We’d had major expenses.
The worst was publicity. I hadn’t tried to keep the secret of the Grog power. That would have been futile. And that power was scary. Our only defense against a panic that could have covered human space like a blanket was the Grogs themselves.
Grogs were funny.
I’d kept pushing, pushing, pushing pictures: Grogs operating typewriters, Grogs guiding Down’s expanding herds of cattle, Grogs in a spacecraft cabin, a Grog standing by during a tricky operation on a sick Kodiak bear. The Grog always looked just the same. To see one was to laugh, and never to fear … unless there were unnatural crystalline certainties poking into the crevices of your brain.
The really important jobs for Grogs were just coming into existence. Already Wunderland had changed its laws to allow Grogs to testify in a courtroom, as expert lie-detectors. A Grog would be present at the next summit meeting between human and Kzinti space. Ships venturing into unknown space would probably carry Grogs, in case they met aliens and needed a translator.
Fuzzy Grog dolls were being sold in the toy stores. We didn’t make a dime on that.
I took a day to rest up after landing, to say Hi to Jilson and Sharon and Lois. Next morning I flew out into the desert. Now there was grass covering a lot of what had been barren land. I found a circle of white far below, and on a hunch, I dropped.
The white was a flock of sheep. In the center of the circle nestled a Grog. She boomed up at me in an amplified voice: “Welcome, Garvey.”
“Thanks,” I said, not trying to shout. She would be reading my mind, and answering through the nerve-implanted vocal equipment we’d started manufacturing in quantity two months ago. That had been another major expense, and a necessary one.
“What’s all this about dolls?”
`We can’t make any money on that. It’s not as if there was a copyright on the Grog form.” I circled the skycycle, landed, and got off.
We talked of things other than business. She wanted a Grog doll, for instance, and I promised her one. We went through a list of “lecturers,” arranging them in order of priority. Getting them here would involve nothing more than paying their way and paying them for their time. None of them would have to make any kind of speech.
Neither one of us mentioned the ramscoop.
It was not on Down. Put a weapon on Down and the Grogs could simply have made it their own; it would be no defense. We’d put it in close orbit around the Downer sun, closer than Mercury would have been. If the Grogs ever became a threat, the electromagnetic ramscoop-field would go on, and Down’s sun would begin behaving very strangely.
Neither of us mentioned it. What for? She knew my reasons.
It was not that I feared the Grogs. I feared myself. The ramscoop was there to prove that I had been allowed to act against the Grogs’ best interests, that I was my own man.
And I still wasn’t sure. Could the last man aboard have sabotaged the motor? Could the Grogs reach that far? There was no way to find out. If it was true, then anyone who boarded the old ship would report that it was A-okay, ready to fire, don’t worry about it, Garvey. Forget it. Sleep easy.
Maybe I will. It’s easy enough to believe that the Grogs are innocuous, helpful, desperate for friendship.
I wonder what we’ll meet next.
GRENDEL
THERE WERE THE sounds of a passenger starship.
You learn those sounds, and you don’t forget, even after four years. They are never loud enough to distract, except during takeoff, and most are too low to hear anyway; but you don’t forget, and you wake knowing where you are.
There were the sensations of being alone.
A sleeper field is not a straight no-gee field; there’s an imbalance that keeps you more-or-less centered so you don’t float out the edge and fall to the floor. When your field holds two, you set two imbalances for the distance you want, and somehow you feel that in your muscles. You touch from time to time, you and your love, twisting in sleep. There are rustlings and the sounds of breathing.
Nobody had touched me this night. Nothing breathed here but me. I was dead center in the sleeping field. I woke knowing I was alone, in a tiny sleeping cabin of the Argos, bound from Down to Gummidgy.
And where was Sharrol?
Sharrol was on Earth. She couldn’t travel; some people can’t take space. That was half our problem, but it did narrow it down; and if I wanted her, I need only go to Earth and hunt her up in a transfer-booth directory.
I didn’t want to find her. Not now. Our bargain had been clear, and also inevitable; and there are advantages to sleeping alone. I’ll think of them in a moment.
I found the field control-switch. The sleeper field collapsed, letting me down easy. I climbed into a navy-blue falling jumper, moving carefully in the narrow sleeping cabin, statted my hair and went out.
Margo hailed me in the hall, looking refreshingly trim and lovely in a clinging pilot’s uniform. Her long, dark hair streamed behind her, rippling, as if underwater or in free fall. “You’re just in time. I was about to wake everyone up.”
“It’s only nine-thirty. You want to get lynched?”
She laughed. “I’ll tell them it was your idea. No, I’m serious, Bey. A month ago a starseed went through the Gummidgy system. I’m going to drop the ship out a light-month away and let everybody watch.”
“Oh. That’ll be nice,” I said, trying for enthusiasm. “I’ve never seen a starseed set sail.”
“I’ll give you time to grab a good seat.”
“Right. Thanks.” I waved and went on, marveling at myself. Since when have I had to work up enthusiasm? For anything?
Margo was Captain M. Tellefsen, in charge of getting the Argos to Gummidgy sometime this evening. We’d spent many of her off-duty hours talking shop, since the Argos resembled the liners I used to fly seven years ago, before my boss, Nakamura Lines, collapsed. Margo was a bright girl, as good a spacer as I’d been once. Her salary must have been good too. That free-fall effect is the most difficult trick a hairdresser can attempt. No machine can imitate it.
Expensive tastes…I wondered why she’d left Earth. By flatlander standards she was lovely enough to make a fast fortune on tridee.
Maybe she just liked space. Many do. Their eyes hold a dreamy, distant look, a look I’d caught once in Margo’s green eyes.
This early the lounge held only six passengers out of the twenty-eight. One was a big biped alien, a kdatlyno touch-sculptor named Lloobee. The chairs were too short for him. He sat on a table, with his great flat feet brushing the floor, his huge arms resting on horn-capped knees.
The other nonhumans aboard would have to stay in their rooms. Rooms 14-16-18 were joined and half full of water, occupied by a dolphin. His name was Pszzzz, or Bra-a-ack, or some such impolite sound. Human ears couldn’t catch the ultrasonic overtones of that name, nor could a human throat pronounce it, so he answered to Moby Dick. He was on his way to Wunderland, the Argos’ next stop. Then there were two sessile grogs in 22, and a flock of jumpin’ jeepers in 24, with the connecting door open so the Grogs could get at the jumpin’ jeepers, which were their food supply. Lloobee, the kdatlyno touch-sculptor, had room twenty.
I found Emil at the bar. He raised a thumb in greeting, dialed me a Bloody Marriage, and waited in silence for my first sip. The drink tasted good, though I’d been thinking in terms of tuna and eggs.
The other four passengers, eating breakfast at a nearby table, all wore the false glow of health one carries out of an autodoc tank. Probably they’d been curing hangovers. But Emil always looked healthy, and he couldn’t get drunk no matter how hard he tried. He was a Jinxian, short and wide and bull-strong: a topflight computer-programmer with an intuitive knack for asking the right questions when everyone else has been asking the wrong ones and blowing expensive circuits in their iron idiots.
“So,” he said.
“So,” I responded, “I’ll do you a favor. Let’s go sit by the window.”
He
looked puzzled, but went.
The Argos lounge had one picture window. It was turned off in hyperspace, so that it looked like part of the wall, but we found it from memory and sat down. Emil asked, “What’s the favor?”
“This is it. Now we’ve got the best seats in the house. In a few minutes everyone will be fighting for a view because Margo’s stopping the ship to show us a starseed setting sail.”
“Oh? Okay, I owe you one.”
“We’re even. You bought me a drink.”
Emil looked puzzled, and I realized I’d put an edge in my voice. As if I didn’t want anyone owing me favors. Which I didn’t. But it was no excuse for being a boor.
I dialed a breakfast to go with the drink: tuna fillet, eggs Florentine, and double-strength tea. The kitchen had finished delivering it when Margo spoke over the intercom, as follows: “Ladies and gentlemen and other guests, we are dropping out some distance from CY Aquarii so that you may watch a starseed which set sail in the system of Gummidgy last month. I will raise the lounge screen in ten minutes.” Click.
In moments we were surrounded. The kdatlyno sculptor squeezed in next to me, spiked knees hunched up against the lack of room, the silver tip of the horn on his elbow imperiling my eggs. Emil smiled with one side of his mouth, and I made a face. But it was justice. I’d chosen the seats myself.
The window went on. Silence fell.
Everyone who could move was crowded around the lounge window. The kdatlyno’s horned elbow pinned a fold of my sleeve to the table. I let it lie. I wasn’t planning to move, and kdatlyno are supposed to be touchy.
There were stars. Brighter than stars seen through atmosphere, but you get used to that. I looked for CY Aquarii and found a glaring white eye.
We watched it grow.
Margo was giving us a slow telescopic expansion. The bright dot grew to a disk bright enough to make your eyes water, and then no brighter. The eyes on a ship’s hull won’t transmit more than a certain amount of light. The disk swelled to fill the window, and now dark areas showed beneath the surface, splitting and disappearing and changing shape and size, growing darker and clearer as they rode the shock wave toward space. The core of CY Aquarii exploded every eighty-nine minutes. Each time the star grew whiter and brighter, while shock waves rode the explosion to the surface. Men and instruments watched to learn about stars.
The view swung. A curved edge of space showed, with curling hydrogen flames tracing arcs bigger than some suns. The star slid out of sight, and a dully glowing dot came into view. Still the view expanded, until we saw an egg-shaped object in dead center of the window.
“The starseed,” said Margo via intercom. There was cool authority in her public-speaking voice. “This one appears to be returning to the galactic core, having presumably left its fertilized egg near the tip of this galactic arm. When the egg hatches, the infant starseed will make its own way home across fifty thousand light-years of space…”
The starseed was moving fast, straight at the sensing eye, with an immediacy that jarred strangely against Margo’s dry lecture-voice. Suddenly I knew what she’d done. She’d placed us directly in the path of the starseed. If this one was typical of its brethren, it would be moving at about point eight lights. The starseed’s light-image was moving only one-fifth faster than the starseed itself, and both were coming toward us. Margo had set it up so that we watched it five times as fast as it actually happened.
Quite a showman, Margo.
“…believe that at least some eggs are launched straight outward, toward the Clouds of Magellan or toward the globular clusters or toward Andromeda. Thus, the starseeds could colonize other galaxies, and could also prevent a population explosion in this galaxy.” There were pinpoints of blue light around the starseed now: newsmen from Down, come to Gummidgy to cover the event, darting about in fusion ships. “This specimen is over a mile in thickness and about a mile and a half in length…”
Suddenly it hit me.
Whatinhell was the kdatlyno watching? With nothing resembling eyes, with only his radar sense to give form to his surroundings, he was seeing nothing but a blank wall!
I turned. Lloobee was watching me.
Naturally. Lloobee was an artist, subsidized by his own world government, selling his touch-sculptures to humans and Kzinti so that his species would acquire interstellar money. Finagle knew they didn’t have much else to sell—yet. They’d been propertyless slaves before we took their world from the Kzinti, but now they were building industries.
He didn’t look like an artist. He looked like a monster. That brown dragon skin would have stopped a knife. Curved silver-tipped horns marked his knees and elbows, and his huge hands, human in design, nonetheless showed eight retractile claws at the knuckles. No silver there. They were filed sharp and then buffed to a polished glow. The hands were strangler’s hands, not sculptor’s hands. His arms were huge even in proportion to his ten-foot height. They brushed his knees when he stood up.
But his face gave the true nightmare touch. Eyeless, noseless, marked only by a gash of a mouth and by a goggle-shaped region above it where the skin was stretched drumhead taut. That tympanum was turned toward me. Lloobee was memorizing my face.
I turned back as the starseed began to unfold.
It seemed to take forever. The big egg fluttered; its surface grew dull and crinkly and began to expand. It was rounding the sun now, lighted on one side, black on the other. It grew still bigger, became lopsided…and slowly, slowly the sail came free. It streamed away like a comet’s tail, and then it filled, a silver parachute with four thread-like shrouds pointing at the sun. Where the shrouds met was a tiny knob.
This is how they travel. A starseed spends most of its time folded into a compact egg shape, falling through the galaxy on its own momentum. But inevitably there come times when it must change course. Then the sail unfolds: a silver mirror thinner than the paint on a cheap car, but thousands of miles across. A cross-shaped thickening in the material of the sail is the living body of the starseed itself. In the knob that hangs from the shrouds is more living matter. There are the muscles to control the shrouds and set the attitude of the sail; and there is the egg, fertilized at the Core, launched near the galactic rim.
The sail came free, and nobody breathed. The sail expanded, filled the screen, and swung toward us. A blue-white point crossed in front of it, a newsman’s ship, a candle so tiny as to be barely visible. Now the sail was fully inflated by the light from behind, belling outward, crimped along one side for attitude control.
The intercom said, “And that’s it, ladies and gentlemen and other guests. We will make one short hyperspace hop into the system of Gummidgy and will proceed from there in normal space. We will be landing in sixteen hours.”
There was a collective sigh. The kdatlyno sculptor took his horn out of my sleeve and stood up, improbably erect.
And what would his next work be like? I thought of human faces set in expressions of sheer wonder and grinning incredulity, muscles bunched and backs arched forward for a better view of a flat wall. Had Lloobee known of the starseed in advance? I thought he had.
Most of the spectators were drifting away, though the starseed still showed. My tea was icy. We’d been watching for nearly an hour, though it felt like ten minutes.
Emil said, “How are you doing with Captain Tellefsen?”
I looked blank.
“You called her Margo a while back.”
“Oh, that. I’m not really trying, Emil. What would she see in a crashlander?”
“That girl must have hurt you pretty bad.”
“What girl?”
“It shows through your skull, Bey. None of my business, though.” He looked me up and down, and I had the uncomfortable feeling that my skull really was transparent. “What would she see? She’d see a crashlander, yes. Height seven feet, weight one sixty pounds—close enough? White hair, eyes blood-red. Skin darkened with tannin pills, just like the rest of us. But you must take more tannin pi
lls than anybody.”
“I do. Not, as you said, that it’s any of your business.”
“Was it a secret?”
I had to grin at that. How do you hide the fact that you’re an albino? “No, but it’s half my problem. Do you know that the Fertility Board of Earth won’t accept albinos as potential fathers?”
“Earth is hardly the place to raise children, anyway. Once a flatlander, always a flatlander.”
“I fell in love with a flatlander.”
“Sorry.”
“She loved me, too. Still does, I hope. But she couldn’t leave Earth.”
“A lot of flatlanders can’t stand space. Some of them never know it. Did you want children?”
“Yah.”
In silent sympathy Emil dialed two Bloody Marriages. In silent thanks I raised the bulb in toast, and drank.
It was as neat a cleft stick as had ever caught man and woman. Sharrol couldn’t leave Earth. On Earth she was born, on Earth she would die, and on Earth she would have her children.
But Earth wouldn’t let me have children. No matter that forty percent of We Made It is albino. No matter that albinism can be cured by a simple supply of tannin pills, which anyone but a full-blooded Maori has to take anyway if he’s visiting a world with a brighter-than-average star. Earth has to restrict its population, to keep it down to a comfortable eighteen billion. To a flatlander that’s comfortable. So…prevent the useless ones from having children—the liabilities, such as paranoia-prones, mental deficients, criminals, uglies, and Beowulf Shaeffer.
Emil said, “Shouldn’t we be in hyperspace by now?”
“Up to the captain,” I told him.
Most of the passengers who had watched the starseed were now at tables. Sleeping cubicles induce claustrophobia. Bridge games were forming, reading screens were being folded out of the walls, drinks were being served. I reached for my Bloody Marriage and found, to my amazement, that it was too heavy to pick up.