Bayern König II. Ludwig - Ludwig II of Bavaria the Swan King

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Ruler of the World by J. T.

McIntosh

CHAPTER ONE

Spacemen are flabby. They spend most of their lives in nogee or mere token gravity, there is little to do in space, and there's always plenty of good food and drink or they wouldn't have signed on.

Flabbier than any of the crew with her was the freighter Elegant Girl, invariably known with immeasurably greater accuracy as the Dirty Cow. She had been a good ship once and, within her limitations was still a reliable ship. But you couldn't run the best of ships forever without a broom or a woman on board, never fix anything but the engines, and expect her to smell of violets. The owners, Astrogo, didn't expect the DirtyCow to smell of violets. They had no intention of ever coming nearer to her than the bank.

The bunk cabin had once been luxurious in its way. In low gravities, three-tiered bunks are not at all inconvenient; you can jump into the top one without effort and falling out of it doesn't necessarily wake you up. There had been tables and lockers and wardrobes and individual scanners and scores of other amenities for the men who had to spend weeks at a time in space.

The doors of the lockers and cabinets that still had doors swung crookedly on torn hinges; the tables were hideously scarred, and the gee units underneath, which had once secured things placed on top, had been kicked and bashed to improve their performance, with the opposite result; only two or three of the scanners still purveyed cracked music, only one a passable picture. And over everything lay the thick crust of assorted grime from a hundred planets.

Six of the crew of the Dirty Cowthere were only ten altogether, counting the three officerswere gathered around the fixed table in the center, each with a bare toe stuck into a deckring. They wore soiled pants, shorts, T-shirts, but mostly just shorts. They were a hairy lot, bearded and unshorn. Although they washed themselves occasionally, itches and body vermin being things even spacemen wouldn't encourage, their fastidiousness did not extend to wearing clean clothes.

The six spoke quietly, though no one even inside the door could have heard a word they said, far less anybody outside. Presently, having reached a decision, they turned to look up at the third-tier bunk where the seventh crewman, having given up trying to coax entertainment from his battered scanner, was reading a tattered book.

"Are you with us?" asked Weir, the hairiest of the six. The man in the bunk didn't hear him. "Are you with us?" Weir said more loudly, but still with furtive restraint, as if trying to shout in a whisper. The man in the bunk looked down. "In what?"

"Can it, Burrell, don't play the fool," said Collina irritably. "You know all about it. You said you were fed up hearing about it. Well, now we've made up our minds without you."

Ram Burrell rolled out of his bunk and with an experienced shove reached the floor, where he expertly grasped a deckring between two toes. Unlike the rest of them, he was naked. Although his stocky body, above average height but not much above, was lightly fuzzed, he was less hairy than any of the rest of them. And he was cleanshaven.

On the Dirty Cow a certain degree of personal uncleanliness was a matter of pride. Nobody got filthy enough to offend the sensitivities of the others, although sensitivity was a rare quality on the ship. Burrell, a hard, rough man, not only kept himself clean but ensured that his immediate surroundings were immaculate too. He reacted savagely when any crewman borrowed his sheets, blankets, or towels. The other six strongly resented this, though they were not precisely sure why.

"You've made up your minds about what?" he said. His avoidance of repetitive obscenity set him apart as much as his cleanliness. He didn't mind swearing, but when he did so it was for emphasis, and there could be no emphasis when every second word was the same. He was fortyish and, in clothes appeared overweight. When he was naked, however, it became clear that all his bulk was accounted for by bone and muscle, not always in the most aesthetic places.

"We're going to jump ship," said Weir, the usual spokesman. Collina, the other crewman with a lot to say, seldom achieved even the appearance of being constructive. Weir did. "Jumping ship isn't mutiny. The thing is, we do it together. The law won't be called in: the captain will have to find us and make us a better offer. It's not so easy to get a crew for the DirtyCow."

Burrell nodded. "Fair enough. But why all the conspiracy now? You can't jump ship before Marsay, and it's nine weeks to Marsay"

"We're jumping ship at bloody Paradiso," said Collina. "Can't you get that through your thick skull?"

Burrell looked at him pityingly. "You can't jump ship at Paradiso. I already told you."

"You haven't been there any more than we have. For God's sake stop acting like"

"Listen," said Burrell patiently, fixing the others with his eyes: the waverers Sneddon and Burks, the thinker Maddox, and the man who couldn't think at all, Johnson. "Paradiso isn't a planet, it's a space station, an artificial world, built and ran by Starways Inc., and it's run for millionaires. There's nothing for us there"

"There's no law on Paradiso," Weir broke in. "For us, that can't be bad."

"For us, that can't be worse. There's no law for the rich. There's too much law for the poor. And that's us."

"Some say you're not so poor," Maddox murmured pensively. Burrell shrugged and gazed contemptuously around him.

For no apparent reason, something snapped in Collina.

It was impossible for Collina to argue without eventually exploding into violence. They all knew that, but what made them particularly wary of him was that there was no telling when he would become violentoften when the argument appeared to be dying out.

Perhaps it was the shrug that annoyed him. Anyway, he launched himself homicidally at Burrell, which was not a smart thing to do. There are dangers in nogee. A fall can't hurt you, even in a big ship that has mass enough to give her some sort of gravity. You fall all right, but air resistance prevents you from working up speed.

Propel yourself in nogee, however, as Collina had just done with a foot against the fixed table, and you so completely overcome air resistance that you resemble a runaway train. Anything in your way is doomed. And Burrell, naked, anchored, in a deckring, was in Collina's way. A runaway train cannot be stopped. But where the rails turn, it has to turn. If Burrell had tried to stop Collina dead he would have damaged himself considerably. Instead, he pulled himself to one side, released his toehold (or he'd have had two broken toes), and pushed Collina's shoulder. The reaction sent Burrell flying back against a steel wall, but he took the impact on his buttocks; his landing was nothing to the impact with which Collina struck the adjacent wall with his head.

Nobody went near him. He was out but probably not dead.

"I was telling you," continued Burrell, joining the group at the table,

"you can't jump ship at Paradise Marsay, sure. I'll jump ship with you at Marsay if you like. Only whatever the offer, I'm not coming back. I've had enough of the Dirty Cow."

"Stick to Paradiso," said Weir doggedly. "Why not Paradiso?" Burrell sighed. "Because there's no place to hide, that's why. Paradiso's a great big hotel in space. Everybody there is either a master or a servant. And the so-called servants, the Starways staff, get paid about ten times as much as us. So in Paradiso, assuming you get past the docks, which is a big assumption, you would get spotted in no time unless either you're getting paid twenty a day or you're paying two hundred a day."