A Voyage To Dari Page 9

  He, in close rapport with her: “And gladly this double curse we’ll both bear, Princess! Discreetly, of course.”

  Croyd appreciated the teasing. He had intuited that Djeel and Hanoku knew each other, might even have plans together, perhaps she was flirting with her own fiance. Oho, though, the implications for this marriage, if that was what was in the wind; double Darian curse indeed, gaily embraced by the prince and this princess of the two highest houses on debonair Dari.

  He darkened, suddenly irritated at Gorsky; she should have told him about Hanoku; sorely he needed a Darian on his team.

  And suddenly he found, amid his growing concerns about voyage hazard, that he was very close to being in love with Djeel, and there was a great deal of eros in it; and this discovery that he could feel eros just at this time was as deep a concern as his discovery that he could feel anger or—hell, face it—jealousy, even. Off duty, or on normal duty, eros and Croyd were good drinking buddies; but when he entered on intensive duty, Croyd used a special power that he had to switch off his emotics for the duration. The switch-off had been part of his private inward exercises immediately on boarding the Castel Jaloux; he had not intended to unswitch until some weeks after arriving on Dari. Only, now, mysteriously, he had lost all his special powers, without losing any normal human potency.

  So he was going to have to depend on normal human powers of self-inhibition; and since Croyd’s emotic well-springs were bronco-unruly, the practice of self-restraint was now going to drain off a great deal of intelligence energy and will energy that could better be applied to concentration on his present complex business. Instantly, therefore, he stared at Djeel’s back (ignoring with care her animate Hanoku fencing) and raised the question what other elements besides eros might be ingredients of his interest. And instantly he found, to his satisfaction and relief, that there was also a great deal of agape. He proceeded, on a basis of this agape, to thrust aside his incipient Hanoku jealousy, insisting to himself that the Djeel-Hanoku relationship was most fitting.

  Djeel’s hand was on Croyd’s arm, dissolving agape, “Hanoku says he won’t join us to talk metascience tonight. How do you like that?”

  Distinctly liking it, Croyd leaned forward to look past Djeel at agreeably relaxed Hanoku. “Why not?” Croyd demanded. “It will be good fun. We will fight all night and never prove anything.”

  The response was odd. Hanoku looked at Djeel, and she at him; her head shook a slight negative, he nodded a slight acknowledgment. Then Lieutenant Hanoku met the eyes of Governor Croyd. “I can join you to start, sir, but I must leave for bridge duty before 2200 hours.”

  “Party pooper!” Djeel pouted, going to work on her steak.

  A sea of problems. Croyd’s major problem was the loss of his powers. This he could not understand at all. The self-weakening had approached the level of morbid preoccupation: he had tested himself at every moment of leisure and had established for certain that now he was only an ordinary man. Was he in the grip of some subtle neurosis? No, for sure, he retained enough mental sophistication to be able to introspect (although no longer could he turn quasi-visual perception inward to inspect his own brain minutely area by area, even neurone by neurone); and he found absolutely no evidence of the viciously reverberating neural circuits that constitute neurosis, rather than mere benign habit.

  Stashed in a corner of Croyd’s right occipital lobe, Childe Roland, done with resting, held himself on ready alert. He had brought off his part of this mission; it remained for his liege lord Dzendzel in the fissure to act when the moment would be right.

  The metascience date with Djeel and Hanoku and me was set for 2100 hours. When dinner broke up at 2010, Djeel and Hanoku excused themselves and strolled off somewhere. Gorsky said she was going to the bridge. Signing to me, Croyd followed Gorsky, and I ambled along after.

  As Croyd mounted the bridge, bracing himself for the customary three-G wind, he had eliminated all other possibilities and had arrived at the conclusion that his brain had been attacked by an alien mind. And the diabolical worst of it was that the attack had eliminated, along with the other powers, his ability to go into himself, diagnose the damage, find the attacker.

  Such an attack could only mean worse trouble ahead, possibly trouble for the entire mission, trouble for the ship. What sort of trouble? Who’d know? But it would come soon, for sure; the brain attack was analogous to an artillery barrage, and assaults don’t linger long after that.

  He found it discomfortable to reflect that on the first occasion when he had noticed loss of power, Djeel had been present. He did not want Djeel to be the enemy. Also he did not want tonight spoiled by any hint that Djeel might be the enemy; and this need spurred his quest for a different solution. Over and over he told himself that a suspicion of Djeel was based on the merest circumstantiality of nearness. On the other hand, it would not have been the first time that his mental integrity had been damaged by a woman having special powers of her own. And surely there was no doubt of Djeel’s high-level mentality! And dark magic lurked among the traditions of Dari.

  Following Croyd to the bridge, I fought to my chair, let myself be squashed back into it, and held a match to a cigar with difficulty because of the multipound G thrust against my match arm; even the flame leaned aft. When the cigar-lighting had got itself done, and I had drawn heavily and spewed smoke into my own face, I inquired of Croyd, “All normal up here?”

  “Seemingly so. The sensors fore and aft are showing us on schedule, about nine percent into the fissure crossing. Hull check shows no metaspace erosion.”

  I queried low, “How about you?"

  Of all people in the cosmos, I was the one who had to know; and Croyd let me have it. “Since we boarded ship, something has cut off my selective brain control. I am just an ordinary guy now. All I can do is what any man can do—exercise will, and hope my brain picks it up right; and that won’t work for any of my special fancy stuff like up-and-downtiming and mind reach.”

  Having cigar-sucked, I responded, “How depressing!”

  We had rapport; my pseudo flippancy did not deceive Croyd at all, rather (as I had intended) it somehow comforted him. “Isn’t it!” he agreed—knowing what I understood:, not only our intergalactic mission but even the security of our own galaxy was threatened by this loss. “And the devil of it is—why, or how, I haven’t the foggiest.”

  “Neurosis?”

  “No.”

  “Then attack from outside?”

  “Probably.”

  “By whom?”

  Croyd grimaced. “I have a damnable suspicion. I want to get rid of that suspicion—preferably right now.”

  “Then let’s get Gorsky into it. She has a single-minded beagleness about her. Okay?”

  “Okay. Pray get her over.”

  Conserving energy in the wind, I crooked a finger at a yeowoman and gave her a message. Presently Gorsky stood prim before us, not even leaning toward us. “Pray sit,” I granted, indicating the other chair flanking Croyd. Gorsky sat and looked at us.

  “Tell her,” I said.

  Croyd asserted economically, “I have lost all my special powers. I am now an ordinary man. I am certain that I have been mind-attacked. Circumstantially, I suspect Princess Djeelian, and I don’t want to. Top secret.”

  “Underclassified,” Gorsky declared. “Supersecret.”

  “All right. What’s your thought about the princess?”

  “Alien culture. Very subtle. To me incomprehensible.” “That’s the problem, isn’t it?”

  “Croyd, if an attacker has weakened you, this attacker is planning to hit us."

  “Exactly. Glad you noticed.”

  Gorsky looked straight ahead at a totally blank view-plate. “This metaspace is the devil,” she remarked; “absolutely no chance of dead reckoning. Has to be all on instruments. Me, I’m an intuitive-type sailor.”

  Up went Croyd’s eyebrows. “You could have fooled me. Gorsky is intuitive?”

  “Almost tot
ally. That’s why I go by the book. My intuition works better when everything else is going by the book.”

  Gazing at her hard square face, Croyd demanded, “Then what does your intuition tell you about the princess?”

  “May I be candid?”

  “You may. You must.”

  “You are having an affair with her.”

  The accusation, converting fancy into fact, for an instant destroyed Croyd’s carefully nurtured agape. He reddened a little, and he required himself to grin. “I must remember to tell her. What else about her?”

  Gorsky’s jaw grew fierce as she stared at the blank viewplate. Then she blurted, “Much as I hate to say so under the cimcumstances, I think she is a nice girl, even if she has known a pirate.”

  Croyd chose to be silent. I smoked.

  Gorsky added, “My sailor’s intuition says that she isn’t the one who has attacked you. For some reason, she wouldn’t be. Maybe it’s her culture.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I told you, I don’t understand her Dari culture. It is totally alien to my own. I could understand myself attacking you that way if I had the ability and if you were an enemy. And I understand my own culture. But I don’t understand her culture, and so I don’t understand her attacking you that way. And . . . and I think I’m making an ass of myself; and if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go back on duty.” She departed heavily.

  Croyd pondered.

  “Well?” I inquired.

  Croyd said softly, “She did it nicely, Tannen. It isn’t Djeel.”

  “I agree, but what is your thought?”

  “Intuition is nothing so very mysterious: it is a subliminal integration that later can be reasoned out. Gorsky's intuition is right, here, Djeel’s culture on Dari is much like our Polynesian culture: open, happy, physical, superstitious, and above all, extraverted.”

  “Wait.”

  “How?”

  “You said superstitious. How superstitious?”

  “All cultures of this kind believe in magic.”

  “Could that have bearing?”

  “I don’t think so, Tannen, because Djeel is Westernized—which is to say, Sol-Galacticized. I size her up as an intellectualized but nevertheless outgoing Polynesian princess—totally different from the magians of our old-world Europa or the faustians of our Europa or the internalized Vendics of our Erth. She may be my enemy for some reason, although I doubt it; but even so, this method is not the one she’d think of using; and since this method is the only attack that has been made upon me, I am satisfied that Djeel is not my enemy. Thank you, Brother Tannen.”

  “What for?”

  “It was your idea to call Gorsky over.”

  “You’re welcome. Want me to stay away tonight?”

  “Not at all!” Croyd protested rather too swiftly. “You and I have been trying to get in a metascience bull session for a decade; Djeel is an honored guest, is all . . . and Hanoku will be there, to start it.”

  I held my cigar, studying it. “A clean breast I should make. Do you know who Onu Hanoku is?”

  Croyd nodded, staring at metaspace. “He is the scion of the one house on Dari that is peer to the house of Faleen. He is also the only pirate captain we captured; the others have all died with their ships.”

  I puffed fiercely. Then I said, “I really meant to tell you, but I had to keep her secret for a while, and then I forgot. So I’m glad you know. And now you know all that I know.”

  “I can give you a bit more. When he was questioned after capture, Hanoku was totally fuzzy; he simply didn’t understand or remember why he had become a pirate, much less raided Sol Galaxy. We put him into the psych tank for probably six months; his mind cleared. He still could not account for his piracy, but he was keenly determined to make amends and get back to Dari as a leader of his people. We made him a proposition, and he entered the space navy as ensign and rose in two years to full lieutenant. This is his farewell cruise; he will drop off on Dari.”

  “Can we be sure of him?”

  Croyd shrugged. “The psych tank is sure of him. His record with the fleet is impeccable. I’ll add, his standing with Gorsky is impeccable; she bullies him merely as a matter of principle.”

  “Then . . . ”

  “Well?”

  “You keep dropping hints about an alien mind. Did you maybe start that line of thought four years ago when Hanoku couldn’t remember why he wanted to be a pirate?”

  “If so, Tannen, I closed on that line of thought today when I woke up to what something has done to my brain.”

  I ruminated.

  Croyd suddenly stood, apparently untouched by the G wind, his brows down hard, his eyes fierce, his jaw set. He said, “By God!” He went to Gorsky. “Would you mind,” he inquired mildly, “directing sensors down into the fissure between the galactic lobes?”

  “That viewplate,” Gorsky responded promptly, pointing with a pudgy finger.

  Croyd spent a very long time poring over the viewplate. To me the picture looked like the one they’d seen this afternoon following the breakthrough: wholly vague.

  Croyd straightened and turned, his shoulders and his mouth cooperating in a seriocomic shrug. To Gorsky and me he said, “Nothing shows, but my own intuition is bugging me. I suggest, Admiral, that you and your crew be ready for anything—and during the next twenty-four hours.”

  Gorsky instantly demanded, “Attack from down there?”

  Croyd nodded.

  Gorsky barked, “Why?”

  “Psychologist’s intuition,” Croyd parried. “Tannen, let’s go; we’re late for a date.”

  Gorsky swung on us. “Gentlemen,” she gravely asserted, “I don’t believe in the indispensable man, but in all the galaxy right now you two most closely approach that phony ideal. And since Croyd is momentarily impotent, his presence aboard ship in an attack can’t help us one special bit. So I will assert command here. If you get the lifeboat signal, you will go to the lifeboat. And as soon as both of you are aboard—now hear this—take off!”

  Into Roland there came now through metaspace a sharp psychic summons from below (defining down as fissure depth). And he was disconcerted to discover that his departure from the Croyd brain was a matter for the keenest regret—particularly since he would have to miss the metascience. Nevertheless, he promptly began traveling up-axone toward the auditory cortex, thence to move at little less than nerve-impulse velocity outbound into Croyd’s ear. In the atrium just outside the eardrum he would pick up a tracer I-ray that would bring him almost instantaneously home.

  Departing, he felt that now he knew this Croyd fairly well. And, not for the first time, he compared Croyd with Dzendzel.

  It bothered him just a little that disaster was going to hit the Castel within hours. And not from pirates.

  H-Hour minus 3, 2 • • •

  HANOKU ARRIVED PROMPTLY AT 2100; Djeel, he said, had been delayed but would come. We tried to put him at ease in an easy chair; he was polite, attentive, responsive, almost eager, but not at ease. He declined a drink; duty in one hour, he repeated.

  Croyd noted with interest that his own premonitory feeling was at shriek level—and still without rational buildup. He decided to put himself on yellow alert and to consciously forget it. I threw an opening metaphysical gambit, and Croyd eagerly responded, but as the fencing proceeded, I noticed that Croyd was really not with it; he kept turning to Hanoku as if to involve the lieutenant, but in fact it was Hanoku, not metascience, that was interesting Croyd.

  Presently I surrendered. “Lieutenant,” I said to Hanoku directly, “it may surprise you to know that metascience is not at all unrelated to your Dari problems. Does it?”

  Instantly Hanoku sat erect; his young eyes (thirty, maybe) were very clear; and he asserted, “Mr. President, no, it does not surprise me. Something is happening to Dari that I do not understand. If I were as superstitious as my parents and most of my own generation, I would say that some god or demon is deliberately cursing us.”
<
br />   I pressed, “Because of Moudjinn?”

  Hanoku leaned forward. “No, sir, that is only the breaks of weakness against strength, not at all mysterious. No, sir; but what is weird is that we have no business being pirates, I had no business being a pirate.”

  Croyd and I visually consulted each other; the lieutenant had practically paraphrased Croyd’s words in lecture. Djeel, of course, might have quoted Croyd to Hanoku; but the point was that Hanoku had chosen these words.

  Croyd picked it up. “Lieutenant, would you be willing to reconstruct your own experience a little? When you were captured, you were almost amnesiac . . . ”

  Hanoku’s voice was a soft purling baritone; he too had an accent, somewhat more pronounced that Djeel’s, but merely colorful, perfectly understandable. “Yes, sir. I was a junior-grade lieutenant on a Moudjinnian frigate, the senior Darian aboard; but there were more than fifty-others, a few petty officers and many crewmen. One day, without any preliminary, conviction arose in me that the gods wanted me to lead a mutiny; and when the concept baffled me, the method of doing it instantly came into my mind with clarity and precision. Before I had even nerved myself to approach others, one of the petty officers came to me secretly, voiced the same conviction, urged me to take command. We found means to talk with others: they were all ready and eager; I found this surprising, but I accepted it. For some reason I preknew precisely the hour to strike; and we struck; and we won with absurd ease.”

  I inserted, “Apparently many mutinies took place at almost the same instant. Are you saying that there wasn’t any preplanning?”

  Hanoku arose and began to pace. "No preplanning!” he spat. “Now, let me tell you how it was. We ejected the Moudjinnians into space, and then by some kind of prescience I made rendezvous with a freighter whose Darian crew had likewise mutinied. Both of us together got in touch with all the other mutinied craft; they were all rendezvousing in pairs, a warship with a freighter. I understood why, as though I had planned it myself. In Djinn Galaxy there are no humans except on Moudjinn and Dari, so Djinn warships are fitted only for local space; their guns are powerful, but only for purposes of intra-planetary war or war deterrence, whereas the freighters are only lightly armed but can cross very deep space. Each of our pairs picked a Darian island and homed on it and took command; each of us new commanders became the lord of his island; for each of us, the warship defended us while we fitted out the freighter with the warship’s guns.”