Whipping Star by Frank Herbert
“Don’t you realize where Fanny Mae has hidden you?” McKie asked. “Don’t you recognize this safe . . .”
“Mliss!”
It was an angry voice from somewhere behind Abnethe, but the speaker was not visible to McKie.
“Is that you, Cheo?” McKie called. “Do you know where you are, Cheo? A Pan Spechi must suspect the truth.”
A hand came into view, yanked Abnethe aside. The ego-frozen Pan Spechi took her place in the jumpdoor opening.
“You’re much too clever, McKie,” Cheo said.
“How dare you, Cheo!” Abnethe screamed.
Cheo swirled, swung an arm. There was the sound of flesh hitting flesh, a stifled scream, another blow. Cheo bent away from the opening, came back into view.
“You’ve been in that place before, haven’t you, Cheo?” McKie asked. “Weren’t you a mewling, empty-minded female in the crèche at one period of your existence?”
“Much too clever,” Cheo snarled.
“You’ll have to kill her, you know,” McKie said. “If you don’t, it’ll all be for nothing. She’ll digest you. She’ll take over your ego. She’ll be you.”
“I didn’t know this happened with humans,” Cheo said.
“Oh, it happens,” McKie said. “That’s her world, isn’t it, Cheo?”
“Her world,” Cheo agreed, “but you’re mistaken about one thing, McKie. I can control Mliss. So it’s my world, isn’t it? And another thing: I can control you!”
The jumpdoor’s vortal tube suddenly grew smaller, darted at McKie.
McKie dodged aside, shouted, “Fanny Mae! You promised!”
“New connectives,” the Caleban said.
McKie executed a sprawling dive across the room as the jumpdoor appeared beside him. It nipped into existence and out like a ravening mouth, narrowly missing McKie with each attack. He twisted, leaped—dodged panting through the Beachball’s purple gloom, finally rolled under the giant spoon, peered right and left. He shuddered. He hadn’t realized a jumpdoor could be moved around that rapidly.
“Fanny Mae,” he rasped, “shut the S’eye, close it down or whatever you do. You promised—no attack!”
No response.
McKie glimpsed an edge of the vortal tube hovering just beyond the spoon bowl.
“McKie!”
It was Cheo’s voice.
“They’ll call you long distance in a minute, McKie,” Cheo called. “When they do, I’ll have you.”
McKie stilled a fit of trembling.
They would call him! Bildoon had probably summoned a Taprisiot already. They’d be worrying about him—the port closed. And he’d be helpless in the grip of the call.
“Fanny Mae!” McKie hissed. “Close that damn S’eye!”
The vortal tube glittered, shifted up and around to come at him from the side. Cursing, McKie rolled into a ball, kicked backward and over onto his knees, leaped to his feet and flung himself across the spoon handle, scrambled back under it.
The searching tube moved away.
There came a low, crackling sound, like thunder to McKie. He glanced right, left, back over his head. There was no sign of the deadly opening.
Abruptly, something snapped sharply above the spoon bowl. A shower of green sparks cascaded around McKie where he lay beneath it. He slid to the side, brought up his raygen. A Palenki arm and whip had been thrust through the jumpdoor’s opening. It was raised to deliver another blow against the Caleban.
McKie sprayed the raygen’s beam across the arm as the whip moved. Arm and whip grazed the far edge of the spoon, brought another shower of sparks.
The jumpdoor’s opening winked out of existence.
McKie crouched, the afterimage of the sparks still dancing on his retinas. Now—now he recalled what he’d been trying to remember since watching Tuluk’s experiment with the steel!
“S’eye removed.”
Fanny Mae’s voice fell on McKie’s forehead, seemed to seep inward to his speech centers. Hunter of Devils! She sounded weak!
Slowly McKie lifted himself to his feet. The Palenki arm and whip lay on the floor where they had fallen, but he ignored them.
Shower of sparks!
McKie felt strange emotions washing through him, around him. He felt happily angry, satiated with frustrations, words and phrases tumbling through his mind like pinwheels.
That perverted offspring of an indecent union!
Shower of sparks! Shower of sparks!
He knew he had to hold that thought and his sanity no matter what the surging waves of emotion from Fanny Mae did to him.
Shower of . . . shower . . .
Was Fanny Mae dying?
“Fanny Mae?”
The Caleban remained silent, but the emotional onslaught eased.
McKie knew there was something he had to remember. It concerned Tuluk. He had to tell Tuluk.
Shower of sparks!
He had it then: The pattern that identifies the maker! A shower of sparks.
He felt he’d been running for hours, that his nerves were bruised and tangled. His mind was a bowl of jelly. Thoughts quivered through it. His brain was going to melt and run away like a stream of colored liquid. It would spray out of him—shower on . . .
Shower of . . . of . . . SPARKS!
Louder this time, he called, “Fanny Mae?”
A peculiar silence rippled through the Beachball. It was an emotionless silence, something shut off, removed. It made McKie’s skin prickle.
“Answer me, Fanny Mae,” he said.
“S’eye absents itself,” the Caleban said.
McKie felt shame, a deep and possessive sense of guilt. It flowed over him and through him, filled every cell. Dirty, muddy, sinful, shameful . . .
He shook his head. Why should he feel guilt?
Ahhh. Realization came over him. The emotion came from outside him. It was Fanny Mae!
“Fanny Mae,” he said, “I understand you could not prevent that attack. I don’t blame you. I understand.”
“Surprise connectives,” the Caleban said. “You overstand.”
“I understand.”
“Overstand? Term for intensity of knowledge? Realization!”
“Realization, yes.”
Calmness returned to McKie, but it was the calmness of something being withdrawn.
Again he reminded himself that he had a vital message for Tuluk. Shower of sparks. But first he had to be certain that that mad Pan Spechi wasn’t going to return momentarily.
“Fanny Mae,” he said, “can you prevent them from using the S’eye?”
“Obstructive, not preventive,” the Caleban said.
“You mean you can slow them down?”
“Explain slow.”
“Oh, no,” McKie moaned. He cast around in his mind for a Caleban way to phrase his question. How would Fanny Mae say it?
“Will there be . . .” He shook his head. “The next attack, will it be on a short connective or long one?”
“Attack series breaks here,” the Caleban said. “You inquire of duration by your time sense. I overstand this. Long line across attack nodes, this equates with more intense duration for your time sense.”
“Intense duration,” McKie muttered. “Yeah.”
Shower of sparks, he reminded himself. Shower of sparks.
“You signify employment of S’eye by Cheo,” the Caleban said. “Spacing extends at this place. Cheo goes farther down your track. I overstand intensely for McKie. Yes?”
Farther down my track, McKie thought. He gulped as realization hit him. What had Fanny Mae said earlier? “See us to the door! I am S’eye!”
He breathed softly, lest sudden motion dislodge this brutal clarity of understanding.
Overstanding!
He thought of energy requirements. Enormous! “I am S’eye!” And “Self-energy—by being stellar mass!” To do what they did in this dimension, Calebans required the energy of a stellar mass. She inhaled the whip! She’d said it herself: They sought
McKie considered the refined discrimination Fanny Mae must possess even to attempt communication with him. It would be as though he immersed his mouth in water and tried to talk to a single microorganism there!
I should have understood, he thought, when Tuluk said something about realizing where he lived.
“We have to go right back to the beginning,” he said.
“Many beginnings exist for each entity,” the Caleban said.
McKie sighed.
Sighing, he was seized by a Taprisiot contact. It was Bildoon.
“I’m glad you waited,” McKie said, cutting off Bildoon’s first anxious inquiries. “Here’s what I want you to . . .”
“McKie, what’s going on there?” Bildoon insisted. “There are dead enforcers all around you, madmen, a riot . . .”
“I seem to be immune,” McKie said, “or else Fanny Mae is protecting me some way. Now, listen to me. We don’t have much time. Get Tuluk. He has a device for identifying the patterns which originate in the stress of creation. He’s to bring that device here—right here to the Beachball. And fast.”
Taken in isolated tandem, Government and Justice are mutually exclusive. There must be a third force at work for any society to achieve both government and justice. This is why the Bureau of Sabotage sometimes is called “The Third Force.”
—from an Elementary Textbook
In the hushed stillness within the Beachball, McKie leaned against a curved wall, sipped ice water from a thermocup. He kept his eyes active, though, watching Tuluk set up the needed instruments.
“What’s to prevent our being attacked while we work?” Tuluk asked. He rolled a glowing loop on a squat stand into position near the Caleban’s unpresence. “You should’ve let Bildoon send in some guards.”
“Like those ones who were foaming at the mouth outside?”
“There’s a fresh crew outside there now!”
Tuluk did something which made the glowing loop double its diameter.
“They’d only get in the way,” McKie said. “Besides, Fanny Mae says the spacing isn’t right for Abnethe.” He sipped ice water. The room had achieved something approaching sauna temperature, but without the humidity.
“Spacing,” Tuluk said. “Is that why Abnethe keeps missing you?” He produced a black wand from his instrument case. The wand was about a meter long. He adjusted a knob on the wand’s handle, and the glowing loop contracted. The squat stand beneath the glowing loop began to hum—an itch-producing middle C.
“They miss me because I have a loving protector,” McKie said. “It isn’t every sentient who can say a Caleban loves him.”
“What is that you’re drinking?” Tuluk asked. “Is that one of your mind disrupters?”
“You’re very funny,” McKie said. “How much longer are you going to be fiddling with that gear?”
“I am not fiddling. Don’t you realize this isn’t portable equipment? It must be adjusted.”
“So adjust.”
“The high temperature in here complicates my readings.” Tuluk complained. “Why can’t we have the port open?”
“For the same reason I didn’t let any guards in here. I’ll take my chances without having them complicated by a mob of insane sentients getting in my way.”
“But must it be this hot?”
“Can’t be helped,” McKie said. “Fanny Mae and I have been talking, working things out.”
“Talking?”
“Hot air,” McKie said.
“Ahhh, you make a joke.”
“It can happen to anyone,” McKie said. “I keep asking myself if what we see as a star is all of a Caleban or just part of one. I opt for part.” He drank deeply of the ice water, discovered there was no more ice in it. Tuluk was right. It was damnably hot in here.
“That’s a strange theory,” Tuluk said. He silenced the humming of his instrument case. In the abrupt stillness something else in the case could be heard ticking. It was not a peaceful sound. It had the feeling of a timing device affixed to a bomb. It counted moments in a deadly race.
McKie felt each counted moment accumulate like a congealing bubble. It expanded . . . expanded—and broke! Each instant was death lashing at him. Tuluk with his strange wand was a magician, but he had reversed the ancient process. He was turning golden instants into deadly lead. His shape was wrong, too. He had no haunches. The tubular Wreave shape annoyed McKie. Wreaves moved too slowly.
The damnable ticking!
The Caleban’s Beachball might be the last house in the universe, the last container for sentient life. And it contained no bed where a sentient might die decently.
Wreaves didn’t sleep in beds, of course. They took their rest in slanted supports and were buried upright.
Tuluk had gray skin.
Lead.
If all things ended now, McKie wondered, which of them would be the last to go? Whose breath would be the final one?
McKie breathed the echoes of all his fears. There was too much hanging on each counted instant here.
No more melodies, no more laughter, no more children racing in play. . . .
“There,” Tuluk said.
“You ready?” McKie asked.
“I will be ready presently. Why does the Caleban not speak?”
“Because I asked her to save her strength.”
“What does she say of your theory?”
“She thinks I have achieved truth.”
Tuluk took a small helix from his instrument case, inserted it into a receptacle at the base of the glowing ring.
“Come on, come on,” McKie jittered.
“Your urgings will not reduce the necessary time for this task,” Tuluk said. “For example, I am hungry. I came without stopping to break my daily fast. This does not press me to speed which might produce errors, nor does it arouse me to complain.”
“Aren’t you complaining?” McKie asked. “You want some of my water?”
“I had water two days ago,” Tuluk said.
“And we wouldn’t want to rush you into another drink.”
“I do not understand what pattern you hope to identify,” Tuluk said. “We have no records of artisans for a proper comparison of . . .”
“This is something God made,” McKie said.
“You should not jest about deities,” Tuluk said.
“Are you a believer or just playing safe?” McKie asked.
“I was chiding you for an act which might offend some sentients,” Tuluk said. “We have a hard enough time bridging the sentient barriers without raising religious issues.”
“Well, we’ve been spying on God—or whatever—for a long time,” McKie said. “That’s why we’re going to get a spectroscopic record of this. How much longer you going to be at this fiddling?”
“Patience, patience,” Tuluk muttered. He reactivated the wand, waved it near the glowing ring. Again the instrument began humming, a higher note this time. It grated on McKie’s nerves. He felt it in his teeth and along the skin of his shoulders. It itched inside him where he couldn’t scratch.
“Damn this heat!” Tuluk said. “Why will you not have the Caleban open a door to the outside?”
“I told you why.”
“Well, it doesn’t make this task any easier!”
“You know,” McKie said, “when you called me and saved my skin from that Palenki chopper—the first time, remember? Right afterward you said you’d been tangled with Fanny Mae, and you said a very odd thing.”
“Oh?” Tuluk had extended a small mandible and was making delicate adjustments to a knob on the case below the glowing ring.
“You said something about not knowing that was where you lived. Remember that?”
“I will never forget it.” Tuluk bent his tubular body across the glowing ring, stared back through it while passing the wand back and forth in front of the ring’s opening.
“Where was that?” McKie
“Where was what?”
“Where you lived!”
“That? There are no words to describe it.”
“Try.”
Tuluk straightened, glanced at McKie. “It was a bit like being a mote in a vast sea . . . and experiencing the warmth, the friendship of a benign giant.”
“That giant—the Caleban?”
“Of course.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“I will not answer for inaccuracies in this device,” Tuluk said. “But I don’t believe I can adjust it any closer. Given a few days, some shielding—there’s an odd radiation pattern from that wall behind you—and projection dampers, I might, I just might achieve a fair degree of accuracy. Now? I cannot be responsible.”
“And you’ll be able to get a spectroscopic record?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Then maybe we’re in time,” McKie said.
“For what?”
“For the right spacing.”
“Ahhh, you mean the flogging and the subsequent shower of sparks?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“You could not . . . flog her yourself, gently?”
“Fanny Mae says that wouldn’t work. It has to be done with violence . . . and the intent to create intensity of anti-love . . . or it won’t work.”
“Oh. How odd. You know, McKie, I believe I could use some of your water, after all. It’s the heat in here.”
Any conversation is a unique jazz performance. Some are more pleasing to the ears, but that is not necessarily a measure of their importance.
—Laclac Commentary
There was a popping sound, a stopper being pulled from a bottle. Air pressure dropped slightly in the Beachball, and McKie experienced the panic notion that Abnethe had somehow opened them onto a vacuum which would drain away their air and kill them. The physicists said this couldn’t be done, that the gas flow, impeded by the adjustment barrier within the jumpdoor, would block the opening with its own collision breakdown. McKie suspected they pretended to know about S’eye phenomena.
He missed the jumpdoor’s vortal tube at first. Its plane was horizontal and directly above the Caleban’s spoon bowl.
A Palenki arm and whip shot through the opening, delivered a lashing blow to the area occupied by the Caleban’s unpresence. Green sparks showered the air.