Swan Song, page 6
The Nightingale is quite different. Perhaps it should not be described as a nebula at all—perhaps a new name should have been invented for it. It’s small, as nebulas go, and contains no visible stars. It’s shaped like a big lens, and unless you’re looking at it edge-on you can see stars through it—blurred and dimmed, but still visible. The space all around the focal lesion is subject to distortive phenomena of the wave-analogue type, but the distortion is oddly regular and possibly predictable. The nebula appears to have a periodic cycle of activity.
So far as I was aware, no one at that time had any idea what the Nightingale might be. I’d never heard any theory to account for it, although no doubt there were a hundred crazy notions with some currency in the space from which the thing was visible. Obviously, Titus Charlot was toying with a hypothesis of his own, trying to come to grips with the enigma and sort it out. I was prepared to admit that if he did manage to find out what went on in the Nightingale it might make a substantial contribution to human understanding of the universe. But I didn’t think that was very relevant. Not to me or to the people who were aboard the Sister Swan. The fact remained that all nebulas are veritable devils, and he who plays hell with devils is apt to have his hands scorched. Such is life.
I knew full well that I’d have to be a madman to sign back on with the Hooded Swan of my own free will, especially after what had happened to the sister ship. The fact that I’d braved the Halcyon Drift and won out didn’t really figure. I’d still be dicing with death, and the dice wouldn’t be loaded my way.
And yet, I was tempted.
I used to think that I know what motives were made of, but it didn’t seem so easy just then.
It never is easy, pointed out the wind, unless you make it easy.
And how do you make it easy? I demanded.
You decide, he said. And then you make excuses.
You’re supposed to find your motives before you make your decisions, I pointed out. Not the other way around.
Causes, he said, come before effects. But most people start with effects and try to discover causes.
Very glib, I congratulated him. You want to go, don’t you? Just like Johnny. Why? Suggest to me some of your excuses. Some of your reasons.
It’s the only game in town, he said. You’re wasting your life trying to play a game that ended three years ago. When your ship went down and you buried Lapthorn the final whistle blew on that phase of existence. Ever since then you’ve been looking backward. Believe me, I know. I know which way’s up and it isn’t where your head’s pointing. You have to start again, but every time you get off the blocks you turn right back in on yourself. The Hooded Swan is the game now, and you ought to know that. You of all people know how much of a ship is its pilot and how much of a pilot is his ship. So it’s not a bed of roses. So playing this game you have to play by Titus Charlot’s rules, which are bent. So OK. All rules are bent. Space is curved. If it wasn’t there’d be no such thing as matter. I want to go. All right. I want to go because I don’t want to stay here, and neither do you. By “here” I don’t mean this room or this world, I mean this head. You’re marking time, spinning the present out indefinitely. You still have a future, but every time you begin to move into it you crap out and sag right back. Take the ship. Accept the purpose.
It could kill me.
Time is killing everybody. Everybody dies.
Great. You talk like a brave man. You always were the voice of implacable courage and heroism. There’s no one big enough so you’ll admit he can’t be licked. Congratulations. But aren’t you forgetting a little something—namely that I die and you don’t? When I go, I go. You just go to another host.
I’m not immortal, he said. Nobody lives forever.
But not everybody dies so easily as I do, I told him. You have less to risk and that’s all there is to it.
Maybe, he said, maybe not. But so what? The fact remains. You may have no future if you die, but what does that count for if you’re determined to have no future while you live? What are you saving your precious skin for, Grainger?
Because I’m fond of it. It hurts me to see it scratched. It’s my innate sense of responsibility.
Fair enough, said the wind. Decide. Stay put. Then ask yourself what your excuses are.
I couldn’t just tell him to shut up and push him to the back of my mind. I would have, once. But not forever. Like on Lapthorn’s Grave, when the wind begins to talk to you, you can’t ignore him to the end of time. You won’t stop the wind blowing. No way.
But I knew my excuses. They were all ready, standing in a row in their Sunday best suits, waiting to be buried. Eve, Nick, Rothgar. All my friends. Alachakh—I sent his coffin into a sun in the Halcyon Drift. Lapthorn—I buried him in a shallow grave on a black mountain. They were all my friends, and they were all my excuses. Going after them wasn’t going to help. It was only going to make me one of them. I didn’t owe them anything, but if I did it wouldn’t be dying. It would be something less dramatic.
But it didn’t come easy to me, that decision. Having the excuses all lined up doesn’t make it easy. To make it easy, as the wind said, you have to use your excuses. And you have to make your decisions first.
I’d be a fool, I thought, to go crawling back to Charlot. A sucker.
Aren’t we all? said the wind.
CHAPTER EIGHT
But it felt good to be back in the cradle. Really good. It gave me a physical thrill to ease the controls, balancing them in my hands. I felt alive again, healthy after a long sickness of the spirit. I felt as if I were home after an enforced absence. It had been enforced.
Tachyonic transfer was a boost into heaven. I felt the power of the flux building up inside me. I felt the wings stretching away from my shoulders. Her vast metal skin was my skin, unblemished. It did more than bring back memories. It brought back identity.
The discovery was a shock. How had I ever let such a feeling sneak out of my mind? I felt as if I’d almost betrayed myself. Then I thought of Johnny and Charlot and the Nightingale, and thought maybe I had.
In tachyonic phase I raced through the hyper-universe, in it and out of it, skimming over its surface but nevertheless supported and contained by it. In turn, I contained a microcosm of my own—a deration field easing gradually as I let her out into the groove. Flux, flowing like blood.
I had to go the long way around in order to make the trip quickly. There were little things in the way like the center of the galaxy. In order to use the Swan’s speed I had to go through clean space. All the way in the inner ring. But the long way around was the easy way around. Space is curved anyway. I felt as if I were going with the curve, not against it. Holding the groove put no strain on me. The random factors didn’t even threaten to throw me off or rub me the wrong way. It was smooth as silk.
My microcosm was populated by strangers. Johnny, of course, was excluded—as engineer is a part of a pilot’s microcosm, not an item in his human cargo. Sam, on the other head, counted as a stranger. You don’t get to know somebody by flying opposite ends of a crate like the Sandman. In all the years I rode the Fire-Eater and even the Javelin, I’d never got to know Lapthorn. Sam was something of an enigma. Still a stranger. I was comfortable when I was with him, but that was all. I thought I might get to know him. He was right down below, sharing the delights of a really first-class mass relaxation drive-unit with Johnny. I’d asked Johnny to let him try his hand with it sometime during the trip. After the things poor Sam had been nursing all his life it would be a sheer joyride. Sam might really fall in love with a heart like the Swan’s. He probably never bothered to dream that he’d ever handle anything like it.
The other strangers were people I was never likely to get to know. Sam’s presence on the ship was only semi-official. We’d come to Zimmer as a package, and he’d already filled the vacancy for a third crewman. The officer making up the complement was Mina Vogan, a slight, dark-haired girl who’d been riding liners for three years or more. I’d hardly had a chance to speak to her. I could make a guess at the reasons why she’d left the liners for a ship like the Swan, but I couldn’t help feeling that she was walking blindfold into hell and that Jacob Zimmer—and Charlot, indirectly—were letting her do it. I didn’t know what she’d done on the liners—she could have been o-in-c of the catering department or ship’s surgeon and still be equally well qualified to take third string on a Library yacht. As her captain, I felt it was my duty to take time out sometime to warn her of the kind of thing she was getting herself into, but I knew she wouldn’t let it put her off. What crewman ever takes the ravings of a ship’s captain seriously?
We had two passengers. One was Zimmer himself, who had tidied up affairs on New Alex very neatly and was off to lick his master’s hand. Zimmer was a nonentity—a relay in the vast human computer which parasitized the real hardware of New Alexandria. He was just an operant function—a flashing light on a display panel. It had been quite straightforward going to him and getting the job. We’d met before, of course, on Hallsthammer, and he’d favored me with a flicker of recognition. Like a true diplomat, he’d not given the slightest sign to indicate that he knew all that had happened between the two meetings. He took me on as pilot and captain without blinking an eyelid. I was momentarily surprised that he handed over the captaincy with a straight face, when Charlot had taken such care to keep it out of my hands on past occasions, but I knew that it only reflected the change in my volunteer status. I was no longer the rebel, the determined fly in the ointment. I had passed the test and been made a member of the family. Married to the Library without a shotgun in my back. Stranger things, they say, happen in space.
The other passenger was somewhat more important. She was a doctor. Nobody had told me why she was going to Darlow, but I had a strong and confident suspicion. Her name was Leila Rolfe, and she was a specialist in spinal diseases. Titus Charlot hadn’t been well for some time now, and I was willing to bet that it wasn’t the male menopause that was bothering him.
Despite the relative overpopulation of my microcosm, I was alone in the control room for almost the whole duration of the flight. I preferred to celebrate my reunion with the bird in relative privacy. I didn’t want anybody to talk to me.
I caught the persistent murmur of voices filtering through the open circuit linking me with the engine room, and I knew Sam was doing a lot of talking. It had to be Sam because Johnny’s mouth would have been close enough to the mike for me to have heard him if he’d vouchsafed more than the occasional grunt or monosyllabic reply. I guessed that Sam was giving him a long chat about his long and arduous career as a tail-ender or rust-buckets. Johnny could do worse than listen. There was a lot that Johnny could learn from Sam if he’d only listen the right way. I could maybe have taught him the same things myself, but when I talk in that kind of vein I just don’t communicate. I spill over too much. I haven’t Sam’s detachment. Sam could explain to him what it was all about without knocking holes in his head. I hoped Johnny would learn, because Johnny had a lot in him. He was a potential spaceman—without a home, or even a race. A man of the transfinite gulf. Provided that he didn’t die in the Nightingale.
While the Swan grooved at thirty thou for hour after hour I let my mind run back and forth along a groove of its own. The man from Caradoc and the farcical way that Commander Denton of the New Alexandrian Police Force had snatched me away from his clutching fingers now seemed like something of a joke. A nonsensical, inconsequential interlude. Soulier had been playing for keeps, playing hard and rough at the game he thought was the real man’s game. But the whole purpose seemed ludicrous against a background of silent stars. His only interest in me had been commercial. Bribery or vengeance—they were only opposite aspects of the same concern. What was the point? Caradoc’s power game had half the known galaxy at stake, but in the final analysis it wasn’t actually for anything. It wasn’t a fight about anything. The part I had been cut out to play was so monumentally trivial as to be quite absurd. A joke of truly minuscule proportions.
My mind had to go back through Soulier to Nick delArco before I discovered anything worth thinking about. Captain delArco. I couldn’t quite work out how long it had been since I pulled him out of that storm on Mormyr. And what for? So he could commit suicide in a dark nebula. The score might be level between me and fate, because Johnny was still alive. One apiece. But even so it was annoying to think that so little had been gained by saving Nick’s worthless hide. Poor Nick. A sucker all along the line. A prince of suckers. His mother had no right to turn him out of his playpen with so little preparation for the wicked wide world and its evil ways. A good guy, Nick. A nice guy.
I knew I could forget Nick, but I knew I wouldn’t. Somehow, he had contrived to leave an impression. Eve was different. Eve I couldn’t forget even if I wanted to. She’d echoed in my mind just a little too loud. She’d echoed Lapthorn, and I could no longer think Lapthorn without knowing that there were two of them. Brother and sister. Man and ghost. I couldn’t count the number of times my reaction-pattern to Lapthorn had taken hold of my behavior toward Eve. She might have interpreted that as an endless series of small cruelties. She could hardly understand. I’d never tried to explain. She could have died hating me. And all for nothing. All for a fake relationship. I hadn’t loved Eve. Not ever. But I just might have, perhaps, if it hadn’t been for the Lapthorn reactions that had got into me.
You did all this to me, I accused the wind, You’ve turned my head around. If it wasn’t for you...why the hell should I feel guilty? Was it me who killed them?
No, he said.
CHAPTER NINE
We made level time to Darlow. There was plenty of time for things to happen, but nothing did. The Swan was in perfect shape. All the pounding she’d taken in the Leucifer system had left not a mark on her. They’d done a good job back on New Alexandria. She was her old self, in every detail. If it were mechanically and humanly possible to make the flight that Charlot had planned, then the Swan and I were fit for it. The only question mark was Johnny.
Darlow was a desolate ball of impure iron whose only conceivably useful feature was its closeness to the Nightingale Nebula. It was a small planet of a tired rose-colored sun. Its air wasn’t poisonous but it contained very little oxygen and life of our kind could only be supported courtesy of abundant artificial aid. The planet wasn’t inhabited, in the normal sense of the word, but New Alexandria had maintained a dome there for a long time, partly as an element in the vast web of New Alexandria interests which threaded the known galaxy, and partly for the specific purpose of observing the enigmatic Nightingale. The base never supported anything resembling a thriving community, but its population tended to be fairly stable; there were men and women who spent all their working lives there, and a handful of children had been born there. Technically, therefore, it counted as one of the vast number of “human” worlds, and like Earth or Penafior it added no less and no more than one to the numerical total. On statistics like that the success of the human race is measured. People will claim we are the galaxy’s primary inhabitants because we “possess” more worlds than the Khor-monsa, the Gallacellans, and all the rest put together. People do say it. All the time.
The people who lived their lives here spent the time in between ships digging holes in the ground looking for whatever they might find or writing the great Darlovian novel. Many of them had a fierce patriotism. It had to be fierce, because there was no other way to answer the questions put to it. The transients—mostly peripatetic technical staff theoretically based on New Alexandria (though they might never see “home” in their entire lives)—were forced to acquire a shadow of the same patriotism. They couldn’t live without it. The spacemen who used Darlow as a stopover or a communication point had to respect the idiosyncrasies of the people. You insult the honor of Darlow at your peril. Pride is a dangerous thing not to have, or at least to know about, on a world like that.
Somehow, I couldn’t help thinking that Abram Adams—the senior man on the base and virtually the world’s dictator—was something other than human. I could see hardly anything that we held in common except a shape and a language. And the Khor-monsa always speak better English than most grounders. The smaller a world the faster it gains and loses words from its pooled vocabulary. The only standard tongue in this day and age is the spacer tongue.
The dome was no more than a mile across and it wasn’t exactly high-density living inside. People on little worlds like lots of personal space. New Alexandria was prepared to cater to that, uneconomic or not. Tragedies had been known to happen in domes in the early days, and still did sometimes. This meant that we were each assigned quarters considerably more salubrious than a starship cabin, and apparently quite luxurious for such a poor world. My rooms included a sitting room whose north wall was a great curved window, commanding a fine view of the bubble-city. The refractive effect of the dome, a plastic interface between gases of different density and makeup, tended to blur the aspect of the land outside the dome, refusing to admit to the sharpness and bleakness of the landscape, but making it strange and mysterious.
I couldn’t stay long in my quarters to enjoy the view—not that I enjoyed it much anyway—because a captain has duties to perform. A mere pilot can crawl into his shell when his ship touches down, but a captain is always a captain. I had to see the port authority, and Adams himself, and last—but hardly least—I had to see Charlot. I changed my clothes, and brushed my recently cut hair, and then I sallied forth, with the habitual purposeful stride of the man with responsibilities.
I cut it all short, not because I was in a hurry to get to Charlot, but because I found it all mildly distasteful.
Circumstances rushed me to the inevitable confrontation. I let them.
