The Crystal Variation

by Sharon Lee

  On his way to the dockside galley for a quick lunch—he still had to finish a test balance on the bulk—he ducked unwittingly by someone ambling slowly down the ‘crete.

  “Ah,” came Master tel’Ondor’s familiar voice, “do you wish to avoid speaking with me as much as that?

  Ears a-fire, Jethri ducked back, bowing a hasty apology.

  “Your pardon, sir. My mind was on my numbers and my stomach on lunch.”

  “A compelling combination, I agree,” the master allowed. “I rejoice to see you thus engaged upon the work of your house. You bring joy to your mother.”

  A test. Great. Jethri kept his sigh to himself and bowed, wincing only a little when his stomach audibly growled.

  Master tel’Ondor moved a languid hand, motioning Jethri onward.

  “Please, you have need. But first, let me congratulate you upon your defense of our ship at dockside.”

  Jethri stiffened. Not a lesson, then—a lecture.

  “But no,” said the master, apparently recognizing something in Jethri’s face, despite his efforts to remain bland— “this is not a problem. The ship speaks well of you, as does the cargo master and the clerk. I am told that you had the mode perfectly in dealing with the incident. The cargo master insists that you were prepared to take a charge and repel boarders!”

  He bowed, gently. “I wish merely that all the traders I have taught would have the sense you’ve shown. I believe you will be quite ready for the next part of your voyage!”

  And with that, he swept his hand forward again, and Jethri went, thinking as much about inertial restraints as about lunch.

  DAY 116

  Standard Year 1118

  Elthoria

  THEY WERE FOUR Standard Days out of Tilene, bound for Modrid. There, they’d do a couple days of fill-in trading and set course for the inner worlds.

  Inner Liaden worlds, where somebody as Terran as a Jethri Gobelyn would speedily become a three-day wonder. At best.

  Say that he worried; it was true enough. Gaenor and Vil Tor, together and separately, assured him that he’d do better than fine, but he considered that they might be a thought biased, being friends. Pen Rel sig’Kethra, who wasn’t necessarily a friend, had responded to the news of their amended route by intensifying the self-defense sessions ‘til they weren’t much shy of a shore-leave brawl. Master tel’Ondor had done the same with the protocol lessons, though at least those didn’t leave bruises.

  And Norn ven’Deelin, who should’ve been as terrified of the whole business as he was—if not more so, having, as he blackly suspected, a much sharper understanding of what exactly would happen if he made hash out of things—Norn ven’Deelin smiled, and patted his arm, and called him her son, and said that she was certain he would acquit himself with honor.

  All that being so, it was no wonder, Jethri thought, throwing back the blanket and slapping on the light, that he couldn’t sleep.

  He pulled on the most comfortable of his Liaden-made clothes—a pair of tough tan trousers, with a multitude of pockets, and an equally tough brown shirt—which was close enough to the coveralls that’d been standard ship wear on the Market to be comforting—slipped on a pair of soft ship slippers, and sorted through his pile of pocket stuff until he had his fractin, the Combine key and the general ship key. He slipped them into a pocket; a wrench set and folding blade into another and left his quarters.

  There wasn’t any need to sneak overtime studies on Elthoria, where the rule ‘mong the crew was that the trader knew best what the trader required. He’d come to have a fondness for that rule, no more so than now, as he swung down the wide corridor toward his personal bin.

  He’d several times over the last ten ship-days thought of the B-crate from home. Finding time to do something about it was the challenge there, his schedule being as crammed as it was.

  Which made his present state of nervous sleeplessness nothing less than a gift, looked at in a certain way. At least he’d be able to open the crate at his leisure, and take care over those things his mother had said he should have.

  He passed one other person on the way to the cargo section—Kilara pin’Ebit, who inclined her head, murmuring a polite, “Sir.”

  “Technician,” he replied, and that was that—no muss, no fuss, as Dyk used to say—and a few minutes later was standing in front of his bin.

  He touched the lock pad in the proper sequence; the door slid open, the interior lights coming up as he stepped into the room.

  Lashed against the far wall was one Terran-standard B crate, looking like it’d taken the rocky route through an asteroid belt to reach him.

  Releasing the netting, he knelt down, feeling in his pocket for the wrench set.

  There was a dent the size of his head in the side of the crate. Frowning, Jethri ran his hand over it. B crates were tough, and the most likely outcome of taking a whack at one with a heavy object was that the object would bounce—unless it broke. Something hard enough to stave in the side of one . . .

  “Must’ve got hit by a flying rock,” Jethri muttered, fitting his wrench around the first tog.

  There were a couple bad seconds with the third and sixth togs, which had gotten jammed when the crate deformed, but he finally got them loose, pulled the panel out, and leaned it against the wall.

  Inside, the crate was divided into four smaller magnetically sealed compartments over one larger compartment. Jethri reached for the seal of the upper right hand compartment, then sat back, his hand dropping to his knee, fingers suddenly cold.

  “C’mon,” he whispered. “It’s just kid stuff.”

  ‘cept it was kid stuff his mother had seen fit to take into custody, hold for more’n ten years before sending it all after him. Say what you would about Iza Gobelyn’s temper, and no question she was cold. Say it all—and when it was said, the fact remained that she was a canny and resourceful captain, who held the best good of the ship in her heart. That being so, she would’ve had a reason, beyond her own personal grief, for locking his things away. And a reason for finally letting them loose.

  He felt the scarebumps rise up on his arms—and then he laughed, breathy and a little too light. “Get a grip! What? You think Iza set you up for a double-cross, like one of Khat’s scare-stories? She sent your stuff because it’s yours by right an’ Paitor talked her into doing the decent.”

  Which Khat hadn’t said, but, then, Khat wouldn’t. The more he thought on it, though, the likelier it did seem that such a conversation had taken place; he could almost hear Uncle Paitor’s voice rumbling around inside his ears, comforting and comfortable.

  Jethri leaned forward and pulled open the top right door.

  A plain black purse sat in the center of the small space, a piece of paper sticking out of the fold. Slowly, he reached in and pulled the paper free; unfolded it and blinked at Khat’s messy scrawl, laboriously spelling out, “Stinks Money.”

  Jethri sat back, a breath he hadn’t known he was holding escaping in a whoosh! He put the paper on his knee, flipped open the purse and counted out a ridiculous amount of Combine paper. All this, from Stinks? It was hard to believe. Harder, in the end, to believe that Khat could cheat the ship. A right stickler, Khat. In a lot of ways, he thought suddenly, she’d’ve made a good Liaden. He slipped the purse and the note into a pocket and looked back to the crate.

  Feeling less spooky about the process, he opened the next door, withdrew a small metal box, and held it between his two hands. The metal was red-gold, burnished ‘til it glowed. The sides were decorated—etchings of stars, comets and moons. Three fancy letters were etched into the flat lid, intertwined like some dirtside creepers—AJG. Arin Jethri Gobelyn.

  The lock was a simple hook-and-eye; he slid it back with a thumb and raised the lid with care.

  Inside, it was lined with deep blue velvet. Scattered ‘round the velvet, like stars, were half-a-dozen expired Combine keys, a long flat piece of what might be carved and polished bone—and a ring.

  He
picked it up between thumb and forefinger. It was a massive thing—arrogant, if jewelry could be said to have attitude—the wide band engraved with stars, comets, moons—just like the side of the box. The top was oval, showing the stylized ship-and-planet of the official Combine seal.

  Jethri frowned. His father hadn’t been one to wear rings—plainly said, rings on a working ship were foolish, they had too much of a tendency to get caught in machinery and on rough edges. A commissioner, though—a commissioner might well wear a ring or a patch or somelike, to alert folks to the fact that here was somebody with connections.

  The gold was cold and unfriendly against his skin. He put it back in the box and reached for the bit of bone.

  As soon as his fingers touched it, he knew it wasn’t bone. Cool and slick, the symbol repeating down one face eerily familiar, it felt just like his lucky fractin.

  Frowning, he had that piece out of his pocket and put it side-by-side on his knee with the—whatever it was.

  By eye and touch, the two of them were made of the same material. Not exactly scientific, but it would do for now. And the repeating symbol? The very same as the big doughnut-shape on the face of his fractin, set end-to-end down the whole length of the thing.

  He picked it up and held it on his palm. Thing had some weight to it—heavier than you expected, like his fractin, which Grig had said enclosed alien workings. A sort of large economy size fractin, then, Jethri thought, smoothing his thumb over the soothing surface. That would have appealed to Arin, with his fascination with the regular sort of fractin. Jethri ran his thumb over it once more, then replaced it on its nest of old Combine keys, lowered the lid the put the box aside.

  The next compartment gave up a pair of photocubes. He snatched one out, hands shaking, and flicked through the images quickly, breathless, then more slowly, as he registered that the pictures were of people he didn’t know, had never seen. Spacers, most of them, but a few ground-based folk, too, the lot of them looking tired and wary. He put it down.

  The second cube—that was the one he had expected, and missed, and wished for. Images of family—Arin, naturally, with the half-grin on his face and his hands tucked into the pockets of his coverall, broad in the shoulder and stubborn in the jaw, brown eyes sitting deep under thick black eyebrows. After that was Seeli, Cris; a picture of Dyk up to his elbows in some cooking project, and a manic grin on his round face; and another of a thin and serious young Khat, bent over a piloting simboard.

  Another picture of Arin, with his arm around a woman that it took two blinks to recognize as Iza—the two of them laughing at some forever secret joke. Then a picture of a skinny kid, big eyes and his ears sticking out, coverall grubby, sitting on the floor of the galley at Arin’s side, the two of them contemplating the mosaic they’d fitted together. Jethri grinned at the memory. They’d used three dozen fractins in that design, and held up dinner for primary shift, while Arin snapped close-ups from every angle, like he did with every design they’d built.

  Still grinning, he clicked the button again, and came back to the first picture of Arin. He put the cube down and opened the last of the small compartments, discovering a notebook and a thick sheaf of hardcopy

  Grinning wider, he pulled out the book, riffling the pages, seeing the meticulous lists that Jethri-the-kid had kept of imaginary cargo, imaginary sales, imaginary buys, all worked out with his father’s help; each pretend deal discussed as seriously as if the merchandise and money were real. The pages fluttered toward the back, his eye snagged on a different script, and he flipped back. . .

  Angular and as plain as printout, Arin’s writing marched down the page in a simple list of ship names. Jethri ran a quick glance down the line, seeing names he was familiar with, names he wasn’t—

  WildeToad. He blinked, remembering the gritty yellow paper crackling in his, and the printout of a ship’s dying.

  Breaking clay . . .

  And why had Arin been keeping a ship list in the back of a kid’s pretend trade journal?

  Jethri shook his head. A mystery for later—or never. Likely it had just been a doodle, on a shift when things were slow; or an illustration meant to go with a conversation long talked out and forgotten. Come to remember it, his father had often doodled in the margins of his book—he riffled the pages again, slower this time, catching glimpses of the odd shapes Arin had drawn to help his thinking along.

  Jethri closed the book and reached for the hardcopy, already knowing they’d be the various rules for the games invented to put use to fractins.

  Something was left behind, though—and Jethri let out a whoop, dropping the game rules unceremoniously to the floor. He’d almost forgotten—

  A mirror no bigger than the palm of his father’s hand, framed and backed in some light black metal. Except, the reflecting surface didn’t reflect, not even the ghost a spacer might catch in the back of a work screen, which was his own face. As a kid, Jethri had amused himself periodically by trying to surprise the mirror into giving him a reflection, pressing his nose against the glassy surface, or leaving the device on a table top and sneaking up around the side, rushing forward at the last second, more often than not yelling “boo!” into the bargain.

  But the mirror never reflected one thing.

  What it did do, was predict the weather.

  Not a gadget that’d be much use on a spaceship, some might say, and they’d be right. No telling that it was all that useful dirt-side, just at first. Between them, though, him and Arin had puzzled out the symbol system and by the time his father died and his mother locked the thing away with the fractins and his trade journal—by that time, if they was dirt-side, Jethri could tell with a glance whether rain was due, or snow; lightning or hail, and from which planetary direction it would come.

  Grinning, he looked into the black, unreflective surface, for old time’s sake, then slipped it away into his shirt pocket.

  That left the big bin—no surprises, there.

  Except it was a surprise—he hadn’t remembered that there’d been so many. He opened the box and scooped up a handful of the cool squares, letting them run through his fingers, watching the shapes flicker, hearing the gentle clatter as the tiles tumbled against each other.

  The second box was counterfeits and brokens—what his father had called the ancillary collection. Some of the fakes looked pretty good, until you’d held a couple genuine fractins, and saw how fine and precise they were, no rough edges, each notch in exactly the same place, no deviation. Once you had that experience, you were unlikely ever to mistake a fake for the real thing again.

  He closed the box, looked back into the compartment . . .

  A rectangular wire frame lay in the far back corner. He brought it out, surprised at how light it was. He didn’t immediately place the metal, or the thing itself—a simple rectangle, sealed at the bottom, open at the top, the four walls gridlike. Not a big thing, in fact it looked to be about the size to—

  He reached into the box holding the genuine fractins, fingered one out and dropped it into the top opening. It slid down the rack to the bottom.

  Jethri smiled, eyeing the thing, figuring maybe fifty-sixty fractins would fit in the frame. Why anybody’d want to slot sixty fractins into a metal holder was another question—probably a new game variation.

  Still smiling, he yawned, and looked down at his wrist, stifling a curse. He was scheduled to be in Master ven’Deelin’s office, bright-eyed, intelligent and awake in something less than five hours.

  Moving quickly, he packed the fractins, sealed the lids and slid them and the wire frame back into their compartment, along with the game rules, his old trade journal, Arin’s box, and the photocube of the strange spacers and grounders.

  Then, he resealed the crate, and netted it snug against the wall.

  Rising, he slipped the purse into a side pocket. The photocube was too big for any of his pockets, so he carried it with him, down the hall and back to his quarters.

  DAY 123

&nb
sp; Standard Year 1118

  Elthoria

  Modrid Approach

  THE ALARM BOUNCED JETHRI out of sleep two subjective seconds after he hit the bunk.

  He threw the blanket back and swung out immediately, having learned from his newly accelerated shifts that the best thing to do when the alarm sounded was get up and get the blood moving toward the brain.

  His feet hit the floor and he rubbed his hands briskly over his face, trying to encourage the blood—or maybe his brain—and began to review his shift schedule. First thing was a breakfast meeting with Pen Rel, who wanted to talk about the theory of self-defense. Then, he needed to go over the list of Ixin’s regular local trading partners, and a history of Elthoria’s last six trading missions to Modrid, that Vil Tor had pulled for him. Gaenor’s Terran lessons had gone on hold since the change of course, though they’d been managing impromptu sessions on the run; so, after his hour in the library, he was scheduled for a long session with Master tel’Ondor, and after that—

  The door chimed, interrupting his thoughts. He snatched up his robe and pulled it on as he crossed the room and slapped the plate.

  Gaenor stood in the hall, in full uniform. She bowed formally as the door slid open.

  “The captain’s compliments, Apprentice Trader,” she said, speaking each word distinctly, so that he would have no trouble following her, though she spoke in a mode other than the mercantile. “You are invited to join the master trader at the trade bench as soon as convenient. The master trader bids you ‘be sure to breakfast heartily’.”

  Jethri bowed his thanks and straightened to find her outright grinning. Her hand rose, making a sign he did not recognize. “At last, we have you in the thick of things! I will see you soon!”