Ruined Blood

By Jude Jones

Forlorn and Keen bagged up the crew's charred remains and heaved them into the new disposal unit which Goldberg had recently installed on the cargo deck. In the centre of the hold the Puma still smouldered under its blanket of carbofoam, slowly cooling and surprisingly undamaged except where Keen's fireslots had burnt into its control mechanisms, having previously fried the crew. 

The privateers waited impatiently for the readings which would show that the rest of the wrecked cargo-ship was safe to explore and as soon as they clicked up, Goldberg dispatched Forlorn into the ship's aft decking to search the storage areas for the byolite ore it had been carrying. He paced around the hold, wishing Forlorn was less cautious. By his calculations there should be enough ore on the cruiser to finance a six cycle blow-out on Phekda should he fancy one. The stink of the scorch still hung in the filtered air - dry chemical heat smells from the ship mixed with the pungent whiff of organic body fumes - persistent and unappetising. 

Forlorn was taking her bloody time with her search. Keen was adding another layer to his protective clothing. Even with precautions byolite was notoriously dangerous stuff to handle. Since mining began, stories abounded of the mutational or psychotic side effects suffered by byo miners and the crews which carried it. Goldberg was sceptical. The Edge abounded with such tales but everyone who was anyone knew that the mining corporations had paid millions to the PR companies to spread whatever fantasies they could dream up as long as they sounded plausible. It was meant to discourage piracy. It never worked. You don't live long as a pirate without learning who to believe. 

The only reason Goldberg had never stiffed a byo-carrier before was that they usually stayed hidden in the centre of a fighter formation big enough to blow him to fragments. Last week's reports of one flying alone had made his year worthwhile. 

Keen, fully kitted up, sidled over and smiled ingratiatingly at his captain. 'Big haul?' Goldberg shrugged and spat twice. Once to rid himself of the smells and then again - one for Keen. Keen was a nothing, a mistake. His only use was gunnery, otherwise he was shipmeat - spacemeat. 

At last Forlorn emerged through the secondary hole they'd burned in the hull. Her face was as blank as ever but Goldberg could sense her anger. Her shoulders were rigid with it. 

'What?' 

'You tell me what, my honey man.' 

'Where's the byolite?' 

'Where indeed?' 

He thrust her aside and climbed into the ship. The storage was undamaged and the doors were opened, their locks blasted into electronic fragments by Forlorn's handpiece. But none of the circuitry worked. Keen always enjoyed taking out ships' Motherdrives once he'd finished with the organics. It didn't matter, the storage was open anyway. He rummaged around. Three of the carrels just contained the usual stuff - imperishables and spares. The fourth was practically empty of anything except a container chest. It wasn't even refrigerated - in fact, none of the carrels showed any signs of having been fixed up with cooling systems. Goldberg assumed the byo had been stored elsewhere. He began to search the rest of the cruiser in a frenzy of brutal thoroughness. 

Eventually he returned to the fourth storage unit. Inside Forlorn was bending over the container chest trying to deactivate the complex locking system which sealed it. 

'Use your piece,' he growled at her. 

She ignored this suggestion. 'You missed this, my sweet.' 

'Look, it's just a chest. You don't think they'd keep byo in that, cretin?' 

'Goldberg.' Forlorn stood up and towered over him in a way she had which was specially calculated to shorten his already short temper. 'We think this is the byo ship we hear about and we pick it up. But we are wrong. We find no byo and so we are saying to ourselves that we have fucked up. Yes? We have scorched the wrong ship. Yes? Then we say, why is this cruiser out here beyond the Edge where only the byo ships and starcharters come? So we look around and find this chest and we think that maybe what is inside the chest will tell us why this ship sails in space with no convoy to keep it safe. Yes, clever Goldberg?' 

'Mother of Earth, you love the sound of your voice, don't you, Forlorn?' Once again he shoved her aside. His key-matcher played over the locking mechanism and found the system. It forced back the clutchers. He slid the lid across and a draught of tempered air hit him in the face as he hunkered down. Underneath many layers of aerated packing he found a small, flat object thickly wrapped in polyperm. He scrabbled at the coverings. 

'Such an astute Goldberg,' said Forlorn's silky voice wisping over his shoulder. 'This thing you have likes its own atmosphere. If you unfold it in this hasty fashion it may not be able to breathe.' 

'I don't care a crap if it breathes or not, mutant! I want to see what it is.' He tore away the last of the polyperm and examined what lay beneath it. 

It was a curious object roughly fifteen centimetres long by eight wide and three deep, shaped like a small sol-brick. One of its long, narrow ends was enclosed in a semi-cylinder of material binding while the broad planes were flat and covered in the same material stretched tightly across their surfaces. There was writing on the narrow bound end and on one of the flat sides - none of it intelligible. It wasn't Standard Galactic Script, he could read that. A code perhaps. 

The most curious aspect of it was that its interior was constructed from hundreds of thin slices of a fiche-like substance, though less plastic in texture than fiche. Each slice was bound into the narrow end half-cylinder so that it could be turned over if you split the object in half. And one each side of each slice of fiche was line after line of the unintelligible writing. 

The whole contraption seemed immensely fragile, although by its smell, it had been treated lavishly with preservative. 

'What it?' asked Keen, who had furtively slipped in behind them. 

A spasm of rage passed through Goldberg, prompted simultaneously by Keen's temerity and by his own puzzlement. 

'It's nothing,' he snarled. 'A waste of two missiles, that's what it is. A waste of a scorch. Just dump it in the disposer and we'll go chase a real byo ship.' 

'Why is it that our clever Goldberg so rarely employs his brain organ?' 

Forlorn smiled sweetly at her captain. 'We seek treasure. Yes? It is our delight as privateers to accumulate such wealths. Sometimes our treasure it is byolite and sometimes other things. Why do we act so strangely fastidious today?' 

'Get to the point, mutant.' 

'We have a major collection of junk, my honey man. Look about your cargo bays. Rarely do we dispose of anything at all other than superfluous organics.' 

'Forlorn, if you don't get to the point soon.' 

'Cerebrate a while, my Goldberg. The Puma is big. It contains one thing only - this thing, so finely packaged in its chest. There is nothing else of value on the ship and therefore our clever captain suggests that we destroy it merely because he knows not what it is.' 

'Well, do you know what it is?' 

'No. An encryption perhaps? But I imagine that the cruiser's back-up Mind may tell us, if Keen has not destroyed it in his lust for disintegrations. '

Grudgingly Goldberg was obliged to admit to himself that Forlorn's observations made sense. Thrusting the hexagon at her he marched out to find the back-up comp and check its function status. 

The Puma was a relic of the Thargoid Wars, bought by the Omega Mining Corporations to use in the uninhabited Zones to ferry their byolite back to their headquarters in the Ququve system. The best thing about a Puma is that they carry their back-ups in the shielded bulk heads of the navigation dock, a few paces back from the Motherdrive on the flight deck. Keen's frying activities had just stopped short of the navvy port. 

Goldberg hurriedly unscrewed the housing and inspected the system. It was dead but he reckoned Forlorn could bring it up if she linked it into the drive-comp on the Fighter Deck of the Corsair. 

Forlorn sighed when he told her but got down to work. She and Goldberg hefted the hardware up to Fighter-Control and she used her Naval knowledge to rig the connections. Keen had disappeared while this tedious process went on but magically slipped back as the Phekdarian prepared to engage the back-up's voice and monitors. 

'Show it what we found,' Goldberg ordered her. 

She held the book up to the scanner. 

The voice evidently mismatched the Icarus's eloquence patterns but was just about comprehensible. 

'The object is a book...' it droned. 'Site of origin: Earth. Age, unknown but preservation process initiated approximately 2100 CE. Book used as portable Write Once, Read Many device. Editing possible but not encouraged. Text is in International Communication Language, ICL, evolved in third millenium CE, progenitor of Standard Galactic Text. Books abandoned soon afterwards in favour of superseding audio-visual technologies. Known collectors of Books limited to sixteen Inner Core antique dealers and gallery holders...' 

'Their names?' snapped Goldberg. 

'Names recently deleted from memory.' 

Forlorn broke her silence. 'And what is contained in this book? What is its content?' 

'Input limited. Content can be read by those with the necessary language. For full information see Motherdrive.' 

They began to question the system all at the same time. Goldberg irritably thrust Keen out of Control and locked the door. But his curiosity remained unsated, the back-up stubbornly refused to elaborate on any subject other than a flat description of what they now possessed. 'Can you read it?' Forlorn asked it. 

Goldberg eagerly seized on this. He held the book up to the scanner. 

'Open at first page,' it instructed him. 

'Upside down.' 

He reversed the book. 

'This is fly leaf. Turn five pages on.' 

'Awake!' it droned, 'For Morning in the Bowl of night 

Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to flight: 

And Lo! The Hunter of the East has caught 

The Sultan's turret.' 

Goldberg irritably dropped the book away from the scanner. 

'What is this?' he raged at Forlorn. 'Some kind of mind-game? I don't understand a sodding word of it!' 

'Make it scan a different page,' she replied. 

He flicked through the book and held it up once more. 

'On the top of the Crumpetty Tree, 

The Quangle Wangle sat, 

But his face you could not see, 

On account of his Beaver Hat. 

For his Hat was a hundred and two feet wide, 

With ribbons and bibbons on.' 

Goldberg shut the back-up down, seething with annoyance. 

'Bastard!' he swore, 'We scorch a Puma just to get hold of this piece of trash!' 

'Trash, you say, my intellectual Goldberg?' Forlorn had picked the book up and stroked it with her spatulate grey fingers. A drop of saliva formed at the corner of her mouth. 'I think it is a thing of power. Give it to me if it frightens you, my Captain.'

The habits of a lifetime reasserted themselves. He snatched it from her. 

'Who said it frightens me? You keep your hands off this, Forlorn, you hear? This is my thing. I keep it and no one else. Understand?' 

Without its tempered atmosphere the Book only lasted less than a month. One day Goldberg reached into his carisack and drew out a handful of shards. The Book's binding had collapsed and the pages were already crumbling in the Corsair's oxygen-enriched air. For a moment he was desperately dismayed, then he rushed off to his suite to find something which would stick it back together. 

Ten was already in his workroom when he arrived and succeeded in calming him. 

'Desist,' Ten murmured, 'Repairing that which is broken will never remake it. What you have then is a repaired broken thing. Think of it like this; it has merely escaped you. You may recapture it perhaps in another form.'

'But I haven't decoded it yet. The back-up's crapped and Forlorn can't fix it. She was working on it for hours. I've only managed to get it to scan a few of those things so far. And you said you'd help!' Goldberg turned his dismay into resentment. 

'Do I not help?' Ten's deep voice had become grave with reproach. 'Listen, John. You have seen the Book and held it. Now that you have lost it let him name it who can. The beauty would be the same.'

Goldberg threw himself onto a couch, his anxieties gradually decaying. Though he was frequently bewildered by Ten's pronouncements he was always convinced by them and obscurely comforted. It was true, he supposed, however you named it the beauty would be the same. 'You are overwrought,' said Ten. 'It is natural. Relax and I'll tell you an interesting story.' Goldberg lay back and listened while Ten told him one of his stories and when it was over he fell into a profound, untroubled sleep. 

Keen was becoming a problem. Goldberg was used to fluctuations in organic crew numbers and had been down to three, as he was now, several times before. The Corsair was a handy size for his activities, much smaller than a Galleon but big enough for its fighter Deck to house four ex-police Vipers and a Puma. 

If he ejected everything else, he could fit in a Panther. But he had been bouncing in and out of hyperspace for too long now. In the last few raids there had been losses and no stop-offs to recruit extra joes. 

The non-vox cybers ran the basics but the organics ran the cybers and if you worked with three you needed each crew joe to pull his full weight. Keen did weapons and nothing else. Even to Goldberg who was difficult to disgust, his personal habits were repellent and his smile was becoming increasingly insinuating. 

After the food hour yesterday, Goldberg had gone back to his suite to find Keen standing in his private washroom staring hard at himself in the mirror. Goldberg bawled and raved but instead of abjectly apologising as he should have done Keen seemed unrepentant. 'There is only one mirror on ship,' he said, his voice heavy with resentment. 'You have a mirror, Goldberg. Why not me?' 

Goldberg had physically thrown him out and since then Keen had locked himself in his quarters, unresponsive to either his captain's fulminations or to Forlorn's cajoling. 

Moreover there was no sign of the missing byo ship on any of the Corsair's sensors. Reports out of Ququve said that one had left Edlaand and they should have been able to find it. Forlorn was unmoved by this but it annoyed Goldberg. They hadn't made a profitable strike for too long. He took his problems to Ten. 

He found the 'droid in High Control gazing out at the waste of ocean space through the viewports. Ten looked sad and preoccupied but when he sensed Goldberg's approach he turned and smiled, listening attentively to his friend's worries. 

'Are you not satisfied with what you have, John?' he said eventually when Goldberg had finished grumbling. 'You have prizes enough to purchase continents - planets even. Why do you sigh for more? Or are you sighing for Lebanon in the long breeze that streams from the delicious East?' 

It was no answer really. Goldberg had never heard of a planet called Lebanon but Ten's remark echoed more obliquely what Forlorn had said. There was no need to find the byo ship in reality. It was just that he was so used to being always on the prowl - it was in the nature of the job. Perhaps he was getting too obsessive about it. A short break might be a good thing. 

On the subject of Keen, Ten was less dismissive. He made Goldberg describe again what Keen had been doing. 

'A mirror. It is perhaps the shadows of the world Keen seeks,' he mused, 

'He may be searching for Camelot...' 

'Which galaxy is that in?' 

'In ours.' 

'One of the Edge systems, huh? You think he may know of some credit- heavy scorch he could pull off near this Camelot world? Does this place have byo mines?' 

'It is a shadow, as I said, John. There is treasure to be found in Camelot but no longer any credit.' 

Goldberg nodded, his mind revolving Keen's perfidy. The gunner knew where to find some hidden booty and was keeping quiet about it. 

For several hours after this conversation Goldberg stalked the decks of the Corsair planning how to extract Keen's secret from him. 

He became concerned about Forlorn too. Perhaps 'concerned' was the wrong word for his unease. Forlorn didn't invite concern. She came from an old mutant Phekdarian family who'd been around since the first mutations occurred on New California after its corporation wars. In spite of her soft, seductive voice and deceptively mild manner she was a huge, ugly brute with pitted grey skin which covered a bald bulging forehead and a prognathous jaw. She was, however, a formidable engineer and pilot whose experience on the Imperial side during the Thargoid Wars had equipped her with enough qualifications to run a privateering ship of her own had she wanted to. Goldberg detested her, as he detested most people, but was coming to depend increasingly upon her services. 

And now she had begun talking to herself. 

'Who were you maundering on to?' he demanded at the food hour one day. Keen, who had resumed his duties and was coming off watch, was silently eating at another table with his back to them. He looked round and smiled obnoxiously at them both before turning back to his raw meat. 

'Maundering, sweet Goldberg? I never maunder.' 

'Talking then. I heard you in your cabin last night. It wasn't Keen. He was up in High and only crazies talk to the cybers. Who were you talking to?' 

'To the other. To shut its gaze down.' 

'What? What other?' 

'My other. I try to close the valves of her attention. Are you not doing the same thing, my honey man, or are you so weak that you drink him in that you may but drink the more?' 

'Mother of Earth, Forlorn, you need a medical. Finish that swill and come up to Pharmac with me.' 

'Sweet Captain Goldberg, I am not sick. No sicker than you or Keen. If I have no objections to your discourses with your other why should you object to mine? Or Keen's either, if we are to mention all.' 

'Keen's? Mine? What crap is this, Forlorn?' 

'I hear you in the night alone - you there, I here, with just the door ajar. Your other gives you comfort when space stares all around and comes between you and that white sustenance - despair.' 

Goldberg stood up, shuddering. His tray fell to the floor. As he left the Canteen he could vaguely hear behind him Keen's muffled giggling. 

***** 

Ten would not turn round. He stood with his face averted towards the distant stars. the stars winked their irregular eyes back at him through the viewport. 

Goldberg waved the tattered pages at his back. 

'He had these all the time!' he cried, 'He'd stashed them in his cabin. He must've filched them from my carrisak when the Book fell apart...' 

Ten continued to study the void. 

'... So you see... you see, Ten.' Goldberg grabbed his arm. '...when he stole the mirror... after that I.... You see, I couldn't trust him.'

'And he wouldn't tell me where to find Camelot.... He was holding out on me... so...you see I had to... you understand, don't you?' 

At last Ten looked down from his sombre face into his. 

'You are men of ruined blood. Therefore comes it you are wise.' 

'Yes, we're wise! I knew you'd see. And his reflection... you know about that too, don't you?' 

'That it had gone? The curse had come upon him perhaps. Let me see the pages that he stole.' 

Goldberg held out the scraps of paper, noticing that his hands were still shaking and certain flecks of blood had escaped his washing. But it didn't matter. Ten understood. He approved. 

'Can you decode them? What do the marks mean?' 

Ten's sonorous voice began to declaim. 

'I replied: This is nothing but dreaming: 

Let us on by this tremulous light! 

Let us bathe in this crystalline light 

Its Sybillic splendour is beaming 

With Hope and in Beauty tonight; - ' 

The man cast the pages negligently aside. 'Hopeless,' he observed. 'A most inferior poet, though his stories are occasionally quite elegantly macabre... '

'What does it mean then?' 

'It is as I said, Keen was half sick of shadows. It was necessary to break the mirror in order to release himself but you broke him before he could.' 

'But I did the right thing. You said it yourself. I had to kill him...' 

'Oh, he is not dead, John.' 

'What?' 

'He has merely joined the rest.' 

The Icarus was running purely on auto these days. The cybers had all been linked in to the Corsair's Motherdrive so that the two remaining organics would not be disturbed. Goldberg had plotted a course several cycles past but now had forgotten where he originally intended to go. He occupied the fore decks and Forlorn the aft. They had, without exactly stating their designs, split the ship vertically into two territories. Even their feeding hours were altered so that they would never occupy the Canteen at the same time. 

It was over a cycle now since he had last set eyes on his First Officer. 

When Ten insisted on the patrols he had objected but since Forlorn remained invisible whenever he patrolled her territory he began to lose his antipathy to moving around the Corsair. 

From time to time he could hear her stealthy footfalls echoing up the airshafts from other decks but as long as they were not approaching him he was reassured. 

Ten took to going about carrying a large black bird on his shoulder. He never referred to it and when Goldberg mentioned it, always changed the subject. Goldberg didn't like the bird but was gradually becoming accustomed to its constant presence. 

He was trying to learn how to write. It was not something he had needed to do before. 

He had difficulty in holding the writing marker which Ten produced for him. The letters which Ten made with such facility seemed wildly complicated when he attempted to copy them. He was endlessly advised to be patient and persistent. Neither was a quality that had ever been necessary to him in his career before. 

He felt as though he might have given up long ago if he hadn't sensed somewhere buried in himself, a sentiment he wished to express in this particular way. What it was or how he could express it remained solidly hidden. 

'John Golbderg,' he wrote - the letters misshapen and ugly. 'John Swinburne Golbderg.' 

Then the slogans started appearing. Ten was unfazed by them but they unnerved Goldberg who could now read fairly long words. 

He came across the first painted large on the partition wall of the aft Crew Mess Room. The letters were uncertain but more confidently formed than Goldberg's infantile efforts. After many minutes he deciphered their sense. 

'I like a look of Agony Because I know it's true He does not sham Convulsion, Not simulte a Throe -' 

'What does she mean with this agony business?' he asked Ten later. 'Why bring me into this agony business. I'm not in sodding agony.' 

'John, John,' sighed Ten. 'This is not for you. In fact I'm not sure who has written these lines or for whom.' 

'It's Forlorn. Forlorn's trying to scare me! It's Forlorn trying to scare me.'

Goldberg took Ten and his bird with him on patrol after that. 

Two days later, he knelt on the floor writing, shakily, to Ten's dictation. 

'The old order changeth, yielding place to new, 

The gods fulfils themselves in many ways, 

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.' 

'What is it?' he gasped when he had finished. His mouth was dry and his tongue swollen. 'Will it keep her away from me?' 

The three lines had been written on the deckfloor as if they were a fence barricading Forlorn's cabin door. 

'Yes,' said Ten, smiling with amusement. 'It is a form of power. It will keep her within and prevent her from writing any more outside. Now she will have to write inside. 

'Ah,' said Goldberg. 'Ah, good.' 

In the days that followed Ten showed him how to ignore the howling which came from Forlorn's quarters. 

When they broke in they found that her cabin had been covered all over in short, staccato verse, painted on every flat surface.. There was no sign that she'd eaten for many days and the body that hung suspended from the duct tubing was drying and emaciated in the sterile atmosphere. Only the muted hum of the Corsair's engines disturbed the silence as Ten and Goldberg stared in fascination at Forlorn's tomb. Some more purloined pages from the Book mouldered, fragmenting into pale slivers, in an open box on her work table. 

Before Forlorn had hanged herself she'd daubed a set of glyphs on the floor beneath her feet and then when they were dry had strung herself up over them. Soundlessly, her boots trod the air above her final offering: 

Parting is all we know of heaven 

And all we need of hell. 

'Women poets!' spat Ten in disgust. 

'We'll be safe,' said Goldberg, looking up at his mentor trustfully. 'I'll be able to find it now.' 

'Yes, indeed. No more distractions. For now you see the true old times are dead.' 

'Good,' said Goldberg, 'Good. Good.' 

The bird opened its beak and spoke. 

'Nevermore,' it said. 'Nevermore.' 

***** 

Excerpt from Attachment Report Holo-V filed by Maenad Investigation Agency regarding the capture of Corsair privateering vessel ëlcarusí and her Captain and sole occupant, John Goldberg. Copies registered with Imperial and Federal Counter-Piracy Agencies; Achenar and Quenisset and with the Omega Mining Corporation; Quqeve. 

Medical examination of John S Goldberg, captain of Pirate vessel 'Icarus' reveals extensive psychosis with full paranoid delusions - one of the most frequently recorded symptoms of acute byolite toxicity. Cerebral biopsies carried out on the two dead organics confirm that both the suicide and the murder victim were likewise affected. 

A Puma Class carrier, previously the property of the Omega Mining Corporation was found in the hold of the 'Icarus' contains several tonnes of byolite ore hidden in locked cargo holds aft of the holding deck. Puma's crew absent, believed killed in action. Tests of the ambient atmosphere suggest strong likelihood that all on-board OMC personnel had been similarly contaminated prior to the pirate action. 

Under Inter-Galactic salvage laws, the byolite ore is legitimate property of the Maenad Investigation Agency, however, in the interests of safety, the ore will be returned to the Omega Corporation. 

The OMC is hereby requested to send a suitably shielded ship to recover the ore. 

The 'Icarus' remains in MIA possession and is in quarantine awaiting removal of the byolite prior to decontamination.