The Fenris Device

by Brian Stableford

  If that’s the way you feel, he said, you’d better go back to sleep. I’ll wake you again when you’re better disposed to consider the problem.

  He did. In fact, he woke me three times more that day, but I was just too sick to think. I asked him to amputate my memories of the dive, I asked him to mask the colossal hangover I had. But he couldn’t do either. The last time I awoke temporarily, Eve spoon-fed me a little. Prior to that I’d been on intravenous supply.”

  When I awoke for the fourth time, it was like waking from a normal sleep. When I was fully awake, I felt a sense of astonishment that I could be whole and well again. But the wind wasn’t about to allow me to simply lie there and enjoy myself.

  You know what’s going to happen now, don’t you? he said.

  No.

  Well, you’d better think. If you had spent more time thinking these last few days and less time rushing about and sleeping, we might not be in this mess.

  OIL, I said, tell me what I ought to know.

  Maslax wants to raise the Varsovien.

  That’s right. He has no chance. He doesn’t know the first thing about spaceflight.

  So who’s he going to take with him to fly the ship?

  But I don’t know how!

  He isn’t going to believe that. In any case, that’s not the point at issue. He’s going to go to the Varsovien in the iron maiden, and he’s going to take you with him. Once he’s out of the Swan, we’re going to have to jump him. We have no choice at all. Now, all I want is for you to think about that. Be ready for that. Pick your moment. I’ll be ready. Just make sure you are. OK?

  I promised him I’d keep it in mind. I got up and began to dress. Before I’d finished, Eve came in. Maslax was behind her, holding the gun. He smiled when he saw me—a great big beaming smile. One might have thought I was his only friend in the whole world.

  “I’m glad that you’re well,” he said. “Very glad indeed. I’ve been waiting a long time. I think we’re ready to make another little journey, now.”

  He was not ungenerous, mind. After some persuasion, he agreed to let me eat before we set out bravely to face the perils of the unknown. He also agreed that someone else could drive the buggy. We suffered a serious breakdown in diplomatic relations only when it came to deciding exactly who should go. Had we settled it democratically, there is no doubt the makeup of the expedition would have been considerably different. As it was, however, Maslax had the only vote worth mentioning, and he called the tune.

  Thus, when the iron maiden rolled out of her harbor in the underbelly of the Swan she carried a crew of four. Eve was driving, and Ecdyon was in the front seat alongside her. I was in the back with him, the gun, and the trigger mechanism for the bomb. I knew, and he knew, that neither Nick nor Johnny knew enough about bombs to risk tampering with the one on the ship, but I wasn’t so sure they wouldn’t try. I hadn’t told them not to, and secretly I was cherishing a fond hope that they might get reckless and lucky all at once and defuse the thing. At the same time, however, I could hardly avoid the corollary fear that they might get reckless without getting lucky.

  We were all suited up inside the maiden—we had no illusions about the amount of risk we could safely take. The vehicle was built to take just about any amount of battering, but nobody had ever thought that she might have to run around on a world like Mormyr.

  When I got my first look at the vaporous caldron into which I’d dropped the Hooded Swan I felt a sudden renewal of all the agonies of the drop. The synesthetic psychedelia that I’d experienced were represented here in living color.

  The sky seemed to be about twenty feet above our heads, a boiling curtain of vapors that writhed from blue to gray to red. All the colors were very dark—though it was daylight here there was less light to see by than the stars provided at night on Iniomi—and they gave the impression of being spectral patterns in an oil slick. I had never seen a sky which gave the impression of being so heavy. It was not merely oppressive, it was positively claustrophobic. It was as though the ground was one surface and the clouds another, with the merest crack between them. And it was all too easy to conjure up the illusion that the crack was slowly closing, the sky slowly falling. I felt like a grain of wheat trapped between slowly turning millwheels.

  And the sky was angry. There was no doubt about that. From point-blank range it spat raindrops and hailstones at us. The hailstones were often as big as chestnuts, and they shattered as they hit the maiden’s steel carcass. They came from all directions, blown about by the wind which eddied madly this close to the ground, and their bombardment sounded like fingers racing on drumskins. It was worse when the big ones hit the shield or the windows, because they they didn’t shatter, but bounced instead, and made a dull thumping sound like a big bass drum booming steadily away behind the rattle of the kettledrums.

  Needless to say, visibility along the ground was not too good. We had a fairly sizable patch of clearshield, thanks to the overlip that kept most of the rain off and virtually all of the hailstones out, but the vapors were thick enough to cut clear sight down to a matter of ten meters, and the gross irregularity of the terrain often cut that still more.

  With a perpetual storm raging over it, and rain washing it, hailstones hammering it, I would have expected the terrain to be smoothed flat as a pancake, eroded into a perfect plain. But this was by no means the case. For one thing the rock wasn’t homogeneous, and it eroded at varying rates, so that all around us were squat, stubby projections twisted into the weirdest shapes, often holed or honeycombed, like impressionistic statuary. The curves and the swirling vapors could hardly refrain from suggesting movement, but the movements all seemed to be impossible writhings and wormings as though the statues were not individual shapes at all but were heaped multitudes of tiny creatures—snakes and frogs and black fish.

  In addition to the uneven erosion, the misshapen configuration of the terrain was the result of continual volcanic activity and earth tremors. The crust of Mormyr was very deep, but in its upper regions it was uneven and unstable. Most of the tremors were inconsequential, originating far below us and at great distances, so that all we perceived inside the maiden were slight shivers. No great cracks appeared around us, nothing was broken. Only the dust was really disturbed by the quaking of the earth—it was shaken and stirred. It danced, in a region mere inches above the smoothed skin of the rock, blurring the ground.

  We had very little to fear from the volcanic eruptions—those we were aware of seemed very tame. No mountains rose to hurl flames and magma high into the air, though no doubt such mountains were not very far away. All we saw were small slits in gullies slowly oozing viscous liquid which turned the colored rain into colored steam and which cooled and bubbled and cracked and oozed in a constant but sluggish turmoil.

  What I did fear more than almost anything else was the lightning. Although we were not a tall target—the iron maiden was not built to be proud, but to be discreet—the projections that surrounded us were even less so. We were able to choose low ground, for the most part, but we dared not risk the gullies for fear of the magma that simmered there. We had to compromise and do the best we could. The lightning made patterns in the sky all around us—when there were sudden sequences of burst, we were caged by the light. The electric glare was the only thing which penetrated the gloom of the ground-hugging clouds—it was all that came to us from without our stormy cocoon.

  Needless to say, driving was extremely difficult, hazardous and slow. Eve was a good driver, but had never driven in conditions which were remotely similar to these. Ecdyon navigated for her—we knew exactly where the Varsovien lay—but we made painfully slow progress. Even Maslax, however, had to curb his impatience under the prevailing conditions. We had less than forty miles to go, but it was going to take us several hours and there was no way of getting around the fact.

  We maintained a dogged silence for the first hour or so, but the silence became almost as oppressive as the sky. It was broken only by
Eve’s occasional muffled curses as we lurched or had to back up to find another way through a particularly bad patch. Occasionally Ecdyon would murmur something—an instruction, a comment—but he mostly just pointed with his hands, owing to the fact that he was in an awkward position. Gallacellans, as I’ve said, were not built for sitting. In order to fit in his seat he had to bend, and while he was folded he couldn’t coil. This meant that his head was stuck in a single orientation, and couldn’t swivel as the occasion demanded. His fore-eyes were stuck in forward orientation, and his hind-eyes were pointing backward, staring Maslax full in the face. This meant that Ecdyon could conveniently address himself to Maslax or me, but not to Eve. I knew that he must be terribly uncomfortable, but Maslax either didn’t know or didn’t care; every time Ecdyon writhed himself into a slightly different posture the little man moved the gun around to threaten him.

  At this point, I was pretty sure I could take the gun away from him—with the help of the wind. But there was one thing I hadn’t considered. Maslax had deliberately chosen a suit that was too large for him—one of the Swan’s suits instead of the one he’d had aboard the Saberwing. He’d adjusted the legs so he was able to walk comfortably, but he’d not troubled to adjust the left arm. This meant that his right suit-arm was some five inches shorter, and therefore he had five inches of empty space beyond his left fingertips. In this space, he was carrying the trigger-device for the bomb aboard the Swan. Thus, though I could take the gun off him if I was fast enough, there was absolutely no way I could stop him triggering the bomb and blowing up Nick, Johnny, and the ship. This made the situation very difficult. I only hoped that the fact that be was now effectively one-handed might cause him to fall and break his neck at some indeterminate time in the future.

  Eventually, there came a time when I couldn’t stand the silence any longer. In any case, I decided, it was time I went to work on Maslax again. They say you can generally talk lunatics out of crazy situations, and this was no time to be passing up an opportunity no matter how little faith I had in the old wives who were credited with the rumor.

  “You know,” I said to him, as though we’d just met on a bus, “I seem to be going through one of those periods when absolutely nothing goes right. All snap decisions and every one turns out to have been second best or even worse. Know what I mean?”

  He looked at me somewhat somberly, but I think he was glad of the chance to direct his morbid attention away from the morbid landscape.

  “You don’t have to make any decisions at all,” he said. “Just do as you’re told.”

  “Ah,” I said. “That’s just it. What are you going to tell me to do? I’ve been sitting here examining nasty suspicions, you see, and it occurred to me that you can save me a lot of needless worry. You’re not an idiot, now are you? You’re not going to ask me to fly an alien starship?”

  “I might,” he said.

  “You know I can’t do it, don’t you?” I said. “You can read my mind, remember? You know I don’t know anything about alien ships.”

  “He does,” said Maslax, indicating Ecdyon.

  “Do you?” I asked the Gallacellan.

  He didn’t answer immediately, and it dawned on me suddenly that he probably did. He’d not been attached to our little mission without a proper briefing. He probably did have instructions about how to lift the Varsovien. I wondered how likely he was to lie.

  “No,” he said. “I know nothing about the Varsovien. Stylaster knows. No one else, so far as I am aware.”

  Maslax didn’t believe him any more than I did. “A ship is a ship,” he said. “Even I can fly a spaceship. Even little Maslax. One of you can fly it. I don’t care which. One of you is going to.”

  How about you, I asked the wind. You’re the ex-Gallacellan. Do you know how to fly it?

  You know me, said the wind. I’ll try anything.

  I did know him, as it happened. He was a tryer all right. He’d not failed me yet. But....

  “Tell me,” I said, redirecting my attention to Maslax. “What gives you the idea you can read minds?”

  His head was at the wrong height inside his helmet—his nose was where his lips ought to have been—but I could still see most of his face through the visor, and I saw something flow into his face the moment I mentioned mind reading. Perhaps it wasn’t a good thing to talk about after all.

  “I know what’s in your mind,” he said. “Your mind’s full of it, like all the rest.”

  “All the rest of what?”

  “Don’t play stupid,” he said, his voice grating harshly. “All of them. All the people.”

  “And what are they full of, Maslax?” I asked him, still pushing, to see what might happen. “Still hate and fear? Is it only hate and fear you can read?”

  “Hate and fear’s all there is to read,” he spat at me. “It’s all there is.”

  I shook my head, not dropping my eyes for an instant. “You know that’s not true,” I said. “You can’t believe that.”

  “You don’t know,” he said fiercely. “You’re not Maslax. You’re not a cripple. You don’t know what it’s like when everyone who gasses you on the street looks at you as if you were an insect. You don’t know what it’s like when anyone who has to stand near you recoils. You don’t know what it is to have everyone who knows you despise you. You just can’t know. You don’t know what other people’s minds are like. You don’t know what your mind’s like. You tell yourself lies, just like there are lies coming out of your mouth all the time. You don’t know. I do. I know what goes on people’s heads. Hate and fear—yes, that’s what I read. That’s what’s there to be read. Hate Maslax. Loathe Maslax. Maslax the crippled, crawling thing. That’s what’s there. You can’t deny it. You feel it. Look at your own eyes. You hate me, Grainger, you and that four-eyed bug and that lady in the front seat who’s trying so hard not to listen. You hate me, and you’re afraid of me. Well, this time you’ve reason to be afraid. But I need you—some of you—and I’ll let you go. Not the others. Not the ones who’ve got a lifetime of hate and loathing to pay out. Not them.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you,” I said, quietly but gathering intensity, “that you might be mad?”

  “Has it ever occurred to you,” he replied, “that I might not?”

  I had to admit that it hadn’t.

  “You’re intending to kill—how many was it? twenty million?—twenty million people, and you want us to believe that you’re sane?”

  “The population of Pallant,” he said, “is twenty-five million. And yes, I do want you to believe that I’m sane. I want you to believe that I have a perfectly respectable motive.”

  I looked at Ecdyon. Not a muscle was stirring. I still didn’t believe that Ecdyon had nothing at all to do with this. Only a Gallacellan could have known about the warship—if there really was a warship, and only a low-caste Gallacellan could have put it into English. If the knowledge hadn’t been given to Maslax directly—and I was prepared to believe that, at least—then it had come to him indirectly. Via Ferrier? Perhaps. But someone had rendered it into English somewhere along the line, and Ecdyon looked like the prime suspect to me, despite his insistence that he knew virtually nothing about the Varsovien.

  “You killed a man named Ferrier,” I said to Maslax. “Did you have a motive for that, too, or did you just want to steal his yacht?”

  Maslax coughed out a laugh. “Motive?” he said. “For Ferrier? I had all the motives in the world. I had years full of motives. I have a lifetime of reasons to kill Ferrier. I should have killed him years ago. I knew that I’d have to, eventually. I always knew.”

  “But if you’d killed him years ago,” I said, prompting him, “you wouldn’t have found out about the Fenris device, now would you?”

  He was silent. Perhaps he was thinking over what I’d said. Perhaps what I said didn’t make sense.

  “It was only recently that Ferrier found out,” I said. “What did you do, read it in his mind?”

  �
��Yes,” he said quickly, rising to the bait like a suicidal mackerel. “I read it in his mind. That’s...when I knew, you see, when I knew that I could...had to...kill him. That was why....”

  “You mentioned a woman,” said Eve, keeping her eyes on the precarious way ahead. “What did you kill her for?”

  I would much rather have continued trying to find out about Ferrier, but I didn’t have a monopoly on Maslax, and in any case, finding out the right questions to ask was pretty much a matter of trial and error. Eve’s question might yet lead to further discoveries.

  Maslax was again reluctant to answer without leading, but I didn’t know how or where to lead, this time. We waited.

  “She was worse,” said Maslax, finally. “She was worse.”

  “Worse than what?” I asked.

  “Worse than all the rest. She was the worst. You just can’t know what it felt like. You just can’t know what pain a mind can feel...a wave of hate, pure repulsion. You just can’t know....”

  “Tell me what happened,” I suggested, trying to sound gentle—maybe even sympathetic. Either I couldn’t manage it or it was the wrong ploy in any case.

  “Shut up,” he said. “Just shut up. Where’s that ship? We should be there by now. If you’re trying to....”

  The gun wavered, focused on the back of Eve’s neck.

  Get him, urged the wind. But even he didn’t sound too confident, and we both knew that while the bomb was inside his suit there’d be no getting to be done.

  “She isn’t trying to do anything,” I told him. “Look outside. This isn’t a highway. We’re a long way from the ship yet.”

  He looked outside, seeming to notice for the first time the colored storm that hid the world from us and battered futilely at the body of the maiden. He looked down at the ground beside the vehicle, craning his neck to sit up in his suit and look over the edge of the window. He watched for more than a minute, apparently fascinated by the bursting of the oily raindrops and the swirling colored dust with which they mingled, and the vapors that rose from the dust and left it still dry.