Barrington Bayley - The Sinners of Erspia

At the far end of the gallery a very tall door slid open with a click . ‘Klystar’ strode through, head rotating rapidly from side to side, bringing each of his eyes to the fore in turn.

Histrina scurried for the stairway. Laedo, on the contrary, stood his ground as the discarded body of Klystar bore down on him.

‘Klystar’ halted. “You should not be here,” he said curtly. “You are not one of the body servitors.”

“ You should not be here!” Laedo shouted at him. “You are committing atrocities! You are murdering children! So much for your ‘superiority’!”

“One might as well listen to the arguments of ants,” ‘Klystar’ retorted, “as to your maundering protests about ‘morality’. Your ‘ethics’ has no objective basis. It is simply a species-survival strategy. Klystar’s intelligence, on the other hand, is aligned with objective reality.”

His voice rose. “To be the instrument of Klystar is high fortune for one such as you. Go, my friend, and become part of Klystar!”

Without warning the Klystar body lashed out with an arm which was surprisingly strong. Laedo was tumbled and tipped into the nearest vat.

The fleshy odour overwhelmed him. The thick yellow fluid closed over his head. He tried to raise himself, only to discover that there was nothing to push up against. The bottom of the vat lay far below the level of the gallery floor. He realized that the six vats were in fact openings of a single larger tank.

He was sinking, but there was no sense of suffocation. He felt no need to breathe. Neither was there complete darkness: a flesh-coloured glow surrounded him. But there was nothing to see apart from vague shadows which might have been faces, bodies, or anything. What there was, quite distinctly, was flickering presences. Helsey Fong was somewhere nearby, feebly protesting. The process of absorption into the fluid was slow. Individuals briefly and sketchily reconstituted themselves. The pus-like yellow muck was a turmoil of bewildered children—they were mostly children—being mixed together as if in some cooking process.

Laedo made swimming motions in an attempt to reach the surface. It was impossible. The more he struggled, the more the custard of melted life resisted. At length he despaired, and was on the point of letting himself sink to the bottom of the tank, when he felt a hand seize his. A slender hand, without a great deal of strength, but with its aid he was able to break free, pushing upward and lifting his head clear.

To his astonishment he had not been more than a foot or two below the surface all the time. The fluid was somehow able to restrain its victims. But now it let him go. It had no wetness, no ability to cling. Instead it poured from him as he gripped the side of the tank and clambered over it. Not a drop of the flesh-stuff remained on him.

“What happened?” he gasped.

“I hid on the stairs till the monster went,” Histrina said in hushed tones. “Since then I’ve been feeling about in the tank looking for you.”

“Thanks.”

Laedo embraced Histrina in genuine gratitude.

“Where did he go?”

“Through that door at the other end.”

“Let’s get away from here.”

Like scared mice they scuttled to the stairway.

While running back to the cargo ship Laedo told himself that he might now have an advantage. ‘Klystar’

would think him absorbed into the life-vat, his substance unwillingly donated to the formation of Klystar’s next body.

Once inside the ship’s lounge he sat down to think.

Histrina watched him with concern. “What are we going to do?” she asked anxiously.

Laedo didn’t answer. Matters were becoming clear in his mind. He had to do more than simply escape, if indeed that was possible at all. It was his duty to oppose Klystar.

He wondered if his cargo carrier’s defence blaster would be capable of destroying the main palace, or least that part of it containing the vat. He rejected the idea. He would be firing on innocent people, and besides the palace might well be capable of defending itself.

There might be a sneakier way of foiling Klystar.

Sunset came. All the Erspia worlds had a twenty-eight hour day, but the moon’s orbit gave it a much briefer period. Laedo had slept for only a few hours when the artificial sun came up again. He left Histrina fast asleep, and armed with a flashlight, made his way to the Excelsior.

He paused, sensing the derelict old starliner all around him. Hull integrity had held and the ship had done its settling long ago. It was eerie to think what it must have been like when in service, thronging with people. Especially weird was to contemplate their fright and bewilderment when the liner was seized by Klystar. As before, Laedo passed through a ballroom, a couple of salons, and descended to the cargo hold where Garo’s stasis cabinet rested.

It was many years since he had travelled on a starliner. He was trying to recall the likely layout. Where would the engineering section be?

Once through the other end of the cargo hold all lights were out. Garo was conserving power, lighting only that part of the ship he planned to walk through. Laedo switched on his flashlight. He was heading towards the stern of the ship, where he reckoned the crude mechanics of drive and power would be located. He got early confirmation. The elegance of the passenger section was gone. His flashlight flickered on bare metal and plastic, seams and rivets. Only the crew would come here.

In a ship of this size there must surely be facilities for effecting repairs: a machine shop, in other words. It perplexed him that he had not thought of this before. Another result of his mental confusion, perhaps, though very likely everything in the machine shop was wrecked.

In due course Laedo discovered the engine room. The huge windings of the inertial drive which had once propelled the Excelsior at several hundred times the velocity of light were a slumped mass of fused and molten metal.

Several doors led from the engine room. Through one of these Laedo found the machine shop. As anticipated, Klystar had trashed this also. Lathes, mills and forming machines were smashed, knocked over, melted, and even the benches on which they had stood mangled into useless shapes. Laedo passed along two lines of machines, training his flashlight on each machine in turn. When he reached the far extent of the room a faint smile came to his lips. Klystar had not been entirely thorough. Probably he had done no more than aim some type of destructive device from the doorway, because a forming machine at the end of the further row had been torn from its mooring bolts and tumbled to the floor, but remained in one piece.

Laedo knelt to examine it. The data processing unit was smashed, so the machine would have to be set up by hand. Laedo was no kind of engineer, but if he could lug the machine back to his cargo ship, power it up and study it for a while, then maybe he could make the part he needed from some piece of metal left lying around.

Maybe.

But that wasn’t his immediate concern. In the ruined engine section should be something else useful.

Laedo used his nose and followed dead, sterile smells years old. In a darkened, blackened corridor he found what he wanted, still seeping with infinite slowness from ruptured tanks: a thick sludge of oil, toxic metals, and exotic compounds. Another search produced a bucket flung in a corner a century and a half earlier. Laedo scooped up a quantity of the sludge and carried it out of the Excelsior .

Treading the yellow moss, he climbed up the declivity until the roofs of the pleasure palaces came in sight.