Hooded Swan, Book I: Halcyon Drift

by Brian Stableford

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Well, Golden Boy, said the whisper, this is your big chance.

  It could well be a big bust. Suicide.

  New Alexandria doesn’t make mistakes. This isn’t the Caradoc Company.

  You don’t know a damn thing about New Alexandria. You can’t possibly judge.

  I know what you know. And my judgements based on what you know are no less valid than yours. In fact, I’d back mine against yours any time.

  And you think that I ought to take this crazy job.

  I judge that you have no reasonable choice. It’s a risk, but so is everything else.

  Even assuming that the ship can fly, which seems to me to be unlikely, there’s still the matter of my being able to fly it. I’ve never flown a mass-relaxation ship before. Contrary to what appears to be public belief, I didn’t fly the Fire-Eater and the Javelin solely on intuition. I used all the mechanical aids at my disposal. And I had to be taught—well and carefully taught by someone who knew all about spaceships. Who can teach me about this one?

  You’re a big boy now. You can look after yourself. If you need any help, I’ll be around.

  So now you’re the galaxy’s number one spacepilot as well?

  No. I only live here.

  That’s extremely amusing. Incredibly funny. You have obviously reached my sense of humour during your internal perambulations. Please don’t overuse it—it has to be kept well under control.

  There may be only one body at the controls of the ship, said the wind, ignoring my sarcasm completely, but there’ll be two minds. Two minds are better than one.

  Like hell. How do you expect me to fly the ship if you keep interrupting me?

  I won’t interrupt you, he explained patiently. I’ll simply learn while you learn. I have a different point of view. Between us, we’ll learn how to fly the ship faster than you could if you were alone. And you still can’t afford to pass up this job.

  Even at the terms I’ve been offered?

  The terms enable you to achieve your desired object—to get rid of the debt to Caradoc. They aren’t easy terms, but twenty thousand is never easy.

  I get you, I thought dolefully. It might pay normally not to bet when you can’t afford to lose, but if the occasion comes when you can’t afford not to win, it’s time to think again.

  I was being slowly convinced when Johnny interrupted me, and allowed me to forget the argument for the time being.

  “You know that guy delArco you saw yesterday?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s outside, in a car. I’ve been talking to him. He’s waiting for us.”

  “For us?”

  “That’s right.” The kid looked me in the face, almost defiantly. “He thinks there might be a job for me on his ship.”

  “As what?” I asked him. “Cook?”

  “Crewman.”

  “Marvellous,” I remarked, with even the sarcasm turning lukewarm through lack of enthusiasm. The possibility occurred to me that delArco had offered the kid a job as an added inducement to me, although I couldn’t see any reason for him to assume that I cared particularly about Johnny Socoro. Maybe he just happened to want a spare crewman. Maybe Johnny was good at his job. Maybe Johnny was the only shipworker in port crazy enough to risk taking the berth.

  We went down to the car. Waiting in the front passenger seat was Nick delArco. The car was the Lapthorn skyrider, and its driver was Eve Lapthorn.

  She smiled at me; delArco looked less than delighted by the sour expression on my face. It obviously hadn’t been his idea to bring her along.

  “Get in, Mr. Grainger,” she said, “and we’ll take you to see your bird.”

  “You can call me Grainger,” I offered, with all due magnanimity. “I presume you’ve already met Johnny.”

  She flashed Johnny a nice smile and nodded agreement. Johnny looked at me and I propelled him gently into the back seat of the car, then followed him.

  “Mr. delArco told me you work for him,” I said to Eve. “I didn’t realise you were his chauffeur.”

  “I have a small interest in the ship,” she replied, but didn’t say what it was.

  “Am I going to have Lapthorns on my back till the day I die?” I asked harshly, letting some of my temper slip. I glanced sideways at Johnny, who’d jumped slightly at the venom in the remark.

  Eve blushed, and rammed the car into a sort of kangaroo leap which lifted us from the ground and threw us into a jerky flight. The engine groaned and she settled us into horizontal by brute force, with a reasonable helping of wilful ignorance. The ride was rough for a couple more minutes while she piled on the power going around bends, but she calmed down before anyone’s hair had a chance to turn white.

  “Have you considered my offer?” asked delArco, turning around to face us. Johnny opened his mouth to reply, but I interrupted him.

  “We’re both considering your propositions,” I said. “Neither of us knows enough yet to be sure. After we’ve seen the ship we’ll be in a better position to decide.”

  He seemed perfectly satisfied by that, and Johnny was content to let me do the talking for both of us.

  “What’s the name of the ship, Mr. delArco?” asked Johnny.

  “The Hooded Swan,” Eve answered for him. “It was my idea.”

  “That’s a strange name,” he said, hesitating slightly over the word ‘strange”.

  “It was another name for the bird called a dodo,” she explained.

  “You have an odd sense of humour,” I remarked. “A lot of people would think that’s a bad name for a ship”

  “But you don’t believe in bad luck,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Then it’s all right. In any case, it will be conventional ships which eventually wind up as dead as the dodo. Not this ship.”

  “Don’t count your dodos before they’re hatched,” I said dryly. She went red again.

  Eve took the car into the old yards. There were newer, better yards on the south side that still saw a certain amount of work, but these were deserted. There hadn’t been a liner built here in twenty years, and even the private concerns didn’t bother with them now. There was better accommodation available for anyone who thought that he simply had to build on Earth. There was the sound of hammering and tinkering emanating from one tower, but it sounded lonely and distant. It was probably somebody messing about with his car. In the bays over the far side of the yards I could see three yachts and a couple of obsolete cargo ships. The yachts were probably strictly for joyriding, and the cargo ships either antiques or scrap. There were a couple of people wandering around, but they were too aimless to be workers. Sightseers, perhaps, or scavengers. They seemed to me like vermin crawling in the corpse of the yards. It had never been more evident that Earth was dead.

  We were nearly two miles out in the complex before we came to our destination. The yard delArco was using was about the most isolated he could find. It was dead quiet. The yard had a high wall, with no overt signs of occupancy, but I could see that the tower within held something more than dust. In addition, there were men on top of the tower—not obvious to the casual glance, but visible if you looked hard enough.

  The gateway was guarded too. We were admitted through a small hatch in the door, but only after delArco had been scrutinised and identified. I wondered whether all this was a product of delArco’s hitherto unsuspected flair for the melodramatic, or whether the New Alexandrians really thought their project warranted this kind of cloak-and-dagger treatment.

  “Are there booby traps as well?” I asked.

  DelArco nodded absently, while he searched for the right key to open the outer door of the tower. He had to find two more for the inner doors, but we finally made it into the inner sanctum, where we were greeted with false warmness by some guy who’d been waiting for us for some time. I shook his hand without looking at him or hearing his name. My eyes were on the ship.

  It’s one thing to sit on a chair in front o
f an HV screen, with the remains of lunch still on the table and cigarette ash on the carpet, and talk about a ship. It’s quite a different matter to stand underneath her belly and look up at her.

  In Johnny Socoro’s house, the Hooded Swan had been an abstraction—a ship that couldn’t fly, an extravagant dream. Here, in the dimness of her construction tower, she was a living thing. A reality, full of substance and beauty.

  I’m not a Lapthorn, to fall in love with a ship. But I’m a spaceman. Ships are my life, my outer skin, my power and my glory.

  When I see a ship, I don’t lose my mind in an orgiastic well of emotion, like six out of seven bad spacers. I’m not overwhelmed by the loveliness and sheer majesty of a ship. But I know these things for what they are. I can see them. And the Hooded Swan was lovely. Make no mistake about that.

  A ship’s performance in deep-space isn’t necessarily connected to her presence on the ground, or lack of it, but a spacer’s confidence is. DelArco was right. This ship wasn’t a bullet—not a steel worm or a giant metal egg on stilts. This ship was a bird. It was built to move. I hadn’t fully appreciated before what delArco had implied when he said the ship was jointed. This ship was like a living being—a bird with feathers of shiny metal. A deep-space albatross. Liners are built to look graceful, to look proud, to look powerful, but the real paucity of their ambition couldn’t be appreciated until you compared them to the Hooded Swan. Eve Lapthorn was right, too. This ship might make rigid ships obsolete. If she flew as well as she looked. If she flew at all.

  “She looks good,” I said calmly.

  They smiled, because they knew I was understating deliberately. They’d watched me looking at her.

  “Shut your mouth, Johnny,” I said, to break the silence. The kid was far too obviously impressed. He’d spent all his working life getting to know the inside and outside of liners far too well. He’d only just realised what a starship was.

  “Well?” said delArco.

  “I’d like to look at the controls,” I said. “I think we’re all agreed that it’s very pretty.”

  “It’s wonderful,” said Johnny.

  “Maybe so,” I said. “But being the fairest of them all won’t help her fly in deep-space.”

  The initial impact of seeing her was wearing off, and I was slowly beginning to suspect that it was all too good to be true. She looked just too beautiful to take on the rigours of deep-space. Deep-space is empty and desolate and—above all—lifeless. The Hooded Swan suggested life in her every line, but not toughness, not sheer brute strength. Could she really cope?

  The first sight of the controls startled me. The old Javelin hadn’t been too difficult to feel, because in terms of control there weren’t too many fancy gadgets. Just a pair of manipulative levers and a panel of on/off switches. Plus instrumentation. But this ship was different. Lots of input and output. Setting registers all over the place. A profusion of dials, a sensor hood that looked like a beehive, a set of spinal electrodes. Some people like to fly a ship as if they were undergoing a major operation, but not me. Some people like every imaginable datum available to them on the panel, like how fast is their heart beating, and how much ash is there in the ashtray. But I want to know what’s vital and what’s necessary, in that order, and nothing else. At that point I was sure that I couldn’t fly the ship and never would be able to. Nor anyone else, for that matter.

  “It takes some getting used to,” said delArco. “But most of the monitor devices are on automatic circuitry. You don’t have to worry about the spinal hookup, because that all works without any conscious control. The hood’s so big because of the vastly increased sensory range and sensitivity made possible by the organo-metallic synapses in the ship’s nerve-net. You can achieve a much higher degree of integration with the ship than you ever could with a conventional model, and this will make the sheer complexity of the controls less frightening. It will take some getting used to, but once you’re acclimatised, the directness of sensation will more than compensate for the profusion of incoming and outgoing signals. You can be the ship’s mind, literally—its reason and its judgement. You’ll be more a part of this ship than you ever could be on board your old Javelin. The Hooded Swan and her pilot are inseparable. They are the same superorganism. You can be a giant, Grainger—a spacefaring giant.”

  All of which, if it were anywhere near true, added up to an incentive which no spaceman could possibly ignore, slavery or no slavery. If delArco was right, what he had to offer was well worth selling my soul for. But he who hesitates is rarely lost, provided that he spends his hesitation in constructive thought.

  I hesitated.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “I’m not a fool, Grainger,” said delArco. I had my doubts. The shipbuilder was a stubborn man, and he didn’t really know what he was about. He was an Earthsider, not a spaceman.

  “I’ll be the captain of the Swan,” he continued. “But I’m not going to tell you how to fly her. Nor am I going to try to tell you what’s impossible and what’s not. All that anybody requires of you is that you do what you can.”

  “But if at any time you tell me to do something and I don’t, for whatever reason, you could have that twenty thousand back on my neck before I could turn around.”

  “The situation won’t arise,” he persisted. “I’ll be on board. So will Johnny. And the engineer they’re sending out from New Alexandria. And maybe Eve as well. I’m not going to tell you to drive us through a star. This ship is precious. Not just in terms of the money that’s gone into her, but in terms of making a point, of proving her worth. We could all make a fortune out of her if we handle her right, and New Alexandria will have established the positive value of their integrative work with the alien races. This could bring all the peoples of the galaxy closer together.”

  I laughed at the last comment. “Don’t try to make out you’re pouring your sweat and blood into it for the ultimate good of interstellar understanding,” I said. “All you want out of it is the money. And what do I care about that? I’m on a two-year contract for damn all. Count me entirely out of the financial interest.”

  “We’ll make your fortune too,” delArco promised. “Stick with us and when your two-year contract is up we’ll make a new one.”

  “Pull the other one,” I said. “It lets loose the dogs of war. What the hell use is a pilot once the ship’s proven? I’m a short-term investment, and I don’t even get danger money.”

  “You get twenty bloody thousand, and that isn’t cheap for a pilot.”

  I sighed. But he was right. I might not see the cash myself, but there was a lot of it.

  “OK,” I said, about to give way. “Just one more thing. Exactly where do you intend taking her on her maiden voyage? How are we going to show her off to the unsuspecting stars?”

  DelArco grinned like a wolf. “I intend to make use of existing resources, where publicity is concerned. I’m going to pre-empt the Caradoc Company’s big scheme and steal the Lost Star from beneath its nose.”

  “You’re going to what?”

  His face fell slightly. “I thought you’d like the idea,” he said. “You owe Caradoc a slap in the eye.”

  “Have you ever been near the Halcyon Drift?” I asked him.

  “Not exactly”

  “Is this your idea, or did you dream it up because you thought I’d like it?”

  “The instructions came from New Alexandria. They want the Lost Star. They want the publicity. They’ve built a ship which can live in the Drift. It all fits nicely, from their point of view.”

  “Lovely,” I agreed. “But have you considered it from your point of view? You have an unproven ship. An unknown quantity. She’s never even flown out of the atmosphere. And you want to take her chasing wild geese in the filthiest mess that you can think of. I’d want to have been sitting at those controls for half a lifetime before I’d contemplate going anywhere near a dark nebula.”

  “We haven’t got half a lifetime,” he retorted. “Caradoc w
on’t keep their circus going forever. If we want to steal their thunder we have to steal it soon.”

  I threw up my arms. “You’re a shipbuilder, delArco,” I complained. “You must have enough sense to realise that you simply can’t do things this way. It’s just not a sound proposition. It’s far too dangerous, and so bloody pointless.”

  DelArco was through arguing. He’d had enough. I tend to get on people’s nerves, if I argue with them long enough. “Look,” he said. “You now know what we’re going to do, when and how. You know the terms of the agreement. I’ve said all I can say. Why don’t you just go away and think it over. If you want the job, let me know before the end of the week. You can have a further ten days to learn the ship before we lift for Hallsthammer. And that’s it. As simple as can be.”

  I turned abruptly on my heel and walked out of the tower, out of the yard. I was thinking: It can’t be done. Not now, not ever. I’ve been in the Halcyon Drift and I’m never going back. Never.

  You sound like a coward, the wind threw at me. You’ve been searching at every step for a new excuse not to get back behind the controls of a ship. That two years on the rock has turned you back into a little boy. You’ve lost your nerve, Grainger. You’ve lost everything.

  I didn’t spare him a thought.

  Cool evening air hit me and turned the sweat on my face icy cold. I wiped it away. My cheeks were burning, but a few deep breaths calmed me down. My heart slowed too.

  A languorous, gloomy dusk was settling over the shipyards. The towers seemed to grow into the gathering darkness. The very faint sound of distant metal clinking on metal in the still air echoed even further away.

  I began to walk, not caring about direction.

  Forget it, advised the whisper. You’re just play-acting.

  Go to hell, I said.

  Do you think somebody’s going to follow you? The girl, perhaps? More melodrama. Which fool are you going to play this time? More hard sarcasm. More I don’t need any help. More I owe you all a grudge. Or are you going to change the tune? Play I’m afraid. I just can’t take it. Why don’t you just for once be honest with yourself. You want this job. You need this job as badly as you ever needed anything. You’re not afraid of the Drift, nor of the ship. You’re afraid that you can’t do it. That’s all.