The cruiser
Marada
had been reluctant to let the outboard Marada go. He had been lonely so long . . . and the Shebat in him proclaimed this outboard to be the most desirable of all outboards. But the
Marada
-consciousness knew better: Shebat was the outboard of his choice, of his passion, of his quest.
Yet there had been many things to be learned from his namesake, who was so admired by Shebat, whom the cruiser most sought to please. Thus he sought within the outboard while the man was aboard, probing deeper than any cruiser had ever delved into the consciousness of man, seeking to model himself after the pilot whose name he bore, so that when he had Shebat back within his hull, she would be pleased.
But the
Marada
was not pleased with all he learned from Marada the man—of right and wrong that were not synonymous with feasible and infeasible; of qualitative decision-making according to an ethical framework that seemed to exist, like a projected simulation, in some singular mental space quite apart from real-time and its considerations of positive and negative. He learned the words ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ but for all his intelligence he could not say he understood them.
Understanding whom Shebat had chosen, if not why, he was content to lay questions of outboard motivations aside. But in to erode that contentment came the unease of the outboard’s misgivings about himself, his society, even his humanity. Riding in behind the acidic wave of philosophical doubt came a whirling conjuration of destiny, a violent, apprehensive precognition both anticipated and shunned.
Having tasted the dichotomy of man, the
Marada
would have withdrawn to meditate upon what he had seen; to sum the questions of cruiser-consciousness in one column and those of outboard-consciousness in the other; to compare the results. He had not known that the outboards were so plagued, so paradoxical.
Something he had seen, bright and clear and harmonious while he opened himself to the pilot’s direction and his nature therewith, was so much more paradoxical, so supremely intriguing, that he had not tried to hold the outboard when he proposed to leave. That consideration was the presence, even warmer and more accepting now that her pilot was back unharmed, of
Hassid
,
Marada
had not had close communion with any other cruiser but
Bucephalus
, who like himself was patterned after a male.
Hassid
was decidedly different, unabashedly female, more personalized than she had let him know while he followed her gleam/hiss/snap out of sponge. She was his beacon, his salvation. She was not the snippy, rank-conscious creature she had pretended to be—
The
Marada
stopped his cogitation, crackling static underlining his malaise: the
Hassid
was no creature, any more than he. He would have to be careful not to become too much like an outboard, not to descend into fantasy or harbor unnatural desires. He was well aware that four minds had never colored any single cruiser, that never had a cruiser dealt with such disparate intelligences as the outboard
Marada
; the junior who had piloted him to space-end through sponge; Spry the master’s master; and Shebat. Shebat . . .
The
Hassid
was very like Shebat in many ways. And she was eminently accessible, which Shebat was not, yet.
The
Marada
followed the
Hassid
across two hundred million miles of solar space, obediently, doggedly and perfectly, keeping an exact-to-the-half-mile distance between them, as he had kept his space-anchor off a cylindrical platform on the border of nothingness and eternity. He had done more difficult things, like ignore programmed orders.
It was said among the outboards that the integrity of any system could be subverted by a skilled programmer. The
Marada
, who was more skilled than any outboard, had even the benefit of the finest outboard’s vast expertise.
For the moment, he was content to follow along in
Hassid’s
mesmerizing, musky wake. If he found it later necessary to assert his individuality, he would do so. But he had learned something from the outboard Marada’s disquiet when the man was considering what the cruiser had done, and what it might have become. He had learned caution, if not subterfuge; he had learned that men kill what they fear. The
Marada
did not want to find himself the object of outboard fears; the possible consequences were too clearly delineated in his namesake’s worried conjecturing.
Neither did he want to discomfit the
Hassid
, who was so very friendly, now that her pilot gave both their orders and demanded concerted communion between them. As one entity, the two cruisers approached Draconis in her wheel of satellites and substations, pirouetting slowly as her anchor-planet rotated on its axis.
The cruiser tried once again to reach Shebat’s thoughts: the same sense of distance, which never obtruded between cruisers no matter what their spacetime locale, came between them.
The
Hassid
caught a taste of his flung greeting—there was no lying possible between cruisers: truth was the only mode of search that could be conceived; no cruiser had ever spoken what was not.
Hassid
knew the reason for the difficulty the
Marada
was experiencing, knew why it was that he could not reach Shebat. He took from her kindly open-mindedness a full chip of information on security shields and interruptor circuitry. When he had absorbed
Hassid’s
tutorial, he knew that he would have to wait until Shebat came near, or rejoined the data net.
Until then, it was only necessary to maintain an unremarkable facade by performing within accepted limits of cruiser behavior.
The
Bucephalus
watched helplessly while a bevy of strange outboards tinkered around in his every cranny. He had not been powered down for the occasion. Even narcolepsy would have been better than scanning his own exploration. If they found nothing wrong, it would not be because of any lack of trying.
Where was Spry? Perhaps no one had told him what his fellow outboards were doing. Surely, if he knew, he would come and protect the
Bucephalus
from these ubiquitous, unfamiliar hands.
The
Bucephalus
reached out with all the urgency he could command toward the mind of his pilot.
Halfway around Draconis’ level two hundred, Softa David Spry burst into tears. Covering his face with his hands, he wept, hoarse wrenching sobs that would not be dammed back, though he sat at Guildmaster Baldwin’s very table with his intimates clustered close about him.
There fell a moment of silence, broken only by the grating anguish of Spry’s weeping. Baldwin unwound his long frame from the chair, taking Spry against him, feeling the man’s shoulders quake and his tears soak through his uniform. Then his ears made sense of what they heard:
“
Bucephalus
,” Spry rasped, repeatedly. And: “No more, please. . . .”
Patting the pilot’s heaving back helplessly, Baldwin’s eyes found Valery Stang’s, his hatchet-face thrust forward, so close he could read every counsel in the furrowed brow.
“Valery, get everyone out of
Bucephalus
. Have it declared space-ready and log in Shebat Kerrion’s master-solo flight for 1100 hours tomorrow.”
“But—” Valery Stang stopped himself. The probability that the second cruiser Marada Kerrion was shipping was indeed his namesake (with all the incriminating evidence needed to make an end to more than just Spry’s career on board) had been endlessly discussed. Evidently, Baldwin had reached by the mechanism of Spry’s breakdown that conclusion which Valery had long anticipated. “I’m on my way,” he assured Baldwin, squeezing the bony arm before he turned away. “Don’t worry. He’ll come out of it. I did.”
And Valery had, though each time he had doubted that he would. Twice he had lost his heart and soul and his self-respect, leaving them with pilfered cruisers at space-end. Twice he had found ways to rebuild himself. Could Softa Spry, first bitch of Kerrion space, be less resilient than he?
He turned back once, and saw Spry slumped, but sitting unsupported. An empathy he had not thought he was capable of feeling toward his arch-rival surprised him with its depth. But then, upon Baldy’s order. Spry was finished. Done. As far as Kerrion space and the guild were concerned, at least, he would soon cease to exist.
Upon that more pleasant thought, the second-rated pilot of Kerrion space slipped through the guildhall doors. When they closed behind him, he was whistling.
He whistled the whole way to the slipbay, where the mighty Kerrion cruisers lay like black keys dividing a piano keyboard. He whistled a soundless tune that he had known since his apprentice days, until he whistled a code that let the dispatcher know that whatever he was about to request should be taken as an unquestionable order. When he left the dispatcher’s office, the man followed along beside.
So it was that the
Bucephalus
was emptied of strangers, and lay untenanted in his slip but still fully powered when late that night a slim, flaxen-haired youth stole aboard and very carefully made certain rote alterations in the
Bucephalus’s
programming which he had been taught but did not understand.
When he had done what Valery had bid him, he was supposed to leave. But Julian was tired of being told what to do, of being denied the adventures wailing round his head like storm winds. And Julian was weary; the hour was late. In the morning Marada would come with his pejorative superiority and his barely masked disdain, and with whatever new emergency everyone was sure he brought along but no one would discuss with Julian.
Marada had no loyalty, no commitment to his family, no love for Parma, to whom Julian would freely have given the blood in his body or the breath in his lungs, if Parma had only asked. But Parma had never asked Julian for anything; Julian was Ashera’s son. Parma loved Marada, in spite of Marada’s flaws and even his open attempts to thwart their father in his attempts to make life secure for them all. Parma hardly remembered Julian’s name. Even the fact that he had come of age had not changed that.
Valery, on the other hand, and those he represented, welcomed the young Kerrion heir into fellowship with no hint of condescension. When the revolution was a success, Julian could become a pilot if he pleased; no one would have the right to stop him. Until then, he would do his best to help bring that day about. He would do not only all that was asked of him, but more than was asked of him, thereby proving himself a man in deeds as well as years. He settled down on his father’s bed in the
Bucephalus
, not taking off his boots, for just a short nap. . . .
It was a measure of the preoccupation of one and all in the consulate that no one missed him. But miss him they did not, and the reasons why they had not counted him absent before the arrival of
Hassid
and
Marada
were themselves forgotten when Arbiter Marada Seleucus Kerrion stepped out of
Hassid’s
port and said to his father, surrounded by high officials of the consulate (not to mention Guildmaster Baldwin and Softa Spry and Valery Stang):
“My son was born without a mind. I found it prudent to leave. Layaba fired on me. I fried all the sieves and shields in Shechem on my way out of there.”
“What?”
bellowed Parma Kerrion, while behind and to his left Spry caught Shebat’s eye and they both began to disentangle themselves from the crowd.
“You heard me,” said the arbiter, standing spread-legged on the gangplank with his hands on his hips, the same light that with its colored pulsing announced the emergency underway making it difficult for him to read Parma’s countenance. “And turn those flashers off. I don’t want anyone in either of these ships. I need you and the guildmaster, right away, for a private consultation in
Hassid
. Throw a cordon around these two bays. If anything happens untoward, it will be of man’s making, not cruisers’. Now!”
Shebat, backing through the crowd slowly, gulped huge, choking breaths. Marada’s eyes had gone over her, bereft of recognition. He had not even known her. She could not take her gaze from him, whom she loved so completely and yet could not touch even once more, when it was likely they would never meet again. His eyes were for his father only, as if he could force acquiescence by that means, not swinging right or left, hardly blinking. A man stepped into her view, between them. With a stab of pain in her solar plexus, she turned, walking slowly away from the
Hassid
toward her rendezvous with Spry.
She heard, fuzzily, Parma’s voice: “Do as he says. Baldwin, come with me.”
He had not even recognized her.
She kept walking, casually, until she had passed the division between the
Hassid’s
slip thirteen and slip fourteen, which had been readied for the unidentified ship Marada was bringing in tandem. It had been
Bucephalus’s
, but
Bucephalus
had been moved into fifteen, Shebat’s old slip, early today, so that both the incoming vehicles could be more easily handled by the emergency crews.
She was not watching; her inner eye saw Marada’s eyes sliding past her without the slightest hesitation; she bumped into someone, apologized without looking up.
The man said: “You should take your master-solo in your own cruiser. If you can get to it.”
The voice of Valery Stang was not unfamiliar to her; it caused her skin to crawl so that she did not immediately make sense of his words. Thus, she proceeded a few steps before she stopped quite still, turned to look first at the pilot, then at the cruiser encircled with foam-throwers and technicians idle at their tasks due to Marada’s order.
“Damn you and your Consortium to all the hells you have forgotten!” she blazed. Then, beyond Valery’s lank, black-haired head, she recognized the cruiser in the slipbay as the
Marada
. She never would have noticed—would have walked past without looking up.
She would have pushed by him up the gangplank and into the ship, if she had dared. She was willing to try to talk her way past the emergency crews; she was willing even to tread the living bridge she would first have to make of Valery Stang to get there. But Marada’s order obtruded—that she would not disobey. She said as much and cited Spry’s dire peril as a probable motivation for his interfering: “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? If I made some foolish error that cost Softa his only chance?”
To her surprise, the master pilot merely squeezed ophidian eyes shut and put his fingers to the bridge of his nose. “If an abject apology would suit you, I am prepared to go down on my knees here and now.”
“Spare me; your momentary company is bad enough. Your very interruption impedes a crucially exact timetable. Go seduce some young girls.” And she stalked off.
But when she had reached
Bucephalus’s
slip, her anger and her mortification that the man she loved had not had so much as a knowing glance for her was pierced through by a soft, sad voice in her mind.
“Shebat, will you not come aboard me? I heard you call I am here. Why did you walk away?”
wondered the
Marada
.
Shebat found herself grasping the
Bucephalus’s
port-grips for support.
“Marada,”
she thought with all her clarity,
“I cannot come to you here. Not now.”
“Then where? When? Shebat, let me help you. I came so far—”