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would get hurt.
A clang rang through the shuttle. The vessel shuddered. BenRabi ceased
flaying himself with the tiny, dull knives of the mind.
The lighter nosed into its mother ship like a piglet to a sow s belly. Moyshe
followed the crowd moving to board the starship. He worked his way close to
the pale Seiner girl. Could he pick up where he had left off?
He wondered why she intrigued him so. Just because she had been kind?
Guides led the way to a common room where several high-powered command types
awaited them.Another lecture , Moyshe thought.Some more shocks set off by a
lot of boredom .
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He was half right.
Even before they were comfortable, one of the heavy-duty lads said, I m
Eduard Chouteau, your Ship s Commander. Welcome aboard Number Three Service
Ship fromDanion , a harvestship of Payne s Fleet. That was enough ceremony,
evidently. He continued, We ve contacted you as emergency replacements for
techniciansDanion lost in a shark attack two months ago. Frankly, Fishers
haven t ever liked or trusted outsiders. That s because outsiders have given
us reason. But forDanion s sake we ll do right by you till we get our own
people from the schools. All we ask is that you do right by us.
BenRabi felt that little feather tickle again. Half-truths were fluttering
around like untamed butterflies. The man had something on his mind. There was
a smoke screen rolling tall and wide, and behind it something he and Mouse
just might find interesting. He made a mental note.
The Seiner schools were unique. Most ground-siders knew a little about them.
They made romantic, remote settings for holonet dramas.
Those shows, naturally, had borne little relation to reality.
The Seiner creches were hidden in dead planetoids somewhere in deep space.
The old and the young of the Fisher fleets dwelt there, teaching and learning.
Only healthy Seiners of working age spaced with the fleets and hazarded
themselves against disasters of the sort that had overtakenDanion .
Unlike Confederation parents, Starfishers yielded their children to
professional surrogates out of love. They did not see their young as dead
weight that might hamper them as they shot the rapids of life.
BenRabi had never seen enough of his father to have developed an emotional
attitude toward him. And what could he think about his mother? She could not
help being what she was. His mother was the child of her society, shaped by a
high-pressure environment. The years and prejudice had devoured their tenuous
umbilical link . . . They were of alien tribes now. The barrier between them
could no longer be breached, even with the best will on both sides.
Visiting her had been a waste of leave time, but then there was the kid.
How was Greta doing? Christ! He might not know for one hell of a long time.
Why had his mother s behavior so horrified him? He should have known better
than to have gone. He had come out of that world. All Old Earth was a
screaming rat warren packed with people seeking new thrills and perversions as
escapes from the grim realities of narrow little lives.
Lights! the Ship s Commander snapped. BenRabi returned from introspection.
A hologram took form in the center of the darkening common room. It developed
like some fantasy magician s uncertain conjuration, flickering for several
seconds, then jerking into sudden, awe-inspiring solidity.
The stars you see here we retaped off a standard Second Level astrogation
training module. Our holo people dubbed the ships from models used in an
engineering status display at Ship s Engineering Control aboardDanion . This
isDanion , your home for the next year.
The nameDanion rolled off his tongue, freighted with everything the ship
meant to him: home, country, refuge, responsibility.
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A ship formed against the imaginary stars. It was a weird thing, making
Moyshe think of octopi entwined. No. He decided it looked like a city s
utilities systems after the buildings and earth and pavement had been removed,
with the leavings flung mad among the stars. There were vast tangles of
tubing. Here and there lay a ball, a cone, a cube, or an occasional sheet of
silverness stretched taut as if to catch the starwinds. Vast nets floated
between kilometers-long pipelike arms. The whole mad construct was raggedly
bearded with thousands of antennae of every conceivable type. The totality was
spectacularly huge, and dreadful in its strangeness.
In theory a deep-space vessel need not be confined in a geometric hull. Most
small, specialized vessels were not. A ship did not have to have any specific
shape, though the complex relationships between drive, inertial-negation, mass
increase effect reduction, temporal adjustment, and artificial gravity
induction systems did demand a direction-of-travel dimension slightly more
than twice that of dimensions perpendicular to line-of-flight in vessels
intended to operate near or above the velocity of light. But this was the
first truly large asymmetric ship benRabi had ever seen.
It was a flying iron jungle. The streamlined ship had been preferred by
mankind since space travel had been but a dream. Even now designers felt more
comfortable enclosing everything inside a skin capable of generating an
all-around defensive screen.
Even the wildest imaginings of novelty-hunting holo studios had never
produced a vessel as knotted and strewn as this mass of tangled kitten s yarn.
BenRabi s astonishment was not unique. Silence died a swift death in that
room.
How the hell does that bastard keep from breaking up? someone demanded.
What I want to know is, how do you build something like that without a crew
from every holonet in the universe turning up?
Someone more technically smitten asked, Ship s Commander what sort of system
do you use to synchronize drives? You d have to have hundreds on a ship that
big. Even with superconductor or pulse laser control systems your synch
systems would be limited to the velocity of light. The lag between the more
remote units . . .
BenRabi lost the thread. Another surprise had jumped on him wearing hobnailed
boots on all four feet.
He was aboard a ship he and Mouse had studied from the surface of Carson s.
She was a typical interstellar vessel of an obsolete class now common only
among the Rim Run Freehaulers.
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