The Shadow of the Ship Read online

  For Dean M. Sandin

  — since March 1959 —

  Contents

  1. Caravaneers

  2. On the Trail of Light

  3. Down into Gravity

  4. Starved Rock

  5. Federated Trailmen

  6. All Substance Forfeit

  7. From the Waterflower Pool

  8. The Detenebrator

  9. A Cry of Crimson

  10. Within the Shadow

  11. Too Quickly the Garden

  12. A Hog in Armor

  13. Riding Double-Jaded

  14. Exhaustion to Vacuum

  15. The Cables Between Faces

  16. An Explosion of Moonbeams

  17. The Bloom of Death

  18. A Track of Golden Fire

  The moving Moon went up the sky,

  And nowhere did abide;

  Softly she was going up,

  And a star or two beside—

  Her beams bemocked the sultry main,

  Like April hoar-frost spread;

  But where the ship’s huge shadow lay,

  The charmed water burnt always

  A still and awful red.

  Beyond the shadow of the ship

  I watched the water-snakes:

  They moved in tracks of shining white,

  And when they reared, the elfish light

  Fell off in hoary flakes.

  Within the shadow of the ship

  I watched their rich attire:

  Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,

  They coiled and swam; and every track

  Was a flash of golden fire.

  —Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  It is necessary to speak and to think what is; for being is, but nothing is not. These things I bid you consider. For I hold you back from this first way of inquiry; but also from that way on which mortals knowing nothing wander, of two minds. For helplessness guides the wandering thought in their breasts; they are carried along deaf and blind alike, dazed, beasts without judgment, convinced that to be and not to be are the same and not the same, and that the road of all things is a backward-turning one.

  —Parmenides

  1. Caravaneers

  Seeing someone aboard whom he did not recognize surprised Rheinallt. After all these clockdays spent traversing the flat and endless night of subspace, there hardly could be anyone new.

  “Where’ve you been hiding?” he asked her. “Snaking along the Blue Trail with us like an invisible sprite?”

  Rheinallt’s questions sounded casual, almost bantering, as he thudded into a leather seat in the lounge car of the caravan. The young woman had been sitting there quietly, alone, when he had entered; she looked out of place. Why couldn’t he remember seeing her before? He had by now not only a mental picture, but a rough characterization also of each passenger, but this one he had somehow missed.

  She took a while to gather a reply. “Here and there,” she answered with a shrug. “I’m not invisible.”

  Purposefully he let his attention wander to the nearby low bartop, as if he had forgotten her already. A groundside handbill had been pressed to the counter and varnished over thickly, and Rheinallt pretended to study this. From a glassy depth big glowing letters spoke the slogan:

  Come with Eiverdein!

  Extend the Accessible Galaxy!

  Scientists and Adventurers

  wanted for a

  Special Caravan.

  Rheinallt had half turned away from this young woman who should not be a stranger, when her outlines seemed to blur slightly, and he blinked to clear his eyes. The blur remained. He glanced to his own hands, to the ornate carved-wood ceiling, to a neatly dressed oldster passing by. All these appeared normal. Then back to his companion.

  She was visibly wavering. Squinting did not sharpen the focus.

  The black pseudosurface of the subspatial meadow was smoother under the caravan’s runners than it had been in several days’ traveling. No side effect of the caravan’s motion could affect only her.

  There was a barely perceptible vibration passing all through her, skin rippling like breeze-ruffled water, a girlish blush in motion rather than in color. As if she were trying to hold down a pneumatic drill meant to be operated by a man with twice her mass. That cloud of dark hair might develop a blurred outline from the ventilator currents, but surely not her face? Or slim arms? It couldn’t be his own vision, for nothing else had blurred or wavered.

  And then, after only twenty seconds at most, the effect stopped.

  There are no unconnected monads: no chance, randomness, or events which merely occur, floating in isolated splendor. And certainly not here, not aboard the Special Caravan where Rheinallt liked to think that all was carefully foreseen.

  Rheinallt frowned heavily. “By your accent, you’re not from the Nation,” he probed, not gently.

  His statement was a fabrication, as he could not identify dialects from a couple of sentences in a language not his native one. In the last couple of years he had worked hard to minimize his own accent. Fortunately the habitual quirks of gesture and interpersonal distance, so important for intimacy and offense, had all the usual variations among the Trail worlds.

  She was even slower to respond this time. In the distance came a faint sound of someone sobbing, an edgy, lonely appeal. Passengers and crew alike were all under the steady tension of their over-prolonged journeying. So he shouldn’t contribute to it himself. Rheinallt visualized his bushy eyebrows, so heavily frowning a moment before, floating lightly up his forehead and blending guerilla-like into the upper waves of hair. This image, although a little foolhardy for a bloodsweater to dwell upon, was silly enough that his mood lightened sufficiently for a smile.

  The young woman was mollified. “No, I’m from Fleurage,” she said finally. “A forest world on the Yellow Trail.”

  Her mouth was red, relaxed now and pretty; almost smiling, but hovering somewhere short of warmth. That same off-balance repose in her eyes showed only far distances, empty dawn sky without horizon.

  Rheinallt nodded. “Galactic Northwest, right? I’ve heard of it.”

  Her lips tightened slightly. “Oh, I don’t know any astronomy. But certainly it’s out of the way.”

  “Out of the way of general trade, at least,” he agreed.

  “Yes!” she said too abruptly. With more control she returned, “And you?”

  She watched Rheinallt now with an elaborate coolness as she took a sip of her wine. Definitely quite young, or an innocent; not his type, or not for some while yet, anyway, he thought.

  “From Blueholm,” he temporized. “In the Blue Free Nation.”

  “Blueholm Station. Our jumping-off point, I remember, but I was there only briefly. A busy city.” She paused, then asked with a show of indifference, “Won’t you have some refreshment?”

  “Might as well.” The caravan’s bar was not crowded; he turned to Haderun, the bartender; lifted a finger. “What’s your name?” he asked her.

  “Susannilar.”

  The bartender unobtrusively slid a drink to Rheinallt’s place, withdrew.

  “I’m Eiverdein,” he told her.

  In full, Hendrik Eiverdein Rheinallt, but the rest of the name went with a different territory. Someday he might again get to use it all, and not just the euphonious part. The Earth where he had been given those names was immensely far away.

  Rheinallt had been told on occasion that he wielded a heavy hand, but he managed not to crush the mug as he wrapped his hand around it, sipped, and set it down again. Tart and sweet together: two contrasting fruit flavors, one fermented, and not totally mixed.

  Susannilar’s eyes flicked to the mug and back to his face. “So this is yo
ur expedition.”

  “My initiative,” he conceded.

  Her face appeared a little less thin, a little less of tautness emulating relaxation and a little more actual ease. He revised an opinion: she had not been on the verge of a smile earlier but of a moue of nervous exhaustion. Her fingers trembled, not an optical effect this time but simply strained nerves. Could she really have been hiding?

  Most of the hopeful researchers had spent many days on Blueholm, assembling odd collections of instruments. An interesting and sophisticated planet, but Susannilar had intimated that she hadn’t had the time or attention to enjoy it. Possibly she had been a late arrival to some larger, established group aboard: an apprentice to some salesman of celebrity science. A supernumerary, even; certainly there were a few of the decorative and entertaining on the caravan, helping to leaven and lighten the long journey.

  “When did you first hear of the Ship?” she asked.

  He snorted. “The shadow, you mean. The shadow of a ship. We don’t know yet what’s really out there.”

  Deliberately she scanned him, and he felt her gaze pass over his face, shoulders, thick hands. It was a childlike analysis from a person new to such processes, but in a strange way this seemed not only an innocent look but a bitter one.

  Rheinallt had the feeling then, for the first time since childhood, that someone was looking at him; actually seeing not just the publicized trail explorer called Eiverdein, but all of himself at once, as a person. Like the difference in seeing binocularly after one has gone through life with one eye closed or blind, except that this was reversed, this was being seen binocularly. He did not like it.

  “Whatever Trigotha found out here,” she asked after this scrutiny, “it has to be a ship before it can be a shadow, doesn’t it?”

  “I should think so,” he said dryly.

  “I mean, I understand Trigotha mentioned a shadow, but there had to be the Ship for there to be a shadow.”

  His fingers strummed a slow rhythm on the wet-slick wood of the bartop. If this was ingenuousness, he didn’t feel drawn by it. Not after that demonstration of binocularity or whatever. The more he mulled that, the more disturbing it seemed. Related to her apparent vibration a few minutes earlier? He ran a quick check on his intraocular muscles and the relevant nerves, but everything seemed fine.

  “Our meager data claim there’s something there,” he told her. “Who knows what it is?”

  “Something in the semblance of a vehicle, I hope,” Susannilar said slowly. “Did Trigotha say definitely that it was artificial, at least, whatever he found? An artifact?”

  Rheinallt stroked his beard. “From the reports I managed to gather, Trigotha’s crew had no doubt about that. In fact, I don’t think it occurred to any of them that it might be only a natural phenomenon.”

  She pondered during another sip of wine. “That’s not quite as good.”

  “As if it had occurred to them, and they’d analyzed the thing? No.”

  “But of course if they’d had the airtime and equipment, and had been able to analyze it, our trip wouldn’t be an adventure. Just a dangerously long vacation tour.”

  Susannilar might be more youthfully curious than informed, but she was no fool. She must have kept herself secreted away during the long stretches that had taken the caravan to increasingly less-visited planets, sliding away from the populous centers of humanity’s self-defined civilization and the sunlit worlds. Was it belated curiosity that now had drawn her out of her shell?

  “So share with me,” she persisted. “When did you first hear of it?”

  “Well, about a year ago, trans-Blue calendar. Trigotha was the man who found it, of course, and sent back the word before he died.”

  His words brought back his joy at hearing that first vast hint: a starship, an abandoned starship! A real ship to use, freedom from the slow drag along the trails. A way home, for him, insofar as he still had a home in the unwelcoming air of Earth.

  “Fifty-four worlds,” he mused. “Humanity here travels between stars only where the trails lead, and we only may touch upon those worlds that the trails touch. Enough of infinity to be maddening. All these worlds trapped like beads on a string, on a few colored fragments of string lost by a god and never found.”

  “More worlds than that,” she said. “Hundreds, aren’t there?”

  “If you count the uninhabitable ones. Poison atmosphere or heavy gravity or airless rock. The caravan’ll be passing another of those dubious semiplaces soon. Starved Rock by name: I’m not looking forward to it.” He shook his head. “So many places to be, and so few that are worth being at.”

  “So we need the Ship to expand,” she said as if by rote.

  “To explore, to grow!” Rheinallt said forcefully. To demaroon himself.

  Susannilar made an elaborate shrug, flipping her hands open; then smiled to take any sting out of her failure to empathize. As she gestured, Rheinallt caught a whiff of a perfume like a spring night full of flowers, a multiflora scent full of happy garden memories.

  Sensing his interest she said, “The perfume is kind of rare, isn’t it? I walk down to hydroponics a lot, but flowering fruit and vegetables can’t match it.”

  “Without exaggeration, it’s lovely. Complex, too.”

  “It ought to be.” Her thoughts were far away for a moment. “It’s a patent blend invented by the botanist Ytrenath. My grandfather. Using it’s a memory splurge as well as a money one.”

  Rheinallt smiled to encourage her.

  “I suppose it’s a little funny. My grandfather used to call me a hog in armor when I dressed up in my mother’s clothes. You know, awkwardness armed in steel, like a bumpkin in evening clothes. All shined up on the outside. He said I wouldn’t learn to grow into Alalortem’s clothes just by slipping into them. I’d need to learn to slip out of myself into a bigger, shinier me to be like my mother.

  “I didn’t understand,” Susannilar went on, “and got upset. He gave me a sample-size bottle of the eau de millefleurs. I didn’t know then how unique it was, or how valuable. He was heir to some traditions, techniques of structure and function. The perfume was only one of his distillations from those techniques. Anyway, the scent’s like a childhood reminder to keep learning and growing.”

  “And did you learn to slip?” Rheinallt asked.

  She suddenly was reticent again. “Slip? Ah, yes, to shift.”

  Ah. But that half-answer was all she would tag onto her anecdote of the perfume. Her expression altered a couple of times, then she turned to gaze absorbedly at the woodwork, her vision calmly tracing the curves of the paneling and molding.

  Rheinallt knew only a little of Fleurage, her planet. Persuasively smooth-tongued tradesmen called it the gourd of perfume on the vine of worlds.

  Out of place, yes. Restless, idle, bored? Rheinallt had not tried to winnow these adventurers of science, nor even found time before leaving the Nation to know everyone personally. Yet no one came so far as this, and abandoned their world-beads of knowledge and warmth, without a reason. Perhaps not without many reasons. The meadow could swallow a good billion reasons of a billion people and yet still be neutrally empty, still be dark, still be reasonless and unhuman.

  Rheinallt couldn’t kid himself that the “Come with Eiverdein!” slogan was anything but bait. The Ship was the hook on the line.

  Susannilar was wrapped in her insistent repose. Rheinallt swiveled to look outward, toward the object of his thoughts—as if calling the pseudosurface an object made an easier mental footing, or the homely label of “meadow” could pin the concept of subspace to a tolerant ground.

  The caravan’s bar ran lengthwise along one of the section-cars. Facing the bartender—so the patrons could keep their backs to it if they chose—was a window of reinforced glass which swept along one entire wall for the length of the car.

  Out there was the meadow, the bottomlands of nothingness. Hard vacuum it was, and else, and other. The black emptiness beneath the universe, the dead m
edium for the gossamer trails. One scholar of the philosophy of mind had deemed the meadow to be the Significant Other to life itself, as though it were outside the light which a conscious mind could cast.

  A motion within the car caught Rheinallt’s eye. From the forward door Arahant padded noiselessly into the room, his muscles bunching and rolling under the fleecy white fur. The catadrome was built rather like a lynx and walked like one, with the feline quality of ignoring anything unworthy of his attention. His gaze passed Rheinallt without acknowledgment, but lingered briefly on Susannilar. Did he notice something strange about her too?

  Arahant jumped gracefully to a high shelf behind the bar, barely touching a barstool on the way up. There he settled and coolly surveyed the rest of the room.

  “Is that the aircat?” Susannilar asked hesitantly.

  “Yes. Arahant is his name.”

  “From very far away? I never heard of aircats until this caravan.”

  “Very. ‘Catadrome’ is part of the technical name, meaning down-running. Perhaps I could get him to show you some time.”

  Rheinallt didn’t try to tell her Catadromous dermaptera, in a language of which she had never heard. Certainly he wouldn’t explain all of Arahant’s talents any more than he would his own. Some things are best kept in reserve. Arahant and he had been marooned in exile together, and both were far from home.

  “A number of passengers prefer to avoid sight of the meadow altogether,” Susannilar offered, dropping her attention from the aircat to the various people sitting below Arahant’s shelf. “Even among us adventurers and investigators.”

  “No wonder.” The wonder that was there wasn’t in the avoidance.

  “Don’t you worry about people getting drunk to hide from meadow-fear? I’ve only been on a few caravans before, short-run rurals on the Yellow Trail. None of them had anything like this lounge.”