The Fenris Device (8 page)

His head was at the wrong height inside his helmet—his nose was where his lips ought to have been—but I could still see most of his face through the visor, and I saw something flow into his face the moment I mentioned mind reading. Perhaps it wasn't a good thing to talk about after all.

“I know what's in your mind,” he said. “Your mind's full of it, like all the rest.”

“All the rest of what?”

“Don't play stupid,” he said, his voice grating harshly. “All of them. All the people.”

“And what are they full of, Maslax?” I asked him, still pushing, to see what might happen. “Still hate and fear? Is it only hate and fear you can read?”

“Hate and fear's all there is to read,” he spat at me. “It's all there is.”

I shook my head, not dropping my eyes for an instant. “You know that's not true,” I said. “You can't believe that.”

“You don't know,” he said fiercely. “You're not Maslax. You're not a cripple. You don't know what it's like when everyone who gasses you on the street looks at you as if you were an insect. You don't know what it's like when anyone who has to stand near you recoils. You don't know what it is to have everyone who knows you despise you. You just can't know. You don't know what other people's minds are like. You don't know what your mind's like. You tell yourself lies, just like there are lies coming out of your mouth all the time. You don't know. I do. I know what goes on people's heads. Hate and fear—yes, that's what I read. That's what's there to be read. Hate Maslax. Loathe Maslax. Maslax the crippled, crawling thing. That's what's there. You can't deny it. You feel it. Look at your own eyes. You hate me, Grainger, you and that four-eyed bug and that lady in the front seat who's trying so hard not to listen. You hate me, and you're afraid of me. Well, this time you've reason to be afraid. But I need you—some of you—and I'll let you go. Not the others. Not the ones who've got a lifetime of hate and loathing to pay out. Not them.”

“Has it ever occurred to you,” I said, quietly but gathering intensity, “that you might be mad?”

“Has it ever occurred to you,” he replied, “that I might not?”

I had to admit that it hadn't.

“You're intending to kill—how many was it? twenty million?—twenty million people, and you want us to believe that you're sane?”

“The population of Pallant,” he said, “is twenty-five million. And yes, I do want you to believe that I'm sane. I want you to believe that I have a perfectly respectable motive.”

I looked at Ecdyon. Not a muscle was stirring. I still didn't believe that Ecdyon had nothing at all to do with this. Only a Gallacellan could have known about the warship—if there really was a warship, and only a low-caste Gallacellan could have put it into English. If the knowledge hadn't been given to Maslax directly—and I was prepared to believe that, at least—then it had come to him indirectly. Via Ferrier? Perhaps. But someone had rendered it into English somewhere along the line, and Ecdyon looked like the prime suspect to me, despite his insistence that he knew virtually nothing about the
Varsovien
.

“You killed a man named Ferrier,” I said to Maslax. “Did you have a motive for that, too, or did you just want to steal his yacht?”

Maslax coughed out a laugh. “Motive?” he said. “For Ferrier? I had all the motives in the world. I had years full of motives. I have a lifetime of reasons to kill Ferrier. I should have killed him years ago. I knew that I'd have to, eventually. I always knew.”

“But if you'd killed him years ago,” I said, prompting him, “you wouldn't have found out about the Fenris device, now would you?”

He was silent. Perhaps he was thinking over what I'd said. Perhaps what I said didn't make sense.

“It was only recently that Ferrier found out,” I said. “What did you do, read it in his mind?”

“Yes,” he said quickly, rising to the bait like a suicidal mackerel. “I read it in his mind. That's...when I knew, you see, when I knew that I could...had to...kill him. That was why....”

“You mentioned a woman,” said Eve, keeping her eyes on the precarious way ahead. “What did you kill her for?”

I would much rather have continued trying to find out about Ferrier, but I didn't have a monopoly on Maslax, and in any case, finding out the right questions to ask was pretty much a matter of trial and error. Eve's question might yet lead to further discoveries.

Maslax was again reluctant to answer without leading, but I didn't know how or where to lead, this time. We waited.

“She was worse,” said Maslax, finally. “She was worse.”

“Worse than what?” I asked.

“Worse than all the rest. She was the worst. You just can't know what it felt like. You just can't know what pain a mind can feel...a wave of hate, pure repulsion. You just can't know....”

“Tell me what happened,” I suggested, trying to sound gentle—maybe even sympathetic. Either I couldn't manage it or it was the wrong ploy in any case.

“Shut up,” he said. “Just shut up. Where's that ship? We should be there by now. If you're trying to....”

The gun wavered, focused on the back of Eve's neck.

Get him, urged the wind. But even he didn't sound too confident, and we both knew that while the bomb was inside his suit there'd be no getting to be done.

“She isn't trying to do anything,” I told him. “Look outside. This isn't a highway. We're a long way from the ship yet.”

He looked outside, seeming to notice for the first time the colored storm that hid the world from us and battered futilely at the body of the maiden. He looked down at the ground beside the vehicle, craning his neck to sit up in his suit and look over the edge of the window. He watched for more than a minute, apparently fascinated by the bursting of the oily raindrops and the swirling colored dust with which they mingled, and the vapors that rose from the dust and left it still dry.

“It doesn't ever stop,” I told him. “It's a constant cycling. Some of these rocks are very hot indeed. The atmosphere's very deep and thick, and the upper strata are very cold. It's not just water. There's life up there, you see. A kind of aerial plankton. We can't see it, not down here. The individuals are so small-like dust motes blown about on the winds forever. There are other life forms down here, but we won't see those either, in all probability. They'll be in the cold-spots and the lakes—not necessarily water lakes; that depends on the cyclothermic properties of the bedrock. This is high ground we're on now. Over half this planet's surface is liquid of one sort or another. Mostly sulfurous or hydrocarbon. A high percentage of the life-forms here will metabolize sulfur compounds as well as—or instead of—carbon.”

He looked at me soberly. I'd reeled off the information as much to show off as anything else, but I had some hopes of it putting him in a better mood.

“It's a hell of a place to spend your day off,” I remarked, as he kept up his stare.

Lightning flashed almost overhead, and there was a peal of thunder like a broadside of cannon. We all jumped, and it broke the little man's stare.

“We could all die here you know,” I told him. “Just because you have a gun and a bagful of bombs doesn't make you the lord of all creation, does it? Just because you have a gun and a cause—you can't wave that gun at the universe and say ‘I want that ship lifted, give me a miracle.' We've already done the incredible once in getting down here. It's asking too much for us to lift the
Varsovien
as well. Even if we reach it.”

But he wasn't going to buy it. He wanted that miracle, and if the universe wasn't going to provide it, via me, he was going to shoot us all, blow the
Swan
, and keep screaming at the storm until the moment he died. It wouldn't take long.

As I sat there looking at him I was suddenly consumed by a feeling that had hardly touched me even in all the most difficult situations of the last few months. I was suddenly consumed by the feeling that there was no way out, that whatever happened we were all going to die. Perhaps there was a moment in the Drift when I thought the same, perhaps when Micheal faltered in his playing while we were keeping the spiders at bay an Chao Phrya. But at those times I was doing something, I still had cards in my hand to play. But was there any amount of card playing going to get us out of this?

No. Nothing short of a miracle.

It was at that moment, drenched with fear and despair and the futility of it all, that I decided I was finished. Paradoxically, I suppose, the moment when I thought that there was no hope was the moment that my decision about what to do finally fell into place. I had had enough of Charlot, enough of trouble. There wasn't a problem in the universe that Charlot didn't want in on. He didn't just want a hand in Destiny, he wanted to be Destiny. Well, OK. But I never wanted to be Destiny's right-hand man.

I never was a hero. I never was one to accept the troubles of all mankind. Let him hire Flash Gordon. I was finished. If the course of events was kind enough to throw me out of this thing alive, I resolved—firmly and finally, then I would quit, and Charlot could call down the vengeance of heaven, if he wanted to.

“We're going downhill,” said Eve. “It looks better up ahead.”

I returned my attention to the outside world. It did, indeed, look much better. The knobs of rock that had plagued us for miles were getting sparser and smaller. We were heading down at an angle of five degrees or so; the slope was getting smoother and cleaner. The wind howled just the same, and the thunder still barked, but it all seemed just a little more distant now that the way was clear for us. Even the visibility was a fraction better. Eve accelerated.

“How far away are we?” I asked Ecdyon.

“According to my calculations,” he said, “we are within two hundred meters.”

“How big is it?” I asked.

“I do not know,” he said.

It was a futile question anyway, because by the time he'd answered, we could see it. Only slight glimpses, at first, and we couldn't be sure what we were seeing, but it was the
Varsovien
all right. The first bits of her we saw were high in the sky, illumined by lightning, and they might almost have been patches of silver sky. I instantly assumed that she was a long, tall ship stood on end, and I wondered how she had stayed upright for thousands of years, or however long it had been. A moment or two later, as we pulled into her wind-shadow, I realized how wrong I was. This was a ship. She lay on her side all right, but what a side! I was reminded of the Caradoc battlewagon I had seen high in the sky over Pharos. Beside this ship, the Caradoc carrier seemed like one of her own tiny helicopters. With the weather on Mormyr what it was, there was no way to see her whole, in all her glory. It would take hours to walk around her. She was five times as broad as any ship I had ever seen was high. She was built to carry a city inside her—a city with all its suburbs and its sources of supply. This ship was a world in her own right. Capable of swallowing moons? Easily, if she could open her mouth.

Eve took the maiden closer, until she was under the curve of the ship's belly. For the first time, we were all but out of the storm. Only a rare freak gust threw a handful of raindrops in to patter against the maiden's hull. We continued to drive along her length, slowly, searching for a blemish in the skin that was still highly polished despite centuries of corrosion.

“Any idea how we're supposed to get in?” I asked Ecdyon.

“If we find a lock,” he said, “I imagine that I can open it.

“You were maybe expecting something this size?” I asked him.

“No,” he replied, making that odd blinking gesture with his eyes—the only attempt at a change of expression he'd been able to adopt for use in conversation with humans. As it served all purposes, it wasn't too communicative, but I thought this time he was merely trying to confirm his denial—to underline it, as if to say “Nobody could have expected this.”

“You realize that it's futile,” I said, not only to Maslax, but to Ecdyon as well. “This whole thing has been a wild-goose chase. From the moment Stylaster contacted Charlot, this thing has been an utter and complete farce. Just take a look at this thing. It was never intended to come within a thousand miles of planetfall. She was built in orbit, and she was intended to stay in space. You can't land a thing like this. The power needed to land and take off would be absolutely impossible to generate, let alone control. This thing is down here for good, believe you me. It'll never get off the ground. Whoever dumped it might just as well have sent it cruising into the sun.”

“You'd better be wrong,” said Maslax.

“No. You're wrong. Can't you see that? Can't you see that you have to be wrong? This isn't a warship. It's not a weapon. How could it be? Who'd build a weapon big enough to house the population of a small world? Who'd need a thing like this to fight a battle? Don't be a fool. There's only one thing that any people could want a ship like this for. Only one. The only thing one could possibly want that much space for is people. This is a migration ship, don't you see? It's an intergalactic. Hell, I don't know what the bloody thing is doing here, of all places. I can think of no reason whatsoever why the Gallacellans would willingly abandon such a ship. But all you have to do is look, man! Can you really sit there and tell me that's a weapon? Can you?”

“The ship is armed,” said Maslax.

“The ship is dead,” I said. “Stone dead. We've all been wasting our time. We've all been wrong. Dead wrong. I thought this was a warship they'd hidden away just in case they ever wanted to change their minds. But it's not. It can't be.”

“I can see a hatch,” said Eve.