Rhapsody in Black

by Brian Stableford

  There were half a dozen other men visible in the ramshackle village as we passed through its streets. If you can call the gaps in between stone tents ‘streets’. The lanky man gently prised my fingers from his shoulder. I’d been so taken up with first impressions of the place that I’d omitted to realise there was no further need of being led.

  He then ushered me into one of the largest of the dwellings—one which was more or less centrally placed. It was remarkable in that it was the first building in the warren I had seen which possessed windows. Inside, it was grim and grey, but it seemed more like a real house than the solid boxes of the town and the capital. It had only two rooms, but these were large and furnished adequately, if crudely. The bed was a strung frame like a spaceship bunk; the table was a cunningly balanced edifice of stone. The chairs were strung frames as well, and had apparently been improvised from various sources.

  ‘Very nice,’ I commented to Tob. ‘Almost palatial, in fact. But a little more light would brighten it up considerably.’

  ‘You can see, can’t you?’ he replied.

  ‘After a fashion.’ But he, of course, was used to nothing more. He had never seen a sun.

  ‘Wait here for Bayon,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s Bayon?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s his house. He’s the boss.’

  ‘A priest?’ I guessed.

  He laughed. ‘Ain’t no Churchmen here. They get along without us, we get along without them. Now, you just sit. Bayon won’t be long. And don’t try to run away.’

  ‘I’m quite well aware of the pointlessness of running away,’ I told him. ‘I’m on your side, remember?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he drawled sarcastically. ‘I remember.’

  Then he left; presumably to talk to his friends. I looked out of the window for a while, but nothing of any consequence seemed to be happening. So I went back and sat down.

  I was very hungry. It was a considerable time since I’d last eaten, and that had only been gruel. Not that there was liable to be anything better available here. Normal worlds have fake food, and good worlds have real food. But Rhapsody only had converters. Probably obsolescent and inefficient converters at that. I tried to imagine anything more lifeless and unappealing than gruel. I found, somewhat to my surprise, that it was easy. Everyone complains about gruel, but everyone eats it. One could do a lot worse.

  My thoughts of hunger were interrupted by the arrival of Bayon. He came in, escorted by Tob and two other men, obviously prepared for a session of interrogation. Their manner was not exactly hostile, but it was determined.

  Bayon was a tall man, like Tob, but of thicker build. For a troglodyte, he was something of a giant. But his frame wasn’t fully fleshed out. He could have put on a lot more weight without beginning to look fat. Life must be hard for the refugees. He carried a power rifle—the only one I’d seen in the possession of the outcasts. The other men carried less sophisticated weapons.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘have you decided whether to eat me yourselves or feed me to the crocodiles?’ The allusion was totally wasted.

  ‘I’m Bayon Alpart,’ said the leader—the man I’d already tagged as the big cheese.

  ‘My name’s Grainger,’ I told him. ‘I pilot starships. You, I take it, have no particular vocation except staying alive.’

  ‘We’re outcasts,’ he said.

  ‘I know’

  ‘You’d better tell me what you’re doing here,’ he said. ‘The whole story. Don’t leave anything out.’

  I sighed, and went over the whole sordid story again. I told it all straight, and I didn’t leave anything out. I suspected that these were people I could work with, people whose interests might be persuaded to coincide with my own. I saw my first real chance of getting the whole mess sorted out, and actually doing something with the pieces.

  It was a longer story than I’d anticipated, and it took a long time. My audience seemed totally engrossed and adequately entertained.

  I even managed to forget, for a while, that I was on the brink of starvation.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘It might well have been a mistake to skip jail,’ I said. ‘I was safe there for the duration. But curiosity drove me out. I wanted to get into the action.

  ‘I went the other way—the way that Johnny and Sampson didn’t go, that is. They headed back the way we’d been brought in. I didn’t see much point in going that way, so I didn’t. I think Johnny might have paused to release Nick and the others, but I can’t be certain. Once I’d decided to run, I ran, before the alarm could be given and we were beset by hordes of trigger-happy miners. I was seen and chased, naturally enough, since I was in the capital. But most of the people I passed either didn’t care or caught on too slowly to the fact that I was escaping custody. They had fifty chances to grab me, and missed every one. Nobody shot at me, presumably because flying bullets and beams would have endangered the citizenry.

  ‘I spent an age wandering around in the tunnels, completely lost. Then I found the town, appropriated a change of clothes, and stepped outside again. At which point I was seized by your compatriots, who were engaged at that particular moment in evading pursuit by someone else. And that’s the whole story. I was dragged into this blind and I still don’t know everybody’s Big Secret. Once I’ve found out what that is all about, I might try to work out some way of making a profit to compensate me for all my trouble. At this particular moment I feel troubled enough to contemplate any and all offers up to and including blackmail.’

  ‘You want to come with us?’ asked Bayon suspiciously.

  ‘That depends entirely on what you want to do.’

  ‘Can you get us offworld?’ he said bluntly.

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve got a ship, of course. Not exactly my ship, but I’ve already explained that. I’m perfectly willing to lift you off, if there aren’t too many of you, but it would depend on Charlot. And, of course, on if and when the miners and the council decide to let us have our ship back.’

  ‘This man Sampson—he could also transport us?’

  ‘Subject to the same condition, yes he could.’

  ‘And if we could provide him with what he wants, he would do so?’

  ‘He’d be falling over himself. But the miners hold control of his ship as well as ours, remember. And the council seems more likely to deal with Charlot. New Alexandria has a lot more to offer.’

  Bayon thought about it for a few minutes. His point of view seemed pretty clear. If he could get his hands on the goods—or part of the goods—he could make his own deal with Sampson while the council was dealing with Charlot. As an idea, it looked to have merit, but as a scheme it had a lot of problems. We hadn’t got the goods, we didn’t know how to contact Sampson, and Sampson couldn’t get his ship offplanet unless the local gentry let him. More or less the same objections stood in the way of our trying to set up a separate deal with Charlot.

  ‘I don’t know whether I can trust you,’ he said.

  ‘I can only offer you my word,’ I replied. ‘I’ll promise to do my level best to get you off Rhapsody, if that’s what you want.’

  ‘Will you act as our spokesman?’

  ‘Sure, if that’s what you want. But what do you intend to do? Do you know what this fabulous treasure is, or where it is?’

  ‘I know where,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know why.’

  Somebody in the group which accompanied Bayon muttered something. I didn’t catch what he said, but I gathered that he wasn’t in favour of Bayon telling me what he knew.

  ‘Get out,’ said Bayon, over his shoulder. ‘All of you. There’s no need for you all to stay. You’ve heard what he has to tell.’

  ‘You think there’s a real chance you can get us out of here?’ said Tob.

  ‘If the council is willing to let us go back to our ships, and lets you come with us, I can certainly carry you to Attalus. Provided that my owner agrees. Even if he doesn’t, Sampson would probably carry you.’

  ‘Out,’ said Bayo
n, waving his hand to dismiss Tob and the others.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I said, feeling that I was now on an adequate footing to ask favours. ‘Before we go any further, have you got any food? I haven’t eaten in days.’

  ‘Get him some soup, Tob,’ said Bayon.

  ‘Soup?’ I queried.

  ‘Watered-down muck from the converters,’ he said. ‘We have to steal it, usually. Anyone in the towns caught supplying us is liable to be sent to join us. A very Exclusive Reward for helping their old friends. But it’s easy to steal. The Churchmen ignore us totally, and everyone else is supposed to do the same. The men at the converters get blamed if anything is missing from the supply, but at the same time they’re not supposed to recognise our existence in order to stop us taking the stuff. They compromise to various extents, and we generally don’t find it difficult to come by enough to keep us alive.’

  Tob reappeared, with a bowl full of semi-dissolved gruel. It was only lukewarm, but it was something which I could use to fill the hole in my stomach, aid I spooned it down rapidly.

  In the meantime, Bayon told me what he knew.

  ‘They found a sealed cave,’ he said. ‘Broke into it by accident while they were hacking away at the rockface down in the mines. They were petrified at first in case it was another warren, and the interconnection was going to play all hell with the airflow. But they were lucky—this time—and it was only a chamber. Part of this warren, I think, but probably waterlocked. The grotto was full of shiny stuff, like this cave. There was no fuss at all for two weeks or more. Then, all of a sudden, every member of the council was accusing every other member of all kinds of crimes. I don’t know the details, because we get the news late down here, and it’s always vague. But there’s something in that cave worth a great deal off this world.

  ‘We tried to get into the cave, today, to get a look, but we were too late. Two weeks ago we could have walked in and everybody who was around would have been looking the other way. Today, there were men with guns at the grotto who decided to relieve the boredom by shooting up a little air. The air they chose just happened to be occupied by us non-existent persons. I don’t know how they’d have got around the problem of disposing of non-existent bodies, but they weren’t playing games. They chased us up to the town, and we split up there. It was easy to lose them once we were out of the tunnel.’

  ‘You didn’t get to see inside the cave, I suppose?’

  ‘No. I don’t know what’s in there. But it probably wouldn’t be obvious anyway. They didn’t find it for some time.’

  ‘They weren’t looking for it.’

  ‘Even so, it can’t be very big.’

  ‘What do you think it could be?’

  He spread his arms wide in a gesture of frustration. ‘How could I know? You’re the spaceman. You travel from world to world. You know what’s valuable, and what kind of thing is most likely to come from worlds like this one. You tell me.’

  But I couldn’t.

  After I’d finished the soup, I realised that it was a long time since I’d had any sleep, as well. I was surprised to find that I wasn’t very tired, despite the fact that I’d been on the go for a long time, but the idea of sleep was nevertheless a very attractive one.

  ‘You know,’ said Bayon, ‘whatever it is, it’s a great big joke on all of us. Our ancestors cut themselves out of the star-worlds hundreds of years ago. There’s no trade. The Churchmen make every effort to ignore the stars, just as they make every effort to ignore us. They don’t want to know about the real human race. And then up comes a find which could make any one of them, or all of them, very, very rich. All those years of living in utter poverty in conditions far more conducive to misery than to piety. All that holiness stored up as credit for the eternal reward which is to come. And now this. Money by the ton. Our whole life is founded upon the assumption that we are not and never could be wealthy. And suddenly, we are. What are they going to do? Can they really deny the existence of this as well? Can they really stare a fortune in the face and ignore it?’

  ‘You live here,’ I said. ‘You tell me.’

  ‘They have to come to terms with it,’ he said. ‘There’s no other rational course. Our ancestors may have had the best of reasons for quitting galactic society. The fact that they hated it would be reason enough, wherever the hate came from. But we no longer have that hatred. We can’t hate the galactic civilisation because we know nothing about it. We have the doctrinal legacy of our forefathers, but not the emotions which shaped it. We live by a creed that is no longer supported by need or desire. But it is all we have to live by. If it were to be abandoned—even if it were seriously questioned, life on Rhapsody would become intolerable. Any violation of the creed has to be punished by exclusion from the exclusive society—excommunication, supposedly total. My group has sixteen outcasts. There must be similar groups in the other warrens. There must be other groups on every world in the Splinters. If women were expelled as well as men we’d have equal shares in the planet in time. The population of the towns has been declining for a long time. There are fewer of us now than there were when the entire Church decamped from the starworlds. The whole organisation is a guaranteed loser. There are only two roads out of these caves. One leads back to the stars and the other goes straight down to hell. Extinction isn’t a very Exclusive Reward.’

  ‘They didn’t tell you all that in the local schools,’ I said. ‘Do you get so much time for contemplating the unfairness of your situation?’

  ‘We’re not so primitive as all that,’ he said. ‘We live close to utter squalor, but we’re not ignorant. We have our teachers and our scientists. The Churchmen and the miners are the pillars of the community, of course—the top and the bottom. But no society exists just like that, as you must know. There’s always filling in the sandwich. We came out of galactic civilisation, remember. Our ancestors were there. They knew what it was about, and they took from it what they cared to call clean. That included education and thought. They didn’t ask that their beliefs should hold up on blind obedience alone. They prepared the jargon and the arguments. They had answers to the questions; they didn’t simply duck them. We’re descended from an advanced culture, Grainger—we went back into the caves. We aren’t a direct relic of the old troglodytes, and you’d be a fool to think we are.’

  ‘You think the Churchmen can cope with the problem, then?’ I said. ‘You reckon they’ll survive without schisms, witch-hunts and revolutions?’

  ‘They’ll survive,’ he assured me. ‘There’s a lot of life in the old dogma yet. They could keep it stuck together for a hundred more years yet. It will beat them eventually, but they’ll fight to the end. While Krist and the hard core of truly devout believers can use the accusation of heresy against anyone who disagrees, they retain the only power which there is on this world. Life here isn’t easy on any terms, but at least the faith gives you a reason for existing. Once you’re an outcast and condemned to unbelief, you’re nothing. There’s nothing to make it all bearable. More than three-quarters of those excommunicated over the last three years have committed suicide within a matter of days. Even the rest of us have difficulty in keeping some kind of hope alive. Getting off the planet is only part of that hope. We have to hope that we can find some kind of life out there with the evil stars. It doesn’t feed my hope to know that Rion Mavra came back instead of disappearing into the galaxy for good. Some of the others think it means something, but they don’t know what. They greet anything new which happens with determined optimism. It’s what keeps them alive.’

  ‘They didn’t exactly treat me like the best thing to happen to them since the day they were born.’

  ‘They’re afraid of you. They’re afraid to trust you. You’re promising them the moon, remember, with an offhand expression which implies that to you it doesn’t matter a damn whether we stay here till we rot or fly away with you. It’s not a matter of little consequence to them—it’s life or death—a second bite at the cherry of Exclusiv
e Reward, a new impossible dream. If they’d been able to handle the realities of their situation they’d likely have killed themselves with the rest. These are the ones who can survive on self-made myths.’

  ‘And what about you? You seem to know so much, to have all the answers at your fingertips. Where do you fit in?’

  ‘Me?’ he replied. ‘I’m as incurable optimist. I’m too clever to be realistic. I can always invent a bright side to go with every dark thought. I’m the only man in the warren whose mind isn’t clothed in black.’

  I’m no born optimist myself, but I had to admit that the idea of a planet of fatalists wasn’t very pretty. There was more darkness on Rhapsody than could be explained by the environmental restraints. I was going to be very glad to get back into daylight again. There might well be insane elements in galactic society, but there was nothing to touch Rhapsody.

  ‘So what do you think we ought to do?’ I asked, returning to the point at last.

  ‘For a start, we can take the grotto.’

  ‘By firepower?’

  ‘It shouldn’t be necessary to kill anybody. We know these caves a lot better than the good citizens. We can get there without any trouble. The guards will see reason when they compare the numbers.’

  ‘And then? Do you think you can shoot your way to the lock and carry the booty away into space aboard the pirate vessel Hooded Swan?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But I think we can make a deal. I think we can make some arrangement which will assure us a ride out of here. Once we have the price of our passage, there’ll be no stopping us.’