The Ship Who Sang (11 page)

An enterprising guard urged his fellows to bring a gantry rig against the ship. Slowly and
with much effort, they wheeled the cumbersome frame from a far side of the field.

Helva watched the performance with grim amusement. Their own fault for insisting we set down so far from the facilities of the port. Perhaps they couldn't see in the gloom of Alioth's perpetual twilight that the lock was closed tight, too.

She tried to rouse Cencom on the tight beam, cursing at that delay because she was so worried about not reaching Kira on the contact.

‘Contact button,' she muttered to herself, recalling the anomalous appearance of one on Noneth's hood. Now, if it were a Service issue or a true imitation, she ought to be able to use it. That Temple female had utilized one to second Noneth's commands to Kira.

Helva wasted no time in throwing open the wide-wave on the contact band. As hastily, she closed it, dazed with the resultant chaotic kaleidoscope of sight and sound that besieged her. Mentally reeling from the impact on her senses, she wondered painfully how she had managed to get several hundred thousand contacts at once. Quickly she scanned the scurrying guards, still trying to wrestle the gantry frame to her. Each one had a button securing his hood at the neck.

‘Great glittering galaxies,' moaned Helva. ‘This religion must be composed of schizoids to deal with that kind of chaos.'

Holding tightly to her sanity, Helva opened
the band a fraction, wincing, at the confusion of sound and sight. She tried to focus in on one contact alone but felt herself drowning in the myriad pictures that returned. It was like trying to focus on a pinpoint through the faceting of a fly's eyeball.

Grimly she refined vision to one small area, forcing herself to accept only one of the conflicting and overlapping images that returned to her. She cut out the sound completely. Fortunately every wearer in the selected segment was converging on one location, crossing a huge plaza, crowded with gyrating, swaying cowled figures, their robes flapping around them as they approached the wide deep steps that led up the side of the dead volcano. This was the ziggurat Helva had noticed in the tape clip.

Suddenly everything and every figure tilted. It took Helva a moment to realize she too was rocking with earthquake as three more volcanoes spewed out their guts skyward. She waited, alert, lest the instability of the spaceport field became too critical for her to remain planet bound.

An ecstatic, moaning roar wafted through the air, now hazy as the earth's minute shifts released gases from narrow fissures in the floor of the plaza. Helva, already confused, did not at first catch the significance of the gas or the fact that the ululation was reaching her ship's outer ears, not issuing from the dumb contact circuits.

Helva increased power in the tight beam, desperately trying to raise Cencom over the
volcanic interferences. Simultaneously she cut in the narrow contact, anxious not to lose Kira. Everyone in the plaza was now waving arms aloft, hoods thrown back from joyful faces raised to the spark-filled, gas-fogged skies. Then the Aliothites wheeled, ducking their heads to breathe deeply of the rising gas fumes. Incredulous, Helva watched, as more and more people pushed and crowded around the fissures; inhaling deeply, staggering away; faces rapt, arms aloft, movements erratic. Then Helva realized that the gases were either hallucinogenic or euphoric, doubly dangerous at a time of mass volcanic eruptions. Yet the exposed open plaza was rapidly filling with bodies either already intoxicated or frantically trying to be.

The significance of gas eruptions in the plaza before the Temple of this demoniac religion was not lost on Helva. Obviously, this effect was known and calculated by the temple hierarchy. Helva was revolted and enraged by such depravity and she redoubled her efforts to locate Kira and her escort. They would have to leave the vehicle and enter the plaza on the south side. One multiexposed group caught her searching eyes. There couldn't be two such slender hoodless figures on this mad planet. Kira was just entering the plaza, her inexorable progress toward the ziggurat steps impeded by the jerking, jolting freak-inebriates.

Fully alarmed, Helva widened the band, trying to skip from contact to contact, forward toward
Kira. The effect was maddening, like seeing thousands of film tapes all interlocking fuzzily, playing on the same master screen. For the first time in her life, Helva felt vertigo and nausea. Her sense of impending disaster deepened as she tried to reach Kira before she entered the Temple of Death. Placed as it was on the top of the massive ziggurat, right next to the old volcano, it must be heavy with the hallucinogenic gases. Helva thanked the Service for the small blessing that Kira had been desensitized to such hazards as hallucinogens, but the girl was as immobile in her trance as if she were susceptible.

Helva groaned at her inability to reach Kira, spiritually or physically.

‘Ooooh,' an answering groan rose from the multitude. ‘The Temple weeps,' the garbled cry went up from a thousand throats. Even the guards at the spaceport, wrestling with the gantry frame, echoed the chant.

‘Oh,' Helva gasped. Her surmise that she was broadcasting to all the Aliothites, was confirmed as this new exclamation was repeated by the crowd. She had been mistaken for the voice of their Temple female.

Oblivious to the multivision, Helva stared at the cylindrical top of the Temple and recognized what she had not consciously identified before. The cylinder was a ship on its long axis, nose and fins buried in the lava of the old eruption. The Temple entrance was nothing more than an airlock, and by the entrance, Helva could trace
the faintly visible designation of a Central Worlds brain ship.

As clear as the day she had heard it, the day Jennan had died, Helva recalled what Silvia had told her about another grief-stricken ship. This had to be the 732. And what better place to mourn than a red-dark violent world, so conducive to the immolation of grief? Or had the 732 aimed at the fiery maw of the erupting volcano and somehow been deflected from the seething cone at the last moment, lodged immovably in the lava-flow at its base? Had the 732 turned her tortured mind on the grim world and urged thousands to die in expiation for the death of her beloved?

The requirements of duty were suddenly lucid to Helva and the plans to discharge it sprang to mind. With the genius of sheer desperation, Helva began to sing, her voice a deep, caressing baritone, coloring her resonances with minor-keyed longing, suspending reason to the dictates of sheer instinct.

she intoned, repeating the phrase a third above as the responsive Aliothites chanted the first phrase in obedient mimicry. It was like having an incredibly well-rehearsed world-chorus at your disposal. Helva exploited the phenonemon ruthlessly.

And down a fifth

Up to an augmented seventh as the chorus chimed in on a dissonance, calculated to raise inner hackles and pierce the gut with longing.

Helva sang, her voice sliding into the edged timbre of a harsh, yearning tenor.

Down again to the original musical phrase, but this time the baritone quality was tinged with scorn.

The last word became a vibrant crescendo of derision, diminishing to a mocking whisper long after the supporting chorus had completed its cry on the augmented seventh.

‘Cencom calling, KH-834, will you acknowledge? ACKNOWLEDGE!' the hard official voice of Regulus Base Cencom broke through Helva's fantastic musical improvisation.

‘Mayday, mayday,' Helva replied in a jolting soprano on both tight beam and the Aliothite contact band. The chorus obediently shrilled out
the resounding emergency challenge. Helva caught her breath as she saw Kira stagger with instinctive reaction to the cry.

‘Mayday?' Cencom demanded. ‘You bet – with a cratty fool Dylanizing on Alioth?'

With a shock, Helva realized that was exactly what she was doing, Dylanizing. Her appeal to Kira, though couched musically, the one medium with which she could hope to reach the entranced scout, had crystallized further into the subliminal form of a Dylanesque protest. Exultant, she knew how to manipulate this to her own ends. With a barely perceptible increase in tempo, she repeated her first phrase, no longer a longing legato, but a mocking staccato. As the chorus responded idiotically true to its model, she hurriedly reported to Cencom.

‘Alioth's religious head is the rogue ship 732; the religious motivation is death!'

‘The brawn, where is your brawn?' Cencom crackled.

‘What is the release word for the 732?' Helva hissed, then chanted the second phrase of her Dylan, again picking up the tempo so that the beat as well as the sound had urgency to it.

‘Report!' Cencom demanded.

‘I don't have time to report, you nardy fool. The release word!' Helva snarled. She jumped her voice an octave and a half, switching registers to heldentenor, her phrase ringing through the plaza in an arrow of sheer emotion-packed sound to pierce the trance of her scout.

Kira's guards were lurching now, half-dazed by the treacherous fumes that filled the plaza. They had Kira by the arms, and Helva, trapped in the background of the mighty chorus, couldn't tell whether they were restraining Kira or hanging on to her for support. The girl alone was unaffected by the hallucinogen.

Helva's tenor rang, scornfully, lashing viciously at Kira's death-wish.

‘You fool,' Cencom said. ‘She
wants
to die!'

‘GIVE ME THE RELEASE WORD!' Helva cried at the tight beam in a strident soprano, then projected her voice, bitterly powerful, angrily compelling, thundering the protest:

The phrase echoed tauntingly through the plaza. The chorus, unable to imitate the incredible pitch of Helva's voice, dropped to the lower octave. The challenge rocked back across the plaza, punctuated by the massive thunder of erupting volcanoes.

With a sudden, soundless, soul-shattering wrench, the massed glimpses of chaos dissolved and Helva was suddenly of single sight – Kira! – in a darkly curtained chamber, unevenly lit by red braziers. Increasing her dark vision, Helva penetrated the gloom, her attention
focused on the hideous object that dominated the room.

On a raised, black basaltic slab lay the decomposing remains of what had once been a man. The teeth were bared whitely through the decayed flesh in a travesty of a smile. The tendons of the neck were stark ridges and the cartilage of his esophagus ended in the indestructible fabric of a scout coverall. His hands, crossed on the chest cavity crumpled by a massive fatal blow, were linked by the intertwined overgrowth of fingernail. The 732's dead brawn lay in state.

And Helva was seeing him through Kira's contact button . . . at last.

A wailing chant filled the chamber, a meaningless, mournful dribble of sound, emanating from the walls, the ceiling, the floor. The mad brain encased in its indestructible titanium shell, had all circuits open, keening, oblivious to everything.

In as soundless a whisper as she could broadcast, Helva muttered swiftly to Kira. ‘It's the rogue 732. It's gone mad. It's got to be destroyed.' It was easier somehow for Helva, knowing what she must do, to think of the 732 as an impersonal ‘it,' rather than the female the brain had once been.

Kira swayed, making no reply.

For one paralysing demisecond, Helva wondered if the girl had inadvertently opened the contact, if Kira were still in the thrall of the
powerful death wish. Had Helva's Dylan protest pierced Kira's self-destructive trance with its mockery? Had Helva succeeded in jolting her brawn to sanity? The release word would be no mortal use if she did not have her mobile brawn's cooperation to immobilize the rogue.

With slow steps Kira approached the bier and its ghastly occupant. The keening grew louder, the mumbling became articulated.

‘He has been taken. He Who Orders has been taken,' chanted the 732 and the crowd echoed the chant as readily as they had Helva's. ‘He is gone. Seber is gone.'

Not helpless again? Helva cried, silently, her mind overwhelmed by hopelessness.

Eerily another sound was superimposed over the 732's wail.

‘Now that dwarf presents a definite problem, Lia.' The wowwing, muffled words could barely be distinguished. ‘I wouldn't be surprised . . .'

It was a man's voice, Helva realized, played back at a lagging speed which distorted the words into a yawing parody. The ship was broadcasting, had broadcast this tape so many times that the sound of Seber's taped voice was as decayed as his corpse on the bier.

Kira continued to sway in her graceful circumnavigation.

‘Speak, O Seber, in singing tones that thy servant, Kira, may hear the music of thy beloved voice,' Kira crooned, making an obeisance to the column behind which lay the shell of the mad 732.

Helva barely managed to suppress the cry of intolerable relief at the cues Kira was feeding her.

‘CENCOM, THE RELEASE WORD!' Helva pleaded on the tight beam just as the 732's crooning broke off abruptly. Helva could almost feel the ship's held breath.

Delay! Delay! Where was Cencom!

‘Lia, the interference on my contact is incredible. Can't you clear up the relays? That dwarf is wreaking havoc . . .'

Even Kira jumped involuntarily as Helva, deepening her voice to a baritone approximation of Seber's, adlibbed frantically.

‘Can't seem to read you clearly. Lia? Lia? You got wires crossed?'

‘Seber? Seber?' shrieked the rogue ship, her voice wild with incredulous hope. ‘I'm trapped. I'm trapped. I was thrown off course when the edge of the volcano blew. I tried to die. I tried to die, too.'