Starfishers Volume 1: Shadowline (10 page)

She was a damned android built for modeling and screwing! You could penetrate her body, but not her facade.

Even Lucifer was baffled by her. She seemed to exist solely to be appreciated for her beauty, like a classic painting or cherished poem. Curious.

He had not thought much about Pollyanna before. She was like that painting. There to be enjoyed and otherwise ignored. It was time to start poking around, back in the silly shadows.

He would have to unravel her by reversing the usual process, by what he did not know.

Pollyanna had made a second point clear. The Blackworld affair was deeper than he had suspected. A potential mercantile war over trillions worth of radioactives did not excite Michael. Pollyanna said he seemed indifferent to the opportunity to tape the conflict. It was important to him for some other reason.

It had to be The Game.

That was Dee’s label for the feud he had been engineering between Hawksblood and Storm. He did not know Storm knew that The Game’s goal appeared to be mutual annihilation. It had been going on since the founding of the two freecorps.

Storm still could not understand why.

He bullied Pollyanna. “Who did Michael see on The Big Rock Candy Mountain? Why?” The answer had to be important.

Pollyanna did not have it.

“Ah, damn. Damn.” He let her kiss him once, then gently disengaged and departed. He returned to his study, put Cassius on call, and turned to Ecclesiastes. He found no solace there. The frenetic, helter-skelter flitting of his mind kept him from following the printed words. He tried the clarinet.

The soul-trying days had come.

Cassius listened without being noticed. “I’ve never heard you play so mournfully, Gneaus,” he said.

Startled, Storm replied, “It’s a dirge. I think we’ve reached the end. I grilled Pollyanna. She’s a good observer. You wouldn’t figure it considering how vacuum-brained she acts.”

“I’ve sometimes wondered about that.”

“You too? Then it’s not my imagination. Could anybody be that shallow without working at it?”

“Possibly. Then again, a preoccupation with sexual encounter would make a mask few men, being egoists, would care to lift. You wanted me?”

Storm made a mental note to ask Frieda and his daughter for the woman’s view of Miss Eight. “We’re getting old, you and I. We’re in our sundown days. Things are slipping past us. It’s like we’re caught in some backwater of time.”

Cassius raised an eyebrow. Storm had difficulty expressing his feelings.

“We’re on the verge of the nightfall of the Legion. Maybe of all the freecorps. I think we’ll be both cause and effect of our own destruction, and I can’t see any way out.”

“As long as there are corporations and rich men who need us, and who won’t be intimidated by the government, there’ll be work for us.”

“Time’s catching up with us. Confederation is starting to flex its muscles. It’s a historical process. It’s inevitable. Democratic control and government regulation are coming on faster than the frontiers are moving out. They’re about to catch up with us.”

“You’re too much the pessimist.”

“Consider the past, Cassius. The block vote of pestholes like Old Earth will devour the capital approach. It’s an old story. Goes all the way back to Rome. Why do something for yourself if all you have to do is vote for a guy who’ll rob somebody else and do it for you?”

Storm’s bitterness surprised him. He had not been aware of the strength of his own feelings.

He told Cassius what he had learned from Pollyanna.

“What do you suggest we do?”

“First, secure Dee here. Things will move slower if he’s tied down. Have Thurston handle that. He doesn’t have the imagination to be taken in by Michael. You go to The Mountain. Take Mouse. You won’t send him back to Academy, and you tell me he’s interested in intelligence work. The two of you, find out who Michael met there. Keep an eye out for Seth-Infinite.”

“You’re softer than you pretend, my friend.”

Storm shrugged. “Ship him home if he gets in the way. Tell Wulf and Helmut to start getting ready for Blackworld.”

“Why?”

“Looks like we’ll end up there, like it or not. We ought to be in shape. Oh. Have the older sergeants think up jobs for Benjamin and Homer. We’ve got to keep them out of trouble. Lucifer I want to backtrack his damned bubble-brained wife. All the way to the place where she was born. Got it?”

“Got it. I take it you won’t be here yourself.”

“No. I’ll rendezvous with you on your way back from The Mountain.” He glanced around, half expecting to see Michael crouching in a shadow. “Where we keep Fearchild. I want to ask him a question.”

“Where’re you going?”

“Festung Todesangst,” Storm murmured. “It was the only clue in Michael’s papers. Pollyanna mentioned it. So did Richard.”

By the raising of an eyebrow Cassius registered as much emotion as he ever did. “To the lion’s den. To see Valerie? Or Helga herself?”

“Valerie. Michael will be using the facilities for all they’re worth. And she will make sure Valerie handles the work. Valerie might know what’s going on.”

“I shouldn’t presume . . . Nevertheless . . . Gneaus, it’s too damned dangerous. If she lays hands on you . . . ”

“I’m aware of the danger. But I have my edge. She doesn’t expect me. There’s an unmonitored landing pad near an out-of-the-way entry lock. I have her recognition codes. I spent a fortune arranging this way in back when they were building the place.”

“Gneaus, I don’t think . . . ”

“You can’t talk me out of it, Cassius. It’s got to be done. Let’s get on with it. Let’s both go and get back before anybody misses us. We can’t control Michael forever even if we chain him to a wall.”

“I’m on my way.”

Storm sequestered himself with the things he loved, strolling around his study, gently touching this or that, remembering, reaching out after timeworn feelings he had almost forgotten. He and Cassius, they were not emotionally normal. Too many hard decisions, too many cruel losses, had turned them into calloused, indifferent men.

He worried about the young ones. Mouse especially. Would they follow the same doomed path? He hoped not.

His study tour was not a habitual practice. It reflected his appreciation of the dangers of Helga’s World, and his uncertainty about his ability to get out again. “The risk has to be taken,” he growled. “The thing has to be tried. The key is there somewhere. If it’s anywhere.”

He spent a few minutes with his wife, then collected equipment he had kept ready since the construction of Festung Todesangst. He said no good-byes.

Cassius would know what to do if he did not come back.

Nineteen: 3020 AD

Frog wakened in the Corporation hospital. Three faces hovered over him. One belonged to a Blake medic with whom he had dealt before. Smythe wasn’t bad for a Corporation flunky. Another was a small white face with vulpine features and hungry eyes. He did not know the man. The third was Moira. Pretty little Moira. He tried to smile.

There were no officials around. He was surprised when his sluggish mind noted their absence.

He came up cussing like a stuttering Arab. He got his tongue under control, snarled, “Get the hell out of here, Smythe. I been getting away with it fifty years. Blake ain’t going to break me with no phony medical bill.”

“On the house, Frog.”

“On the house, my ruddy red rectum. Blake don’t give away no fourth-hand condom.” He glanced at Moira, prim and blondly angelic, trying not to squirm worriedly on a hard chair. He misinterpreted her concern as embarrassment. He flashed her a weak grin. “We argue about it later.”

He glared at Foxface. The man had perched on a low dresser, one foot on the floor. “Who the hell you be, guy?”

“August Plainfield. Stimpson-Hrabosky News. Pool man assigned to cover you here.”

“Uhn?” He got a bad odor from the newshawk. Vulture-reek, maybe. His breed wallowed in it wherever there was human carrion.

He looked at Moira again. She looked anxious, frightened, and tired. Just the worry? Or the holonet people giving her hell?

He was no fan but he had watched enough HV to know the netmen pursued their stories ruthlessly, with a singleminded inhumanity.

He had half feared he would stir them up with his stunt, but had not foreseen that they would go after Moira. He had rehearsed a few choice lines for them. But Moira . . . She was a baby. She could not handle the pressure.

What did a child’s comfort matter to a vulture like Plainfield? His kind saw everyone and everything as fodder for the camera-cannon they used to down the prey they fed their monster audience.

“Moira, you go outside a minute. I got a word to say to this critter.” Pain was not making him feel reasonable. He was sure that Smythe, who had gone next door to check his metabolic monitors, was in a dither. The Doc was all right, but he took things too serious.

Hell, let him stew.

Moira crawled off her chair and left without a word. In her public reticence, and other ways, she was aping him. It was her way of showing affection. Frog found it disconcerting. Like so many men who maintain a tight rein on emotion, Frog longed for its expression in others. It provided him an excuse for opening a little himself. And it terrified him. He might get trapped into exposing an Achilles’ heel of self.

He used some of his choice words on the newsman.

Then a few more, bloody-minded, colorful, and threatening. Plainfield endured them like a mountain weathering another of countless storms fated to lash its slopes.

“What did you find out there?” he asked when Frog ran down.

“Huh? Find? Nothing. More Shadowline. More Brightside. And if I did find something, I wouldn’t tell no creepo like you.”

“Thought so. You rambled a lot while you were under. About the yellow, the orange. Dreaming, Doctor Smythe thinks. I’ve got a notion you weren’t. Dreams don’t leave men radiation sick. Yellow has meant radioactivity for a thousand years.”

Frog’s face wrinkled in a frown so deep that for a moment he resembled a dark-eyed prune. “I don’t remember so good. Oxygen starvation do things to your brain. Check my log.” He smirked. Plainfield was not going to get near his rig till Blake’s people checked it out. They might not bring it in for years.

“I did. I didn’t find anything. In fact, I found so much nothing that it made me curious. Made me wonder why a man would tell his computer to forget a place that left him half dead of radiation poisoning. Made me wonder why a man would take the trouble to register a formal claim on the shade at the end of the Shadowline when he thinks he’s dying. When he’s never filed a claim before. And it made me wonder why he revised his will the minute the claim was notarized.”

“I want to be buried out there,” Frog improvised. “Somebody’s going to do it again someday. I want him to bury my ashes on the only claim I ever had.”

“Your diction and syntax are improving.” Plainfield smiled a smile that made him appear more wolf than fox. “You may be telling the truth. Corporation people who think they know ‘that crazy dwarf’ figure it something like that. Or think you’re rigging a scheme to get them to throw money down a rathole in some cockamamie revenge. I don’t suffer their preconceptions. I don’t know you. I just know people. I think you found something.”

“Just a place to be buried,” Frog insisted nervously. This interrogation was not his idea of an interview.

Plainfield’s smile broadened. “You might get there quicker than you want. El Dorados, dreams that come true, they have a way of devouring their dreamers.”

“What the hell kind of newsman are you, anyway?” Frog was so nervous his customary act was slipping.

“Call me a dream shaper. I make fantasies come true. Mostly my own, but sometimes other people’s, too. Those sometimes turn out to be nightmares.”

Frog stopped being nervous and started being scared. He looked around for a weapon.

He was in over his head. Bluster was useless, and his condition denied him his customary alternative, attack.

Frustration kindled anger. Hadn’t his flesh always betrayed his spirit? Hadn’t he always been just a little too short, too small, or too weak? Why wasn’t somebody from Blake doing the questioning?

“Why’d you do it, anyway? I mean, make the run. Reasons after the fact could be supplied, I suppose, but I want to know what makes a man try something impossible in the first place. I’ve studied everything known about Brightside and the Shadowline. There’s no way you could have known that you’d find anything out there.”

What
does
make a man throw himself into something for which there is neither a reasonable nor rational justification? Frog had done a lot of thinking during his ran. Not once, even remotely, had he been able to make his motives add up. Most of the time he had told himself that he was doing it for Moira, but there had been times whan he had suspected that he was doing it for Frog, to salve a scarred ego by showing humanity it was wrong about his being a clown. Yet that had not taken into account the probability of failure, which would have done nothing but underscore his foolishness.

Why, then? A badfinger for Blake? Because he had had some crazy, deep-down conviction that he would find something? No. Not one of those reasons was good enough in itself.

All that time alone and still he had not figured himself out.

Thr man who hides from himself hides best of all.

“What did you find?”

Frog strove to focus on Plainfield. And realized that his earlier assessments were incorrect. The man was neither vulture, fox, nor wolf. He was a snake. Cold-blooded, emotionless, deadly. Predatory, and unacquainted with mercy. Nor was he owned. This news business was cover. He was a dagger in his own hand.

Plainfield moved toward him. A slap hypo appeared in his palm. Frog struggled weakly. The hypo hit his arm.

Wrong again
, he thought.
He’s worse than a snake. He’s a human
.

“What did you find?”

Frog knew he would not make it this time. This man, this
thing
that called itself August Plainfield and pretended to be a newsman, was going to strip him of his victory, then kill him. Even God in heaven could not stop him from talking once the drug took hold, and then what value would he have alive?