Free Rhapsody in Black by Brian Stableford

here. Go, at once.’
    â€˜Where?’ I asked him. ‘Where do I go?’
    â€˜Anywhere,’ said the priest. ‘There is nothing for you here. The people will not see you. There is nothing for you here. You must go.’
    â€˜I want something to eat,’ I said. ‘Some clean clothes.’
    â€˜No one will give you anything,’ he said.
    â€˜Suppose I take it?’ I said, feeling an edge of real hatred creeping into my voice.
    â€˜We will not see you,’ said the priest, and promptly looked straight ahead again. He took up his recitation again. I glanced back at the priest who had discovered me. He was studiously looking elsewhere, and while I stared at him he assumed the air of one going about his proper business and moved away, quietly and respectfully.
    Deliberately, I shone the beam into the eyes of the speaking priest. He did not blink. I moved closer, making the beam more intense and more direct. It must have hurt him, but he did not show by the slightest sign that anything was happening. Suddenly, I had become the invisible man.
    I went back into the corridor, and began opening the other doors, searching for food and water and clothing. I found water, and I found a thick overall which enabled me to replace my filthy trousers.
    I washed my hands slowly and carefully, realising for the first time that they were badly blistered. I am inordinately sensitive about my hands—a pilot has to have good hands to handle a ship well—and the blisters brought home the fact that I had plunged neck-deep into bad trouble. I paused to wonder what was wrong with me, sure that I would never have acted this way in the old days. But that soon passed, and I began to wonder once again what I was going to do next. The weird attitude of the people had caught me completely by surprise. What was the point of being free if nobody would see me? But I knew full well that if I tried to go back to the capital, steal a spacesuit and get back to the Swan , the armed miners would have no difficulty in seeing me and shoving me right back into my cosy cell. And this time they’d be more careful about letting me out.
    When I was good and ready, I went back outside.
    Okay, said the wind, so you’re an ace burglar. You can steal what you like. So what?
    â€˜Somewhere,’ I said, ‘there has to be someone who can tell me where to find whatever it is that’s caused all the trouble.’
    Sure, he agreed. But how are you going to get him to look at you, let alone tell you what he knows?
    I didn’t know.

CHAPTER SIX
    Once upon a time, long before the Javelin ploughed a ditch in the black rock of Lapthorn’s Grave, Lapthorn and I had occasion to set the Fire-Eater down on a world which had pretensions to being a planet of beauty and elegance. The people there thought very highly of themselves and had a generally low opinion of everybody else. As a nut cult, I suppose, they were no less unusual than the worm-like citizens of Rhapsody, but they certainly seemed to have a lot more to be proud of (and conceited about). However, I don’t like cults of any kind, and I probably wouldn’t have liked them any better than I liked the Exclusive Rewardists even if they hadn’t been so consistently nasty to me. They thought that Lapthorn and I were pretty poor specimens, both physically and idealistically, and they lost no opportunity to offer us evidence of our failings.
    In the main square of the port where we made landfall stood a monument which carried a proud boast of their ambitions and their philosophy. The statue was corny enough—a stylised athlete in the classical mould. The ancient Greeks had produced hundreds just as good, but because the cultists had plonked theirs a thousand light-years from ancient Greece they had a much higher opinion of themselves. The inscription on the pedestal was the motto of the cult.
    It read: MEN LIKE GODS
    Lapthorn had studied the statue