The Ragged Astronauts lao-1

by Bob Shaw

  The evocative smell of freshly-lit oil lanterns and candles took his thoughts back to the few treasured nights he had spent with Aytha Maraquine. During the heady hours of passion Dalacott had known with total certainty that they would overcome all difficulties, surmount all the obstacles that lay in the way of their eventual marriage. Aytha, who had solewife status, would have had to endure the twin disgraces of divorcing a sickly husband and of marrying across the greatest of all social divisions, the one which separated the military from all other classes. He had been faced with similar impediments, with an added problem in that by divorcing Toriane — daughter of a military governor — he would have been placing his own career in jeopardy.

  None of that had mattered to Dalacott in his fevered monomania. Then had come the Padalian campaign, which should have been brief but which in the event had entailed his being separated from Aytha for almost a year. Next had come the news that she had died in giving birth to a male child. Dalacott’s first tortured impulse had been to claim the boy as his own, and in that way keep faith with Aytha, but the cool voices of logic and self-interest had intervened. What was the point in posthumously smirching Aytha’s good name and at the same time prejudicing his career and bringing unhappiness to his family? It would not even benefit the boy, Toller, who would be best left to grow up in the comfortable circumstances of his maternal kith and kin.

  In the end Dalacott had committed himself to the course of rationality, not even trying to see his son, and the years had slipped by and his abilities had brought him the deserved rank of general. Now, at this late stage of his life, the entire episode had many of the qualities of a dream and might have lost its power to engender pain — except that other questions and doubts had begun to trouble his hours of solitude. All his protestations notwithstanding, had he really intended to marry Aytha? Had he not, in some buried level of his consciousness, been relieved when her death had made it unnecessary for him to make a decision one way or the other? In short, was he — General Risdel Dalacott — the man he had always believed himself to be? Or was he a…?

  “There you are!” Conna said, approaching him with a glass of wheat wine which she placed firmly in his free hand while depriving him of the fruit juice. “You’ll simply have to mingle with the guests, you know. Otherwise it will look as though you consider yourself too famous and important to acknowledge my friends.”

  “I’m sorry.” He gave her a wry smile. “The older I get the more I look into the past.”

  “Were you thinking about Oderan?”

  “I was thinking about many things.” Dalacott sipped his wine and went with his daughter-in-law to make Smalltalk with a succession of men and women. He noticed that very few of them had army backgrounds, possibly an indication of Conna’s true feelings about the organisation which had taken her husband and was now turning its attention to her only child. The strain of manufacturing conversation with virtual strangers was considerable, and it was almost with relief that he heard the summons to go to the table. It was his duty now to make a short formal speech about his grandson’s coming-of-age; then he would be free to fade into the background to the best of his ability. He walked around the table to the single high-backed chair which had been decked with blue spearflowers in Hallie’s honour and realised he had not seen the boy for some time.

  “Where’s our hero?” a man called out. “Bring on the hero!”

  “He must have gone to his room,” Conna said. “I’ll fetch him.”

  She smiled apologetically and slipped away from the company. There was delay of perhaps a minute before she reappeared in the doorway, and when she did so her face was strangely passive, frozen. She pointed at Dalacott and turned away again without speaking. He went after her, telling himself that the icy sensation in his stomach meant nothing, and walked along the corridor to Hallie’s bedroom. The boy was lying on his back on his narrow couch. His face was flushed and gleaming with sweat, and his limbs were making small uncoordinated movements.

  It can’t be, Dalacott thought, appalled, as he went to the couch. He looked down at Hallie, saw the terror in his eyes, and knew at once that the twitching of his arms and legs represented strenuous attempts to move normally. Paralysis and fever! I won’t allow this, Dalacott shouted inwardly as he dropped to his knees. It isn’t permitted!

  He placed his hand on Hallie’s slim body, just below the ribcage, immediately found the telltale swelling of the spleen, and a moan of pure grief escaped his lips.

  “You promised to look after him,” Conna said in a lifeless voice. “He’s only a baby!”

  Dalacott stood up and gripped her shoulders. “Is there a doctor here?”

  “What’s the use?”

  “I know what this looks like, Conna, but at no time was Hallie within twenty paces of a globe and there was no wind to speak of.” Listening to his own voice, a stranger’s voice, Dalacott tried to be persuaded by the stated facts. “Besides, it takes two days for pterthacosis to develop. It simply can’t happen like this. Now, is there a doctor?”

  “Visigann,” she whispered, brimming eyes scanning his face in search of hope. “I’ll get him.” She turned and ran from the bedroom.

  “You’re going to be all right, Hallie,” Dalacott said as he knelt again by the couch. He used the edge of a coverlet to dab perspiration from the boy’s face and was dismayed to find that he could actually feel heat radiating from the beaded skin. Hallie gazed up at him mutely, and his lips quivered as he tried to smile. Dalacott noticed that the Ballinnian ptertha stick was lying on the couch. He picked it up and pressed it into Hallie’s hand, closing the boy’s nerveless fingers around the polished wood, then kissed him on the forehead. He prolonged the kiss, as though trying to siphon the consuming pyrexia into his own body, and only slowly became aware of two odd facts — that Conna was taking too long to return with the doctor, and that a woman was screaming in another part of the house.

  “I’ll come back to you in just a moment, soldier,” he said. He stood up, tranced, made his way back to the dining room and saw that the guests were gathered around a man who was lying on the floor.

  The man was Gehate: — and from his fevered complexion and the feeble pawing of his hands it was evident that he was in an advanced stage of pterthacosis. While he was waiting for the airship to be untethered, Dalacott slipped his hand into a pocket and located the curious nameless object he had found decades earlier on the banks of the Bes-Undar. His thumb worked in a circular pattern over the nugget’s reflective surface, polished smooth by many years of similar frictions, as he tried to come to terms with the enormity of what had happened in the past nine days. The bare statistics conveyed little of the anguish which was withering his spirit.

  Hallie had died before the end of the littlenight of his coming of age. Gehate and Ondobirtre had succumbed to the terrifying new form of pterthacosis by the end of that day, and on the following morning he had found Hallie’s mother dead of the same cause in her room. That had been his first indication that the disease was contagious, and the implications had still been reverberating in his head when news had come of the fate of those who had been present at the celebration.

  Of some forty men, women and children who had been in the villa, no fewer than thirty-two — including all the children — had been swept away during the same night. And still the tide of death had not expended its fell energies. The population of the hamlet of Klinterden and surrounding district had been reduced from approximately three-hundred to a mere sixty within three days. At that point the invisible killer had appeared to lose its virulence, and the burials had begun.

  The airship’s gondola lurched and swayed a little as it was freed from its constraints. Dalacott moved closer to a port hole and, for what he knew would be the last time, looked down on the familiar pattern of red-roofed dwellings, orchards and striated fields of grain. Its placid appearance masked the profound changes which had taken place, just as his own unaltered physical aspect disguised the fact that
in nine days he had grown old.

  The feeling — the drear apathy, the failure of optimism — was new to him, but he had no difficulty in identifying it because, for the first time ever, he could see cause to envy the dead.

  PART II

  The Proving Flight

  Chapter 6

  The Weapons Research Station was in the south-western outskirts of Ro-Atabri, in the old manufacturing district of Mardavan Quays. The area was low-lying, drained by a hesitant and polluted watercourse which discharged into the Borann below the city. Centuries of industrial usage had rendered the soil of Mardavan Quays sterile in some places, while in others there were great stands of wrongly-coloured vegetation nourished by unknown seepings and secretions, products of ancient cesspools and spoilheaps. Factories and storage buildings were copiously scattered on the landscape, linked by deep-rutted tracks, and half-hidden among them were groups of shabby dwellings from whose windows light rarely shone.

  The Research Station did not look out of place in its surroundings, being a collection of nondescript workshops, sheds and shabby single-storey offices. Even the station chiefs office was so grimy that the typical Kolcorronian diamond patterns of its brickwork were almost totally obscured.

  Toller Maraquine found the station a deeply depressing place in which to work. Looking back to the time of his appointment, he could see that he had been childishly nai’ve in his visualisation of a weapons research establishment. He had anticipated perhaps a breezy sward with swordsmen busy testing new types of blades, or archers meticulously assessing the performance of laminated bows and novel patterns of arrowheads.

  On arrival at the Quays it had taken him only a few hours to learn that there was very little genuine research on weapons being carried out under Borreat Hargeth. The name of the section disguised the fact that most of its funds were spent on trying to develop materials which could be substituted for brakka in the manufacture of gears and other machine components. Toller’s work mainly consisted of mixing various fibres and powders with various types of resin and using the composite to cast various shapes of test specimens. He disliked the choking smell of the resins and the repetitious nature of the task, especially as his instincts told him the project was a waste of time. None of the composite materials the station produced compared well with brakka, the hardest and most durable substance on the planet — and if nature had been obliging enough to supply an ideal material what was the point in searching for another?

  Apart from the occasional grumble to Hargeth, however, Toller worked steadily and conscientiously, determined to prove to his brother that he was a responsible member of the family. His marriage to Fera also had something to do with his newfound steadiness, which was an unexpected benefit from an arrangement he had plunged into for the sole purpose of confounding his brother’s wife. He had offered Fera the fourth grade — temporary, non-exclusive, terminable by the man at any time — but she had had the nerve to hold out for third grade status, which was binding on him for six years.

  That had been more than fifty days ago, and Toller had hoped that by this time Gesalla would have softened in her attitude to both him and Fera, but if anything the triangular relationship had deteriorated. Irritant factors were Fera’s monumental appetite and her capacity for indolence, both of which were an affront to the primly sedulous Gesalla, but Toller was unable to chastise his wife for refusing to amend her ways. She was claiming her right to be the person she had always been, regardless of whom she displeased, just as he was claiming the right to reside in the Maraquine family home. Gesalla was ever on the look-out for a pretext on which to have him dismissed from the Square House, and it was sheer stubbornness on his part which kept him from finding accommodation elsewhere.

  Toller was pondering on his domestic situation one foreday, wondering how long the uneasy balance could be maintained, when he saw Hargeth coming into the shed where he was weighing out chopped glass fibres. Hargeth was a lean fidgety man in his early fifties and everything about him — nose, chin, ears, elbows, shoulders — seemed to be sharp-cornered. Today he appeared more restless than usual.

  “Come with me, Toller,” he said. “We have need of those muscles of yours.”

  Toller put his scoop aside. “What do you want me to do?”

  “You’re always complaining about not being able to work on engines of war — and now is your opportunity.” Hargeth led the way to a small portable crane which had been erected on a patch of ground between two workshops. It was of conventional rafter wood construction except that the gear wheels, which would have been brakka in an ordinary crane, had been cast in a greyish composite produced by the research station.

  “Lord Glo is arriving soon,” Hargeth said. “He wants to demonstrate these gears to one of Prince Pouche’s financial inspectors, and today we are going to have a preliminary test. I want you to check the cables, grease the gears carefully and fill the load basket with rocks.”

  “You spoke of a war engine,” Toller said. “This is just a crane.”

  “Army engineers have to build fortifications and raise heavy equipment — so this is a war engine. The Prince’s accountants must be kept happy, otherwise we lose funding. Now go to work — Glo will be here within the hour.”

  Toller nodded and began preparing the crane. The sun was only halfway to its daily occlusion by Overland, but there was no wind to scoop the heat out of the low-lying river basin and the temperature was climbing steadily. A nearby tannery was adding its stenches to the already fume-laden air of the station. Toller found himself longing for a pot of cool ale, but the Quays district boasted of only one tavdrn and it had such a verminous aspect that he would not consider sending an apprentice for a sample of its wares.

  This is a miserly reward for a life of virtue, he thought disconsolately. At least at Haffanger the air was fit to breathe.

  He had barely finished putting rocks into the crane’s load basket when there came the sounds of harness and hoofbeats. Lord Glo’s jaunty red-and-orange phaeton rolled through the station’s gates and came to a halt outside Hargeth’s office, looking incongruous amid the begrimed surroundings. Glo stepped down from the vehicle and had a long discussion with his driver before turning to greet Hargeth, who had ventured out to meet him. The two men conversed quietly for a minute, then came towards the crane.

  Glo was holding a kerchief close to his nose, and it was obvious from his heightened colouring and a certain stateliness of his gait that he had already partaken generously of wine. Toller shook his head in a kind of amused respect for the single-mindedness with which the Lord Philosopher continued to render himself unfit for office. He stopped smiling when he noticed that several passing workers were whispering behind their hands. Why could Glo not place a higher value on his own dignity?

  “There you are, my boy!” Glo called out on seeing Toller. “Do you know that, more than ever, you remind me of myself as a… hmm… young man? “He nudged Hargeth. “How is that for a splendid figure of a man, Borreat? That’s how I used to look.”

  “Very good, my lord,” Hargeth replied, noticeably unimpressed. “These wheels are the old Compound 18, but we have tried low-temperature curing on them and the results are quite encouraging, even though this crane is more-or-less a scale model. I’m sure it’s a step in the right direction.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, but let me see the thing at… hmm… work.”

  “Of course.” Hargeth nodded to Toller, who began putting the crane through its paces. It was designed for operation by two men, but he was able to hoist the load on his own without undue effort, and directed by Hargeth he spent a few minutes rotating the jib and demonstrating the machine’s load-placing accuracy. He was careful to make the operation as smooth as possible, to avoid feeding shocks into the gear teeth, and the display ended with the crane’s moving parts in apparently excellent condition. The group of computational assistants and labourers who had gathered to watch the proceedings began to drift away.

  Tolle
r was lowering the load to its original resting when, without warning, the pawl with which he was controlling the descent sheared through several teeth on the main ratchet in a burst of staccato sound. The laden basket dropped a short distance before the cable drum locked, and the crane — with Toller still at the controls — tilted dangerously on its base. It was saved from toppling when some of the watching labourers threw their weight on to the rising leg and brought it to the ground.

  “My congratulations,” Hargeth said scathingly as Toller stepped clear of the creaking structure. “How did you manage to do that?”

  “If only you could invent a material stronger than stale porridge there’d be no.…” Toller broke off as he looked beyond Hargeth and saw that Lord Glo had fallen to the ground. He was lying with his face pressed against a ridge of dried clay, seemingly unable to move. Fearful that Glo might have been struck by a flying gear tooth, Toller ran and knelt beside him. Glo’s pale blue eye turned in his direction, but still the rotund body remained inert.