The Girl With a Symphony in Her Fingers

by Michael G. Coney

  Carioca’s mouth had fallen agape during this. When I finished she hitched it up, thought a bit, then said: “You take the whole thing too seriously, Joe. The Foes are a club, that’s all. A woman’s club, if you will. This talk of evil is nonsense. When we demonstrate, we just think what fun it is to be doing it together. If it helps you any, Joe, I don’t think the members consider the objects of the organization as deeply as you do.”

  “Then we need a new organization. God damn it, Carioca, they shout obscenities at people.”

  “Well, isn’t it fun to have the chance to shout obscenities at people without fear of any comeback?”

  I nearly lost my temper, and a good customer. “I’ve never felt any desire to shout obscenities at people. That’s the mentality of a teen-aged vandal.”

  She took my arm suddenly. “Oh, come on, Joe. Let’s not quarrel. I came to do business with you. You and I are on the same side, basically. It’s people like your friend Marshall I don’t like. It was he who faked the Newspocket transcript, of course.”

  “Oh, don’t give me that, Carioca.”

  “No, I mean it. It’s typical of his sense of humor. And I can tell you, it’s not so funny up at Lake William for a person of my age, Joe.”

  It was the first time I’d ever heard her mention her age. I changed the subject hastily. “You said you came to do business?” I smiled to make it sound less mercenary.

  “Of course, you must be busy.” Her manner had become stiff. “I’d like to buy four dozen slithe-skin wristlets, please.”

  “Four dozen?”

  “They’re for the Foes of Bondage. We shall wear them at the demonstration tomorrow and they will show the solidarity of our feelings.”

  I had a mental image of four dozen Foes with fists upraised but with wristlets unfortunately showing colors of rainbow diversity. “Do you think that’s wise?” I asked.

  “Look, Joe Sagar. Do you want the business or don’t you?”

  Resignedly I took her into the showroom. While she was selecting the wristlets she persisted in asking about Charles, his crime, his sentence. She seemed to be trying to work up a feeling of pity for the man.

  Although the President’s Trophy is the first event of the season and tends to be looked on as a mere hors d’oeuvre to the main course of races later in the summer, it is nevertheless an event worth winning. The psychological boost to the victor will frequently start a winning vein which in subsequent weeks can be worth a good deal of prize money. And more than any other sport, sling-gliding depends on confidence.

  Traditionally, the main body of spectators gathers along the ancient stone seawall which was one of the few human artifacts on the Peninsula to escape total destruction by the tidal waves of the Slide. Here gather the curious, the casual, the enthusiasts—and the Foes of Bondage. Out across the bay, half a mile distant, the gaunt pillar of the fulcrum rises from the calm water.

  The Foes had already picketed the entrance to the marina, screaming their epithets at the hovercars as they arrived with pilots, crews, and maintenance men. On stepping from my own vehicle I had been surprised when a woman I hardly knew thrust herself before me and referred to my slithe farm as a “plantation.” This was the latest dirty word unearthed by the Foes, and apparently referred to some early phase of Man’s relationship with his fellows. When I replied, rather weakly, that I didn’t plant anything at the farm—if the growing of crops was what she objected to—she merely uttered a jeering noise and called me a “boss man.”

  Then Carioca Jones appeared. “My God, Joe,” she shrilled. “Do you mean to say you’re actually taking part in this pantomime?”

  Fortunately the press of the crowd took her away from me at this point, so I was spared the embarrassment of conversation.

  The President’s Trophy is a distance/placement event. The glider flies to a point out in the Strait, drops a marker, and returns, the pilot endeavoring to land at a point as close as possible to the seawall. A buoy, just offshore from the spectators, indicates the optimum. It is this finish close to the crowd which gives the event its popularity.

  By the time the boats were cruising about, testing their engines, the Foes of Bondage had positioned themselves at a point near the northern end of the seawall, close to the marina. From time to time their president—the elderly Evadne Prendergast whom Carioca Jones hoped to supplant—whipped them into a frenzy with a few well-turned phrases. She had an imposing, almost Puritanical presence which lent weight to her oracular delivery. From my position I couldn’t hear the words, but judging from the cheers of her supporters it was all good stuff.

  In the distance a hydrofoil was racing toward the fulcrum. The crowd was still. Behind the boat a tiny glider rose into the sky. It was too far away for us to see the whip as the boat snapped around the fulcrum, but we could judge the fearsome acceleration as the little dart was flung low above the water at a speed around two hundred fifty miles per hour. For an instant we lost it against the trees of the island opposite; then it slipped into view above the Strait. There was a murmur as those with binoculars saw the marker buoy drop away as the glider turned to make its approach. The distance of this buoy from the fulcrum is taken into account in the final placings, encouraging pilots to go for speed and distance instead of merely stalling slowly in for an accurate landing.

  Archer was gliding and he was trying to squeeze a little too much distance from his speed. He was coming in fast and low after a wide turn and it was apparent that he would not make the finishing buoy. Skimming the sea so close I’ll swear he raised ripples on the smooth surface, he used his last breath of flying speed in a shallow climb, then stalled and dropped into the water about two hundred yards away.

  The spectators clapped politely as he struggled clear of his harness and trod water waiting to be picked up. The Foes of Bondage were silent. Their wristlets remained neutral to a woman—neither showing the purple of enraged distaste nor the pink of pleasure. I assumed they had done their homework and established that Archer had no bonded S. P. man.

  I caught sight of Carioca Jones at the instant she glanced at me—and suddenly I knew that the Foes’ rancor was being reserved for our boat, and for Doug Marshall in particular.

  10

  Marshall was gliding, Charles was steering, and I was observing, sitting in the stern and watching for trouble. Charles’s attention was naturally concentrated ahead, on the fulcrum. I stole a quick glance over my shoulder and saw the black post rising solitary out of the flat sea about half a mile ahead. I looked back and Marshall was waving.

  “Right!” I shouted to Charles.

  He gunned the engine. The whip took the strain and rose dripping from the water with hardly a sag in its rigid length. A feather of foam appeared at Marshall’s skis as he began to move, rising upright with the glider attached to his back like a bright vampire.

  The boat rose on its foils and the last of the roiling wake fled astern, to be replaced by twin hissing threads of spray. Marshall began to experience lift and kicked off his skis, raising his hands to grip the controls in the nose of the glider. He drew up his legs, jackknifing and thrusting them back into the slender fuselage. He was flying, the whip attached to his chest harness with a snap-fastening.

  He sailed easily behind us at about fifty miles per hour, lying facedown within the tiny glider. I suppressed a shudder; the takeoff always affects me like that, ever since Patterson’s mistake last season. Patterson had grasped the controls clumsily, so we assumed afterward; anyway, his glider had plunged down suddenly, watched by some twenty helpless spectators in my boat nearby. It had struck the water at a downward angle and the whip had smashed through the nose, jamming. Then the angle of the whip to the glider had taken it down through the water, deeper, deeper. I think the most terrifying thing was watching the exposed length of whip shortening, shortening despite the deceleration of the boat, as the glider and Patterson dived uncontrollably into the black pressure of the deeps. He must have descended over sixty feet in
a very few seconds.…

  But Marshall was safely aloft and veering out toward our starboard beam, ready to take advantage of the initial effect of the fulcrum post. He had banked and I could see him grinning at us, grinning with exhilaration, a six-foot man in a ten-foot glider.

  At moments like this the oddest notions come to the front of a man’s racing stream of thoughts. Suddenly I was thinking of Thursday night on the slipway, and the fact that Doug Marshall seemed to be a target, and that the Foes of Bondage had arrived back from Lake William earlier than expected—Wednesday, I’d been told…

  Charles hit the water brake for just the instant necessary to swing Doug directly abeam,’ and, at precisely the right moment, he leaned across to the whip bracket.

  And slipped the pin easily into its housing, locking the whip at right angles to the boat. He eased the throttle away and we leaped forward again, the glider riveted to a parallel course sixty yards from our starboard beam and matching our speed of around ninety miles per hour. I exhaled a gasp of relief, which was lost in the scream of the turbines. Just for a moment the thought of sabotage had crossed my mind.

  “Coming up!” shouted Charles.

  I glanced around quickly and saw the fulcrum post racing nearer, the giant hook jutting out black and solid toward us. In June of last year, I think it was, Bennett had misjudged the clearance and run into the hook.

  Charles thumbed a button and the eye slid out from the reinforced portside of the hull. The craft listed as the huge steel loop extended and I made the conventional sign to Marshall—the O of finger and thumb. He dipped in acknowledgment.

  “Brace yourself!” shouted the bonded man. He leaned into the padded pillar to the right of the wheel. I huddled in my seat, cushioning my head in my hands.

  The hook engaged the eye.

  I think I probably screamed a little as the G’s hit me; I’m told I usually do. The hook engaged the eye—and snatched the hydrofoil, by now traveling at around one hundred miles per hour, into a thirty-yard-radius turn.

  Round about this time I never know what’s happening; I just cower there and wait for it to finish. I’ve seen it from a distance, of course, and it looks quite simple. The pilot has taken his glider to a station off the starboard of the boat, so that when the hook engages the eye, the boat veers sharply away. Despite its rigidity, the whip bends. The glider begins to accelerate as the centrifugal force allied to the incredible strength of the whip takes effect.

  I’ve seen boats circle the fulcrum post on the swiveling hook so fast that the whip spirals like a watchspring, the glider lagging behind at first but accelerating, accelerating until the whip finally snaps straight and flings the glider outward at speeds which can reach almost three hundred miles per hour. A glider ten feet long with a wingspan of perhaps seven feet, made of aluminum and stressed fabric. …

  There is a certain margin for error. If the observer senses that the glider is not in the correct position, that the pilot is not quite ready, he can tell the steersman to abort at any distance up to forty yards from the gantrylike hook and the boat will veer right, slowing, while the pilot detaches the whip from his harness, closes in, stalls, and drops into the water alongside. This is the textbook procedure, although I’ve seen teams take a wide, wide turn and approach the hook again without dropping the glider.

  As the G’s forced my head into the padded rest I again sensed something was wrong. I opened my eyes, saw the dizzy blur of water racing past, the gaunt blackness of the fulcrum partially obscuring my view. Then, climbing rapidly against the sky, the glider. The whip curved back from Marshall, beyond my field of vision. I could see him fumbling one-handed with the release mechanism.

  The glider lagged back, dropping out of view as the whip curled. Marshall’s snap-fastening had jammed. He could not break clear of the whip. Shortly, all that coiled energy would be spent in smashing him into the sea, or whirling him and his glider into broken pieces overhead.

  Once, and once only, I saw a man make a perfect landing on the surface with the whip still attached to his jammed fastening—yet that man died, too. Farrel… We watched from the shore as the eye hit the hook and the boat snapped into its turn at exceptionally high speed; it was the finals of the National Distance Championships. The whip coiled into a venomous high-tensile spring which reminds the over-imaginative of a striking cobra. Farrel had gone into his slow climb and was accelerating as the boat slowed at the fulcrum and the whip began to straighten. Farrel’s wife was watching through binoculars and I heard her gasp suddenly, a quick gasp which was almost a scream. I remember the expression on the face of Farrel’s bonded man who was standing next to her, as he snatched the glasses from her and clamped them to his eyes. Mrs. Farrel turned to me; her face was twisted and she was only able to utter one word—but it was probably the only word apposite to the situation.

  “Why?” she said.

  And the boat had slowly descended from its hydrofoils and was wallowing around the fulcrum, while the whip spent its venom in hurling Farrel into a speed of three hundred miles per hour. He had stopped trying to fight the release mechanism now and was concentrating on his attitude, maintaining level flight as the whip straightened and began to slow.

  At this point the-other spectators realized something was wrong. Sometimes, a foolhardy pilot will delay release until the very last instant of acceleration, taking chances on the control problems which arise with a dying whip. But Farrel had gone past even that point. There was a slow murmur of communal horror.

  There were also a few anticipatory chuckles from S. P. men standing near. Except for Farrel’s man, of course: he stood like a statue, binoculars jammed against his face.

  The whip slowed—although we couldn’t tell from where we stood, the whip must have been slowing—but still Farrel retained control, retained his horizontal attitude. He was rapidly losing lift due to the dragging effect of the whip at his chest, but he avoided overcorrecting and plunging into the sea, and he avoided the disastrous stall which would have started an end-over-end spin and a breakup of the glider. He was giving a masterly exhibition.

  And it was all pointless, of course. There were murmurs of appreciation from around us and I think some people really thought Farrel was going to get away with it. But they didn’t know sling-gliding the way the rest of us did. You never escape from a jammed fastening.

  Farrel was decelerating visibly now,’ edging closer to the water, extricating his legs from the slender fuselage and dangling them feet upturned, like a swan coming in to land.

  An S. P. man chuckled, watching the whip.

  There was a communal sigh as Farrel touched the water and his speed fell to zero. He flipped the nose of the glider up in a last-minute stall. I think, even then, he felt he could avoid the inevitable if he could get the drag of the glider’s surface area against the water in addition to his own weight.

  He didn’t make it. He was probably up to his waist in water when the Whip reacted. The deceleration had coiled it backward, building up a reverse tension which now exploded in snatching Farrel from the water and dragging him backward, end over end in the scattering remnants of his glider, spinning along the surface in a curved, frantic plume of spray.

  The whip waved to and fro a few times, gradually losing momentum, until at last it lay quiet and twitching on the surface and the boat was able to cast loose from the hook and pick Farrel up. His neck was broken, his back, his legs were broken; there was hardly a bone in his body which had escaped fracture, hardly an organ which was not ruptured.

  It might have been possible to do something about all that … but Farrel was dead, too.

  It had taken just a few seconds. I remember the look on the face of the bonded man when they brought the body ashore. Absolved of all his obligations, his past crime atoned for, release from his bond by the death of his principal, he was now a free man. A freeman. He turned silently away from the drenched and broken thing they had laid on the seawall, and he walked off, saying nothing
.

  Then Farrel, now Marshall… Pressed hard against the latex headrest, I watched helplessly as the whip straightened preparatory to coiling in the reverse direction while Marshall stayed high in the sky, transfixed by the tip. I rolled my head against the force which held it and saw Charles fighting his way clear of the G-post. His eyes were wide and dead as they met mine; I knew he was going to try something desperate, but his motives were anybody’s guess. He edged clear of the post and centrifugal force snatched him from my view instantly.

  All this happened so quickly that I had every excuse for doing nothing; in any case, there was no way I could have got clear of the seat. Then the boat was slowing, the landscape ceased its crazy spin, the fulcrum post became a solid object of iron and rust and rivets. As is the way of boats built for speed, she stopped quickly. I stood, my head reeling.

  Marshall was clear, gliding landward, trailing the whip behind him, the broken end dangling a short distance above the surface. I satisfied myself that he was descending quickly enough to avoid a stall—the whip in total length is no aid to a smooth landing—and turned my attention to Charles. He was floundering in the water, twenty feet off the port bow. I grabbed the wheel, revved the engine, and slipped it into reverse; backed clear of the hook, retracted the eye, and motored toward him. I got my hands under his armpits and dragged him up the short ladder and onto the deck. He was a big man, strong and heavy, but he was unable to help himself or me.

  “Where’s Doug?” he asked faintly.

  “Almost down. He’ll be OK.” I glanced at the rig which fastened the whip to the boat; the steel tubing was bent, the whip itself snapped off short where Charles’s flying body had smashed into the swivel joint.

  It was one of those occasions when the last thing you want to do is consider the implications. I pillowed Charles’s head on a life jacket and spun the wheel, heading for shore. Marshall was traveling parallel to the seawall now, diving to maintain speed and at the same time lose height before the trailing end of the whip began to drag in the water and the abrupt deceleration began. Gauging the point of impact, I drove the boat on at full throttle.