by J. J. Keller
Reigo switched the visor in his suit’s helmet to infra-red. Na’Athril and Ro’Orrin appeared as faint-colored blobs on a scaffolding branch. A web-work of repair stretched over the damaged part of the array, and already much of the missing cable had been replaced. He watched as Na’Athril hooked a long tool from its back with one tentacle. The suit made the dexterous tentacles clumsy, and the tool drifted away. The morran reared, neck extending, leaving only one foot on the gantry, as it stretched to reach the dropped tool. The foot disconnected and the morran drifted away from the ship, twisting helplessly, a thin cable trailing behind it.
“Na’Athril’s in trouble,” Reigo told Ogonaovan.
Ogonaovan looked up, and fiddled with his visor. “Ye Gads! Na’Athril, where’s yer bloody safety cable?”
Na’Athril’s safety cable wasn’t attached to the ship, and the welding tool it had caught had activated, the energy beam causing the morran to drift away.
Ogonaovan roared over the radio. “Na’Athril, turn that fuckin’ welder the other way ’round!”
The morran drifted out of the Nimrod’s shadow, and Phlygema’s harsh light caught the little spidery shape trailing from its thread. Reigo heard the morran’s scream through the transmitter in his suit and saw the tool dropped. He heard Ogonaovan telling the morran, with much florid language, to adjust the photomitigator level in its visor. His eyes scoured the outside of the ship in desperation as the morran floated toward the tail, impotent in the sunlight, limbs thrashing.
Reigo leapt away from the half-mended crater and tore off across the hull, feet hammering. “Fix the damage!” he told Ogonaovan.
“Reigo, don’t be a dick ’ead,” the engineer replied.
His mother’s voice. “Reigo, explain yourself. Time is running out.”
“Mother, the morran’s in trouble.”
“Reigo, you are running toward the stern. I have a radio communication blind spot there. You are going out of range! Reigo stop!”
The Nimrod’s computer’s signal disappeared.
The morran’s safety cable was yards away and still drifting. Reigo concentrated on running. It was easy to misplace one’s feet in this weightless gait. He hurdled protrusions he hardly saw in the starlight, relying only on instinct to tell him the magnets under his feet would bring him back down and not leave him to Na’Athril’s fate as he raced like a flea along the flank of the Nimrod with its wings and cables towering into the shadow above him.
His suit’s power meter read low. He was nearing the great tail column, constituting half the Nimrod’s length, where hydrogen was fused and the energy channeled to the propulsion funnel at its far end. As he leaped forward to catch the cable, he grabbed one of the great flared cooling spines that extended from the rear of the habitable part of the ship. His fingers closed on the cable. The morran’s momentum dragged him. He slid along the spine, wrapping his free arm around and pressing the soles of his boots against it, and pulled back. The morran stopped drifting. Reigo snapped the hook on the end of the cable to his belt and began to pull it in. He sweated in his suit, not daring to risk using both arms lest he lose his grip on the spine. At last his hand found the morran’s tool belt and he pulled Na’Athril in.
Reigo switched between channels on his communications radio. “Na’Athril?” He couldn’t make out anything through the visor. The morran wasn’t moving. He slid back down the spine and anchored himself to the hull with his boots while he secured Na’Athril to his back with the safety cable. Twenty minutes maximum, Tiorné had said. He began to run back toward the prow.
“Reigo!” snapped his mother’s thought as soon as he was back in radio range.
“I’ve retrieved the morran. I’m coming back.”
“I need to brake now, Reigo!” Tiorné said.
“I am coming, Mother!” Lactic acid burned in his muscles as he stamped back the way he’d come. The electromagnetic boots felt like lead, and his suit had shut off heating to conserve power, the perspiration on his back beginning to chill him. He flexed his fingers inside his insulated gloves as he passed the point of impact where they had been working. It could not be much farther now.
“Reigo!” repeated his mother.
“I’m here!”
A helmet appeared from the airlock cavity. A sweating, beefy face was inside it. “All right, you li’l wanker!” Ogonaovan swiveled to look at the morran, encumbered by the bulk of his suit. “Na’Athril? Thought you was a goner.” The man thrust out a huge gloved hand and pulled Reigo and the morran into the airlock. The door closed, and air flooded the compartment. Reigo felt the morran grow heavier in his arms as gravity normalized. The traces of carbon dioxide frost on Ogonaovan’s visor vanished.
Hectar ran through the inner airlock door to stand before Reigo. His mouth was opening and shutting, his finger waving up and down as though a scorpion was attached to the end of it. Spit landed on Reigo’s visor.
“Oh, fuck off, Hectar!” Ogonaovan said over the radio in Reigo’s ear. “Reigo, put Na’Athril down quickly!”
Even as he pulled off his helmet after depositing the morran on the floor, Reigo heard the Nimrod’s engines over Hectar’s piercing nasal voice. “What were you doing out there? The tachyon array still isn’t working, and Tiorné says the ship needs to brake!”
Ogonaovan slumped back on his buttocks, yanked off his helmet, and wiped his brow on the back of his glove. He pulled at Na’Athril, a mass of trailing appendages bound in insulated lagging. Reigo was still breathing hard from his exertions as they maneuvered the morran onto its back, the tentacles of the tail and head not moving at all.
“Shut up, Hectar!” Ogonaovan answered. “I think this morran’s stopped breathing.”
Ogonaovan eased Na’Athril’s head back on its thin neck, shading his eyes to see through the visor.
“It’s only a morran!” Hectar blustered. “What are you doing? You’re not qualified to administer medical treatment!” He turned to Aspera. “Get Doctor Ceril!”
Ogonaovan tore open the morran’s suit, revealing the dull silvery-blue fur of the chest, and disconnected the helmet from the neck seal. He dropped the helmet to one side, tilting Na’Athril’s head up and thumbing open the lid of one eye. The gold-flecked iris reached almost to the corner, but the pupil was contracted into a narrow, vertical slit.
“Light madness,” Ogonaovan diagnosed. “Na’Athril’s had a seizure of some sort.” He probed at the cleft of the upper lip with his fingers. The gums were a strong blue color, but the skin around the muzzle was blistered--sunburned.
Ogonaovan levered the jaws apart. Reigo stared as he closed his lips on the morran’s muzzle and exhaled into its mouth. Na’Athril’s chest rose fractionally.
“Here.” Someone else pushed past Hectar and came to kneel on the floor upon scrawny knees engulfed by a purple robe. The leper--Naral.
“You aren’t qualified either!” Hectar shouted, but no one paid him any heed.
The stranger rammed the morran’s sternum hard with the heel of one hand. Ogonaovan forced air into Na’Athril’s lungs again, and this time the body on the floor jumped and retched. The limbs and tentacles contorted and Na’Athril twisted violently. One tentacle lashed Reigo’s cheek and knocked him backward against the corridor wall. The stranger placed his plastic-gloved hand on the morran’s forehead and the fit quickly abated.
Ogonaovan stared at the man. “Well, I never...”
Aspera and Ceril arrived at a run. Ceril saw the recovered morran struggling on the floor and halted, straightening his tunic. “Well, it would seem my services aren’t required after all.”
Ogonaovan got back into his chair and lifted Na’Athril onto his lap. “Come on, little ’un.” He stroked the morran’s neck as he moved off into the corridor. “Let’s get you fixed up with some of my special brew.”
Hectar glared at Ogonaovan’s back as the mechanic left. He spared Reigo a furtive glance, before turning and heading toward the bridge. No doubt he was going to file a
report and speak to Tiorné to make it look like the incident had been Ogonaovan’s fault.
Aspera went after Hectar, and Ceril shrugged and grimaced. He left Reigo alone with Naral.
“Thank you for helping with the morran,” Reigo said.
A benign smile flew across the leper’s distorted face as he made eye contact. Reigo tried to ignore the revulsion he felt. “You are not as other men. You see men equally. Morrans too.” Naral tilted his head in the direction Ogonaovan had gone. The movement dislodged flaky skin into his steri-suit. Reigo quelled a shudder. “That is mental transcendence not often seen in one so young.”
Reigo stared at him. “What are you talking about?”
“Lazarus, too, sees all men are equal, and morrans. Their bodies may be frailer, but that matters not to Him for the life that will come next.”
Reigo shook his head. “That does not sound like Steel and Flame to me. There cannot be any life beyond the death of the body, for all that the mind is compartments of solvated ions. So the Pagan Atheist said.”
Naral smiled, although on his face it resembled more a grimace. “Ah. The Pagan Atheist. Three books where twenty-four should stand.”
“You are not making any sense.”
“Sense will come, with time. Lazarus leads the willing from the darkness with His revealing light. Once you have seen His most holy light, your eyes will be opened.” Naral cocked his head to one side in a whimsical manner. “Come into the light, why not?”
“Light?”
“Perhaps, with time, you will come to see it is not me who is diseased.”
Naral’s face was intense in the gloom of the corridor, the pallid skin almost luminous. Reigo stepped away. Something about the leper unsettled him.
“Reigo!”
Reigo turned to the voice with a start. Tiorné stood in the corridor, a dark silhouette, the Nimrod’s interface bolt gleaming in the center of her forehead like a third eye. “Reigo! Get to the bridge, now!”
* * * *
On the bridge, Tiorné sat at the table. “Sit down, Reigo.”
Naral’s words turned over in Reigo’s head, and it had begun to dawn on him that some semblance of sense was in the leper’s assertion--there were only three books in the Teachings of the Pagan Atheist. Where were the other books? He had been familiar with the Teachings his whole life. Tiorné had seen to it he read from the book regularly. Why had he never thought of that before? Why had that question never occurred to him? Reigo sat slowly, but his eyes were locked with his mother’s in a mutiny.
“When I give you an order, Reigo, I expect you, as a member of this ship’s crew, and first and foremost as my son, to obey it!”
“Na’Athril was in trouble.” Reigo kept his voice calm, his expression neutral. Nothing aroused Tiorné’s disgust so much as lack of control over emotions.
“It’s a morran. ’Twould be of little consequence were it lost. The other morrans can breed more. You wasted time trying to rescue this worthless morran. You fail to appreciate the severity of the situation. If you had stayed out there any longer, the ship would have gone out of braking range! I would have been unable to change the course to intercept the planet! Already I am having to brake the ship to the very limits of its capacity! You know I cannot pull away with you on the outside of this vessel!”
A deep groan ran through the ship, so low it barely entered the threshold of hearing, and Reigo sensed it in his guts more than with his ears. Tiorné’s interface bolt flickered.
Reigo look straight into his mother’s dark, rebuking eyes. “But you would pull away, with a morran stranded outside?”
“That I would. And it dissatisfies me deeply that you cannot grasp the pertinence of such an action in the given situation. Steel and Flame, Reigo!”
Reigo looked down at the desktop where his fingers lay on the edge of its monogram. Naral’s words from the corridor flashed before him. Perhaps men of the Blood were more intelligent than men not of the Blood, but they were still worth the same. Perhaps morrans were not the same as humans in terms of how they felt and thought, but that still didn’t make them jetsam in his eyes.
“Reigo, are you paying attention to what I am saying?” Tiorné slapped her palm down on the table surface.
“Yes!” Reigo jerked up his head to meet his mother’s gaze. “Your words smack of injustice and discrimination!”
Tiorné started to her feet. “What has got into you, Reigo?”
Reigo spoke to his mother in a sibilant snarl. “Tiorné of the Nimrod is renowned for her fairness, her lack of prejudice! That is not what I see here today!”
“Reigo!” Tiorné brought both hands down hard on the table. “There is no merchant fairer than me. I will give any man a chance, and I will give morrans a chance too, for I see that they have their uses, unlike the opinion some men take. But it is naive to pretend everything is of equal worth, for it is not! Low-caste men will never be equal to men of the Blood, and morrans will never be equal to men, and the greatest loyalty of all men is not only to their Blood, but to their own blood, and you are my blood and are worth more than morrans, or indeed any other man on this ship! If you interpret the Teachings to mean that the personal worth, to you, of all men must be the same, then all you do is devalue those who truly deserve your loyalty, and reduce everything to the lowest common denominator! Steel and Flame, Reigo!”
“Steel and Flame! Steel and Flame? What is Steel and Flame?” Reigo seized a copy of The Teachings of the Pagan Atheist from the side of the bridge table and shook it in his mother’s face. “A quote from a book with half of it missing?”
Tiorné’s mouth was a stern line. “Do not blaspheme in here. Do not dare disrespect the Teachings.”
“There are only three books in this volume, Mother! You’ve been making me read it all my life, so I should know! There’s the Pagan Atheist, then the book of Epsilon, then the book of Pilgrennon! Pilgrennon is the alpha and the Pagan Atheist is the omega. There should be twenty-one other prophets in reverse order between them, but there’s only Epsilon. Why’s that? Where are the others?” Reigo threw the book down on the table.
Tiorné stared at the book a moment before speaking. “That is an abridged book. Very few books are important enough to make into a printed form, and including all the volumes would make it too large.”
“So, what, they’ve been censored?”
“Quite the contrary. I have read them all myself and it makes perfect sense that they not be included. They do little to advance beyond anything the Pagan Atheist already wrote. They are of course all freely available, just not in printed form, because including them would be redundant.”
Reigo tried to steady his breathing. “I can read them?”
“Of course. You may read them any time you like. They are recorded in the ship’s memory.”
Reigo leaned back against his chair and exhaled.
Tiorné spoke gently. “For an adolescent like yourself, black and white are very clear to see. But with age and experience you will begin to see the shades of gray between.”
Reigo still felt that an injustice had been done, but he could find no more ammunition for his argument. This was always the way with his mother. How could she, stonehearted Tiorné, understand how Reigo felt about the sanctity of life? How could she possibly know how he felt about morrans and morality? Ensconced in her Steel and Flame rationale with her ship’s computer wired into her mind, she was as remote from compassion and humanity as the machine itself.
Chapter 3
Reigo headed aft to his cabin. The corridors felt dark, although he couldn’t see that the lighting had been altered.
There was a distant rattling of metal-on-metal too. He found himself wandering from the course he’d intended to take and searching for the source of the sound. It grew louder and, as he drew closer, he began to make out noises--the noises of men--grunts and stridulous breathing, and words uttered in low voices. The inner door to one of the airlocks was standing open and stark
light flooded in through the window.
The rattling, as it turned out, originated from one of the anchoring ladders, and it was rattling because Hectar’s back was against it in order to gain some leverage for his thrusting against Aspera. His hair had disengaged from its usual pigtail and obscured his face. He had his feet braced against the floor and his hands gripping one of the rungs, for he was at least a foot shorter than Aspera and impaired by his lack of height and excess of girth. Aspera’s legs were wrapped around his waist, her knee hooked through the ladder and her hands gripping his shoulders, spine arched backward away from him, head tilted back and eyes closed in an expression of snarling, savage delight. That brilliant sunlight illuminated everything, their naked bodies obscene in its all-revealing glare.
Reigo stared at them in disgusted fascination. Everyone on the Nimrod knew they’d been having an affair for some time, but they never did it anywhere they might be seen, and they both denied it emphatically when confronted. Aspera, although her own origins were presumably ignominious, was embarrassed by Hectar. Hectar, although he’d occasionally claimed to be the offspring of a castellan’s daughter, was still half Blood. Nobody on the ship mentioned it, the same as they never mentioned that Ogonaovan had no Blood at all, or asked about Aspera or Ceril’s past. That was the Nimrod. Tiorné didn’t judge people on anything other than their fitness for purpose.
He found himself unable to avert his attention from them as Hectar’s thrusting became slower, more powerful. Aspera took her hands off his shoulders and reached behind to another ladder, pushing herself into him. The shape of her breasts and nipples showed stark against the glare from the window, quivering sharply with each of Hectar’s movements. Hectar took a hand away from the ladder to trace down the contours of her chest and abdomen, into the hollow of her navel and down over her groin and buttocks. Aspera made a low, hissing gurgle that faded into a murmur. A bloody throbbing started in Reigo’s crotch.
Reigo forced himself to look away and crept off to his cabin. A sudden fatigue overcame him there, and he fell on his bed and lay for half an hour, passing back and forth across the threshold of consciousness.