Frontier of the Dark

by A Bertram Chandler

“You do not mind if I take a record?” she asked.

  “This is your ship, Lady Mother,” said Falsen.

  “Then begin,” said the Doralan captain.

  • • •

  “We are Nicholas Falsen and Linda Veerhausen,” he started. “Second officer and purser/catering officer of the Commission’s Epsilon Crucis … ”

  The Lady Mother interrupted him. “But surely that is a Dog Star Line uniform that Miss Veerhausen is wearing.”

  Linda was quick on the uptake. “I used to be with the Dog Star Line, Lady Mother,” she said. “Epsilon Crucis was my first ship in the Commission’s service. Their stores department was out of uniform trimmings, so I was wearing the old ones until I could get a proper set.”

  “I see. Go on, please, Mr. Falsen.”

  “We were bound,” he said, “from Earth to Caribbea with general and refrigerated cargo. It was a quiet voyage until … until it happened. It was on my watch. Miss Veerhausen shouldn’t have been in the control room with me, but she was. I’m glad that she was. It saved her life … .”

  He took a sip of the now cold tea to gain time. Linda filled in for him.

  She whispered, in a low voice, “It was horrible. Horrible.”

  “Yes,” he said. “It was horrible. The secondary field of the instruments in control must have saved us, but the rest of the ship … have you ever seen what happens when a Mannschenn Drive unit runs wild?”

  “No,” said the Lady Mother. “But I’ve read about it.”

  So have I, thought Falsen. I hope that you’ve read the same accounts that I have. He said, “Everybody was dead, of course. They’d aged decades in microseconds. Except for the Mannschenn duty engineer. He’d been … everted. I’d cut the Drive, of course, as soon as the buzzer sounded, but it was too late. I don’t think that I could have been any faster … .” He hoped that he was conveying the impression that a tardy response to the alarm was weighing heavily on his conscience. “And then, while we were investigating, hoping that we’d find somebody who wasn’t dead, the Drive started up again by itself. I managed to stop it. Then it started again. I stopped it again. We couldn’t tell how long it would stay stopped so … so we abandoned ship.”

  “You abandoned ship,” echoed the Lady Mother, her voice shocked. “You abandoned a huge, expensive piece of highly advanced technology for which many worlds less wealthy than your own would have been grateful. I don’t suppose you remember the elements of your trajectory … ”

  Falsen said that he did not.

  The Lady Mother sighed. ‘Perhaps that is just as well,” she said. “My orders are to carry out a thorough survey of this planet with a view to future colonization. But I must confess that I find the thought of a salvage operation tempting. Talking of salvage, where is your boat? Carl in told me that the two of you were in a cave and that there was no indication of how you got there.”

  Falsen made what he hoped was a regretful shrug. “Unless you’ve special mud-dredging gear,” he said, “you’ll never find her. The surface on which we landed seemed solid enough; it supported our weight even while we were carrying various bits and pieces to higher ground. We left the air-lock door open, of course, and the thing just filled and sank.”

  The Lady Mother sighed. “Mr. Falsen,” she said, “I would not wish to be in your shoes when you return to Earth. Not only have you lost a ship, you have also lost a boat — and, if I may borrow one of your Terran sayings, lifeboats don’t grow on trees. But any court of enquiry is a long time in the future. I expect to remain here at least two hundred days to complete my survey. Then I must return to Dorala to make my report. And then your own people will have to make arrangements to return you to Earth. I trust that you will not mind being separated so long from your own kind.”

  “I mind,” mewed a voice from near deck level. Pondor, Falsen saw, had returned. “I mind their being here, aboard our ship. Find their boat for them, Lady. Tell them to go. They are not our people. They smell. They smell wrong.”

  “Rubbish, cat. If you’d spent all your life aboard an Earth ship, you would say that I smelled all wrong.”

  “You would never smell wrong, Lady. Make them go.”

  “When an animal tells me that I stink,” said Falsen stiffly, “it’s time that I went.”

  “Don’t pay any attention to Pondor,” said the Lady Mother, smiling. “He’s jealous. He’s used to being the center of attention, the only male aboard the ship. Just ignore him and he’ll stalk out, all outraged dignity, and cuff his wives to restore his self-esteem.”

  “A charming animal,” said Linda.

  “If I thought that you really meant that,” said Pondor, “I might like you.”

  “Just how intelligent are these cats?” asked Falsen while Pondor glared at him. “They can talk — but they could be no more than a sort of mammalian version of the parrot.”

  “I really don’t know,” admitted the Lady Mother. “Of course, they couldn’t compute a trajectory or build a ship … ”

  “My people were gods once,” said Pondor haughtily. “Gods don’t build ships.”

  “Could you make a world, then?” asked Falsen nastily.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never tried.”

  The Doralan captain, to judge from her changing expressions, was not sure whether to be amused or annoyed, but when the cat jumped onto her lap she made no attempt to dislodge him. The stewardess came in to collect the tea things. The Lady Mother gave her orders in her own language.

  Then, to Falsen and Linda with an apologetic smile, “I think that you’d better go now. Pondor does not approve of you. Prenta here will take you to the spare cabins that have been made ready for you. You will mess with my officers, some of whom speak English. I shall see you again.”

  “I hope that I don’t,” muttered the cat.

  CHAPTER 4

  The elevator cage was somewhere in the bowels of the ship, so, with an apologetic smile, the stewardess led them down the spiral staircase that encircled the axial shaft. It had been modified to suit the Doralans; its treads were too close together for easy negotiation by Falsen and Linda. The deck to which they were taken was just below the one on which the senior officers had their quarters. The cabins were small and the furnishings might have been designed for Terran children.

  Falsen explored the one that was to be his. It did not take him long. There was a bunk, on which he would be able to sleep only if he curled up like a dog. (But as he almost invariably did this anyway, it would be no great hardship.) There was a little stool that folded back into the bulkhead when not in use. There were toilet facilities. Fortunately, the Doralans saw eye-to-eye with Terrans regarding the techniques for body-waste disposal, although the pedestal was both small and low. There was no depilatory dispenser in the shower cubicle, only one for liquid detergent. He pressed the button and ejected a few drops onto the palm of his hand, sniffed. It reeks, he thought, like a whore’s garret. There was a hot-air blower for drying off.

  He returned to the bedroom, sat down on the bunk. The door onto the alleyway was open and he could hear Linda talking to somebody in the next cabin. He considered getting up to join them, but then thought better of it. So far aboard this ship, the only person who had not regarded him as something that the cat brought in was the Lady Mother. To all the others he was just a member of a despised sex. The Doralans would talk freely to Linda; they would not do so to him.

  He pulled out the pack of cigarettes. There were three left. He took one out and lit it, looked around for an ashtray. There was none, of course. And soon, he thought, there would be no more cigarettes. He shrugged. As a man he was a slave to the habit — but he wasn’t always a man. To him, in his other form, nicotine was distasteful. He smoked slowly. When the ash was long he got up, went through to the toilet and shook it off into the bowl. He returned to the bunk, sat there, listening. Although his hearing was keen, he could make out only an occasional word.

  Then Carlin came out into the alleyway. He r
ecognized her voice as she called to Linda, “Our afternoon meal will be in about sixty of your minutes. I will call for you then.”

  Linda came into Falsen’s cabin. She fumbled briefly with the unfamiliar door fastenings, then slid the panel shut. She sat down beside him on the bunk.

  “Carlin was in a talkative mood,” she said. “I think that she was trying to convert me to her way of thinking. She went on and on about this big ship of theirs, a crew of a hundred, and not a single male among them. Not counting, of course, Pondor. But he hardly ranks as crew.”

  “A hundred … ” said Falsen thoughtfully.

  “Yes. A hundred. And we are only two. But there’s the value of surprise. And misdirection.”

  “We have to do it,” said Falsen. “We have the right to survive — or to fight for survival. How we do it — that has to be worked out.” He got up and paced up and down the narrow confines of the little cabin like a caged wild beast. “We have to take the ship. They won’t have changed her controls much. And I’m a navigator. There are worlds out towards the Rim that won’t be colonized for generations, if at all. There’ll be no real expansion until there’s some kind of FTL radio … .”

  “What sort of worlds?” she asked dubiously. “Planets like this, which would be bad enough, or with atmospheres of chlorine or fluorine or something equally toxic?”

  “Some of them. But there are good worlds, too. Planets with rivers and forests and animals equivalent to sheep and cattle and deer … .”

  “And lions and tigers.”

  “We can compete.”

  “You’re sure that there are such worlds?”

  “Of course. The Federation has colonized a few already, within spitting distance of Earth. Such as your home planet. Austral. And get this straight: If we stay here the balloon is bound to go up, sooner or later. We have to get somewhere where there’s no explaining to do. To anybody.”

  The girl was not listening. She was on her feet, tense, alert, staring at the door. Suddenly she strode to it, pulled it open, pounced with the same speed as she had shown during her capture of the crayfish. Swiftly and silently she backed into the room, the thing between her hands struggling viciously, trying to cry out, succeeding in spite of the pressure on its throat in emitting a strangled squeal.

  “What … ?” began Falsen.

  “Shut the door!” she snapped. “Secure it, if possible.”

  He obeyed.

  Then he saw what it was that she had. It was a cat — not Pondor but one of his mates. Like him, it was of Persian descent, but it was black. And the Lady Mother had implied that all the cats could talk.

  “This thing,” snarled Linda, “was spying.”

  “Can it understand English?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m taking no chances. I’ll make sure that it won’t talk!”

  Claws drew angry furrows down her face as she lifted the cat to her mouth. There was a semiarticulate cry — then a silence broken by a horrid dripping sound. Blood ran down Linda’s chin and the front of her shirt.

  “What do we do with the body?” asked Falsen.

  “It’s meat, isn’t it?”

  “But … the bones and the fur … ”

  “There’s only one way,” she said. “Watch the door, will you? We don’t want one of them bursting in in the middle of it.”

  While the body of the cat, its throat torn out, bled on the deck, she stripped. Falsen did not watch her change; nobody had ever seen him do so and he hoped that nobody ever would. He stood there, facing the door. From behind him, from deck level, he heard the tearing noises, the noisy slursping, the splintering and crunching of fragile bones to an assimilable sludge.

  Then he felt her hand on his shoulder.

  He turned around.

  There was very little blood on her, only a few smears on her chin out of reach of her tongue, other smears on her small breasts. She looked … sated.

  She said, “I enjoyed that, although I’m wondering if I’ll be able to digest the fur.”

  Falsen noted that there were still a few black strands caught between her teeth.

  He said, “You’d better get cleaned up. Use my shower. Wash your shirt at the same time; it will dry fast enough under the blower. I’ll get the mess off the deck.”

  “What mess?” she asked.

  He looked down. The hard, polished, composition surface was clean. He remembered those slurping noises.

  He said, “You won’t feel like having dinner, or whatever they call their afternoon meal.”

  “You’ll just have to eat for two,” she told him, grinning.

  • • •

  She had just finished dressing when there was a peremptory rapping on the door. Falsen opened it. Carlin stood there, resplendent in a form-fitting, gold-trimmed scarlet tunic that left most of her plump thighs exposed, and highly polished scarlet kneeboots. Her glossy green hair fell almost to her shoulders. She looked past Falsen at Linda.

  She said, “You were not in your cabin.”

  “I was here,” said Linda.

  “So I see.”

  Were there regulations on this ship forbidding members of opposite sexes to be together behind a closed door? Falsen wondered. He knew very little about Doralan mores. Presumably, a matriarchal society had its own peculiar code of conduct. He grinned inwardly. If Carlin knew what they had been doing, she would have a real cause to be shocked.

  “I am to take you to mess,” said Carlin. “Both of you.”

  As she spoke, a pleasant sound issued from the concealed speakers of the public-address system, a crystalline tinkling.

  “Come,” said Carlin.

  They followed her along the alleyway to the spiral staircase around the axial shaft. One deck down they came to a large room that was, to the humans, more alien than anything they had so far seen aboard this ship. There were low tables, some seating four, some six, with padded benches, the upholstery of which was glossy black. Every pillar was festooned with vividly green creepers bearing both scarlet flowers and glowing golden fruit. Huge pots between the tables contained plants not unlike organ-pipe cacti — but the Terran cactus bloomed rarely. All of these plants were encrusted with tiny scarlet blossoms.

  The air was warm, carried a cloying scent.

  Falsen had served in Delta-class liners, tried to remember what this compartment was like in such ships. The officers’ smoking room, he recalled. A bar, a couple of dart boards, card tables and other tables with electronic games, a bookcase, a playmaster, magazine racks … definitely a masculine ambience. Although the Interstellar Transport Commission carried female officers, they were in the minority. Here he was in the minority — a minority of one.

  Carlin led them to a table.

  Doralans, already seated, stared at them curiously and, in Falsen’s case, with some hostility. He felt big, gross, clumsy. He felt no better when he was off his feet and sitting on one of the benches, facing Linda and Carlin across the polished white surface of the table. He looked down at the cutlery — stainless steel it might have been — things that combined the functions of forks and spoons, one spoon that was just that and nothing more, one small knife.

  There was a decanter of some dark wine and fragile; graceful tulip glasses.

  Carlin poured — for herself, for Linda, for Falsen.

  She raised her glass in salute — to Linda only.

  Falsen sipped.

  The wine was too sweet (of course) and, like the tea that he had drunk earlier, tasted of aniseed.

  “You like our wine, Falsen?” asked Carlin, at last condescending to pay some attention to him.

  “Yes and no,” he replied. “I rather like the strong hint of aniseed.”

  “Aniseed? Oh, yes. It is one of our herbs, dillum … .”

  The first course was served, a sort of fruit salad. Linda only toyed with hers. Carlin did not attack her portion with any great enthusiasm. Neither did Falsen, although he was hungry. While they were waiting for the bowls to be rem
oved, he tried to make conversation.

  “Lady Carlin,” he began, hoping that this was the right form of address, “I trust that I am not bad mannered … ”

  “I have been on Earth,” she said. “I am familiar with Terran manners.”

  “Aboard a ship,” he persisted, “uniform is worn so that people know who does what. Those stars on your collar … what do they signify?”

  “Badges of rank, of course.”

  “I’d already assumed that. And as your captain, your Lady Mother, wears three six-pointed stars on each side so you, with a couple of pairs, must be what we’d call, in our ships, the chief officer … .”

  A stewardess removed the remains of the fruit salad, another one brought oval plates, each with a slab of some pallid flesh over which a green powder had been sprinkled.

  Carlin picked up one of the fork-spoons. Linda and Falsen followed suit. Carlin seemed in no great hurry to attack her portion.

  She said to Falsen, “No. Chief engineer. If you look closely you will see that each of my stars is actually a design of three interlocked wheels with points radiating from the rim.”

  She dug her implement into the pale flesh, breaking off a piece. She brought it to her mouth, chewed. Linda and Falsen did likewise.

  Fish, he thought. Or something like fish.

  Carlin still seemed to have no great interest in her food, so Falsen continued the conversation.

  “We all have different ways of doing things — but it seems rather odd, to me, that an engineer should be in charge of a survey party, as you were when we were picked up.”

  “Why?” she asked. She grinned, and her face became almost attractive. “Oh, I know that as far as you Terrans are concerned the members of the spaceman branch are the Lord’s anointed, just as members of the male sex are. With us seniority, regardless of branch or department, is taken into account when officers are required to be in charge of extravehicular activities. Tell me, Falsen, in what way is a master astronaut’s certificate of competency superior to my chief engineer’s qualifications when it comes to exploring the surface of an unknown world?”

  Falsen admitted that he could not answer the question.