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The projection was still and silent.
D’Branin clucked. “You do not answer. Ah, Royd, what am I to do? I must believe him, then. We are in danger, perhaps from you. I must abort our mission, then. Return us to Avalon, Royd. That is my decision.”
The ghost smiled wanly. “So close, Karoly? Soon now we will be dropping out of drive.”
Karoly d’Branin made a small sad noise deep in his throat. “My volcryn,” he said, sighing. “So close – ah, it pains me to desert them. But I cannot do otherwise, I cannot.”
“You can,” said the voice of Royd Eris. “Trust me. That is all I ask, Karoly. Believe me when I tell you that I have no sinister intentions. Thale Lasamer may speak of danger, but no one has been harmed so far, have they?”
“No,” admitted d’Branin. “No, unless you count Alys, cutting herself this afternoon.”
“What?” Royd hesitated briefly. “Cutting herself? I did not see, Karoly. When did this happen?”
“Oh, early – just before Lasamer began to scream and rant, I believe.”
“I see.” Royd’s voice was thoughtful. “I was watching Melantha go through her exercises,” he said finally, “and talking to her. I did not notice. Tell me how it happened.”
D’Branin told him.
“Listen to me,” Royd said. “Trust me, Karoly, and I will give you your volcryn. Calm your people. Assure them that I am no threat. And keep Lasamer drugged and quiescent, do you understand? That is very important. He is the problem.”
“Agatha advises much the same thing.”
“I know,” said Royd. “I agree with her. Will you do as I ask?”
“I do not know,” d’Branin said. “You make it hard for me. I do not understand what is going wrong, my friend. Will you not tell me more?”
Royd Eris did not answer. His ghost waited.
“Well,” d’Branin said at last, “you do not talk. How difficult you make it. How soon, Royd? How soon will we see my volcryn?”
“Quite soon,” Royd replied. “We will drop out of drive in approximately seventy hours.”
“Seventy hours,” d’Branin said. “Such a short time. Going back would gain us nothing.” He moistened his lips, lifted his cup, found it empty. “Go on, then. I will do as you bid. I will trust you, keep Lasamer drugged, I will not tell the others of your spying. Is that enough, then? Give me my volcryn. I have waited so long!”
“I know,” said Royd Eris. “I know.”
Then the ghost was gone, and Karoly d’Branin sat alone in the darkened lounge. He tried to refill his cup, but his hand began to tremble unaccountably, and he poured the chocolate over his fingers and dropped the cup, swearing, wondering, hurting.
The next day was a day of rising tensions and a hundred small irritations. Lindran and Dannel had a “private” argument that could be overheard through half the ship. A three-handed war game in the lounge ended in disaster when Christopheris accused Melantha Jhirl of cheating. Lommie Thorne complained of unusual difficulties in tying her system into the shipboard computers. Alys Northwind sat in the lounge for hours, staring at her bandaged finger with a look of sullen hatred on her face. Agatha Marij-Black prowled through the corridors, complaining that the ship was too hot, that her joints throbbed, that the air was thick and full of smoke, that the ship was too cold. Even Karoly d’Branin was despondent and on-edge.
Only the telepath seemed content. Shot full of psionine-4, Thale Lasamer was often sluggish and lethargic, but at least he no longer flinched at shadows.
Royd Eris made no appearance, either by voice or holographic projection.
He was still absent at dinner. The academicians ate uneasily, expecting him to materialize at any moment, take his accustomed place, and join in the mealtime conversation. Their expectations were still unfulfilled when the afterdinner pots of chocolate and spiced tea and coffee were set on the table.
“Our captain seems to be occupied,” Melantha Jhirl observed, leaning back in her chair and swirling a snifter of brandy.
“We will be shifting out of drive soon,” Karoly d’Branin said. “Undoubtedly there are preparations to make.” Secretly, he fretted over Royd’s absence, and wondered if they were being watched even now.
Rojan Christopheris cleared his throat. “Since we’re all here and he’s not, perhaps this is a good time to discuss certain things. I’m not concerned about him missing dinner. He doesn’t eat. He’s a damned hologram. What does it matter? Maybe it’s just as well, we need to talk about this. Karoly, a lot of us have been getting uneasy about Royd Eris. What do you know about this mystery man anyway?”
“Know, my friend?” D’Branin refilled his cup with the thick bittersweet chocolate and sipped at it slowly, trying to give himself a moment to think. “What is there to know?”
“Surely you’ve noticed that he never comes out to play with us,” Lindran said drily. “Before you engaged his ship, did anyone remark on this quirk of his?”
“I’d like to know the answer to that one too,” said Dannel, the other linguist. “A lot of traffic comes and goes through Avalon. How did you come to choose Eris? What were you told about him?”
“Told about him? Very little, I must admit. I spoke to a few port officials and charter companies, but none of them were acquainted with Royd. He had not traded out of Avalon originally, you see.”
“How convenient,” said Lindran.
“How suspicious,” added Dannel.
“Where is he from, then?” Lindran demanded. “Dannel and I have listened to him pretty carefully. He speaks standard very flatly, with no discernible accent, no idiosyncrasies to betray his origins.”
“Sometimes he sounds a bit archaic,” Dannel put in, “and from time to time one of his constructions will give me an association. Only it’s a different one each time. He’s travelled a lot.”
“Such a deduction,” Lindran said, patting his hand. “Traders frequently do, love. Comes of owning a starship.”
Dannel glared at her, but Lindran just went on. “Seriously, though, do you know anything about him? Where did this nightflyer of ours come from?”
“I do not know,” d’Branin admitted. “I–I never thought to ask.”
The members of his research team glanced at each other incredulously. “You never thought to ask?” Christopheris said. “How did you come to select this ship?”
“It was available. The administrative council approved my project and assigned me personnel, but they could not spare an Academy ship. There were budgetary constraints as well.”
Agatha Marij-Black laughed sourly. “What d’Branin is telling those of you who haven’t figured it out is that the Academy was pleased with his studies in xenomyth, with the discovery of the volcryn legend, but less than enthusiastic about his plan to seek them out. So they gave him a small budget to keep him happy and productive, assuming this little mission would be fruitless, and they assigned him people who wouldn’t be missed back on Avalon.” She looked around. “Look at the lot of you. None of us had worked with d’Branin in the early stages, but we were all available for this jaunt. And not a one of us is a first-rate scholar.”
“Speak for yourself,” Melantha Jhirl said. “I volunteered for this mission.”
“I won’t argue the point,” the psipsych said. “The crux is that the choice of the Nightflyer is no large enigma. You just engaged the cheapest charter you could find, didn’t you, d’Branin?”
“Some of the available ships would not consider my proposition,” d’Branin said. “The sound of it is odd, we must admit. And many ship masters have an almost superstitious fear of dropping out of drive in interstellar space, without a planet near. Of those who would agree to the conditions, Royd Eris offered the best terms, and he was able to leave at once.”
“And we had to leave at once,” said Lindran. “Otherwise the volcryn might get away. They’ve only been passing through this region for ten thousand years, give or take a few thousand.”
Someone laughed. D’Branin was nonplussed. “Friends, no doubt I could have postponed departure. I admit I was eager to meet my volcryn, to see their great ships and ask them all the questions that have haunted me, to discover the why of them. But I admit also that a delay would have been no great hardship. But why? Royd has been a gracious host, a good pilot. We have been treated well.”
“Did you meet him?” Alys Northwind asked. “When you were making your arrangements, did you ever see him?”
“We spoke many times, but I was on Avalon, and Royd in orbit. I saw his face on my viewscreen.”
“A projection, a computer simulation, could be anything,” Lommie Thorne said. “I can have my system conjure up all sorts of faces for your viewscreen, Karoly.”
“No one has ever seen this Royd Eris,” Christopheris said. “He has made himself a cipher from the start.”
“Our host wishes his privacy to remain inviolate,” d’Branin said.
“Evasions,” Lindran said. “What is he hiding?”
Melantha Jhirl laughed. When all eyes had moved to her, she grinned and shook her head. “Captain Royd is perfect, a strange man for a strange mission. Don’t any of you love a mystery? Here we are flying light years to intercept a hypothetical alien starship from the core of the galaxy that has been outward bound for longer than humanity has been having wars, and all of you are upset because you can’t count the warts on Royd’s nose.” She leaned across the table to refill her brandy snifter. “My mother was right,” she said lightly. “Normals are subnormal.”
“Maybe we should listen to Melantha,” Lommie Thorne said thoughtfully. “Royd’s foibles and neuroses are his business, if he does not impose them on us.”
“It makes me uncomfortable,” Dannel complained weakly.
“For all we know,” said Alys Northwind, “we might be travelling with a criminal or an alien.”
“Jupiter,” someone muttered. The xenotech flushed red and there was sniggering around the long table.
But Thale Lasamer looked up furtively from his plate, and giggled. “An alien,” he said. His blue eyes flicked back and forth in his skull, as if seeking escape. They were bright and wild.
Marij-Black swore. “The drug is wearing off,” she said quickly to d’Branin. “I’ll have to go back to my cabin to get some more.”
“What drug?” Lommie Thorne demanded. D’Branin had been careful not to tell the others too much about Lasamer’s ravings, for fear of inflaming the shipboard tensions. “What’s going on?”
“Danger,” Lasamer said. He turned to Lommie, sitting next to him, and grasped her forearm hard, his long painted fingernails clawing at the silvery metal of her shirt. “We’re in danger, I tell you, I’m reading it. Something alien. It means us ill. Blood, I see blood.” He laughed. “Can you taste it, Agatha? I can almost taste the blood. It can, too.”
Marij-Black rose. “He’s not well,” she announced to the others. “I’ve been dampening him with psionine, trying to hold his delusions in check. I’ll get some more.” She started towards the door.
“Dampening him?” Christopheris said, horrified. “He’s warning us of something. Don’t you hear him? I want to know what it is.”
“Not psionine,” said Melantha Jhirl. “Try esperon.”
“Don’t tell me my job, woman!”
“Sorry,” Melantha said. She gave a modest shrug. “I’m one step ahead of you, though. Esperon might exorcise his delusions, no?”
“Yes, but—”
“And it might help him focus on this threat he claims to detect, correct?”
“I know the characteristics of esperon quite well,” the psipsych said testily.
Melantha smiled over the rim of her brandy glass. “I’m sure you do. Now listen to me. All of you are anxious about Royd, it seems. You can’t stand not knowing whatever it is he’s concealing. Rojan has been making up stories for weeks, and he’s ready to believe any of them. Alys is so nervous she cut her finger off. We’re squabbling constantly. Fears like that won’t help us work together as a team. Let’s end them. Easy enough.” She pointed to Thale. “Here sits a class one telepath. Boost his power with esperon and he’ll be able to recite our captain’s life history to us, until we’re all suitably bored with it. Meanwhile he’ll also be vanquishing his personal demons.”
“He’s watching us,” the telepath said in a low, urgent voice.
“No,” said Karoly d’Branin, “we must keep Thale dampened.”
“Karoly,” Christopheris said, “this has gone too far. Several of us are nervous and this boy is terrified. I believe we all need an end to the mystery of Royd Eris. For once, Melantha is right.”
“We have no right,” d’Branin said.
“We have the need,” said Lommie Thorne. “I agree with Melantha.”
“Yes,” echoed Alys Northwind. The two linguists were nodding.
D’Branin thought regretfully of his promise to Royd. They were not giving him any choice. His eyes met those of the psipsych, and he sighed. “Do it, then,” he said. “Get him the esperon.”
“He’s going to kill me.” Thale Lasamer screamed. He leapt to his feet, and when Lommie Thorne tried to calm him with a hand on his arm, he seized a cup of coffee and threw it square in her face. It took three of them to hold him down. “Hurry,” Christopheris barked, as the telepath struggled.
Marij-Black shuddered and left the lounge.
When she returned, the others had lifted Lasamer to the table and forced him down, pulling aside his long pale hair to bare the arteries in his neck.
Marij-Black moved to his side.
“Stop that,” Royd said. “There is no need.”
His ghost shimmered into being in its empty chair at the head of the long dinner table. The psipsych froze in the act of slipping an ampule of esperon into her injection gun, and Alys Northwind startled visibly and released one of Lasamer’s arms. The captive did not pull free. He lay on the table, breathing heavily, his pale blue eyes fixed glassily on Royd’s projection, transfixed by the vision of his sudden materialization.
Melantha Jhirl lifted her brandy glass in salute. “Boo,” she said. “You’ve missed dinner, captain.”
“Royd,” said Karoly d’Branin, “I am sorry.”
The ghost stared unseeing at the far wall. “Release him,” said the voice from the communicators. “I will tell you my great secrets, if my privacy intimidates you so.”
“He has been watching us,” Dannel said.
“We’re listening,” Northwind said suspiciously. “What are you?”
“I liked your guess about the gas giants,” Royd said. “Sadly, the truth is less dramatic. I am an ordinary homo sapien in middle age. Sixty-eight standard, if you require precision. The hologram you see before you is the real Royd Eris, or was so some years ago. I am somewhat older now, but I use computer simulation to project a more youthful appearance to my guests.”
“Oh?” Lommie Thorne’s face was red where the coffee had scalded her. “Then why the secrecy?”
“I will begin the tale with my mother,” Royd replied. “The Nightflyer was her ship originally, custom-built to her design in the Newholme spaceyards. My mother was a freetrader, a notably successful one. She was born trash on a world called Vess, which is a very long way from here, although perhaps some of you have heard of it. She worked her way up, position by position, until she won her own command. She soon made a fortune through a willingness to accept the unusual consignment, fly off the major trade routes, take her cargo a month or a year or two years beyond where it was customarily transferred. Such practices are riskier but more profitable than flying the mail runs. My mother did not worry about how often she and her crews returned home. Her ships were her home. She forgot about Vess as soon as she left it, and seldom visited the same world twice if she could avoid it.”
“Adventurous,” Melantha Jhirl said.
“No,” said Royd. “Sociopathic. My mother did not like people, you see. Not at all. Her crews had no love for her, nor she for them. Her one great dream was to free herself from the necessity of crew altogether. When she grew rich enough, she had it done. The Nightflyer was the result. After she boarded it at Newholme, she never touched a human being again, or walked a planet’s surface. She did all her business from the compartments that are now mine, by viewscreen or lasercom. You would call her insane. You would be right.” The ghost smiled faintly. “She did have an interesting life, though, even after her isolation. The worlds she saw, Karoly! The things she might have told you would break your heart, but you’ll never hear them. She destroyed most of her records for fear that other people might get some use or pleasure from her experiences after her death. She was like that.”
“And you?” asked Alys Northwind.
“She must have touched at least one other human being,” Lindran put in, with a smile.
“I should not call her my mother,” Royd said. “I am her cross-sex clone. After thirty years of flying this ship alone, she was bored. I was to be her companion and lover. She could shape me to be a perfect diversion. She had no patience with children, however, and no desire to raise me herself. After she had done the cloning, I was sealed in a nurturant tank, an embryo linked into her computer. It was my teacher. Before birth and after. I had no birth, really. Long after the time a normal child would have been born, I remained in the tank, growing, learning, on slow-time, blind and dreaming and living through tubes. I was to be released when I had attained the age of puberty, at which time she guessed I would be fit company.”
“How horrible,” Karoly d’Branin said. “Royd, my friend, I did not know.”
“I’m sorry, captain,” Melantha Jhirl said. “You were robbed of your childhood.”
“I never missed it,” Royd said. “Nor her. Her plans were all futile, you see. She died a few months after the cloning, when I was still a fetus in the tank. She had programmed the ship for such an eventuality, however. It dropped out of drive and shut down, drifted in interstellar space for eleven standard years while the computer made me—” He stopped, smiling. “I was going to say while the computer made me a human being. Well, while the computer made me whatever I am, then. That was how I inherited the Nightflyer. When I was born, it took me some months to acquaint myself with the operation of the ship and my own origins.”
“Fascinating,” said Karoly d’Branin.
“Yes,” said the linguist Lindran, “but it doesn’t explain why you keep yourself in isolation.”
“Ah, but it does,” Melantha Jhirl said. “Captain, perhaps you should explain further for the less improved models?”
“My mother hated planets,” Royd said. “She hated stinks and dirt and bacteria, the irregularity of the weather, the sight of other people. She engineered for us a flawless environment, as sterile as she could possibly make it. She disliked gravity as well. She was accustomed to weightlessness from years of service on ancient freetraders that could not afford gravity grids, and she preferred it. These were the conditions under which I was born and raised.
“My body has no immune systems, no natural resistance to anything. Contact with any of you would probably kill me, and would certainly make me very sick. My muscles are feeble, in a sense atrophied. The gravity the Nightflyer is now generating is for your comfort, not mine. To me it is agony. At this moment the real me is seated in a floating chair that supports my weight. I still hurt, and my internal organs may be suffering damage. It is one reason why I do not often take on passengers.”
“You share your mother’s opinion of the run of humanity?” asked Marij-Black.
“I do not. I like people. I accept what I am, but I did not choose it. I experience human life in the only way I can, vicariously. I am a voracious consumer of books, tapes, holoplays, fictions and drama and histories of all sorts. I have experimented with dreamdust. And infrequently, when I dare, I carry passengers. At those times, I drink in as much of their lives as I can.”
“If you kept your ship under weightlessness at all times, you could take on more riders,” suggested Lommie Thorne.
“True,” Royd said politely. “I have found, however, that most planet-born are as uncomfortable weightless as I am under gravity. A ship master who does not have artificial gravity, or elects not to use it, attracts few riders. The exceptions often spend much of the voyage sick or drugged. No. I could also mingle with my passengers, I know, if I kept to my chair and wore a sealed environ-wear suit. I have done so. I find it lessens my participation instead of increasing it. I become a freak, a maimed thing, one who must be treated differently and kept at a distance. These things do not suit my purpose. I prefer isolation. As often as I dare, I study the aliens I take on as riders.”
“Aliens?” Northwind’s voice was confused.
“You are all aliens to me,” Royd answered.
Silence filled the Nightflyer’s lounge.
“I am sorry this has happened, my friend,” Karoly d’Branin said. “We ought not have intruded on your personal affairs.”
“Sorry,” muttered Agatha Marij-Black. She frowned and pushed the ampule of esperon into the injection chamber. “Well, it’s glib enough, but is it the truth? We still have no proof, just a new bedtime story. The hologram could have claimed it was a creature from Jupiter, a computer, or a diseased war criminal just as easily. We have no way of verifying anything that he’s said. No – we have one way, rather.” She took two quick steps forward to where Thale Lasamer lay on the table. “He still needs treatment and we still need confirmation, and I don’t see any sense in stopping now after we’ve gone this far. Why should we live with all this anxiety if we can end it all now?” Her hand pushed the telepath’s unresisting head to one side. She found the artery and pressed the gun to it.
“Agatha,” said Karoly d’Branin. “Don’t you think … perhaps we should forego this, now that Royd …?”
“NO.” Royd said. “Stop. I order it. This is my ship. Stop, or …”
“… or what?” The gun hissed loudly, and there was a red mark on the telepath’s neck when she lifted it away.
Lasamer raised himself to a half-sitting position, supported by his elbows, and Marij-Black moved close to him. “Thale,” she said in her best professional tones, “focus on Royd. You can do it, we all know how good you are. Wait just a moment, the esperon will open it all up for you.”
His pale blue eyes were clouded. “Not close enough,” he muttered. “One, I’m one, tested. Good, you know I’m good, but I got to be close.” He trembled.
The psipsych put an arm around him, stroked him, coaxed him. “The esperon will give you range, Thale,” she said. “Feel it, feel yourself grow stronger. Can you feel it? Everything’s getting clear, isn’t it?” Her voice was a reassuring drone. “You can hear what I’m thinking, I know you can, but never mind that. The others too, push them aside, all that chatter, thoughts, desires, fear. Push it all aside. Remember the danger now? Remember? Go find it, Thale, go find the danger. Look beyond the wall there, tell us what it’s like beyond the wall. Tell us about Royd. Was he telling the truth? Tell us. You’re good, we all know that, you can tell us.” The phrases were almost an incantation.
He shrugged off her support and sat upright by himself. “I can feel it,” he said. His eyes were suddenly clearer. “Something – my head hurts – I’m afraid!”
“Don’t be afraid,” said Marij-Black. “The esperon won’t make your head hurt, it just makes you better. We’re all here with you. Nothing to fear.” She stroked his brow. “Tell us what you see.”
Thale Lasamer looked at Royd’s ghost with terrified little-boy eyes, and his tongue flicked across his lower lips. “He’s—”
Then his skull exploded.
Hysteria and confusion.
The telepath’s head had burst with awful force, splattering them all with blood and bits of bone and flesh. His body thrashed madly on the tabletop for a long instant, blood spurting from the arteries in his neck in a crimson stream, his limbs twitching in a macabre dance. His head had simply ceased to exist, but he would not be still.
Agatha Marij-Black, who had been standing closest to him, dropped her injection gun and stood slack-mouthed. She was drenched with his blood, covered with pieces of flesh and brain. Beneath her right eye, a long sliver of bone had penetrated her skin, and her own blood was mingling with his. She did not seem to notice.