David Weber - Hell's Gate

And then, of course, there were the people called "Mythalans," but for some reason, neither Gadrial nor Jasak seemed to want to talk about them.

Despite the situation in which she and Jathmar found themselves, Shaylar was fascinated by the bits and pieces about Arcana she'd so far been able to fit together. It was frustrating to have so incomplete a picture, however, and not just where politics was concerned. In fact, there was something else which continued to puzzle her even more, and she looked up from her sewing.

"Gadrial?"

"Hmm?"

"What moves this ship?"

Gadrial glanced up in obvious surprise. She gazed at Shaylar for a moment, then used a word with which Shaylar wasn't yet familiar.

"What does that word mean?" she asked, and Gadrial laid her needlework in her lap and folded her hands, her expression thoughtful as she clearly considered how best to answer.

"It's what powers our whole civilization." She spoke slowly, choosing her words. "Not everyone can use it," she added. "You must be born with a Gift for it."

A small thrill of astonishment ran through Shaylar. Whatever it was, it sounded a little like Talents, except that no Talent had ever powered a ship. Then Gadrial stood up and retrieved a small leather case from her luggage. She opened it and extracted a familiar crystal.

"This is my PC," Gadrial said. "My personal crystal. You've seen me use it in our language lessons, but I also use it to store my other work?my notes, my calculations. Anything I need to record. It's?" she used the unfamiliar word again "?that makes it possible."

"Gadrial, it's just a stone."

Even as Shaylar said it, she knew she sounded foolish. Certainly Gadrial had already given more than sufficient proof that that "just a stone" was capable of remarkable things. It was just that the very notion continued to offend Shaylar's concept of how the physical laws of the multiverse worked. In fact, she realized, the real reason she'd said it was that a part of her desperately wanted for it not to work after all.

"Don't be silly, Shaylar," Gadrial chided, as if she were the telepath and she'd read Shaylar's mind. "You've seen it work before. But it won't work for just anyone. It takes someone born with a Gift to build a PC or compile the spellware to make its applications work. But each crystal can hold immense amounts of data, if you know how to encode and retrieve it, and someone with a Gift can even program it so that non-Gifted people can use it. Here."

She began to murmur. Whatever she was saying, it wasn't in Andaran, and despite the number of times she'd already seen it, Shaylar's scalp prickled as the crystal began to glow. Squiggles of light appeared within it, recognizable as writing, although the words weren't in the same script as the signs aboard this ship.

"Here," Gadrial repeated, extending the crystal towards Shaylar. "This time I've powered it up for you."

Shaylar accepted it very gingerly. It was heavier than she'd expected. It still looked like nothing so much as absolutely clear quartz, yet it was clearly denser than quartz from the way it weighed in her hand. The squiggles glowing in its depth shifted slightly as the crystal settled into her palm. The unintelligible words moved, as if to present themselves to her for easier reading.

"What do you mean, powered it up for me?" she asked.

"I mean I've … turned it on for you. Activated its spellware in non-Gifted mode and released my password so that you can enter and retrieve data if you want to."

"But how?" Shaylar demanded in frustration. "This isn't a machine?it's just a lump of rock!"

"Of course it's a machine," Gadrial replied.

"No, it isn't. It's not?" Shaylar shook her head, searching for the Andaran word for "mechanical." Unfortunately, that wasn't one she'd learned yet. "There are no switches," she said instead. "Nothing to provide power."

It was Gadrial's turn to blink in apparent surprise. Then she shrugged.

"I provided the power," she said.

"But how?"

"By saying the proper words. Here, try this." Gadrial handed Shaylar a stylus or wand which appeared to be made out of the same transparent not-quartz as the crystal itself. "Write something on it," she encouraged.

Shaylar looked at her for a moment, then pressed the tip of the stylus hesitantly against the "PC." A spark of light?a bluish-green light, quite different from the color of the words already floating in the crystal?glowed to life at the point where stylus and crystal made contact. As she moved the stylus, the spark became a line, following the stylus tip as she slowly and carefully wrote her own name. She finished and lifted the stylus away, and her name floated instantly to the glassy center of the crystal, displacing the words which had been there before.

Shaylar stared at it, half-delighted and half-terrified by the implications, then shook her head.

"I don't understand!"

"That's because you don't have a Gift," Gadrial explained. "A non-Gifted person can use most of our machines if the spellware is set up that way and someone who is Gifted charges them first. But if you don't have a Gift yourself, you're completely dependent on someone else to write the spellware and power the system."

They were speaking the same language, but no communication was taking place, and Shaylar drew a deep breath.

"You can't run a machine by just talking to it," she said slowly and patiently, and Gadrial's brows drew together.

"Of course I can! I told you?I'm Gifted."

"But?" Shaylar wanted to tug at her hair. "You keep saying that, but what does Gifted mean? What is it you can do?that someone without a Gift can't?that makes hunks of rock light up this way?"

"I can tap the field," Gadrial said, exactly as if that actually explained something.

"What field?"

Gadrial used the same word that had started this conversation, and Shaylar let out an exasperated howl.

"Why are you upset, Shaylar?" Gadrial asked, starting to frown.

"Because your words make no sense!" Shaylar pointed to the ominously glowing rock in her own hand. "This piece of stone makes no sense. This ship makes no sense! Nothing about you people makes any sense!"

She realized she was breathing hard, teetering on the edge of a genuine panic attack. She was afraid?terribly afraid?and she didn't quite know why. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a cliff, and if Gadrial kept talking, she would tip right over the edge and fall.

Gadrial reclaimed her "personal crystal" and set it carefully on the blanket to one side. She let her left hand rest lightly on it while she regarded Shaylar steadily, and then she shook her head slowly.

"Your people truly don't have anything like this, do they?" she finally said, her voice filled with wonder and what sounded like pity.

"No," Shaylar admitted, and Gadrial inhaled deeply.

"Magister Halathyn told me that," she said. A flicker of pain went through her eyes as she mentioned Magister Halathyn's name, but those eyes never left Shaylar's face, and she continued steadily.

"I didn't really want to believe him," she admitted. "It suggested a universe so different from ours that I can't really wrap my mind around it. Not yet, anyway. But everything I've seen from you since has only confirmed it, and now this."

She shook her head again.

"No wonder you're so lost. Let me try to explain."

She sat back, once again obviously thinking, looking for the best way to explain something complicated using the still limited vocabulary they had in common.

"There is a force in the universe," she began finally. "People with a Gift can sense it, can touch it?use it to do certain things. Some Gifts are very weak. People born with them can do only little things, because they can touch only a little of that force. It's like … like a field of energy. Of sunlight. A sea of energy that lies between things."