The Kyben Stories Read online

  The ship ploughed through a maze of colors whose hues were unknown, skiiiiittered scud-wise, and popped out, shuddering. There it was. The sun of Delgart. Omalo. Big. And golden. With planets set about like boulders on the edge of the sea. The sea that was space, and from which this ship had come. With death in its hold, and death in its tubes, and death, nothing but death.

  The blaster and the mindee escorted Alf Gunnderson to the bridge. They stood back and let him walk to the huge quartz portal. The portal before which the pyrotic had stood so long, so many hours, gazing so deep into inverspace. They left him there, and stood back, because they knew he was safe from them. No matter how hard they held his arms, no matter how fiercely they shouted at him, he was safe. He was something new. Not just a pyrotic, not just a mind-blocked, not just a blaster-safe, he was something totally new.

  Not a composite, for there had been many of those, with imperfect powers of several psi types. But something new, and something incomprehensible. Psioid + with a + that might mean anything.

  Gunnderson moved forward slowly, his deep shadow squirming out before him, sliding up the console, across the portal shelf, and across the quartz itself. Himself superimposed across the immensity of space.

  The man who was Gunnderson stared into the night that lay without, and at the sun that burned steadily and high in that night. A greater fire raged within him than on that molten surface.

  His was a power he could not even begin to estimate, and if he let it be used in this way, this once, it could be turned to this purpose over and over and over again.

  Was there any salvation for him?

  “You’re supposed to flame that sun, Gunnderson,” the slick-haired mindee said, trying to assume an authoritative tone, a tone of command, but failing miserably. He knew he was powerless before this man. They could shoot him, of course, but what would that accomplish?

  “What are you going to do, Gunnderson? What do you have in mind?” the blaster chimed in. “SpaceCom wants Omalo fired … are you going to do it, or do we have to report you as a traitor?”

  “You know what they’ll do to you back on Earth, Gunnderson. You know, don’t you?”

  Alf Gunnderson let the light of Omalo wash his sunken face with red haze. His eyes seemed to deepen in intensity. His hands on the console ledge stiffened and the knuckles turned white. He had seen the possibilities, and he had decided. They would never understand that he had chosen the harder. He turned slowly.

  “Where is the lifescoot located?”

  They stared at him, and he repeated his question. They refused to answer, and he shouldered past them, stepped into the droptube to take him below decks. The mindee spun on him, his face raging.

  “You’re a coward and a traitor, fireboy! You’re a lousy no-psi freak and we’ll get you! You can take the lifeboat, but someday we’ll find you! No matter where you go out there, we’re going to find you!”

  He spat then, and the blaster strained and strained and strained, but the power of his mind had no effect on Gunnderson.

  The pyrotic let the dropshaft lower him, and he found the lifescoot some time later. He took nothing with him but the battered harmonica, and the red flush of Omalo on his face.

  When they felt the pop! of the lifescoot being snapped into space, and they saw the dark grey dot of it moving rapidly away, flicking quickly off into inverspace, the blaster and the mindee slumped into relaxers, stared at each other.

  “We’ll have to finish the war without him.”

  The blaster nodded. “He could have won it for us in one minute. He’s gone.”

  “Do you think he could have done it?”

  The blaster shrugged his heavy shoulders. “I just don’t know. Perhaps.”

  “He’s gone,” the mindee repeated bitterly. “ He’s gone? Coward! Traitor! Some day … some day …”

  “Where can he go?”

  “He’s a wanderer at heart. Space is deep, he can go anywhere.”

  “Did you mean that, about finding him some day?”

  The mindee nodded rapidly. “When they find out, back on Earth, what he did today, they’ll start hunting him through all of space. He’ll never have another moment’s peace. They have to find him … he’s the perfect weapon. But he can’t run forever. They’ll find him.”

  “A strange man.”

  “A man with a power he can’t hide, John. A man who will sooner or later give himself away. He can’t hide himself cleverly enough to stay hidden forever.”

  “Odd that he would turn himself into a fugitive. He could have had peace of mind for the rest of his life. Instead, he’s got this …”

  The mindee stared at the closed portal shields. His tones were bitter and frustrated. “We’ll find him some day.”

  The ship shuddered, reversed drives, and slipped back into inverspace.

  Much sky winked back at him.

  He sat on the bluff, wind tousling his grey hair, flapping softly at the dirty shirttail hanging from his pants top.

  The Minstrel sat on the bluff watching the land fall slopingly away under him, down to the shining hide of the sprawling dragon, lying in the cup of the hills. The dragon slept — awake — across once lush grass and productive ground.

  City.

  On this far world, far from a red sun that shone high and steady, the Minstrel sat and pondered the many kinds of peace. And the kind that is not peace, can never be peace.

  His eyes turned once more to the sage and eternal advice of the blackness above. No one saw him wink back at the silent stars. Deeper than the darkness.

  With a sigh he slung the battered theremin over his frayed shoulders. It was a portable machine, with both rods bent, and its power pack patched and soldered. His body almost at once assumed the half-slouch, round-shouldered walk of the wanderer. He ambled down the hill toward the rocket field.

  They called it the rocket field, out here on the Edge, but they didn’t use rockets any longer. Now they rode to space on a whistling tube that glimmered and sparkled behind itself like a small animal chuckling over a private joke. The joke was that the little animal knew the riders were never coming back.

  It whistled and sparkled till it flicked off into some crazy-quilt not-space, and was gone forever.

  Tarmac clicked under the heels of his boots. Bright, shining boots, kept meticulously clean by polishing over polishing till they reflected back the corona of the field kliegs and, ever more faintly, the gleam of the night. The Minstrel kept them cleaned and polished, a clashing note matched against his generally unkempt appearance.

  He was tall, towering over almost everyone he had ever met in his homeless wanderings. His body was a lean and supple thing, like a high-tension wire; the merest suggestion of contained power and quickness. The man moved with an easy gait, accentuating his long legs and gangling arms, making his well-proportioned head seem a bubble precariously balanced on a neck too long and thin to support it.

  He kept time to the click of the polished boots with a soft half-hum, half-whistle. The song was a dead song, long forgotten.

  He, too, was a half-dead, half-forgotten thing.

  He came from beyond the mountains. No one knew where. No one cared where. He had almost forgotten.

  But they listened when he came. They listened almost reverently, having heard the stories about him, with a desperation born of men who know they are severed from their home worlds, who know they will go out and out and seldom come back. He sang of space, and he sang of land, and he sang of the nothing that is left for Man — all Men, no matter how many arms they have, or what their skin is colored — when he has expended the last little bit of Eternity to which he is entitled.

  His voice had the sadness of death in it. The sadness of death before life has finished its work. But it had the joy of metal under quick fingers, the strength of turned nickel-steel, and the whip of heart and soul working through loneliness. They listened when his song came with the night wind; probing, crying, lonely through the darkness of
a thousand worlds and in a thousand winds.

  The pitmen stopped their work as he came, silent but for the hum of his song and the beat of his boots on the blacktop. They watched as he came across the field.

  There was no doubt who it was. He had been wandering the star paths for many years now. He had appeared, and that was all; he was. They knew him as certainly as they knew themselves. They turned and he was like a pillar, set dark against the light and shadow of the field. He paced slowly, and they stopped the hoses feeding the radioactive food to the little animals, and stopped the torches they boiled on the metal skins; and they listened.

  The Minstrel knew they were listening, and he unslung his instrument, settling the narrow box with its tone-rods around his neck by its thong. As his fingers cajoled and pleaded and extracted the song of a soul, cast into the pit of the void, left to die, crying in torment not so much at death, but at the terror of being alone when the last calling came.

  And the workmen cried.

  They felt no shame as the tears coursed through the dirt on their faces and over the sweat shine left from toil. They stood, silent and all-feeling, as he came toward them.

  Then with many small crescendos, and before they even knew it was ended, and for seconds after the wail had fled back across the field into the mountains, they listened to the last notes of his lament.

  Hands wiped clumsily across faces, leaving more dirt than before, and backs turned slowly as men resumed work. It seemed they could not face him, the nearer he came; as though he was too deep-seeing, too perceptive for them to be at ease close by. It was a mixture of respect and awe.

  The Minstrel stood, waiting.

  “Hey! You!”

  The Minstrel stood waiting. The pad of soft-soled feet behind him. A spaceman; tanned, supple, almost as tall as the ballad-singer — reminding the ballad singer of another spaceman, a blond-haired boy he had known long ago — came up beside the silent figure. The Minstrel had not moved.

  “Whut c’n ah do for ya, Minstrel?” asked the spaceman, tones of the South of a long faraway continent rich in his voice.

  “What do they call this world?” the Minstrel asked. The voice was quiet, like a needle being drawn through velvet. He spoke in a hushed monotone, yet his voice was clear and bore traces of an uncountable number of accents.

  “The natives call it Audi, and the charts call it Rexa Majoris XXIX, Minstrel. Why?”

  “It’s time to move on.”

  The Southerner grinned hugely, lines of amusement crinkling out around his watery brown eyes. “Need a lift?”

  The Minstrel nodded, smiling back enigmatically.

  The spaceman’s face softened, the lines of squinting into the reaches of an eternal night broke and he extended his hand: “Mah name’s Quantry; top dog on the Spirit of Lucy Marlowe . If y’doan mind workin’ yer keep owff bah singin’ fer the payssengers, we’d be pleased to hayve ya awn boward.”

  The tall man smiled, a quick radiance across the darkness the shadows made of his face. “That isn’t work.”

  “Then done!” exclaimed the spaceman. “C’mon, ah’ll fix ya a bunk in steerage.”

  They walked between the wiper gangs and the pitmen. They threaded their way between the glare of fluorotorches and the sputtering blast of robot welding instruments. The man named Quantry indicated the opening in the smooth side of the ship and the Minstrel clambered inside.

  Quantry fixed the berth just behind the reactor feeder-bins, sealing off the compartment with an electrical blanket draped over a loading track bar. The Minstrel lay on his bunk — a repair bench — with a pillow under his head. He lay thinking.

  The moments fled silently and his mind, deep in thought, hardly realized the ports were being dogged home, the radioactive additives were being sluiced through their tubes to the reactors, the blast tubes were being extruded. His mind did not leave its thoughts as the atomic motors warmed, turning the pit to green glass beneath the ship’s bulk. Motors that would carry the ship to a height where the driver would be wakened from his sleep — or her sleep, as was more often the case with that particular breed of psioid — to snap the ship through into inverspace.

  As the ship came unstuck from solid ground, hurled itself outward on an unquenchable tail of fire, the Minstrel lay back, letting the reassuring hand of acceleration press him into deeper reverie. Thoughts spun, of the past, of the further past, and of all the pasts he had known.

  Then the reactors cut off, the ship shuddered, and he knew they were in inverspace. The Minstrel sat up, his eyes far away. His thoughts deep inside the cloud cover of a world billions of light years away, hundreds of years lost to him. A world he would never see again.

  There was a time for running, and a time for resting, and even in the running, there could be resting. He smiled to himself so faintly it was not a smile.

  Down in the reactor rooms, they heard his song. They heard the build to it, matching, sustaining, whining in tune with the inverspace drive. They grinned at each other with a sweet sadness their faces were never expected to wear.

  “It’s gonna be a good trip,” said one to another.

  In the officer’s country, Quantry looked up at the tight-slammed shields blocking off the patchwork insanity of not-space, and he smiled. It was going to be a good trip.

  In the salons, the passengers listened to the odd strains of lonely music coming up from below, and even they were forced to admit, though they had no way of explaining how they knew, that this was indeed going to be a good trip.

  And in steerage, his fingers wandering across the keyboard of the battered theremin, no one noticed that the man they called “The Minstrel” had lit his cigarette without a match.

  RUN FOR THE STARS

  I

  They found him looting what was left of the body of a fat shopkeeper. He was hunkered down with his back to the blasted store-front, picking through the hundred pockets of the dead merchant’s work-bib.

  He didn’t hear them come in. The scream of the Kyban ships scorching the city’s streets mingled too loudly with the screams of the dying.

  They crept up behind him, three men with grimy faces and determined stares. The roar of a power terminal exploding somewhere across the city covered the crackle of their boots in the powdered and pebbled concrete that littered the floor. They stopped, and a man with blond hair nodded to the other two. They grabbed him suddenly, twisting his hands up behind his back, bringing a sharp, surprised scream from him.

  Bills and change tinkled from his hands, scattered across the rubble-strewn floor.

  Benno Tallant twisted his head painfully and looked up at the men holding him. “Lemme go! He was dead! I only wanted to get enough money to buy food with! Honest to God, lemme go!” Tears gathered in the corners of his eyes from the pains in his twisted arms.

  One of the men holding him—a stocky, plump man of indeterminate age and a lisping speech said snappishly, “In case you hadn’t noticed, lootie, this is a grocery you were robbing. There’s food all over the shop. Why not use that?”

  He gave the arm he held another half-twist.

  Tallant bit his lip. There was no use arguing with these men; he couldn’t tell them the money was to get narcotics. They would kill him and that would be the end of it. This was a time of war, the city was under siege from the Kyban, and they killed looters. Perhaps it was better that way; in death the insatiable craving for the dream-dust would stop, and he would be free. Even dead he would be free.

  Free, to walk without the aid of the dream-dust; free, to lead a normal life. Yes, that was what he wanted, to be free…he would never touch the dream-dust again, if he came out of this alive.

  And the pusher was probably dead, anyhow.

  The thought of death—as it usually did—sent chills coursing down through his legs, numbing his muscles. He sagged in their grip.

  The pig-faced man, who had not spoken, grunted in disgust. “This the best we can do, for Christ’s sake? There’s got to be some
one in the group better for this job. Look at the miserable little slob, he’s practically jelly.”

  The blond man shook his head. He was obviously the leader of the group. A patch of high forehead was miraculously clean among the filth and grime of his skin; he rubbed his hand over his forehead now, blotting away the clean area. “No, Shep, I think this is our man.”

  He turned to Tallant, stooped down and studied the quaking looter. He put his hand to Tallant’s right eye, and spread the lids. “A junkie. Perfect.” He stood up, added, “We’ve been looking for you all day, fellah.”

  “I never saw you before in my life, what do you want with me? Lemme go, willya!” They were taking too long to kill him—something was wrong.

  His voice was rising in pitch, almost hysterically. Sweat poured down over his face as though a stream had been opened at the hairline.

  The tall, blond man spoke hurriedly, glancing over his shoulder. “Come on, let’s get him out of here. We’ll let Doc Budder go to work on him.” He motioned them to lift the quaking man, and as he rose, added, “There’s a good five hours’ work there,” and he patted Tallant’s lean stomach.

  The lisping man named Shep said, “And those yellow bastards up there may not give us that long.”

  The pig-faced man nodded agreement, and as though to punctuate their feelings, a woman’s high-pitched scream struck through the fast-falling dusk. They stopped, and Tallant thought he might go mad, right there, right in their arms, because of the scream, and these men, and no dust, and the entire world shattering around him. He wanted very badly to lie down and shiver.

  He tried to slump again, but the pig-faced man dragged him erect.

  They made their way through the shop, kicking up fine clouds of concrete dust and stepping on bits of plasteel that crackled beneath their feet. They paused at the shambles of the storefront, and peered into the gathering darkness.