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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1975, 2011 by Brian Stableford
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
For Ceri
CHAPTER ONE
Chasing freedom can be a very tiring game. It’s the sort of game that dominates your thought and endeavor for months or years—endurance isn’t a problem as long as you have some kind of effort to make and some kind of direction to go—and then, when you win it, you’re left utterly and absolutely flat. Empty and exhausted. Drained of all purpose, impetus, and ambition. The first taste of hard-won freedom is inevitably as foul as stagnant water. It can be the first time in your life that you can’t find an answer to the question why, and when you’ve been fighting that hard for that long, the lack of such an answer can be frightening.
It only takes time to get back into yourself, but that time can hang so limp and useless it makes you sweat to wear it.
In the end, it’s OK. It’s worth the feeling absolutely flat, let down like a worn-out balloon, provided that you can know the only way is up and you’re all set to start climbing. It’s not the bottom of the spiritual well or the ladder back up to the good air which really threatens you...it’s the past you left so recently behind, the past that’s sitting on your footprints, the past which can always run after you, can always catch you up, if it can only think of a motive....
...A reason to drag you back down.
When the Sandman touched down on Erica I was in no hurry to leap out of her and get dirt between my toes. There was nothing about honest soil which appealed to me at that particular point in time. There were one or two little things in my province which needed sorting, and I was happy enough to sort, although two hours any time in the next two days would set everything up, and I was bound to be asked to do a tour of duty as officer-of-the-watch.
After a while, though, I began to get bored. I wandered down to the engine room to see if I could catch Sam Parks before he ducked ship and ran for the big city lights. I had a lot of things I wanted to complain about, and he wouldn’t take offense if I bitched at him. Also, of course, he might be able to drop me a hint as to how to get the complaints heard somewhere that mattered. I had a suspicion that a lot of valuable breath could go to waste without my getting the slightest satisfaction from the noble captain.
Sam was still cleaning up in the engine room, if “cleaning up” is the right expression to describe turning a disaster into a mess.
“Does it bitch itself up like that every trip?” I asked, in sympathetic tones.
“Hello, Grainger,” he said. “I already know.” He looked up at me with his gray eyes, which had retreated somewhat with advancing age until they were almost in the shadow of his fading eyebrows, except when he looked up. He straightened briefly, easing a kink in his back. He was a big man—or had been—but he was as thin as a rake. His hands looked too big for his slender wrists, as though they’d been stuck on as an ironic afterthought. Sam was a giant designed by a committee who wanted to go easy on materials.
“What do you know already?” I asked.
“Everything you’re going to tell me. It’s all true and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it.”
“Nobody’s blaming you,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter who blames who,” he said, sounding totally resigned. “Things is what they seem. A mess. Same down here, as you can see. I reckon I’d be prepared to ride a decent drive-unit into hell, just for the pleasure of its company.”
“You could get a better ship than this,” I said, meaning a nice clean passenger job, though I wasn’t about to say so in case he was a proud man and took offense.
He shook his head. “Too old,” he said. “Couldn’t pass the medical. What’s your excuse?”
“I was in a hurry,” I said. “What does the captain think of his wonderful ship?”
“The captain doesn’t think. He only waits. Promotion is slow but loyalty pays its miserable dividends eventually. The faster we fall to pieces the happier he’ll be. He ain’t going places but he’s got years under his hat yet. Go see him if you want to. He’ll be half expecting you. He’ll give you the old story—and it’s true, so you can’t argue. He can’t afford it, whatever it is. He can’t afford to get a downship crew in to attend to what we have, let alone replace any of it. He can’t afford it—God’s truth. It’s not his ship. He has his margins, same as anyone else. Anyone thinks the margins are too narrow on the Sandman, they jack it in. That’s how come you’re employed; but don’t be grateful.”
“I thought your last pilot might have died of shame,” I said, trying to inject a little wit into the downbeat tone of the conversation.
“He was no good,” said Sam. “Of all the parts needed replacing he was number one on the list.”
“So OK,” I said. “He’s replaced. Be happy.”
He shrugged away the note of irony in my voice. I tried to shrug it away as well. I’d picked up the Sandman on Ludlock. It was by no means the sort of operation I wanted to stay with, but it was too close to the core for berths to be easy to come by. I needed to be farther out into the inner ring before I could begin to make real plans. The Sandman would get me there eventually, if I managed to hold her together without too much sealing wax in her seams. It’s a hard life, but it goes on.
I still had most of the cash that remained to me once I’d bought myself free of all obligations to Titus Charlot and the shadows which trailed him, but it wasn’t all that much of a stake and it wouldn’t carry me far into the civilized galaxy or into the future. Ideally I wanted to buy myself a slice of a ship, but with inflation the way it was, courtesy of the Caradoc/Star Cross stranglehold on interplanetary commerce, the chance was becoming more remote by the hour. I had to live on whatever was offered and a purseful of hope. The Sandman had been on offer.
She was a squat, untidy d-skipper, built cheap somewhere on the Solar wing. She handled in a manner that was faintly reminiscent of the old Fire-Eater that Lapthorn and I had used to trundle away our youth, and felt privileged so to do. The Sandman wasn’t quite as old as the Fire-Eater, but she was by no means this year’s model, or even last year’s. It wasn’t that she was horribly dangerous or difficult to fly—but she was damned uncomfortable and capable of giving sixty percent efficiency at the best. She was slow, cumbersome, and a real pig’s bastard in atmosphere. On takeoff she acted like a bronchial case with a hangover and she landed like a drunk coming down a ladder. Apart from that she was home, for the time being.
“Couldn’t we do her up a bit between ourselves?” I asked.
Sam had returned to his slow and unmethodical tidying-up while I’d been thinking quietly to myself. Now he looked up again with a distant expression on his face. I realized that his complexion had once been as pale as his eyes, before the radiation tan got to his skin and polished it up like dark wood. For a second or two, his eyes failed to focus, and I knew there was more than one reason why he’d fail a medical if he were forced to take one. He’d spent his life looking at a lot of hot light. I wondered how old he was, in real years. Maybe the same age as me. He could probably live to see fifty-five, if he retired now to chew grass on some dirt-side haven where the labor problem was nine parts solved. Otherwise....
After
