Charles Sheffield - Starfire

My field of view moved steadily across the room, and I counted the paces. The window came closer. I was looking up and out, to a high layer of scattered cloud. And then I was looking down.

Down, down, down. Far below lay dwarfed fields, towers, and highways, and beyond them the dull, distant glint of water.

I stepped back convulsively. My legs moved, but I did not move. I stepped again, and again. Nothing. I was rooted to the spot, running backward in a nightmare. Finally I realized what I had to do and squeezed the hand controller. The video field switched at once to full local.

“You all right?” Seth must have heard my panting.

I stared at the familiar fixtures of my study: the old elephant-foot umbrella stand, the carved bone flute on the wall, the delicate glass globe on my desk that had survived a hundred close encounters with my darlings. Slowly they soothed me. “I am … all right. You should have warned me.”

“Wrong.” Seth was cheerfully unrepentant. “This was a practical test, right? You think when I’m wandering Sky City I’ll be able to give you a running commentary about where we’re goin’? If you think that, you’re blowin’ bubbles. I’ll be wearin’ what looks like a normal jacket, an’ people who talk to their clothes get put away. You have to figure out for yourself how much input you can take.”

He was, of course, absolutely right, but that made his casual callousness no easier to take. Slowly I allowed the remote scene to bleed back into my visual feed. Superimposed on the furnishings of my study appeared a faint black-and-white outline of the window. Seth must still have been standing in front of it.

“How high is the place where you are standing?” I asked.

“Don’t know exactly. I’m up near the top of The Flaunt, so I’d guess over thirty-five hundred feet.”

“Don’t move. I wish to try an experiment.”

As long as my sense of presence was firmly rooted in the castle, the fact that the other view emanated near the vertiginously high summit of The Flaunt had no more effect on me than a photograph taken from a mountaintop. The question was, at what point was the remote scene mistaken for reality?

Gradually I strengthened the feed. The sky beyond the window turned from pale gray to blue. Dark lines lower down in the image strengthened and changed. Once again I saw roads and buildings.

I had reached the point where the image was drawn equally from my own and Seth’s perspective. Still I felt no discomfort.

“You havin’ fun there?” Seth, I realized, had little idea what I was doing. His only input was the sound of my breathing.

I told him of my actions, and added, “Wait a little longer. I propose to see how far I can go with this.”

“Take your time. Don’t worry about me, I can stand around here all day.” Sarcasm should not be confused with wit, and Seth’s use of it suggested more tension than he would admit.

I continued to change the balance of images presented to me, gradually increasing the contribution from Houston. All went well until the scenes of my study began to lose color and appear only as a set of gray edges. At that point I felt a prickling in the palms of my hands and a sweaty clamminess on my forehead and cheeks.

Others might tell themselves that they were still in control, that they could handle the fear seeping like iced water up the spinal column and into the brain. I held no such delusions. I have known, for far too many years, that I am not in control of myself.

I decreased slightly the contribution from Seth. As the image of my study strengthened, once more I could breathe easy. I locked the setting of my controller and studied the scene presented by the RV helmet.

“I think this will be satisfactory,” I said. “My surroundings are enough to anchor me in this reality, and I can see yours well enough to make my own observations. Select some feature below you.”

“The ship canal. Over on the left.”

“I see it. Four vessels are visible. I am not able to make out their types.”

“Me neither. Four ships is right. But you can do somethin’ I won’t be able to do once I’m up at Sky City. Watch this.”

I took no action, but the canal expanded suddenly in my field of view. One of the ships at the center of the scene sprang into vivid detail. I could see individual funnels and masts and hatches, even individual human figures standing on the deck.

“How are you able to do that?”

“Beats me, but I’ll tell you what I was told. This jacket I’m wearin’ has sensors all over it. They can work together, an’ when they do it’s like having a telescope with a mirror two feet across. You got a control for it on the side of your hand unit. When you turn it on you’ll see a lot more detail of what I’m lookin’ at than I can. Try it for yourself.”

“I will. But not now.” As Seth was speaking I had become aware that the gray image representing my own local scene was changing. The clean-edged outline of the walls had become broken and uneven. “I must go. You can call me later.”

“I’ll do that-from Sky City.”

It was, I suspect, intended to keep me from breaking contact. If that was Seth’s objective, it failed. I decreased the remotely viewed component to zero, and at once saw what I already suspected. My study was crowded. Every one of the girls was there.

I spoke to Paula, whom the others through some unidentifiable instinct recognized as their senior. “Would you care to explain your presence?” I said. “This is not some form of entertainment, devised for your pleasure. As I told Crystal and Lucy-Mary, I am engaged in an important meeting.”

“I’m very sorry.” Paula’s face said she was no such thing. “It’s just that Lucy-Mary and Crystal told us you were-well, we all wanted to see you.”

“Indeed?” I stood up and walked into their midst. As always, their beauty rendered me breathless-but not speechless. “You see me. Here I am. Have I, then, become so much an object of ridicule that the very sight of me-”

I stopped. I had caught sight of myself in the long mirror next to the mantelpiece. The bottom of the RV helmet formed a seamless match to my own dark shirt. Tall, forbidding, with a swollen, goggle-eyed, hideous head, I had become a chimera, a lusus naturae, enough to strike terror into any heart. But not, apparently, those of my darlings. They stared at me with interest.

I pulled off the RV helmet. At the sight of my frowning face every girl, from tall and mature Bridget to little golden-haired Victoria, shrieked, turned, and ran out of the room.

It was done on purpose, planned long before they ever entered. I went back to sit at my desk. It was nice to know that my young wards were developing that most important of all senses, the sense of humor; but at the moment I had serious issues to ponder.

Seth Parsigian was relying on me to perform miracles. He would head off for Sky City, move around at my bidding, return images to Earth, and blithely wait for me to do-what?

To integrate new material from Sky City with the existing evidence, apply my own unique understanding of the mind of a serial killer, point a spectral finger at some individual, and say, “That’s the one.”

It would not happen. The pattern of deaths remained totally baffling, the brain behind the killings unseen and alien. There was no hint of compulsion, no suggestion of the recurring need that enforced its schedule for murder.

As I have already remarked, the savage mutilation of the Sky City bodies disgusted me. I had not touched sexually, nor would I ever touch, my victims. I had saved them, from poverty and misery, from hunger and dirt, from abusive parents, from sexual assault, from the degradation and drugs and dark despair that would otherwise have been their lot. They were rising again to a place where each could fulfill her own high potential.