Gerard F. Conway is another product of the Clarion science fiction workshops; in fact the story below was written last year for discussion there. It’s a powerful story about a different kind of interstellar ship, and a very personal type of space disaster. . . . At Clarion, evidently they don’t do just writing exercises. You’ll see more of Conway’s writing in his first novel, THE MIDNIGHT DANCERS, an Ace Science Fiction Special to be published July 1971. And, of course, there’ll certainly be much, much more after that: the man is a story-teller.
Gerard F. Conway
We were three weeks out from Centauri when our Cork blew.
He was a thin man, almost gaunt, with lines and hints of age wrinkling the paperweight thinness of his skin; for that, he was a young man, and it showed in the way he carried himself—easily, sliding along with that forward shove affected by those still new in space, the kind of lopsided tumble that bumps you off walls, cracks your head against low hatches, gives you a hundred bruises and cuts on your first trip out. Like a fly in water, spinning about, flapping gauze wings; he moved like that. Occasionally, he smiled; when it came, it rested for only a moment as though unsure, waiting to be blown away. If I were to pick a word, a single word for him, it would be Young.
Like all Corks, he was a Sensitive. You could see it in his hands, the way they fluttered over his lap when he sat in the lounge, the way they touched and lighted on the arms of his chair, rested on his knees, moved on to trap themselves under his elbows; his fingers were long, tapered, sallow candles lit from an inside source, always pale and drained, pinkish at the tips where the nails used to be. When he spoke, his hands jumped and dove, winding tapestries in the coffee-stained air of the lounge where we slouched about, chatting and listening to carefully worn tales; when he spoke, his voice was quiet, unobtrusive, gentle. When he spoke, he looked down, watching his hands. Sometimes he stared at them as though they were apart from him, flesh-tinted birds nestling in his lap. I know that look.
Three weeks out on our third run, he blew. We were lucky to get back to port. Lucky for us. His luck ran out when he shipped aboard the Charter.
You can’t think of yourself objectively; at least, it’s that way with me. I can’t judge; it’s too easy to relax the more temperate aspects of the personality, and take hell out on yourself. Too easy. We all tend to mark ourselves as martyrs.
* * * *
I was captaining the Charter when we touched down on Endrim; half the crew had been blown away by the last twist into the Back Region: the former Captain was one of the first to go down, of course, and since I was First, I took up and carried through and brought us down and kept us Out. All the right things, all the smart things. We still lost half our crew.
By the time we reached Endrim, we were a limping mass of crippled mindship. Even the Engineer was on the verge of being blown; somewhere back in the second foray our Cork—this one was an old man way past his third ‘juve, a crumpled shell of gray and pink who’d somehow managed to stick it through six runs with only minor adjustments; the contrast between him and the Cork we latched onto at Endrim was blowing—cracked up and began fingering pod controls in his bay section; somehow he punched a liferaft node and ejected himself suitless into the Big None. Never found him, though at that point we were rather busy to be looking for a half-senile Sensitive. Maybe we should have sent out a pod; after he blew, everything seemed to crumble at the edges, eating in towards the middle like acid rust on a sheet of cheap tin. That’s when the Engineer started complaining about stresses along the lateral lines; that’s when half the crew snapped and went screaming into liquid madness.
A Cork is quite a useful thing on a mindship; without one, crews have a tendency to dissolve in their own madness.
When we touched Endrim, I made finding a new Cork Priority One.
In a port, any port, whether it’s on the dark side of the main spiral or the light, you’ll find three types of districts: your pleasure centers, where the less discriminating congregate; your livers—local residents only, it says here; and your communes. It’s the last place you look for when you’re searching out a Sensitive.
That’s where I found the new Cork.
* * * *
I was with the Cook. He pushed through the screen ahead of me, twisting around to hold the strands back and let me through; I ducked under the low hang, came out into a scent of sweet smoke tainted by an under-odor of dust, and the dry, sometimes choking flavor of packed earth. It was dark, graying towards corners where candles and oil-lamps made futile, halfhearted efforts to relieve the black. I blinked against the sting spotting my eyes, glanced in at the unmoving shapes outlined in the dim glow.
“Here?”
“Bet. Bet on, right.”
“Your game.” Straightening, I looked around, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the gloom; beside me, the Cook shuffled about, obviously looking for a familiar face. If he could see a face. Endrim was his home port; he hadn’t been born there, but when he thought of a place when he thought of home, it was Endrim. He’d been my guide, more or less. I’d gotten the impression that parts of the port were as strange to him as they were to me.
One of the figures moved, unwound into a spider-shape vaguely resembling a man. The Cook moved forward, hooked an arm, beckoning the house-head towards him. They spoke in low tones while I settled myself against a wall latticed with cracks, made a show of relaxing: I was tense. I was a new Captain, and this was my first cruise, my first crew-choice. I was tense.
They came over to me, the house-head moving in a slow, stooped slide-walk: spacer. I watched him, and in the gloom, I saw the left side of his face, wrinkled and twisted, creviced with a subsurface river of scarlet where a set of capillaries had broken: a blown Cork . . . one who’d snapped so far the pieces were scattered like powdered sand. His eyes found me, he saw my look, and he smiled, a curve of the lips just slightly askew from the line of his face.
“Not your man here, Cap’n, not me, no. Quiet boy we got, back new. Fresh one, no scars, you see, huh.”
His voice was slurred, blurred by the pull of the muscles torn in his neck.
“Let’s see him.”
“Back. Wait, hold. Kay.”
He turned, slipped into the shadows. I glared at the Cook; he didn’t seem to see me.
Then the blown Cork was back, and behind him was another man. Correction: a boy. And just like that, with a man coming towards me out of the darkness, I snapped; not on the surface, but underneath, so deep, so far inside that I didn’t sense it then, or even later when it all surged out; it was then, right then, that I snapped. That I made my first wrong decision, my first murder; of myself, of this Cork. Not tangible; not real so you could touch it—but real so it would be in my mind forever when I realized it for what it was.
His hands moved nervously at his sides, finally latched into the loops of his overjacket, fidgeting in and out of the leather curls. He didn’t look at me, only towards me, and he spoke softly in answer to my questions. I tried to be the well-studied pro.
“Name?”
He told me.
“You’re from Endrim?”
He shook his head, named a place just in from the Center.
“How’d you get out here?”
He’d shipped passage. That startled me. Passage from the Center to the rim was hardly inexpensive, and there were many old Spacers caught on the rim who’d been born down towards Earth space—and who couldn’t return to die; not even a trader will take on an old spacer past his fourth ‘juve, and those old men were next to creditless. Sometimes a charter-ship will give mercy passage, but not often; when one does, the old man becomes a galley slave of sorts, and generally works harder than he’d ever worked in a life of spacing. For most, though, spacing to the rim is a one-way ticket. It’s the last haul, the final jump before death . . . and here was a man little more than a boy who’d shipped passage to the soul dump of the galaxy; it was odd. It was more than odd.
I said as much, and he shrugged, and his hands twisted at the loops of his overjacket.
“Experience?”
He’d been on one run, was laid off when the ship lost its permit; a shuttle ship between worlds of the Endrim system. Little more than a children’s game. No experience; it would have been a masochistic form of suicide for me to take him on.
“Billet him,” I said to the Cook, turned, and pushed my way from the commune, out into the cool night air of Endrim.
When we cut ourselves, we use little knives.
* * * *
(I don’t want to look within my soul; the questions there are darker than the answers; I don’t want to have to know, to see myself, to understand. So I wait. I move about, I slice and cut away at the pieces of my flesh which mean the most to me, and in slicing, I cut others. Or is it the other way around? I don’t know. I don’t want to know.)
* * * *
He was a fair Cork. In time, with experience to back up his instincts, he’d be a good one. He had a natural sense of calm, a quiet way about him that set one at ease, relaxed tightening muscles, soothed anxieties to a knotted throb rather than a lancing pain; he was a Sensitive. Just talking with him eased the soul.
When we were in Drive, he was everywhere, talking, calming, relaxing, easing: a mind among our minds, a valve for our combined tensions, a release, a Cork.
During those weeks of our first run as a full charter-ship, under my command, I watched him with half attention; he always seemed to be just a few feet away, a constantly stabilizing factor because of his familiarity alone. When I was setting a course, or reviewing the planes and lines of the mind-structure powering the ship, he was there: a lamb-soft presence that our previous Corks under the last Captain had never been. Where they’d been huge, powerful, draining, he was small, an undercurrent sewer for our frustrations, present yet overwhelming. He channeled the dirt and the insanity out of our minds, keeping us all on that borderline tightrope between the sane and the mad.
I’ve heard Corks described as maternal images, psychic wombs into which the power-minds of the ship crawl during stress, to be cradled and loved—to be drained. The poisons of the sick minds which power a mindship have to be sucked clean; the Cork was the Valve which drained us.
I say us; that includes the Captain. Most of all, the Captain. There isn’t a truly sane mind aboard a mind-ship; it’s a contradiction in terms. Sane minds don’t provide the degree of energy needed to twist space, to send a charter-ship into the Back Region; sane minds are passage payers, not crew; sane minds are useless when it comes to space.
But if there’s anyone who has to be sane on a mind-ship, to any degree—it’s your Cork. If he blows, everyone blows.
And that’s your real one-way ticket.
I didn’t see him after that day in the commune until we were two weeks out from Endrim, heading in towards the Center; I’d been aware of his presence, of course, but there’s a difference between that sort of awareness and actual confrontation; one is nebulous, a drifting, echoing thing. The other is stark, real, tangible. It’s an important difference. It was for me.
I’d fixed the lines, set the degrees for the run down the well to Center; in the Back Region, in the zone pushed to one side of real space, the gravity well acts like a suction pump on a mindship. It provides all the pull needed for a run into Center, so all that’s required is a vector set and a guard crew to watch for bubbles in the continua; going up from Center is another matter. There you’re fighting all the way, riding light currents while dragging against that black well, swimming up towards thinning stars cast through the ghost-haze of hyperspace; in a run out, it’s all struggle . . . and it’s on the run out that your Cork receives his greatest strain. That’s why I found him in the lounge, sipping at a drink, listening to the untensing crew members trade tales about other runs, other times. He was watching them, and at the same time, his eyes had that oddly distant look that reveals a Cork to be in Sensitive. Going in he could afford to wander outside his station; going out he’d have no time for socializing. So he sat there, drinking and listening with a distant, passive look.
I went over.
We made small talk, inane, untroubled talk between a Captain and one of his officers; he seemed reticent about the portions of his life before he came to Endrim. When, in passing, I asked him about his early days before he left the Center, he grew even less talkative than before; he seemed to wind in on himself, a slight hardening of the wires in his neck—nothing definite, nothing obvious, just a sudden withdrawing. His answers remained soft, there was no hint of tension in his voice; he circumvented the subject entirely with a single phrase, bringing it around to me, to my past. Strangely, the shift didn’t strike me then as abrupt; perhaps I wanted to talk about myself, had been only keeping time until the inevitable return questions started. It was friendly, shallow; it seemed so.
I talked then about life on my home world, a dustbin planet in the western arm; the Cork listened, and his attention seemed to act like a salve, drawing out things of my past that I’d let rest for years, things I’d been aware of, but which I’d kept buried without review since those days.
Being alone during a sandstorm, crouching in a darkened corner of cold steel while wind pelted the outside walls with a rain of dry sand; watching a friend die, too small, too young to help him; then alone, never wanting to be alone again, leaving the world years later to space, where the walls were still cold steel, where other winds pelted those outsides with dry sand, but where you weren’t alone, where there were others joining your mind with theirs, their minds with yours; speaking of a gut need to stay inside, away from the naked expanse of vacuum and dust, to hide within a framework of cozy steel, running from space into space; I told him about a box I’d once seen that opened into another box, which in turn unfolded into another box— which flowered to reveal another box, each layer peeling away to a following layer, until there was nothing left but a final square which couldn’t be opened. In languid tones, I told him all of this, and at the time I thought it was all simply idle talk between a Captain and one of his officers.
He listened, his hands dancing at the ends of his arms: alien, with separate lives. Or not so separate.
I didn’t ask him about himself again; that seemed distant, unimportant.
After a while, I left.
* * * *
We made the run in to Center under the line. We’d charted most of the coordinate space assigned when the Charter had left base four runs earlier under a different Captain and a partially different crew; two more runs and then we’d leave. The next took us across the central plane of the spiral; five weeks without incident off-ship, and only one incident within.
The Cook pointed it out; I’d just left control when he approached me, plucked at my side.
“Gotta do, gotta do quick. Cork go, maybe snap, huh?”
“What?”
“He sitting, not talking no one. Something wrong, bet, something, bet on, right.” He bobbed his head, a shank of blackish hair twirling back from his eyes, falling back again. I stared at him, let it come in slowly. The Cork.
“Where is he?”
“Mess. Just sit, not talk, just sit, drinking.”
That was bad. I walked on down the hall, found myself moving into a trot, came to the shafts and dropped the three levels to the mess level.
He was sitting by himself, just back from the coffee console, sipping at the steaming cup, staring at his hands.
“What’s wrong?”
Nothing; he shrugged, tried a weak smile. I slid into place across from him, nervously keyed the remote on the table before me, waited for the hot coffee to be prepared; muscles jumped in quick spasms along the outsides of my ankles, a nervous thing I get. I watched the Cork. He kept his eyes on his hands, occasionally taking a drink from his coffee.
“Cook says there’s something the matter. . .”
He said no, nothing was wrong.
I felt uneasy, sitting with him. Everything about him was calm, gentle—and yet I felt uneasy. I realized that I’d practically deliberately avoided him since that day in the lounge. Being near him made me uncomfortable; I couldn’t explain it.
“Dammit—say something.”
He did. He started to talk, quietly, about nothing particular, commenting first on the smoothness of the run, the attitudes of the crew, who he thought was involved with whom, how he liked the ship, how he was happy to be running under me, how he admired my calm, my judgment, how he liked the Engineer, how he was glad the others liked him, rambling, continuing on without saying anything; his hands drifted across the tabletop, brushing it gently as though smoothing the wrinkles from a sheet, stopping to take up his cup, hold it, place it back; he talked, and I stopped listening; I didn’t want to listen, didn’t really quite want to hear him. Finally, I pushed away from the table; he stopped speaking, looked up at me.
Was anything the matter?
“No,” I answered, wearily. “No. It’s fine. Just okay. I’ll see you later.”
I went out, feeling weak. Something nagged at the back of my mind, and I brushed it away, as I brushed away the memory of the Cork sitting there, watching me leave, his eyes blank and uncaring. Seemingly.
* * * *
(What had I expected from him, that it hurt me and forced me to hurt him when nothing came? What had I wanted from him, other than for him to be a good Cork? Why had I chosen him, of all the ones to choose —why him?)
* * * *
I saw him about the corridors of the ship; he moved through the halls slowly, head down as he took a vaguely wandering path along the rim of the mind-ship, where the gravity was on; moving like a wraith of sorts, he always seemed lost in thought, though we knew that the distant look he held was that of a Sensitive in contact. He left varying impressions with the crew. Some of them thought him a touch psycho, others that he was the most sane of us all and was lost in our insanity; both were wrong, by my thinking. He was different, alone; apart from the rest of us. Dispassionate might have been a good word, but for the fact that he was hardly that; I found him at times when he thought he was alone, and he’d be shaking himself back and forth, muttering something low and rhythmic under his breath. In any but a Cork, I would have found it strange; but the ways a Cork maintains his sanity sometimes seem stranger than madness.
So it seemed to me at the time; now I see that I didn’t want to understand him, to see how he was crumbling inside. I didn’t want to see him. He was the Cork.
So it went. He listened, and he spoke little of himself— little of substance, little of him—and in his station, he took up our insanities.
And on our third run, three weeks out from Centauri, up from the Center, our Cork blew.
* * * *
Mind drive:
I stood away from the ship, away from the ball of light matrixed with networks of power and energy, a hundred balls of mind rolling in upon themselves like waves upon a muddy beach, churning up soot and soil and seeping back into gray-green blackness, foaming in coils of power: central to the silent storm of madness glowed the jeweled prism-light of the Cork’s mindfield, which seemed to whirlpool the darkness away even as the madness was generated, sending the ebon richness away from the ship in a stream of pulsating sapphire which shoved the Charter on through the Back Region, lancing white and blue behind, a helix of force.
Beyond the ship were the stars: dim, slightly out-of-focus, as though seen through a veil of cheesecloth; ahead, the dome-like bowl of dun-colored space was dappled with pinpricks of gold and crimson: the hyper-space stream.
I stood away from the ship, and I guided its bulk with careful charges of power along the lateral lines, along the planes, along the narrowed vertices; I stood away within my mind, outside the ship, non-eyes overseeing the mind drive.
A hundred sick souls pouring out the filth of their madness, to have it twisted and bent, curved through a funnel wielded by the Engineer; a hundred sick souls, filtered through a sane one—a safety valve, a Cork.
The stream of energy pulsed, unchanging, a throbbing flow.
I could feel the weight of Center dragging at me, pulling at the fringes of my perspective; the same sensation one gets when climbing a high tower with a heavy pack strapped to one’s back—it sets you aslant. I compensated, the ship shifted, and we moved sluggishly through the stream.
Images:
Twist-
Squatting in sunlight, sweating from open pores, juices welling along the insides of my arms, down my sides, my waist—sweltering, dying; waiting and no one comes. He’s gone; my fault; he’s gone. Desert world.
(Gentle thoughts from the jewel: cool, soothing, draining off the memory.)
Twist-
Dark, cold room around and over, sounds throbbing in my veins, in my skull, alone, wet afraid panicking—
(His hands came into my mind and plucked the madness away, silken fingers from the gem brushing my thoughts—cold.)
Twist-
Control room chaotic-, fires, smashing consoles and screens, the labored breathing of a madman in the Captain’s set, blood trickling black from his nostrils, cutting a scarlet river down his chin. Screaming, I shoved him from the chair, watched the body curl over on itself like paper tossed into a fire, limp, waferthin, rag-doll fall away; screaming, I clambered up into the Captains set, found the wires . . .
(And the Cork plumbed the poisons from my mind, and I was purged, cleansed... .)
The ship plunged on.
* * * *
In the control room, I fell forward as something took the Charter and shook it.
Walls canted up around me; I fell sliding from the set, caught myself on the arm before the wires could tear out of my skin. In the distance, alarms screamed.
Somehow I was back in the set, strapping the emergency bands across my chest, snapping them into place around my feet. Another shock threw the ship forward; I slammed into the bands, thumped back.
“Engineer . . . status report.” Calm. Tendrils of calm played with the burgeoning shadows of panic lacing my consciousness; I gripped the arm rest, forced myself to relax.
Forced—
I cut off the hurried string of numbers from the Engineering section. “The Cork—where is he? I want him up in the control room with me. Now.”
“Yes, sir.”
Punching a key on the board console to my left, I studied an exterior view of the ship. It showed a bowl of gray curving away to either side, unstained save for a congealing mass of vibrating black dead center on the screen.
“He’s not in his section, sir.”
“Find him, then.”
“Yes, sir.”
Not in his section. It drove home, fell away; I stared at the screen, not registering the view. Not in his section.
“Sir?”
“What?”
“We’ve found him, sir.”
“Where?”
“In the ... ah, in the mess, sir. Drinking coffee.”
Goddamn!
“Send him up.”
“Yes, sir.”
The ship lurched forward again, and the view on the screen flickered, faded, grew large again. I sent out impulses to reverse the thrust.
Behind me a pneumatic hiss signaled the entrance of the Cork.
“Where in hell were you?” He started to explain; I cut him off. “Never mind. You’ll be stationed here. I want you near me when we push through that hole.”
He didn’t answer. I was busy again, making corrections, feeding in new figures to the computer brains lining the shell of the control room, relaying the decisions and revisions on sight along the mental circuits binding the ship.
During a pause, I glanced up at him.
He was ready to blow.
It was there in his posture; he slouched, slumping weakly against the bank of machines leading up into the Captain’s set; his shoulders curved away into his back, a line of trembling muscle. His hands quivered at his jacket front, fumbling with the nubbin of a zipper, nervous, more nervous than I’d ever seen him before. His eyes were shadowed, and they didn’t meet mine; it wasn’t a new thing—only now it seemed to have meaning, where before ...
“Oh god.”
He didn’t seem to hear me.
If I’d cared just a bit more, I would have seen it coming. Just a small bit more awareness, and perhaps . . . No good.
I groped in the slot under the left arm rest, came up with the syringe kept filled there for the Captain’s use during a hard pull; I grabbed his arm, plunged it in. He seemed unaffected.
“Just stay. Just keep thinking...”
He didn’t answer; he didn’t seem to hear me.
I turned away from him, made the connections that would send me over into mind-drive, and blacked out.
Black:
Shrieking:
Writhing and alive: Light.
It curled from away, from everywhere, and it bent in on us, a great, blistering, ebon sore.
I threw the ship forward, peeling away the layers of hyperspace—
—boxes, each flowering into the next and (A ghost form came and took the fear from me, swallowing it into himself)—
—battering against the gravity well eating into our drive, slamming up through seas of force, while the burning sun flared around us, the Back Region consumed with heat, the fabric of hyperspace wrinkling in a white-hot energy storm, and the fiber bent, and it warped, and it fell away from us—
Twist-
Seething sun golden bronze madness leaping now larger ever larger always ta—
(Shadow hands came, and took our madness)
(Weak, soft, frail hands—like tissue)
(Tissue in a maelstrom)
(Breaking)
A hundred sick souls poured out their insanity, and the sewer swallowed the festering ichor, and it drove us on, funneling the power, driving.
The black spot erupted before us.
I slid the ship around, away—cut forward and then punched into overdrive.
We were gone, caught in a side-drift, splicing away from the side-space between real and unreal, in and out—gone.
Where we’d been, the black spot blossomed, flowed, spread like ink—and drained away.
The ship slipped through a fold in space, came out in the grain-black midnight of outside. We drifted through sudden calm. Stars were brilliant chalk against a velvet paint sky.
Silence.
Everywhere ...
From some dim corner of our collective consciousness came a low moan, a pitiful moan of pain and agony, not an audible moan, not a physical scream of swollen torment—but a whimpering mental whine.
The Cork.
I came back to the control room, tore off my straps, swung down out of the Captain’s set—and found him slumped on the floor inches from my feet, arms outstretched as though groping for something yet out of his reach.
* * * *
His mind was gone, lost somewhere back in the torrent of madness I’d forced him to drain; he lay in a huddle at the foot of the set, wound in on himself, fetus-like, his pale hair tumbling in disarray over eyes blanked white, staring; he’d clamped down on his tongue sometime during the flight, and a stream of red-black blood dribbled through his lips to the floor, already turning brown. His clothes were torn in ragged strips; his arms were bleeding. He was whimpering when I came to him, a gurgling whimper that spat up clots of blood. I bent to him quickly, removed the twists of wire from his forehead, pulled him up to a sitting position. His body was limp, sagging in my hands; the bones seemed to jut through the skin like dry sticks. I stared at him, and after a while I let him down and left him there to whimper alone, in silence.
* * * *
We cut ourselves with small knives. An old man doesn’t matter, but a young man’s different: an old man’s something you’re going to be ... a young man’s something you were.
Why did I take on an inexperienced Cork? Not just my own inexperience; oh, no: something dark within me that made me strike out against myself, against the Cork—against a wealth of hates and frustrations I could never quite touch before having them taken away. . . . Something about a sand planet. . . .
But I still can’t quite touch it. I never will. Sometimes I think about that Cork, and what I did to him. Sometimes I have nightmares in which I’m strapped to a table and people stick knives and pins into me, needling me with private things, and I scream, not for myself, but for them. Sometimes I’m another man’s sewer, and I realize: we’re all leeches.
Sometimes I’m a little bit mad.
But not for long.
The silken fingers quickly come, and take the pain away....