Starsong
by Timothy Zahn
Illustration by Vincent Di Fate
The woman was somewhere in her mid-fifties, I estimated, wearing a lower-middle-class blue-green jacket suit and a professional scarf of a style I didn’t recognize. In one hand she held a boarding ticket; with the other she balanced the inexpensive and slightly scuffed carry-bag slung over her shoulder. Her hair was dark, her features unreadable, and her stride, as she toiled up the steep gangplank toward me, stiffly no-nonsense with an edge of disdain.
In short, she looked like any of the thousands of business types I’d seen in hundreds of spaceports across the Expansion. She certainly didn’t look like trouble.
But that’s always the way with life, isn’t it? It’s right when everything’s going along nice and smooth and you’re all relaxed and bored that you suddenly discover that you’re in fact eighty degrees off course with a dead stick, straked engines, and a comatose musicmaster.
And everything right then was indeed going along nice and smooth. The flight deck had been showing flat green when I’d left three minutes earlier, Rhonda had the engines running at peak efficiency—or at least what passed for peak efficiency with those rusty superannuates—and Jimmy, while his usual annoying self, was very much awake.
And yet, if I’d been paying better attention, I might have wondered a little as I watched the woman approaching me. Might have seen that her completely ordinary exterior wasn’t quite matched by the way she walked.
The way she walked and, as I quickly found out, the way she talked. “I’m Andrula Kulasawa,” she announced to me in a no-nonsense voice that matched the stride. It was a voice that sounded very much like it was accustomed to being listened to. “I’m booked on your transport; here’s my ticket.”
“Yes, Angorki Tower just informed me,” I said, popping the plastic card into my reader and glancing at it. “I’m Jake Smith, Ms. Kulasawa, captain of the Sergei Rock. Welcome aboard.”
A flicker of something touched her face—amusement, perhaps, at the pilot of a humble Class 8 star transport calling himself a captain. “Captain,” she said, nodding her head microscopically as a hooked finger pulled the scarf away from her throat. “And it’s Scholar Kulasawa.”
“My apologies,” I said, hearing my voice suddenly go rigid as I stared at the neckpiece that had been concealed behind the nondescript scarf.
And if the walk and voice hadn’t made me wonder, that should have. Scholars were one of the most elite of the upper/professional classes, and I’d never seen one yet who wouldn’t freeze his or her throat in winter rather than wear something that would cover up that glittering professional badge. “The, uh, the Tower didn’t—”
“Apology accepted,” she said, her tone somehow managing to carry the message that it was her graciousness, not my worthiness, that was letting me off the hook for my unintended social gaffe. “Has my equipment been loaded aboard yet?”
“Equipment?” I asked, throwing a glance down the gangplank behind her. There was no other luggage there that I could see.
“It’s not back there,” she said, an edge of strained patience in her voice now. “I have two Size Triple-F Monshten crates back at the loading ramp. Research equipment for my work on Parex. It’s on the ticket.”
I looked at my reader again. It was there, all right. “I didn’t know, but I’ll see to it right away,” I promised, stepping back and gesturing her through the hatchway. “In the meantime, may I help you get settled?”
“I’ll manage,” she said, twitching the carrybag away as I reached for it. “Where is my seat?”
“The passenger cabin is aft—back that way,” I told her. “First hatchway on the left.”
“I do know what ‘aft’ means, thank you,” she said shortly, brushing past me and disappearing down the passageway.
I heard her carrybag scraping against the wall as she maneuvered her way down the narrow corridor. But she didn’t call for assistance, so I just sealed the outer hatchway and headed straight up to the flight deck.
The cramped room was empty when I arrived, but a glance at the status board showed the cargo hatch was still open. That would be where my copilot would be. Dropping into the pilot’s seat, I keyed the intercom for the cargo bay. “Yo, Bilko,” I called. “How’s it going?”
“Coming along nicely,” First Officer Will Hobson’s voice replied. “Got all the power lifters aboard, and it looks like we’ll have room for most of that gourmet food, too.”
“Well, don’t start figuring the profit per cubic meter yet,” I warned. “Our passenger has a couple of Triple-F Monshtens on the way.”
“She has what?” he demanded, and I could picture his jaw dropping. “What is she, a rock sculptor?”
“Close,” I said. “She’s a scholar.”
“So what, she’s shipping her lecture hall to Parex?”
“I haven’t the foggiest what she’s shipping,” I told him. “You’re welcome to ask her if you want.”
He snorted, a noise that sounded like a bad connection somewhere in the circuit. “No, thanks,” he said. “I had my fill of the scholar class on Bar-simeon.”
“Let me guess. Card tournament?”
“Dice, actually. And man, those scholars are real poor losers. Wait a minute—here come her Monshtens now. Triple-F’s, all right. Let’s see… code imprint says it’s Class-I electronics. Your basic off-the-shelf consumer stuff.”
That did seem odd. “Maybe she’s running a holotape business on the side,” I suggested.
Bilko snorted again. “Or else she’s bringing a podium sound system she could lecture in the Grand Canyon with,” he said.
Days afterward, I would remember that line. Right then, though, it just sounded like Bilko’s usual brand of smart-mouthing. “What she’s got in her luggage is none of our business,” I reminded him. “Just get it aboard and secured, all right?”
“If you insist,” he said with a theatrical sigh.
“I insist,” I said, keying off. Bilko, I had long ago concluded, was privately convinced he’d been switched at birth with some famous stage actor, and he seldom if ever passed up a chance to get in some practice in his might-have-been profession. Personally, I’d always considered those attempts to be a continual reminder of the great contribution the hypothetical baby-switcher’s action had made to live theater.
I keyed the intercom to the engine room. “Rhonda?”
“Right here,” Engineer Rhonda Blankenship’s voice came. “We in preflight yet?”
“Just started,” I told her. “Engines up and running?”
“Ticking like a fine Swiss clock,” she reported. “Or like a mad Bolshevik’s bomb. Take your pick.”
“You’re such a joy and comfort to have around,” I growled. She’d been after me for years to get new engines or at least have the old ones extensively overhauled. “You might be interested to know we have a professional passenger aboard. A scholar.”
“You’re kidding,” she said. “What in space is a scholar doing here?”
“Probably a study on the struggles of lower/working-class star transports,” I told her. “No, actually, it’s probably out of necessity. The Tower said she needed to get to Parex right away, and we were the only scheduled transport for the next nine days.”
“What, all the liners running full today?”
“The liners don’t take Monshten Triple-Fs as check-on luggage,” I said. “And don’t ask me what’s in them, because I don’t know.”
“I wasn’t going to,” she assured me. “If they look at all interesting, Bilko will figure out a way into them.”