Crystal Line

by Anne McCaffrey

Tucker only smiled, the slight, tolerant smile playing at the corner of his mouth, as if he were chary of admitting even that much about himself.

  "Don't let Shad's reticence mislead you, Killashandra Ree," Orric went on, laying a hand on his friend's shoulder. "He's accredited for more than a lunk fisher. Indeed he is." Killashandra felt yet another tweak of pain that she masked with a smile for Orric. "Shad's got first mate's tickets on four water worlds that make sailing Armagh look like tank bathing. Came here with a submarine rig one of the Anchorite companies was touting." He shrugged, eloquently indicating that the company's praise had fallen on deaf Armaghan ears.

  "They're conservative here on Armagh," Tucker said, his accent a nice change, soft after Orric's near-bellow. She almost had to sharpen her hearing to catch what he said.

  "How so?" she asked Shad.

  "They feel there is one good way to catch lunk when it's in oil. By long line. That way you don't bruise the flesh so much and the lunk doesn't struggle the way it does in a net and sour the oil. The captains, they've a sense of location that doesn't need sonic gear. I've sailed with five, six of the best and they always know when and where lunk are running. And how many they can bring from that deep."

  And, thought Killashandra, bemused by Shad's soft accent, you'd give your arm to develop that sense.

  "You've fished on other worlds," she said out loud.

  "Aye."

  "Where, for instance?"

  He was as unforthcoming as a fish—or herself.

  "Oh, all over. Spiderfish, crackerjaw, bluefin, skaters and Welladay whales."

  The young man spoke casually, as if encounters with aquatic monsters were of no account. And how, Killashandra wondered to herself, did she know that's what he'd named? Nervously, she glanced to one side and saw Orric's eyes light up, as if he had hoped that the catalog would impress her.

  "A crackerjack opened his back for him on Spindrift," Orric said proudly. "And he flew five miles with a skater and brought it down, the largest one ever recorded on Mandalay."

  Killashandra wasn't sure why Orric Thursday wished to extol his friend. But it made him more acceptable in her eyes. Shad was too young, anyhow. Killashandra made no further attempt to draw Shad out but turned to Tir and Orric.

  Despite a continued concern for her consumption of harmat, Orric kept ordering until full dark closed down abruptly on the planet and the artificial lights came on in the room.

  "Mealtime," Biyanco announced in a loud, penetrating voice, and activated a barrier that dropped over the bar. He appeared through a side door and briskly gestured them to a table for four on the other side of the room. Killashandra made no resistance to Orric's suggestion that they all dine together, and she spent the rest of the evening—listening to fish stories—in their company. She spent her night alone—by choice. She had not made up her mind yet.

  When the sun came up over the edge of the sea, she was down in the hotel's private lagoon, floating on the buoyant waters, just as the lunk ships, sails fat with dawn winds, slid out to open sea with incredible speed.

  To her surprise, Orric appeared at midday and offered to show her Trefoil's few diversions. Nothing loath, she went and found him most agreeable company, conversant on every phase of Trefoil's domestic industry. He steered her from the usual tourist path, for which she was grateful. She abhorred that label, though tourist she was, on any world but Ballybran. Nor did she give Orric Thursday any hint of her profession, despite all his attempts to wheedle the information from her.

  It wasn't that she liked being secretive, but few worlds understood the function of crystal singers, and some very odd habits and practices had been attributed to them. Killashandra's discretion and caution was instinctive now.

  Late that afternoon, a bleeper on Orric's belt alerted him to return to the dock: the fishing boats had been sighted.

  "Sorry, m'dear," he said as he executed a dipping turn of his fast airflipper. "Duty calls."

  She elected to join him on the wharf, allowing him to think it was his company she preferred. Actually, she wanted to watch the silent teamwork of docking, and see the mahogany figure of Shad Tucker again. He was much too young for her, she told herself again, but a right graceful person to observe.

  They had made a quick plenteous catch that day, Killashandra was told as the fishermen drowned their thirsts in harmat at the Golden Dolphin. Tucker seemed unusually pleased, and Killashandra couldn't resist asking why.

  "He's made enough now to go off-world," Orric said when Shad replied with an indolent shrug. "He won't go." Orric shook his head, a wry grin on his face. "He never does. He's been here longer than on any other planet."

  "Why?" Killashandra asked Shad, then had to hush Orric. "Let Tucker reply. He knows his own mind, doesn't he?"

  Shad regarded her with mild surprise, and the indolent look left his blue eyes, replaced by an intensity she found hard to ignore.

  "This is a real sea world," Shad said, picking his words in his soft-accented way, "not some half-evolved plankton planet."

  He doesn't open his lips wide enough to enunciate properly, she thought, and wondered why he guarded himself so.

  "You've lunk for profit, territ and flatfish for fine eating, the crustaceans and bivalves for high livers, then the sea fruits for a constant harvest. Variety. I might buy myself a strip of land and stay."

  "You do ship on more than the lunk boats?"

  Shad was surprised by her question. "All the boats fish lunk when it runs. Then you go after the others."

  "If you've a mind for drudgery," Tir Od Nell said gloomily.

  Shad gave Tir a forbearing glance. "Lunk requires only muscle," he said with a sly grin.

  This appeared to be an old challenge, for Tir launched into a debate that Shad parried with the habit of long practice.

  For the sake of being perverse, Killashandra took Tir to bed that night. She didn't regret the experience, although there was no harmony between them. If it gave her no peace, his vehemence did take the edge off her hunger. She did not encourage him to ask for more. Somewhere, long ago, she had learned the way to do that without aggravating a lover.

  He was gone by dawn. Orric dropped by a few hours later and took her to see a sea-fruit farm on the peninsula, ten klicks from Trefoil to the south. When she assured Max Ennert, the farmer, of her experience, they were all fitted out with breather tanks and went submarine.

  Enclosed by water, isolated by her trail of bubbles, though attached by guideline to Max and Orric, she realized—probably not for the first time—why crystal singers sought water worlds. Below sea level, there was insulation against aural sound, relief from the play of noise against weary eardrums.

  They drifted inches above the carefully tended sea gardens, Max and Orric occasionally pruning off a ripe frond of grape or plum and shoving them in the net bags they towed. They bypassed reapers in a vast sea-valley where weed was being harvested. Occasionally, loose strands would drift past them, the fuller, longer ones deftly caught and netted by the men.

  Killashandra was content to follow, slightly behind Max, slightly ahead of Orric, craning her neck, angling her body to enjoy as much of the clear-sea view as possible. One or the other man checked her gauges from time to time. Euphoria could be a curse undersea, and they didn't know of the professional immunity she enjoyed.

  Perhaps that was why Orric argued with Max at one point, when they had been below some two hours. But they stayed down almost three more before they completed the circuit. As they walked out of the sea at Max's landing, night was approaching with the usual tropical dispatch.

  "Stay on, Orric, Killashandra, if you've no other plans," Max said but the words sounded rehearsed, strained.

  She entered the room where she had changed to sea dress and heard Orric's footsteps right behind her. She didn't bother closing the door. He did, and had her in his arms the next instant. She made no resistance to his advance nor did she respond. He held her from him, surprised, a question in his eyes.
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  "I'm not susceptible to euphorics, Orric," she told him.

  "What are you talking about?" he asked, gray eyes wide with innocence.

  "And I've submarined on more worlds than Shad has sailed."

  "Is it Tucker you're after?" He didn't seem jealous, merely curious.

  "Shad's . . ." She shrugged, unwilling to place the young man in any category.

  "But you don't fancy me?" He did not seem aggrieved—again, merely curious.

  She looked at him a long moment. "I think . . ." She paused then voiced an opinion that had been subconscious till that moment. "You remind me too much of someone I've been trying to forget."

  "Oh, just remind you?" Orric's voice was soft and coaxing, almost like Tucker's. She put that young man firmly out of her mind.

  "No offense intended, Orric. The resemblance is purely superficial."

  His eyes twinkled merrily, and Killashandra realized that the resemblance was not purely superficial, for the other man would have responded in just the same way, amused with her and taking no offense. Perversely that annoyed her more.

  "So, dark and mysterious lady, when you get to know me better . . ."

  "Let me get to know you better first."

  They flitted back to Trefoil, circling over quays empty of any fishing craft.

  "Lunk is moving offshore," Orric said. "Season's about over, I'd say."

  "Does Tucker really have enough for a ticket-off?"

  "Probably." Orric was busy setting the little craft down in dim light. "But Tir needs one more good haul. And so, I suspect, does Skipper Garnish. They'll track school as far as there's trace before they head in."

  Which was the substance of the message left for Orric at the Golden Dolphin. So Killashandra, Orric, and Biyanco talked most of the evening with few other drinkers at the bar.

  That was why Killashandra got an invitation to go with Biyanco fruit-harvesting. "Land fruit for harmat," Biyanco said with an odd shudder.

  Orric laughed and called him an incorrigible lubber. "Biyanco swears he's never touched sea fruit in his life."

  "Never been that poor," Biyanco said with some dignity.

  The brewman roused her before dawn, his tractor-float purring outside her veranda. She dressed in the overall he had advised and the combi-boots, and braided her hair tightly to her skull. On the outward leg of their trip, Trefoil nestled on the curved sands of a giant horseshoe bay, foothills at its back. Rain forests that were all but impenetrable swept up the hills, sending rank streamers across the acid road in vain attempts to cover that man-made tunnel to the drier interior.

  Biyanco was amiable company, quiet at times, garrulous but interesting at others. He stopped off on the far side of the first range of foothills for lorries and climbers. None of the small boys and girls waiting there looked old enough to be absent from schooling, Killashandra thought. All carried knives half again as long as their legs from sheaths thong-tied to their backs. All wore the coveralls and combi-boots with spurred clamp-ons for tree-climbing.

  They chattered and sang, dangling their legs from the lorries as the tractor hovered above the acid road. Occasionally one of them would wield a knife, chopping an impertinent streamer that clasped itself to a lorry.

  Biyanco climbed farther above sea level by the winding acid road until he finally slowed down, peering at the roadside. Five kilometers later he let out an exclamation and veered the tractor-float to the left, his hands busy with dials and switches. A warning hoot brought every climber's legs back into the lorries. Flanges, tilting downward, appeared along the lorry load beds and acid began to drop from them. It sprayed out, arcing well past the tractor-float's leading edge, dissolving vegetation. Suddenly the float halted, as if trying to push against an impenetrable barrier. Biyanco pushed a few toggles, closed a switch, and suddenly the tractor-float moved smoothly in a new direction.

  "Own this side of the mountain, you know," Biyanco said, glancing at Killashandra to see the effect of his announcement. "Ah, you thought I was only a bar brewman, didn't you? Surprised you, didn't I? Ha!" The little man was pleased.

  "You did."

  "I'll surprise you more before the day is out."

  At last they reached their destination, a permaformed clearing with acid-proofed buildings that housed his processing unit and temporary living quarters. The climbers he had escorted went further on, sending the lorries off on automated tracks, six climbers to each lorry. They had evidently climbed for him before and in the same teams, for he gave them a minimum of instruction before dismissing them to pick.

  Then he showed Killashandra into the processing plant and explained the works succinctly.

  Each of the teams worked a different fruit, he told her. The secret of good harmat lay in the careful proportions and the blending of dead ripe fruit. There were as many blends of harmat as there were fish in the sea. His had made the Golden Dolphin famous; that's why so many Armaghans patronized his hostelry. No vapid, innocuous stuff came from his stills. Harmat took months to bring to perfection: the fruit he'd process today would be fermented for nine months and would not be offered for sale for six years. Then he took her below ground, to the cool dark storage area, deep in the permaform. He showed her the automatic alarms that would go off if the vicious digger roots of the jungle ever penetrated the permaform. He wore a bleeper on his belt at all times (he never did remove the belt, but it was made of a soft, tough fiber). He let her sample the brews, and it amused her that he would sip abstemiously while filling her cup full. Because she liked him and she learned about harmat from him, she gradually imitated drunk.

  And Biyanco did indeed surprise her, sprier than she had ever thought him and elated with his success. She was glad for his sake and somewhat puzzled on her own account. He was adept enough that she ought to have enjoyed it, too. He had tried his damnedest to bring her to pitch but the frequency was wrong, as it had been with Tir, would have been with Orric, and this badly puzzled Killashandra. She ought not to have such trouble off-world. Was there crystal in her soul, after all? Was she too old to love?

  While Biyanco slept, before the full lorries glided back to the clearing, she probed her patchy memory again and again, stopped each time by the Guild Master's cynical laugh. Damn the man! He was haunting her even on Armagh. He had no right to taint everything she touched, every association she tried to enjoy. She could remember, too, enough snatches to know that her previous break had been as disastrous. Probably other journeys, too. In the quiet cool dark of the sleeping room, Biyanco motionless with exhaustion beside her, Killashandra bleakly cursed Lars Dahl. Why was it she found so little fulfillment with other lovers? How could he have spoiled her for everyone else when she could barely remember him or his lovemaking? She had refused to stay with him, sure then of herself where she was completely unsure now. Crystal in her soul?

  Experimentally, she ran her hand down her bare body, to the hard flesh of her thighs, the softness of her belly, her firm breasts. A woman never conceived once she had sang crystal. Small loss, she thought, and then, suddenly, wasn't sure.

  Damn! Damn! Damn Lars Dahl. How could he have left her? What was rank to singing black crystal? They had been the most productive duo ever paired in the annals of the Heptite Guild. And he had given that up for power. What good did power do him now? It did her none whatsoever. Without him, black eluded her.

  The sound of the returning lorries and the singing of the climbers roused Biyanco. He blinked at her, having forgotten in his sleeping that he had taken a woman again. With solemn courtesy, he thanked her for their intercourse and, having dressed, excused himself with grave ceremony. At least a man had found pleasure in her body, she thought.

  She bathed, dressed, and joined him as the full fruit bins began spilling their colorful contents into the washing pool. Biyanco was seated at the controls, his nimble fingers darting here and there as he weighed each bin, computed the price, and awarded each chief his crew's chit. It was evidently a good pick, judging by the gri
ns on every face, including Biyanco's.

  As each lorry emptied, it swiveled around and joined the line on the tract-float that was also headed homeward. All were shortly in place, and the second part of the processing began. The climbers took themselves off under the shade of the encroaching jungle and ate their lunches.

  Abruptly, noise pierced Killashandra's ears. She let out a scream, stifling a repetition against her hand but not soon enough to escape Biyanco's notice. The noise ceased. Trembling with relief, Killashandra looked around, astonished that no one else seemed affected by that appalling shriek.

  "You are a crystal singer, then, aren't you?" Biyanco asked, steadying her as she rocked on her feet. "I'm sorry. I wasn't sure you were, and I've not such good pitch myself that I'd hear if the drive crystals were off. Honest, or I'd have warned you." He was embarrassed and earnest.

  "You should have them balanced," Killashandra replied angrily, and immediately apologized. "What made you think I might be a crystal singer?"

  Biyanco looked away from her now. "Things I've heard."

  "What have you heard?"

  He looked at her then, his black eyes steady. "That a crystal singer can sound notes that'll drive a man mad. That they lure men to them, seduce them, and then kidnap 'em away to Ballybran, and they never come back."

  Killashandra smiled, a little weakly because her ears still ached. "What made you think I wasn't?"

  "Me!" He jabbed at his chest with a juice-stained finger. "You slept with me!"

  She reached out and touched his cheek gently. "You are a good man, Biyanco, besides being the best brewman on Armagh. And I like you. But you should get those crystals balanced before they splinter on you."

  Biyanco glanced over at the offending machinery and grimaced. "The tuner's got a waiting-list as long as Murtagh River," he said. "You look pale. How about a drink? Harmat'll help—oh, you are a witch," he added, chuckling as he realized that she could not have been as drunk as she had acted. Then a smile tugged his lips across his face. "Oh-ho, you are a something, Killashandra of Ballybran. I should've spotted your phony drunk, and me a barman all these decades." He chuckled again. "Well, harmat'll help your nerves." He clicked his fingers at one of the climber chiefs, and the boy scampered into the living quarters, returning with glasses and a flask of chilled harmat.