Starlady & Fast-Friend by George R. R. Martin Read Free Book Online Page A

change.
    He unstrapped, pulled himself up, and stood looking down on her. “No,” he said. “It’s not worth the risk. We’re too close. Leave the dark alone. And don’t change course, you hear, not five feet. I’m going down to angel.”
    “Brand!” Robi said. “Damn you. And don’t bring that thing up here, you understand? And….” But he was gone, silently, ignoring her.
    She turned back to the viewscreen and, frustrated, watched the dark.
* * *
    Asleep, awake, it never mattered. The vision would come to him all the same. Call it dream, color it memory.
    There were four of them, inside Changling Station, on the wheel of rebirth. It was a doughnut, the Station; brightly lit, screened. Around it, in all directions, ships—trapper ships with their catch, bait ships hauled by timid trappers, supply ships out from Triton, couriers from Earth and Mars and Luna with commissions for the fast-friends. And derelicts. Hundreds of ill-fit hulks, holed, abandoned, empty, filling up the Jungle like hunks of cold steel garbage.
    Between the ships moved the fast-friends.
    The airlock where they donned their spacesuits had had a window in it; it was a large, empty chamber, a good place for long looks and last thoughts. Brand and Melissa and a fat blonde girl named Canada Cooper had stood there together, looking out on the Jungle and the fast-friends. Canada had laughed. “I thought they’d be different,” she said. “They look just like people, silly naked people standing out in space.”
    And they did. A few stood on the hulls of derelicts, but most of them were just floating in the void, pale against the starlight, small and stern and awesome. Melissa counted fourteen.
    “Hurry up,” the government man had said. Brand hardly remembered what he looked like, but he remembered the voice, the hard flat voice that whipped them all the way out from Earth. They were the candidates, the chosen. They’d held to their dream, they’d passed all the tests, and they were twenty. That was the optimal age for a successful merger, the experts said. Some experts. Adams, the first-merged, had been nearly thirty.
    He remembered Melissa as she put on her suit, slim and clean in a white coverall zipped low, with her crystal pendant hanging between her gold-tan breasts in the imitation gravity of the spinning Station. Her hair was tightly bound. She’d kept it long, her red-blonde glory, to wear between the stars.
    They kissed just before they put on helmets.
    “Love you,” she said. “Love you always.” And he repeated it back to her.
    Then they were outside, them and Canada and the government man, walking on the skin of Changling Station, looking down into the Pit. The arena, the hole in the doughnut, the energy-screened center of the whole thing, the place where dreams came true.
    Brand, young Brand, looked down at where he’d have to go, and smiled. There was nothing below but stars. He’d fall forever, but he didn’t mind. They’d share the stars together.
    “You first,” the government man said to Melissa. She radioed a kiss to Brand, and kicked off toward the Pit.
    She didn’t get far. There were darks in there, three of them, trapped and imprisoned. Once she was beyond the screens, one came for her. The sight was burned deep in Brand’s memory. One moment there was only Melissa, suited, floating away from him towards the far side of the Station. Then light.
    Sudden, instantaneous, quick-dying. A flash, nothing more. Brand knew that. But his memory had elaborated on the moment. In his dreams, it was more prolonged; first her suit flared and was gone and she threw back her head to scream, then her clothes flamed into brilliance, and lastly, lastly, the chain and its crystal. She was naked, wreathed in fire, adrift among the stars. She no longer breathed.
    But she lived.
    A symbiote of man and dark, a thing of matter and energy, an alien, a changling, a reborn creature with the mind of a human and the speed of a dark.