Exceptions to Reality by Alan Dean Foster Read Free Book Online

seated alongside him kept his voice down. “There’s enough advanced medical technology on this ship to allow an amoeba to operate a
torkue
projector. With the medics caressing his carcass twenty-four seven, I’ll bet the old bastard’s got another twenty years in him before he slides into complete senility.”
    The ship plunged out of OTL to emerge in the vicinity of Delta Avinis. It was the forty-third multiple-star system the
Seraphim
had visited since leaving home. According to the elaborate Cosocagglia mythology, the Chauna was only to be encountered in multiple-star systems. Why this should be, no one knew—not even the Cosocagglia themselves. It did not matter, Tyrone grumbled silently as coordinates were checked and confirmed, because there was no such thing as a Chauna. They might as well be searching single-star systems, or dark wanderers, or the ghostly gray silverstone spheres known as stuttering molters.
    “Something beautiful.” That was how the Cosocagglia legends identified the Chauna. A stellar phenomenon that was supposedly unsurpassingly beautiful. That was about all the fable had to say about it, too. Tyrone had seen the translations, laboriously performed by the xenologists who worked with nonhuman species, like the Cosocagglia. Where the Chauna was concerned the Cosocagglia could supply reams of adjectives but nothing in the way of specifics. A Chauna was no more, no less, than a beautiful thing.
    They had encountered the phenomenon but rarely; a millennia ago, when the Cosocagglia had been in their prime: a youthful, expansionist, vital race. To see a Chauna, it was said, was to be blessed forever with knowledge of what real beauty was. Any individuals so consecrated by the vision were held up to be the most fortunate of travelers. But for all its supposed wonder, there remained in the crumbled lore of the species not a single description of the Chauna itself.
    How exceptional could it be, anyway? Tyrone mused. Even if it existed, it was hardly likely to be a previously unobserved phenomenon. In the course of the past thousand years humankind had identified an enormous range of stellar objects and events, from X-ray bursters to miniature ambling pulsars to Möbius black holes. Some were so esoteric, the always busy astrophysicists had not found time to name them. Some were even beautiful, like the tornadic nebulae and the gamma-ray ropes. But none, according to the Cosocagglia who had been shown imagings of them, were Chauna.
    Delta Avinis was an impressive, but not unprecedented, double-star system. There were half a dozen planets, all sere, all lifeless. Their orbits were erratic, their gravitational grip on continued existence uncertain.
    As soon as he was confident that downslip had been finalized and that the system held no navigational surprises, Tyrone rose from his seat, formally relinquished control of the ship to Wakoma and Surat, and announced that he was going on sleeptime. Two months ago such announcements by the Shipmaster had been greeted with unified protest. Now people simply muttered to themselves in his absence. Everyone was too tired to remonstrate loudly. Resigned to a seemingly interminable fate, they had not yet decided what to do about it, or what to do next. That eventuality might manifest itself at the next star system, the Shipmaster knew, or the one after that. He would keep things going for as long as he could. It was part of his job.
    Surat waited for several minutes until she was sure her superior was gone before rising from her position. “I’m going to talk to Gibeon Bastrop.”
    One of those who served under her looked up in alarm. “Are you sure that’s wise, Anna?”
    The navigator shrugged slim shoulders. “What can the Old Man do—fire me? I’m not refusing to perform my duties. Maybe later, but not yet. Not today.” Such a refusal, they both knew, could result in a hearing board denying recompense to the perpetrator. Angry and frustrated as they were,