The Fenris Device (13 page)

Prey mentality. Perfect armor. The ultimate defense. The
Varsovien
would have no switch for turning the Fenris device on. Would it have one for turning it off?

There's one way, said the wind. Just one way.

It's just not one, I told him. There has to be an easy way. Damn it, this thing's nothing more than a machine. It works with circuits and wires and networks and synapses just like any other machine. All we have to do is break one wire, one synapse. All we need is just one wrench in the right part of the works. Your way is just pure madness. .

Look, said the wind, without as much patience as I might have shown if the relative positions were reversed—that is to say, normal—this is a big ship. This is a very, very big ship. It may be a machine, but it is a machine on a scale you have never, ever, envisaged in all your life. Yes, it needs only one pair of wire cutters or one wrench. But we just don't have access to the right wire or the right works. The guys on the
Cicindel
are good, but hell, they're a million miles away from a ship they've never seen, talking to a linguistic incompetent. Sure, if we had three weeks or a month, we could get enough information to them. They could work things out. They could talk us through it. We could find the tools and the plans and we could do the work with pinpoint accuracy. But, Grainger, this ship is accelerating. In fifty minutes or less it is going to make tachyonic transfer and cut us off from the
Cicindel
. Maybe forever. Do you want to go to Andromeda? Do you want to take a million-mile bomb to Andromeda?

But what you're suggesting, I said, still bewildered, is blowing up the ship.

I'm proposing to do just what you want, said the wind. Cut the circuit. Stop the machine. Turn the Fenris device off and keep the
Varsovien
in normal space. As far as the people on the
Cicindel
—and as far as I myself—can see there is just one way to be sure of doing that in the time available and that is to burn out the brain that's coordinating the machine. They can tell me exactly how to do that from right here, and they can tell me exactly how much time we have in hand to get out of this room, off of this deck, and deep enough into the bowels of the ship so that we aren't burned out with it. Now is that or isn't it the only thing we can do?

What about Johnny? I said. What about the captain? Who's going to bring them back, if we only have standard ships? Are you going to go down in the
Cicindel
and get them out? Are you?

That, of course, was a silly question.

If necessary, he said, that's exactly what I'll do. What good are we going to be to Johnny and Nick if we're in a flying coffin on our way out of the galaxy? We have to take our problems one at a time, and the one we have at this time is: How do we get out of here? And there's only one way we know. Just one. Burn the brain and run like hell. As soon as the defense mechanism cuts out the
Cicindel
will come in and pick us up. They'll know exactly where we'll be. Then we can worry about another drop to Mormyr. Maybe Nick can bring the ship up. Maybe we can get the
Sister Swan
operational in time. Maybe the Gallacellans have a ship we can at least try it in. But first, we've got to be free to try it. We have to save ourselves first. You're arguing with the inevitable.

And I was, of course. There was no way of turning the Fenris device off—not just like that. In the time we had available, there was only one method—outright brutality. We bad to cripple the whole damn ship. I had my suspicions about the helpful people aboard the
Cicindel
—they hadn't wanted the ship lifted, maybe they had a vested interest in her being destroyed. Maybe they were holding out on us. Maybe there was an easy way, apart from just cutting loose and blasting. But how could we know? We were in their hands. At their mercy. They were calling the shots. We had no alternative but to do as they told us, and wait in some cubby-hole a mile or two downstairs for them to come in and pick us up. And suppose it didn't work? Suppose the Fenris device didn't cut out? For our next trick....

But it was pointless worrying about that. It was pointless worrying at all. We had to do what we had to do.

I felt my body begin to get back into my suit, and I heard my voice tell Eve to do the same. Then I heard me tell Maslax that he could either come with us under his own steam or not at all, because Eve and I would have enough to do carrying Ecdyon. Dragging Ecdyon, more like.

Maslax made no reply, and the wind wasn't wasting any time waiting for him to show some signs of interest. My body was already back at the console, clicking away into the speaker.

We turned away abruptly.

“Right,” said my voice. “Let's get Ecdyon into the perambulating cubicle.”

Eve and my body took an arm each, and began to heave. I supposed that if the wind was finished clicking now I could ask to take over again, but I knew he wouldn't see it that way. This was his show—it was a maneuver he'd initiated—he had some right to see it through. I had to concede him that, like it or not.

We managed to bundle Ecdyon through the door into the smaller chamber. He stirred, and made some awkward noises that might have been the Gallacellan equivalent of cries of pain, but he didn't show any signs of being aware of what was going on, despite the fact that all four of his eyes were still open.

I felt my body hesitate for just a moment, then I found thyself kneeling over Maslax, doing up his suit. I didn't bother fastening his helmet—just hauled him up by the scruff of the neck, threw him into the elevator with Eve and the Gallacellan, and then threw the helmet in after him.

“Throw me the gun,” said my voice, to Eve.

She complied, and the wind let go a few last clicks at the caller. Then we backed up into the doorway, he took careful aim, adjusted the beam, and launched a needle-like ray into the wall just below the console.

Then there was more waiting, while the needle ate its way through the wall, and the chamber filled with smoke. An alarm bell went off close at hand, and we jumped spasmodically. But the wind lost the aim for only a fraction of a second. Then white fire began gouting out of the hole in the wall, and electric sparks, and a series of sharp, crackly explosions. I felt my left hand grip the door and my body poise itself to jump. I felt my eyes get hot, and vision was lost in a dazzling glare.

Then we leaped backward, slammed the door, slammed the door of the elevator, and punched a button. We didn't need to pause to wonder which button. The wind was really on his toes.

For one terrible moment I thought we weren't going to move, and then I felt the gentle tug of sidewise acceleration as we began our retreat, amid the ever-increasing clamor of alarm bells. I was listening for a big bang, not knowing whether to hope or expect to hear it immediately or when we were well away from the hot spot. Without my sense of time, the waiting was horribly distorted. We seemed to be stuck inside a single moment, moving inside a tiny, featureless cylinder, while all around us a machine as big as a world went mad. If the
Gray Goose
had been an ant attacking a whale, then what were we, inside the whale? Not Jonah, for sure. Bacteria, maybe. Perhaps not even that. Allergens setting off a vast chain reaction affecting the whole body. Tiny molecules sending the
Varsovien
into anaphylactic shock.

We transferred from the horizontal conveyor to the vertical. Again, we took Ecdyon through first, and again we had to go back to carry Maslax. He was absolutely inert—not dead, not even unconscious. Completely comatose.

Down we went.

I knew it would be much farther down than across, that the descent would take far longer. But I still couldn't feel the waiting. I was still isolated from the sequence of events, suspended like a fly in amber in a little shell of nothing that owned neither time nor space. I was nowhere. And yet I existed. I was a part of it all, if not a participant. I was there.

My body kicked Maslax a few times—quite without malice—trying to remind him that life was still going on. Eve was busy looking at Ecdyon, trying to find signs of life.

The alarm bells went on and on, as if the whole ship was filled with nothing but alarm bells, and still the big bang had not happened. Still we were dropping. I was conscious of movements—my own and Eve's, but I was taking little notice. The movements seemed meaningless. A few words floated past, but I didn't hear them. I had determined previously that I was going to listen and remember every single word that the wind used my voice to say, but that seemed unimportant now.

Then we stopped again, and I felt my arm reach out to grip the door handle. I felt my brain register something that made my hand hesitate. The handle which had begun to turn stopped, and my grip on it became suddenly intense. I tried to regain a temporal integration with events, just some connection, so that I would know what was happening, and what was wrong.

I heard my voice say: “There's no air out there.”

It made no immediate impact. I was suited. I had my helmet on. I was breathing my own air, from my own backpack. What did it matter what was in the corridor or the other chamber?

Then I remembered Ecdyon. His suit was holed.

I needed all of that timeless instant then. Time stopped dead while I isolated myself from it and tried to see. I could feel the tightness of my hand's grip against the door—a grip the wind would not relax. I knew that the decision he was making would take less than a second. He had no more time. We had to get to a place of safety before the bang and the cut-out of the ship's functions. We had to get into an airlock, from which the
Cicindel
could rescue us. If the power cut out and the lift fell...they'd never find us. We'd be dead.

I could almost feel the thoughts jumbled into that split second—almost pick them up one by one and read them. Ecdyon: seven feet tall. No other suit. No patch. Ecdyon: dead.

My hand turned the handle, and opened the lock.

“Open the other door!” my voice howled at Eve.

My body dived to Ecdyon's side, took a firm hold, and even while Eve was still opening the door we were pulling him through. Eve went back for Maslax. She'd already put his helmet back on during the descent. He was all right.

I think, if she hadn't gone back, the wind would have left him. I think the wind would have opted to save those extra few seconds by shutting the airlock door as quickly as possible and flooding the place with air from the pressure-system just that fraction sooner. But Eve went back, seconds wasted while she was clumsily pushing him through the lock. She had neither the strength nor the speed for a smooth operation. But we got him through, we got the door shut, and we threw the air-valve open.

And nothing happened. The tank was empty. One of the missiles from the
Gray Goose
had cracked the supply system, and the air had gone out through the outer skin. Including the air from the lock.

Ecdyon died there, on the floor of the chamber.

People do die. It's one of the facts of—ha, ha—life. A lot of people died in the Halcyon Drift, including Alachakh, who was my friend. A couple of guys got plugged on Rhapsody, for no very good reason. Men died on Pharos. If the chances had turned out a little different on Chao Phrya, people could have been killed there, too. Ferrier was dead, and his girl. The crew of the
Gray Goose
was dead.

By all this, I remained relatively unaffected.

But to have a man die beside me—to have him die as a direct consequence of my own actions—that was different. In a way, I was even responsible for the fact that his suit was holed in the first place. If I'd chosen to warn Maslax about the orientation of the artificial gravity field, the gun need never have gone off.

I still held that gun. I still had it in my hand. Throughout the entire sequence—opening doors, pulling bodies about, pressing buttons—I had never let go of that gun, as if my life depended on my hand sticking to it, never letting it go.

So maybe it was the wind. What difference did that make?

None at all.

I don't like people dying. I don't even like people getting hurt. If it happens close at hand, it makes me sick. I felt a little sick then. Nothing comparable had happened to me since the
Javelin
went down, since I failed to save the ship, since I failed to flip the ship, and since the crash had killed Micheal Lapthorn, who was also—I guess—my friend.

I had already had enough. I had already decided to quit and get out and go somewhere where the action was stone cold and people weren't dropping dead or hanging worlds in the balance on all sides of me. This came on top of my having had enough. It was adding injury to insult.

The purring in the walls of the ship was dying slowly and progressively. There was no big bang, no convulsions, no screaming. The
Varsovien
died as quietly as had Ecdyon. Discreetly.

The light in the airlock was out. I had a light mounted on my backpack, along with a spare air-bottle, but I didn't bother to switch it on. We waited in the pitch darkness, saying nothing except for the occasional remark about how much time it might take, or was taking.

I had taken command back from the wind. We weren't reckoning on needing any more Gallacellan. Everyone except Eve would take it for granted that it was Ecdyon who had done all the talking. He wouldn't be arguing the point. I reckoned that if I never said another word about it, Eve would never be sure enough of herself to start talking. That had worked before. She still didn't know what had happened aboard the
Lost Star
. All attempts to find out had simply been met with stony silence. She had dropped the matter eventually—what else could she do?

It was a long wait. I almost wished that I'd left the wind in the hot seat, so that I wouldn't have had to feel the passing of time minute by minute—I could have felt it all at once. But that would have been a sort of suicide, a preference for non-existence. Unlike the wind, I am exclusively a creature of body-and-soul. I don't have his versatility. Backseat driving was his way of life, but to me it was more a way of death. One can't just opt out of bad and boring moments of life. That's futile. So I did my own waiting, and my own worrying, and I lived within my own misery.

Eventually, we heard them. My helmet was resting against the metal casing of the lock, and I heard them outside the lock. They weren't opening the lock—they didn't do that for quite some time. At first, I couldn't figure out what they were doing, but eventually I realized they were connecting the locks. They were running a corridor from their ship to this one. I wondered if they knew whether the lock was cracked and that if they tried to flood it with air they'd have to patch it up pretty smartly. It didn't matter much—they'd have it to spare.

It wasn't until they actually began to open the door that I realized what their lights were going to show them.

One dead Gallacellan, with a gunshot wound in his chest. One Grainger, still holding the gun. I couldn't even drop the damn thing, because we were in free fall owing to the ship's switching off. It would just float around the lock with us, like a big ugly wasp.

The lock swung open, and the Gallacellans came in. There were two of them—suited. About ten meters of white corridor was behind them, and then another lock, outer door open, inner closed.

We had to take turns going through the
Cicindel
's lock—two at a time. Eve and I went first. I didn't look either of our rescuers in the face. I just couldn't. I stuck the gun out of sight, in the pack, but my hand still felt hot, as if it were carrying the mark of Cain, or something.

Beyond the lock there was light aplenty, gravity (a fraction more than E-normal), and air (the same sharp air that we breathed aboard the
Varsovien
). There were also Gallacellans. Two more of them. Waiting for us. I took my helmet off, and this time I couldn't help looking at them.

I couldn't tell by looking what caste they might be.

“Anybody speak English?” I asked. There was no answer.

Eve and I stood to one side to let the lock open and close again. One of the Gallacellans came through, carrying Maslax as if the little man were just a rag doll. The alien deposited his burden on the floor, conveniently to one side. I didn't bother to go to him, and neither did Eve. Just at that moment, we didn't particularly care what was going to happen to Maslax in the near future or at any other time up to and including the day of judgment. We had had enough of Maslax.

We waited, until the last Gallacellan came back, carrying Ecdyon.

I wished that Gallacellans changed expression, so that I could know what one or more of them might be thinking. But they stood there as if they were movie props made out of rubber.

“We tried,” I said, pointlessly. “We really did try.”

Ominous silence. They looked at me, and I felt accused, even though there was nothing in their faces but the usual blank features.

One of them turned his back on me and clicked.

What did he say? I asked the wind.

He wants to know how come you speak Gallacellan, he said.

And I laughed. I don't really know what I'd been expecting. Accusations, questions, just sarcastic comments. I don't know. But not this.

“I don't,” I said, in English, then realized that it was a silly thing to say, and corrected it to: “I don't understand.” I spread my hands wide and tried to look ingenuous.

It's no good, said the wind. I think he knows.

How?

I really did try, he said. I tried, but there just wasn't any way. I just didn't sound like a Gallacellan. I got all the caste-forms right, I'm sure about that. But you haven't got the voice for it. They must have figured us out right away. Even over the circuit.

One Gallacellan sounds pretty much like another to me, but I had to admit that they handled their language a lot better than the wind had. He was right. I wasn't built for it.

OK, I said tiredly. You'd better tell them what happened. But keep in touch, hey? Just once now and again, if you have a moment, give me a quick summary.

It was so easy just to pass back inside my own skull. I surprised myself. My body didn't even stagger. A perfectly smooth operation. I knew I was getting used to it and I didn't like it. But playing a completely passive rate is like riding a bicycle—you don't forget how to do it. The level of control remains the same—one slip and your body is in trouble—and it never becomes easy. But you get used to it. You acquire the touch. I didn't particularly want to acquire the touch. Privately, I swore that it would never happen again—that I would never get into a situation where I needed it to happen again. I promised myself, faithfully.

After the clicking had gone on for a few moments, I asked the wind whether the Gallacellan believed us. It seemed to me likely that he wouldn't. It was a long and complicated and fairly incredible story.

I don't think he even cares, the wind told me. He doesn't give a damn about Ecdyon—he's too high caste for that. He hasn't even bothered to ask who shot him, let alone why. He doesn't want to know what we were doing on the
Varsovien
, or why. He just wants to know who taught us Gallacellan.

What've you told him?” I asked.

I'm telling him, he assured me. Worry not, I'm telling him.

The truth?

You have to be joking. He wouldn't believe it. I've told him we learned it by listening, by studying, by watching. I've told him that the Library has put together all that the human race knows about Gallacellans, and that we've found out quite a lot. I'm going to talk to him some more, about mutual understanding and the benefits of communication.

Who the hell do you think you are? I said. Titus Charlot?

But I got no answer. He was clicking again.

We didn't have to stand in the corridor long. They took us into a cabin—a big cabin, fitted out so finely and neatly that it just had to be the captain's cabin. They only wanted me—or, to be strictly accurate, they only wanted the wind. But Eve was nervous, and she wanted to stick with me. They didn't object. Maslax they took somewhere else. I never saw him again. I believe that his interest in the world revived after a period of time in Iniomi, but they never gave him back his job in the Library, nor even sent him back to Pallant. I think he ended up on Airn, the second world of the system, but whether he was in jail, in the hospital, or what the hell I simply do not know. I never wanted to know enough to find out.

The wind talked to the captain for several hours while the
Cicindel
flew to Iniomi. Occasionally, he slid back some small packet of information about what he was trying to do, or what the captain was telling him. But I never got a full transcript of the conversation and I guess I never will.

The wind wanted to be the human race's first diplomatic mission to the Gallacellans. He wanted to do Charlot's work for him and set up a basis for negotiation. He had big plans, did the wind. But he always was an optimist.

He hadn't got a cat in hell's chance. I guessed that pretty soon, and I think he probably knew it all along, but wanted to try anyway.

The Gallacellan wall of indifference hasn't come into being simply because they don't like humans. Basically, the Gallacellans are an indifferent people. They've cultivated it in their civilization, and no doubt it was there for them to cultivate. A defensive mentality. They owned to no priorities except survival, and their chief priority was ensuring that survival—ensuring it against all possible eventualities. Fair enough. That's the name of the game. That's evolution for you. He who survives is the fittest, by definition. Man is an evolutionary gold-medal winner because he is an active survivor. Some people might claim that he has a basically nasty mind. He is an omnivorous grabber—a possessor. But that's not the only kind of fitness that wins out in the good old struggle for existence.

The Gallacellans were gold-medal survivors as well, only the Gallacellan is a passive survivor.

He is always around to fight another day (but never today). He runs away. When caught, he is difficult to kill, but basically he is difficult to catch. The Gallacellan would far rather live in peace than not. He likes to know where he stands. He likes to know he is safe. The Gallacellan society is carefully structured, and so is the language, to allow maximum communication where it is needed, and none at all where it is not. The caste system is absolute. The notion of privacy is central to the Gallacellan civilization. That such a civilization is imperfect is manifestly obvious. But it is just as manifestly obvious that the human civilization is totally unstable, and just as imperfect, and contains just as many contradictions. That it works is also manifestly obvious.

There is, as they say, more than one way to skin a cat.

But when all the analyzing and philosophizing is done, there remains one simple fact. The Gallacellans are not interested in talking to one another, save for definite social purposes. They do not indulge in merry chitchat. All their communication is functional, helping to keep the race in good condition and surviving as well as possible. There is no conceivable reason why they should want to become interested in talking to humans, except insofar as it is strictly functional. And the Gallacellans have a caste to decide what is and is not strictly functional.

They are narrow-minded. So are we. The overlap is very slight indeed.

The wind argued for a long time. I know that he argued hard, and I believe that he argued well. But he could not break caste. Whatever he said that was outside what the captain wanted to hear the captain simply would not and did not hear. Despite the fact that they were speaking the same language, they failed to communicate. Except insofar as it was strictly functional—as the captain defined function.

The wind made not the slightest dent in the wall of indifference. The situation remained the same. It had a certain deadly irony. The only Gallacellans with whom we could really communicate were the ones who could speak human languages. That was because it was their designated function to communicate. But their communication with other Gallacellans was strictly limited, defined by other functions. They couldn't use their understanding any more than I could use mine. Titus Charlot, not for the first time, was simply going to have to reconcile himself to the fact that he wasn't going to unite the contents of the human and the Gallacellan minds inside one of his analogue machines. It was just not on.

If they knew you weren't a Gallacellan all along, I said, why did they rescue us?

In the interests of peaceful coexistence, the wind told me. And because they needed to know how come I could make myself understood.

So none of us got what we wanted. We set down on Iniomi without being able to tell the captain how we knew his language, but without convincing him it was a good idea to promote interracial relations. Out of the hours of talk came precisely nothing.