Jo Clayton: Crystal Heat

Listening with such concentration her head started hurting again, she picked out of the weave of sound they gave back to her an astonishing amount of data:

There were too many sounds exchanged between the two-bump and the one-bump who studied them and whom they studied in their turn. Too many to remember. And they had no way ’of deciding what was name and what was just talk.

The two-bump was wider than Shadith, the bumps were rounder and bigger and it showed brighter colors than Shadith though it had a carapace very like hers.

The growth on its head was longer and thicker than Shadith’s and a different color, it was a shiny black and hung all the way to the bending part of its body; there were two white streaks in the black, very shiny, too.

It came on a flying thing, broad and flat like the creepier, but far more silent and more subtle.

It argued with the one-bump stilter; the argument made lots of noise, but the other stilters didn’t come out to see what was happening.

The speaker Taalav thinksthe one-bump fed (untranslatable and untranscribable noise) to the others; this (noise) was the poison the Taalav collect in their stingsacs. The one-bump had taken sacs from Taalav in earlier days.

It took the one-bump most of four days to collect two full arrays and shift them on the transport. In all this time, none of the six legs or the other stilters appeared.

By the time this was done, Shadith was shaking with fatigue, sodden with sweat rolling down inside the exo, soaking the spongy cushions supposed to protect her body from the abrasion of the metal supports. She took a step toward the creepler, then turned again. She thought a moment, shaped a question, sang/whistled it to the Taalav: When I find your others, shall I bring them home to you?

She expected another cascading consultation, but the large one answered immediately.

Maker of Songs if they thrive, let them

be

Shadowplant the spirit/essence in

another place

Two-bump friend let them shape another

home

After she rode the platform up and settled herself in the reed chair, Shadith watched the Taalav arrays go spreading out beneath the trees, taking up the lives they’d put down to talk to her. She heard the Kliu guard’s breathing start to change and knew he was about to come awake.

She touched the sensor and set the creepier going on the trek back to the lake. A little tact and some patience and I’m off this stinking world. She smiled at the burp from the Kliu’s eating mouth. Sounds like, crocface there OD’d on (noise); may his gut rebel and his head feel worse than mine.

A drone from Digby was waiting for her when she reached the ship, but she didn’t access the data inside until she was well away from Pillory and ’splitting for Spotchalls.

Digby was sitting behind the desk again, wearing the face she’d seen when he set her to work. “A bit of information has come into my hands, Shadow, which you might find interesting and perhaps even useful. Word has come from Marrat’s Market that the Broker Jingko iKan has on offer a Taalav crystal. Guaranteed genuine and not stolen. Seems clear to me this is the smuggler’s payoff and he’s getting his money out of it as fast as possible. I want to remind you of the strictures of this search. You’re to be invisible to the Kliu. I leave it to you to figure out how.”

Shadith watched the image dissolve as the message erased itself from the ship’s memory. “Complications. So I’m supposed to get past OverSec without letting anyone know I’m looking for that smuggler. Cover? Spla! Can’t sneak in and disguise won’t do it. OverSec took that template of me when I went into Sunflower Labs. Said it would be erased. Not likely.

Cover… cover… a job that’ll be plausible and get me in without airing the Kliu connection. Lee? No. If she were hunting something, she’d do it herself. Swarda would do, but he and his crew are on a run out to the Hevardee. Aslan’s Mama. Yes. She owes me. Doesn’t like me all that much, but she likes feeling obligated even less. I need to talk to her first, though. Droom. That’s another month of traveling while the trail freezes on me, but with Digby’s strictures… Shayss!”

Sighing, she called up the destination code of the Hegger Combine and fed them into the router, then dealt with the disorientation as the ship phased into the new course and ’splitted for Droom.

5. I Forgot What Home Was Like

Lylunda crawled from the sludge of the ocean called the Haundi Zetin, wriggled through the tangle of baifruit vines and into the clump of tall, thin rynzues with their woody braided stems and the dusky black heat-collector nodules on the spray of branches at the top. Half an hour ago she’d brought her ship down through a foaming red light, Ekilore’s sullen fire filtered through an abundance of cloud fleece as the sun rose above the horizon; they were dry clouds because the rainy season was still two months off. She’d settled it in the tangled mass of vines and trees on the largest island in a spray of islands that ran parallel to the coast, covered it with camou cloth and left it with a low-level shield in place, a smuggler’s special.

On her feet again, she looked back at Nameless Island, only one end of it visible past the tangle of vines and the droop of the rynzu branches.

They were all nameless islands. Behilarr notion-why bother identifying something so useless? The Zeal was a soup of poisons infested with eels that were mostly mouth and vast schools of small, black swimmers that could strip flesh from bone in seconds.

All of these died when they ate Behilarr flesh, but the Behilarr died as well, ending as vomited chunks on the ocean floor. She was only half Behilarr. She grinned at the thought; maybe she’d only half-poison the fish.

No one went boating for pleasure in the waters round here and swimming was a skill only the very rich with their pools of filtered water could afford to learn. Her ship would be safe out there until she came back for it, though she didn’t look forward to the long dangerous swim to reach it.

In the strengthening light of the steamy dawn, she slipped off the impeller harness and laid it on the ground, unclipped her dita sac, took out the can of cleanser and the packet of blancafilm, and began the long process of cleaning and stowing her aegis suit and all the appurtenances that let her come safely through the hazards of the ZeOn.

By the time she reached the coast road, most of the morning was gone and she wasn’t quite so pleased with herself for finding a perfect place to stow her ship. The burlap sack she’d used to conceal her offworld gear was a hot wet spot on her back, the rough weave rubbing a rash through her blouse and T-shirt. Smuggler on the brain, she thought. I probably could have parked the ship in the tie-down at the transfer station and come in legit. And saved myself a lot of trouble…

She started walking along the edge of the unpaved road, a line of dirt beaten hard by the hooves of cattle driven from the nearby arranxes, the estates of the Highborn Behilarr, to the feed lots and slaughtering houses outside Haundi Zurgile. Zurg. Where she was born. Hutsarte had only been colonized a little more than a hundred years ago, and. Behilarr were slow to spend money on things like roads even though floats did need fairly level ground to operate efficiently.

Dream on, Luna, if you came in legit, your name would be on the list. How long would it take a hired snoop to find you then?

Her ankle turned as her foot slipped into a rut. Arms waving, she found her balance again but winced as she took the next step. “Jaink! I think I sprained the thing.”