Rhapsody in Black (5 page)

It was foggy.

It was always foggy on Attalus.

We had returned to the
Hooded Swan
with all due haste, arriving with a few minutes in hand of midnight. But there wasn't the slightest sign of Charlot or our precious guests. While we were attending to necessity and using a few rare hours of freedom to unbend our ship-clouded minds, Charlot had apparently taken it into his head to change the schedule.

‘Damn him!' I said.

‘He'll be along,' said delArco. ‘It's probably taking them longer than he figured to pack their bags.'

‘They can't own much,' I muttered. ‘They came away from the Splinters in a spaceship.'

‘We could go back to the port and have a drink,' said Johnny.

‘At midnight?' I said scornfully. ‘This isn't civilisation, you know.'

‘Well,' said Nick, ‘at least we know that Titus Charlot and his crowd can't be merrily socialising.'

‘More probably cleaning out the local bank,' I said humourlessly.

The prospect of a long wait was most unattractive. The crew of any spaceship might be as happy as skylarks zooming their pride and joy between the star-worlds, but when the ship is on
terra firma
they need time to savour real gravity and real air, and time to imbibe a ration of dirtside living. A starman is a creature of two worlds: out there and down here. Each has its mode of existence. Upship personnel tend to develop agoraphilia on a hop, and it takes a certain amount of downstairs routine to work it off. To be rushed around at breakneck speed and then left to hang about in the fog on the edge of the tarpol was nobody's idea of a joke.

By one o'clock (local) I was distinctly annoyed. I hadn't had any proper sleep for three days. The drug-induced ship cycle just isn't the same, somehow.

‘Where do you suppose they've gone to?' asked Eve.

‘We must have been over all the possibilities at least three times during the last hour,' I snarled. ‘Give it a rest. Talk about the weather, or something. On second thoughts, make it “or something”. I don't like the weather, either.'

‘The port officer's not there,' supplied Nick. ‘There's no light in the reception building. That's against regulations.'

‘So report him,' I suggested. ‘Hell, there are only two ships down, and
we
don't need a baby-sitter.'

‘We've had one every other landfall we've made,' he pointed out.

‘This is Attalus,' I reminded him. ‘There aren't any police here because there aren't any criminals. There's nothing for the criminals to live off. Besides which, nobody knows we're here. The last job was a publicity stunt, remember? It wasn't us the crowds were interested in, it was the
Lost Star
.'

‘We needed that police protection, though,' he said pensively.

‘Nobody's going to try to assassinate me here,' I assured him. ‘And you had nothing to worry about even on Hallsthammer. No one has anything against you.'

The boredom, of course, was solely responsible for the morbid vein of conversation. None of us really thought that anything untoward had happened to Charlot, or was about to happen to us.

‘He's coming,' said Johnny suddenly.

‘About time,' I said. ‘How many maniacs has he got with him?'

‘Can't tell. Fog.'

Charlot and his companions went directly to the ship, and we set out to join them. We met halfway across the tarpol.

‘Sorry,' said Charlot briefly. ‘They all wanted to go home, but they weren't sure that they ought to. It's been a long, hard argument'

He really did look somewhat fatigued. The peculiarities of the faithful had apparently been getting on his nerves somewhat.

There were seven people with him.

At first glance, they didn't look very much out of the ordinary. There wasn't a smile in sight, but it
was
the middle of an alien night. We didn't look happy either.

We loaded up without exchanging any pleasantries. In the interests of getting off the ground without further hanging about, even I gave them a hand with the baggage. There wasn't much as I'd predicted.

As we crammed them into the cabins, Titus Charlot identified them by name. I listened, and even learned how to tell them apart, though I wasn't particularly interested.

Rion Mavra himself was in no way distinguished. He was of medium height and complexion, with drab features. He looked to me like the perfect picture of a civil servant, although Charlot had described him as a politician. Judging by appearances, I decided that in all probability he was a failed diplomat without a future. At that time, however, I had no idea what kind of qualities it took to be a top man in the Splinters, or what shortcomings one could get away with.

Cyolus Capra, I remembered, was some sort of blood relative to the boss. He looked more alive than Mavra—insofar as any of them could have been said to look alive. I charitably put it down to the hour and the situation, but it later transpired that the corpse-like expressions were their natural attributes.

Cyclide, Mavra's wife, was a small, compact woman who had obviously seen better days and wasn't trying too hard to convince herself or anybody else that they were still around. She didn't look pushy enough to be the power behind her husband, or interested enough to have kept pace with him. The Church of the Exclusive Reward apparently had old-fashioned ideas about the place of women in society. Cyclide always seemed to be half a pace behind her husband.

The two other men, Pavel Coria, and something Khemis—whose first name I forget—looked counterfeit. By which I mean that they gave the appearance of being reasonable imitations of humankind without quite having the feel of the real thing. They reminded me vaguely of the way Lapthorn used to speak about the ‘faceless hordes' that populated the worlds of the core. ‘Human vermin' was another expression which he might have used. And Lapthorn, unlike me, was quite an admirer of his own species. I took an instant dislike to these two, and they never did the slightest thing which might tempt me to dispel it as an overly harsh first impression formed under unfortunate circumstances.

The remaining two females did not seem to be attached to Coria and/or Khemis, and neither did they lay claim to any relationship with the Mavra family. One of them was called Camilla, and was very young and very plain. Her existence seemed quite irrelevant, save that she occupied a certain amount of space.

Angelina, on the other hand, was just young enough, and far from plain. She was the only one of the seven who clearly showed symptoms of having been born and bred in a warren. Her skin was dead-white, and had an odd, lustrous quality which made it look silvery when illuminated obliquely. Her hair was very pale blonde, and also had a noticeable sheen. Her eyes were pale grey, and her lips bloodless. In addition, she had a fragility of frame and feature which made her ghostliness seem very appropriate and even beautiful. Very few people are actually suited to the appearance of etiolation, but Angelina was one of them. I found Angelina most definitely attractive.

It didn't strike me as particularly odd that Angelina was the only one whose aspect betrayed her origin. The cave-dwellers with whom I'd been associated in the past had all sported magnificent suntans and hair all colours of the rainbow. All courtesy of lamps, skin salves and bottled pigment, of course. It did occur to me, as I looked at Angelina, that Rhapsody didn't have the sort of culture which would go overboard on cosmetics—and, in fact, was extremely unlikely to be able to come by supplies of cosmetics. But Mavra and his friends had presumably been on-surface for some time, now, and would have been forced to adopt a fake suntan simply for protective purposes. They had presumably dyed their hair muddy brown in order to avoid standing out among the populace of their host planet.

Once I was in the cradle, preparing for the lift, I eliminated all thought of our human cargo and its place of origin from my consciousness. But the wear and tear of the previous trip, coupled with the highly unsatisfactory Attalus landfall, had left its calling card. I was unusually slow, and I could feel an edginess about my nervous state which was most definitely out of the ordinary. For the first time since I took control of the
Swan
I missed a transfer. I had a grossly inexperienced engineer underneath me, of course, but I really don't think it would have made any difference if it had been Rothgar. Johnny did nothing wrong—it was me who made the mistake. I was surprised, and extremely annoyed. I was, when all was said and done, the self-confessed best pilot in the known galaxy. (As good as I could be, at any rate.)

I caught the second transfer—just—and got the bird into a groove with a minimum of manoeuvring, but I could still feel my temper fraying. I'd been building up a current of resentment ever since the lift from New Alexandria, but it was that missed transfer which really set the edge on me. After all, I'd lately piloted a ship in and out of the heart of the Halcyon Drift at tremendous speed, without a mishap, and I couldn't be blamed for yielding a little to the legend of my own infallibility. It may seem strange that such a small thing could upset me so much, but I honestly think that if there was one single incident which could have sparked off the whole chain of events which followed in the caves of Rhapsody, then that was it. A fractional slip by mind and hand, and maybe three or four minutes lost forever.

We were well under way, and going very fast indeed—forty thou or more—when I finally abandoned her wholly to the groove and sank back into the cradle. I lifted the hood from my eyes, but didn't push it all the way back.

‘ETA?' asked Nick.

‘Three hours and a few minutes,' I told him. I couldn't be bothered giving him the standardised time. By standard it might be mid-afternoon, but as far as I was concerned it was still one o'clock in the morning plus thirty or forty standard minutes. Like most spacemen, I didn't use a wristwatch. If you keep standard time, it doesn't tell you anything, and if you keep local time you have to adjust the watch every time you make a drop. Lapthorn had carried one, and laboriously altered its time and setting every landfall, but I could never be bothered, Besides, Lapthorn had always been around so that I could ask him.

Eve came into the control room with Charlot. ‘All settled now,' she said. Neither she nor Charlot made any mention of the poor take-off. That didn't make me feel any better about it. A sarcastic comment would at least have allowed me to expend a little vitriol in a reply.

‘They're a peculiar crowd,' said Nick idly.

‘You can't expect them to act like tourists,' said Charlot. ‘They're exiles. They don't know what sort of a welcome or lack of it they're going back to. They've only my word. I think only Mavra believes there's anything actually to be gained. And the white girl, perhaps.'

‘Do the rest of the people on Rhapsody look like her?' asked Eve.

I interrupted with a brusque laugh. ‘Hardly,' I said. ‘Just as pale but as ugly as sin.'

I didn't look around, but I could imagine the sharp glance which Eve would have thrown in my direction.

‘They'll be pale,' said Charlot. ‘What else would you expect? Some members of the Church hierarchy might be able to get cosmetics, but I can't really think that they'd take much trouble over them. The Order of the Exclusive Reward is somewhat ascetic. Self-decoration would undoubtedly be frowned upon.'

Which didn't really add much to what I'd said.

‘Are they all members of the priesthood?' Nick wanted to know.

‘They're all members of the priestly
caste
,' replied Charlot. ‘None of them is actually ordained. But I don't believe the Church maintains a great many ordained ministers. The whole caste seems to bear a collective responsibility for the maintenance and dissemination of the dogma, but the actual part played by any one of them might be any of half a dozen things. Political, philosophical, clerical, or simply advisory.'

‘In other words,' I put in, ‘the Churchmen are a hereditary aristocracy who maintain their privilege by saying that God meant it to be that way. They have all the plum jobs and give all the orders.'

‘True enough,' said Charlot. ‘I'm not trying to make these people out to be any better than they are, so there's no need to be derisory. You're not scoring off me. I only want to deal with these people—to buy whatever they have to sell with whatever they want in return. I'm as critical of this type of faith as you are, but it's not going to advance my cause if I say so in your kind of terms. I'd be obliged if you would limit your insults and your mockery once we're landed, as well.'

‘I'll say what I like,' I said.

‘No doubt. But I'd appreciate it nevertheless if you didn't go out of your way to be unpleasant. And I'd be even more grateful if you could bring yourself to exercise a little self-restraint.'

The content of the words was sarcastic, but the tone in which they were delivered was not. Charlot was occasionally very difficult to fathom.

In the course of the trip Mavra and two of his companions—Capra and Khemis—appeared in the control room for a look around. If it had been up to me, I'd have locked them out, and I think Captain delArco was of the same mind. But Charlot was sparing no possible effort to make friends. They didn't ask questions and they didn't look impressed. They prowled around for a while, with the same hangdog expressions on their faces that they'd worn during embarkation. Eve spoke to them, and so did Charlot, but their attempts at communication met with blank-wall indifference. Capra answered, but flatly. Khemis merely grunted. Mavra made an effort, but it was obvious that he was keeping his opinions and his goodwill under strict guard. I didn't envy Charlot having to trade with such people.