The Sword and the Plough (25 page)

Jeremiah nodded. He didn’t look, he didn’t
need to, he had seen it all before.

“Can’t see the rot from this high up,” he
commented drily.

“Yeah, it’s nice all right,” Lars muttered.
“But there’s not enough black rock down there to make me feel at
home.”

Jeremiah looked up. “Lumaian or Trionian?” he
asked.

“Trionian to the core,” Lars responded.

The old man bobbed his head. “I know what
you mean,” he said. “I’m Lumaian born – spent my childhood and
youth there. Since then I’ve been to every planet in the
Commonwealth, but the black rock hills and plains of Lumai will
always be the place I call home.”

“So, your accent is Lumaian, then?” Lars
queried.

Jeremiah gave a shrug. “I guess,” he
answered. “I didn’t know it still showed. It’s a long time since
I’ve been home.”

“So, why did you leave Lumai?” Caroline
asked.

“Case of having to, miss, it’s where my work
is,” Jeremiah replied. “But one day, maybe, I’ll go home again.”
His blue eyes stared out wistfully at the stars. “Forty years is a
long time…”

Outside, the sunlight glinted brightly on the
shiny metal of the shuttlecraft’s stubby delta wing, but for the
moment, Jeremiah’s gaze saw nothing but the black rock planet of
his birth.

“How much longer, Jeremiah?” Caroline asked
softly, breaking in on their pilot’s reverie. “We seem to have been
up here forever.”

Jeremiah’s thoughts evaporated and he glanced
down quickly at the ship’s navigation panel.

“
It’s just over the horizon now,” he said.
“Should see something of it before too much longer. We have to
climb a bit higher yet. Young Seth tries to keep above the main
orbit patterns – prefers to keep his business private, like his dad
before him.” He shot his passengers a grin. “And to be sure, no
one’s ever complained. Nobody likes to see their rubbish flaunted
in front of them. It’s something they’d rather forget, just so long
as someone else deals with it; out of sight, out of mind, as the
ancient saying goes.

“Of course, getting rid of the rubbish is not
always as easy as you’ll soon see.”

The shuttlecraft had now passed in its
passage from one hemisphere to the other, from one season to its
opposite. Far below, grey clouds banked and cold rain fell upon a
pale winter landscape.

“There!” Jeremiah announced suddenly. “Young
Seth’s place is showing on the scanner now. It should be visible
any minute.”

Lars and Caroline stared ahead, intent on
catching the first glimpse of their destination.

“Ah, there’s the start of it now,” Jeremiah
exclaimed a short time later, “so auto-pilot off.” He switched the
flight controls to manual. “There’s quite an art to getting through
all the junk. Looks like a regular minefield, don’t it?” His eyes
were sparkling in anticipation of his passengers’ amazement.

Lars gasped out in awe at the sight ahead. A
quick sideways glance told him that Caroline was as wide-eyed as
himself.

In front of them, piled high in orbit
above the planet, floated a mountain of man-made debris, obsolete
and worn out equipment, the shattered parts of a million different
things. Sad things, dead things – broken, rotted; bones of ships
that had once sailed deep space with pride. And here and there a
larger hulk, the skeleton of some derelict space station, grey and
powerless.

The shuttlecraft slowed, retrorockets
glowing, and then they were in the midst of the twisted wrecks,
dull and jagged metal all around them, threatening to tear their
frail craft apart.

A hundred metres or so off their port bow
a laser-cutter flared against the blackness, and for a second or
two they glimpsed men at work, slow clumsy figures in their
protective spacesuits.

“
It’s not your everyday rubbish that’s the
problem,” Jeremiah explained. “A quick blast in the
disintegrator
and it’s
gone forever. No, it’s the metals, plasarm, and the like. Hard to
know what to do with half of it. Of course, some of it’s useful,
even profitable. Most of the better materials we can break up and
compress into blocks.

“
Megran’s too rich to bother with scrap,
but the younger planets buy it, planets like New Terra and your
Trion, Lars; Lumai and Theti too, sometimes, saves them building
expensive processing industries of their own.

“
Look over there,” Jeremiah said suddenly,
pointing out the starboard window. “The old cruiser
Liberty –
sailed right
into an asteroid shower; ripped open a seam in her outer hull and
ruptured the inner one before they knew what had hit them. Lost
most of her crew before they could compensate for the air loss –
limped home with just a handful of survivors. Strained the old
girl’s hull so much she had to be scrapped.”

The dark shape of the vessel hung suspended,
her stern towards them, dwarfing the other flotsam around her.
Black holes about her hull showed where sections of her battered
skin had already been cut away.

“
She’ll keep Young Seth and his boys busy
for a few more months yet,” Jeremiah continued. “They don’t come
much bigger than the
Liberty
.”

“What about a battleship?” Lars asked.

“Yeah well, there ain’t too many of those,”
Jeremiah responded.

The ocean of wreckage around them seemed
almost endless. The shuttlecraft was travelling through a narrow
tunnel in the wasteland of scrap, the danger of collision and
almost certain destruction never far from each wing tip. Young
Seth’s place was somewhere deep inside, the
keep
as it were, in a fortress of
junk.

It was a full twenty minutes before the
isolated space station came into view. It floated in an area clear
of detritus.

The hum of the solar motors ceased and the
shuttlecraft floated, drifting gently forward. Jeremiah was using
its own momentum to carry it up to the docking tower.

Jeremiah and his passengers were silent. They
were looking down on top of the space complex.

“Quite something, isn’t it?” Jeremiah said at
length.

Lars nodded. He had not yet found the words
for what he saw. He was unused to the nature of the cosmos, and the
sheer size of the space station hanging like a bright moon in the
blackness, filled him with wonder.

The space station was an enormous white disc,
a hundred and fifty metres or so in diameter, and three storeys
deep. It filled the view from the shuttlecraft’s cockpit. A four
storey high docking tower stood at its centre, like the axle of a
wheel. Sunlight sparkled on a myriad of portholes and windows. It
was an oasis in the desert that was space; a world in its own right
for all who lived there.

* * *

There was a slight bump, and the shuttlecraft
came to a halt.

“Okay, the docking magnets have caught
us.”

Jeremiah activated the internal reciprocals
docking the little craft securely.

He smiled across at his passengers. “End of
journey.”

* * *

It amazed Lars that the floor of the space
station should feel so solid – as solid as any foundation set upon
the black rock of Trion. It was difficult to believe, and indeed
impossible to understand, that he was walking above the Megran sky,
beyond its clouds and its climates, like some ancient god in
control of the destinies of the puppet mortals crawling far
beneath. His mother had told him of the strange beliefs and
practices of earlier times; of gods and goddesses – their priests,
rituals and prayers, the sacred books. He could almost now believe
it to be true.

Lars and Caroline were waiting to meet
their latest benefactor, Young Seth. The room, in which they were
waiting, was large, about the size of the main dining room in the
restored Buckingham Palace, Caroline told Lars. Jeremiah explained
the station had once been a safe house, a palace in orbit, for the
Megran rulers in the days of the pirates. The room still showed
some signs of its former glory.

However, the gold carpet was now
threadbare, and the sometime frescoed walls mottled by stains and
grime. It also smelt a trifle musty. Bought from the current Megran
government as obsolete and surplus, it had become the headquarters
of the
Ace Rubbish Removals, Salvage and Scrap
Merchants
–
Seth
and Son proprietors
.

Three old armchairs, a somewhat nondescript
grey in colour, a crumpled air couch, a large, one-time ornate
dining-room table, with twenty dilapidated chairs, and a bronze
model of the Commonwealth star systems, made up the total trappings
of the room.

“Look Lars, look how beautiful Megran is. She
looks even more magnificent from this far out in space than she did
from the shuttle.”

Caroline was standing staring out the
plasarm glass windows on the far side of the room. “No matter how
many times I gaze out on a planet it never fails to entrance me, to
spark again in me that wonderful, awe-inspiring sense of mystery.
It is not Megran that’s evil, only those who rule her.”

Lars came over to the tall windows where
Caroline stood, nose pressed against the plasarm-glass, looking
down on the planet. He had never been afraid of heights before, but
suddenly the boundless depths outside the glass, and the giant mass
of the planet floating far beneath, made him feel unsteady on his
feet. He reeled backwards.

Caroline smiled. “Do you suffer from vertigo,
Lars?”

He nodded. His mouth had gone dry and for an
instant, he could not speak.

“
I did too, the first time,” Caroline went
on. “But now I like to use the feeling to make believe I’m out
there, that I’m a part of it, free to fly forever through the
universe and beyond, just as Keb’s wisdom described.”

She raised her arms and flattened her body
against the glass.

Lars reached out tentatively and touched
the window with his fingertips, then his whole hand, finally both
hands. As he did, it seemed to him that something in that vast
emptiness beyond was reaching out to him and he marvelled at it;
and he began to reach out in turn, seeking to understand the
infinite mystery, the unparalleled adventure of the living universe
and the
multiverse
* beyond.

Lars did not hear the door at the other end
of the room sigh softly open, nor was he aware of another presence
in the room until he felt Caroline’s touch on his arm.

The young man who had just entered was of
average height and slimly built. His blue overalls were work
stained and faded. His tanned complexion spoke of time exposed to
the Megran sun. Blue eyes, sapphire in the depth of their colour,
looked out from beneath a mop of wavy black hair. But there was no
mistaking the family resemblance. It was Old Seth’s son all
right.

“
Welcome Lady Caroline – Lars,” the young
man said, bowing slightly in obeisance to Caroline. “Welcome to my
home.”

However, there was a coolness in his manner,
which belied his words and Lars wondered why.

“Jeremiah has told me of you and your needs,”
the young man continued. “And he has also expressed to me my
father’s wish that I should do all in my power to help you. I will
therefore, do what I can.”

“We are indeed grateful for your help.”
Caroline was speaking now, but with a formality in her tone, which
showed her unease. “And be assured,” she was saying, “the queen
will be informed of your loyalty and the services you and your
father have rendered in her hour of need…”

Caroline would no doubt have said more, but
all at once, Young Seth raised his hand, stopping her.

“
Please, Lady Caroline,” he said. “I am
willing to fulfil my father’s wishes in the best way I am
able.
But
it must
be understood right from the start that neither my father nor I
seek any reward in this.”

“I understand, but the queen would want…”
Caroline began.

“
Please!” the young man interjected again,
his insistent tone rising. “My father is a good and simple man who
would feel it his duty, indeed an honour, to assist your cause. He
is a gentle man who would not have wished to offend you, and thus
he may not have expressed his own wishes on this clearly enough –
if at all.”

Young Seth dropped his gaze for a moment and
studied the floor, as if debating with himself how much more he
need say.

At length, he made up his mind. “Before we go
any further there are matters I must explain.”

Again, he contemplated the floor, as if some
words of advice were written thereon.

“You know my father is a convict?”

Caroline nodded.

“But you are not aware of his crime?”

Caroline shook her head.

“Then I will explain.”

The young man paused, pulling his thoughts
together.

“
They came – five years ago now,” he began.
“Ferdinand’s men, with warrants and other legal documents to
disguise their purpose, but they came as thieves nevertheless. They
accused him of tax evasion, my father, who had always been so
honest – they accused
him
.

And they invented an enormous sum which he
could never hope to pay.” Young Seth shook his head. “They didn’t
want taxes. They wanted a source to bleed, to feed Ferdinand’s
hunger for empire. And so, they sentenced him to fifteen years
–
fifteen years
–
a hostage to keep me here to work for Ferdinand – the evil prince
of Megran.

“The unspoken threat was my father’s safety
if I did not comply. They spoke of his crime. But the only crime
was the one which they committed.”