Rhapsody in Black

by Brian Stableford

  And on that other world, light was a treasure of immense value. The aesthetic existence of the culture was built around the qualities and uses of light. The people thrived on light—soft light, kind light, warming light, soothing light, sad light, angry light, jealous light, callous light. The rarity of light within the caverns enabled the people to find all kinds of beauty in the mere presence of it that other cultures, saturated by abundant solar radiation, could not hope to discover.

  Again, nothing of that sort here. The inhabitants of Rhapsody were apparently content with their darkness. If anything, they had come to abhor light in any quantity. Their capital had been illuminated only by dim lanterns, placed haphazardly rather than in the locations where they would be most useful.

  The Rhapsody people had eyes, and used them; there was no doubt about that. But they seemed to be ashamed of their eyesight, and they apparently rejoiced in the hardship of doing without it whenever it was convenient, and often when it was not.

  One could, perhaps, imagine that the warrens here might develop an alternative aesthetic life from that of the other world. One might imagine their coming to appreciate the qualities of darkness, rather than of light, finding beauty and inspiration in shadow and obscurity. But that had not happened either. These people seemed to have no art and no concept of beauty.

  Even their language had been modified only by loss. They had abandoned all the words describing the quality of light: effulgence, brilliance, sheen, iridescence, radiance, lambent, pellucid, lustrous, rutilant, luminiferous, incandescent, coruscate. Likewise, they found no use for terms describing bodies of light; not merely sun, but also nimbus, corona, aurora, spectrum, beam, halo, ignis fatuus and spangle. They did not trouble to differentiate between a glitter and a gleam, a glow and a glare. They were ignorant of the whole appreciation of brightness in all its forms. They lived by muted yellow lamplight, existing in an environment of dismal gloom. As though they were born and lived and died in veils or blindfolds.

  And the corresponding enrichment of their language, which should have adapted their speech to their environment, was simply not there. They knew darkness, and obscurity, and murkiness, and shadow. And that was all. Nothing new to allow them to be in closer harmony with their world. The entire culture seemed to me to be somewhat subhuman.

  Time to move, said the whisper, jerking me from my train of thought.

  I permitted myself a slight groan as I got to my feet. My arms and legs seemed to have seized up completely in belated protest against the long crawl through the narrow fissure by which I had come to this spot. I flexed my fingers and kicked my feet. My hands were torn and the wounds were filthy. They seemed to have no feeling in them at all while I held them still, but as I curled the fingers they burned with pain. The little finger of my right hand caught on my belt as I tried to clean some of the dirt from the palm by rubbing it on my equally filthy shirt. The flashlight which I’d lodged there fell from its precarious position, and clattered on the stone floor.

  Frenziedly, I dropped to my knees and began searching the floor with my injured hands. I found it, and flicked the switch anxiously. The light came on, and for a few moments it seemed abundantly strong. But as my eyes adjusted, I realised that it was very weak indeed, and could not possibly last more than a couple of hours.

  It’s not all that vital, the wind assured me.

  ‘I’m not used to stumbling around in Stygian darkness. I come from a normal world, where people use their eyes.’

  I’ve lived without sight before now, he told me. It’s only a matter of using the other senses at your disposal. You have enough of them. With a little help from me, you can get by.

  ‘I’ll drive my own body, thank you very much,’ I said. ‘There’ll be no more takeovers.’

  Your insistence on my maintaining a wholly passive role in this partnership is quite ridiculous. I can use your body more efficiently than you can. It makes no sense at all to be so determined that you and you alone should exercise control of it.

  ‘It makes sense to me,’ I assured him. ‘And you can’t gain control if I don’t want you to, can you?’

  No.

  Actually, I had my doubts about that. I wasn’t sure exactly how far I could trust what the wind said about the limitation of his abilities. After all, he had never once mentioned the fact that he could assume control over my body until the occasion had actually arisen, at which point he had simply gone and done it.

  I moved off, walking briskly along the passage. I considered turning off the flash and making my way by feel, which would have been moderately easy. But I didn’t like the idea at all.

  ‘I hope we’re going the right way,’ I said pensively. ‘I don’t really want to end up back in the capital with all those angry miners.’

  Don’t you know?

  ‘Do you?’

  It didn’t occur to me to keep track, he said darkly. You’re driving, so I assumed you knew what you were doing.

  ‘I hope I do,’ I said serenely. ‘My sense of direction hasn’t let me down before. Not often, anyhow.’

  Not, of course, that I’d ever been called upon to navigate in a place like this before. In total darkness, with no sky but only solid rock, orientating oneself could hardly be easy. However, I reflected, the tunnel only went two ways. If I had completely lost my sense of direction, there was still a fifty-fifty chance that I was going the right way.

  The passage curved right, and was joined by another coming from the left. I tested the air currents in both corridors. The new one had more or less still air. It swirled around near the entrance, because of the current in the main corridor, but it had no real current of its own. I concluded that it served merely to connect two tunnels which were part of the circuit, and therefore had no part in the circulation itself.

  I followed the airstream around the bend, and on into the darkness. I could have taken the connector and gone through it to the other tunnel, which might have been arterial, and therefore warm. But there didn’t seem a lot of point in searching out a warm tunnel when my real objective was habitation. Creature comforts could be attended to once I’d re-established contact with the human race—preferably some fraction of it which wasn’t after my blood.

  Switch off, directed the wind suddenly.

  I complied, and saw the reason for the directive almost immediately. In front of me, but a long way off, there was a faint glimmer of light. I glanced behind me, but there was only limitless darkness in that direction.

  The light ahead seemed to be extremely feeble, but I knew that it would only be a dim electric bulb and it was probably not as far away as it looked. I hesitated, not over whether to go on or not, but over the matter of the flashlight. If I continued with it on, then I would be just as visible to an observer near the other light-source as that light was to me. It seemed sensible to keep my approach as close a secret as was possible, and therefore I eventually continued in darkness. I moved cautiously, and with a certain amount of trepidation.

  When I reached the light, I found that it was a bit of an anticlimax. It was just a light, hanging from the ceiling. There was another some twenty or thirty yards on, and more after that. I presumed that I was coming close to a town. The abrupt termination of the ‘street-lights’ appeared to have no obvious rationale except that the supply of cable had given out. It seemed a little pointless to light a small fraction of a road, especially when the job was done so inefficiently, but it seemed typical of the way things were done on Rhapsody.

  From my point of view, though, the transition from darkness into light was an important one. Quite apart from allowing me to conserve the power in my flashlight, it had a noticeable psychological effect. I no longer felt like a skulker pretending to be a shadow, no longer a worm in Rhapsody’s dirt, or a rat in Rhapsody’s walls. I could see, and I could be seen, and there were no two ways about it. If I went on, then I walked openly, as a man among men.

  A particularly disreputable man, by all appearances. In the
tentative glow of the yellow bulb, I could see at last how bad I looked. My clothes, from neck to toe, were completely begrimed. They were not simply black, but slick and greasy by virtue of the amount of native protoplasm which I had encountered. My face, I supposed, would be equally filthy. Certainly no one I might encounter was going to take me for an innocent citizen out for a healthy stroll, nor even a worker covered with the dirt of honest toil. It was patently obvious that I had been crawling through places where honest toilers were not wont to crawl.

  But I hadn’t really any choice. I stuck the flashlight firmly in my belt, and set off regardless, striding confidently and trying to appear perfectly self-possessed. But the road was still absolutely deserted. The dust beneath my feet wasn’t the dust of centuries, by any means, but it was obvious that people didn’t tramp back and forth along the corridor every day. Apparently the principle of isolation which was an integral part of the faith of Exclusive Reward applied all down the line. Perhaps the people in the town that I was approaching didn’t even know yet about the state of affairs in the capital. If that was so, they probably wouldn’t be nearly so disposed to clapping me in irons or shooting me dead the moment they saw me.

  That was the nicest thought I’d had in ages.

  On the other hand, what I’d seen of Rhapsody’s children didn’t lead me into thinking I might be welcome. Human or otherwise, most people are willing to talk to people who help them. But even Charlot had had a hard time getting through to Mavra’s associates. Mavra himself had been forthcoming enough, but he was some kind of politician anyway. Anyone I was liable to meet in the caves would presumably be more like Mavra’s hangers-on—Coria and Khemis. And I didn’t much like what I’d seen of them.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It was foggy.

  It was always foggy on Attalus.

  We had returned to the Hooded Swan with all due haste, arriving with a few minutes in hand of midnight. But there wasn’t the slightest sign of Charlot or our precious guests. While we were attending to necessity and using a few rare hours of freedom to unbend our ship-clouded minds, Charlot had apparently taken it into his head to change the schedule.

  ‘Damn him!’ I said.

  ‘He’ll be along,’ said delArco. ‘It’s probably taking them longer than he figured to pack their bags.’

  ‘They can’t own much,’ I muttered. ‘They came away from the Splinters in a spaceship.’

  ‘We could go back to the port and have a drink,’ said Johnny.

  ‘At midnight?’ I said scornfully. ‘This isn’t civilisation, you know.’

  ‘Well,’ said Nick, ‘at least we know that Titus Charlot and his crowd can’t be merrily socialising.’

  ‘More probably cleaning out the local bank,’ I said humourlessly.

  The prospect of a long wait was most unattractive. The crew of any spaceship might be as happy as skylarks zooming their pride and joy between the star-worlds, but when the ship is on terra firma they need time to savour real gravity and real air, and time to imbibe a ration of dirtside living. A starman is a creature of two worlds: out there and down here. Each has its mode of existence. Upship personnel tend to develop agoraphilia on a hop, and it takes a certain amount of downstairs routine to work it off. To be rushed around at breakneck speed and then left to hang about in the fog on the edge of the tarpol was nobody’s idea of a joke.

  By one o’clock (local) I was distinctly annoyed. I hadn’t had any proper sleep for three days. The drug-induced ship cycle just isn’t the same, somehow.

  ‘Where do you suppose they’ve gone to?’ asked Eve.

  ‘We must have been over all the possibilities at least three times during the last hour,’ I snarled. ‘Give it a rest. Talk about the weather, or something. On second thoughts, make it “or something”. I don’t like the weather, either.’

  ‘The port officer’s not there,’ supplied Nick. ‘There’s no light in the reception building. That’s against regulations.’

  ‘So report him,’ I suggested. ‘Hell, there are only two ships down, and we don’t need a baby-sitter.’

  ‘We’ve had one every other landfall we’ve made,’ he pointed out.

  ‘This is Attalus,’ I reminded him. ‘There aren’t any police here because there aren’t any criminals. There’s nothing for the criminals to live off. Besides which, nobody knows we’re here. The last job was a publicity stunt, remember? It wasn’t us the crowds were interested in, it was the Lost Star.’

  ‘We needed that police protection, though,’ he said pensively.

  ‘Nobody’s going to try to assassinate me here,’ I assured him. ‘And you had nothing to worry about even on Hallsthammer. No one has anything against you.’

  The boredom, of course, was solely responsible for the morbid vein of conversation. None of us really thought that anything untoward had happened to Charlot, or was about to happen to us.

  ‘He’s coming,’ said Johnny suddenly.

  ‘About time,’ I said. ‘How many maniacs has he got with him?’

  ‘Can’t tell. Fog.’

  Charlot and his companions went directly to the ship, and we set out to join them. We met halfway across the tarpol.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Charlot briefly. ‘They all wanted to go home, but they weren’t sure that they ought to. It’s been a long, hard argument’

  He really did look somewhat fatigued. The peculiarities of the faithful had apparently been getting on his nerves somewhat.

  There were seven people with him.

  At first glance, they didn’t look very much out of the ordinary. There wasn’t a smile in sight, but it was the middle of an alien night. We didn’t look happy either.

  We loaded up without exchanging any pleasantries. In the interests of getting off the ground without further hanging about, even I gave them a hand with the baggage. There wasn’t much as I’d predicted.

  As we crammed them into the cabins, Titus Charlot identified them by name. I listened, and even learned how to tell them apart, though I wasn’t particularly interested.

  Rion Mavra himself was in no way distinguished. He was of medium height and complexion, with drab features. He looked to me like the perfect picture of a civil servant, although Charlot had described him as a politician. Judging by appearances, I decided that in all probability he was a failed diplomat without a future. At that time, however, I had no idea what kind of qualities it took to be a top man in the Splinters, or what shortcomings one could get away with.

  Cyolus Capra, I remembered, was some sort of blood relative to the boss. He looked more alive than Mavra—insofar as any of them could have been said to look alive. I charitably put it down to the hour and the situation, but it later transpired that the corpse-like expressions were their natural attributes.

  Cyclide, Mavra’s wife, was a small, compact woman who had obviously seen better days and wasn’t trying too hard to convince herself or anybody else that they were still around. She didn’t look pushy enough to be the power behind her husband, or interested enough to have kept pace with him. The Church of the Exclusive Reward apparently had old-fashioned ideas about the place of women in society. Cyclide always seemed to be half a pace behind her husband.

  The two other men, Pavel Coria, and something Khemis—whose first name I forget—looked counterfeit. By which I mean that they gave the appearance of being reasonable imitations of humankind without quite having the feel of the real thing. They reminded me vaguely of the way Lapthorn used to speak about the ‘faceless hordes’ that populated the worlds of the core. ‘Human vermin’ was another expression which he might have used. And Lapthorn, unlike me, was quite an admirer of his own species. I took an instant dislike to these two, and they never did the slightest thing which might tempt me to dispel it as an overly harsh first impression formed under unfortunate circumstances.

  The remaining two females did not seem to be attached to Coria and/or Khemis, and neither did they lay claim to any relationship with the Mavra family. One of the
m was called Camilla, and was very young and very plain. Her existence seemed quite irrelevant, save that she occupied a certain amount of space.

  Angelina, on the other hand, was just young enough, and far from plain. She was the only one of the seven who clearly showed symptoms of having been born and bred in a warren. Her skin was dead-white, and had an odd, lustrous quality which made it look silvery when illuminated obliquely. Her hair was very pale blonde, and also had a noticeable sheen. Her eyes were pale grey, and her lips bloodless. In addition, she had a fragility of frame and feature which made her ghostliness seem very appropriate and even beautiful. Very few people are actually suited to the appearance of etiolation, but Angelina was one of them. I found Angelina most definitely attractive.

  It didn’t strike me as particularly odd that Angelina was the only one whose aspect betrayed her origin. The cave-dwellers with whom I’d been associated in the past had all sported magnificent suntans and hair all colours of the rainbow. All courtesy of lamps, skin salves and bottled pigment, of course. It did occur to me, as I looked at Angelina, that Rhapsody didn’t have the sort of culture which would go overboard on cosmetics—and, in fact, was extremely unlikely to be able to come by supplies of cosmetics. But Mavra and his friends had presumably been on-surface for some time, now, and would have been forced to adopt a fake suntan simply for protective purposes. They had presumably dyed their hair muddy brown in order to avoid standing out among the populace of their host planet.

  Once I was in the cradle, preparing for the lift, I eliminated all thought of our human cargo and its place of origin from my consciousness. But the wear and tear of the previous trip, coupled with the highly unsatisfactory Attalus landfall, had left its calling card. I was unusually slow, and I could feel an edginess about my nervous state which was most definitely out of the ordinary. For the first time since I took control of the Swan I missed a transfer. I had a grossly inexperienced engineer underneath me, of course, but I really don’t think it would have made any difference if it had been Rothgar. Johnny did nothing wrong—it was me who made the mistake. I was surprised, and extremely annoyed. I was, when all was said and done, the self-confessed best pilot in the known galaxy. (As good as I could be, at any rate.)