Barrington Bayley - The Star Virus

It was a flawless, crystal-clear lens about four feet in diameter and three thick, with a beautifully brilliant sheen superior to any plastic Rodrone knew, but more like ancient glass. His fascinated attention was immediately trapped, like a moth attracted to a flame, by a glowing swirl of light that occupied the central region, a blazing coruscation. At first he was fooled into thinking that it moved, but in fact it was frozen. The effect came from the impression it gave of ceaseless energy.

Rodrone blinked. Why did it amaze him so? It was only a gimcrack gadget, he told himself. Anybody could make one.

Nevertheless the impression of something remarkable and magical remained. He was about to examine the lens further when one of the men lounging about the control room and watching with interest suddenly murmured in bemusement.

“Say, look at that....”

Rodrone looked. So far, apart from the inner swirl of light, the cylindrical prism had seemed to be perfectly transparent and limpid. Now colored shadows were developing in it, growing swiftly stronger until definite pictures formed. It was as if the device was warming up, for suddenly the definitions sharpened and the images became solid. The whole outer part of the prism surrounding the central light turned into a kaleidoscope of moving pictures, each different and with no apparent relation to the others.

Could it be some kind of picture show, an alien magic lantern? Or perhaps a communicator, or instruction device? Rodrone leaned close, peering into the glass and focusing on one scene. As he did so it seemed to expand and fill his vision, though dimly he was aware that objectively it was no larger than any of the others.

He saw a flat landscape dotted with spindly trees. Stilt-like beings, tall with angular stick limbs, worked on the construction of a machine as skeletal as themselves. As Rodrone watched, an aircraft sped swiftly out of the distance, borne on wide, flat wings. The stilt-beings whirled around, tugging frantically to bring weapons to bear on the aircraft, but in vain. A splayed beam shot down at them, and everything it touched exploded. The airplane banked and swung low over the scene, surveying the broken sticks of beings and machinery that were scattered over a wide area. The picture dwindled to nothing as the plane leveled off and vanished again into the distance.

He turned his eyes to another scene. He seemed to pan in on a gleaming white city, approaching it from the air. A sparkling tower rose like a huge finger, and some distance from it a vast screen had been erected. Somehow or other the tower was projecting symbols and pictures on to the screen, visible from all over the city. A flurry of curly glyphs was followed by a foxlike face, mouthing and gesticulating angrily.

With a deep sigh Rodrone straightened. There was a varied succession of such screens, each one in its own way fascinating. They seemed to range over a dozen worlds, all unknown to him, and he had no doubt that the full repertoire would number thousands. But what was the purpose of it all?

By now all the crewmen present had clustered around the prism and were watching it avidly. Among the comments, Rodrone caught one from Clave.

“Eh, there’s a man in this one.”

He hurried around to the other side of the big lens, and saw that Clave was right—at least, he thought so. It was impossible to say whether the figure in the glass was genuinely a member of Homo sapiens because his back was turned and he was dressed in a brown robe and cowl, like the garment of a monk from ancient Earth Rodrone had once seen in a picture. But the hands, which were visible, were fully human. The monk sat brooding on a rock in some indeterminate place, his head resting on his hand.

“He’s just sitting there,” Clave said emptily.

Though surprised to see a human being included in the Streall picture show, Rodrone gave the vision barely a glance. He still could not be certain whether the lens would repay study or not, but something in him insisted that it would. Suddenly, he felt savagely possessive about it.

“Take it to my cabin,” he ordered curtly.

“What, don’t we get to see the pictures?” someone complained. “It’s boring in here.”

But Rodrone ignored the grumbles and affirmed his wishes with an irritable wave of his hand. Nobody questioned his mood. They knew when to humor him.

For the rest of the voyage, he decided, he would study the lens alone. When he got to Brüde, he would find means of tearing every secret from it; he was bent on that, after the trouble he had already taken.

But, he reflected, he would need help.

The sun was slowly traversing the western rim of the crater as Rodrone returned from his daily walk around his base. Already half the crater was in shadow, but a mellow wash of light struck the further wall and penetrated into the mouths of various openings to storage caverns, living quarters and so on.

Brüde was a warm, balmy world, well suited to the life of carefree sensuality his men liked to indulge in when they were not roaming space on the pretext of making a living. The sights and sounds of the usual evening bacchanalia on the point of warming up met his senses as he passed through a low-slung entrance.

The recreation area was the size of a small dance hall. Perfumes wafted into the air from diaphanously clad girls whose presence, however, left Rodrone cold despite his hardly having touched a woman for years. That was due to the drug he took, DPKL-59, which as a side effect to its artificial stimulation of the intellectual function also took away the sex drive. For a time he had occasionally combated this unlooked-for by-product by taking an aphrodisiac drug, L-dopa or Maire Rodex-5, but for some reason synthetically induced sex left him unsatisfied and he soon abandoned the practice.

He supposed he could also thank DPKL-59 for his not having seen his wife in the past five years. His information was that she was alive and well on Land V, where he had last left her, but he had no immediate plans to contact her. Yet, with typical ambivalence, he still regarded her as his wife and constant companion. He felt that their relationship went deeper than the need for the repeated reassurances that frequent meetings would have given. For both of them, just the knowledge that the other existed somewhere in the Hub was enough.

At the moment his wife was as far from his thoughts as she was in space from his body. He scanned the room until catching sight of the most flamboyant figure there: Redace Trudo.

Redace was the man Rodrone had invited to help him fathom the secrets of the lens, as he had come to call the mysterious Streall artifact. As Rodrone approached he looked up from his earnest conversation with a reclining girl.

“Greetings,” he offered mockingly in his broad, lilting voice. “Why, it is just too much if you think you are going to tear me away from this gorgeous creature here.”

Redace was an unashamed, outrageous dandy. Handsome to the point of caricature, he affected a foppish manner that led many, unacquainted with his enormous sexual appetites, to presume him to be homosexual. Sometimes Redace encouraged this impression for his own amusement.

He took great care over his clothes and had a taste for elaborate hats. At the moment he wore an embroidered, padded jacket in violet and silver with flaring side-skirts, and a hat constructed of a number of interleaving arcs, like the petals of a flower, topped by a jaunty feather. Slung from his waist was an old-fashioned mother-of-pearl holster. The decorated gun it carried contained specially tuned lasers to fire deadly beams in all Redace’s favorite colors—lavender, apricot, rose pink and a pale, pretty green.

Rodrone had a considerable, though unspoken admiration for the man. He was what he would have liked to be himself: a released personality in complete harmony with himself. He had two qualities rarely found in one man; he was sensual and extrovert, but he also had a mind which mastered any subject with systematic ease. His knowledge of science was wide and penetrating, and he could read any book in Rodrone’s library without the aid of DPKL-59. Yet despite his abilities, his outlook on life was unremittingly anarchistic. Scorning trade or productive enterprises, he and his raggle-taggle band lived purely by piracy, which they pursued with such enthusiasm that more than once the Merchant Houses had sent ships to destroy him, failing to winkle him out of the asteroid belt a few light-months from Brüde where he lived in a chaotic jumble of warrens.