The Shadow of the Ship, page 28
“Figures. Harder to chase after them without taking our only other wired-cannon from the nose-car. And without either of those, the remainder of the caravan’s too vulnerable for the trip back.” Rheinallt stood. “How many squeakers?”
“Two. It won’t cripple us. I don’t think Glenavet wanted to try reharnessing more than two. If a person isn’t trained as a beast handler, the complexity of the traces goes up geometrically with the number of squeakers.”
Rheinallt was about to head for the rear of the parked caravan when Arahant thrust open the door to the compartment and burst in, panting in great billows of white fur. The catadrome vaulted into the armchair and sat.
“What have you been up to?” Rheinallt asked him.
“Thought you were too groggy to ask,” he said promptly, jumping down again although he was still breathing heavily.
“Come on. It’s too late to do anything more, but you might get a last glimpse of the former rattle on your tail.”
“Fine.” The three of them left, striding rapidly rearward down the long carpeted, car-segmented corridors.
After a minute Rheinallt asked, “What do you mean, do anything more?”
“Yes. Well, I was ambling around, keeping an eye on Glenavet. Most of the people aboard were worn out, of course. Been a hectic day. You know, that man’s personality has really upgraded since he’s been hanging out with that young witch of yours.”
“She’s no witch,” Rheinallt said irritably.
“Get on with it,” Whitnadys demanded. “At least tell him what you told me by speaking tube. About following that millefleurs scent, and all.”
They went through another intercar airlock on their way back through the caravan. The corridors were empty and they kept their voices low, not wanting to wake the passengers unnecessarily. Whitnadys seemed to feel no need to wake any others of the crew, so Rheinallt thought they could put that off. Already he had made up his mind not to go chasing after Glenavet and Susannilar. What would be the use?
“Your caboose crew had deserted for the downy fields of sleep, Hendrik,” Arahant said. “You might lean on them for that. Anyway, not too long ago I was drifting toward the tail of the caravan, following a trace of a certain exotic perfume. When I got to the last car but one, I saw Glenavet in the airlock detaching the couplers between the cars.”
“Casting them off or capping them?” Whitnadys asked.
“Capping them. No, he wasn’t doing any kind of sabotage. Besides, that isn’t easy: any old trailman knows about air-safety interlocks. As soon as I realized what he was doing, I gave him the evil eye and my best expression of disapproval. But I realized that he didn’t know an aircat’s expressions from a hump on the meadow, so that wouldn’t do the caravan much good. So I fluffed up as large as I could, but dug my claws into the carpet so if there was a blowout, I wouldn’t be at the mercy of the air currents as I’d been when the airtent blew.”
“Good idea,” Rheinallt said briefly.
“Then I saw a length of pipe that had been left in a corner, and I grabbed that, and very slowly I brought it to bear on the airlock door as though it were some esoteric weapon.” Arahant chuckled. “Really spooked him. Between my sudden fluff-up which he’d never seen before, and my pointing a strange pipelike gizmo at him, he was ready to run for it.
“Glenavet slammed the airlock door on the caboose side. I ran and propped the piece of pipe in the airlock so it was pointing outward, and jumped back within the next-to-last car.
“I slammed that airlock door, and turned off all the airlocks leading back to the connections with the caboose. I was afraid Glenavet might just order the squeakers to haul down the trail and wrench loose anything he hadn’t already detached. And that’s what he did, but apparently everything vital had been detached already. Pulled out the speaking tube, maybe; little things of that order.”
“Is everything sealed off now?” Rheinallt needed to know.
“Right as rain,” the aircat said.
“Don’t bring that up now. So he already had the squeakers hitched, and pulled the caboose away?”
“Yes. They didn’t stop, either. When they looked back, they must have seen that pipe pointing at them like a gun barrel.” Arahant sounded pleased with himself.
“I see,” Whitnadys said. “The wired-cannon mounted in the caboose faces forward for them, if the two squeakers they hijacked were pulling the car directly away from the rest of the caravan. They couldn’t stop for a parting shot without turning and stopping, and you had them too scared to try that.”
“Correct, my dear lady,” Arahant said.
“You didn’t mention Susannilar,” Rheinallt said. “Are you positive she’s with Glenavet?”
“Definitely. She at least did look back at the caravan. I recognized her by her glowing red face through the caboose airlock’s porthole. The red was no ordinary sunburn.”
“Here we are,” Rheinallt said. They had arrived at what was now the last car. He went to the utility porthole in the rear airlock door.
“They’re almost out of sight,” he reported. A tiny hint of yellow lamplight was visible for a few moments, then it disappeared, drawn down behind some intervening rise in the meadow. “They’re gone now.”
“They can’t have much in the way of supplies,” Whitnadys said sympathetically. “I don’t know if they’ll make it.”
“Well, you’re the expert, Whitnadys,” Arahant said. “If not to escape, why else would they have tried it?”
Rheinallt put in, “Arahant may have foiled an attempt to take over the caravan, using the wired-cannon as a weapon. His pipe trick may have scared them off from that. Glenavet seemed to think lately that the spirit of the Ship had entered into him with Susannilar’s esoteric help, or some such.”
Whitnadys laughed. “Sounds like a simpleminded, twisted version of you, almost.”
“Thanks,” Rheinallt said dryly. “What happened to Tadako?”
“Never saw him tonight,” Arahant confirmed.
“This bodes no good at all,” Rheinallt said with a yawn.
“Why?” Whitnadys asked. “Assuming they never really meant to try to capture the caravan, and did stock up on supplies, I think it’s sort of romantic. Like an elopement.”
Arahant shook his head, twitching pointed ears. “Remember how they’ve both been changing. That’s not been too good for them. And what Hendrik means is that there are two people with newfound power out for a spree. Wherever they alight there’s going to be trouble. I could see Glenavet’s increasing effect on other people aboard. He’s far more dangerous than when he was content to be a minor organizer of trailmen. Now he’s going to want to organize worlds.”
“Oh,” Whitnadys said faintly. “I see what you mean.”
“Fortunately,” Arahant went on, “not being human myself, I was immune to blandishments of a human on the make, or I might have ‘eloped’ with them.”
Whitnadys knelt down and hugged Arahant.
“I’ll have to roust out some of the crew to keep watch,” Rheinallt said. “I don’t think they’ll be back, though.”
“I can do that,” Whitnadys said, straightening. “I also need to talk to some overly sleepy, or witch-susceptible, beast handlers.”
Arahant’s slitted eyes sparkled. “I wish I could have signed our late Detenebrator for an orchestra. You know I’ve a huge vocal range myself, thanks to species adaptations, that allows me to write unusual but entirely live-performable effects into my operas. The Detenebrator would have been as good a shrieker as a couple of my sisters together. Incredible sonics. A real blateroon it was.”
18. A Track of Golden Fire
The following day they had a celebration. Some at least of their ends had been achieved. The caravaneers all drifted outside, except for a few delegated to hold down the caravan’s presence. As they went out Seebanone handed each a gas torch. They gathered like fireflies on the gentle slopes of a hollow a third of the way up toward the Ship.
The very bottom of this depression was the size of a sunken bathtub. The water in it had been brought from the caravan’s tanks. The surplus had better go back afterward, too, or the cargomaster would make the revelers spit up whatever they had swallowed.
Meadow-tea was another arcane detail of the subspace traveler’s life in this culture that Rheinallt was supposed to know all about. Whitnadys was leading the uncommon ceremony, but the captain-of-caravan would have to play a major part. She had promised to cover any lapse of his.
Dozens were gathered in a circle around the hollow in the pseudosurface, and more were ambling over. Not even all the crew had drunk the tea before, so there was plenty of trailsign going back and forth as the procedure was explained to the newer trailmen as well as to most of the passengers.
A crewman brought up a last bucket of water and poured it into the hollow with a flourish. The water came down in an unbroken stream, glittering transparently, and merged with a silent splash and rippling into the little pool. Droplets that edged away from the bucket’s stream vanished without fuss, so the column of poured water was clean-sided as polished metal. Droplets splashed up from the black vanished too, but left a tiny peak of separation behind them for an instant, like a golf tee after the golf ball is knocked galley-west.
At one end of the hollow, Whitnadys lay on her belly with her ungloved hands in the water, keeping a human contact with the pool lest the whole mass disappear. The meadow itself would not leak water any more than it would leak consciousness.
“Are your hands cold?” Rheinallt asked Whitnadys.
She shook her head no.
The crewman returned the last empty bucket to the always-manned caravan. Another, who had been standing by with a waterproof as well as vacuum-proof lantern, hunkered down next to Whitnadys and shined the beam on her hands where they were thrust into the water. The ring of people edged closer to see, with the ones in front kneeling or squatting.
The dark surface of the water twinkled in the lantern light as Whitnadys’ hands moved gently with her breathing. Slowly, with beautiful hulalike dancing motions, her hands moved into the gestures which invited all present to partake of meadow-tea.
Sharing of water in vacuum. But no one moved yet.
Slowly Rheinallt unsnapped his glove and drew it off. Taking a utility knife from a belt sheath, he pantomimed cutting a small incision in the vein at his wrist. Although the knife did not actually cut him, Rheinallt caused the blood to well up anyway. Then more quickly, but still striving for clearly differentiated motions as though he were on stage, he knelt by the edge of the basin and thrust his bleeding wrist into the dark water.
In the lantern light, Whitnadys’ fingers flashed and sparkled. In trailsign she said, “In our captain’s blood is the strength which keeps breath within us, waters of life within us, freely supporting minds within us, will to press on within us, taste of home within us.”
Subtle currents in the dark pool spread tinted streamers of his blood away from his wrist. They wended down to the end of the basin and began to curl back toward the lantern. Rheinallt could not tell if Whitnadys was affecting this motion yet; it seemed natural so far. He kept his wrist low, and his heart obligingly leaned on the pump handle and tried to fill the void it felt, not knowing this gap was immense and unfillable.
Rheinallt presumed he would not get dizzy from loss of blood before Whitnadys gave the sign for the next stage. If he did, he would just have to grit it out.
With quick motions underwater, Whitnadys began finger-painting, swirling the blood into bold arcs. Before exiting the caravan earlier she had coated her fingertips with various mixtures chosen to alter the microstructure of her skin: a vertical patch of skin will adhere more water than will a vertical patch of glass. Her unguents had enhanced this effect like hook-and-eye cloth, except that she was fastening to the heavier and more cohesive blood cells among the slipperier molecules of water.
Also, her fingers were webbed with small wedges of a transparent plastic sheeting, so that when her pale fingers gestured languidly toward a streamlet of blood, the blood was scooped by the semiporous membranes and deposited where she wished.
The unguents on the fingers represented an older tradition; the membrane was a technological improvement which the tea makers had snapped up. Whitnadys used both means.
She nodded to Rheinallt that he had bled enough for the cause. He pulled his wrist from the water, refusing a bandage readied beforehand and caused the cut to close. His wrist throbbed a little. He drew his glove over the aching hand and massaged it gently with the other.
Whitnadys now sketched a flower, the petals taking form in three dimensions, highlighted by the rays of the lantern, as her fingers fluttered gracefully in the gleaming pool. Now and then the hands formed a word or two in trailsign, then drew out a reddish curve of petal, then went on to more words. Occasionally, in fantastically planned gestures which the audience could only appreciate when one was completed, she both sketched and signed simultaneously.
As she completed these extraordinary flourishes, indrawn breaths in dozens of helmets made flickers of light as those who held gas lanterns that leached air from their suits changed their breathing abruptly enough to force-feed or starve their gas flames. As Whitnadys’ efforts developed, these appreciative flickers increased.
As a work of art it was wholly plastic and ephemeral, but it held them all so spellbound Rheinallt wished he could have recorded her shapings. But electronic recorders were not so easy to contrive as fruit juice in the diet.
Whitnadys went on making her swirls live and writhe in the black-cupped pool. The flower she drew in silence became more and more complex, yet at the same time more abstract and arabesque: a mandala.
A jerking movement among the ranks of watchers caught Rheinallt’s attention. He looked up reluctantly, then saw the weakened Tadako standing close, recovering now from the poison he said Nollinsae had slipped him. Could Nollinsae also have goaded the late Wirtellin into the foolhardy attack, back on Starved Rock? He would have to ask Tadako if he had noticed any such activity. Tadako rubbed his sleeve thoughtlessly on the outside of his helmet; the stolid, loyal trailman was crying.
When Rheinallt looked down into the pool again, Whitnadys had begun drawing his own face. A caricature, naturally, without much shading. But it definitely was his image forming, metamorphosing from the flower she had drawn. His heavy eyebrows could not be mistaken for pistils, stamen, or anything else.
He glanced at Whitnadys’ expression, fully expecting to see her impish guess-what-Hendrikal! Look, but her face was smooth, eyes intent and wholly serious. She had not told him beforehand about the subjects of the designs.
Already now Whitnadys was blurring the smiling face, smearing the floating streaks of brows and cheekbones into a featureless ovoid. He was sorry to see his likeness go so quickly. The new mass of red rested on the black meadow-bottom of the pool, as though it were flattened there, or dug in like the Ship.
Yes, a model of the Falling Angel as it appeared on the meadow, as it now loomed in the middle distance above them. A miniature of the shadowy red form, imbedded intangibly in the meadow. Involuntarily Rheinallt glanced toward the real thing, and saw others do likewise. Then he grinned at his own label, for the realness of the Ship was the most debatable part of this whole caravan-quest. Had they settled that reality to anyone’s entire satisfaction? Already the watery model was blurring and diffusing.
There was some elbow-pushing, stares, and a flurry of intersign among the spectators. The final stage of the ceremony was to begin.
Rheinallt wished the old mapmaker Ortelius could have been there to see it. He would have to hunt him up as soon as they got back to Blueholm. His trip narrative would be garnished with some hard navigational records, and sweetened vastly for the patient dreamer with hints of travel breakthroughs. Ortelius would love it. Also he would be pleased to hear that, so far at least, no one had died from vacuum-related accidents, or from lifting one foot too many off the pseudosurface. Only by hostile action: the betrayal by other consciousnesses than one’s own.
Whitnadys pulled a long tube from her belt, stretching one arm to uncoil the long rubbery length while she kept her other hand firmly in the water. Without looking up she reached above her head with one end of the tube; as it was accepted by the nearest crewman she plunged the other end in the water.
One by one the whole crowd of watchers circulated alongside Whitnadys, and each in turn took a sip of the meadow-tea through the tube. As each who was running a firebrand came by, he or she removed that feeder tube from the air valve in the helmet, inserted Whitnadys’ hose, and sucked. Then the crewmember or expeditionary would hand the sipping tube to another, replace the firebrand, and puff it alight again. There was a continuing lantern-flicker in the vicinity.
As the tube was first proffered, Rheinallt had put one hand back into the pool, and allowed a faint electric charge to pass from his fingers through the tube to tingle the palate of each sharer. Even the most bemusedly nonceremonious had their eyes snapped wide by the sensation.
Next-to-last, Rheinallt took a sip himself. It seemed cold to the palate, but that was imagination. It had an undefinable taste which had not quite the warm saltiness of blood licked from a fresh cut, but savored of it.
Whitnadys finished the tasting, then recoiled the tube one-handed and clamped it again to her belt. In the earliest days the tea makers had used swamp reeds. Before her time.
Now, at last, he caught an impish glance from her; but it was only visible an instant before she turned to look off across the meadow at the huge hull of the Falling Angel. She looked for a long minute, and many of the rest saw the direction of her gaze and imitated her, thoughtfully.
Suddenly she snapped her head back to face the pool in front of which she still lay. Startled, the watchers who had become participants did too. In spite of knowing what must come next, and despite various cramps and odd tastes in their mouths, few were ready for it to end.
