The Starkahn of Rhada (7 page)

Excerpt from the
Galactic Rescript
of 7000 GE,
late Second Stellar Empire period

“Remember, Starkahn, that I, too, am a citizen of the Empire,” Ariane said positively. “I leave it to your sense of fair play to assign me a suitable role in the upcoming fiasco.” She had extended her drogue through the airlock into my apartment in the Coral Sands Hostel. The rest of her vast bulk floated in neutral buoyancy outside my room two hundred meters from the sea bottom and twice that from the surface of Zodiac Bay.

Gonlan’s mascons are grouped near the polar regions, so gravity is slightly lower than the equator, where the best diving is to be found. Zodiac Bay, an inlet of the Gonlan Sea, is a basin of fine blue water alive with fish and the varied sea mammals of Gonlan. The Coral Sands Hostel is a favorite vacation place for tourists from the galactic center and for Rim-born personnel of the Fleet on leave.

ADSPS cyborgs, in particular, like to spend their leaves in Zodiac Bay playing manta. Their shape predisposes them to the sea, of course. And at Zodiac Bay the human members of the survey teams can obtain cryogenic rebreather implants so that they can disport themselves with their cyborgs at any depth down to seven hundred meters. The psychologists tell us that there is something soothing about a return to the sea, this being apparently true for both man and cyb, who after all was made, as the
Warls
tell us, in man’s image.

So I was resting in my sea quarters: a room built of corals, damp and smelling deliciously of sea. I say deliciously because my implanted “lung” relished the salty moisture of the air and the pelagic flavor that permeated every part of the vast coral warren. And as I rested from the trip from Rhada and from the sea trip aboard the hover-craft to the marker buoy and then the deep dive to the hostel, I listened to Ariane tell me what she had learned from Erit of what was happening in the laboratories of the University of Gonlanburg.

I said, “You don’t have to remind me that you are a citizen, Ariane. I suggested only that it might be better if you stayed out of the misdemeanor I’m planning. Even a cyborg can be reprogrammed if the offense is great enough.”

“
You’re
risking it.” Ariane spoke reproachfully. “Should I do less? I thought we were friends.”

“We are,” I said. “And don’t get bristly with me and start quoting me chapter and verse about your civil rights. I know the law as well as you do. That’s the problem. You’ve already involved yourself in too much. Before we’ve done, I may be in front of a court martial or even an ecclesiatical synod. We haven’t had a heresy trial in the Empire for a thousand years, but this just might be the time. You’ve heard of Peter of Syrtis.”

“Peter the Hermit. Peter the Idiot. I know all about him,” Ariane said. “A fanatic. He can’t possibly give us trouble.”

“He’s the Grand Master’s personal nuncio to Gonlanburg. The warlords will treat him very carefully indeed. He has the Galacton’s authority, as well.”

“All the more reason for me to get into this. How did you plan to get off-world with the girl? Even assuming you could get to her and get her away from the university?”

“I hadn’t thought of that yet,” I said.

“Ah, Kier. What would you do without me--or Lady Nora--or someone to look out for you?” Ariane asked, womanlike. I could feel the coral tremble as she moved her fifteen metric tons restlessly outside the tower. A lovely swirl of bubbles and fishes stormed past the windows in the blue-green sea light.

“Ariane,” I said. “All my earlier objections still stand. It is my responsibility. Gret agrees with that, by the way. The alien is the key to the starship. There will be no controlling the ship without the girl. But--”

“No buts. You cannot succeed without me. Ergo, I must participate. What is our program?”

“Where is Erit?”

“At Gonlanburg. She will contact me when the alien is revived. I should say--
if
.”

I thought about the beautiful girl floating in the life-support capsule and decided that I wanted very much for the warlocks to revive her. And only a part of my hope was concerned with our chances of catching up with--and neutralizing--her deadly doomsday machine.

“The Gonlani-Rhad warlocks are the best on the Rim,” I said. “If the thing can be done--if there is any scientific hope--then it
will
be done.”

“So Erit says,” Ariane murmured. “But what then, Starkahn? How do we spirit an alien being out of the laboratories? And what do we do with her then?”

“The last part I can answer right away. We take her to Gret. He and Erit can put her in Triad. At least the mystery will be solved. What happens next is anybody’s guess. Lady Nora wants to use this incident, as she calls it, to build support for the Rhadan royalists . . .“

“I am deeply attached to you and to Lady Nora as well,” Ariane said severely. “But I don’t approve of royalist plots. It’s archaic to think of bringing back the Rhadan monarchy.”

I smiled ruefully at that, though I couldn’t have agreed with her more. “Well, no matter. We’ll face that problem when the time is right for it,” I said. “The important thing is being ready to take the alien the moment the warlocks bring her around. We can’t wait. Not only might Nav Peter take her off to Algol or Mars or somewhere--we don’t know what
her
powers may be. We will have to take her before she regains all her faculties.”

“What a man creature you really are, Kier,” Ariane said in a disapproving tone. “I would never have thought about that.”

I wanted to leave the hostel at once and penetrate the university grounds. I could do that because of my reputation as an amateur historian and because I was the Starkahn. But Ariane would have none of it. Erit was watching the warlocks, and she would say when we should move. Meanwhile, Ariane declared, it was important that she and I should appear to be nothing more than a human-cyborg survey team on holiday, diving in the crystalline waters of the Gonlan Sea.

The Coral Sands Hostel was one of a cluster of tourist accommodations on the main reef of Zodiac Bay. The guest chambers honeycombed the reef, and the public rooms, wet and dry, were extensive and quite luxurious for the Rim.

There were perhaps eight hundred to a thousand guests at Zodiac Bay, and of this number more than half were unattached women from every nation of the Empire. For some reason it is traditional in our time for women from the galactic center to flock to the Rim, hoping to find marriageable males. Group marriages have become very much the thing in the Inner Nations, and there are always women who seek the more old-fashioned morality of the Rim, where one husband to one wife is still the general rule.

But the girls at the Coral Reef soon identified me as an SW officer vacationing with my cyborg, and consequently they pointedly avoided me. Women who lead approximately normal lives seldom can understand the relationship between a man and a cyborg and soon conclude that the man (mentally addled by long periods in deep space, probably) is in love with (or at least infatuated with) a fifteen-ton creature of metal and tissue resembling a giant devilfish. The result is not conducive to easy relationships between SW pilots and women seeking husbands or lovers.

On our third morning of diving together, I headed for the sea-lock and a swim in company with Ariane. As I swam out to meet her, the clean, vaguely salty seawater flowed through the gills of my implant. The light at this depth was mostly blue-green, and shoals of firefish darted brilliantly across the shimmering coral of the reef. My worries about Gonlanburg and what I must do there were fading in the beauty of the sea. The nitrogen content of the Gonlan Sea is low, but at a depth of more than two hundred meters, the effect of the gas concentration is slightly euphoric. This “rapture of the depths” was once a serious problem to divers on all the water planets. But, with the discovery of the cryogenic rebreathing implants--the “gills”--that permit air-breathing mammals to breathe water at ambient pressure, any damage from the “rapture” almost vanished. Today it is a relaxing phenomenon more popular than alcohol or drugs.

In the sapphire distance I could make out Ariane’s manta form. She was swinging slowly about in circles, waiting for me. Quite suddenly I was reminded of the way she looked in deep space, with the light of the now murdered Delphinus star on her, and I wasn’t so euphoric any more.

But Ariane was a pleasant sight, silently gliding through the deep, clear water at swimming pace. The cyborg, who could move in the void at speeds that were multiples of the velocity of light, was swimming lazily, spiraling down, rolling, hanging weightless in the abyss, all with the grace of a ballet dancer.

The waters of the Gonlan Sea near Zodiac Bay are reasonably warm, but there are some deep trenches in the sea bottom off the continental shelf, so that there are many currents of much colder water flowing through the bay. These can be seen as streaks of murky green, rivers of dull color flowing through the cobalt and sapphire depths.

Ariane would penetrate one of these green torrents and slip into the lower abyss, into areas of pressure far too great for a man, even one equipped with gills. For a time she would vanish, and then she would come jetting up through the warmer layers, her sleek flanks roiling the water in shock waves so that she seemed wreathed in silver.

Pressing the base of my skull against the encephalophone pickup, I subvocalized, calling Ariane across the intervening sea. “Very pretty. Now slow down and let me join you.”

“Come along,” Ariane said. “Do you want to ride or swim?”

I kicked closer to her with my jet fins, enjoying the silky feel of the cool sea on my skin through my sea suit. “I’ll swim, thanks. We may not have much chance to do this again later on.”

Ariane coasted slowly through the blue water, with me swimming just over her titanium prow, for all the world like the remora fish of the terrestrial ocean.

“Have you heard from Erit?” I asked, after a lazy interval. “Wait until we are farther from the reef. The Navigators have been known to monitor short-range encephalophone conversations.”

We swam in silence out into the center of the bay until we were englobed by empty water, miles of it, free even of fishes, which disliked the frigid waters rising from the deepsea trenches.

“You had better come aboard,” Ariane said. “I don’t want to discuss this on external circuits.”

I was reluctant to leave the sea: carrying an implanted gill creates a psychological dependence on the ocean--the great mother of life and all that. But Ariane opened the airlock invitingly, and I moved a bit up the evolutionary scale and came aboard to stand, dripping, in the lock as she pumped the water back into the sea.

I hadn’t been aboard Ariane since returning from our last ill-fated deep space probe, and she had been partially refitted since then. I was soon to discover why, and it came as a real shock to me. But for the moment I merely stood, shivering a little at the air on my skin and gasping a little as the medium in my lungs changed from water to Ariane’s oxygen-rich gas mixture. I felt a little heady as the stuff speeded up my metabolism. I stepped from the lock into Ariane’s bridge. I kicked away my fins, but with the tubing of the cryogenic gill still protruding from my chest, I felt a bit like a cyborg myself.

I sank down onto the familiar comfort of the acceleration couch and--Only, somehow, it wasn’t quite as comfortable as it should have been. The contours were wrong, unfamiliar. I didn’t like it. It was a surprise in circumstances where there should have been nothing but the deliciously comforting touch of the accustomed.

Ariane’s voice came clearly to me: “So you’ve noticed.”

“What have the refitters done here?” I demanded.

“Those aren’t your measurements in the control couch, are they?”

“No. Definitely not.” I felt angry and cheated, somehow. No one had the right to make changes like this. The relationship between SW team pairs was so close, so unique, that unauthorized modifications were like interference between a man and wife--and on the most intimate level.

“I couldn’t be sure before,” Ariane said. “I had no way to measure the changes they made during the refit.”

“You couldn’t be sure of what?” I asked.

“Did the Court of Inquiry release
all
of its findings?” she asked.

“They announced the reprimand in the All Fleets,” I said.

“Well, they wouldn’t mention a change of assignment until it was actually made, would they?” she said.

I was dense enough to fail to understand her.

“Look around you,” Ariane said. “Any other changes?”

I did as she told me and moved about the tiny bridge with increasing consternation. “My reading tapes are gone. So are all the rest of my personal belongings. What’s the meaning of this, Ariane? Why didn’t you say something to me?”

“I wasn’t sure,” she said. “After all, if a surgeon went to work on you, could you say for sure what he took out?”

The accuracy of that homey analogy was beyond my disputing.

“The Bureau of Personnel is going to break us up,” I said, aghast. Not that the military gods and goddesses lacked the right and authority to change our assignments. That was unquestioned. But it was a thing almost never done; unheard of in the Fleet, actually. SW teams were, by custom, sacrosanct. Then why were Ariane and I being reclassified?

“It is something to think about, isn’t it, Kier,” she said. “We come back from a probe with the first specimen of what could be a lost branch of
homo sapiens
, with news of a doomsday machine loose in the galaxy--and what happens? You are nearly court-martialed, and I’m sent off to play in the sea, and neither of us are told that we are being reassigned. Now who had the power to do something like that, Starkahn? Tell me who?”

I threw myself disconsolately onto the now-ill-fitting contour couch and said, “
You
tell
me
, Ariane--”

“I can’t. This is human behavior. No cyborg ever behaved so sneakily. I can’t help you. But I can guess that it was someone who wants no further investigation of the black starship or, quite possibly, the girl in the support capsule.”