Cook, Glen - And Dragons In The Sky

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And Dragons in the Sky

Glen Cook

It has been a good year for Glen Cook. He won an Honorable Mention in last

year's NAL prize contest; he has increased his magazine sales; he has just

sold a fine novel to New American Library; he has married a lovely girl (whom

he met at Clarion); and he has written a gripping account of a future

civilization in which loyalties -- to lovers, friends, and nations -- conflict

very much as they do today.

Of "And Dragons in the Sky" Glen writes: "Sometimes the world sweeps over my

dikes and I just have to get alone, with my typewriter, where I can drain off

the emotions in a long, hot draught. Sometimes -- sometimes I'm lucky and a

story appears on the paper. This is one of those."

In this frenetic, quick-shift, go, drop-your-friends -possessions -roots -

loyalties like throwaway containers age, heroes, legends, archetypal figures

are disposable: as brilliant and ephemeral as the butterflies of Old Earth.

One day some researcher may wrest from Nature a golden, universe-changing

secret, some brave ship's commander may shatter the moment's enemy, be a hero,

legend for a fleeting hour -- and fade to dust with Sumer and Akkad. Who

remembers on the seventh day? Who remembers Jupp von Drachau rinding those

Sangaree? Mention his name. Blank stares reply. Or someone may say, "He's too

old," meaning, too long gone. A whole year, Confederation.

I think of heroes and legends as, toolcase in hand, I wander toward the gate

of Carson's Blake City spaceport, wearing a name a size too small -- latest in

a list of dozens -- the clothing of a liquids transfer systems tech -- which

work I loathe -- and, within me, the nerves of an instel radio. A small, dying

pain surrounds a knot behind my right ear. Each slow step drives spikes of

agony into the bones of my legs. They've been lengthened three inches,

hastily. My stomach itches where twenty pounds have been taken off, hastily

again. This is a hurry-up job.

But, then, aren't they all? There's no time, these days, for carefully

executed operations. Everything is rushed. Nothing is permanent, there are no

fixed points on which to anchor. Life is like the flash floods of Sierran

rivers in thaw time, roaring and cascading past too swiftly for any part to be

seized and intimately known. But wait! In the river of life apassing, there

are a few fixed rocks, two long-lived legends that're heavy on my mind. Like

boulders in Sierran streams, they're all but hidden in the turbulence of our

times, but they endure, go forever on.

There has to be something for me. I want! I cry, but what I don't know. I've

been trying to find it through all my years with the Bureau.

Ahead, I spot my small, brown, mustached Oriental partner, Mouse. Making no

sign, I turn in the gate behind him. We don't know each other this time.

I wish there were something solid to grasp, to know. Everything moves so fast.

. . . Only in legends. . . .

There is Star's End; there are the High Seiners. Sheer mystery is Star's End,

fortress planet beyond the galactic rim, with automatic, invincible weapons to

kill anyone foolish enough to go near -- without a shred of why. In the lulls,

the deep, fearful lulls when there's nothing to say, nothing being said, we

moderns seize Star's End as strange country to explore, explain, to extinguish

the dreadful silence -- we're intrigued, perhaps, by the godlike power there,

destructive as that of ancient, Earth-time deities. Or we turn to the High

Seiners, the Starfishers.

We should know them. They're human. Star's End is just a dead metal machine's

voice babbling unknown tongues. Yet, in their humanness, the High Seiners are

the greater, more frightening mystery. Destruction is familiar, though to

encompass its purpose is sometimes impossible. The quiet, fixed culture of the

Seiners we comprehend not at all, though we yearn for it, hate them for their

blissful stasis: their changelessness oddly twists our souls.

But such thoughts fade. Work comes first. I enter the terminal, great plastic,

glass, and steel cavern with doors opening on other worlds. Light crowds it.

We need light these days, fearful as we are of entropic night. (I wanted to be

a poet once. An instructor assigned me a paean to Night. I lost my want then.

Too many dark images crowded my mind.) People are here in their multitudes,

about the familiar business of terminals. Several men in odd, plain High

Seiners' garb wait behind a distant table. My new employers.

Mouse passes small and brownly with a wink -- why that name I don't know. He

looks more like a weasel.

I study faces in the crowd, mostly see bewilderment, determination, malaise.

I'm after the nonchalant ones. The competition is here somewhere. The Bureau

has no copyright on interest in Starfish. "Uhn!"

"Excuse me?"

I turn. A small blue nun has paused, thinking I've spoken. "Pardon. Just

thinking out loud." The Ulantonid wobbles off, leaving me wondering why all

modern Christians are aliens. But it fades. I return to that face.

Yes, Marya Strehltsweiter -- one name I remember -- though she has changed

too. Darker: skin, hair, eyes, darker, and heavier. But she can't disguise her

ways of moving, speaking, listening. A poor actress, unusual in her race.

She's Sangaree, who have passed as human for ages -- who, also, are almost

always murdered on discovery. Marya has talent. She stays alive.

She sees me looking. Eyebrows raise a millimeter, questioningly, then

consternation briefly, before a smile. She knows me, remembers the last time

we crossed swords -- I think of a place in Angel City on the Broken Wings, of

lifting the papers Von Drachau needed to nail the Sangaree. Perhaps, she's

thinking, this'll be her game. She nods ever so slightly.

Other faces tease my memory, though I think they serve no governments.

Corporation agents, perhaps, or McGraws. Considering what we're after, I'll

not be surprised if there are more agents than job-hungry techs here.

The crowd. I now see it as a whole, much smaller than expected. Maybe two

hundred. The Seiners advertised for a thousand. Hard to find techs romantic,

or hungry,

enough to plunge into an alien human society for a year....

Speculation dissolves. The Starfishers are checking us in. I shuffle into line

four places behind Mouse, wondering why he's so shaky. He's always shaky.

"Mr. Niven." A whisper, warm rubbing my arm. I look down into eyes dark as

Sangaree gunmetal coins.

"Pardon, ma'am? BenRabi. Moyshe benRabi."

"How quaint." She smiles a gunmetal smile. My bed she has shared, and would

share, I know -- and, in the end, she'd drink my blood. "And the Rat, eh?"

Meaning Mouse. "So many people want to bleed for a little Seiner money. Orbit

in an hour. See you." More gunmetal smiling as she takes her gunmetal-hard

body toward the Ladies.

The nervousness begins, as it always does before I jump in the lion's den. Or

dragon's lair. They say, to the uninitiated, the Starfish appear as dragons a

hundred miles long. . . .

Before liftoff, a briefing. The officer-in-charge is brutally honest. "We

don't want you," he says, "we need you. You'll mock us as anachronisms. Oh,

yes," to a lone head-shake. "You're here hunting the myth of the Starfishers,

or to spy, but you'll find neither romance nor information

-- just hard work and strangeness. We won't ease you into our culture. You're

here only so we can meet our harvest contracts." I suffer a premonition, a

feeling this man has more than harvests on his mind. Plainly, through his

words, I sense disappointment, a touch of hatred for landsmen. They have a

wounded ship out there, badly mauled -- I'm not sure I believe that -- which

needs a thousand techs to salvage, and they are only getting two hundred.

He pauses, fumbles in pockets -- a pocketed, cloth jacket

-- produces an odd little instrument. Only after it's lit and belching

noxious clouds do I recognize it. A pipe! I shudder. Romantic techs, I see,

are wondering what greater horrors lurk ahead. Good psychology, the pipe. The

Seiner is easing us in after all, preparing us for bigger shocks to come.

"Among you," he says after his pause grows squirming long, "are spies. So many

interests want a Starfish herd." He smiles, but it quickly fades to grimness.

"You'll learn nothing. Till your contracts end, you'll see nothing but the

guts of ships -- and only when you work. You'll not come in contact with those

who have the information you're after. You, who'd steal our livelihood and

culture,

be warned. We're a nation, a law unto ourselves. We hold to old ways, still

execute for espionage and treason." While the pause for effect lasts, I think

of the many times Confederation has tried to bring the Seiners into the fold,

to impress upon them "enlightened" justice. They always fail, yet annexation

remains a major government goal.

A nervous stir runs through the room. The briefing officer meets pairs of eyes

one by one. The romantics are finding their legend toothed and clawed. The

disquiet grows. Executions. You don't execute people any more....

Soon we're herded aboard a shuttle -- first landsmen for the fleets in

generations -- that is obviously no commercial lighter, just stark

functionalism and steel painted gray. We're lifting blind, I see. Weedlike

clumps of wiring hang where viewscreens have been removed -- no chances are

they taking.

The knot behind my ear, the nondispersable parts of the tracer, seizes me with

iron, spiked fingers. I've been "switched on" by the Bureau. I stagger. The

thin, pale Starfisher girl seating us asks, "Are you ill?" On her face,

shocking me more than talk of execution, is a look of true concern, not bland,

commercially dispensed stewardess's care.

I want fires across my mind, as it so often does. "Yes." Dropping into my

seat, "A touch of migraine." But I can never discover what I need.

Her eyes widen a fraction. She'll report this. But, somewhere hi my medical

file, a tendency toward migraine is noted to cover the pain of the tracer. I

am susceptible, though it hasn't bothered me in years. There are pills. Why, I

ask myself again, do they have to use an imperfect device? Of course, it's all

we've got, the only way to track them to the herd. Completely nonmetal, the

tracer is the only undetectable device available.

I want is in my mind. The Bureau has supported my years of search, knowing I'm

searching (Psych doesn't miss much), knows it's showing a good return on

investment (the sane make poor agents, axmen, or whatever). Years, and I still

have no intimation of the absence in my soul.

The vessel shivers. We're on the way to the orbiting Starfisher. Three rows

ahead, Mouse shakes. He's terrified by space travel.

"The Rat's chicken." She's beside me. I didn't see her sit down. "Sorry to

startle you. Maria Elana Gonzalez, atmosphere systems, distribution." Gunmetal

smile.

I want. What? "Moyshe benRabi." In case she has forgotten. We exchange

nothings all the way to the Starfisher, too wary to probe for clues to one

another's missions.

I'm forgetting she's Sangaree, that once I used her to find and kill a lot of

her people. I don't feel guilty, either -- not that I hate Sangaree, as is

common. In my mood of the moment she doesn't count. Nothing does. I'm the

uninvolved, uncommitted, unemotional modern man. I'm concerned more with Mouse

than the steel-souled death beside me.

According to our pasts on file, our paths have never crossed. But this is our

fourth team job and, though he's always afraid, he's a good partner --

especially when the roughhouse begins. He's the only person I know who has

killed a man (except the Sangaree lady who, being Sangaree, doesn't qualify as

a person). Killing isn't uncommon these days, but the personal touch has been

eliminated -- ergo, the shock of "execution." Anyone can punch a button, hurl

a missile to obliterate a ship of a thousand souls. There is no lack of nice

remote space battles (against Sangaree, McGraw pirates, in the marque-and-

reprisal antics of governments, in raids and overnight wars), but to do in a

man face-to-face, with knife or gun . . . it's just too personal. We don't

like to get close to people, even to kill.

I'm afraid. I'm getting close to, growing fond of, Mouse. We work together too

much. Bad for our detachment. The Bureau promised no more jobs together last

time, but then came this hurry-up, top-men job. Always the rush. Somehow,

sometime, one of us will get hurt. We're so much safer as islands in motion

(Brownian), pausing for interaction, moving on before roots can take, be

ripped up, leave painful wounds.

There's a clang through the shuttle, rousing me. We've nosed into the mother

ship like piglet to sow's belly. The pale, helpful girl leads us into the

starship, to a common room where notables wait.

They're unceremonious. One says, "I'm Eduard Chou-teau, Ship's Commander.

You're aboard Number Three Service Ship from Danion, a harvestship of Payne's

fleet. You're to replace people Danion lost hi a shark attack. We don't like

outsiders, but we'll try to make your stay comfortable. We've got to keep

Danion alive until we receive replacements from our schools ..." I have the

feeling he isn't telling all Starfisher motives.

Most everyone, via the romantic entertainment media, knows of the Seiner

schools, the creches within asteroids of deep space where Starfishers hide

their children. They are nursery schools, boarding schools, military

academies, technical colleges, safehouses where children can grow up unexposed

to disasters of Danion's sort. Unlike landsmen, though, Seiners send their

children to professional parents out of love. We do so to be rid of cargo that

may slow us in shooting the rapids of life.

"Lights," says the Ship's Commander. They fade. Central to the common, a

spatial hologram appears. "Those aren't our stars. The ship is ours. Danion."

Something focuses, something like octopuses entwining -- no, like a city

sewage system with buildings and earth removed, vast tangles of tubing with

here and there a cube, a cone, a ball, with occasional sheets of silverness,

or great nets floating, between arms of piping, raggedly bearded with

hundreds, thousands of antennae. In theory, a deep space ship needs not be

contained, needs have no specific shape, yet this is the first such I've ever

encountered. I realize I've discovered an unsuspected rigidity of human

thought. The needle-shaped ship has been with us since space travel was but a

dream.

My surprise is shared. A stir runs through the common. But now I'm suffering

another surprise.

Mouse and I once studied the Seiner from Carson's surface. She's a typical

interstellar vessel. A ship of her class approaches the harvestship in the

hologram. The surprise is relative size. The starship is a needle falling into

an ocean of scrap. The harvestship must be thirty miles in cross-section. . .

Light returns, drowning the hologram. Around me are open mouths. We thought we

were aboard a harvestship. I begin, with distress, to realize how little

prepared I am to go among these people, how little the Bureau has told me. A

more than usual job-beginning nervousness sets in. Until now, with change the

order in my fast-paced universe, I've assumed I can handle the strange, the

unknown -- but this space-borne mobile, it's too alien. True alien handiwork

suddenly seems less foreign, less frightful. It's the size. Nothing human

should be so big.

"This's all you'll know of Danion," says the Ship's Commander, "of her

exterior. Her guts you'll know well. We'll get our money's worth from you

there."

And they will. Fifteen hours a day, teamed with Seiner technicians, we

landsmen will labor to keep Danion alive and harvesting. Scarce four hundred

of us will manage the work of a thousand -- and, in our free time, we'll

repair the shark attack damage responsible for the original casualties. Daily,

we'll work to exhaustion, then stagger to our bunks too weary even to think

about spying. . . .

But there're problems first, a time of distress two days after departure. The

ship drops from hyper. I, and everyone, assume we've arrived. We gather in the

common room, a custom of travelers, somehow expecting view-screens and a look

at our new home. Shortly, however, the First Lieutenant appears.

"Please return to your quarters," he says. He seems paler than the usual

Starfisher. "We're ambushing Confederation Navy ships following us from

Carson's."

I'm dumbstruck. The Navy shouldn't move in yet. Nor should Seiners so casually

turn on pursuers -- not, at least, on my Navy. I look around. The few angry

faces I label "competition dismayed." Across the room, Mouse appears

bewildered. The Sangaree woman is in a rage, face red, fists clenched.

The First Lieutenant fields a few questions before retreating, all with a

single explanation. "We've entered a hydrogen stream, taken station with a

fleet. Starfish noise is being broadcast from scoutships. We often do this to

cover the withdrawal of our vessels forced to enter 'civilized space.'" He

leaves us thinking.

We go too, Mouse and I glumly wondering if we're now expendable.

The general alarm sounds. Engagement is imminent. I hope the admiral (I'm

considering my own survival, not his comfort) recognizes the trap and gets

out. I'm hoping the Seiners don't do angry, rash things afterward.

I've hardly strapped in. The vessel rocks. Departing missiles. I'm amazed.

She's got batteries heavier than her appearance suggests.

I took this job expecting the total boredom of unchange, nul-novelty, but find

surprises come almost too fast to assimilate.

The all-clear sounds shortly, and with it a buzz from my cabin door. It opens.

A crewman asks, "Mr. benRabi? Come with us, please." He's polite, oh, polite

as the spider inviting the fly. His teeth seem all white sharp and pointy.

Behind him are ratings with angry guns. Yes, I'll go with him.

As I join him in the passage, another door opens with a characteristic squeal.

Yes. A group is collecting Mouse.

Done already, I think, and by space gypsies centuries behind the times.

How?

"Ah," says the Ship's Commander as we enter his office, "Commander Igarashi,

Commander McClennon." My eyebrows rise. I didn't know Mouse's name, but

Igarashi it might be. He's got me nailed, though McClennon I haven't used in

fifteen years. "Please be seated." I sit, glance at Mouse. He, too, is

stunned.

"You're wondering about your Navy friends? Decided discretion was the better

part. Admiral Beckhart must be perturbed." He chuckles. "But that's not why

you're here. It's those tracers you've got built in."

This startles me. He's talking plural. I thought I was the only one with a

unit, and Mouse was along for the ride. Mouse, it seems, thought the same.

Wheels within wheels, and I should've guessed. It's the Bureau's way.

"All biological, eh? Interesting development. Passed our detectors easily. But

we're a paranoid people -- and think of everything." Smugness. "We've watched

the hyper bands since liftoff, had you pegged in hours. Dr. Du-Maurier. . . ."

Hands seize me. The doctor examines me quickly, numbs my neck and the side of

my head with an aerosol anesthetic. He produces an antique lase-scalpel.

The Ship's Commander says, "This'll be fast and painless. We'll pull the

ambergris nodes . . . and sell them back to the Navy next auction, I think."

He chuckles again. I smile. There's a curious justice in it. Mouse and I, and

others, are aboard in hopes of locating the great night-beasts which produce

just that little item.

Ambergris, the High Seiner calls it. My studies say ambergris is a "morbid

secretion" of Old Earth whales, very valuable. Others, landsmen, call the

material star's amber, spacegold, skydiamond, any of many names. It's the

wealth of our age. In the old tongues its name is hard, pithy. It's the solid

wastes of Starfish -- crap, but crap without which interstellar civilization,

as it exists, could not be. There would be no fast star-to-star communication.

In a way I don't understand (having no knowledge of the physics), a tachyon

flow is generated in a gap between as ambergris node and a Bilao crystal

anode. These are the only materials that will do. Neither can be synthesized.

Bilao crystal, mined on Sierra, is many times cheaper than ambergris. The

tachyon stream is formed into a coherent beam which computers impress and aim

at a receiver. Each tachyon carries an impressed hologramatic

portrait of the whole message. The receiver need catch but a few. Thus

distance, diffusion, beam spread, small aiming errors are overcome.

Every planet in The Arm, of six races and countless governments (the Sangaree

not included) is part of an instel net: military, government, or commercial.

The demand for ambergris far exceeds the supply. Such a vast market can never

be saturated.

Communication is the foundation of civilization. There are trillions of beings

in The Arm, thousands of planets, millions of ships, all wanting instel -- and

all the Seiner fleets produce less than a hundred thousand nodes each year. No

wonder the vultures gather.

Vultures. Mouse and I are vultures -- no, rapacious birds, falcons hurled

aloft to bring down game information. We're to locate a herd, tell Navy where,

let it be seized for Confederation. A better ownership than the Seiners', who

sell to anyone meeting their price. They're too democratic, from

Confederation's viewpoint. Often, under their system, the stones go to

belligerent, imperialistic governments, or unscrupulous corporations. We're

here to stop that. Uh-huh. Sometimes you tell yourself tall ones, else you ask

questions, worrying no-matters like right and wrong.

My soul, slithering past morality shyly, merely mumbles I want. There is pain

in it I can't withstand. I must find my Grail, and soon, or abandon this

secret quest. I've seen men so, in grim places on beautiful worlds, zombies

with humanness gone, defeated by the universe, time, and all-too-rapid change,

the little ones in madhouses, the big ones masters of corporations or

governments in which people are the cattle of machines. Not for me, no. . . .

My soul howls at an invisible moon.

"One down." The doctor tosses the node-anode piece to the Ship's Commander. I

feel no pain. I'm glad he interrupts the thoughts. I'm on the edge of a

scream. He turns to Mouse.

"We don't like spies," says the Ship's Commander. We. Always these people say

we. The worm within me squirms. This man touches my need. I try to seize

something, to know, but like a wet catfish it easily wriggles from my grasp.

"But Danion's dying. We love her. We'll keep you alive, keep our contracts,

work you till you drop, till Danion can live without you, then we'll send you

away. Please be no more trouble than you've been. We need you desperately, but

we'll not be pushed too far.

Return to your quarters. We'll get underway soon, for home."

I rise, touching the small bandage behind my ear. There is no pain, but its

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