . . . ”

“Briefing in Final Process in fifteen minutes, gentlemen. Thank you.”

Neidermeyer nodded. The Major descended the escalator.

“So,” Marescu snapped. “They’ll never use it, eh? You’re a fool, Paul.”

“Maybe they won’t. You don’t know . . . Maybe it’s a field test of some kind.”

“Don’t lie to yourself. No more than you already are. The damned bomb doesn’t need testing. I already tested it. They’re going to blow up a sun, Paul!” Ion’s mouth worked faster and faster. His voice rose toward a squeak. “Not some star, Paul. A sun. Somebody’s sun. The goddamned murdering fascists are going to wipe out a whole solar system.”

“Calm down, Ion.”

“Calm down? I can’t. I won’t! How many lives, Paul? How many lives are going to be blasted away by those firecrackers we’ve given them? They’ve made bloody fools of us, haven’t they? They suckered us. Smug little purblind fools that we are, we made ourselves believe that it would never go that far. But we were lying to ourselves. We knew. They always use the weapon, no matter how horrible it is.”