Rhapsody in Black (4 page)

‘The worlds are isolated, even from each other. They have no more than half a dozen ships of their own, and indulge in only so much intercommunication as is necessary to the continued existence of the colonies. Only Serenity and Vitality can really be said to be self-supporting, but most of the others are nearly so, and the bulk of the traffic is triangular, between Sanctity, Ecstasy and Harmony. The precise balance of supply and demand within the Splinter Culture is quite irrelevant, and so are the sordid details of their particular dogmas. What is relevant is that rumours have reached me that the people of Rhapsody have discovered something on their world which I might want. It is no use whatsoever to Rhapsody, or to any of its neighbours. It is potentially capable of making the world—or certain people on the world—very rich, so my informant claims, but the world doesn't know whether or not it wants to be rich. And the dogmas of the religion, of course, specifically forbid any of its adherents to
be
rich. All of which is causing a certain conflict between various members of the Church Hierarchy and their individual and collective greed.'

‘What have they found?' asked Nick.

‘I don't know,' he replied, sounding somewhat annoyed at the redundant interruption.

‘What
could
they have found?' Nick followed up.

‘It's difficult to say. Rhapsody, of course, exists by mining and by the conversion of heat energy into electrical power. The people are fed by organic conversion, but their efficiency is obviously limited. They have to be supplied occasionally with raw organics from the middle worlds of the system—that's Vitality and Felicity. The mining, if undertaken properly, might be an economical proposition, but of course the people have no interest in interstellar commerce. They supply only their own needs. I assume that whatever has been found has been found in the mines. I maintain an open mind as to its possible nature. Speculation is quite useless.'

‘It sounds like a wild goose chase to me,' I said.

‘Perhaps,' he conceded. ‘But New Alexandria has chased a good many wild geese in its time, and the few that we have caught have amply rewarded us for our trouble. It is precisely because we have always been willing to try what no one else thought to be worthwhile that we are now the most influential world in the galaxy. Knowledge which is worthless in small quantities becomes immensely valuable in complete form. None of our time has ever been truly wasted.'

“That is a matter of opinion,' I said.

There were a thousand things he could have cited in order to support his argument. So many, in fact, that he didn't even bother. He just ignored me.

‘Where does Mavra come in?' asked Eve.

‘The political situation in the Splinters as a whole, and Rhapsody in particular, is in a state of perpetual confusion and flux. Today's exiles are tomorrow's heroes. Small heresies may so easily become divine revelations. In matters of belief, fashion is a powerful driving force. No religion is ever static, and when a faith is confronted with a problem like the one which has arisen on Rhapsody, viewpoints are subject to many forces which tend to move them about and spin them around. It seems to me that by taking Rhapsody's exiles back home at this time, I may be able to inject several friends into important positions within the Church Hierarchy. This may be valuable.'

‘You expect competition, then?' I asked. ‘This ramrod that you mentioned?'

‘The ramrod belongs to an organisation known as the Star Cross Combine. By no means as large or as influential as the Caradoc Company, who were so unfortunate and so troublesome in the matter of the
Lost Star
, but rich and ambitious nevertheless. I hardly think they will have taken precipitate action because of a rumour, but they might well have directed the captain of the ramrod to invest a few weeks or so in investigation. They might not, of course, and he might not be able to get there in time, even if they did. But that remains to be seen. A few hours invested in making friends can hardly do us any harm, whether Star Cross is involved or not'

‘Suppose somebody else has become interested in the rumour?' asked Johnny.

‘They'll be too late,' Charlot predicted confidently. ‘Rumours reach New Alexandria very quickly. Star Cross's advantage was purely positional. And in any case, no one else is likely to go so far out of their way hunting—as Grainger so aptly put it—wild geese.'

He fell silent, and looked at us expectantly. There were no more questions. We seemed to be finished, for now.

It seemed to be a moderately easy way to pass the time. A great deal easier than hunting up the
Lost Star
, anyhow. Law or no Law, what could possibly happen to me on Rhapsody? Not that it was my kind of world, of course. I have an irrational distaste for the faithful, no matter which particular breed they belong to. Naturally enough, the feeling tends to be mutual. Even the most easygoing of people tend to find me mildly offensive—to begin with, at least.

I was suspicious of Charlot's story, but not enough to worry me. I assumed as a matter of course that the old man knew more than he was telling us. But if I was to be tied to him for two years, I was rarely going to find circumstances where I could be one hundred percent sure of what was on his mind. The New Alexandrian mind is basically twisted, and Charlot had a few extra twists over and above the call of duty.

All in all, I was pleasantly surprised that this operation seemed to offer little opportunity for disaster.

‘When do you want to lift?' I asked him.

‘As soon as possible,' he replied. ‘You can attend to your various needs while I talk to the people from Rhapsody. It will take them some time to collect together their belongings, but I think we should be ready to go by midnight.'

‘It couldn't possibly wait till morning, I suppose?'

‘Midnight,' he stated definitely.

‘We'll be ready,' promised Captain delArco.

The party broke up. Charlot exited at a fast walk. His hurry was showing. I guess he had a lot of sweet-talking to do. The Rhapsody crowd wouldn't make friends easily. Not even in response to the carrot of a free ride home. But I had no doubt that Charlot could talk his way into their good books, given an hour or two in which to do it. By midnight, Rion Mavra would be his bosom buddy.

‘Not much of a job,' commented Johnny, as we headed for hot water and soap. He seemed quite down in the mouth about the dullness of it all. Apparently the harrowing trip through the Halcyon Drift hadn't cured him of his thirst for deep space adventure. He had real courage all right, but no sense of proportion.

‘It'll be a cakewalk,' I said unenthusiastically. ‘Relax and enjoy it. There's plenty of time yet to go shooting monsters on alien worlds.' That, I supposed, would be his idea of a good time. There's no accounting for taste.

At that time, I didn't exactly visualise my taking an active part in the happenings on Rhapsody. I certainly didn't see myself wandering around in the planet's black depths, alone, shattered, frozen and pursued. I suppose it was Johnny's sense of melodrama which involved me in the first place, but once I was loose, it was all my own work.

And all my own fault.

I should have been dead tired, but I couldn't go to sleep. It wasn't simply a matter of not daring to go to sleep, even if I was sitting on a highway. I purely and simply couldn't sleep.

After a while, I began to find the darkness oppressive. I once lived, for a while, on a world which was not unlike Rhapsody. The main difference was that it could be reached, even by p-shifters, because it was that much farther away from its primary. (Even so, it was never easy sliding the old
Fire-Eater
in and along an eclipsed groove.) But the culture could hardly have been more dissimilar. The air was always hot and loaded with odours. The background smell of sweat and the conversion machines was always masked by heavy perfume. Here, on Rhapsody, there was nothing like that. Not that the air smelled bad—this was a much bigger warren, and there were fewer people here—but where there were odours, in the towns and the mine workings, they were politely ignored, as if they did not exist. And it was a matter of politeness—the odours were never so perpetual that they could be blotted out of one's consciousness.

And on that other world, light was a treasure of immense value. The aesthetic existence of the culture was built around the qualities and uses of light. The people thrived on light—soft light, kind light, warming light, soothing light, sad light, angry light, jealous light, callous light. The rarity of light within the caverns enabled the people to find all kinds of beauty in the mere presence of it that other cultures, saturated by abundant solar radiation, could not hope to discover.

Again, nothing of that sort here. The inhabitants of Rhapsody were apparently content with their darkness. If anything, they had come to abhor light in any quantity. Their capital had been illuminated only by dim lanterns, placed haphazardly rather than in the locations where they would be most useful.

The Rhapsody people had eyes, and used them; there was no doubt about that. But they seemed to be ashamed of their eyesight, and they apparently rejoiced in the hardship of doing without it whenever it was convenient, and often when it was not.

One could, perhaps, imagine that the warrens here might develop an alternative aesthetic life from that of the other world. One might imagine their coming to appreciate the qualities of darkness, rather than of light, finding beauty and inspiration in shadow and obscurity. But that had not happened either. These people seemed to have no art and no concept of beauty.

Even their language had been modified only by loss. They had abandoned all the words describing the quality of light: effulgence, brilliance, sheen, iridescence, radiance, lambent, pellucid, lustrous, rutilant, luminiferous, incandescent, coruscate. Likewise, they found no use for terms describing bodies of light; not merely sun, but also nimbus, corona, aurora, spectrum, beam, halo,
ignis fatuus
and spangle. They did not trouble to differentiate between a glitter and a gleam, a glow and a glare. They were ignorant of the whole appreciation of brightness in all its forms. They lived by muted yellow lamplight, existing in an environment of dismal gloom. As though they were born and lived and died in veils or blindfolds.

And the corresponding enrichment of their language, which should have adapted their speech to their environment, was simply not there. They knew darkness, and obscurity, and murkiness, and shadow. And that was all. Nothing new to allow them to be in closer harmony with their world. The entire culture seemed to me to be somewhat subhuman.

Time to move, said the whisper, jerking me from my train of thought.

I permitted myself a slight groan as I got to my feet. My arms and legs seemed to have seized up completely in belated protest against the long crawl through the narrow fissure by which I had come to this spot. I flexed my fingers and kicked my feet. My hands were torn and the wounds were filthy. They seemed to have no feeling in them at all while I held them still, but as I curled the fingers they burned with pain. The little finger of my right hand caught on my belt as I tried to clean some of the dirt from the palm by rubbing it on my equally filthy shirt. The flashlight which I'd lodged there fell from its precarious position, and clattered on the stone floor.

Frenziedly, I dropped to my knees and began searching the floor with my injured hands. I found it, and flicked the switch anxiously. The light came on, and for a few moments it seemed abundantly strong. But as my eyes adjusted, I realised that it was very weak indeed, and could not possibly last more than a couple of hours.

It's not all that vital, the wind assured me.

‘I'm not used to stumbling around in Stygian darkness. I come from a
normal
world, where people use their eyes.'

I've lived without sight before now, he told me. It's only a matter of using the other senses at your disposal. You have enough of them. With a little help from me, you can get by.

‘I'll drive my own body, thank you very much,' I said. ‘There'll be no more takeovers.'

Your insistence on my maintaining a wholly passive role in this partnership is quite ridiculous. I can use your body more efficiently than you can. It makes no sense at all to be so determined that you and you alone should exercise control of it.

‘It makes sense to me,' I assured him. ‘And you can't gain control if I don't want you to, can you?'

No.

Actually, I had my doubts about that. I wasn't sure exactly how far I could trust what the wind said about the limitation of his abilities. After all, he had never once mentioned the fact that he
could
assume control over my body until the occasion had actually arisen, at which point he had simply gone and done it.

I moved off, walking briskly along the passage. I considered turning off the flash and making my way by feel, which would have been moderately easy. But I didn't like the idea at all.

‘I hope we're going the right way,' I said pensively. ‘I don't really want to end up back in the capital with all those angry miners.'

Don't you know?

‘Do you?'

It didn't occur to me to keep track, he said darkly. You're driving, so I assumed you knew what you were doing.

‘I hope I do,' I said serenely. ‘My sense of direction hasn't let me down before. Not often, anyhow.'

Not, of course, that I'd ever been called upon to navigate in a place like this before. In total darkness, with no sky but only solid rock, orientating oneself could hardly be easy. However, I reflected, the tunnel only went two ways. If I had completely lost my sense of direction, there was still a fifty-fifty chance that I was going the right way.

The passage curved right, and was joined by another coming from the left. I tested the air currents in both corridors. The new one had more or less still air. It swirled around near the entrance, because of the current in the main corridor, but it had no real current of its own. I concluded that it served merely to connect two tunnels which were part of the circuit, and therefore had no part in the circulation itself.

I followed the airstream around the bend, and on into the darkness. I could have taken the connector and gone through it to the other tunnel, which might have been arterial, and therefore warm. But there didn't seem a lot of point in searching out a warm tunnel when my real objective was habitation. Creature comforts could be attended to once I'd re-established contact with the human race—preferably some fraction of it which wasn't after my blood.

Switch off, directed the wind suddenly.

I complied, and saw the reason for the directive almost immediately. In front of me, but a long way off, there was a faint glimmer of light. I glanced behind me, but there was only limitless darkness in that direction.

The light ahead seemed to be extremely feeble, but I knew that it would only be a dim electric bulb and it was probably not as far away as it looked. I hesitated, not over whether to go on or not, but over the matter of the flashlight. If I continued with it on, then I would be just as visible to an observer near the other light-source as that light was to me. It seemed sensible to keep my approach as close a secret as was possible, and therefore I eventually continued in darkness. I moved cautiously, and with a certain amount of trepidation.

When I reached the light, I found that it was a bit of an anticlimax. It was just a light, hanging from the ceiling. There was another some twenty or thirty yards on, and more after that. I presumed that I was coming close to a town. The abrupt termination of the ‘street-lights' appeared to have no obvious rationale except that the supply of cable had given out. It seemed a little pointless to light a small fraction of a road, especially when the job was done so inefficiently, but it seemed typical of the way things were done on Rhapsody.

From my point of view, though, the transition from darkness into light was an important one. Quite apart from allowing me to conserve the power in my flashlight, it had a noticeable psychological effect. I no longer felt like a skulker pretending to be a shadow, no longer a worm in Rhapsody's dirt, or a rat in Rhapsody's walls. I could see, and I could be seen, and there were no two ways about it. If I went on, then I walked openly, as a man among men.

A particularly disreputable man, by all appearances. In the tentative glow of the yellow bulb, I could see at last how bad I looked. My clothes, from neck to toe, were completely begrimed. They were not simply black, but slick and greasy by virtue of the amount of native protoplasm which I had encountered. My face, I supposed, would be equally filthy. Certainly no one I might encounter was going to take me for an innocent citizen out for a healthy stroll, nor even a worker covered with the dirt of honest toil. It was patently obvious that I had been crawling through places where honest toilers were not wont to crawl.

But I hadn't really any choice. I stuck the flashlight firmly in my belt, and set off regardless, striding confidently and trying to appear perfectly self-possessed. But the road was still absolutely deserted. The dust beneath my feet wasn't the dust of centuries, by any means, but it was obvious that people didn't tramp back and forth along the corridor every day. Apparently the principle of isolation which was an integral part of the faith of Exclusive Reward applied all down the line. Perhaps the people in the town that I was approaching didn't even know yet about the state of affairs in the capital. If that was so, they probably wouldn't be nearly so disposed to clapping me in irons or shooting me dead the moment they saw me.

That was the nicest thought I'd had in ages.

On the other hand, what I'd seen of Rhapsody's children didn't lead me into thinking I might be welcome. Human or otherwise, most people are willing to
talk
to people who help them. But even Charlot had had a hard time getting through to Mavra's associates. Mavra himself had been forthcoming enough, but he was some kind of politician anyway. Anyone I was liable to meet in the caves would presumably be more like Mavra's hangers-on—Coria and Khemis. And I didn't much like what I'd seen of
them
.