‘Sleep I cannot, rest eludes me.’
And down a fifth
‘Dreams to plague me, tortured I.’
Up to an augmented seventh as the chorus chimed in on a dissonance, calculated to raise inner hackles and pierce the gut with longing.
‘Let me sleep, let me rest, let me die.’
Helva sang, her voice sliding into the edged timbre of a harsh, yearning tenor.
Down again to the original musical phrase, but this time the baritone quality was tinged with scorn.
‘Death is mine, mine forever.
Let me sleep, let me rest, let me die.’
The last word became a vibrant crescendo of derision, diminishing to a mocking whisper long after the supporting chorus had completed its cry on the augmented seventh.
‘Cencom calling, KH-834, will you acknowledge? ACKNOWLEDGE!’ the hard official voice of Regulus Base Cencom broke through Helva’s fantastic musical improvisation.
‘Mayday, mayday,’ Helva replied in a jolting soprano on both tight beam and the Aliothite contact band. The chorus obediently shrilled out the resounding emergency challenge. Helva caught her breath as she saw Kira stagger with instinctive reaction to the cry.
‘Mayday?’ Cencom demanded. ‘You bet – with a cratty fool Dylanizing on Alioth?’
With a shock, Helva realized that was exactly what she was doing, Dylanizing. Her appeal to Kira, though couched musically, the one medium with which she could hope to reach the entranced scout, had crystallized further into the subliminal form of a Dylanesque protest. Exultant, she knew how to manipulate this to her own ends. With a barely perceptible increase in tempo, she repeated her first phrase, no longer a longing legato, but a mocking staccato. As the chorus responded idiotically true to its model, she hurriedly reported to Cencom.
‘Alioth’s religious head is the rogue ship 732; the religious motivation is death!’
‘The brawn, where is your brawn?’ Cencom crackled.
‘What is the release word for the 732?’ Helva hissed, then chanted the second phrase of her Dylan, again picking up the tempo so that the beat as well as the sound had urgency to it.
‘Report!’ Cencom demanded.
‘I don’t have time to report, you nardy fool. The release word!’ Helva snarled. She jumped her voice an octave and a half, switching registers to heldentenor, her phrase ringing through the plaza in an arrow of sheer emotion-packed sound to pierce the trance of her scout.
Kira’s guards were lurching now, half-dazed by the treacherous fumes that filled the plaza. They had Kira by the arms, and Helva, trapped in the background of the mighty chorus, couldn’t tell whether they were restraining Kira or hanging on to her for support. The girl alone was unaffected by the hallucinogen.
‘Let me sleep, let me rest, let me die!’
Helva’s tenor rang, scornfully, lashing viciously at Kira’s death-wish.
‘You fool,’ Cencom said. ‘She wants to die!’
‘GIVE ME THE RELEASE WORD!’ Helva cried at the tight beam in a strident soprano, then projected her voice, bitterly powerful, angrily compelling, thundering the protest:
‘Let me sleep, let me rest, let me die!’
The phrase echoed tauntingly through the plaza. The chorus, unable to imitate the incredible pitch of Helva’s voice, dropped to the lower octave. The challenge rocked back across the plaza, punctuated by the massive thunder of erupting volcanoes.
With a sudden, soundless, soul-shattering wrench, the massed glimpses of chaos dissolved and Helva was suddenly of single sight – Kira! – in a darkly curtained chamber, unevenly lit by red braziers. Increasing her dark vision, Helva penetrated the gloom, her attention focused on the hideous object that dominated the room.
On a raised, black basaltic slab lay the decomposing remains of what had once been a man. The teeth were bared whitely through the decayed flesh in a travesty of a smile. The tendons of the neck were stark ridges and the cartilage of his esophagus ended in the indestructible fabric of a scout coverall. His hands, crossed on the chest cavity crumpled by a massive fatal blow, were linked by the intertwined overgrowth of fingernail. The 732’s dead brawn lay in state.
And Helva was seeing him through Kira’s contact button . . . at last.
A wailing chant filled the chamber, a meaningless, mournful dribble of sound, emanating from the walls, the ceiling, the floor. The mad brain encased in its indestructible titanium shell, had all circuits open, keening, oblivious to everything.
In as soundless a whisper as she could broadcast, Helva muttered swiftly to Kira. ‘It’s the rogue 732. It’s gone mad. It’s got to be destroyed.’ It was easier somehow for Helva, knowing what she must do, to think of the 732 as an impersonal ‘it,’ rather than the female the brain had once been.
Kira swayed, making no reply.
For one paralysing demisecond, Helva wondered if the girl had inadvertently opened the contact, if Kira were still in the thrall of the powerful death wish. Had Helva’s Dylan protest pierced Kira’s self-destructive trance with its mockery? Had Helva succeeded in jolting her brawn to sanity? The release word would be no mortal use if she did not have her mobile brawn’s cooperation to immobilize the rogue.
With slow steps Kira approached the bier and its ghastly occupant. The keening grew louder, the mumbling became articulated.
‘He has been taken. He Who Orders has been taken,’ chanted the 732 and the crowd echoed the chant as readily as they had Helva’s. ‘He is gone. Seber is gone.’
Not helpless again? Helva cried, silently, her mind overwhelmed by hopelessness.
Eerily another sound was superimposed over the 732’s wail.
‘Now that dwarf presents a definite problem, Lia.’ The wowwing, muffled words could barely be distinguished. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised . . .’
It was a man’s voice, Helva realized, played back at a lagging speed which distorted the words into a yawing parody. The ship was broadcasting, had broadcast this tape so many times that the sound of Seber’s taped voice was as decayed as his corpse on the bier.
Kira continued to sway in her graceful circumnavigation.
‘Speak, O Seber, in singing tones that thy servant, Kira, may hear the music of thy beloved voice,’ Kira crooned, making an obeisance to the column behind which lay the shell of the mad 732.
Helva barely managed to suppress the cry of intolerable relief at the cues Kira was feeding her.
‘CENCOM, THE RELEASE WORD!’ Helva pleaded on the tight beam just as the 732’s crooning broke off abruptly. Helva could almost feel the ship’s held breath.
Delay! Delay! Where was Cencom!
‘Lia, the interference on my contact is incredible. Can’t you clear up the relays? That dwarf is wreaking havoc . . .’
Even Kira jumped involuntarily as Helva, deepening her voice to a baritone approximation of Seber’s, adlibbed frantically.
‘Can’t seem to read you clearly. Lia? Lia? You got wires crossed?’
‘Seber? Seber?’ shrieked the rogue ship, her voice wild with incredulous hope. ‘I’m trapped. I’m trapped. I was thrown off course when the edge of the volcano blew. I tried to die. I tried to die, too.’
Kira was fumbling with the draperies at the bulkhead. Her escort, roused from their euphoria as they sensed sacrilege, dove toward Kira. Her swift hand caught one on the voice box in a deadly chop. She ducked under the other man, using her body to throw him against the bier so squarely that his head cracked ominously against the stone and he slumped down.
‘KH, the release is na-thom-te-ah-ro, watch the pitch!’
And Helva, knowing she was in effect executing one of her own kind, broadcast the release word to the 732. As the syllables with their pitched nuances activated the release of the access panel, Kira caught the plate, reached in deftly and threw the valve that would flood the inside of the shell with anesthesia.
‘I can’t see you, Seber. Where are . . .’ and the 732’s despairing wail was stilled in longed for obl
ivion.
Kira whirled, the panel clinking behind the concealing draperies as cowled figures lurched into the main cabin from the quarters behind.
‘Hold!’ Helva commanded in Lia’s voice. ‘He Who Orders has decided. Take the barefaced woman back to the ship. Such blasphemous seed is not for the chosen of Alioth.’
Kira, again trancelike, followed the dazed hoods back down the steps.
‘Helva, what in the fardles is happening there?’ Cencom demanded within the 834.
‘He has decided,’ the fanatical mob in the plaza groaned and swayed in the thrall of the hallucinogenic fumes.
‘Helva!’ snapped Cencom.
‘Oh, shut up all of you,’ said Helva, near a breaking point.
‘He has ordered. That is Eternal Truth.’
She watched just long enough to be sure that the reeling, freak-drunk Aliothites would not interfere with Kira’s return. How they could, Helva couldn’t imagine, for they were dropping by the hundreds, exhausted by fumes and frenzy.
‘You better have a good explanation for deliberately abrogating specific restrictions in your journey tape regarding Dylanistic . . .’
‘I’ll Dylanize you, you fatuous oaf,’ Helva cut in angrily. ‘The end justifies the means, and might I remind you that for some reason, unknown forever to God and man, your list of restricted planets did NOT include Alioth, as by the fingernails of that God they should have!’
Cencom sputtered indignantly.
‘Control yourself,’ Helva suggested acidly. ‘I found your long-lost rogue and I have killed her. And I did some rough but effective therapy on your precious Kira of Canopus. What more do you want of one brain shell? Huh?’
Cencom maintained silence for 60 stunned seconds.
‘Where is Kira?’ and Helva could swear Cencom sounded contrite.
‘She’s all right.’
‘Put her on.’
‘She’s all right!’ Helva repeated with weary emphasis. ‘She’s on her way back from the Temple.’
The spaceport rocked under a multiple eruption just as the vehicle bearing Kira screeched to a halt at the lift. Helva unlocked the mechanism and Kira leaped on before the guards came to their senses. The ground danced under the ship’s stabilizers and, as Kira dove from airlock to pilot’s couch, Helva slammed the lock shut and precipitously lifted from grim Alioth.
In the tail scanners they saw the guards retreating to safety as the gantry tumbled leisurely down. Bright jewels dotted the receding planet as it gave them a volcanic sendoff.
‘Scout Kira of the KH-834 reporting,’ the slender girl said crisply to Cencom, shedding her cloak. Helva half-expected a shower of hairpins to follow but Kira remained tautly erect before the tight beam. She gave a terse report, demanding to know why traders had not reported the presence of Service-type contact buttons plainly visible on every Aliothite. And why – a far more criminal omission – the hallucinogenic gas eruptions had not been reported.
‘Hallucinogenic gas?’ Cencom echoed weakly. Such instances were the nightmare of colonization; entire populations could be subjected to illegal domination by such emissions, as indeed had happened on Alioth.
‘I recommend strongly that all traders dealing with Alioth in the last 50 years be questioned as to their motives in suppressing such information from Central Worlds. And discover who was the semi-intelligent CW representative who cleared this freak-off planet for colonization.’
Cencom was reduced to incoherent sputters.
‘Stop gargling,’ Kira suggested sweetly, ‘and order an all-haste planet-therapy team here. You’ve got an entire society to reorient to the business of living. We’ll file a comprehensive report from Nekkar, but now I’ve got to inspect our children. That was a rough take-off. Over and out.’ And Kira closed the tight beam down.
With a fluid motion she propelled herself to the kitchen, shaking her braids free and massaging her scalp with rough fingers.
‘My head is pounding!’ she exclaimed, reaching for coffee. ‘That gas was unbelievably malodorous.’ She leaned wearily against the counter, her shoulders sagging in fatigue.
Helva waited, knowing Kira was sorting her thoughts.
‘The closer I got to that temple, the deeper the terrible miasma of grief. It was almost visible, Helva,’ she said, and then added scathingly, ‘and I wallowed in it. Until that Dylan of yours reached me, Helva.’
Her eyes widened respectfully. ‘The hair on the back of my neck stood up straight. That final chord got me, right here,’ she groaned, jabbing at her abdomen with a graphic fist. ‘Thorn would have given his guts to compose such a powerful Dylan.’ Her shoulders jerked spasmodically in a violent muscle spasm.
‘That awful corpse!’ She closed her eyes and shuddered, shaking her head sharply to rid herself of the effect. ‘I think . . .’ she murmured, her eyes narrowing with self-appraisal, ‘I have been thinking – I had done the same thing to Thorn.’
‘I think perhaps you had,’ Helva agreed softly.
Kira sipped at her coffee, her face tired but alive, the mask of vivacity replaced by an inner calm. ‘I have been so stupid,’ she said with trenchant self-contempt.
‘Not even Cencom is infallible,’ Helva drawled.
Kira threw back her head in a whoop of laughter.
‘That’s Eternal Truth!’ she crowed, dancing back into the main cabin.
Helva watched the victory dance, immeasurably pleased with the outcome of the affair as far as Kira was concerned. She could not regret that she had had to kill one of her own peers. Lia had really died years before with her scout: that tortured remnant had peace at last, and so had Kira. She and Helva would continue together on their stork run, picking up the seeds from . . .
Helva let out a yip of exultation. Kira stared at her, startled.
‘What hit you?’
‘It’s so ridiculously simple I can’t imagine someone never suggested it to you. Or maybe they did and you rejected it.’
‘I’ll never know unless you tell me what it is,’ Kira replied caustically.
‘One of the facets of your grief psychosis . . .’
‘I’m over it now,’ Kira interrupted Helva, her eyes flashing angrily.
‘. . . Ha to that. One of the facets has been the lack of progeny from your seed and Thorn’s? Right?’
The scout’s face turned starkly white, but Helva plunged on.
‘Neither sets of your parents were stupid enough to have ignored their RCA duty. Right? So their seed is on file. Take some of your mother’s and his father’s and . . .’
Kira’s eyes widened and her jaw dropped, her face lighting with incredulous radiance. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Delicately she stretched out her hand, touching the access panel softly.
Helva was ridiculously, embarrassingly delighted at her acceptance of the idea. Then Kira drew her breath in sharply, her face concerned.
‘But for you . . . wouldn’t you take your mother’s and . . .’
‘No,’ Helva said sharply, then added more gently, ‘that won’t be necessary.’ She knew in mind and heart now that the resolution of grief is highly individual: that both she and Kira had reached it by different means, just as Theoda had.
Kira looked unaccountably stricken, as if she had no right to take the solution Helva offered if Helva did not, too.
‘After all,’ the ship chuckled, ‘there aren’t many women,’ and Helva used the word proudly, knowing that she had passed as surely from girlhood to woman’s estate as any of her mobile sisters, ‘who give birth to 110,000 babies at one time.’
Kira dissolved into laughter, crowing with delight over Helva’s analogy. She snatched up her guitar, strumming a loud introductory arpeggio. Then the two, ship and scout, surprised the stars with a swinging Schubert serenade as they sped toward Nekkar and deliverance.
Dramatic Mission
HELVA TURNED THE sound down, pleased that all the embryo-tube racks and the great beakers of nutrients were being pulled out, but not
at all pleased with the mauling the crewmen were giving her in the process.
They didn’t really need to add to the scars already made by the metal frames on her decks, or the stains of spilled nutrients on her bulkheads. But she was silent because even the pilot’s cabin showed unmistakable marks of long tenure and Kira Falernova had been a tidy person. However, Helva had no wish to go to Regulus and show this shoddy interior to whichever brawns were waiting to team up with her.
She said as much to the other brain ship sitting near her, to one side of the commercial pads at the Nekkar spaceport.
‘That’s a silly waste of credit, Helva,’ Amon, the TA-618, replied, his voice slightly peevish. ‘How d’you know your new brawn will like your taste? Let him, or her, pay for it out of his quarters’ allowance. Really, Helva, use some sense or you’ll never buy free. And I don’t see why you’re so eager to be saddled with a brawn anyway.’
‘I like people.’
Amon made a rude noise. Since he’d landed, he had steadily complained to her about his mobile partner’s deficiencies and shortcomings. Helva had reminded herself that Amon and Trace had been together over 15 standard years and that was said to be the most difficult period of any long association.
‘When you’ve had a series of brawns aboard you as long as I have, you won’t be so philanthropic. And when you know what your brawn is going to say before he says it, then you’ll have a little idea of the strain I’m currently under.’
‘Kira Falernova and I were 3 years on this storkrun . . .’
‘Doesn’t signify. You knew it was a short-term assignment. You can put up with anything on that basis. It’s the inescapable knowledge that you’ve got to go on and on, 25 to 30 years’ worth . . .’
‘If he’s all that bad, opt a change,’ Helva said.
‘And add a cancellation penalty to what I’m already trying to pay?’
‘Oh, I forgot.’ Her reply, Helva realized the moment the words were out of her mouth, was not very politic. Among his many grievances with the galaxy at large, the extortionate price of repairs and maintenance made by outworld stations ranked high. Amon had run afoul of a space-debris storm and the damage had required a replating of half his nose. Central Worlds had insisted that the cause was his negligence, so it was therefore not a service-incurred or compensable accident.
The Ship Who Sang Page 9
