Tad Williams - A Stark And Wormy Knight

“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?