You have been a friend to me, Grainger, and that is why I give you what I know. I hope that you reach the Lost Star, because if you do not, other Khormon ships will try, and other Khormon lives will be lost. Once the Hymnia has failed, it is clear that no ship of ours can succeed, but that will not stop them trying. If you should feel this knowledge to be a burden, then I apologise for having inflicted it upon you.
Whatever you do, you may be sure that Alachakh agrees with you.
The co-ordinates which you already have will guide you to the Lost Star. I hope that your quest is successful.
Goodbye.
Alachakh the Myastridian.
Well now, I said to myself, what was all that in aid of? I stuck the letter into Alachakh’s pocket.
I eased in front of the cradle, careful not to disturb the man inside it. I looked carefully at his controls, which were easy enough to understand more or less at a glance. I referred to his scanners and plotted a rough course which would carry the ship into the nearest solar system, after which it could not help eventually falling into the sun. I carefully reset the controls. The Hymnia had no power, of course, but she had momentum to carry her. All that was needed was one short burst to realign her path. I bled the internal power to give her that burst. Afterward, she was completely dead. No light, no life. It might take her several years, but eventually she would reach her destination and her ultimate end, if the time storms did not catch her and hurl her back into the past, or the dust-clouds shatter her as they moved on the tachyonic winds.
I evacuated the ship, to make sure that Alachakh could not rot away before he reached his burial.
Then I returned to the Hooded Swan.
Johnny was waiting for me at the airlock, and he helped me to take off the suit.
“Are they dead?” he asked.
“Very,” I replied.
“Did you settle whatever it was you had to settle?”
“I did what I could.”
We walked slowly back to the control room, where delArco was waiting patiently.
“All over?” the captain asked.
I nodded.
“Can we play the tape now?”
“Sure.” I fiddled with the recorder with one hand, while I helped Eve out of the cradle with the other. The string of co-ordinates vomited out while I put the hood back on my own head, and adjusted the connections at the back of my neck.
“That tells us exactly where the Lost Star is?”
“It tells us what world she’s on, and her approximate location. And I mean approximate. You can’t get a dead fix from twenty light-years away. I’ll be pleased if we hit the same continent.”
“Did you find out anything else? On the Khormon ship, I mean.”
“Yes. Alachakh’s dead.”
“Nothing else?”
“Yes. I know why he’s dead.”
“Why?”
“That’s his business. A personal matter.”
“What about Myastrid?” This from Eve.
“I didn’t go over there looking for fairyland,” I told her.
The third degree died of starvation. Nobody was getting any place.
“OK,” said the captain. “Let’s get going. If you’re quite ready.”
“Aye aye, Captain, sir,” I replied. I began a close scrutiny of the scanner. The printout from the computer revealed that we were very close. Poor Alachakh had gone down practically on the Lorelei’s doorstep. I slipped the ship into a rough groove and prepared for transfer.
Alachakh, I thought to myself, is bloody clever. He knew damn well he probably wouldn’t make it. So he wants me to do it for him. Sure, it would be impolite to ask, but he can still drop hints like overweight anvils. He knows full well that I haven’t got a reason for taking this trip—not one of my own, not a good reason. This trip doesn’t mean a thing. Unless I use it to do a friend a favour. But if I did, Charlot would have me in jail the moment I touched soil again. Forever.
I blasted the Hooded Swan through the light barrier and accelerated toward the dragon’s lair.
Here we come, Lost Star, ready or not,
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I was careful again, now that the prize was practically in the bag. I took things as easy as I could—trying to save the Swan from all unnecessary discomfort.
We passed close to deep lesions, and had to flutter in the grip of the distortion currents a time or two, but there was nothing new, nothing I couldn’t handle with a minimum of bruising. We made the star-system in a little under three hours. But even when we were within spitting distance the trouble wasn’t over. It isn’t ever easy.
“There’s an anamorphosis around the sun,” I announced.
“What?” Rothgar’s voice echoed in the phone.
“She’s a focus. A doorway for the power that sweeps from the core of the Drift. A hot spot. The mouth of hell. There’s a contortive domain like a cage across half the system. The fabric’s stretched taut. Flying in that’ll be like crawling on broken glass.”
I slowed right down and drifted in, not heading straight for the star but describing an oblique orbit, looking for the exact position of the planet I wanted. The screen was blurred by the intense distortion, but I found the world without too much difficulty.
“That tears it,” I said. “The bastard’s inside the zone by a lousy few million miles. Of all the bloody silly places to be. I can get close at slow transcee, but if she can be reached at all, it’ll have to be subcee. With no guarantees.”
What made the situation even more serious was that our troubles might not end even if and when we reached the world. This wasn’t one of the degenerate lumps of bad rock that I’d chosen to set down on earlier. This was a genuine, honest-to-goodness planet, likely to have an atmosphere and maybe even a life system. What might the surface be like, in the centre of a distortion field like that? What sort of life forms could survive there?
“This is going to take time,” I said. “And it won’t be pleasant. We’re going to be an hour or more inside a field which can—if we offend it in the slightest fashion—draw on a power greater than that of a thousand suns just to give a reflexive twitch. Think as small as you possibly can. This is one time in your life when you want to be absolutely negligible.”
And so, having scared hell out of anyone with the sense to listen, I transferred down and commenced the approach.
Less than three minutes into it and I was scared half to death myself. I could feel that power I’d been talking about so glibly, and I’d never felt anything so colossal in my darkest dreams. It was impossible. I felt the sheer presence of the field drawing me out and pressing me in. I was draining away into my boot-heels. I knew, as sure as I knew my name, that I couldn’t make it. My hands almost fell away from the levers.
Move it! howled the wind. You’ll kill us all!
I gathered my melting heart and picked up my mind in the hands of my courage. I felt the arcs of my wings and the hollow steel of my spine. I became sympathetic to the waves and the warps. I sat in the plane of the stress and prayed that my presence there would have absolutely no effect. I found crevices in the stress and slid the Swan along them, like a sleek fish moving through still water with never a single ripple.
Giant hands were around me, caressing me, stroking me, lulling me.
To kill a small mammal, like a mouse, you hold him—or her—by the tail and gently stroke the fur on his/her back with a scalpel handle. When he/she is settled down under the stroking, secure within the caress, lulled into comfort, you press down behind the head and pull the tail hard, breaking the little bastard’s neck.
I felt like a mouse. But I was composed. I was very scared, but I could hold my fear. Tightly.
The deeper I went in, the worse the distortion became. This, I thought, was it. The worst the Drift had to offer. Beat this and you have conquered the Halcyon Drift. You have won.
Just on and on, trying not to irritate it, trying so hard not to be noticed. Like a bedbug on a ma
n’s thigh. Like a leopard stalking. Like a hunted man in a crowd. Like the worms of my own gut.
That great big hand began to squeeze. I couldn’t make it between the lines. I was running out of crevice. The pattern was too complicated. It flowed too fast. It was too sharp to feel. I was touching it but I couldn’t find its contours. It was stiff and slimy, like a frog-skinned bone. It could feel me, and I knew it. It was reacting with revulsion and hatred; the sun was a giant baleful eye burning my eyes inside the hood. It could see me, and I watched the thoughts in its face, choosing the moment to strike and stamp me out like the loathsome vermin I had become when I chose to invade its body.
Still stroking, still caressing, but with a trace of eagerness, of gathering passion, of consuming ardour. Getting ready, ready, ready for the climactic moment.
The scalpel handle coming down on my neck.
I couldn’t breathe, my windpipe was trapped beneath my spine and closed, I was choking to death, my neck was bending, my spine was stretching, I had to break, but I couldn’t scream because I didn’t have the breath, I couldn’t suck in air, couldn’t get it out, I was on the verge of extinction, of breaking, of....
Black out and give it to me....
I couldn’t hear for the blood beating in my eardrums, I couldn’t hear because there was no oxygen getting to my brain, I was fighting for air, for my senses, for my sanity.
BLACK OUT ! ! !
I did.
I opened my eyes and could see absolutely nothing. I was hot and wet. And very tired. My body was strained as though it had been through terrible tortures. The wetness was sweat. It had poured out of me. But not on my face. There the wetness was cold water. There was a damp cloth on my face. As I blinked my eyelids, it was removed, and I looked up into Eve’s face,
“You went out like a light,” she said.
That I already knew.
“When?”
“As soon as we were down.”
“We’re down?”
“Yes.”
But I knew that couldn’t be. I’d blacked out after no more than a few minutes. We were more than a million miles away.
“What happened?” I asked. “I don’t remember.”
“Nothing happened. It was a rough ride, and I thought for a time we might all be dead. I could see Nick, and he was a corpse already, just waiting for deep-space to come in and claim him. But you just flew the ship. You shed your sweat and tears, but you flew the ship. We watched the strain in your movements, but they were always right. We landed.”
“How long...?” I began, and had to stop to clear my throat. “How long did it take?”
“Fifty-eight minutes. I counted them. We’ve been down about ten.”
“Leave me alone,” I said. She withdrew, taking the cloth with her.
I shut my eyes.
You did that?
We did it. You found a little too much imagination. But you knew what to do, once your mind was submerged.
You knew what to do.
I didn’t need to. It was your brain that performed the operations. Your memories, your reflexes, your judgement. All I had to do was hold you together, make sure the machine worked.
I’m not a machine.
You had to be a machine, to make that flight. Your mind was impairing your mechanical efficiency. That’s why you had to black out.
If I’m so much of a handicap to my own body I wonder you haven’t bothered to throw me out,
I can’t do that.
Well, I’m not sorry.
You’re not sorry I’m here, either.
You serve your purposes, I admitted. Could I have survived without him?
I opened my eyes again.
“Anything wrong?” Eve asked. She was still hovering around me.
“I ache.”
DelArco shoved a cup of coffee into my hand. It occurred to me suddenly that someone had disconnected the hood and unclasped me. But I was too tired to worry. For the moment, we seemed safe, and I just didn’t want to know about anything which opposed that impression.
“Charlot was right,” said the captain. “We needed you.”
“Yeah,” I agreed modestly. “No other two guys could have done it.”
I sipped the coffee for a moment or two, and it brought back my sense of bodily presence. Once that came back I began to worry about its continuation. I picked up the hood and looked at the world outside.
There wasn’t a great deal to see. It was weird, but not frightening. I should have felt relieved—I could have dreamed up an awful lot of nastiness the world might have possessed.
I tuned in the famous Lost Star bleep. It came over loud and clear. I’d heard it before, of course, but only as a faint, illusory whisper. Now it was unmistakably real. Not a will o’ the wisp. Not a siren song. It was a comfortable sound. Almost homely.
“Well,” I said. “There’s Captain Kidd’s treasure. X marks the spot. Now get me something to eat, and let me rest for a while.”
“Do you want a sleeper?” asked Eve.
“I don’t need one. I’ll take a pick-me-up in an hour or two, and then we’ll go out into the wilderness. There’s no point in hanging around too long. Tell Johnny to get the Iron Maiden ready.
“And,” I added, “you better all remember that the slowest part of a space flight is the taxi into town. It might be all over bar the shouting, but don’t hold your breath.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
There was, inevitably, a dispute about who was going to do what. Everybody wanted to go and nobody wanted to stay. I had my own reasons for not wanting to take anybody along, but delArco sure as hell wasn’t going to let me get first look at the Lost Star. He still thought this was his joyride.
Finally, the argument had to reach its most rational solution. Somebody had to stay with the ship, and that somebody had to have some kind of chance to take the ship back if the landing party didn’t make it. Which pointed the finger at Rothgar and Eve. Rothgar was no hero, and he was well satisfied, but Eve pleaded that there was only one competent pilot aboard. Unfortunately, she was reminded, said competent pilot was also the resident expert on alien territory, and hence had to go. We took Johnny along as well, against my better judgement. But delArco was the captain, and the arguments against weren’t wholly convincing.
And so it was that three of us set forth in the Iron Maiden—a sort of amphibious tank designed and built on Penaflor, and supposedly the last word in transport for alien worlds. Penaflor has an unnaturally high regard for the efficacy of armour plating, which testifies to a military bent in its attitude. I’d never been in such a monstrosity before, so I was suspicious of its utility. But it was a lot faster than walking, and the only other alternative was to take the Swan up again and stooge around in atmosphere searching for the wreck. I certainly didn’t want to do that—mutilated space was bad enough without having to cope with atmosphere as well. And it was all too obvious that the effects of the distortion were as great on the surface as they were in space.
True enough, the surface didn’t actually jump up and down much. The wind wasn’t violent enough to be called worse than capricious. But there was life here—life in extreme abundance, just as one might expect in an earth-type atmosphere. Everything that lived here was both a rhythmic and a facultative metamorph.
Which meant, in simple terms, that as the distortion waves came in from the contortive domain, the life forms co-opted the energy of the waves. Only immovable objects can resist forces of that magnitude. Iron Maidens and spacesuits could stand firm against the distortion, just as they could keep out sunlight and hard radiation. But a life system can’t evolve in an iron box. It can’t just keep local conditions at barge-pole length. It has to live with them. Ergo the life forms lived off the distortional energy. They absorbed the inconstant flow, channelled it and employed it. Their only problem was a superabundance of supply. They had to invent ways of using it which weren’t strictly necessary, in the empirical sense.
And so th
ey perpetually changed shape.
Every distortion wave—their frequency varied from one every ten minutes to half a dozen a minute—occasioned a complete revision of the landscape. That was the rhythmic part. In addition, the life forms could use stored energy to make extra changes in between waves. Every bioform was as fluid as it wanted to be. It could be any shape it wanted, or none at all, just so long as it didn’t try to hold one more than a moment or two.
And with a superabundant supply of warp energy from the solar domain, there was no limit to the profusion of life except life itself. The metamorphic system, I reasoned, must make for very fast evolution, but evolution in only one direction. The entire purpose of the metamorphosis was the passive absorption of energy. Conquest by submission and acceptance. But did this mean that we—as invaders—were safe from danger? Probably not—a pitfall is a very passive kind of trap.
We had not gone far before I noticed that the life forms were not as versatile as I had at first supposed. There were only limited types of shape they could adopt. It must be something to do with the ordination of the stress patterns. There were no sharp edges or straight lines, no axial joints. Cylinders and spheres were apparently preferred, but unduloids and catenoids were permissible, and several times I saw mobius-twisted entities which I took to be nodoids.
At first, I thought such a life system would lend itself very easily to the evolution of intelligence, but I later realised that this would be well-nigh impossible. Intellect necessarily involves some kind of mediation between stimulus and reaction: in the human instance it is rationalisation. There are races which don’t rationalise—which have no memories and no language—but which still might be classified as intelligent, but they do have a pseudo-emotional system acting as interpreter for physical signals, and some kind of decision-making apparatus which is modifiable by purely introspective means which have nothing to do with Pavlovian conditioning. They don’t work by pure reflex. This life system did. There could be no gap between stimulus and reaction. There was no gap into which intelligence could fit.
Hooded Swan, Book I: Halcyon Drift Page 14
