Jo Clayton: Crystal Heat

“One thing you learn after a while, Lil, these things pass. You live through them and life gets better.”

Lilai sucked in a long ragged breath, but she didn’t say anything, perhaps out of loyalty to her feuding parents. Lylunda hugged her; she, too, stayed silent, mostly because she didn’t know what more to say.

A horse in one of the stalls that ran along the side of the barn whickered and shifted his feet, his shod hooves muffled by the straw bedding. Another snorted and thumped against the barrier between the stalls. Two barn cats hissed and yowled in a brief fight, then there were scratching noises as one of them fled. Up near the rafters there was some soft peeping from owlets in their nests. Outside, the little brown meuttertiks broke into scolding chirps; something must have been threatening their nests.

Lilai’s shaking slowly went away. She leaned her head against Lylunda’s shoulder for a moment, drew a sigh up from the soles of her feet. A moment later she wriggled free and got to her feet.

At the doorway she turned and gave Lylunda a wavery smile, then she was gone.

Lylunda scrubbed a hand across her eyes. “Jaink! I hate this. I want to get away from here. Now.”

Grey took Lilai with him when he left.

Lylunda did her best to keep out of the way, but she did stand at her window as the child walked to the flier with her father. Lilai waved to her mother, climbed inside. Aleytys was watching from her garden, half hidden by a flowering sehnsur, the wind blowing delicate lavender petals from its lacy blooms onto her head and shoulders.

She stood there until the flier vanished into the thready clouds; then she walked with quick energetic steps toward the barn, brushing away the petals as she went. Shortly afterward she rode away from the house on one of the blacks, keeping the horse to a controlled trot, not pushing it, but her eyes were fixed on the horizon, as if being in motion were something she had to do, as if that jagged line between sky and earth were someplace she had to be.

Lylunda stepped away from the window. “This whole visit has been a letdown. You expect legends to have perfect lives, not this kind of kak.” She sighed. “I thinkI’ll give Digby a call. With any luck I can be on my way and out of her hair.”

Lylunda smiled as she patted the arm of her pilot’s chair. It was good to be back in her own ship; she could feel the tension draining out of her. She woke the kephalos and initiated the call to Digby, then sat back and waited for it to go through.

Digby was a silver-haired docent, handsome and stately, with what Lylunda took to be a smug gleam in his bright blue eyes. “What can I do for you, Lylunda Elang?”

“I was wondering if the Kiln had finished inspecting the site and were satisfied with what they saw.”

“That’s proprietary information, you understand. However, I’m willing to let it out. For a price, of course. Nothing extravagant, just a brief report on your views.”

“My views about what?”

“About the events between the time you left Bol Mutiar and arrived at Wolff.”

“Shadith will have given you that already.”

“And do you never cross-check your information?”

“Hm. I see no problem with that; the whole thing was a disaster.” She went through the meager calendar of events after the healing, adding no commentary, keeping strictly to what happened and what she was told.

“You’re sure the dead man was the xenobi Prangarris?”

“I didn’t go downside, but that wouldn’t have helped anyway, he was inside that crystal weave. I watched Tigatri’s keph peel through the crystal until you could see the man inside. It ’was Prangarris, no doubt about that. And there were shells of dead Taalav all around the site.” She tapped impatiently on the chair ann. “So, have the Kliu been there? Are they satisfied?”.

“My fee was released from escrow two hours ago. They are satisfied. I would advise staying away from that sector of Cousin space; they won’t be looking for you, but if you fell into their hands, your life would be short and messy. Mmh. Should you take a notion to look for steady work one day, come see me.” The screen blanked as he cut the connection.

Lylunda wrinkled her nose. “Not likely, my friend.” She stretched, groaned with pleasure at the feeling of chains dropping off her body. “We say good-bye and thanks much, 0 Aleytys of Wolff, then I go find a Pit and throw myself a party. O000 eee, it’s been a while.”

21. Endgame

Once the ship was down, Digby wasted no time. He had the body on its feet and moving before the engines cooled; it was out of the ship and installed in a bubble car so fast Shadith only caught a few glimpses of the lichens and rubble that seemed to make up most of the local landscape.

After the flat metallic atmosphere of the ship, the air was cool and crisp with a sharp, fungal tang to it. She was irritated at being dumped back into the sterile blandness of machined air and made a note to do her version of the Vryhh ship gardens once she got back to her own transport. Having plants about would make more work and introduce more contaminations into her ship, but the feel of the atmosphere would certainly be worth it.

The car zipped from the recamouflaged pad and plunged straight at a granite cliff rising a hundred meters straight up.

Idiot poseur. Playing infantile games of scare the prisoner. Tchah!

She ignored the rock and mused over what she’d have to do to her ship to get it ready for use. It had been sitting at Wolff since she signed on with Digby and would have developed the quirks and crotchets all moth-balled ships picked up. At least those with complex kephaloi. She hadn’t run across any major problems ’splitting from Wolff to University, even though she was towing the Backhoe and putting more strain on the ship, but sometimes it took a while for the quirks to start showing.

The membrane that sealed out the local atmosphere and mocked the mottled gray of the granite twanged as the car passed through it.

The weight of the mountain pressed down on her as the flimsy car scooted deeper and deeper into it. And even more oppressive was her growing fear that she wasn’t going to get out of this with mind intact. If Digby wouldn’t let her speak before he tried the probe… all she could do was try to short it out. Which would work once…

A second membrane squeaked. The bubble car stopped and stood shuddering on its supports as jets of fluid hammered at it from above, below and both sides.

After the wash was done, Shadith heard a series of clunksand clanks; then the car began gliding forward, drawn along by some exterior method of propulsion.

During the next fifteen or so minutes the car was scrubbed thoroughly, the air in it expelled and replaced repeatedly until she was as battered as the small vehicle, the body she couldn’t feel coughing with irritation from the sterilizers carried by that air.

The car passed through a third membrane and stopped. The gullwing doors swung up and the body moved stiffly out. It walked to a massive plug in the wall, waited for it to slide open, then stepped into a rock lined with shining white tiles where it was inundated once again with antiseptic fluids. If she could have, Shadith would have sighed with frustration and impatience.

Hair kinked into curls so tight and close to her head they hurt, throat raw and temper on the point of exploding, she moved with the body into a white room beyond the lock; it marched to a chair facing a wall, plopped itself down, and folded its hands in its lap.

The wall irised open.

Behind thick glass she saw a nude male body wrapped in a cocoon of wires and tubes, a Sustain unit almost as complex as those she’d seen on Ibex when Aleytys was hunting the last clues that would put her in touch with her mother. In a sort of irony she was in no mood to appreciate, it also looked rather like the crystal mass the Taalav had woven around Prangarris. Digby, she thought, the original, the one and only. Wonder how old he is? From how he looks, he was here before this world formed. Gods, unless I talk really fast, for sure I’m not getting out of here knowing that.