Hooded Swan, Book I: Halcyon Drift

by Brian Stableford

  ALSO BY BRIAN STABLEFORD

  Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations

  The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales

  Beyond the Colors of Darkness and Other Exotica

  Changelings and Other Metaphoric Tales

  Complications and Other Stories

  The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies

  The Cure for Love and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  The Dragon Man: A Novel of the Future

  The Eleventh Hour

  Firefly: A Novel of the Far Future

  Les Fleurs du Mal: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

  The Gardens of Tantalus and Other Delusions

  The Great Chain of Being and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  Halycon Drift (Hooded Swan #1)

  The Haunted Bookshop and Other Apparitions

  In the Flesh and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels

  Kiss the Goat

  Luscinia: A Romance of Nightingales and Roses

  The Mad Trist: A Romance of Bibliomania

  The Moment of Truth: A Novel of the Future

  An Oasis of Horror: Decadent Tales and Contes Cruels

  The Plurality of Worlds: A Sixteenth-Century Space Opera

  Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine

  The Quintessence of August: A Romance of Possession

  The Return of the Djinn and Other Black Melodramas

  Rhapsody in Black (Hooded Swan #2)

  Salome and Other Decadent Fantasies

  The Tree of Life and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  The Undead: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

  Valdemar’s Daughter: A Romance of Mesmerism

  The World Beyond: A Sequel to S. Fowler Wright’s The World Below

  Xeno’s Paradox: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

  Zombies Don’t Cry: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 1972, 2011 by Brian Stableford

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  DEDICATION

  For Val and Maureen

  PROLOGUE

  It is on a world whose name I do not know, on the slopes of a great mountain, that the Javelin came down. She is surrounded by black boulders which are too heavy for a man to move. I have sealed the cracks in her silver skin with mud and clay, but she no longer has a door. Inside, she is not badly damaged—the drive chamber and the tailfins are shattered beyond all hope, but the living quarters are still sound. If it were not for the fact that she was built to stand upright, but lies on her side, she would be comfortable. But who can sleep in a vertical bunk?

  Some thirty or forty yards from the ship there is a cross planted in the ground. It marks Lapthorn’s grave. It is a shallow grave, because there is not a great deal of dirt caught in the crack between the faces of implacable rock. The cross is often blown down, as though the wind is able to seek it out and pluck it away. Lapthorn is not welcome here; neither am I. The wind continually tells me so.

  To right and left, as I look down the mountain, the view is excised by more gigantic slopes of languid black rock, but before my resting place is a channel which leads down to the plain and away across the ashen desert. Far off, beyond the expended sands, more mountains form a distant wall which shines all colours from red to violet as the sun walks the grey sky from dawn till dusk. Brown clouds move sullenly across the sulky face of the sky, washing the black mountain faces with hazy tears. The sparse bushes, the shifting sand, the grey ridges are obscured by a constant floating dust which likewise changes colour with the advancing hours of every day.

  I wear a long beard. My hair is never cut save for the tufts which threaten to invade my eyes and rob me of sight. I take no pride in cleanliness. I live in misery and regret, and make no effort to assert my humanity. I am an invader, a beast. There is no need to remind myself that I belong elsewhere. I am not wanted here.

  Another day is draining away, and the desert is cold tedious blue-turning-grey. I was not always so despairing. I used to go down every evening to the plain to bring water from the small pools which are constantly maintained by the rain which flows from the slopes. I would bring water for washing as well as for drinking. But I found that I could carry water enough for three days if I did not bother to wash, and I grew idle, long ago. I used to occupy my days in mending my ill-used home, in trying to improve the meagre quality of my life here. I mounted expeditions to all points of the compass, and planned the circumnavigation of the world which I had inherited by virtue of being stranded. But what I found on the peak, in the far plain, and on other slopes never repaid the effort I put into reaching them, and mental fatigue soon drowned my adventure with pointlessness.

  The present never occupies my mind. Every day is identical, and there is no use in counting them, nor profit in trying to make each one individual in any way. When my mind wanders, it is never to tomorrow or yesterday, but always deep into the past—before the Javelin lifted from some inconsequential rim world on the journey which would result in her death, and Lapthorn’s death, and my despair. I remember other worlds, other times, other ships.

  I once lived a while on the darkside of a world which circled close to a blue giant sun. The ships had to creep in and out of ports hidden in deep caves, fully shielded against the fearsome torrent of radiation. There was no habitable place in the system save for the deep, labyrinthine ways of the inner world. The people lived in cities built in the planet’s honeycomb heart, away from the lethal light and the cold of darkness, The air was always hot and loaded with odours—a background stench of faint decay and sweat, and heavy perfume intended to drown and disguise it, since it could not be concealed. The most valued thing on the planet was light—soft light, kind light, warming light, soothing light, painless light. All worlds want most what they cannot find around them. With a brightside that was an inferno, and a darkside that could see no stars, this planet bred people who knew the true beauty and presence of light, who could savour its texture and understand the inner qualities of its makeup. Lapthorn and I used to take our ship—it was the old Fire-Eater then—back and forth in search of all manner of lighting devices—exotic lamps and equally exotic substances to fuel them.

  After three years of trading with the world and living there fifty days in every hundred, Lapthorn swore that he could tell the colour of light with the follicles of his skin and taste its texture with his tongue. He was beginning to babble about the search for the perfect light when I thought it was time to move on to fresh pastures. Lapthorn was like that—impressionable, sensitive. Every world left something in his character. I’m different. I’m a realist.

  Another time we worked, for a while, for the great library at New Alexandria. Lapthorn didn’t like that, because it was in the inner wheel—the great highway of star civilisation. Earth was too far out from the rich worlds to remain the hub of human existence. New Alexandria, New Rome, New Israel and Penaflor were our homes in the stars. They were our new heritage, the focus of our future. Lapthorn hated them and craved the distant shores. He loved the feel of alien soil, the heat of alien suns, the love of alien women. But there was better money, come by far more easily, in the core, and we needed to scrap the Fire-Eater before she fire-ate herself and us with her. Hence the New Alexandria job.

  We spent the best part of two years tracking down alien knowledge and literature commissioned by the library. The books we found were in a thousand languages, many of which were completely unknown save to the people who wrote them down. But the problems of tran
slation weren’t any of our concern. We just located the books, procured them by fair means or foul, and carted them to the library. I liked that job, and even Lapthorn admitted that it was good in parts—the parts we spent on the alien worlds. Oddly enough, I think that was the most dangerous job I ever did. I found that aliens (pretty much like humans, I suppose) are perfectly logical where major matters like money are concerned, but absurdly touchy about certain objects no good to man or beast.

  The sky is as black as the mountains now. The desert plain is invisible. I light the fire. The light hasn’t much warmth. Lapthorn would have complained of its dull colour and its foul taste. But it’s all I have. The ship retains a reservoir of power, but all of it is directed to one single purpose—maintaining the faint, surely futile, mayday bleep which is my solitary hope of eventual rescue. The bleep has a limited range, and no ship is likely to pass within it, because I am within the fringes of a dark nebula, where no sane captain would bring his ship. But the bleep is my one link with the universe beyond the mountain, and it surely deserves every last vestige of the Javelin’s power.

  Agitated by the wind, clouds of sand rustle against the lower slopes. The fire crackles. The wind seems to be deliberately shifting so that wherever I sit it can blow smoke into my eyes. It’s a malicious wind, this one. Lapthorn’s cross will be down again in the morning. Moths, attracted by the fire, flit back and forth above the flames, casting shadow-flickers in the light reflected from the smoke column.

  The sparks that fly away from the fire remind me of stars. I wish that I were a moth, to fly away from this little world, among the stars again. The wind knows about this idle dream and uses it to taunt me. It whispers in my ears. It’s the wind which brings back all these memories of other worlds, other times—indirectly, at least, by driving me to avoid its presence and insistence.

  After New Alexandria, when we had our beautiful new ship, I let Lapthorn have his head for a while. We went out to the rim and wandered, searching new worlds for new ways to make money. There was little or no profit to be made, little or no comfort to be had, and we did no good for ourselves. Lapthorn fell in love at least twice, but it never lasted long with Lapthorn, whether it was a woman or a world. Events left their scars and their souvenirs, but nothing monopolised Lapthorn’s soul for more than a short space of time.

  We traded with the Lakshmi, whose adults look like gold-winged flies, and whose children grow in the ground like trees from eggs like knotty roots. Males exist only in the vegetative phase. One generation of adults pollinates the female flowers of the next, and the pistils of the flowers serve as pupae carrying already-gravid female flies. Even Lapthorn found little in this race to touch his heart, although for a while he showed a tendency to talk to trees, and once or twice I saw him looking at fireflies with a delighted air of mystery in his expression.

  We lived with the dog-faced Magliana, in villages strung between the treetops in a webwork of branches and creepers, far above a vast equatorial swamp covering half a world.

  Lapthorn was bitten by a snake on Varvarin, and would have died of it but for the nomads of the district, who saved his life in return for one of his hands. They took the hand and dissolved the flesh away. They reconnected the bones with copper wire and one of them wore it around his neck as a pendant. Few of the nomads had two hands, and almost all of them wore one or more displayed in some prominent fashion on his person. A hand worn around the neck or at the waist will never strangle you or steal from you. This is especially relevant if you have enemies. The nomads had. But they were healers and they healed Lapthorn. Help always has a price, and some are strange. I contrived to keep both of my hands on my arms. I had to. A one-handed engineer can still do his job, but a one-handed pilot is worthless.

  On Bira, we both got hooked on the nectar of the scorpion lilies, which grew only in the dawn, and faded once the sun was clear of the horizon. But the local day was two standard years long, and the dawn lingered long. We followed sunrise around the planet for half a year, until we reached the shore of an uncrossable sea. There would be no more lilies until the dawn reached the far shore. Hundreds of the natives had taken the same ecstatic trek, and over half of them died in the throes of withdrawal. Those who did not began the return journey, to wait for the sun again. They were a slender, sickly people, but Lapthorn and I had stronger stomachs and stronger minds. We returned only so far as our ship, and left for a different shore.

  Not even Lapthorn really got what he wanted out of those years on the fringe. His craving for new ideas and new experiences was never satiated. He seemed to have an infinite capacity for change. Everything added a new facet to his personality. He was never full up, never exhausted. I think Lapthorn might have found the secret of eternal youth. He was still healthy and strong when he died coaxing the drive of the Javelin, while I remained unhurt at the controls. When a ship goes down, it is usually the pilot’s fault, but the engineer invariably suffers most.

  In the meantime, nothing made any impression on me. Maybe I had the secret of eternal age. The star-worlds had nothing to teach me. They had not the capacity to change me. Lapthorn said that I had no soul. I suppose that we were completely mismatched. In fact, our partnership never really contained any harmony. We worked together simply because we had started out together, and neither of us could afford to break away. I suppose Lapthorn was enough of a dreamer not to care too much about who was up front, because all that mattered to him was where we were going and where we’d already been. And I didn’t give a damn who was down below as long as his drive never let me down.

  But all we collected in years of fringe-running was a reputation. The cargoes we carried never made a fortune, but they created rumours. The stories we could tell about ourselves were impressive, and contained enough truth for later voyagers to confirm that we might actually have done what we said. Lapthorn liked people to talk about us.

  The fire is dying. It’s time for sleep. I wish that for once I didn’t have to go to bed hungry. But I wish the same things every night. There’s not much that’s edible growing on the mountain or living down in the desert. The ship’s supplies of deep-space gruel ran out some time ago. Somehow, though, I don’t starve. I chew leaves and I snare mice, and I contrive to live. But I’m always hungry. Perhaps I ought to be thankful that I haven’t poisoned myself. But the world sustains my kind of life. I’m not wanted, but I’m tolerated, because I’m not too much of a nuisance. The world might not have liked Lapthorn though. And there’s the wind, of course, which wants someone to talk to, a memory to stir, a mind to invade.

  I don’t think that I’m going mad. Loneliness is supposed to send men mad, and any other man would begin to get worried when the wind talked to him. But not me. Lapthorn said I have no soul. I can’t go mad. I’m a realist. I’m stuck with myself, with my sanity. I hear the wind speak, therefore the wind speaks. No argument, no worry. I don’t talk back. I listen, but I don’t react. Nothing this world can do to me will elicit any response. I don’t give in to alien worlds. I give way only to myself. Nothing reaches me from out there.

  After the fringe, I tried to come back into the really big markets, in search of a killing. Guns, cosmetics, jewellery and drugs were all hot markets, with constant demand and irregular supply: anything in which fashion rules instead of utility is a good market for the trader—and that includes weaponry as well as decoration and edification. I reckoned that we had the initiative to dig out the best, and I was right, but times had moved on while we were out on the rim with the dropouts, and we failed at the other end—the outlets. We couldn’t get a fair price, with the middlemen moving into the star-worlds in droves, quoting the Laws of New Rome, and the ordinances of wherever they happened to be, and never moving their hands from their gun butts. It was enough to sour anyone against life in the inner circle. I began to sympathise with Lapthorn’s dislike of the human way of life.

  We stuck with it for a while, because I thought Lapthorn’s genius for digging out the best
gems and the most exciting drugs might see us through. But it was useless. The little people seemed to take an excessive delight in cheating us and leaning on us because we were known. The other free traders talked about us. We were the best, by their lights. But we weren’t system-beaters. We weren’t equipped for dealing with that kind of problem. We had no alternative but to return to small trading, alien to alien. Lapthorn wasn’t sorry, of course, and my sorrow was more for the evil ways of the world in general than for our own small part in the human condition.

  We settled down, eventually, in the other rim, helping to push it even further out. Right back at the beginning, the rim had been a burden I’d borne for Lapthorn’s sake, and civilisation a burden he’d borne for mine. We’d taken turns to call the tune, each of us chafing under the other’s yoke, building up the resentment and the determination to flip the coin back over again. But in the end, we stopped fighting and drifted.

  I suppose neither of us was ever happy. Lapthorn’s dreams were impossible—there was never any conclusion to which he could follow them. He followed them further with me than he could have with anyone else, but I still couldn’t find him a destination. And in the meantime, I wouldn’t have been happy anywhere or anyhow. I’m just not a happy man. Lapthorn said that I have no soul.

  A lot of spacemen are like me. Cold, emotionless men who don’t inherit any part of the worlds and the people that they see. There are a few fake Lapthorns—with his vulnerability but without his inexhaustibility—but eventually they always go native somewhere. If they can be reached, they’re taken. If not by one world, then by the next. Only Lapthorn lasted almost forever. Most of the men who live long enough among the stars to crash on some ridiculous, forlorn world like this one are my type of spaceman—the maverick kind, the lone wolves, the men with hearts of stone, the men without souls.

  I sleep in the control room, because my bunk is wrong way up, and the control room is the only space big enough for the wall to make an adequate floor and vice versa. The old Fire-Eater wasn’t quite so cramped, for all that the Javelin was a better ship. And was she, though? The Fire-Eater never went down.