The Fenris Device

by Brian Stableford

  “You can talk all you bloody well like,” I said. “But I’m not going back down there again.”

  “We’ll talk about it later,” said Charlot, ominously, and quietly, because Ecdyon was busy clicking away at Stylaster in Gallacellan.

  “It’s impossible,” I said.

  “That’s for me to decide.”

  “Like hell it is,” I said. “You only own this ship. I fly it and Nick is the captain. The only man who can order me to fly back into that hell is Captain delArco. Now, he knows I’m serious when I say it can’t be done, and he’s not going to order me to do it. So legally, Mr. Charlot, you can’t touch me.”

  He looked at me with pure poison in his gaze. All the politeness and the helpfulness and the almost-friendship that we’d built up on Pharos was gone. He was an old man. He was a sick man. If there was one thing he wanted to do more than any other before he died it was to make meaningful contact with the Gallacellans. In the five centuries since the Gallacellans met the human race on Leucifer IV there had been exactly one opportunity to make that contact, and this was it. Only Grainger and the bounds of possibility stood between Charlot and Stylaster, and Charlot was not the man to respect the bounds of possibility. So what chance had Grainger?

  “Captain delArco will follow my instructions,” said Charlot coldly, getting angrier by the minute because he knew that every word would get back to Stylaster, now or later.

  “Captain delArco had better think long and hard about that,” I said. “And so had you. Because between you and me and anyone else who can hear me, I won’t take this ship back down into the atmosphere of that planet. You can have me thrown in jail till I rot, between you, if you have a mind to. But any other attempt at landing on Mormyr is an attempt at suicide and murder, and I won’t do it.

  I had to put my case across in the strongest possible terms. It was no good at all saying “It’s too dangerous” or “I’m scared” or “It hurts.” Nothing short of impossibility was going to stop Charlot, so impossibility was what he was going to get. I’d gone in once, because I had no way to refuse. But I wasn’t going back. In my humble opinion, no one had the right to ask that of me. And privately, I had every confidence that when it came to the crunch, Nick delArco wasn’t going to be Charlot’s puppet.

  “You have to try again,” said Charlot.

  “No,” said Eve, who was still waiting for the blood to stop oozing from my mouth. “He can’t. He’s right. It would kill him.”

  I was really and truly thankful to have that support just then. Johnny had the sense to keep his mouth shut, and Nick delArco had absolutely nothing to say—yet.

  I reached out to take the controls in my hands again, and Eve slipped the hood back down over my eyes. We were just drifting in a loose orbit around Leucifer, heading away from Mormyr.

  “Shall we go home?” I asked.

  “We’ll go back to Iniomi,” said Charlot. “We’ll get you back into shape. Then we can discuss what to do next.”

  I began to set us on a course for the fourth world.

  Stylaster clicked for a moment or two, like a demented typewriter.

  “Stylaster says,” Ecdyon translated, “that your ship was most impressive. He is very confident that we will be successful.”

  “Bastard,” I muttered, not loudly enough for the interpreter to hear. A moment later, I regretted not saying it louder, so that Ecdyon could have passed it on. But it was too late to repeat it.

  I still think..., began the wind.

  I know, I said. Shut up.

  Then I slipped the Swan into the groove.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Once we were down on Iniomi I was fit for nothing except crawling into my bunk and waiting for the doctor. I didn’t want to do that and I had no intention of doing anything that I didn’t want to do right at that moment. So I dumped the ship in the yard like a sack of potatoes and I dragged my tired frame out of her belly, and I went walking in the alien night.

  The stars were bright, and they were packed closer than I usually see them in the skies of the worlds where I habitually make my living. Brighter even than the stars of New Alexandria. Leucifer was close to the core—some even called her a core star. But we—the human race—hadn’t touched the real core stars. That was bad space to fly, and the worlds were bad, too. We stayed away, in the regions which were more fitting for our kind of people. Perhaps we would have gone farther into the core, extended the tentacles of interstellar human civilization that way, if it hadn’t been for the Gallacellans. They were core people. They lived on the worlds which we thought were bad. They didn’t seem to like us much, and the feeling was fairly mutual.

  The Gallacellans had been starfaring long before the human race had escaped its own system, and long before the Khor-monsa had begun to build their galactic society as well. Wherever we went, the Gallacellans had already been—at least to have a look. But they were a careful people. We found no trace of them, until we met them in the flesh. That was on Iniomi. Soon after, we met them on forty or fifty other worlds as well. Our civilizations overlapped slightly. But not much. What we called the heart of the galaxy, the Gallacellans figured almost as the rim. They came from the center. The humans and the Khor-monsa came from the outer reaches.

  Iniomi got into all the history books as the world where we met the Gallacellans. Once there, of course, it got more than its due share of attention. Leucifer’s inner worlds—II and III—attracted more people than they were worth on simple merit, and became thriving worlds despite the fact that life on both of them was tougher than it was most places we chose to settle. The Gallacellans retained only a small base on Iniomi, for no apparent reason. We opened a small base as well, for purposes of communication, but the Gallacellans weren’t very interested in communicating. They wouldn’t teach anyone their language, and only permitted a few low-caste members of their own society to learn a couple of ours. A few centuries’ conversation seemed to have done little for either race. A number of Gallacellan names had passed into human languages, but even that was via the interpreters, who provided human-sounding equivalents of Gallacellan clickings. People could click in a fair imitation of Gallacellan speech, but they couldn’t click intelligibly. Hence words like Mormyr and Iniomi were Gallacellan in origin, but sounded human because the interpreters had made them over into human sounds for us.

  The average Gallacellan is about seven feet tall, but he looks taller because he has big ears which stick upward from his head. At least, rumor has it they are ears. After several hundred years, we still don’t know for sure. He has a face which might be yellow or brown, sometimes striped or blotched, the texture of wax. He has eyes in the back of his head as well as the front, he also has a mouth in the back of his head, but somewhat modified so that it doesn’t look very much like the front one. One is for eating (the front one), the other is for talking. A Gallacellan usually turns his back on you to talk to you, but if you are another Gallacellan you have your back turned as well, so it doesn’t seem rude. Because Gallacellans don’t look at one another when they talk they have no need of facial expressions, but they sometimes use gestures to attract the attention of the hind-eyes, which habitually look at the sky or the ground. People have hypothesized that the Gallacellans have so many eyes and use them thus because on their home-world they were prey to a large number of natural enemies. This remains conjecture. The Gallacellan body looks humanoid, but is capable of movements which the humanoid is not. The Gallacellan’s limbs are of varying size and multi-jointed, and his body can coil like a spring over its full length. It is presumed that the Gallacellans are remarkable athletes. The females of the species are similar in all respects save that they tend to be somewhat plumper than the males and do not make use of the coiling facility, if they have it.

  Little is known about the Gallacellan character. They appear proud and xenophobic, but in no way hostile. They are simply incurious and unforthcoming. Charlot, of course, wanted the Gallacellans to participate in his project
for integrating alien and human modes of thought (as the Khor-monsa were only too pleased to do), but they refused. No one could have been more surprised than Charlot when the Gallacellan named Stylaster offered cooperation in return for Charlot’s assistance in a little matter of salvage.

  Which explains why Charlot was mad keen on my being able to take the Hooded Swan all the way down to the surface of Mormyr. Needless to say, I was by no means as keen on the project as he. I have quite natural reservations about risking my life, especially for no good reason. I had wanted no part of the Lost Star farce, and I wanted no part of this one, which seemed to me to be too close to a carbon copy for comfort. As far as I was concerned, if the Gallacellans wanted to recover the ship which had gone down on Mormyr, then they could go fetch it themselves, and if they were unwilling to do so, then they shouldn’t have been careless enough to lose it there in the first place.

  Normally, I wouldn’t balk at the idea of helping out aliens, because I quite like aliens, but the Gallacellans were not by any means a likable lot. Ecdyon was the only one I’d ever had occasion to exchange words with, and I hadn’t much liked the words—though most of them, I know, had been Stylaster’s and not Ecdyon’s own. I’ve allowed people to talk me into doing some fairly hazardous things in my time, but not when they used such insulting patronization as Stylaster.

  As I walked the streets of the Iniomi spaceport—the human sector—I was doing some pretty heavy thinking. I’d had it fairly easy for a long time with respect to the piloting angle, and a very respectable slice of the two years I owed Charlot had been swallowed up. It seemed a great pity to waste all that time by digging my heels in now. If I’d been going to tell him to take a running jump, then I should have done it right back at the very beginning. On the other hand, Titus Charlot simply was not a reasonable man. I’d helped him out time and time again, yet he showed not the least vestige of gratitude nor any intention of refraining from jeopardizing my future—and, for that matter, the future of the other people who worked for him. The poorer his health became, the more determined he was to wring all that he could out of such time as might remain to him.

  I was considering quitting, and it was a difficult thing to consider.

  The wind, of course, had every confidence in our ability to do whatever we were called upon to do. He thought we were a great team, and that we were only just beginning to integrate. I thought he had delusions of grandeur. He’d been on the rock where I picked him up a lot longer than I had. One couldn’t blame him for being glad to get back in the swing of things, and he was certainly a useful guy to have around, but no matter how fully I was disposed to trust him, the fact remained that I was me and that I was the one who had to decide what to make of me. There’s a protocol to be observed in relationships with alien mind-parasites.

  It was a cold night, and I wasn’t in any fit condition to walk for miles—and the town didn’t stretch for miles, in any case—so I stopped off at a small coffee shop to sit and brood for a while. It was dimly lit and I deliberately chose a shadowed corner in which to sit, but I knew I couldn’t hide. There were only a dozen places on Iniomi where I could possibly be, and if anyone wanted to seek me out they’d be sure to find me eventually. I knew someone would come looking—it was only a matter of waiting to see who.

  The shop was deserted—there was no night-life on Iniomi. Bleak worlds breed bleak people. Iniomi had no life, and the air was unbreathable except in the domes. The base was supplied from Pallant—the third world. Nobody really knew why it was still here—they’d given up their attempts to make headway with the Gallacellans generations before. But these human bridgeheads tend to cling somehow. People who can’t stand it leave, and whatever remains becomes the population of the world. Bleak people, but people nevertheless.

  The coffee was good. Real. Pallant, though poor, was a productive world. Not big enough for the companies to take over, but good enough to supply its own needs with a lot to spare. Small traders—such as Lapthorn and I had been—ran in and out all the time. Worlds like Pallant were the only places where they could make a safe living now that the companies were steadily absorbing everything exploitable.

  The waiting was good, too. The room was warm, and the girl who was serving didn’t attempt to bother me except when I called. She sat, too, reading. Patiently whiling the night away. I shuffled a pack of cards, not even bothering to lay out a game of patience.

  I don’t really know who I was expecting. I hoped it wouldn’t be Charlot, and I didn’t think that it would be.

  But Johnny might have come, to tell me why he’d lost his touch with the plasm and blown the flux-field, and to tell me that it wouldn’t happen again. Not that he could be held to blame—he was as good with the drive as anyone could expect him to be. He was a good engineer. Sometimes the flux-field blows, and that’s all there is to it. No one has perfect touch. That’s why it would be so foolhardy to go back again, even if Johnny could do it just a little bit better. Next time, it might be me who blew it. Nobody’s fault. I mulled over the things I might say to Johnny.

  On the other hand, it might be Eve who came. Eve often came around, just to see how I felt. Eve had an almost morbid curiosity about my well-being, or lack of it. I was the man who knew her brother, the man who nearly died with her brother, the man who might have died instead of her brother. She was Lapthorn’s ghost, haunting me. But not in any malicious way. I didn’t mind Eve. I wouldn’t have minded if it had been Eve who came through the door, looking for me, wanting to talk to me about what was on and what might yet be happening.

  As things turned out, however, it was Nick who came. Perhaps he’d been sent, perhaps they had all talked it over and decided it had better be Nick who tried to ease me back to a state fit for human company. Nick was my friend. Ever since the clash of loyalties had come out my way on the world in the Drift, Nick had reckoned himself my bosom buddy. But he knew I didn’t see things the same way. He knew there was something between us—a ship. He always wanted to remove that obstruction to the true communion of our souls, because he was a guy who needed very much to like and be liked, but I had never permitted it. A matter of principle.

  “You ought to be seeing the doctor,” he said.

  “I oughtn’t to be in such bad shape I need a doctor,” I said.

  “This means a lot to Charlot—getting the Gallacellans to break down their wall of silence.”

  “It’s not a wall of silence,” I said. “It’s a wall of indifference. They don’t like us. They never have. Nobody can blame them. Their only interest in us is keeping us from interfering with them. They don’t want to know about us and they don’t want us to know about them. That’s fine by virtually all the human race except Charlot. They’re playing him for a sucker. They’re using him, or attempting to. He knows it, and it makes him angry. He also knows he can’t pass up the bait, and that makes him angrier. We’d all be better off out of this.”

  “You’re going to try to use me against him,” said Nick.

  I nodded. I put the cards back in my pocket.

  “Suppose I take his side?”

  I drew a rigid finger across my Adam’s apple.

  “Could it be done?” he asked.

  I hesitated. “Perhaps,” I admitted after a while, figuring that earnest sincerity was the best line to take with a man like delArco. “Perhaps it could. Getting down is the tough bit. Once down, it’s easier to come back. It’s always easier accelerating than slowing down. But there’s no man in the galaxy up to it. Not Johnny, and not me. We’re both good. But a man can only do so much. And I’m a spaceman, remember, not a deep sea diver. Atmospherics is not my specialty. Down there, my reputation doesn’t count for much. I’m scared, Nick. For me and for the half-dozen others who die if I make a mistake. I’m not a young man, Nick—you know that. I can’t take the responsibility of diving back into that Hell’s Kitchen. I can’t and I won’t. If you decide that you can bear that kind of responsibility, you can give me orders. You’r
e the captain. I won’t obey them, and that will put me on the spot. Alternatively, you can tell Titus that it can’t be done. He can sack you, but that’s all. Ultimately, the authority is yours. That’s the law.”

  “I don’t want to lose the Swan,” he said. It was an empty statement. The Swan wasn’t his, for all that he carried master’s papers. He wasn’t even a spaceman. I think maybe he had always wanted to be one—all the time he was growing rich building ships—and I think the fact that he was nominally one now was genuinely important to him. But “genuine” is a relative term.

  “Titus Charlot is a bad man to work for,” I said.

  “He’s one of the most important men in the galaxy,” he replied.

  “So what,” I said. “He isn’t going to leave you his money, let alone his place in the history books. What difference does it make whether he’s a big man with the Library or a tramp from the far rim? He’s a bad man to work for.”

  “You did all right on Pharos.”

  “I’d have done just as well if I’d never seen Pharos. OK, for a while back there we were side by side. But I’m not fool enough to think that was forever. Titus is using us just as the Gallacellans are trying to use him.”

  “There’d be a queue a mile long to run the Hooded Swan,” he observed.

  “So let them have it,” I said. “There’s no point in being a sad dog in the manger.”

  “Would you do that?” he asked. “Just like that? If you weren’t tied to Charlot by a millstone for two years, would you just cash in your chips and run, leaving the ship to the next man in line? And laugh all the way? You love that ship, Grainger, and I know you do.”

  Well, he was right, of course. But he was also wrong. Given the chance of an honest choice between attempting the Mormyr landing and giving up the ship, I’d leave the ship, I thought. But how could I be sure, without the honest choice? It was the pressure that made things so difficult.