Orbitsville Trilogy

by Bob Shaw

  In actuality Renard seemed to spend most of his time in bitter argument with the freighter's captain, Lars Lessen, a morose, pigeon-chested man in his fifties. Lessen, it transpired, had undertaken to provide a crew and run the ship on a fixed-price contract, and he was deeply unhappy with the way things were working out.

  Forty years earlier the Hawkshead would almost have flown itself to Orbitsville. Now more and more human interventions were required to keep its myriad systems in operation, and the extra man-hour payments were gnawing into Lessen's profits. He reacted by waging psychological warfare on Renard—one tactic being to call him with unnecessary frequency over minor decisions—and to Dallen's surprise seemed to be gaining the upper hand, evidence of the advantages of playing on one's home ground.

  The ship had one largish canteen area, in place of Dallen's imagined dining room, but it was jealously monopolised by the thirty-strong crew. The group of ten supernumeraries recruited by Renard were more-or-less expected to use the mealomat dispensers and eat in their rooms. These were prefabricated cabins ranged in a partial circle on Deck 5, the one just above the vertiginous well of the cargo hold.

  The living arrangements, which could have been described as unsociable, came as an unwelcome surprise to the others, but they suited Dallen quite well because Cona had not taken to space travel. She had become hysterical during the brief shuttle ride to the ship, necessitating heavy sedation, and had continued to react badly to the confinement of the cabin Dallen shared with her and Mikel. The only way he could keep on top of the situation was by dosing her with a tranquiliser prescribed by Roy Picciano, a drug which on Dallen's insistence included an effective libido depressant.

  Mikel was rapidly becoming a normal-seeming infant, one who played a lot with his toy vehicles and showed an obvious pleasure on seeing his father, but Dallen found himself still unable to make a wholehearted response. No matter how often he cursed himself for the lack of emotional generosity there remained a hint of reserve, a stubborn feeling that fate was a salesman trying to fob him off with a substitute product.

  The story of what had happened to his family was quick to circulate among the Hawkshead's crew, bringing sympathy he could well have done without, but a welcome result was that four women in the field engineering section volunteered a baby-minding service. Dallen accepted with gratitude, conscious of the fact that no matter how much genuine concern other men might show for one in his predicament it was always women who came through with the sort of practical help which made a difference in life's daily battles. As well as freeing him to do his quota of work on the grass trays, the arrangement gave Dallen some extra time with his fellow passengers.

  The first shipboard meeting with Gerald Mathieu was a tableau of civilised awkwardness and non-communication. It took place on the narrow strip of deck between the cabins and the abyss of the ship's hold. There were no other people in sight, and as the two men drew together Dallen was almost swamped by a manic urge to seize his chance, to end his baleful and unnatural involvement with the other man in a single burst of primitive violence. For one thunderous instant the idea seemed almost feasible—a sudden grapple and lift, a body plunging into the lethal steel-spiked depths, a story about a freak accident…

  But what sort of accident?

  The guard rail was chest-high and, try as he might, Dallen was unable to invent an incident in which one man could be propelled to his death without suspected homicidal intent on the part of the other. Abruptly the crucial moment passed, its karma-potential fading. There was a sense of ponderous wheels, having hesitated, juddering into a new set of positions—and now Dallen was faced with the problem of how to address a person he saw only as a walking corpse.

  "Hello, Gerald," he said, smiling, glancing at the spartan surroundings. "Like to buy a ticket for the mutiny?"

  Mathieu met his gaze squarely. "That's yard-arm talk, Mister Christian."

  Christian? Dallen thought, disconcerted. I've got to start reading books, the way Cona wanted.

  Before he could compose a reply the odd little nonincident was over and the tall figure of Mathieu was moving out of sight between two cabins, ice-smooth blond hair glowing dully in the ship's dismal illumination. He was wearing immaculate silvery grey casuals—his idea of clothes suitable for manual work—and looked as composed and urbane as ever, but Dallen thought he had detected a difference in the man. Had it been in the hard calmness of the eyes? Was that typical of one who was stoking up on felicitin, or had Mathieu's skirmish with death—by all accounts a remarkable escape—wrought some profound change in his character?

  It makes no difference, Dallen told himself, rejecting the alien idea which had tried to enter his mind, the idea that Mathieu was in the process of becoming a new person, one who might not deserve the fate which was in store for him. Dallen had little patience with any kind of violent criminal, but the species he had least time for were those who murdered innocents and then, while their appeals against execution were filtering through, composed books or holoplays about the sanctity of human life. He denied Mathieu any right to plead "not guilty for reasons of resurrection". It was essential that the issues of life and death, crime and punishment, sin and retribution should retain their old clarity—enough complication had already been introduced into his thoughts by the Karal London experiment.

  Mathieu and London should have remained in separate compartments of his life, but they had a disconcerting way of merging in his thoughts like images in an antique stereo viewer, both of which had to contribute to make a rounded picture. London taught that after death there came new life. Mathieu had already enacted his own little pastiche on that theme—the shock of his "death" and return to life was still reverberating in Dallen's system—and the philosophical implications continued to cloud his thinking about his family tragedy.

  Given that there was no such thing as death in the former sense of the word, that it was merely the gateway to a new existence, could execution still be regarded as a penalty? What kind of punishment was it that simply advanced the next phase of an evildoer's life? And, going further, how serious a crime was murder if it meant that the victim had similarly been introduced to his own immortality?

  It makes no difference, Dallen repeated to himself, angered by the mental clamour following his deceptively bland encounter with Mathieu. He returned to his own cabin and spent some time examining the contents of the small travel bag he had privately labelled his execution kit.

  It held a miscellany of items ranging from blades and wires to drug containers, gathered almost at random, any of which might become an unobtrusive murder weapon in suitable circumstance. No plan had yet crystallised, but some dark instinct kept drawing his attention to the most innocent-seeming object of the lot—a miniature spraycan of paint he had taken from Madison City's transport workshops.

  The first in-flight meeting with Silvia London was equally unsatisfactory from Dallen's viewpoint.

  He had not seen her since her cathartic act of destroying the glass mosaic in her home, but he knew she was being accompanied on the journey by two officers of the Anima Mundi Foundation. Both were women and previously unknown to him. They had dealt with the considerable media interest given to Silvia before the start of the voyage, and now seemed to be coaching her for various kinds of public appearances in major cities. Their presence reminded Dallen that Karal London, in spite of the obviously cranky aspects of his operation, had been a determined and far-sighted man with a serious mission in life. It also made him wonder if he had allowed himself to be too much influenced by Renard's male chauvinist analysis of Silvia's relationship with the dead man.

  Her reaction to the news of London's "discarnation" had, in a way, pleased him with its message that she was far from being the simplistic sexual timebomb described by Rick Renard—but there was another part of him, repressed throughout his adult life, which savoured the thought of being the first to bed a voluptuous young woman after she had been deprived of sex for two years. And
his emotional dichotomy was made worse by the fact that he was quite unable to read Silvia's signals, had no way of knowing if what had passed between them meant everything or nothing. One interpretation was that he was a fantastically lucky man who had only to reach out his hand and take one of life's choicest offerings; another was that he was an overgrown adolescent with delusions inspired by a surplus of imagination, conceit and hormones.

  I fail to see the difficulty, old son, he could imagine Renard saying to him, were he himself not one of the problem's parameters. Why not simply go ahead and try your luck?

  Why not indeed? Dallen asked himself as he entered the Deck 4 compartment which contained the bank of mealomats and saw the black-clad figure of Silvia amid a group of five women at the machines. Unfortunately the question presupposed his being a normal man in normal circumstances. There was no allowance for internal confusions and conflicts, for his unmanning guilt over Cona and Mikel, for his dehumanising compulsion to annihilate Gerald Mathieu, for his reluctance to resolve the question of Silvia too soon in case it transpired that it had all been a game which Renard had won in advance by virtue of his money, power and grinning confident insensitivity.

  Silvia was discussing the choice of food with a companion, and as Dallen drew near he saw that, although slightly pale, she looked as though she had recovered from her period of trauma. He took in the firm-jawed face and the prominence of the lower lip, the massy fullness of breasts emphasised by the flatness of abdomen, the air of easy strength combined with femininity, and inside him was born a pain which had something to do with the fact that he had never read poetry and therefore did not have access to the words needed to let Silvia know how he felt about her. He was hesitating, overwhelmed, when she looked in his direction. She carried on her conversation without the slightest break, but her eyes engaged Dallen's and remained there, unwavering, while he moved towards another row of machines.

  He smiled at her, then developed the conviction it was the same meaningless facial grimace he had made earlier on meeting Mathieu, and deliberately broke the visual contact by moving behind a drinks dispenser. Freed of the intense emotional pull, he selected food for Cona and himself, and when he emerged from an alley of cabinets Silvia was gone.

  A few minutes later, back in his cabin, he found Cona sitting on the edge of her bed, blinking drowsily. Her smock had ridden up to her broadening hips, exposing a wisp of colourless hair at the juncture of puckered thighs. He twitched the hem of the garment down to her knees and began setting out dishes of food on the foldaway table. The air smelled of stale perspiration.

  "Din," Cona mouthed with effort. "Di-in."

  "Very good," Dallen said, blanking out his freshly renewed mental image of Silvia's face. "Say dinner. Din-ner."

  "Din!" Cona shouted in sudden manic joviality, lurching towards the table. She picked up a spoon, holding it sideways in her fist, and reached for a dish of chocolate mousse. Dallen had found that if he gave in and permitted her to eat some dessert at the beginning of a meal it was then quite easy to coax her into having a fair amount of the main protein dish, but all at once the idea was intolerable.

  Without speaking, he closed his hand over Cona's and steered the spoon towards a block of moulded salad. She froze for a moment, then began to resist with her considerable strength. Before he quite knew what he was doing, he had half-risen to his feet to gain leverage and had clamped Cona's head against his hip. Subduing her with furious ease, he forced her to take salad on to the spoon and was guiding it to her mouth when something prompted him to glance towards a mirrored wall at the far side of the room.

  The tableau he saw there, with its ancient formalised composition—oppressor looming over the oppressed—could have been from any period in history. The medium could have been grainy 20th Century or age-darkened oil paint or perspectiveless woodcut, but the principal elements were the same. Faces of torturer and victim alike—both robbed of all humanity—turned towards the camera-artist as though demanding to go on record for posterity. Dallen released his wife at once and stood facing his reflection.

  "Bastard," he whispered. "The bastard has to pay."

  Chapter 16

  As a preliminary to the execution Dallen kept a close watch on Mathieu's movements.

  He was quickly rewarded by the discovery that Mathieu, even when he had a freedom of choice, preferred a fixed pattern of activity. The work schedule called for each person in Renard's team to be responsible for two adjacent stacks of grass trays, the most tedious task being the rotation of the sunlight panels to give a reasonable simulation of night and day. Each tray also had to be lightly watered at some time during its "night" period. There was no hard-and-fast rule about exactly when the watering should be carried out, but Mathieu liked to do it as soon as he had removed each sunlight panel, starting at the top of the stacks and methodically working down to deck level.

  Every morning at eleven, ship time, he climbed a twenty-metre alloy ladder attached to the front of one stack and serviced its top layer of trays. That done, he stretched all the way across the aisle and worked on his other stack from its rear, taking advantage of his long reach to avoid making two separate ascents. It was a technique of which Renard did not approve, but he had contented himself by sourly reminding Mathieu he was not covered by industrial insurance. And Dallen had listened to that particular exchange with satisfaction, knowing it would help smooth his way through what was to follow…

  On the fifth morning of the voyage he awoke early. Cona was snoring peacefully in her bed at the other side of the prefab, and Mikel was fast asleep in his cot, one foot projecting through the bars. There was little in the peaceful, tallowy dimness of the cabin to indicate that it was part of an engineered structure which was hurtling through distorted geometries of space. Were it not for near-subliminal, amniotic fluttering in the air Dallen could have believed himself to be in a holiday chalet anywhere on Earth or Orbitsville. His thoughts turned at once to Silvia London, only a few paces and partitions away on the same deck, but he hurriedly blanked out a vision of how she might look in bed. His morning erections were becoming painfully insistent, and on this crucial day all his mental and physical energies had to be directed elsewhere.

  He quietly got out of bed and took stock of his emotions, trying to ascertain how he felt about his decision to proceed immediately with Mathieu's execution. There was a certain sense of disbelief mingled with a cold sadness and fears for his own safety—but the basic resolution was still there, intact, a dominating force which excluded compassion or regrets.

  That's all right, he thought, unaccountably relieved. Nothing has changed.

  Taking care not to disturb Cona or Mikel, he used the radiation shower cubicle—wishing it could have been a stinging water spray—and got dressed in the soft shirt and slacks which were his usual working attire. He brought the travel bag out of a closet and took from it the small container of special paint, which he put in his breast pocket.

  There was nobody else abroad on Deck 5 when he left his cabin, so we went straight to the tubular elevator cage, dropped himself to the bottom of the cargo hold and stepped out into an angular jungle of scaffolding. Tall stacks of grass trays, half of them glowing under artificial sunlight, created a three-dimensional confusion of brilliance and shadow. There were puddles on the floor and the air was warm and humid, rich with meadow scents, dulling metal surfaces with condensation.

  It took Dallen less than a minute to make sure no others had showed up early for work, then he went to Mathieu's two stacks and climbed the innermost ladder, the one always used by Mathieu. At the top, precisely when it was necessary for him to be alert and at peak efficiency, he was numbed by an awareness that he was at the point of maximum danger. He was only a few metres below the ring-shaped Deck 5, in a position readily visible to anyone who might emerge from a passenger cabin, and now his scheme—so foolproof when evaluated in the security of his bed—seemed reckless beyond belief.

  With a final swinging
glance at the circular guard rail above, he took the paint container out of his shirt pocket and sprayed a colourless fluid on to the ladder's top rung. Highly nervous, fighting off a tendency to shake, he returned the container to his pocket and slid commando-fashion to the foot of the ladder. The greenhouse stillness of the bottom deck was heavy and undisturbed. Dallen ran to the elevator, took it up to Deck 5 and within a matter of seconds was back in the sanctuary of his cabin, where Cona and Mikel were still asleep. The entire sortie had taken approximately three minutes.

  Dallen sat down at the table and considered what he had done. The emulsion with which he had sprayed the ladder was manufactured for law enforcement bodies under the brand name of Pietzoff, and it was peculiarly suitable for his purpose. It was used to prevent people clinging to security vehicles and the vulnerable wing generator tubes of aircraft. Finger pressure on the deposited crystals would produce a neural shock which would affect Mathieu's whole body, not only repelling him from the ladder but preventing him from grasping anything which might lessen his fall.

  There was no absolute guarantee that the impact with deck would kill him, but Dallen intended to be close to the scene of the "accident", first to reach the fallen man, and would need only the briefest moment to complete his work. An extra shearing of the neck vertebrae would go unnoticed among Mathieu's other injuries. The final step would be to ascend the ladder, ostensibly checking for faults, and wipe away the Pietzoff emulsion with the solvent sponge already in his pocket.

  At that point, justice having been done, he could return to a normal life.

  Dallen spread his hands on the table and frowned down at them as—for the first time—he tried to envisage the future which lay beyond Mathieu's death. What would constitute a "normal life in his case? A Metagov job sufficiently undemanding that he would be able to devote most of his time to rehabilitating Cona? Perhaps he would be provided with a pension on compassionate grounds and given a house on the edge of one of those heroic developments which straggled a short distance into Orbitsville's endless oceans of grass. That way he could make Cona his life's work—and what would the career landmarks be? The day she learned to flush the toilet for herself? The day she completed her first sentence? The first night on which, in the mental chaos of the dark hours, he failed to turn her away from his bed?