The Ballad of Beta 2 by Samuel R. Delany

Author:Samuel R. Delany
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction, General, Aeronautics & Astronautics, Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9780553203127
Publisher: Bantam Books
Published: 1976-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

VI

So that 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 eyes 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 held 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 de Rimbaud, Voyage Orestes, The Worm Ouroboros. He had read none of them and only heard of 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 out. 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 eye-holes.

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.

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