A Stark And Wormy Knight

The Tenth Muse

When I first got to know Balcescu, I didn’t like him much. A snob, that’s what I thought he was, and way too stuck on himself. I was right, too. One of the things that drove me crazy is that he talked like George Sanders, all upper-crust, but I didn’t believe for a moment he actually knew who George Sanders was. Old Earth movies wouldn’t have been highbrow enough for him.

He also loved the sound of his own voice, whether the person he was talking to had time to listen or not.

“There you are, Mr. Jatt,” he said one day, stopping me as I was crossing the observation deck. “I’ve been looking for you. I have a question.”

I sighed, but not so he could tell. “What can I do for you, Mr. Balcescu?” Like I didn’t have anything better to do coming up on twelve hours ‘til Rainwater Hub than answer questions from seat-meat. Sorry, that’s what we call passengers sometimes. Bad habit. But I hate it when people think they’re on some kind of a pleasure cruise, and that just because I’m four feet tall and my voice hasn’t broken yet I’m the best choice to find them a comfy pillow or have a long chat about the business they’re going to be doing planetside. What a lot of civilians don’t get is that this is the Confederation Starship Lakshmi, and when you’re on my ship, it’s serious business. A cabin boy is part of the crew like anyone else and I’ve got real work to do. Ask Captain Watanabe if you think I’m lying.

Anyway, this Balcescu was a strange sort of fellow — young and old at the same time, if you know what I mean. He had all his hair and he wasn’t too wrinkled but his face was thin and the rest of him wasn’t much huskier. He couldn’t have been much older than my cabin-mate Ping, which would make him late thirties, maybe forty at the most but he dressed like an old man, or like someone out of an old movie — you know, those ancient films from Earth where they wear coats with patches on the elbows and loose pants and those things around their necks. Ties, right. That’s how he dressed — but no tie, of course. He wasn’t crazy, he just thought he was better than everyone else. Wanted you to know that even though he was some kind of language scientist, he was artistic. It wasn’t just his clothes — you could also tell by the things he said, the kind of the music he listened to. I’d heard it coming out of his cabin a couple of times — screeches like cats falling in love, crashes like someone banging on a ukulele with a crescent wrench. Intellectual stuff, in other words.

“I can’t help but noticing that much ado is being made of this particular stop, Mr. Jatt,” he said when he stopped me on deck. “But I went through four Visser rings on the way out to Brightman’s Star and nobody made much of that. Why such a fuss over this one, this…what do they call it?”

“People call Rainwater Hub ‘the Waterhole’,” I told him. “You can call it a fuss, but it’s dead serious business, Mr. Balcescu.”

“Why don’t you call me Stefan, my young friend — that would be easier. And I could call you Rolly — I’ve heard some of the others call you that.”

“Couldn’t do it, sir. Regs don’t allow it.”

“All right. How about something else, then? You could call me something amusing, like ‘Mr. B’…”

I almost made a horrified face, but Chief Purser always says letting someone know you’re upset is just as rude as telling them out loud. “If you don’t mind, I’ll just keep calling you Mr. Balcescu, sir. It’s easier for me.”

“All right, then, Mr. Jatt. So why is Rainwater Hub such a serious business?”

I did my best to explain. To be honest, I don’t understand all the politics and history myself — that’s not our job. Like we rocket-jocks always say, we just fly ‘em. But here’s what I know.

When Balcescu said he went all the way out to Brightman’s Star and there was no fuss about wormhole transfers, he was right, but that’s because he’d left from the Libra system and his whole trip had been through Confederation space. All those Visser rings he went through were “CO amp;O” as we say — Confederation Owned and Operated. But when he hopped on the Lak’ to join us on our run from the Brightman system to Col Hydrae, well, that trip requires one jump through non-Confederation space — the one we were about to make.

Not only that, but for some reason not even Doc Swainsea can explain so I can understand, the Visser ring here at Rainwater is hinky, or rather the wormhole itself is. Sometimes it takes a little while until the conditions are right, so the ships sort of line up and wait — all kinds of ships, the most you’ll ever see in one place, Confederation, X-Malkin, Blessed Union, ordinary Rim traders, terraform scouts out of Covenant, you name it. They call it the Waterhole because most of the time everybody just…shares. Even enemies. Nobody wants to shut down the hub when it means you could wind up with an entire fleet stranded on this side of the galaxy. So there’s a truce. It’s a shaky one, sometimes. Captain Watanabe told us once in the early days the Confederation tried to arrest a Covenant jumbo at another hub, Persakis out near Zeta Ophiuchus — the Convenant had been breaking an embargo on the Malkinates. Persakis was shut down for most of a year and it took twenty more for everyone to recover from that, so now everybody agrees there’s no hostilities inside a hub safety zone — like predators and prey sharing a waterhole on the savannah. Once you get there, it’s sanctuary. It’s… Casablanca.

I mentioned I like old Earth movies, didn’t I?

After I’d explained, Balcescu asked me a bunch more questions about how long we’d have to wait at Rainwater Hub and who else was waiting with us. For a guy who’d traveled to about fifteen or twenty different worlds, I have to say he didn’t know much about politics or Confederation ships, but I did my best to bring him up to speed. When he ran out of things to ask, he thanked me, patted me on the head, then walked back to the view-deck. Yeah, patted me on the head. I guess nobody told him that any member of a Confederation crew can break a man’s arm using only one finger and thumb. He was lucky I had things to do.

The weird stuff started happening as we entered the zone. Captain Watanabe and Ship’s Navigator Chinh-Herrera were on the com with Rainwater Hub Command when things started to get scratchy. At first they thought it was just magnetar activity, because there’s a big one pretty close by — it’s one of the things that makes Rainwater kind of unstable. The bridge lost Hub Command but they managed to latch onto another signal — com from one of Rainwater’s own lighters — and so they saw the whole thing on visual, through a storm of interference. Chinh-Herrera showed it to me afterward so I’ve seen it myself. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t.

First there was the huge alien ship, although even after several views it takes a while to realize it is a ship. Shaped more like a jellyfish or an amoeba, all curves and transparencies, and not particularly symmetrical. In another circumstance you might even call it beautiful — but not when it’s appearing out of a wormhole where it’s not supposed to be. The Visser ring wasn’t supposed to open for another several hours, and it certainly wasn’t supposed to open to let something out.

Then that… thing appeared. The angry thing.

It was some kind of volumetric display — but what kind, even Doc Swainsea couldn’t guess — a three-dimensional projected image, but what it looked like was some kind of furious god, a creature the size of small planet, rippling and burning in the silence of space. It just barely looked like a living creature — it had arms, that’s all you could tell for certain, and some kind of glow around the face that might have been eyes. Its voice, or the voice of the alien ship projecting it, thundered into every com of every ship within half a unit of Rainwater Hub. Nobody could understand it, of course — not then — it was just a deafening, scraping roar with bits along the edges that barked and twittered. “Like a circus dumped into a meat grinder, audience and all,” Chinh-Herrera said. I had to cover my ears when he played it for me.

If it had stopped there it would have been weird and frightening enough, but right after the monstrous thing went quiet some kind of weapon fired from inside it — from the ship itself, cloaked behind the volumetric display. It wasn’t a beam so much as a ripple — at the time you couldn’t even see it, but when we played it back you could see the moment of distortion across the star field where it passed — and the nearest ship to the Visser ring, a Malkinate heavy freighter, flew apart. It happened just as fast as that — a flare of white light and then the freighter was gone, leaving nothing but debris too small to see on the lighter’s com feed. Thirteen hundred men dead. Maybe they were X-Malkins and they didn’t believe what we believe, but they were still shipmen like us. How did it feel to have their ship, their home, just disappear into fragments around them? To be suddenly thrown into the freezing black empty?

A few seconds later, as if to show that it wasn’t an accident, the god-thing roared again and convulsed and another ship was destroyed, one of Rainwater’s lighters. This one must have had some kind of inflammable cargo because it went up like a giant magnesium flare, a ball of white fire burning away until nothing was left but floating embers.

This was too much, of course — proof of hostile intent — and a flight of wasps was scrambled from Rainwater Station and sent after the jellyfish ship. Maybe the aliens were surprised by how quickly we fought back, or maybe they were just done with their giant hologram: in either case, it disappeared as the wasp flight swept in. A moment later the wasps were in range and began to fire on the intruder, but their pulses only sputtered and flashed against the outside skin of the jellyfish ship. A moment later every one of the wasps abruptly turned into a handful of sparks flung out in all directions like spinning Catherine wheels — an entire flight gone.

After that, everybody fell back, as you can imagine. “Ran like hell” might be a better way to put it. The Confederation ships met up in orbit around the nearest planet, several units away from Rainwater, and the officers began burning up the com lines, as you can imagine. Nobody’d seen anything like the jellyfish before, or recognized whatever it was on that volumetric or how it was done. We accessed some of the Hub drones so we could keep a watch on Rainwater. The alien ship was still sitting there, although the Visser ring behind it had closed again. There were moments when the angry-god display flickered back into life, as if it was waking up to have a look around, and other moments when crackling lines of force like blue and orange lightning arced back and forth between the jellyfish and the ring, but none of this told anyone a thing about what was really going on.

Our first major clue came when one of the Hub’s own lighters got close enough to pick up some of the wreckage of the Malkin jumbo. The ship had not been blown apart in any normal sense — no shear and no heat, or at least no more than would be expected with sudden decompression. The carbon ceramic bones and skin of the ship had just suddenly fallen apart — “delatticed” was Doc Swainsea’s term. She didn’t sound happy when she said it, either.

“It’s not a technology I know,” she told Captain Watanabe the day after the attacks. “It’s not a technology I can even envision.”

The captain looked at her and they stood there for a moment, face to face — two very serious women, Doc tall and blonde, Captain W. a bit shorter and so dark haired and pale skinned that she looked like an ink drawing. “But is it a technology we can beat?” the captain finally asked.

I never heard the answer because they sent me out to get more coffee.

About two hours later, while I was bringing more whiskey glasses to the captain’s cabin — which meant, I assumed, that the doctor’s answer had been negative — I found Balcescu standing waiting for the lift to the bridge.

“I think I have it, Mr. Jatt,” he told me as I went by.

I was in a hurry — everyone on the ship was in a hurry, which was strange considering we obviously weren’t going anywhere soon — but something in his voice made me stop. He sounded exhausted, for one thing, and when I looked at him more closely I could see he didn’t look good, either: he was pale and trembling, like he hadn’t had anything but coffee or focusmeds for a while. Maybe he was sick.

“Have what, Mr. Balcescu? What are you talking about?”

“The language — the language of the things that attacked us. I think I’ve cracked it.”

Two minutes later we were standing in front of the captain, Chief Navigator Chinh-Herrera, Doc Swainsea, and an open com line going out to the other Confederation ships.

“I couldn’t have done this if it had been pure cryptography,” Balcescu explained, standing up after all the introductions had been handled. His hands were still shaking; he spilled a little of his coffee. He obviously needed some food, but I was damned if I was going to leave the room right then.

Sorry. We spacemen swear a lot. But I wasn’t going to rush out to the galley just when he was about to explain.

“What I mean to say is,” Balcescu went on, “if it is anything like the languages we already know — and I think it is — then they haven’t given us enough of a sample to do the standard reductions. For one thing, we couldn’t know that we were even hearing all of it…”

“What are you talking about?” asked Chinh-Herrera. “Not heard it all? It nearly blew our coms to bits!”

“We heard the part that was in our audio register. And there were other parts above and below human hearing range as well that we recorded. But who could say for certain that there weren’t parts of the language outside the range of our instruments? This is a first encounter. Never make assumptions, Chief Navigator.”

Chinh-Herrera turned away, hiding a scowl. He didn’t like our Mr. Balcescu much, it was easy to see. The chief navigator was a good man, and always nice to me, but he could be a bit old-fashioned sometimes. I actually understood what Balcescu was saying, because I’ve spent my life living with other people’s assumptions, too. That’s what happens when you’re my size.

“So you’re saying the sample wasn’t enough to form a basis for translation, Dr. Balcescu?” This was Doc Swainsea. “Then why are we here?”

“Because it is a language and I know what they’re saying,” said Balcescu wearily. By his expression, you’d have thought he was being forced to explain the alphabet to a room full of four year olds. “You see, we’ve enlarged the boundaries of human-contact space quite a bit in the last couple of hundred years — the Hub system has seen to that. Just a few weeks ago I was out in the Brightman system doing something that would have been unthinkable only generations ago — xenolinguistic fieldwork with untainted living cultures.” He gave Chinh-Herrera a bit of a sideways look. “In other words, speaking alien with aliens. Our linguistic database has also expanded hugely. So I figured it was worth a try to see if there were any similarities between what we heard at Rainwater Hub and any of the other cultures we’ve recorded on the outskirts of contact space. I spent hours and hours going through different samples, comparing points of apparent overlap…”

“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. “Touche, 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.

I asked the captain what I could bring her.

“Just sit down, Jatt,” she told me. “Shipman Ping’s handling your duties. You’re here as an observer.”

“Observer?” I had no idea what she was talking about. “Begging your pardon, Captain, but Observing what?” It was a mark of how sure she was of her command that I could ask my commanding officer a question that easily. A lot of ‘em want you to treat anything they say like it’s written on a stone tablet.

“This,” she said, and one of the engineers turned on the com screens.

The first thing I saw was a group of perhaps a half-dozen red circles moving across a star field, heading toward the immensity of the alien jellyfish ship. It took me a few more seconds until I figured out that the red circles were only on our screen, that they were markers outlining the position of several small Confederation ships which would otherwise have been almost too dark to see. The weird thing, though, was that I could see as I focused on their silhouettes when they crossed in front of the alien vessel that they weren’t Confederation cruisers or jumbos or even attack ships, but…

“Lifeboats,” said the captain as if she’d heard my thought. “One from each of the Confederation ships.”

“I’m sorry, Captain Watanabe, I’m still not getting any of this…” I looked around to see if anyone else was as puzzled as I was, but they were all watching the screens intently. I noticed that Balcescu, who lately had been at all these sort of meetings, was conspicuously absent. Had he given up? Or just pissed everyone off so much that they hadn’t invited him for this…whatever it was?

“Bear with us, Shipman Jatt,” the captain said. “You’re here by special request, but we’re in the middle of an actual mission here and we don’t have time to…” Her attention was distracted by a murmur from the first lieutenant.

“They’re not going for it,” he said.

“Maybe they’re just not in a hurry,” said Doc Swainsea. “Their approach is slow. Give it time…”

Even as she said it, one of the lifeboats suddenly flew apart. The others scattered away from their stricken comrade in all directions, but slowly — too slowly. The small ships dodged and dived, but within only a few minutes every one of them had been reduced to shattered flotsam. I blinked hard as my eyes filled with tears.

“There he is!” said Captain Watanabe. “See, Jatt?” When she turned to me she saw my face. “No, look, he got through!”

“He? What are you talking about? They’re all dead!” It was all I could do to keep from sobbing out loud at the waste, the murderous stupidity of it all.

“No! No, Jatt, the lifeboats were unmanned. They were cover, that’s all.” She pointed to the screen again, at what I had taken for another small, rounded chunk of debris. “See, that’s him! He’s almost reached them!”

“He doesn’t know, Captain,” said Chinh-Herrera suddenly. “Balcescu didn’t tell him.”

“For Christ’s sake, who is this he you keep talking about…?” Then suddenly it hit me. “Wait a minute…Balcescu? Are you telling me that’s Balcescu out there? What’s he doing? What’s going on?” I was almost crying again, and if you don’t think that’s embarrassing for a guy my age no matter how tall he is, you’re a damn idiot.

“He’s in one of our exterior repair pods,” said Chinh-Herrrera, pointing to the tiny, avocado-shaped object floating across the starfield toward the jellyfish, which loomed above it now like a frozen tidal wave. “The engineers modified it. Wait’ll you see what it can do.”

“If the ship lets it get close enough,” said Doc Swainsea. I noticed for the first time that her eyes were red, too.

I still didn’t really understand, but I sat in silence now with everyone else, holding my breath as I watched the tiny object float closer to the monstrous ship. At last it touched and stuck. Everyone cheered, even me, although I still wasn’t quite sure why. Slowly, the rounded shape of the repair pod flattened against the side of the jellyfish ship until had turned itself into a wide, shallow dome like a black blister.

“It’s slicing its way through,” said Chinh-Herrera. “Monofilament cutter.”

“Put on the helmet feed,” said the captain.

A moment later another picture jumped onto the screen — a close-up view of something falling away — a section of the alien ship’s skin that had been cut away now falling into the ship, I realized. The hole it left pulsed with blueish light.

“How’s the pod holding up?” the captain called to the engineers.

“The blister beams have gone rigid — no loss of pressure. We’re solid, ma’am!”

A moment later we could see feet in an excursion suit fill the screen as Balcescu looked down while he stepped through the hole cut in the alien hull. It seemed crazy — the aliens must know he was there. How many seconds could he have until they were on him? And what the hell was he supposed to do in that little time — plant a bomb? Why would they send Balcescu to do that instead of one of the marines?

But all I asked was, “Why isn’t he talking to us?”

“Radio silence,” Chinh-Herrera whispered. “To make sure we give him as long as possible before he’s detected.”

“He likes it better that way, anyway,” said Doc Swainsea.

As Balcescu moved inside it was as though he had been swallowed into some giant living thing — the blue-lit corridor was mostly smooth except for low bumps in strange formations, and as shiny-wet as internal organs. I half expected him to be swept up like a corpuscle in a blood stream, but instead he turned into the main passage, which seemed to be about half a hundred feet tall and nearly that wide, and began to move down it. He was walking, I realized, which meant that the ship had to have some kind of artificial gravity.

“What’s he looking for?” I whispered, but nobody answered me.

Suddenly a trio of inhuman shapes emerged from a side-corridor into the main passageway. I heard several of the observers swear bitterly — I must confess Captain Watanabe was one of them — as the horrors turned toward Balcescu. I couldn’t make a sound, I was so frightened. They were at least twice human height, rippling like ash in a fire, but undeniably real, even seen only on com screen. Whatever complicated arrangement was at the bottom of their bodies didn’t touch the floor, but they did not give the impression of being light or airy or ghostly. And their faces — if those were their faces…! Well, I’ll just say I think I know now what was under the Commendatore’s mask.

Balcescu stopped and stood waiting for them. We could tell he’d stopped because the walls around him stopped moving. I guess he thought there was no point in running away, although if it had been me I sure as hell would have given it a try. The entire bridge was silent. You know that expressions about hearing a pin drop? If someone had dropped one just then we all would have jumped right out of our skins.

The terrible things approached Balcescu until they were right in front of him — and then they glided right past him.

“What the hell…?” I said, louder than I meant to, but nobody seemed to care. They were too busy cheering. For a second I thought they’d lost their minds. “Has he got some kind of cloaking device…? I asked.

Balcescu had turned around for some reason and was following the floating aliens. To my horror, he actually hurried after them until he caught them, then reached out and shoved the nearest one in the back. The creature stumbled slightly, or at least bobbed off balance, but then righted itself and went on as if it hadn’t noticed anything unusual. Neither of them even looked back.

I felt like crying again, even as everyone else was celebrating. I just didn’t get it. I almost thought I’d lost my mind.

“I hope you all saw that,” Balcescu said. I realized it was the first time I’d heard his voice in days. Who would have guessed I’d be hearing it over a comlink from the alien ship? “I humbly submit that I have won the argument.”

“You sure did, you arrogant sonuvabitch!” shouted Chinh-Herrera, but I think the comlink was only working one way.

“What happened?” I asked Doc Swainsea. She seemed more restrained than the others, as if she didn’t quite believe this was the victory everyone else seemed to think it was.

“They’re not real,” she said. “He was right, Rahul.” The doctor is the only person who calls me by my true name.

“Not real? But they blew up our ships! And just now…he pushed one of them!”

“Oh, they’re real enough — they have weight and mass. But they’re constructs. They’re not real people, any more than a child’s toy soldiers are real.” She frowned. She looked very tired, like it was taking all her energy just to keep talking to me. “No, that’s a bad analogy. They’re not that kind of toys, they’re puppets. This was all a show.”

“A show? They killed people! Hundreds of shipmen! What kind of show is that?”

But before she could answer me I heard Balcescu’s voice and turned back.

“This looks like it, don’t you think?” he asked, as if having a conversation with an old friend. “Time to make a little trouble for the local repertory company, I think.” George Sanders, maybe even Cary Grant — I have to admit, the superior bastard did have style. He seemed to be standing in a large chamber, one that was even more intestinal than the passageway, if such a thing was possible. At the center of it floated a huge, shifting transparency, a moving gob of glass-clear gelatin as big as a jumbo jet. Balcescu walked toward it, then stopped and held up his com wand, thumbed it. A deep rasp of sound echoed through the room and the jelly rippled. Then a vast pseudopod abruptly reached out toward Balcescu and engulfed him. I must have cried out, because Chinh-Herrera turned to me and said, “Nah, don’t worry. He was right again, damn him. Look, it understood!”

The pseudopod was lifting him as gently as a mother with her child. Balcescu’s point of view rose up, up, up until he was at the top of the gently swirling jelly, up near the roof of the intestinal, cathedral sized room. He stepped onto a platform that emerged from the bumps and swirls of the wall, then held up his com wand again. A single sound, loud and rough as a tree pulling up its roots as it fell, then Balcescu and the rest of us waited.

Nothing happened.

“Maybe I’m being too polite,” he said. Balcescu still sounded like he was on a day-hike in the hills. Even I had to admire him — me, who’d seen him drunk and feeling sorry for himself. I can’t tell you how annoying that was.

He lifted the com wand and thumbed it again and another wash of sound rolled out, this one harsher and more abrupt. We waited.

The jelly thing abruptly shrank away beneath him like water down a drain. Then the lights faded all though the vast room. Everything was black. A moment later, Balcescu’s helmet light flicked on, but the view now was almost all shadows, the chamber’s far walls a distant, ghostly backdrop.

“Mission accomplished, Captain Watanabe,” he said. “It’s turned off.”

The bridge erupted in cheers, some of them almost hysterical. I still didn’t really understand what I’d just seen, or why I was even there, but when Ping appeared a few moments later with something that looked as near as damnit to champagne, I took a glass. God knows everyone else was having some, even the captain.

I was taking my second sip when I noticed someone standing over me.

“I’ve got something for you, Rahul,” said Doc Swainsea. She showed me her ring with its glowing spot. I let her touch mine so the data could transfer. “He asked me to make sure you got it.”

“He?” I asked, but I knew who she meant. It was just something to say as I watched her walk away and out of the conference room. She was the only one beside me who didn’t seem happy, and I wasn’t sure I understood my own reasons.

I stayed on the bridge a little while, but I wanted to see what he’d left for me. Anyway, I never liked champagne much. Any alcohol, in fact. Too many people over the years have thought it was funny to try to get the little guy drunk, and I used to be stubborn and stupid enough to try to prove them wrong.

“Hello, Mr. Jatt. I’m sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye properly, but the last few days have been a bit of a whirlwind, getting ready for this thing we’re trying. But I did want to say goodbye. I’m glad I got a chance to know you, even a little bit. I intend no joke, by the way.”

Balcescu was wearing an exosuit. The message looked like it had been recorded just before he left, which explained why he was talking like he wasn’t coming back.

“But I owed you of all people an explanation, because you were the one that gave me the idea. I guess you must know by now whether I was right or not.”

Like you ever really doubted it, you arrogant s.o.b., I thought. But then I wondered, hang on, if he was so sure of himself, why did he leave me this message?

“I should have suspected something right away — or at least as soon as I translated the message,” he went on. The Balcescu of half a day ago was putting on his exosuit gloves. “I mean, really — ‘The Outward-Reaching Murder Army will spit upon the stars that give you life’? ‘Only black ash will show that you ever lived.’ A bit over the top, isn’t it? But I didn’t see it. I took it at face value.

“Then you asked what else I could figure out about the aliens. I began to wonder. As you said, we knew what they’d said — but not why. Were they just roving the universe like Mongol horsemen, conquering and slaughtering? But why? What was the plan? Why leave a ship with immensely superior firepower to defend a Visser ring when they could have wiped out every ship in the vicinity in minutes? But it was the way they talked that really puzzled me. Bloody melodrama, that’s what it was. It was like something out of one of those ancient movies you told me you like so much… ”

“Those aren’t the kind of movies I like,” I told the recording. “Not that John Wayne crap — well, except for ‘Stagecoach’…and maybe ‘The Quiet Man’. I like characters.”

“…but I still couldn’t figure out what was making me itch. Then Diane…Dr. Swainsea…came in with her wide-spectrum audio analysis of the sounds that we hadn’t noticed at first, the ones that were largely out of our hearing range. Think about it. Behind those overly dramatic words they were pumping out a huge range of sounds — higher, lower, faster, slower — not exactly synchronized to the words, but emphasizing them, heightening the effect. What does that sound like?”

It hit me like a blow. “A soundtrack,” I whispered. “Like a movie.”

“Right,” the recording said. “A score — as in an opera. As in Don Giovanni.” The recorded Balcescu had closed all his seals and sat calmly, as if we were in the same room at the same time, having an ordinary conversation. “So I kept thinking, Mr. Jatt — why would someone go to such lengths, write an entire space opera, so to speak, just to kill innocent people? I couldn’t wrap my head around it. But then I started thinking that maybe they didn’t know they were killing anyone? But how could that be?” He smiled that infuriating smile of his. “Because maybe they didn’t think there was anyone left to kill. Remember, this thing came to us through the Rainwater Hub, the most compromised wormhole in known space. Who’s to say they even came from our galaxy? Remember, I only found traces of their languages in some of the very oldest civilizations we know out near the galactic rim. Maybe the originals that spoke those languages are long gone — at least in physical form.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, and I was about to run the recording back when he picked his helmet up off the clean pad where it had been sitting. The mirrored visor made a brief infinity loop with the recording wall screen — a million helmets strobed. “Look, if you saw this by itself, up close, you would assume someone was in it, right?” He slid the visor up to show the empty interior. “My guess is, these people — let’s call them the Company, like an opera company — have left their physical forms behind long ago. They might even be dead and gone, but that’s another libretto.” Again, that irritating grin. “But what they haven’t done is given up art. Just as our operas often imitate the past in which they were written, the Company’s art mimics the time when they had bodies. Entire constructs that perform acts of aggression and destruction and who knows what else? Programmed, operating in empty space at the edge of a distant galaxy, for the nostalgic pleasure of bodiless alien intelligences. Of course they would violently destroy what they come into contact with — because they’re pretending to be the kind of ancient savages that would do that. But that’s why I’m guessing that the Company are no longer wearing bodies — they assumed that anything they came in contact with would be more of their own lifeless constructs, part of this art form of theirs that we can’t hope to understand…yet.

“So that’s my idea, and in an hour or so we’ll find out if it’s true. I’ve convinced the captain it’s worth a try, and she’s brought in the other Confederation ships, so at the very least I will be the center of a fairly expensive little drama of my own.” Balcescu stood then, his helmet under his arm as though he were some kind of antique cavalier. “Sorry I couldn’t explain this to you in person, but as I said, it’s been a busy last 48 hours or so, putting together my hypothesis and then getting ready to test it.” He turned toward the door. “But I did want to thank you, Mr. Jatt. You opened my eyes in a couple of ways, and that doesn’t happen very often.”

I’ll bet it doesn’t, I thought, but suddenly I wished I’d told him my first name.

“And now one of two things are going to happen,” the recorded Balcescu said. “Either I’m wrong somehow — about the purpose of that ship, or about how realistic and thorough its defenses are, in which case by the time you see this I’ll have been delatticed, as Diane puts it. Or, I’ll be right, and I’ll be able to use the little bit of Company language I’ve put together, along with some useful algorithms from Dr. Swainsea, to override the programming and cancel the show, as it were.” He moved to the door of his cabin, so that he stood just at edge of the recorded picture. “And if I succeed with that, then I’m going to start looking for some kind of emergency return pod. You see, the Confederation are welcome to the ship itself. I don’t give a damn about how it works or how far it came to get here or anything of the things they want to know. I just want to go where the show is happening — where the opera, or religious passion play, or children’s game, or whatever this thing represents, is really going on. I’m hoping that the Company has some kind of recoverable module — like a ship’s black box — and that it will return to their space, wherever that might be. I intend to be on it.

“How could I miss that chance? A whole new culture, language, and even more importantly, a whole new art form! Nine muses aren’t going to be enough anymore, Mr. Jatt. So that’s why I made this recording, my friend. Either way, I wanted to say thank you — and goodbye.” And with that the recorded Balcescu held out his comwand and the recording went black.

Maybe he hadn’t guessed how soon I’d watch the recording — maybe he was still on the alien ship. I commed the captain’s cabin but she was on the observation deck with everyone else, celebrating. I rushed up, but before I could say a thing to Captain Watanabe or any of the other officers I spotted Dr. Swainsea leaning against the biggest view-portal looking out at the jellyfish ship, so strange, so large, so distant.

“Doc…Doc…!” I called as I ran up.

“I know, Rahul,” she said without turning. “Look — there it goes.” She pointed. I thought I could see a dim streak of light moving away from the alien ship — but not toward the Visser ring, I was surprised to see. “God only knows what kind of path those things travel,” she said. “Well, Stefan will find out soon enough.”

“You knew what he was going to do?”

“Of course. I helped him.” She looked at me. “Oh, Rahul, what else was I going to do? Beg him to stay? We had…maybe the beginning of something. How could that compete against a Big Idea, especially for a man who lived for big ideas? No, I couldn’t have asked him and he couldn’t have agreed — we both would have hated ourselves. You’ll understand someday.”

I understand now, I wanted to say, but everyone needs to tell their own story their own way. You don’t have to be six feet tall to know that. “It was just…” I shook my head. “At first I didn’t like him. But then, I kind of thought he and I might be…we might…”

“It might have been the beginning of a beautiful friendship?” she asked. Something in my expression must have amused her, because she laughed. “You don’t think you’re the only one who watches old pictures, do you?”

“I guess not.” I frowned. “I think Balcescu’s crazy, anyway. We’ve already got music and art and Fred Astaire and Katharine HePRETTY BOYurn and Howard Hawks — do we even need a tenth muse?”

“I need a drink,” she said. “Then maybe I’ll feel a little bit less like Ingrid Bergman.”

We walked across the observation deck, threading our way through the happy crew members, many of whom were already well into the champagne. She still looked sad, so I reached up and took Doc Swainsea’s hand…Diana’s hand. Lose a friend, make a friend. Sometimes life does imitate art, I guess.

“Well,” I told her — my best Bogart — “whatever else happens, we’ll always have Rainwater Hub.”