myths. It awed me; a race of sentients moving out from some mysterious origin in the core of the galaxy, sailing towards the galactic edge and, it was alleged, eventually bound for intergalactic space itself, meanwhile always keeping to the interstellar depths, no planetfalls, seldom coming within a light year of a star.” D’Branin’s grey eyes sparkled, and as he spoke his hands swept enthusiastically to either side, as if they could encompass the galaxy. “And doing it all without a stardrive, Royd, that is the real wonder! Doing it in ships moving only a fraction of the speed of light! That was the detail that obsessed me! How different they must be, my volcryn—wise and patient, long-lived and long-viewed, with none of the terrible haste and passion that consume the lesser races. Think how old they must be, those volcryn ships!”
“Old,” Royd agreed. “Karoly, you said ships. More than one?”
“Oh, yes,” d’Branin said. “According to the Nor T’alush, one or two appeared first, on the innermost edges of their trading sphere, but others followed. Hundreds of them, each solitary, moving by itself, bound outward, always outward. The direction was always the same. For fifteen thousand standard years they moved among the Nor T’alush stars, and then they began to pass out from among them. The myth said that the last volcryn ship was gone three thousand years ago.”
“Eighteen thousand years,” Royd said, adding. “Are the Nor T’alush that old?”
“Not as star-travellers, no,” d’Branin said, smiling. “According to their own histories, the Nor T’alush have only been civilized for about half that long. That bothered me for a while. It seemed to make the volcryn story clearly a legend. A wonderful legend, true, but nothing more.
“Ultimately, however, I could not let it alone. In my spare time I investigated, crosschecking with other alien cosmologies to see whether this particular myth was shared by any races other than the Nor T’alush. I thought perhaps I could get a thesis out of it. It seemed a fruitful line of inquiry.
“I was startled by what I found. Nothing from the Hrangans, or the Hrangan slave races, but that made sense, you see. Since they were out from human space, the volcryn would not reach them until after they had passed through our own sphere. When I looked in, however, the volcryn story was everywhere.” D’Branin leaned forward eagerly. “Ah, Royd, the stories, the stories!”
“Tell me,” Royd said.
“The Fyndii call them iy-wivii, which translates to something like void-horde or dark-horde. Each Fyndii horde tells the same story, only the mindmutes disbelieve. The ships are said to be vast, much larger than any known in their history or ours. Warships, they say. There is a story of a lost Fyndii horde, three hundred ships under rala-fyn, all destroyed utterly when they encountered an iy-wivii. This was many thousands of years ago, of course, so the details are unclear.
“The Damoosh have a different story, but they accept it as literal truth—and the Damoosh, you know, are the oldest race we’ve yet encountered. The people of the gulf, they call my volcryn. Lovely stories, Royd, lovely! Ships like great dark cities, still and silent, moving at a slower pace than the universe around them. Damoosh legends say the volcryn are refugees from some unimaginable war deep in the core of the galaxy, at the very beginning of time. They abandoned the worlds and stars on which they had evolved, sought true peace in the emptiness between.
“The gethsoids of Aath have a similar story, but in their tale that war destroyed all life in our galaxy, and the volcryn are gods of a sort, reseeding the worlds as they pass. Other races see them as god’s messengers, or shadows out of hell warning us all to flee some terror soon to emerge from the core.”
“Your stories contradict each other, Karoly.”
“Yes, yes, of course, but they all agree on the essentials—the volcryn, sailing out, passing through our short-lived empires and transient glories in their ancient eternal sublight ships. That is what matters! The rest is frippery, ornamentation; we will soon know the truth of it. I checked what little was known about the races said to flourish further in still, beyond even the Nor T’alush—civilizations and peoples half legendary themselves, like the Dan’lai and the ullish and the Rohenna’kh—and where I could find anything at all, I found the volcryn story once again.”
“The legend of the legends,” Royd suggested. The spectre’s wide mouth turned up in a smile.
“Exactly, exactly,” d’Branin agreed. “At that point, I called in the experts, specialists from the Institute for the Study of Non-Human Intelligence. We researched for two years. It was all there, in the libraries and memories and matrices of the Academy. No one had ever looked before, or bothered to put it together.
“The volcryn have been moving through the manrealm for most of human history, since before the dawn of spaceflight. While we twist the fabric of space itself to cheat relativity, they have been sailing their great ships right through the heart of our alleged civilization, past our most populous worlds, at stately slow sublight speeds, bound for the Fringe and the dark between the galaxies. Marvelous, Royd, marvelous!”
“Marvelous!” Royd agreed.
Karly d’Branin drained his chocolate cup with a swig, and reached out to catch Royd’s arm, but his hand passed through empty light. He seemed disconcerted for a moment, before he began to laugh at himself. “Ah, my volcryn. I grow overenthused, Royd. I am so close now. They have preyed on my mind for a dozen years, and within the month I will have them, will behold their splendor with my own weary eyes. Then, then, if only I can open communication, if only my people can reach ones so great and strange as they, so different from us—I have hopes, Royd, hopes that at last I will know the why of it!”
The ghost of Royd Eris smiled for him, and looked on through calm transparent eyes.
Passengers soon grow restless on a starship under drive, sooner on one as small and spare as the Nightflyer. Late in the second week, the speculation began in deadly earnest.
“Who is this Royd Eris, really?” the xenobiologist, Rojan Christopheris, complained one night when four of them were playing cards. “Why doesn’t he come out? What’s the purpose of keeping himself sealed off from the rest of us?”
“Ask him,” suggested Dannel, the male linguist.
“What if he’s a criminal of some sort?” Christopheris said. “Do we know anything about him? No, of course not. D’Branin engaged him, and d’Branin is a senile old fool, we all know that.”
“It’s your play,” Lommie Thorne said.
Christopheris snapped down a card. “Setback,” he declared, “you’ll have to draw again.” He grinned. “As for this Eris, who knows that he isn’t planning to kill us all.”
“For our vast wealth, no doubt,” said Lindran, the female linguist. She played a card on top of the one Christopheris had laid down. “Ricochet,” she called softly. She smiled.
So did Royd Eris, watching.
Melantha Jhirl was good to watch.
Young, healthy, active, Melantha Jhirl had a vibrancy about her the others could not match. She was big in every way; a head taller than anyone else on board, large-framed, large-breasted, long-legged, strong, muscles moving fluidly beneath shiny coal-black skin. Her appetites were big as well. She ate twice as much as any of her colleagues, drank heavily without ever seeming drunk, exercised for hours every day on equipment she had brought with
