Read Ebook: The starmen by Brackett Leigh

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Ebook has 1269 lines and 56051 words, and 26 pages

He said to Edri, quite reasonably, "But that isn't possible."

Somebody put a wine-cup in a hand that didn't belong to him any more, and Edri's voice spoke to him from miles away. "But it is. Drink up, Trehearne. Sovereign remedy for practically everything. Take in the idea slowly, with the wine. We come from another world, another sun. It seems incredible to you. To us, it's only a familiar fact."

Trehearne sat down. The wine burned in his throat, and his head spun round. Everything had turned unreal. "Another world, another sun." He stared down at himself, turning his hands over and back again and staring at them as though he had never seen them before. "My own blood. That's why...." He shook his head, stumbling over his own words, and then he shivered, a muscular reaction that shook him right down to his heels. He repeated carefully, "I am going with you."

"Very soon now," said Edri, in such a sombre tone that Trehearne was startled partly out of his daze, enough to see that Edri looked at him with pity, as one looks at a man about to die. A new alarm took hold of Trehearne, and he cried out,

"What's the matter? What are you hiding from me?"

"An ordeal." Once more Shairn stood before him, and her eyes were searching into him, and she had ceased to smile. "You've been given what you wanted, a chance to learn the truth about yourself."

He rose and put his hands on her as he had once before, and not in tenderness. "Go on."

Her red mouth parted a little to show him the edges of her teeth. "Only a true Vardda can endure the velocities of starflight. Are you afraid, Michael?"

"Yes," he said. "I am." He stood for a long moment, with the blood pounding in his temples and everything, herself, the world, all the years of his own life that had gone before, lost and vague beyond a blinding mist, and then he said slowly, "But you're right, I've got what I wanted."

Outside the keep a man's voice shouted. Someone said, "The ship!" More voices shouted, and the door was flung open. Something dark and cruel came into Trehearne's face. He looked at Shairn and said. "I'll live to thank you." He let her go. People were moving toward the door. He moved with them, as in a dream, but knowing that he would not wake. He lost track of individuals. There were only shadows around him, sounds, motion, without meaning. The walls were gone, and the light. Wet, cold, dark, the outside, the moor, the wind and the naked sky. It had stopped raining. There was a wide rift in the clouds, a valley of stars, and in the valley was a presence, solemn, silent, huge and strange. He watched it, and it settled down, gently as a drift of the night itself, and it sang as it came, a quiet humming that filled all the space between the horizons with a quivering echo more felt than heard. Power. Immensity, and strength. Trehearne drew in a deep unsteady breath. His heartbeats rocked him as he stood. Instinctively his hands moved, a flier's hands, remembering the might of pistons and of jets, groping toward a greater thing. He was not conscious of the motion. He was cold, and the wind flowed through his bones. The great dim bulk dropped down and lay quiet on the moor. Its hull was scored and pitted by the atmospheres of unnamed worlds. Its ports had looked upon infinities where the stars were swallowed up like clouds of fireflies. Trehearne began to walk toward it. If there were others with him, he did not know it. His eyes were on the ship.

A lock-door opened high in the looming flank. White light blazed from it. A folding metal stair came down, and then people descended it and mingled with those that were on the ground. A larger hatch clanged open, lower down. More light blazed out. Machinery began to clatter, and men went back and forth and shouted. The things that were made ready in the sheds began their transfer to the ship. Trehearne reached the foot of the ladder.

He looked up. The vast alien bulk of the ship was above him. It hung over him like the end of the world. It had come out from the darkness between the stars, and it would return there, and he was going with it. There were voices all around him, and some of them were speaking to him, but he did not hear them. He saw no faces. He saw nothing but the curved immensity of the hull that had made such voyages. There were tears in his eyes. They were not of fear, nor of self-pity. They were of exaltation. Men had done this thing. Men had reached out and taken the stars in their hands. They were not men of Earth, but they were of his own race. And they had done it.

He began to climb the ladder, and the treads rang hollow beneath his feet.

High. High up in the cold wind, with the smell of the wet moor heavy on it. A round lock chamber opened before him. He stepped into it, on a metal deck worn bright by the passing of many feet. Others came behind him and pressed him on, down a long transverse corridor faced in metal. The scars of time and hard use were on it. Now and again through a bulkhead door he glimpsed a cabin or an orderly room. They were real. Men lived and worked in them. Someone--Edri--made him turn aside and into a lounge with deep chairs bolted to the deck. "Sit down," said Edri, and he sat obediently. And Edri said, "You have a chance, but you'll have to fight for it. The first time is hard even for...." He stopped, and Trehearne finished for him.

"Even for a true Vardda."

"Even," said Edri gently, "for a Vardda. Trehearne, we're alone in the galaxy. Generations ago our race was founded by a man named Orthis, whose system of controlled mutation made us what we are, the Vardda--the Starmen. It's a difference, a condition of the flesh. With us there is no doubt. With you--your blood is mixed. But you're a throwback in every other way. The mutation may have bred true, also."

His voice carried hope, but no conviction. Trehearne frowned, trying to grasp the sense of what he said. It was hard to think, hard to believe with his mind, in spite of what his senses told him. Things had happened too fast. Too fast, and too big. He caught a glimpse of Shairn's face. It was white, and he realized that all at once she was beginning to be afraid.

"Fight," said Edri. "That's the thing to remember."

All through the ship, the bells rang sharply.

Trehearne took hold of the arms of the chair in which he sat. For a brief moment of panic he wanted to get up and run, but he could hear the sonorous clang of the lock-doors closing and he knew it was no use. Everyone was seated now. The bells rang again. He braced himself, and fixed his gaze on Shairn.

Swift, smooth and awesome as the hand of God, acceleration pressed down upon him. Muttering an all but silent thunder, the ship rushed upward into the sky, and for the first time in history, Earth-born ears listened to the banshee scream of atmosphere past a cleaving hull.

FIVE

The wailing shriek rose to a crescendo, and then it died. Earth was gone. They had stepped away from it. Even its sky was behind them. A weight like to the weight of mountains lay on Trehearne, and he was horribly afraid.

He waited for the pressure to ease. His temples were bursting, it was an agony to breathe, and he thought, It can't go on like this, it's got to let up! But it did not. There was a change in the pitch of the motor vibration. He listened to it climb, higher and higher, until it slipped over the threshhold of hearing, and as it climbed, the pressure grew. The bones of his chest crushed in upon his lungs. Everything around him began to waver and grow vague, to recede slowly into a reddish twilight.

And still the pressure grew.

Anguish became terror, terror turned into blind panic. His body was shredding apart, dissolving toward a tattered ruin, a heap of bloody rags. This body he had been so proud of, this star-born self that was only a mockery, a sham. The mutation hadn't bred true. He was going to die, to cease utterly from being. He was....

Far, far away, a voice, Shairn's voice, crying, "I've killed him. Poor Michael, I didn't mean for him to die!"

Poor Michael. A mongrel, a walking deceit. Proud Michael, who thought he was so damned good, and wasn't anything. Idiot Michael, who had run after a witch. And she hadn't meant for him to die. She hadn't really been that angry because he had treated her like an equal--not nicely, perhaps, but like an equal, which he wasn't. That was kind of her, not really to want him killed. He began to be able to see her face again. He wasn't sure whether it was true sight, or only the memory of how she had looked before he began to die. But he could see her, pale, distorted. He was glad he could see her. She was sitting in front of him, and she wasn't far away. Somehow, pressure or no pressure, he was going to get to her. He was going to put his hands around her white throat, and then they could forget about starflight together, and it wouldn't matter that he was a mongrel and she was not. He began to fight against the pressure.

He wanted so little. Only to get up, to move the short distance and lock his fingers at the back of her neck, with his two thumbs lying over the great pulses. So little. He was filled with a raging determination to have it. He fought. He had nothing to fight with but will-power and the instinctive desire of the organism to claw onto life as long as there was a flicker of it left. He wanted to get up, and he fought, an inner struggle without sound or motion, a blind battle to regain control of his own flesh. His face contorted, like the face of a man who lifts something far too heavy, and the sweat ran on it. Slowly, slowly, his hands moved on the chair arms, contracted, became fists. The muscles of his arms tightened, and then the great muscles of the chest and belly, and they labored, and the breath came painfully into his lungs--came, and went, and came again, and his flagging heart stumbled, steadied, and began to beat more evenly. The red mist that wrapped him cleared away a bit and he could see Shairn more distinctly. She was staring at him. Her mouth and eyes were wide open, ludicrous, startled. Then Edri's head came between them and blotted her out, and he was shouting, but the blood was pounding so loud in Trehearne's ears that he could not hear what he said. He raised a hand and tried to thrust Edri away. He did not want to lose sight of Shairn. There was a tremendous exaltation on him. He was winning. He was going to get up and do the thing he wanted to do. The sinews coiled and tensed along his thighs. The pressure didn't hurt so much, and the terrible vibrations of speed were not tearing at him quite so hard. He leaned forward a little, breathing in deep harsh gasps, and his body strained and tightened....

Shairn's voice, thin and shrill through the tumult in his ears. For a moment the meaning didn't penetrate. Then slowly it dawned on him what she had said. And then, more slowly still, he realized that it was true. He could feel the life flowing back into him. He was getting the hang of it now, a simple matter of tensing the muscles in a certain way, and the agony of the vibration lessened, the atoms of his body stopped their ghastly dissolution. It was only a matter of strength--not the kind that can move great weights, but a more subtle kind, a tensile strength that knit the fabric of the flesh together and made it impervious as steel. In an infantile way he had been using it for years without knowing it, in his testing of fast planes. That was why he had never blacked out, why he had never been tortured as other men were by the spectre of inertia waiting for them at the end of a dive. Now he had found at last the purpose his body was made for. He forgot about Shairn. She didn't matter any more. He had won, he was alive, he was going to live, and he was not a sham nor a mockery, he was not even a mongrel. The mutation had bred true. His vision was clearing fast. He raised his head and looked around, and they were all staring at him, the Vardda, the Starmen, who had been so sure he was going to die. They were talking back and forth in excited voices, they were getting up and coming toward him, and Edri was pounding him on the shoulder. He thrust them all away and stood up.

"I'm one of you now," he said. "I passed your test." He was suddenly exhausted and shaken, but he would not show it. He stood erect and faced them.

Shairn took him in her arms and kissed him. Trehearne said, "You're glad I didn't die."

"Yes. Oh, yes!"

"You would have felt just a little guilty, wouldn't you?" He held her off and looked at her. She was very beautiful. Her throat was warm and white. He studied it, thinking what he had wanted to do only a short few minutes ago, and then he shook his head. He said slowly, "I owe you something, Shairn. I won't forget it."

She did not like his tone, and her brows drew into a dark line. She turned away, and over her shoulder Trehearne saw Kerrel looking at him in such an intent, strange way that he challenged it. "You don't look very happy, Kerrel. Does my survival upset you?"

Kerrel shook his head. "I don't enjoy condemning a man, particularly when I have nothing against him. But it brings up other problems. You have no conception of them now, Trehearne, but the thing you have just done brings you automatically into conflict with the most basic tenet of Vardda law, and how the Council will decide the question I don't know." He shifted his gaze to Edri and said in a curiously soft tone, "It could have the most dangerous consequences."

If it was bait, Edri refused to take it. He laughed and said, "This is no time to worry about consequences. I'm going to find Trehearne a cabin and me a bottle, and put the two together for a small celebration. A man doesn't become a Vardda every day." He took Trehearne's elbow and started him toward the door. "Come on."

Trehearne's new-found strength had not deserted him--it was, apparently, automatic when it was once started, like the heart-beat--but the ordinary kind was running out of him like water from a sieve. He made it out into the passageway without staggering, but a few steps farther on he clung to the bolt-heads in the wall and said unhappily, "I think I'm going to fall over."

"Reaction," said Edri. "Don't let it bother you. We all get it, first time out. Here, hang on."

The passage seemed a mile long, but eventually there was a cabin, small, compact, and functional, and there was a bunk, and Trehearne sat down on it. Edri went away somewhere, and came back again after a minute with a bottle. The stuff, whatever it was, went down like white fire, and Trehearne felt better. He set the cup aside and then began to look at his hands, turning them over as though he had never seen them before.

"They seem like everybody else's," he said.

"They're not. You're not. As Kerrel told you, you have no idea yet of what you've done, but as time goes by you will."

"It's quite true, then--about the mutation?"

"Oh, yes, quite. The form and structure of your body cells, and mine, are different from other people's. Due to that altered form and structure, your tissues, and mine, possess a tensile strength in their cell-walls that can withstand incredible acceleration pressure without collapse. And I hope you never know how lucky you were that the mutation was a recessive that finally bred true in you." He filled the glasses again, slowly, withdrawn for a moment into some brooding thought of his own. Then he added sombrely, "Some day I'll tell you the story of Orthis, who found the secret of the mutation. And a grand proud story it is, but with a shameful ending. He.... No. Forget it. The less you know about that, the better. Besides, we're celebrating. Drink up."

Trehearne drank. His head was swimming, and he felt hollow inside. The glass was heavy in his hands. He said, "There'll be trouble when I get to--to Llyrdis?"

"Sufficient unto the day, Trehearne. Worry about that when you come to it."

But he had already ceased to worry. Llyrdis. He said the name again, and it felt strange on his tongue. Llyrdis. A name and a world he had never heard of until a few short hours ago, and now.... The hollow spaces inside him were filled suddenly with homesickness, with a longing, with something akin to horror. He stared at the iron walls that closed him in, and he knew where he was, in an impossible ship with alien people, flying faster than light across nothingness to an alien star.... His stomach contracted, sending up a bitter fluid to burn his throat, and his hands were cold as a dead man's. Earth was gone. His Earth, sky, mountains, sunrise, city streets, country roads, the faces and voices of people, the men he had worked with, the women he had had or wanted to have, all the familiar things--the currency, the bars, the names of nations, books, pictures, shirtmakers, history--what was the use now of all the history he had learned, where did Caesar rank among the stars? Earth was gone, and even the sun had gone with it, and it was in a way as though he had died--and how do you start life again afterward, a stranger? There was this cabin, and outside its walls there was no world, no sunlight, nothing. Nothing.

Edri led him swiftly to a tiny adjoining cubicle and left him alone with his misery while he used the intercom by the cabin door. Presently the ship's doctor joined him. They got Trehearne back into the bunk, and a needle glittered briefly in the light, sending him to a place where there were not even any dreams.

On Number Four screen in the ship's control room, the pinpoint fleck that represented an isolated yellow sun flickered, faded, and went out.

Trehearne looked up from the bunk and asked, "How long have I slept?"

"Nearly twenty-four hours by Earth reckoning," Edri answered. "You needed it." He leaned over and offered Trehearne a prosaic pack of American cigarettes. "Smoke?"

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