Star Rigger's Way (4 page)

When he finished the final adjustment, he rubbed his forehead against the suit faceplate, trying to scratch an itch over his eyebrow. It was time to be getting back to the bridge. And there was that ringing again—was it coming from the outside?

The exit was on the far side of the pile, and it took him a few minutes to work his way around the circular catwalk. He stopped at the intercom. "This is Gev. Adjustments are all right in here. Has the power smoothed out in the net?" His voice was dull, a muffled echo inside the chamber suit.

No answer. And there was that noise.

Then the exit port opened, and clanging exploded around his head: general-alarm klaxon. Stunned, he sealed the hatch and hurried to the prep-room intercom. "Bridge! Bridge!" Still no answer; either no one was in the net, or communications circuits were out. The alarm meant a vital systems failure.

He quickly checked the pile console; there was no danger here, but there was a massive interruption in the net circuit. He headed for the bridge at a run. The suit still encumbered him; panting, he flipped open his visor for more air. He shouted into a corridor intercom, and this time he was answered by a hiss. The corridor illuminators flickered but remained alight.

He mounted the ramp to the bridge—and gagged as he inhaled a lungful of smoke. Choking, he slapped his visor down and panted rapidly, hoarsely, to draw filtered air through the suit. The bridge was gloomy and filled with acrid haze. He moved cautiously, squinting and blinking tears and thinking: there is burning flesh in this smoke. The instrument panels were blackened but no longer burning. He turned to look at the rigger-stations in the outer circle of the bridge. His stomach dropped. His crewmates were dead in their alcoves; their bodies still smoldered in the rigger-seats. Marc, the com-rigger, his neck and cheeks collapsed, his eyes sunk in their sockets, smoking. Gayl, Abdul, Niesh—all the same. He stared at each one for the same long minute. Numbness blocked every nerve, every emotion, every thought except a detached
awareness
of horror.

For a time he did not move at all. But gradually the haze began to clear from the bridge, and he knew what had to be done. He remained shock-calm, and though the stench continued to burn in his nostrils and his stomach threatened to convulse, he did not become sick. Garbed still in the chamber suit, he wrapped the four bodies and carried them to a small, unused freezer-hold. He ventilated and scrubbed the bridge, and he finally shut off the clamoring alarm. He examined the instruments and recorders, and he reconstructed and logged the accident to the best of his ability. And
then
he went to pieces.

He stayed in the commons; he was afraid to leave. Through tears and shakes and stuttering outcries to an empty ship, he relived and relived the accident. It had been a freak happening: a Flux abscess. Uncontrolled energies from the Flux had flared through the net, cauterizing every delicate nerveway tied into it—including the space communicators, the neural foam of the rigger-stations, and the riggers themselves. What had caused it? There was no way to be sure. Perhaps a subjective firestorm, a nightmare brought to life by the fantasies of one of the riggers. Perhaps a gravity-abscess, an unexpectedly close approach to an analogue of a star or black hole from normal-space. Perhaps something altogether different, some uncharted phenomenon of the Flux. It was always so difficult to know; abscesses existed along that delicate boundary between fantasy and subjective reality, and few witnesses ever survived to tell.

And might his own tinkering with the flux-pile have contributed to the accident? He thought not. He
prayed
not. But how could he be sure? Would he have to chase back the demon of guilt, too?

It had been his luck that he had been out of the net, his luck that he had not died with the others.

Luck? He was in a crippled ship, with fluxwave communications completely burned out. He was alone, more alone than he had ever been in his life, more alone than he had ever dreamed possible. And
Sedora
was a four-rigger freighter. Was it even conceivable that it might be flown by just one?

Reliving the horror for the hundredth time, he tried to summon the living faces of his dead crewmates. But they were gone now; he could recall neither their faces nor their names. A mercy, perhaps—but lord, the emptiness of having forgotten the last humans he might ever see.

(Whasss?)

Eventually, though, other names returned to him: Janofer, Legroeder, and Skan. The names began to click through his head like the chatter of a rad counter, rhythmically: Janofer Legroeder and Skan. Janofer Legroeder and Skan.

The faces came later, as he stalked the commons, battling with his thoughts—or as he moved dazedly about the bridge, watching the healers slowly regenerate the neural foam in the rigger-seats so that he could make the attempt to fly. The faces of friends, and their voices—along with the memories, the dread.

Finally it was time to discover whether or not he could, in fact, fly. When the pilot-rigger station was ready for use, he suppressed his apprehension and entered
Sedora
's net. It glowed fuzzily about him, shimmering, reflecting his nervousness. Hours went by as he struggled just to become settled again in the net, to establish a basic vision. And when at last he did, he was astonished to sink his fingers into the stuff of space and to feel the ship moving at his bidding.

Sedora
, as it turned out, could be flown by one; but she was ponderous, and she flew as though laden with water. He could work only short, numbing shifts, and even then his endurance was strained. The ship moved on its course; but his thoughts flew ahead to the Hurricane Flume, the maelstrom to which all currents in this region of space led. There was no escaping the Flume. He could shape it to the image of his choice, but he could not make it less treacherous. He tried to consider alternatives; but there were no alternatives. The Flume danced constantly in his mind, and he was sure that he hadn't a chance in a thousand.

Therefore hope, when it appeared, was exceedingly strange. It was in the fourth day after he began flying that he noticed the signal—a part of the windrush, the starsong of the net. But like a warbling bird it twittered incessantly and would not be ignored. Finally he decided that
perhaps
he was hearing a distress beacon. With nothing to lose, and with tightly suppressed excitement, he wheeled
Sedora
upward into the clouds to find the source of this distraction. The search very nearly drained him—ten hours, in all, of purring through crazy blue skies with golden veils and spun hair arching across the stars like a yellow-brick road.

But in the end he found it: a flattened raisin of a spacecraft, drifting abeam of
Sedora
in the queer, atmospheric near-distance of the Flux. He grappled it in his net and took it spiraling up with him through layered images of space, through regressing visions, into spinning darknesses . . . until the stars exploded in bright pricks of light. Withdrawing from the net, he looked out through the clearplex port into normal-space.

The ship drifting alongside
Sedora
was squat, strange. Alien.

Suited, he left through the sidelock and floated across. He rested, enjoying weightlessness and gazing off into the galaxy; it was splendid and brilliant around him, exotically beautiful. From space,
Sedora
was silent, a gun-grey cetacean linked to him by a snaking lifeline. He turned, and his soles touched the alien hull. As he searched for an airlock he wondered who or what he might find—and whether, perhaps, the strangeness was only beginning.

(Hyiss?)

Before the disaster, though, was departure—boarding
Sedora
at Deusonport Field, with mixed and hurt feelings. It was
Lady Brillig
he wanted to fly. But if they said that a tour as helper-rigger on a slowship might teach him, then helper-rigger he would be. Deusonport Field: scattered clouds, blue-tinged sun, green hills and forest about the perimeter. Should be a cheery sight upon return. Relaxed, amidst the frenetic commerce of the Aeregian planets.

But what should be so troubling about the leaving behind of friends?
(Who asked that? Who is wondering?)

Earlier still,
Lady Brillig
out of Jarvis on Chaening's World: Legroeder and Skan as usual; and Janofer, never quite stationary—her moods like air currents, never remaining simply petulant or contemplative or buoyant or depressed, but always a turbulent mixture, and her attention rarely focusing for long upon any one friend, but forever shifting from one to another to somewhere beyond thought. Why could he not have been closer to them? To her?

But why desire closeness? Rejoice in isolation.
(Who?) (Whass?)

Before
Lady Brillig
there was only the training, the school. The buffeting among childhood peers. Homeless, familyless.
(Hyiss!) (What?)

And . . . earlier? . . . later? . . . the flight-shell of another spacecraft altogether: the battery of riffmar in turmoil, working to confused commands while he fought to control his fury and discover what was
wrong.
The riffmar were maddeningly inept, never mind that they responded directly to his control.
Mindless plants!
he shrieked soundlessly, but it was not a curse so much as a statement. Oh, why oh why had he come such a way to this nowhere place in space to be stranded? Why had he let Corneph
get
to him like that?

A riffmar, confused by his unsure control, stumbled near. He swatted it with his left paw and flattened it.
Six more left, by damn, and they'd better start flying!
But they wouldn't, not unless he determined what was stalling the craft, and instructed them. If only he knew more about these things!

(Strange, to be flying without knowing  . . .)

Bring me syrup,
he ordered, and glared at the two riffmar scurrying to comply, wrestling between them a large stalk from the bin. He took it moodily in his jaws and sent the two off to tend the riff-bud cultures, and then to feed themselves. While they were wriggling their tendril toes into the nutrient beds, he crunched the sweet stalk and brooded.

He had left Syncleya in a terrible fury. Actually, a tantrum. True, it wasn't his time yet to learn to fly (not for another four seasons), and he
had
taken the shell from the space-docks without knowing if it had been properly checked and prepared—all right, that was questionable judgment, admittedly, and perhaps he had compounded the error by heading for deep space rather than one of the worlds—but
who would have thought that a simple shell could malfunction?
Everyone knew that flying was bloody simple—use your riffmar to run the shell, nothing complicated, and let your mind steer the ship, like the interdreaming of the quarm, but with no other broil-damn minds cluttering up your thoughts.

(You had never flown before? But  . . .)

(Hone-ly held-hers f-hly!)

(Elders? Then you aren't . . . very old. Oh.)

Lord-o, it wasn't the same for the others. He just
had
to get away from the quarm and from Corneph's incessant
nagging
, never letting him rest for a moment without conforming to the quarm. Share, merge, unite, never leave a thought untouched. Here: become a plant, become an alien (he had never even
seen
an alien!). Broil-dammit! Was he strange, just because he alone could not stand it?

Ooh, to be free of them! That's why he had fled! But he'd never meant to make it permanent.

(Did the others offend? Is that why you do not wish company?)

(Whass?)

Now he was stalled, stalled! Why would the thing not fly? Seated in his sunken dais, he grilled the riffmar on their findings (though he had not been tending them, so how could they have found anything?). He hurled abuse at the quivering creatures, and finally he leaped screaming, scattering them in fright.
Odomilk!
he shrieked, and when it was brought he sucked on the pods with a vengeance, while the riffmar huddled in their nutrient beds. Nothing like pungent odomilk—but still, there were the riffmar to be attended to. Certain chores they could perform by rote, but hardly what he was demanding now. And he had best be careful; there were only six of the sluggards left. Here, an idea: perhaps there was a maintenance recorder.

Humming, he set the riffmar to locating the memory cube and then, once they found it, to obeying the cube's silent recitation. Hey-now, the thought-flow amp seemed to be working, so maybe it was just the controls out of kilter. That was more like it—a pity he hadn't thought of the recorder sooner, but after all he was a forest-singer and not a flight-crafter. Corneph—that sot-rotted nuisance would be unbearable if he knew of this. His bloody arrogance could drive anyone from home. Corneph, with his stinking empathic whistle, diving like a fool into the quarm and dragging you off on a mindlark whether invited or not. Lord-o-lord, to be rid of him was worth even this!

A riffmar peeked shyly at him, awaiting recognition.

Useless plants!
He recognized it with a powerful swat. Hah! Two with one blow!

Oh damn, now, he needed those two to fly!

Alarmed, he prodded the limp ferns—but it was no use; they were dead. He sprang to all fours, whiskers curling and twisting. What had they been meaning to tell him?

The four living riffmar huddled at the control tree, so obviously paralyzed with fear that he approached with unusual caution. What had they learned?

Ssss.
They quivered, struggling to coordinate a reply.
Hssshell ffly . . . h-need more uss.
One of them collapsed, strained beyond its limit, and the others lifted it gingerly and carried it to the nutrient bed.
Ssssss.

That was it, then; he was finished. He had caught the image before it faded. The controls had been upset by a passing storm; now, with the help of the maintenance memory cube the problem had been corrected, and all he needed to fly again were six riffmar to operate the controls. And all he had left were four.