Hooded Swan, Book I: Halcyon Drift Read online

  It was late at night—going on for midnight—and the owner threw me out before I’d really had my fill of sitting in his chair. Once precipitated from the warmth, I was also hurled right back into my problem. Where could I go and what could I do?

  I had to go looking for Herault. There was no one else I might look for on the whole planet, and certainly no one else in the New York environs. It was the obvious place to go—the only chance, really. But I was reluctant, because I knew there was probably no Herault to be found. Ageless and indestructible, he’d seemed, when I’d last seen him—seven years ago. But he’d been old. Under Earth conditions—particularly New York conditions—it’s rare in this day and age for a man to reach sixty, and Herault must have been past that ten years ago. The poisons of Earth accumulate in all of its children, no matter how strong or indomitable they might be. And the mental stress of living beyond our understanding puts a strain on all of our hearts. Herault might have been working still even on the last day of his life. But he couldn’t live forever.

  I didn’t want to go knocking on Herault’s door to be answered by a stranger, who didn’t give a damn whether Herault was dead or not, to be told that no one of that name lived there. But what else could I do?

  I was ten miles from Herault’s place, and I’d already walked three or four from the spacefield. But I dragged my feet along in the right direction somehow. I wasn’t in the best of health after two years on Lapthorn’s Grave (I named the world on the spur of the moment), and that was a long ten miles. It took me over three hours, and by the time I arrived I was frozen stiff and dead tired.

  There was no sign of life. Herault had lived above his place of work, a shop where he repaired various instruments associated with the proper working of vehicles of all kinds—cars, ships, even flipjets. The shop should have been full of machine tools, workbenches, bits and pieces of work in progress, odds and ends, and the smell of oil. It wasn’t. I got in by opening the unlocked door. The place had been cleared out some time before. All that remained was the tiny office partitioned off in one corner of the shop. I switched on the light in the office and went through the drawers in the desk.

  Nothing. Cleaned out to the last shred of paper. Herault was dead, all right. He’d been obliterated. Wiped off the face of the Earth.

  The chair in the office was hinged so that it could be stretched into a makeshift bed. Herault had lived very closely with his work. He didn’t sleep down here because he had to—his own bed was just upstairs. He used to sleep here because—occasionally—he wanted to. To be on top of the job at every moment. I’d slept here sometimes, too, but not for nearly twenty years. I extended the frame and lay down upon it.

  I was too cold to be comfortable, but in time I contrived to drift off to sleep.

  CHAPTER TWO

  When I woke up in the morning, somebody was standing over me.

  “What time is it?” I asked, trying to focus my eyes.

  “Eleven o”clock,” he replied, and added, ‘Mr. Grainger.”

  I sat up and looked at him hard. He was young—maybe twenty or twenty-one. He was calm and relaxed. If he’d been surprised to find me, he’d overcome his surprise by now. And he knew my name.

  “People who know me,” I said, “call me Grainger. Ergo, you don’t know me. So how do you know who I am?”

  “The last time I saw you I called you Mr. Grainger.”

  Seven years ago. Last time I saw Herault. There was a kid in the shop. His grandson. Parents jumped for Penaflor chasing the guy’s job. Herault didn’t like the guy, hadn’t got on any too well with his daughter. But the kid was a different matter. Herault had taken the kid. The kid had grown up.

  “Johnny,” I said. “I remember you. Don’t recall your father’s name, though.”

  “Socoro,” he said. “I’m Johnny Socoro.” And he stuck out his hand. I shook it slowly.

  “Grandfather’s dead,” he added.

  “I know,” I told him, letting my eyes move around the empty shop.

  “I’d have liked to keep on running the place, but I didn’t have a chance. I knew about the technical side of things, but not about the business end. And things were getting rough even before he died. No work in the port, so nothing to repair. I closed up the shop and got a job with the lines before it was too late.”

  “You’re a spacer, then?”

  “No. They don’t train upship personnel here. I just look after them while they sit in the bays. I’d like to go up, but the company doesn’t think much of the idea. They play pretty close to general policy. It’s a dead end but so is Earth. If you need any help in your ship I’d be grateful for anything you can offer.”

  “Haven’t got one,” I told him.

  “What happened?”

  “Went down in the Halcyon fringe a couple of years back. A ramrod picked me up a week or two ago. I’ve got nothing except a colossal debt and a few trinkets that belonged to my partner.”

  “You want some breakfast?”

  “Sure. Shouldn’t you be working, though?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing down. Dead time till the Abbenbruck comes in from Templar tomorrow.”

  I was surprised. Dead time in New York was new to me. That meant that the lines were using somewhere else as a centre for operations. Penaflor or Valerius, I supposed. I could still remember the time when Earth was the centre of the human universe and all civilisation emanated from her. And I didn’t think of myself as old yet. The times, they change at a remarkable pace. New Rome had built her interstellar law, New Alexandria had cornered the market in alien knowledge, information and data storage. It was inevitable that the spacelines would emigrate eventually to the new worlds. The hot hub stars where power was plentiful had resulted in a heavy industrial belt stretching from Penaflor to Anselm. Earth was nowhere, except where the people were. And that too had changed, in a ceaseless outward flow.

  Earth just wasn’t needed any more. She had been on the decline for a hundred years. She’d nurtured the space age in her womb for over a millennium, and breast-fed the young worlds for another five centuries. But overnight, she was obsolete and dying.

  Breakfast was good.

  “It’s all recon stuff. I’m sorry,” Johnny said.

  “Until last night I lived on alien salad and gruel,” I replied. “It tastes great.”

  “I don’t pull in much down at the port,” he explained.

  “Go to Penaflor,” I said. “If Herault taught you, you’ll know enough to make a mark there. For all their reputation, those heavy metal worlds aren’t tough. Full of soft people living on easy money. You’ll get a good ship, too, if you want to fly.”

  “Like I said, I don’t pull in much. They won’t let me work a passage, and I sure as hell can’t afford a ticket.”

  “You could do it in short hops. Philo, Adlai, Valerius, or something like that. Get a scratch job on each world until you have the price of a jump to the next. It gets a lot easier as you go inward. The first step is the only difficult one.”

  “I thought of that too.”

  “And?”

  “I’m still thinking.”

  “OK, Johnny,” I said, feeling that I’d been bothering the kid a bit. “I’m sorry. There’s no rush. Do it in your own time and your own way.” Then I thought I might sound patronising, so I shut up and concentrated on eating.

  “So what are you going to do now?” he asked, as he brought the coffee.

  “I don’t know,” I confessed. “I came out here because it was the only place I knew to come to.”

  “You don’t know anyone else in the port?”

  “If I do, they’re only transients, and I wouldn’t know where to find them. If I were to hang around the big bars, I’d probably recognise a few people. But they’d only be faces and names. I don’t really know anybody.”

  “Why’d you drop ship here, instead of the inner wheel? You’d have been a hell of a lot better off. Didn’t you realise what it would be like here?”
/>   “I knew that I was going the wrong way from New Rome,” I admitted. “But they offered me a lift here. And I was in the same spot you are. No cash, no prospects. Then there’s Lapthorn’s things. I had some vague idea about dropping them into his old ancestral home.”

  “What things?”

  “Just junk. But Mommy and Daddy might like to have them, now his letters don’t arrive any more. I guess they might even be harbouring lingering hopes that he’s still alive. I’d better see them.”

  “Do you know where they are?”

  “I never met them, but he told me enough about them to make them easy to find. Two parents and one sister, still thriving last time I heard. Solidly embedded in the good old Illinois dirt. Big house and land, I believe. Last of the recon barons or something. I can get his number easily enough and tell them I have news of their long-lost-but-not-forgotten.”

  “You don’t sound too happy about it.”

  “Happy? I’m delirious. What exactly am I supposed to say? Can you send me the fare to your family estate so that I can give you the full details of the Javelin disaster and give you a description of the rock where your son’s bones lie mouldering? Hell, even the cross won’t be upright now I’m not there to keep standing it up.”

  “There’s a phone downstairs,” said the kid.

  It was a problem that had to be faced eventually. But not now. I’d feel a real bastard asking Lapthorn senior for a touch so I could deliver his son’s effects.

  You’re too poor to be proud, inserted the wind.

  I know it, I replied, and I must have murmured, or moved my lips, because Johnny said, “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I talk to myself.” I lapsed into silence again, thinking about the phone, Lapthorn senior and expensive train rides.

  “You mentioned a colossal debt,” said Johnny. “How’d you collect that?”

  “An outfit called the Caradoc Company charged me for their services in rescuing me from the rock where I went down. They took me to New Rome and got me clobbered for twenty thousand.”

  “Hell!” Johnny was suitably impressed. You can judge the social standing of a man even now by the sums of money he reacts to. “How did they decide on that figure?”

  I shrugged. “Probably measured what they thought my gratitude ought to stretch to.”

  “Caradoc’s the firm with the fleet in the Drift, isn’t it?” said the kid. “Trying to fish for the Lost Star.”

  Inspiration descended upon me like a ton of bricks. The Lost Star bleep was the Lorelei of deep-space. It could be heard all over the Halcyon Drift and quite some way outside it, but because of the warping of space inside the Drift, its source couldn’t be located. It had lured one or two good men to an untimely death in the dark nebula. A lot of ships whose captains had no sense and time to spare had gone in after her. But there were no maps of the Drift, there were dust-clouds in abundance, and the further in you went, the more distorted was the space in which you were flying. The core was virtually unreachable at supercee velocities. A heavily shielded, slow-moving ship with a sound mass-relaxation drive might reach her, if it could find her. But nothing else stood a chance. The distortion-lesions would tear a fast ship apart.

  Ships did work in the outer Drift—but they were usually Khormon ships. But now Caradoc had a fleet of ramrods in there. So that was why Axel Cyran had been in such a bad way. The Drift had worn his nerves down and the silly fool had capped it all by homing in on the wrong bleep. I could see how he might be less than happy to find that his Lost Star was really a castaway pirate. Which didn’t make that twenty thousand any less of a dirty trick, though.

  “They’ve got to be mad,” I said. “They’ll lose ships and men, and even if they stood a cat in hell’s chance of finding the Lost Star, which they don’t, they’d never recover their investment.”

  “Her cargo’s reported to be very valuable.”

  “Rumoured, not reported. Any ship that’s been bleeping for eighty years is bound to attract loose talk and romantic notions about treasure hoards. And no cargo could be worth the risk.”

  “The Lost Star attracted a lot of attention a year ago, when New Alexandria offered an open contract on her cargo. Nobody would go near her, and there was a bit of a stir because someone tried to get the Drift declared illegal territory to stop anyone trying. Anyhow, Caradoc is looking for privileges out in the inner wheel, and with so much competition they have to attract attention. They’re greedy, and they reckon raising the Lost Star is worth a few months of ramrod time. They’ve got about thirty in there, mapping the core from all angles, and trying to narrow down the places where the Lost Star might be.”

  “Well,” I said, “I still think it’s crazy. It’s just a waste of resources, and I hope Caradoc regrets it. They’ll pull out as soon as they start losing men. The crews will only take so much—I’m damn sure I wouldn’t spend the best years of my life Driftshuttling for some mindless, fat-arsed company boss.”

  We paused in the discussion while he cleared away the breakfast remains. He looked a hell of a lot better now than he had at thirteen. He’d been a small, thin child with a sharp, not very pleasant face. He was a comfortable medium size now, with much smoother features. There were no alien shadows in his eyes, though. No remains of emotional impacts. Untouched by unhuman hand, without a doubt. I thought maybe he’d be a good engineer one day. He might be able to take Lapthorn’s place if I ever did get another ship. He looked vaguely like a Lapthorn type—vulnerable to alien contact, but that might just be because he hadn’t yet had the need or opportunity to throw up a shield.

  “The phone,” he reminded me, after a couple of minutes had passed and I’d made no move.

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “The phone.” I got up slowly and reluctantly. “Mr. Grainger...,” he said.

  “Grainger,” I corrected.

  “Don’t you have a first name?”

  “No.”

  “Well, Grainger then....” He paused again.

  “What d”you want?”

  “When you’ve seen your partner’s family. If you come back here, that is. I’d like to know what you intend to do. We seem to be pretty much in the same boat, and if you’re going to work your way into the hub, I’d like to come with you, if that’s all right with you.”

  “It might be,” I said. “But don’t bet on it”

  He thanked me kindly.

  “Like I said,” I emphasised, “Don’t bet on it. I haven’t made up my mind what I’m going to do with myself yet. It might not include taking over where your last nurse left off.” He looked put out, but not completely disheartened.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was a woman who answered the phone—middle-aged but not letting the years get too tight a hold on her. She was alive and alert—something positive just in the manner with which she switched on the screen and looked me up and down.

  “Yes?” Her voice was sharp, and sounded to me somewhat hostile—though perhaps that was my imagination.

  I decided that a little cowardice in the face of the enemy might be discreet.

  “I’d like to speak to Mr. William Lapthorn, if that’s possible,” I said.

  “What about?” she asked, awkwardly.

  “It’s a personal matter,” I said uncomfortably. I knew that beating about the bush might look bad, but I couldn’t think how else to handle the old lady.

  “And who are you?”

  “My name’s Grainger.”

  A deathly silence. Her face didn’t change. But she knew my name. It was only my imagination again, I think, but her eyes seemed to come closer, searching me out to devour me. I brought myself under control with an abrupt effort of will, and elected to act naturally.

  “It’s about your son,” I told her calmly. “We worked together.” I hoped that the use of the past tense wouldn’t send her into hysterics. But she wasn’t the hysterical type.

  “Tell me what you have to tell,” she said.

  “Is your husband
there, Mrs. Lapthorn?” I persisted.

  “Tell me.”

  “Two years ago,” I said, trying not to sound too cold and mechanical, “The Javelin crashed in the Halcyon Drift. Your son died in the crash. I was picked up only a matter of days ago. I reached Earth yesterday. I have a few of your son’s things.”

  The woman edged sideways on the screen. Someone else was there, easing her away so that he could get a look at me. But his own face didn’t appear on my screen for a moment or two. It was obviously Lapthorn’s father. The facial similarity was slight but recognisable, in the chin and mouth mostly. His eyes were completely different from his son’s, though. Lapthorn’s eyes had been the product of a thousand alien suns.

  “Where are you?” asked William Lapthorn quietly. It struck me suddenly that he wasn’t old enough to be my father. Lapthorn had come straight from the cradle to the Fire-Eater, but I’d worked a number of years for Herault. I’d never been quite so conscious of that age difference until now.

  “I’m in New York spaceport.”

  “Can you get out here?”

  Hesitation.

  “No money?”

  “No money,” I agreed. It was surprisingly easy. I didn’t even have to ask him.

  “I’ll get some to you via the nearest pickup.”

  “I’m in the North Area,” I said.

  “What’s your full name?”

  “Grainger. That’s all there is. They have identification on file—there’ll be no trouble. Tell them I dropped yesterday, then they can check with the port authority.”

  “Come out as fast as you can,” he said. “We can’t talk on the phone.” The last remark, I think, was directed as much to his wife as to me.

  “All right, Mr. Lapthorn,” I said. “Thank you.” He cut the connection midway through my thanks.

  Johnny had fetched my packsack in from the office while I was phoning. He handed it to me.