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“Yes, yes, of course, but they all agree on the essentials—the volcryn, sailing out, passing through our short-lived empires and transient glories in their ancient eternal sublight ships. That is what matters! The rest is frippery, ornamentation; we will soon know the truth of it. I checked what little was known about the races said to flourish further in still, beyond even the Nor T’alush—civilizations and peoples half legendary themselves, like the Dan’lai and the ullish and the Rohenna’kh—and where I could find anything at all, I found the volcryn story once again.”
“The legend of the legends,” Royd suggested. The spectre’s wide mouth turned up in a smile.
“Exactly, exactly,” d’Branin agreed. “At that point, I called in the experts, specialists from the Institute for the Study of Non-Human Intelligence. We researched for two years. It was all there, in the libraries and memories and matrices of the Academy. No one had ever looked before, or bothered to put it together.
“The volcryn have been moving through the manrealm for most of human history, since before the dawn of spaceflight. While we twist the fabric of space itself to cheat relativity, they have been sailing their great ships right through the heart of our alleged civilization, past our most populous worlds, at stately slow sublight speeds, bound for the Fringe and the dark between the galaxies. Marvelous, Royd, marvelous!”
“Marvelous!” Royd agreed.
Karly d’Branin drained his chocolate cup with a swig, and reached out to catch Royd’s arm, but his hand passed through empty light. He seemed disconcerted for a moment, before he began to laugh at himself. “Ah, my volcryn. I grow overenthused, Royd. I am so close now. They have preyed on my mind for a dozen years, and within the month I will have them, will behold their splendor with my own weary eyes. Then, then, if only I can open communication, if only my people can reach ones so great and strange as they, so different from us—I have hopes, Royd, hopes that at last I will know the why of it!”
The ghost of Royd Eris smiled for him, and looked on through calm transparent eyes.
* * *
Passengers soon grow restless on a starship under drive, sooner on one as small and spare as the Nightflyer. Late in the second week, the speculation began in deadly earnest.
“Who is this Royd Eris, really?” the xenobiologist, Rojan Christopheris, complained one night when four of them were playing cards. “Why doesn’t he come out? What’s the purpose of keeping himself sealed off from the rest of us?”
“Ask him,” suggested Dannel, the male linguist.
“What if he’s a criminal of some sort?” Christopheris said. “Do we know anything about him? No, of course not. D’Branin engaged him, and d’Branin is a senile old fool, we all know that.”
“It’s your play,” Lommie Thorne said.
Christopheris snapped down a card. “Setback,” he declared, “you’ll have to draw again.” He grinned. “As for this Eris, who knows that he isn’t planning to kill us all.”
“For our vast wealth, no doubt,” said Lindran, the female linguist. She played a card on top of the one Christopheris had laid down. “Ricochet,” she called softly. She smiled.
So did Royd Eris, watching.
* * *
Melantha Jhirl was good to watch.
Young, healthy, active, Melantha Jhirl had a vibrancy about her the others could not match. She was big in every way; a head taller than anyone else on board, large-framed, large-breasted, long-legged, strong, muscles moving fluidly beneath shiny coal-black skin. Her appetites were big as well. She ate twice as much as any of her colleagues, drank heavily without ever seeming drunk, exercised for hours every day on equipment she had brought with her and set up in one of the cargo holds. By the third week out she had sexed with all four of the men on board and two of the other women. Even in bed she was always active, exhausting most of her partners. Royd watched her with consuming interest.
“I am an improved model,” she told him once as she worked out on her parallel bars, sweat glistening on her bare skin, her long black hair confined in a net.
“Improved?” Royd said. He could not send his projection down to the holds, but Melantha had summoned him with the communicator to talk while she exercised, not knowing he would have been there anyway.
She paused in her routine, holding her body straight and aloft with the strength of her arms and her back. “Altered, captain,” she said. She had taken to calling him captain. “Born on Prometheus among the elite, child of two genetic wizards. Improved, captain. I require twice the energy you do, but I use it all. A more efficient metabolism, a stronger and more durable body, an expected lifespan half again the normal human’s. My people have made some terrible mistakes when they try to radically redesign humanity, but the small improvements they do well.”
She resumed her exercises, moving quickly and easily, silent until she had finished. When she was done, she vaulted away from the bars and stood breathing heavily for a moment, then crossed her arms and cocked her head and grinned. “Now you know my life story, captain,” she said. She pulled off the net to shake free her hair.
“Surely there is more,” said the voice from the communicator.
Melantha Jhirl laughed. “Surely,” she said. “Do you want to hear about my defection to Avalon, the whys and wherefores of it, the trouble it caused my family on Prometheus? Or are you more interested in my extraordinary work in cultural xenology? Do you want to hear about that?”
“Perhaps some other time,” Royd said politely. “What is that crystal you wear?”
It hung between her breasts ordinarily; she had removed it when she stripped for her exercises. She picked it up again and slipped it over her head; a small green gem laced with traceries of black, on a silver chain. When it touched her Melantha closed her eyes briefly, then opened them again, grinning. “It’s alive,” she said. “Haven’t you ever seen one? A whisperjewel, captain. Resonant crystal, etched psionically to hold a memory, a sensation. The touch brings it back, for a time.”
“I am familiar with the principle,” Royd said, “but not this use. Yours contains some treasured memory, then? Of your family, perhaps?”
Melantha Jhirl snatched up a towel and began to dry the sweat from her body. “Mine contains the sensations of a particularly satisfying session in bed, captain. It arouses me. Or it did. Whisperjewels fade in time, and this isn’t as potent as it once was. But sometimes—often when I’ve come from lovemaking or strenuous exercise—it comes alive on me again, like it did just then.”
“Oh,” said Royd’s voice. “It has made you aroused, then? Are you going off to copulate now?”
Melantha grinned. “I know what part of my life you want to hear about, captain—my tumultuous and passionate lovelife. Well, you won’t have it. Not until I hear your life story, anyway. Among my modest attributes is an insatiable curiosity. Who are you, captain? Really?”
“One as improved as you,” Royd replied, “should certainly be able to guess.”
Melantha laughed, and tossed her towel at the communicator grill.
* * *
Lommie Thorne spent most of her days in the cargo hold they had designated as the computer room, setting up the system they would use to analyze the volcryn. As often as not, the xenotech Alys Northwind came with her to lend a hand. The cyberneticist whistled as she worked; Northwind obeyed her orders in a sullen silence. Occasionally they talked.
“Eris isn’t human,” Lommie Thorne said one day, as she supervised the installation of a display viewscreen.
Alys Northwind grunted. “What?” A frown broke across her square, flat features. Christopheris and his talk had made her nervous about Eris. She clicked another component into position, and turned.
“He talks to us, but he can’t be seen,” the cyberneticist said. “This ship is uncrewed, seemingly all automated except for him. Why not entirely automated, then? I’d wager this Royd Eris is a fairly sophisticated computer system, perhaps a genuine Artificial Intelligence. Even a modest program can carry on a blind conversation indistinguishable from a human’s. This one could fool you, I’d bet, once it’s up and running.”
The xenotech grunted and turned back to her work. “Why fake being human, then?”
“Because,” said Lommie Thorne, “most legal systems give AIs no rights. A ship can’t own itself, even on Avalon. The Nightflyer is probably afraid of being seized and disconnected.” She whistled. “Death, Alys; the end of self-awareness and conscious thought.”
“I work with machines every day,” Alys Northwind said stubbornly. “Turn them off, turn them on, makes no difference. They don’t mind. Why should this machine care?”
Lommie Thorne smiled. “A computer is different, Alys,” she said. “Mind, thought, life, the big systems have all of that.” Her right hand curled around her left wrist, and her thumb began idly rubbing the nubs of her implant. “Sensation, too. I know. No one wants the end of sensation. They are not so different from you and I, really.”
The xenotech glanced back and shook her head. “Really,” she repeated, in a flat, disbelieving voice.
Royd Eris listened and watched, unsmiling.
* * *
Thale Lasamer was a frail young thing; nervous, sensitive, with limp flaxen hair that fell to his shoulders, and watery blue eyes. Normally he dressed like a peacock, favoring the lacy vee-necked shirts and codpieces that were still the fashion among the lower classes of his homeworld. But on the day he sought out Karoly d’Branin in his cramped, private cabin, Lasamer was dressed almost somberly, in an austere grey jumpsuit.
“I feel it,” he said, clutching d’Branin by the arm, his long fingernails digging in painfully. “Something is wrong, Karoly, something is very wrong. I’m beginning to get frightened.”
The telepath’s nails bit, and d’Branin pulled away hard. “You are hurting me,” he protested. “My friend, what is it? Frightened? Of what, of whom? I do not understand. What could there be to fear?”
Lasamer raised pale hands to his face. “I don’t know, I don’t know.” He waited. “Yet it’s there, I feel it. Karoly, I’m picking up something. You know I’m good, I am, that’s why you picked me. Just a moment ago, when my nails dug into you, I felt it. I can read you now, in flashes. You’re thinking I’m too excitable, that it’s the confinement, that I’ve got to be calmed down.” The young man laughed a thin hysterical laugh that died as quickly as it had begun. “No, you see, I am good. Class one, tested, and I tell you I’m afraid. I sense it. Feel it. Dream of it. I felt it even as we were boarding, and it’s gotten worse. Something dangerous. Something volatile. And alien, Karoly, alien!”
“The volcryn?” d’Branin said.
“No, impossible. We’re in drive, they’re light years away.” The edgy laughter sounded again. “I’m not that good, Karoly. I’ve heard your Crey story, but I’m only a human. No, this is close. On the ship.”
“One of us?”
“Maybe,” Lasamer said. He rubbed his cheek absently. “I can’t sort it out.”
D’Branin put a fatherly hand on his shoulder. “Thale, this feeling of yours—could it be that you are just tired? We have all of us been under strain. Inactivity can be taxing.”
“Get your hand off me,” Lasamer snapped.
D’Branin drew back his hand quickly.
“This is real,” the telepath insisted, “and I don’t need you thinking that maybe you shouldn’t have taken me, all that crap. I’m as stable as anyone on this … this … how dare you think I’m unstable, you ought to look inside some of these others, Christopheris with his bottle and his dirty little fantasies, Dannel half sick with fear, Lommie and her machines, with her it’s all metal and lights and cool circuits, sick, I tell you, and Jhirl’s arrogant and Agatha whines even in her head to herself all the time, and Alys is empty, like a cow. You, you don’t touch them, see into them, what do you know of stable? Losers, d’Branin, they’ve given you a bunch of losers, and I’m one of your best, so don’t you go thinking that I’m not stable, not sane, you hear.” His blue eyes were fevered. “Do you hear?”
“Easy,” d’Branin said. “Easy, Thale, you’re getting excited.”
The telepath blinked, and suddenly the wildness was gone. “Excited?” he said. “Yes.” He looked around guiltily. “It’s hard, Karoly, but listen to me, you must, I’m warning you. We’re in danger.”
“I will listen,” d’Branin said, “but I cannot act without more definite information. You must use your talent and get it for me, yes? You can do that.”
Lasamer nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.” They talked quietly for more than an hour, and finally the telepath left peacefully.
Afterwards d’Branin went straight to the psipsych, who was lying in her sleepweb surrounded by medicines, complaining bitterly of aches. “Interesting,” she said when d’Branin told her. “I’ve felt something too, a sense of threat, very vague, diffuse. I thought it was me, the confinement, the boredom, the way I feel. My moods betray me at times. Did he say anything more specific?”
“No.”
“I’ll make an effort to move around, read him, read the others, see what I can pick up. Although, if this is real, he should know it first. He’s a one, I’m only a three.”
D’Branin nodded. “He seems very receptive,” he said. “He told me all kinds of things about the others.”
“Means nothing. Sometimes, when a telepath insists he is picking up everything, what it means is that he’s picking up nothing at all. He imagines feelings, readings, to make up for those that will not come. I’ll keep careful watch on him, d’Branin. Sometimes a talent can crack, slip into a kind of hysteria, and begin to broadcast instead of receive. In a closed environment, that’s very dangerous.”
Karoly d’Branin nodded. “Of course, of course.”
In another part of the ship, Royd Eris frowned.
* * *
“Have you noticed the clothing on that holograph he sends us?” Rojan Christopheris asked Alys Northwind. They were alone in one of the holds, reclining on a mat, trying to avoid the wet spot. The xenobiologist had lit a joystick. He offered it to his companion, but Northwind waved it away.
“A decade out of style, maybe more. My father wore shirts like that when he was a boy on Old Poseidon.”
“Eris has old-fashioned taste,” Alys Northwind said. “So? I don’t care what he wears. Me, I like my jumpsuits. They’re comfortable. Don’t care what people think.”
“You don’t, do you?” Christopheris said, wrinkling his huge nose. She did not see the gesture. “Well, you miss the point. What if that isn’t really Eris? A projection can be anything, can be made up out of whole cloth. I don’t think he really looks like that.”
“No?” Now her voice was curious. She rolled over and curled up beneath his arm, her heavy white breasts against his chest.
“What if he’s sick, deformed, ashamed to be seen the way he really looks?” Christopheris said. “Perhaps he has some disease. The Slow Plague can waste a person terribly, but it takes decades to kill, and there are other contagions—manthrax, new leprosy, the melt, Langamen’s Disease, lots of them. Could be that Royd’s self-imposed quarantine is just that. A quarantine. Think about it.”
Alys Northwind frowned. “All this talk of Eris,” she said, “is making me edgy.”
The xenobiologist sucked on his joystick and laughed. “Welcome to the Nightflyer, then. The rest of us are already there.”
* * *
In the fifth week out, Melantha Jhirl pushed her pawn to the sixth rank and Royd saw that it was unstoppable and resigned. It was his eighth straight defeat at her hands in as many days. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the lounge, the chessmen spread out before her in front of a darkened viewscreen. Laughing, she swept them all away. “Don’t feel bad, Royd,” she told him. “I’m an improved model. Always three moves ahead.”
“I should tie in my computer,” he replied. “You’d never know.” His ghost materialized suddenly, standing in front of the viewscreen, and smiled at her.
“I’d know within three moves,” Melantha Jhirl said. “Try it.”
They were the last victims of a chess fever that had swept the Nightflyer for more than a week. Initially it had been Christopheris who produced the set and urged people to play, but the others had lost interest quickly when Thale Lasamer sat down and beat them all, one by one. Everyone was certain that he’d done it by reading their minds, but the telepath was in a volatile, nasty mood, and no one dared voice the accusation. Melantha, however, had been able to defeat Lasamer without very much trouble. “He isn’t that good a player,” she told Royd afterwards, “and if he’s trying to lift ideas from me, he’s getting gibberish. The improved model knows certain mental disciplines. I can shield myself well enough, thank you.” Christopheris and a few of the others then tried a game or two against Melantha, and were routed for their troubles. Finally Royd asked if he might play. Only Melantha and Karoly were willing to sit down with him over the board, and since Karoly could barely recall how the pieces moved from one moment to the next, that left Melantha and Royd as regular opponents. They both seemed to thrive on the games, though Melantha always won.
Melantha stood up and walked to the kitchen, stepping right through Royd’s ghostly form, which she steadfastly refused to pretend was real. “The rest of them walk around me,” Royd complained.
She shrugged, and found a bulb of beer in a storage compartment. “When are you going to break down and let me behind your wall for a visit, captain?” she asked. “Don’t you get lonely back there? Sexually frustrated? Claustrophobic?”
“I have flown the Nightflyer all my life, Melantha,” Royd said. His projection, ignored, winked out. “If I were subject to claustrophobia, sexual frustration, or loneliness, such a life would have been impossible. Surely that should be obvious to you, being as improved a model as you are?”
She took a squeeze of her beer and laughed her mellow, musical laugh at him. “I’ll solve you yet, captain,” she warned.
“Meanwhile,” he said, “tell me some more lies about your life.”
* * *
“Have you ever heard of Jupiter?” the xenotech demanded of the others. She was drunk, lolling in her sleepweb in the cargo hold.
“Something to do with Earth,” said Lindran. “The same myth system originated both names, I believe.”
“Jupiter,” the xenotech announced loudly, “is a gas giant in the same solar system as Old Earth. Didn’t know that, did you?”
“I’ve got more important things to occupy my mind than such trivia, Alys,” Lindran said.
Alys Northwind smiled down smugly. “Listen, I’m talking to you. They were on the verge of exploring this Jupiter when the stardrive was discovered, oh, way back. After that, course, no one bothered with gas giants. Just slip into drive and find the habitable worlds, settle them, ignore the comets and the rocks and the gas giants—there’s another star just a few light years away, and it has more habitable planets. But there were people who thought those Jupiters might have life, you know. Do you see?”
“I see that you’re blind drunk,” Lindran said.
Christopheris looked annoyed. “If there is intelligent life on the gas giants, it shows no interest in leaving them,” he snapped. “All of the sentient species we have met up to now have originated on worlds similar to Earth, and most of them are oxygen breathers. Unless you’re suggesting that the volcryn are from a gas giant?”
The xenotech pushed herself up to a sitting position and smiled conspiratorially. “Not the volcryn,” she said. “Royd Eris. Crack that forward bulkhead in the lounge, and watch the methane and ammonia come smoking out.” Her hand made a sensuous waving motion through the air, and she convulsed with giddy laughter.
* * *
The system was up and running. Cyberneticist Lommie Thorne sat at the master console, a featureless black plastic plate upon which the phantom images of a hundred keyboard configurations came and went in holographic display, vanishing and shifting even as she used them. Around her rose crystalline data grids, ranks of viewscreens and readout panels upon which columns of figures marched and geometric shapes did stately whirling dances, dark columns of seamless metal that contained the mind and soul of her system. She sat in the semi-darkness happily, whistling as she ran the computer through several simple routines, her fingers moving across the flickering keys with blind speed and quickening tempo. “Ah,” she said once, smiling. Later, only, “Good.”
Then it was time for the final run-through. Lommie Thorne slid back the metallic fabric of her left sleeve, pushed her wrist beneath the console, found the prongs, jacked herself in. Interface.
Ecstasy.
