by John Brunner
“Took it as my pay after we put down the rebellion of the old Twenty-Seventh Fleet.”
Spartak remembered Father Erton’s accusation against the fighting order to which Vix had pledged himself; he swallowed dryness and was glad when the other left the subject where it lay.
“That’s not all I’ve picked up, by any means, though most of what I’ve had I’ve spent as fast as I got it. Matter of fact, I guess there may be some problems if you’ve fallen into the ways of these sexless monks you’ve kept so much company with.”
“You have a girl with you?” Spartak suggested.
“That’s right.”
“A slave?”
“I don’t like the tone of your voice,” Vix said sharply. “I don’t pay her regular wages, if that’s what you mean, but I keep her, feed her, clothe her—and she does the chores for me that a woman usually does for a man. But there are other reasons why a girl keeps company with a man without being enslaved. Have you forgotten, cooped up in your hermitage here?”
“Have you been together long?” Spartak inquired peaceably. He was tempted to correct Vix’s mistaken idea of the life led by his order, but after the row with Father Erton he felt he no longer held a brief to defend it.
“About five years altogether.” Vix brightened a little; they were in full sight of the transport terminus in the village. “Ah! From here we can get to the spaceport in under the hour.”
“There she is,” he exclaimed, throwing up a proud arm to point. “The smallest vessel in sight, but mine. Go over and stow your bags. I have to pay port dues and get clearance—they still observe all sorts of old-fashioned rules and regulations here.”
“Ah—this girl of yours,” Spartak ventured. “What’s her name, for when I meet her?”
“Vineta. Don’t worry—she knows it’s you coming back with me if anyone off this world does.”
Spartak shrugged and made off across the hard gray surface of the port. A great deal must have changed in the last few years, he reflected, for his brother to have secured a ship of his own. Governments of planets, great trading enterprises, and other corporate organizations had owned ships under the Empire; if these bodies were letting go of the items most indispensable to the continuance of galactic trade and communication, decay must have spread far and fast.
There was one exception to the list of ship-owners he’d mentally made: pirates sometimes claimed to own their ships absolutely. But he preferred not to linger on that idea.
He came close to the ship now. The access ladder was down; awkwardly he clambered to the top, his bags swinging. He rapped on the door of the lock, thinking: twenty thousand years! It is incredible!
When no one opened to him, he tested the manual lock release. It opened the door for him.
He frowned. It was unlike Vix to risk leaving the ship thus. But if he’d done it, perhaps it was to comply with some regulations such as he’d mentioned—or else this girl of his felt safe on her own. He climbed inside and called aloud. “Ah—Vineta? Are you there?”
But there was no one in any of the accessible compartments of the vessel: control cabin, living quarters, sleeping quarters, even the sanitary facilities were all empty.
He was standing, puzzled, in the control room when Vix came stamping aboard, and forestalled the redhead’s questions with a curt sentence.
“She wasn’t here when I arrived.”
“What? Vineta! Vineta!”
The harsh sound reverberated in the hollow hull. No answer came. Vix set to searching, as Spartak had just done, and came back moments later with his face a mask of fury.
“Gone!” he roared. “After all I’ve done for her, to walk out like this—take to her heels without even clearing out her gear! The little baggage! The little radiation-spawned sweet-tongued—”
“Vix,” Spartak said very softly, “are you altogether surprised?”
“What do you mean by that?” the redhead blasted.
“I remember from—from back home. The way you used to treat your women sooner or later turned them against you. And the life you’ve been leading isn’t the sort which would make you any more gentle.”
“So you think she just waited till my back was turned and ran for it?”
“Not exactly. But Annanworld had quite a reputation. Isn’t it possible that she decided she was tired of a roving life? She’ll never have been to Asconel, probably never stopped on any single world with you for more than a short stay—”
“What are you talking like this for? You never even saw the girl!” Vix wiped away sweat that has started on his forehead. “Ach! Go stow your gear in the lower cabin—that was hers, and some of her things are still there. I’m going to ask the port authorities what became of her, and fetch her back by her hair if I have to!”
He gave his half-brother a final withering glare. “Well, move. Or would you rather I left her behind, because it might embarrass you to have my mistress here in such a confined space? Is that why you’re trying to talk me into thinking it’s my fault? If she was going to run off she could have done it on a dozen other worlds without waiting for this previous favorite of yours!”
Spartak said nothing, but picked up his bags and made his way to the lower cabin as directed.
VI
A FROWN of self-directed anger pulling his brows into deep furrows over his nose, Spartak glanced around the lower cabin, barely taking in the pathetic few belongings which bore witness to the occupancy of it by the girl Vineta. He had not meant to spark an argument with Vix; it was simply that ten years on Annanworld had accustomed him to going straight to the point in the interests of exposing the truth, and he had largely forgotten how to use tact. He had been shorn of most of his false conceptions of himself, and was glad to have lost them. But it made no odds that Vix had almost certainly treated his girl the same as he had always treated women—even beating her occasionally. To have told him that she had probably grown tired of him and run off was a stupid error.
Sighing, he cleared away the miscellaneous junk disposed on the shelves and in the drawers. Without his at first realizing, they made a picture to him: a kind of implied portrait of their owner. This curiously shaped seashell, from some planet where the mollusca had a copper-based metabolism to judge by the bluish sheen of the lining; this necklet of rock crystal, pink and blue and yellow; this solido of two smiling elderly folk—her parents, possibly?
It wasn’t until he came to tall closets in the far corner and found half a dozen costumes hanging there, together with a small stringed instrument which he did not recognize, that he checked and started to think seriously about the conclusions he ought to draw. Even then he went ahead with what he had originally intended—changing clothes, putting aside the brown robe of his order in favor of garments not worn since his arrival on Annanworld, but still a fair fit to his body, whose leanness had remained constant since his late adolescence.
There was a reminder in that stringed instrument of his own mother, who had been a wandering singer and teacher. It was the means of getting a living. Surely that, and the clothing, would not have been left behind, no matter how eager she was to escape Vix and lose herself on Annanworld? And it was still less likely that she should have abandoned small souvenir items, like the solido, which were no burden to carry and presumably held emotional significance for her.
Maybe she went aground to buy something, he told himself at last, marveling how sluggish his mind had been made by the annoyance his disagreement with Vix had caused. I must tell Vix not to do anything rash—
In that instant, when he stood with one leg in his old but serviceable breeches of Vellian silk, the ship’s gravity went on, and within seconds he felt the surging of the drive. This was not the slickly smooth operation of a large liner, elaborately maintained for the passengers’ comfort—like the only other vessels in which he had ever flown space. It was the jarring violence of a scoutship stripped for action, without frills, and seemed to vibrate all the way into his belly, trigge
ring a reflex nausea.
He resisted it in near-panic, thinking what foul company Vix would be if he worked out for himself, many systems distant, what Spartak had just deduced from the clothing still in the cabin.
He struggled out into the corridor, and as he turned from sliding shut the cabin door, caught a glimpse of movement at the foot of the companionway leading up to the control room. It was too brief, and the drive-induced nausea was now too strong, for him to get a clear view of the person who had gone by, but the obvious deduction was that Vineta was aboard after all.
He had no time to work out where she might have been hiding; he was completely unfamiliar with this design of ship, and if Vix hadn’t found her she must have concealed herself very thoroughly. Or else Vix himself wasn’t yet aware of all the nooks and crannies in his prized new possession.…
No, rational thought was beyond him at the moment. Wait till the drive settled down to free-space operation—that would be soon enough to solve the riddle.
He was on the point of returning to his cabin when he heard the cry.
“Spa-ar-tak!”
And the drive went off.
The shock was like a dash of cold water, clearing the fog from his brain. With reflex speed he made for the companionway, scrambling up it with the agility of a Sirian ape.
The shock was renewed as soon as he saw what was happening in the control room. It was no girl that he had glimpsed passing this way. It was a man, huge and bulky as a Thanis bull, his hair wild, his body cased in crude leather harness and his feet in steel-tipped boots, who now was wrestling chest-to-chest with the tough but far smaller Vix, overbearing the redhead in a crushing embrace.
Vix tried to butt him on the nose, failed as the attacker jerked his head back, lost his balance to one of the steel-tipped boots as it cracked against his ankle, and went slamming down to the floor. He had had no time to draw his sidearms, obviously—perhaps he’d mistaken the sound of the stranger’s approach for Spartak’s—but he’d done well in the first instance, for a short sword lay at the foot of the control board: his assailant’s, logically, which he had somehow contrived to dash from his grip.
Horrified, Spartak saw the two antagonists crash to their full length, saw the stranger break Vix’s grasp on his right wrist and force his hand closer and closer to the redhead’s throat. Wild pleading showed in the green eyes, but there was no breath available for him to call for aid again.
To renounce his oath so soon? To pick up the sword from the floor and drive it into the stranger’s back? It could be done, but—
And then he remembered, as clearly as if he were hearing it in present time, the voice of one of his earliest tutors on Annanworld. “Always bear in mind that the need for violence is an illusion. If it seems that violence is unavoidable, what this means is that you’ve left the problem too late before starting to tackle it.”
Spartak dodged the struggling men and made for the control board. As he scanned the totally unfamiliar switches, he heard a sobbing cry from Vix—“Spartak, Spartak, he’s going to strangle me!”
Time seemed to plod by for him, while racing at top speed for his brother. But at last he thought he had it. He put one hand on the back of the pilot chair, and with the other slammed a switch over past its neutral point to the opposite extreme of its traverse.
Instantly he went head over heels. But he was prepared for this; in effect, he fell to the ceiling like a gymnast turning a somersault, and landed on his feet with a jar that shook him clear to the hips. The universe rolled insanely around him, and through a swirling mist of giddiness he saw that what he had intended had indeed come about. Locked in their muscle-straining embrace, Vix and the unknown had crashed ten feet to the ceiling as the gravity reversed, and now Vix was on top—and breaking free! For the force of the upside-down fall had completely stunned the stranger.
Spartak reached out, clutching Vix by the loose baldric on which he normally slung his energy-gun, and reversed the gravity once more, restoring its normal direction. The attacker slammed to the floor again while he and Vix fell rather less awkwardly; this time, he moved the switch with careful slowness, not exceeding a quarter-gravity till he felt his soles touch the floor.
And then he said, “Who is he?”
“I—I—” Vix put his hands to his temples and pressed, breathing in enormous sobbing gasps. “What did you do?”
“I put the gravity over to full negative.”
“But—” Vix began to recover. “But—how? Do you know these ships, then?”
“No, I’ve never seen one before. But it followed logically. There’s always an automatic gravity compensator on a starship, for high-gee maneuvering in normal space, and it seemed reasonable to expect a manual over-ride on a vessel like this which might get damaged during combat.”
“You mean you just took a chance on it, while he was throttling the life out of me?” Vix exploded.
Clearly the redhead had suffered one of the worst frights of his life. Spartak hesitated.
“Why didn’t you just pick up his sword and run him through with it?” Vix blasted on.
“Ah—well, if I’d done that,” Spartak countered in the calmest tone he could manage, “he wouldn’t have been able to tell us who he is and why he set on you. As it is, here he’s no more than stunned, and you’re alive to ask him the right questions.”
“I guess so,” Vix agreed sullenly, and gave the dazed attacker a prod in the ribs with his foot. “I look forward to beating some answers out of him, at that. Here, I’l put some lashings on him before he wakes up.”
He started to a corner chest in search of ropes.
“I don’t think you’ll have to beat the information out,” Spartak ventured. “I have some stuff with me which will probably make him talk a lot faster than that.”
“Such as what?” Vix found a length of braided leather and a short flexible chain, and started to bind the man’s limbs.
“I—uh—brought some medical things I thought might come in handy,” Spartak said, swallowing hard. Ever since his childhood, fighting and violence had physically upset him, and the glee in Vix’s voice as he proposed torturing the man to make him talk had picked up the backwash of the nausea from the drive and redoubled it. “I’ll go fetch it right away!”
But first, he told himself, he’d better take a dose of something to calm his own stomach.
He was at the door of the lower cabin, fumbling to open the sliding panel, when he felt the knocking beneath his feet.
Astonished, he stared down at the flooring of featureless metal plates. The knocking came again, more vigorously, and his eyes suddenly spotted a small cluster of bright new scratches at one end of the plate on which he stood.
“By the moons of Argus!” he exploded, and dropped to his knees to lever up the plate and push it aside.
In the compartment beneath him lay the missing Vineta, a crude cloth gag in her mouth, her clothing torn and a huge bruise discoloring the soft olive skin of her right cheek. She was small and slender, but even so her assailant had had to cram her by main force into the tiny space under the floor.
Frantically he lifted her out and set her on her feet; she stood for a second holding on to him, shaking out her space-black hair, then seemed to recover a little and let go of his arm. He made to remove the gag, but she shook her head and tore it out herself.
“Are you Vix’s brother?” she whispered. Her voice was pitifully hoarse.
“Yes—yes, I’m Spartak.”
“Is he—?”
“He’s all right. He’s up in the control room tying up the man who attacked him—and you too, presumably. How did it happen?”
“He had a message sent from the port controller to say he was some sort of official.” Vineta swallowed painfully. “And Vix had told me that on Annanworld they had lots of regulations left over from Imperial days, which we’d have to comply with or be delayed in leaving … so I let him come aboard.”
She passed a weary hand ove
r her forehead and then touched the bruise on her cheek, wincing. “Thank you for letting me out,” she whispered. “I was so afraid …”
And she turned to hurry in search of Vix.
Spartak watched her go. The rips in her costume exposed much more of her tight, firm body than he cared to see, and a completely irrational envy overcame him against his will, at the thought of the endless succession of beautiful women Vix had enjoyed and abandoned. Contrary to the assumption Vix had made, his order on Annanworld didn’t demand celibacy, and even Father Erton had kept up an association with a woman in the same specialization as himself, which had endured for almost thirty years. But his own two or three attempts to form such a relationship had foundered on his shyness and his reluctance to detach himself from his studies.
Now, without warning, he found he was wistful, as if he had left some very important part out of his life.
VII
THE LAST thing he expected to find when he returned to the control room clutching his large black medical case was a full-blown shouting match. But he heard it even before he came in. Vix was bellowing at the girl.
“You realize he could have killed me? You just let him in—opened the lock for him and let him in! You didn’t keep a gun on him, or anything sensible like that—oh no, you wouldn’t have thought of it!”
“But you told me yourself we had to.…!” The answer dissolved on a high note which foreshadowed tears.
“What conceivable reason could the controller have to send someone aboard before I got back?” Vix thundered. “I ought to take the hide off you!”
Spartak pushed the door aside, and Vineta ran into him blindly, making headlong for the privacy of the lower cabin. He caught her with his free hand, and spoke sharply to Vix.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself! Just because you’ve been scared white, that’s no reason to take it out on her. She’s had a worse shock than you have—look at that bruise on her! And you know where I found her? Folded up like an embryo in a tiny hole under the floor of the lower corridor! Here,” he added in a gentler tone to the girl, looking for a place to set down his medical case. “I’ll put something on the bruise and give you a pill to calm your nerves.”