Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

One thing was sure—you had to be crazy or desperate to become like that. Little more than a slave to some corporation, forever locked in a cold vacuum of space, looking down on what you could never again share.

She could never do that. She thought death far preferable to that kind of life, but because others thought differently she and the rest of humanity could still travel on working ships requiring no crew and no skilled bridge. It wasn’t the only way to travel through space, but it was the most cost-effective, the most efficient way to do it.

“What would you like, ma’am?”

She was startled out of her reverie by the question. She looked up and saw a young, dark, curly-headed man in a kind of uniform wearing a barely visible headset and microphone.

“Oh, give me a half carafe of the house chablis,” she responded.

“Yes, ma’am. Coming right up.”

She wasn’t used to being waited on, and she couldn’t see the appeal of it. Hell, with the all-automated system she’d have ordered when she wanted to and had a quick response. Now she’d been interrupted, would have to wait until this boy got the wine from probably the same kind of machine they had in the lower-class places, have him bring it when he had the time and noticed it was up, and then she’d have to pay him or even tip him. It seemed not only archaic but so… unnecessary .

She decided to keep to something mild and controllable. Any of the fun drugs would just siphon precious cash while impairing her, and hard booze was murder on somebody her size. Wine was low-alcohol, and she could sip it.

She looked around, and settled for some reason, perhaps past experience or just plain instinct, on one guy who was sitting at the end of the bar near the route to the rest rooms. She wasn’t sure why her senses were attracted to him; certainly he looked less like he belonged here than she did. Maybe that was the reason—he just looked like a fish out of water. Rumpled clothes that looked like they’d been slept in, but of an expensive designer-type cut and look. Gray and black peppered hair that went in all directions at once and looked not only uncombed but perhaps uncombable, and a full but very nicely trimmed beard and mustache of the same middle-aged mix that fit his face quite well but which also marked him as an anachronism. Nobody who traveled between worlds had beards these days. Too much trouble. And the fact that the thick facial hair got a lot of attention when the rest of him did not told her that the look he had was the look he deliberately cultivated.

And he smoked! She wasn’t sure what he smoked, but the pipe was clearly visible when he reached inside his coat for something. People who smoked were just about flaunting their wealth and position, particularly these days.

What was a guy like that doing on a world like this drinking beer alone in an overpriced bar?

She decided to see if she could find out.

The method wasn’t subtle nor innovative, but it usually worked if a guy liked women. Sitting as he was on the stool just in front of the rest rooms, it was fairly simple to go by him fairly ostentatiously to get a feel if he noticed you, and, whether he did or not, when you came out (assuming he was still there) you were simply stuffing something, maybe a small makeup kit or anything that would make a real clatter on the floor, and you just dropped things near the guy. Most people were polite enough to notice and even help, and it broke the ice.

This guy was no exception. In fact, she felt his eyes on the back of her neck as she went in, and, after five minutes or so, when she emerged and dropped the small makeup kit so that it opened and scattered small stuff all over the floor, he was fairly quick to slide off the stool and begin to help her retrieve things.

She gave him the patented smile and thanked him for helping. It didn’t take a minute to recover and put away the dropped materials. “Thanks,” she said. “I do that a lot, I’m afraid, after I’ve been offworld for a while and then get back on. Different gravity or something, I guess.”

His eyes, an odd blue-gray unusual in any company, widened a bit and his bushy eyebrows rose. “You’ve been in space as more than a passenger, I take it?” It was a throaty baritone, one that wouldn’t carry all that far but had a kind of friendly, relaxed texture to it. The accent was definite but unplaceable; he was from someplace she’d never been.

She nodded. “Just got back from saving the universe and getting canned for my trouble. We weren’t getting paid to save the universe, we were getting paid to salvage a dead world.”

He was definitely interested, possibly hooked. “You were with that group that ran into that thing that ate a whole colony? I heard about that.”

“Everybody has. All it’s done is make me and most of my crew unemployable around here. I shoulda brought back some of the damned worm and let it eat my creditors. Trouble is, the worm would then know what they knew and it would still come after me for the money.” She looked around. “Pardon, but I’m standing and my drink’s over there. Care to join me, Mister…?”

“Norman Sanders,” he responded. “Thank you, I’d be delighted for the company.”

It was as easy as that. It still amazed her after all this time, but it usually was as easy as that.

“You know,” he said, sitting down opposite her, “this is quite a coincidence. I was actually thinking of getting in touch with you, or at least one of your party, when I heard the story. Might not pay much to these hard-bitten salvage types, but it might well make a great production.”

“Production?”

“Yes, that’s part of my work. I’m a producer. Actually, I’m a writer, but you have to be officially a producer or they rank you lower than the janitor.”

“A producer of what?” She honestly didn’t know what the guy was talking about.

“Comedies, dramas, extravaganzas. Whatever they’ll pay to watch. Go in, pay your money, and become one of the crew of—what was the name of your ship?”

“The Stanley .”

“Ah, yes! Become one of the crew of the Stanley as it explores a bizarre and sinister world of the dead. Feel what it’s like to be pursued by a voracious monster! And, if you survive and get away, this time you’ll be a hero. It’s a natural. I write it and get a real producer to finance it—piece of cake with all the clearances in hand—and then we use some classic virtual actors and a few real ones and we pump in the adrenaline and it’s a natural. Fine tune it, pump it up, and sell it to the bored and stuck masses on a hundred worlds, particularly the young folks, and we got a hit. And based on a true incident, hell, it’s critic proof!”

She tried to follow him. “You write—plays? Books? Cyber experiences?”

“All of the above,” he responded with a smile and a shrug. “It’s a lot more complicated these days in some ways, but the professional storyteller remains the oldest profession of humankind!”

“I thought something else was the oldest profession,” she noted.

He chuckled. “That’s what they all think! But, listen, it wasn’t just animal lust that got the first whore in bed with the first man. No, ma’am. It was because that first man, and first woman probably, and maybe even the first whore, all had fantasies . The fantasies came first, then the act, then more storytelling afterwards as the first man tried to explain it away to the first woman. It doesn’t matter. We storytellers sometimes get shot but we generally don’t starve. One of the earliest tales is of Scheherazade, who was supposed to be executed for something or other but got to telling stories the king found fascinating. She knew when she ran out of stories she’d lose her head, so she kept telling them, a thousand and one, until the old king forgot or dropped dead or whatever. And thousands of years later and on worlds hundreds of light-years from Old Earth, they still remember her name, the storyteller’s name, while nobody knows who that king was.”