Star Song and Other Stories Read online

  Star Song and Other Stories

  Timothy Zahn

  Timothy Zahn Star Song and Other Stories

  For Dr. Stanley Schmidt: Who, 24 years ago, rescued me from the slush pile.

  Thanks, Stan.

  Introduction

  I've always liked short stories. I've especially always liked short story collections.

  That's not just because you're holding a collection of mine in your hands right now, deciding whether or not to dive into it. It's also not just because I started my career with short stories, though that is in fact what I did. For me, short fiction was a great way for a novice writer to learn the craft of putting narrative and character and plot together, rather like climbing a series of foothills before tackling the awesome and slightly terrifying mountain of a full-fledged novel. I published seven stories before even beginning my first novel (and wrote a lot more that were never published), and had published twenty-two of them before that novel finally saw print.

  No, my love of short fiction is a lot older than that. It goes back to the days of my youth, back when I first began my exploration of the universe of science fiction. My pattern then was to pick a new author off the local library's SF

  shelves and try a book by him or her. If I liked it, I would read the shelves dry, and then (if I had any spare money that month) hunt up whatever newer works might be available at the bookstore.

  But unless there was a novel by Author X that looked particularly intriguing, I

  always preferred to start with a short-story collection if one was available.

  Why? Very simply, because a collection gave me a better idea of the author's range than a single novel ever could. It let me see variations in style and character, plus a wider sampling of the kind of ideas he or she liked to play with. The full extent of the author's sense of humor was often better represented, too. Whereas humor might be almost totally absent in a particularly grim novel (or overly lavished in a deliberately silly one), a collection would again give the kind of balance to let me know if this was someone I wanted as my guide into worlds of wonder over the next few weeks or months.

  Which brings us back to this particular collection. In putting it together, I've tried to give a fair sampling of the sort of stories I've been writing over the years. There's everything from serious to humorous; from very short vignette to novella length; from my somewhat older efforts ("Point Man," 1987) to more modern ones ("Star Song," 1997).

  A quick rundown of the particular stories, in case you're interested:

  "Point Man" was the third of a series of interconnected stories (modeled after Larry Niven's Known Universe series) that somehow never got any farther than these three. I have that problem sometimes with series: I get distracted by something else, and never quite get back. Maybe someday...

  "Hitmen—See Murderers" was one of those ideas that let me edge a little ways into philosophy, as well as getting to figure out ways that something that looked so useful and good could generate such bad results. I was probably at least partially influenced by Arabian Nights-type stories, and seeing how a malevolent genie could mess up a perfectly good set of wishes. (Tip for beginning writers: read everything. It all gets used eventually.)

  "The Broccoli Factor." Don't even ask. Too much time spent around small children, I guess.

  "The Art of War" was commissioned (sort of) by Kris Rusch, who was editing Fantasy & Science Fiction at the time. She had been intrigued by my Star Wars character Grand Admiral Thrawn and his way of connecting art and war, and thought there was something else I could do with that pairing. This may not have been exactly what she had in mind, but it's what came out.

  "The Play's the Thing" was inspired by my first trip to New York City since childhood, and my first-ever Broadway play. Until I can write, produce, or star in one myself, I guess this story will have to suffice.

  And finally, "Star Song" was one of the handful of stories I've written where I

  was able to draw on my love of music. It was also one of those maddening times where I quickly had all of the story except for one crucial piece. In this case, a comment from my son was the key to that piece, after which everything fell into place. I made the mistake of giving him 5% of the payment in thanks.

  Never do that with a teenager. He now figures any residual money that comes in from the story is partially his, and as a paralegal student he knows how to argue from precedent. I'm just glad I didn't offer him 10%.

  So there you have it: background, history, and, hopefully, a little appetite whetting. All that's left now is the stories themselves.

  Enjoy!

  Point Man

  Everyone, my mother used to tell me, had a special talent. Every human being, in one way or another, stood head and shoulders above all those around him. It was, she'd firmly believed, part of what made us human; one of the few things that stood us apart from the lower animals and even from the sophisticated alien hive minds that plied the galaxy.

  She never told me just what she thought my talent was while I was growing up, of course. At the time I figured that she simply didn't want to prejudice me.

  Looking back from the perspective of five decades, it has gradually become apparent that she hadn't told me what my talent was because she was never able to find any. But she was too kind to tell me outright that I was so uniformly average... and so I left home and spent thirty solid years looking for something in which I could excel.

  Eventually, I found it. I found that I had a genuine and unique knack for being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

  I remember vividly the day that conclusion suddenly came to me; remember almost as well the solid month afterwards that I fought it. But eventually I had to give in and accept it as truth. There were just too many instances scattered throughout my life to blame on coincidence and accident. There was the time I walked into my college room just as my roommate was frying his cortex with an illegal and badly overset brain-stretch stimulator. I was eventually exonerated of all blame, but the trauma and stigma were just as bad as if I'd been thrown out of school, and eventually led to the same result. I joined the Services and had worked my way up to a very promising position in starship engineering when I

  was transferred to the Burma... three months before the ship's first officer attempted a mutiny and damn near made it. Again, the wrong place at the wrong time, and this time the stigma of association effectively ended my Services career. I eventually went into the merchant fleet, kicking around various ships until my special damn talent landed me in another innocent mess and I was forced to move on.

  So given my history, I shouldn't have been surprised to be on the Volga's bridge when it broke out of hyperspace on that particularly nasty evening.

  I shouldn't even have been on the bridge, for starters. That fact alone should have tipped me off that my perverse talent was about to do me dirty again.

  Second Officer Mara Kittredge was at the command console, Tarl Fromm and Ing Waskin were backing her up at helm and scanners, and there was absolutely no reason why anyone else should have been needed, least of all the ship's third officer. But I was feeling restless. We were about to come out of hyperspace over Messenia, and I wanted to make sure this whole silly stop was handled as quickly as possible, so I was there. I should have known better.

  "Thirty seconds," Waskin was saying as I arrived. He glanced up at me, then quickly turned back to his scanners. Probably, I figured, so that I wouldn't see that faintly gloating smile he undoubtedly had on his skinny face.

  Kittredge looked up, too, but her smile had nothing but her normal cool friendliness in it. She was friendly because she felt professionals should always be polite to their inferiors; cool, because she knew
all about my career and clearly had no intention of being too close to me when the lightning struck again. "Travis," she nodded. "You're a little early for your shift, aren't you?"

  "A shave, maybe," I said, drifting to her side and steadying myself on her chair back. She wasn't much more than half my age, but then, that was true of nearly everyone aboard except Captain Garrett. Bright kids, all of them. Only a few with Kittredge's same hard-edged ambition, but all of them on the up side of their careers nonetheless. It made me feel old. "Was that thirty seconds to breakout?"

  "Yes," she said, voice going distant as the bulk of her attention shifted from me to the bank of displays before her. I followed her example and turned to watch the screens and readouts. And continued my silent grousing.

  We weren't supposed to be at Messenia. We weren't, in fact, supposed to be anywhere closer than a day's hyperdrive of the stupid damn mudball on this particular trip. We were on or a bit ahead of schedule for a change, we had all the cargo a medium-sized freighter like the Volga could reasonably carry, and all we had to do was deliver it to make the kind of medium-sized profit that keeps pleasant smiles on the faces of freighter contractors. It should have been a nice, simple trip, the kind where the crew's lives alternate between predictable chores and pleasant boredom.

  Enter Waskin. Exit simplicity.

  He had, Waskin informed us, an acquaintance who was supposed to be out here with the Messenia survey mission. We'd all heard the rumors that there were supposed to be outcroppings of firebrand opaline scattered across Messenia's surface—opaline whose current market value Waskin just happened to have on hand.

  It was pretty obvious that if someone came along who could offer off-world transport for some of the stone—especially if middlemen and certain tax and duty formalities happened to get lost in the shuffle—then that someone stood to add a

  tidy sum to his trip's profits. The next part was obvious: Waskin figured that that someone might as well be the crew of the Volga.

  It was the sort of argument that had earned Waskin the half-dozen shady nicknames he possessed. Unfortunately, it was also the sort of argument he was extremely adroit at pushing, and in the end Captain Garrett decided it was worth the gamble of a couple of days to stop by and just assess the situation.

  I hadn't agreed. In fact, I'd fought hard to change the captain's mind. For starters, the opaline wasn't even a confirmed fact yet; and even if it was there, it was less than certain what the Messenia survey mission would think of us dropping in out of nowhere and trying to walk away with a handful of it.

  Survey missions like Messenia's were always military oriented, and if they suspected we were even thinking of bending any customs regulations, we could look forward to some very unpleasant questions.

  And I, of course, would wind up with yet another job blown out from under me.

  But freighter contractors weren't the only ones to whom the word "profit" brought pleasant smiles... and third officers, I'd long ago learned, existed solely to take the owl bridge shift. Half the ship's thirty-member crew had already made their private calculations as to how much of a bonus a few chunks of opaline would bring, and my arguments were quickly dismissed as just one more example of Travis's famous inability to make winning gambles, a side talent that had made me the most sought-after poker player on the ship.

  Waskin always won at poker, too. And got far too much satisfaction out of beating me.

  Abruptly, the lights flickered. Quickly, guiltily, I brought my attention back to the displays, but it was all right—the breakout had come off textbook-clean.

  "We're here," Fromm reported from the helm. "Ready to set orbit." "Put us at about two hundred for now," Kittredge told him. "Waskin, you want to try and contact this friend of yours and find out about this opaline?"

  "Yes, ma'am," he nodded, swiveling around to the comm board.

  "Was there anything else?" Kittredge asked, looking up at me.

  I shook my head. "I just wanted to make sure we knew one way or another about the rocks before anyone got too comfortable here."

  She smiled lopsidedly. "I doubt you have to wor—"

  "Holy Mother!"

  I snapped my head around to look at Waskin, nearly losing my hold in the process. He was staring at the main display. As I shifted my eyes that direction, I felt a similar expletive welling up like verbal fire in my throat.

  We'd come within view of the mission's base camp... or rather, within view of the blackened crater where the base camp was supposed to be.

  "Oh, my God," Kittredge gasped as the scanners panned over the whole nauseating mess. "What happened?"

  "No idea," I said grimly, "but we'd better find out." My long-ago years in the Services came flooding back, the old pages of emergency procedures flipping up in front of my mind's eye. "Waskin, get back on the scanners. Do a quick full-pattern run-through for anything out of the ordinary, then go back to infrared for a grid survivor search."

  "Yes, sir." There was no cockiness now; he was good and thoroughly scared.

  With an effort, he got his face jammed into the display hood, his hand visibly trembling as he fumbled with the selector knob. "Yes, sir. Okay. IR... those fires have been out a minimum of... eighteen hours, the computer says. Could be more." His thin face—what I could see of it, anyway—was a rather pasty white, and I hoped hard that he wouldn't pass out. Time could be crucial, and I didn't want to have to man the scanners myself until we could get another expert up here. "Shortwave... nothing in particular. No broadcasts on any frequency.

  Neutrino... there's a residual decay spectrum, but it's the wrong one for their type of power plant. Tachyon... uh-oh."

  "What?" Kittredge snapped.

  Waskin visibly swallowed. "It reads... it reads an awful lot like the pattern you get from full-spectrum explosives."

  Fromm caught it before the rest of us did. "Explosives, plural?" he asked.

  "How many are we talking about?"

  "Lots," Waskin said. "At least thirty separate blasts. Maybe more."

  Fromm swore under his breath. "Damn. They must have had a stockpile that blew."

  "No," I said, and even to me my voice sounded harsh. "You don't store full-specs that close to each other. Someone came in and bombed the hell out of them.

  Deliberately."

  There was a long moment of silence. "The opaline," Kittredge said at last.

  "Someone wanted the opaline."

  For lousy pieces of rock...? I forced my brain to unfreeze from that thought.

  Messenia had been militarily oriented.... "Waskin, cancel the grid search for a

  second and get back on the comm board," I told him. "Broadcast our ship ID on the emergency beacon frequency and then listen."

  Kittredge looked up at me. "Travis, no one could have survived a bombing like that—"

  "No one there, no," I cut her off. "But there would have been at least a few men out beyond the horizon from the base—that's standard procedure."

  "Yeah, but the radiation would have got 'em," Waskin muttered.

  "Just do it," I snapped.

  "I'd better get the captain up here," Kittredge said, reaching for the intercom.

  "Better get a boat ready to fly, too," I told her. My eyes returned to the main display, where the base was starting to drift behind us. "With the doc and a couple others with strong stomachs aboard. If there are any survivors, they'll need help fast."

  She nodded, and that was that. If I hadn't been there, they'd have done a quick, futile grid search and then gone running hotfoot to report the attack to some authority or other without trying the emergency beacon trick. We'd have missed entirely the fact that there was indeed a survivor of the attack.

  And we sure as hell would have missed getting mixed up in mankind's first interstellar war. His name was Lieutenant Colonel Halveston, and he was dying.

  He knew that, of course. The Services were good at making sure their people had any and all information that might have an influence on thei
r performance or survival. Halveston knew how much radiation he'd taken, knew that at this stage there was nothing anyone could do for him... but countering that was a strong will to hold out long enough to let someone know what had happened. The Services were good at developing that, too.

  We didn't get to talk to him on the trip up from Messenia, partly because the doc needed Halveston's full attention for the bioloop stabilization techniques to work and partly because long chatty conversations on an open radio didn't seem like a smart idea. It was nerve-racking as hell... and so when the captain, Kittredge, and I were finally able to gather around Halveston's sickbay bed, we weren't exactly in the greatest of emotional shapes.

  Not that it mattered that much. Halveston's report would have been a full-spec bombshell no matter what our condition.

  "It was the Drymnu," he whispered through cracked lips. "The Drymnu did this."

  I looked up from Halveston to see Captain Garrett's mouth drop open slightly.

  That, from the captain, was the equivalent of falling over backwards with shock... which was about what I felt like doing. "The... Drymnu?" he asked carefully. "The Drymnu? The hive race?"

  Halveston winced in a sudden spasm of pain. "You know any other aliens by that name?" he said. I got the impression he would have snarled it if he'd had the strength to do so.

  "No, of course not," the captain said. "It's just that—" He paused, visibly searching for a diplomatic way of putting this. "I've just never heard of a hivey attacking anyone before."

  A little more of Halveston's strength seemed to drain out of him. "You have now," he whispered.

  The Captain looked up at Kittredge and me, back down at Halveston. "Could it have been a group of human pirates, say, pretending they were a Drymnu ship?"

  Halveston closed his eyes and shook his head weakly. "Outposts get a direct cable feed from the main base's scanners. If you'd ever seen a Drymnu ship, you'd know no one could fake something like that."