Дэймон Найт - Orbit 8

But Starfinder wants the second ganglion destroyed by someone other than himself, doesn’t he? Apparently not, for he walks past the shift leader without a word and descends the companionway to the third deck. Here, in the main supply room, he procures an anti-2-omicron-vii suit. Both the supply room and the third-deck corridor are deserted, and in moments he has reached the lowest deck and is heading for the drive-tissue chamber. He drops off the suit by the machine-shop door, picks up his hyperacetylene torch and tanks in the drive-tissue chamber, and returns. Then he is in the machine shop, the door sealed behind him*

He marks off the center of the shop, dons the anti-2-omicron-vii suit and begins burning through the deck.

The machine-shop door is constructed of transsteel filched from the whale’s subtissue and is six inches thick. Even radiation from a healthy ganglion would be unable to penetrate it; hence Starfinder has no fears on that score.

Hyperacetylene does not melt metal—it vaporizes it. A depression three feet in diameter begins to take shape.

Starfinder’s mind wanders as he burns...The towers the Carthaginians built atop their war beasts housed bowmen, and when the enemy was within range the bowmen unleashed their arrows from the safety of their portable forts, killing many of their foes and wounding others. Astride each elephant’s neck sat a pilot armed with a sledgehammer, with which to smash the animal’s vertebrae should it panic and go berserk. The Carthaginians were master converters. They thought of everything.

Much later in his history, as he grew more civilized, man devised subtler means of converting animals. The dolphins are a classic example. While publicly making friends with a few of them, man privately trained others to carry explosives to the hulls of enemy ships and to detonate both the explosives and themselves at exactly the right moment. The Technologists were master converters too.

Thoughts of the dolphin lead ineluctably to thoughts of the whale that once flourished in the seas of Earth. For a time, Starfinder’s mind dwells upon Moby Dick , which he read while he was blind, and he wonders whether Melville meant evil to be symbolized by the whale, as so many scholars seem to think, or by Captain Ahab?

What does this whale symbolize?

Freedom? Death? Both?

What do I , Starfinder, symbolize?

Burn, Starfinder—burn! Leave your soul alone. You did not create the elephant. You did not create the dolphin. You did not create the whale. You did not create this whale. And above all, you did not create man . Burn, burn, burn!—and when you see the rose, burn that too!

But when he sees the rose he does not burn it. Instead, he extinguishes the torch and lowers himself into the second-ganglion chamber. It is surprisingly large, and its walls emit the same pale phosphorescence that illumines the rest of the whale’s interior. The rose is huge, but although its radiation is still deadly, its blueness is not the blueness of the other roses he has known—the roses he has killed...

Starfinder kneels, and examines the stem. It is cracked—probably from the shock waves of the explosion that destroyed the first ganglion—and the energy stored in the whale’s transsteel subtissue cannot reach the rose in sufficient quantities to sustain it

But the injury is a minor one. Starfinder can repair the damage in a matter of minutes. Both the stem and the rose consist of transsteel: all he needs to set them right are a welder and a packet of transsteel welding rods, both of which items are no farther away than the drive-tissue chamber.

But, damn it!—he didn’t come here to fix the rose. He came to destroy it

Why, then, didn’t he bring the special explosives that alone can do the job? Only Jonah’s charges can effectively eradicate a rose, and there is a whole box of them in the supply room.

Slowly Starfinder straightens. As though to make his burden heavier yet, the whale transmits a new combination of hieroglyphs:

At first Starfinder doesn’t understand the meaning of the message. Then he realizes that the whale is referring to their bargain. represents the rose in its present damaged condition; the stickman represents Starfinder. ((*)) stands for the rose after Starfinder shall have repaired it, and the resultant oneness of Starfinder and the whale can mean only one thing; spacetime, the three-sided figure signifying space, and , with its abrupt descent, time.

There is a long silence. Then the whale, as though afraid it has failed to make itself clear (and perhaps growing desperate because it is so close to death) discards its pride and spells out its acceptance of the bargain in a single hieroglyph which Starfinder cannot fail to understand:

And Starfinder? He climbs out of the second-ganglion chamber, picks up his hyperacetylene torch and tanks, quits the machine shop and seals the door behind him. Then he returns to the drive-tissue chamber, removes the anti-2-omicron-vii suit and goes back to work. Somehow he manages to get through the rest of the day.

Lying abed, hands clasped behind his head, Starfinder gazes up at the celestial ceiling of his room. His whale is the evening star.

It is distinguishable from the others because its surface is burnished, causing it to reflect even more of the rays of Altair than its dead brothers. It is the brightest object in the heavens.

Lying on his bed, waiting for the angel Gloria Wish, he watches it rise and set, and he wonders how he will be able to live with himself after he tells her that the whale is still alive and that he has made a bargain with it.

He does not need to wonder how she will react when he does tell her. He knows. She will say, “Starfinder, are you insane? Get hold of the shift leader and go up there and kill it at once!”

And Starfinder will say, “Very well, Gloria Wish—I will do as you command.”

He will say this because Gloria Wish is stronger than he. She is neither god nor goddess, but she comes very close to being both. It has taken only three centuries for modern Terraltairan woman to evolve, but she is the culmination of everything womankind ever wanted to be. She is the glory of womankind incarnate. To look at a Terraltairan woman is to fall in love.

But seldom is that love returned in kind. It cannot be on a planet where there are so many men. Starfinder knows how lucky he is, and he is grateful. It is true that Gloria Wish will outlive him, then she will become 1 with many lovers after he is dead. But right now she is his, and his alone. Only he can have her. The appeasing of her appetite is his responsibility alone.

But can he appease that gargantuan appetite? Can he alone—even with the assistance of priapean injections —perform a task that up till now has required the energies of twenty men?

There are two sayings on Altair IV that crop up regularly during barroom conversations and appear periodically on rest-room walls. The first one rises to poetic heights of a sort, and goes like this:

The second is a simple statement of fact, and goes like this:

The only old men on Terraltair are queers.

Lying on his bed waiting for Gloria Wish, Starfinder stares straight up into the black and infinite immensities where yesterday is the sparkle of a distant star and tomorrow the twinkle of another and today a drop of darkness; he sees the climbing into heaven of the dead whales, the sad promenade of the ((*)) less leviathans across the face of ; he sees the yellow mote of the Earth Mother and he visualizes the filmy-nightgowned Earth waiting with all her treasures—Earth Past, the great green orb with all her seas and the ships upon them, and the ancient armies marching over her lands; the path of history, queens and kings, a pageant colorful and cruel— all this I hold in the palm of my hand; all this is mine for the taking—