Nightflyers & Other Stories Read online

  “Quiet,” she snarled at Royd. She had no breath to waste on talk.

  Now she used all the disciplines she had ever learned, willed away the pain. She kicked feebly, her boots scraping for purchase, and she pulled herself forward with her unbroken arm, ignoring the fire in her shoulder.

  The corpse came on and on.

  She dragged herself across the threshold of the lounge, worming her way under the crashed sled, hoping it would delay the cadaver. The thing that had been Thale Lasamer was a meter behind her.

  In the darkness, in the lounge, where it had all begun, Melantha Jhirl ran out of strength.

  Her body shuddered and she collapsed on the damp carpet, and she knew that she could go no further.

  On the far side of the door, the corpse stood stiffly. The sled began to shake. Then, with the scrape of metal against metal, it slid backwards, moving in tiny sudden increments, jerking itself free and out of the way.

  Psi. Melantha wanted to curse it, and cry. Vainly she wished for a psi power of her own, a weapon to blast apart the teke-driven corpse that stalked her. She was improved, she thought despairingly, but not improved enough. Her parents had given her all the genetic gifts they could arrange, but psi was beyond them. The genes were astronomically rare, recessive, and—

  —and suddenly it came to her.

  “Royd,” she said, putting all of her remaining will into her words. She was weeping, wet, frightened. “The dial … teke it. Royd, teke it!”

  His reply was faint, troubled. “… can’t … I don’t … Mother … only … her … not me … no … Mother…”

  “Not Mother,” she said, desperate. “You always … say … Mother. I forgot … forgot. Not your Mother … listen … you’re a clone … same genes … you have it too … power.”

  “Don’t,” he said. “Never … must-be … sex-linked.”

  “No! It isn’t. I know … Promethean, Royd … don’t tell a Promethean … about genes … turn it!”

  The sled jumped a third of a meter, and listed to the side. A path was clear.

  The corpse came forward.

  “… trying,” Royd said. “Nothing … I can’t!”

  “She cured you,” Melantha said bitterly. “Better than … she … was cured … pre-natal … but it’s only … suppressed … you can!”

  “I … don’t … know … how.”

  The corpse stood above her. Stopped. Its pale-fleshed hands trembled, spasmed, jerked upward. Long painted fingernails. Made claws. Began to rise.

  Melantha swore. “Royd!”

  “… sorry…”

  She wept and shook and made a futile fist.

  And all at once the gravity was gone. Far, far away, she heard Royd cry out and then fall silent.

  * * *

  “The flashes come more frequently now,” Karoly d’Branin dictated, “or perhaps it is simply that I am closer, that I can see them better. Bursts of indigo and deep violet, short, and fast-fading. Between the webbing. A field, I think. The flashes are particles of hydrogen, the thin ethereal stuff of the reaches between the stars. They touch the field, between the webbing, the spurs, and shortly flare into the range of visible light. Matter to energy, yes, that is what I guess. My volcryn feeds.

  “It fills half the universe, comes on and on. We shall not escape it, oh, so sad. Agatha is gone, silent, blood on her faceplate. I can almost see the dark area, almost, almost. I have a strange vision, in the center is a face, small, rat-like, without mouth or nose or eyes, yet still a face somehow, and it stares at me. The veils move so sensuously. The webbing looms around us.

  “Ah, the light, the light!”

  * * *

  The corpse bobbed awkwardly into the air, its hands hanging limply before it. Melantha, reeling in the weightlessness, was suddenly violently sick. She ripped off the helmet, collapsed it, and pushed away from her own nausea, trying to ready herself for the Nightflyer’s furious assault.

  But the body of Thale Lasamer floated dead and still, and nothing else moved in the darkened lounge. Finally Melantha recovered, and she moved to the corpse, weakly, and pushed it, a small and tentative shove. It sailed across the room.

  “Royd?” she said uncertainly.

  There was no answer.

  She pulled herself through the hole into the control chamber.

  And found Royd Eris suspended in his armored suit. She shook him, but he did not stir. Trembling, Melantha Jhirl studied his suit, and then began to dismantle it. She touched him. “Royd,” she said, “here. Feel, Royd, here, I’m here, feel it.” His suit came apart easily, and she flung the pieces of it away. “Royd, Royd.”

  Dead. Dead. His heart had given out. She punched it, pummeled it, tried to pound it into new life. It did not beat. Dead. Dead.

  Melantha Jhirl moved back from him, blinded by her own tears, edged into the console, glanced down.

  Dead. Dead.

  But the dial on the gravity grid was set on zero.

  “Melantha,” said a mellow voice from the walls.

  * * *

  I have held the Nightflyer’s crystalline soul within my hands.

  It is deep red and multi-faceted, large as my head, and icy to the touch. In its scarlet depths, two small sparks of smoky light burn fiercely, and sometimes seem to whirl.

  I have crawled through the consoles, wound my way carefully past safeguards and cybernets, taking care to damage nothing, and I have laid rough hands on that great crystal, knowing it is where she lives.

  And I cannot bring myself to wipe it.

  Royd’s ghost has asked me not to.

  Last night we talked about it once again, over brandy and chess in the lounge. Royd cannot drink, of course, but he sends his spectre to smile at me, and he tells me where he wants his pieces moved.

  For the thousandth time he offered to take me back to Avalon, or any world of my choice, if only I would go outside and complete the repairs we abandoned so many years ago, so the Nightflyer might safely slip into stardrive.

  For the thousandth time I refused.

  He is stronger now, no doubt. Their genes are the same, after all. Their power is the same. Dying, he too found the strength to impress himself upon the great crystal. The ship is alive with both of them, and frequently they fight. Sometimes she outwits him for a moment, and the Nightflyer does odd, erratic things. The gravity goes up or down or off completely. Blankets wrap themselves around my throat when I sleep. Objects come hurtling out of dark corners.

  Those times have come less frequently of late, though. When they do come, Royd stops her, or I do. Together, the Nightflyer is ours.

  Royd claims he is strong enough alone, that he does not really need me, that he can keep her under check. I wonder. Over the chessboard, I still beat him nine games out of ten.

  And there are other considerations. Our work, for one. Karoly would be proud of us. The volcryn will soon enter the mists of the Tempter’s Veil, and we follow close behind. Studying, recording, doing all that old d’Branin would have wanted us to do. It is all in the computer, and on tape and paper as well, should the system ever be wiped. It will be interesting to see how the volcryn thrives in the Veil. Matter is so thick there, compared to the thin diet of interstellar hydrogen on which the creature has fed so many endless eons.

  We have tried to communicate with it, with no success. I do not believe it is sentient at all. And lately Royd has tried to imitate its ways, gathering all his energies in an attempt to move the Nightflyer by teke. Sometimes, oddly, his mother even joins with him in those efforts. So far they have always failed, but we will keep trying.

  So goes our work. We know our results will reach humanity. Royd and I have discussed it, and we have a plan. Before I die, when my time is near, I will destroy the central crystal and clear the computers, and afterwards I will set course manually for the close vicinity of an inhabited world. The Nightflyer will become a true ghost ship then. It will work. I have all the time I need, and I am an improved model.


  I will not consider the other option, although it means much to me that Royd suggests it again and again. No doubt I could finish the repairs, and perhaps Royd could control the ship without me, and go on with the work. But that is not important.

  I was wrong so many times. The esperon, the monitors, my control of the others; all of them my failures, payment for my hubris. Failure hurts. When I finally touched him, for the first and last and only time, his body was still warm. But he was gone already. He never felt my touch. I could not keep that promise.

  But I can keep my other.

  I will not leave him alone with her.

  Ever.

  Dubuque, Iowa

  November 1978

  Override

  Dusk was settling softly over the high lakes as Kabaraijian and his crew made their way home from the caves. It was a calm, quiet dusk; a twilight blended of green waters, and mellow night winds, and the slow fading of Grotto’s gentle sun. From the rear of his launch Kabaraijian watched it fall, and listened to the sounds of twilight over the purring of the engine.

  Grotto was a quiet world, but the sounds were there, if you knew how to listen. Kabaraijian knew. He sat erect in the back of the boat, a slight figure with swarthy skin, and long black hair, and brown eyes that drifted dreamy. One thin hand rested on his knee, the other, forgotten, on the motor. And his ears listened to the bubbling of the water in the wake of the launch, and the swish-splash of the lakeleapers breaking surface, and the wind moving the trailing green branches of the trees along the near shore. In time, he’d hear the nightflyers, too, but they were not yet up.

  There were four in the boat, but only Kabaraijian listened or heard. The others, bigger men with pasty faces and vacant eyes, were long past hearing. They wore the dull gray coveralls of deadmen, and there was a steel plate in the back of each man’s skull. Sometimes, when his corpse controller was on, Kabaraijian could listen with their ears, and see with their eyes. But that was work, hard work, and not worth it. The sights and sounds a corpse handler felt through his crew were pale echoes of real sensation, seldom useful and never pleasurable.

  And now, Grotto’s cooling dusk, was an off-time. So Kabaraijian’s corpse controller was off, and his mind, disengaged from the dead men, rested easy in its own body. The launch moved purposefully along the lake shore, but Kabaraijian’s thoughts wandered lazily, when he thought at all. Mostly he just sat, and watched the water and the trees, and listened. He’d worked the corpse crew hard that day, and now he was drained and empty. Thought—thought especially—was more effort than he was prepared to give. Better to just linger with the evening.

  It was a long, quiet voyage, across two big lakes and one small one, through a cave, and finally up a narrow and swift-running river. Kabaraijian turned up the power then, and the trip grew noisier as the launch sliced a path through the river’s flow. Night had settled before he reached the station, a rambling structure of blue-black stone set by the river’s edge. But the office windows still glowed with a cheery yellow light.

  A long dock of native silverwood fronted the river, and a dozen launches identical to Kabaraijian’s were already tied up for the night. But there were still empty berths. Kabaraijian took one of them, and guided the boat into it.

  When the launch was secure, he slung his collection box under one arm, and hopped out onto the dock. His free hand went to his belt, and thumbed the corpse controller. Vague sense blurs drifted into his mind, but Kabaraijian shunted them aside, and shook the dead men alive with an unheard shout. The corpses rose, one by one, and stepped out of the launch. Then they followed Kabaraijian to the station.

  Munson was waiting inside the office—a fat, scruffy man with gray hair, and wrinkles around his eyes, and a fatherly manner. He had his feet up on his desk and was reading a novel. When Kabaraijian entered, he smiled and sat up and put down the book, inserting his leather placemark carefully. “’Lo, Matt,” he said. “Why are you always the last one in?”

  “Because I’m usually the last one out,” Kabaraijian said, smiling. It was his newest line. Munson asked the same question every night, and always expected Kabaraijian to come up with a fresh answer. He seemed only moderately pleased by this one.

  Kabaraijian set the collection box down on Munson’s desk and opened it. “Not a bad day,” he said. “Four good stones, and twelve smaller ones.”

  Munson scooped a handful of small, grayish rocks from inside the padded metal box and studied them. Right now they weren’t much to look at. But cut and polished they’d be something else again: swirlstones. They were gems without fire, but they had their own beauty. Good ones looked like crystals of moving fog, full of soft colors and softer mysteries and dreams.

  Munson nodded, and dropped the stones back into the box. “Not bad,” he said. “You always do good, Matt. You know where to look.”

  “The rewards of coming back slow and easy,” Kabaraijian said. “I look around me.”

  Munson put the box under his desk, and turned to his computer console, a white plastic intruder in the wood-paneled room. He entered the swirlstones into the records, and looked back up. “You want to wash down your corpses?”

  Kabaraijian shook his head. “Not tonight. I’m tired. I’ll just flop them for now.”

  “Sure,” said Munson. He rose, and opened the door behind his desk. Kabaraijian followed him, and the three dead men followed Kabaraijian. Behind the office were barracks, long and low-roofed, with row on row of simple wooden bunks. Most of them were full. Kabaraijian guided his dead men to three empty ones and maneuvered them in. Then he thumbed his controller off. The echoes in his head blinked out, and the corpses sagged heavily into the bunks.

  Afterwards, he chatted with Munson for a few minutes back in the office. Finally, the old man went back to his novel, and Kabaraijian back to the cool night.

  A row of company scooters sat in back of the station, but Kabaraijian left them alone, preferring the ten-minute walk from the river to the settlement. He covered the forest road with an easy, measured pace, pausing here and there to brush aside vines and low branches. It was always a pleasant walk. The nights were calm, the breezes fragrant with the fruity scent of local trees and heavy with the songs of the nightflyers.

  The settlement was bigger and brighter and louder than the river station; a thick clot of houses and bars and shops built alongside the spaceport. There were a few structures of wood and stone, but most of the settlers were still content with the plastic prefabs the company had given them free.

  Kabaraijian drifted through the new-paved streets, to one of the outnumbered wooden buildings. There was a heavy wooden sign over the tavern door, but no lights. Inside he found candles and heavy, stuffed chairs, and a real log fire. It was a cozy place, the oldest bar on Grotto, and still the favorite watering hole for corpse handlers and hunters and other river station personnel.

  A loud shout greeted him when he entered. “Hey! Matt! Over here!”

  Kabaraijian found the voice, and followed it to a table in the corner, where Ed Cochran was nursing a mug of beer. Cochran, like Kabaraijian, wore the blue-and-white tunic of a corpse handler. He was tall and lean, with a thin face that grinned a lot and a mass of tangled red-blond hair.

  Kabaraijian sank gratefully into the chair opposite him. Cochran grinned. “Beer?” he asked. “We could split a pitcher.”

  “No thanks. I feel like wine tonight. Something rich and mellow and slow.”

  “How’d it go?” said Cochran.

  Kabaraijian shrugged. “O.K.,” he said. “Four nice stones, a dozen little ones. Munson gave me a good estimate. Tomorrow should be better. I found a nice new place.” He turned toward the bar briefly, and gestured. The bartender nodded, and the wine and glasses arrived a few minutes later.

  Kabaraijian poured and sipped while Cochran discussed his day. It hadn’t gone well; only six stones, none of them very big.

  “You’ve got to range farther,” Kabaraijian told him. “The caves around here have
been pretty well worked out. But the High Lakes go on and on. Find someplace new.”

  “Why bother?” Cochran said, frowning. “Don’t get to keep them anyway. What’s the percentage in knocking yourself out?”

  Kabaraijian twirled the wine glass slowly in a thin, dark hand, and watched the dream-red depths. “Poor Ed,” he said, in a voice half-sadness and half-mockery. “All you see is the work. Grotto is a pretty planet. I don’t mind the extra miles, Ed, I enjoy them. I’d probably travel in my off-time if they didn’t pay me to do it. The fact that I get bigger swirlstones and my estimates go up—well, that’s extra gravy.”

  Cochran smiled and shook his head. “You’re crazy, Matt,” he said affectionately. “Only corpse handler in the universe who’d be happy if they paid him off with scenery.”

  Kabaraijian smiled too, a slight lifting at the corners of his mouth. “Philistine,” he said accusingly.

  Cochran ordered another beer. “Look, Matt, you’ve got to be practical. Sure, Grotto is O.K., but you’re not gonna be here all your life.” He set down his beer, and pulled up the sleeve of his tunic, to flash his heavy wristlet. The gold shone softly in the candlelight, and the sapphires danced with dark blue flame. “Junk like this was valuable once,” Cochran said, “before they learned how to synthesize it. They’ll crack swirlstones, too, Matt. You know they will. They already have people working on it. So maybe you’ve got two years left, or three. But what then? Then they won’t need corpse handlers anymore. So you’ll move on, no better off than when you first landed.”

  “Not really,” said Kabaraijian. “The station pays pretty good, and my estimates haven’t been bad. I’ve got some money put away. Besides, maybe I won’t move on. I like Grotto. Maybe I’ll stay, and join the colonists, or something.”

  “Doing what? Farming? Working in an office? Don’t give me that crap, Matt. You’re a corpse handler, always will be. And in a couple years Grotto won’t need corpses.”

  Kabaraijian sighed. “So?” he said. “So?”

  Cochran leaned forward. “So have you thought about what I told you?”