Table Of ContentOrbit 11
By Damon Knight Proofed By MadMaxAU
Contents
ALIEN STONES
Gene Wolfe SPECTRA
Vonda N. McIntyre I REMEMBER A WINTER
Frederik Pohl DOUCEMENT, S’IL VOUS PLAIT
James Sallis THE SUMMER OF THE IRISH SEA
C. L. Grant GOOD-BYE, SHELLEY, SHIRLEY, CHARLOTTE, CHARLENE
Robert Thurston FATHER’S IN THE BASEMENT
Philip José Farmer DOWN BY THE OLD MAELSTROM
Edward Wellen THINGS GO BETTER
George Alec Effinger DISSOLVE
Gary K. Wolf DUNE’S EDGE
Edward Bryant THE DRUM LOLLIPOP
Jack M. Dann MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE
Gardner R. Dozois THEY COPE
Dave Skal COUNTERPOINT
Joe W. Haldeman OLD SOUL
Steve Herbst NEW YORK TIMES
Charles Platt THE CHRYSTALLIZATION OF THE MYTH
John Barfoot TO PLANT A SEED
Hank Davis ON THE ROAD TO HONEYVILLE
Kate Wilhelm
Gene Wolfe
ALIEN STONES
“Heading unchanged,” Gladiator said. “Speed unchanged.” She
flashed figures on the cathode-ray-tube terminal at the
command console to substantiate it.
Daw nodded. Twenty-eight firing studs stretched along the
mid-band of the console. They would permit him, Daw, alone on
the bridge (as he liked it) to launch every missile aboard the
ship; even if Gladiator’s central processing unit were knocked
out or under system overload, there would be strike vectors
from the independent minicomputers that clung, embryonic
self-brains, to the walls of the missile foramens.
But there was no need for the minis. His ship was
untouched; he could order Gladiator herself to do the shooting.
Instead he asked, “Drive?”
And Gladiator answered: “No indication of drive in use.”
“Okay.”
“Shall present course be maintained? Present course is a
collision course in point three one hours.”
“Match their velocity and lay us alongside. How long?”
“One point forty-four hours.”
“Do it. Meantime maintain battle stations.” Daw flipped on
his console mike without touching the switch that would have
put his own image on the terminals in every compartment of the
ship. Naval tradition decreed that when the captain spoke he
should be seen as well as heard, but Daw had watched tapes of
his own long, brown face as he announced, in what he felt to be
unbearable stiff fashion, various unimportances, and he found it
impossible to believe that his crew, seeing the same stretched
cheeks and preposterous jaw, would not snicker.
“This is your captain. The ship sighted last night is still on
her course.” Daw chewed his lower lip for a moment, trying to
decide just what to say next. The crew must be alerted, but it
would be best if they were not alarmed. “There is no indication,
I repeat, no indication, that she is aware of our presence.
Possibly she doesn’t want to scare us off—she may want peace,
or she may just have something up with her sleeve. Possibly
something’s wrong with her sensors. My own guess—which isn’t
worth any more than yours—is that she’s a derelict; there’s no
sign of drive, and we haven’t been able to reach her on any
frequency. But we have to stay sharp. Battle conditions until
further notice.”
He flicked off the mike switch. Several como lights were
blinking and he selected one: the reactor module. Mike switch
again. “What is it, Neal?”
“Captain, if you could give me a breakdown on the
radiation they’re putting out, it might be possible for me to work
up an estimate of how long it’s been since they’ve used their
drive.”
“I’m happy to hear that you know their engineering,” Daw
said. “Especially since Gladiator’s been unable to identify even
the ship type.”
Neal’s face, seen in the CRT, flushed. He was a handsome,
slightly dissipated-looking man whose high forehead seemed
still higher under a thick crest of dark hair. “I would assume
their drives are about the same as ours, sir,” he said.
“I’ve done that. On that basis they shut down only an hour
before we picked them up. But I’m not sure I believe it.” He cut
Neal off and scanned the rest of the lights. One was from the
ship’s cybernetics compartment; but Polk, the cyberneticist, was
bunking with the systems analyst this trip. Daw pushed the light
and a woman’s face appeared on the screen. It was framed in
honey-toned hair, a face with skin like a confection and classic
planes that might have shamed a fashion model. And a smile,
he had seen that smile often before—though as seldom, he told
himself, as he decently could.
“Yes, Mrs. Youngmeadow?”
“Helen, please. I can’t see you, Captain. The screen is
blank.”
“There’s some minor repair work to be done on the camera
here,” Daw lied. “It’s not important, so we’ve given it low
priority.”
“But you can see me?”
“Yes.” He felt the blood rising in his cheeks.
“About this ship, Captain . . .” Helen Youngmeadow
paused, and Daw noticed that her husband was standing behind
her, beyond the plane of focus. “Captain, everyone on the ship
can hear me—can’t they?”
“I can cut them out of the circuit if you prefer.”
“No—Captain, may I come up there?”
“To the bridge? Yes, if you like. It’s a long way.”
Another como light. This time the alternate bridge module
—in appearance much like his, but lacking the battered Old and
New Testaments bound in steel and magnetically latched to the
console. “Hello, Wad,” Daw said gently.
Wad made a half-salute. His young, dark-complexioned
face showed plainly the strain of two years’ involvement in a
hell that demanded night and day a continual flow of
deductions, inferences, and decisions—all without effect.
Looking at Daw significantly, he drew a finger across his throat,
and Daw gave him the private circuit he had offered Mrs.
Youngmeadow.
“Thanks, Skipper. I’ve got something I thought you ought to
know abbout.”
Daw nodded.
“I’ve been running an artifact correlation on the visual
image of that ship.”
“So have I. Electronic and structural.”
“I know, I got your print-out. But my own analysis was
bionic.”
“You think that’s valid?”
Wad shrugged. “I don’t know, but it’s interesting. You know
what the biologists say: Man has reached the stage where he
evolves through his machines. The earliest spacecraft
resembled single-celled animals—pond life. The dilettante
intellectuals of the time tried to give them a sexual significance
—that was the only thing they knew—but they were really much
closer to the things you find in a drop of pond water than to
anything else.”
“And what does your analysis say about this ship?”
“No correlation at all. Nothing higher than a tenth.”
Daw nodded again. “You think the lack of correlation is
significant?”
“It suggests to me that it may have originated somewhere
where life forms are quite different from what we are
accustomed to.”
“Mankind has colonized some queer places.”
With heavy significance Wad said, “Would it have to be
mankind, Captain?” He was speaking, Daw knew, not to him but
to his instructors back home. If his guess were correct he would,
presumably, be given some small number of points; if not, he
would lose ground. In time he would, or would not, be given his
own command. The whole thing embarrassed Daw and made
him feel somehow wretched, but he could not really blame Wad.
He was Wad. To keep the ball rolling—mostly because he did
not want to answer the other como lights—he said, “Men have
spread their seed a long way across the galaxy Wad. We’ve
seen a lot of strange ships, but they’ve always turned out to be
of human origin.”
“The part of the galaxy we know about is tiny compared to
the vastness we don’t know. And there are other galaxies!”
Daw said, “I’ve been thinking about the stranger’s build
myself, as I told you. He looks like a crystal to me—modules
ranged in a three-dimensional rectangular array.”
“What do you think that means?”
“Comes from a world where they’ve discovered radio.”
Wad broke the connection; Daw grinned but found he
didn’t much blame him for it.
Daw wondered what Gladiator’s bionic correlation program
would say about Gladiator herself. Perhaps liken her to the
armor of a caddis-fly larva—an empty cylinder of odds and ends.
Caddis-fly armor exploded. The interior of his helmet held the
familiar smells of fine lubricating oil, sweat, and the goo he
sometimes used on his hair; he kicked down and the soles of his
boots clinked home on the hull of the bridge module.
Above him and around him Gladiator flung her shining
threads, the stars a dust of ice seen through the interstices, the
connecting tubes like spider web—half glittering, half drowned
in inky shadow.
Still ten thousand miles off, the other ship was, under the
immense lasers Gladiator directed toward it, another star; but
one that winked and twinkled as its structure surged and
twisted to the urgings of accelerations long departed.
A hatch at Daw’s feet opened and a metal-clad figure he
knew to be Helen Youngmeadow rose, caught his hand, and
stood beside him. Like his own, her faceplate was set for full
transparency; her beautiful face, thus naked to the darkness of
a billion suns, seemed to him to hold a hideous vulnerability. In
his earphones her voice asked: “Do you know this is the first
time I’ve been out? It’s lovely.”
“Yes,” Daw said.
“And all this is Gladiator; she doesn’t seem this big when
she talks to me in our cabin. Could you show me which one it is?
I’m lost.”
“Which module?” From his utility belt Daw took a silver rod,
