Into the Sea of Stars (15 page)

It was fascinating, as well, since the founding philos
ophy had survived, unlike the Friends of the Light who
had quickly evolved into something beyond the wildest imaginings of their founders.

"So you artificially inseminate out of your frozen bank
and then train your children through the library."

"Not artificially"
came
a voice from the audience. "Ours
is the natural way; yours the abomination."

"Have you ever tried it?" Richard shouted back. "It's
not so bad."

"God damn it, Richard," Ian shouted before the uproar
swept over them, "are you trying to get us killed?"

"We'd prefer if you didn't take
Her
name in vain," Diana said coldly. "And as for getting killed, you might not be too far off the mark."

Richard looked at Diana with a weak smile. "May I ask one or two other questions?"

Diana nodded an affirmative.

"How do you administer your system?" Ian said before
Richard could ask another question.

"We have a system of support groups."

"I'm
sorry,
I'm not familiar with that term. What is a support group?"

Several of the women laughed.

"We are all organized into groups of ten sisters who
provide support and encouragement to each other. From
each such group one is selected who, with nine others
selected by their groups, participates in the next level of administration. So the structure progresses up to the Sis
ter Eldest, the position I now hold."

"It sounds like a logical management system," Ian re
plied, trying to smile in a friendly fashion.

"Watch it, sisters," Diana said sarcastically, "he's ap
pearing to support us, but we all know that underneath he still wishes to exploit."

"Okay." He hesitated for a second, unsure if "okay" signaled agreement or expression of anger. They didn't
show any stronger hostility so he assumed his colloqui
alism had been correct.

He tried for another. "I can relate to that and to your
struggle."

"Don't patronize us!" several dozen shouted.

He wasn't sure of that term either, but the tone of the
response was enough. "Let me make this a more personal
question then. It's obvious you don't like us, I can accept
that. So why not return our clothes and Richard and I
will be on our way. And if our two sisters desire, they
can head out, as well. Is that okay?"

Diana's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Why? So you
can run back to your male-dominated world and give them
the word as to where we are?"

Diana turned away from Ian and faced the audience.
"Sister Ellen has already told me that you can make a
voyage of a thousand years in just a matter of months.
No thank you. We don't want you running home and then
bringing back your contemptible breed to gawk and ex
ploit. We know a pig named
Stasz
is hiding in your ship.
Sisters, once we figure out the way, we'll break into the
pigs' ship and take it for ourselves!"

The women cheered while Ian looked at Richard and grimaced. The women were serious, and there would be
no turning on the charm and talking their way out. Ian
looked appealingly at Shelley, hoping that she would speak
out. She looked him straight in the eye then brushed her hair back off her small rounded breasts, so that he could
see them more clearly. She favored him with a tiny smirk.

"So, what are you going to do with us?"

Diana smiled at his question.

"The Primary Council support group has debated that
question and we've come up with a proper answer.

"Our frozen sperm is a thousand years old, and in
creasing numbers of samples are flawed after the extended
deep freeze. Sister Ellen has assured me that your medical
backgrounds are adequate, even if your physical appearance is substandard.

"Therefore," Diana continued, "we propose to use you
to
resupply
our bank."

"Suppose we won't cooperate," Ian snapped back, his dignity insulted by the mere thought of what she was
suggesting.

"We've thought of that, as well. We understand that you men find the watching of the sexual act between women to be particularly exciting. Perhaps after several such voyeuristic experiences you'll be willing to, how shall I say, give us a hand."

"Oh, God, I've died and gone to heaven," Richard
moaned.

The doorway slipped open and Shelley signaled them to be silent. Ian had half suspected it all along, but know
ing it was true caused him to kiss her with relief.

"Let's go," Shelley whispered. Ian nudged Richard awake. Richard looked at him bleary-eyed and groaned.
He had been taken out hours before for a "session," or
at least that's what Diana had said, and must have been
returned when Ian was already asleep.

Ian pointed to the door where Ellen and Shelley stood.

"Is this an escape?" Richard asked. "Well, if so, count
me out, you'll never make it."

"Come on, asshole," Ellen commanded, "we're going."

"Leave without me, this setup isn't so bad. At least
let me offer a couple more samples first."

Ellen slipped into the room and pulled out a stun prod
like the one Diana used. "If you don't get your ass up
and moving," Ellen hissed, "I'm going to put it on your
butt and jolt your backside clear across this room. Now
move!"

"All right, damn it." Richard cursed wearily and got to his feet. Ellen fell in behind him and Shelley led the
way. Twice they encountered a "sister," and in both cases
Shelley managed to drop them with a stunner. And in
both cases Richard had to be dragged away from his at
tempt to "make sure there was no lasting damage."

Finally they reached the airlock entry and a brief scuf
fle ensued as they fought their way past half a dozen
guards then finally managed to secure
themselves
inside
the airlock.

"Now let's hope
Stasz
didn't decide to abandon us
here," Ian said.

"Not to worry," Ellen replied. "I managed to lift the radio out of my suit and I stayed in touch with him." She
pulled the unit out of the pouch hanging from her shoulder,
which was the only stitch of clothing she had on.

"We're in the airlock,
Stasz
."

"How the hell do I know it's you?" The fear in his voice was obvious.

"Listen, you drunken idiot," Richard replied, "I know
you've already snatched two of my bottles and hidden them under your bunk since we left Earth. God knows how many more you've taken while I've been away. In
fact, that's the only damn reason I've come back—"

The airlock hatch opened.

"Blast my eyes with a nova,"
Stasz
muttered as Ellen and Shelley drifted past. Shelley even stopped for a mo
ment, leaned up and kissed
Stasz
on the cheek, then pushed
off and floated away to the main cabin—the three men
looking after her.

"What happened?"
Stasz
asked, as he looked mockingly at his two now slightly self-conscious companions.

"Paradise," Richard replied.

"Docking unlatched," Shelley said, her eyes on the
main instrument board. She was back in a light coverall, and Ian found himself looking at her and imagining what
he had seen earlier.

There was a faint tug of gravity as the maneuvering
thrusters turned them out and away from the
torus
.

"My compliments, Ellen," Ian said softly.

She looked back at him and smiled. "It was Shelley,
as well. She had come across a description of the unit in the library banks some weeks back. She pointed it out to
me and we both had a good laugh wondering what it would
be like if we ever came across them. The moment I saw
Carrie I knew what we had hit into, and realized that I
had to play along and wait for a chance to escape."

"Just how far did you play along?"
Stasz
asked leeringly. "Yeah, the doc told me about what
them
girls did
to each other back there."

Ellen fell strangely silent.

"You seemed to enjoy yourself," Richard said, directing his comment to Shelley. "I swear you loved every
minute of teasing poor old Ian and me."

She smiled knowingly and without comment looked
back to the board.

"Did they torture you at all?"
Stasz
asked, already
imagining all sorts of exquisite possibilities.

"
Ahh
, what torture," Richard said softly.

"Just think about this for torture," Ellen said suddenly,
with a malicious gleam in her eye. "I was thinking of
letting it ride for another couple of days, but then I found out what they had planned for you two so I took the extra
risk and tried the breakout at once. It seems they found
the old way of taking sperm samples to be rather repug
nant. So, my dear doctor, their medical people came up
with a suggestion that Diana approved of right after they
had their first specimen-gathering session for you."

"Oh, I can just imagine what delights they had planned,"
Richard said smoothly, "though to beat that first session
would have been darn near impossible. Ian, my old com
rade, you should have been there to see it. Why, it was
a true delight. You really missed something while you
were asleep. And then these damn women here came and
dragged us away before you had a chance."

Ian gave the two girls a look of reproach.

"You could have let me have one session," Ian replied,
"before liberating us."

"Maybe we should have, you ungrateful slug," Ellen
responded, her face aglow with a malevolent smile, "but
my dear sister Shelley talked me out of waiting. You see,
my fine chauvinistic friends, the medical team suggested to Diana that a simple operation could cut off the part of your body that they needed; it could have been rigged to
a bio support unit to produce all the sperm they'd ever
need. They just did that little show for you to get a sample,
so they could check out if you were viable and worth the effort.

"If the operation had worked, they planned the same
for you, my dear Ian."

Not another word was said as the three men went aft to drink.

Colonial Unit 13

First Completion Date:
 
2023

Primary Function:
Cosmos Society.
Organization of pro-
space activists.
One of the first units to demonstrate
the feasibility of the O'Neill Cylinder design.

Overall Design:
Single cylinder, 1400 meters by 350 me
ters.

Propulsion:
 
Matter/Antimatter.

Course:
SETI Anomaly One.
Galactic Core.

Political/Social Orientation:
Multinational Japanese,
Russian, English.
Cited by Beaulieu as "a colonial
unit of exceptional promise, showing the possibilities
of international harmony through peaceful coopera
tion in space."
With the coming of the Holocaust the
citizens of
13
voted to evacuate rather than be turned against each other by their less-civilized ancestors
below.

"Jesus, what the hell is this!"

The jump-down from light speed was complete, but Ian was ignoring
Stasz's
shouted questions because he
was still nauseated from the transition.

"Get on the board, Ian."

Convinced for the moment that dinner wasn't going to
come rushing back up, Ian pushed forward to hover be
hind
Stasz's
shoulder.

"I'm getting a lot of debris," Shelley called from the
Co's
position. "I've locked onto a beacon two thousand
klicks
ahead, declination five degrees off. But there are no significant mass readings."

"Ian, look at this!" Shelley dialed the CRT up to a
higher magnification.

A human body was at screen-center slowly tumbling through space.

"I'm picking up more, Ian, dozens of them. Do you want to look?"

He shook his head and turned away.

Within minutes
Stasz
was maneuvering the Discovery through a nightmarish jumble of debris—the twisted rem
nants of what had once been a vessel of several hundred
thousand tons. On a number of occasions hard maneu
vering was required to avoid torn hunks of metal and, in one case, a mummified fragment that had once been hu
man.

"As near as I can estimate,"
Stasz
reported, "a thin
cloud of debris is traveling outward from Delta Sag at a
velocity of just over 230 miles per second."

Delta Sag was straight ahead of them and outshining
all the other stars in the heavens. Another half hour's run would have jumped them within twenty A.U. of the star. But the signal beacon had caused them to stop and jump down into a floating funeral.

Ian scanned the trajectory
backplot
and passed it over
to
Stasz
.

Stasz
punched in the data and within seconds had a
response.
"Approximately fifty-two years, six months
outward bound from Delta Sag,"
Stasz
reported, "assum
ing constant velocity."

"I have the beacon source on visual," Shelley an
nounced.

The five of them huddled around the primary screen as the image came up. It was a nondescript hulk of in
terstellar flotsam slowly tumbling end over end.

"Approximately a hundred meters long by fifty wide,"
Stasz
reported. "It looks like the reactor core. It's still
hot,
I'm picking up some trace readings."

Even as
Stasz
spoke, the Discovery lurched slightly as it weaved past a large fragment that its shields could not
vaporize.
Stasz
guided the vessel back onto an intercept course and before the hour was over he was fine-tuning
the final approach that would bring them up alongside the
reactor unit.

"This is a waste, Ian," Ellen said, "whatever colony
unit this was, it's been blasted beyond recognition."

The others murmured their agreement. They were flying
formation with a drifting junk-yard—torn metal, shredded
shielding, shards of glass, and mummified bodies.

"I need to find out more," Ian replied coldly. "We started
out aimless, but with each step farther out, the path seemed
to point us into this direction, and to that star." He pointed
at Delta. "Now, damn it, we're only a fraction of a light-year out from it and we find this. I've got to know why.
Was this an accident or was it something else?"

"You mean Smith's colony?" Richard asked.

"Isn't it obvious?"

"By my hairy butt,"
Stasz
shouted. "There's someone aboard that hulk!"

They crowded forward to see where he was pointing.

"There, in that window, I saw a light flashing. Look,
it will roll into view again in another couple of seconds.
There, there it is!"

As the window came into view, a strobe flashed once,
then again and again in rapid succession, and in the flashing light Ian thought he saw a figure waving.

After half a dozen passes they were convinced that
there was somebody alive in there.
But how to get at him?

Twelve hours later they were still debating the ques
tion.

"Look,"
Stasz
repeated yet again, as if they were ig
norant children. "First, there's no docking port."

"But there does seem to be an airlock."

"We're not sure
its
functional,"
Stasz
replied. "Second, there's only one person in here who's had experience with
an EVA propulsion device, and that's me. And if you think
I'm going out into that floating junkyard, you're crazy.
Remember, comrades, if I buy it, who the hell is going to
fly you back home?"

None of them liked to be reminded of that.
Stasz
was all they had, and as such, he was treated with special care
when it came to dockings and explorations.

"So, who wants to go?" Shelley asked again, and all
were silent.

"We could always tie a tether line to someone, he could
push out, and if he runs into a problem we could reel him
back in."

"Well, sister," Richard said reproachfully, "what do
you mean 'him'? I thought after that dose of liberation at our last visit, you would be more than eager to prove
yourself yet again."

"Just remember, buster, it was I who saved you from an operation that might have improved your personality."

"And you never did tell us,
sister
Ellen, just how sisterly you and Carrie got. My, my, I would have loved to
have seen that show."

"You rotten son of a bitch!"
Ellen stood up with such vigor that she tumbled from her seat and catapulted clear
into the forward cabin.

Her shrieks filled the air and it was some seconds before the rest of them realized that the shrieks were not
screams of rage but of terror.

They pushed forward and Ian felt his heart skip over
into a near palpitation as he looked toward the forward
window. A mummified face was looking in the window
from the outside. But this mummy was grinning and its eyes were rolling. It brought up a space-suited hand and
waved.

"Guess that settles the question of whether we go to
the neighbors or the neighbors come here," Richard said.
"I better get a
bottle,
it looks like he needs a drink."

"Crack one for me, as well," Ellen said hoarsely. "I need it."

"Elijah, they called me Elijah Crump." He spoke slowly,
each word formed distinctly and with effort, as if every syllable was a physical form that had to be worked over
before expelled.

With quiet ceremony Richard drifted forward and of
fered a drink container, but first he shook it lightly. The tinkle of ice could be heard.

"Richard, should you?" Ellen asked.

Elijah looked at him, a glint of suspicion in his eyes.

"Are you from
Sagit
?"

"
Sagit
?"
Ian asked.

"He must mean Delta Sagittarius," Shelley interjected,
and pointed back to the front of the ship where the one
star now dominated the sky before them.

"Yes, Delta Sagittarius." He stumbled over Sagittarius
but they knew what he had said. "Curious name, what
does it mean? We never did know."

Ian wrestled with so many questions. He had almost
leaped upon Elijah the moment he had cleared the airlock,
so eager was he to find out why. Why? There were so
many whys, but he had to be patient. Elijah was not the
typical image of what one expected to come floating in for a friendly visit.

First off, his suit was downright dangerous. It was of an ancient pattern, last seen in Earth environment a mil
lennium ago. Patched and
repatched
in a crazy-quilt pat
tern that looked like the efforts of a hallucinating
seamstress. He was clothed in a set of coveralls that had been worked on in the same way, worn and threadbare
from a thousand cleanings, matching the appearance of
the man who wore them.

Elijah was lean, gaunt, and stretched out thin, his fingers long and sensitive, his high forehead fringed with a
thin wisp of snow-white hair that matched the long flowing
beard framing his face. Eagerly his eyes darted from one
to the other of them, drinking in the sight of them; yet
his look was also one of suspicion and fear.

"I haven't spoken to anyone in, how long is it
?...
"
He lapsed into silence again,
then
noticed the drink still being offered by Richard.

Tentatively he took the container in his hand and brought
the straw to his lips.

Tears came to his eyes.

"Bless you," he whispered. "I remember now, it's...
it's
called alcohol."

"Gin, my man," Richard replied cheerfully, "and the
best to be had in this part of the cosmos."

"You were saying that you hadn't spoken to anyone," Ian interjected, fearful that Richard would start in on a comparative study of alcohol that would drag their guest
into a numbing oblivion. "How long has it been?"

Elijah nodded his head slowly, took another sip and
savored it.

"I remember a name for it, we called it
godt
. I had a chronometer aboard, back there." He gestured vaguely back toward the airlock. "It broke after measuring fifty-
one
godt
."

"That's Old Russian for years," Ian whispered in quiet amazement.

Elijah took another sip and smiled gravely at them. "I have survived upon that hulk alone. The other survivors
died within the first year, and I was left alone.
Alone after
the destruction.
It's been at least fifty years," he whis
pered, "since I have talked to another man."
Elijah started to laugh.

"Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide, wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My
soul in agony."

Ian sat enrapt, but it was Shelley who interrupted.

"I've heard a fragment of that."

"Coleridge,
The
Ancient Mariner."

"We've only a fragment," she continued. "The rest is believed lost."

"I know it all, right in here," Elijah said, pointing to
his head. His voice rose up with a deep sonorous tone
that echoed through the ship.

"I closed my lids, and kept them close
,
And the balls like pulses beat;
For the sky and the sea, and the sea, and the sky
Lay like a load on my weary eye,
And the dead were at my feet."

He stopped and looked at them.

"I'm sorry, I was alone, you see.
Never a voice to respond, never a soul to listen as I shouted my words to the universe."

Ian could hardly respond
,
stunned by the magnitude
of what he was observing. Fifty years alone, lost in the
endless reaches of the universe! "What happened?" he
asked tentatively.

Elijah took another sip and there was a wild glint in
his eye.

"'For I alone have lived to tell thee this tale!' "

"What?"

"You don't realize, my friends, that I've waited two
score and ten years to utter those simple words, 'for I
alone have lived to tell thee this tale,' can't you see? Can't you see what this means?" His voice broke and he started
to sob.

Ian looked across at Richard and the others.

"Not now, Ian, don't push him yet. It can wait," Rich
ard said softly. "It can wait, let him have his drink."