The Unwound Way

by Bill Adams

  The Unwound Way

  Bill Adams

  and

  Cecil Brooks

  Copyright © 2020 Lia Adams and Cecil J. Brooks

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Except insofar as is implicitly granted by sale on the Kindle platform, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the authors.

  This new edition of THE UNWOUND WAY has given us the opportunity to make a few small editorial revisions, but is otherwise a complete and unabridged version of the work originally published by Del Rey / Ballantine Books in 1991.

  Cover image: The Land's End Labyrinth (2004), by Eduardo Aguilera. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

  To our mothers and aunts

  GEORGIA and GENEVA

  and to our fathers and uncles

  EDWARD and EDWIN

  with gratitude and with love.

  Foreword

  My brother-in-law, Bill Adams (1954-2019), was the only published fiction writer I knew well. He published several stories in mystery magazines in the late 1970s, as T. M. Adams, a nom de plume inspired by his given names William Powell, coincidentally the name of the famous Thin Man star. In the early 1990s, he collaborated with his cousin Cecil Brooks on two novels, The Unwound Way and The End of Fame, about Evan Larkspur, a poet and playwright who finds, after a century in space and cold-sleep, that his works have become both revered and seditious.

  Bill was a funny and engaging guy. Like Scaramouche, was was born with the gift of laughter and the sense that the world was mad. A treasured memory from his youth was that he was once mistaken for a Mob hit man. At my wedding, he said, “I am sure that on some level David already considers me a brother-in-law—I am around all the time, and I am unemployed.”

  When ebooks and self-publishing appeared on the scene, he made sporadic attempts to re-release the Larkspur novels. I was never sure what kept that from happening—sloth, perfectionism, modesty? But I still think they are great yarns, lively and funny, that say interesting things about identity and freedom without ever interrupting the action.

  When Bill died last year after the last of a series of strokes, I resolved to reconcile the various revisions we found in his files and finally make the books available again. I hope you enjoy them as much as I always have.

  David Wall

  April 3, 2020

  This is as strange a maze as e’er men trod,

  And there is in this business more than nature

  Was ever conduct of. Some oracle

  Must rectify our knowledge.

  The Tempest V, i.

  PART ONE

  THE MASK

  Chapter One

  I emerged from the sun’s dazzle into a new world, night and stars. The vivid greens and raw-meat reds of the rain forest outside, the humidity and cascading bird calls, were tucked behind me by an airlock door. Humans can’t follow the three-week days of the planet Zenobia. Indoors, they keep their own calendars and clocks, and within Condé’s manor house it was just past midnight. All the scarlet-curtained windows had been polarized black, a hologram image of Zenobia’s night sky projected within the frames.

  After the heat outside, the air-conditioning was like the brandied kiss of the young woman who met me at the door—a pleasant shock, a new dazzlement. I think she introduced herself as our patron’s niece, hostess for our cast party, but she was already pretty badly dazzled herself. I followed the flow of guests into the great hall, cheerfully resigned to the decadence of the occasion.

  The actor, the smuggler, the fugitive—each lives for a successful run. I was all three that night, and felt I deserved a triple crown. The play was done. The contraband had been delivered. And my new identity appeared to be better-connected than usual.

  I relaxed and took in the panelings of native wood and the wine-red carpets, my fellow players in flamboyant costumes and the local gentry in formal dress. I found another ostentation less amusing—human servants, in livery designed to make fools of them. But man must drink, even if the serving tray is strapped to some page boy’s head, and I had just snagged an extra glass when I reached the entrance to the buffet room, and saw it.

  For a moment I thought I’d begun one of my special dreams, those torments that rip me out of reality and leave the torn edges flapping. It was real, though. Not quite the sword of Damocles, perhaps, but hanging over my place at dinner just the same. The bust, the mask, the mocking face of bronze. Always bringing me down to earth, and back to beginnings.

  ◆◆◆

  The Blue Swathe—that’s what they called this distant fringe of the human sphere, still nearly as far as you could get from the central stars ruled directly by the Column. At least three different waves of colonization had rolled through the Swathe, turning up rich new worlds every time, and even in this age of the Column regime an air of frontier freedom remained. Here you could buy a cup of coffee without submitting to an automatic identity and credit check; vote for local officials in a secret ballot; write an outspoken letter to a news service. A cynic might point out that this looser leash had been procured by special and rather dirty services to the state, for the region was also home to half the arms factories and naval shipyards that maintained the central power. But meanwhile, the Swathe’s Sodality had recently voted in civil libertarian reforms—optimistically anticipating a rumored policy shift by the Column’s shadowy Consultant. This had attracted me.

  I’d entered the region as one act in a small carnival—a conjuror, the real me in a way, despite the fanciful alias: “Praku Ras.” The outfit had folded unexpectedly on a mudball of a mining planet. I’d been stranded, no salary saved and no theaters to fall back on.

  Fortunately I was only seven years out of naval service, and the universe remains abrasive enough to keep my martial skills polished. Shiphandling, for instance. Under the name Lars Park, I soon picked up a pilot’s job with the Hermes Line, the only courier service franchised to operate within the Swathe.

  I started at the bottom—probational half-pay, and an obsolescent boat that burned up half its backups on every sunplunge. But part of me had always wanted to experience faster-than-light travel just that way: alone, solely responsible, free to feel the immensity and insanity of it.

  We sling ourselves into the curved space at the very rim of a star, protected from its energies only by wrapping them around ourselves. The stronger our bootstrap shield grows, the steeper we make our descent. And if we are not deflected into a dangerous spin, and if we do not take in energy too fast and burn out, and if the force field curves to singularity against the slope of the gravity well—we squeeze ourselves out of space entirely, following a geodesic through praeterspace into the domain of a new star.

  And yet, I finally learned, the sense of wonder slips away. The job turned into a dull grind as I transported messages, packages, and news dispatches from star to star throughout the Swathe’s Six and Thirty Sodality. Only the smuggling kept me aware and alive.

  My dispatchers insisted that if I didn’t play along as the other pilots did, I would never be promoted to the permanent list. Anyway, I rationalized, smuggling is not a crime against people, only their Customs—bad manners, in other words, and no more.

  But when I demanded an overdue raise the Hermes Line kicked me out, using evidence of the “misconduct” they’d forced on me as their excuse. It was obviously a racket. I wasn’t arrested, for one thing; a trial would have exposed the smuggling as company policy.

>   But the company gave me a good scare and, to get rid of me, a letter of introduction to a Swathe labor exchange. I used it, too, which meant not changing my name again—two mistakes, but I couldn’t see that at the time.

  Once the labor exchange found me a part in a play, I couldn’t see past the footlights. I had originally signed on as an understudy, but when the lead had an attack of temperament—something about wanting to be paid—I picked up his role. Odysseus in Phaiacia, by Larkspur, of course. I’m not a first-rate actor, but a great part can make you look great if you understand it, and I understand that one better than any man living. The interstellar craze for live theater and Larkspur had just reached the Swathe, in what was billed as the Odysseus play’s centennial year. Our production moved from triumph to triumph, feted afterward by local society; something about verse plays always brings out the rich.

  I enjoyed the tour—hell, I reveled in it. But I was irked because our canny impresario paid me only scale, putting me off with vague promises of a tour-end bonus. I don’t live for money, mind you, I live for experience—but that costs money. It’s the bait that never grows stale; it draws us back to old and obvious traps.

  One night on Woodvyl a man named T’ung came backstage and introduced himself as another exploited ex-pilot for the Hermes Line. He said he had a plan to cheat them out of a fat smuggling fee. So revenge as well as greed demanded I help him.

  My part in the scam was to be simple. All I had to do was wear a certain bracelet to the troupe’s next port of call, Zenobia. The dull gray band didn’t look like much. But it had belonged to a Discocephalic alien once, and like every other nonhuman intelligence of which the human race had ever found traces, the Discocephalics had been extinct for millennia; that made the artifact extremely valuable. A Zenobian would pick it up on behalf of one Maximilien Condé—a big-time defense contractor who hadn’t wanted to be involved with a more professional smuggler.

  The risks seemed slight, since the iron-alloy bracelet had no face value and could be worn openly. But I think I was surprised, given this perverse universe, when everything went off without a hitch.

  The contact man showed up the evening of our first Zenobian performance, relieved me of the contraband, and paid me in full. For the next few weeks I had nothing to worry about except our leading lady’s boyfriend, and perhaps the continual whine of our troupe’s director: “Why are you tampering, Freeman Park?”—his stubborn refusal to take my word for it that if Larkspur had lived past twenty-two, he’d have fixed Odysseus’s closing speech. And meanwhile the play rolled across the Zenobian landscape like a great golden engine, with cheering crowds to greet it at every stop.

  I hadn’t been surprised when we received invitations to hold our cast party at Condé’s manor and Condé’s expense. The contact man had implied that this was coming, and I’d looked forward to the role of secret guest of honor. And here I was. Only that bronze face—my own dark side, the shadow of the past—could bring me down now, I reminded myself. But in fact a future had already been hung and honed for me: a winding hall of mirrors, and an upraised axe.

  ◆◆◆

  I entered the room and faced the damned thing. They had it rigged to float head-high in the air, above a little table between the smorgasbords, with passage on either side to go around and view the back. I assumed at first it was a hologram, sharper than most. I’d seen such copies before; they were so commonplace you’d have thought the wealthy would pass them up as vulgar.

  But someday I would have to visit Schaelus’s original bronze, in his subject’s restored dorm room at Nexus University—the Larkspur Museum. The piece has the crazy virtue of Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleonic paintings: neoclassic lines so clean that they make the romantic seem realistic.

  Face-on, it appears to be the bust of a young man. He’s just begun to turn and look upward at something surprising and inspiring. His hair is worn long and unbound, to the shoulders. Styles come and go, and when we wore our hair that way it didn’t seem effeminate; but here it emphasizes the slenderness of the subject’s neck. The eyes and their lashes also conflict with the otherwise virile cast of the face. I wonder why people like to see their poets as androgynous. Perhaps it’s an attempt to picture the Muse as well as the man; here, it does work.

  Then you walk around the bronze, and discover that it’s not a simple bust, but a hollowed facade, like a death mask. And it shares an optical illusion with death masks: under the right lighting, the concave inner side begins to appear convex, another outward face; it’s like the drawing of a transparent cube, which you can mentally flip back and forth as you decide which end is toward you. Schaelus deliberately spent as much effort on the inner side as on the facade, to maximize the illusion, the uncertainty.

  What is it meant to suggest? We peek beyond the young man’s enigmatic face to find—nothing, except an opportunity to see through his eyes. But if we attempt this, we find the eyeholes opaque and the face unexpectedly confronting us again. A cool comment on a legend, and also a fine work of romantic art. But I hate it for the lie on the little plaque in front:

  EVAN LARKSPUR

  1594-1616

  If Light is but a wave, then why not surf?

  The Enchanted Isle II, iv.

  I don’t mind the choice of quotation, apt or not. But I object to the name—the pretense that this is a portrait, when there is no resemblance at all. That’s what I was thinking when a female voice whispered in my ear, “He’s you,” and maybe that’s when the evening began to turn on me, maybe that’s when I entered the mirror maze behind the mask.

  “What?” I said, looking to see who had followed me around the table—an attractive blonde. The alcohol gleam in her eyes made it impossible to guess whether her shoulder straps were supposed to fall that way or not; I couldn’t give the problem the attention it deserved, because she hit me with it again: “He’s you.”

  But she went on, smiling now that she had my attention: “He’s me. That’s what Schaelus is saying. Everyone wants to put on that mask, and see himself as Larkspur. Everyone likes to imagine…taking off the way Larkspur did, seeing something better out there, and just turning his back on all this…crap.” On the last word she gestured to indicate the room, the planet, or the Column and its Consultancy ruling over us all—a fling of the arm that settled the shoulder-strap question, anyway.

  An older, soberer, richer-looking gentleman came up behind her, turned her around, and readjusted her dress; she raised her arms and took it for granted, like a six-year-old. “Romantic nonsense, of course,” the boyfriend—if that’s what he was—said to me. “This whole notion the young have, of Larkspur as a social critic.”

  “Uh-hunh,” I said, and started to move away, but he acted as though I were arguing with him.

  “Oh, he was a fringe colonial, true,” he went on, “but he must have had aristocratic ties. He got into Nexus U. itself, was accepted into one of the ‘exclusive’ secret societies there—a Kanalist fraternity, of course; The Enchanted Isle is full of their symbolism⁠—⁠”

  “Hans is jealous,” the blonde pointed out, turning only her head. “Hans was blackballed.”

  “Envy,” Hans said. “Nouveau types are the worst snobs. Like Larkspur himself,” he went on, for public benefit now; a few other guests, china and silver in their hands, had drifted into listening distance. “His plays were obviously written for a coterie audience. Can’t you just see the colonial boy trying to fit in with the old guard at Nexus, learning Ur-Linguish to smarten up his accent? That’s what led him into the treasure trove of forgotten Earth literature. He was no genius. Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Rostand—those are the geniuses. People say ‘adaptation’ and ‘hommage,’ but the right word is ‘plagiarism.’ ”

  “Totally unfair,” said another woman, looking on, and her companion added, “What about the Satires?”

  Hans ignored them. “Larkspur would be forgotten today if not for a romantic death—and the rise of nouveau snobbery under th
e Consultancy.”

  “Watch it,” someone said in a low voice, but we were far from the Column’s central worlds and its Shadow Tribunal, and everyone just laughed.

  “Oh yes, we’re all supposed to be good Ur-Linguophiles now,” Hans said, shaking a finger at me as though I had been arguing with him. “Even in the Swathe, our class is supposed to speak with a central-sphere accent. Where better to pick it up than in memorable verses? And if the plays are full of the sort of heroic, larger-than-life characters the Consultancy would like to have in the Column navy, all the better for recruitment, eh?”

  “Totally unfair,” repeated the outriding woman, an intense brunette in a conservative dinner gown. “Larkspur can’t be blamed for the way his work’s been used since his death. He was an individualist, an old Alignment Federalist. I think that’s why he ran away and joined the navy—the last bulwark of the old order. He was an Old Rite Kanalist, too, and he saw that the Reformed Rite lodges were selling out to the Column. He saw⁠—⁠”

  “He saw The Enchanted Isle flop within the elite community that was supporting him,” Hans said, swooping to the kill, “so he decided to give up amateur theater, accept a commission in a nearlight survey, and make a vast vulgar fortune, like⁠—⁠”

  “Like me,” said a self-assured voice at my side. There was another general laugh, as the speaker wedged his way into the center of the group. By the time he clapped me on the shoulder I’d guessed that he was our host, Sir Maximilien Condé.

  I regained my composure. Wherever Larkspur is played, they gossip about his life. As the lead player, I was a natural target; no doubt our director would have to listen to the same literary yattering when he arrived. But there had been something about the way they’d gathered around me…Of course, in Condé’s case I was the secret guest of honor, a colorful character who had done him a favor. No doubt that explained the look of hidden knowledge in his eyes.