Starfishers - Starfishers Triology Book 2

Six: 3047 AD

The Olden Days, Luna Command

He waited patiently in the line outside Decontamination. When his turn came he went to Cubicle R. No one else had done so. A sign saying OUT OF SERVICE clung to the door beneath the R.

That sign had been there more than twenty years. It was old and dirty and lopsided. Everyone in Luna Command knew that door R did not open on a standard decon chamber.

The men and women, and occasional non-humans, who ignored the sign were agents returning from the field.

He closed the door and placed his things on a counter surface, then removed his clothing. Nude, he stepped through the next door inward.

Energy from the scanner in the door frame made his skin tingle and his body hair stand out. He held his breath, closed his eyes.

Needles of liquid hit him, stung him, killing bacteria and rinsing grime away. Sonics cracked the long molecular helixes of viruses.

A mist replaced the spray. He breathed deeply.

Something clicked. He stepped through the next door.

He entered a room identical to the first. Its only furniture was a counter surface. On that counter lay neatly folded clothing and a careful array of personal effects. He dressed, filled his pockets, chuckling. He had been demoted. His chevrons proclaimed him a Second Class Missileman. His ship's patch said he was off the battle cruiser Ashurbanipal.

He had never heard of the vessel.

He pulled the blank ID card from the wallet he had been given, placed his right thumb over the portrait square. Ten seconds later his photograph and identification statistics began to appear.

"Cornelius Wadlow Perchevski?" he muttered in disbelief. "It gets worse and worse." He scanned the dates and numbers, memorizing, then attached the card to his chest. He donned the Donald Duck cap spacers wore groundside, said, "Cornelius Perchevski to see the King."

The floor sank beneath him.

As he descended he heard the showers go on in the decon chamber.

A minute later he stepped from a stall in a public restroom several levels lower. He entered a main traffic tunnel and walked to a bus stop.

Six hours later he told a plain woman behind a plain desk behind a plain room, behind a plain door, "Cornelius W. Perchevski, Missileman Two. I'm supposed to see the doctor."

She checked an appointment log. "You're fifteen minutes late, Perchevski. But go ahead. Through the white door."

He passed through wondering if the woman knew she was fronting. Probably not. The security games got heaviest where they seemed least functional.

The doctor's office made him feel like Alice, diving down a rabbit hole into another world.

It's just as crazy as Wonderland, he thought. Black is white here. Up is down. In is out. Huck is Jim, and never the Twain shall meet... He chuckled.

"Mr. Perchevski."

He sobered. "Sir?"

"I believe you came in for debriefing."

"Yes, sir. Where do you want me to start, sir?"

"The oral form. Then you'll rest. Tomorrow well do the written. I'll schedule the cross-comparative for later in the week. We're still trying to get the bugs out of a new cross-examination program."

Perchevski studied the faceless man while he told his tale. The interrogator's most noteworthy feature was his wrinkled, blue-veined, weathered hands. His inquisitor was old...

The Faceless Man usually was not. Normally he was a young, expert psychologist-lawyer. The old men in the Bureau were ex-operatives, senior staff, decision-makers, not technicians.

He knew most of the old men. He listened to the questions carefully, but there was no clue in the voice asking them. It was being technically modified. He reexamined the hands. They offered no clues either.

He began to worry. Something had gone broomstick. They did not bring on the dreadnoughts otherwise.

His nerves were not up to an intensive interrogation. It had been a heavy mission, and the trip home had given him too much time to talk to himself.

Debriefing continued all month. They questioned him and counterchecked his answers so often and so thoroughly that when they finally let him go he no longer really felt that the mission had been part of his life. It was almost as if some organ had been removed from him one molecule at a time, leaving him with nothing but a funny empty feeling.

Five weeks after he had arrived at Luna Command they handed him a pink plastic card identical in all other respects to the white one he had received at Decontamination. They also gave him an envelope containing leave papers, money, bankbooks, and such written persona as a man needed to exist in an electronic universe. Included was an address.

An unsmiling amazon opened a door and set him free.

He stepped into the public tunnels of Luna Command. Back from beyond the looking glass. He caught a bus just like any spacer on leave.

The room was exactly as he had left it—except that they had moved it a thousand kilometers from its former location. He tumbled into his bed. He did not get out again for nearly two days.

Cornelius Perchevski was a lonely man. He had few friends. The nature of his profession did not permit making many.

For another five days he remained isolated in his room, adapting to the books, collections, and little memorabilia that could be accounted the time-spoor of the real him. Like some protean beast his personality slowly reshaped itself to its natural mold. He began taking interest in the few things that made a unified field of his present and past.

He took down his typewriter and notebooks and pecked away for a few hours. A tiny brat of agony wrested itself from the torn womb of his soul. He punched his agent's number, added his client code, and fed the sheets to the fax transmitter.

In a year or two, if he was lucky, a few credits might materialize in one of his accounts.

He lay back and stared at the ceiling. After a time he concluded that he had been alone enough. He had begun to heal. He could face his own kind again. He rose and went to a mirror, examined his face.

The deplastification process was complete. It always took less time than did his internal mendings. The wounds within never seemed to heal all the way.

He selected civilian clothing from his closet, dressed.

He returned to public life by taking a trip to the little shop. The bus was crowded. He began to feel the pressure of all those personalities, pushing and pulling his own... Had he come out too early? Each recovery seemed to take a little longer, to be a little less effective.

"Walter Clark!" the lady shopkeeper declared. "Where the hell have you been? You haven't been in here for six months. And you look like you've been through hell."

"How's it going, Max?" A self-conscious grin ripped his face open. Christ, it felt good to have somebody be glad to see him. "Just got out of the hospital."

"Hospital? Again? Why didn't you call me? What happened? Some Stone Age First Expansioner stick a spear in you again?"

"No. It was a bug this time. Acted almost like leukemia. And they don't even know where I picked it up. You have anything new for me?"

"Sit your ass down, Walter. You bet I have. I tried to call you when it came in, but your box kept saying you weren't available. You ought to get a relay put on that thing. Here, let me get you some coffee."

"Max, I ought to marry you."

"No way. I'm having too much fun being single. Anyway, why ruin a perfectly good friendship?" She set coffee before him.

"Oh. This's the real thing. I love you."

"It's Kenyan."

"Having Old Earth next door is good for something, then."

"Coffee and comic opera. Here's the collection. The best stuff is gone already. You know how it is. I didn't know when you'd show up. I couldn't hold it forever."

Perchevski sipped coffee. He closed his eyes and allowed the molecules of his homeworld to slide back across his taste buds. "I understand. I don't expect you to hang on to anything if you've got another customer." He opened the ancient stamp album.

"You weren't out to the March of Ulant, were you, Walter?"

"Ulant? No. The other direction. Why?"

"Because of the rumors, I was curious. You know how Luna Command is. They say Ulant has been rearming. The Senators are kicking up a fuss. High Command keeps telling them it's nonsense. But I've had a couple of high-powered corporate executive types in and they say the Services are smoke screening, that there's something going on out there. A lot of heavy ships moving through here lately, too. All of them moving from out The Arm in toward the March."

"It's all news to me, Max. I haven't had the holo on since I got back. I'm so far behind I'll probably never catch up. These Hamburg... The notes all over the page. What are they?"

"Jimmy Eagle did that. Right after I picked up the collection. Lot of them are forgeries. The cancellations. Most of the stamps are good. He marked the reprints. You haven't heard any news at all?"

"Max, by the time I got back from Illwind I was so sick I couldn't see. I didn't care. I don't know why we've got an embassy on that hole, anyway. Or why they sent me there. The only natives I ever saw were two burglars we caught trying to blow up the Ambassador's safe. They need a military assistance mission like Old Earth needs another Joshua Ja. Their methods of killing each other are adequate already."

"Then you haven't even heard that Ja is done for?"

"Hey? What happened? This I got to hear about."

Joshua Ja was one of Old Earth's more noxious public figures. The holonet newscasters had dubbed him the Clown Prince of Senegal. The nets followed his threats and posturing faithfully, using him as humorous leavening for their otherwise grim newscasts.

The self-proclaimed Emperor of Equatorial Africa was no joke to his subjects and neighbors. His scatterbrained projects and edicts invariably cost lives.

"He invaded the Mauritanian Hegemony while you were gone."

Perchevski laughed. "Sounds like one gang of inmates trying to break into another's asylum."

Old Earth was a nonvoting member of Confederation. Both Confederation itself and the World Government refrained from interfering in local affairs. World Government held off because it had no power. Confederation did so because the costs of straightening out the home-world were considered prohibitive.

Earth was one of the few Confederation worlds supporting multiple national states. And the only one boasting an incredible one hundred twenty-nine.

World Government's writ ran only in those countries deigning to go along with its decrees.

Centuries earlier there had been but two states on Earth, World Commonweal and United Asia. United Asia had remained impotent throughout its brief, turbulent history. World Commonweal might have created a planetary state, but had collapsed at Fail Point, so called because at that point in time agro-industrial protein production capacity had fallen below the population's absolute minimum survival demand.

"You missed the best part of it, Walter. During the first week the Mauritanians shot down half of their own air force. And the Empire lost a whole armored brigade in a swamp because Ja ordered them to march in a straight line all the way to Timbuktu. The holonets had a field day. That's the lilac brown shade there. We've got a Foundation certificate for it."

Perchevski lifted the stamp and examined its reverse. "I already have a copy. I'm just looking."

"Anyway, the Mauritanians have been less klutzy than the Imperials. They're closing in on Dakar."

"What's the Council doing?"

"Laughing a lot. They're going to let him go down. The word's out that other countries shouldn't accept refugees from the Empire. Ja and his gang have done too much damage to Old Earth's image."

"Old Josh? You're kidding. How do you lower something that's already at the bottom?"

"You see anything you want?"

"You, my love."

"Smart ass."

"Wednesday night?"

"What've you got in mind?"

"A cribbage game."

"I'll call you. If it does any good. If you're not off to some weird place with a name like Toilet Bowl."

"Actually, I was thinking about going to the archaeological digs at Ley."

"Funny you should mention them. More coffee?"

"Sure. Why?"

"They broke into a new chamber last month. It was in pretty good shape."

"Is it open?"

"They put a transparent tube in. You can walk through and look, but you can't get close to anything or get in the way."

"Call me, then. If you want to go see."

"Excuse me, Walter." Another customer had come in. "Yes sir? May I help you?"

"How are you in Twenty-first Century France?"

Perchevski lost himself in the bits of paper that told tales of a remote, turbulent era. He finally selected seven pieces for his collection, paid for them from the Walter Clark account.

"Max, thanks for the coffee. And hold that Berlin piece, will you? I'll let you know as soon as I make up my mind. Like maybe Wednesday?"

"All right, Walter. Ill call you tomorrow."

"Leave a message if I'm not there."

"I will."

He clambered aboard a bus and returned the two hundred kilometers to his apartment.

You're a fool, he told himself. To go all that way for an hour of gossip.

But damn, did he feel better.

He had traveled a lot farther in the past. He doubted that Max had a ghost of a notion just what she meant to him. She was one of the few stable realities in his life. She was a landmark by which he guided himself back from the wildernesses of Bureauland.

He mounted his new stamps in his albums using a surgeon's care. He took down a notebook and marked their catalog numbers off his list of wants, noting the date and price he had paid for each. He entered the total in his cumulative ledger, then marked down the fact that two more album pages had been filled.

The detailed record keeping was necessitated by something within him, some compulsion to put down tiny proofs that he was interacting with the universe, if only through the hieroglyphics of numbers. He had other notebooks in which he kept other records. He did a lot of bookkeeping on the events of his life.

None of it ever left his apartment.

He wondered what the Bureau snoops made of the lists and notes. He was sure they checked them whenever he was away.

He finished his record keeping. He looked around the sterile room. It suddenly became very tight, very lonely.

He tried the holo, turning to the Luna Command news channel. He caught it in a low cycle. There was nothing on but an endless parade of public service messages, though once a commentator mentioned rumors of a forthcoming major news event involving Navy. Something big was expected, but its nature could not be determined. Security remained unusually tight.

"Sure," Perchevski growled at the cube. "The Chief of Staff will probably announce this year's winners in the Fleet Backgammon Playoffs."

Luna Command was heart and brain of Confederation. It was headquarters for the Services, which were Confederation's bone and sinew. It was the hub of a human enterprise kept unified only by its military. And the only exciting thing that had happened there in Perchevski's lifetime had been the discovery of the prehistoric alien base on the moon's dark side.

The military did not control Confederation. But the only obstacle to absolute military rule was a gentlemen's agreement among the generals and admirals to accept the forms of democracy. High Command could do anything it damned well pleased, any time it pleased, were it to ignore custom. Out in the remote reaches, far from senatorial eyes, it often did. There were few sanctions the civilian sector could exercise.

Aggravated, Perchevski killed the holocast. He checked the lunar calendar for the best viewing site, recovered his tunic, and hit public transportation again. He took the high-velocity electric train the six hundred kilometers to the tourist observation dome overlooking Tycho.

The crater was not the attraction there. People did not come from Confederation's one hundred thirty-four member planets, and more than a hundred dominions, protectorates, associated states, and outright colonies, to look at a hole in the ground. The allies and tributaries were not interested in a crater either.

Neither was Perchevski.

Tycho observation dome offered a magnificent view of Old Earth. His homeworld. A world he had not visited in eight years.

Tycho, or its sister domes, was as close as most tourists cared to get to their biological roots.

Perchevski lay back in a lounger and half-listened to the canned commentary.

"... where the race of Man began... possibly also the planet of origin of the Sangaree... first successful extraterrestrial landing, July 20, 1969, in the old dating. Neil Armstrong... ascension of World Commonweal following World War III... Fail Point, July, 2194, led to the Collapse. Reinhardt Ships carried Commonweal refugees to interstellar colonies from 2187 through the end of the Luna Wars in 2226. The Treaties of Jerusalem of 2228 led to the chaotic exploration and random settlement we now call First Expansion.

"A profligate expenditure of resources and racial will initiated a reactionary isolationism which spanned the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth centuries. Space travel, even to Luna, was discontinued. Contact with the star worlds did not resume till 2613, when Vice-Admiral Takada Yoshimura brought New Earth's fleet back to Luna. A short time later Yoshimura encountered ships of the Palisarian Directorate.

"The old records in Luna Command revealed the locations of scores of settled worlds. The secondary colonies of the Directorate were under pressure from Toke at the time. The Directorate and New Earth concluded a xenophobic alliance, and began searching for other human allies.

"The concept, if not the fact, of Confederation had been created.

"We have our former enemies, the Toke, to thank for midwifing Confederation through its birth pains. The unrelenting determination of the Star Lords and Caste of Warriors united humanity. The conflict endured sufficiently long for Confederation to become a reality, with its military headquartered here in the tunnels of Luna.

"Confederation and Luna Command have been growing steadily since."

Perchevski stopped listening. He had heard it all before.

He knew he would hear it again. The viewing domes were the Meccas of regular hadjs.

He looked at the Earth and wondered how his parents were doing. He had not heard from either for a long time.

He slept while returning to his apartment. It had been a long day.

Two messages awaited him. The first was from Max. She wanted to see the xenoarchaeological digs Darkside. The other was from his employers. The printout said: SENIOR STAFF PARTY WEDNESDAY 8 PM ATTENDANCE MANDATORY CONTACT 864-6400-312 FOR FURTHER INFO.

He sighed, pecked out the number. Max would not like this. He tried her number after he had gotten the story.

"Max? Walter. Yeah. Thanks for calling. Hey. I've got a problem. Just got word from my boss. I have to go to a staff party tomorrow night. Can't get out of it. I know. I'm sorry. Hey! Want to come along? All the big wheels will be there. The Chief of Staff Navy is supposed to come out with some big announcement. No. I don't think it has anything to do with the March of Ulant. That's all smoke screen, if you ask me. It's at the Command Club. Can you meet me there? Okay. 'Bye."

He lay back on his bed and wondered what the news would be, and why he had been ordered to make an appearance. He was a senior operative, but certainly not senior staff.

He also wondered how long it would be before they called him down and stuck him behind a desk. It didn't look as if his vacation was going to go through, and they did not like people just loafing around while they waited for an assignment.

Again he thought about his parents.