At least that was most people thought. Boaz wasn’t so sure. He believed that there was such a thing as the soul, and that it was not spatially limited. Perhaps it followed along with the identical memory. Just the same, he did not like the death cult. The clone’s memory of sex death caused it to seek the same experience over again. It was a vicious circle of perversion.
Boaz himself had no clone body. He would have welcomed death if it could have helped him. But it could not help him. It would still leave the past, where his agony lay.
He slept, still slumped in the armchair. After ten hours he awoke to find the merchant’s trucks arriving. Even before he roused himself his ship robots had put out a derrick and were clambering down the side of the hull. He followed, and watched them hoist the crates into the hold.
He opened the last crate. Inside were Boems, from a unique planet where crystalline growths proliferated to a fantastic degree. Boems were simply the most advanced form of this growth. Whether they were simply natural crystals with a better than adp complexity or evolved living forms, sentient but non-motile, had never been established. One could converse with them, using the right kind of modem, but the responses could equally be a processing of the inquirer’s own information as genuine.
Whatever the truth, they made useful control systems. Put a Boem in a cybernetic device and it became almost a person – hence the attraction for the toy industry, even for those cerebrally scrambled. Manufactured adp, on the other hand, lacked spontaneity.
Boaz had no way of knowing whether those were in fact scrambled, as the merchant had promised, but it was far too late for him to be able to reconsider the contract. He would have to deliver the cargo before attending to any quest of his own. Such was the law.
He put his odour to the delivery note. The trucks rolled away, the robots climbed back inside, the derrick withdrew. Captain Boaz mounted the tread-rail and took himself to the flight cabin. The first of the fuel sticks was sparked and began to deliver its energy. Slowly, the cargo carrier rose through the lemon-colored sky.
2
Once Boaz was among the blazing lights that were stars and the curtains of splendour that were stretches of dust and gas, there was nothing to distract him. As his ship sped through the galactic realm he had little to do but sit, and as he sat he brooded, and when he brooded the past could not help but well up. Onplanet he could always direct his attention elsewhere. But here there was only the ship and the void.
The faint drone of the ship engine was a constant background. His attention, even when resisting at first, found itself flicking from one to another of the images that bubbled up to claim it.
Memory took over.
Captain Joachim Boaz had not always borne that name. His original name had been a single word, a curse, a nickname, a word he would not bother to articulate now; it did not seem like him any more. Born in the warrens of Corsair, he had never known a father and saw little of his mother. From the age of ten he had been alone, trying to join one of the conduit gangs, as the packs of juveniles who terrorized the warrens were called.
But Boaz was ill-fated from birth. He was born deformed, his spine twisted, his limbs warped, unable to walk but only to hump himself along with a stout stick he held in both hands, and which was also his defence against the kicks and blows he received from young and old alike. He never was accepted by any gang, though he ran with any that would tolerate him, able to get up a fair speed as he lolloped along with his stick.
Unable to share in the thievery and robbery by which the conduit gangs survived, he spent much of his time begging at the spaceport. By the time he was fifteen he had conceived an ambition: he wanted to be a shipkeeper. Those straight-backed, steady-eyed men, owners of their own ships, able to go anywhere, were heroes to him as they strode about the spaceground. They were less liable to kick him aside with a well-shod boot than were space passengers, mechanics or even company crewmen; more inclined to give him a coin instead. Dimly Boaz guessed that there was more to the universe than Corsair’s brutish, pitiless society. When he saw a ship soar up into the blue (Corsair had a blue sky) he thought of escape.
When he was sixteen, it happened. Boaz came humping out of the conduit onto a shadowed corner of the spaceground. Half a dozen Slashers, the conduit gang he avoided most, were chasing him, shouting his name at him, the name he hated, the name that described what he was.
He might even have got away from them had not a pylon been in his way. With his mode of locomotion he could not change direction easily at speed. It gave one of them a chance to head him off. His stick was kicked from under him and went skittering away. He scrabbled after it, but they had him now. They put a prong on him to hear him scream.
He only felt one jolt. Then a change came over the scene. The Slashers paused, their yells cut short. The prong was suspended in midair. Boaz raised his eyes as he lay on the floor of the spaceground. He saw a pair of bare feet, above them bare ankles and legs bare up to the mid-thigh. Then the hem of a chiton, a toga-like garment that draped loosely from the shoulders.
It was a garment worn by professional people who did not have to work much. The young Boaz peered up over his humped, twisted shoulder. Above the white fabric of the chiton he saw blue eyes gazing from a clean-shaven face with hair cut neatly across the forehead.
The stranger must have stepped from behind the pylon. The Slashers could have dealt with him easily, but they seemed too surprised to act for the moment. The conduit gangs had a tacit agreement with the port managers: they did not molest off-world visitors on the spaceground itself. Yet that did not seem to be all that was restraining them. There was something in the unflinching look of the newcomer that was overpowering.
He made a sweeping gesture with his arm. ‘Be off with you.’
They did not move at once but after a few moments, with surly glances, they made their way back to the conduit. The stranger retrieved Boaz’s stick and handed it to him. Boaz planted its end on the floor and hauled himself up it until he was as nearly upright as he could be. He came not far above the stranger’s waist.
‘Thank you, sir. If you could spare a small coin, sir…’
The man in the chiton ignored his automatically replayed spiel. He was looking Boaz over with a professional eye.
‘Were you born in that condition, young man?’
Nervously Boaz took one hand off his stick to clutch his ragged tunic protectively to him, bunching it up at his throat. ‘Yes, sir,’ he whispered.
‘Have you ever seen a doctor?’
‘A doctor, sir?’
Boaz scarcely knew what a doctor was. Sickness on Corsair was as rare as congenital disorder; natural selection had bred it out.
‘A doctor is someone who mends a body that has gone wrong.’ The man spoke patiently, at once understanding the extent of Boaz’s ignorance.
‘No, sir.’ Boaz held out his hand but then, perceiving that he was to be given nothing, made as if to shuffle off.
‘Wait,’ the man said. ‘I wish to talk to you. Follow me.’
Wonderingly Boaz obeyed. He felt peculiar and out of place as the man escorted him into one of the hotels lining the spaceground. Soon he found himself in a well-lit, well-furnished room. It was all strange to him; he was not used to furnished interiors.
The man spoke, but not to Boaz. A minute later a servitor appeared and delivered a covered tray. Inside it was an oval plate of spiced food. The man invited Boaz to eat.
The food was delicious, but scant in quantity. Boaz did not guess that this was because his host, seeing his half-starved features, did not wish to overburden his stomach. With it was a fizzy drink, the sort Boaz liked and bought often. He gulped it greedily.