The Fenris Device

by Brian Stableford

  It hurt. Had the console been flat and smooth he might have split the fingers, but as it was the panel sloped considerably and my fingers slipped between the switches. Nothing was broken and the skin was not cut. But I am inordinately sensitive about my fingers. I’m a pilot, and a pilot’s life is in his fingertips. Even a bruise can mean the difference between life and death in a delicate balance in distorted space. I really wanted to clench my fist and knock Maslax across the room. I am not by nature a violent man but at that moment I felt close to murder. Self control intervened, however, and I listened, instead, to what Maslax was saying.

  “Touch those switches again,” he threatened, “and I’ll burn your hand off.”

  “How long?” Eve asked the Gallacellan.

  “If neither ship changes speed,” said Ecdyon, consulting the screens and the dials and calculating in his head, “I think about twenty minutes.”

  We had just twenty minutes to take Maslax, by force, by stealth, or by persuasion. Just twenty minutes, because I was determined that the Cicindel shouldn’t follow the police boat to oblivion.

  Come on, I said to the wind, think of something, damn you!

  You’re bigger, you’re faster, said the wind.

  Not that way, I said. Not while he can press that trigger. There has to be another way. An easier way.

  There’s only one other way.

  Tell me.

  He’s got a weak mind. He’s mad. Break him.

  I looked hard at the ugly, malevolent face of the little man. He was looking right back at me, and he was waiting—waiting with the gun, because he knew I was going to try something and he wanted to kill me. I could read it in his face—I didn’t need telepathy. He actually wanted to give himself the pleasure of shooting me, and he was just waiting for me to give him the reason.

  “What am I thinking, Maslax?” I rapped out. “Come on, tell me. Show me this mind reading talent of yours. Tell me what I’m thinking.”

  “Hate and fear,” he said tautly. “Hate and fear.”

  I shook my head, and made every effort to sneer at him. “Wrong,” I said. “That’s wrong. I’m not afraid of you. I don’t even hate you. Try again, Maslax. Tell me what I’m thinking. Give me the words. Come on, you read the words, don’t you? There are words, up here, inside my head. Tell me what they are, Maslax. You can’t read minds at all, can you? And you know it. I can take you Maslax, can’t I? I can take you because you can’t read my mind. You don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “I can read your mind,” he said. But there was an edge in his voice. I was beginning to shake him. I’d picked out his weak spot. I was attacking his fantasies.

  “Show me,” I invited. “Give me the words. Come on, tell me. What are the words?”

  “Cripple!” he said.

  “Wrong.”

  “Hate—loathing—foul!”

  “Wrong.”

  “Animal—insect—spider!”

  “Wrong.”

  He screamed. “You’re lying!”

  “I’m not lying,” I told him, keeping my voice level. “I’m not lying. You have the words wrong, Maslax. You can’t read. But I don’t want you to take my word for it. I’m going to prove it to you. I’m going to prove beyond every last vestige of doubt that you’re wrong, and then you’ll have to see it. Do you know how I’m going to do it? You should, if you can read my mind. You should know exactly how I’m going to do it. Come on, Maslax, tell me. How am I going to prove you wrong? What am I going to do?”

  I took a step forward, and he took a step back. He was frightened—really saturated with fear. I was astonished. Words, only words, but I had him moving backward. I had him retreating. The gun didn’t matter. I had the weapon that mattered now—the only weapon that mattered. I took one more step forward and the stark terror in his eyes was a joy to behold.

  “Come on,” I said, my voice still quiet, but taking on a tone of calculated menace, “tell me. What am I going to do? I’m going to prove you wrong, aren’t I? I’m going to prove to you that you can’t read minds. And you know I’m going to prove it because you don’t know what I’m going to do. Isn’t that right? You know, don’t you? You know I’m going to prove it.”

  I knew exactly what he was going to say and I was ready for him.

  “You’re not!” he squealed in anguish. “You’re not because you can’t. There’s no way. There’s nothing you can do. Nothing!”

  “Nothing?” I said. “Nothing? Is that what I’m going to do? Nothing—because there’s nothing I can do? Well, how about this, Maslax?”

  And I took from the pocket of my jacket a pack of playing cards. I don’t have many personal effects—I don’t even wear a watch—but I do like to carry a pack of cards. Sometimes, I just turn them over, playing patience. It calms me after a flight. Sometimes, I seek out a game—a gambling game—because that soothes my nerves as well. Ever since Johnny took up gambling to pass away dead time on New Alexandria I’d been carrying this pack so that I could relieve him of a little of his pay now and again. With owing Charlot so much, I was always a little starved for cash.

  Maslax looked at the pack of cards as if it were a rattlesnake about to bite him. He raised his gun and pointed it—not at me, but at the cards in my hand. He was afraid of those cards. He was afraid because he hadn’t known they were there, and he was afraid because he knew what I was going to do with them.

  “What’s the matter, Maslax?” I asked him. “You can’t be afraid of a little test of skill, now can you? You can read my mind, remember? There’s nothing to be afraid of. Nothing at all. Here, I’ll show you what we’re going to do. I’ll explain this little game we’re going to play. I’m going to hold the pack in my hand, like this, so I can see the bottom card. I’m going to look at it hard, and concentrate on it. And then you’re going to tell me what it is.”

  I riffled the cards once, and then held them up so that the card at the bottom was facing me. It was the seven of diamonds. I was just about to start, when it suddenly occurred to me that maybe—just maybe—I was wrong. Or maybe—just maybe—he would accidentally call the right card. It would only take once, just the first time, for the whole campaign to fall down. I riffled again, left fifty-one cards in my left hand, held between two fingers, and palmed one in my right hand. The one I palmed was the seven of diamonds—the facing card in the pack was now the jack of spades. It didn’t matter now what card he called—I had one with which to prove him wrong.

  “Call it,” I said, holding the pack up in front of my face. “Call the card.”

  His mouth was open; he was staring. He was trying to speak, trying to force words out, but they wouldn’t come. They wouldn’t come because he was afraid.

  “Come on, Maslax,” I taunted. “You can do it. You can read my mind. Just tell me what the card is.”

  He went back one pace more, and would have gone two, but the wall stopped him; he was backed right up against it. He stammered, and he looked at the pack of cards the way people had been looking at him for years—or so he thought.

  He finally got it out. “It’s the jack,” he said. “The jack of spades.”

  For a moment, my heart almost stopped beating.

  I pretended to pull the card out, and produced the red seven from my right hand. I threw it at him, and he watched it flutter as if he were mesmerized by it. While he was watching it I shuffled the pack again and palmed another card—the three of diamonds—ready for a repeat performance. The seven settled face-up.

  “There’s your jack of spades,” I said, loading all the mockery I could muster into my voice. “What’s the next one? Come on, Maslax, really show us what you can do.”

  The new card facing me in the pack was the ten of hearts.

  Maslax was breaking apart. “The jack,” he said again. “It’s the jack of spades.”

  I plucked the ten out of the pack and I let it fall, exposing it as I did.

  “The next one, Maslax,” I said. “Call the next one. Read m
y mind.”

  He moaned, and called the jack of spades for the third time. I turned the pack in my hand, still holding them. The bottom card was the six of clubs.

  “Well,” I said. “You don’t seem to be able to read my mind after all.”

  He howled, and I threw the pack at the ceiling.

  He fired, and the cards cascaded into a cloud of fire.

  I dived forward, grabbed his left arm, and rammed the elbow back into the wall. I groped for the empty gauntlet, and felt the hard lump of the trigger device free of his nerveless, paralyzed fingers. Ecdyon, who had uncoiled into a long dive the moment I was out of the way, was grappling with the dwarf’s gun hand, but it was no longer necessary. Maslax had crumpled up, and dropped the gun as if his right hand were as deadened as his left.

  Eve picked it up.

  We let him go, and turned back to the console where the screens still shone and the tape outlets ticked quietly away, dropping slow streamers onto the floor. A couple of smoldering cards clung to the console; the rest had fallen to the floor. I stamped out the remaining flames. There was a long dark scar on the ceiling where the beam had burned the plastic.

  I felt weak. It was all I could do to stop my knees shaking. I’d piloted ships through the worst conditions imaginable, and I’d felt afterward as if I were fit to die. But I’d never felt quite like I felt then. It was only then that I realized that Maslax’s naked fear had escalated at the same rate as my own deeply buried panic. When he called that first card correctly I had felt a wash of pure horror, but I had simply not recognized it. It suddenly struck me that I would never know whether Maslax had read my mind or not. I would never know whether I might not have beaten him by simply feeding him my own fear.

  I shook my head, trying to clear it. “Call that ship,” I said. “Warn them off.”

  I continued absorbing my state of tension, getting my self back into a state of calm, not paying any attention to what was going on around me now that all was well again. It was some moments before I realized that all was not well.

  While those moments were wandering by, Eve was staring at me, and her realization that I wasn’t aware was just as slow. Eventually she said, “Grainger,” in a very low voice.

  I looked at her, and then I looked where she was pointing.

  Ecdyon had no sooner regained his feet after jumping Maslax than he had collapsed again. He was in an untidy sprawl all over the cabin floor. He was unconscious.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I realized that this was no time for standing around lamenting the cruelty of fate. I roused my languishing self-control.

  “Get that suit off Maslax,” I told Eve. “Let’s have that little box of tricks of his in a safe place. I’ll take care of this.” I waved my hand perfunctorily to indicate that “this” covered everything to do with the instruments and switches.

  OK, genius, I said—silently—so you can read. Anything he could do you can do better. Tell me which buttons to press and which knobs to turn.

  So you can do what? he asked.

  So I can warn off the Cicindel. We’ll get around to the next move after that’s out of the way.

  How are you going to warn off the Cicindel? he wanted to know.

  And was a good question.

  You better teach me to click like a Gallacellan, fast, I said.

  No chance, he replied. You’ve got to let me have control. With full control, I just might—and I mean might—be able to produce some sound by which I can make myself understood. But I need that control. You must see that.

  I saw it. But I didn’t like it. Sure, he’d taken control before—once in the Halcyon Drift, once on Chao Phrya when his talents as a musician became desperately important. But the first time I was cradled and hooded, and the second time there was no one around who was in any fit condition to watch. This time was different. I was mobile, operative, and Eve was standing right behind me. It seemed somehow quite indecent to let someone else have my body and my voice when other people were not only watching but might actually want to exchange merry chitchat.

  Grainger, said the wind, we’re running out of time.

  There was, I knew, no alternative. There was no future at all in his producing click-patterns in my mind and my trying to duplicate them. But still I hesitated. If I was helpless, sure, I’d hand over automatically. But I didn’t feel helpless. I was on my feet and moving.

  If you can’t let go, he said, you’ll have to let me knock you out.

  But that was right out of the question. I wasn’t going to have him walking around in my body without my being around to keep a careful eye on him.

  Fair enough, I said, it’s all yours.

  I just relaxed, let everything go limp. My body didn’t even sag. There was one weird and frightening moment when I watched my hands reach out for the switches, knowing that it wasn’t me who was moving them. But the moment passed. I relaxed, utterly and completely. I sat back to watch. I already knew, after my experiences on Chao Phrya, the difficulties of being an absolutely passive observer. When you’ve been sovereign in your body for as long as I have, you get used to doing all sorts of things almost automatically—I don’t mean reflex actions, because the reflexes would be just the same whichever one of us was in control—I mean things like thinking about Eve and glancing sideways to see what she was doing. Thought and action are much more closely related than we tend to think. While you’re doing absolutely nothing but lying still and thinking—effectively what I was doing—your current of thought is producing all kinds of tiny actions to complement and corroborate your thoughts. Conscious application of senses, small changes of facial expression, just changes in bodily tension—all these are the products of consciousness. I could get away with it to a certain extent, but it takes only a very small conflict of nervous impulses to wreak havoc with coordination.

  It was easier, this time, simply because I’d been through it before—in theory. I wasn’t as worried or as fearful as I had been in the purple forest. But then, on that occasion the total demand on my body had been to stay perfectly still. The chance of conflict had been quite minimal. The present situation wasn’t like that—now, I had to pretend to be perfectly immobile, absolutely impotent, while the wind trundled my body around in a perfect imitation of Grainger going about the business of keeping himself in one piece. That was difficult.

  In the earlier months of our association—our symbiosis, as we would have it—it would have been impossible. My animosity toward him, my fear and my resentment of him, would have rendered me quite incapable of giving him my body to use as he wished. The conflict would have been inevitable. To do as I was doing needed perfect trust. Not perfect harmony—we never had that and never could have had it—but perfect understanding. A willingness to let him get on with it in his own way. A willingness not to be afraid of what might happen to my most precious possession through his carelessness or willful neglect. That asks a great deal of any man—maybe more of me than of most men, by virtue of my individualistic philosophy of life. A man just cannot be asked to do something like that without finding himself changed by the experience. That had been my initial fear of the wind—that my old identity would be eroded, forced to change. And it was justified. Grainger now was not Grainger as he had been when the Javelin went down on the rock that became Lapthorn’s Grave. Grainger plus wind was a different being, unequal to the sum of the parts. I hadn’t wanted him, and the reasons I hadn’t wanted him had proved to be only too good. And yet here I was, playing possum in my own mind, letting the invader who’d changed me change me even more, giving him my body to use. It was necessary, absolutely necessary, for the demands of the present situation to be met, but that necessity in no way altered what was actually happening, the constraints it put upon me, the demands I had to meet. The fact remains that however necessary it was, I couldn’t have done what I did without the existence of a very special relationship with the wind.

  I call it perfect trust. Some might call it love. />
  I heard the clicks coming out of the call circuit—the clicks that meant we have contacted the Cicindel. I didn’t know how long we had left, and I had no way of knowing what sort of message the wind was going to try to get across in whatever imitation Gallacellan he could make my voice produce. How long an explanation would the pilot of the Cicindel demand? How long an explanation could the wind produce?

  I heard my voice begin to click. I can imagine no more eerie feeling than listening to your own voice conducting a conversation in a language you not only don’t know, but aren’t physically equipped for talking.

  I had no real sense of passing time—measuring time is something which involves the accumulation of events, and the conscious involvement with said accumulation of events. Suspended in my functional limbo I felt quite out of touch with time. I could hear the clicking going on, but I had real difficulty in deciding which clicks came out of the call circuit and which out of me. I didn’t feel involved with either set.

  I knew that I could talk to the wind, and he could talk to me, but I didn’t know when it was safe to do so. He never interrupted me when I was talking—and very rarely when I was listening to someone else talking. He was an adept at interposing his comments and questions into the blank spaces of life—the seconds in which nothing is happening, between events. Of course he was an adept—it was his way of life. But I was a stranger here. I didn’t know how to pick my moments. So I waited, simply not knowing what was happening. I could see the screens—the wind was watching them intensely—but I didn’t know what each showed. It should have been possible to work it out—visual representation ought to be the same in the two races, as we saw by the same wavelengths of light. But I didn’t even occupy myself with that—my sensation of detachment was too great for me to explore the limited avenues by which I might involve my mind in events. I simply watched and waited, content to be a passenger in the whole affair.

  In a sense, the rest was a great relief to me. I had been on the move and under pressure for a long time now. The hours I’d spent in my bunk on the Swan between the dive and the drive had been recuperation, not rest. This enforced relaxation was the first in a long time. To some extent, I needed it.