Berserker's Star Page 12

  Harry offered no comment. Actually, the cannon he had concealed was a new model, hardly known to anyone as yet, and much less bulky than the old. Most people trying to imagine a cannon hidden on his ship would mistakenly discount the idea at once.

  It was not that he had been conspiring or plotting to keep the damned thing. Selling it to pirates and terrorists was not an acceptable resolution of the problem either. It had crossed Harry’s mind to dump the weapon somewhere, just to get rid of it, but that was a lot easier to say than to accomplish.

  “And what business are you in, Mr. Bulaboldo?” Lily seemed to be asking it in all innocence.

  “He’s a crook,” Harry explained succinctly. “The details vary from time to time.”

  Bulaboldo immediately protested, doing a bad actor’s impression of injured innocence, that he was not wanted for any crime at the moment. “At least not in this jurisdiction, old top.”

  Harry muttered that he had heard of his acquaintance that he was not above doing a little slave trading now and then.

  Lily gave every impression of being outraged. “Surely that cannot be legal anywhere!”

  Bulaboldo considered the point, frowning, gazing into the distance. The question seemed to put him on his mettle, a challenge not to his morals but to the depth of his knowledge of legal codes across the settled Galaxy.

  “No, I don’t believe it is.” He shook his head. “Which, of course, poses difficulties, as one might expect. As a general rule, owning slaves really makes no economic sense. Ah, but in certain quarters, they are unsurpassed as a status symbol.”

  That answer silenced Lily for a time.

  A good acquaintance, thought Harry, with every crime in the book… except one, probably. One crime that Bulaboldo would never commit was that of being goodlife. The bulky one enjoyed life too much to ever join that grim fraternity. But he would not be above dealing with the goodlife, or even with their metal masters, the berserkers themselves, if he thought he could make a reasonable profit.

  Bulaboldo was making polite inquiries of his own. “And you, my lady, how are you enjoying your visit to our peculiar world?”

  “So far it’s not been dull.” Lily appeared to reflect. “I must say that hardly an hour of my trip has been dull, especially since meeting Mr. Silver.”

  “Only to be expected! One must anticipate a certain piquancy in one’s daily affairs when one travels with our dear Harry.”

  When Bulaboldo heard about Lily’s missing husband, and understood that she was not here simply as Harry’s companion, he listened to her story attentively, and with an appearance of great sympathy.

  Then he said, with an air of offering a revelation: “If this Alan Gunnlod belongs to the sect you speak of, I can tell you exactly where he’ll be.”

  Lily only nodded. “Somewhere near the famous Tomb of Timur, right? I’ve known that for months. The trouble is in getting there. But I’m going to do it, if it takes me years. I’m going to get him back.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Bulaboldo had a pronouncement to make. “If they’re putting a seal on your ship, old chap, the next step will very likely be to put one on a cell door, with you inside it.”

  “I don’t need you to tell me that.” Whether Robledo Pike was really taking care of that problem or not, it wouldn’t do for Harry to act as if he thought he had help in high places. “Then where’s a good place to keep out of sight?”

  The bulky one looked concerned, and seemed to be thinking rapidly. Meanwhile, he stood facing both visitors, his massive shape forming a substantial roadblock around which the people of Maracanda detoured as they went about whatever business or nonsense they had in mind this morning. Few of them paid any attention to Harry and Lily, another pair of newcomers, maybe religious pilgrims or maybe prospectors, still wearing their shipboard coveralls.

  “Old man, this is not exactly the most welcoming town for an outsider who wants to hide out. Even I have been in that spot a time or two—though fortunately at the moment I can walk the unpaved streets of Maracanda openly, looking each citizen boldly in the eye.”

  Harry said: “If you’ve got an idea, let’s hear it. Keep me out of jail, and I’ll owe you one.”

  Bulaboldo’s eyebrows went up. “Is that a serious pledge? Mind, old chap, I’ll hold you to it.”

  “Never doubted that you would.”

  “Well, I’ll do my best. My only idea is simple and to the point. We’ve got to get you aboard a caravan. That’ll buy us some time to work out a more permanent solution.”

  Lily brightened, as if the suggestion were a new one to her. “A caravan to the place they call Tomb Town, I hope.”

  The big man turned his benevolent gaze her way. “All the caravans that start from here go there, my darling. And vice versa, because there’s really no other destination. Trains of vehicles wend their way from port to Portal, so to speak, and back again, across the wilderness.

  “But we must get you, both of you, quickly to the departure point and aboard the morning eastbound. Wait right here, chaps. I’ll slide my ample bottom into a groundcar and be back before you know it.”

  He moved away with surprising quickness, light-footed despite his size. Harry and Lily moved also, sliding more casually, a short distance to a doorway, where they waited, trying to blend into the adobe walls.

  As soon as Bulaboldo was out of sight, Lily commented: “I must say I think you were serious about his being a criminal. How long have you known him?”

  “Too long.”

  “Do you think we can trust him?”

  “Absolutely not. But he can be very effective when he wants to do something—and I believe that for some reason he genuinely wants to help me. Maybe he can speed up our passage east. So for the moment I’m going to act as if I don’t have any choice—and I’m not sure how much I really have. You see his eyes light up when I said I’d owe him one? He’s already got a payoff in mind, and he’s probably on our side until he gets it.”

  “I hope you’re right. Harry? I can’t thank you enough for what you’ve done. Just getting me here alive—and then volunteering to help me the way you have.”

  “Forget it, kid.”

  Pondering the somewhat vague commission he and Lily had accepted from General Pike, Harry decided he wasn’t going to work very hard at looking for nonexistent goodlife on the east side of Maracanda. He doubted that his former passenger would spend much time spying for the Templars either. Harry would have been willing to bet that there were no actual functioning berserkers within light-years of this crazy place.

  Pike had given Harry and Lily each a key that ought to provide them access to the Templars’ private telegraph terminals in the east. Harry sympathized with the general’s objectives, but had doubts about his shrewdness. Pike seemed to be the kind who saw goodlife and berserkers everywhere.

  He said to Lily: “Here’s another point we can be thinking about: general is a high rank to be commanding such a small detachment as the Templar force on Maracanda seems to be.”

  “Indicating what?”

  “Suggesting that Pike has been more or less put out to pasture here. It’s the kind of thing that’s likely to happen when an officer fairly seriously screws up on a tougher assignment.”

  Lily thought about it. Finally she said: “But the general might be right. There could be some goodlife here.”

  “Sure, they could be anywhere. So could vegetarians, or nudists. But I can’t see any reason why goodlife, or berserkers, would favor Maracanda as a target. If your goal is to destroy life, why plot against a world that has so little? Outside of a few humans, a very few pets, and a modest mass of intestinal bacteria, the total count of living things on Maracanda must be very close to zero. And there are the famous breakdown zones—I don’t see how berserkers are going to operate in them.”

  Lily was ready for a little argument. “The humans here all seem to be concentrated on the few small parts of the surface that are not breakdown zones. And you tol
d me berserkers love killing Earth-descended humans best of all.”

  “Well, they would if they loved anything—which they don’t. And there are many, many worlds with bigger populations than this one.”

  Back in Pike’s office, he had thought of hitting the general with those arguments, but had decided against it.

  But of course Lily was right. The fact that Maracanda seemed an unprofitable place for berserkers to spend their time and energy didn’t mean that goodlife couldn’t be here. Some charismatic worshiper of death might have come along and drawn a following unto himself. Probably they’d be pretending to be something else among the other cults that were obviously flourishing. There were always sick and disaffected people, ready to commit some form of suicide, and some of those decided to worship the damned machines without even having seen one.

  Harry was not particularly eager to have either Space Force or Templar Pike to see him in the company of, and apparently on friendly terms with, a shady character like Bulaboldo. So Harry had his back turned to the ramped entrance of the administration building, and was leaning his right side against the tavern’s peculiar adobe wall, washed in the diffused sky glow that passed for sunshine, here in this solar system without a sun.

  He wanted to look inconspicuous, without giving the impression that he was working at it. Lily was standing at Harry’s left side, facing in the same direction he was. “Do you feel all right, Harry?”

  “Sure. Great.”

  Except for her interview with Rovaki, Lily had been almost continuously in his sight, ever since they’d landed. Harry was keeping an eye on her, alert for any indication that she had spent time on this world before and was already secretly familiar with Maracanda. So far, Harry’s alertness had been totally wasted. But still the castaways’ last accusation refused to absolutely die.

  Bulaboldo had been gone no more than two minutes when he reappeared, driving a sleek groundcar, which he pulled up directly in front of the doorway, minimizing Harry’s exposure to observation as he climbed in. Maybe it was done just out of habit: the fewer people who knew when you did anything, the better off you were in general.

  Lily was right after him, slamming the door behind her. At once Bulaboldo pulled out into the broad street’s modest traffic.

  The vehicle looked, sounded, and felt new and expensive. Judging by the prices he’d seen so far, everything was expensive on this world. “Your car?” Harry asked.

  “Of course, old fellow. Did you think I’d steal one?”

  Harry didn’t bother to answer that.

  Bulaboldo was driving on manual control, one-handed, while he used the other to facilitate a private conversation on his communicator. “Excuse me just a moment, old ones. Must give certain of my associates a few hints of what I’m thinking.” r His communicator, like most others, was equipped with a privacy device that kept any trace of the conversation from reaching his passengers’ ears. The gadget even blurred Harry’s line of sight to the speaker’s lips, while Bulaboldo spoke briefly toward a spot on the dashboard.

  His private talk on the communicator took less than a minute, and then he gave his companions his full attention once again.

  “Tell me about these caravans,” Harry suggested.

  “Oh, you’ll love ‘em. But wait a couple of minutes and we’ll be in sight of one, old top. Easier to show than tell.”

  During the next few minutes he gave Harry and Lily something of a guided tour of the city, as he drove smoothly through streets lined with houses and other buildings made almost entirely of the strange adobe, its colors varying in strips and panels. A number of these structures appeared to have been deliberately left roofless.

  “So it’s true that it never rains? Or do they use forcefields somehow, to—”

  “It never rains.”

  There was a school. Yelling children in assorted sizes, evidently on some kind of break from lessons, filled a yard lightly fenced off from the street. That was something you didn’t see every day, in most cities.

  Bulaboldo said: “They tell me Maracanda has one of the Galaxy’s highest birth rates. Can’t think why, unless it’s just a sense of all this empty space waiting to be filled, a lot of good air being generated that goes unbreathed.”

  The width of Port City from west to east proved to be no more than four or five kilometers. They had soon traversed that distance, and were pulling into a parking area, already about half occupied. Most of the other vehicles in sight looked basically similar to Bulaboldo’s, though few were as elegant.

  Climbing out of the car, Harry saw that they were only a short walk from a long, low, roofless structure that put him in j mind of a loading dock. Large signs at both ends cautioned:

  ONLY VEHICLES

  BREAKDOWN READY

  PERMITTED BEYOND THIS POINT

  “What’s that all about?” Harry wondered, nodding at the warning.

  Bulaboldo led his two companions forward. He seemed in a jovial mood, eager to play the guide. “The edge of town was established at this very spot for a reason, old sod. It’s perfectly safe for people to travel beyond the sign—for thousands of kilometers beyond it, if they like. But”—he pointed dramatically into the peculiar desert—“as soon as one proceeds a few more meters in that direction, one immediately risks running into spots and strips of breakdown zone. See where that wire runs, mounted on poles?”

  “It looks like some primitive telegraph,” Lily said, squinting, as if the idea of this world possessing such a system were totally new to her. Harry nodded, silently approving. The thing looked like a mock-up of some ancient Earthly line of simple wire communication. A single strand, supported on a series of uprights spaced some twenty or thirty meters apart, went zigzagging off to vanish at last behind a hill, a kilometer or more away. He didn’t suppose this was the Templars’ private wire. More likely this was the public facility Pike had mentioned.

  Bulaboldo went on: “The road itself is only faintly marked, and rather hard to see, but it generally follows the telegraph line. They both avoid the breakdown zones as much as possible. But every now and then the zone borders shift by a few meters. Usually the change is only temporary, but when it happens, telegraph service is likely to be interrupted. And if the road is overrun, caravans have to shift to primitive mode.”

  “How’s that again?”

  “Takes a bit of explaining. The engine that drives the caravan is the same type, hydrogen fusion, that’s used in normal groundcars on most worlds, but the caravan also has an alternate system, much more primitive. Has to be seen to be believed. Private vehicles cleared for use in breakdown zones are lightweight shells, equipped with pedals, so the driver and passengers can… no, I’m not putting you on, old sod. Not a bit of it.”

  “So the telegraph only works intermittently?”

  ” ‘Weirdly’ or ‘occasionally’ might be closer to the mark. And the private lines, of which I’m told that one or two exist, are no better. There are instances on record of messages being delayed for months, even years.”

  Lily broke in: “When you get a chance, tell us more about the caravans.”

  “Of course.” Bulaboldo leered at them both, as if about to launch into an obscene joke. “Let us concentrate upon essentials. The train of rolling wagons has comfortable seats. Needs ‘em, because it takes two days to get to Tomb Town. There’ll be lots of time for conversation.” He turned a more benign gaze on Harry. “I’m sure that you and I, old sod, will have a lot to talk about.”

  “You’re making the trip with us, then.” Lily sounded startled.

  “Oh, very much so. Didn’t I tell you, my chick? I have extensive business interests over in the east—not in Tomb Town so much as in Minersville, which stands nearby—so yes, we will be mates, for a time, aboard the ship of the desert, fellow lodgers tonight at the caravanserai.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A hostelry of sorts. Not too uncomfortable, bit of an exotic experience. You’ll see.”

  By
now they were all three standing atop the loading dock. Harry was looking out into the open country—though “country” somehow seemed too natural a word for all these geometric curves and segments of straight line—beyond the city’s edge. Bulaboldo had evidently told the truth, for civilization seemed to come to an abrupt end, right about here. To the west of the dock there were only a couple of small structures, whose purpose Harry could not determine.

  Beyond those two small sheds, he could see nothing but a vast expanse of the odd land, stretching out to an improbable horizon. The horizon was not the result of any planetlike curvature, but only the apparent shrinkage of distant space between the strange land and the lowering sky.

  It was very difficult to say exactly how vast the visible portion of the Maracandan surface might be, for it lacked a single human shape or other familiar object to give perspective. The scenery both far and near was so strange, so lacking in familiar visual clues, that Harry feared he might go dizzy staring at it.

  Beside him, Lily was evidently experiencing some similar effect, for she clutched at his arm. Well, anyone could be upset, Harry thought, looking at this. Oddities of perspective, and the half artificial look of the peculiar overhead that was not quite a sky, made it difficult to judge distances.

  She had shifted her gaze, and was pointing off to their right. “What’s that?”

  Just north of the loading dock stood another massive structure, even lower and wider in its profile, its volume stretching away for a city block or more. This one was mostly imported metal inside a partial facing of adobe slabs.

  “That’s where we get the stuff to breathe, m’dear.” Bulaboldo explained that this was one of the vast atmospheric generators, installed a decade or more ago, that worked at keeping the air breathable, all across the habitable surface. Strangely enough, the first explorers had found the Maracandan atmosphere quite acceptable on their arrival; ever since then, time and energy had been devoted to keeping it that way. Another generator was implanted near the spaceport, most of its huge bulk also underground. Similar units were buried at a number of strategic locations, both here and in the east.