Book 2 - Starfishers by Glen Cook Page B

out of love. They did not see their
young as dead weight that might hamper them as they shot the rapids
of life.
    BenRabi had never seen enough of his father to have developed an
emotional attitude toward him. And what could he think about his
mother? She could not help being what she was. His mother was the
child of her society, shaped by a high-pressure environment. The
years and prejudice had devoured their tenuous umbilical
link . . . They were of alien tribes now. The
barrier between them could no longer be breached, even with the
best will on both sides.
    Visiting her had been a waste of leave time, but then there was
the kid.
    How was Greta doing? Christ! He might not know for one hell of a
long time.
    Why had his mother’s behavior so horrified him? He should
have known better than to have gone. He had come out of that world.
All Old Earth was a screaming rat warren packed with people seeking
new thrills and perversions as escapes from the grim realities of
narrow little lives.
    “Lightsl” the Ship’s Commander snapped.
BenRabi returned from introspection. A hologram took form in the
center of the darkening common room. It developed like some fantasy
magician’s uncertain conjuration, flickering for several
seconds, then jerking into sudden, awe-inspiring solidity.
    “The stars you see here we retaped off a standard Second
Level astrogation training module. Our holo people dubbed the ships
from models used in an engineering status display at Ship’s
Engineering Control aboard
Danion
. This is
Danion
, your home for the next year.”
    The name
Danion
rolled off his tongue, freighted with
everything the ship meant to him: home, country, refuge,
responsibility.
    A ship formed against the imaginary stars. It was a weird thing,
making Moyshe think of octopi entwined. No. He decided it looked
like a city’s utilities systems after the buildings and earth
and pavement had been removed, with the leavings flung mad among
the stars. There were vast tangles of tubing. Here and there lay a
ball, a cone, a cube, or an occasional sheet of silverness
stretched taut as if to catch the starwinds. Vast nets floated
between kilometers-long pipelike arms. The whole mad construct was
raggedly bearded with thousands of antennae of every conceivable
type. The totality was spectacularly huge, and dreadful in its
strangeness.
    In theory a deep-space vessel need not be confined in a
geometric hull. Most small, specialized vessels were not. A ship
did not have to have any specific shape, though the complex
relationships between drive, inertial-negation, mass increase
effect reduction, temporal adjustment, and artificial gravity
induction systems did demand a direction-of-travel dimension
slightly more than twice that of dimensions perpendicular to
line-of-flight in vessels intended to operate near or above the
velocity of light. But this was the first truly large asymmetric
ship benRabi had ever seen.
    It was a flying iron jungle. The streamlined ship had been
preferred by mankind since space travel had been but a dream. Even
now designers felt more comfortable enclosing everything inside a
skin capable of generating an all-around defensive screen.
    Even the wildest imaginings of novelty-hunting holo studios had
never produced a vessel as knotted and strewn as this mass of
tangled kitten’s yarn.
    BenRabi’s astonishment was not unique. Silence died a
swift death in that room.
    “How the hell does that bastard keep from breaking
up?” someone demanded.
    “What I want to know is, how do you build something like
that without a crew from every holonet in the universe turning
up?”
    Someone more technically smitten asked, “Ship’s
Commander—what sort of system do you use to synchronize
drives? You’d have to have hundreds on a ship that big. Even
with superconductor or pulse laser control systems your synch
systems would be limited to the velocity of light. The lag between
the more remote units . . . ”
    BenRabi lost