“Isn’t it automatic?” I said.
“No, it’s not.”
“A bit primitive,” I said and recognized the phrase as I spoke it as one of Ned’s. But I stood up, closed the door, and returned to my armchair with good grace.
Montesquieu looked at me in silence for five or six seconds. I returned her stare. “What’s he up to?” she said suddenly.
“What’s who up to?” I said.
“Don’t play dumb. What’s Malley up to?”
“Ned. As far as I know he’s proving to be a valuable washer woman.”
“He spends half his spare time with Her Excellency.”
“I think they’re writing a poem together. A cycle of poems.”
“Ulrike Lewis hasn’t written a poem in fifteen years. That’s fifteen of our years, Ms. Harpenden. Not miserable little Earth years.”
“She wrote a poem when she was visiting Earth. We heard her recite it on the telly.”
“Recycled. She changed a few proper nouns, that was all.”
“Well, maybe Ned has inspired her, given her a new lease on life.”
“He’s giving her organs a new lease on life. The ship’s organ factory has orders for no less than twenty-two new body parts for Her Excellency alone. Her first transplant is next week.”
“Meatus,” I said.
“Precisely.”
“Well, if Her Excellency wants to regenerate herself.…”
“It’s not just Her Excellency. She keeps recommending Malley’s services to all and sundry. There’s not an officer at the High Table who hasn’t got an order in. Most of them have three or four. New lungs, new livers, new hearts, miles of veins and arteries.…”
“Well, they’re old guys,” I said. “They’re wearing out.”
“Look, sister,” Montesquieu said. “This is an intergalactic spaceship. It is a closed community. We all live in close quarters to one another.”
“I know.”
“What you don’t seem to know is the power of mass hysteria.”
“Hysteria?”
“Yes, hysteria. It gets magnified in closed institutions. No one has an outside perspective. No one can take time out. Everyone reacts to the obsessions of their neighbors by becoming obsessed themselves, which in turn causes an intensification of the original.… Round and round it goes.… Everybody gets caught up.… And before you know it.… Look, Harpenden, there won’t be a single member of the ship’s company who doesn’t think his or her whole body is riddled with disease.…”
“Calm down,” I said.
Montesquieu looked as if I’d slapped her face. She took a deep breath, swallowed a few times and said, “Ms. Harpenden! You are very close to being criminally impertinent.”
“Maybe,” I said, “but, Flight Regulator, let’s try and look at this in perspective. Coolly and rationally.”
“I’ve just told you, there is no outside perspective, not while the ship is in flight. We can’t look at it in perspective. He’s started on the crew.”
“Who’s started what on the crew?”
“Malley. He treats the crew’s mess as a consulting room for his vile practices. Men and women are lining up to have their inner putrefaction diagnosed by his alleged powers of smell. A single diseased molecule is enough to set off alarm bells in his nose. So he says.”
“I eat my own meals in the crew’s mess,” I said. “Often with Ned. I haven’t seen lines of men and women queuing up.”
“Then you can’t have been paying attention.… I have my sources, my informants.”
For a while there was silence. I looked at Montesquieu. She was still breathing heavily. I looked round her office. There was no item of personal significance, no image of husband, boyfriend, girlfriend, children. There was no art on the walls. The place was sterile.
I said, “Why don’t you talk to Ned himself?”
“I am forbidden.”
“Forbidden? By whom?”
“By Her Excellency.”
“Oh, come on.…”
“I made the mistake of sending Her Excellency a memo outlining my concerns. An executive order forbidding me from approaching Malley in any way was my only repayment. I was doing my duty.”
“What do you want me to do about it?”
“You’re his friend. Talk to him. Please talk to him. Before the mass hysteria goes viral, before the breakdown of all social structure destroys this spacecraft.”
“I’ll give it a go,” I said. “And now I’ve got work to do.”
Without waiting for a formal dismissal I left the room.
* * * *
I didn’t have work to do, I had an early dinner to consume before I started serving the officers theirs. In the crew’s mess I found Ned and his friends, John Doe and D’Bridie. I took my tray over to their table.
“Dear lady, you look a bit agitated,” John Doe said. “I hope nothing has happened to upset the even tenor of your days.”
“You’re very perceptive,” I said.
“Then speak to us of your angst,” Doe said. “You are amongst friends.”
I wanted to talk to Ned by himself. But then I thought, bugger it, nothing’s private, the ship’s a hothouse, just as Montesquieu says. I might as well broadcast my feelings to all and sundry.
“I’ve been talking to Flight Regulator Montesquieu,” I said.
“A stalwart of the ship’s company,” John Doe said.
“Her!” D’Bridie said. “A snapper. That’s what she is. She snaps. She’s as uptight as all get-out one minute, the next minute she’s snapped. Did she snap with you, Em?”
“Almost. I told her to calm down.”
“Far out.”
“She’s one of my greatest fans,” Ned said. “She sent a memo to Lewis praising my many talents.”
“She sent a memo to Lewis complaining bitterly about you,” I said.
“Why’d Montesquieu complain about Ned?” D’Bridie said.
“He is a menace to the good order of the ship,” I said. “He is the cause of mass hysteria.”
“Alas,” John Doe said. “The saint is often cast out from the pigsty of his own eyeballs.”
“What rubbish is that, John?” D’Bridie said.
Doe started to say something, but I cut him off. “Listen, you arseholes, I’m on this ship because I want to go home. I want to get home in one piece. I want to pass the time until we arrive at Newharp just doing my job and being left alone. I don’t want to become involved in saving the whole social structure of the ship from total chaos. Got it?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ned said quietly. “We’ve got it, Em. No one’s going to involve you.”
“Bloody Montesquieu already has,” I said.
* * * *
Ned Talking
The Delegate went into orbit around Skyros and stayed there. Round and round we went. Rumors abounded, the bane of shipboard life. It was said that the Skyroans were asking an exorbitant fee to allow us to land. It was said that they were all suffering from some hideous new disease and we’d be mad to land. It was said that they weren’t prepared to accord Her Excellency the pomp and ceremony she deserved. Her Excellency was deliberately delaying things until her latest organ replacement was given the all clear. All sorts of things were said.
* * * *
One afternoon Lewis and I were working on our cycle of epic poems. I asked her what was going on. She said the problem seemed to be that there wasn’t a single Skyroan authority to deal with. The place was divided up into countries, fiefdoms, principalities, no-go areas, and they were all at war with one another. Also, there was a rash of civil wars: some entities were simply ripping themselves apart for the fun of it.
“Best we give the place a miss,” I said.
“It wouldn’t look good,” Lewis said.
“It would look even worse if we took the runabout down and landed on a battlefield. Bang! Crash! Kaput!”
“Good strong words,” Lewis said. “Let’s put them in the poem.”
So we did. When we’d finished, that bit of the epic cycle read:
Bang! Crash! Kaput! The Heavens shook.
Kaput and Crash and Bang
No love nor peace was with the rook.
And the dove had fled the land.
Lewis said, “There’s some little suzerain called New Stoke-on-Trent. It’s said to be reasonably peaceful. They’re prepared to let us talk to schools.”
“Schools?” I said. “Not joint sittings of both houses of parliament?”
“I’m not sure that they’ve actually got a parliament.”
“What about shore leave for the crew?”
“That might not eventuate.”
“They’re not going to like that.”
“Can’t be helped.”
* * * *
Em Talking
They tricked us out, me and Ned, in ambassadorial robes. I looked like a dork. I felt a complete idiot. But I was excited all the same; the trip to this New Stoke-on-Trent place would be a change. We were about to get out of the spinning drum for a few days, breathe the air of a new planet, see new sights, hear new sounds. We went down to the Skyroan surface in the officers’ runabout. It was a damn sight more civilized than the crew’s runabout that we’d taken from Earth. There must have been about two dozen of us in the official party. I wasn’t thrilled to see that Montesquieu was in attendance. I was amazed to see that Ned’s friends D’Bridie and John Doe were included. John Doe was wearing his huge overcoat, D’Bridie was carrying a backpack.
“How did those two get in on the act?”
“Procurement,” Ned said.
“What?”
“John’s been here before. He knows people. He is going to get in a supply of new cutlery. So that everybody can eat properly. D’Bridie is his assistant. I fixed it with Lewis.”
“What else did you fix?”
“Not much.”
We were met on the landing ground by some heavily armed militia folk, who ushered us straight into waiting troop carriers. If we thought we were going to see the sights on the way to the school we were wrong. The back of the troop carrier had no more windows than The Delegate.
“I don’t reckon this place is quite as peaceful as advertised,” Ned said.
“No kidding.”
The noise in the troop carrier made conversation difficult, so we didn’t talk. The machine rattled and jolted and gave no impression of traveling on a made road. At one stage I thought I heard gunfire, but maybe I was mistaken. We arrived at the school and were hustled out of the troop carriers and into an assembly hall. It was a bog-standard school assembly hall. It could have been on Earth, it could have been on Newharp, there was nothing exotic about it at all. The place was packed; they must have bused in a heap of kids from surrounding schools. They were all talking as loudly as they could. Some of them were sitting on window sills. Scuffles and fights broke out. Teachers were trying to quieten them down, with no success. Our party was ushered onto a wide stage. We sat and looked at the kids. The kids largely ignored us. The proceedings proceeded. In both languages. Everything was translated by babbling translator folk, so everything took twice as long. Finally Ned and I were called to the microphone. Ned used the Skyroan language skills he’d picked up on Earth flogging replacement organs to refugees. He talked directly to the kids in a bastard version of their own tongue, reciting a translation of the epic poem cycle that he and Her Excellency had cobbled together. But the kids started to drum their feet. A slow handclap added to the noise. Ned started yelling, but now he was yelling limericks:
There was a young lady from Skyros
Who’s bum was like a rhinoceros.
She sat on a mouse.
Which shrieked like a louse
And cursed the young lady from Skyros.
I’d never heard such infantile drivel in my life. It was acutely embarrassing to be standing next to Ned. But it began to work. The kids started laughing, and they were laughing with Ned, not at him. After a dozen such limericks Ned had the whole audience in the palm of his hand. He said, “Right. You lot can have a go. Someone come up here and do a limerick. What about you, mate, you look like a champion limerickeer.” He pointed at a rough lout in the second row.
Ned had picked just the right guy. The lout grinned like a cat and bounded over the row of kids in front of him, half squashing a smallish urchin as he did so. He leapt onto the stage, bumped into me, took the microphone from Ned and shouted, “There was a mad crowd from Earth, Whose brains were made out of turf.…”
An explosion on the roof of the hall sent a rain of dust and light-fittings cascading down onto the heads of everyone below, including me. Kids screamed and started stampeding out of all available exits, including the windows. The heavily-armed militia guys rushed the stage and began herding our party out of a back door. The sound of gunfire punctuated their shouted commands. Acrid smoke drifted everywhere. I found myself stumbling along next to Ned, who was conducting a shouted exchange with a militia girl. He turned to me, “She reckons it’s a kidnap attempt. Apparently, Lewis would be worth her weight in cold-fusion pellets. We’re OK, we’re not worth anything.”
“Good to know,” I said.
Out in the playground our party was being bundled back into the troop carriers. I saw Her Excellency propelled unceremoniously into the lead carrier by two beefy militia types. Then someone called my name. I looked round, Flight Regulator Montesquieu was standing next to the open rear hatch of a smallish troop carrier.
“You and Malley, into this one.”
Ned and I climbed into the vehicle. D’Bridie and John Doe were already there. Up front, the driver was accompanied by a couple of grinning militiamen who held their firearms at the ready—they had the cheery demeanor of the recently bribed. Montesquieu didn’t climb into the carrier herself, she yelled at the driver to take us away. The carrier started forward even as the hydraulics were closing the rear hatch.
John Doe said, “I do believe our esteemed colleague, Flight Regulator Montesquieu, has called us a cab of our very own. I suspect the driver will be taking us on a leisurely tour of New Stoke-on-Trent’s main tourist attractions. Pity we can’t see out.”
Doe wasn’t wrong. It took forever to get back to the landing ground. And when we arrived, it was too late.
We stood in the Skyroan dust and watched the runabout take off. It accelerated slowly; it was carrying the ancient, shaken-up Ulrike Lewis, after all. The pilot wasn’t going to subject her to too many g-forces, not if he knew what was good for him. For an eternity the craft seemed to float upside down on the cloud cover, like the keel of a boat seen by an underwater swimmer. And then it was gone, swallowed by the mist. I turned in complete misery to my companions. There was no answering misery on their faces; they had been watching the departing runabout with as much concern as a bunch of commuters who’d just missed a light rail shuttle.
“It’s not going to come back for us,” I said.
“I wouldn’t think so,” John Doe said. “We are marooned. We are castaways of the cosmos.”
“We’re on the wrong bloody planet!” I was nearly crying. “This place is worse than Earth.”
“I’m sure it has some attractions, dear lady,” John Doe said. “Let us look on the bright side.”
“Don’t bloody dear lady me.”
Ned said, “We’ll get you home, Em. We might even get there faster than The Delegate. We’ll be there to welcome Lewis on her triumphal return.”
“How? There aren’t any people smugglers going between here and Newharp. And we’ve got no money. No damn money at all.”
“The space lanes are not empty,” John Doe said. “Interplanetary trade demands the constant plying to and fro of that workhorse of commerce, the humble freighter. The freighter is not to be sneezed at.”
“And how the fuck are we meant to pay the goddamned humble freighter captain? With the clothes off our backs? Here, captain, give us passage to Newharp. Have a second-hand shirt and a
used pair of socks.”
“We can always realize our capital,” John Doe said. “Skyroans are discerning aficionados of genuine antiques.”
“Realize what capital? What antiques?”
D’Bridie put her arm around my shoulders and squeezed. Silently she kicked the backpack that rested in the dust at her feet. There was a muffled clanking sound. “Spoons, Em,” she said. “Knives and forks. Ceremonial ones. John knows a guy who deals in them. John’s been here before. He’s got connections. We’re rich. We’ll go home in style.”
“I also know a matron who keeps an excellent hostelry not far from here,” John Doe said. “Let us go and eat.”
THE DARKFISHERS, by John Gregory Betancourt
From the log of the Albert Einstein:
July 14, 2131
The starship sank today. Tantalus’s oceans are just too big; we couldn’t make it to an island. Fortunately, we managed to evacuate the surviving crew onto dry land of sorts—a gigantic floating crustacean. It has vegetation growing on its back, so I have little fear that it will submerge and drown us. Who knows? Perhaps it will be a suitable base until we make it to shore. If this thing ever goes near shore.
I pray I do not die here. The isolation is awful. When will they come for us? When will they answer our distress call?
—Julie MacIntyre
Acting Commander
* * * *
The world moved. As Rik sat on the edge of its fleshy plates, he gazed out across the cold, emerald-green ocean toward the unchanging line of the horizon; not even a fish broke the smooth stillness of the waves. He looked down. Through the murky water directly below he glimpsed oceanbottom, where the world’s thousandlegs moved like the shadowy cilia of some huge anemone, each individual limb stirring up clouds of sand.
Drifting.…
He felt worldground beneath him dip an inch, rippling as its plates shifted, then stabilize as it went over a little ridge and adjusted to the water’s new depth. The whole process fascinated him, and he often sat at the edge of the world and watched oceanbottom flow away below.
Drifting.…
He smiled. Drifting, loose in the water, away from the world—it was a nightmare and a warning drilled into every child. When he stood on the edge of the world and looked out across the ocean, though, he saw only the beauty of the water, the knives of sunlight on the waves, or the shadows of amalanthi as they glided high above. The water had carried away his father eight years before, they said, but he found it hard to believe. How could anything so lovely hurt anyone? Now the waves seemed to call him, their foamy crests reaching like fingers to touch the soles of his bare feet. He edged back, laughing, toward drier plates.
Yondering Page 5