Crystal Singer (31 page)

Killashandra finished the milsi stalks and regarded the final dish of nut-covered cubes. People were lining up at the catering areas, the first serving themselves with generous trays. So she wasn’t the only hungry one.

“
Here
she is!” Rimbol’s delighted cry startled her. She twisted in the chair and saw the Scartine. Mistra, Jezerey, Borton, and Celee were close behind him. “I told you I saw her at the storm scan. You get hungry or something?” His eyes bright with mischief, Rimbol began to count the empty plates.

“You must have cut a lot of crystal to afford all that,” Jezerey commented. Her eyes were unfriendly.

“Antona’s orders. I didn’t have a convalescence like you lot, so I’m eating for two now.”

“Yes, but you got out into the ranges, and we’re stuck here!” Jezerey was almost savage. Borton shook her arm.

“Cut that, Jez. Killa didn’t do it to spite you, you know.” Borton looked across to Killa, his eyes entreating.

“Yes, you did get out into the ranges,” Mistra said in her soft voice, “and I’d very much appreciate it, Killashandra, if you’d tell us what actually does happen when you cut. I’ve got the awfullest notion that they don’t tell us all, for all they do tell.”

“Here, get rid of the debris”—Rimbol was shoveling dishes and plates together—“and someone order beer and things. Then Killashandra can divulge trade secrets.”

Killashandra was not in a confessional mood, but the mute appeal in Mistra’s brown eyes, the wary concern in Rimbol’s, and Borton’s stiff, blank expression could not be denied by a classmate, no matter what doctrine of self-preservation Lanzecki was preaching. Jezerey would find her own level; that was certain. Rimbol, Mistra, and Borton were a different matter.

Celee returned then with pitchers and beakers. “Look, since singing isn’t my trade, why don’t I just shuttle food for you?” he asked good-naturedly. He winked at Killashandra to emphasize his indifference to the outcome of his adaptation.

Orders were given him, and as he left, complaining that his back would be broken, the others settled at the table and looked expectantly at Killashandra.

“Most of what happens is explained,” Killashandra began, not knowing precisely how to describe the phenomenon.

“Theory is one thing. Where does it differ from practice?” Mistra asked gently.

“She doesn’t say much but she gets to the point,” Rimbol noted while raising his eyes in comic dismay.

Killashandra smiled gratefully at Mistra.

“Those storm simulation flights—the real thing can be worse. I didn’t cut squarely for all the practice I had retuning soured crystal. I suppose your hands get stronger, but don’t be surprised if your first block has a reptilian outline.” She was rewarded with a chuckle from Rimbol, who clowned with an exaggerated wriggle of his torso. “You know you’ve got to be shepherded into the ranges by some experienced Singer? Well, keep one fact perfectly clear: he or she is liable to forget from moment to moment that you are legally supposed to be with him. Mine damned near sliced my leg off. Just keep the tape playing on repeat so he can’t forget it. Talk to him all the time, keep yourself in his sight, especially after he’s just cut crystal . . .”

“Yes, yes, we’ve been told that. But when you find crystal . . .” Jezerey interrupted abruptly.

Killashandra looked at her coolly. “When” the girl said. “It’s if, not when—”

“But you found crystal. Black crystal,” Jezerey began indignantly.

“Shut up, Jez.” Borton pressed his fingers warningly into her shoulder, but she shrugged off his hold.

“The unexpected starts when you cut your own crystal. You tap for the note on the face and then tune the cutter and then . . .” Killashandra was back in the fault, the first black segment, uneven cut line and all, weighing in her palms, dazzling her with its slow change in sunlight from transparency to the black matte of the thermally responsive crystal, losing herself in the memory of that shimmering resonance, feeling the, incredible music in her blood and bones . . .

An insistent tugging on her sleeve finally broke her trance.

“Killa, are you all right? Shall I get Antona? Killa?” Rimbol’s urgent and anxious questions brought her to dazed awareness of her present position. “You’ve been away for—”

“Six minutes, four seconds,” Borton added, tipping his wrist to see the display.

“What?”

“What? she says”—Rimbol turned to the others with a teasing manner—“when she’s been visiting her claim on the sly. Look, friends, no visible means of contact and yet our fair lady— Does it truly take that kind of a hold on you, Killa?” He dropped his antic pose and touched her gently on the arm, his face concerned.

“Well, I didn’t think it could get me sitting here with my friends, but this advice I will freely give you, having just demonstrated. Cut, and pack! If you don’t, you may stand there like I just was and commune with your crystal until the storm breaks over you.”

“Communing with crystal!” Jezerey was impatient, skeptical.

“Well, it might not happen to you.” Killashandra tried to speak mildly, but Jezerey aggravated her. “Got your sled yet?” she asked Rimbol.

“Yes . . .” Rimbol said.

“But we’re not allowed to use them,” Jezerey finished, glaring at Killashandra.

“Which might be just as well, considering your performance on the simulator,” Borton said.

“So crystal singing is really addictive? How fast is the habit formed?” Rimbol was off in a seriocomic vein to lighten the tension that was developing. “Can it be broken? Is it profitable?”

“Yes, fast, no, and yes,” Killashandra responded. “Don’t let me inhibit your enjoyment of your meal.” She rose quickly, keeping Rimbol from rising by a restraining hand on his shoulder. “See you tonight here?”

She hardly waited for his answer, for she had seen a figure entering the Commons at the far end, moving with Lanzecki’s unmistakable stride. She walked to intercept him.

He was Guild Master, she realized, as he scanned the faces in the lounge. He barely paused as she reached him.

“I’d like that assignment.”

“I thought you would.”

No more than that and they had passed each other, he for the catering area and she for the lifts.

CHAPTER 11

I
t was a relief to be back in her quarters. Somehow the absurdity of the bizarre, triatmospheric wall restored to her a sense of the absurd. Her attempt to verbalize her experience of crystal cutting to her friends and its aftermath disturbed her. How could memory, even of such an ecstatic moment, dominate mind and body so? She had broken that first communion with the crystal block by packing it. Or had she? And whom could she ask? Was addiction why it was so easy for a Singer to lose the data retrieval function of the mind?

Had she hesitated over Lanzecki’s offer because she actually didn’t want to be far from the ranges? She remembered then the longing in Borella’s voice to return to the ranges when her wound had healed. On the other hand, Borella could now not wait to get off the planet.

The ambivalence, Killashandra decided, could be explained. Oddly enough, it was analogous to having the starring role in a large company. The applause could be the crystal singing in your hand, fresh from the vein, stimulating, ecstatic. The same emotional high every time you cut, until body and mind were exhausted by the clamor, the concentration. The thrall of crystal confounded by the urgent need of rest and relief.

She had seated herself by the computer keyboard, motivated to record some of her reflections. The automatic time display winked the change of hour. Even thinking about crystal took enormous hunks of time. She’d been back in her room more than two hours.

Briskly sitting upright, she keyed for the original entry she had made and listened dispassionately to her voice rehearsing the few facts she had entered. Then she tapped the record tab.

“I found an abandoned black crystal vein and cut with success. The trick with crystal is to pack it away before the song gets to you in the sun. I lost my sled trying to save old Moksoon. A waste of a good sled. Lanzecki is generous, and I shall be installing the five interlocking segments I cut in the Trundimoux System. That way I avoid Passover storms which are expected to be unusually violent.”

She played back the terse synopsis of her last two weeks. Would the bones of experience remind her of the degree and emotional heights at some later time? She sniggered at her own pretentiousness. Well, she never had considered herself any sort of a playwright

As she leaned back in the console chair, she became aware of rumbling in her belly.

“Not again!”

To deny the stimulus of hunger, she determinedly dialed a furniture catalog though she had nothing to put on tables or shelves since she had hung her lute on the wall. She thought of playing the instrument which she hadn’t done in a long time, but the B string broke the moment she turned the pin. Very carefully, she replaced the lute. Then, clenching her teeth, she made for the caterer in angry strides to assuage her unacceptable appetite.

She was dialing vigorously when the communit buzzed.

“Lanzecki here.”

“Are you linked to my catering dial?”

“It is not coincidence. Guild Masters are allowed to eat when their daily duties permit. May I join you?”

“Yes, of course.” She sounded as genuinely welcoming as she could after her facetious greeting.

Lanzecki was, she supposed, as much a victim to pre-Passover appetite as anyone else. Nor did she suppose him to be exploiting her by conveniently dispatching her off-world. Or . . . taking the cup of protein broth she had dialed as Lanzecki’s call came through, she went to the console and checked with Marketing. The display confirmed that the Trundimoux order for a five-place communications system utilizing black-crystal components had been received five days before. The order was priority rated by the FSP sector chief. She returned to the caterer and dialed enticing food for a tired, hungry man.

And it was Lanzecki the man who entered her apartments as she was vainly trying to squeeze plates, platters, and pitchers onto the limited surface of her table. She really ought to have got in more furniture.

“I started,” she said, waving her soup. “I didn’t think you’d mind.” She handed him a steaming cup.

“Nor do I.” As he smiled, the tension lines around his eyes and mouth eased.

“I had a morning snack with Antona after hunger overcame me during the storm scan,” she said as he seated himself, stretching out his legs.

“She undoubtedly reassured you that we’re all eating heartily at this moment.”

“She ate a lot, too.”

Lanzecki laughed. “Don’t worry. You’ll have no appetite during Passover.”

“But I won’t be here.”

“The instinct operates independently of your physical whereabouts. Especially, I regret to inform you, when your transition was so recent.”

“So long as I’m not gorging like this while I’m installing the crystals.” Some planets, particularly new ones like the Trundimoux system with limited food supplies, might consider a hearty appetite unbecoming.

“No, more likely you’ll be sleeping it all off.” He finished his soup and seemed more interested in picking out his next item. “Tomorrow, Trag will instruct you in installation procedures. We had a secondary communication from the Trundimoux giving us the disposition of the five units. I understand that the kindly call them Trundies; the informed style them the Moux.”

“The what?” Killashandra demanded on a laugh, for she couldn’t see herself using either nickname.

”Two crystals will be installed on mobile mining stations. Trundimoux has three asteroid belts. That’s how they can afford black crystal.” Lanzecki snorted. “They’ve fortunes in ore whirling about, waiting to be grappled. The third unit is to be on the one habitable planet and one each on the large satellites of the gas and the ice planets. Trundimoux mining operations have been seriously hampered by lack of real-time communications, so they mortgaged half a belt and, I expect, will discharge that indebtedness in short order. Originally, the system was exploited merely for the asteroid ores, with several multi-hulks hauling the metal to the nearest manufacturing system—Balisdel, I think it is. The Balisdelians got greedy, Trundimoux miners rebelled, settled the better planet and one of the outer moons. In less than seventy-five years, they’re a going concern.”

“With money enough for black-crystal communications.”

“They’d already a linkage with Balisdel and two other systems, but this will be their own internal link. Yarran beer?” Lanzecki rose to dial the order.

Killashandra laughed. “Who drank Yarran beer before Rimbol got here? Besides you.”

“The discovery was by no means original with me, either. Yarran beer is as close to addictive as anything can be for us.”

There was a heaviness about Lanzecki this evening, Killashandra thought. It wasn’t fatigue, for he moved as easily as ever for a man of his build.

“I’d forgotten how pleasant the taste is,” he went on, returning with a pitcher and two beakers.

“Is this Passover going to be that bad?” she asked.

Lanzecki took a long draught of the beer before he answered, but his eyes were twinkling, and his mouth fell into an easier line.

“We always plan for the worst and generally are not disappointed. The challenge thus presented by each new Passover configuration is irresistible, forces that are changeless and changing, as unpredictable as such natural phenomena are.”

Killashandra was startled by his unexpected philosophizing and wondered if she had been wrong about his mood.

“You actually enjoy this!”

“Hmmm. No—‘enjoy’ is not the appropriate word. Stimulated, I think, would be more accurate.” He was teasing her. His lips told her that. Teasing but something more, something deeper, the element that caused the heaviness about him. “Stop thinking and eat. I’ve ordered up a particular delicacy which I hope you’ll enjoy, too. Catering goes to great pains at this time of Ballybran’s cycle, and we must respond.”

Tonight, his appetite equaled hers as they sampled the marvels of taste and texture that had been conjured from the cuisines of all the elegant and exotic worlds in the Federation. Lanzecki knew a great deal about food and promised her that one day he would personally prepare a meal for her from raw produce to finished dish.

“When eating is not a necessity, as it is now, but can be enjoyed,” and his eyes twinkled at the repetition of that word “in complete
leisure
.”

“We’re not at leisure now?”

“Not completely. As soon as I have satisfied my symbiotic self, I must meet with the storm technicians again.”

She suppressed an irrational disappointment that their dinner was not a prelude to another loving night.

“Thank you, dear heart,” he said.

“Thank me? For what?”

“For being . . . aware.”

She stared at Lanzecki for a long moment

“You’re certain telepathy is not in the symbiotic . . .”

“Absolutely not!” Lanzecki’s assurance was solemn, but she wasn’t sure about his mouth.

Killashandra rapidly catalogued some of her responses to him and sighed.

“Well, I am sorry you’re not staying!”

Lanzecki laughed as he reached for her hand and kissed it lightly. Not light enough so that she didn’t respond to his touch.

“I have never intended to invade your privacy, Killashandra, by watching the shift and flow of your thoughts and emotions. I enjoy them. I enjoy you. Now” —and he rose purposefully—“if it were anything but storm tactics . . .” He kissed her palm again and then strode swiftly from the room.

She let her hand fall back to her lap, Lanzecki’s graceful compliment echoing through her mind. Quite one of the nicest she had ever been paid.

Oddly enough, that he had been invading a Fuertan’s treasured privacy, once her most defended possession, did not distress Killashandra. If Lanzecki continued to “enjoy” what he saw. She took a long swallow of beer. How much she had changed since that aimless, aching ride on the pedestrian way to Fuerte’s spaceport! How much of the change was due to her “symbiotic self?” That, too, had been an invasion of privacy to which she had, before officialdom of the FSP, agreed.

Now that she had held crystal, vibrant in the palm of her hand, light and sound coruscating off the sun-warmed quartz, she felt no regrets for loss of privacy, no regrets for an invasion that had been entrance into a new dimension of experience.

She laughed softly at her whimsy. She finished the beer. She was sleepy and satiated, and tomorrow would be a wearying day. She hoped that Trag did not get reports from Enthor on the raggedness of her first cuttings.

The next morning, after a sturdy breakfast, she reported to Trag in the cutting room. Other members of Class 895 were already busy under the supervision of Concera and another Guild member. Killashandra greeted Concera and smiled at the others.

Trag jerked his head to a side door, and she followed him. She experienced a double shock, for there on the work table amid installation brackets and pads were five black crystals. And she didn’t respond to their presence at all!

“Don’t worry!” Trag picked up the nearest one and tossed it negligently at her.

She opened her mouth to scald him with an oath when the object reached her hands and she knew it wasn’t black crystal.

“Don’t you ever frighten me that way again!” Fury was acid in her belly and throat.

“Surely you didn’t think we’d risk the black in practice.” Trag had enjoyed startling her.

“I’m too new at this game to know what is risked,” she replied, getting her anger under control. She hefted the block in her hand, wanting more than anything else to loft it right back at Trag.

“Easy now, Killashandra,” he said, raising a protective hand. “You knew it wasn’t black crystal the moment you walked into the room!”

The coolness in Trag’s voice reminded her that he was a senior Guild member.

“I’ve had enough surprises in the ranges without having to encounter them here, too, Trag.” As she controlled panic and rage, she also reminded herself that Trag had always been impersonal! Her relations with Lanzecki were clouding other judgments.

“Coping with the unexpected must become automatic for a Singer. Some people never learn how.” Trag’s eyes shifted slightly to indicate the room behind them. “You proved just now that your instinct for the blacks is reliable. Now”—and he reached out to take the block from her hand—“let us to the purpose for which these were simulated.” He put the block among its mates.

Only then did she realize that the five mock crystals had been cast in the image of those she had cut, wiggles, improper angles and size.

“This substance has the same tensile strength and expansion ratio as black crystal but no other of its properties. You must learn today to install crystal properly in its bracketing with enough pressure to secure it against vibration but not enough to interfere with intermolecular flow.” He showed her a printed diagram. “This will be the order and the configuration of the Trundimoux link.” He tapped the corresponding block as he pointed out its position, repeating what Lanzecki had rattled through. “Number one and two, the smallest, will be on mining stations, number three on the gas planet satellite, number four on the ice planet satellite, and number five, the largest crystal, will be installed on the habitable planet. You and you alone will handle the crystals.”

“Is that Guild policy?” How much more did she have to learn about this complex profession.

“Among other considerations, no one in the Trundimoux System is technically capable.” Trag’s voice was heavy with disapproval.

Killashandra wondered if he considered them “Trundies” or “Moux.”

“I would have thought Marketing would handle installation.”

“Generally.” His stiff tone warned her off further questions.

“Well, I don’t suppose I’d’ve been saddled with the job if I hadn’t lost my sled and if Passover weren’t so near.”

She got no visible reaction from her rueful comment.

“Remember that,” Trag advised, and added with an unexpected wryness, “if you can.”

Installing crystal in padded clamps was not as simple as it had sounded, but then, as Killashandra was learning, nothing in the Heptite Guild was as simple as it sounded. Nevertheless, by evening, with arm, neck, and back muscles tense and hands that trembled from the effort of small, strong movements, eyes hot from concentration on surface tension readings, she believed she understood the process.