STAR BANQUET
By Laura Davids Todd
copyright Laura Todd 2006
The energy bolt struck the starcruiser Nova right after shift change. Andra Bryce, Nutrition Assistant, almost spilled kaffa all over herself.
“Flaming shards!” Her brother
Darrin, communications officer, snapped awake. “Where’d those ships come from?
They just popped out of nowhere!”
The screen showed several huge,
whale-shaped craft gathering around the Nova. Their sides pulsed with waves
of violet and indigo.
“Full alert!” The Captain leaped
from his chair. “Stations, everyone!”
The crew scrambled for suits and
helmets. Andra, always clumsy, couldn’t get hers to close. She crouched behind
Darrin’s communications console and tried to make herself invisible.
"Nova to unknown craft,”
Darrin sent out a frantic message. “Identify yourselves!”
The frequencies remained silent,
but for the crackle and hum between the enemy craft.
“Who are they? Is it the
Cygnus privateers?” Darrin murmured. “It doesn’t look like any known fleet.
Could they be...aliens?”
Andra almost wet her pants. Wish
I’d stayed home on Tantalus! A dull mining world was better than the middle
of an interstellar war. She was no soldier and Nova was no warship. It carried
only defensive weapons for use against human pirates and hijackers. No one
had ever encountered hostile, star-traveling aliens.
Just our luck to be the first.
Another plasma charge raked the
ship: a bolt of concentrated thunder and lightning. The Nova fired its starboard
laser cannon. The barrage of energy blasts increased and the crew were shaken
and bruised till their eyeballs nearly fell out.
“Nova to unknown ships,” Darrin
yelled into the comm unit. “We come in peace--call off your attack!”
Andra shut her eyes and her memory fractured. Dad! This is all your fault! It’s you who drove me into space!
She must have been five the first
time Dad had hit her for being a clumsy brat. She had bumped into his ethanol
distillation equipment, or spilled a vat... she couldn’t actually remember
the offense. Dad really did depend on his home-brewed ethanol mixture to dull
the pain. So he hit her and she blacked out.
I dreamed I was floating in
space, she told Mom afterward. I heard friends talking to me, but their
voices were lights instead of sounds.
"Shhh." Mom held her finger to her lips. "It was just your
imagination."
Dad's temper just got worse as she grew older. Mom would soothe her after
his outbursts. "You must understand, honey. You have to step outside
yourself, see his viewpoint. He was a great astrophysicist, you know, but
then he had that accident. His ship crashed, and those injuries...awful. And
who could afford regeneration treatments? "
Every time Dad hit her, Andra went away inside herself and saw his viewpoint.
In fact she went quite far away on many occasions, until people began to look
at her strangely. They said she had seizures, and spoke out of her head.
"You ought to go off-planet," her brother Darrin told her when she
turned sixteen.< /p>
"Oh, you mean 'cause I'm no good here?" He was right, of course.
Who'd want someone like her on a mining crew, operating a scoop?
"I didn't mean that. I meant...maybe you could take training as a Listener.
You know, an alien communication specialist."
Darrin was just being kind, that was all. She was clumsy and dumb--not qualified
to be any sort of "specialist"! But out of curiosity, she looked
up Listener's Guild on the screen.
The art of Listening to alien life forms requires a special gift. It may
be a slime-sucking bottom dweller, or an intelligent enterobacteria that dissolves
its prey from the inside, or a ball of superheated gases that smell worse
than a sewer. You must forget your own prejudices and feelings, see its viewpoint,
pick up its thoughts and begin communication.
Why not? It beat staying home. She ran away to Astropolis and applied at the
Listener's Guild branch office. They took her on as a charity student and
she got as far as Lesson Two. Then Dad and Uncle found her and dragged her
back home.
"Call themselves Listeners!" Dad slammed his hand on the table.
"Lazy losers--getting paid to sleep! Couldn't talk to an alien if it
was attached to their backsides! You're not getting involved with them--I
forbid it!"
The day Andra turned eighteen, she signed on the Nova as a Nutrition Assistant. Anything to get away from
Dad!
Life on the Nova turned out to be not much more exciting than Tantalus. They
escorted mining ships and took colonists around from one asteroid to another.
And Andra brewed kaffa and brought it round to the passengers and crew, all
of whom called her "kid".
But today certainly wasn't boring, thought Andra, as the next energy pulse
raked over the ship and tossed them all on the floor. The one after that sent
the ship spinning end over end. Andra hugged the floor, groaning.
"You okay?" Darrin knelt by her side.
She held onto her stomach. "I think I'm gonna throw up."
"Ah, you'll be fine." Darrin, the protective older brother, tried
to cheer her up with banter. "Hey, my stomach's not doing so good either.
It's that awful crap you folks in the galley serve. Space beans and space
gruel."
Andra attempted a wan smile. Big Darrin loved good eating--and hated ship
food.
"You'd think if they could invent interstellar drive," he said,
"they could invent synth-food that tasted like the real--"
Another blast rocked them back and forth. Andra held onto her head. "They're
playing with us. Like kids with a toy!"
"Sure wish we could talk to them," Darrin said. "If you'd just
finished Listener training--"
"Shut up." She didn't need to go to any school. She knew enough
about empathizing with an alien life form from Dad. She'd learned to feel
what he felt. The headaches and the disorientation, when something invades
your head...
An alien life form!
"Darrin". She grabbed his arm. "Maybe I could try to talk to
them. If you'll stay with me."
"Seriously? You could contact them?"
The Captain had heard him. "What's this? You can talk to aliens?
He looked as desperate as a trapped miner on his last oxygen tank. The whole
crew stared at her in wide-eyed terror. "Then do it, for God's sake.
Beg forgiveness for invading their territory, or whatever we did to piss them
off."
"First I'd...I'd have to find a quiet place to lie down."
"Young lady, this is no time for a nap." The Captain grabbed both
of her shoulders, staring at her with an intensity that reminded her of Dad.
"Either you talk to those aliens, or they'll scramble us like one of
your Proteen shakes and suck us in!"
She gulped. What did she get herself in for? Alien communication is a risky
job. If you aren't well trained, you could go insane. That was part of
Lesson Two, something to scare the students. Back then it was just words in
a lecture session. Now... there were real, hostile aliens out there!
But it was too late to back out.
"Fine. As soon as all of you go away and stop staring at me." If
I go drooling crazy and wet my pants, I don't want you watching.
She sat back against a bulkhead and shut her eyes, trying to ignore the roiling
nausea in her stomach. "Darrin, stay with me," she whispered, interlacing
her fingers with his.
What was Lesson One? Put all fear aside. That was harder than stopping
a runaway land crawler! Forcing her breathing to slow down, she recited the
training phrases in her head. I transcend myself. I overcome my fear of
things that are strange.
She visualized the Focus, a shining blue crystal, and imagined stepped inside.
I open my soul to the Universe.
Yes. At some point empathy had become a part of her makeup. At first a survival
mechanism, then a part of her soul. She'd stopped wanting to kill Dad. Then
she was able to sense what made him that way: the constant pain, and...that
other thing.
Now...her heartbeat slowed. I become a clear pool... a channel. All beings
who wish to speak...I invite you...share communication and friendship!
Glowing clouds formed behind her eyelids. Patterns of sparks swirled and re-formed,
coalescing into images: huge, whale-like shapes that swam among the vastness
of the dust clouds. They crowded around the mote that was the Nova, like hungry
predators around a groundmole.
A sudden shock of recognition swept over her. Where had she seen theses shapes before? She searched her memory. Early childhood... a dream. And... in one of Dad's rages, a memory. A ship like this one...
Dad had seen these aliens too!
They wrecked his ship. Brain-damaged him. Made him a dirt miner on Tantalus.
No wonder he's angry.
Andra fought her own emotions and stuffed them into a corner, and set up the
Focus once more. Empathize with all life. Learn their needs.... their reasons.
The flanks of the enemy ships pulsed with color; their backfins churned out whorls of energy that could smash the Nova into atoms. Her clarity fled. First they'd crippled Dad, now they'd come for her! *Pleasepleaseplease don't hurt us,* the terror leaked out from her. *Forgive us for our offense-we surrender!*
One of the huge shapes turned in her direction, and its colors brightened.
Had they heard? If she could distract them..... *Who are you?*
Their answers came in no language any human could recognize, a language of
thought pulses and flashes in the mind.
*We are Floaters. We live in bright clouds, dance on waves, feed on flashes.
Lovely flashes of light!*
The ship waved a fin, and the shockwave sent the Nova rocking again. Yet Andra
hung onto the thread of communication. *Stop! Why are you firing at us?*
*Fire? Yes... fine lovely energy sparks. Taste of fire, taste of light! We
share a feast of comradeship. We taste your energy, and you taste ours!*
*Comradeship? You mean you're not trying to kill us?*
*What is kill? We mean joy. Fun, friendship, dancing.*
Her mind reeled. She was expecting predators, ruthless killers. These were
childlike innocents! And now she realized something else.
*You're not ships at all, are you?*
What she had thought of as their metal hulls, were merely dense clouds of
gas. Not ships, but life forms. Strange beings that floated in the deep of
space, living on radiation and dark matter. Beings that had never known what
creatures of flesh know...hate, aggression, death. Theirs was an eternity
of starlight and the joy of gamma-ray baths and the sharp pulses of ionic
energy that tasted wonderful.
*Well, your games aren't fun to us,* Andra scolded them. *You destroyed my
father's ship and now you're destroying us. Don't you understand? We're not
made like you are. We're just frail sacks of liquid and flesh...*
*Really? Unbelievable! You poor creatures...Ah well...we're sorry.* The starwhales
emanated regret, like children interrupted in their games. *What a shame...it
was such a fine feast.*
She remembered all of it now... that first time, when she'd seen them in a
childhood dream. Friends floating in space, their voices lights instead of
sounds.
*But what are you? Did you come from a planet once? Were you creatures like
us?*
Now the Starwhales emanated a vast amusement. *Us? Live on ball of rock? Not
ever!*
"Andra! Wake up!"
A voice called to her from a long distance away. "Andra? Are you all
right."
"Darrin?" She rubbed her eyes. "Are we still under attack?"
"No. They've stopped firing. What happened? Did you talk to them?"
The Captain and crew still ringed her, firing questions. "What did they
say? What did they want?"
"Th... they...they never meant us any harm, Captain. They were just..."
she began to laugh. "They were playing a game, Darrin--having a party,
having fun!"
"Fun!" The First Mate rolled his eyes. "Call that fun? That's
sick."
"No-really," said Andra. "They aren't ships at all, they're
living creatures." She tried to rub the stiffness out of her shoulders.
"Never evolved from any kind of planetary life. I guess they just...assembled.
You know, from the amino-acids that float among the dust clouds...."
"No kidding! That's crazy!"
"Energy is food to them," she went on, as Darrin helped her sit
up. "They sensed ours and they wanted to share some of theirs. We thought
we were fighting a war--when we've been sharing a banquet!"
"Well, if that isn't the strangest..." Darrin grinned. "See?
I knew my sister could do it."
"They must be able to shift from matter to energy, or something...they
couldn't understand how our kind of life was possible, but after I explained
it to them, they promised to stop throwing good food at us."
"Well, well. Great work, kid," said the Captain. "You saved
all our skins."
Yesterday the crew's respect would have been the sweetest reward of her life.
But now... she had seen the universe from the viewpoint of an utterly alien
consciousness. It was as if she had lived all her life inside a sealed chamber-and
seen the sky for the first time. "Darrin, I...I think you were right.
I was born to be a Listener." She grinned at her brother.
"Sure were! I wonder what Dad will say."
Their smiles faded. They looked at each other, imagining. Could she teach
Dad to Listen to the aliens who had accidentally crippled him, and would that
relieve his torment? Would he forgive her, and she him?
"It's incredible," the First Mate said, "a life-form that can
exist in the cold of space. Maybe they were the first living beings in the
universe. Boggles the mind!"
"Sure does! And we discovered them! We are going to be so
famous..." the Captain broke off. "We should make a friendly gesture.
What do you say, Miss Andra? If they want to feast, should we reciprocate
and send them some of our food?"
"What? Poison them with space
beans and space gruel?" cried Darrin. "Now that would be an act
of war."
Mark A. Garlick / space-art.co.uk