Arran descended the ladderwell to the lowest level of the
vessel. Although he owed his attention to a different errand, as he prepared to perform it, he reviewed what he knew about the starship's weaponry. The first oflftcer had certain expectations of him, after all. Over the course of the Thousand Years' War, the armaments of starsailing ships had passed through many generations of improvement. The first, Arran knew from his studies at home, had consisted of rockets laden with the atomic explosives humankind had carried from the dim mists of antiquity. However, like the pistol he had restored and used to gratifying effect upon Skye, atomic weapons were by now so obsolete they had been all but forgotten by practical-minded beings, thanks to the phenomenon of "fratricide," in which a flux of subatomic particles prevented a nearby chain reaction, which fortuitous capability was inherent in the second generation of shipboard defenses, particle beam weapons.
Arran reached the bottom of the well and broke his ruminations to open the hatch. Among his multitude of duties as the newest ship's boy, a task which both fascinated and revolted him, was a collection of chores which, at intervals, brought him into contact with Gyrfalcon's "cargo."
Under a mandate issued by a long-dead Hanoverian Ceo who purposed preventing isolation of—and ensuring adequate service to—the imperium-conglomerate's millions of colonial starports, spreighformers (excepting as disassembled cargo in transport to specific destinations) were forbidden aboard any Monopolitan vessel, truncating its potential range and duration and necessitating frequent stops for refitting and replenishment. As other ceos, of other imperia-conglomerate, came to appreciate the murchantilist wisdom of the prohibition, it was extended to all starships plying the galactic Deep. With spreighformers in use everywhere else, colonies and capitals required, sought, and fought over raw materials to feed the protean devices. Ores and other minerals constituted tradable cargo, for spreighformers could not fabricate elements. Rare or heretofore unheard-of items, for which no duplicating programs yet existed, were also valued. Exotic organics, too complex for economical synthesis, had been a speciality of Arran's ring-encircled Skye. One
178 HENRY MARTYN
more commodity existed which, unsuited to multiplication in spreighformers, had become a staple of interstellar traffic: slaves.
Closing the hatch behind him, Arran dogged it shut. Where had his thoughts been? Yes: known of old with a sailor's familiarity as "peebies," particle beam weapons were employed, before invention of the §-field, aboard starships, and, capable of rendering atomics inoperable, to defend fortifications. With the advent of §-physics, the tactical and strategic usefulness of peebies was reduced to negligibility, owing to the nature of the inertia-canceling fields surrounding vessels. It must have been astounding, he thought, the first time it happened. Employed by ground installations against an inertialess marauder, peebies wafted her away, unharmed, like a dry leaf upon the wind. Worse, an inertia-less starship attempting to employ peebies was whisked ofi under impulse of her own weapons. (It was an indication of Arran's growth and state of mind that he already calculated ways to make surprise use of this phenomenon in battle.) For a time, "tactics" had consisted of no more than waiting for an enemy to drop his shields in order to thrust—"shoot," the word was—hoping to beat him to the punch.
This time, Arran's nose distracted him. Whoever last had duty here had done a thorough job—of doing nothing! Noxious odors assailed him and he was hard put to control his stomach. Although the expression "crewbeing" circulated aboard every ship, and it was not unusual for captains to fill their complements with members of half a hundred sapient species, that of the Gyrfalcon, and every other vessel plying her trade, was human in its entirety, this, too, by edict of the Monopolity, promulgated for the best of reasons. It was her cargo that was alien.
Human slavery was by no means rare within a culture which otherwise considered itself civilized, mostly referred to by less discomfiting names—polite usage it was felt, constituting the one discernible difference between civilization and barbarism. Gyrfalcon's unwilling passengers, upon the other hand, were non-human captives, labeled slaves without a qualm (when they were not called livestock), and,
as such, inheritors of indescribable misery, subject to eventual fates which no one, not even their self-styled proprietors, could predict with accuracy.
This watch it was Arran's task to provide what comfort was now and again aflforded the unfortunate creatures pent upon the liftdeck and elsewhere. Arran had not been surprised to learn that the Gyrfalcon trafficked in little besides slavery. Her dark holds reeked with the stench of it, echoed with the terror and agony of its victims. Perhaps, after all, worse fates than death existed; worse fates, indeed, than many often held to be worse than death.
Slavery was one such. Somehow it made Arran feel filthier than the huddled, miserable beings he attempted to care for. Bizarre in manner and appearance though they were to the unsophisticated boy, their intelligence was undeniable. Upon this account he believed them worthy of a happier destiny. In many ways, he reflected during introspective moments of increasing rarity, he had been worse affected by exposure to the practice than by any of the other depravities he had witnessed, which had befallen him, or with which he— unwilling, at first—had become acquainted with to a point of terrible intimacy, his first day aboard the starship, or at any time afterward.
Each of Gyrfalcon's several levels was partitioned—with the same §-field-reinforced mesh the remainder of the ship was fabricated from—into wedge-shaped compartments extending from the mastfoot to the hull. Some of these afforded room for what inanimate stowage she carried, equipment, and supplies. A larger number housed crewbeings. The majority had been given over to her most profitable lading. Each wedge holding living cargo was separated from its neighbors by a double wall of mesh, forming a narrow corridor accessible from an annular walkspace circumferential to the ladderwell.
Into this space Arran now emerged, attempting for another few seconds to ignore the terrible noises, the unbearable odors, the hideous sights which, in essence, had brought him here. He opened a utility compartment and unrolled a length of hose. Intended to control fire, it was already fastened to a valve inside the compartment. He had only to make certain
180 HENRY MARTYN
the nozzle was closed before he turned the wall-mounted handle, felt the hose stiffen with pressure, and, his thoughts defensively centered upon the next watch and the anticipated drill, plodded outboard with it until he reached the hull.
Time had had its way with peebies, just as with atomic rockets. In due course §-field weapons were invented, and, by the time of Arran's tenure aboard the Gyrfalcon, all of the more ancient weaponry was centuries obsolete. More important, in view of what was to come, it had faded from human memory.
So efficient were §-fields (he detected an analogy to what he had learned of modem flesh and fabric from Old Henry's shocking experiment) they could protect the ship they rigidi-fied even from atomic explosion. It was ironic that §-physics could also initiate such explosions by squeezing fissionables in a collapsing field. This was generally known, but, save one application, regarded as a useless parlor-trick, albeit upon a spectacular scale. Crewbeings belowdecks believed that a "Doomsday" bomb constructed upon the principle was secreted in the officers' quarters of every Hanoverian starship, and could, as a last resort, be set off* in case of mutiny. Be this as it may, it had occurred to Arran's facile intelligence that such a device might make an effective secret weapon. The principle was forgotten or dismissed, offering those who remembered, and could arrive at a method of applying it, the advantage of surprise. In the majority of minds, only projectibles availed against starships. Arran had learned to take nothing for granted.
Within horribly crowded pens either side of him, Arran was recognized. The captives, alien as they seemed (some measure, he understood, of how alien he must seem to them), had come to see that, unlike other keepers, this one took no delight in cruelty. Those healthy
enough moved forward against the press of their sicklier fellows to the mesh which limited their freedom, taking advantage of the service he was about to perform. Arran opened the nozzle, directing a blast of water into one of the pens. Characteristic of him—this, too, the pens' inhabitants appreciated—he aimed the potentially injurious torrent at a snubbing-post, presently unoccu-
pied, reserved for the restraint of violent specimens. This kindly precaution broke the stream's force, allowing the captives to shower in its gentler reflection.
Two nonhuman races were represented upon this voyage. As a security measure, the idea being to reduce communication among them and any resistance it might engender, they had been divided and the much-different species alternated about the circumference of the deck. Arran was scornful. He had witnessed the creatures signing to one another without regard to species, and believed they had already worked out a rough pidgin among themselves.
In the pen to his left, facing the mast, resided the compact creatures whom the crew, somewhat redundantly, referred to as "rollerballers." Arran had no idea what it was proper to call them, nor where they came from. They, in all probability from a primitive civilization, were in no position to tell him, even had he possessed mastery of whatever they used for language. The new cargo steward's manifest, which Arran had perused in the course of his lessons, stated their system coordinates—meaningless to him, astrogational neophyte that he remained—their quantity at loading-time (they had already suffered an attrition exceeding forty percent, although they were still jammed together so that, had they been human beings and one among them fainted or died, he would not have been able to fall), and a taxonomical number.
This rate of attrition brought to mind a tale told by another of the ship's boys. During a long, stormy watch before the Gyrfalcon's arrival at Skye, with the first officer occupied shiphandling and the captain reputedly ailing, several slaves —not roUerballers but the others, and only the cleanest, healthiest-looking specimens—had been dragged out of a pen and slaughtered for food. Casting about for a precedent by which certain limits customarily imposed upon his authority might be exceeded, the captain had recalled a time during his own apprenticeship when some variety of insectile vermin were discovered nibbling at the inanimate cargo. The individual held responsible had refused the ordained punishment, eating the pests in place of the foodstuffs they had consumed, and was instead trussed up and the vermin inserted into
182 HENRY MARTYN
various of his bodily orifices until he died. Of what, Arran was uncertain and the storyteller had not ventured an opinion.
By the captain's order, the culprits in the latter instance were punished not for murder, but for theft of ship's property, a more serious offense, by having their ears and noses cut off, loss of these being unlikely to affect their performance as laborers, and being compelled to watch as their flesh was pulped into the feed given the slaves. At that, Arran's informant had been bland, it might have been worse. The guilty parties might have lost certain other appendages of no use to ship or captain. It might have been their fellow crewbeings who wound up, knowingly or otherwise, consuming what they had been deprived of, rather than alien slaves.
The largest of these came no higher than the boy's waist. In form, he thought, it was as if someone had upholstered a three-legged stool in purple leather, having placed another like it, up-ended, atop the first. From between the padded, upthrust "legs" of the upper "stool" arose a fat, furry, golden worm-thing, boasting three huge, protruding eyes spaced at equal distances from one another. These disturbed Arran with their human appearance and their color, a penetrating and appealing blue. No additional sensory appendage nor, indeed, any other orifice or protuberance adorned the knobbish head (assuming it was what it appeared), nor was a mouth visible anywhere. Arran's watchmate had informed him that individual fibers of the golden fur were thought to be organs of smell or hearing. As he had learned to do with all other sailors' opinions, Arran had reserved judgment.
Uncounted measure-long transparent tendrils, half the diameter of Arran's smallest finger, arose about the base of the worm-part, as well as from underneath the three lower "legs." These were mobile but not strong, as he had learned by approaching—at his messmate's invitation, which proved to be an ugly practical joke—too close during his first watch assigned to this duty. Two or three tendrils had torn loose during his panic-stricken struggle to free himself, but the creature who had seized him (or caressed him, how could he tell?) had shown no sign of pain. In the end, Arran
had concluded that the appendages were expendable, regenerating with wear or breakage. As for his messmate, Arran had broken one of his appendages—his nose—presumably less capable of regeneration and likely to heal crooked.
Grinning at the memory, Arran let his thoughts turn back to matters of consequence. In addition to nine projectibles upon the gundeck, the commanddeck boasted three vertical bow chasers of middling power, aimed parallel with her mast, the vessel's starsails tuned transparent to their energies. Here upon the liftdeck, three similar stem chasers were aimed aft against pursuers. Thus was Gyrfalcon defended about her perimeter, aft, and along her direction of travel. It cost something, from what the tachyon sails collected, to employ fifteen projectibles, for they were the most power-greedy mechanisms aboard. As with intersecting §-fields of two approaching vessels, their residual kinergics—a kind of recoil—imposed considerable strain upon the star-ship's fabric. A stout, new ship could thrust with every pro-jectible at the same time (although this was seldom done), but older, weaker vessels might rattle themselves apart doing so.
As Arran washed the pen, taking care not to strike the aliens with the direct stream, he saw several who had assumed a different shape, retracted their inner bodies and rolled their outer legs until they resembled two-lobed balls a measure through. Before an uncordial parting, Arran's informant had claimed rollerballers came from a planet too hot, too cold, or bathed in too much radiation, to which they had evolved a natural barrier. They were valued because they could enter a dangerous facility—ancestral reactors, which new construction upon the capital world seemed always to be digging up—extend short-lived tendrils through seams in their armor, and perform tasks in an environment which would kill other sapients. Arran remained skeptical of such claims, yet they made sense. An unmistakable metallic sheen characterized their purple skins and a sharp odor of heated iron. Perhaps they absorbed shielding substances from their nutriment, depositing them in their circumference. He had been cautioned, by Mr. Krumm, not some ignorant gossip, never to ingest their feed, nor permit it to linger on his own skin.
The rollerballers' bite and touch were also rumored
184 HENRY MARTYN
poisonous. Other than a moment's terror, he had suffered no ill effect from the latter. He was curious to know what they would bite him with. They appeared to absorb the evil-smelling mash he fed them through their tendrils and possessed no mouths to speak of. Or with. If they communicated, it was by means of their tendrils, although he believed they displayed emotion with their great, sad eyes; the texture of their golden fur, and by the expedient—whenever they seemed threatened or despondent, which (given their unhappy situation) was often—of rolling into the ball-shape which gave them their name, and, with greater and greater frequency, of dying in this universe-rejecting posture.
Having done what he could, Arran directed his attention to the right-hand pen. If roUerballers were strange and incomprehensible, their companions in misery, creatures the crew dubbed "flatsies," might have appeared ridiculous in differing circumstances. Arran was uncertain, had he stumbled across them upon their own world, that he would have recognized them as people, althou^ had they not been intelligent beings, they would never have found themselves imprisoned within the stifling holds of the Gyrfalcon. Neither her ofl5cers nor crewbeings would stoop to hauling domesticated animals about the galaxy, a resort which they one and all—without much logic, considering their principal occupation—fe
lt was beneath them. Intelligence being the chief prerequisite to slavery, that institution was, Arran felt, if not the ultimate depravity, then by all means the lowest, most pitiable (and, to both parties alike, degrading) variety of parasitism conceivable.
Perhaps the captain knew where flatsies came from. No one else did, nor how many times this consignment had changed hands. The manifest offered nothing more illuminating than a repetitive string of N/A barquode symbols. Perhaps the captain even knew what flatsies were good for, whether they possessed some special aptitude as was alleged of roUerballers. Possibly they had been captured upon a speculative basis, in hope they would sometime, somewhere, prove to be of value.
Stretched full length upon the deckmesh, as they never were unless ill or already dead, the average flatsy spanned half again Arran's height, half a measure wide, and no more
than two siemmes' thickness. Both ends were rounded, one folded to support the creature's erect stance, the other sporting eyes at the height of Arran's own, but—unlike those of the rollerballers—without the faintest resemblance to anything human. Each seemed to consist of no more than a bright red spot a couple of siemmes in diameter with a bright red circle round it. Overall, the flatsies were a pale, milky white. Arran thought, sometimes, that he could see through them. Horizontal rows of short lines or grooves marched down their bodies like uncrossed tally marks. When clean and healthy, they gave off a neutral, not unpleasant smell, and flowed along the deck without effort, like garden snails, although they left no slimy track. They possessed no visible appendages and communicated, if that was what they did, by means of soft hooting and a low, complicated, inharmonious whistling which prickled the hair at the back of Arran's neck.
Coordinated Arm 01: Henry Martyn Page 20