Hooded Swan, Book I: Halcyon Drift

by Brian Stableford

  Not because Alachakh had wanted me to, although that was a good reason. Not because I respected the Khor-monsa, although that was a fact. Because I wanted to spite Titus Charlot. Because I wanted to cheat him and rob him of what little glory I could. And because I wanted to destroy the legend of the Lost Star. I wanted the silly story to come to absolutely nothing, to make a fool of the whole bloody human race. Except me. And also because it was a good joke.

  Of such things are motives made. Nobility and altruism are unknown in the human race.

  So when Captain delArco stuck his head out of the inner hatchway, I jammed my gun up against his faceplate.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  He stared at it so hard his eyes crossed.

  “Be quiet, Captain,” I hissed, in conspiratorial tones. And then, to Johnny: “Johnny! This is Grainger. Do exactly as I say and don’t ask questions. Don’t say a word. Switch off the call circuit at the Maiden. Sit tight and don’t move.”

  I didn’t hear him cut out, of course, but I had to assume that he’d do as he was told.

  “Now, Captain,” I said. “Take it easy. Now, are you wired to that monitor on the ship?”

  “You know I am.”

  “You’re transmitting right now?”

  “All the time.”

  “Then switch it off.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can. Laws of New Rome. Invasion of privacy. You have to be able to take yourself out of the monitor. So do it.”

  There was a pause.

  “OK,” he said, “it’s off. But I’ve already seen you holding a gun on me. I’ve heard you tell me to switch off. You’re in deep trouble.”

  Again, I couldn’t actually know whether he’d switched off or not. I just had to assume he was co-operating.

  “Now you can come out,” I said.

  As he did so, I relieved him of his gun.

  “Are you going to explain?” he asked.

  “But of course. I need your help and understanding. I can’t tell you everything, I’m afraid, but I’ll tell you all I can. The full story, abridged edition. OK? Well then....

  “This trip is a stupid stunt. Its sole purpose is to make a fool out of Caradoc Company and make capital out of the joke. Everybody will laugh because nobody loves Caradoc. In order to pull off this farcical trick, a pilot named Grainger is obliged to risk his own life and several others.”

  “Nobody forced you.”

  “Don’t interrupt. And as for force, twenty thousand with a penalty clause in case I die young is a powerful lever. I’d call twenty thousand an awful lot of obligation.

  “To continue with the sordid story, Grainger—while willing to comply with the blackmail for reasons of self-preservation—understandably fails to discover any strong loyalty to his employers. He is very fond of his new ship, but this only serves to make him that much less fond of the people who wish to prostitute her into a performing freak.

  “He discovers that the owner is somewhat unbalanced, and cares nothing about the ship or its crew, but only about the credit due to him for his part in a complicated scheme. His interests lie entirely in showmanship and vainglory. However, he relies upon others to go out and perform for him, and gather his glory. Grainger suspects that Titus Charlot may have set him up to be clobbered with the twenty thousand which he later volunteers to pay off. Charlot certainly finds out very early that Grainger is back in circulation, which implies that he has some contacts in the Caradoc organisation, or on New Rome. Grainger also believes Charlot to be responsible for the attempt on his life by a crocolid. He does not, of course, suggest that Charlot paid the crocolid, but simply that he talked so loudly about his ship and what it would do that Caradoc was inspired with the idea of bumping off its pilot.

  “In brief, Grainger does not like Charlot.

  “Meanwhile, back at the plot, Charlot chooses as captain of ship a man calculated to get on Grainger’s nerves. Sole purpose of said captain is to keep all legal responsibility out of Grainger’s reach. Ship’s captain has all sorts of authority under the Law of New Rome. Ship’s pilot has not. Captain is therefore a device to make sure that Grainger can only do as he is told. Captain delArco is a puppet. He has been played for a sucker by Titus Charlot. In order to promote and maintain tension between the two men—so that the captain doesn’t listen any more than is necessary to Grainger—Charlot also puts aboard one female, always guaranteed to provide tension, one engineer notorious for creating bad morale aboard his ships, and one crewman who wants to like everybody and only serves to highlight the differences between them.

  “An unhappy Grainger then finds out that his closest friend—Alachakh—desperately wants to reach the Lost Star. His reason is so powerful that he is willing to kill himself in the attempt. That reason, of course, is an alien reason. You wouldn’t understand it. Neither do I. I’m not asking you to believe that reason had any meaning as far as you or I are concerned. But it was a reason. It is a reason. And we have no reason. None at all. We’re here at the whim of a megalomaniac.

  “In part, you know, we killed Alachakh. It was us he was racing. He could have beaten Caradoc easily. But not us. We forced him to fly too fast. We made him fail in his mission. It was our fault that he died with his job unfulfilled. I’m not suggesting that because of that we have a duty to him. We don’t owe him anything. But you can’t forget him. You can’t just imagine that he never existed. Because he did. And we were there when he died.

  “I’m not going to tell you what Alachakh’s reasons were. They were personal as well as alien. They’d mean nothing to you, and he didn’t want to tell anybody what they were. But I put to you this proposition: We can pull off Charlot’s stunt. We can beat Caradoc, we can give him his chance to gloat. But we can also, at one and the same time, fulfil Alachakh’s purpose. We can do what he wanted to do.

  “So what do we do?”

  “That depends,” answered delArco. “It sounds far too good not to have a catch. You’re trying damned hard to sell me. What do we have to do in order to pull off this classic double?”

  I licked my lips. “The Lost Star’s cargo is in her hold. I want to burn it. Every last vestige of it. And then I want you to corroborate my story that it never existed. That the whole thing was a myth. A lie.”

  “And what is the cargo?” There was a quality in his voice which suggested that he already suspected.

  “Books. Alien books.”

  He nodded. “And you aren’t going to tell me why you want them burned? Alien reasons?”

  “Alien reasons,” I agreed. “But I’ll tell you a couple of things for free. One: these books contain no scientific or technological information which is not already available to New Alexandria. Two: the secret that I want kept is quite harmless. In human terms, it is practically meaningless. We can hurt no one by destroying this cargo, but we can help a lot of people on Khor.”

  “Do I get time to think?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Will you point those guns somewhere else.”

  I stuck them both into my belt. Then I sat back to wait. A few minutes passed, and he remained deep in apparent contemplation.

  “There’s no evidence that this cargo ever existed,” I pointed out. “Nobody can pin anything on either of us.”

  “You’re asking me to put a hell of a lot of trust in you.”

  “That’s right,” I agreed.

  “What will you do if I refuse to help you?”

  “Burn the books anyway.”

  “And me with them?”

  “No. I’ll take you home, and hope you change your mind on the way.”

  “And if I don’t.”

  “Then Titus Charlot will be very angry indeed. With both of us. But I’m not Titus Charlot. I don’t leave a wake of corpses. It’s your choice. If you won’t help me, I’ll do it on my own.”

  Then I crossed my fingers and sat back. I knew I would win. If anyone had tried to hand me a load of garbage like I’d just h
anded out to delArco, I’d have told them where to stick it. But Nick delArco was a nice man. People liked him. He was nice because he wanted people to like him. Even me. If he thought he could win me over by doing me a favour now, then he would. Of such things are motives made. We all have our human weaknesses.

  “All right,” he said finally. “Let’s burn the books. You convinced me.”

  Logic is just our excuse for doing the things we want to do.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “You can call me Nick,” he said sardonically.

  “That’s right,” I murmured. “We’re friends, now.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “You didn’t want me in on this at all, did you?” he said, as we fed books to the fire in the burned-out drive chamber. “Leaving me in that forest and fusing the lock on the door.”

  “It might have been easier if you’d stayed lost.”

  “How did you propose to stop me finding the ashes once I did get here?”

  “Close up the drive chamber and claim it was hot.”

  “What about the gauge?” he said, pointing at the radiation counter.

  I grinned. “By the time I closed up, the chamber would have been hot.”

  “People get hurt messing about with atomics,” he commented.

  I continued to haul stuff out of the hold and pass it along to him. He threw it into the drive chamber. I’d decided to have the fire there anyway, for safety’s sake. Just in case Caradoc ever did beat the odds and get here. The best place to hide trees is in forests, the best place to hide evidence of a fire is in the ashes of an older fire. When the Lost Star had come down, her engine had gone exactly like the Hymnia’s. It’s the way dimension hoppers nearly always go.

  “You know,” said delArco—he was very talkative now we were on the same side—“I’m not New Alexandrian, but I was brought up to their ways of thought. I was taught that burning books is the worst crime you can commit.”

  “Circumstances,” I replied, “alter cases.”

  “Circumstances never seem to alter you.”

  “They do,” I assured him.

  “You always seem the same way to me.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And what way is that?”

  “Untouched by human hand. Isolated. Alienated. And trying desperately to keep it up no matter how circumstances change.”

  “I just don’t let things get to me, that’s all. You can’t if you live the way I do. If alien worlds once begin to reach you, you’re as good as dead. Grounded, anyway, which is almost as good as dead. You have to stay steady. Lapthorn used to say I had no soul.”

  “I’m not talking about alien worlds reaching you,” he said, as we tirelessly passed the books from hand to hand. “I’m talking about people. You don’t let them touch you either.”

  “Where’s the difference?” I countered. “Alien is alien is alien. People are alien to me.”

  “You’re people too.”

  “So it’s said.”

  “So you can’t be alienated from yourself.”

  “Look,” I said, pausing. “What’s all this in aid of? Just because our purpose is one for the first time, there’s no call for you immediately to start saving my soul from the pit of despair.” I threw the next load twice as hard, for emphasis, but he caught it comfortably. He was a big man.

  He shrugged. “You’re inconsistent. You give me a long spiel about Titus Charlot’s disregard for his crew, but you profess to a total disregard for everybody.”

  “I pointed out Titus Charlot’s disregard for the lives of his crew,” I said. ‘not for their love and generosity. The less Charlot cares about my state of mind, the better I like it. It’s my state of health I don’t like him jeopardising.”

  “You really think there’s a lot of difference?”

  “So OK,” I said, unworried and unmoved. “I’m a real test for patience. Also understanding and faith in human nature. Maybe I’m no better than Titus Charlot. I didn’t claim to be. What I said is still true, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t bother to answer. We were almost through the cargo now—it hadn’t taken nearly as long as I feared. The drive chamber was brimful of junk, and we were having to use a pretty powerful beam to make the stuff burn or melt, or otherwise render it unrecognisable. Myastridians built to last. The whole ship was full of smoke and it must have been as hot as hell. Spacesuits come in very handy, now and again.

  “What about the monitor tape back at the ship?” said delArco suddenly. “It has a rather embarrassing bit of conversation on it, just before it’s switched off.”

  “You can chop the lot at the point where we entered the distortion field. Never can tell how these deep-space phenomena will affect delicate equipment, can you? Great shame the tape is blank from then on, isn’t it? Charlot will simply have to rely on a word of mouth account of the finding of the Lost Star.

  “I should think we’ll find documents in the cabins. The crew isn’t there—they jumped ship, sealed her up and went to live in the jungle, I suppose. They’re not here, anyway—not even whitened bones. But they won’t have taken their ship’s papers with them. We’ll get enough to establish where we’ve been. And as a centrepiece to the collection, we’ll cut the nameplate out of the hull. A nice touch, don’t you think? They can hang it up on a wall somewhere as an everlasting memorial to the conquest of the Halcyon Drift. They might even put a plaque underneath it with our names on. Wouldn’t that be just wonderful?”

  “We could take back the control levers as well,” he suggested.

  “You’d have cynical souls doubting their origin,” I told him. “Anything that doesn’t have Lost Star stamped on its backside won’t convince the average sceptic. On the other hand, we could have a few thousand replicas made, and sell them off as holy relics.”

  “What are you going to tell Johnny?” he returned to the point. “He’s going to be pretty curious about the way you cut him off.”

  “Pretend it never happened. Ignore it.”

  “You can’t do that. He’s bound to ask.”

  “Then we say that it seemed the best thing to do at the time. We considered it advisable, bearing in mind the circumstances. If he persists, tell him to shut up. Privileges of rank.”

  “So it’s all worked out,” he said.

  “Certainly has,” I replied. We threw the last of the books onto the fire, and I opened up with my gun again, using up the last of the charge ensuring that everything which could be destroyed would be. The walls of the drive chamber were slowly melting, the molten metal bubbling and streaming. The volume of the incandescent remains shrank as ash shrivelled away into the walls.

  “Don’t crack that piledriver,” said delArco, in worried tones.

  “Take more than a few thousand degrees to make any impression on that shielding,” I assured him. “It’s compact matter.”

  Finally, completely satisfied, I stuck the empty gun back into my belt. When the chamber cooled down, it would not look much different from the way it had looked when I’d first opened the door. A burned-out room doesn’t suffer much extra for going through the same thing twice.

  “We’ll have to leave the main hatch open to let smoke out,” I said, “but apart from that we can collect our souvenirs and leave her as we found her.”

  I went to the nose of the ship to carve out the nameplate, as I’d suggested, while delArco searched the cabins and the control room for official documents. When I’d finished with the nameplate, I went and cut off a couple of the control levers for good measure. I’d have liked to take more junk, but delArco’s gun was almost empty by now, and I liked to hold a little power in reserve.

  Last of all, I killed the Lost Star bleep. The siren of the spaceways was no more. Kaput, dead, finished. One legend, crushed beneath the heavy hand of reason. And that’s almost the end of the story.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Captain delArco woke me up. It was the first night I’d spent in a bunk in a very long time, and I w
asn’t too pleased.

  Luckily, he came straight to the point instead of sparing the time to be sarcastic.

  “Four ships just entered the system,” he said. “Caradoc ramrods.”

  “What do you want me to do?” I snarled. “Congratulate them on getting so close?”

  “You said they’d never make it,” he pointed out.

  “I said it’d take months. It still will. They’ll have to come through the contortive domain at walking pace.”

  “They aren’t going to come through the contortive domain. They just bleeped us to tell us so. They weren’t pleased when they found they’d been beaten to the punch.”

  “So?”

  “The gist of the message was this: Captain Casorati of the Caradoc Company’s ship De Lancey to the New Alexandrian Hooded Swan. We request you to transmit a statement renouncing all legal title to the cargo and effects of the Lost Star, surrendering same right to the Caradoc Company in fair trade for instructions as to how to escape from the Drift. We feel it incumbent upon us to warn you that if you do not comply with this request, you will undoubtedly fall prey to the Drift.”

  There was an amazed silence for some three seconds. Then I burst out laughing.

  “They’re threatening to shoot us down!” I gasped. “Ramrods threatening the Hooded Swan. That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in years.”

  “Those ramrods are armed,” said delArco humourlessly.

  “I don’t care if they’re packing planet-smashers,” I said. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to hit anything in space? Let alone warped space? There are millions of miles of bent emptiness between us and the Caradoc ships. How can they possibly throw a missile across that so accurately that we can’t even dodge it?”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Of course I’m sure. In this space, they’d be lucky if they could hit a bloody star, let alone a spaceship. If they start shooting, they’ll be far more likely to hurt themselves than to hurt us. I suggest you tell them that. But be polite. Assure them that we’re very grateful for their kindness in offering to help us out, but we think we can make it on our own. We also thank them for their concern regarding our vulnerability but suggest they are far more likely to fall prey to the Drift than we.”