Barrington Bayley - The Star Virus

“You fools, you think you can negotiate with the Streall,” he told the merchants. “You’re afraid of them; you want to appease them. Yet we could be a match for them if we put our minds to it. For that matter, why do you think they want the lens?”

He paused to let that sink in. “The lens has strange properties, gentlemen.”

The Jal-Dee spokesman became visibly uncomfortable. He placed an open file before him on the table. “Well, let’s see now, what we know about you. Name: Rodrone Chang. A lot of very disturbing reports of piracy. Oh yes, we know all about that private fleet of yours, armed to the teeth. Chang, we won’t be lectured to by a man like you!”

“There was no piracy!” Rodrone expostulated angrily, and untruthfully. “We simply overhauled cargo ships and forced them to sell at a reasonable price. Would you have us starve?”

“Never mind.” He waved his hand in annoyance. “This is an order: hand over the lens, and all is well.”

“The lens is mine,” Rodrone repeated. “It cost me a lot of effort to come by it, and I have uses for it. You have no jurisdiction over me, and that’s an end to it.”

He realized as he said it that the last statement was unwise. But he would not back out now. He pulled on his gloves, and tossed aside his cloak to reveal his handgun meaningfully.

As he turned to go, the Kormu representative, who up to now had not spoken, turned red. “It was an order, you scum! We know who we’re dealing with: a waster, a no-good, a goddamned pirate and a fuzzy-brain!”

This time Rodrone flushed at the ambiguous term, but made no answer. He left the building in a hurry, still defying the blunt command and realizing that he would have to leave Stundaker immediately.

He was honest enough to admit that the contempt had stung, even though it was no different from what he had expected. They had classified him, no doubt, according to their own values, and their estimate could hardly be favorable: a brooding, uncertain man, with a doubtful past and doubtful emotions. Not a man to be trusted, not a man to whose word one attached much importance. It would have been no use trying to persuade them that a basic seriousness underlay his errant nature.

Besides, he thought as little of them as they did of him. In this kind of culture, the only one humanly possible in the Hub, the sediment separated out, but the sediment carried all the weight.

He felt more free on the spaceground. Most spacemen shared varying degrees of disgust for the overfed detritus that had sunk to the bottom of economic activity, taking untold wealth with it. He could expect sympathy and, if there was trouble, help here. He had to get away quickly; there was no knowing how long it would take the House of Jal-Dee—clearly the strongest voice in the current council—to act.

And above, the stars shone down in brilliant daylight, providing the reason for it all: the Hub. The dazzling, star-packed plethora of worlds where anything could happen. Stundaker’s primary blazed down on the spaceground, slightly blue in color, and with it a scattering of extra-hard points glittered: nearby suns of the local cluster, many of them only light-weeks away.

He relaxed, enjoying the bustle around him. Hard-eyed men busied themselves with a multitude of tasks. Here, a bargain was struck, there, a fight was in progress. Further off, a woman in billowing skirts sat by a pile of luggage. About sixty percent of the men wore side arms, not because violence was particularly prevalent, but because it added a flamboyance which was in style. There were literally thousands of ships on the ground, of every size, range and mode of propulsion, and seemingly of every age. It required a second look to realize that some of those outlandish lumps of metal actually were ships. Rodrone walked by a stubby, streamlined shape that rested on a quartet of vanes each about three times the vessel’s breadth and nearly its height. Bowsers were busy pumping some fluid into it, and he imagined it was taking aboard water as propellant for an old-fashioned nuclear engine. Interplanetary traffic, most likely. Then he caught a whiff of alcohol. By space, a chemical rocket! He smiled, amused but not really surprised.

He skirted around the bowsers and started walking towards his own ship, the Stond , whose battered hull reared up a quarter of a mile away.

Then he stopped. Long, low armored vehicles were parked near the Stond , and even from here he could make out the insignia of the House of Jal-Dee. Men, armed and uniformed, stood guard at the portal ramps. They looked as if they were there to stay.

Casually Rodrone stepped back, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, until he was hidden by the bowsers again. He trembled with a sudden, sick fury. They were after the lens.

But the lens was not aboard the Stond . For safety’s sake he had removed it the minute they landed to a hotel in the town that surrounded the spaceground on all sides.

As he stood there he heard the sound of an approaching motor. One of the police cars swept by, containing members of his crew who struggled angrily with green-uniformed thugs. The driver, taking no notice of the scrimmage in the back of the vehicle, surged across the field at top speed, scattering bystanders and overturning a flimsy stall selling cold drinks.

The muffled, outraged shouts of Rodrone’s men faded into the distance. Rodrone pulled his cloak around him and glowered.

“What’s up, you been impounded?”

A mechanic had stepped out of the nearest bowser and was checking the meters. He glanced at Rodrone over his shoulder and gave a half-chuckle, half-grunt.

“Well, maybe this old crate won’t go far or fast, but at least it’s a ship. They might need an extra man.”

Rodrone walked away without answering. The mechanic had immediately sized up his situation, but a glorified firework wouldn’t take him far enough from Stundaker.

He made his way cautiously to the edge of the ’ground, and then threaded his way through the surrounding town. Any spaceground made for a fast-moving community; most of the buildings of the town were semipermanent structures made of plastic board, gaudy and in bad taste. Rodrone’s hotel was typical: a five-story edifice deriving its structural strength from an external scaffolding. Inside, however, it was fairly pleasant.

He took a lift to the fourth floor and let himself into the suite he had rented. Clave looked around as he entered.

“How’s things?”

“Bad.” Rodrone told him what had happened.

Clave showed no sign of surprise or alarm, though he probably felt it. He made a gesture, crossing the room. “I’ve been looking at this thing while you were out. It’s great.”

Rodrone joined him and looked down at the lens, experiencing for the thousandth time the familiar fascination of it. Not for one second since he first set eyes on it had that fascination completely left him. Nor had he grown tired of the scenes and dramas of endless variety, both within and beyond the reach of his imagination, that sprang to life and played themselves out in its limpid outer parts. Not one of them was even mediocre or nondescript, and each had a clearly defined beginning and an end—except, that was, for the one that he had now come to look on as his own private personal serial: the mad monk and his rabble in their assault on the beautiful city.

He had definitely discounted the idea that it was merely an alien version of a fictional picture show. The playlets seemed too authentic for that, fantastic though they were. He was convinced that they represented actual events.

Hypnotically his gaze focused on the glowing swirl in the center, the swirl that was a homologue of a past age of the galaxy, atom for star. He basked in the feeling that came over him when he thought of the innumerable suns hissing in the Hub, that condensation from which the spirals radiated, pouring electromagnetic energy into space. There was a significance in it he could not put his finger on, something unvocalized, ungraspable, something that would explain the whole sweep of history.