Leave me alone.
I can’t do that. You’re not alone now and you never will be again. You have to learn to live with me, even if you can manage to keep yourself apart from everybody else. And in order to make that a lot easier, you should go back and take that job. It isn’t a joyride, but you don’t want a joyride. If you turn down this ship you might as well crawl into a hole and die. Even if she won’t fly, even if the Drift beats her, you still have to be there.
I didn’t turn back. I walked aimlessly on. The alien was quite right. It was cowardice, pure and simple. Not fear of deep-space, not fear of the Drift, but fear of the opportunity. It was the chance that I might not be up to it, the chance that I couldn’t become the heart and the soul of the Hooded Swan. Cowardice.
I wandered around the yards for an hour, till it was totally dark. The only light to see by was the starlight and the lonely marker lights set in some of the towers—a mute glow feigning life where there was only oldness and decay. I made my way out of the area altogether, back into the narrow, huddled streets of the port dormitory town. It began to rain, and the water hummed and rattled on the roofs and the pathways. I kept to the dark alleys, away from the wider streets where the cars hardly ever passed by any more.
I wanted a drink, but not in some little back street bar full of silence and gloom and resignation. I walked steadily and purposefully towards the landing area, where the big, gaudy tourist traps were. Where—even now—there would be crowds in from the ships. Where I could get just a little taste of elder days—Fire-Eater days and Javelin days. Lapthorn days. Dead days.
I was well into my seventh drink and still stone cold sober when the fight started. It was nothing to do with me. Fights are always starting in spaceports. It’s something to do with tradition and the honour of the fleet. Mostly they don’t finish—they just kind of evaporate. It’s rare for anyone to get hurt or arrested. And the bars only use unbreakable furniture.
Anyway, I wandered over to watch. A circle had been cleared around the middle of the room, where a couple of tables and half a dozen drinks had been upset. There were six men fighting—five against one. The crowd, in true sporting fashion, was cheering on the loner while making no move to save his head from being kicked in. Not unnaturally, the poor guy was losing.
It was Rothgar.
The first friend I’d seen in two years.
Somebody knocked him in my direction. I caught him neatly by the shoulders, pinned his arms and whirled around so fast the others never saw where he went. The circle folded in tightly around me, and my back hid Rothgar from his assailants. The five men peered myopically around, slowly dropping their hands as they realised that they were no longer under attack. Knowing Rothgar, I was in no doubt that it was they and not he who had been attacked.
He squirmed, and twisted his head to look over his shoulder into my face. He didn’t recognise me, and tried to kick me. I kicked him back.
“Rothgar, you bloody fool, it’s me,” I said. “Grainger!”
“Oh,” he said. “Hi. How many did we kill?”
“None.”
“How many did we knock down?”
I shook my head, and let him go.
“You’re losing your touch,” he said. “We should have been able to handle that lot.”
“You were on your own,” I said.
“Now that’s what friends are for,” he said. “You lousy bastard, why didn’t you help me?”
“I did,” I told him. “I stopped the fight.”
“Bloody hell.”
“You were losing,” I added.
“Getting old,” he excused himself. “They move too fast these days. Grow up in high gee or something.”
I sat him down in a chair and looked him over. White-haired, three or four days unshaven, dark-eyed. Medium height, but still trying to look bigger than he was, and walk bigger, and talk bigger. His hot temper was cooling quickly to room temperature. He sagged a bit, and it wasn’t because they’d roughed him up much. He was getting old. He looked a bit ridiculous, stumbling out of a fight with a false air of triviality, as if it were all in an evening’s fun. It wasn’t. Not any more.
“How’ve you been, these last years?” I asked him.
“Ah, you know the routine. You lift on anything with a drive. You sort out the mess the last bastard left. You nurse the baby and hep her up. Then they kick you in the balls and drop you in the shit. Saved a couple of ships, maybe broke one or two up. I forget how long two years have been. Maybe I told you before. They’re all scared of me now. The lines don’t like to touch me any more and the companies hate my guts.”
“I went down,” I told him.
“That what went on? Alachakh told me you must have hit black rock. I saw him on Hannibal and we had a long talk. He had big business there. A lot of money and big noise on Khor. He’s got a good ship—a big one. Still calls her the Hymnia, though, like his first ship. Not good for her, that—giving a new baby a dead ship’s name. I told him but aliens don’t always understand a thing like that. And Alachakh is a big man, since I don’t know when. He doesn’t take much notice any more. He’s old, you know.”
Being old is serious for a Khormon.
“You know where Alachakh is now?” I asked.
“Out at the carnival. Hallsthammer.”
“Carnival?”
“Drift-dredging is the new fashion. Everybody is doing it. Lots of dumb kids flocking around the Caradoc boys. All the old hands figure if the kids can do it, they can do it better. The Halcyon is sure crowded. I heard tell of a couple dead when I came in. But nobody’s anywhere near the jackpot yet.”
Alachakh in the Halcyon Drift? That didn’t seem to make much sense. Alachakh was no idiot, and he wasn’t spacedrunk either. Only old. But even if his time was coming, he wouldn’t take it in the Drift.
“Is nothing happening in the whole damn universe except the search for the Lost Star?” I complained.
“Nothing that anybody cares about,” said Rothgar. “People don’t care much any more. Times have changed.”
“I haven’t been away that long,” I muttered. Nobody cared much anyway.
“Ach,” said Rothgar, expressing intoxicated disgust, “It’s only a circus. Been going on too long. Time’s running out. Only a month or three left in it. Then they’ll leave the poor old Lost Star lost forever. Shouldn’t have called a ship by a name like that. Aliens again, I’ll bet, or rich men, or women. Nobody should call a ship lost before she lifts. What do they expect from her? Still, if we all go digging for her, maybe she won’t be lost after all.”
Suspicion invaded my mind.
“You’re not, by any chance, in from New Alexandria to ride a ship called the Hooded Swan?”
“Sure,” he replied. “Only New Alexandria will hire me these days. Only people got any faith in a man’s hands. Everybody else wants the instruction book to do the flying. They offered me a good job.”
“Drift-dredging,” I said flatly.
“Sure,” he said again. “Everybody’s doing it.”
And how many men would “everybody” contribute to the Halcyon’s already considerable total of victims? But did I care? Did I care if it was Rothgar, or Alachakh, or Caradoc’s thirty ramrods, or Johnny Socoro, or Eve Lapthorn? Or me?
“Fate,” I said, “has it in for me. It has doomed me to fly that ship. I am condemned by circumstances to fly into the core of the Halcyon, to play chicken with time-schisms and lesions and all other breeds of perverted, mutilated space. Everywhere I turn I meet the Drift. What the hell else can I do?”
“I lost you,” Rothgar complained.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “Just that when I came back from Lapthorn’s Grave, the Drift came with me. It’s riding on my back, and I can’t shake it no matter where I go.”
Rothgar didn’t bother complaining again. He just assumed that I was drunk.
I sat back in my chair to think. It wasn’t coincidence, of course. The links between delArco and
Eve Lapthorn, between New Alexandria and me, between my brand of flying and the ship—all these had existed before. But someone had gone to a certain amount of trouble to weave a web around these links from which I couldn’t escape. The New Alexandrians, of course. Computermen all. Devious minds. They liked things nice and orderly. They liked to set things up. And they had. They’d be just now checking their answers with a slide rule.
I’d always liked the New Alexandrians, while I’d worked for them before. But now I was building up a little bit of resentment. What got me most of all was that I didn’t believe that I was worth the trouble.
“You want another drink?” asked Rothgar. “I got paid.”
“Fine,” I said. He got up to go to the bar, then turned back to face me.
“You the pilot on the Hooded Swan?” he asked
“Yes,” I said, resigned to my fate.
He grinned. “It’ll be good to fly with you,” he said. “I like a pilot who knows what he can do. Out on the rim they say you’re the best. I say it too, which is maybe what keeps the story moving. You know how it is.”
“I know,” I said. “I say the same about you. Maybe we talked ourselves into a job we can’t do.”
He laughed. “They shouldn’t have called the ship that name,” he said. “But it’s not so bad as all that. We can live through it.”
Then we got drunk.
CHAPTER NINE
Johnny woke me up the next morning, dragged me into a sitting position, and shoved a cup of coffee into my hand.
“What’s the matter?” I wanted to know. “I wasn’t that drunk. I’m perfectly all right.”
“Eve’s downstairs,” he said.
I started to groan, but thought better of it.
“What does she want?” I asked, in neutral tones.
“You. I can’t imagine why.”
“Don’t you start,” I said.
“Don’t you ever stop?” he retorted. I gathered that he was annoyed about something.
“I made myself a little unpopular yesterday,” I guessed.
“You were a little tiring,” he said.
So much for my attempt to raise a few obvious objections and submit them for rational discussion. DelArco obviously had Johnny on his side. Which was understandable. The kid had never been in space. I drained the coffee cup and gave it back to him. “Cold,” I commented.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
I got dressed at an unnecessarily leisurely pace, and then wandered downstairs. Eve was seated. Johnny leaned against the wall, eyeing her covertly.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she said.
“What for?”
“Because I want to talk to you.”
“Not about that bloody ship?”
“Not directly,” she said. “I want to ask you about Michael.”
I nodded. Johnny looked a little less than happy as I eased past him to the door, but I turned in the doorway to shrug helplessly at him. He returned the gesture.
The sun was shining brightly but wetly. Dark clouds were still drifting to the north, and the pavements were still wet with the rain that had lasted all night. We wandered in the vague direction of the Northeast Area. This side of New York Port wasn’t a great place for strolling but Eve had something on her mind—real or imaginary—and she wasn’t paying any heed at all to the shabbiness of our surroundings.
“The world where Michael was killed,” she said. “It was on the edge of the Halcyon Drift.”
“Not far inside the fringe,” I said.
“Why were you in the Drift?” She wasn’t beating around the bush. I saw what she was driving at right away.
“I told you,” I said. “We were making a run for Hallsthammer from Adadict looking for some cargo.”
“You weren’t going to try to locate the Lost Star?”
“No, we weren’t.”
“Where were you going to take the cargo you picked up on Hallsthammer?”
I shrugged. “Around. Depends mostly on what it was. Probably tried to pick up some cloth and suchlike for a world named Rosroc. There was stuff on Rosroc we could run to Hallsthammer, if we could trade for it.”
“So you intended to be around the Drift for some time?”
“Not too far away, I guess. Your brother liked it out there. But being near the Drift and being in the Drift are two very different propositions.”
“I read over Michael’s last few letters last night. He mentioned the Lost Star. Twice. Once from Hallsthammer and once before you made the first landfall out on the rim near the Halcyon. Whose idea was it, to go out there?”
I groaned inwardly. The suspicion had crossed my mind before, but I had never seriously imagined that Lapthorn might have his eye on the Lost Star treasure. Not even Lapthorn....
“Michael’s,” I answered her.
“Does that matter to you?”
“Does what matter?”
“The fact that Michael died because he wanted to go after the Lost Star.”
“You think I ought to rush straight out there and die with him, trying the same crazy trick,” I suggested. “From motives of loyalty? Or just plain sentiment?”
“But he did intend to try?”
“He might have. He acted like an idiot, at times. But he didn’t say anything to me. I thought we were there to run cargo, the way we always did. That’s how we made our living. I would never have let him talk me into Drift-diving. I’d never take a ship of mine into a place like that.”
“But it wasn’t just your ship, was it? It was his as well.”
“It wouldn’t fly without me. Or without him, for that matter. Wherever we went, we had to agree to go. I would no more let him go treasure-hunting in a dark nebula than he’d let me get a job running mail from Penaflor to New Rome. We always compromised.”
“You didn’t compromise at the end, did you?”
“What’s that supposed to imply?”
“I know a little bit about spaceships,” she said. “I’ve been around them quite a lot. Your ship was two-ended, right? Controls in the nose and engine in the belly.”
“So?”
“So whichever end came down first would take the brunt of the crash.”
“And....”
“The man at the controls might have no chance of avoiding the crash, but he might have plenty of time to change the attitude of the ship.”
“I told you all about the crash,” I said. “I didn’t kill your brother deliberately.”
“You could have flipped that ship. You had the time.”
“I was spending the time trying to get us down in one piece. I didn’t make up my mind before we hit that one of us was going to die. I was fighting an all-or-none battle. I was trying to save the ship, and stop her from smashing us all into little pieces.” But it wasn’t as simple as that and I must have known it at the time. Could I, if I had thought about it, have flipped the ship and saved Lapthorn’s life while forfeiting my own?
The simple fact was that I hadn’t thought about it. I’d just done what I’d done, without hesitation, by sheer reflex. It had never occurred to me that there was any choice to be made.
We’d both stopped walking. Other people were on the street, ostensibly paying us no attention whatsoever, but close enough to hear us.
“I suppose I could have flipped the ship,” I said, very quietly. “I had the time.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I didn’t.” Still very quiet.
“And what right had you to decide that it was Michael who was going to die, and not you?” Her voice was intense, but not angry or hysterical.
“Right?” I said hoarsely. “What has right got to do with it? I had the controls. If there was a decision it was mine to make. I did what I did and I never even saw a decision. Right and wrong don’t enter into it. I was at the controls. I tried not to crash. I crashed. If the only thing in my mind had been giving your brother a better chance of surviving, then perhaps I could have saved him. But
it wasn’t. There was nothing in my mind about saving anything except the whole lot—ship and contents. My ship was going down. I was thinking about her.”
“I see,” she said, in normal tones. “All right.”
“All right!” She’d lost me. My voice rose, helpless before her inconstant attitude. “You force me to admit that I could have engineered your brother’s survival—or at least that I didn’t do all I could to save his bloody life. You make out that you believe I should have been the one who was killed, and that you think I should think so too. And now all you can say is, I see. All right.”
She’d started walking along in the middle of my spiel, and I was half a pace behind throughout the second half.
“I was just curious,” she said, offhand.
“Oh, bloody marvellous,” I said. “Thanks a lot. And now, I suppose you want to start helping me again.” I felt slightly uncomfortable as I came out with the last remark. “That reminds me,” I added.
“What did it remind you of?” She sounded slightly surprised.
“I owe you an apology.”
“What for?”
“I thought you put delArco on to me. I sort of blamed his first visit on you.”
“I told him where to find you.”
“Yes, but it was the New Alexandrians who were so keen on his hiring me. I thought he was acting on your say-so. He did say that his backers sent him, but I didn’t really believe him.”
“I shouldn’t worry too much about it,” she said.
I decided that I was entitled to a little curiosity as well.
“Exactly what is your part in all this?” I said. “What are you doing on the crew of the Hooded Swan?”
She hesitated. “I’m the monitor for New Alexandria. They’re recording the whole trip on a shipboard device that records sensory impressions. They’ll be recording history using my eyes.”
It didn’t sound right, somehow. I wondered whether there was any reason she could have for lying. While I was wondering, I somehow forgot to ask exactly what sort of job she had with the delArco organisation.
Hooded Swan, Book I: Halcyon Drift Page 7
