“Excuse me, your Honor!” It was Captain Alva’s voice, desperate. “I’ve just received a message from the communications gate. Static has blanketed our connection with Delta-6. Faint messages are coming through asking for assistance. They seem to have — ”
A sound like an explosion, only it didn’t stop.
Joneny jumped. At first he thought the people in the court had rioted. Then he realized it was raging static. He punched the label again; the static stopped. Confused, with long rollings of terror in him, he stepped back from the trial index, pulling his thoughts to the present. The auditorium before him was no longer empty.
He started. Nearly a quarter of the seats were filled with azure-skinned youngsters, boys, all of whom had been paying silent attention to the record of the trial. As Joneny watched, openmouthed, several of the audience, now that the recording was over, floated from the seats and listed to one side or the other. Joneny looked around for his guide and found him at last, stretched out across the upper surface of the gell.
“What — what are they?” Joneny motioned again to the figures in the auditorium.
The boy stuck his head in and said, “I told you. They’re the rest of me…the Destroyer’s Children.”
“Then what are you?”
The boy slipped the rest of the way into the gell, shrugged, and when Joneny glanced at the auditorium again, it was empty.
“Didn’t you say you wanted to go to the Death’s Head?”
Joneny shook his head, not in negation but to clear it. He was still trying to figure out why the ending of the last trial record was so sudden, as well as make some judgment on the situation between the One-Eyes and the Norm. And there was no explanation for these green-eyed youngsters who seemed so capable of navigating in a vacuum.
“You said you wanted to see it.”
“Huh?” Nothing would resolve. “Oh, yes. I guess so.”
“You just follow me,” the boy said; then he added in what seemed a consoling tone, “You’ll see.”
The boy popped out of the bubble. Nervously Joneny propelled the gell after him.
Chapter Six
So this was what the ballad meant by “Death’s Head hill.”
The gell, with Joneny inside, had just entered a room larger than the auditorium. The walls curved toward a vaulted peak. The blue glow was replaced by crimson. The floor sloped upward; the ceiling came down and joined in an immense funnel that was stopped by a skull-shaped grate. The wide door at the bottom where the mouth would be increased the resemblance. Joneny stood at the bottom of the curved metal slope and stared for a full minute.
At last his gaze fell away from the heights and he caught sight of an alcove at the bottom. At the back of the alcove was a door. His sandals clicking on the plates, he started toward it. A moment later he pushed open the door and blinked as the light went again to blue. It was a living apartment; it had not been set up for free fall, which reigned in this part of the ship now. Books had drifted from shelves and settled like barnacles on the walls. A lamp had done the same. As Joneny stepped in, the bulb, disturbed after aeons, blinked on and went out again. Who had lived here? Joneny wondered.
His eyes roamed the books: Moby-Dick; Les Illuminations; Voyage, Orestes; The Worm Ouroboros. He had read none of them and had heard of only one.
Across the room was another door. He gloved the gell again and pulled it open. One instant he was terrified that the black thing billowing out was alive. But it was only cloth. Surprise still held, but he reached out and took the suit of clothing from the closet and spread it. There was something on the shoulder, and when he pushed back the black folds, he saw it was a rope — a rope had been coiled about one shoulder like an emblem.
Without bellying, the cloth waved and floated, and a part of the suit he hadn’t seen rose into sight from behind the collar. It was a black hood that would mask the entire face save two ominous eyeholes.
Joneny frowned. He put the suit back in the closet and shut the door. One sleeve caught outside and flapped slowly in the windless space like a truncated arm. Again he looked at the books quivering among the shelves.
One was large, black, and familiar. It was the same sort of book that Captain Hank Brandt had kept his log in. Joneny pulled it to him and opened the silvered pages. It was no diary. The entries were statistically terse. On the opening page the epigraph:
Lord, what do I here…
Then:
Executed today at 2:00 P.M….name and date. Executed this morning at 6:30…name and date. Executed this afternoon…
The book was only half filled. Joneny turned to the final entry: …this evening at 11:45, One-Eyed Jackson-O-E-5611.
The words that started in his mind were also sounding inside the gell. He turned to listen to the boy singing to an odd, bare melody:
“Another man stood on Death’s Head hill,
His eyes were masked, his hands were still.
Over his shoulder he carried a rope,
And he stood stock quiet on Death’s Head slope.”
Joneny let the book float away, went to the door of the executioner’s apartment, and looked toward the Death’s Head.
The Destroyer’s Children, several hundred of them now, all standing over the floor that sloped toward the skull, turned and looked at him. Their lean bodies cast thin shadows in the crimson vault.
Joneny turned back again. The boy was outside the bubble now. The words What are you? came into his mind again, but before he said them, the boy shrugged again. Joneny thought about this for three whole seconds before he asked, “You can read my mind, can’t you?”
The boy nodded.
“Is that why you speak so well?”
The boy nodded again.
“And you say you don’t know what you are,” said Joneny trying to control both voice and thoughts.
A third time the boy nodded.
“Why don’t we try to find out?” He motioned for the boy, who came forward and stepped (pop) into the bubble. “Let’s go back to my ship, all right?”
“All right,” the boy said.
They made their way from the Death’s Head, along the blue corridor, through the courthouse, and out into the hollow wound of the starship in which Joneny’s cruiser hung against the girders.
The gell plunged through the open space toward the silver oblong. A few yards from the door, Joneny slowed. “I want you to stay outside the ship until I call you in.”
“Okay.”
Joneny moved the gell forward, and the boy popped out the back wall. The selector field passed the gell and Joneny felt gravity strike him again. He collapsed the bubble around him and kicked it into the corner like a pile of cellophane. Then he looked out the door again. In the light from his cruiser, some twenty feet away, the boy waved at him. Joneny waved back and went to the controls.
Once more he glanced at the boy before he jammed the ship into time stasis. Again he went to the door and looked out. Nothing in that blackness should be able to move now, reflected Joneny, for, relatively speaking, everything outside the ship was caught in time, though one could also say that it was Joneny’s cruiser that was caught.
“You can come in now,” he said. Joneny was expecting one of two things to happen. Either the boy would stay put, suspended and immobile. Or he would come drifting in through the door: Joneny rather hoped for the latter. It would correlate with the strange flickering he had seen before on the Sigma-9 that also ignored time stasis. It would be at least a stab in the definition of just what the boy’s lack of humanity was, and his ignorance (in the sense of ignoring) of time would make his disregard of space less strange.