When they were half a day out from Inskerelleryon, Quella felt that it was safe for her to leave the Reference bridge. Kalindy XII was cruising at the moderate pseudo velocity of four light years per standard day, the Strip Engine pulsing them in and out of NoSpace like a phantom as they ran along the flux line which the main computer continually recalculated at every real instant and enforced at every imaginary one. Donald Souveroon, the chief navigator and vice captain assumed command. He was a good officer but he was very young, Quella thought. This was only his second ship and he had yet to face the really testing fires of authority that she had faced. But Vital Void had little previous experience in passenger transport. All of its older captains were freight men and wanted to remain so. There was no desire to run a ship they saw as a disaster - especially with a clone in charge. At least Souveroon had enthusiasm, even if Quella privately wondered if it was misplaced, and she consoled herself with the thought that it was better to have a keen and willing subordinate who was ready to learn, than some crusty old captain who might be set in old freighter ways and oppose her every phase change of the way.
The Reference Bridge was nominally supported by six enormous flying buttresses curving down through the spin induced “gravity well” in the pattern of the coreolis path followed by a free falling object cast out of the zero gravity heaven of the little universe. That whorl span right in front of the forward bulkhead into six green hatches ringing the little cylinder - the normal exit routes from the bridge. There were two other ways in and out of the command centre via the red glowing hatches immediately in front of the Televisual circle and on the zero gravity axis in Quella’s office - right in the middle of her passenger chart. The first of these led through the bulkhead to the hermetically sealed vacuum environment at the very bow, where the gyrobatteries ran, and suits were required at the rare intervals when they had to be inspected. That was the way Hertzhog had come and gone. The green hatches were numbered, and led to tunnels through the buttresses. Quella took number four.
Emerging from the bridge she experienced a brief confusion which was a mixture of vertigo and agoraphobia amongst other things - quite involuntary and the product of a brain, eye and ear team that just couldn’t ditch ten million or more years of erroneous evolutionary training without a little regret. The tube down which she was climbing was made of clear plastic, which allowed a panoramic view of the completely surrounding landscape within the cylinder. Everyone was susceptible, no matter how many times they had made the transition from the smaller to the larger space.
To overcome the sensation she stopped and made a deliberate effort to study her surroundings. This was not the approved way of coping with disorientation but Quella needed to do more than overcome temporary mental aberration, she needed to stamp her authority on this ship. She wanted to stare it out now; to feel at ease and totally in command. “I am captain,” she thought with pride, “and I will not be afraid of my ship for even a fraction of a second if I so will it.”
First she let her eyes run down the axis of zero gravity. Behind the Reference Bridge a thick cable of light followed that axis right through to the aft bulkhead with its heavy radiation shielding against the fuser. This was the artificial sky. A full three meters in diameter the mirror crystalline surface refracted and reflected a carefully controlled quantity and frequency of light piped down fibre optic cables at the behest of the environment control computers. For almost all its length it shimmered in a gorgeous blue with occasional flecks of white. Almost two thirds of the way along there was a small section which glowed with a brilliant yellow radiance that was painful to look at for more than a brief second. The source sun was at the heart of Kalindy’s internal illumination and was currently bathing the great cylinder with an intensity adjusted spectrum matching the wavelength normal patterns for Sol - Old Earth.
Only at one point was the band of light interrupted. Marginally closer to the bow, englobing the centre of mass, the cable ran to a matt black sphere with a five meter radius, held like a bead on a string. This was the outer housing for the Strip Engine, kept in touch with the bridge computers via that cable.
Satisfied with the state of the sky and feeling much better, Quella turned her gaze onto the land. Immediately under her feet a little brook flowed to its final sink - the popular spring of Bandusia. Buttress three had a surface exit near here but Quella’s route would curve away from it. The water flowed from the aft to the bulkhead down a gentle gradient along carefully constructed channels assisted by concealed pumps where necessary. It cycled back through underground pipes in the hull integrity zone, which coated the outside of all Kalindy’s atmosphere controlled spaces. Tracing its course, Quella came back to Lake Neriad, six kilometres away, which the stream mischievously filled and emptied. Sparkling under the artificial sun it glittered brightly back at her and she thought that she could catch a glimpse of a white sail. She took a deep breath. These were the dominant features but the most persistent impression over the whole ship was of green. The world of Kalindy’s 0.2 gravity surface supported a riot of plants from a variety of planets, each species carefully selected by Vital Void’s genetic advisors to provide a pleasant and controllable environment. Small pools with abnormally high fountains were surrounded by dwarf oak and cypress ‘where blossomed many an incense bearing tree’. Here and there, were bright carpets of blue, yellow and red flowers, artfully random in designed ‘chaos’. Little Japanese bridges crossed the Bandusia to reveal secret paths to surprising follies. In their oasis of air amidst the harsh vacuum desert of space the tourists idled as through they were ‘forgotten by God when he evicted man from Eden’ as it said in one of the regular oriented publicity shots.
Quella felt at ease and totally in command. She began to descend.
At first the way was little more than a ladder, easy to negotiate under conditions where the downward force was minimal. Gradually it began to flatten out in high and narrow steps which grew wider and wider, until by the time Quella reached the bottom she was striding boldly down a staircase which looked like something from a stage spectacular and was broad enough for a whole chorus line. As the buttress plunged into the heavy engineering and massive welding of the hull integrity zone, the stairs twisted through 90 degrees to lead her out through a grand ten meter tall archway facing aft.
The captain’s house was only fifty metres away, set back a little from the rough and sprawling gravel path leading to the arch, amongst some tall desert willows which partially screened it from direct gaze. If the situation demanded, Quella knew that she could sprint from her front door to the Reference Bridge in a just over a minute and a half (assuming the standard 0.2 g under which she had mostly practised). Unless there was a real emergency it was an ability she ought not to have to demonstrate again. The dwelling itself was simple but adequate - a functional kind of architecture designed to serve the easy needs of its environment with the minimum of fuss. White stone (belt quarried at Videroth) was cut into a squat box with a flat roof, curtained by the low crenelation's of a parapet which provided the only exterior decoration. In many ways it resembled the rustic pattern developed so extensively in the Eastern Mediterranean countries of Old Earth. Inside, thin dividing walls, mere boards of plastic, glass and wood, could be moved easily into different grooves cut in the floor to create a variety of spaces around the few fixed fittings - the water and power points.
Quella lived alone.
Vis Ulman was waiting for her. The old steward had guessed correctly just when his mistress would return from the bridge and he had a hot meal set on the table. Quella smiled in appreciation but frowned when she saw that Colin Le Grant was also standing inside with the air on an impatient man who has been pacing in tight circles for too long. The chief steward took a deep breath and stepped across his senior officer’s path, ignoring for once their relative ranks.
“Ah, captain,” he fussed, “I wonder if we could discuss a problem with the luxury percentage in green leaf crops and I’d like a word on the ‘B’ schedule in flight program. I think we have an inconsistency which may take a bit of sorting out.....”
His voice trailed off. Quella’s face was set in a sharp little smile - the rigid form of her earlier momentary pleasure.
“No, we couldn’t. I’ve just come off duty and as you can see I’m about to eat. I suggest you return in half an hour. Now if you don’t mind...”
It looked as if she might evict him with brute force and the dapper little man bowed out hurriedly, muttering his apologies “Of course...of course...”
Calm was restored. Quella sat down at the table and glanced over at Vis who was laughing silently at the recent discomfort of his young superior. She gave him a mischievous wink and began to eat.
Vis was a lively old character and he’d shipped with Quella for a long time before the Kalindy was launched, including the Soor to Mavavak run where she’d first taken command in highly unusual circumstances. He hadn’t been a steward in those days, but age and accident had finally forced him out of his usual occupation on the repair details. By that time it was too late. There was no planet he could call home and there were no friends or relations amongst the mass bound. There was nothing left at all, until the Kalindy came along and he didn’t want to stop. Now he attended to the regular crew and specifically the captain, the best job as far as he was concerned, in a whole variety of tasks performed by a host of stewards under the supervision of Colin Le Grant.
Quella was always glad to see him. It was good to have a familiar face around. She knew that Vis found it somewhat galling to be responsible to Le Grant for whom he held the mild contempt that age sometimes brings towards the young. In private he often loosed wry little comments into the conversation which made it more than plain just what he thought of the chief steward’s character, but he never crossed the boundaries of insubordination. Vis was nothing if not discrete and sometimes he could be very funny. They both left unspoken the fact that he was lucky to be working at all, but he knew it as well as she and could not remain bitter for long. Especially not on this ship - the glorious Kalindy XII!
Until she started eating, Quella hadn’t realised just how hungry she was. Now, though, she ate slowly and thoroughly, enjoying every bite of the large meal that had been placed in front of her.
“Good?” Vis asked after a silent but steady ten minutes.
“Very good.”
“I’ve been experimenting with a sauce of wierdle root and banana. They go well together it seems,” he chuckled. He took his new duties seriously and there was evidence that he enjoyed them. They discussed this and that for a while as the old man cleared the table.
“Fetch Le Grant will you?” Quella asked at length.
From the integrated height of command, Quella was able to take a more balanced view of the qualities of her chief steward than Vis. She knew that he was a good officer even if he was rather irritating at times. Vital Void had been lucky to snatch him from his former post as second steward on Supra Light’s Magog. Most of his faults stemmed from a basic over zealous regard for the importance of his job, a certain pedantry and unnecessary exactitude in the delivery of orders and lack of experience at this scale of operation. But seen in the right way, that zeal was the correct attitude to have in that it did ensure he got the necessary attention from command. Le Grant wasn’t going to let her forget his significance, and as she reminded herself from time to time when she studied the passenger chart in her bridge office, he was the one who was dealing directly with them and that was significant. As for the problems he had coping with the new size of the ship, well didn’t they all?
It only took ten minutes to sort out the potential eco imbalance which Le Grant’s monitors had warned of. Quella authorised a ‘limited growth’ virus release; a specially engineered short cycle species from the bio reserve library. The other problem was much more difficult, involving as it did a clash of personalities in entertainment. She knew what Le Grant wanted her to say but she wasn’t prepared to let it go that quickly and arranged a management meeting in a standard week. That way Quella felt she would get a closer look at the politics and practicalities involved. At last the captain was able to dismiss her chief steward and stretching languidly from the table turned to the bedroom.
For the last month, Quella had set her bed in one corner of the house where her personal terminal (one of the few fixed features) fed on the currents of information brought from the bridge computers. She had screened a small area quite effectively with opaque plastic and wood to make what amounted to a private room. Letting herself relax, she sat on the bed and closed her eyes for a second. It was the first time since the death that she had been really alone (not counting the short walk home). She got up to draw black curtains about the area; a warning not to disturb her as well as a means of shutting out the light. There was only the steady red glow from the terminal which meant that it was in local mode. The screen drew her attention. It had reverted to the title page of her private diary space, a memory locked file she had opened at the start of the voyage almost idly, but which now held a growing fascination close to obsession. She had decided to record her thoughts, feelings and any knowledge gained about the passengers as their journey proceeded. The data set entry level read.
(1) Mr. Big Eye (Delta)
(2) Zaralova-Justa (Nu)
(3) Prince Falym (Regular)
(4) Kaal Dol (Theta)
(5) L’Rrantora (Omicron)
(6) Theodore Vega (Regular)
She had originally designed it to display them in a tentative order of those from whom she might get most trouble, starting with the worst at the top.
“L’Rrantora should have been top if I’d known he was going to die. Then again perhaps by the end of the voyage I won’t feel the same,” she thought gloomily meditating on vague and improbable social disasters in a mood born of tiredness.
Quickly she opened the file at (5) and typed in some concluding notes on the omicron and his Fellows; her recollection of their dignified leave-taking and her puzzlement at the strange but happy agreement reached with the embassy. L’Rrantora’s full fare was being paid to Vital Void despite the fact that the journey had only just started. Since the company had been unable to get any insurance cover for such an incident that meant a lot. She shut the file down and keyed the interrupt request codes for bridge communication. The green null signal was reassuring confirmation that nothing had happened in her short absence so she flipped the monitor program.
The internal surface area of Kalindy’s largest atmosphere controlled space was just a little more than thirty square kilometres. It was organised into eight different zones. Six of these were the private estates of the individual passengers, each of whom had a specially landscaped park of about three square kilometres. Six square kilometres were ‘common free’ ground, most of which was concentrated around the lake resort centre with the rest running in belts of varying width between the estates. This left a further final six square kilometres designated as ‘restricted’. Part of it was occupied by the crew quarters, built in a thin band around the buttresses supporting the Reference Bridge. Scattered islands throughout the rest of the ship made up the remainder of the zone. All of these were ‘high growing’ points where bio cylinder and food production needs were fulfilled - vitally important whenever there was a long distance between ports capable of Replenishing the ship.
In theory, anywhere on their own land passengers were completely secluded and at liberty to do whatever they liked without invasion of privacy. In practice this was only the case within the mansions at their heart because it had been all to easy in this sort of environment to set up concealed cameras, and the need to discretely monitor for any possible dangerous actions sufficient persuasion for it to be done. The program relayed a guided stream of images from eyes in the artificial sky and hidden in the park land through to Quella’s terminal allowing her to study at leisure. It was highly probable that the passengers knew something of the sort was going on and why. None of them were fools. Of course no one would speak of it openly.
Channel thirty seven - close focus Kaal-Dol.
The thetan was lying flat on his back on a low hillock just outside his near temple of a house. Of all the species on board the Kalindy, the thetans were the most at home in the low gravity, low pressure atmosphere, where even the percentage of oxygen was closer to the quantities on their native world than it was to the concentration on that of its human builders. Was it odd then that they were often perceived as the most alien to the human eye - here or anywhere? Yet in many ways they resembled the so called ‘regular’, with the long and upright back of a genuine vertebrate, bipedal action from forward jointed limbs, two grasping arms and a head possessing the same sensory instruments in roughly the same places. An impartial observer might even have confused the two species but a member of either could never have made such a mistake for a second. The fact was that the thetans spare skeletal form with its greyish skin pressed hard into hollow bones, its full rib cage and tall almost commanding presence resembled nothing so much as that awful medieval image of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Quella felt the strength of the image even now, and knew it for a powerful example of the disturbing emotion produced by any caricature. Something superficially similar to a well know type threatens to turn hidden expectations into treacherous falsehoods. We have nothing to trust but fear that our subconscious doesn’t know it - or knowing it, hates it all the more for its deception - the classic surrealist technique. The picture Quella was looking at reminded her forcibly of that spiritual ancestor of the surrealists, Heronimous Bosche. About Kaal-Dol’s head, coloured lights shot in solid bars, ambivalent patches and hard little spots, to hold him in fascination. Two fellows were lying about ten metres away to either side, and they too had their constellations of laser induced holography playing from machinery beneath their heads, drowning out the yellow day and acting on thetan senses in a way they considered as half spiritual and half pleasurable. She understood that the feeling was something like hypnosis and induced synaesthesia with a euphoric after effect. ‘Taking the Light’, it was called and those who composed the interplays were highly regarded in certain sections of thetan culture - not to mention rich. Kaal-Dol composed interplays but that was the least of his talents. Kaal-Dol was the founder and most respected member of an art movement that had spread from a group of like minded fellows to sweep the Confederacy. Variously called ridiculous and sublime in concept, Transient Art had made him a contemporary legend (a strangely ironic comment on the very idea). Kaal-Dol was the only one of the passengers to have personally designed his quarters. The fantastic, almost gothic structure towered to a greater height than was common even on his home world. Quella couldn’t help but feel that he knew what his effect was on the human psyche and had set out to enhance it with this grotesque ‘palace of death’ - an ornate pile of columns, caverns, masks and darkness hardly typical of thetan culture. Whether the intent was malicious, humorous or just the product of her paranoid imagination she hadn’t yet concluded, but she meant to find out before the voyage was over.
There was something else about Kaal-Dol which Quella found uniquely fascinating. He was the only other clone on Kalindy. For the thetans, as for humanity now, Quella knew only too well, cloning was illegal. Kaal-Dol had been nurtured by a group of religious fanatics (now broken up by the authorities, in so far as they could tell) from the cells of a famous and centuries dead martyr who had been cast into an icy chasm for his dissent long before the race Emerged into the Confederacy. They saw him as the symbol of ultimate faith in a form of government and communal life practised by no other modern thetans. For ten standard years they raised the young Kaal-Dol to believe in it until they finally went too far for government toleration. When he was liberated and the truth of his origins came to light, there was of course great glamour associated with this history and it made a planet wide sensation for a short while. His later fame so eclipsed the story that until recent universal interest in all the passengers it had been mostly forgotten. Kaal-Dol himself, of course, carried only the physical form of his parent and name sake, however well those early indoctrination experiences with his teachers had been designed to duplicate the mind. He liked to refer to that life, which he had completely renounced, as his ‘birth trauma’, but the body was his ‘public conscience’ or his ‘fossilised ghost’. Quella could empathise with such a being.
Channel twenty eight - close focus Prince Falym.
Although he was the product of one of the most austere cultures humanity had yet given rise to, the heir to the throne of the Iron Suns enjoyed a life of fantastic luxury, which history should tell us is perhaps not such an uncommon paradox. Quella’s camera found him close to his palace, where together with a small crowd of courtiers he was playing in a large open swimming pool. The pool was irregular in shape as through it had welled out of a none existent subterranean spring to fill rounded edges fringed with stubby little sandy plants and had diving rocks over the deeper waters. Falym’s entourage numbered about forty, which was by far the largest of any of the groups of Fellows and almost a challenge to the company’s claim that an unlimited number of companions could travel with the passenger. He was certainly getting value for money on that score. Quella recognised the prince himself as he pushed his lean and somewhat stringy body out of the water and threw himself down on the soft ground. She let the picture close in. He was a young man - a regular of course - wiry and impatient, with a strange nervous energy to the movements below the skin, and sporting that affectation of barbarianism popular in ‘fashionable’ Iron Suns circles - a thin black moustache. It didn’t suit him. A young woman moved into the frame; a short brunette in a revealing swim costume, the design of which was almost as clever as her expensively structured body. She went to sit beside the prince with whom she was clearly familiar. Quella frowned. It was Rulla Louge, not one of the official members of Falym’s party but the youngest of the accredited Gossip Hounds. The prince’s hand snaked out towards her and though she couldn’t match sound to vision Quella watched Rulla laugh. No doubt one way to get a sensational story of scandal amongst the Iron Sun’s aristocracy was to participate in it, but Quella had a feeling that the prince would have ways of protecting himself and she found herself hoping that Rulla wasn’t out of her depth; this despite the most vicious character assassinations which had appeared under her young but growing name. Oblivious of the others cavorting all about them, and ignorant of the captain’s camera they were going a lot further than the latter at first realised and later didn’t quite believe. She wondered if the King, let alone the generals and harsh regiments of blood soaked peasants who had carved out the kingdom of the Iron Suns with such monomaniac passion could even guess at this high life style. Did they really give tacit approval to such an expression of contempt for their barren fortress mentality? But perhaps they needed this too - a public counterpoint to their dour little lives and minds. The Iron Suns; a people who’ve got the rulers they need and deserve, Quella thought sourly. She flipped the switch.
Channel eleven - Theodore Vega
The oddity of the trip and the focus of the dream for a host of vicarious followers in the Primaries, he was the poorest of the travellers but then he hadn’t paid for his holiday. Theodore Vega was a water weed harvester from Cascoll. The fates in the form of the Vast Holme Random Selector had singled him out as the lucky winner in Confederacy Contax ‘Big News’ (serving regular, irregular and alpha through phi populations in three hundred and four editions on over a thousand systems every standard month) Universal Matrix contest (with the Big Big prizes). This was the biggest prize of all. Quella was interested to see how this humble farmer would get on with the rest of the passengers. Of course they were all from diverse backgrounds so the ‘normal’ social conventions were already strained on Kalindy and there was bound to be some rethinking. That was just what made the prospect so interesting. The little sociological obsession the captain was cultivating was intrigued. What was the really fundamental difference between the rich and successful of all species and this poor provincial? As yet she had no clues because he’d kept himself pretty much to himself. There he was now, in his work weathered black robe, which against all temptation or reason to the contrary he had so far never changed for more appropriate clothes. His face was obscured by a low hanging cowl, but a grey speckled beard emerged over the front of his cloak. He was sitting in a simple wooden chair on his own, writing in some sort of journal. Quella had seen him do this on more than one occasion and she was burning with curiosity to find out the exact nature of this strangely archaic action. She had a peculiar intuition that Theodore was in his own way compiling the same sort of notes that she was, though if so, God alone knew why. It would be interesting to see what he thought of the others and she wondered if she was included. As for the man himself, he remained surprisingly enigmatic. Naturally the captain had studied the big publicity splash in ‘Big News’ but for such an attention grabbing feature on the new ‘star of the common man’ it revealed even less that was of interest than usual, although taking a large number of words to do so. Alone amongst the passengers Theodore Vega had no companions. He could only afford to leave the nets and channel maintenance because family and friends were prepared to take up the extra work. He was a widower. It seemed that if anyone joined him the estuary would go to ruin. ‘Big News’ made much of the solitary life of the water pastures and the contrasting glories of the galaxy they were showing their winner. Quella wasn’t convinced or impressed but it suggested that Vast Holme had found a genuine random mark because if their owners had faked it they could surely have come up with a much better subject for their stories.
“Movement Violation Warning“, said the screen, and cut to channel 45. - Zaralova-Justa .
The tracking program was just about effective as the computer modelled the visual cues it was receiving from the close focus zoom in real time, then tried to interpret and anticipate the subject to follow a dark running form, bounding over the ground that had once been L’Rrantora’s estate. At times it fell behind, then shot ahead or veered away in confusion resulting in a tumble of awkward images. Quella took manual control, stepped back the range and watched the picture steady. Now she could see that there were four Nu racing towards the open wooden halls where the omicron had resided. A smaller human figure was running hard in an attempt to keep up with them, but he was gradually falling farther and farther behind. It was another Gossip Hound chasing a story.
In a few more seconds the leading Nu, which was in fact Zaralova-Justa herself, had reached the nearest building. She wasted no more time but straight away struck the thin wall with a powerful paw and punched right through it. The omicron residences had been spacious and lightly constructed after the fashion popular in the mild lands of their home world. This made it easy for the powerful Nu as bit by bit they undertook a systematic and impressive orgy of destruction, pulling down every last free standing structure. They were perfectly entitled to do so. With the departure of the omicrons, Quella had ordered their estate to be designated ‘common free ground’, though this fact seemed not to have permeated to the surveillance monitoring programs yet. Nevertheless the captain was a little surprised to see this fanatical demolition. She was clearly not as surprised as the Gossip Hound, however, who had finally caught up and was sitting down, obviously panting heavily and staring open mouthed at the somewhat frightening display of raw power. At least Quella had seen this sort of thing before and she knew what it meant.
On Mavavak there was a small colony of nu occupying the prime bay side site where the river Orochustra (lit. sweet water) ran into the Kalareenth Ocean (somewhat to the annoyance of the later arriving iotans). The first time Quella visited ‘The Wild City’ she had been in charge of chemical testing equipment as cargo controller on the ‘Old Grey Mule’, one of the ‘B’ class freighters. She had just finished the orientation experiences at Vital Void’s expense and in those days, of course, she carried a different name. The streets of ‘The Wild City’ were close and hot; the buildings tall and leaning out in the higher stories where they sometimes touched to arch narrow little alleys. Nu crowded together everywhere with a powerful odour of alien pheromones like sweet cakes which made them as uncomfortable as she. During the short summer their fur thinned, but it was not as effective as their natural cycle on their home world and this inaccuracy in their biological clocks made them short tempered and violent. They had a reputation for seemingly irrational anger at any time, so when Tuk-i-loss ex Terra (Quella series 9), emerging from a cool warehouse into the flat heat of the streets, dead under the enormous red sun, saw thirty or so nu, looking like great lumbering black bears with powerful claws and teeth destroying a yellow pebbled building on the waterfront, she hesitated to ask why. It was in fact the custom of ‘Bringing Down the Houses of the Dead’. Apparently, whenever any nu died in a building, that building was considered unholy because it had offered hospitality to Death. Therefore it must be raised to the ground and the land purified before any other structure could be built on the spot. It was a wonder that the nu had any architecture at all, but apparently they kept most of their buildings because any individual who was near to death was expected to leave his home and complete the process in the open air. This must, in the past, have led to many more deaths than would have happened otherwise, with exposure to the raw elements surely serving only to further weaken the ill. The custom also meant that there could be no such buildings as hospitals; the chance of their destruction was too great. Recently, however, an industry had grown up on the home world in shelters for the dying. These were special areas where quick little buildings were put together from prefabricated parts and dismantled after death. A spiritual agent was always on hand to exorcise the ground and the whole thing could be reconstructed in a couple of hours. The hard liners amongst the nu denounced this practice as weak willed and a break with the spirit of the old tradition, but it was gaining in popularity, especially amongst the higher social classes. It was interesting to speculate on the cultural and biological forces which had given birth to such a custom in the first place.
What surprised Quella was to see it applied across the boundaries of species; an exceptionally fanatical thing to do. She would not, in point of fact, have even expected to see the nu obey this custom for their own kind, for Zaralova-Justa was not only the most powerful nu, she was the most powerful individual aboard Kalindy XII, and that was why she ranked second in Quella’s initial list of possible trouble. She carried an Orb; the treasure beyond price that marked her out as one of the Twenty Seven.
She was at this moment the only nu with office in that highest tier of Confederacy Government, also known somewhat enigmatically as the Alta-Tsey. In the secret files of certain regular exo-sociologists, however, the nu were ‘written in the book of life’ - an ascendant race, but only just. The time scale was too long to be worrying. In those same files, although Quella didn’t know it, the deltans were marked as most critical - highly ascendant. It was time for a quick look at Mr. Big Eye.
The last and potentially most troublesome of the passengers had the estate farthest from the bridge, beyond Lake Neriad and against the stern shielding. It was an area overgrown with a thick and sappy species of tree, twisted like barley sugar and united in a tangled commonwealth of thin red twigs. The roots of these plants formed a woody net which broke the surface of the thin soil to make progress through the copse very difficult, if not impossible, for a regular. But the cameras found Mr. Big Eye and it didn’t matter to it. Mr. Big Eye was a splash of lurid yellow draped over the trees near the turbulent path which the spring of Bandusia cut through the wood. It needed all the energy of its source pumps and the high slope at the start to make headway. Mr. Big Eye was a parasitic fungus whose slow creep and other extraordinary properties made it into a borderline case between the traditional plant/animal boundary that gave biologists such a headache. It also happened to be on the Centrum of Vital Void - the entity most responsible for the construction of Kalindy. Significantly, there were no fellows in either the simple sense or in the one a more knowledgeable exo-biologist might have expected. Deltans did not live in large communities with other deltans. They were, by the nature of their diet, somewhat isolated. However they were extremely long lived organisms; certainly the longest of any intelligent species known to the Confederacy. Mr. Big Eye was still a vigorous youngster of two and a half thousand years growth and three sporings. The oldest of the known deltans was at least twenty three thousand years old.
Mr. Big Eye worried Quella because it was both her passenger and her employer. In theory she was to treat it just like any of the others but in practice she wondered just how the relationship would work out. At the moment it was quiescent with the mellow tones of its skin and widespread pseudopodia indicating feeding. It was far from the translator.
When L’Rrantora died, Quella had considered it important to keep the deltan informed even though she made a policy of keeping the news from the other Gossip Hounds for as long as possible. It was interested but politely asked what she was going to do about it, and the implication was clear. From now on, Quella resolved, Mr. Big Eye would find out as and when it chose to communicate with the stewards and she would engage in no more emergency ‘courtesy calls’.
Having her fill of images Quella yawned and turned away at last. She flipped the screen back into local line lock with the Reference Bridge master computer and it blackened in sympathy. Only the tiny winking green lights with the digits of the time remained, together with the all clear communication. The spinning starship rocked her to sleep as it flickered its way through the sightless and silent depths of space.
