Hooded Swan, Book I: Halcyon Drift Read online

  Even in here, the voice of the wind can reach me. There isn’t any door to keep it out, but even if there were, the voice would find a way. I have difficulty getting to sleep, but it isn’t wholly the fault of the wind. It’s the hunger and the timelessness. I’d sleep all the time if I could, but I’m saturated far too easily, and sleep is never easy to find if you’re already brimful of it.

  When I drift away from consciousness, in search of elusive sleep, I think about people.

  There was Herault, back on Earth, before Lapthorn and I sealed our unlikely alliance and bought the Fire-Eater with our pooled funds. I was very young then, and Herault was old. He must be dead by now. It was seven years since I’d last been home to see him. Lapthorn had relented once or twice before that and let me make a landfall on home, but he hated Earth like poison, and I’d let him divorce me from the planet as well, eventually. But even Lapthorn had liked Herault. He’d been a good man to work for and he’d taught me a great deal about spaceships and spacemen. I learned to fly the Fire-Eater by feel—to use her sensor web as if it were my own eyes and my own body—but it was Herault who talked me into that feel, who knew how to acquire it and make sure that I did. They don’t fly like that these days, because they don’t think it’s necessary. The flying schools teach them to trust their machines, not to become a part of them. It works—in clear space, on planned runs. But not in the outer rim, and out in the galactic centre. That’s why civilisation is the inner rim, and not the heart itself.

  Herault taught Lapthorn the drive as well. A dimension-skipper is supposed to be easy to handle, but Herault didn’t let Lapthorn think he could get away without knowing everything there was to know. If it hadn’t been for Herault, we’d never have got into space. If it hadn’t been for Herault, we’d never have lasted as long as we had. We’d never even have made it to this forsaken rock on the rim of nowhere. I’m grateful to Herault for all he did and tried to do. I’m sorry it ended up like this, and so would Herault be, if he knew.

  More people.

  On Peniel there was a girl called Myane. On Rocholt there was Dorcas, on Alhagayel there was Joan, on Doreniken there was Ophinia. Not an impressive list. Not a meaningful list any more. There were no others worth remembering, and even these are not the most cherished of memories. I could forget them without difficulty. Lapthorn could have remembered half a hundred, the smell and the taste of every one. He could have gorged himself on the delicacies of his remembrance. But they just didn’t matter enough to me.

  Alachakh was my friend. He was a Khormon trader. I saved his life once, on Veneto. He saved Lapthorn’s, on Beckhofen. Lapthorn saved mine, on San Calogero. I’m not sure that things happened in that order. We were around together a lot, Alachakh and I. Not because we flew together, or because we chased each other’s cargoes, but because we thought the same way. Alachakh and his engineer—Cuvio—were a counterpart to Lapthorn and myself. His ship—the Hymnia—was a sleek Khormon craft. I bought the Javelin because she was the closest human ship to the Hymnia. Alachakh is one of the few men I’ve ever liked, and one of the few men Lapthorn held in high regard. Even the mavericks need to talk to each other, once now and again. Even the mavericks need to like somebody that they’d make an effort for, to have someone they could rely on for help.

  I’m awake again now, and I shouldn’t be. It’s still dark and I have no right to be waking up in the middle of the night. Did something wake me? Perhaps it was Lapthorn’s cross falling over again. The wind is here and it’s plucking at my face, running chilly fingers across my eyes. I won’t listen to it. I only want to go back to sleep.

  You’ve got to listen, it’s saying. I can reach you and you know it. I can touch you whenever I want. I’m all the way inside of you.

  It’s not true. Nothing ever reaches me. There’s no alien world, no alien being, no alien feeling, can leave a mark in my mind.

  I can.

  Did I really hear something? Shall I get up and look around? Maybe it’s an animal or an insect. Was, I mean. It’s gone now.

  I’m not gone, says the whispering wind. I’m with you now. I knew you’d have to let me in, and you have. I’m not wind any more, I’m a voice in your head. I’m all here. You can’t get away from me now, not even if you do run back to the stars. I’m part of you now, all wrapped up in your mind. You can’t ever be free of me.

  I’m going back to sleep.

  People.

  Benwyn, Quivira, Emerich, Rothgar. Rothgar, now—it’s worth thinking about Rothgar for a while. An easy man to remember. Thought he was a great big man inside his thin frame. Hard drinker. Meant trouble for most of the ships which took him on because few of their captains could handle him and even fewer could stand to have him around. He knew all the engines and must have worked them on well over a hundred ships—big liners, p-shifters, ramrods, even Khormon dredgers and Gallacellan ships. He was a genius in his way. But what’s the point of genius if you haven’t the temperament to apply it? He was the best man to have underneath you that any pilot could find. He put the power where it was needed, gave you thrust when you asked for it, made the drive do the impossible to get you through a tough spot. But he was condemned nevertheless to spending half his life bumming around spaceports touting for work. He was his own man, though. Nobody owned Rothgar, except for a little bit at a time. Nobody could scare him. Nobody could make him do anything he didn’t want to do. Rothgar was the most unyielding man I ever knew.

  Places.

  A million of them. Little bits of big worlds. Single moments of odd places. One day later in choosing a path through the galaxy, one day later in setting down on each world, and I’d see the whole lot differently. They’d be different moments, different little bits of the same worlds. Nobody ever gets to know the star-worlds, no matter how much you absorb. They touch you, but only with the tips of your fingers. You deal in tiny fragments, not in whole entities. They touched me lightest of all. I have memories, but they’re faded, like old photographs. Unreal. Lapthorn’s memories would be as bright as white stars—he’d be forever taking them out and polishing them up, in case he needed one in a hurry. Every one would be a jewel—a living light. What must it have been to be Lapthorn? To see so clearly, feel so deeply.

  Was it, I wonder, a tragedy that I lived and Lapthorn died?

  Should the ship have come down head first instead of belly-flopped? Would the broken drive have killed him anyway? Was it my fault that Lapthorn died? Could I have crashed in such a fashion that Lapthorn lived, even if it meant that I died? Should I have, if I could?

  But Lapthorn must have died here anyway, in time. He would have drained away, into its drabness and its perpetual misery. He needed the stimulation of the worlds whose selves he tried to absorb into his own. He needed light of a special kind, did Lapthorn. To him, this world would have become a limitless darkness in a very short time. Maybe it will get me that way too—bore me to death, kill me with a dismal everpresence.

  It’s the wind again.

  Please go away and let me sleep. It’s so insistent tonight, as though it has a point to make. Perhaps it is getting through to me after all. Perhaps it has invaded my mind. No man can withstand pressure forever. Maybe even I will give in, in the end.

  It’s not a matter of giving in. I’m with you, but I’m real. It’s the real world that we’re in.

  Maybe so, my friend, I reply. Perhaps, now that you’re here, I should just accept the fact. But you’ve not treated me kindly.

  I had to find a way in, the wind replies. It’s never easy.

  Sometimes I’ll swear it understands every thought I think. A clever wind, this. An educated one. Needing my attention, like a little child. But why? Why do you want to be a part of me? Why do you want to live in my mind?

  I need you. I need somewhere to be. I need someone to hold me. I need a host.

  You’re marooned here as well, I suppose;

  Yes.

  How come?

  Others died here.


  Not humans. This world’s unmarked on my charts. Undiscovered, unvisited. We’re right on the edge of the Halcyon Drift. A bad place. It must have been the Drift that brought us down. It was either radiation or distortion, and there’s plenty of both in the Drift. But no human ship has ever tried to map the Drift. If you came here in a ship, it was an alien.

  It was an alien, the wind confesses.

  I realise finally that I’m not alone, that the voice belongs to another sentient being. It’s not the wind at all—not really. It’s an alien mind parasite, and I’m its new host. I don’t know whether to be glad or sad.

  I thought you didn’t want me here. I thought you kept blowing down the cross on Lapthorn’s grave.

  I had to get inside you, the wind explains. I had to make you take notice.

  And what are you, now you’re inside me? Are you the soul that Lapthorn said I hadn’t got? Are you the voice of my conscience? What are you, alien wind? What are you made of?

  I’m made of you. I am you. But I won’t bother you. Talk to you, perhaps—help you, if I can. But I’m not going to cause you any trouble.

  In case I throw you out?

  You can’t throw me out. In case you become an unsuitable host. I have to live with you now, and you with me.

  It’s going on for morning now. The sun is coming up. For all my lack of sleep, I don’t feel tired. I think I’ll get up and go outside.

  I feel better than I’ve felt for sometime, and I’m not sure why. Oddly enough, it isn’t because the wind throws up a wall between myself and loneliness. To tell the truth, I don’t care much either way about the wind. Maybe it will bother me, maybe it won’t. But it’s here now and there’s nothing I can do about it. But I don’t need the wind. I’m not Lapthorn. I’m adequate enough, all by myself.

  It’s a bright red morning. The sun sparkles shyly. Silver sky instead of grey. But the black slopes are just as dismal. Nothing changes them. There are little wisps of cloud wandering from east to west. And something shining, like a little star, is coming towards me.

  It’s a ship.

  I know now what woke me in the night. It was the ship going over, trying to get a fix on my bleep. And now they have it, and they’re coming down in the plain. I’m free.

  I’m going with you. For life.

  I don’t care. I’m going home.

  I’ll just go and stand up the cross that marks Lapthorn’s grave.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The ship that picked me up was a ramrod, the Ella Marita, owned by the Caradoc Company and skippered by a Penaflor Eurasian named Axel Cyran. I dare say that if you were to encounter Cyran in a good mood he would strike you as a reasonably ordinary, fairly decent kind of spaceman. I never got a chance to see his good side. Working for a cut-throat gang like Caradoc can ruin anybody.

  The Caradoc Company is one of a hundred or more trading combines with minor spacefleets, each one trying to organise, stabilise and monopolise some tiny fraction of the galaxy’s trade. At this time, flow from the rim to the inner wheel was building up into a flood and everyone with money wanted to ride in on the tide of prosperity. The hub worlds—particularly Penaflor, Valerius and New Alexandria—were interested in reliability and results. Like everybody else, Caradoc was trying to make a big name for itself. Many things stood in its way. One of them was the free traders—the thousand or so little ships which knew the ground, had made the contacts, and stubbornly refused to cooperate with the companies. Ergo, Caradoc didn’t like free traders. Most especially, they didn’t like the men from whom the free traders claimed to take their lead—the ones they talk most about. Including me.

  Cyran wasn’t pleased to see me. He seemed to think that I’d got in his way. He called me a bloody pirate and told me I’d wasted good company money luring his ship from its assigned mission to pick me up. I began to wonder exactly why he had picked me up, and I was half afraid he might throw me back.

  I expressed my sincere gratitude to the captain, and even apologised for putting him to so much bother. I refrained from asking any questions which he might see as impertinent—like what the hell was he doing in the Halcyon Drift anyway? I remained extremely unpopular. In the end, I decided I’d be better off talking to nobody, just sticking to my bunk and accepting the gruel they handed out with all the gratitude I could feign. The crew looked after me as well as they could, but Cyran really had it in for me and he was always on their necks. I could see that the captain had obviously had a very worrying time inside the Drift—who wouldn’t?—but I couldn’t really excuse his conduct on that basis. I’d have paid him gladly for all his trouble, but I hadn’t a sou. The stuff that I’d crammed into my packsack before going to meet the Ella Marita was all junk, and mostly Lapthorn’s junk at that—souvenirs and keepsakes. Even Lapthorn hadn’t had anything of value—you can’t cart a curio collection around in a starship—and what there was wouldn’t raise the price of a shirt in any port in the galaxy.

  I had plans to duck ship and fade away as soon as we touched the tarpol in the landing bay, wherever we were, but it didn’t work out that way. The ramrod’s base was Hallsthammer, and it was close enough for Cyran to be still seething when we set down. He still wanted a scapegoat for his bad trip and I was it. He had me arrested and transferred me to the p-shifter which the Caradoc fleet used for liaison with home base on Earth.

  The p-shifter took me to New Rome, and the Caradoc lawyers hauled me into court with a claim for compensation as a result of the Ella Marita’s detour to salvage me. News of my pickup must have travelled very fast, because I was a joke on New Rome practically before I touched down there. The idea of a salvage claim against a spaceman seemed funny to them. It wasn’t nearly so funny to me, especially when I had to watch the case go against me every inch of the way. The Law of New Rome sticks anywhere in the galaxy, no matter what the local law might be. In order to stick like that it has to be dependable and enforceable, and above all fair. The New Romans made no claim that their system had anything to do with justice—it was law and law only. But for the most part it protected the likes of us from the likes of them. The Ella Marita salvage case, however, was a clear-cut victory for them. A charge of twenty thousand was placed on the rescue, and an award made against any pay I might accumulate. I might have been flattered—nobody had ever suggested to me that my hide was worth anywhere near that amount—but for the first few days I was too sick. In addition, the Caradoc Company took out insurance against the recovery of their money and charged the premiums to me. Which meant that if I were lucky enough to live to be a hundred, Caradoc and the insurance company would divide every penny I made between them, and even if I died next week, Caradoc wouldn’t lose unless they murdered me.

  All this did not add up to a nice prospect. But at least while the p-shifter was on New Rome I got a little medical attention, and began to get back into some sort of reasonable shape. Alachakh heard I’d been picked up, and sent me a message of congratulation. Obviously he didn’t know about the legal tangle. News travels slowly on the rim.

  In the end, out of the kindness of their hearts, the Caradoc men let me ride on the p-shifter when it went back to Earth. All free, gratis and for nothing—a gesture of pure goodwill. One has to be grateful for small mercies.

  It might have been more sensible to wait until I could hitch a lift to Penaflor, where the commercial spacelines were mostly based and where the major shipyards were. But hitching rides on spaceships isn’t easy, and I’d have had to live on charity while I was on New Rome. At least Caradoc was willing to feed me gruel in return for their blood money. Besides which, I was so damned tired I only wanted to run home and hide. Earth was all the home I had. Maybe nobody there knew me, except old Herault, but it was where I’d started out from. It was where I was born (at least, I presume so—no reliable account of the incident survives, and it’s possible I was dumped there at an early age).

  In any case, I ended up back in New York spaceport. I had enough loose change in my pockets for
a couple of meals and a bus ride into the city, and that was about all. Not that there was much point in going to New York City proper—the port was practically a city in its own right, and if work was to be found, it would be here.

  Bearing in mind that even a condemned man was entitled to a hearty meal, I found a cheap hole on the north side of the port conurbation and rediscovered the delights of imitation food. It was my first almost-honest meal in two years, give or take a month, and recon or not it tasted beautiful compared to deep-space gruel and alien grass.

  After I’d invested time in pampering my stomach, I sat back to relax and indulge in a little harmless self-pity.

  That opened the door.

  It’s no good crying about it.

  I explained that I wasn’t crying. I am in no way a slave to my emotions. I told the wind that I was merely regretting the more unfortunate aspects of the situation, and thinking that things could be better.

  You’re a sham, Grainger, said the wind. You’re no man of steel. You feel, just like everybody else. You’re just ashamed to admit it.

  The wind hadn’t been around too long then, so it still made mistakes. It had made itself comfortable in my mind, but it hadn’t quite got acclimatised yet. It still didn’t know me, let alone understand me.

  Let me alone, I requested. End of argument. I decided at that time to think of it as “he” thereafter. It was not that either his voice or his manner was in any way masculine, it was simply that to call it ‘she” would have introduced sexual overtones to the presence that were completely unwarranted. The wind hadn’t told me anything about himself beyond the fact that he had been cast away on the Halcyon rock just as I had. I knew nothing about his nature or his history—only that he was with me for life and that he seemed to have every intention of treating his new home with the respect which any good home deserves. I’m told that children often talk to non-existent companions, but that they grow out of it. I sometimes wonder whether they just don’t grow out of telling other people about their companions.