Rhapsody in Black (11 page)

‘What happens when they get back? And when is that likely to be?'

‘Pretty soon,' he said. ‘You slept most of the day anyway. And when they come back we'll be eating. After that, I guess we'll be moving. Bayon won't want to waste any more time. Once we've laid in the supplies, we'll be on our way.'

‘Revolution time,' I said. ‘All sixteen of you.'

‘Ain't no law against it,' he said.

‘True,' I conceded. And it was true, in more than a metaphorical sense. Fomenting revolution was against the Law of New Rome. If I had been on any planet other than an LWA I'd be risking twenty years (despite the fact that I wasn't actually fomenting anything—you know what the Law's like).

The prospect of action gladdened me. I wasn't really in favour of the tough line, although I admitted its potential, but I really did need something to
do
. Another time, another place, I could maybe have sat down and waited forever, lying in a hammock drowsing in the sunlight. But Rhapsody dressed exclusively in black, and sitting here was far too much like sitting in a coffin. Lying down was a declaration of intent to die. I needed something to occupy me, body and soul.

Something other than the wind.

A life of my own. I'd already had a taste of eternal death two years of it on Lapthorn's Grave, where there was nothing to do except stand that bloody cross up two or three times a day. Well, the cross was down now, no doubt, and it would stay down forever.

And that's how and why I became Rhapsody's public enemy number one.

Right from the start I was plagued by the suspicion that the boss wasn't cut out for his job. It all seemed horribly familiar. Nick delArco was a good guy but he was no starship captain. Bayon Alpart was the natural leader of his band, but he was operating on a scale that he couldn't handle. You can't just
be
a hero, or a gangster, or a revolutionary, or a tough guy. You have to have the qualifications. They don't hand out bits of paper for those things even in the weirdest of academies. But the bits of paper are all fakes anyhow. The qualifications are inside you, but they don't just grow there—they have to be put there.

Bayon didn't really know what he was doing or how he was going to do it. But he couldn't admit that, because he was the boss and bosses can't doubt. Maybe I shouldn't cry too loudly, because I probably couldn't have done any better. I didn't have the qualifications either. But that still didn't make me happy. I couldn't question his strategy, his intentions, his methods or his chances. There was no
obvious
road to where we wanted to go. And it was his party. I was only along for the ride. An extra card in his hand, an extra weapon for his fight. The fact that he was a local boy who knew only the Rhapsody angle and I was a worldly-wise citizen of the galaxy was only a fact, not an argument. He had the greater subjectivity; I had the greater objectivity. There was no way of knowing which talent might solve the problem. I had no real kick. I was one of the gang and that was it. No hero, no war leader, no expert. I had to play my role from behind.

Frankly, I was scared. Things could go wrong. And when things go wrong during gun-toting operations, people can get hurt.
Very
hurt. Personally, I don't like guns. I volunteered not to carry one (we had more men than guns). But I didn't imagine that would make it any less likely that I'd get shot if the bullets and the beams actually started to fly.

The first difficulty we had to cope with, of course, was gaining access to the grotto without giving advance warning or having to cope with any extra bother
en route
. Naturally enough, we didn't have a map. Most civilisations are flat and can be mapped flat. Rhapsody wasn't and couldn't. The problem of approach and access was a problem in three-dimensional geometry and dispersion. The grotto, of course, was only a single point on a single line. It was the intersections of the other lines which disobeyed good two-dimensional sense.

The problem was simple. We wanted to preserve a way out without conceding the opposition a way in. The disposition of sixteen men to achieve this end required very difficult thinking. I couldn't get near it. All that had to be trusted to Bayon's judgement. He did try to explain, but it was pointless, and I had to tell him so. I knew a bit about arterial and venous shafts, about towers and showers, and about the anatomy of alveolar systems. But only a bit. The pattern of tunnelling imposed by the necessity for supporting the rock was beyond me, and I didn't know the territory involved.

The outcasts had spent the whole day in stockpiling food and water. Their raiding expedition must itself have been a strategic masterpiece. They had stolen enough gruel to last sixteen of us a week. There was less water than would last us half that long, but the area we intended to command included several sources—and there was always the additional chance that the cave we intended to take contained water.

I wondered what was going on back at the capital, in the meantime. Had the council made a decision? If so, then we might be sticking our heads in the lion's mouth. If the booty was already committed to Sampson, he and his crew would be quite prepared to shoot their way in to claim it, and the Churchmen would be prepared to let them. If Charlot had acquired title, which was more likely, the prospects were a lot better. We'd hand it over and help him load it up in exchange for a ride out and—dare I hold out for it?—a small payment to save time and guarantee exclusive rights.

On the other hand, if the council had not yet handed on their hot potato, they might be prepared to attach conditions about dealing with outcasts—like, for instance, Charlot would only get the goods if he guaranteed to leave the hellbound in hell. That possibility would almost certainly lead to trouble.

And, in further complication, there was also the awkward little fact that Charlot had yet to pay me back for the
Lost Star
doublecross. How that was going to affect matters, Charlot alone could tell.

The outcasts were quite relaxed, considering the importance of the operation. When Bayon detailed his plans and handed out the jobs, they nodded calmly and the questions they asked were confined to matters of importance. There was no sign of doubt or frayed nerves. Nobody was looking for trouble; everybody would be ready for it if it came. They all gave the appearance of being strong, capable men. But then, they had been selected by the rigorous process of survival.

We moved off just as soon as we had finished talking. There was no zero hour set for dramatic purposes. We got ready, and when we were ready, we went. We split into groups as men peeled away from the main group in order to adopt their specific positions defending our potential escape route from any surrounding operation mounted by the enemy.

The eventual assault party was just five strong. There was Bayon, Tob, two men named Harl and Ezra, and myself. Bayon carried the best of his group's weapons—their solitary power rifle. It was only about half charged, but you can cause an awful lot of mayhem with a half charged beam gun. At a reasonable rate of power-release it could burn a hole through a couple of hundred men, if they were obliging enough to stand in a straight line so that no power splashed astray. Tob, Harl and Ezra were all armed with ordinary projectile weapons. The main advantage of a standard gun over a beamer is range, and so we were ill-armed for our purposes. The three rifles were by no means primitive—they were good, efficient pieces of machinery, whose design had been perfected centuries before. But their
presence
on Rhapsody was a little incongruous, let alone their prevalence over the beam guns which the inhabitants would have found much more functional in the general run of their affairs. But the people of Rhapsody were far from immune from the small illogicalities which invariably plague dogmatically maintained cultures. The Church of the Exclusive Reward had armed itself only to answer the possibility that they might be called upon to defend their isolation and alienation. They were not an armed society by nature. Possibly, they had chosen to employ so few beamers
because
the power of such weapons was so immoderate and ubiquitous.

We made our approach via a network of bleak, difficult passages, which seemed to bend about themselves tortuously. To my (admittedly uneducated) eye they did not look to be alveolar vessels at all, but faults caused at some distant time past by stress within the alveolar architecture. My flashlight had not yet been exhausted, but I used it very sparingly, saving as much light as I could for the indeterminate future. Bayon and his men, as was usual, showed no dislike for the darkness, and moved with ample confidence therein. Occasionally, though—when it was necessary to avoid deep pits or pass by loose structures of rock which threatened disaster if disturbed—even Bayon expressed gratitude for the availability of light. He had his own lanterns, of course, but he was as jealous of these as I was with the light of my flash. Conservation was always his first priority. I had to be given frequent help in the tunnels, but Tob was ever-present and discreet, so that I did not make too much of a fool of myself.

The worst part of the journey by far was the ascent of a slanting hotshaft which was only ten or fifteen degrees from the vertical.

Here, fortunately, we had light in plenty—not just from the flash and Bayon's lamps, but from the walls themselves, where luminous life-forms clung to the scattered crevices which we used for handholds. Thus, not only was our way lighted but we knew where to reach for with both hands and toes by the brightness of the light. The climb was rendered practical by virtue of this coincidence. Without the organisms, the danger of slipping down the shaft while we manipulated our own lights to our convenience would have been considerable, and we would probably have had to choose another way to the grotto. And there was no other way available which offered us such a close approach without the danger of interception.

The shaft disgorged us into a corridor about four feet tall and three across, through which we had to crawl for a hundred metres before emerging into a vertical slit, where we paused for the first time. The slit opened directly into the blind mine-shaft where the grotto was situated.

We had presumed that there would be no guards beyond the opening of the slit, since they would only be covering limited access. This implied that we had only to contend with those who were now between ourselves and our objective.

Harl and Tob went on, easing themselves out into the shaft. Tob went right, to check our hypothesis that there were no guards that way. Harl went left, to find out how many we had to deal with at the mouth of the grotto.

We waited anxiously, wooing the silence and dreading the sound of shots from either direction.

Three minutes elapsed before Harl came back.

‘Two,' he said, and Bayon heaved a sigh of relief. Had there been more, the likelihood of a battle would have increased greatly. Two men are a partnership, and may be expected to behave sensibly. Three make a crowd, and cannot.

We had to wait a further three minutes for Tob. His task had taken longer, because he was looking for something which was (as we had hoped) not there.

‘What's the light like at the cave-mouth?' Bayon asked.

‘Two masked lanterns. Purely a formality. They can't do much,' supplied Harl.

‘Good. Take it dead slow. No noise. Wait until we're all in a firing position—we'll have to feel our way.'

‘Right,' said Tob.

‘You know what to say?' Bayon addressed me.

‘Sure,' I said. It had to be me who did the talking. We didn't want any silliness about problems of existence and recognition of same.

The muted lanterns were all in our favour. It might be expected that if they were bothering to guard something, the miners would also have made provision for the guards to get a clear sight down the tunnel for a few metres, at least. But that wasn't Rhapsody's way. Tunnel creatures shun the light.

And so we were allowed to make our approach in deep shadow, unseen and unsuspected.

We had expected the guards to be at ease—off their guard, in fact—since their presence there was largely symbolical, and they were prevented by lack of light from doing any effective guarding. But we were wrong. This pair were taking it seriously, without realising the incongruity. They were standing straight, rifles at the ready, alert for any sound. The light of masked lamps made them easy targets, but I don't think they realised that fact. Unless, of course, they were merely putting on a show.

Which was entirely possible, because as we arranged ourselves into a line preparatory to attack, we realised that somebody else was inside the grotto. If there were more guards, with more guns, the situation was much worse than we had thought.

We could hear voices, but we couldn't hear what was being said, so they didn't give us any clue to the identity of the people inside.

We all knew what was going on, but we couldn't start a discussion about it. We were far too close for a whisper not to carry. I didn't dare start my spiel, ordering the guards to drop their guns, in case there were more guns inside and the people holding them were alerted. For the same reason, I hoped Bayon would decide against shooting down the sentries. That narrow entrance could be defended from the inside for a considerable time. Lives would be lost in taking the grotto on those terms.

The only course left open to us, it seemed to me, was to try stealth and speed simultaneously, and hope to succeed by surprise. I couldn't tell Bayon so, and I couldn't act myself, because I didn't have a gun. So I just stood there, and waited for our noble leader to do his stuff.

Bayon was in no hurry. He elected to wait and watch. In this case, his judgement proved superior to mine. Within a few minutes, they came out of the grotto.

There were four of them. One I didn't know and one I couldn't see. The other two were Rion Mavra and Cyolus Capra. The four of them were engaged in a conversation—whose content we still could not identify. They paused just outside the entrance to the grotto so that the leading man—the one I didn't know—could emphasise some point he was making.

I felt Bayon tense as he levelled his gun, but he still held back and allowed them to come on.

Mavra and the unknown man moved forward together, and the others dropped back, apparently temporarily disengaged from the conversation. I saw the fourth figure highlighted briefly beyond and between Mavra and the other. It was Angelina. The surprise was momentary—I couldn't afford the time to think about it.

Then Bayon moved.

Involved as they were with one another, neither man saw us as we covered the three paces which separated us. They reacted only when violent hands were laid upon them.

Bayon reached out to take Mavra's head in the crook of his arm, and swung the smaller man around effortlessly. Mavra gasped, but he was drowned by Bayon's loud yell.

‘Ezra! Get Krist! Tob the other one! Grainger the girl.'

The allocation of tasks did not represent any denigration of my fighting spirit relative to his own men, but merely reflected the way we had lined up. We were already halfway to completing what Bayon demanded of us.

Ezra took hold of the man that I had not recognised—Akim Krist, it seemed—and shoved him into the wall of the tunnel, moving in behind him so that Krist's body shielded him from the armed men, while his own rifle was aligned across Krist's chest in a threatening position.

Meanwhile, Bayon had gone forward, moving Mavra with him as a human shield.

Capra had moved instinctively backward and to one side, and it was not necessary for Tob to clear him out of Bayon's way. But Angelina froze, and I had to lunge forward, lift her bodily, and then force her right down, so that Ezra and Harl could—if necessary—fire over our bodies. Chivalrously, I fell on top of her instead of getting underneath her so that she would absorb any loose lead. I think it was an accident—it was the way we fell.

The guards had acted with all due suddenness in levelling their guns and striking an aggressive pose. Mercifully, though, they were not so trigger-conscious as to let fly without a decent amount of premeditation. Sensibly, they didn't fire at all.

There was a sudden and profound silence. I caught myself waiting for something to happen, and remembered that I was the mouthpiece.

‘Put the guns down,' I said levelly.

The guards hesitated. Their exaggerated trepidation clearly showed that they recognised Bayon, who was only a few feet away, staring at them over Mavra's head. But it was quite clear that the Hierarch himself, Akim Krist, was convinced of the reality of the gun which held him pinned to the wall, and he was having no trouble compromising with the unreality of its holder.

‘Tell ‘em, Krist,' growled Ezra, relishing the menace in his own voice. Heroically, Krist ignored him.

I released Angelina, leaving her huddled on the ground. I brushed past the trailing arm of the prisoned Mavra and walked up to the guards. They looked at me with distaste, but they had already relaxed the attitude of their guns. I secured both rifles, and used them to point the way into the grotto. Both guards accepted the invitation, and descended the short slope into the glittering interior of the treasure cave.

I turned around, bowed slightly, and gestured to the grotto with my empty hand. My eyes met Mavra's. His gaze was colourless, lacking both surprise and reproach. Krist, however, had realised that I was solid, and was regarding me with mixed hatred and anger. His eyes were fixed on me, as he refused to honour my companions with the direction of his stare.

One by one, they all filed past me into the grotto. Harl helped Angelina to her feet, and to my surprise—and his—she thanked him in a low voice. She almost smiled at me as she brushed past, but her face couldn't quite manage it. In any case, it would have been an enigmatic smile—I was reasonably sure that she was not amused, and she could hardly be making us welcome.

I was about to enter, last of all, but I had to step back to let Harl out again. After the slightest of glances around the object of our exercise he had been ordered out again by Bayon to replace the previous guardians. He carried both of our lamps, and he was taking the masks off the other lights preparatory to distributing them intelligently in the corridor when I stepped into the grotto.

It was full of light.

Even so, there was no glare. The light was faint and filmy, like the light of the Milky Way as seen from a rim world on a clear night. It was an oddly familiar and—to me—beautiful effect. The floor had been cleared to leave a short pathway and a square space in the centre of the cave, which was just adequate to accommodate the ten of us. Standing room only.

The grotto was shaped like a cone with the point lopped off, but the interior surface was knobbed and distorted, with abundant rock-forms like stalagmites and stalactites. It looked to be a stress-cyst rather than an alveolar pocket. Its base diameter was about five metres, but the walls sloped inwards, tapering so that at eye-height the grotto only seemed to be about three metres wide.

The entire inner surface except for the patch where we stood was encrusted with blue-grey and green-grey growths which had luminescent facets set in ordered array over their tegument, like tiny sequins.

There was a small semicircular pool in the rear of the cave. Its surface was jet black, but set with a multitude of very faint pinpricks which were the reflections of the facets in the water. Beside the pool was an irregular heap of randomly lighted debris—obviously the detritus which had been cleared to allow spectators the room to stand.

‘Very nice,' I commented.

Bayon and his men were strangely wary, now that the action was over. They were looking about suspiciously, trying to see something which might be worth all this fuss. But there was nothing which could even seem unfamiliar to them.

‘It's gone!' said Ezra.

‘No it hasn't,' I told him. ‘This little collection we've assembled didn't come here for the privacy. And no one guards empty caves. It's still here, whatever it is.'

I wanted to get a close look, but it was impossible with the crowd crammed into the small cleared space.

‘Get them out,' I said to Bayon. ‘They're in the way.'

‘You'll have to tell them,' he reminded me.

I located Rion Mavra and addressed myself to him. ‘Look,' I said. ‘If we're going to be difficult about this, there's going to be a lot of unnecessary tension generated. Do you think that you could possibly admit—temporarily—that those guns have trigger-fingers on them, and that the men with the trigger-fingers should be obeyed?'

‘We'll do as you say, of course,' said Mavra, without committing himself.

‘Well then, I'll put you in charge of liaison. If my wishes aren't carried out, one of you might get shot by some nasty non-existent person. I want you all out of here and into the blind end of the mine-workings. I want you to imagine that there's a guard with you watching your every move. This imaginary guard will be called Ezra, if you wish to imagine that you can talk to him for the purpose of asking for something. I want you to make yourselves as comfortable as possible and wait. Do you think that you can handle all those instructions in one go?'

‘We'll do as you say. But I'd like to talk to you about what you're trying to do.'

‘Capture your big prize,' I said, waving an arm about my head (with some difficulty) to indicate the span of my ambitions.

‘What do you hope to gain by taking by force what your employer might well get by honest means?' he followed up.

‘Ah, well, there's the rub,' I said. ‘It's not primarily what I want which brought me here. I'm looking after the interests of some other people. You might not know them, though I'm sure you could if you made the effort. It would save you from having to assume that it was the will of God which picked you up in the corridor and brought you back in here.'

He didn't seem impressed.

‘Do you intend to hold us as hostages?'

‘Bayon?' I asked.

‘Yes,' said Bayon.

‘Yes,' I repeated, playing the game. ‘Now get out and do as I told you. Ezra, sit them down in a neat little group. If they don't know what you want them to do, hint by means of a few swift kicks. I think they'll catch on. We'll come back to them in a few minutes, when I've had a look around.'

They all filed out, and a sudden afterthought sent me out into the tunnel after them.

‘By the way,' I said, tapping Mavra on the shoulder, ‘you wouldn't care to tell me what to look for, I suppose?'

It was Angelina who answered. ‘I'm sure, Captain Grainger, that you have sufficient intelligence to see what is before you.'

It was the first time she'd spoken in my presence, and the heavy irony startled me. ‘I'm not the captain,' I said. ‘I only fly the ship.'

‘What about you?' said Ezra to Akim Krist. The Hierarch ignored him—looked straight through him.

‘Capra?' I asked.

‘There's nothing in there,' he said, with a grotesquely ineffective attempt at defiance.

‘Ah, forget it,' I addressed them collectively. ‘I'll find out for myself.' And I returned to the grotto to do just that.

There were three types of organism.

The primary producer was the luminescent organism. It was—quite literally—the base element of the system. It spread vegetatively over the inner surface of the grotto, like a thick coat of paint. It varied in thickness from about half an inch to one-and-a-half, according to the pieces which I inspected. (I took fresh specimens from the wall rather than look at the organisms which had been cleared from the floor, in case the latter had deteriorated.) Its texture was soft and easily breakable, like a dry, firm fungus. Internally it was partially differentiated into ill-defined strata, in and between which were suspended cloud-like ‘organs'. There did not seem to be any cellular structure, nor was there a multi-molecular fibrous skeleton. The differentiation seemed to be purely and simply a matter of molecular densities and protoplasmic cohesion. It was difficult to be certain with only the feeble light of my flashlight, and without any magnifier, but I formed the impression that the cloud areas were motile within the strata, and that there must be considerable streaming of molecules within the protoplasm. I noticed that as I held a plaque of the substance between my fingers, the luminescence died, but if I placed the distal surface against the palm of my hand, it grew brighter. The reaction was quick, and quite considerable for such a minor difference in temperature; it seemed obvious that the organism was thermosynthetic, gaining energy from the excitement of molecules by heat energy. The luminescence was probably an energy-excretory process—a means of disposing of absorbed energy which could not be immediately channelled into anabolic and catabolic processes.

This type of organism was representative of a class which often developed on conductive faces near hotcores. It could not be the cause of all the excitement.

The second type consisted of certain small growths which studded the sequined carpet. Each growth looked like a tiny tree, beginning at a single point and bifurcating as each branch reached a length of two and a half inches. The branches did not grow high but remained close to the substratum, so that the dendrite proliferated mostly in a horizontal plane. Some of these organisms had attained a diameter of fifteen inches, but most were a great deal smaller.

The active elements of the organism were borne at the tip of each branch—oval, sapphire-like bodies (not luminescent) which apparently secreted the branches over a period of time, and caused a bifurcation every time they divided—presumably by ordinary binary fission. I detached one of the dendrites from its bed, and carefully inspected the material which made up the skeletal elements. It had a curious almost-metallic texture, which reminded me of something which momentarily eluded my mind. The translucent blue skin of the vital cell, coupled with the familiar form of the organism, led me to believe that it used as its energy source the light excreted by the thermosynthetic carpet. Since it was basically similar to eukaryot types which could be found on virtually every habitable world in the galaxy, I concluded that this also could not be the Great Discovery. Leaving aside the microscopic endoparasites which undoubtedly existed in the system, I was thus left with the last visible type.

This type was difficult to spot, even though I knew roughly what to look for—a secondary consumer. I expected to find some kind of motile plasmid which ate the vital cells of the dendrites, but all the dendrites I inspected had all their cells intact.

It took me some time, but I finally noticed that it was the dendritic stalks, and not the living cells, which showed evidence of attack. This was unusual. It is not uncommon, of course, for non-living structural material to be organic in content, and hence an available source of food for another organism. But these dendritic skeletons had seemed to be metallic rather than carbonaceous. I puzzled for a while over this peculiarity, wondering what it could mean, while I continued my search for the organism itself.

It was, as I'd expected, a motile form, but the specimens which I eventually located were sitting quite still, wrapped around the dendritic elements like tiny protoplasmic rings. They could be induced by a gentle prod to unwind and reveal their true nature—long, thin and vermiform.

No infected dendrite, so far as I could see, carried more than one ring, and most had none, which made the worms rare by any standard. Their total biomass couldn't be more than a couple of grams.