Enhancing the enjoyment of science fiction stories with electronic media!

Browser Readable E-Books on CD-ROM

A Science Fiction Story

Written by Gary Raab

Read the first chapter of this science fiction story free before purchasing as a browser readable e-book on CD-ROM from Antelope Publishing. Price $9.95

Try as he might, David White found it almost impossible to adjust to the architecture of the Twenty-Seventh Century.

Granted, the buildings were constructed in the weightlessness of outer space, so that there was no need to be overly concerned with the questions of strength and stability that would have been necessary had they been built on the surface of a planet with gravity, and it seemed that there was no shortage of raw materials to work with, so that the vast majority of the buildings were enormous, ballooning out in every direction with a blatant indifference to however much space they might take up (space being, after all, one thing their builders had more than enough of) but the sheer eccentricities of style and lack of coherent, consistent patterns often made David feel that they weren't real buildings at all.

The fact that they were floating freely in space, or in some cases fixed in place by what seemed to be pitifully inadequate cables, stretching off to attachment points which were mere specks of light in the distance, did little to destroy the illusion that the buildings were toys left behind in a jumble after some child had grown weary of playing with them.

Perhaps if David had come from a country that had had enough of its own history to have many different periods of architecture surviving side by side, as was the case in ancient cities in Europe and Asia, he might have found the wide range of styles less disturbing, but he was an American, or at least he had been one back some six hundred years ago, and America, at that time, had been such a relatively new country that its architecture was limited to a few centuries at most of the fads of architects and of the plutocrats who paid them to construct buildings for them, so that he was hardly cosmopolitan enough to appreciate the wide range of styles and approaches to the simple processes of building that were possible to the truly imaginative and eccentricity inclined.

Also, quite possibly, David may have been just a bit homesick. Trapped as he was some six hundred years out of his time, anything he found in this new circumstances that was too different from what he was familiar with tended to fill him with frustration and melancholy.

For these and, other, more important reasons, after his first few weeks in the floating, outer space city of Pirate's Port, David tended to spend as much time as he could aboard the large pirate ship, Innsbruck. He explored its seemingly endless hallways, corridors, vast warehouse-like holds and the more luxurious suites and rooms that copied, loosely and imperfectly, the style of a Georgian English mansion. At other times he shared long, rambling conversations with his girlfriend Zania Dogtooth Ten, his fellow exile (in space if not in time), Sergeant Motormouth McKane, Captain Portsmouth, and various other friends and acquaintances he had made while on the huge pirate ship. Sometimes he'd simply lie on his bed in his own suite, listening on the oddly-styled stereo to various recordings he had acquired of Twenty-Seventh Century music, trying to learn to appreciate them.

If his friends noticed David's growing isolation and introversion, they said nothing about it, at least not to his face. Zania made various polite and gentle, if determined, efforts to get him interested in shopping in the many stores of Pirate's Port, and McKane suggested more than once that a spell of bar-hopping would do the young man a great deal of good. He wasn't quite clear just what sort of good he meant by that, and David shrugged off their suggestions with indifference.

If any of his friends pushed too hard, David found excuses to go elsewhere and then he disappeared for hours, sometimes for days, so that it soon became apparent that any efforts to get David off the ship would simply lead him to cut off what limited human contact he was willing to enjoy.

Therefore, by unspoken agreement his friends eventually gave up and went their separate ways, leaving the young man to solve his own problems in his own way.

Not that David was passing through a major psychological crisis (or so he told himself at any rate), it was simply that he was finding it more and more difficult to adjust to living in outer space, with the earth of his childhood totally destroyed, blown into scattered bits and fragments. Anything that reminded him that the very concept of a solid world beneath his feet was meaningless in this new society in which he found himself caused him a great deal of anxiety and discomfort.

Even David's formerly overwhelming infatuation with the beautiful Zania Dogtooth Ten, a love which had, at first, seemed to give him an anchor in this mad new environment in which he found himself, began to fade slightly, leaving him with an awkward sense of discomfort and embarrassment when he was in her presence. It was as if he had, in some way, done her a great injustice and would, if he allowed their relationship to continue, only bring her greater unhappiness.

Not that he thought it through in so many words, for David was, after all, young and not especially introspective by nature. But he recognized that he was beginning to avoid the young woman on occasion, and found her attempts to line up a new date for their marriage, after the fiasco with Sister Hedda and the Fellowship of Frankfort, to be irritating and frustrating.

Zania herself was not as young as she appeared, and certainly nowhere near as youthful as David, since she had died and had been brought back to life in a younger form, in a Replicated body, some years before David had been Replicated, and so she was mature enough to be fully aware of what was happening. Indeed, she had begun to wonder, for a time, if it might not be better for her to make a clean break with the young man, terminate the engagement, and go on with her life in another direction, but every time she even hinted at such a thing David gave her such a mournful, hang-dog, droopy-eyed, look that she didn't have the heart to go through with it.

Beside, she truly did love the Twentieth-Century man and she was wise enough to realize that he was going through a painful and difficult period of adjusting to his new circumstances, so she bit her lip and tried to be as patient with him as she could.

Motormouth McKane, being a soldier in the centuries-long war that was raging across the solar system, was much older than either David or Zania, having been killed, repeatedly in fact, in battle soon after being brought back to life in a new form, and immediately sent back out to the wars. He had never really been able to mature in the normal sense of the word. His life had been continually cut short at an early age, and while that early age had been stretched out through the decades, he had never grown into a truly mature man, let alone an old one, so he tended to have many of the flaws of adolescence and young adulthood, which was awash with hormones and rampant physiological energies that played havoc with the intellect.

He was wise enough with experience, however, to recognize some of the problems David was going through, and also to realize what was happening between the young couple. However, since he had never, himself, experienced anything more romantic than puppy love and the kinds of bar-oriented relationships which were, perhaps, something more than mere friendships between the sexes and certainly something less than matrimony, he was at a loss as to what to advise.

Not that David would have accepted any such advice anyway. His plunge into isolation and withdrawal left few chinks in his armor, and well-meant advice from his friends was not one of them.

Captain Portsmouth, who looked younger than any of the others and was, in fact, far older, was the one who recognized most clearly what David was going through. While he was a very busy man, having responsibility for the running of the ship Innsbruck, including caring for all of the members of the crew in a physical sense if no other, and taking care of such details of piratical business as arranging the ransoming of the enemy soldiers he had rescued from deep space on his last voyage and having the workmen repair the ship from its various injuries during the voyage and after, he finally stepped in and took a hand in David's problems.

When David had first been taken aboard the Innsbruck, he had been placed in a room that had reminded him very strongly of a Twentieth Century motel room, long and narrow with no windows, a small bathroom at the back and a bed and a small table with what David had later realized to be a stereo system, but little more. Of course at the time the captain had had to assume that David was less than a friend, if not outright hostile.

Later, when the young man had agreed to join the crew, the captain had tried to shift him to a more luxurious suite in the officers' quarters, with several rooms, more advanced communications systems, including the modern equivalent of a television, and possibly a window or two looking out into the depths of space. David had resisted so firmly that Portsmouth had finally given in with a shrug, and simply assured the young man that the offer for better accommodations was open to him whenever he might choose to accept it.

He had assumed that sooner or later David would grow tired of his somewhat austere circumstances and, from curiosity of what sort of quarters might be offered to him if for no other reason, seek to move up to something better, but so far that hadn't happened. David's original, if not entirely comfortable, room was another anchor to which he was clinging in an attempt to maintain some level of stability in his life, and the captain was wise enough to recognize this and to leave him alone with it.

Finally, however, Portsmouth decided that something must be done, so one afternoon when he had managed to find himself a spare hour or two with none of the continual, predictable crises demanding his immediate attention, he made his way down to the narrow, dull hallway in front of David's apartment and knocked firmly on the door with the hilt of his ever-present sword.

Through the thick, heavily insulated walls he could hear music -- or what he assumed was music, though it hardly sounded like it to his way of thinking. Apparently David's ear was sensitive enough to hear the knock on the door, which was hardly as loud as a blinking of eyelids by comparison with the noise within, for in a moment the music suddenly shut off and the door opened to reveal a very bleary, unshaven, not entirely clean, David White peered out dressed in baggy off-white pants and an armless grey T-shirt.

David, for his part, viewed Portsmouth with some misgivings. The captain was dressed, as usual, in what appeared, to David's eyes, to be a poor imitation of a Gilbert-and-Sullivan pirate, with thigh-high leather boots (red today, he noticed), tight, silken black trousers, a heavily frilled white shirt with French sleeves that flared widely at the forearms and then tightened at the wrist, an embroidered black vest, and a red scarf over his curly orange hair.

Like most pirates who had been brought back to life in a new, Replicated form, Portsmouth had made his new body as attractive as possible, on the principle that if one had the choice, why not choose the best. At first to David's eyes the man had looked too young, and too much like a model in an expensive clothing catalog of the Twentieth Century, to take seriously. Fortunately by now David had had enough experience with the superficially charming but tough captain not to be deceived by appearances.

"Ah, friend David," Portsmouth said with a brilliant smile. He rested his sword blade sideways on his shoulder and pushed his way into the room, seeming not to notice the odd bits of clothing strewn all over the furniture and floor, the trays of old food perilously balanced on the chairs and on the table against the wall, and the general aroma of cheese and sausages.

"How goes it, then?" the captain asked, sitting down on the edge of the unmade bed.

"All right I guess," David said cautiously. He closed the door and stood awkwardly, shifting from one bare foot to another.

"Oh, take a seat, take a seat, David White," the captain said with an idle wave of his hand. "No need to stand on ceremony between friends, now, is there? At least when I'm off duty, as it were."

David grimaced slightly and glanced helplessly around the room before hastily lifting a pile of soiled clothing from a nearby chair and dropping it to the floor. He sank carefully into the cushions and gave the captain a suspicious look. "I wouldn't have expected you to come here in the middle of the afternoon, like this," he said carefully. "Nothing's wrong, is it?"

The captain gave him a warm smile, though David had had enough experience with the man to know that his smiles gave little clue as to what he was actually thinking. "Not wrong, precisely, friend David," he said with a shrug. "I just meant to remind you, tonight's the big banquet, and I'll be expecting you to attend."

"I don't know if I'm much good at banquets," David said. "I think I'll just pass on it, this time."

"Ah, but you can't be doing that, now, David White, can you?" the captain told him. "Or perhaps no one has ever bothered to explain to you just what's involved, tonight. Is that the case?"

David looked at him blankly. "I don't think - no, nobody said anything," he stumbled. "At least not anything in particular. Why, is something up?" For the first time in weeks, he seemed to show a flash of interest.

The captain shrugged and brought his booted feet up until he was seated cross-legged, tailor-fashion on the bed.

"Nothing dangerous, at any rate," he said slowly, "or at least not in the sense you might be thinking."

"Oh." David once more slumped and his eyes wandered to his stereo. "Then I don't see why I should have to attend."

"You're not getting the point, David, and that's understandable, seeing as how you're still unfamiliar with our ways here among the pirates." The captain paused and adjusted his scarf slightly by his reflection in the mirror on the opposite wall.

"I think I've told you before, Pirate's Port is run - if anything so anarchical as a society of individualistic pirates, can be said to be run at all - by the Brotherhood. Or perhaps I never even told you that much?" he asked, fixing the young American with a sharp eye.

"I guess I remember hearing something about the Brotherhood, yeah," David said slowly. "It kind of reminds me of the way people used to talk about the Mafia, back where I come from. You know," he said in response to the captain's questioning look. "A bunch of thugs. Organized crime. That kind of stuff."

"Aye, well, I see what you're saying, but I hope you'll not be so foolish as to make such comparisons in public, David," the captain said. "Not that I'd call the Brotherhood criminals, of course, or not any more than any of the pirates here are criminals in a technical sense. They're just the most powerful people in the city, for one reason or another. Some, it's because of their wealth, others it's their connections, with powerful family ties or networks of - well, I suppose you'd be calling them spies, that sort of thing. And with others it's from sheer force of personality, which is something I greatly admire in a person, myself."

He gave David a broad grin. "But anyway, they being who they are, it doesn't do to get on the wrong side of them, and so you must be going to the banquet tonight."

David blinked. "I don't - what does that have to with some old party?" he asked with what was very close to a teenager's petulance.

"You see, David White," the captain said with calm patience, "the party tonight is in honor of the Brotherhood itself, and the leading members of each family will be there. It's something every captain is required to do, after an especially successful trip, throwing such a party, more or less as a form of ... well, shall we say submission? to the power of the Brotherhood. And they'll be expecting to meet with you, you being one of the most famous men in Pirate's Port just at present because of your background and your adventures, if you take my meaning. They would consider it a personal affront if you were not there."

David felt his face blanch for a moment. "I don't- but I'm not much good at- I mean, captain, you know I'm out of my league with that kind of thing," he said desperately.

"My manners are six hundred years out of date, for crying out loud. Every time I go out among people I say or do something stupid. And everybody lets me know it, too," he added bitterly."

Portsmouth gave him a compassionate look. "Is that what you're thinking, David?" he asked in a kindly tone.

"It's the truth!" the young man insisted.

The captain paused for a moment and then he shrugged. "I'm sure you'll find we pirates aren't all that much on manners ourselves, when you become more familiar with us," he said. "Oh, I know I personally prefer a certain elegance of style in my own behavior, and that may have led you to believe that the rest of us feel likewise, but I assure you, David, anyone who would try to insist upon a rigid submission to etiquette for any pirate crew would soon learn better, possibly by means more direct than gentle. If you take my meaning." He gave the young American a smile.

"Yeah, well, that's easy to say, but I still don't like making a fool of myself in front of strangers," David insisted.

"I can't say I have no sympathy for you, David White," the captain said, rising to his feet. "But I'm afraid this party is something you cannot avoid. All of my officers and crew are to be there, and that means you must attend also. I won't willingly offend the Brotherhood. I will provide you with suitable clothing, and I'll send for you at seven. See that you're ready." And with that he strode from the room so quickly that David had no more chance to argue.

Antelope Publishing Electronic Books come on CD-ROM.
Each of our e-books comes in its own attractive jewel case.
Antelope e-books are designed to be viewed on your web browser.
You don't need to be on-line to view these books.
They will contain all the text and graphics you see on the web.
Your CD-ROM book will contain two complete stories, one with music, and one without, for times when you wish a quieter read.
The White Knight in the Pirate Conspiracy is twenty-five chapters long, full of action, romance, and lots of adventure.

Antelope Publishing
Browser Readable E-Books on CD-ROM
The White Knight in the Pirate Conspiracy
By Gary Raab
$9.95 (plus shipping and handling)

Click to purchase The White Knight in the Pirate Conspiracy on CD-ROM.
Click to check out and change the contents of your shopping cart at any time.

Antelope Publishing Science Fiction E-Books

An e-magazine for the family with children's literature, romance, fantasy, mystery and science fiction stories in serial by authors past and present. New postings monthly by Antelope Publishing.

Copyright © 1997 Antelope Publishing. All Rights Reserved.

3733