Universe 1 - [Anthology] Read online

  “Here?”

  “Bet. Bet on, right.”

  “Your game.” Straightening, I looked around, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the gloom; beside me, the Cook shuffled about, obviously looking for a familiar face. If he could see a face. Endrim was his home port; he hadn’t been born there, but when he thought of a place when he thought of home, it was Endrim. He’d been my guide, more or less. I’d gotten the impression that parts of the port were as strange to him as they were to me.

  One of the figures moved, unwound into a spider-shape vaguely resembling a man. The Cook moved forward, hooked an arm, beckoning the house-head towards him. They spoke in low tones while I settled myself against a wall latticed with cracks, made a show of relaxing: I was tense. I was a new Captain, and this was my first cruise, my first crew-choice. I was tense.

  They came over to me, the house-head moving in a slow, stooped slide-walk: spacer. I watched him, and in the gloom, I saw the left side of his face, wrinkled and twisted, creviced with a subsurface river of scarlet where a set of capillaries had broken: a blown Cork . . . one who’d snapped so far the pieces were scattered like powdered sand. His eyes found me, he saw my look, and he smiled, a curve of the lips just slightly askew from the line of his face.

  “Not your man here, Cap’n, not me, no. Quiet boy we got, back new. Fresh one, no scars, you see, huh.”

  His voice was slurred, blurred by the pull of the muscles torn in his neck.

  “Let’s see him.”

  “Back. Wait, hold. Kay.”

  He turned, slipped into the shadows. I glared at the Cook; he didn’t seem to see me.

  God.

  Then the blown Cork was back, and behind him was another man. Correction: a boy. And just like that, with a man coming towards me out of the darkness, I snapped; not on the surface, but underneath, so deep, so far inside that I didn’t sense it then, or even later when it all surged out; it was then, right then, that I snapped. That I made my first wrong decision, my first murder; of myself, of this Cork. Not tangible; not real so you could touch it—but real so it would be in my mind forever when I realized it for what it was.

  His hands moved nervously at his sides, finally latched into the loops of his overjacket, fidgeting in and out of the leather curls. He didn’t look at me, only towards me, and he spoke softly in answer to my questions. I tried to be the well-studied pro.

  “Name?”

  He told me.

  “You’re from Endrim?”

  He shook his head, named a place just in from the Center.

  “How’d you get out here?”

  He’d shipped passage. That startled me. Passage from the Center to the rim was hardly inexpensive, and there were many old Spacers caught on the rim who’d been born down towards Earth space—and who couldn’t return to die; not even a trader will take on an old spacer past his fourth ‘juve, and those old men were next to creditless. Sometimes a charter-ship will give mercy passage, but not often; when one does, the old man becomes a galley slave of sorts, and generally works harder than he’d ever worked in a life of spacing. For most, though, spacing to the rim is a one-way ticket. It’s the last haul, the final jump before death . . . and here was a man little more than a boy who’d shipped passage to the soul dump of the galaxy; it was odd. It was more than odd.

  I said as much, and he shrugged, and his hands twisted at the loops of his overjacket.

  “Experience?”

  He’d been on one run, was laid off when the ship lost its permit; a shuttle ship between worlds of the Endrim system. Little more than a children’s game. No experience; it would have been a masochistic form of suicide for me to take him on.

  “Billet him,” I said to the Cook, turned, and pushed my way from the commune, out into the cool night air of Endrim.

  When we cut ourselves, we use little knives.

  * * * *

  (I don’t want to look within my soul; the questions there are darker than the answers; I don’t want to have to know, to see myself, to understand. So I wait. I move about, I slice and cut away at the pieces of my flesh which mean the most to me, and in slicing, I cut others. Or is it the other way around? I don’t know. I don’t want to know.)

  * * * *

  He was a fair Cork. In time, with experience to back up his instincts, he’d be a good one. He had a natural sense of calm, a quiet way about him that set one at ease, relaxed tightening muscles, soothed anxieties to a knotted throb rather than a lancing pain; he was a Sensitive. Just talking with him eased the soul.

  When we were in Drive, he was everywhere, talking, calming, relaxing, easing: a mind among our minds, a valve for our combined tensions, a release, a Cork.

  During those weeks of our first run as a full charter-ship, under my command, I watched him with half attention; he always seemed to be just a few feet away, a constantly stabilizing factor because of his familiarity alone. When I was setting a course, or reviewing the planes and lines of the mind-structure powering the ship, he was there: a lamb-soft presence that our previous Corks under the last Captain had never been. Where they’d been huge, powerful, draining, he was small, an undercurrent sewer for our frustrations, present yet overwhelming. He channeled the dirt and the insanity out of our minds, keeping us all on that borderline tightrope between the sane and the mad.

  I’ve heard Corks described as maternal images, psychic wombs into which the power-minds of the ship crawl during stress, to be cradled and loved—to be drained. The poisons of the sick minds which power a mindship have to be sucked clean; the Cork was the Valve which drained us.

  I say us; that includes the Captain. Most of all, the Captain. There isn’t a truly sane mind aboard a mind-ship; it’s a contradiction in terms. Sane minds don’t provide the degree of energy needed to twist space, to send a charter-ship into the Back Region; sane minds are passage payers, not crew; sane minds are useless when it comes to space.

  But if there’s anyone who has to be sane on a mind-ship, to any degree—it’s your Cork. If he blows, everyone blows.

  And that’s your real one-way ticket.

  I didn’t see him after that day in the commune until we were two weeks out from Endrim, heading in towards the Center; I’d been aware of his presence, of course, but there’s a difference between that sort of awareness and actual confrontation; one is nebulous, a drifting, echoing thing. The other is stark, real, tangible. It’s an important difference. It was for me.

  I’d fixed the lines, set the degrees for the run down the well to Center; in the Back Region, in the zone pushed to one side of real space, the gravity well acts like a suction pump on a mindship. It provides all the pull needed for a run into Center, so all that’s required is a vector set and a guard crew to watch for bubbles in the continua; going up from Center is another matter. There you’re fighting all the way, riding light currents while dragging against that black well, swimming up towards thinning stars cast through the ghost-haze of hyperspace; in a run out, it’s all struggle . . . and it’s on the run out that your Cork receives his greatest strain. That’s why I found him in the lounge, sipping at a drink, listening to the untensing crew members trade tales about other runs, other times. He was watching them, and at the same time, his eyes had that oddly distant look that reveals a Cork to be in Sensitive. Going in he could afford to wander outside his station; going out he’d have no time for socializing. So he sat there, drinking and listening with a distant, passive look.

  I went over.

  We made small talk, inane, untroubled talk between a Captain and one of his officers; he seemed reticent about the portions of his life before he came to Endrim. When, in passing, I asked him about his early days before he left the Center, he grew even less talkative than before; he seemed to wind in on himself, a slight hardening of the wires in his neck—nothing definite, nothing obvious, just a sudden withdrawing. His answers remained soft, there was no hint of tension in his voice; he circumvented the subject entirely with a single phrase, bringing it a
round to me, to my past. Strangely, the shift didn’t strike me then as abrupt; perhaps I wanted to talk about myself, had been only keeping time until the inevitable return questions started. It was friendly, shallow; it seemed so.

  I talked then about life on my home world, a dustbin planet in the western arm; the Cork listened, and his attention seemed to act like a salve, drawing out things of my past that I’d let rest for years, things I’d been aware of, but which I’d kept buried without review since those days.

  Being alone during a sandstorm, crouching in a darkened corner of cold steel while wind pelted the outside walls with a rain of dry sand; watching a friend die, too small, too young to help him; then alone, never wanting to be alone again, leaving the world years later to space, where the walls were still cold steel, where other winds pelted those outsides with dry sand, but where you weren’talone, where there were others joining your mind with theirs, their minds with yours; speaking of a gut need tostay inside, away from the naked expanse of vacuum and dust, to hide within a framework of cozy steel, running from space into space; I told him about a box I’d once seen that opened into another box, which in turn unfolded into another box— which flowered to reveal another box, each layer peeling away to a following layer, until there was nothing left but a final square which couldn’t be opened. In languid tones, I told him all of this, and at the time I thought it was all simply idle talk between a Captain and one of his officers.

  He listened, his hands dancing at the ends of his arms: alien, with separate lives. Or not so separate.

  I didn’t ask him about himself again; that seemed distant, unimportant.

  After a while, I left.

  * * * *

  We made the run in to Center under the line. We’d charted most of the coordinate space assigned when the Charter had left base four runs earlier under a different Captain and a partially different crew; two more runs and then we’d leave. The next took us across the central plane of the spiral; five weeks without incident off-ship, and only one incident within.

  The Cook pointed it out; I’d just left control when he approached me, plucked at my side.

  “Gotta do, gotta do quick. Cork go, maybe snap, huh?”

  “What?”

  “He sitting, not talking no one. Something wrong, bet, something, bet on, right.” He bobbed his head, a shank of blackish hair twirling back from his eyes, falling back again. I stared at him, let it come in slowly. The Cork.

  “Where is he?”

  “Mess. Just sit, not talk, just sit, drinking.”

  That was bad. I walked on down the hall, found myself moving into a trot, came to the shafts and dropped the three levels to the mess level.

  He was sitting by himself, just back from the coffee console, sipping at the steaming cup, staring at his hands.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Nothing; he shrugged, tried a weak smile. I slid into place across from him, nervously keyed the remote on the table before me, waited for the hot coffee to be prepared; muscles jumped in quick spasms along the outsides of my ankles, a nervous thing I get. I watched the Cork. He kept his eyes on his hands, occasionally taking a drink from his coffee.

  “Cook says there’s something the matter. . .”

  He said no, nothing was wrong.

  I felt uneasy, sitting with him. Everything about him was calm, gentle—and yet I felt uneasy. I realized that I’d practically deliberately avoided him since that day in the lounge. Being near him made me uncomfortable; I couldn’t explain it.

  “Dammit—say something.”

  He did. He started to talk, quietly, about nothing particular, commenting first on the smoothness of the run, the attitudes of the crew, who he thought was involved with whom, how he liked the ship, how he was happy to be running under me, how he admired my calm, my judgment, how he liked the Engineer, how he was glad the others liked him, rambling, continuing on without saying anything; his hands drifted across the tabletop, brushing it gently as though smoothing the wrinkles from a sheet, stopping to take up his cup, hold it, place it back; he talked, and I stopped listening; I didn’t want to listen, didn’t really quite want to hear him. Finally, I pushed away from the table; he stopped speaking, looked up at me.

  Was anything the matter?

  “No,” I answered, wearily. “No. It’s fine. Just okay. I’ll see you later.”

  I went out, feeling weak. Something nagged at the back of my mind, and I brushed it away, as I brushed away the memory of the Cork sitting there, watching me leave, his eyes blank and uncaring. Seemingly.

  * * * *

  (What had I expected from him, that it hurt me and forced me to hurt him when nothing came? What had I wanted from him, other than for him to be a good Cork? Why had I chosen him, of all the ones to choose —why him?)

  * * * *

  I saw him about the corridors of the ship; he moved through the halls slowly, head down as he took a vaguely wandering path along the rim of the mind-ship, where the gravity was on; moving like a wraith of sorts, he always seemed lost in thought, though we knew that the distant look he held was that of a Sensitive in contact. He left varying impressions with the crew. Some of them thought him a touch psycho, others that he was the most sane of us all and was lost in our insanity; both were wrong, by my thinking. He was different, alone; apart from the rest of us. Dispassionate might have been a good word, but for the fact that he was hardly that; I found him at times when he thought he was alone, and he’d be shaking himself back and forth, muttering something low and rhythmic under his breath. In any but a Cork, I would have found it strange; but the ways a Cork maintains his sanity sometimes seem stranger than madness.

  So it seemed to me at the time; now I see that I didn’twant to understand him, to see how he was crumbling inside. I didn’t want to see him. He was the Cork.

  So it went. He listened, and he spoke little of himself— little of substance, little of him—and in his station, he took up our insanities.

  And on our third run, three weeks out from Centauri, up from the Center, our Cork blew.

  * * * *

  Mind drive:

  I stood away from the ship, away from the ball of light matrixed with networks of power and energy, a hundred balls of mind rolling in upon themselves like waves upon a muddy beach, churning up soot and soil and seeping back into gray-green blackness, foaming in coils of power: central to the silent storm of madness glowed the jeweled prism-light of the Cork’s mindfield, which seemed to whirlpool the darkness away even as the madness was generated, sending the ebon richness away from the ship in a stream of pulsating sapphire which shoved the Charter on through the Back Region, lancing white and blue behind, a helix of force.

  Beyond the ship were the stars: dim, slightly out-of-focus, as though seen through a veil of cheesecloth; ahead, the dome-like bowl of dun-colored space was dappled with pinpricks of gold and crimson: the hyper-space stream.

  I stood away from the ship, and I guided its bulk with careful charges of power along the lateral lines, along the planes, along the narrowed vertices; I stood away within my mind, outside the ship, non-eyes overseeing the mind drive.

  A hundred sick souls pouring out the filth of their madness, to have it twisted and bent, curved through a funnel wielded by the Engineer; a hundred sick souls, filtered through a sane one—a safety valve, a Cork.

  The stream of energy pulsed, unchanging, a throbbing flow.

  I could feel the weight of Center dragging at me, pulling at the fringes of my perspective; the same sensation one gets when climbing a high tower with a heavy pack strapped to one’s back—it sets you aslant. I compensated, the ship shifted, and we moved sluggishly through the stream.

  Images:

  Twist-

  Squatting in sunlight, sweating from open pores, juices welling along the insides of my arms, down my sides, my waist—sweltering, dying; waiting and no one comes. He’s gone; my fault; he’s gone. Desert world.

  (Gentle thoughts from the jewel: c
ool, soothing, draining off the memory.)

  Twist-

  Dark, cold room around and over, sounds throbbing in my veins, in my skull, alone, wet afraid panicking—

  (His hands came into my mind and plucked the madness away, silken fingers from the gem brushing my thoughts—cold.)

  Twist-

  Control room chaotic-, fires, smashing consoles and screens, the labored breathing of a madman in the Captain’s set, blood trickling black from his nostrils, cutting a scarlet river down his chin. Screaming, I shoved him from the chair, watched the body curl over on itself like paper tossed into a fire, limp, waferthin, rag-doll fall away; screaming, I clambered up into the Captains set, found the wires . . .