Jeffrey Carver - Eternity's End

He felt the ship coming back under his control. He quickly damped out the back-and-forth yawing, and felt the Narseil behind him slipping into a closer coordination. The three riggers and their ship shot down the Hurricane Flume and out, dropped along a dazzling white waterfall, and spun away downstream. Legroeder laughed in triumph and heard the Narseil hissing their approval, and he knew that he had finally won the lesson, and it was one he would not soon forget.

For the next two days, his training accelerated to a blur. Battle sims were added to the basic rigging practice, and soon Legroeder was steering the fictitious ship as frantically as he had once piloted a scout ship out of the mine-strewn fortress of Outpost DeNoble. It was something he was good at, and he’d certainly done enough battle flying in captivity, but now he was being tripped up by something altogether different.

It was his rigger-mates, the Narseil.

He had always known that the Narseil had some kind of weird time sense, which was one of the things that made them exceptional riggers; but he’d never encountered it firsthand. They called it, in their own translation to human speech, the tessa’chron , or extended time. A form of temporal persistence, it enabled them to see the “present” as a smear of time fore and aft, ranging from about a second, under ordinary circumstances, to several seconds under stress. Battle, even simulated battle, seemed to bring it out in them. No doubt it was useful to them to have a continuing momentary glimpse into the future; but for Legroeder it meant always feeling half a step behind. The implants helped; they couldn’t give him the same time sense, but they could reinterpret some of the information that the Narseil were pouring into the net. But that meant adjusting to a whole new level of implant function.

It was going to take practice. A lot of practice.

In the meantime, the rigger crew racked up a score of six victories to three losses against programmed enemies, all in encounters in which they were outnumbered and outgunned by their adversaries. Mission Commander Fre’geel pronounced their progress satisfactory, and decreed additional exercises.

“We’re ready to go,” announced Cantha at breakfast a day later. “We’ll be boarding this evening, and departing during the night.”

The announcement stunned Legroeder.

“Is this a problem? Don’t you feel ready?”

“Well—not to invade a stronghold, no.” Legroeder suddenly felt a desire for a few more days of commando training. He suddenly felt hazy on the actual strategic plans. He suddenly wanted to go lie down in a meadow.

The Narseil chuckled, an almost musical sound. In the days they had spent together, Cantha seemed to have developed a pretty good understanding of Legroeder’s feelings. “None of us feels quite ready, either. Don’t worry, we’ll keep training on the ship. But you know—beyond a certain point, our strategy is going to have to unfold on the fly. If things go according to plan, you and I won’t have to fight; we’ll just follow the marines in.”

“Yeah, well, that’s a nice thought—”

“And between your knowledge of the raiders, and our own skills, I’m hopeful of acquiring some good intelligence and transmitting it out before we’re discovered and destroyed.” Cantha’s tall, amphibious eyes seemed to glimmer with an almost human humor.

“Very funny. Could you please refrain from using the word destroyed when you talk about our chances?”

“If you insist,” said Cantha. “Look, this is our last day here. What would you say to breaking training and having some of our excellent—” he struggled for the correct word “—the closest thing to it, I guess, would be your beer. Do you like beer?”

“I like beer.”

“Then let’s celebrate, my friend.”

It turned out that all the Narseil involved in the mission were celebrating that day. It also turned out that the average Narseil had a much higher tolerance for alcohol than Legroeder did. He was fairly woozy after just half a glass of what was definitely a fermented beverage, but seemed to him a cross between coconut milk and something called beermalt that was popular in rigger dives. Not only did it carry a kick; the Narseil served it in liter-sized flagons.

Legroeder began nursing his drink, watching the celebration from the sideline. He still wondered what made these Narseil tick, but he had grudgingly come to enjoy the conviviality of their company. Cantha turned out to be something of a singer, and while the singing sounded to Legroeder like the moaning of a walrus, it was well appreciated by the other Narseil. Legroeder sipped his drink and chatted with Korken, the young Narseil who’d been friendly with him on the trip here, who wasn’t coming along on the mission but wished he were; and with Com’peer the surgeon, who wasn’t coming along, either, and didn’t appear the least bit sorry.

After the celebration had gone on for a while, Fre’geel called for silence. A Three Rings priest stood up and spoke for a few minutes in a kind of singsong that might have been a prayer, or poetry, or both; and then Com’peer rose with a Bible in her hand and offered a prayer in Legroeder’s tongue. It sounded vaguely familiar to Legroeder, though he had trouble placing it. A psalm, perhaps?

The other Narseil listened in respectful silence as Com’peer read several other psalms, then concluded with a benediction. Legroeder found himself unexpectedly moved by the offering. A moment later, Fre’geel returned and delivered an address that sounded more like a eulogy than a pep talk—except that he then broke into what could only be called a song and dance, jittering across the front of the room, waving a wand that was apparently some sort of data storage device, but looked to Legroeder like a wooden cane.

Cantha, noting Legroeder’s amusement, came over and confided that when Narseil departed on a difficult mission, especially one with a high degree of risk, they liked to send themselves off with a rousing good time—to taste, if briefly, the good times that they might not live to see if things went against them. Legroeder nodded. “Not so different from us,” he said.

At the end, all the Narseil sang an anthem together, swaying to and fro as though their arms were linked (they weren’t), their neck-sails flopping from side to side in perfect rhythm. Legroeder tipped his glass to finish his beverage, and realized that he was drunk. As the Narseil anthem came to an end, he sighed deeply, thinking that maybe it was time he offered a bit of human something to this gathering of lunatic aliens. He stood, clearing his throat self-consciously—then raised his empty glass and cried, “Hip, hip—hooray!” and when all eyes turned toward him in curiosity, he yelled it again. “HIP, HIP—HOORAY! Say it with me! Shout it!”

The Narseil stirred in uncertainty, but Cantha and one or two others joined him… and then more, until the whole roomful of Narseil was thunderously shouting, “ HIP HIP—HOORAY! HIP HIP—HOORAY!” —cheering the celebration to its conclusion.

Legroeder returned to his quarters to rest for a few hours before boarding the ship. Lying on his mattress on the floor, he stared at the ceiling and tried not to be sick. He thought of what the Narseil had turned him into, and realized that he really did not want to go on this mission at all; and then he remembered Harriet and her grandson, and Maris, and why he had to for himself—and he closed his eyes mournfully and let all of his thoughts drain out of his mind. Eventually he drifted off to a sleep that was neither long enough nor restful.