The Star Fisherman
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Robert F. Young was a Hugo nominated author known for his lyrical and sentimental prose. His work appeared in Amazing Stories, Fantastic Stories, Startling Stories, Playboy, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Galaxy Magazine, and Analog Science Fact & Fiction.
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The Star Fisherman - Robert F. Young
The Star Fisherman
by Robert F. Young
©2020 Positronic Publishing
The Star Fisherman is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, locales or institutions is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except for brief quotations for review purposes only.
ISBN 13: 978-1-5154-4612-5
The Star Fisherman
Men have fought and died, sung and cried, stolen and lied for love. Christopher Stark did all of these—and more. Over his life loomed two gigantic images: that of the beautiful Priscilla, 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, hand for hand, foot for foot. —Deuteronomy 19: 21
Christopher Stark was an almost
man. He was almost brilliant, he was almost tall, he was almost 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 man’s back. Christopher Stark’s tiger clawed him incessantly , and sometimes the pain was too much for him to bear. He could never stop wanting to be something more than what he really was, and he could never stop trying to convince other people that he was something more than what he really was. He convinced quite a few of them in his day, and in the end, when he was dying, he even convinced himself.
When he was twelve years old he boasted to his boyhood sweetheart that someday he would buy himself a shining catamaran and set forth upon the Trans-solar Sea and cast his net into the black deep and snare a thousand fishes for her hair. His boyhood sweetheart eventually married the son of a sausage-maker and became a princess, but Chris, true to 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, but thanks to his tiger he perfected it to a degree that put potentially greater fishermen to shame. He spurned the berths he could easily have obtained on the innumerable fishing-company trawlers and fished alone, and the catches that he brought in to the Tethys fisheries were tremendous. So were the hangovers that he took back with him to the Trans-solar Sea. As the years passed, he grew more and more contemptuous of his colleagues, and fished in ever deeper waters; 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 a planet that, in common with its seven sisters, was just as dead as he was. Chris did not snare the body deliberately—he knew nothing of its presence, in fact, until he pulled in his net, and even then he did not recognize the bulky space-suited figure entangled in the magnetic mesh for what it really was. Oftentimes ordinary meteors t raveled with the much smaller, diamond-like variety that men coveted and that women wore in their hair, and it wasn’t until after he dragged the net and its contents from the casting deck, through the outer and inner cargo locks and 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 a shower of glittering fishes.
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