Starfishers Volume 2: Starfishers by Glen Cook Page B

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 the thread. Another surprise