He came again to the ship ground. A few dozen ships dotted the flat, three-mile-square expanse. They loomed and seemed to drift on the hazy air. A few were half-heartedly streamlined for a swift getaway, but most ship designers did not consider the small saving in fuel worth the trouble and ungainly shapes abounded.
Evening was coming on. The sun was low and on the sky’s opposite horizon a few stars showed. Overhead was an unusual sight; this system was irregular in its planetary formation, and the planet was actually the binary satellite of a gas giant. It could be seen glowing palely in the effervescent sky, its rings clearly visible.
The ship ground was a raised plateau. From its vantage the landscape and the town were laid out like a map. Captain Boaz paused to look at it. Why was it, he wondered, that on nearly all man-inhabited worlds he had visited he received this same feeling of universe old and in decline? A universe experiencing a soft autumn, wearing out, losing vitality. Could the universe really be approaching its end, when it would dissolve in mind-fire? Or was it only human society that exuded such decay?
He reminded himself that the impression could not be other than subjective: it emanated from its own feelings. Such a belief had arisen before, when in fact mankind had been very young, as he knew from reading the works of philosophers and historians such as Plutarch, Lucretius and Marcus Aurelius, who had lived before there was even a machine civilization. They too had concluded, for reasons that seemed trivial now, that the world was in its dotage, and they, it was evident, had stood on some hill as Boaz did now, and saw the fey melancholy that seemed to invest everything and even to drift down from the stars.
It said something for Captain Boaz’s character that he could muse in so pensive a manner just after having killed one man, barely refraining from killing another. It was not that he was a cruel or heartless man; on the contrary his adherence to colonnade philosophy gave him a strictly ethical outlook. But, in comparison with what he had known, it simply did not seem important. They had come against him, and that was that.
A flowing tread-rail carried him up the ship’s side to the manport. Inside, he went to the engine cabin, where he busied himself with checking out the fuel sticks, measuring their straightness (vital for smooth performance) and sampling their peculiar energy, which alone could send a ship faster than light. Finally he slammed them into the empty induction tubes (on landing there had been less than an inch of stick left).
He went to the main cabin and prepared himself a simple meal of the special foods he ate. He felt at home. The metal, the processors, the adp, the transmitters, enwrapped him. He was inside his ship like a babe inside the womb. No longer did it need to protect him from afar; there was no fear of distance, no narrow control-beam. Its emanations regulated his nervous system, his perceptions, carefully preserved him from harm, and did it all by means of a suffused ambiance of constant signalling that filled the air around him.
His ship; it was his tragedy, and his salvation, and his hope. It reached out its gentle hands and maintained him for as long as he remained within range. It gave him abnormal strength and immunity from many weapons. At ten miles its efficacy began to fade and he would fall ill. At fifteen miles he would die, in a horrible agony that was a repetition of the agony he could remember.
And the ship, just as it could reach out to regulate his ravaged body, could also reach out with its subtle beams to tell him what was happening elsewhere. Boaz settled himself in a low armchair, and without really meaning to, found himself indulging in the random spying he would sometimes resort to as a means of diverting his mind from the broodings that threatened to overwhelm him. His mind seemed to drift, as if in a waking dream, through the streets and buildings of Hondora. The sun was down; the day’s business was over. The town was giving itself over to the pursuits that mainly interested its habitants: the pursuits of aimless pleasure.
The ship’s beams lunged softly, undetectable, through metal, through walls of lithoplaster, paint and HCferric. Boaz perceived the interior of a crowded bar. Nymphgirls danced in the centre of the room, rarely with men, who held back and drank solidly.
His perspective shifted, zoomed in on a booth at the far end. A tough-looking man sat at a narrow table, a tankard in front of him. His face was broad and flat, with a spade jaw, squashed nose and widely separated eyes, as if it had been hit with a mallet. Sharing the table with him was a girl with long red hair, red lips, long cheeks. Her movements were mobile; she gestured and shifted as she talked, quite unlike her stolid partner.
There had been tease-play between them. Boaz saw that they had only met that night, but she was seeking a relationship. He was less enthusiastic, offhanded but not dismissive. Consequently they needled one another.
He looked at her in annoyance. ‘I keep thinking I’ve met you before. I have, haven’t I?’
‘Have you?’
‘Ah, I don’t know.’ He drawled his words, scarcely moved his jaw when he spoke. ‘Maybe it was your sister. You got a sister?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Yah – I guess it was somebody else. There are a million girls like you. I’ve had a hundred, at least.’
She leaned close, looked up at him from under long lashes. Her mouth hung open lasciviously. ‘You ever kill a girl like me?’
‘I’ve killed lots of girls.’
Boaz became sleepy. He dozed. The man and the girl danced, drank, drifted in and out of his awareness. There was a certain savage intensity developing between them. When he came fully awake again they were in a private room, facing one another across the mattressed floor like animals ready to pounce on one another. Both were naked.
Suddenly her eyes hardened. ‘You have killed somebody like me before. I’m Jodie. Remember?’
He looked uncertain, flexing his muscled body in impatience. ‘Jodie? But your face. It’s not the same. Not quite, anyway.’
She looked triumphant. ‘I’m altered. A hormonal imbalance in the tank. Too much thyroid. But I’m Jodie all right – and I remember.’ Her voice became fervid. ‘God, how I remember!’
With a darting movement she bent to her discarded clothing and came up with a coiled tendril of an object. It was a parawhip. Her hair swung about her shoulders as she straightened. Her words came in gasps. ‘I’ve got kinky thinking about it. But this time it’s going to be different. This time, I’m going to kill you!’
The whip sang out to reach for the man’s nerves and incapacitate him for her pleasure. But he was too quick for her. He sidestepped. Then he sprang, caught her wrist and twisted her arm, catching the handle of the whip with his other hand as it fell from her grasp.
‘Sorry, honey, I don’t go for that clone stuff.’ His voice was gruff and hot. ‘There’s only one way I want to stay alive. For you, though—’
His big hand around her throat, he forced her to the floor. Boaz signalled the ship to withdraw from the scene. His voyeurism drew the line at sex murder; he found it distasteful.
The girl had a clone body stashed away somewhere. A transmitter was in her brain, something like the one in Boaz’s ship, but much, much simpler. Moment by moment it fed her experiences into the sleeping clone. When she died the clone would wake up. It would have all her memories, including the memory of dying. Jodie resurrected.
Sex killing had become a fashionable cult among the sated pleasure-seekers of this region, who found through it the acme of a connection long known to psychologists: the connection between sex and death. They said there was no ecstasy to match it, because there was nothing fake about it. The original did die, genuinely, forever. The sense of continuity belonged only to the new, awakened clone.