Seas of Ernathe Read online

  "You couldn't take any man and teach him to fly—no, he had to have the gift of imaging, he had to be crazy enough and sane enough to run in the fantasy and carry a ship on his back. And it worked, that's how this Cluster was settled, and how the galaxy beyond it was settled!" Seth's eyes blurred. A painting vibrated in his mind, a painting from a gallery on Venicite: a gleaming graceful ship of the past, gliding gull-like, submarinelike through the flux that underlay the cold and the empty blackness of space itself.

  "Ah!" Racart said, his face suddenly alight, his brows furrowed with interest. He stabbed with a finger at Seth's heart. "Then I can forget this stuff about the Cluster and we can talk about the important things. You want this yourself, don't you?" He nodded to his own question, not expecting Seth to answer. "Have you taken the drug yet?" His eyes flashed bright, green, intent upon Seth's.

  The pilot was startled by Racart's bluntness. He should have guessed—Racart wanted to hear about a friend, not about politics out among the worlds. "Yes," he said, "I have taken it. I'm not sure how to describe it. Frightening, terrifying. Exhilarating. Mind-twistingly strange." He frowned, lost again in the powerful, disturbing memories of the drug: tumultuous visions hurled bright against the black emptiness of space, dashed against the diamond maelstrom of stars; soul-aching longings fulfilled for the briefest of moments and then wrenched away to leave bare, cold sweating reality.

  He nodded. "I've taken it, and it failed for me. At least it failed in what we wanted it to do—but I hope not forever. One day a man will find a harness for that drug, and the techs will harness him into a ship's rig—and we'll have our new way to fly the stars. And then another man will learn to do it without the drug. And maybe I'll get a chance, again, and maybe all those other things will happen, too." He tapped his fingers thoughtfully on the table. "After that—who knows?" He drank his lukewarm ale, suddenly embarrassed by his own speech.

  Racart was silent, pondering; but he was obviously impressed. When he spoke, his voice was so soft that Seth had to strain to hear. "I have always had a good feeling toward the Nale'nid, and I guess I still do." He smiled faintly, his expression changing. "But you'll have to know what happened today, if you and we are to decide where to go from here. Mynalar means our way of life, too, though I think we could find a way of life without it, if necessary. I don't know why the Nale'nid are keeping us from the mynalar, but I do know that we've a people out there whom we must understand." His eyes flickered across Seth's gaze and took on their more usual dream-reflecting intensity.

  His next words were drowned in a clatter.

  A stutter of pulsed air-bursts rocked the lounge, echoed through the street outside: pok-a-pok-a-pok-a-pok! The bar was instantly still, a dozen faces staring at one another from the crouched or flattened positions that every person had taken instinctively. The stutter repeated itself and whined off to the sound of a dying pulse-generator. A border-weapon coughed, and then the air was still. Seth looked at Racart in astonishment and horror—and received in return a gesture of bewilderment. Someone near the exit crept to the door and cautiously peered out. "Looks okay," the man said. "People are moving out into the street." He glanced back, shrugged, and went outside himself.

  Seth and Racart followed, looking carefully up and down the street. The sun was liquid red just above the western horizon, and the street awash in its glow suddenly began filling up again with the people of Lambrose. Two uniformed perimeter guards made their way down the street, one of them shouting reassuringly, "The Nale'nid set off the perimeter defenses! No one was hurt, and we're back under control!" That seemed to satisfy most of the Ernathenes, who apparently were used to this sort of thing. But Seth saw several of the starship personnel staring about in disbelief, and he had to share their feeling; it seemed that anytime a defense battery went off in this town it was the Nale'nid who were doing the shooting. Perhaps, he thought, the solution was simply to dismantle the defenses.

  The worry on Racart's face told him that not every Ernathene was satisfied. And his own officers, he knew, would be incredulous at this new episode.

  "I think it's time we checked in," he said, and nudged Racart in the direction of the Planetary Mission's headquarters. Racart could tell his story to everyone at once.

  What he found when he arrived, though, was not ready and willing listeners, but more disturbing news.

  Chapter Three

  "The Chief-of-arms says the confusion was so widespread, he's relieved that only one Nale'nid was killed. The guard apparently only wanted to frighten it away, but the shot caught the creature squarely. He said another sea-person distracted him as he was firing a warning at the first." Richel Mondreau sighed grimly. He was a tall, stiff-featured man; the hard lines of his face met in acute angles, running in jigsaw fashion from his cheekbones down to the scrape-shaven chin, and up again through the zigzag mouth and sharp nose to the bronzed-gray eyes, which settled in turn upon each of the younger men. The eyes left Seth, finally, and fixed upon Captain Jondrel Gorges, master of Warmstorm. "We'll send these two off to inspect the damage, then, and have a look at the body, eh, Captain?"

  Seth started to speak, but held back when Gorges nodded slowly in approval and addressed him in a tone that was grave and yet managed at the same time to sound sleepy. "You will of course inspect things closely, Pilot Second, before you go to sea. Richel here has the greatest confidence in you, though he would never admit it to himself." Mondreau scowled at the latter remark.

  To sea? Seth wondered queasily. He answered, "Very well, Captain. But before we go—" and he glanced at Racart, standing gloomily beside him—"perhaps we, Racart especially, should explain something that happened earlier today. We feel it may be important."

  Mondreau swung to face Seth. "Fine," he said shortly. "Later, though. You're leaving on a harvest ship in two hours, traveling as observer. Mr. Bonhof has been assigned by his people to help you learn how things operate around here. We'll tie in anything else you know later."

  Seth nodded uncomfortably. He supposed Racart's story could wait. "We'll head over to the plant, then," he said, and motioned to Racart. The Ernathene said nothing until they were in the street again; then with a few short words he cursed the killing of the Nale'nid. Seth sympathized. "This is hardly going to create a climate for diplomatic understanding."

  Racart answered, "That wasn't what I was thinking of. I don't think the Nale'nid themselves will be too upset about it. I'm worried about its effect right here—among your people, and especially among mine. It's going to raise havoc with our good intentions. People who have been tolerating the trouble will feel that the dam has been broken, that a violent precedent deserves a violent follow-up. Others will say, 'Now we've done it, we have no legitimate claim here so let's get out before the Nale'nid rightfully explode.' " Racart walked quickly, in this agitation. He rounded a corner abruptly and Seth had to hurry to follow.

  "Which point will you take?" Seth asked, catching up.

  Racart shot him a glance that told nothing and marched straight ahead. "Hah!" he muttered fiercely. His brows were furrowed and his eyes narrow and determined. His previous mood of intimacy had vanished altogether.

  They walked through the clustered, radiation-shielded family domes, and down the main harbor avenue among the shops and public gathering houses. There were many pedestrians in the street but almost no vehicles, except for an occasional utility van. Lambrose was laid out neatly in small town fashion, expanding away from the harbor according to the whim and variegation of the land. Home and recreational buildings were grouped generally in a northeasterly fan, while the mynella and food conversion plants were set inland at a southerly angle. The spaceport, planetary defense batteries, and satellite control all were located at the end of a road to the east—the third point in the triangle comprising Lambrose and Lernick.

  Seth and Racart turned left near the harbor and headed back inland along the "industrial park." The sun had already set over the water, and its fading light left a sheen
in the sky, a mottled orange and red backdrop for ship silhouettes. Stars were prickling into view in a few cloudless patches, making Seth wish for just a few minutes of completely clear sky, so that he might see the entire spectacle.

  The mynella-mynalar facility was the final segment of a long plankton receiving and conversion plant. At the wharf was the loading pier where the harvesters emptied their slurry-cargoes. Separators divided the mynella organisms from the others; then the conveyor line split, the larger one carrying the bulk of the harvest for food and synthetics conversion, and the smaller one carrying mynella to the drug-extraction facility at the end of the line. This was a flat-roofed building surrounded by roadway and several stands of carefully nurtured trees. Early evening floodlighting cast a pleasant aura about the building.

  They were met at the door by a security man. "You'll be wanting to see the Nale'nid first, I imagine." He led the way past rows of great stainless vats, mixers, and centrifuges. Another man joined them—Andol Holme, Crew-Exec of Warmstorm, a lean but hulking blond. Seth was glad to see him; Holme was one of his closest friends and advisors.

  "Have you seen Richel and the Captain yet?" Holme inquired.

  Seth nodded. "They're not happy. Mondreau's starting with a scattergun survey—he's sending us off on a harvester as soon as we're done here, and I gather he has some of his researchers just about everywhere right now."

  Holme clucked, nodding. "You'll be busy, all right—we all will—and this sight is not going to make you feel easier." His face curled into a grimace, and as they swung into a side corridor, Seth saw why. His stomach knotted. Racart exhaled with a whisper.

  The Nale'nid stretched on the floor was a fair, slender-faced man who, but for the sleekness of his face and mossily smoothed hair, and the translucent fronds draped about him as garments, could have been mistaken for any man in the settlement. His face held a curious mixture of expressions; his forehead was silk smooth, peaceful, but his mouth was twisted in gruesome pain. His left side was cratered and fused black by the explosive heat of a pulse-weapon. The flesh, fatally destroyed by the single burst, had been so instantly cauterized that the visible damage was confined to a fifteen-centimeter concave mass of char; a severed garment frond was neatly scorched on either side of the wound. The smell of burnt flesh forced Seth to choke back a retch.

  He finally looked away, up at the Crew-Exec. Holme grunted an appreciation of his feelings and said, "No one knows why the weapon was set for a full charge, least of all the guard who was using it. Possibly with all the fooling around one of the Nale'nid themselves might have changed the setting—but that hardly makes sense does it? But then what sense for them to come in here in the first place, and to take over the border defenses and shoot off all the weapons into the air? Nothing about them makes much sense so far."

  Racart stirred but kept his silence. Seth glanced at him nervously, saw that he was strangely calm. Seth asked his question of Holme, however, and of the guard, who was standing silent. "Then they got control of all the defense systems again?" He shook his head at what that implied about the defense security—and yet he knew that security had been tightened considerably after the incident with Warmstorm.

  "They seem to . . . just appear when you're not looking . . . whether you're actually looking or not," the guard said, talking to no one in particular. His eyes glazed with recall. "Even when you think you're being watchful, they sneak by as if they were made of air. One walked right in front of me, and he was nearly past before I even noticed him."

  "Yes," Racart said, startling Seth. "They do that, don't they?"

  "Though I've never seen one hurt a person," the guard concluded. Racart's eyes clouded at that, but he shook his head and gave Seth a glance that said, not now.

  "Let's make that tour, shall we?" Holme suggested. The guard nodded and gestured to two others who had arrived to senso-record and remove the body. He led the three men back through the plant, to the primary reducers where the incoming slurry of mynella was thickened and ground to a paste. Workers were clustered around the wide tanks, inspecting beneath cowlings and under the tank lids. The supervisor glanced up at their approach and shook her head; everything there was normal. Seth and Holme poked about for a moment, then followed the others down the line, to the first of the chemical-process converters. Here, also, a work crew was checking, and drawing out material for testing. So far, nothing was wrong.

  "So where's the problem?" asked Seth.

  "Patience," said the guard. "We already know there's a foul-up at the end—I just wanted to see if anything more had been found." They passed the secondary reducers and came to the mynalar end of the facility where the crude drug was refined and purified before packaging and sealing. Here a number of people were gloomily examining a powdery material in a small stainless vat. A middle-aged woman, a chemist, told them what had been found.

  "This batch has been ruined. We don't know yet about the others. And we don't know how it was done. We never know how it was done." She looked tired, but when Seth glanced questioningly at the chemical plumbing she anticipated his query. "There's nothing wrong with the equipment. The batch was half run, and doing fine, when the Nale'nid came."

  Seth stepped closer to inspect the equipment, and listened casually to the conversation of the workers nearby. He was startled to hear them discussing, not the loss of the drug batch, but the death of the Nale'nid. They're really getting used to this business, he thought, but not to people getting hurt over it. Do they know what this could mean to their whole future here? The mood was one of anxiety, of bewilderment, of concern about the reaction of the Nale'nid people to the death of one of their own.

  "There may be people asking for shutdown of operations. Or of the defense batteries," the guard said, unhappily.

  Racart answered without hesitation. "It won't matter, either way." He looked at Seth probingly. "It won't matter at all."

  Seth shook his head. It had to matter. But it could hardly be to the general good.

  * * *

  Seth and Racart returned to their respective quarters to pack sea-bags, then parted with Andol Holme in the Warmstorm compound. Before heading off to make his report to Gorges and Mondreau, Holme had offered Seth a bit of advice: "Listen to these sailors. If anyone can tell you how the Ernathenes feel, it will be them—none of this official falderal. And they'll probably tell you more than you want to know about the Nale'nid, too." With that, he had given Racart a pleasant nod and Seth a slap on the back, and the two had headed for the docks.

  The activity there was quiet but constant; supplies for up to twenty days at sea were being loaded, though the average run was only three to five days. Ardello was a great broad-nosed floating allosteel iceberg, filtering systems and holding tanks constituting much of its bulk, with the crew's quarters located on the upper decks. While Racart went in search of an officer to assign them quarters, Seth stood at the rail amidships, looking down at the water slapping between the wharf and the hull. He had been on only one sea-going ship in his life—a huge stabilized liner on the Sladar Ocean of Rethmere—and the prospect now of a week on a rumbling work ship was enough to make him wish he were back in space. Several passing crewmen nodded cordially to him; nevertheless, he felt wholly out of place. Racart, of course, would be quite at home; he regularly sailed on a sister ship of Ardello.

  "Mr. Perland, would you come with me?" asked a voice behind him. A young man Racart's size put out his hand. "I'm Ferris Tarn, filter hand third—I'll show you to your bunk. Racart will meet you later." Seth shook hands and lugged his bag after the sailor. They went down a companionway in the after deckhouse and made their way through several cabins to the male bunkroom. Tarn pointed to a third-level bunk and a small stowage compartment and said, "You sleep there and keep your things here. The head is up forward." The bunk was tiny, even smaller than Seth's bunk on Warmstorm, and there was about half a meter of headroom between it and the ceiling. He envisioned bashing his head into the ceiling several times a n
ight.

  Tarn introduced him to several of the crew, then offered to take him on a tour of the ship. Seth readily agreed, and they spent the next half hour exploring the interior levels, much of it at first glance meaningless to Seth, and then above decks in and around the superstructure. At night the top deck was a gleaming array of strange shapes in unequal pools and splashes of light; the air was chilly and salty, and Seth felt as if they were already at sea.

  They descended again to the crew's level, and Tarn took him past the female section. "Just so you'll know where it is," Tarn remarked with a grin.

  "There you are!" Racart called. He was standing in the shadows of the passageway with a young woman. Seth waved his thanks to Tarn and joined them. The girl was a golden-skinned Ernathene, apparently in her early twenties, and a regular Ardello crewmember. Her name was Mona Tremont, and she greeted Seth with a smile but, he thought, something less than total enthusiasm. "Mona is a sonar tech."

  "And you are the starpilot," Mona said, not quite interrupting Racart, but giving Seth no chance to respond, either. Her tone was ambiguous, suggesting either admiration or cloaked derision, but Seth could not tell which. "Are you going to study us, or the Nale'nid?" she asked, this time in a lighter voice.

  Seth shrugged. "Both, I suppose. I want to see your operation in action, but the main reason I'm along is to learn about the Nale'nid—if they make an appearance."

  "They will," said Mona. "After what happened at the plant, I don't know why we're even making this run. But we're inviting trouble of some sort, for sure." Her eyes carried a dark cynicism that was roughly disguised in her voice. "I hope your 'planetary mission'—isn't that what you call it?—doesn't blow its top and start muscling about with the Nale'nid. It will only make things worse, you know. Racart, see you later." With that, she disappeared into the woman's quarters, leaving Racart and Seth alone in the passageway.