Nightflyers & Other Stories Read online

  “Yes,” Kabaraijian said. “But I don’t like it. I don’t think it would work, first of all. Spaceport security is tight to keep people from smuggling out swirlstones, and you want to do just that. And even if it would work, I don’t want any part of it. I’m sorry, Ed.”

  “I think it would work,” Cochran said stubbornly. “The spaceport people are human. They can be tempted. Why should the company get all the swirlstones when we do all the work?”

  “They’ve got the concession,” Kabaraijian said.

  Cochran waved him silent. “Yeah, sure. So what? By what right? We deserve some, for ourselves, while the damn things are still valuable.”

  Kabaraijian sighed again, and poured himself another glass of wine. “Look,” he said, lifting the glass to his lips, “I don’t quarrel with that. Maybe they should pay us more, or give us an interest in the swirlstones. But it’s not worth the risk. We’ll lose our crews if they catch us. And we’ll get expelled.

  “I don’t want that, Ed, and I won’t risk it. Grotto is too good to me, and I’m not going to throw it away. You know, some people would say we’re pretty lucky. Most corpse handlers never get to work a place like Grotto. They wind up on the assembly lines of Skrakky, or in the mines of New Pittsburg. I’ve seen those places. No thanks. I’m not going to risk returning to that sort of life.”

  Cochran threw imploring eyes up to the ceiling, and spread his hands helplessly. “Hopeless,” he said, shaking his head. “Hopeless.” Then he returned to his beer. Kabaraijian was smiling.

  But his amusement died short minutes later, when Cochran suddenly stiffened and grimaced across the table. “Damn,” he said. “Bartling. What the hell does he want here?”

  Kabaraijian turned toward the door, where the newcomer was standing and waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. He was a big man, with an athletic frame that had gone to pot over the years and now sported a considerable paunch. He had dark hair streaked with white and a bristling black beard, and he was wearing a fashionable multicolored tunic.

  Four others had entered behind him, and now stood flanking him on either side. They were younger men than he was, and bigger, with hard faces and impressive builds. The bodyguards made sense. Lowell Bartling was widely known for his dislike of corpse handlers, and the tavern was full of them.

  Bartling crossed his arms, and looked around the room slowly. He was smirking. He started to speak.

  Almost before he got the first word out of his mouth, he was interrupted. One of the men along the bar emitted a loud, rude noise, and laughed. “Hiya, Bartling,” he said. “What are you doing down here? Thought you didn’t associate with us low-lifes?”

  Bartling’s face tightened, but his smirk was untouched. “Normally I don’t, but I wanted the pleasure of making this announcement personally.”

  “You’re leaving Grotto!” someone shouted. There was laughter all along the bar. “I’ll drink to that,” another voice added.

  “No,” said Bartling. “No, friend, you are.” He looked around, savoring the moment. “Bartling Associates has just acquired the swirlstone concession, I’m happy to tell you. I take over management of the river station at the end of the month. And, of course, my first act will be to terminate the employment of all the corpse handlers currently under contract.”

  Suddenly the room was very silent, as the implications of that sank in. In the corner in the back of the room, Cochran rose slowly to his feet. Kabaraijian remained seated, stunned.

  “You can’t do that,” Cochran said belligerently. “We’ve got contracts.”

  Bartling turned to face him. “Those contracts can be broken,” he said, “and they will be.”

  “You son of a bitch,” someone said.

  The bodyguard tensed. “Watch who you call names, meatmind,” one of them answered. All around the room, men started getting to their feet.

  Cochran was livid with anger. “Damn you, Bartling,” he said. “Who the hell do you think you are? You’ve got no right to run us off the planet.”

  “I have every right,” Bartling said. “Grotto is a good, clean, beautiful planet. There’s no place here for your kind. It was a mistake to bring you in, and I’ve said so all along. Those things you work with contaminate the air. And you’re even worse. You work with those things, those corpses, voluntarily, for money. You disgust me. You don’t belong on Grotto. And now I’m in a position to see that you leave.” He paused, then smiled. “Meatmind,” he added, spitting out the word.

  “Bartling, I’m going to knock your head off,” one of the handlers bellowed. There was a roar of agreement. Several men started forward at once.

  And jerked to a sudden stop when Kabaraijian interjected a soft, “No, wait,” over the general hubbub. He hardly raised his voice at all, but it still commanded attention in the room of shouting men.

  He walked through the crowd and faced Bartling, looking much calmer than he felt. “You realize that without corpse labor your costs will go way up,” he said in a steady, reasonable voice, “and your profits down.”

  Bartling nodded. “Of course I realize it. I’m willing to take the loss. We’ll use men to mine the swirlstones. They’re too beautiful for corpses, anyway.”

  “You’ll be losing money for nothing,” Kabaraijian said.

  “Hardly. I’ll get rid of your stinking corpses.”

  Kabaraijian cracked a thin smile. “Maybe some. But not all of us, Mr. Bartling. You can take away our jobs, perhaps, but you can’t throw us off Grotto. I for one refuse to go.”

  “Then you’ll starve.”

  “Don’t be so melodramatic. I’ll find something else to do. You don’t own all of Grotto. And I’ll keep my corpses. Dead men can be used for a lot of things. It’s just that we haven’t thought of them all yet.”

  Bartling’s smirk had vanished suddenly. “If you stay,” he said, fixing Kabaraijian with a hard stare, “I promise to make you very, very sorry.”

  Kabaraijian laughed. “Really? Well, personally, I promise to send one of my deadmen by your house every night after you go to bed, to make hideous faces at the window and moan.” He laughed again, louder. Cochran joined him, then others. Soon the whole tavern was laughing.

  Bartling turned red and began a slow burn. He came here to taunt his enemies, to crow his triumph, and now they were laughing at him. Laughing in the face of victory, cheating him. He seethed a long minute, then turned and walked furiously out the door. His bodyguards followed.

  The laughter lingered a while after his exit, and several of the other handlers slapped Kabaraijian on the back as he made his way back to his seat. Cochran was happy about it too. “You really took the old man apart,” he said when they reached the corner table.

  But Kabaraijian wasn’t smiling anymore. He slumped down into his seat heavily, and reached almost immediately for the wine. “I sure did,” he said slowly, between sips. “I sure did.”

  Cochran looked at him curiously. “You don’t seem too happy.”

  “No,” said Kabaraijian. He studied his wine. “I’m having second thoughts. That insufferable bigot riled me, made me want to get to him. Only I wonder if I can pull it off. What can corpses do on Grotto?”

  His eyes wandered around the tavern, which had suddenly become very somber. “It’s sinking in,” he told Cochran. “I’ll bet they’re all talking about leaving…”

  Cochran had stopped grinning. “Some of us will stay,” he said uncertainly. “We can farm with the corpses, or something.”

  Kabaraijian looked at him. “Uh-uh. Machinery is more efficient for farming. And deadmen are too clumsy for anything but the crudest kind of labor, much too slow for hunting.” He poured more wine, and mused aloud. “They’re O.K. for cheap factory labor, or running an automole in a mine. But Grotto doesn’t have any of that. They can hack out swirlstones with a vibrodrill, only Bartling is taking that away from us.” He shook his head.

  “I don’t know, Ed,” he continued. “It’s not going to be easy.
And maybe it’ll be impossible. With the swirlstone concession under his belt, Bartling is bigger than the settlement company now.”

  “That was the idea. The company sets us up, and we buy it out as we grow.”

  “True. But Bartling grew a little too fast. He can really start throwing his weight around now. It wouldn’t surprise me if he amended the charter, to keep corpses off-planet. That would force us out.”

  “Can he get away with that?” Cochran was getting angry again, and his voice rose slightly.

  “Maybe,” Kabaraijian said, “if we let him. I wonder…” He sloshed his wine thoughtfully. “You think this deal of his is final?”

  Cochran looked puzzled. “He said he had it.”

  “Yes. I don’t suppose he’d crow about it if it wasn’t in his pocket. Still, I’m curious what the company would do if someone made them a better offer.”

  “Who?”

  “Us, maybe?” Kabaraijian sipped his wine and considered that. “Get all the handlers together, everybody puts in whatever they have. That should give us a fair sum. Maybe we could buy out the river station ourselves. Or something else, if Bartling has the swirlstones all locked up. It’s an idea.”

  “Nah, it’d never work,” Cochran said. “Maybe you’ve got some money, Matt, but I sure as hell don’t. Spent most of it here. Besides, even the guys that have money, you’d never be able to get them together.”

  “Maybe not,” Kabaraijian said. “But it’s worth trying. Organizing against Bartling is the only way we’re going to be able to keep ourselves on Grotto in the long run.”

  Cochran drained his beer, and signaled for another. “Nah,” he said. “Bartling’s too big. He’ll slap you down hard if you bother him too much. I got a better idea.”

  “Swirlstone smuggling,” Kabaraijian said, smiling.

  “Yeah,” Cochran said with a nod. “Maybe now you’ll reconsider. If Bartling’s gonna throw us off-planet, at least we can take some of his swirlstones with us. That’d set us up good wherever we go.”

  “You’re incorrigible,” Kabaraijian said. “But I’ll bet half the handlers on Grotto will try the same thing now. Bartling will expect that. He’ll have the spaceport screwed up tight when we start leaving. He’ll catch you, Ed. And you’ll lose your crew, or worse. Bartling might even try to force through deadman laws, and start exporting corpses.”

  Cochran looked uneasy at that. Corpse handlers saw too much of deadmen to relish the idea of becoming one. They tended to cluster on planets without deadman laws, where capital crimes still drew prison terms or “clean” executions. Grotto was a clean planet now, but laws can change.

  “I might lose my crew anyway, Matt,” Cochran said. “If Bartling throws us out, I’ll have to sell some of my corpses for passage money.”

  Kabaraijian smiled. “You still have a month, even with the worst. And there are pleny of swirlstones out there for the finding.” He raised his glass. “Come. To Grotto. It’s a lovely planet, and we may stay here yet.”

  Cochran shrugged and lifted his beer. “Yeah,” he said. But his grin didn’t hide his worry.

  * * *

  Kabaraijian reported to the station early the next morning, when Grotto’s sun was fighting to dispel the river mists. The row of empty launches was still tied to the dock, bobbing up and down in the rapidly thinning fog.

  Munson was inside the office, as always. So, surprisingly, was Cochran. Both of them looked up when Kabaraijian entered.

  “Morning, Matt,” Munson said gravely. “Ed’s been telling me about last night.” Today, for some reason, he looked his age. “I’m sorry, Matt. I didn’t know anything about it.”

  Kabaraijian smiled. “I never thought you did. If you do hear anything, though, let me know. We’re not going to go without a fight.” He looked at Cochran. “What are you doing here so early? Usually you’re not up until the crack of noon.”

  Cochran grinned. “Yeah. Well, I figured I’d start early. I’m going to need good estimates this month, if I want to save my crew.”

  Munson had dug two collection boxes out from under his desk. He handed them to the two corpse handlers, and nodded. “Back room’s open,” he said. “You can pick up your deadmen whenever you like.”

  Kabaraijian started to circle the desk, but Cochran grabbed his arm. “I think I’ll try way east,” he said. “Some caves there that haven’t really been hit yet. Where you going?”

  “West,” said Kabaraijian. “I found a good new place, like I told you.”

  Cochran nodded. They went to the back room together, and thumbed their controllers. Five deadmen stumbled from their bunks and followed them, shuffling, from the office. Kabaraijian thanked Munson before he left. The old man had washed down his corpses anyway, and fed them.

  The mists were just about gone when they reached the dock. Kabaraijian marched his crew into the boat and got set to cast off. But Cochran stopped him, looking troubled.

  “Uh—Matt,” he said, standing on the dock and staring down into the launch. “This new place—you say it’s real good?”

  Kabaraijian nodded, squinting. The sun was just clearing the treetops, and framing Cochran’s head.

  “Can I talk you into splitting?” Cochran said, with difficulty. It was an unusual request. The practice was for each handler to range alone, to find and mine his own swirlstone cave. “I mean, with only a month left, you probably won’t have time to get everything, not if the place is as good as you say. And I need good estimates, I really do.”

  Kabaraijian could see that it wasn’t an easy favor to ask. He smiled. “Sure,” he said. “There’s plenty there. Get your launch and follow me.”

  Cochran nodded and forced a grin. He walked down the dock to his launch, his dead men trailing behind.

  Going downriver was easier than going up, and faster. Kabaraijian hit the lake in short order, and sent his launch surging across the sparkling green surface in a spray of foam. It was an exhilarating morning, with a bright sun, and a brisk wind that whipped the water into tiny waves. Kabaraijian felt good, despite the events of the previous night. Grotto did that to him. Out on the High Lakes, somehow, he felt that he could beat Bartling.

  He’d run into similar problems before, on other worlds. Bartling wasn’t alone in his hatred. Ever since the first time they’d ripped a man’s brain from his skull and replaced it with a dead man’s synthabrain, there had been people screaming that the practice was a perversion and the handlers tainted and unclean. He’d gotten used to the prejudice; it was part of corpse handling. And he’d beaten it before. He could beat Bartling now.

  The first part of the voyage was the quickest. The two launches streaked over two big local lakes, past shores lined thickly with silverwood trees and vine-heavy danglers. But then they began to slow, as the lakes grew smaller and choked with life, and the country wilder. Along the banks, the stately silverwoods and curious danglers began to give way to the dense red and black chaos of firebriar brambles, and a species of low, gnarled tree that never had received a proper name. The vegetation grew on ground increasingly hilly and rocky, and finally mountainous.

  Then they began to pass through the caves.

  There were hundreds of them, literally, and they honeycombed the mountains that circled the settlement on all sides. The caves had never been mapped thoroughly. There were far too many of them, and they all seemed to connect with each other, forming a natural maze of incredible complexity. Most of them were still half-full of water; they’d been carved from the soft mountain rock by the streams and rivers that still ran through them.

  A stranger could easily get lost in the caves, but strangers never came there. And the corpse handlers never got lost. This was their country. This was where the swirlstones waited, cloaked in rock and darkness.

  The launches were all equipped with lights. Kabaraijian switched his on as soon as they hit the first cave, and slowed. Cochran, following close behind, did likewise. The channels that ran through the nearer caves were w
ell known, but shallow, and it didn’t pay to risk tearing out the bottom of your boat.

  The channel was narrow at first, and the glistening, damp walls of soft greenish stone seemed to press in on them from either side. But gradually the walls moved farther and farther back, finally peeling away entirely as the stream carried the two launches into a great vaulted underground chamber. The cavern was as big as a spaceport, its ceiling lost in the gloom overhead. Before long the walls vanished into the dark too, and the launches traveled in two small bubbles of light across the gently stirring surface of a cold black lake.

  Then, ahead of them, the walls took form again. But this time, instead of one passage, there were many. The stream had carved one entrance, but a good half-dozen exits.

  Kabaraijian knew the cave, however. Without hesitating, he guided his boat into the widest passage, on the extreme right. Cochran followed in his wake. Here the waters flowed down an incline, and the boats began to pick up speed again. “Be careful,” Kabaraijian warned Cochran at one point. “The ceiling comes down here.” Cochran acknowledged the shout with a wave of his hand.

  The warning came barely in time. While the walls were increasingly farther apart, the stone roof above them was moving steadily closer, giving the illusion that the waters were rising. Kabaraijian remembered the way he’d sweated the first time he’d taken this passage; the boat had been going too fast, and he’d feared getting pinched in by the ceiling, and overwhelmed by the climbing waters.

  But it was an idle fear. The roof sank close enough to scrape their heads, but no closer. And then it began to rise again to a decent height. Meanwhile, the channel widened still more, and soft sand shelves appeared along either wall.

  Finally there was a branching in the passage, and this time Kabaraijian chose the left-hand way. It was small and dark and narrow, with barely enough room for the launch to squeeze through. But it was also short, and after a brief journey, it released them to a second great cavern.

  They moved across the chamber quickly, and entered its twin under a grotesque stone arch. Then came yet another twisting passage, and more forks and turns. Kabaraijian led them calmly, hardly thinking, hardly having to think. These were his caves; this particular section of undermountain was his domain, where he’d worked and mined for months. He knew where he was going. And finally he got there.