Nightflyers and Other Stories

“Who is this Royd Eris, really?” the xenobiologist, Rojan Christopheris, complained one night when four of them were playing cards. “Why doesn’t he come out? What’s the purpose of keeping himself sealed off from the rest of us?”

“Ask him,” suggested Dannel, the male linguist.

“What if he’s a criminal of some sort?” Christopheris said. “Do we know anything about him? No, of course not. D’Branin engaged him, and d’Branin is a senile old fool, we all know that.”

“It’s your play,” Lommie Thorne said.

Christopheris snapped down a card. “Setback,” he declared, “you’ll have to draw again.” He grinned. “As for this Eris, who knows that he isn’t planning to kill us all.”

“For our vast wealth, no doubt,” said Lindran, the female linguist. She played a card on top of the one Christopheris had laid down. “Ricochet,” she called softly. She smiled.

So did Royd Eris, watching.

Melantha Jhirl was good to watch.

Young, healthy, active, Melantha Jhirl had a vibrancy about her the others could not match. She was big in every way; a head taller than anyone else on board, large-framed, large-breasted, long-legged, strong, muscles moving fluidly beneath shiny coal-black skin. Her appetites were big as well. She ate twice as much as any of her colleagues, drank heavily without ever seeming drunk, exercised for hours every day on equipment she had brought with her and set up in one of the cargo holds. By the third week out she had sexed with all four of the men on board and two of the other women. Even in bed she was always active, exhausting most of her partners. Royd watched her with consuming interest.

“I am an improved model,” she told him once as she worked out on her parallel bars, sweat glistening on her bare skin, her long black hair confined in a net.

“Improved?” Royd said. He could not send his projection down to the holds, but Melantha had summoned him with the communicator to talk while she exercised, not knowing he would have been there anyway.

She paused in her routine, holding her body straight and aloft with the strength of her arms and her back. “Altered, captain,” she said. She had taken to calling him captain. “Born on Prometheus among the elite, child of two genetic wizards. Improved, captain. I require twice the energy you do, but I use it all. A more efficient metabolism, a stronger and more durable body, an expected lifespan half again the normal human’s. My people have made some terrible mistakes when they try to radically redesign humanity, but the small improvements they do well.”

She resumed her exercises, moving quickly and easily, silent until she had finished. When she was done, she vaulted away from the bars and stood breathing heavily for a moment, then crossed her arms and cocked her head and grinned. “Now you know my life story, captain,” she said. She pulled off the net to shake free her hair.

“Surely there is more,” said the voice from the communicator.

Melantha Jhirl laughed. “Surely,” she said. “Do you want to hear about my defection to Avalon, the whys and wherefores of it, the trouble it caused my family on Prometheus? Or are you more interested in my extraordinary work in cultural xenology? Do you want to hear about that?”

“Perhaps some other time,” Royd said politely. “What is that crystal you wear?”

It hung between her breasts ordinarily; she had removed it when she stripped for her exercises. She picked it up again and slipped it over her head; a small green gem laced with traceries of black, on a silver chain. When it touched her Melantha closed her eyes briefly, then opened them again, grinning. “It’s alive,” she said. “Haven’t you ever seen one? A whisperjewel, captain. Resonant crystal, etched psionically to hold a memory, a sensation. The touch brings it back, for a time.”

“I am familiar with the principle,” Royd said, “but not this use. Yours contains some treasured memory, then? Of your family, perhaps?”

Melantha Jhirl snatched up a towel and began to dry the sweat from her body. “Mine contains the sensations of a particularly satisfying session in bed, captain. It arouses me. Or it did. Whisperjewels fade in time, and this isn’t as potent as it once was. But sometimes – often when I’ve come from lovemaking or strenuous exercise – it comes alive on me again, like it did just then.”

“Oh,” said Royd’s voice. “It has made you aroused, then? Are you going off to copulate now?”

Melantha grinned. “I know what part of my life you want to hear about, captain – my tumultuous and passionate lovelife. Well, you won’t have it. Not until I hear your life story, anyway. Among my modest attributes is an insatiable curiosity. Who are you, captain? Really?”

“One as improved as you,” Royd replied, “should certainly be able to guess.”

Melantha laughed, and tossed her towel at the communicator grill.

Lommie Thorne spent most of her days in the cargo hold they had designated as the computer room, setting up the system they would use to analyze the volcryn. As often as not, the xenotech Alys Northwind came with her to lend a hand. The cyberneticist whistled as she worked; Northwind obeyed her orders in a sullen silence. Occasionally they talked.

“Eris isn’t human,” Lommie Thorne said one day, as she supervised the installation of a display viewscreen.

Alys Northwind grunted. “What?” A frown broke across her square, flat features. Christopheris and his talk had made her nervous about Eris. She clicked another component into position, and turned.

“He talks to us, but he can’t be seen,” the cyberneticist said. “This ship is uncrewed, seemingly all automated except for him. Why not entirely automated, then? I’d wager this Royd Eris is a fairly sophisticated computer system, perhaps a genuine Artificial Intelligence. Even a modest program can carry on a blind conversation indistinguishable from a human’s. This one could fool you, I’d bet, once it’s up and running.”

The xenotech grunted and turned back to her work. “Why fake being human, then?”

“Because,” said Lommie Thorne, “most legal systems give AIs no rights. A ship can’t own itself, even on Avalon. The Nightflyer is probably afraid of being seized and disconnected.” She whistled. “Death, Alys; the end of self-awareness and conscious thought.”

“I work with machines every day,” Alys Northwind said stubbornly. “Turn them off, turn them on, makes no difference. They don’t mind. Why should this machine care?”

Lommie Thorne smiled. “A computer is different, Alys,” she said. “Mind, thought, life, the big systems have all of that.” Her right hand curled around her left wrist, and her thumb began idly rubbing the nubs of her implant. “Sensation, too. I know. No one wants the end of sensation. They are not so different from you and I, really.”

The xenotech glanced back and shook her head. “Really,” she repeated, in a flat, disbelieving voice.

Royd Eris listened and watched, unsmiling.

Thale Lasamer was a frail young thing; nervous, sensitive, with limp flaxen hair that fell to his shoulders, and watery blue eyes. Normally he dressed like a peacock, favoring the lacy vee-necked shirts and codpieces that were still the fashion among the lower classes of his homeworld. But on the day he sought out Karoly d’Branin in his cramped, private cabin, Lasamer was dressed almost somberly, in an austere grey jumpsuit.

“I feel it,” he said, clutching d’Branin by the arm, his long fingernails digging in painfully. “Something is wrong, Karoly, something is very wrong. I’m beginning to get frightened.”

The telepath’s nails bit, and d’Branin pulled away hard. “You are hurting me,” he protested. “My friend, what is it? Frightened? Of what, of whom? I do not understand. What could there be to fear?”

Lasamer raised pale hands to his face. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he waited. “Yet it’s there, I feel it. Karoly, I’m picking up something. You know I’m good, I am, that’s why you picked me. Just a moment ago, when my nails dug into you, I felt it. I can read you now, in flashes. You’re thinking I’m too excitable, that it’s the confinement, that I’ve got to be calmed down.” The young man laughed a thin hysterical laugh that died as quickly as it had begun. “No, you see, I am good. Class one, tested, and I tell you I’m afraid. I sense it. Feel it. Dream of it. I felt it even as we were boarding, and it’s gotten worse. Something dangerous. Something volatile. And alien, Karoly, alien!”

“The volcryn?” d’Branin said.

“No, impossible. We’re in drive, they’re light years away.” The edgy laughter sounded again. “I’m not that good, Karoly. I’ve heard your Crey story, but I’m only a human. No, this is close. On the ship.”

“One of us?”

“Maybe,” Lassamer said. He rubbed his cheek absently. “I can’t sort it out.”

D’Branin put a fatherly hand on his shoulder. “Thale, this feeling of yours – could it be that you are just tired? We have all of us been under strain. Inactivity can be taxing.”

“Get your hand off me,” Lasamer snapped.

D’Branin drew back his hand quickly.

“This is real,” the telepath insisted, “and I don’t need you thinking that maybe you shouldn’t have taken me, all that crap. I’m as stable as anyone on this … this … how dare you think I’m unstable, you ought to look inside some of these others, Christopheris with his bottle and his dirty little fantasies, Dannel half sick with fear, Lommie and her machines, with her it’s all metal and lights and cool circuits, sick, I tell you, and Jhirl’s arrogant and Agatha whines even in her head to herself all the time, and Alys is empty, like a cow. You, you don’t touch them, see into them, what do you know of stable? Losers, d’Branin, they’ve given you a bunch of losers, and I’m one of your best, so don’t you go thinking that I’m not stable, not sane, you hear.” His blue eyes were fevered. “Do you hear?”

“Easy,” d’Branin said. “Easy, Thale, you’re getting excited.”

The telepath blinked, and suddenly the wildness was gone. “Excited?” he said. “Yes.” He looked around guiltily. “It’s hard, Karoly, but listen to me, you must, I’m warning you. We’re in danger.”

“I will listen,” d’Branin said, “but I cannot act without more definite information. You must use your talent and get it for me, yes? You can do that.”

Lasamer nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.” They talked quietly for more than an hour, and finally the telepath left peacefully.

Afterwards d’Branin went straight to the psipsych, who was lying in her sleepweb surrounded by medicines, complaining bitterly of aches. “Interesting,” she said when d’Branin told her. “I’ve felt something too, a sense of threat, very vague, diffuse. I thought it was me, the confinement, the boredom, the way I feel. My moods betray me at times. Did he say anything more specific?”