Whipping Star by Frank Herbert
“They ran for it while they had time; I understand,” McKie said.
“Time . . . yes, your single-track line. This comparison provides suitable concept. Inadequate but sufficient.”
“And you are definitely the last Caleban in our . . . wave?”
“Self alone,” the Caleban said. “Terminal endpoint Caleban—yes. Self confirms description.”
“Wasn’t there any way to save yourself?” McKie asked.
“Save? Ahhh . . . avoid? Evade! Yes, evade ultimate discontinuity. This you suggest?”
“I’m asking if there wasn’t some way for you to escape the way your . . . fellows did.”
“Way exists, but result same for your wave.”
“You could save yourself, but it would end us, that it?”
“You not possess honor concept?” the Caleban asked. “Save self, lose honor.”
“Touché,” McKie said.
“Explain touché,” the Caleban said. “New term.”
“Eh? Oh, that’s a very old, ancient term.”
“Linear beginning term, you say? Yes, those best with nodal frequency.”
“Nodal frequency?”
“You say—often. Nodal frequency contains often.”
“They mean the same thing; I see.”
“Not same; similar.”
“I stand corrected.”
“Explain touché. What meaning conveys this term?”
“Meaning conveys . . . yeah. It’s a fencing term.”
“Fencing? You signify containment?”
McKie explained fencing as best he could with a side journey into swordsmanship, the concept of single combat, competition.
“Effective touch!” the Caleban interrupted, her words conveying definite wonder. “Nodal intersection! Touché! Ahhh-ahhh! This contains why we find your species to fascinate us! This concept! Cutting line: touché! Pierced by meaning: touché!”
“Ultimate discontinuity,” McKie snarled. “Touché! How far away is your next touché with the whip?”
“Intersection of whip touché!” the Caleban said. “You seek position of linear displacement, yes. It moves me. We perhaps occupy our linearities yet; but self suggests another species may need these dimensions. We leave, outgo from existence then. No so?”
When McKie didn’t answer, the Caleban said, “McKie, you hang my meaning?”
“I think I’m going to sabotage you,” McKie muttered.
Learning a language represents training in the delusions of that language.
—Gowachin Aphorism
Cheo, the ego-frozen Pan Spechi, stared out across the forest toward sunset over the sea. It was good, he thought, that the Ideal World contained such a sea. This tower Mliss had ordered built in a city of lesser buildings and spires commanded a view which included also the distant plain and faraway mountains of the interior.
A steady wind blew against his left cheek, stirred his yellow hair. He wore green trousers and an open-mesh shirt of dull gold and gray. The clothing gave a subtle accent to his humanoid appearance, revealing the odd ripples of alien muscles here and there about his body.
An amused smile occupied his mouth, but not his eyes. He had Pan Spechi eyes, many-faceted, glistening—although the facets were edge-faded by his ego-surgery. The eyes watched the insect movements of various sentients on streets and bridgeways below him. At the same time, they reported on the sky overhead (a faraway flock of birds, streamers of sunset clouds) and told him of the view toward the sea and the nearby balustrade.
We’re going to pull it off, he thought.
He glanced at the antique chronograph Mliss had given him. Crude thing, but it showed the sunset hour. They’d had to disengage from the Taprisiot mindclock system, though. This crude device showed two hours to go until the next contact. The S’eye controls would be more accurate, but he didn’t want to move.
They can’t stop us.
But maybe they can. . . .
He thought about McKie then. How had the BuSab agent found this place? And finding it, how had he come here? McKie sat in the Beachball with the Caleban right now—bait, obviously. Bait!
For what?
Cheo did not enjoy the contradictory emotions surging back and forth through him. He had broken the most basic Pan Spechi law. He had captured his crèche’s ego and abandoned his four mates to a mindless existence terminating in mindless death. A renegade surgeon’s instruments had excised the organ which united the pentarchal Pan Spechi family across all space. The surgery had left a scar on Cheo’s forehead and a scar on his soul, but he had never imagined he would find such delicate relish in the experience.
Nothing could take the ego from him!
But he was alone, too.
Death would end it, of course, but all creatures had that to face.
And thanks to Mliss, he had a retreat from which no other Pan Spechi could extricate him . . . unless . . . but there’d be no other Pan Spechi, very soon. There’d be no other organized sentients at all, except the handful Mliss had brought here to her Ark with its mad Boers and Blacks.
Abnethe came hurrying onto the observation deck behind him. His ears, as multiplanar in discrimination as his eyes, marked the emotions in her footsteps—boredom, worry, the constant fear which constricted her being.
Cheo turned.
She had been to a Beautybarber, he observed. Red hair now crowned her lovely face. McKie had red hair, too, Cheo reminded himself. She threw herself onto a reclining chairdog, stretched her legs.
“What’s your hurry?” he asked.
“Those Beautybarbers!” she snapped. “They want to go home!”
“Send them.”
“But where will I find others?”
“That is a proper problem, isn’t it?”
“You’re making fun of me, Cheo. Don’t.”
“Then tell them they can’t go home.”
“I did.”
“Did you tell them why?”
“Of course not! What a thing to say!”
“You told Furuneo.”
“I learned my lesson. Where are my legal people?”
“They’ve already gone.”
“But I had other things to discuss with them!”
“Won’t it wait?”
“You knew we had other business. Why’d you let them go?”
“Mliss, you don’t really want to know the other matter on their minds.”
“The Caleban’s to blame,” she said. “That’s our story, and no one can disprove it. What was the other matter the legal numbheads wanted to discuss?”
“Mliss, drop it.”
“Cheo!”
His Pan Spechi eyes glittered suddenly. “As you wish. They conveyed a demand from BuSab. They have asked the Caleban for Furuneo’s head.”
“His . . .” She paled. “But how did they know we . . .”
“It was an obvious move under the circumstances.”
“What did you tell them?” she whispered. She stared at his face.
“I told them the Caleban closed the S’eye jumpdoor just as Furuneo was entering it of his own volition.”
“But they know we have a monopoly on that S’eye,” she said, her voice stronger. “Damn them!”
“Ahhh,” Cheo said, “but Fanny Mae has been moving McKie and his friends around. That says we have no monopoly.”
“That’s exactly what I said before. Isn’t it?”
“It gives us the perfect delaying tactic,” he said. “Fanny Mae sent the head somewhere, and we don’t know where. I’ve told her, of course, to deny this request.”
She swallowed. “Is that . . . what you told them?”
“Of course.”
“But if they question the Caleban . . .”
“They’re just as likely to get a confusing answer as a usable one.”
“That was very clever of you, Cheo.”
“Isn’t that why you keep me around?”
“I keep you around for mysterious reasons of my ow
“I depend on that,” he said.
“You know,” she said, “I’ll miss them.”
“Miss who?”
“The ones who hunt us.”
A basic requirement for BuSab agents is, perhaps, that we make the right mistakes.
—McKie’s commentary on Furuneo,
BuSab Private Files
Bildoon stood in the doorway to Tuluk’s personal lab, his back to the long outer room where the Wreave’s assistants did most of their work. The BuSab chief’s deep-set eyes held a faceted glitter, a fire that failed to match the composure of his humanoid Pan Spechi face.
He felt weak and sad. He felt he existed in a contracting cave, a place without wind or stars. Time was closing in on everyone. Those he loved and those who loved him would die. All sentient love in the universe would die. The universe would become homeless, enclosed by melancholy.
Mourning filled his humanoid flesh: snows, leaves, suns—eternally alone.
He felt the demands of action, of decision, but feared the consequences of anything he might do. Whatever he touched might crumble, become so much dust falling through his fingers.
Tuluk, he saw, was working at a bench against the opposite wall. He had a length of the bullwhip’s rawhide stretched between two clamps. Parallel with the rawhide and about a millimeter below it was a metal pole which lay balanced on air without visible support. Between rawhide and pole could be seen flickers of miniature lightning which danced along the entire length of the gap. Tuluk was bent over, reading meters set into the bench beneath the device.
“Am I interrupting anything?” Bildoon asked.
Tuluk turned a knob on the bench, waited, turned the knob once more. He caught the pole as the invisible supporting force released it. He racked the pole on supports against the back wall above the bench.
“That is a silly question,” he said, turning.
“It is, at that,” Bildoon said. “We have a problem.”
“Without problems, we have no employment,” Tuluk said.
“I don’t think we’re going to get Furuneo’s head,” Bildoon said.
“It’s been so long now, we probably couldn’t have gotten a reliable nerve replay, anyway,” Tuluk said. He screwed his face slit into an S-curve, an expression he knew aroused amusement among other sentients but which represented intense thought for a Wreave. “What do the astronomers say about the star pattern McKie saw on that mysterious planet?”
“They think there may have been an error in the mindcord.”
“Oh. Why?”
“For one thing, there isn’t even a hint, not the slightest subjective indication of variation in stellar magnitudes.”
“All the visible stars had the same light intensity?”
“Apparently.”
“Odd.”
“And the nearest pattern similarity,” Bildoon said, “is one that doesn’t exist anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well . . . there’s a Big Dipper, a Little Dipper, various other constellations and zodiac similarities, but . . .” He shrugged.
Tuluk stared at him blankly. “I don’t recognize the references,” he said presently.
“Oh, yes—I forgot,” Bildoon said. “We Pan Spechi, when we decided to copy human form, explored their history with some care. These patterns of stars are ones which were visible from their ancient homeworld.”
“I see. Another oddity to go with what I’ve discovered about the material of this whip.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s very strange. Parts of this leather betray a subatomic structure of peculiar alignment.”
“Peculiar? How?”
“Aligned. Perfectly aligned. I’ve never seen anything like it outside certain rather fluid energy phenomena. It’s as though the material had been subjected to some peculiar force or stress. The result is, in some ways, similar to neomaser alignment of light quanta.”
“Wouldn’t that require enormous energy?”
“Presumably.”
“But what could cause it?”
“I don’t know. The interesting thing is that it doesn’t appear to be a permanent change. The structure shows characteristics like plastic memory. It’s slowly snapping back into reasonably familiar forms.”
Bildoon heard the emphasis which betrayed Tuluk’s disturbance. “Reasonably familiar?” he asked.
“That’s another thing,” Tuluk said. “Let me explain. These subatomic structures and their resultant overstructures of genetic message units undergo slow evolution. We can, by comparing structures, date some samples to within two or three thousand standard years. Since cattle cells form the basic protein for vat culture food, we have fairly complete records on them over a very long time indeed. The strange thing about the samples in this piece of rawhide”—he gestured with a mandibular extensor—“is that its pattern is very ancient.”
“How ancient?”
“Perhaps several hundred thousand years.”
Bildoon absorbed this for a moment, then, “But you told us earlier that this rawhide was only a couple of years old.”
“According to our catalyzing tests, it is.”
“Could this alignment stress have mixed up the pattern?”
“Conceivably.”
“You doubt it, then?”
“I do.”
“You’re not trying to tell me that whip was brought forward through time?”
“I’m not trying to tell you anything outside the facts which I’ve reported. Two tests, previously considered reliable, do not agree as to the dating of this material.”
“Time travel’s an impossibility,” Bildoon said.
“So we’ve always assumed.”
“We know it. We know it mathematically and pragmatically. It’s a fiction device, a myth, an amusing concept employed by entertainers. We reject it, and we are left without paradox. Only one conclusion remains: The alignment stress, whatever that was, changed the pattern.”
“If the rawhide were . . . squeezed through a subatomic filter of some sort, that might account for it,” Tuluk said. “But since I have no such filter, nor the power to do this theoretical squeezing, I cannot test it.”
“You must have some thoughts about it, though.”
“I do. I cannot conceive of a filter which would do this thing without destroying the materials subjected to such forces.”
“Then what you’re saying,” Bildoon said, voice rising in angry frustration, “is that an impossible device did an impossible thing to that impossible piece of . . . of . . .”
“Yes, sir,” Tuluk said.
Bildoon noticed that Tuluk’s aides in the outer room were turning their faces toward him, showing signs of amusement. He stepped fully into Tuluk’s lab, closed the door.
“I came down here hoping you’d found something which might force their hand,” Bildoon said, “and you give me conundrums.”
“Your displeasure doesn’t change the facts,” Tuluk said.
“No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“The structure of the Palenki arm cells was aligned in a similar fashion,” Tuluk said. “But only around the cut.”
“You anticipated my next question.”
“It was obvious. Passage through a jumpdoor doesn’t account for it. We sent several of our people through jumpdoors with various materials and tested random cells—living and dead—for a check.”
“Two conundrums in an hour is more than I like,” Bildoon said.
“Two?”
“We now have twenty-eight positional incidents of Abnethe flogging that Caleban or attempting to flog it. That’s enough to show us they do not define a cone in space. Unless she’s jumping around from planet to planet, that theory’s wrong.”
“Given the powers of that S’eye, she could be jumping around.”
“We don’t think so. That isn’t her way. She’s a nesting bird. She likes a citadel. She’s the kind who castles in chess whe
“She could be sending her Palenkis.”
“She’s there with ’em every time.”
“We’ve collected six whips and arms, in all,” Tuluk said. “Do you want me to repeat these tests on all of them?”
Bildoon stared at the Wreave. The question wasn’t like him. Tuluk was plodding, thorough.
“What would you rather be doing?” Bildoon asked.
“We have twenty-eight examples, you say. Twenty-eight is one of the euclidean perfects. It’s four times the prime seven. The number strongly indicates randomness. But we’re faced with a situation apparently excluding randomness. Ergo, an organizing pattern is at work which is not revealed by analytic numbering as far as we’ve taken it. I would like to subject the spacing—both in time and physical dimension—to a complete analysis, compare for any similarities we . . .”
“You’d put an assistant on the other whips and arms to check them out?”
“That goes without saying.”
Bildoon shook his head. “What Abnethe’s doing—it’s impossible!”
“If she does a thing, how can it be impossible?”
“They have to be somewhere!” Bildoon snapped.
“I find it very strange,” Tuluk said, “this trait you share with humans of stating the obvious in such emphatic fashion.”
“Oh, go to hell!” Bildoon said. He turned, slammed out of the lab.
Tuluk, racing to the door after him, opened it and called at the retreating back, “It is a Wreave belief that we already are in hell!”
He returned to his bench, muttering. Humans and Pan Spechi—impossible creatures. Except for McKie. Now, there was a human who occasionally achieved analytic rapport with sentients capable of higher logic. Well . . . every species had its exceptions to the norm.
If you say, “I understand,” what have you done? You have made a value judgment.
—Laclac Riddle
By an effort of communication which he still did not completely understand, McKie had talked the Caleban into opening the Beachball’s external port. This permitted a bath of spray-washed air to flow into the place where McKie sat. It also did one other thing: It allowed a crew of watchers outside to hold eye contact with him. He had just about given up hoping Abnethe would rise to the bait. There would have to be another solution. Visual contact with watchers also permitted a longer spacing between Taprisiot guard contacts. He found the new spacing less tiresome.