Hooded Swan, Book I: Halcyon Drift

by Brian Stableford

  All in all, I decided that this might well be the safest biosphere it had ever been my pleasure to tamper with. Whatever I did, it seemed, it could do only one thing: let me. However, I retained my caution and a respectable portion of my suspicion. Both delArco and I wore guns. Johnny—who had been delegated to remain with the vehicle—had a veritable arsenal beneath his fingertips. Firepower, of course, was something else much beloved of the nasty-minded people of Penaflor.

  I didn’t believe in wandering around inside a portable fort myself. It’s one thing to carry a little tiny gun for the purpose of saving oneself from occasional embarrassment. It is quite another to have a kid, alone for the first time on a rather disturbing alien world, sitting on enough blast to evaporate a continent. That’s a lot to ask of anybody’s sense of judgement. And, of course, aliens are exactly the same as humans in one respect: whatever they do to make you shoot at them, they do a hell of a lot worse after you’ve shot at them. It takes a great deal of maddening or scarifying to make me shoot, but you couldn’t depend on a kid like Johnny to show anything like that restraint. It’s all right to order someone not to fire unless absolutely necessary, but you so rarely find out what absolute necessity is until afterwards, which is ipso facto too late.

  We made good time over the first hundred miles, and nobody bothered us. There was a distinct instrument flicker caused by the distortion field despite our shielding, but we couldn’t get lost while we had the bleep. Radio communication with the ship was loud and clear, but a hundred miles isn’t all that far and we had several hundred still to go. We travelled, for the most part, over vegetation which was as keen to change colour as shape, so that one minute we’d be driving along a bright blue valley with yellow spots, and the next it would be chequered red and black. I never saw the ground, the cover was so thick, but our wheels could feel it plainly enough—the vegetation beneath them collapsed flat at our touch, and did its level best to get out from under. The plant carpet was dense but not tall—it barely came up to our mudguards.

  I kept a constant watch on the terrain. It was so boring that it took a considerable amount of concentration to keep my attention there, but I didn’t begrudge the effort of will. I failed to spot a single “higher” life form. No herd-consumers, no fliers, no fast movers. So there was no standard I could apply to the system to make it more comprehensible. On sane, sensible worlds, one can apply simple rule of thumb. Spot a slinky quadruped with big fangs and you know a little worry could be productive. Spot an absurd little creature stood on his back end waving a fist at you, and you know that worry is mandatory. The biggest danger here was that if there were anything which would bear worrying about, I wouldn’t recognise it.

  Things began to get difficult when we reached what looked like a gigantic flat plain. We had a fairly humpy ride down to it, and from up above it looked like an endless mottled carpet, with colours flowing and fusing like an oil-slide. Close to us, we could see the leaves and the tendrils and the flowers changing too, dwindling away or bursting forth, shrivelling and exploding, caught in helpless, purposeless gaiety by their relentless dancing master. But further away we could see nothing of shape—only colour and preternatural flatness. The plain stretched clear to the horizon on three sides of us. Far away to our right, the sun was beginning to sink. Its inconstant light flared and faded, its diameter changed and blurred. Prominences were clearly visible in dazzling white and harsh, electric yellow.

  Johnny eased us down the slope—where I saw bare rock protruding from the living sheath for the first time—and onto the plain. Where we promptly stopped.

  “The wheel won’t grip,” he said. “I’m going down. Sinking.”

  “You’re not sinking, you’re floating,” I told him. “This is the sea.”

  “Covered with plants?”

  “Why not? Even on nice, normal worlds there are Sargasso Seas. Surface weed, extending skin, clustering plant islands. Thousands of square miles, on a lot of worlds. This isn’t unusual.”

  He switched on the turbines, and the screws began to shove us laboriously through the tangle. It was the water rather than the plants which slowed us down. The matted vegetation put up not the slightest resistance to our passage. It changed to accommodate us—only too willing to oblige. Very polite.

  “How far to the other side?” asked delArco morosely. He was bored stiff.

  “Who knows? Maybe the Lost Star is mouldering full fathom five on the seabed. Better call the Swan and tell them we won’t be home for tomorrow’s supper, let alone today’s.”

  The captain laconically informed Eve that we’d hit treacle and might be considerably slowed.

  “In the meantime,” I suggested, ‘let’s all remember that patience is a virtue, and very character-building.”

  The sudden drop in our pace made five hundred miles seem like a very long way. I’d been glad, last night, that I’d managed—or the wind had managed—to set us down so close. On a planetary scale, five hundred miles is the edge of the bull’s eye.

  “We could play cards,” said Johnny. “Or guessing games.”

  “If you’re getting bored,” I said, “let someone else drive.”

  “Who’s driving?” he replied. “I just sit here. We’re setting a dead straight course over dead level water in dead weather. Who needs to drive?”

  “Never mind,” I consoled him. “We might meet a sea monster.”

  Nobody was amused. I’m strictly a laugh-in-the-face-of-death humorist. When things are depressingly normal, sardonic irony becomes just as ordinary, and just as depressing.

  I worried about the real possibility of meeting a sea monster for a little while, but pretty soon worry as a whole had lost both its flavour and its bite. Nothing was happening. Nothing even looked like happening. It didn’t even look like rain.

  I had to content myself with thinking how nice it was to let somebody else do the driving, and how this was the best chance I’d had to relax since I’d been picked up by the Ella Marita.

  We had to take shifts at the wheel while we plugged steadily on across the ocean—for ocean it was, not just a salt lake or a channel between land masses. The limitlessness of it began to get heavy on the nerves. Eventually, I reasoned, we had to come to the end. The Lost Star couldn’t really be under water, if her bleep was still going. If she was down at all, she couldn’t be in perfect condition. And spaceships are designed to keep air in, not to keep water out. If she’d survived for eighty years, then she was high and dry.

  The sun was still descending with reluctant lethargy to the horizon. Local daylight could last about fifty hours, all told, I estimated—which meant we had another eighteen or so. Local night might be longer or shorter, but I judged that it would most likely be the same length. The co-ordinates descriptive of the world’s identity (which Alachakh had given us along with those defining its position) registered no axial tilt at all. I was prepared to doubt Caradoc’s measurements (they were a long way away when they made them) but the fact that we’d contrived to set down so close suggested that they weren’t far out.

  I imagined that even during the night, there might be light enough to see by. The afterglow of the sun would leave a long twilight because of the light-bending which took place in the distortion field. But even so, night wouldn’t be as comfortable as day. Alien night is always a bad place to be.

  In the meantime, the Lost Star bleep crept closer all the time. The sun set while we were still not clear of the sea. I asked whether anybody wanted to wait out the night where we knew we’d be safe, but the suggestion met with a derisory reception. I didn’t think much of it myself. The sooner we got to the wreck, back, and away out of the Drift, the better we’d all feel. Two days sitting in the Iron Maiden was a lousy idea.

  I was right about the night’s darkness not being too intense. Although moonless, the world was ideally orientated to receive what illumination was available. We were pointed at a fairly light-dense sector of the Halcyon core, and a tight-knit cohort of th
irty close suns cast an unsteady but welcome light. Like a great curtain, the gaping cavern of the core hung across the sky, shedding light that was pale, but sufficient. The horizon glowed white, surrounding us like a vast silvery ring set with a jewel-like flare at the point where the sun had vanished.

  The colours in the weed around us—I thought of it as seaweed although there was no significant difference between the land and the sea plants—dulled to indigos, maroons, bronzes and greys. Nothing pale, nothing bright, but we could still perceive the macabre dance of shape and hue.

  Our distance from the Lost Star crept down through fifty miles, and forty.

  I began to think again about what her cargo would be, and what I was going to do when I found it. By now, of course, I knew what the cargo was. Alachakh must have reasoned it out as well, but he hadn’t told me in so many words because he couldn’t be sure. It was easy enough to put myself in the place of a starship captain who—eighty years ago—had happened on the remains of an unknown civilisation out beyond the rim. I knew what other starships had brought back from similar missions. I knew what the most valuable thing in the galaxy was, so far as that captain’s imagination had been concerned. And I knew that, ironically, that cargo would be completely worthless today, save to give away one single well-kept secret. Worthless that is, in terms of contribution. In terms of price, I had no doubt that certain people would still be willing to pay a fortune for it, unseen.

  Twenty miles from the Lost Star we came up out of the sea. Johnny and I were both dozing at the time, so we hadn’t noticed the cliffs looming up, and delArco hadn’t thought it worthwhile disturbing us in order to tell us. He accelerated up the beach as soon as the wheels found purchase, and the jerk woke us both up.

  He had to turn in order to search for an incline we could ascend. The cliff face looked sheer and savage—and unbroken.

  This shore presented quite a different aspect. To judge by what we’d already seen, this land was bleak and inhospitable. Plants grew, but they grew high rather than wide. There was no anchorage to be found in the hard igneous rock, save in furtive crevices, and where the plants could grow, they chose to reach upward rather than lying prostrate over the implacable surfaces which offered them nothing. The plants either could not or would not drown this land as they had the first—here there was room to move. Here there was intermittent constancy.

  The way delArco chose—had to choose, for there was no other—was sheer and bumpy. But the Iron Maiden was built to take it. Once or twice, I worried lest we slip backward, but she was a tenacious beast and climbed the cliff with dogged insistence. Once on top of the cliff, we saw that our return to land wasn’t going to enable us to make much better time. The landscape was broken and blasted. The vegetation was tall and clumped at all levels. There was nothing flat here—just a series of jagged surfaces meeting one another at all angles. The sum of the angles was a gentle upslope leading away from the cliff edge. But there was no roadway, no easy path. It would be climb and crawl, almost as much down as up, ridge and gully and hump and crack, all the way up to the top of a mountain.

  “It’s an island,” said delArco. “Part of a chain of volcanic origin.” He pointed away to the right and left where, from our vantage point on the ledge, we could see other sombre cones limned black by the dim painted sky.

  “Where’s the ship?” I asked, leaning forward from the back seat to see the instrument panel.

  DelArco pointed up the mountain. “If I judge the distance right,” he said, “it’s on the plateau. Or in the crater, as the case might be.” I ran my eyes along the jagged ridge which was, to our eyes, the topmost limit of the mountain. There was no way of telling what lay beyond the wall of rock. It could hardly be a live volcano if the Lost Star had been peacefully bleeping away therein for eighty years. But how deep a hole there might be we couldn’t tell.

  “Can we get up it?” I asked.

  All three of us studied the slopes carefully.

  “I don’t know,” said delArco. “But I should think so.”

  “You can’t go mountain climbing in a tank,” said Johnny.

  “It’s not so much the getting up as the coming back down again.” Which, of course, was a shrewd observation.

  “It’s not the most sensible expedition to undertake in a spacesuit, either,” I told them. “Rock is sharp.”

  We eased forward, picking our way along gullies and over boulder-strewn rises, looking for a better view rather than making progress.

  It was obvious that we would have to make some attempt at getting a good deal closer to the summit. It ought to be possible—it was a very big mountain, but it wasn’t outstandingly high.

  Looking around, I could see one or two of the living conglomerates moving within themselves. That was natural, of course, with their constant change of shape and re-orientation of internal components, but in the gloom I got the impression that they were somehow stirred to action by our nearness—discussing us, watching us.

  The captain moved the Maiden forward as best he could, punctuating his efforts with occasional swearing—an uncharacteristic symptom of annoyance. I left the problem of getting down again to hope and providence. If the Iron Maiden failed us, she failed us and that was that. We’d have to swim home. Until then, we had to trust her to carry us where we needed to go.

  Johnny took a short shift for a few hours which brought us to within three miles, and I took her a further two. Things got more difficult all the time, and at the end of my shift I decided that we might as well leave it at that.

  We all suited up—Johnny too, in case of emergency. We called the ship. Radio communication was very poor, but we could make ourselves understood.

  “Right,” I told Johnny. “You can hear us talking through the call unit. Leave the channel completely open. Don’t do anything. You should be perfectly all right sitting here. If anything happens to us, we’ll tell you what to do. If we don’t tell you, don’t do it. Sit tight and wait. If we don’t come back, go home. Don’t come after us, because whatever happened to us would be bound to happen to you. You can’t be forearmed unless you’re forewarned.”

  “There’s no point in me leaving you,” he said. “We’d never get home.”

  “You stand a damn sight better chance than if you come after us. Eve can pilot the ship, even in deep drift. All she has to remember is to fly slowly. Anything I can do at two thou, she can do at two hundred. It might take you months, but home you can go. I’m not indispensable.”

  “Cut it out,” said delArco. “What the hell’s the point? We’ll be back in a matter of hours. What can happen?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “If I did, it wouldn’t be necessary.”

  “Great,” he said. “Let’s get moving, if you’re quite ready.”

  We opened the inner door and crammed ourselves into the lock—both at once so we needn’t sterilise the interior in between transfers.

  Outside, I felt almost naked for a moment or two. There’s no doubt that armour plating has psychological power, even if its value is overrated.

  But soon another feeling replaced the brief breath of insecurity, and that was a strange kind of familiarity. Almost nostalgia. Here was Grainger, standing in a suit in the alien night, ready to walk away into the unknown in search of money.

  “Lead on,” invited delArco. That was the real pioneer spirit emerging in the captain’s character. You go first and I’ll kill whatever kills you.

  The first thing I did was to go to the nearest patch of metamorphic bioforms and peer into it at close range. The leaves, which writhed and flexed like fluttering fingers as they changed their form, were teeming with animal life, which likewise changed in phase with the plants. Most of the tiny animals were bulbous or vermiform, seemingly soft-bodied and legless—suckers or mucous gliders. Such was the profusion and confusion that I almost went cross-eyed trying to pick out exotic forms as they appeared and disappeared.

  “Watch your feet,” I said to delArco. �
��The plants have millions of tiny friends. All feeding off the living flesh, I imagine, and adapted to a dozen or more different morphs. Maybe each bug has a cycle tied to a specific plant morph cycle, but maybe not. I’d assume that wherever your eye rests there’s something which could and would eat you if it got the chance. Don’t let your suit get ruptured just on account of the breathable air.”

  “That’s what I like about you,” said delArco. “You always look for the worst possible contingency.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “No other way makes sense.”

  As I’ve already said, rock climbing in spacesuits is nobody’s idea of fun. Micropunctures are especially dangerous where the air is good. A tiny rip might not even give you the warning you need in order to do something about it. So I was inclined to tread very carefully indeed. DelArco naturally grew impatient. He knew—because it said so in the manual—that spacesuits are unrippable. The specifications clearly say that the material will stand up to anything. But you’ll notice that the insurance doesn’t cover you for mountain climbing, acid damage and hostile aliens. The only reason the premiums are so cheap is because a lot of people never come back to claim.

  The captain forged ahead. I briefly contemplated the idea that it might be immensely convenient if his spacesuit did rip and I could go on to the Lost Star alone. But you can’t go around shooting people in the back. It’s anti-social.

  Because he was ten or twenty yards ahead the whole way up the lip, he was the first to peer over into previously unknown territory. He stood dramatically on the skyline, hoping to be the first human to clap eyes on the eighty-year-old wreck of the Lost Star, that fabulous legend of the spaceways.

  Unfortunately, we couldn’t see a damn thing except jungle. Real jungle, this time. In fact, denser jungle than I’d ever seen before, on the couple of hundred worlds I’d touched.

  It was a plateau rather than a crater, although it was about concave enough to be described as a vast shallow saucer. It was perhaps five miles in diameter, which put the Lost Star a lot nearer our edge than the far one.