A Stark and Wormy Knight

  “And, Doctor Balcescu?” That was Captain Watanabe. She wasn’t big on being lectured, either.

  “And there are similarities – distant and tenuous, but similarities nevertheless – between what we heard yesterday and some of the older speech systems we’ve found out toward the galactic rim. I can’t say exactly what the relationships are – that will take years of study and, to be honest, a great deal more information about this latest language – but there are enough common elements that I think I can safely translate what we heard, at least roughly.” He looked around expectantly, almost as if he was waiting for polite applause from the captain and the others. He didn’t get it. “I used what we already know about these particular rim dialects as a ratchet, combined with some guesswork…”

  “Get to the point, Doctor,” said the captain. “Tell us what it said. A lot of good men and women are dead already, and the rest of us are stranded 46 parsecs from the nearest Confederation hub.”

  “Sorry, of course.” He pointed to the com screen and the picture of the monstrous apparition jumped back onto it. I’d seen it before, of course – everyone had been watching it over and over, trying to understand what had happened – but it still scared the brass marbles off me. It was like something out of an old ghost story, the kind they tell down in the engine bay on a slow shift, with the lights down. The thing was like some wailing spirit, a banshee heralding death – and not just the death of a few, but of the whole human race. How could we beat something like that?

  As the image billowed and stretched in achingly slow motion, like living flame, Balcescu spoke.

  “What it seems to be saying, as far as I can tell, is unfortunately just as bellicose as its actions suggest. It boils down to this.” He said it like a man reciting a memorized speech, all emotion squeezed out of his voice. “ ‘Your death is upon you. Only black ash will show that you ever lived. The Outward-reaching Murder Army’ — that’s the best I can do, that’s pretty much what they’re saying – ‘will spit upon the stars that give you life, extinguishing them all. The cold will suck the life from you. All memory of you will be obliterated.’ ” Balcescu shook his head. “Not exactly Shakespeare. In fact, a rather crude translation, but it makes the main points.”

  The monstrous shape still rippled slowly on the com screen, its face glowing like a dying sun.

  “Well,” said Captain Watanabe after a long silence. “Now that we know what it said, I’m sure we all feel a lot better.”

  * * *

  Everybody on board the Lakshmi continued to hurry around as the days went past, but with what seemed like an increasing hopelessness. Rainwater was one of the longest and most important holes – without it, it would take us years, maybe decades, to make our way back. There was no other shortcut from this part of the rim.

  Under emergency regs most of the passengers had been put into cryo, except for those like Balcescu who had a job to do. I didn’t have much to keep me occupied so I spent a lot of time with the people who had time to spend with me. Chinh-Herrera the navigator didn’t have much to do either, once he’d plotted the various ways back home that bypassed Rainwater, but when he was done he didn’t really want to talk. I’d bring him wine and stay a while, but it wasn’t much fun.

  One evening I got called up to Balcescu’s room, an unused officer’s cabin he’d been given. To my surprise, as I got there Doc Swainsea was just leaving, dressed in civilian clothes – a dress, of all things – and carrying her shoes. She smiled at me as she went past but it was a sad one and she didn’t really seem to see me. Balcescu was sitting in the main room listening to music – kind of pretty, old-fashioned music for a change – and when he saw my face he smiled a little bit too.

  “We all deal with fear in different ways,” he said, as if that explained something. “Did you bring my coffee, Mr. Jatt?”

  I put the tray down. “There’s plenty of coffee down in the commons room,” I told him, a touch grumpily I guess. “Cups, spoons, you name it. Even stuff that tastes like sugar. It’s practically a five-star restaurant down there.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I’d heard it in old movies.

  He raised an eyebrow. “Ah. Is it the revolt of the proletariat, then, Mr. Jatt?” he asked. “The Admirable Crichton? If we are all going to die, let it be as equals?”

  I’d seen The Admirable Crichton, as a matter of fact, but I didn’t remember anyone using a word like “proletariat”. Still, I got the gist. “Some would say we were already equals, Mr. Balcescu,” I said. “The Confederation Constitution, for one. I’ve read it. Have you?”

  He laughed. “Touché, my good Jatt. As it happens, I have. It has its moments, but I think it would make a dull libretto. Unlike this.” He gestured loosely to the air and I realized he was drunk, so I started pouring the coffee. We might die as equals but it probably wouldn’t be soon, and in the meantime I’d be the one who’d have to clean up any messes. “I said, unlike this,” he told me again, more loudly. The music was getting loud too, some men singing in deep voices, all very dramatic.

  “I heard you!” I practically shouted back. “Here’s whitener if you want some. And sweetener.”

  “I haven’t been able to get this out of my head for days!” He waved his hand over the chair arm and the music got quieter, although I could still hear it. “Don Giovanni. That…thing…that alien projection we saw reminds me of the Commendatore’s statue. Come to drag us all to hell.” He laughed and reached clumsily for the coffee. I held the cup until he had a grip on it.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mr. Balcescu,” I said. “Unless you want something else, I’d better be going.”

  “That’s what…Diana said.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Dr. Swainsea. Never mind.” He laughed again, another in a line of some of the saddest laughs I had ever heard. “Don’t you know Don Giovanni? My God, what do they teach cabin boys these days?”

  “How to deal with drunken idiots, mostly, Mr. Balcescu. No, I don’t know Don Giovanni. One of those old Mafia films?”

  He shook his head. He seemed to like doing it enough that he kept it up for a bit. “No, no. Don Giovanni the opera. Mozart. About a terrible man who seduces women – preys on them, really.” He began to shake his head again, then seemed to remember that he’d done that already, and for a good long while, too. “At the end, the murdered spirit of one of the women’s fathers, the Commendatore, comes after him in the form of a terrible statue. In his foolishness and his pride, Don Giovanni invites the ghost to supper. So the statue, the ghost, whatever you want to call it – it comes. It’s going to take him to his judgement. Listen!” He cocked an ear toward the music. “The Commendatore’s statue is saying ‘Tu m’invitasti a cena, Il tuo dover or sai. Rispondimi: verrai tu a cenar meco?’ That means, ‘You invited me to dinner — now will you come dine with me?’ In other words, he’s going to take him off to hell. And Don Giovanni says, ‘I’m no coward – my heart is steady in my breast.’ He’d rather go to the devil than show himself afraid — that’s panache!” Balcescu was lost in it now, his eyes closed as the music swelled and the voices boomed. “The ghost takes his hand, and Don Giovanni cries out, ‘It’s so freezing cold!’ The ghost tells him it’s his last moment on earth – repent! ‘No, no, ch’io non me pento!’ Don Giovanni tells him – he won’t repent!” Balcescu sat back in his chair, eyes still closed, and sighed. “That is Art. That’s what Art can do!”

  He said it – slurred it a bit, actually — as though it were the end of a beautiful dream, but I could hear the music in the background and nobody sounded very happy – not even the stony-voiced thing that I guessed was the Commendatore’s statue. Made sense. What did the poor old Commendatore have to look forward to after his revenge, anyway? He was already dead.

  “I don’t get you, Mr. Balcescu.”

  He frowned. “You really should call me ‘Doctor’, Mr. Jatt. I am a doctor, you know. Art, I said. Art teaches us the things that reality can’t. Teaches
us to live with the things that seem beyond endurance. Missed chances. Failed love affairs. Suffering and death — the stuff of actual life.”

  He was lecturing again and I didn’t like it. “But what’s so good about that?” I asked. “I don’t like your kind of art – that high-falutin’ stuff that’s just like real life. Why can’t it be the other way around – why can’t life imitate the stuff I like? Like Casablanca, y’know? Some scary bits, some laughs, then the good guys win – a decent ending, y’know? Why can’t life be like that?” I was getting kind of angry.

  “Ah, well. You know what Oscar Wilde once said? ‘God and other artists are always a little obscure.’ ” Balcescu looked just as struck by dark thoughts as I was, his thin face sagging into lines of weariness. All of us on the Lak’ were feeling that way, trying to follow our routines in the long shadow of doom – or at least permanent exile. “You know, I shouldn’t even be here,” he said after while. “I was going to go back to my home in the Gliese Ring, but a colleague asked me to come to the opening of an exhibit at the Xenobiology Gardens on Col Hydrae 7. Just a big party, basically, but he used some of my material from the Xenolinguistic Encylopedia and thought I’d like…” He shook his head. “And here I am. Never going home, now. ‘Cause I said yes to a goddamn cocktail party…” He fell silent again for a long moment. “Never mind, Mr. Jatt. I’ve kept you long enough. I’m sure you have more important people to help.”

  As I’ve told you, I didn’t really like Balcescu much, and I usually don’t give a crap for other people’s self-pity, but I suddenly felt sorry for him. Don’t ask me why – he wasn’t any worse off than the rest of us – but I did. A little.

  “Mr. Balcescu, how old do you think I am?”

  The reaction was slowed by alcohol, but when it came he looked mildly startled. “How old are you? My dear Mr. Jatt, how the hell should I know? Ten? Eleven but small for your age?”

  “Has it ever occurred to you to wonder why a Confederation cruiser would have an able-bodied shipman ten or eleven years old?”

  “But you’re…you’re a cabin boy, aren’t you?”

  “That’s the name of my job, yes. But I’m a legit grade CS6 shipman, bucking for grade seven. I’m forty-three years old, Mr. Balcescu. I’ve been shipping out on Confederation ships for twenty-five years.”

  His eyes went wide. “But…look at you! You’re a kid!”

  “I look like a kid, but I’m just about your age…right? Although right now you look about ten years older. You look like crap, in fact.”

  He straightened up a little, which was what I’d intended. “What happened to you? Is it some kind of genetic thing?”

  “Yeah, but not in the way you mean. My parents were Highfielders – they were subscribers to Reverend Highfield’s generation ship. You may have heard of that – the Highfielder movement started up about the same time the X-Malkins were splitting off. My parents’ church said that the Confederation system was full of sinners and was doomed to be destroyed by the Lord, so they planned to send their children away to find another home outside the system, somewhere far away across the galaxy. And to make sure we’d be able to survive on ship as long as possible, they worked with geneticists to retard our aging processes – see, they started this project before we were even born. That was supposed to give us an advantage for a long haul trip – keep us small, easy to feed, revved-up immune systems. So don’t worry about me, Mr. Balcescu – I’ll hit puberty eventually, but it won’t be for another twenty or thirty years. I’m looking forward to sex, though. I hear it’s a lot of fun.”

  “What…what happened?” Balcescu was listening now, all right. “Why didn’t you go?”

  “Do you remember Katel’s World?”

  For a moment he couldn’t place it. Then he went a little pale. I see that a lot when I tell people. “Oh my God,” he said. “Those were your parents?”

  “My folks and about a thousand other Highfielders. And of course a few thousand of their children. That’s why the Confederation went in, to protect the children. But as you probably remember, things didn’t work out so well with that. I was one of about eight hundred that were rescued alive. I grew up in an orphanage, but I always wanted to see the big black – I figure it’s sort of what I was born for. So here I am.”

  He stared at me. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Don’t know, exactly, Mr. Balcescu. I hate to see people lose track of what’s important, I guess. And I hate to see people make assumptions. And I definitely don’t like to see people being underestimated.”

  “Are you saying I underestimated you?” He sat up and wiped his hand across his face. “Well, I suppose I did, Mr. Jatt, and I apologize for…”

  “With respect, Mr. Balcescu, I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about you underestimating yourself. Instead of sitting around listening to weepy music and feeling sorry for yourself, there must still be useful work you can do. You figured out what those aliens were saying – what else can you figure out about them?”

  When I left with the empty wine glasses he was drinking his coffee and staring up at the ceiling as if he was thinking about something real. The music had started again, Don Giovanni and his doomed pursuit of pleasure. Oh, well, better than the caterwauling modern stuff, I guess.

  Honest, I’ve got nothing against art. I hope I’ve made that clear. I just don’t like moping. Waste of everyone’s time. “Life’s a banquet,” as good old Rosalind Russell said in one of those ancient films I like, “and most poor suckers are starving to death.”

  * * *

  The thing that finally made it all happen was Doc Swainsea’s report. I don’t know what happened between her and Balcescu, but after the night I saw her she pretty much disappeared from social life on the ship, spending something like twenty hours a day in her lab. I know, because who do you think brought her meals to her, cleared away the old trays, and tried to get her to sleep and take a sonic occasionally?

  Anyway, it happened during one of the meetings where I was off duty and my roomie Ping was serving at the bridge conference table — he gave me the lowdown the next morning. Doc Swainsea was just finishing up her final report. The energies she’d been able to analyze in the destruction of the Malkinate ship and the Hub lighter were like nothing else she’d seen, she told the captain and the others. The wreckage was like nothing else she’d seen, either. The projection mechanism had to be like nothing she’d seen. And she’d been in touch with a xenobiologist on one of the other trapped ships and he agreed that the projected apparition looked like nothing he’d seen, either. If it was an image of a real life form, it was one we hadn’t come into contact with yet.

  “Extragalactic, most likely,” was Balcescu’s one contribution, Ping said. Nobody argued, but nobody seemed very happy about it, either. Then the odd part happened.

  Doc Swainsea closed with one last point. She said that in analyzing the projection she’d discovered a regular pulse of complex sound buried deep in the roaring, blaring audio, at a level too low for humans to hear without speeding it up. It didn’t sound anything like the speech Balcescu had translated – in fact, she wasn’t sure at all that it was speech, although it seemed too regular and orderly to be an accident. She said she didn’t know what that signified, either – she just thought she should mention it. Pim said she looked exhausted and sad.

  And just at this point Balcescu got up and walked out.

  When Pim told me I couldn’t help wondering what was going on. Was it something to do with that evening the two doctors had spent together, the one I’d walked in on? It had just looked like a less-than-satisfactory date to me, but maybe my lagging biochemistry had betrayed me – maybe there had been something more complicated going on. Pim said Doc Swainsea had looked surprised too when Balcescu left so abruptly, surprised and maybe a little hurt, but she didn’t make a big deal of it. That upset me. I really liked Doc Swainsea, although the difference in our ranks meant I didn’t get to talk to her much.


  I didn’t have much time to think about Stefan Balcescu, though. That morning as I came on duty, right after I talked to Ping, we heard that five Malkinate cruisers had attacked the jellyfish ship. The black starfield around Rainwater Hub looked like a Landing Night celebration back home – fireworks everywhere. But silent, of course. Completely silent. The X-Malkins were obliterated in a matter of minutes.

  * * *

  Things got a little crazy after that. Some of the passengers who were supposed to be in deep sleep staged a sort of mini-mutiny. We didn’t do much to ‘em once we put an end to their uprising – just put ‘em back in cryo where they were supposed to be in the first place. One of the passenger cabin CS4s turned out to be the sympathizer who’d let them out, and he wound up in cryo himself, except in the brig. Captain Watanabe knew she had a lot of unhappy, worried shipmen on her hands but she also wanted to make sure she did the right thing. The problem was, at that moment nobody believed anything good could happen from staying near Rainwater Hub: everybody figured if we were going to take years getting home, we might as well get started. But the captain and some of the other Confederation officers hadn’t given up yet — and strangely enough, the one who had convinced them to hang on was Stefan Balcescu.

  I only found out what was happening when I got called to the bridge one evening almost a week later. It was about day twenty of the crisis. Captain Watanabe was in the conference room with Lt. Chinh-Herrera, Dr. Swainsea, First Lieutenant Davits who headed up the ship’s marines, and several men and women from Engineering whose names I didn’t know – they’ve kind of got their own world down there.