by Sharon Lee
Ring finger.
“It is not necessarily criminal to bring a nascent dramliza into an environment rife with unknown talents, but a case may be made for lunatic. What say you, Trader?”
“I say,” Padi answered, following this without effort, “that I most carefully reviewed the files you made available to me. Trader Veshtin is clearly experienced, bold, and able. Her previous apprentices and juniors have all praised her abilities as a teaching trader. At any other time, I would willingly place myself under her guidance. However, my master trader is on the edge of opening not only a new market, but very possibly a new sector to trade, and as my ultimate goal is to achieve the amethyst, I cannot in conscience turn my back on that experience.”
There, it was said. She met her master’s eyes, face composed and calm.
After a moment, he inclined his head.
“Allow me to compliment you; that was nicely phrased.”
“Thank you,” she said, with a composure she did not quite feel. She had given her opinion. The master trader was under no obligation to abide by her preferences. Nor, if it came to that, was Father so constrained. She was his heir, and while an heir could be placed at risk, it was not best practice.
“As you have chosen to accompany the Passage to The Redlands, there are certain studies you will be required to undertake, for your own safety,” he said.
Padi sat up, breath-caught.
“Yes, sir,” she murmured.
He smiled, slight and wry.
“You will see that I had anticipated you,” he said, and raised a finger. “You will apply yourself wholeheartedly to your tutoring in the dramliz arts. Especially, you will learn to build and maintain shields.”
“Yes, sir. Lina and Priscilla have already begun to train me in the art. Today, it was determined that I have the capacity to build shields, and that I have enough raw power to maintain them without tiring. It has also been determined that I need to acquire focus. Priscilla has given me exercises.”
“One is gratified.”
He sighed, picked up his glass and sipped.
“If you please,” Padi murmured. “I have a question.”
“One question. The hour grows late.”
“Yes sir. I wonder if we will be taking on trade goods for The Redlands, and if so, what is our port?”
“That is two questions,” he noted, replacing his glass.
Padi waited.
The master trader lifted his eyebrows.
“As you know,” he said austerely, “our next port is Pommier, there to release those who no longer wish to stand crew on this ship. We shall, of course, consider what Pommier has to offer—in fact, I will welcome your opinion on that topic tomorrow. After Pommier—we shall see. Does that satisfy you, Trader?”
“Yes, Master Trader,” Padi said evenly. “Thank you.”
The master trader bowed his head; Father met her eyes.
“If a mere parent may suggest it,” he said gently, “you have had a long and tiring day; the first of many long and tiring days, I daresay. I see from your face that you have been accessing board rest, and enhancing your concentration . . . rather often. That is not viable, long-term, as we both know. If you allow, I may give you a technique which will place you into a Healing sleep. Thus you will Balance your debt to your body, and also, perhaps, make it . . . less necessary to incur such a debt tomorrow.”
It was, Padi thought, very tempting. Board rest would only serve her so far, and it would be good to have another knife in her belt. However, the benefits of her last exercise were already beginning to thin, and dramliz work was more tiring than most . . .
“Peace, my child. I would make you a gift.”
“I . . . believe that I don’t understand,” she said. “Forgive me.”
“There is nothing to forgive. I promise that it will be quite painless. All you need do is accept it.”
Accept it was a technical term as she knew from her lessons with Lina. It required making her mind a still pool and releasing her emotions. Which sounded easy . . .
Still, she had had some practice, and if she did not approach perfect, she at least was not entirely without technique.
Carefully, deliberately, she calmed her thoughts, and breathed peace into her center.
“Admirable,” Father murmured. “Only remain so, peaceful and calm. It is a very small thing I give; soft, sweet, and infinitely useful to you. You cannot make energy from nothing, and you cannot perpetually borrow against your future. You may, however, give your body leave to function at its most efficient. Here, now, in your hand.”
She felt it, exactly as if he had slipped a sweet into her hand. She curled her fingers to hold it safe, and in that moment felt it dissolve, leaving a delightful taste on her tongue, and a brief glimpse of a pattern in lambent silver, spinning comfort at the back of her mind in the instant before it, too, dissolved.
She sighed and opened her eyes.
“Thank you,” she said, feeling soothed and, yes, peaceful.
“You are most welcome,” Father said, smiling. “Go now and find your rest. Chiat’a bei kruzon, my child.”
“Chiat’a bei kruzon, Father,” she said.
Rising, she leaned over the desk, kissed his cheek—and left him.
* * *
The door closed behind her, his bright blade of a daughter, and Shan slumped somewhat in his chair.
That last—that had been a rare foolishness, to open his shields even so small a bit, to pass one of the sweetest and most useful of a Healer’s many tools on to someone in desperate need.
Well. He closed his eyes, and only breathed until the fine trembling stopped, and he felt he could be steady on his feet.
When he was thus certain of himself, he spun back to the screen, extended a hand . . .
. . . and closed his files.
IX
Priscilla filed the report on The Redlands that Shan had forwarded to her.
It was, she thought, just as well that they had offered the buyout option, and were en route to deliver the most distressed of their crew to safety. She only hoped that The Redlands didn’t give birth to another round of despair.
For a brief moment, she considered the possibility of making another offer before they hit Pommier, but—no. There was a limit to how many crew they could lose; and a limit, too, to available reserves, the ship’s treasury as well as Shan’s personal fortune.
And those were really worries for—tomorrow.
For now . . .
For this moment, when she had time to herself, with the most pressing of her tasks completed, and her shift, if the captain could fairly be said to have a shift, over—she had an impossibility to inspect.
Lina had proven Padi telekinetic. That was useful for the purposes of a final Sorting, but not surprising. Padi’s aunt—Shan’s sister, Anthora—also counted telekinesis among her numerous talents. Priscilla had once, years ago, seen Anthora tease her brother Val Con by moving his wineglass just ahead of his reaching hand. And she had Seen the extension of Anthora’s will that she had used to push the glass. It had been the veriest whisper of will, a tool no more substantial than a cat’s whisker. But there had been a tool—a form—involved.
A form had to be involved in the interface between the planes. The form focused the will, and insured that only the energy required for a given task was expended. Without a form, a dramliza might expend all of her talent on one simple task.
What Padi had shown her at Lina’s instruction was, therefore, theoretically possible.
There had been no connection between Padi and the stylus. There had been, to Priscilla’s Sight, a faint lavender nimbus around the little object, echoing Padi’s aura, which gave some credence to the seemingly daft idea that she had “taught” the stylus to float. If she had, in fact, detached a pinch of her considerable power and bound it to the stylus, it might indeed seem as if there were no connection between the witch and the object. Padi’s rather shamefaced confession that many
of the objects in her quarters floated—but only when she was concentrating or perhaps a little warm in her emotions—lent credence to this theory.
Priscilla had traded Padi one of her own, non-floating, styli for the one that did tricks, and had set it aside to study later.
And now . . . it was later.
She opened the drawer where she had placed the stylus, against any sudden moment of aerial improvisation, placed it on the desk, and considered it with all the senses available to her.
Excepting the faint lavender aura, it was a perfectly ordinary stylus. The aura . . . Priscilla extended a thought—then pulled back.
Settling into herself, Inner Eyes open, and shields down, she said, very calmly, “Please rise, stylus.”
The stylus remained only a stylus, and so very innocent of any peculiarity, on the desk. Priscilla sighed, and extended her will. There was a spark, sudden, as her thought intersected the lavender aura, and Priscilla felt a faint thrill before she enclosed the stylus in her will.
It reposed inside her regard, cool, inanimate, and faintly mocking.
Priscilla frowned and held herself still, recalling once again that evening when Anthora had seen fit to tease her brother until he, no wizard, had simply decided that the glass would obey her prompting no more.
It had upon the instant stopped its coy game. Priscilla, who had been watching closely, Saw Anthora push, increase the weight and angle of her will, shove—
And Saw her intention bisected, flowing past the glass to dissipate in the room beyond.
In the meanwhile, young Val Con had casually put out his hand, picked up his glass, and wandered away, sipping.
“Pah!” Anthora had said, when Priscilla had asked what had happened.
“It is because he is the delm genetic.”
She had sighed at Priscilla’s frown, and elaborated.
“Clan members cannot circumvent the Delm’s Word. He wished me to stop moving his glass—and it was so. I doubt I could have lifted it had I reached out my hand and took hold.”
For years, Priscilla had simply assumed that the effect was as Anthora had described it, born of relationships and melant’i in-clan, and had nothing to do with the larger arena of dramliz talent.
And now here came Padi, disdaining forms, and merely desiring an object to float.
Well, Priscilla thought, and what if Val Con’s wish for a less peripatetic wine glass had not acted upon Anthora, but upon the glass?
She considered the stylus reposing within the bubble of her will, and carefully withdrew herself. Standing, she did inventory, making certain that she had not automatically created an artifact; that she was in no way in contact with the stylus, though her attention was certainly centered upon it.
It was something like making sure that she was standing with her hands behind her back, shoulders deliberately level, and not quite daring to breathe.
“Rise,” she said, and willed it to be so.
The stylus rolled on the desk, two full revolutions, and then—
It rose.
This was not the easy wafting into the air that Padi had demonstrated, but a rather brisk ascension, nor did it stop at fifteen centimeters, but kept on rising, accelerating a little, until Priscilla said sharply, “That’s enough!”
It paused then, and for all the worlds like a peevish apprentice, fell, striking the desk with a boom!
Priscilla’s Sight jumped; golden lines spun, flared, coalesced. Off-center, she flung out a hand, glimpsed a black, yawning hunger—heard another boom that shook her heart in her chest—
And it was gone. Serenity reigned as far as her Senses extended. The hunger was dismissed. The song of the universe fell sweet upon her soul.
She felt a familiar touch, and there came the voice, Moonhawk’s own, rising in jubilation.
The door has closed.
BOOM!
Padi twisted on her bunk, more than half asleep, brows pulled in protest of the echoes. A hand fell on her shoulder and she stilled, brow smoothing.
“What was that?” she muttered, and wasn’t really surprised to hear Lute’s voice in answer.
“A door closed, that was all. Sleep again, child; there’s naught for you to do.”
Civilization
* * *
“ . . . data,” Trader Isfelm was telling the Trade Council. “On our side, see you, we’ve got plenty too much data. I make no argument; the best course, for yourselves and for us, too, is to go out. But to go out, we need to know what’s there. We need charts, navigation updates . . . ”
“We have charts, maps, and navigation tables in our archives,” Portmaster krogerSlyte said. “We’ll be more than pleased to open them to you.”
Bentamin leaned back in his chair, watching Trader Isfelm with all the senses available to him. The trader was well-known, being their usual contact with the Iverson Loop, a wiry, quick-talking woman, with a sharp intelligence and seemingly endless patience with the ignorance of the world-bound. What continued to fascinate him, meeting after meeting, was her apparent natural ability to shield her thoughts and emotions from even a determined auditor.
Right now, Trader Isfelm was being patient with the portmaster.
She smiled, spread her hands, and ducked her pointed chin slightly.
“That’s free-handed, and I’m grateful,” she said, sounding exactly grateful. “But the truth is—we have charts, maps and nav grids, same like you—likely from the same source, and every bit as old. The problem, in a word—is that in the spaceways, under Dust or in the Clear, things move. In fact, what we’re calling routes are less like that fine avenue outside the window here, than a series of markers and suggestions. The routes, and the protocols for traveling along them—they’re all adjusted as space moves.”
She considered the faces ’round the table one by one, apparently not finding the ready understanding she had hoped for.
Glancing down, she picked up the mug before her and sipped tea, wondering, so Bentamin thought, how to get her concept through their thick heads.
The tea apparently had a restorative effect; when the trader put her mug down, she was smiling slightly.
“Well, here now—you’ll have seen the Dust Warnings we bring in with our infopacks. Data gathered from the beacons, buoys, and stations along our route, that is. Those measurements were how we first knew the Dust was leaving us, the rate of its going, and where it might be tending. All of space is like that—moving, readjusting itself, always changing, fast or slow.”
Another glance around the table. Bentamin gave the trader a nod of encouragement, and got a wry half-grin in return.
“Now, our information being as old as it is, past Redlands space, we might as well not have it; it’s more a danger to navigation than any kind of help. We need updates from out there—clear, fresh data—that’s what it comes down to. I’m willing to go out. Space! I’m eager to go out! But unless and until I can supply my captain and my nav rider with numbers better than two hundred Standards gone, they’re not taking the risk. And nor do I blame them.”
“These numbers, then,” said the portmaster. “How do you suggest we gather them? Even before Dust, The Redlands were considered out of the way.”
By design, Bentamin thought. The population of The Redlands specifically did not want to be found out by dramliz, the Liaden Council of Clans, or by any other persons who might see them and their talents worthy only of elimination.
Or, he thought, Reavers suddenly looming in his thoughts, exploitation.
“My thought was the research station,” Isfelm said, and raised her hand, the big, showy ring she always wore catching the light from the windows. “The Dust is thinned enough now, signal distortion ought not be a problem. How if—”
A subtle chime sounded inside Bentamin’s ear, followed by the voice of the portmaster’s amanuensis.
“Begging your pardon, Warden, but the Oracle is calling for you on the emergency comm. You can take it in the privacy parlor.”
“Thank you,” he replied.
Trader Isfelm was still talking, the rest of the council concentrating on her proposal.
Bentamin rose and slipped quietly out of the room, moving quickly down the short hall to the privacy parlor.
The red light was blinking on the comm unit. Bentamin braced a hip against the table, and touched the button.
“Aunt Asta, it’s Bentamin,” he said, keeping his voice calm and gentle.
“Bentamin! I wanted you to know immediately! The universe has cut its final ties with darkness. We need have no more concerns on that head.”
Bentamin blinked—and realized that he was relieved indeed. Aunt Asta was free of her private horror. The universe was no longer in danger. She could rest now, and be easy.
“That is excellent news!” he said enthusiastically.
He hesitated before deciding that he had to ask, if for no other reason than it would be unlike him not to ask. “How were these ties cut, if it can be told?”
“A hero arose,” Aunt Asta said. “Battle was joined; the sacrifice was made; and the door was closed! Closed and sealed. We are unbreachable.”
“Truly, we owe much to this hero,” Bentamin said piously.
There was a pause, and for an instant he feared that he had gone too far and Aunt Asta, with her Far-Seeing eyes, had Seen entirely through him.
If so, she decided that mercy was in order, on this day when the hero’s sacrifice had been made, and the universe was saved.
“It is the way of life,” she said, as if she were delivering a lesson to a child. “Danger arises, and also the answer to danger. Balance is the rule.”
An old lesson, that one, and not accurate, so far as Bentamin had observed. On the other hand, rules were a comfort to Civilization, as much as they were irksome to the Haosa. In between those two poles, surely a truth was balanced. And who could say, but that the universe depended upon that truth?
“I am going to take a nap,” Aunt Asta told him. “Go back to your meeting, Bentamin.”
The line went dead.