Fritz Leiber: Ship of Shadows

Also, although the platinum-haired girl had interested him most of the two strange ones, something began to bother him about the girl who’d been playing bartender, the one with golden hair like Suzy’s, but much slimmer and paler—he had the feeling he’d seen her before. And something about her had frightened him.

When he reached the central gangways, he was tempted to go to Doc’s office before the Bridge. But he wanted to be able to relax at Doc’s and take as much time as needed, knowing all errands were done.

Reluctantly he entered the windy violet gangway and dove at a fore angle for the first empty space on the central gang-line, so that his palms were only burned a little before he had firm hold of it and was being sped fore at about the same speed as the wind. Keeper was a miser, not to buy him handgloves, let alone footgloves!—but he had to pay sharp attention to passing the shroud-slung roller bearings that kept the thick, moving line centered in the big corridor. It was an easy trick to catch hold of the line ahead of the bearing and then get one’s other hand out of the way, but it demanded watchfulness.

There were few figures traveling on the line and fewer still being blown along the corridor. He overtook a doubled up one tumbling over and over and crying out in an old cracked voice, “Jacob’s Ladder, Tree of Life, Marriage Lines…”

He passed the squeeze in the gangway marking the division between the Third and Second Holds without being stopped by the guard there and then he almost missed the big blue corridor leading aloft. Again he slightly burned his palms making the transfer from one moving gang-line to another. His fretfulness increased.

“Sspar, you isssiot—!” Kim began.

“Ssh!—we’re in officers’ territory,” Spar cut him off, glad to have that excuse for once more putting down the impudent cat. And true enough, the blue spaces of Windrush always did fill him with awe and dread.

Almost too soon to suit him, he found himself swinging from the gang-line to a stationary monkey jungle of tubular metal just below the deck of the Bridge. He worked his way to the aloft-most bars and floated there, waiting to be spoken to.

Much metal, in many strange shapes, gleamed in the Bridge, and there were irregularly pulsing rainbow surfaces, the closest of which sometimes seemed ranks of files of tiny lights going on and off—red, green, all colors. Aloft of everything was an endless velvet-black expanse very faintly blotched by churning, milky glintings.

Among the metal objects and the rainbows floated figures all clad in the midnight blue of officers. They sometimes gestured to each other, but never spoke a word. To Spar, each of their movements was freighted with profound significance. These were the gods of Windrush, who guided everything, if there were gods at all. He felt reduced in importance to a mouse, which would be chased off chittering if it once broke silence.

After a particularly tense flurry of gestures, there came a brief distant roar and a familiar creaking and crackling. Spar was amazed, yet at the same time realized he should have known that the Captain, the Navigator, and the rest were responsible for the familiar diurnal phenomena.

It also marked Loafday noon. Spar began to fret. His errands were taking too long. He began to lift his hand tentatively toward each passing figure in midnight blue. None took the least note of him.

Finally he whispered, “Kim—?”

The cat did not reply. He could hear a purring that might be a snore. He gently shook the cat. “Kim, let’s talk.”

“Shshut offf! I ssleep! Ssh!” Kim resettled himself and his claws and recommenced his purring snore—whether natural or feigned, Spar could not tell. He felt very despondent.

The lunths crept by. He grew desperate and weary. He must not miss his appointment with Doc! He was nerving himself to move farther aloft and speak, when a pleasant, young voice said, “Hello, grandpa, what’s on your mind?”

Spar realized that he had been raising his hand automatically and that a person as dark-skinned as Crown, but clad in midnight blue, had at last taken notice. He unzipped the note and handed it over. “For the Exec.”

“That’s my department.” A trilled crackle—fingernail slitting the note? A larger crackle—note being opened. A brief wait. Then, “Who’s Keeper?”

“Owner of the Bat Rack, sir. I work there.”

“Bat Rack?”

“A moonbrew mansion. Once called the Happy Torus, I’ve been told. In the Old Days, Wine Mess Three, Doc told me.”

“Hmm. Well, what’s all this mean, gramps? And what’s your name?”

Spar stared miserably at the dark-mottled gray square. “I can’t read, sir. Name’s Spar.”

“Hmm. Seen any… er… supernatural beings in the Bat Rack?”

“Only in my dreams, sir.”

“Mmm. Well, we’ll have a look in. If you recognize me, don’t let on. I’m Ensign Drake, by the way. Who’s your passenger, grandpa?”

“Only my cat, Ensign,” Spar breathed in alarm.

“Well, take the black shaft down.” Spar began to move across the monkey jungle in the direction pointed out by the blue arm-blur.

“And next time remember animals aren’t allowed on the Bridge.”

As Spar traveled below, his warm relief that Ensign Drake had seemed quite human and compassionate was mixed with anxiety as to whether he still had time to visit Doc. He almost missed the shift to the gang-line grinding aft in the dark red main drag. The corpse-light brightening into the false dawn of late afternoon bothered him. Once more he passed the tumbling bent figure, this time croaking, “Trinity, Trellis, Wheat Ear…”

He was fighting down the urge to give up his visit to Doc and pull home to the Bat Rack, when he noticed he had passed the second squeeze and was in Hold Four with the passageway to Doc’s coming up. He dove off, checked himself on a shroud and began the hand-drag to Doc’s office, as far larboard as Crown’s Hole was starboard.

He passed two figures clumsy on the line, their breaths malty in anticipation of Playday. Spar worried that Doc might have closed his office. He smelled soil and greenery again, from the Gardens of Diana.

The hatch was shut, but when Spar pressed the bulb, it unzipped after three honks, and the white-haloed gray-eyed face peered out.

“I’d just about give up on you, Spar.”

“I’m sorry, Doc. I had to—”

“No matter. Come in, come in. Hello, Kim—take a look around if you want.”

Kim crawled out, pushed off from Spar’s chest, and soon was engaged in a typical cat’s tour of inspection.

And there was a great deal to inspect, as even Spar could see. Every shroud in Doc’s office seemed to have objects clipped along its entire length. There were blobs large and small, gleaming and dull, light and dark, translucent and solid. They were silhouetted against a wall of the corpse-light Spar feared, but had no time to think of now. At one end was a band of even brighter light.

“Careful Kim!” Spar called to the cat as he landed against a shroud and began to paw his way from blob to blob.

“He’s all right,” Doc said. “Let’s have a look at you, Spar. Keep your eyes open.”

Doc’s hands held Spar’s head. The gray eyes and leathery face came so close they were one blur.

“Keep them open, I said. Yes, I know you have to blink them, that’s all right. Just as I thought. The lenses are dissolved. You’ve suffered the side-effect which one in ten do who are infected with the Lethean rickettsia.”

“Styx ricks, Doc?”

“That’s right, though the mob’s got hold of the wrong river in the Underworld. But we’ve all had it. We’ve all drunk the water of Lethe. Though sometimes when we grow very old we begin to remember the beginning. Don’t squirm.”