Frank Herbert - Whipping Star

Whipping Star

Frank Herbert

1969

A BuSab agent must begin by learning the linguistic modes and action limits

(usually self-imposed) of the societies he treats. The agent seeks data on

the functional relationships which derive from our common universe and which

arise from interdependencies. Such interdependencies are the frequent first

victims of word-illusions. Societies based on ignorance of original

interdependencies come sooner or later to stalemate. Too long frozen, such

societies die.

-BuSab Manual

Furuneo was his name. Alichino Furuneo. He reminded, himself of this as he

rode into the city to make the long-distance call. It was wise to firm up the

ego before such a call. He was sixty-seven years old and could remember many

cases where people had lost their identity in the sniggertrance of

communication between star systems. More than the cost and the mind-crawling

sensation of dealing with a Taprisiot transmitter, this uncertainty factor

tended to keep down the number of calls. But Furuneo didn't feel he could

trust anyone else with this call to Jorj X. McKie, Saboteur Extraordinary.

It was 8:08 A.M. local at Furuneo's position on the planet called Cordiality

of the Sfich system.

"This is going to be very difficult, I suspect," he muttered, speaking at (but

not to) the two enforcers he had brought along to guard his privacy.

They didn't even nod, realizing no reply was expected.

It was still cool from the night wind which blew across the snow plains of the

Billy Mountains down to the sea. They had driven here into Division City from

Furuneo's mountain fortress, riding in an ordinary groundcar, not attempting

to hide or disguise their association with the Bureau of Sabotage, but not

seeking to attract attention, either. Many sentients had reason to resent the

Bureau.

Furuneo had ordered the car left outside the city's Pedestrian Central, and

they had come the rest of the way on foot like ordinary citizens.

Ten minutes ago they had entered the reception room of this building. It was

a Taprisiot breeding center, one of only about twenty known to exist in the

universe, quite an honor for a minor planet like Cordiality.

The reception room was no more than fifteen meters wide, perhaps thirty-five

long. It had tan walls with pitted marks in them as though they had been soft

once and someone had thrown a small ball at them according to some random

whim. Along the right side across from where Furuneo stood with his enforcers

was a high bench. It occupied three-fourths of the long wall. Multi-faceted

rotating lights above it cast patterned shadows onto the face of the bench and

the Taprisiot standing atop it.

Taprisiots came in odd shapes like sawed-off lengths of burned conifers, with

stub limbs jutting every which way, needlelike speech appendages fluttering

even when they remained silent. This one's skidfeet beat a nervous rhythm on

the surface where it stood.

For the third time since entering, Furuneo asked, "Are you the transmitter?"

No answer.

Taprisiots were like that. No sense getting angry. It did no good. Furuneo

allowed himself to be annoyed, though. Damned Taprisiots!

One of the enforcers behind Furuneo cleared his throat.

Damn this delay! Furuneo thought.

The whole Bureau had been in a state of jitters ever since the max-alert

message on the Abnethe case. This call he was preparing to make might be

their first real break. He sensed the fragile urgency of it. It could be the

most important call he had ever made. And directly to McKie, at that.

The sun, barely over the Billy Mountains, spread an orange fan of light around

him from the windowed doorway through which they had entered.

'"Looks like it's gonna be a long wait for this Tappy," one of his enforcers

muttered.

Furuneo nodded curtly. He had learned several degrees of patience in sixty-

seven years, especially on his way up the ladder to his present position as

planetary agent for the Bureau. There was only one thing to do here: wait it

out quietly. Taprisiots took their own time for whatever mysterious reasons.

There was no other store, though, where he could buy the service he needed

now. Without a Taprisiot transmitter, you didn't make real-time calls across

interstellar space.

Strange, this Taprisiot talent -- used by so many sentients without

understanding. The sensational press abounded with theories on how it was

accomplished. For all anyone knew, one of the theories could be right.

Perhaps Taprisiots did make these calls in a way akin to the data linkage

among PanSpechi creche mates -- not that this was understood, either.

It was Furuneo's belief that Taprisiots distorted space in a way similar to

that of a Caleban jumpdoor, sliding between the dimensions. If that was

really what Caleban jumpdoors did. Most experts denied this theory, pointing

out that it would require energies equivalent to those produced by fair-sized

stars.

Whatever Taprisiots did to make a call, one thing was certain: It involved

the human pineal gland or its equivalent among other sentients.

The Taprisiot on the high bench began moving from side to side.

"Maybe we're getting through to it," Furuneo said.

He composed his features, suppressed his feelings of unease. This was, after

all, a Taprisiot breeding center. Xenobiologists said Taprisiot reproduction

was all quite tame, but Xenos didn't know everything. Look at the mess they'd

made of analyzing the PanSpechi Con-Sentiency.

"Putcha, putcha, putcha," the Taprisiot on the bench said, squeaking its

speech needles.

"Something wrong?" one of the enforcers asked.

"How the devil do I know?" Furuneo snapped. He faced the Taprisiot, said,

"Are you the transmitter?"

"Putcha, putcha, putcha," the Taprisiot said. "This is a remark which I will

now translate in the only way that may make sense to ones like yourselves of

Sol/Earth ancestry. What I said was, 'I question your sincerity.' "

"You gotta justify your sincerity to a damn Taprisiot?" one of the enforcers

asked. "Seems to me . . ."

"Nobody asked you!" Furuneo cut him off. Any probing attack by a Taprisiot

was likely a greeting. Didn't the fool know this?

Furuneo separated himself from the enforcers, crossed to a position below the

bench. "I wish to make a call to Saboteur Extraordinary Jorj X. McKie," he

said. "Your robogreeter recognized and identified me and took my creditchit.

Are you the transmitter?""Where is this Jorj X. McKie?" the Taprisiot asked.

"If I knew, I'd be off to him in person through a jumpdoor," Furuneo said.

"This is an important call. Are you the transmitter?"

"Date, time, and place," the Taprisiot said.

Furuneo sighed and relaxed. He glanced back at the enforcers, motioned them

to take up stations at the room's two doors, waited while they obeyed.

Wouldn't do to have this call overheard. He turned then, gave the required

local coordinates.

"You will sit on floor," the Taprisiot said.

"Thank the immortals for that," Furuneo muttered. He'd once made a call where

the transmitter had led him to a mountainside in wind and driving rain and

made him stretch out, head lower than feet, before opening the overspace

contact. It had had something to do with "refining the embedment," whatever

that meant. He'd reported the incident to the Bureau's data center, where

they hoped one day to solve the Taprisiot secret, but the call had cost him

several weeks with an upper respiratory infection.

Furuneo sat.

Damn! The floor was cold!

Furuneo was a tall man, two meters in bare feet, eighty-four standard kilos.

His hair was black with a dusting of grey at the ears. He had a thick nose

and wide mouth with an oddly straight lower lip. He favored his left hip as

he sat. A disgruntled citizen had broken it during one of his early tours

with the Bureau. The injury defied all the medics who had told him, "It won't

bother you a bit after it's healed."

"Close eyes," the Taprisiot squeaked.

Furuneo obeyed, tried to squirm into a more comfortable position on the cold,

hard floor, gave it up.

"Think of contact," the Taprisiot ordered.

Furuneo thought of Jorj X. McKie, building the image in his mind -- squat

little man, angry red hair, face like a disgruntled frog.

Contact began with tendrils of cloying awareness. Furuneo became in his own

mind a red flow sung to the tune of a silver lyre. His body went remote.

Awareness rotated above a strange landscape. The sky was an infinite circle

with its horizon slowly turning. He sensed the stars engulfed in loneliness.

"What the ten million devils!"

The thought exploded across Furuneo. There was no evading it. He recognized

it at once. Contactees frequently resented the call. They couldn't reject

it, no matter what they were doing at the time, but they could make the caller

feel their displeasure.

"It never fails! It never fails!"

McKie would be jerked to full inner awareness now, his pineal gland ignited by

the long-distance contact.

Furuneo settled himself to wait out the curses. When they had subsided

sufficiently, he identified himself, said, "I regret any inconvenience I may

have caused, but the maxalert failed to say where you could be located. You

must know I would not have called unless it were important."

A more or less standard opening.

"How the hell do I know whether your call's important?" McKie demanded. "Stop

babbling and get on with it!"

This was an unusual extension of anger even for the volatile McKie. "Did I

interrupt something important?" Furuneo ventured.

"I was just standing here in a telicourt getting a divorce!" McKie said.

"Can't you imagine what a great time everyone here's having, watching me

mubble-dubble to myself in a sniggertrance? Get to the business!"

"A Caleban Beachball washed ashore last night below Division City here on

Cordiality," Furuneo said. "In view of all the deaths and insanity and the

max-alert message from the Bureau, I thought I'd better call you at once.

It's still your case, isn't it?"

"Is this your idea of a joke?" McKie demanded.

In lieu of red tape, Furuneo cautioned himself, thinking of the Bureau maxim.

It was a private thought, but McKie no doubt was catching the mood of it.

"Well?" McKie demanded.

Was McKie deliberately trying to unnerve him? Furuneo wondered. How could the

Bureau's prime function -- to slow the processes of government -- remain

operative on an internal matter such as this call? Agents were duty bound to

encourage anger in government because it exposed the unstable, temperamental

types, the ones who lacked the necessary personal control and ability to think

under psychic stress, but why carry this duty over to a call from a fellow

agent?

Some of these thoughts obviously bled through the Taprisiot transmitter

because McKie reflected them, enveloping Furuneo in a mental sneer.

"You lotsa time unthink yourself," McKie said.

Furuneo shuddered, recovered his sense of self. Ahhh, that had been close.

He'd almost lost his ego! Only the veiled warning in McKie's words had

alerted him, allowing recovery. Furuneo began casting about in his mind for

another interpretation of McKie's reaction. Interrupting the divorce could

not account for it. If the stories were true, the ugly little agent had been

married fifty or more times.

"Are you still interested in the Beachball?" Furuneo ventured.

"Is there a Caleban in it?"

"Presumably."

"You haven't investigated?" McKie's mental tone said Furuneo had been

entrusted with a most crucial operation and had failed because of inherent

stupidity.

Now fully alert to some unspoken danger, Furuneo said, "I acted as my orders

instructed."

"Orders!" McKee sneered.

"I'm supposed to be angry, eh?" Furuneo asked.

"I'll be there as fast as I can get service -- within eight standard hours at

the most," McKie said. "Your orders, meanwhile, are to keep that Beachball

under constant observation. The observers must be hopped up on angeret. It's

their only protection."

"Constant observation," Furuneo said.

"If a Caleban emerges, you're to detain it by any means possible."

"A Caleban . . . detain it?"

"Engage it in conversation, request its cooperation, anything," McKie said.

His mental emphasis added that it was odd a Bureau agent should have to ask

about throwing a monkey wrench into someone's activities.

"Eight hours," Furuneo said.

"And don't forget the angeret."

A Bureau is a life form and the Bureaucrat one of its cells. This analogy

teaches us which are the more important cells, which in greatest peril, which

most easily replaced, and how easy it is to be mediocre.

-Later Writings of Bildoon IV

McKie, on the honeymoon planet of Tutalsee, took an hour to complete his

divorce, then returned to the float-home they had moored beside an island of

love flowers. Even the nepenthe of Tutalsee had failed him, McKie thought.

This marriage had been wasted effort. His ex hadn't known enough about Mliss

Abnethe despite their reported former association. But that had been on

another world.

This wife had been his fifty-fourth, somewhat lighter of skin than any of the

others and more than a bit of a shrew. It had not been her first marriage,

and she had shown early suspicions of McKie's secondary motives.

Reflection made McKie feel guilty. He put such feelings aside savagely.

There was no time for nicety. Too much was at stake. Stupid female!

She had already vacated the float-home, and McKie could sense the living

entity's resentment. He had shattered the idyll which the float-home had been

conditioned to create. The float-home would return to its former affability

once he was gone. They were gentle creatures, susceptible to sentient

irritation.

McKie packed, leaving his toolkit aside. He examined it: a selection of

stims, plastipicks, explosives in various denominations, raygens,

multigoggles, pentrates, a wad of uniflesh, solvos, miniputer, Taprisiot life

monitor, holoscan blanks, rupters, comparators . . . all in order. The

toolkit was a fitted wallet which he concealed in an inner pocket of his

nondescript jacket.

He packed a few changes of clothing in a single bag, consigned the rest of his

possessions to BuSab storage, left them for pickup in a sealpack which he

stored on a couple of chairdogs. They appeared to share the float-home's

resentment. They remained immobile even when he patted them affectionately.

Ah, well. . . .

He still felt guilty.

McKie sighed, took out his S'eye key. This jump was going to cost the Bureau

megacredits. Cordiality lay halfway across their universe.

Jumpdoors still seemed to be working, but it disturbed McKie that he must make

this journey by a means which was dependent upon a Caleban. Eerie situation.

S'eye jumpdoors had become so common that most sentients accepted them without

question. McKie had shared this common acceptance before the max-alert. Now

he wondered at himself. Casual acceptance demonstrated how easily rational

thought could be directed by wishful thinking. This was a common

susceptibility of all sentients. The Caleban jumpdoor had been fully accepted

by the Confederated Sentients for some ninety standard years. But in that

time, only eighty-three Calebans were known to have identified themselves.

McKie flipped the key in his hand, caught it deftly.

Why had the Calebans refused to part with their gift unless everyone agreed to

call it a "S'eye"? What was so important about a name?

I should be on my way, McKie told himself. Still he delayed.

Eighty-three Calebans.

The max-alert had been explicit in its demand for secrecy and its outline of

the problem: Calebans had been disappearing one by one. Disappearing -- if

that was what the Caleban manifestation could be called. And each

disappearance had been accompanied by a massive wave of sentient deaths and

insanity.

No question why the problem had been dumped in BuSab's lap instead of onto

some police agency. Government fought back wherever it could: Powerful men

hoped to discredit BuSab. McKie found his own share of disturbance in

wondering about the hidden possibilities in the selection of himself as the

sentient to tackle this.

Who hates me? he wondered as he used his personally tuned key in the jumpdoor.

The answer was that many people hated him. Millions of people.

The jumpdoor began to hum with its aura of terrifying energies. The door's

vortal tube snapped open. McKie tensed himself for the syrupy resistance to

jumpdoor passage, stepped through the tube. It was like swimming in air

become molasses -- perfectly normal-appearing air. But molasses.

McKie found himself in a rather ordinary office: the usual humdrum whirldesk,

alert-flicker light patterns cascading from the ceiling, a view out one

transparent wall onto a mountainside. In the distance the rooftops of

Division City lay beneath dull gray clouds, with a luminous silver sea beyond.

McKie's implanted brainclock told him it was late afternoon, the eighteenth

hour of a twenty-six-hour day. This was Cordiality, a world 200,000 light-

years from Tutalsee's planetary ocean.

Behind him, the jumpdoor's vortal tube snapped closed with a crackling sound

like the discharge of electricity. A faint ozone smell permeated the air.

The room's standard-model chairdogs had been well trained to comfort their

masters, McKie noted. One of them nudged him behind the knees until he

dropped his bag and took a reluctant seat. The chairdog began massaging his

back. Obviously it had been instructed to make him comfortable while someone

was summoned.

McKie tuned himself to the faint sounds of normality around him. Footsteps of

a sentient could be heard in an outer passage. A Wreave by the sound of it:

that peculiar dragging of the heel on a favored foot. There was a dim

conversation somewhere, and McKie could make out a few Lingua-galach words,

but it sounded like a multilingual conversation.

He began fidgeting, which set the chairdog into a burst of rippling movements

to soothe him. Enforced idleness nagged at him. Where was Furuneo? McKie

chided himself. Furuneo probably had many planetary duties as BuSab agent

here. And he couldn't know the full urgency of their problem. This might be

one of the planets where BuSab was spread thin. The gods of immortality knew

the Bureau could always find work.

McKie began reflecting on his role in the affairs of sentiency. Once, long

centuries past, con-sentients with a psychological compulsion to "do good" had

captured the government. Unaware of the writhing complexities, the mingled

guilts and self-punishments, beneath their compulsion, they had eliminated

virtually all delays and red tape from government. The great machine with its

blundering power over sentient life had slipped into high gear, had moved

faster and faster. Laws had been conceived and passed in the same hour.

Appropriations had flashed into being and were spent in a fortnight. New

bureaus for the most improbable purposes had leaped into existence and

proliferated like some insane fungus.

Government had become a great destructive wheel without a governor, whirling

with such frantic speed that it spread chaos wherever it touched.

In desperation, a handful of sentients had conceived the Sabotage Corps to

slow that wheel. There had been bloodshed and other degrees of violence, but

the wheel had been slowed. In time, the Corps had become a Bureau, and the

Bureau was whatever it was today -- an organization headed into its own

corridors of entropy, a group of sentients who preferred subtle diversion to

violence . . . but were prepared for violence when the need arose.

A door slid back on McKie's right. His chairdog became still. Furuneo

entered, brushing a hand through the band of grey hair at his left ear. His

wide mouth was held in a straight line, a suggestion of sourness about it.

"You're early," he said, patting a chairdog into place across from McKie and

seating himself.

"Is this place safe?" McKie asked. He glanced at the wall where the S'eye had

disgorged him. The jumpdoor was gone.

"I've moved the door back downstairs through its own tube," Furuneo said.

"This place is as private as I can make it." He sat back, waiting for McKie

to explain.

"That Beachball still down there?" McKie nodded toward the transparent wall

and the distant sea.

"My men have orders to call me if it makes any move," Furuneo said. "It was

washed ashore just like I said, embedded itself in a rock outcropping, and

hasn't moved since."

"Embedded itself?"

"That's how it seems."

"No sign of anything in it?"

"Not that we can see. The Ball does appear to be a bit . . . banged up.

There are some pitting and a few external scars. What's this all about?"

"No doubt you've heard of Mliss Abnethe?"

"Who hasn't?"

"She recently spent some of her quintillions to hire a Caleban. "

"Hire a . . ." Furuneo shook his head. "I didn't know it could be done."

"Neither did anyone else."

"I read the max-alert," Furuneo said. "Abnethe's connection with the case

wasn't explained."

"She's a bit kinky about floggings, you know," McKie said.

"I thought she was treated for that."

"Yeah, but it didn't eliminate the root of her problem. It just fixed her so

she couldn't stand the sight of a sentient suffering. "

"So?"

"Her solution, naturally, was to hire a Caleban."

"As a victim!" Furuneo said.

Furuneo was beginning to understand, McKie saw. Someone had once said the

problem with Calebans was that they presented no patterns you could recognize.

This was true, of course. If you could imagine an actuality, a being whose

presence could not be denied but who left your senses dangling every time you

tried to look at it -- then you could imagine a Caleban.

"They're shuttered windows opening onto eternity," as the poet Masarard put

it.

In the first Caleban days, McKie had attended every Bureau lecture and

briefing about them. He tried to recall one of those sessions now, prompted

by a nagging sensation that it had contained something of value to his present

problem. It had been something about "communications difficulties within an

aura of affliction." The precise content eluded him. Odd, he thought. It

was as though the Calebans' crumbled projection created an effect on sentient

memory akin to their effect on sentient vision.

Here lay the true source of sentient uneasiness about Calebans. Their

artifacts were real -- the S'eye jumpdoors, the Beachballs in which they were

reputed to live -- but no one had ever really seen a Caleban.

Furuneo, watching the fat little gnome of an agent sit there thinking,

recalled the snide story about McKie, that he had been in BuSab since the day

before he was born.

"She's hired a whipping boy, eh?" Furuneo asked.

"That's about it."

"The max-alert spoke of deaths, insanity. . . .'

"Are all your people dosed with angeret?" McKie asked.

"I got the message, McKie."

"Good. Anger seems to afford some protection."

"What exactly is going on?"

"Calebans have been . . . vanishing," McKie said. "Every time one of them

goes, there are quite a few deaths and . . . other unpleasant effects --

physical and mental crippling, insanity. . . ."

Furuneo nodded in the direction of the sea, leaving his question unspoken.

McKie shrugged. "We'll have to go take a look. The hell of it is, up until

your call there seemed to be only one Caleban left in the universe, the one

Abnethe hired.'"

"How're you going to handle this?"

"That's a beautiful question," McKie said.

"Abnethe's Caleban," Furuneo said. "It have anything to say by way of

explanation?"

"Haven't been able to interview it," McKie said. "We don't know where she's

hidden herself -- or it."

"Don't know. . . ." Furuneo blinked. "Cordiality's pretty much of a

backwater."

"That's what I've been thinking. You said this Beachball was a little the

worse for wear?"

"That's odd, isn't it?"

"Another oddity among many."

"They say a Caleban doesn't get very far from its Ball," Furuneo said. "And

they like to park 'em near water."

"How much of an attempt did you make to communicate with it?"

"The usual. How'd you find out about Abnethe hiring a Caleban?"

"She bragged to a friend who bragged to a friend who . . . And one of the

other Calebans dropped a hint before disappearing."

"Any doubt the disappearances and the rest of it are tied together?"

"Let's go knock on this thing's door and find out," McKie said.

Frank Herbert - Whipping Star

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: