Brian Stableford - Hooded Swan 1 - The Halcyon Drift

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Brian Stableford

Halcyon Drift

Prologue

It is on a world whose name I do not know, on the slopes of a great mountain, that theJavelin

came down. She is surrounded by black boulders which are too heavy for a man to move. I have sealed

the cracks in her silver skin with mud and clay, but she no longer has a door. Inside, she is not badly

damaged - the drive chamber and the tailfins are shattered beyond all hope, but living quarters are still

sound. If it were not for the fact that she was built to stand upright, but lies on her side, she would be

comfortable. But who can sleep in a vertical bunk?

Some thirty or forty yards from the ship there is a cross planted in the ground. It marks

Lapthorn's grave. It is a shallow grave because there is not a great deal of dirt caught in the crack

between the faces of implacable rock. The cross is often blown down, as though the wind is able to seek

it out and pluck it away. Lapthorn is not welcome here; neither am I. The wind continuously tells me so.

To right and left, as I look down the mountain, the view is excised by more gigantic slopes of languid black

rock, but before my resting place is a channel which leads down to the plain away across the ashen desert. Far off,

beyond the expended sands, more mountains form a distant wall which shines all colours from red to violet as the sun

walks the grey sky from dawn till dusk. Brown clouds move sullenly across the sulky face of the sky, washing the

black mountain faces with hazy tears. The sparse bushes, the shifting sand, the grey ridges are obscured by a

constant floating dust which likewise changes colour with the advancing hours of every day.

I wear a long beard. My hair is never cut save for the tufts which threaten to invade my eyes and

rob me of sight. I take no pride in cleanliness. I live in misery and regret, and make no effort to assert my

humanity. I am an invader, a beast. There is no need to remind myself that I belong elsewhere. I am not

wanted here.

Another day is draining away, and the desert is cold tedious blue-turning-grey. I was not always

so despairing. I used to go down every evening to the plain to bring water from the small pools which are

constantly maintained by the rain which flows from the slopes. I would bring water for washing as well as

for drinking. But I found that I could carry water enough for three days if I did not bother to wash, and I

grew idle, long ago. I used to occupy my days in mending my ill-used home, in trying to improve the

meagre quality of my life here. I mounted ex-peditions to all points of the compass, and planned the

circum-navigation of the world which I had inherited by virtue of being stranded. But what I found on the

peak, in the far plain, and on other slopes never repaid the effort I put into reaching them, and mental

fatigue soon drowned my adventure with pointlessness.

The present never occupies my mind. Every day is identical, and there is no use in counting them,

nor profit in trying to make each one individual in any way. When my mind wanders, it is never to

tomorrow or yesterday, but always deep into the past - before theJavelin lifted from some

inconsequential rim world on the journey which would result in her death, and Lapthorn's death, and my

despair. I remember other worlds, other times, other ships.

I once lived a while on the darkside of a world which circled close to a blue giant sun. The ships

had to creep in and out of ports hidden in deep caves, fully shielded against the fearsome torrent of

radiation. There was no habitable place in the system save for the deep, labyrinthine ways of the inner

world. The people lived in cities built in the planet's honeycomb heart, away from the lethal light and the

cold of darkness, The air was always hot and loaded with odours - a background stench of faint decay

and sweat, and heavy perfume intended to drown and dis-guise it, since it could not be concealed. The

most valued thing on the planet was light - soft light, kind light, warming light, soothing light, painless light.

All worlds want most what they cannot find around them. With a brightside that was an inferno, and a

darkside that could see no stars, this planet bred people who knew the true beauty and presence of light,

who could savour its texture and understand the inner qualities of its make-up. Lapthorn and I used to

take our ship - it was the oldFire-Eater then - back and forth in search of all manner of lighting devices -

exotic lamps and equally exotic substances to fuel them.

After three years of trading with the world and living there fifty days in every hundred, Lapthorn

swore that he could tell the colour of light with the follicles of his skin, and taste its texture with his tongue.

He was beginning to babble about the search for the perfect light when I thought it was time to move on

to fresh pastures. Lapthorn was like that - impressionable, sensitive. Every world left something in his

character. I'm different. I'm a realist.

Another time we worked, for a while, for the great library at New Alexandria. Lapthorn didn't

like that, because it was in the inner wheel - the great highway of star civilisation. Earth was too far out

from the rich worlds to remain the hub of human existence. New Alexandria, New Rome, New Israel,

and Penaflor were our homes in the stars. They were our new heritage, the focus of our future. Lapthorn

hated them, and craved the distant shores. He loved the feel of alien soil, the heat of alien suns, the love

of alien women. But there was better money, come by far more easily, in the core, and we needed to

scrap theFire-Eater before she fire-ate herself and us with her. Hence the New Alexandria job.

We spent the best part of two years tracking down alien knowledge and literature commissioned

by the library. The books we found were in a thousand languages, many of which were completely

unknown save to the people who wrote them down. But the problems of translation weren't any of our

concern. We just located the books, procured them by fair means or foul, and carted them to the library.

I liked that job, and even Lapthorn admitted that it was good in parts - the parts we spent on alien

worlds. Oddly enough, I think that was the most dangerous job I ever did. I found that aliens (pretty

much like humans, I suppose) are perfectly logical where major matters like money are concerned, but

absurdly touchy about certain objects no good to man or beast.

The sky is as black as the mountains now. The desert plan is invisible. I light the fire. The light

hasn't much warmth. Lapthorn would have complained of its dull colour and its foul taste. But it's all I

have. The ship retains a reservoir of power, but all of it is directed to one single purpose - maintaining the

faint, surely futile, mayday bleep which is my solitary hope of eventual rescue. The bleep has a limited

range, and no ship is likely to pass within it, because I am within the fringes of a dark nebula, where no

sane captain would bring his ship. But the bleep is my one link with the universe beyond the mountain,

and it surely deserves every last vestige of theJavelin's power.

Agitated by the wind, clouds of sand rustle against the lower slopes. The fire crackles. The wind

seems to be deliberately shift-ing so that wherever I sit it can blow smoke into my eyes. It's a malicious

wind this one. Lapthorn's cross will be down again in the morning. Moths, attracted by the fire, flit back

and forth above the flames, casting shadow-flickers in the light reflected from the smoke column.

The sparks that fly away from the fire remind me of stars. I wish that I were a moth, to fly away

from this little world, among the stars again. The wind knows about this idle dream, and uses it to taunt

me. It whispers in my ears. It's the wind which brings back all these memories of other worlds, other

times - indirectly, at least, by driving me to avoid its presence and insistence.

After New Alexandria, when we had our beautiful new ship, I let Lapthorn have his head for a

while. We went out to the rim and wandered, searching new worlds for new ways to make money. There

was little or no profit to be made, little or no com-fort to be had, and we did no good for ourselves.

Lapthorn fell in love at least twice, but it never lasted long with Lapthorn, whether it was a woman or a

world. Events left their scars and their souvenirs, but nothing monopolised Lapthorn's soul for more than

a short space of time.

We traded with the Lakshmi, whose adults look like gold-winged flies, and whose children grow

in the ground like trees from eggs like knotty roots. Males exist only in the vegetative phase. One

generation of adults pollinates the female flowers of the next, and the pistils of the flowers serve as pupae

carrying already-gravid female flies. Even Lapthorn found little in this race to touch his heart, although for

a while he showed a ten-dency to talk to trees, and once or twice I saw him looking at fireflies with a

delighted air of mystery in his expression.

We lived with the dog-faced Magliana, in villages strung be-tween the treetops in a webwork of

branches and creepers, far above a vast equatorial swamp covering half a world.

Lapthorn was bitten by a snake on Varvarin, and would have died of it but for the nomads of the

district, who saved his life in return for one of his hands. They took the hand and dissolved the flesh

away. They reconnected the bones with copper wire a: one of them wore it around his neck as a

pendant. Few of the nomads had two hands, and almost all of them wore one more displayed in some

prominent fashion on his person. A hand worn around the neck or at the waist will never strangle you

steal from you. This is especially relevant if you have enemies. The nomads had. But they were healers

and they healed Lapthorn. Help always has a price, and some are strange. I contrived to keep both of

my hands on my arms. I had to. A one-hand engineer can still do his job, but a one-handed pilot is

worthless.

On Bira, we both got hooked on the nectar of the scorpion lilies, which grew only in the dawn,

and faded once the sun was clear of the horizon. But the local day was two standard years long, and the

dawn lingered long. We followed sunrise around the planet for half a year, until we reached the shore of

an uncrossable sea. There would be no more lilies until the dawn reach the far shore. Hundreds of the

natives had taken the same ecstatic trek, and over half of them died in the throes of withdrawal. Those

who did not began the return journey, to wait for the sun again. They were a slender, sickly people, but

Lapthorn and I had stronger stomachs and stronger minds. We returned only far as our ship, and left for

a different shore.

Not even Lapthorn really got what he wanted out of those years on the fringe. His craving for

new ideas and new experiences was never satiated. He seemed to have an infinite capacity for change.

Everything added a new facet to his personality. He was never full up, never exhausted. I think Lapthorn

might have found the secret of eternal youth. He was still healthy and strong when he died coaxing the

drive of theJavelin, while I remained unhurt at the controls. When a ship goes down, it is usually the

pilot's fault, but the engineer invariably suffers most.

In the meantime, nothing made any impression on me. Maybe I had the secret of eternal age. The

star-worlds had nothing teach me. They had not the capacity to change me. Lapthorn said that I had no

soul. I suppose that we were completely mismatched. In fact, our partnership never really contained any

harmony. We worked together simply because we had started out together, and neither of us could

afford to break away. I suppose Lapthorn was enough of a dreamer not to care too much about who

was up front, because all that mattered to him was where we were going and where we'd already been.

And I didn't give a damn who was down below as long as his drive never let me down.

But all we collected in years of fringe-running was a repu-tation. The cargoes we carried never

made a fortune, but they created rumours. The stories we could tell about ourselves were impressive, and

contained enough truth for later voyagers to confirm that we might actually have done what we said.

Lapthorn liked people to talk about us.

The fire is dying. It's time for sleep. I wish that for once I didn't have to go to bed hungry. But I

wish the same things every night. There's not much that's edible growing on the mountain or living down in

the desert. The ship's supplies of deep-space gruel ran out some time ago. Somehow, though, I don't

starve. I chew leaves and I snare mice, and I contrive to live. But I'm always hungry. Perhaps I ought to

be thankful that I haven't poisoned myself. But the world sustains my kind of life. I'm not wanted, but I'm

tolerated, because I'm not too much of a nuisance. The world might not have liked Lapthorn though. And

there's the wind, of course, which wants someone to talk to, a memory to stir, a mind to invade.

I don't think that I'm going mad. Loneliness is supposed to send men mad, and any other man

would begin to get worried when the wind talked to him. But not me. Lapthorn said I have no soul. I

can't go mad. I'm a realist. I'm stuck with myself, with my sanity. I hear the wind speak, therefore the

wind speaks. No argument, no worry. I don't talk back. I listen, but I don't react. Nothing this world can

do to me will elicit any response. I don't give in to alien worlds. I give way only to myself. Nothing

reaches me from out there.

After the fringe, I tried to come back into the really big mar-kets, in search of a killing. Guns,

cosmetics, jewellery, and drugs were all hot markets, with constant demand and irregular supply.

Anything in which fashion rules instead of utility is a good mar-ket for the trader - and that includes

weaponry as well as decora-tion and edification. I reckoned that we had the initiative to dig out the best,

and I was right, but times had moved on while we were out on the rim with the dropouts, and we failed at

the other end - the outlets. We couldn't get a fair price, with the middle-men moving into the star-worlds

in droves, quoting the Laws of New Rome, and the ordinances of wherever they happened be, and never

moving their hands from their gun butts. It was enough to sour anyone against life in the inner circle. I

began to sympathise with Lapthorn's dislike of the human way of life

We stuck with it for a while, because I thought Lapthorn’s genius for digging out the best gems

and the most exciting drugs might see us through. But it was useless. The little people seemed to take an

excessive delight in cheating us and leaning on us because we were known. The other free traders talked

about us. We were the best, by their lights. But we weren't system-beaters. We weren't equipped for

dealing with that kind of problem, we had no alternative but to return to small trading, alien to alien.

Lapthorn wasn't sorry, of course, and my sorrow was more for the evil ways of the world in general than

for our own small part in the human condition.

We settled down, eventually, in the other rim, helping to push it even further out. Right back at

the beginning, the rim had been a burden I'd borne for Lapthorn's sake, and civilisation a burden he'd

borne for mine. We'd taken turns to call the tune, each us chafing under the other's yoke, building up the

resentment and the determination to flip the coin back over again. But in the end we stopped fighting and

drifted.

I suppose neither of us was ever happy. Lapthorn's dreams were impossible - there was never

any conclusion to which he could follow them. He followed them further with me than he could have with

anyone else, but I still couldn't find him a destination. And in the meantime, I wouldn't have been happy

anywhere or anyhow. I'm just not a happy man. Lapthorn said that I have no soul.

A lot of spacemen are like me. Cold, emotionless men who don't inherit any part of the worlds

and the people that they see. There are a few fake Lapthorns - with his vulnerability but without his

inexhaustibility - but eventually they always go native somewhere. If they can be reached, they're taken. If

not by one world, then by the next. Only Lapthorn lasted almost forever. Most of the men who live long

enough among the stars to crash on some ridiculous, forlorn world like this one are my type spaceman -

the maverick kind, the lone wolves, the men with hearts of stone, the men without souls.

I sleep in the control room, because my bunk is wrong way up, and the control room is the only

space big enough for the wall to make an adequate floor and vice versa. The oldFire-Eater wasn't quite

so cramped, for all that theJavelin was a better ship. And was she, though? TheFire-Eater never went

down.

Even in here, the voice of the wind can reach me. There isn't any door to keep it out, but even if

there were, the voice would find a way. I have difficulty getting to sleep, but it isn't wholly the fault of the

wind. It's the hunger and the timelessness. I'd sleep all the time if I could, but I'm saturated far too easily,

and sleep is never easy to find if you're already brimful of it.

When I drift away from consciousness, in search of elusive sleep, I think about people.

There was Herault, back on Earth, before Lapthorn and I sealed our unlikely alliance and bought

theFire-Eater with our pooled funds. I was very young then, and Herault was old. He must be dead by

now. It was seven years since I'd last been home to see him. Lapthorn had relented once or twice before

that and let me make a landfall on home, but he hated Earth like poison, and I'd let him divorce me from

the planet as well, eventually. But even Lapthorn had liked Herault. He'd been a good man to work for

and he'd taught me a great deal about spaceships and spacemen. I learned to fly theFire-Eater by feel -

to use her sen-sor web as if it were my own eyes and my own body - but it was Herault who talked me

into that feel, who knew how to acquire it and make sure that I did. They don't fly like that these days,

because they don't think it's necessary. The flying schools teach them to trust their machines, not to

become a part of them. It works - in clear space, on planned runs. But not in the outer rim, and out in the

galactic centre. That's why civilisation is the inner rim, and not the heart itself.

Herault taught Lapthorn the drive as well. A dimension-skipper is supposed to be easy to handle,

but Herault didn't let Lapthorn think he could get away without knowing everything there was to know. If

it hadn't been for Herault, we'd never have got into space. If it hadn't been for Herault, we'd never have

lasted as long as we had. We'd never even have made it to this forsaken rock on the rim of nowhere. I'm

grateful to Herault for all he did and tried to do. I'm sorry it ended up like this, and so would Herault be,

if he knew.

More people.

On Peniel there was a girl called Myane. On Rocholt there was Dorcas, on Alhagayel there was

Joan, on Doreniken there was Ophinia. Not an impressive list. Not a meaningful list any more. There

were no others worth remembering, and even these are not the most cherished of memories. I could

forget them without difficulty. Lapthorn could have remembered half a hundred, the smell and the taste of

every one. He could have gorged himself on the delicacies of his remembrance. But they just didn't

matter enough to me.

Alachakh was my friend. He was a Khormon trader. I saved his life once, on Veneto. He saved

Lapthorn's, on Beckhofen. Lapthorn saved mine, on San Calogero. I'm not sure that things happened in

that order. We were around together a lot, Alachakh and I. Not because we flew together, or because

we chased each other's cargoes, but because we thought the same way. Alachakh and his engineer -

Cuvio - were a counterpart to Lapthorn and myself. His ship - theHymnia - was a sleek Khormon craft.

I bought theJavelin because she was the closest human ship to theHymnia. Alachakh is one of the few

men I've ever liked, and one of the few men Lapthorn held in high regard. Even the mavericks need to

talk to each other, once now and again. Even the mavericks need to like somebody that they'd make an

effort for, to have someone they could rely on for help.

I'm awake again now, and I shouldn't be. It's still dark and I have no right to be waking up in the

middle of the night. Did something wake me? Perhaps it was Lapthorn's cross falling over again. The

wind is here and it's plucking at my face, running chilly fingers across my eyes. I won't listen to it. I only

want to go back to sleep.

• You've got to listen, it's saying. I can reach you and you know it. I can touch you whenever I

want. I'm all the way inside of you.

It's not true. Nothing ever reaches me. There's no alien world, no alien being, no alien feeling, can

leave a mark in my mind.

• I can.

Did I really hear something? Shall I get up and look around? Maybe it's an animal or an insect.

Was, I mean. It's gone now.

• I'm not gone, says the whispering wind. I'm with you now. I knew you'd have to let me in, and

you have. I'm not wind any more, I'm a voice in your head. I'm all here. You can't get awayfrom me now,

not even if youdo run back to the stars. I'm part of you now, all wrapped up in your mind. You can't ever

be free of me.

I'm going back to sleep.

People.

Benwyn, Quivira, Emerich, Rothgar. Rothgar, now - it's worth thinking about Rothgar for a

while. An easy man to remember. Thought he was a great big man inside his thin frame. Hard drinker.

Meant trouble for most of the ships which took him on because few of their captains could handle him

and even fewer could stand to have him around. He knew all the engines and must have worked them on

well over a hundred ships - big liners, p-shifters, ramrods, even Khormon dredgers and Gallacellan ships.

He was a genius in his way. But what's the point of genius if you haven't the temperament to apply it? He

was the best man to have underneath you that any pilot could find. He put the power where it was

needed, gave you thrust when you asked for it, made the drive do the impossible to get you through a

tough spot. But he was condemned nevertheless to spending half his life bumming around spaceports

touting for work. But he was his own man, though. Nobody owned Rothgar, except for a little bit at a

time. Nobody could scare him. Nobody could make him do anything he didn't want to do. Rothgar was

the most unyield-ing man I ever knew.

Places.

A million of them. Little bits of big worlds. Single moments of odd places. One day later in

choosing a path through the galaxy, one day later in setting down on each world, and I'd see the whole

lot differently. They'd be different moments, dif-ferent little bits of the same worlds. Nobody ever gets to

know the star-worlds, no matter how much you absorb. They touch you, but only with the tips of your

fingers. You deal in tiny frag-ments, not in whole entities. They touched me lightest of all. I have

memories, but they're faded, like old photographs. Unreal. Lapthorn's memories would be as bright as

white stars - he'd be forever taking them out and polishing them up, in case he needed one in a hurry.

Every one would be a jewel - a living light. What must it have been to be Lapthorn? To see so clearly,

feel so deeply. Was it, I wonder, a tragedy that I lived and Lapthorn died?Should the ship have come

down head first instead of belly-flopped? Would the broken drive have killed him anyway? Was it my

fault that Lapthorn died? Could I have crashed in such a fashion that Lapthorn lived, even if it meant that

I died? Should I have, if I could?

But Lapthorn must have died here anyway, in time. He would have drained away, into its

drabness and its perpetual misery. Heneeded the stimulation of the worlds whose selves he tried to

absorb into his own. He needed light of a special kind, did Lap-thorn. To him, this world would have

become a limitless dark-ness in a very short time. Maybe it will get me that way too - bore me to death,

kill me with a dismal everpresence.

It's the wind again.

Please go away and let me sleep. It's so insistent tonight, as though it has a point to make.

Perhaps itis getting through to me after all. Perhaps it has invaded my mind. No man can withstand

pressure forever. Maybe even I will give in, in the end.

• It's not a matter of giving in. I'm with you, but I'm real. It's the real world that we're in.

Maybe so, my friend, I reply. Perhaps, now that you're here, I should just accept the fact. But

you've not treated me kindly.

• I had to find a way in, the wind replies. It's never easy.

Sometimes I'll swear it understands every thought I think. A clever wind, this. An educated one.

Needing my attention, like a little child. But why? Why do you want to be a part ofme? Why do you

want to live inmy mind?

• I need you. I need somewhere tobe. I need someone to hold me. I need a host.

You're marooned here as well, I suppose.

• Yes.

How come?

• Others died here.

Not humans. This world's unmarked on my charts. Undis-covered, unvisited. We're right on the

edge of the Halcyon Drift. A bad place. It must have been the Drift that brought us down. It was either

radiation or distortion, and there's plenty of both in the Drift. But no human ship has ever tried to map the

Drift. If you came here in a ship, it was an alien.

• It was an alien, the wind confesses.

I realise finally that I'm not alone, that the voice belongs to another sentient being. It's not the

wind at all - not really. It's an alien mind parasite, and I'm its new host. I don't know whether to be glad

or sad.

I thought you didn't want me here. I thought you kept blowing down the cross on Lapthorn's

grave.

• I had to get inside you, the wind explains. I had to make you take notice.

And what are you, now you're inside me? Are you the soul that Lapthorn said I hadn't got? Are

you the voice of my con-science? What are you, alien wind? What are you made of?

• I'm made of you. I am you. But I won't bother you. Talk to you, perhaps - help you, if I can.

But I'm not going to cause you any trouble.

In case I throw you out?

• You can't throw me out. In case you become an unsuitable host. I have to live with you now,

and you with me.

It's going on for morning now. The sun is coming up. For all my lack of sleep, I don't feel tired. I

think I'll get up and go out-side.

I feel better than I've felt for some time, and I'm not sure why. Oddly enough, it isn't because the

wind throws up a wall between myself and loneliness. To tell the truth, I don't care much either way

about the wind. Maybe it will bother me, maybe it won't. But it's here now and there's nothing I can do

about it. But I don'tneed the wind. I'm not Lapthorn. I'm adequate enough, all by myself.

It's a bright red morning. The sun sparkles shyly. Silver sky instead of grey. But the black slopes

are just as dismal. Nothing changes them. There are little wisps of cloud wandering from east to west.

And something shining, like a little star, is coming towards me.

It's a ship.

I know now what woke me in the night. It was the ship going over, trying to get a fix on my

bleep. And now they have it, and they're coming down in the plain. I'm free.

• I'm going with you. For life.

I don't care. I'm going home.

I'll just go and stand up the cross that marks Lapthorn's grave.

The ship that picked me up was a ramrod, theElla Marita, owned by the Caradoc Company

and skippered by a Penaflor Eurasian named Axel Cyran. I dare say that if you were to encounter Cyran

in a good mood he would strike you as a reasonably ordinary, fairly decent kind of spaceman. I never

got a chance to see his good side. Working for a cut-throat gang like Caradoc can ruin anybody.

The Caradoc Company is one of a hundred or more trading combines with minor spacefleets,

each one trying to organise, stabilise, and monopolise some tiny fraction of the galaxy's trade. At this

time, flow from the rim to the inner wheel was building up into a flood and everyone with money wanted

to ride in on the tide of prosperity. The hub worlds - particularly Penaflor, Valerius, and New Alexandria

- were interested in reliability and results. Like everybody else, Caradoc was trying to make a big name

for itself. Many things stood in its way. One of them was the free traders - the thousand or so little ships

which knew the ground, had made the contacts, and stubbornly refused to co-operate with the

companies. Ergo, Caradoc didn't like free traders. Most especially, they didn't like the men from whom

the free traders claimed to take their lead - the ones they talk most about. Including me.

Cyran wasn't pleased to see me. He seemed to think that I'd got in his way. He called me a

bloody pirate and told me I'd wasted good company money luring his ship from its assigned mission to

pick me up. I began to wonder exactly why hehad picked me up, and I was half afraid he might throw

me back.

I expressed my sincere gratitude to the captain, and even apologised for putting him to so much

bother. I refrained from asking any questions which he might see as impertinent - like what the hell was

he doing in the Halcyon Drift anyway? I re-mained extremely unpopular. In the end, I decided I'd be

better off talking to nobody, just sticking to my bunk and accepting the gruel they handed out with all the

gratitude I could feign. The crew looked after me as well as they could, but Cyran really had it in for me

and he was always on their necks. I could see that the captain had obviously had a very worrying time

inside the Drift - who wouldn't? - but I couldn't really excuse his conduct on that basis. I'd have paid him

gladly for all his trouble, but I hadn't a sou. The stuff that I'd crammed into my packsack before going to

meet theElla Marita was all junk, and mostly Lapthorn's junk at that - souvenirs and keepsakes. Even

Lapthorn hadn't had any-thing of value - you can't cart a curio collection around in a star-ship - and what

there was wouldn't raise the price of a shirt in any port in the galaxy.

I had plans to duck ship and fade away as soon as we touched the tarpol in the landing bay,

wherever we were, but it didn't work out that way. The ramrod's base was Hallsthammer, and it was

close enough for Cyran to be still seething when we set down. He still wanted a scapegoat for his bad

trip and I was it. He had me arrested and transferred me to the p-shifter which the Caradoc fleet used for

liaison with home base on Earth.

The p-shifter took me to New Rome, and the Caradoc law-yers hauled me into court with a

claim for compensation as a result of theElla Marita's detour to salvage me. News of my pickup must

have travelled very fast, because I was a joke on New Rome practically before I touched down there.

The idea of a salvage claim against a spaceman seemed funny to them. It wasn't nearly so funny to me,

especially when I had to watch the case go against me every inch of the way. The Law of New Rome

sticks anywhere in the galaxy, no matter what the local law might be. In order to stick like that it has to

be dependable and enforceable, and above all fair. The New Romans made no claim that their system

had anything to do withjustice - it was law and law only. But for the most part it protected the likes ofus

from the likes ofthem. TheElla Marita salvage case, however, was a clear-cut victory forthem. A

charge of twenty thousand was placed on the rescue, and an award made against any pay I might

accumulate. I might have been flattered - nobody had ever sug-gested to me that my hide was worth

anywhere near that amount - but for the first few days I was too sick. In addition, the Cara-doc

Company took out insurance against the recovery of their money and charged the premiums to me.

Which meant that if I were lucky enough to live to be a hundred, Caradoc and the insurance company

would divide every penny I made between them, and even if I died next week, Caradoc wouldn't lose

unless they murdered me.

All this did not add up to a nice prospect. But at least while the p-shifter was on New Rome I

got a little medical attention, and began to get back into some sort of reasonable shape. Alachakh heard

I'd been picked up, and sent me a message of congratulation. Obviously he didn't know about the legal

tangle. News travels slowly on the rim.

In the end, out of the kindness of their hearts, the Caradoc men let me ride on the p-shifter when

it went back to Earth. All free, gratis and for nothing - a gesture of pure goodwill. One has to be grateful

for small mercies.

It might have been more sensible to wait until I could hitch a lift to Penaflor, where the

commercial spacelines were mostly based, and where the major shipyards were. But hitching rides on

spaceships isn't easy, and I'd have had to live on charity while I was on New Rome. At least Caradoc

was willing to feed me gruel in return for their blood money. Besides which, I was so damned tired I only

wanted to run home and hide. Earth was all the home I had. Maybe nobody there knew me, except old

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