Boxmaster 
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Lyle Odirin studied the velvet blackness inside his eyelids, holding his breath against the ache of loss. It would abate any moment now. It always did.

Outside his private world, the attorney's voice repeated, "Boxmaster, when did you lose contact with your Number Three box?"

His Guildmaster had assured Odirin that eventually the memory wouldn't hurt so much. But the Guildmaster had never lost a shard to a black hole. No other Boxmaster had.

Odirin probed at the sore cavity in his mind where his awareness of his Number Three box and the shard it had housed ought to have been. I've got to do this now, before I lose my nerve.

"Boxmaster?" The Prosecuting Attorney's tone was brisk but sympathetic. "Boxmaster Odirin?" He was a clean shaven, tanned, middle aged human simply intent on doing his job.

Odirin studied the courtroom, trying to focus on the reality of it, to distance the memory. Simulated Earth wood paneling with matching benches gave the room an exotic look. In the spectator's gallery, journalists representing a dozen species tensed, recorders at the ready. On the floor in front of the judge's bench, a Blackbox Display Stage flickered, already cued up to Lyle Odirin's bodyfields. Only the Stage's receptacle for a Blackbox was empty.

Lyle averted his gaze. "I'm sorry, will you repeat the question, sir?"

A murmur rippled through the gallery. The reporters had made much of his disoriented condition. Financial markets had been dipping and soaring for days as rumors about his ability to testify had mushroomed.

"When did you lose contact with your Box Number Three?"

"After - " His throat clenched tight over the words. Swallowing hard, he forced out the words. "After it entered the black hole." Just don't remember it.

"Did it survive long enough to debrief to you?"

"Yes - yes it did." He had to go through with this - now, while the data was still fresh in his mind. When the grief was gone, so would the data be.

"Will you step to the display stage and show us what you obtained?"

Routine. Just routine.

Lyle rose to step down from the witness chair, the Defense Attorney leaped up. "Objection, Your Honor!" He waved a datacase. "I have here expert depositions stating that in the absence of the recording Blackbox, the display stage may show the subjectively distorted recall of the Boxmaster, rather than the objective facts the stage would normally provide."

The Prosecutor strode to his own table and seized a similar datacase. "Your Honor, I have documentation to the effect that the objectivity of the display decreases with time. Today, Boxmaster Odirin's display will be far more objective than verbal testimony. Tomorrow that will not be the case. May I approach the bench?"

The judge beckoned the two attorneys toward her. She was a stickler for the archaic etiquette, but the gaze she turned toward Odirin was uncertain.

As the two men approached, Odirin blotted the beads of sweat from his face and said quietly, "Your Honor, I'd prefer to do this now. The economic consequences - " His was the first Blackbox report available from an accident scene in the last eighty major disasters. Never before had boxes been lost at such a rate. "Please, Your Honor." His head ached and he couldn't concentrate. He admitted to himself he was more than a little afraid of reliving Number Three's demise.

The Prosecuting Attorney, who had charged Regency Spacelines with criminal negligence in the loss of their passenger liner, Wings of Man, expected Odirin's Display to clinch his case. The Regency Defense Attorney apparently thought so too.

Odirin had no idea what was stored in his own mind. He only knew that his Number Three had given that final debriefing as valiantly as any human could have - as if it were a living entity.

He dragged his mind back from the edge of madness. The sentience of shard was a common delusion among those who'd lost a box, but succumbing to it left a Boxmaster useless to the Guild and to themselves. There can't be anything worse than losing a Box to a black hole if it's made me begin to think like that. So if the worst has already happened, and I survived it, then I can do this debriefing. I can.

" . . . so, Your Honor, I suggest we clear the court even of the jury and record the display. Later, after studying these expert opinions, you may rule on the recording's admissibility in this case. There is legal precedent - "

"I know the precedents," the judge interrupted. She cast a glance at Odirin who met her eyes steadily.

She motioned him to the Display Stage. "Bailiff, clear the court."

With just the two attorneys, the judge, and Odirin's Guildmaster Adrun Rudy observing, Odirin placed himself at the stage controls. He didn't give himself a chance to think. He thrust his hands into the sleeves of the receptacles and grasped the contacts, throwing his mind into that peculiar state where the images recorded by a shard and filtered through a boxmaster's mind could project onto the stage.

Instantly, blackness surrounded him. Stars appeared, and there was the awareness of the burnished skin of Wings of Man surrounding him as if it were his own skin. The solar sails were deployed full to the particle wind. After the initial instant of breath-stopping wonder, Odirin announced, "You may begin, Guildmaster."

Having debriefed the shard before it perished, Odirin carried within his subconscious the Shard's entire holistic awareness of the ship, the instruments, every living thing aboard including a small colony of rats in the hold, and every instrument, every electrical current. He was the ship and the immediate surroundings. But the Stage was a linear device. They would have to elicit the data they wanted by questioning or they'd be here the better part of a century.

The attorneys had submitted lists of questions to the Guildmaster, who had the skill - as a former Boxmaster - to get at the salient points, leaving no doubt as to what had really happened.

Guildmaster Rudy, voice low and controlled, guided Odirin to the moments before the event. Odirin lost awareness of the voice and the questions.

Wings of Man sped through the void. The sails were not deployed. The ship thrummed with the beat of the Wenshiss Drive, skimming over reality like a water bird taking off from the surface of a lake.

His Number Three Shard reveled in the sensation, a luscious thrill unlike anything the human nervous system could encompass. Again, for the briefest moment, Odirin was convinced the shards accepted this as payment for their work.

Abruptly, a shattering blackness crackled through the Wenshiss fields, the engine thrum stopped in mid-beat, and without warning they were racing through real space, tumbling out of control.

On the bridge, the watch officers worked frantically calling out damage reports. The scene slowed, taking in each officer's performance, each decision, each word, in careful sequence, all against the ship's own clock display.

Then the scene shifted back in time, to Engineering, and again the clock rolled forward as each officer performed flawlessly.

Engineering was a cavernous space with gleaming casings looming out of the deck, control boards glittering along all visible edges. The deck was an open gridwork, non-conductive to all the different forces they manipulated here. Overhead, access catwalks and crane riggings had folded out of the way, secured against rough maneuvers. Technicians in immaculate protective coveralls sporting the embroidered Regency Line patches labored with a subdued frenzy.

"Chief's crazy," commented one. "We'll never get this fixed without a repair dock. And we'll be a year getting there."

"I heard the Captain's S O S was answered. She may have gotten us a tow before this static isolated us."

"Jubee says her S O S wasn't heard. He's alternate Chief Com Officer. He ought to know. Said this is some new kind of stuff."

"I heard that, too. Don't believe everything you hear."

"Listen. Too many ships have disappeared without a trace - not even their blackboxes turning up. I say we've fallen into 'it' - whatever 'it' is."

Another man in an officer's gold uniform snapped, "Save it. I don't want to hear that kind of talk!"

They snapped to attention. "Aye, Chief."

When the Chief Engineer had gone, they looked at each other and shrugged. One muttered, "Nevertheless - I'm telling you. It'll be a year before we see port again - if then."

The scene shifted back in time again.

They saw the Captain roll out of bed, pull her uniform on with a few swift motions, and dash toward the bridge, talking to her bridge officers on her hand com, sending the S O S all the while she arranged clothes, and placated disturbed passengers.

When she arrived on the bridge, she was impeccably uniformed, and fully informed. As with all her other officers, she performed each move, each decision, with a calm precision that would have done a combat officer proud.

At length, position and course replotted, the Captain ordered, "Deploy sails. It may take us nearly a year, but we'll make Horransport on our own. I just hope we can raise someone to take our passengers off."

Wings of Man had been on a business commuter run. Everyone aboard was in a hurry.

Ordinarily sails were used to accelerate away from a star, out to where they could engage the Wenshiss drive. But the sails were also a backup, in case of engine failure.

An alarm pierced the relative quiet of the bridge. Through a speaker, a voice announced, "Proximity Alarm. Ship approaching through hyperspace. Stand by for specs."

The Captain leaned over her Com Officer. "Let me see."

"Sorry, Captain, the interference is vicious. I'm not even sure that's a ship." He pointed to a bright spot among the static on his display screen.

"It's the source of the interference, isn't it?"

He twisted his head about to look up at her, assessed her expression, then just nodded silently.

A grim air invaded the bridge. Everyone had heard that quiet exchange. Finally, someone muttered. "Pirates."

Someone else whispered, "Can't be. No such thing in space. That's a scare story invented by newsmongers to explain the rash of disasters we've been having."

"Nevertheless, it's pirates," asserted someone.

The ship gathered speed now under the deployed wings, but agonizingly slowly. Even their maneuvering engines could do no good. The other ship dropped into normal space and closed on them at a leisurely pace that was all the more menacing for that. Static increased to a roar that forced them to shut down most of their sensors and detectors.

During the long hours of that approach, telescoped by Guildmaster Rudy's questioning, the Engineers kept up their frantic and highly inventive attempts to fix the Wenshiss drive. Eventually, however, the Captain had to announce the situation to the passengers. They were isolated, helpless, and the objective of a ship that refused to answer hail.

When the action finally came, it came all at once.

The Captain ordered, "Drop our Log Torpedo." It was a casing with a microscopic Wenshiss drive programmed to home to Regency's main repair dock.

"Log Torpedo away, Captain."

Seconds later, the screens registered the torpedo blip among the static, and then a huge orange flare that died to nothing in moments. Simultaneously, the big ship approaching split off a smaller ship, and then something smacked into the Wings of Man knocking people off their feet.

Someone got to a screen and shouted, "Captain - our sails are gone!"

The aft viewer showed the gossamer constructs floating away behind them. The Environmental Board flashed red indicating seams leaking atmosphere.

The proximity alarms went off. The smaller ship was on a collision course.

"Silence that," ordered the Captain. And when the officers lunged to begin the collision drill, she barked, "Hold it! Keep your stations. Computer, this is the Captain. Authorization - all personnel, all passengers, full access to the arms lockers. Acknowledge."

"Acknowledged, Captain," came the computer's voice as the order flashed on all screens.

"Give me 'Shipwide,' Jubee. This is the Captain speaking. An unidentified ship is approaching with apparent intention to board. It has fired on us, and destroyed our Log Torpedo, as well as our sails. Those who wish, may arm themselves from ship's stores. Non-combatants report to the Grand Saloon. Those able to fight, stand by for directions to the point where they breach our hull." She cut the connection, then breathed, "May God save us all."

Then she issued quick orders for a skeleton crew to remain on the bridge, and she led the rest, well armed, into the corridors to lead combat squads.

They'd barely begun organizing when they heard the hiss-crackle of a grappling field hitting the ship. The pirate ship planted a self-sealing personnel tube to the hull, and a few seconds of cutting created an adequate hatch.

Though the crew and armed passengers acquitted themselves well, the pirates were in battle armor, mismatched, repaired and salvaged, but effective battle armor. They killed wantonly as they spread out.

Odirin watched in horror as a detachment of pirates in officers' uniforms swept in behind the battle-armored troops. The officers marched in formation, protecting one man in the middle. Odirin got a good long look at his carriage, his face, his gestures, and was sure he'd know him again, anywhere. He was carrying something cupped in his right hand. At intervals, he consulted the instrument and issued gruff orders to his escort.

The pirate officers went directly to the access hatch leading into the structural interior of the ship, to the point where Odirin himself had attached his Number Three Blackbox to the frame of the ship.

That point was not listed on any plans. It was a point Odirin himself had chosen and had never recorded. There was no way they could have known where it was. And no instrument Odirin had ever heard of could detect a box or its shard except its own monitor made from a piece of the shard itself. Yet these men went right to Odirin's box.

Odirin had hardly absorbed that when the man in the center stepped forward and out of nowhere two great white blocks of some gritty material loomed into Odirin's consciousness, coming at him from either side, emitting a sizzling, screaming static that addled his thoughts and jangled his nerves.

And then darkness.

Dimly, he felt his hands come free of the Stage's contacts, felt his body sag limply to the floor. His head hit hard, but he barely felt it, barely heard the stage's recorder snap off.

For one suspended moment, he relived his final contact with his Number Three as his ship chased it through space. Interlaced with his Three was another presence in his mind, rasping on his nerves like the screech of rusty machinery. There was only a moment's wincing pain, and it was gone, replaced again by the overwhelming white static.

In a moment of overload, the static was gone. He was a Blackbox in space, alone, naked among the stars. A dark blot of nothing grew before him. Time began to ripple, and he dipped in and out of consciousness.

A long, long time later, the dark blot was quite large and no longer frightening. He was going to die. But seven years of freedom among the stars had been worth it.

Without warning, out of nowhere, loomed a familiar joyous presence. Lyle Odirin, his Master.

And one debt remained to be paid. Even in the great shadow of death, it had to be paid. Rousing to the effort, he summoned those last, excruciating moments of the Wings of Man and gave them to his Boxmaster.

Barely had he finished when the darkness lapped at the edge of his being, eating at him, eroding him particle by particle, until he felt himself being sucked away. . . ..

". . . heart stopped. Try again."

Great jolting pain.

". . . that's got it!"

". . . no, he's gone."

"You can't give up! He's got nine boxes. We can't afford to lose him."

"You don't understand. Brain damage can - "

"Lyle!"

The voice was close, low pitched, commanding.

"Lyle, we need you!"

"Here, try this."

A sharp hiss. More pain. Then a cheerful little sound perked in time with his heart. The inside of his nose got cold with the returning breath.

"Got it! He's going to make it."

I stopped breathing. I died. People who died often had strange hallucinations. He opened his eyes to a sea of faces that swayed sickeningly over him as he labored to orient himself, and gradually remembered. Pirates! They shoved my box into a black hole - to get rid of it! So I couldn't trace them.

They're not going to get away with this. Not if it's the last thing I do.

Guildmaster Rudy was grinning down at him. Odirin grinned back. Rudy said, "Welcome back, Boxmaster."

Odirin blinked, taking stock. The aching agony of loss had abated now that he'd retrieved the memories, just as Rudy had predicted. "Good to be back," he answered his Guildmaster. "Remind me to believe you, next time you tell me something."

#

Three days later, when they released him from the hospital, Odirin answered the summons to Rudy's office in the Guild Hall on Alexis.

He picked his way across the dispatcher's forum, peripherally aware of the activity at the rows of desks. Each dispatcher's desk was surrounded by a transparent light curtain which displayed the data currently in use; starmaps, locations of Boxmasters' ships, locations of boxes, lists of customers, terms of contracts with customers, and a growing category, waiting lists of unfilled requests for boxes.

Odirin could read the data displays from the outside of the curtains just as handily as the dispatchers on the inside. When his shoulder brushed the glowing fields, he could even hear the dispatchers talking to the main system that controlled the data for the region centered at Alexis.

As he passed the trouble desk at the back of the room, he heard angry voices raised in a shouting match and couldn't help pausing to listen.

" . . . if not, I'm going to lose this election! And there goes the last human voice in the Assembly! Can the Guild afford that?"

"The Guild won't plead guilty in court. Our every move has been meticulously legal."

Odirin now recognized the distinguished face on the light curtain, Alexis's famous Planetary Representative who had been a staunch supporter of the Guild's interests in Alexis politics. He wore a hint of a gray beard edging his jaw, and a proudly bald pate that had been fashionably tattooed decades ago.

"Humans are the only ones who believe the Guild's word!" The Representative explained with exaggerated patience, "If the Guild hadn't pulled that box out of Doca's pharmaceutical plant, the Boxmaster would have caught the mutation of the virus in the vats before the bad vaccine it produced killed twenty thousand Itsinen. The Itsinen blame the Guild, and the Guild is all human. I'm human, and the only Guild supporter left in the Alexis Assembly! The Itsinen blame me for the deaths, and over half my constituency is Itsinen. Plead guilty and pay the reparations, or the Guild will be forced to move this headquarters off Alexis."

Odirin moved on, a pall of gloom settling over him. He knew the situation was even worse than the Representative portrayed. With the losses they'd been taking, the Guild simply didn't have the boxes available to cover all requests.

The boxes were the only recorders that didn't force a business to select beforehand what sort of data to collect, or to decide in advance what questions the collected data would have to answer.

Only a box could provide all the data after an unpredictable disaster, data necessary to preventing the same disaster from happening again. Boxes could prevent disasters by spotting mechanical deterioration of the interiors of machinery and structures before failure. Interstellar government, business and industry had come to rely on box surveillance because it was the only truly objective data admissible in a court of law. Any mechanically collected recording could be faked or altered, but a boxmaster's testimony could not.

Perhaps it was unhealthy, but interstellar civilization had come to rest on the hard bedrock of Guild reliability. With a box on site, there was no such thing as an inexplicable disaster. If someone wanted to destroy the Union of Stars, a good place to start would be the Guild.

Odirin flinched away from that thought before it could fully form and buried it deep. He had nine boxes in the field, and a pirate to catch. That bunch of mangy criminals were an annoyance, not a menace.

At the back of the dispatcher's forum, he found Rudy's waiting room. The Receptionist, an elderly woman who had been a Boxmaster and in her turn a Guildmaster as well, passed him in with a sympathetic nod. "Brace yourself, youngster, the worst is yet to come."

"That's what I like about you, Grandmother. Always an optimist."

"Save your sense of humor. You'll need it. And don't call me grandmother. I'm not."

He laughed. "How do you know?" Boxmasters seldom married, except perhaps another Boxmaster. However both men and women donated genetic material to the anonymous gene pool.

She answered with a raised brow, and ordered him, "Straighten your leathers, youngster, and get on in there."

Automatically, Odirin yanked at the jacket of his black thanahide uniform and checked his reflection. There were a few new wrinkles around his eyes which sparkled darkly under his sheltering brows. He was clean shaven, square jawed, and trim waisted enough that in the famous uniform, he looked like a recruiting poster.

Thanahide enhanced the human frame, and always felt comfortable. Boxmasters were never voluntarily "out of uniform." Perhaps, he thought, it really is made from the hide of the mythical beast of the planet Lorell.

Odirin walked up the short hall to the Guildmaster's door where he put his hand on the security lock. Grandmother had raised his spirits. Maybe it was simply that she had survived it all. But then, in her day, there had been no pirates.

The doors swung open to reveal an expanse of dark indigo carpet leading to a draped wall. Flags of the planet Alexis and the Union of Stars flanked the desk, with the Guild's banner draped on the wall behind it. Adrun Rudy occupied the desk chair while one of the seats before it held a Kethsem aboriginal.

That one individual wiped out Odirin's awareness of the conversation pit in one corner, the data storage racks that circled the room, the refreshment robot that rolled about opening its bins and doors as ordered, and the breathtaking view displayed on one huge wall monitor. It showed a city spread out below them, as if they were at the top of the tallest building. The sun was setting over that city casting a dim ruby glow, the only light in the office.

Kethsem's sun provided such lighting.

As Odirin entered, the aboriginal stood and turned. He barely came up to Odirin's shoulder, his limbs straight as machined shafts, showing no musculature. He sported a feathery fuzz on his head that sparkled as if scaled and moved with the shifts of his emotional state.

There was nothing unusual about the Kethsem, except that he wore the white thanahide uniform of a Guild apprentice.

An icy chill trickled through Odirin's nerves. A Boxmaster who had lost a box then had to train an apprentice. It was a promotion of sorts, and extra pay came with the extra hazard.

No, Odirin protested silently. I wouldn't have time to track down those pirates.

"Boxmaster Odirin," said Rudy, "may I introduce your new apprentice, Yran - I'm sorry I can't pronounce the rest of it."

Yran politely enunciated his name.

"Yran," Odirin repeated. There had never been a nonhuman in the Guild before. "Guildmaster, may I speak with you privately?"

"Will you excuse us a moment, Yran. We have some unfinished business." He led the way into the hall.

With the door closed, Odirin gritted, "Adrun! You promised I wouldn't have to take an apprentice yet!"

"That was when they were saying you wouldn't survive the hour! Besides, as far as I knew then, the whole class had been assigned."

"Oh, you mean I'm getting the one nobody else would accept?"

"Prejudice, Lyle?"

"No, Adrun. Shock. You know I was a lousy apprentice and a worse journeyman. I was never any good until I could work alone. And I've never trained an apprentice before. Why me? Why him? Nonhumans always fail. Is someone setting me up?"

Rudy sighed. "No. And don't assume Yran is going to fail. He's the best nonhuman candidate the Guild Academy has yet produced. Getting him is an honor!"

What a great way to keep Odirin too busy to hunt for pirates. But he hadn't mentioned his determination to violate Guild policy and go after them himself. "Adrun, it'll take two years to get him through his apprenticeship, maybe more. I'd go crazy cooped - "

"Less than two years, if his record is any indication."

"If he's that good, he should be assigned to someone with experience. A success with a nonhuman would go a long way toward defusing the prejudice against the Guild."

"It's more critical than that. Do you realize how many Boxmasters we've lost these last two years? We never were a popular choice for youngsters looking for a career they could expect to live to retire from. Now - well. The talent for handling shard may be strongest in humans, but it still isn't all that common. In the last year, we've admitted only six humans to the Guild Academy. We have to fill the gap with nonhumans. If Yran makes it through his apprenticeship, we'll be getting more applicants from other species too."

"Listen Adrun, give him to someone else, someone who's done this before. I wouldn't know where to start with a - a Kethsem. I seem to recall they have three sexes?"

"Largely irrelevant."

"Guildmaster, don't do this to me. I want to check on my other boxes, then tackle those damn pirates. From what I saw in that display - at least now we know why we've been losing so many boxes - and so many Boxmasters who try to retrieve their boxes after a disaster. It's not all just random bad luck. It's an actual enemy destroying boxes. Adrun, we can't let them get away with this!"

"We won't. But it's not your job. I'm not belittling what you did in that courtroom, Lyle. By the way, the judge decided to admit your testimony. And the press - "

"I've seen the reports. And I've a lot more to contribute. We can get those bastards."

"I agree."

"Then why are you sidelining me with an apprentice!"

"You're up for it. It's your next step. Believe me, Lyle, it's necessary - for your development. We know what we're doing. Teaching is the best way to recover."

"I'm over the loss. Quicker than I ever expected."

"I know. You're the best. And he deserves the best. He's brighter than he looks. And he's earned his whites with top honors."

"Is he really a he?"

"I don't know. If it matters to you, ask him."

"Rudy!" protested Odirin.

"Make it Guildmaster. Let's go."

Silently, Odirin followed his Guildmaster back into the office. The Kethsem was sitting calmly, hands on knees, head slightly bowed. He looked up as they came in, apprehensive.

Odirin put on his best smile. "So you're my new apprentice! Sorry to keep you waiting."

But I doubt the pirates will wait.

End Chapter One