Hooded Swan, Book I: Halcyon Drift

by Brian Stableford

  “Get the money?” he asked.

  “I got the money,” I replied, a fraction sourly. I tapped him on the shoulder with my open palm. “Thanks for the breakfast, Johnny. I’ll be back when I’ve seen the old man.”

  “You can stay as long as you like,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said quietly.

  “See you, Grainger,” he called, as I went out of the door. I raised my hand in a half wave, half salute.

  The pickup was just up the street and around the corner. The place was deserted. Even though it was late morning, I felt uncomfortably alone in a city which had once been all activity. Maybe, I thought, the whole North Area stays in bed when Johnny’s line doesn’t have a ship down.

  At the pickup I dialled through to the Illinois cybernet and announced my identity. The New York net checked and confirmed my identity, and the two decided after a momentary conference that I really was entitled to be collecting money on the Lapthorn account. A credit card, punched and banded, oozed out of a slot and flopped down onto the counter. I inspected it, but couldn’t make head nor tail of the code. That sort of thing tends to change very quickly.

  I tapped out a query on the keyboard, asking how much the card was carrying. The printout said six hundred. That was high, unless the unitary cost index had been untied from pay levels in the state. I asked, and it hadn’t. Two and two still made four, and six hundred was enough to take me a lot further than Illinois. I could flipjet to Chicago and ride a train to Lapthorn’s for a tenth of it.

  I suppose it seemed logical to the elder Lapthorn that he should be free with his petty cash, but his excessive charity left me unmoved. What’s he trying to buy? I wondered.

  He can’t buy you for a lousy six hundred, said the wind, with something that sounded remarkably like a sneer. You’re worth twenty thousand.

  And two hundred a month to the insurance company to make sure I don’t get off too lightly, I supplied. I wonder what sort of a policy they got. No one would insure me to go deep-spacing on the rim. But that’s irrelevant. Six hundred is a lot of loose change.

  The guy knows you’re down and out. He knows you were his son’s soulmate. He thinks you’ve made a pilgrimage to Earth just to deliver the news and the mortal remains. So should he leave you without the price of a meal? He’s trying to help you.

  Thanks, I said. You’re a great comfort to a spaceman in distress.

  Any time, the wind assured me.

  I reflected that the wind was getting to sound like me. He was digging in deeper all the time. I wondered about the day when I became more him than me, but he didn’t comment on the matter, leaving it to my imagination.

  From the pickup to the inland jet field was only a matter of a couple of miles, but I called a taxi. I figured that if I owed William Lapthorn anything for his generous handout, it was all due speed in getting to him.

  On the flipjet, I began to wonder about the people I was going to see. What sort of parents could blend halves of themselves into a Lapthorn? He was an odd combination of vulnerability and indestructibility. What sort of home could have generated his phenomenal appetite for strangeness and unhumanity?

  I hadn’t seen enough of Lapthorn’s parents to make any sensible judgement. The mother austere, the father efficient—superficial estimates only. Perhaps, I thought, they had been too efficient and therefore distant—starved the atmosphere of uncertainty and anticipation. I visualised the young Lapthorn living an automated existence, anchored in an endless static present, with no perspective in either memory or forethought. Had a debt built up that he had needed to discharge? Maybe so—but if that had been the whole truth, the star-worlds would have burned him up within weeks. What made Lapthorn last so long? He was twenty—Johnny Socoro’s age—when the Fire-Eater first touched down on alien dirt. He was thirty-five when the Javelin went down. Fifteen years is a lot of time to be constantly inhaling alien air and alien thought. I was a good deal older and made of hard stone, but it was a wonder that I survived. How much more of a wonder that Lapthorn was still unhurt, unconquered and undiminished.

  Could the same be said of his parents? Unhurt, unconquered, undiminished? Were they just the same now as the day he left for deep-space? Seventeen years might not even have touched them in a stable, mechanical environment. For all the character they’d add to themselves in seventeen blind years, they might have waved goodbye the day before yesterday.

  All this wasn’t wholly romance. It had always seemed to me that this was the way the rich chose to live—in timeless isolation, protected from all harm by the mechanisation of their homes and their lives. They atrophied, mentally and socially, because their brains were no longer used.

  You’re afraid of these people.

  I’m not afraid. They can’t hurt me. But I don’t like them. I can’t.

  You haven’t even seen them.

  It doesn’t matter precisely who or what they are. I don’t like them. I don’t like what I am to them, or what they are to me. We’re related, through Lapthorn, and that’s a farce. Because the Lapthorn I know and the Lapthorn they know are two completely different people. Because Lapthorn and I are two completely different people. We don’t fit—none of us. Not even if the connecting piece was still here and alive could I like Lapthorn’s parents or they like me. It’s futile.

  You aren’t exactly a capable entity, are you, Grainger? Blocked by confusion and lack of understanding at every mental step. Can’t you even perform a simple task like returning your partner’s junk to its rightful resting place? Is this your own personal failing or is it a characteristic of your race?

  All right, I conceded, there are fields in which I’m not very capable. So what? I imagine that my peculiar incapacities are mine and mine only, but I can’t speak for the human race. Their capabilities or lack of them are their own affair.

  Why don’t you use a first name, Grainger?

  Because I haven’t got one.

  I know you don’t know of one. I know your unknown mother and father didn’t leave you one as a parting gift. But that’s not the only way to come by names, is it? Why not give yourself a name? Do yourself a favour.

  I don’t need another name.

  You don’t want another name. It would demean you to use one. It might seem as though you had an identity, as though you were a member of the human race, as though you really existed instead of being a legend of the rim stars.

  So suddenly you’re an expert on human psychology.

  I’m an expert on you, Grainger, and I’m learning more all the time. I’m right inside you. I’m with you every decision you take. I’m riding your every thought, and feeling everything you feel. This isn’t the most comfortable of minds to live in, my friend. I would appreciate it greatly if you could get it sorted out a little. Come to terms with yourself and the universe.

  If I’d known you wanted to reform me, I replied, I’d never have let you in. You’re stuck with me, and if you don’t like it, then it’s too bad. I don’t give a damn whether or not my mind is your idea of the Garden of Eden. If you don’t like riding my thoughts, get off.

  I’m with you till you die. You know that.

  Well, you’re with the me you know and apparently don’t think much of. You can’t change me. You can live in my mind, but you can’t alter it. So forget it. I don’t need your help to run my affairs. You’re welcome to stay, just so long as you keep quiet.

  I’m not sure that I can comply with that, mine host. I think you occasionally need reminding when you act the fool. And I think you might need my help one day.

  I’ll do without, thanks.

  We’ll see.

  Do I consult you as if you were an oracle, or do we take a democratic vote? I remarked.

  He observed the sarcasm, and shut up.

  There was a slightly foul taste in my mouth, caused by too much thinking. Silent conversation with the wind was engrossing. I roused myself to take note of my surroundings and came back to the land of the not-yet-dead. />
  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Lapthorn estate was just beyond Aurora. The train stopped at a tiny town that looked just as deserted as the spaceport. All of Earth seemed to have gone to sleep.

  There was a car waiting at the station, with a small sandy-haired guy driving. He didn’t introduce himself but I assumed he must be the hired hand and that the Lapthorns were all at home, anxiously preparing for the arrival of the next best thing to the prodigal son. The car was a nice, newly sprayed skyrider that was perfectly smooth on her cushion. A lot of these fancy floating jobs are no real improvement on groundhogs so far as jumping and jerking are concerned, but some poor engineer had put his heart into making this one behave as the advertising material said it would. That sort of thing had been Herault’s claim to a meaningful existence.

  The house was big and the grounds suitably impressive. The grandeur of empty land should have been losing its status and becoming a fraction ridiculous now the starward flow had reduced the population by seventy or eighty percent, but a bit of empty Earth was still worth noticing. The grass would be Andean, of course, and the trees from Australia or Alaska. Ninety-nine percent of the north-eastern states had been under concrete at one time with nothing living free except flies, rats and humans, plus other minor vermin. All this was reclaimed, like the food which had made the Lapthorn family its fortune in the first place.

  The interior décor was fabulous, and the polite atmosphere you could feel between your fingers. It was ten minutes before anyone said anything to me which wasn’t a socially respectable synthetic. Even then we took time getting down to the real heart of the matter.

  There were four of us seated in a circle. I’d been offered food and drink and—for the sake of convenience—met the offers with a blanket refusal. I’d been welcomed and thanked about three times. So now we reached the guts of the story. Lapthorn junior was dead and I wasn’t. How, why, and what the hell else was there?

  Mrs. Lapthorn sat on my left, leaning forward like a predatory bird waiting to snatch up the words as they fell. William Lapthorn sat opposite, looking majestically relaxed. The Lapthorn lips were held in a straight line—not taut or limp, just restrained from evidencing any reaction. Eve Lapthorn—the sister—sat to my right, waiting without having yet decided what she was going to do or say. I had the odd sensation that she was the only living thing in the room.

  I told them about my first meeting with Michael Lapthorn—it was a continual effort to refer to him by his first name. I’d rarely called him by any name at all—you don’t have to when you work that closely together—but I’d always thought of him by his surname. Herault, of course, had first brought us together. I had some money, he had some money. Separately, we amounted to nothing. Together, we added up to a cheap spaceship, which was what we both wanted. We hadn’t bothered about such things as compatibility—in such a manner are marriages of convenience made.

  I told them briefly of our years in space. I made nothing whatsoever of the gulf which existed between Lapthorn’s nature and mine, nor that between Lapthorn’s needs and ambitions and mine. They’d have formed their own ideas about that from his letters, and the only thing I knew about those was that there were a lot of them. I didn’t want to shatter any illusions, whatever they might be.

  I told them how the Javelin had run into trouble because of dust carrying either distorted space or radiation out from the Drift, while we were en route for Hallsthammer from Adadict, and had been drawn back into the Drift with the cloud. I didn’t tell them that the idiot who’d plotted a course which shaved the Drift so fine was me, trying to economise on fuel. Nor did I point out that if it hadn’t been for Lapthorn we wouldn’t have been short of fuel, nor even in the Drift region. I gave them the pure facts and let them assign their own blame.

  I told them how the controls had seized once we were into the Drift, and how I’d been unable to slow her down until the distortion had ripped our shield away and bled our power so that we didn’t have a hope of getting out again. I described our one last drop—how I’d searched for a star and headed into the system with all the optimism I could muster, and how I’d contrived to put her down on a world which just might sustain life. I couldn’t convey to them just how lucky I had been, because they were concentrating their attention on how unlucky Lapthorn had been. Somehow, he’d kept the piledriver alive despite the drain. I had impulse barely sufficient to get the Javelin down. But not in one piece. We had nowhere near the blast required to balance her and set her down feather-light. We went in hard and low. I tried to straighten her out, but it was no good. One end or the other was bound to take the impact and break. It was the back end. Michael Lapthorn died.

  Amen.

  Silence from the audience. No comment until they’d mulled it over. Mother didn’t trust me and didn’t like me. It was my fault, by her standards. I’d been entrusted with the life of her son and I’d been careless enough to break her toy. Too bad. Father, on the other hand, accepted the inevitability of events. At all costs show no hostility to poor Grainger, because it wouldn’t be sporting. No blame to be laid at all. Keep that mouth straight. Eve was just a little lost. Perhaps having trouble remembering dear Michael. She was very young when he left home. A little guilty, maybe, because she couldn’t remember him. She thought all this ought to mean more to her, but it didn’t quite fit in.

  All this I knew before anyone opened his mouth.

  “You’re not at all as I expected you to be,” said the old man, eventually. OK, I thought, avoid the subject altogether. Talk about me instead, if you’d rather.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “In Michael’s letters you seem to be quite a different man.”

  “I’ve spent the last two years alone on a dead rock,” I reminded him.

  “It goes deeper than that,” he said. “You don’t seem to be the kind of man my son would idolise.”

  Idolise? I wondered what on Earth Lapthorn had written about me.

  “You were a kind of hero, as far as my son was concerned,” he clarified. It was news to me.

  “You mean his early letters,” I said dubiously. “He was young then....”

  “Oh, no,” the elder Lapthorn interrupted me. “All his letters. In fifteen years, his opinion didn’t change. He always thought the same about you, wrote about you in the same way. His letters didn’t change.”

  His letters didn’t change. Fifteen years of deep-space—of filling up with new knowledge, new experience, new feeling, and his letters home didn’t change. I swear that the Lapthorn who died on that rock wasn’t the Lapthorn that left home. By no means. And now his father sits in his unchanging armchair in his unchanging drawing-room and tells me that he couldn’t tell the difference.

  “I don’t understand,” I said pointlessly.

  “It must have been rough,” said Eve Lapthorn. “After the ship went down.”

  “The wind kept me company,” I said—softly, whimsically.

  “You seem to be all right now, though,” the older woman supplied.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “It wasn’t too bad—I was a bit hungry, but I’m over that now.” Sheer courage and nobility shone out of me. Oh, it was nothing, really. You can say that, once it’s a couple of weeks behind you and you’re sitting in someone’s drawing room.

  “The things you brought back,” said the old woman. “Where are they?”

  “In my packsack,” I said. “I left it in the hall.” I got up, but they made me sit down again and Eve brought it in, opening it as she crossed the room. All she found on top was my dirty shirt. I stood up and took it from her.

  I took out Lapthorn’s personal possessions from the bottom of the bag.

  There was his wristwatch, his identity papers and his sunglasses. That ended the utility section. There were four bits of rock—each uniquely patterned but quite worthless; a pair of wings from a big arthropoid; and some small items of alien jewellery—presents from various people.

  “Is this all?” s
aid his father.

  What did you expect, I almost said, holiday snapshots? Lapthorn didn’t need crude images—his memories were alive. This was just junk.

  “We don’t carry much aboard ship,” I tried to explain. “It’s not like a liner where they have space to spare and fuel to waste. These were just personal items—just for the sake of having a few personal possessions. I’m sorry there’s nothing here of even sentimental value, but your son just didn’t have anything concrete that he valued that much.”

  “What do you mean by nothing concrete?” asked Eve.

  “I mean he carried things in his mind,” I said. Inadequately. How could I explain?

  “We have his letters,” said his mother. Implying: we could have done without you. You needn’t have bothered.

  “That’s right,” said the old man. “The letters contain much more meaning than we could hope to find in the contents of his pockets. Would you like to see them?”

  Who are you trying to kid? I thought. You wouldn’t understand a meaning if it were six feet tall. But his offer surprised me. Admitted to the inner sanctum of Lapthorn family feeling as regards the late lamented.

  “No, thank you,” I said. Mother hadn’t liked the idea either. She looked pleased when I refused.

  The family affair was winding down. I could feel it. We had all done our duty by the dead man. What should be said to assuage social responsibility had been said, and there was nothing left. My presence would soon become a burden, but they wouldn’t think of letting me leave yet. After all (they said) they wanted a chance to get to know me. We had so much to talk about. Like hell. But they didn’t even see that it was nonsense.

  Feeling trapped, I stayed for dinner. It was, at least, another meal which wouldn’t put a strain on my pocket.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I intended to leave as soon as possible the next day. I took a shower before breakfast. My clothes had been cleaned while I slept. I grabbed the packsack as soon as we’d eaten, bid a hurried farewell and bolted for the gate. The steam-roller tactics shook the elder Lapthorns but Eve was quick to volunteer to drive me to the station. I could hardly refuse.