《The Star Fisherman 》作者：- Robert F. Young【EPUB】

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THE STAR FISHERMAN By ROBERT F. YOUNG Men have fought and died sung and cried stolen and lied for love. Christopher Stark didall of these—and more. Over his life loomed two gigantic images: that of the beautifulPriscilla and that of the mysterious fisher-figure in the reaches of space. And thine eye shall not pity but life shall go for life eye for eye tooth for tooth handfor hand foot for foot. —Deuteronomy 19:21 CHRISTOPHER Stark was an quotalmostquot man. He was almost brilliant he was almost tall he wasalmost broad-shouldered he was almost well-proportioned and he was almost handsome. His self-image on the other hand was everything that he was not. Now a self-image which is not reasonably in keeping with reality can become a tiger on a mansback. Christopher Starks tiger clawed him incessantly and sometimes the pain was too muchfor him to bear. He could never stop wanting to be something more than what he really was andhe could never stop trying to convince other people that he was something more than what hereally was. He convinced quite a few of them in his day and in the end when he was dying heeven convinced himself. When he was twelve years old he boasted to his boyhood sweetheart thatsomeday he would buy himself a shining catamaran and set forth upon the Trans-solar Sea andcast his net into the black deep and snare a thousand fishes for her hair. His boyhoodsweetheart eventually married the son of a sausage-maker and became a princess but Chris trueto his word and true to his tiger bought his catamaran and set forth and cast his net. Deep-space fishing was an occupation for which he was as ill-suited as he was for winning women butthanks to his tiger he perfected it to a degree that put potentially greater fishermen toshame. He spurned the berths he could easily have obtained on the innumerable fishing-companytrawlers and fished alone and the catches that he brought in to the Tethys fisheries weretremendous. So were the hangovers that he took back with him to the Trans-solar Sea. As theyears passed he grew more and more contemptuous of his colleagues and fished in ever deeperwaters and finally one day in the autumn of his youth he cast his net and snared a dead man.Thus his story ended—and thus his story begins. THE dead man was drifting in the Alpha Centauri Archipelago some ten million miles from aplanet that in common with its seven sisters was just as dead as he was. Chris did not snarethe body deliberately—he knew nothing of its presence in fact until he pulled in his netand even then he did not recognize the bulky spacesuited figure entangled in the magnetic meshfor what it really was. Oftentimes ordinary meteors traveled with the much smaller diamond-like variety that men coveted and that women wore in their hair and it wasnt until after hedragged the net and its contents from the casting deck through the outer and inner cargo locksand into the brightly illumined hold that he realized the true nature of his catch. The minute he deactivated the magnetic field the figure collapsed limply to the deck amid ashower of glittering quotfishes.quot Carefully Chris unscrewed and removed the rime-coated helmet.The face down into which he gazed was the face of an old old man and yet despite its cob-webbed eye-corners its sunken cheeks and cadaverous complexion it emanated a swiftly-fadingradiance that cast doubt upon the recent death that the rolled-up eyes bespoke. Neverthelessdeath had come and it had come to stay though whether it had come before or after its victimhad been cast adrift in space was a question to which Chris could supply no answer. He cut away the rest of the suit revealing an age-shrunken body clad in leisure-class clothingthat was much too large for it. Methodically he went through the pockets. They contained noidentification of any kind but they did contain a small roll of bluebacks. He also found apen an unwritten-in notebook and a glossy new photograph. He threw the pen and the notebookaway and pocketed the blue-backs. They would compensate him partly at least for the full catchhe had been robbed of. Finally he looked at the photograph. He was never quite the same afterward. IT was a photograph of a girl. A severe black dress enshrouded her from neck to ankles and ablack bonnet with an immaculate white brim imprisoned her hair. It was an ensemble designed tohide rather than to enhance feminine charms and yet her loveliness flamed forth with avividness that drove back the gray and brooding shadows of the room in which she stood. Hertawny hair peeped in waves and ringlets from the edges of its bonnet-prison haloing her faceand softening the superimposed sternness of her mouth and chin. The face itself was heart-shaped the green eyes were wide-apart as were the Slavic cheekbones. The cheeks were thinnerthan they should have been and the nose was slightly turned up but neither defect coulddisturb so close an approach to perfection. And as for the severe styling of her dress it onlyserved to define the flatness of her stomach and the fullness of her thighs and to emphasizewith a sort of sartorial litotes the fact that her breasts were in blossom. Christopher Starkturned the photograph over with trembling hands. On the back a name and address had beenwritten in spidery unsure letters: Priscilla Petrovna Miltonia Europa. Yes he thought itwould have to be Europa for where else but on Europa did women dress to drive men away Whereelse but on Europa was sex synonymous with sin He had never been there himself but he hadtalked with star fishermen who had been. In the heavens of Europa massive Jupiter brought tomind Hell itself and as a result Catholic Protestant and Jew had merged to found a newPuritanism. It takes a puritanical god to cope with a visible hell and on the barren plains ofEuropa the ghosts of John Milton and John Bunyan walked side by side and woe betided those whocrossed their paths. Standing among the tiny piscine meteors that would someday adorn the hairand dangle from the pierced noses of the women of Earth New Earth nee Venus and Tethysstanding beside the dead man who had robbed him of two-thirds of his catch standing there inthe hold of his robot-brained catamaran rooted to the steel deck by his magnetic fishingboots Christopher Stark looked at the photograph of the girl again and knew his destiny. Thewomen in his life other than those he had bought and paid for had been few and far betweenbut there had been enough of them for him to know that the woman whose likeness he stooddevouring now was the one for him. He gazed down at the dead man. Her grandfather probably possibly her great grandfather. Ineither event Priscilla Petrovna would be beholden to the man who returned him to Europa for adecent burial. He Christopher Stark would be that man. Supplies could be obtained on Europafrom the N.E.S.N. contingent stationed there—at twice their original price perhaps but theycould be obtained. And so could fuel. He needed both supplies and fuel Christopher Stark didand he needed something else far more. He needed love. He had needed it all his life and theneed had created an emptiness in him that he had been at a loss to understand till now. HE kicked off his boots and slipped out of his tanks and togs then he ascended the hatchladder to the galley. From the galley it was but a few steps to the control room. As he steppedthrough the doorway the port-viewscreen caught his eye and he stopped in his tracksmomentarily stunned. He had never seen the constellation before. He had not known in factthat such a constellation existed. The port-viewscreen employed a 100quot cathode tube and reduced objects to one-third of theiractual size and yet it was barely able to frame the star pattern that the port-camera wastelecasting. The pattern delineated a macrocosmic star fisherman casting a macrocosmic net. Compared to him Orion was a pygmy Andromeda a baby girl. The stars of his arras andshoulders ran the gamut from red to blue from giant to dwarf from Population I to PopulationII. His eyes were supernovae his hair was a cosmic storm. The pale