James Schmiz - The Witches of Karres

Joining her, the captain glanced at the Leewit. She was lying on one side now, eyes closed, knees drawn up. “Why wrap her in blankets?” he asked.

“Spread them out like so… Vatch took her over the Egger Route. She’ll throw three fits when she first wakes up — most everyone does! Route’s pretty awful! Won’t last long, but she’ll be hard to hang on to if we don’t have her wrapped.”

They laid the Leewit on the blankets, began rolling her up tightly in them. “Cover her head good!” Goth cautioned.

“She won’t be able to breathe—”

“She isn’t breathing now,” Goth told him, with appalling unconcern. “Go ahead that’s the way to do it!”

By the time they were done, the bundled-up non-breathing Leewit looked unnervingly like a small mummy laid away for a thousand-year rest. They knelt on the floor at either end of her, Goth holding her shoulders, the captain gripping her wrapped ankles. “Can cut loose any time now!” Goth said, satisfied.

“While we’re waiting,” said the captain, “what happened?”

Goth shook her head. “First off, what’s going to happen. The Leewit mustn’t hear that because she can’t block a vatch. They’re coming for us. Don’t know when they’ll make it, but they’ll be here.”

“Who’s coming?”

“Toll and the others. Whoever they can spare. Can’t spare too many though, because they’re already fighting the Worm Worlders. They’re at the Tark Nembi place — the Dead Suns Cluster, where I thought it might be — trying to work through to Manaret. Right now Karres is stuck in a force-web tangle, with so many Nuri globes around you can’t look into space from there—”

It sounded like an alarming situation, but Goth said the witches had their new weapons going and figured they could make it. They’d had a plan to use the Manaret synergizer, which would have made their undertaking much less difficult; but time was running out, and they’d given up waiting for Olimy to arrive with the device or report his whereabouts. They had to assume he’d been trapped and was lost. But now that they knew what had happened, they were throwing everyone available on the problem of tracing out the Egger Route section the vatch had broken into the distant past. Toll still had a line on the Leewit, though a tenuous one, so they’d know exactly to what point to go. When they arrived, they’d reverse and take the Venture with everyone and everything on it back to Karres-now.

“They can move the whole ship over the Route?”

“Sure. Don’t worry about that! You could move a sun over the Route except it’d nova before it got anywhere. If they get to us quick enough, that’ll be it.”

“The vatch…”

“Looks to me,” Goth said, “like the vatch got the idea backwards. You said get the synergizer to the other Karres, to the witches that can use it. So instead it brought a Karres witch back to the synergizer.”

“The Leewit? ” said the captain, astonished.

“Can’t figure that either yet!” Goth admitted. “Well, it’s a vatch—”

“What was the humming noise?”

“That’s the Route. Vatch punched it straight into the ship so it could drop the Leewit in with us.”

He grunted. “How did Toll do, uh, whatever she did?”

Goth said no one had realized a giant-vatch was hanging around Karres-now until it scooped up the Leewit. With all the klatha forces boiling on and about the planet at the moment, the area was swarming with lesser vatches, attracted to the commotion; among them the giant remained unnoticed. But when the Leewit disappeared, Toll spotted it and instantly went after it. She’d got a hook into the vatch and a line on her daughter and was rapidly overhauling the vatch when it managed to jerk free.

“I see,” nodded the captain. Another time might be better to inquire what esoteric processes were involved in getting a hook into a giant-vatch and a line through time on one’s daughter.

“Toll didn’t have enough hold on the Leewit then to do much good right away,” Goth continued. “There was just time for the touch-talk before she got sucked back to Karres-now.”

“I suppose touch-talk’s a kind of thought-swapping?”

“Sort of, but—”

The small blanket-wrapped form between them uttered a yowl that put the captain’s hair on end. The next moment he was jerked forward almost on his face as the Leewit doubled up sharply, and he nearly lost his grip on her ankles. Then he found himself on his side on the floor, hanging on to something which twisted, wrenched, kicked, and rotated with incredible rapidity and vigor. The vocal din bursting from the blankets was no less incredible. Goth, lying across the Leewit with her arms locked around her, was being dragged about on the deck.

Then the bundle suddenly went limp. There was still a good deal of noise coming from it; but those were the Leewit’s normal shrieks of wrath, much muffled now.

“Woo- ooof! ” gasped Goth, relaxing her hold somewhat. “Rough one! She’s all right now, though — you can let go—”

“Hope she hasn’t hurt herself!” The captain was a little out of breath, too, more with surprise and apprehension than because of the effort he’d put out.

Goth grinned. “Take more than that bit of bouncing around to hurt her , Captain!” She gave the blankets a big-sisterly hug, put her mouth down close to them, yelled “Quit your screeching — it’s me! I’m letting you out—”

The captain found Vezzarn and Hulik in the passenger lounge, spoke soothingly if vaguely of new developments which might get them all out of trouble shortly, and returned to the control section hoping he’d left the two with the impression that the Leewit’s mode of arrival and the subsequent uproar were events normal enough in his area of experience and nothing for them to worry about. They’d agreed very readily to remain in the lounge area for the time being.

Goth and the Leewit were swapping recent experiences at a rapid-fire rate when he came back into the room. They still sat on the floor, surrounded by scattered blankets. “They got a klatha pool there now like you never saw before!” the Leewit was exclaiming. “They—” She caught sight of the captain and abruptly checked herself.

“Don’t have to watch it with him any more!” Goth assured her. “Captain knows all about that stuff now.”

“Huh!” When they’d loosened the blankets and the Leewit came eeling out, red faced and scowling, and discovered the captain there, her immediate inclination apparently had been to blame him for her experience, though she hadn’t been aware of Toll’s touch-talk conversation with Goth, in which Toll simply had used her as a handy medium — switching her on for the purpose about like switching on a ship intercom, the captain had gathered. The Leewit, in fact, remembered nothing clearly since the moment she’d relled a giant-vatch and simultaneously felt the vast entity sweeping her away from Karres. She recalled, shudderingly, that she’d been over the Egger Route. She knew it had been a horrifying trip. But she could only guess uneasily now at what had made it so horrifying. That blurring of details was a frequent experience of those who came over the Route and one of its most disturbing features. Since it was the captain who’d directed the vatch’s attention to Karres in the first place, the Leewit wasn’t so far off, of course, in feeling he was responsible for her kidnapping. However, nobody mentioned that to her.

The look she gave him as he squatted down on his heels beside the sisters might have been short of full approval, but she remarked only, “Learned mighty quick if you know all about it!”

“Not all about it, midget,” the captain said soothingly. “But it looks like I’ve started to learn. One thing I can’t figure at the moment is that vatch.”