And All the Stars a Stage by James Blish

Author:James Blish
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Sff
ISBN: 9780575104129
Publisher: Avon Books (NY)
Published: 1973-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

96 fames Blish

elsewhere in the fleet. Otherwise, what each ship found to say was very much like what all the others found to say. The entries became steadily shorter, the attendance at the transceiver more and more perfuncm tory; often, now, what was written down in the Log was not the full text of the message, and sometimes the message was not entered at all.

“Birn, just what are you doing now?” Ailiss’ voice snapped down from the

RIF bridge. “Trying to figure out what thirty per cent of three is, again?” “I was thinking,” Jorn said slowly.

‘Well, do it on sack time. I need those fleet angular momentum corrections

now.~

“They’ve been on your clipboard for the last twenty minutes.”

“Um. Oh. High time. Well, find something else to do. Something productive.”

Jorn suppressed a retort and bent to faking a job. She had caught him

during one of those brief periods —once rare, but they were becoming

commoner now -when be was ahead of schedule; but he was not going to let

the matter turn into another session of snapping and snarling over nothing

if he could help it. He had bad more than enough of those already.

Ailiss O’Kung was in fact tolerating the strains of the new society rather

more poorly, on the whole, than Jorn would have expected. Jorn found the

reaction thoroughly unpleasant. Perhaps the only compensation to be derived

from it from his point of view -and it was mainly a gain only for his

curiosity, though it did slightly increase his respect for Ailiss at a time

when he had lost almost all other traces of itwas that through these

quarrels he managed to learn something about her background. She had never

let a scrap of that kind of information slip out during the training

period, and thereafter there simply hadn7t

And all the Stars a Stage 97 been time, until now. What prompted her suddenly to volunteer what she had so long withheld was unknown to Jorn, but it was his guess-and a good one, he suspected on very little evidence-that she felt forced by her situation into using it to bold her emotional “altitude,” not only over Jorn, but in the whole hierarchy of the shipboard peck-order.

And she had been indeed highly placed back home: a scientific attach6 to a

member of the Matriarch’s cabinet, and the youngest person of either sex

ever to hold the post. She had surrendered it on her own initiative to join

The Project, which had had no such high place to offer her, though to be

sure it bad placed her as high as it could.

This was admirable, doubtless. But it was no longer of any moment: an empty

title in a discarded history, without bearing on the world of the lavelin.

That Ailiss referred to it at all now meant only that she had failed to

reconcile herself to the deprivation of power, and the reversal of status,

which she herself had engi” neered. In this, though perhaps she was an

extxeme case (or perhaps not), she was far from alone on board the ship;

the affliction was as general among the women as a low-grade contagion, and

it was ever present.

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