The Shadow of the Ship, page 8
Rheinallt plopped down on the bar both his half-finished drink and the bartender’s towel he had borrowed to wipe his face and neck. Getting the corners straight in his mind with an instant of irritation at his own need to decode the reflections, he twisted to look directly, but could see nothing. The two women who had been talking just behind him had made almost no progress. Another way? The press of bodies and the hubbub had, if possible, increased.
He vaulted onto the bar top, carefully establishing footing on the slick wood. The air near the ceiling was so thick he had to work to breathe, and his sweating increased. He beckoned to Haderun, who had quickly positioned himself near his feet, making a few guarding sweeps with another towel.
“The megaphone!” Rheinallt shouted down to him. “Have you still got it?”
Haderun nodded wordlessly, passed his hand over his face, and rummaged under the bar. After a few moments of tumbling miscellaneous glassware out to bounce or shatter on the floor, he came up with the megaphone.
Rheinallt snatched it up. “Thanks.” He hadn’t used it since leaving Blueholm when he had coordinated a gaggle of stevedores, but there were several stashed in the caravan awaiting a needful occasion. To Haderun he added quickly, “Get the fans going faster. Bleed air to vacuum to increase the draft. Hurry.”
Rheinallt started what would have been a bellow into the megaphone but changed the tone instinctively into a loud but firmly controlled shout: “Hold it all!”
Heads spun, torsos twisted to look back up at him. Was there a fire in the corner by the telescope? Smoky in that direction. A fire would be a first-rate disaster.
“Calm down! That’s right: take it easy, please!” The megaphone handle slipped in his sweaty palm, and he surreptitiously reabsorbed the moisture so fast his palm ached. His free arm he waved in a slow steady arc, a visibly bracing gesture which would have a subconsciously soothing influence. Agitation in the car began subsiding.
“Thank you,” he said more quietly after a few moments. A full panic in a bottleneck-doored car with vacuum outside and fire inside was something he had heard terror-tales of but never witnessed. Living witnesses to meadow panics were rare.
“There’s no fire here,” a voice called from the corner. “A little explosion—caused some smoke, but no fire at all.” Arahant’s voice, the first time he had spoken in public on the Special Caravan. And if Rheinallt knew him, the aircat had arranged adequate misdirection before calling out. The anonymous assertion was another calming influence.
“What’s going on?” someone called.
“Spaced if I know,” he replied through the megaphone, eyes sweeping the crowd. “Tell you what. If any of you people immediately in front of the doors, either fore or aft, feel like leaving, please do so. You’ve seen the flash. I think that’s all you’re going to see. You’ll all hear the whole gossip soon enough, probably over and over until you’re sick of it.”
Amid laughter, a few drifted through the locks. He could feel fresh air coming now, curling under his hair and cooling his neck where he stood near the ceiling.
Sharp of Arahant to head for the disturbance; he could travel routes that Rheinallt, like the two women conversing behind him earlier, couldn’t use. Had Arahant gotten to the scene of the explosion, as he had called it, soon enough to pick up any evidence? Vital clues might be missing by the time Rheinallt himself got there.
By now several more had left. Rheinallt still couldn’t see anything out of the way from the bartop. Time to go and look. He held out his arm straight toward the far corner.
“Now if you folks along this line will sidle one way or another and clear a lane for me, I’d like to see if we can find out what’s been going on.” He swayed his arm slightly back and forth, and was gratified to see an irregular gap open, a devil’s lane leading more or less crookedly toward the site of the mysterious flash.
Rheinallt jumped down into the crowd, taking the megaphone with him. When he got to the aft window corner he found the telescope, clamped upon its tripod as he had seen it on Starved Rock. This time the instrument faced a blackness devoid of stars, darkly rolling meadowland. The caravan had finished its long climb out of the planetary gravity well and was again on the illimitable harsh plain. The trail undulated into the distance, appearing and reappearing until it became a bright thread and was swallowed in vast subspatial darkness.
Was the Ship out there? He looked, saw nothing, and returned to the business at hand.
On the floor, almost hidden by a shuffling eddy of feet and legs, was a man with a blast-burned face. The crew, like all professional trailmen who traveled the Blue Trail of the Nation, wore no uniform. He couldn’t even tell if the dead man was one of his own, and felt an extra pang of regret that whoever had died here might be a friend.
Arahant sat on his haunches nearby, eyes half closed but ears pricked to full alertness.
Rheinallt knelt, then gently touched the charred front of the head. Hardly a face anymore. “Does anyone know who this is?”
Silence with scuffling feet. Finally someone answered, “Don’t know for sure. I mean, don’t know him myself, but he was one of the cooks. He was chief souper last time.”
“In charge of the last general meal?”
“Yeah.”
Another tragedy for which there was no obvious cause. Rheinallt felt he was being dogged, all in the last clockday, with events of deadly import but whose meanings escaped him individually. One dead uselessly on Starved Rock, one badly sick in the ninth car, one blasted in the lounge car. And of course the first observer, the telescopist blasted on Starved Rock; that tuber’s death, removed in time, seemed somehow to impinge on the other three.
The poor cook was quite dead. Out of long habit Rheinallt had reached for the pulse, and his fingertips on the wrist found none. The skin was still warm there, if not as warm as the face. Definitely a burn, on the face.
Close by the floor here the smell was bad too. Arahant’s nose was wrinkled almost shut and he was probably breathing stored air. Fortunately the fans already were doing their extra work.
“Who was close by when that flash happened?” Rheinallt asked.
“It came from the meadow,” a voice muttered surprisingly.
“Yes!” stated another.
“Not true,” a third chimed in. “Came out of that telescope thing. Hit him right in the face.”
“Didn’t have a chance.”
“No, no. That first man was right, too. It came right out of the meadow and down through the telescope.”
“Right, the magnification killed him.”
“What a pity.”
“But still—what caused it?”
Rheinallt held up a hand to sustain the silence which followed this last question. He could see apprehensive glances stolen at the meadow only a few feet beyond the window. This time the vast emptiness spoke to his years of experience in subspatial travel. “Nothing’s out there,” he tried to reassure them.
But among this melee of eyewitnesses were there none who could give a coherent account? The muttering showed only the residual excitement from an almost-panic caused by the red flash. Had they all mazed each other? Great observers of the Ship they were going to make, he thought sardonically, great theoreticians and practical engineers!
“Who—” he began.
“A deodand!” someone shouted.
“Yes, yes. Of course!” came immediate agreement in a similar voice.
“What’s that?” a voice asked from the rear.
“Claim the deodand!”
“Heard you the first time,” the inquirer said. Bremolando, the young crewman who accidentally had lost the air storage tank earlier. “What in blazes is that?”
“A forfeit. The telescope is forfeit. It killed a man.”
Rheinallt stood up. The reaction to the death was becoming as weird as the death itself. “Wait a minute, folks. I never heard of this deodand thing, myself.”
“Me neither,” the nearby Bremolando backed him up. “Forfeit? We’ve nothing like that in the Nation.”
A chunky man wormed his way out of the press of people to stand in the small clearing near the body. “I’m Nollinsae,” he announced, more to the crowd than to Rheinallt. “I’m a Guard officer. Those of you who claim the deodand are correct. The telescope is the proximate instrument of this man’s death, and is forfeit to the government.”
Bremolando pushed forward, honestly puzzled. “But there is no government in the Blue Free Nation. Who’s supposed to claim whatever it is?”
“Quite true,” Nollinsae agreed crisply. “I therefore will undertake to convey it to the proper officials of my own government.”
“So who’s that?” someone asked, querulous rather than disputing the right.
“Fleurage,” Nollinsae said with deliberate patience. “Yellow Trail.”
Rheinallt didn’t like the turn of this. “We’re nowhere near any Yellow territory.”
Inwardly he asked himself what was the point of the fuss over the telescope itself. He had gone over the instrument closely enough when it had been brought aboard the caravan. Glass lenses and a metal tube didn’t flashburn a man.
Nollinsae was ready for this. “Of course not, Captain Eiverdein. But surely we are in no other sovereignty. As a credentialed officer of the Fleurage Guard, I am the best qualified of the many worthy people present to convey the deodand. Harm has been done by unknown forces, acting through this instrument, to our late companion here. It is only natural that the human collectivity should take responsibility for the instrument of harm to itself. In due course the initiator of this attack upon humankind will be found and battled with.”
Suddenly Rheinallt realized that this person was the author of the strange note he had received before the descent to Starved Rock. Nollinsae, of the Guard. He remembered the face now, and the name came to life.
“I need to talk to you on another matter,” he said softly to Nollinsae.
The Guard officer smiled. “Certainly.” He laid a hand on the tripod. “I’ll take this now. In the meantime, I suggest your crew see to the burial. Our air has become rather foul.”
“That’s right, Captain,” Bremolando said. “We got to put this body out pretty quick.”
Events were not happening so quickly that Rheinallt had not had his chance to peek into the telescope tube and verify that it was indeed empty. They were right about burial. What more could be learned from studying the corpse with primitive medical facilities? Powder burns? That he had not seen any meant only that a coarse powder was not the blasting agent. Absence of small fragments or shards meant only that there was no conventional grenade involved.
Quite possibly, the man had been murdered in some subtle fashion by an energy weapon; but by whom, toward what end? Where could such an advanced weapon come from in the Trails culture? That charred face already had told its only fact: death by flashburn.
Volunteers had taken grips on the demised’s limbs and were lifting him. Rheinallt found the corpse blocking him from Nollinsae and the telescope. The Guardsman was forging into the crowd with that instrument held before him as an effective prow, tripod folded and all held aimed for streamlining his exit.
“Nollinsae,” Rheinallt called, “wait. How do you know the telescope killed him?”
Did Nollinsae think that there had been a bomb concealed inside, or know it? Wait yourself, he thought. Remember Trigotha’s tuber on Starved Rock: he looked blasted, too. What did they have in common except the cursed telescope? The inside of the tube didn’t even contain a spotlight or such that could blow up in a user’s face; and in fact the instrument itself still didn’t look damaged.
Nollinsae was almost out of sight. “Isn’t it obvious, Captain Eiverdein?” he called back loudly over people’s heads. “He saw the Ship through the telescope, and its awful light was concentrated through the lenses and killed him.”
This revelation set off such a hubbub that Rheinallt resolutely closed his ears to it. If the Ship had indeed been briefly visible when the caravan topped the rim of the gravity well, then the caravan would come to it in due time.
Since it hadn’t killed Trigotha or his men—except maybe one back on Starved Rock?—he would have to assume it wasn’t necessarily fatal. His working hypothesis was that it was only fatal when a person with a weapon was involved, but this had yet to be demonstrated. Added caution for the whole caravan wouldn’t hurt. He felt he could let go the evidence at hand, the body of the cook and the telescope, with nothing more to be learned from them. The body had to go anyway, either to vacuum or to hydroponics, and he could always pry the telescope away from Nollinsae if other developments pointed back that way.
Of much more interest was Nollinsae himself, who had tipped his hand—but what had he shown?
The subspatial equivalent of burial took place from the intercar airlock while the caravan was still moving. Bremolando and the three handiest crewmen carried out the body and walked out a few yards. The caravan’s continued motion shortly brought the grand side window of the lounge car opposite the burial party. Then, with reverent deliberateness, the four placed the body gently on the bluely glowing trail. At Bremolando’s nod they released their grips simultaneously and straightened up.
Before they could regain a standing posture the dead man had vanished without a trace. The meadow, the pure surface and bottom boundary of existence, had claimed him.
Bremolando and the others clumped back into the lounge car, unfastening helmets and stripping off skintight airsuits. Some of the passengers very likely never had seen a burial on the meadow, and the solemnity of the simple procedure without ceremony had quieted them as the mysterious death had excited them.
Rheinallt lifted the almost-forgotten megaphone to his lips and without force said the name “Lhudesin.”
He felt sure that the singer had not left the car, and when he glanced down at the aircat, Arahant nodded. There might be dark vacuum outside, but in here were people who could use a dirge to reestablish contact with each other. He hoped whatever song was chosen would have some bite to it, a hard touch.
Across the big room Lhudesin toyed with the strings of his instrument for a few minutes, striking random chords. After a while the notes resolved themselves into premonitions of the old dirge, “Black Meadow Music”; then the song began itself properly and his voice caught up the tune. Rather high and definitely quavering, the old man’s tone still had the sincerity and mellow roundness of projection which had brought him fame long before.
The words drifted, lost, without punctuation to nail them to the ear. The room now was totally quiet, and in the stillness the music did not seem an accompaniment because it was lost too, separately.
“Whistle down the darkened plain
Where the silent vacuum shrieks
Like time’s hungry wind alone
“Some are sinking all the same
Where the meadow has no floor
To shatter out to all their fragments
And scatter loose among the stars
A silent song like rain
“Some are leaping up to vanish
Where a fear of edge of death
Can’t flatter life to bribe a foothold
To matter where there is none
So long the chord is gone
“Some are rushing home to nothing
Where they’re turning off their mind
To chatter brightly like a person
And batter down their echoed soul
An empty hiss like steam
“Some are floundering back and forth
Where the meadow called them out
To tatter home and rock to longing
And latter nights of saints are grazing
A grassy hymn to doom
“Whistle down the darkened plain
Where the silent vacuum shrieks
Like some hungry mind alone.”
7. From the Waterflower Pool
Late on the next clockday Rheinallt was sitting at his desk, feeling be webbed in the hassles of administering a caravan en route. Glenavet, he thought, was more or less neutralized by the death of his active associate, the delegate Wirtellin. Rheinallt did not expect him to cease his advocacy among the caravaneers, but tentatively had pegged him as a basic trailhand: honest enough, not imaginative, and not unnecessarily violent. Trying to sell the idea of the Federated Trailmen might even give the crew something professionally exciting to discuss, and Rheinallt saw no reason why it should be more exciting than that.
The Fleurage Guardsman, Nollinsae, was coming to the fore as a potential problem. Like Wirtellin, Nollinsae might be happiest when the people around him were standing on their knees; not for ideological reasons, though, but for more personal, slipperier motives.
Conceivably Nollinsae just happened to rub Rheinallt the wrong way, as officious types often did without being consciously immoral. What in the abysmal hell, though, had been that business with the telescope? As a scientist he doubted Nollinsae could tell a star from a candle. Yet if he was along as a beast of prey, so far Rheinallt could not make hide nor hair of him.
That telescope was a worrier. Not who possessed it, but the antics of those around it. Like the king’s ankus in the old story, one could follow its progress down the jungle trail by the bodies it left behind. But only bodies of those who held certain values, who considered the jewel-encrusted ankus a treasure in itself as well as a goad.
His thoughts were interrupted as Susannilar, the unfocused girl-woman, snatched open the door and slipped in, closing it carefully behind her. Her face was sharp like that of a hunted fox, but her breathing seemed normal; she was not actually being pursued.
“You’ve got to help me!” she blurted out.
“About Nollinsae?” Rheinallt was deliberately calm.
She stared. “You know—yes, of course you do.”
Permitting himself a mild smile, he said, “I know lots of things, and I’ve known lots of different kinds of people.”
Her laugh was jerked out of her, half finished: “Ha, you’re in for some surprises.”
“No doubt,” he said equably. “I’ve known personally perhaps a hundred thousand people in my life, and been acquainted with many more. Being surprised by people is nothing new to me.”
