Rhapsody in Black (10 page)

‘Not in the Splinters. Our culture is founded on talk, not on violence. We can do it, and we will do it. You'll help us, because you're committed. You take orders from me, now.'

I wasn't really surprised by the sudden hardness and hostility in his tone. It was perfectly clear that Bayon saw me only as a means to his particular end. He wanted to use me any way he thought he could. Like his followers, he could never bring himself to trust me enough to do things my way. He thought he knew best and he was going to push things the way he thought they ought to go. There would be no arguing with him.

I had to go along. He was probably more dangerous than the miners and the Church, so far as my state of health was concerned.

And besides, if I was on anybody's side, it would have to be his. Believe it or not, I sympathised. I wouldn't condemn anybody to live out their life in this filthy pit if they didn't want to.

And on top of all that, this was my best chance of cutting myself into the profits. On Rhapsody, where the Law of New Rome was non-existent, possession might well represent all ten points at issue when it came to deciding who owned what.

So now we know, said the whisper.

‘Like hell we do. What kind of a fortune could possibly be buried in a cave on Rhapsody? It doesn't make sense.'

It has to make sense, he pointed out. Charlot is here. Sampson is here. They may not know what it is, but it has to be real—make no mistake about that. The problem is that you can't see the sense.

‘Can you?'

You're in a better position to guess than I am. You've been on worlds of this type before.

‘And you have access to all my memories of those worlds. But there's never been a world quite like this one. The people on those other worlds lived and acted like people. This is different. It's possible the idiots only think they've found something, and are raising hell over nothing at all.'

You shouldn't allow your dislike of these people to lead you into underestimating them. They would love to believe that there is nothing in that grotto of theirs. If they do believe it, it's because they can't refuse. As your new ally has pointed out, they are not ignorant except by conscious effort of will, which applies only to certain areas. They have their analysts and their logicians. Somebody knows what is in that cave and has checked their guess very carefully indeed. It doesn't matter who did it—only that it could be done, here no less than anywhere else. The fact that they have refused the galaxy's values does not make them blind to its prices.

‘Well, you know what kind of thing brings a price these days as well as I do. Knowledge. Saleable ability. Alien science and alien technology. But there's none of that in the caves of Rhapsody.'

I think you'll find that the tremendous success of New Alexandria hasn't been simply in the collection of data. The New Alexandrians—including Charlot—are, in their own right, great scientists. The original purpose of the Library, don't forget, wasn't to provide leverage for galactic power, it was to provide for the needs of the pure research workers of the star-worlds.

‘I know all that.'

That's hardly surprising, since I'm picking it all out of your brain. But it needs calling to your attention, because it has a bearing on the current problem.

‘I don't see how.'

The New Alexandrians owe all their wealth not to alien knowledge but to their own ability to use and develop what they have found there. Their principal role is not collecting but adapting.

‘In other words,' I said, ‘you reckon it's something new. Not vulgar cash convertibles like radioactives or gemstones, but something peculiar which has properties no one's ever come across before.'

That's about the size of it. No amount of mineral wealth could possibly command the kind of respect that this find does. They could simply sell that to Sampson far a new set of conversion machines, and carry on exactly as before. This is more important than that—probably important with respect to the ethical considerations of the Church, as well. There seems to be more trouble here than would be warranted by a simple question of whether to involve outsiders or by private profiteering.

‘You could well be right there,' I conceded. ‘The Church of the Exclusive Reward does seem to be getting itself unduly steamed up. Improvised police forces don't spring up overnight unless extreme matters of internal politics are involved. And Charlot must have known about the political angle, or he wouldn't have taken the trouble to provide himself with a local politician
en route
. They didn't throw Mavra in stir with us, despite the fact that he was officially an exile. His past political sins appear to have become unimportant in the light of the current conflict.'

We don't actually know that Mavra has been welcomed back into the fold.

‘They certainly weren't ignoring him, like they were supposed to.'

Not at all. You're confusing Mavra with Bayon. Bayon has been excommunicated from the faith. Mavra was merely expelled for political reasons. He still qualifies as one of the faithful.

‘Maybe. But that's by the way. The question we've just set up is what the mystery
thing
might be able to do. If its properties are what make it so valuable, it must be able to do something we can't do already.'

Cheap power. A perpetual motion machine.

‘Let's not be ridiculous. You don't dig up perpetual motion machines in caves. Are you trying to be funny?'

Of course not. Nor did I mean to imply that there was a perpetual motion machine in the grotto. Merely that something in the cave is capable of evolving power in an undiscovered fashion, which might ultimately lead to the development of a perpetual motion machine. I thought that was quite obvious and straightforward.

‘Well, it wasn't. And it's ridiculous. Let's at least think of examples which don't blatantly contradict the laws of physics.'

I contradict your precious laws of physics, he pointed out.

‘Yeah,' I remarked, without enthusiasm. ‘Well, maybe they found another one of you.'

Without a host, he said, scornfully, I'd be hardly likely to wind up in a place like this. And even with a host I'd have difficulty getting into a sealed cave.

‘You were free-living on Lapthorn's Grave.'

Dormant, between hosts. I didn't start off like that, you know. I was born into a mind.

‘No,' I said, ‘I didn't know. You may have access. to my memories, but I don't have access to yours.'

I can give you access, he said, with a sudden eagerness which made me very wary indeed.

‘No !' I said, with some vehemence.

It wouldn't be difficult, he said. I can imprint them in your mind. It'll take time, but think what it could offer you. I was once...

‘
I don't want to know
!' It was virtually a mental shriek. I didn't want to know. Not anything. Not ever. I wanted no part of him.

My abilities saved your life and your ship in the Halcyon Drift, he said.

‘So you did me a favour,' I retorted. ‘Well, I didn't ask, and even if I ought to be grateful, I'm not. Let's just say that once paid for your keep. You've rented space in my mind and you've added some time to my life. So okay, we're all square. But we aren't lovers, and we never will be. Just leave me alone. Don't do me any
more
favours. Right?' I was on edge, and I was pretty tired. Perhaps I let my temper loose and said more than I should have. But the thought of what he might be able to do with my mind and my identity just got on my nerves. I was scared of him.

What about the guessing game? he said, a trifle bitterly. Have we finished?

‘There's no point,' I said. ‘Making silly suggestions about perpetual motion machines or super-ray guns or planet-eating bug-eyed monsters is only going to give me bad dreams.'

You've had enough of talking to yourself for one day, he said—and this time there was no mistaking the bitterness.

‘I was talking to you,' I said. ‘Now I want to stop talking to you and sleep, if that's okay. It's been a hard day.'

You don't talk to me, he said. You talk to yourself. All you want from me is an echo. Well, you can't hide from me, Grainger. I'm here and you have to learn to live with me. You can't pretend you're crazy—you're not the type. You have to acknowledge me. You don't live in a black cave, you can't simply choose not to see me. Even if I can't harm you, Grainger, I'm
here
. Remember that.

Then there was a funny sensation in my mind, just one fleeting instant of it, like a lead weight falling on top of me... and through me...

Then I cut out.

I woke up to soft, silvery light filtering through the window-slit.

It seemed only normal and natural in the first few seconds, until I remembered that I was in the caverns of Rhapsody, and then—for a moment or two—what was normal became horribly abnormal. Almost immediately, of course, I made the connection between the light and the luminescent organisms of Bayon's village. But that single moment of fear caused by the slowness of my reactions after waking up was strangely disturbing, as though I were adapting myself to the black reality of Rhapsody. That was something I didn't want to do. I wanted to remain separate—a part of an entirely different world. To a large extent, what we are depends on what we perceive, and I had no wish for my senses to be rebalanced to accommodate the whims of Rhapsody's culture.

There are three senses associated with what we call sight: dark/light perception, depth perception and colour perception. On Rhapsody, which chose always to dress in dimness, the last two were obliterated almost to the point of extinction, even under the conditions of illumination extant in the towns, because neither can function properly except in
bright
light. This threw emphasis on the primary sense of dark/light separation, which was even further emphasised by the fact that the people of Rhapsody chose to live a large fraction of their lives in the shadow rather than the light. In addition, of course, the inhibition of the overall sense-category of sight put a heavier responsibility on hearing (or, to be strictly accurate, on loudness perception—hearing, also, is a compound sense).

The reordering of the usefulness of my senses was an inevitability, while I was forced to operate within this environment. But changes in one's sensory orientation can sometimes result in changes in one's personality—even in one's identity. It was not so much that I feared a permanent change—I would have to spend a considerable period on Rhapsody before I became irrevocably colour-blind—but that I was worried about Grainger-on-Rhapsody behaving in a manner which might be considered aberrant by Grainger-off-Rhapsody. It was a syndrome I had encountered before on many of the worlds to which Lapthorn and I had taken the
Fire-Eater
and the
Javelin
. I had always fought such effects tooth and nail, but I had also been able to study the total subjection to them by their expression in Lapthorn, who believed in the whole experience of alien worlds. On dark worlds, he became a dark Lapthorn, on odorous worlds, an odorous Lapthorn. He
changed
, from world to world. It was not insanity, although several of his multiple forms behaved in a manner which would have been grossly out of place
everywhere else
. The syndrome is purely a matter of adaptation, but if it begins to come easily and naturally, then eventually one adaptation or another will claim one's soul, and one is trapped in an alien (alien, that is, to
other
men) environment for the rest of one's days.

It happens to a lot of spacemen. It would have happened to Lapthorn, in time, had not the crash ended his life. But it wasn't going to happen to me. I was determined never to surrender myself to alien worlds, alien ways, alien points of view.

And not to alien parasites, either.

I got up, and went out of the shack. The light was still steady and silver, and I was grateful for having found it. There was nobody around except for the lanky man—Tob—who had helped to bring me here. He was sitting just outside the door of Bayon's house, reclining with his head and shoulders supported by a cushion or rock, looking suspiciously like a jailer. He was cleaning his fingernails with a sheath-knife and he didn't bother to look up as I emerged.

“Bout time,' he murmured.

‘Where is everybody?' I asked.

‘We got a living to earn,' he said. ‘Just ‘cause you sleep till evening is no reason for us to do the same. A free life is no easy life. We have to eat. Food supply has to be kept up. That means taking stuff from the converters. It also means putting stuff back in. Them machines is about clapped. As it is, we got to get regular supplies of green-stuff from outside. Muck that grows here is no good at all. Jellied rock and glued-up dirt. We daren't just steal from the converters without putting nothing back.'

‘I'm sure that your sense of social responsibility is both highly developed and highly commendable,' I said. ‘Why aren't you out earning
your
living?'

‘I'm baby-sitting.'

‘Alpart was worried in case I woke up crying? He thought I might need something?'

‘Bayon always worries.'

‘That's no doubt why he boasts about his optimism. Did he think I was likely to run away?'

He looked up from his manicure, for the first time. He had a very unhandsome face, but it wasn't unfriendly. His paleness and his wispy, stunted beard made him grotesque to my eyes, but it was a face with definite humanity. So many of the faces here were white masks, with as much in-built capacity for expression as the faces of reptiles.

‘You ain't very pretty,' he said, ‘but we love you anyway. You mean a lot to us and we're going to look after you as well as we can.'

‘Very kind of you. But you don't need to keep me a prisoner. I'm on your side.'

‘Them as plays it safe,' he said, ‘is the ones who manage to get by down here.'

‘Them as plays it safe,' I mimicked, ‘don't get kicked out of the holy flock to begin with.'

‘We all make mistakes,' he said, without rancour. ‘It makes us extra careful about making any more. The first mistake we made cost us our chance to live like worms. If we make the mistake of losing you it could cost us our chance to live like people.'

‘Perfect,' I said. ‘I can see that Bayon's got you all convinced. I know it would be no good my telling you that you probably wouldn't find the star-worlds any more accommodating than this hell-hole, and it would make me very unpopular if I did. But you don't know what the star-worlds are like. They're wonderful—but for star people.'

‘Once a worm, always a worm,' he said. ‘Is that what you're trying to tell me?'

‘No, Tob, definitely not that. You're no worm or you wouldn't be here. You'd be in the mines or at the bottom of a hotshaft pretending to be charcoal. You can find a life in the star-worlds—I'm as sure as you are of that. What I'm trying to tell you is that it won't be easy. It won't descend upon you automatically, the minute you step onto alien soil. There will be no miracles. It'll require just the same effort and determination you put into living down here.'

‘I know,' he said. Just that, without protest or emphasis. He did know. I had to stop assuming that the people of Rhapsody were ignorant savages. They were something weird all right, but it was something a lot different from naiveté and barbarity.

‘Sure,' I said, ‘you know. And I can't really blame you for keeping eyes on me all the time.'

‘No,' he agreed, ‘you can't. We need you, spaceman, a hell of a lot more than you need us.'

‘My name's Grainger,' I said.

‘Grainger,' he said tonelessly. ‘You told us. Ain't much different from “spaceman”, is it? Bayon is Bayon and I'm Tob. What's your real name?'

I sighed. ‘I haven't got another name. I was born an orphan. Grainger's as real a name as I've got.'

He looked at me steadily. ‘Nobody gets born an orphan,' he said, accurately, but missing the meaning of what I'd said. ‘In any case, even the orphans round here got names. They're easy to come by.'

‘I don't come from around here,' I pointed out. ‘It doesn't matter anyhow. I'm sorry, but I haven't got another name. I'm just Grainger, that's all.'

‘Difficult to be friendly then,' he commented.

‘I won't take it to be unfriendly if you call me by my name,' I assured him.

He shrugged.

‘I will get you off if I can,' I told him. ‘I meant what I said. If it's humanly possible, I won't leave you to die down here.'

‘And this Charlot,' he said. ‘The one
you
have to ask. What about him? Does he feel the same way?'

That was a very difficult question. I didn't like Charlot and he didn't like me. He didn't owe me any favours. I could hardly make promises on his behalf. On the other hand, if I expressed any doubt, or even evaded the question, I would destroy any faith which Tob might place in me. I was reasonably sure that I could get Bayon's sixteen men onto the
Hooded Swan
, but reasonably sure wasn't nearly enough for Tob and Bayon. They'd been offered the carrot, and nothing was going to stand in their way.

‘Whether Charlot gets what he wants or not,' I told him, ‘he'll have lots of empty space on the ship. He's a human being, like the rest of us. He couldn't possibly elect to leave you here.'

All of which must have sounded to Tob like: ‘I'm not sure.'

‘It's not impossible to get off the world,' I said. ‘Rion Mavra and six others left.'

‘Churchmen,' he said. ‘Just arguers, not throwouts.'

‘Yes, but ships do arrive and take off. Not just the Splinter ships, but ships to and from Attalus. Not often, I know. But there are ships. If the locals ignore you, and refuse to recognise your presence, you shouldn't have too much difficulty getting to the offworlders.'

‘Do you honestly think we ain't tried?'

‘No,' I said. ‘I imagined you had. What goes wrong?'

‘The ships that come here from outside come to deal with the Churchmen. And that isn't easy. They wouldn't do it if they didn't have to. But from time to time, Attalus wants something and only our prices are low enough. The Church wouldn't deal either, but
they
have to, as well. We couldn't live here without support. Things break. Things have to be repaired and replaced. But the Church has a choice and Attalus doesn't. Attalus needs the Church more than the Church needs Attalus. We can always trade with the companies, because we have metal we don't want, and can pay their prices.

‘So do you really think that any ship from Attalus would dare to carry back renegades from Rhapsody or any other of the Splinters? They take the exiles, sure, because that's where the Church reckons its exiles ought to go. But we're dead. We don't exist, but we can't be allowed to escape from our non-existence. If we could get back our existence, the threat of excommunication would be only a tenth of what it is. The Churchmen would kill us, whether we exist or not. And the ships from Attalus wouldn't carry us. They wouldn't dare.'

I could see his point. Attalus
did
need its tenuous connection with the Splinters more than the Splinters did. It was apparent nonsense to think of Attalus being poorer than the Splinters, but that was the reality. Rhapsody had a minimum of wealth, but what it had was surplus to requirements. It could be used, in time of need. But all the wealth which Attalus possessed was tied up in maintaining a reasonable standard of living. They had much more in the way of resources, but they needed every last gram. Wealth and poverty are both determined by what is
enough
. The standard of everyday life on Rhapsody would be intolerable by the standards of Attalus.

There must be company ships as well—few and far between but I knew better than to ask Tob about that. Company men were company men. If you couldn't pay the fare, you didn't get the ride. That had been brought home to me so hard that I'd never ever forget it. Bayon, Tob and the rest were trapped—caught in the Church's web and condemned to the Church's version of hell. A living hell, where they served as terrible reminders to the faithful. The imaginary non-existence was cruel and brilliant. The people knew, but they could not admit that they knew. They lived alongside their hell, and it was an act of faith not to see it. It was even an act of faith
not to be a part of it
, for life on Rhapsody couldn't be objectively much different for the faithful and the condemned. I never found out what kind of Exclusive Reward the people were promised for their suffering—in all probability they weren't allowed to know the details, but had to take it on trust that it would be
good
—but they earned every bit of it.

They deserved it all. Their life, their heaven, and their hell. The only ones who didn't deserve it were the ones who had to suffer most—the hellbound themselves.

I meant to get them out. I really was absolutely determined. How much could I blame them for a lack of trust? Not at all,
then
. Later events cast a different shadow, though.

And what are you going to get out of it? demanded the wind.

I didn't bother with the question. His speaking had just reminded me of something.

‘Last night,' I subvocalised, ‘did you knock me out?'

How could I do that?

‘I didn't ask how.'

You went to sleep.

‘I don't usually go to sleep like somebody handed me a piledriver on the back of the head.'

You said yourself that you were tired.

He was taunting me deliberately. So many times before, he'd assured me that he couldn't take command of my body unless I let him. But how much control did he really have? Was he really unable to act, or was he simply trying to attain his ends by guile instead of force? After all, he had to live with me. Diplomacy made a lot of sense.

I didn't knock you out, he said suddenly.

I couldn't tell whether it was because the joke was over, or whether it was because he didn't like the way my train of thought was taking me.

‘I don't believe you,' I said.

It's true. I cannot render you unconscious by any direct action. I cannot subvert any voluntary control which you have over your body. I did not knock you unconscious last night.

There was nothing to be gained by further argument. I had to accept what he said, or else reject it outright without any real evidence. I accepted it, but retained my doubts. I returned my attention to Tob.