Jo Clayton: Crystal Heat

His ears crumpled, the edges rolling inward, and a film dulled his large black eyes, nocturnal eyes, unused to strong sunlight. “That is another difficulty, Desp’ Searcher. The exact location of the island and the Taalav beasts is a security matter. You’re a pilot, a view of the night sky, even a strange sky, would yield sufficient data for you to work out the island’s location.”

Shadith blinked at him; she found that degree of idiocy in a subadministrator rather hard to swallow. “It may have been a secret before now,” she said as mildly as she could, “but it has certainly lost that status with the departure of the thief. Right? In any case, I need to study everything the thief left behind, and of course, the physical requirements of a Taalav array. That last will set important parameters to the search for the world where they were taken. I’m sure you understand that.”

“You’ll need living quarters. That will take time to arrange.”

“I assume you have a new xenobiologist in place by now. Is that person Kliu?”

“The Kliu do not concern themselves with such matters.”

Why was 1 so sure what your answer would be? Halt/ “Another prisoner? Or have you gone outside this time?”

“It is not necessary for you to know that.”

“In any case, you will have set up accommodations for this person and his aides. It should not be difficult to find a spare room for me in that facility. Especially since you’ve known I was coming for over a month standard. And that I was female-if that is to be your next objection.”

She read his burst of anger with no difficulty, the overtones of petulance and distaste. Her exoed hands clasped in her lap, she waited with stiff patience for him to realize that stalling to the point of forcing her to walk out on him would win him nothing but a reprimand from his superiors.

He ignored her last response as if she hadn’t spoken, tapped a sensor with the longest of his eight fingers. When her erstwhile guide shuffled in, he flung a spate of Kliubre at him in the expectation that Shadith wouldn’t understand what he was saying. She listened carefully. A lot of cursing and nasty epithets, but basically he was doing what should have already been done, ordering a flier and pilot to take her to Glin Paran which was apparently the name of the island in question.

The dot in a semicolon of islands trailing across one of Pillory’s southern seas, Glin Paran was a wheel with a lake at the hub and a high jagged rim around the periphery. It was a big island, almost a subcontinent.

Shadith suppressed a sigh as the flier dipped from the-scatter of clouds and fought the choppy winds; the trip had been as rough as the Kliu pilot could make it and Pillory cooperated with his malice by throwing storm after storm at them. Despite the support of the exo, she was battered and exhausted; some of her bruises felt as if they went to the bone.

The Kliu slammed the flier down, waited only long enough for Shadith, the ’bot mule, and her sullen guard to disembark, then he shot away, vanishing into those clouds they’d left such a short time before.

Shadith glanced at the guard, but he had his eyes nearly shut against what was for him the glare of the sun, though the reddish light was more like a cloudy twilight to her. He was radiating stubbornness and revulsion and his speaking mouth was pressed shut with such determination that she didn’t bother saying anything to him. She looked around.

They were standing on a gritty landing pad, wind whipping debris against their legs and into their faces. On every side there were tangles of squat trees. Several stands of reeds taller than the trees grew out of the water, a cross between rules and bamboo with short stubby leaves like knife blades, tough enough to stab with. Each reed was different from its neighbor in color and configuration, a red like dried blood, a green so dark it was almost black, fire orange, a deep sapphire blue, plus blends and shades of all these colors, mottling and stripes; a few had feathery sprays of seed pods bursting from their tops.

In the open spaces between the tree clumps there were patches of low brush with brown, dead-looking leaves clinging to branches that were as crooked and knotty as arthritic fingers.

The xeno settlement was sited a short distance into the lake with only a spidery catwalk joining it to the bank. The buildings were constructed from those reeds and took some getting used to because whoever supervised the construction seemed to have been colorblind. Apart from that, though, they were simple boxes with peaked roofs made from the leaves of the reed, overlapping like shingles. The area where the catwalk reached the bank had been cleared though she could see new sprouts just breaking the surface of the water; apparently the reeds had to be cut back again and again. She wondered about the catwalk and why the Kliu had gone to so much inconvenience with their building. It seemed to suggest that the Taalav arrays were hostile and dangerous. If not them, then some other predator flourished here. Which made the guard rather more useful than she’d supposed. Or maybe it was simply because they didn’t want to harm the juvenile body parts of the Taalav.

Reasoning without data was a singularly futile process, so she gave it up and followed the guard toward the settlement.

A man in an exo stood on the platform at the end of the catwalk. He had a shaggy black beard and heavy eyebrows, so his face seemed mostly hair. Despite that there was something familiar about that face. She didn’t know him, but she’d seen his phot recently. Ambela? University?

She tapped the mule with her toe, sent it humming onto the narrow walk, followed it. Halfway across, she remembered when and where she’d seen him and nearly misstepped off the edge.

It was a big scandal around the middle of her first year at University. His picture was everywhere. Saklavaya. That was his name. He’d been skimniing and selling exotics from expedition stocks-which would have been bad enough, but he had the misfortune to be caught pinching off genetic material from the rarer of the alien sentients he had access to and selling these interesting bits to one of the Gray Market meatfarms. The uproar when this was discovered nearly destroyed the Xeno School. The Regents Board fined him all his voting stock and convinced Helvetia to freeze his accounts; then they barred him from ever returning to University or using University services. If he was here as a result of some further predations and not just hired, she suspected the Kliu had better keep a close eye on their crystals.

She’d gotten to watch his hearing. Her friend Aslan was a member of the Xeno Department and went every day to glare her fury at this man who’d polluted everything she believed in. Shadith wasn’t afraid he’d recognize her. She was in the Music School and the various Departments of University were self contained units.

She stopped in front of him. “You are?” ’

“Vannar. I run this place. What’n pyag you think you’re going to learn here? The last xenobi is long gone and I’ve got his rooms. There’s nothing there.”

“Desp’ Vannar. If you’ll show me where I’ll stay while I’m making my investigation, I can get on with it and out of your hair.”

“That’s all?” She looked at the small stack of printed readouts. “I asked for every offworld contact for the past three years. I was very careful to specify that proprietary data could be privacy blanked, but I wanted the contacts and context.”

Vannar shrugged. “Don’t ask me. None of my doing, I passed on the request as you framed it. You should have taken care of that while you were still at Base. If you don’t mind, I have work I need to do.” He sauntered out of the room.