Lifeboat Read online

  “But you could have lived if you hadn’t done ... this,” he said. “Why didn’t you just survive, yourself, in order to do your own erasing of the shame of what’s happened?”

  “I am already dishonored beyond the cooperation of any but members of my own ship’s company, all of whom now are dead. But the new life within me, being stainless, cannot be denied cooperation by another Albenareth without new reason; and that assistance will be needed to find whoever destroyed my ship.”

  There was another pause between them.

  “Very well,” said Giles, finally. “I am not Albenareth, as you say, and I admit I do not fully understand. But I still see no reason why you will not change the course of this lifeship to 20B-40 and give the rest of us a chance of life. In fact, now I formally insist that you change course.”

  “No,” said the Captain, emotionlessly. “The life that I carry will be stainless at birth, but more than this is needed. There must be some inherited honor for the young one to ensure its chance at the rank and duty of a ship’s officer, which is available only to a few, even among the Albenareth. If this lifeship delivers what is left of its passengers to Belben, alive or dead, there is that honor. Otherwise, there is only expediency.”

  “There’s no honor in saving lives?” snapped Giles.

  “How could there be?” said the Captain. “A life saved by other than that life’s owner has only been intruded upon, in its own area of honor—its own responsibility to delay as long as possible the satisfaction of passing through the further Portal. Also, these are only human lives. If you and your people were Albenareth, you would all gain honor by joining me in the execution of my duty, which is to convey them to Belben. As you are not, it makes no difference one way or another. But, Adelman, it is to Belben we go and no other destination.”

  The Captain closed her eyes.

  “Rayumung ...” said Giles.

  The dark figure did not answer. Giles turned and walked out, leaving the motionless alien behind him.

  In the first section of the ship he saw Hem lying on his cot and Mara standing as if waiting. For a second he stared at her, puzzled. Then, with a jolt, memory returned. He had become so involved in his conversation with the Captain he had forgotten that they had been speaking the alien tongue, which Mara of course did not know.

  He smiled at her, now, to reassure her.

  “I’m afraid,” he said, “the Captain doesn’t know much more about the vine than we do. It’s not the Captain’s area of specialty. So, for the present, we’ll simply avoid any of the spotted fruit. If you find any like that, pick it and put it directly into the converter. Will you tell the rest about that?”

  “Yes,” she said. She did not turn away immediately, however, and it seemed to him that she was watching him a little curiously. “That was all you were able to find out, in spite of talking to him so long?”

  “The Captain and I always seem to have a bit of an argument whenever we talk,” he said. “I’m afraid I didn’t learn anything else worth telling you. But I’ll be talking to the Captain again, and as soon as I have some information to pass on, I’ll pass it on. But for now, just avoid the spotted fruit as I said, and don’t worry. Tell the others that.”

  “I will,” she said.

  She turned and went back into the middle section of the ship and he heard her voice, although, with the recorder running in the background, as it was more and more constantly now, he could not make out exactly what she was saying to the rest Gradually, the sound of the recorder was coming to be used as a privacy tool, and as such it was welcome.

  Giles lay down on his cot and gave his thoughts over to the problem of the Captain. One way or another, their course must be changed to the destination of 20B-40—and the change must be made while the Captain was physically still able to make it.

  8

  Sixth day—23:57 hours

  The humans, except Giles, were all asleep. Although the lights still blazed eternally overhead, they had all fallen into a pattern, a sleeping and waking cycle. At about midnight, lifeshiptime, Giles sat murmuring into the recorder to log the day before trying to sleep himself.

  “Sixth day,” he dictated. “There’s still enough fruit, but the numbers of those with spots are increasing. More leaves dying. Morale, about the same. This is the end of the sixth day.”

  He put the recorder safely away on the floor at the head of his cot, where Esteven could come and get it in the morning, and reached for the sleeve he had cut from his shipsuit. The orange-colored sleeve, from wrist to shoulder, was long enough to make a workable blindfold with its two ends tied behind his head—enough to keep the light out so that he could sleep more easily. He had no way aboard the lifeship of seeing himself reflected, but he could imagine how his one bare, exercise-muscled arm and his curly, six-day beard gave him a wild, almost barbaric look. Curiously, none of the arbites had such a look. Though Groce and Esteven both were sprouting considerable beards—touched with a few gray hairs in Groce’s case—they looked disheveled and unwashed, rather than wild. Frenco and Hem, on the other hand, had no beards to speak of. Frenco’s consisted of a few limp black hairs scattered sparsely over his lower features. Hem had a faint fluff of blond mustache and some sandy stubble following the line of his jawbone on each side from chin to upper cheeks.

  Nearly all of them now, except Biset, had sacrificed at least a small part of their clothing to make a light shield for their eyes during sleeping hours. He could hear them breathing slumberously beyond the screen now. Lucidly none of them was a snorer of any heaviness or regularity, although Hem occasionally rolled over on his back and fell into a sort of deep rumbling in his throat.

  Giles wrapped his loose sleeve around his head and tied it, then stretched out on his cot. He waited for sleep, but it was slow in coming. At moments like this he became actively conscious of the closeness of the surroundings, the thickness of the atmosphere, and all the unresolved problems that stood between them and a safe planetfall on 20B-40, to say nothing of those standing between him and the successful completion of his mission. He turned over restlessly on the cot, looking for a more comfortable position. Even assuming the ib vine held up and they could make the course change to 20B40, could the arbites stand up to another thirty or forty more days like this?

  Something intruded on his thoughts. Something barely heard, like a cry cut off before it had actually had time to clear the throat of the one crying out. He listened ... but he heard nothing.

  He continued to listen. There was no sound but the nighttime heavy breathing; even Hem’s approximation of a snore was silent. And in addition to those noises there was nothing ... or was there?

  He sat up on the cot, pulling the sleeve from his head. The bright light overhead burst on his eyes in its full strength. Through the dazzle of it as his vision adjusted, he identified what he thought he had been hearing—a quiet thudding from the very bow of the ship.

  He got to his feet, his sight clearing. The quiet thudding was coming from behind the screen that hid the control console of the lifeship and the Albenareth Captain. He stepped forward, turned the end of the screen—and saw the alien choking the life out of Esteven. The man’s face was dark, his hands plucking feebly at the alien fingers fastened with casual power around his throat, his kicking heels making the almost inaudible noise Giles had heard as they drummed upon the fabric-covered flooring.

  Giles threw himself at the Captain.

  “Release him!” he shouted in Albenareth, tearing at the Captain’s fingers. It was like trying to pull steel rods loose. “Let that man go! You’re killing him!”

  “I am in process of disposing of him,” said the Captain coldly, continuing to choke the entertaincom. “He has profaned the book of navigation and should be removed from our midst in the interest of honor.”

  “You do yourself dishonor!” raved Giles. “He is not yours to dispose of. You take something to which you have no right! He is my man—mine to keep or mine to kill—not yours
! You are a thief, without honor!”

  The reaction was instantaneous. The Captain literally dropped Esteven, who fell gasping to the floor. The Captain’s hands were up, her long fingers now directed toward Giles, who braced himself to face attack by the alien.

  But the hands dropped. The Captain turned from Giles and dropped into her command chair, to gaze at the forward screen.

  “Take him, then.” The Albenareth’s voice was cold and indifferent. “He has dared to touch and turn the pages of our Holy of Holies. But do with him what you want. Only, if I see him in the forward part of the lifeship again, I will consider that one who cannot control his property lies about his rights to it.”

  Giles pulled Esteven to his feet, lifting him bodily into the air, slapping aside the feeble efforts of his hands when the entertaincom tried to resist, then shoved the man ahead of him, out of the Captain’s area, through the first section of the lifeship and into the middle section.

  The other arbites had crowded into the first section, awakened by the sound of the loud voices in Albenareth. They rolled back now like retreating surf before the approach of Giles with Esteven, into the middle section. When Giles with the other man had joined them there, he shoved Esteven into their arms, beckoning Mara to him. She hesitated, and in exasperation he reached out a long arm and literally hauled her close enough to him so that he could speak to her in tones too low to be heard by the Captain up front.

  “Take care of Esteven,” he told her. “The Captain was choking him, but he’ll be all right.”

  “What—” began Biset, demandingly. Giles stopped her with a glare.

  “I’ve just saved his stupid life—keep your voice down!” whispered Giles harshly. “And I don’t guarantee to be able to save any more of your lives, unless you follow orders. Now, do what I say, and don’t let Esteven beyond that screen there into the front of the ship if you value his life!”

  He let her go and turned away. Behind him, Esteven had slumped down on the floor and was sobbing.

  “I didn’t mean anything wrong. I couldn’t sleep. I thought it was just a book—to read, to look at you know....”

  Giles returned to the front section of the ship, followed by Hem.

  “Hem,” he said to the big arbite, “keep them back there. I’ve got to do some thinking.”

  Hem nodded and stood in the doorway. Giles threw himself down on his cot. Now, on top of everything else, he had the puzzle of Esteven. Not for a second did Giles believe that the entertain-com had merely wanted to look at the navigational book. And to actually step into the private area of the Captain would have taken courage Giles would have been ready to swear Esteven did not have.

  On the other hand, what could the entertaincom have been hoping to gain from getting at the book? The Albenareth mathematics would have meant nothing to him—and the navigational manual would have no white spaces such as Groce’s antique math book had owned, on which Esteven could play at writing music.

  The recorder had started up with the familiar Bosser and Singh in the middle section of the lifeship. The puzzles in Giles’ mind seemed to go up and down, around and around, with the repetitive melody of the music....

  He woke suddenly to the awareness that he had dozed off. Hem was looming over his cot.

  “Mara wants to talk to you, Honor, sir,” Hem said.

  “Oh?” Giles sat up, rubbing his eyes into the clearer vision of full wakefulness. He became aware that Mara was standing in the entrance through the screen as if before an invisible barrier.

  “Sit down,” he told her, motioning to the end of his cot “Save your strength. We all need to save what strength we’ve got.”

  She hesitated for perhaps a second. He could not tell. Then she sat.

  “You’re right of course,” she said.

  He smiled. It was one of the unlikely sort of things she had a habit of saying—certain statements or questions that if they had not been said so innocently, would have been impudent. It was not up to an arbite like herself to pass judgment on the correctness of what he said. He remembered what he had thought of her shortly after he had first noticed her.

  “Tell me, Mara,” he said. “You didn’t happen to grow up in the household of some Adelborn family, did you?”

  “Did I?” She laughed. “Far from it My father died when I was only three. There were eight children in our family—a computer error gave my parents a permit for that many offspring, and they didn’t realize it was an error until too late. Then, as I say, my father died, and my mother got special permission to devote all her time to bringing up her family—she even got permission to move my grandmother in, to help. So I actually grew up almost as if I’d lived a hundred and fifty years ago, before the Green Revolution.”

  He gazed at her, surprised.

  “Weren’t you enclassed?” he asked.

  “Oh, I had to take the usual courses,” she said. “But with a family as large as ours, whenever I was home we were in an environment of our own making. A regular old medieval family-type environment.”

  “Yes,” he said. He felt a terrible pity for her. No wonder a girl like this could fall into the trap of joining an organization like Black Thursday. For a second he was almost tempted to warn her that Biset had identified her as a revolutionary. But the habit of duty silenced him.

  “What was it you wanted to talk to me about?” he asked.

  She glanced at the entrance to the middle section of the lifeship, but the recorder was putting out enough sound there so that she did not have to lower her voice unduly to speak privately to him.

  “It’s about Esteven,” she said. “I thought you’d want to know. I’m not a licensed nurse, but when I was in secondary school I put in a year full time as a probationer in the medical services. I had the usual courses. There’s something wrong with Esteven physically. His hands are ice-cold—here in this thick steambath air of a lifeship—and his pulse is rapid and erratic.”

  He looked at her with respect.

  “That’s good—your noticing that and coming to tell me about it,” he said. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any idea what could be causing symptoms like that?”

  She shook her head.

  “As I say,” Mara said, “I was only a part-time volunteer worker for a year, and back when I was hardly grown, at that.”

  Giles nodded.

  “Of course,” he said. “Well, it’s something I’m glad to know about I’ll try talking to Esteven himself and see if he knows what’s wrong with him.”

  “Not that we can do much about it, whatever it is,” Mara said. “Here on this alien lifeship with no medical equipment or drugs. I don’t know what to do.”

  She sounded to Giles’ ears to be genuinely upset.

  “It’s not your responsibility to do anything,” he reminded her gently. “I’m the one who’s responsible.”

  “Oh yes,” she said, waving one hand as if to brush that Statement aside. “You’re an Adelman and you think you ought to take everything on your own shoulders. But you’re stuck here with a bunch of arbites; and what do you know about arbites?”

  “What do I—” he began to repeat in astonishment, and checked himself, hearing the long-ago echo of Paul Oca’s voice saying almost the same thing to him. The astonishment carried him past what would have been an ordinary, instinctive refusal to discuss such a ridiculous charge with her. “Aren’t you the arbite who told me how all the lower classes dreamed of a chance to go indent to one of the Colony Worlds—”

  He broke off and glanced over at the other cot in the front section of the ship. But Hem was not there, nor was he in view in the middle section. Hem did not spend much time in the middle section anyway. If he was not up front, he was probably back harvesting the vine or collecting the fruit he would eat himself. Nonetheless Giles lowered his voice.

  “Just the other day,” he went on, “I had a long talk with Hem. Hem’s miserable at being shipped away from the work-mates he used to know. He’d give anything to g
o back to Earth. Perhaps I know more about arbites than you think.”

  “Oh, Hem!” said Mara. “It’s immoral, the way poor, helpless children like him are gene-controlled to grow up as hardly anything more than animals—”

  “Shh!” he said, genuinely alarmed for her. “Keep your voice down. There’s ... someone aboard here might decide to report you.”

  Mara did lower her voice, but the tone of it was still scornful. “You mean the split?” she said. “I’m not afraid of her!”

  “Split?” he echoed.

  “The Police agent,” said Mara. “Biset.”

  He studied her, unable to believe it. “You ... already know she belongs to the Police?”

  “Of course,” said Mara. “Everybody on the spaceship knew it. There’s always one. The World Police sent an agent out with every shipment of indents. Any arbite knows that.”

  “What else do you know about her?” he asked.

  “I know she’s likely to report anyone she doesn’t like, whether they’ve done anything or not. If she decides she doesn’t like me she’ll dream up some reason to report me.”

  He gazed at her gravely.

  “The possibility doesn’t seem to worry you much,” he said. “The word is they don’t pay too much attention to Police agents like her out on the Colony Worlds when they turn in bad-conduct or revolutionary-talk reports and minor charges like that,” she answered. “They’ve had too many Police agents coming out with shipments and trying to cause trouble before they’re shipped back to Earth again.”

  “I think her accusation might be a little more serious than that” Suddenly Giles threw his sense of duty to the winds. Bisets were a dime a dozen. This girl, with her straightforwardness and courage, was a jewel among the stones of the gravel pile that was the arbite lower class. “She might accuse you of being one of the Black Thursday revolutionaries.”