Hooded Swan, Book I: Halcyon Drift

by Brian Stableford

  “You didn’t ask Alachakh.”

  “He didn’t want me to ask.”

  “What did he mean earlier,” she asked, “when he talked about being unable to change his mind? I couldn’t follow that.”

  “Khormons have sectioned brains,” I explained. “They have eidetic memories—they never forget. They sort and classify their memories, and hold them in separate memory-banks—what Alachakh called rooms. Their consciousness can scan one section at a time. Their minds exist in all the rooms, but as the rooms fill up, their minds become compressed smaller and smaller. Eventually, the mind has to split, to lose its coherence. That’s deadlocking. As a matter of principle—of politeness to their fellows—the Khormons usually choose to die before they reach this stage, or before the condition becomes acute. As a matter of pride, they like to perform some useful action in dying. Every Khormon wants to be a dead hero.”

  “So Alachakh’s attempt on the Lost Star is a kind of ritual suicide?”

  I shrugged. “Just about. I would have figured him for a less ostentatious way out, but the last two years seem to have left a big mark on him. He’s not quite the man I used to know.”

  “You don’t seem sad,” she said hesitatingly. “If that man was your friend, and he just told you that he was going to die in a matter of days....”

  “I’m not sad,” I said simply. “Neither was he.”

  “But he was an alien.” She spoke without thinking.

  “So he’s entitled to be polite. He’s entitled to be reconciled to his death. But I’m not, am I? Not according to you. I have to put up a show. I have to cry, like they do in the movies, like they train their children to do. Well, I’d rather be a Khormon kind of hypocrite than a human one. I’ll not weep for Alachakh.”

  “You didn’t even say goodbye,” she accused.

  “It wasn’t necessary,” I told her. “Not yet. He knows I’ll be there when he dies. We’ll say goodbye then.”

  She shook her head, and refused to understand.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  As Eve and I left the building, we paused reflexively on the pavement to feel the cool air. Eve looked up at the darkening sky, and my eyes flicked right and left along the street, then came to rest dead opposite, where an alien in a spacesuit was watching me. He was standing stock still, and his face was hidden inside the helmet, but I sensed from his attitude that he was staring at me, and that he was recognising me. Then he moved his hand to his belt. I got suddenly very scared as I realised what was coming. I barged Eve to the ground, and turned to run to my right. I was acutely aware of the time the motion took, but things seemed to move more normally once I was in full flight. The gun in the alien’s hand followed me, tracking the course of my run, and fired. I ducked, but I’d have been too late if he’d fired straight. The beam splashed the wall a few inches behind me. I got showered in brick dust, but it didn’t hurt.

  The silver-suited figure never had time for a second attempt. He was shot down by someone standing in the hotel doorway. The police had arrived with uncommon and remarkable alacrity.

  I stopped sweating and walked slowly back. The cop was already helping Eve to her feet.

  “Thanks,” I said, recovering her from his arms. We all went across the street to inspect the cadaver.

  “That’s OK,” replied the gum-chewing cop laconically, as he strode proudly up to his kill like a hunter-tourist. “It’s what I’m paid for.”

  “You came out of that doorway in one hell of a hurry,” I said. “Were you watching him? Or us?”

  “We protect the citizens,” he said.

  “And today you have to protect us.”

  “Seems so,” he agreed. ‘maybe somebody knew you were going to need help. Came in that New Alexandrian bird, didn’t you? Going to steal Caradoc’s gold.” He pushed at the spacesuit with his boot and turned the corpse onto its back.

  “Crocolid,” he said, in his slow, idle tone. “We got three dome colonies on this continent. They don’t often come out, with having to suit up and all. Some of them work in the port, though—odd jobs, mostly.”

  “Odd job is right,” I confirmed.

  “He was waiting for us,” said Eve, finding it a little hard to believe. She’d led a sheltered life. Mind you, I hadn’t exactly made a habit of being shot at.

  “Apparently,” I said, “Caradoc thought I got off too lightly on New Rome. Or maybe they thought I was being ungrateful, coming back to the Drift so soon. Either way, they thought I needed a lesson.” I crouched down beside the cop, who was calmly desuiting the dead alien. “Any chance of finding out who paid his wages?”

  “What do you think?” he replied scornfully.

  “I think the one thing I’d like to know more than anything else is whether he was paid to hit me, or whether he was told to miss,” I said.

  “Brother, if I were you, I’d worry,” he said confidently. I couldn’t quite see why anyone should want me dead enough to hire a hit man. It didn’t make sense, no matter how much Caradoc didn’t like me. How loudly, I wondered, had Charlot bragged about the prowess of the Hooded Swan? How much time did Caradoc think they needed to buy in order to beat us to the Lost Star?

  There was a crowd gathering.

  “Can we go?” I asked. “Or do we need the shadow of the law lurking in our wake?”

  “I’ll come with you,” he said. ‘the wagon just turned the corner. We can leave justice in the hands of the almighty.”

  He was discreet about following us back to the ship. He turned away every time I looked back over my shoulder.

  I was glad to get away from the port again. Maybe Hallsthammer is a bitch of a world where people get gunned down in the streets every day of the year. I’d been on worlds like that before. But I’d never been important enough to shoot. Only a little guy with his own business to mind and no talent for stepping on other people’s toes. I didn’t like being important enough to be a target.

  The whole affair put me in a violent frame of mind. As we passed beneath the Swan prior to climbing into her belly, I realised for the first time that this kind of ship could revolutionise space combat as well as space exploration. Space battles had been fought half a hundred times in the past, but casualties were so light it was hardly worth the bother. It’s difficult to hit anything out in all that emptiness. But the Hooded Swan could manoeuvre. She could get in close no matter what velocity she was travelling. If she were armed, she’d be a phenomenally successful warship. Maybe more people than the Caradoc Company had a right to be afraid of her. Though the idea of New Alexandria as a military power was ridiculous, the idea of an Earth fleet trying to reinforce the mother planet’s influence in the galaxy was oddly plausible.

  “She’d make a great hawk, if she had claws,” I said to Eve, to explain my silent contemplation.

  “You want to use her to hunt pigeons?” she asked.

  “Worms,” I said. “Giant steel worms. It isn’t the sportsman coming out at last. It’s the pessimist. Don’t let it worry you. Let’s go make some coffee and tell the children about our adventure.”

  Johnny was dutifully concerned about the nearness of my escape from the jaws of death, but Rothgar only used it as fuel to feed his morbid outlook on life in general and tomorrow in particular. I changed the subject, as soon as it was decently dead.

  “I saw Alachakh,” I told Rothgar.

  “I saw Cuvio,” he countered. “Gave me a special bleep for tracking him. You can hook it into the control panel and it’ll plot his path in our computers.”

  I took the small device which he handed to me. “Damned clever, these aliens,” I muttered. “By the way,” I added. ‘do you know what Myastrid means?”

  “Yes.”

  I was surprised. I spat a mouthful of coffee back into my cup lest I choke on it. “Well,” I said. “Tell me.”

  “Khormon fairyland. Silly stories, you know the type of thing.”

  “Not the lost planet?” I said distastefully.

  “
Not so far as I know,” said Rothgar. “Just fairyland. Strictly for the kids.”

  I shrugged. “I guess Alachakh really didn’t want me to know what he was about. I suppose I’ll find out in due course.”

  “Don’t you have any idea what might be on the Lost Star that he could want so badly?” asked Eve.

  “None at all,” I replied.

  “I’ll tell you what’s on board the Lost Star,” said Rothgar. “Khormon fairyland. Damn us all.”

  I nodded in half agreement.

  “Whatever it is,” I said, “it can’t possibly be of any value now. We’re a whole new universe. Eighty years is a long time. Standards have changed so radically within my working lifetime that the trade routes I started out on are totally redundant today. Price is a matter of fashion, and fashions change tremendously over the years. And never so fast as during the last century. I think we’ll find something in the hold of the Lost Star, if we reach her. But it will be worthless.”

  “As long as we’ve got something to show for it,” said Johnny. “If we find her and then can’t bring anything back, it’ll be a hell of a bust after all this shouting.”

  “That’s true, I guess,” I agreed. “Stunt or no stunt, we’ll need a few baubles to feed the imagination of the peasantry. Just so long as they don’t expect miracles.”

  “So we win the game even if we don’t find a fortune,” he said.

  “First time I ever saw a kid so eager not to find a fortune,” I commented.

  We would no doubt have carried on the conversation in much the same halfhearted vein, but we were saved the trouble by the return of Nick delArco. He was a bit steamed up. Word had filtered back to him that some unkind person had taken a potshot at his pilot. I was quite flattered by his concern. I didn’t know he cared.

  He and Charlot had talked to the police, without getting much satisfaction. Since tragedy had been averted, and a convenient corpse duly registered as part of the day’s haul of evildoers, the police were well satisfied. It looked OK on their books, and to follow it any further would be wasteful of man-hours and totally unproductive. The whole thing was a dead end. All delArco had got from the police was a string of interesting facts about crocolids.

  The assassin’s race was a relic. In their heyday, the crocolids had colonised seven or eight worlds in the neighbour systems to their home world of Hycilla. They’d progressed slowly because they had only subcee drives. To complicate matters further, Hycilla had a peculiar atmosphere which had necessitated setting up all the colonies under domes. Hycilla had then been badly knocked about by injudicious quarrelling amongst the crocolids. The planetary environment took a turn for the worse, which resulted in the eventual extinction of the indigenes. Without support from home, most of the colonies had been unable to sustain themselves. The crocolids on Hallsthammer had been among the lucky ones. But stuck in the domes, fighting poisonous atmosphere, they’d been completely unable to evolve. Their society and technology had been static for millions of years. It was possible that the crocolids were the earliest known spacefaring species, though no one could really speak for the antiquity of the Gallacellans.

  When the humans and the Khor-monsa had arrived—in that order—the crocolids had shown no interest at all. Inbreeding was well on the way to completely homogenising the genetic structure of the species, despite inter-dome eugenic conventions. The intellect and physique of the average crocolid were showing distinct signs of stagnation and deterioration. Everybody tended to look down on the crocolids as an inferior class of beings. People tend to lack sympathy for losers.

  Contact had been established, of course—human vanity especially can’t stand being ignored. Suited crocolids had some minor commerce with the ports, but for the most part they didn’t bother anybody and nobody bothered them.

  It was no good pestering the crocolids about the fact that one of their brethren had tried to gun me down, because they wouldn’t give a damn, and it was nothing to do with anybody except the individual concerned. It was no good trying to tie in Caradoc (or any other suspect, if any) with the crocolid, because all crocolids were identical, even outside their monkey-suits, and Caradoc—like everyone else—had irregular but not infrequent dealings with the aliens.

  I gathered from delArco’s verbose and largely irrelevant account that Charlot was unworried by the incident, and had every confidence in police protection. The captain himself didn’t have that kind of serene faith in the long arm of the law. He was an Earthman, which made him something of a connoisseur of criminal activities. Nobody had shot anybody else on New Alexandria in twenty years, which might have gone a long way to explain Charlot’s lack of concern. I think maybe delArco was a little bit scared as well, though he needn’t have been. Caradoc would surely have the sense to realise that he was absolutely dispensable. Rothgar pointed this out, and the subsequent rise in temper made it necessary for us all to retire for the night.

  Next morning, we lifted.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Handling the ship in the Drift was nobody’s idea of fun. This was the big test—if she could be flown safely in space like this, then she justified her price tag. Oddly enough, I think I was more confident at this moment than anyone else. DelArco had a lot of mouth, but he wasn’t so insensitive that he didn’t know that Driftdiving was dangerous. Rothgar, of course, was a born pessimist, and I’d thrown enough fear into Johnny and Eve to make them petrified of every dust-cloud. But by now I knew my ship. I knew how she felt, and I could sense what she was capable of. I hadn’t said anything to the others, because it was a personal matter, but I had every confidence in the Hooded Swan, and in my own ability to handle her even in distorted space.

  The one thing that worried me more than any other was my own concentration. Under normal circumstances I didn’t leave the control cradle, but I could rest there for long periods of time. In the Drift, it would be far more difficult to relax. There is, of course, lots of empty space in any nebular structure—everything in deep-space is ninety-nine percent emptiness, no matter how black it looks from outside—but you can’t really rely on any one bit of that space staying empty while you’re in it. In fact, it’s far less likely to stay empty while you are in it, because you provide a sort of focus for the contortive confluence of the lesions. The movements of the Drift within itself are not simply the cartwheels which the whole universe turns—Drift space casually disobeys principles which are called laws in saner corners of the galaxy.

  At the heart of the nebula is a stress-zone of colossal dimensions and apparently limitless power. The fabric of space is shredded and colloided in a pseudotemporal matrix which stretches the core into many other times—and perhaps many other spaces—than this one. Gravitic orientation follows all kinds of weird curves, and causes similar anomalies in light-paths and the distribution of matter. There are worlds in the Drift—suns and planets and moons and comets—and they behave in pretty much the same manner as worlds do anywhere else, but in distorted space, you can never be sure. Not of planetary conditions, of absolute motions, not even of their constancy in time.

  Theoretically, the Drift-worlds offered peaceful havens where I could drop ship and enjoy the luxury of sleep and silence. But could I really relax while we were in the nebula? Probably not. And we would be five days or more within the Halcyon’s boundaries. If, at any time during that five days, my concentration gave way under the strain, it could kill us all, no matter how perfect the Hooded Swan might be.

  The .first thing we met as we advanced into Drift space was the dust. Vast clouds of dust fly before the forces which wander through the Drift. It’s not particularly dangerous in itself—most ships can live in dust. Dirt-trackers and alien dredgers even mine the dust-clouds. But it’s one thing to smash through a cloud, bouncing it off your shield, and quite another to fly in an unsteady rain which maintains a continuous but inconstant strain on the ship’s armour. If the shield begins to flaw or erode then power may bleed away through the wound, and the unbalancin
g of power inevitably leads to the unbalancing of the relaxation flux. And when the flux itself begins to bleed, you have one foot in the grave.

  I retained a lot of respect for the dust, and felt it carefully with the sensors during the first hour or two that we flew through it. But my mobility seemed easily capable of coping with the common intensities of flow. Minor adjustments of my wings maintained a steady relationship between the orientation of my surfaces and the rain. After a while, compensating for the changes became a matter of routine and reflex. The pattern of my reactions was automatically programmed into the helm computers, and the ship soon learned to take some of the manipulative burden from my hands, although I maintained full vigilance.

  I’d hooked Alachakh’s special bleeper into our standard signalling apparatus. As the bleep came in, it put a trace onto my subsidiary screen which plotted the path which the signal source had followed. When we entered the Drift, we were about two hours behind the Hymnia, but we fell back a little in the early stages while I treated the Drift with more respect than Alachakh thought was necessary. I stuck to the trace without using it as a plotted groove. Alachakh had the maps. I knew that wherever the Hymnia could go, the Hooded Swan could follow, but I couldn’t put limitless trust in the trace-path. The very fact of Alachakh’s passage along it would make it that much more uncertain for us, as distortion-patterns homed in on his wake.

  I had to warn delArco and Eve not to speak to me when I talked. To a certain extent, commenting out loud about the situation helped my mental state. But I could do without helpful suggestions, silly questions and messages of congratulation.

  “I’m going to close up a bit,” I said. “There’s dust blowing across me and I don’t want the road breaking up.”

  A big cloud came billowing in—apparently from all sides. It was hot stuff blasted out from the centre, reforming all around us. The patter of the dirt on my wings halted for a moment, and then broke up into chaotic fingers stabbing at all parts of the shield. I rippled my wings but I couldn’t reduce all the angles of impact. I pushed extra power into the shield, and made sure the ship’s heart was beating firm and strong in case I needed even more. I was relying on the storm’s being of short duration. Pushing power into the shield over an extended period of time would weaken the drive-unit. There was no possibility of refluxing or repairing until we reached Hallsthammer again, and the motor would have to be treated with respect.