The Coming Event

CHAPTER EIGHT

Every ship carried ghosts and a slaver more than most; whispers, sighs, cries of pain and grief, the slurry of restless movement. Vibrations caught and transmitted through the structure to fade and die in murmuring susurations. But, in the Moira, the ghosts Dumarest heard were things of silence.

The ship was too quiet. In the engine room Jed Craig tended the humming generators and in the control room watchful mechanisms studied the space through which they drove but here, in the cabin, he heard nothing but the small sounds created by the woman at his side.

She moved as he glanced at her, one hand lifting to touch his arm, her lips smiling as her fingers met his flesh. She was newly awake as he could tell from the altered tempo of her breathing yet remembered a recent passion which, slaked, had left them satiated.

A single point of light illuminated the cabin with a soft, pink glow and he remembered another room, another woman revealed in a similar illumination.

As if reading his mind Ysanne said, "Regrets, Earl?"

"No."

"Memories, then? Of someone you left behind in Zabul?" Her hand moved over his naked torso. "Someone who loved you?"

A question he left unanswered even as he wondered why he found it so hard to remember Althea's face. Copper hair and emerald eyes-familiar coloration, but she had lacked the raw energy which filled Ysanne. The same burning individuality which had made Kalin so precious.

"Earl?"

"Nothing." The past was dead and ghosts should be left in peace. Now, at this moment, only Ysanne was real. The woman and the ship and the dangers they faced.

"I was thinking," she said. "About you and Maynard. I thought you'd relied on luck to avoid getting hurt but now I know better. You planned the whole thing from the very beginning. Watched and waited and moved when the time was right. And, by God, how you moved! I've never seen anyone so fast."

"It's over. Forget it."

"Aren't you curious? About him and me?"

"No."

Her hand tensed on his chest then relaxed. In the light she looked wild, barbaric. An animal yet to be tamed, broken, fitted with a yoke. She had come to him with an unabashed directness and his response had matched her own.

"You're different," she mused. "From the very first moment we met I recognized that. We're two of a kind. What you want you take. What you need you go after. Like me. You can understand how it is; to see something and know you must have it. Must have it. Once, when I was very young, I saw a kalifox. It had fur which changed color in different lights and I wanted it. I wanted it so bad I hunted it for seven weeks. I chased it over the plains and into the hills and up into the snow and never gave it rest. I caught it in the end."

"Did you enjoy the fur?"

"We both enjoyed it." She laughed with a soft amusement. "I didn't kill it, Earl. I fed it and kept it for a pet until winter came and it ran off to mate. I used to hear it barking from the hills at night and, sometimes, I would bark back." She snuggled a little closer. "Can you understand that?"

"Yes."

"Did you ever have a pet? On Earth, Earl? Did you?"

There had been no time for pets, no time for softness of any kind. To catch an animal was to gain a meal and to feed one was to invite starvation. Trust, love, affection, generosity-all were luxuries he'd never known.

She seemed to sense this and she didn't press the question, talking instead of her own world.

"You'd like Manita, Earl. We live simple lives close to nature. Hunting, fishing, growing crops. No one tells another what to do. There are no pressures. A man doesn't have to prove himself. To live. To share. To help when help is needed."

"But you left."

"I said we lived simple lives not that we are ignorant. To keep what we have we must be as educated as those who might want to take it from us. So I learned. I was always good at finding my way around and it was natural I should become a navigator. I like it so I do it. When I stop liking it I do something else."

"Like hunting down a legend?"

"Of course. But it isn't that to you, is it? It's real and you want to go back home." Her tone gentled. "At times I feel the same. I remember the open plains and the hills and the nights when the sky glowed with stars. The meetings and pairings and the fun. The hunts, too, and the fishing, but most of all, I think, the freedom. That's when I begin to get restless."

"And move?"

"Yes."

"And when you stop liking what you're doing now?"

She said, "What you're really saying is what happens when I stop liking you. Isn't it obvious? We stop being lovers. We stop being companions. You want more?"

"I wasn't talking about us. I'm talking about our partnership. Does that end too?"

For a long moment she stared at him then, smiling, she said, "Earl, you fool, for us there'll be no ending. We'll go on until we find a new beginning. Then, maybe, you'll go running into the hills and, at night, I'll hear you barking."

"And will you bark back?"

"Maybe. That's for you to guess." She grew serious. "Don't worry, Earl, I'm no quitter. Once I start a thing I see it through. If Earth exists we'll find it."

"It exists."

"Then we'll find it." She stretched like a cat on the soft comfort of the bed. "Now kiss me before I go and check the controls."

Maynard's death had robbed the Moira of experienced command. Seated in the big control chair Dumarest checked the instruments and studied the screens, going through a routine which he had learned from service with various freetraders, knowing it wasn't enough. To stand a temporary watch to relieve a tired captain was a different matter from accepting the full responsibility of a ship and all it contained.

As yet they had been lucky. Space was clear and the automatics capable of maintaining flight and safety, but space was also deceptive and odd vortexes of energy lay in unexpected places. Swirling maelstroms of force could take a ship and rip it apart with opposed energies. Nodes held within their parameters the fury of dying suns. In these areas the instruments couldn't be trusted and only an experienced hand and eye could guide a ship on a safe route.

Experience Dumarest lacked and he knew it.

"Earl?" Ysanne spoke from the intercom. "How is it going?"

"All right as yet. Are we on course?"

"The same as I set. Barely any deviation."

Proof of the superior efficiency of the Moira's equipment but enough to have missed their target had it been distant.

"Change," ordered Dumarest. "Set a new course."

"To where?"

"Take your pick. I want a random pattern to throw off any pursuit."

"From whom? We took care of that other ship."

"Just do it."

This precaution could be unnecessary but there could always have been a third vessel which had remained unseen or which had arrived just after they had left. A ship could be following them with its sensors picking up the spatial disturbance left by their passage.

Such a command decision was a part of a captain's duties. As it was his job to oversee the general running of the ship and crew. To insure that there were correct supplies, fuel for the engines, air for the tanks. To delegate authority but never to be careless. No matter what happened to a ship; in the end only one person alone was responsible.

Craig reported from the intercom, "Generator's showing signs of mounting inefficiency, Earl. I'd like to strip it down and monitor the coils."

"Have you replacements?"

"No. We were due for a refit but Pendance had to act in a hurry."

A decision was needed and Dumarest made it. "Leave things as they are for now. Checking will take time and the gain needn't be worth it. Let me know if the condition gets worse."

"As you say, Earl."

As the voice died an alarm flashed red, the glow holding for a long moment before the ruby turned green. A node of potential danger had been spotted by the sensors and avoided by the computer guidance system.

"Relax," said Ysanne from behind the chair. "Those lights will send you crazy if you stare at them long enough. That was Maynard's trouble. He couldn't trust the machines and ended by doubting himself." She moved so as to stand to one side, the braids of her hair reflecting the winking telltales in oily shimmers. "I've fed the course changes into the system. Three at varying angles and different periods. After the last we head to where we're going."

"Sorkendo?"

She betrayed her surprise. "How did you know we came from Sorkendo?"

"Why go back there?"

"Pendance has funds stashed away in the Homtage Bank and I figured we could get them. Land and claim he was dead and use them for a refit and supplies."

Dumarest said, "Were you checked in at the bank as a full crew-partner? Was Craig?"

"I wasn't and I'm sure Jed wasn't either. Does it matter? They know we're both a part of the Moira's crew."

"It doesn't signify. Crews have been known to mutiny. A smart captain doesn't make it easy for them to gain any benefit from it."

"Maynard, then?" She frowned as she remembered. "Damn! We cycled him through the lock. We should have taken his hands first and used his prints to authenticate a deposition as to our right to claim."

The very suggestion revealed her lack of knowledge in certain areas.

"They wouldn't have accepted it," said Dumarest. "You aren't the first to have thought of that. In any case Pendance had probably radioed the bank to freeze his account."

"Of course! Why didn't I think of that?" She threw back her braids with an impatient gesture. "You'd have done better to have killed him, Earl. Well, if we can't go to Sorkendo, where else?"

To where the Cyclan wouldn't be waiting and they could find a captain willing to work for nothing but a promise. A world on which they could ready the Moira for a long journey-and to find it soon!

There was a subtle beauty in madness. An insidious attraction which manifested itself in the fabrication of complex logic which built alien worlds from accepted premises and realms of enticing fantasy from minor speculations.

Was this the root of the contamination?

Seated in his chair, alone in his office, Elge sensed rather than heard the swift interplay of minds honed and sharpened to a razor's edge. These intelligences had had centuries in which to ponder over abstract ideas, to create worlds based on adaptations of those concepts, to crystallize them into a variety of concrete wholes.

And that was the beauty of it. Not just one rigid universe beset by harsh disciplines but a plethora, each different from the other, each with its own basic logic. A game in which, like gods, the freed minds of old cybers had created worlds and planets and galaxies as they willed. Not like gods-they had been gods, each cyber in the world of his making the only true deity.

The recording ended and for a long moment Elge sat motionless in his chair. Had he and Nequal before him been guilty of a heinous crime? The recording had been taken from brains since destroyed. Minds judged to be insane and erased for fear of future contamination. But what if the apparent sickness had been the result of a natural progression? The next step in the evolutionary scale?

Elge had considered this possibility before. A mind, like a body, could grow and mature, develop like a child into a man. To progress from the fear-ridden, superstition-poisoned mentality of an aboriginal savage to the calculating intellect of a being able to recognize the stars for what they were, demons and ghosts for the nonsense they represented, the awe of the unknown for the ignorance it personified.

A normal man could do that contaminated as he was with destructive emotions. A cyber was superior to a normal man, free as he was from distorting glandular exudations. And, as a cyber to a man-the developed brains?

Even if that were so there had been no crime. Life was the cheapest thing in the universe and, though some had been destroyed, others would follow if the theory was correct. And would the development end there? Elge remembered the demonstration and the massive arm of the robot which had crushed the brain controlling it. It would be suicide if the mind had been aware of what was happening and what it was doing. But if it had been aware, and there was no doubt that was the case, could it have been not suicide but release? — the intelligence finally freed of the last vestige of hampering flesh so as to soar into the limitless regions of the universe?

Such speculation held endless connotations and opened vistas of entrancing complexity which a century of uninterrupted thought would only begin to comprehend.

Could the intelligence survive once the brain had been destroyed? The mind was not the organ-that much had been proved long ago. The ego, the self, was the product of an electromagnetic potential which could be plotted and measured and set down in graphs and wavering lines. Could be caught by machines which emulated telepathy as the recordings demonstrated.

And a world of the mind, to that mind, was as real as any other.

For a moment his senses swam and Elge straightened, one hand reaching toward the recorder to play again the trapped emissions of now-dead brains. Or brains which even now were enjoying true release. Freed from the prisons in which, all unwittingly, they had been placed.

His hand halted as the door opened and Jarvet entered the room, a folder beneath his arm.

"Master!" He placed the folder on the desk and glanced at the apparatus recently installed. "The latest report from Cyber Vire."

"Leave it."

"Yes, Master. The Council has studied the report and it would be best to bring your information up to date."

A warning? Elge glanced at the aide then at the folder. Engrossed with the recordings, he had mischanneled his energies and recognized the error. Time had been lost which should have been put to better use. A matter of minutes only, perhaps, but there could be no excuse for inefficiency.

He reached for the file and began to scan the contents.

Lim was dead and Vire had failed. The Saito had vaporized and all within it-Lim's pyre and one he had merited by his stupidity. Vire was not wholly to blame and yet the tools he had chosen reflected on his ability.

"Time was a matter of prime importance," said Jarvet as Elge put down the final sheet. "He contacted agents on Sorkendo while in transit and arranged for a military-type operation. One which, as we now know, failed."

That failure left the cyber in a damaged vessel, the mercenaries dead or stranded, their own ship taken by the man they had been engaged to capture.

Where was he now?

Correction-where would he be? And when?

Elge looked again at the report. As yet Vire had made only radio contact with Pendance and it would take time before his ship could reach Zabul. The result for which Dumarest had planned.

How to locate him in the immensity of space?

A man, using available transportation, was restricted to certain definable areas of operation. He could only go where ships were available to take him. Even if he adopted a random path it could never wholly be that because, always, his choices were limited. But now Dumarest was in his own vessel and could go where he pleased.

At least so it seemed, but Elge knew better.

Paper moved beneath his hand as he checked certain data. Vire had been thorough in his questioning of Pendance and his men. Facts; details as to supplies carried by the Moira, the temperament of the crew, the state of the vessel itself-all helping to build an overall picture.

The faulty generator would slow the ship and need repairing. Fuel was low. Of the crew Maynard had emotional difficulties which could lead to a confrontation if the woman was careless. The engineer, while skilled, would be of little use outside his field.

To operate the ship Dumarest would need men, money and material.

And those needs could drive him into a trap.