Читать книгу Swan Song - Brian Stableford - Страница 4

CHAPTER ONE

Chasing freedom can be a very tiring game. It’s the sort of game that dominates your thought and endeavor for months or years—endurance isn’t a problem as long as you have some kind of effort to make and some kind of direction to go—and then, when you win it, you’re left utterly and absolutely flat. Empty and exhausted. Drained of all purpose, impetus, and ambition. The first taste of hard-won freedom is inevitably as foul as stagnant water. It can be the first time in your life that you can’t find an answer to the question why, and when you’ve been fighting that hard for that long, the lack of such an answer can be frightening.

It only takes time to get back into yourself, but that time can hang so limp and useless it makes you sweat to wear it.

In the end, it’s OK. It’s worth the feeling absolutely flat, let down like a worn-out balloon, provided that you can know the only way is up and you’re all set to start climbing. It’s not the bottom of the spiritual well or the ladder back up to the good air which really threatens you...it’s the past you left so recently behind, the past that’s sitting on your footprints, the past which can always run after you, can always catch you up, if it can only think of a motive....

...A reason to drag you back down.

When the Sandman touched down on Erica I was in no hurry to leap out of her and get dirt between my toes. There was nothing about honest soil which appealed to me at that particular point in time. There were one or two little things in my province which needed sorting, and I was happy enough to sort, although two hours any time in the next two days would set everything up, and I was bound to be asked to do a tour of duty as officer-of-the-watch.

After a while, though, I began to get bored. I wandered down to the engine room to see if I could catch Sam Parks before he ducked ship and ran for the big city lights. I had a lot of things I wanted to complain about, and he wouldn’t take offense if I bitched at him. Also, of course, he might be able to drop me a hint as to how to get the complaints heard somewhere that mattered. I had a suspicion that a lot of valuable breath could go to waste without my getting the slightest satisfaction from the noble captain.

Sam was still cleaning up in the engine room, if “cleaning up” is the right expression to describe turning a disaster into a mess.

“Does it bitch itself up like that every trip?” I asked, in sympathetic tones.

“Hello, Grainger,” he said. “I already know.” He looked up at me with his gray eyes, which had retreated somewhat with advancing age until they were almost in the shadow of his fading eyebrows, except when he looked up. He straightened briefly, easing a kink in his back. He was a big man—or had been—but he was as thin as a rake. His hands looked too big for his slender wrists, as though they’d been stuck on as an ironic afterthought. Sam was a giant designed by a committee who wanted to go easy on materials.

“What do you know already?” I asked.

“Everything you’re going to tell me. It’s all true and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it.”

“Nobody’s blaming you,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter who blames who,” he said, sounding totally resigned. “Things is what they seem. A mess. Same down here, as you can see. I reckon I’d be prepared to ride a decent drive-unit into hell, just for the pleasure of its company.”

“You could get a better ship than this,” I said, meaning a nice clean passenger job, though I wasn’t about to say so in case he was a proud man and took offense.

He shook his head. “Too old,” he said. “Couldn’t pass the medical. What’s your excuse?”

“I was in a hurry,” I said. “What does the captain think of his wonderful ship?”

“The captain doesn’t think. He only waits. Promotion is slow but loyalty pays its miserable dividends eventually. The faster we fall to pieces the happier he’ll be. He ain’t going places but he’s got years under his hat yet. Go see him if you want to. He’ll be half expecting you. He’ll give you the old story—and it’s true, so you can’t argue. He can’t afford it, whatever it is. He can’t afford to get a downship crew in to attend to what we have, let alone replace any of it. He can’t afford it—God’s truth. It’s not his ship. He has his margins, same as anyone else. Anyone thinks the margins are too narrow on the Sandman, they jack it in. That’s how come you’re employed; but don’t be grateful.”

“I thought your last pilot might have died of shame,” I said, trying to inject a little wit into the downbeat tone of the conversation.

“He was no good,” said Sam. “Of all the parts needed replacing he was number one on the list.”

“So OK,” I said. “He’s replaced. Be happy.”

He shrugged away the note of irony in my voice. I tried to shrug it away as well. I’d picked up the Sandman on Ludlock. It was by no means the sort of operation I wanted to stay with, but it was too close to the core for berths to be easy to come by. I needed to be farther out into the inner ring before I could begin to make real plans. The Sandman would get me there eventually, if I managed to hold her together without too much sealing wax in her seams. It’s a hard life, but it goes on.

I still had most of the cash that remained to me once I’d bought myself free of all obligations to Titus Charlot and the shadows which trailed him, but it wasn’t all that much of a stake and it wouldn’t carry me far into the civilized galaxy or into the future. Ideally I wanted to buy myself a slice of a ship, but with inflation the way it was, courtesy of the Caradoc/Star Cross stranglehold on interplanetary commerce, the chance was becoming more remote by the hour. I had to live on whatever was offered and a purseful of hope. The Sandman had been on offer.

She was a squat, untidy d-skipper, built cheap somewhere on the Solar wing. She handled in a manner that was faintly reminiscent of the old Fire-Eater that Lapthorn and I had used to trundle away our youth, and felt privileged so to do. The Sandman wasn’t quite as old as the Fire-Eater, but she was by no means this year’s model, or even last year’s. It wasn’t that she was horribly dangerous or difficult to fly—but she was damned uncomfortable and capable of giving sixty percent efficiency at the best. She was slow, cumbersome, and a real pig’s bastard in atmosphere. On takeoff she acted like a bronchial case with a hangover and she landed like a drunk coming down a ladder. Apart from that she was home, for the time being.

“Couldn’t we do her up a bit between ourselves?” I asked.

Sam had returned to his slow and unmethodical tidying-up while I’d been thinking quietly to myself. Now he looked up again with a distant expression on his face. I realized that his complexion had once been as pale as his eyes, before the radiation tan got to his skin and polished it up like dark wood. For a second or two, his eyes failed to focus, and I knew there was more than one reason why he’d fail a medical if he were forced to take one. He’d spent his life looking at a lot of hot light. I wondered how old he was, in real years. Maybe the same age as me. He could probably live to see fifty-five, if he retired now to chew grass on some dirt-side haven where the labor problem was nine parts solved. Otherwise....

After a pause, he said, “We might. If we had the time and the inclination. Pigs might also fly. No pay, no thanks, and a flogged-out gut is what we’d end up with. You volunteer?”

His voice held a hint of bitter sarcasm. He was getting at me, just a little. He knew I’d been running ships that made this one look like scrap metal, and he knew I’d owned my own in the past. He couldn’t help resenting it, just a little. It occurred to me that he really would love pouring a bucketful of sweat into a ship like the Hooded Swan, if that could be anything more than a dream. But this wasn’t my ship or his, not in the real sense. We were here to stay alive and get paid. Sure, we could ginger up the baby but for nothing, or less than nothing. We’d probably lose out on pay because if she could go faster she could work faster and there’d be less pay for space time.

“Suppose I were to request politely that the contacts could be trimmed?” I said. “It’s no fun hooking up to that column. It feels like I’m being garrotted.”

Sam shrugged. It was none of his business. But the way his eyes dropped told me that there wasn’t much chance.

I accepted the situation without grace, but without much bitterness. In all likelihood I would have to go at the captain anyhow, if I got the chance. I would complain long and hard. But it would only be for the good of his soul and mine.

“It’s a living,” said Sam. He didn’t sound as if he meant it—much.

“Any idea where we’re liable to be going in the near future?” I asked him.

“Nowhere,” he said. “Lots of it.” He waved a hand indicatively. ‘Hop, skip, and hop again. No jump, not for a while. Wait for some luck. That captain’s one hell of a smartass when it comes to cheating dirt squatters. In time, he’ll land us a little role. Then we go somewhere decent for a while. The company doesn’t need to ask too many questions. Anyone’s entitled to a look at the living now and again.”

I nodded. It was no more than I expected. No ship working this kind of territory was going to be taking long hauls unless she had effort in hand. Her margins were too narrow. She’d hop a handful of light-years at a time, picking up crumbs and swapping marbles. It might be months before we touched somewhere important enough to warrant my hanging around waiting for something to turn up—somewhere that opportunity might call once now and again to give a quick knock. Perhaps I could have made it to the inner ring faster by taking one ship at a time and keeping my direction out from the heart stars, but that would be risky. I might get stranded and I’d certainly get poorer. Far better to stick with the Sandman and be patient. If it took six months, six months it took. You can’t command the future from where I was.

“You’ve been around these parts all your life?” I asked him, to manufacture conversation.

“I know my way around,” he said. He looked at me and he grinned.

“I used to work the outer rim,” I said. “Mostly.”

“Never could stand wide-open spaces,” he said.

The hatch behind me was open, and somebody on their way out of the belly of the ship paused to look in on us. It was a kid whose name I didn’t know. Chief bottle-washer and cargo-humper, and part-time everything as the occasion demanded. The captain generally called him “Hey you,” or—not so often—”What the hell are you doin’?” Everyone else probably did the same. It’s easy to lose or gain names out in space.

“You got seckin watch, Turpin,” he said, with an odd flattening accent that I’d not heard before. “Better mik most of the evenin’.” He paused as he glanced sideways at me. “You’re OK,” he said, deliberately avoiding any direct manner of address. “Free till tomorrow.”

“Thanks,” said Sam. I nodded acknowledgment.

“Captain still aboard?” I asked. I knew the other spare crewman had already gone. He’d been in the cockpit with me when we touched and he’d gone out like a rabbit. Apparently, he had urgent business of one kind or another on the ground.

“Naw,” said the engineer, waving the kid away. “He’ll be in his cabin, but not in, if you see what I mean. He’ll crawl around the port as soon as the jumboes have cleared the cargo—he won’t be fit to talk to till tomorrow, when he’ll have his mind on a lift again. He shouldn’t have to beg for cargo—the port knew we were on regular run, and they got a standing arrangement to fix us up. Unless the big company’s expanding its operation to cut us out.”

“What company’s that?” I asked.

He looked at me a little sharply. “Zacher’s lot,” he said. “The something-or-other lifting company. Something like that.”

“Never heard of it,” I said.

“You could have signed on with ’em where we picked you up, if you’d wanted to,” he said. He thought I was already sick to death of the Sandman.

I shook my head. “Don’t like the big men and the sign-on,” I said.

He looked away again. He knew the score. He probably valued his own soul too much to put it in hock.

I turned away to go back to the cockpit, but he interrupted me. “I’m going out in a couple of minutes,” he said. “If you want to come with me. I know my way around. Here and everywhere.”

I didn’t hesitate. “Okay,” I said.

“Don’t bother the captain,” he said. “Just lock your cabin door.”

“Sure,” I said.

I waited for him outside. I looked around the field at all the rust-buckets sitting on the tarpol. There were six, but one of them just had to be a derelict. I couldn’t imagine that anybody intended to lift it. Of the others, two were obviously based here—transports owned by communities or planet-based operations which had found something to dig up and ship out to somewhere else in the vicinity, just to keep the micro-economy ticking over. The others were operative ships, cleaner and tougher, but not new. I assumed that one, at least, must belong to the company Sam had talked about. Even a relatively small company with a name like the something-or-other lifting company could probably keep a couple of hundred ships on a rim-to-rim shuttle covering a two-fifty-world circuit and clean up pretty comprehensively. Come the time when the Sandman and all the other small-time operators like her got run clear out of the black edges on the profit margins they’d have a stranglehold on a corner of civilization. Then they’d merge with Star Cross or somebody, and another piece of the jigsaw of Galactic Empire would be in place. I wouldn’t live to see it, unless I got really unlucky and the whispering thing that rode in my mind let me live forever. Once the amalgamation had taken place Zacher’s collection of toy traders would be put to the thankless task of drawing into their net all the little worlds which had stayed out of the loose network of exploitation—the worlds which had contrived, somehow, to look after themselves. Things could get unpleasant then—all around. One by one, they’d be tied in one way or another. There could be no escape except ultimate escape—total insularity. Only the Coventry worlds could stay out of the company bag forever—worlds which turned their back on the stars from which the settlers had come, and forgot that there was a great big wonderful universe on their tail end. I could smell wars—maybe a hundred years off, maybe only five. They’d come. It’s a great big fragile universe.

Sam came down out of the skipper and we set off for the port clearing-house. The sun—a deep red sun—was already close to setting. I had no idea how fast local time might run and I didn’t really care. I was still becalmed by the desolation of newfound freedom, and the length of the night didn’t seem a terribly relevant thing. I had no ideas, no foci in time. I was content to drift with Sam.

The air was thin but clean and fresh. There was a light wind, perhaps a little cold for comfort, but rolling just a hint of alien odors across the field. It was easy enough, drifting, I thought. I didn’t mind the emptiness.

Though I didn’t know it, a fragment of darkness from the long shadow of my past was waiting for me in the clearing-house. It hadn’t just caught up with me, it was already ahead of me.