Panglor Read online

  Panglor

  Table of Contents

  Introduction to the New Edition

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  About the Author

  PANGLOR

  Jeffrey A. Carver

  Copyright © 1980, 1996 by Jeffrey A. Carver

  Published by E-Reads. All rights reserved.

  SKU: ERBAEN0039

  Books by Jeffrey A. Carver

  The Star Rigger Universe

  (in chronological order in the future history)

  Panglor

  Dragons in the Stars

  Dragon Rigger

  Star Rigger's Way

  Eternity's End

  Seas of Ernathe

  The Chaos Chronicles

  Neptune Crossing: Volume One

  Strange Attractors: Volume Two

  The Infinite Sea: Volume Three

  Sunborn: Volume Four

  Novels of the Starstream

  From a Changeling Star

  Down the Stream of Stars

  Standalone Novels

  The Infinity Link

  The Rapture Effect

  Roger Zelazny's Alien Speedway: Clypsis

  Battlestar Galactica (miniseries novelization)

  Dedication Page

  For Kathy and for Chuck

  Introduction to the New Edition

  This book is a modest revision of a novel that was first published in 1980. In certain ways, Panglor is the foundational novel of my Star Rigger Universe. It's not the first book that I wrote in that future history, but it's the one that sets the stage for all the others (Dragons in the Stars, Dragon Rigger, Star Rigger's Way, Eternity's End, and Seas of Ernathe—in chronological order within the future history).

  This is the story of how it all came to happen: how starfarers first learned to navigate the streams of space among the stars—the Flux, that strange realm where intuition and imagination, meshed with the objective topographies of spacetime, create fantastic images through which pilots can navigate their ships. The adventures of pilot Panglor Balef provide the first glimpse of the Flux, without actually naming it.

  Panglor had been out of print since shortly after its publication in 1980. It was first published by Dell Books, just prior to Dell's closing down of its science fiction line. It appeared without promotion, with a dreadful cover, and sank like a stone. I was delighted to see it return to print with a Tor edition in 1996. To celebrate the occasion, I did some editing on the prose that I might have done in 1979, if I'd had the skill then. James Frenkel, the book's original editor and its Tor editor as well, assisted me with the job.

  It was a curious experience, looking back on work first done sixteen years earlier. These days, it's not that uncommon for a writer to dust off an early work, and to revise and expand and generally recraft a new novel out of old cloth. I did not do that. I liked the story I'd told and had little further to add to it; but it was clear that it could be made a better book with a little help from a more experienced hand.

  I suppose any author mutters quietly to him- or herself, looking back on earlier work—especially work done in the formative years, when the craft and narrative voice were just emerging. In my case, the muttering is often but not always critical; sometimes it's astonishment at a line or paragraph that seems to sparkle with unexpected originality. Once, when perusing a book of mine after a long absence, I was particularly startled by one scene—a scene I had no memory of having written. Suddenly, paranoiacally suspicious that a fast one had been pulled on me, I dug into my files, found the original manuscript, and checked to see if someone else had snuck in those sentences. No one had but me; such is the ephemeral nature of memory.

  In rereading Panglor, I found an energy and exuberance that I didn't want to lose. I also found some pretty clunky prose and painfully awkward bits of characterization. And so, vorpal red pencil in hand (no word processor for this one), I set out to snip back the thickets of purple prose here, to straighten the garbled sentences there, to stamp out the redundancies everywhere—and in general, to provide a better read without needlessly altering the book that a promising younger writer had created.

  That's what I tried to do, anyway, and I hope I succeeded.

  I had a good time rereading the book while I was at it. I hope you enjoy it, too.

  For more information on my books, stories, and other matters science-fictional, visit my website at http://www.starrigger.net/ or my blog at http://starrigger.blogspot.com/.

  Jeffrey A. Carver

  Author's Note

  Panglor is pronounced PANG-lor,

  ou-ralot is pronounced OOH-ruh-lot,

  and

  Alo is pronounced AY-lo.

  Chapter 1

  Any moment, Panglor Balef knew, it could be over. His mouth felt gritty, and his stomach hurt. If the goddess of fate smiled upon him, he would soon see the star. But if her smile turned malicious . . .

  There was nothing to do but wait. He glared at the instruments, which told him nothing. The sequencer chuckled annoyingly. He sat forward and cursed savagely: "Whore!" Then he sat back. "Ah—" he grumbled. His voice was not as acid as he'd hoped. Two weeks in this ship, and his curses were losing their bite. That worried him: loss of the cutting edge, failure of cynicism. He was tired.

  "You aren't worth the bile eating my gut," he told the ship, and it was nearly true. This ship, The Fighting Cur, had once been a stout freighter, but it had lived its years. Still, it was a spaceship and the only thing standing between him and the vacuum of space. He had other worries caged in his thoughts at the moment, such as whether he would survive foreshortening. "Talk, sweethearts," he pleaded of the instruments.

  Fear gnawed at him. "LePiep!" he barked. There was a scuffling noise behind him, and the ou-ralot poked her head up beside the center instrument display. Panglor glared at her. "Trying to toss me out, hang me on," he gargled. The ou-ralot looked at him perplexedly. A prairie dog-sized animal, she had soft, tufted fur and round eyes. Her wings were concealed in the fur on her back, but her bushy tail twitched nervously. "Dope," Panglor said, in a sudden swelling of affection.

  The ou-ralot was smart and empathic, better company than a human; but certain things were beyond her understanding. One of them was the incredible nervous strain of foreshortening, of flight between the stars. There was nothing a pilot could do while in foreshortening; the cards had already been played, in the instant of the ship's insertion into foreshortening, through the collapsing-field near the star of origin. The joker was that not all ships that entered foreshortening came out at the other end. Where the losers emerged, or if they emerged anywhere at all, was one of the unanswered questions of star travel. The statistical chances of failure were small but well established, and there was no known way to improve them.

  As he often did, Panglor considered where his ship might emerge if the uncertainties went against him. His mind filled with images: Misty wastes, veils of darkness closing around The Fighting Cur, sealing it forever from the view of stars, planets, or any references at all of the known universe; an infinity of darkness and emptiness, beyond space and time. Limbo. Or . . . adrift among the stars, the ship speeding at a sublight snail's pace in the vast interstellar reaches, prematurely emerged from foreshortening and doomed to spend eternity coasting, missing its target by billions of miles, centuries late, its pilot long since dead.

  It was the emptiness behind the uncertainty that terr
ified Panglor. He didn't want to end his days alone, in some nether realm of emptiness, in limbo.

  He glanced at LePiep. "Over here," he said, whacking the cushion beside him. The ou-ralot sprang up and settled in the seat. "Good," he said. The control bay was still. The bridge of The Fighting Cur was a shallow, curved section bending back on both sides to the exit passages. The compartment was gloomy, the sensor-fringe viewscreen in the front wall lit dimly by the midnight-blue glow of foreshortening.

  Panglor felt twinges in his chest, a hint of hysteria. He rubbed his forehead and then his temples, fingering several days' grease and sweat.

  The emergence light clicked on, amber.

  Lying thief, you taunt me! he accused silently, his blood rising. But he swung to look into the binocular scoopscope. The image he saw in the scope was a gray background with two clusters of white pointillist dots, swarming crazily. The clusters existed only on two specific planes, which danced toward convergence. Murdering mothers! he thought. His eyes ached. The dots swam. They fell into a three-dimensional contour, an obliquely aligned cone.

  A muted tone sounded from the console. Beside him LePiep panted raspily in echo of his own excitement. He held his breath, banished his demons . . .

  He felt a tremor in his gut and his groin and his ears, and the ship dropped out of foreshortening. The viewscreen darkened completely and filled with stars. He blinked at the star pattern, then switched to a stern view.

  There it was, an aurora-red glow, hanging in space and retreating like a debtor. It was the capture-field that had snared him from foreshortening. He cackled, shaking a fist in triumph. "We beat it!" LePiep squirmed madly beside him. "Peep!" he cried, ruffling her fur. "We're there. You can relax." He touched the ou-ralot under the chin. After a moment she stopped squirming and stared at him with wide, wet eyes.

  He had made it through. He was free.

  Free to see human beings again. Free to continue his job and his life.

  Free. For all the good it would do him.

  But, whatever else—the danger of disaster in foreshortening was behind him.

  The capture-field was still shrinking in the viewscreen. The Cur was moving at a hell of a good clip, probably about .01c. Panglor scanned the instruments and disengaged the safety to the drivers. That started the sequencer, and the ship immediately began rotating into the proper deceleration attitude. A golden-white G4 sun moved into a corner of the viewscreen, a bright disk. It was an ordinary G4 sun, no different from any other, except that it was the right G4, Dreznelles 3, the third-named sun in the Dreznelles star group. Panglor noted the spectral ID coming in, confirming the star's identity, and he smiled. He could afford to smile, to feel a touch of gratitude before the baser emotions took over.

  The drivers kicked on, jarring the ship until the internal grav field compensated. What a creaky old can this ship was. Like him. In another day or so the ship would rest. But not him; his troubles were just—

  "God, it's already started," he muttered. His nerves were shot; he had to make himself relax.

  LePiep hopped down from the seat and disappeared, whistling, into a pile of junk near the exit. "LePiep!" he yelled. She remained in her burrow. Eighteen, maybe twenty hours to relax, to get ready to deal with people again. The thing was, he knew he'd be watched—probably from the moment he arrived. "LePiep!" he bawled. "Get out here!" He groped under his seat for a brew packet; he snapped its activator until the liquid moke was steaming hot, then he sipped it and brooded.

  He recalled Garikoff's face, rough-hewn and dark, his eyes piercing as he gave Panglor the orders to fly. Blackmailing bastard. For a cent Panglor would have killed him and walked out, but at that point he didn't really have much choice; they had him outnumbered, and they had guns. So he'd gone along with the orders—not that he'd had a better offer in sight, anyway—and Garikoff's goons weren't likely to leave him unobserved now, so he'd have to carry the orders through. There was just one question: What kind of work did the bastards have up their sleeves for him at D3, and what were his chances of coming away from it alive?

  He studied the star field in the viewscreen, not comforted much by its beauty. "Peep?" he growled. The ou-ralot poked her head out of the junk pile and stared at him with pulsating brown eyes.

  "Hy-ooop?" she whistled. "Hy-ooop?"

  * * *

  The Dreznelles 3 Waystation, population approximately half a million, circled its sun in a Trojan orbit following D3's second planet. Manmade, it was the only human-inhabited world in the D3 system. The Fighting Cur was about twelve hours out when it entered the Waystation's real sphere of influence, the long-range linear-shift field. The ship began decelerating in a new mode. The field interaction produced a glowing halo several hundred kilometers out from the ship: radiant loss of kinetic energy that the field couldn't absorb. The image in the viewscreen was now fringed with orange light in the fore and aft displays, but totally washed out to the sides. Panglor switched the sensor-fringe to radar/UV composite, and that restored some clarity to the view.

  Waystation Control beeped him shortly after he entered the linear-shift field, asking for registry and flight codes. "Never give you a break, do they?" he grumbled to LePiep, disguising his relief at hearing a human voice. He returned the information in a telemetric pulse, and Control fed him back some orbital numbers and then went away and left him alone with his thoughts again.

  Hours later, the waystation actually became visible, a cluster of sparks shifting slowly against the stars. The cluster of sparks grew and multiplied; he was closing fast, still decelerating. "LePiep, look at this." The ou-ralot rooted some wafers out of a broken package and tossed her head disdainfully. Panglor, disgruntled, watched the approach alone.

  The first thing to resolve visually was the floating spaceyards, a jumbled assortment of liners and freighters and large haulers and police vessels and station shuttles, all moored in orbit a dozen kilometers from the station proper. The Cur stopped its deceleration and drifted by the outer yards. They passed the marshaling and loading area, where large cargo haulers were swallowed by the entry ports of enormous warehouses. Behind the warehouses, several of the spiderweb radiators of the linear-shift field glittered impressively across the panorama of stars. Though they were a mere fraction of the entire system—comprising hundreds of radiators, f-s field generators, and the vast solar converters and relays much closer to the sun—they were nevertheless awesome, winking and glittering against space. The sight was appropriate for a station that was a trade center and interstellar crossroads. The D3 Waystation served several of the busiest trade routes of southern Sagittarian space, particularly the routes connecting Veti, trans-Cygnus 34, and the outworlds of the Boreaum Matrix.

  Waystation Control came on-com, telling him to relinquish control to beacons blue-two and blue-three, and to prepare for rendezvous with the tugs.

  "Christ, anyway," Panglor grumbled, locking the Cur's sensor-fringe to the beacons' lasers. He and his ship didn't need tugs. But what could he do? Couldn't fight the guild and union regs. "Ought to just let a man do his job," he growled. LePiep, startled by the anger in his voice, jumped up onto the console and gazed sympathetically at him, eyes wide, her small ears standing upright. He stared back at her. "What?" he said, in exasperation. The ou-ralot had caught him off stride. She blinked. She was trying to help, trying to calm him. "Ah hell, Peep," he said guiltily. "Right; okay."

  Four tugs approached The Fighting Cur like glittery eyes slipping across the starfield. They latched without fuss, and forty minutes later, the Cur was docked at a mooring station. Panglor secured the ship. Waiting for the shuttle, he located his duffel in his cabin, stuffed it quickly, then sat down with LePiep. "Friend," he said, stroking the ou-ralot's back, "what I really could use is a strong drink and some time to figure this thing out." He had tried to figure it all out during the flight, but he never could think properly during foreshortening transit.

  The shuttle arrived: time to be off. He zipped LePiep into her
quarantine bag, and with that in one hand and duffel in the other he boarded the shuttle and took a seat at the very rear of the cabin. LePiep huddled against him inside her bag as the shuttle broke from the Cur and accelerated.

  The waystation proper came into view when the shuttle passed the mooring area and pitched over to change course. The view was spectacular. The station was a fabulous, articulated jewel filling half the heavens. Sunlight spilled over its surface in intricate patterns of darkness and brilliance. Passing behind one angular wing of the station, the shuttle darted into shadow, leaving the station's nearest section etched in blazing fringes and outlines against the night. The shuttle decelerated, wheeled, and scooted toward the upper edge of the wing. Minutes later, they docked, and Panglor looked up at an open port.

  LePiep cried softly in the confinement of her bag. She stared at him through the clear plastic with fearful eyes. "Hey, Peep," he said, feeling sudden pressure in his throat. He blinked mist out of his eyes, then lifted the bag and the duffel and moved to the port.

  Arrival inspection was a bloody nuisance—customs, decontamination, medical. Eventually they were released and sent on their way down a concourse, Panglor decontaminated and in clean clothes, and LePiep decontaminated and fluffy, perched on his left shoulder, her tail hooked under his arm. They followed a pair of floating electric blue lines that converged in the distance like parallel rails arrowing to a horizon. It was a psykinetic directional—personalized, supposedly, to his own intended destination and visible only to him. Despite the number of concourses he had to walk through, at least he didn't have to worry about getting lost.

  Each new hall was a shock of stimuli: people swarming and gliding in every direction—spacers, transient passengers, locals. He saw an enormous variety of clothes, tight and bulging and bright and subdued, people chattering in unfamiliar languages and reeking of pungent smells. None of these people seemed quite real to him. He couldn't help thinking of them as ghosts—just like the ghosts who had put him out of work, and the ghosts who were blackmailing him now—as something less than human, not to be trusted.