James Schmiz - The Witches of Karres

He came back with the coffee, finally stood looking at the lamp again. Since he’d put it down in its usual place, it had done nothing except sit there quietly, casting a pool of light on the desk before it.

The captain put the cup aside, moved back a few steps.

“Well,” he said aloud, “Let’s test this thing out!”

He paused while his voice went echoing faintly away through the Venture’s passages. Then he pointed a finger at the lamp, and swung the finger commandingly towards the worktable beside the communicator stand.

“Move over to that table!” he told the lamp.

The whole ship grew very still. Even the distant hum of the drive seemed to dim. The captain’s scalp was crawling again, kept on crawling as the seconds went by. But the lamp didn’t move.

Instead, its light abruptly went out.

“No,” Goth said. “It wasn’t me. I don’t think it was you either — exactly.”

The captain looked at her. He’d grabbed off a few hours sleep on the couch and by the time he woke up, Goth was up and around, energies apparently restored.

She’d been doing some looking around, too, and wanted to know why the Venture was running on half power. The captain explained. “If we happen to get into a jam,” he concluded, “would you be able to use the Sheewash Drive at present?”

“Short hops,” the witch nodded reassuringly. “No real runs for a while, though!”

“Short hops should be good enough.” He reflected. “I read that item in the Regulations. They right about the klatha part?”

“Pretty much,” Goth acknowledged, a trifle warily.

“Well…” He’d related his experiences with the lamp then, and she’d listened with obvious interest but no indications of surprise.

“What do you mean, it wasn’t me — exactly?” he said. “I was wondering for a while, but I’m dead sure now I don’t have klatha ability.”

Goth wrinkled her nose, hesitant, said suddenly, “You got it, captain. Told you you’d be a witch, too. You got a lot of it! That was part of the trouble.”

“Trouble?” The captain leaned back in his chair. “Mind explaining?”

Goth reflected worriedly again. “I got to be careful now,” she told him. “The way klatha, is, people oughtn’t to know much more about it than they can work with. Or it’s likely never going to work right for them. That’s one reason we got rules. You see?”

He frowned. “Not quite.”

Goth tossed her head, a flick of impatience. “It wasn’t me who ported the lamp. So if you didn’t have klatha, it wouldn’t have got ported.”

“But you said…”

“Trying to explain, Captain. You ought to get told more now. Not too much, though… On Karres they all knew you had it. Patham! You put it out so heavy the grown-ups were all messed up! It’s that learned stuff they work with. That’s tricky. I don’t know much about it yet…”

“You mean I was, uh, producing klatha energy?”

But he gathered one didn’t produce klatha. If one had the talent — inborn to a considerable extent — one attracted it to oneself. Being around others who used it stimulated the attraction. His own tendencies in that direction hadn’t developed much before he got to Karres. There he’d turned promptly into an unwitting focal point of the klatha energies being manipulated around him — to the consternation of the adult witches who found their highly evolved and delicately balanced klatha controls thrown out of kilter by his presence.

A light dawned. “That’s why they waited until I was off Karres again before they moved it!”

“Sure,” said Goth. “They couldn’t risk that with you there — they didn’t know what would happen…” He had been the subject of much conversation and debate during his stay on Karres. So as not to disturb whatever was coming awake in him, the witches couldn’t even let him know he was doing anything unusual. But only the younger children, using klatha in a very direct and basic, almost instinctive manner, weren’t bothered by it. Adolescents at around Maleen’s age level had been affected to some extent, though not nearly as much as their parents.

“You just don’t know how to use it, that’s all,” Goth said. “You’re going to, though.”

“What makes you think that?”

Her lashes flickered. “They said it was like that with Threbus. He started late, too. Took him a couple of years to catch on — but he’s a whizdang now!”

The captain grunted skeptically. “Well, we’ll see… You’re a kind of a whizdang yourself, for my money.”

“Guess I am,” Goth agreed. “Aren’t many grown-ups could jump us as far as this.”

“Meaning you know where we went?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I… no, let’s get back to that lamp first. I can see that after your big Sheewash push we might have had plenty of klatha stirred up around the Venture . But you say I’m not able to use it. So…”

“Looks like you pulled in a vatch,” Goth told him.

She explained that then. It appeared a vatch was a sort of personification of klatha, or a klatha entity. Vatches didn’t hang around this universe much but were sometimes drawn into it by human klatha activities, and if they were amused or intrigued by what they found going on they might stay and start producing klatha phenomena themselves. They seemed to be under the impression that their experiences of the human universe were something they were dreaming. They could be helpful to the person who caught their attention but tended to be quite irresponsible and mischievous. The witches preferred to have nothing at all to do with a vatch.

“So now we’ve got something like that on board!” the captain remarked nervously.

Goth shook her head. “No, not since I woke up. I’d rell him if he were around.”

“You’d rell him?”

She grinned.

“Another of the things I can’t understand till I can do it?” the captain asked.

“Uh-huh. Anyway, you got rid of that vatch for good, I think.”

“I did? How?”

“When you ordered the lamp to move. Vatch would figure you were telling him what to do. They don’t like that at all. I figure he got mad and left.”

“After switching the lamp off to show me, eh? Think he might be back?”

“They don’t usually. Anyway, I’ll spot him if he does.”

“Yes…” The captain scratched his chin. “So what made you decide to bring us out east of the Empire?”

Goth, it turned out, had had a number of reasons. Some of them sounded startling at first.

“One thing, here’s Uldune!” Her fingertip traced over the star map between them, stopped. “Be just about a week away, on half-power.”

The captain gave her a surprised look. Uldune was one of the worlds around here which were featured in Nikkeldepain’s history books; and it was not featured at all favorably. Under the leadership of its Daal, Sedmon the Grim, and various successors of the same name, it had been the headquarters of a ferocious pirate confederacy which had trampled over half the Empire on a number of occasions, and raided far and wide beyond it. And that particular section of history, as he recalled it, wasn’t very far in the past.

“What’s good about being that close to Uldune?” he inquired. “From what I’ve heard of them, that’s as bloodthirsty a bunch of cutthroats as ever infested space!”

“Guess they were pretty bad,” Goth acknowledged. “But that’s a time back. They’re sort of reformed now.”

“ Sort of reformed?”

She shrugged. “Well, they’re still a bunch of crooks, Captain. But we can do business with them.”