Crystal Line

by Anne McCaffrey

  "Sorry about that, Killa, but you know I was right."

  "Yes, I know," she replied, absently rubbing her wrists before she elbowed herself to a sitting position. "You're sneakier than an Altairian tangier," she said nastily. But the purely physical aches distracted her nerves from the interior throb of crystal sting.

  A mug of some warm liquid was thrust at her.

  "Drink this. Stuffed full of stimulants," Lars said, and she obeyed.

  The beverage coursed down her gullet and seemed to find an immediate path to her armpits and stomach, radiating out from those points to her extremities.

  "Thanks, Lars," she said.

  He ruffled her hair. "That's my Sunny!"

  "I am not your Sunny," she said, shooting him a brief, dark scowl of denial.

  "No, you're not much like my Sunny, are you?" his voice had gone expressionless again.

  She tried not to care, but perhaps it was as well. "We're here to cut, aren't we? Let's do it."

  Stiffly she got to her feet and walked as firmly as she could to the cutter rack. The weight of the tool was almost more than her flaccid arm could support, but just as Lars's hand came to her assistance, she managed to heave the cutter strap on to her shoulder.

  "Let's go."

  As she descended from the sled on to the rock– and shard-strewn ground, she was vaguely aware that he had slung more than his cutter to his shoulder. By the time she had scrambled to the rock face only fifteen meters from the sled, she was panting with exertion. She paused long enough to catch her breath to sing. She chose an A; heard Lars sing out in C and the face echo it back. Not a strong rebound but enough to encourage her. With her hand flat on the rock, she tried to find the source of the echo.

  "It's stronger over here," Lars said, and she closed the distance between them with a leap. "Don't break a leg!" he shouted.

  She sang A again, and the reverberation rippled through her hand.

  "Easy, girl," he said, but she was too busy tuning her cutter.

  Old habit guided them both, and Killa managed to hold her cutter against the buck of the subsonic blade through the crystal that had lain hidden since the tectonic pressures had formed it.

  "Hold it steady!" Lars's voice penetrated her cutting fever and steadied her just enough so that their initial cut was true. Lars did the underslice as Killa held out eager hands to receive the excision. Her fingers clawed it free, ignoring the lacerations, and she held it up—a form in green, clear and solid.

  Sunlight caught it, making it sing in her hands. The shaft sang on and on, its sound coruscating through her skin to bone and blood, flowing down her arms to her body, through her body to her legs, flowing and blotting out the sting with its resonance, leeching the agony of her long absence from the crystal that rejuvenated her.

  When someone wrenched the shaft from her, she screamed and received a hard slap across her face; she dropped to the ground, bruising her knees on the scattered crystal debris.

  " Killa! You've been thralled!" Lars's voice caught her just as she was about to launch herself at him, a formless silhouette in the haze beyond her crystal rapture.

  Slowly she got to her feet, crawling her hands arduously up her legs to straighten a body shaking with fatigue and the residue of thrall. Lars reached out to support her, one hand gently brushing dirt and sweat from her face. Instinctively she leaned into his body, accepting support, unconsciously entreating sympathy, and his arms closed about her, his chin on her head, as they had so often stood after a good cutting.

  "There, there, Sunny," he said, patting her shoulder and cuddling her. "You needed that. Feel somewhat better?" he asked, tipping her head back and looking down into her haggard face.

  "How long did you let thrall last?" she asked, aware of her incredible weariness.

  "Considering your condition," he said with a laugh, "most of the day,"

  She pushed away from him. "You mean, you let me thrall all day long when I could have been cutting? An hour or so at most would have been enough."

  He stepped back from her ire, grinning more broadly now, holding up his hands in mock appeal. "That's more like my Sunny."

  "I'm not your Sunny," she said, needing to rant and rave herself back to a more normal humor than the limp and nauseating lug she knew she had been.

  "Well, then, it's a good deep green, and I cut around you, in case you didn't hear, locked in that thrall."

  She both hated and admired Lars in this sort of a mood: far too amenable, far too effective, far too . . . right! Shard his soul!

  Glaring at him, she sang out a high C, lost it for lack of support in her weakened condition, set her diaphragm muscles, and sang it again. She could hear his A an octave below. The green resonated, and their blades touched its bright surface as one.

  When they had excised five shafts, Lars refused to let her pitch for more. He even refused to let her help him carry the carton back to the sled. When they got back and had racked their cutters, he insisted that she needed to wash, however briefly, and when she was obviously unable to stand up under the dribble coming from the shower head, he undressed, too, and supported her.

  He made her lie down under the quilt while, buff naked, he made a quick meal for them both. She managed to spoon it into her, but the effort was all she had left and he caught the sagging plate before it tipped over on to the quilt.

  "Can't mess it up. It's the only one we've got."

  She tried to think of a smart reply to that. Honor demanded that she not let Lars get away with the last word today, but she fell asleep before she could think of something appropriately scathing.

  Crystal song woke her and, aware of the warmth of the body beside her, she turned, eager for the benison of relief. She matched the eagerness of her partner, accepting and returning the passion she found. The gentleness and tenderness he displayed reminded her of Shad, and yet, as she opened her eyes, it wasn't Shad's engagingly innocent face that she saw. It was Lars Dahl's.

  He gazed down at her for a long moment, his blue eyes dark with unspoken words as he searched her face. When she gave a little impatient twitch, he moved away.

  "A better day today, isn't it, Sunny?" he said noncommittally.

  "Yes, it is," she said with an equal lack of emphasis as she snagged her clothes from the floor.

  It was easy to fall into the old habits. She might rail silently at finding herself accepting their former routine, but it helped. They didn't have much to discuss. Except the cutting.

  "We shouldn't stay here," she said after they had finished eating. "Green's not black, and that's what we're after."

  "Feeling up to it?" he asked offhandedly.

  She shrugged. "I'd rather waste time on looking than on cutting."

  "Green's easier to cut to get back into the swing of it."

  "Ha! I'm back already."

  He cocked an eyebrow at her. "When thrall can hold you for hours?"

  "That," she said, snapping her words out, "was your fault. I wouldn't have needed more than an hour."

  "Ha!" He mimicked her.

  But they were already, out of long habit, setting the cabin of the sled to rights to take off.

  They bickered with some heat and contempt for the first hour in the air. Some equity was reached when they came across another worn paint mark that bore enough resemblance to one of the released ones for them to land. But as they were surveying the canyons, they caught sight of a sled in one of the gorges and quickly left the area, Killa swearing under her breath.

  "What about one of the claims we cut? Aren't there any in the vicinity?"

  Lars frowned thoughtfully. "Should be." Then he banged his fist on the console. "If only we could establish some method by which singers could register the location of sites . . ."

  "Ha! And have renegades spend weeks trying to break into the program!"

  "There are security measures available now that no singer could break."

  "Ha! I don't believe you! I won't believe you."

&nb
sp; "I know," he said, shrugging away her anger, and grinned over his shoulder at her. "But I'll win 'em over to my way of thinking!"

  "That'll be the day!"

  "It'll come, Sunny. The Guild has to reorganize. It can't continue to operate on guidelines that're centuries old, incredibly obsolete and damned naive."

  "Naive?"

  "It's a rough galaxy we live in. The business ethics that motivated the earliest Guild Masters simply don't exist, and modernization is long overdue."

  "Modernization?" Killa swept her hand around the cabin, where sophisticated equipment was installed in small, discreet, and effective packages.

  "I don't mean the hardware. I mean"—he jammed a finger to his temple—"the software. The thinking, the ethos, the management."

  Killa made a disparaging noise in her throat. "This Guild Mastership has addled your software, that's for sure."

  "Has it?" He cast her a sideways glance. "I think you'll come to agree that updates are essential."

  "Hmmm. Hey, isn't that a marker of ours to starboard . . ."

  It was, though nearly rubbed completely off the flat summit. They touched down, as much to refurbish the marker as to see if anything was familiar.

  "Vaguely," was Killashandra's verdict. Something nagged at her, something quite insistent. "I think," she began hesitantly, "I think it's black."

  "You don't sound sure . . ."

  "I think you were also right to ask me if I was up to it." She fought the frisson that racked her.

  "We can go back and cut more green."

  "No, we're here to cut black and black we'll cut, if it kills me."

  "I draw the line at suicide, no matter how badly the Guild needs black right now."

  She gave him a wry grin.

  What they found was a deep blue crystal, one of the loveliest colors either had ever cut. They got three cartons of it and were back at the sled, filling up their water bottles, when the first twinge of storm warning caught Killashandra. She sucked in her breath at the intensity of it. The crystal deprivation must have made her doubly vulnerable. She caught at the side of the cistern, and Lars reached out to support her.

  "What's the matter? And don't you dare say 'nothing', Killa," he said, eyes piercing hers with his growing recognition of the probable cause. "Storm?" When she nodded, he cursed under his breath. Then he closed the water tap and covered his half-filled canteen, stowing it in place. He took hers from her limp hand and put it away, as well. " All right, let's get ready."

  "But it's only the—"

  "Fardles, Killa, I can tell just from your reaction that it's going to be a bad blow."

  "It's only because—"

  "I don't care what it's because," he cried, irritably chopping his hand downward to interrupt her. He took her arm and turned her toward the galley. "We're returning, and that's that. I'm not risking you to even the mildest blow. Your head's not on straight yet from deprivation."

  Though she protested vehemently, she had to recognize the fact that he was absolutely correct in assessing her state. She wouldn't admit it to him—she argued out of habit. He refused to entertain her contention that they would have enough time to cut at least five, he agreed but discounted the fact that this was the best blue lode they had seen in decades.

  "It isn't black," he said, his mouth and eyes angry. "Try not to forget that, Sunny, it's black we need!"

  "Then why did we waste time cutting this blue?"

  "You thought there was black here!" He was moving around his side of the sled, securing cabinets and stowing oddments away.

  "We cut good blue . . ." she began, going meek on him, a tactic that had often worked. "I don't remember how many times you've told me that . . ."

  The anger went out of him all at once, and reaching across the narrow space that separated them, he caressed her cheek briefly, his smile penitent. "Sorry, Sunny, no matter how you try to slice it, we're not cutting any more . . . here . . . today."

  "It should be a partners' decision, not one way," she said, wondering if he were weakening. "You've never been this arbitrary before."

  He gave a weary sigh. "I'm arbitrary now! As Guild Master, I have more than a partner's stake in keeping your brain unscrambled."

  "I didn't want you to be Guild Master."

  "You've made that clear," he said, and his eyes flashed at her before once again he relented. "We were the best duet the Guild ever had. I've seen the printout of our aggregate cuttings. Impressive!" The smile he gave her was suddenly boyish, and she felt her heart unseize as the Lars she knew so intimately surfaced briefly. "Now let's scramble. I'm not risking you, or me."

  In far better charity with each other, they returned to the Guild. By then the storm warnings were far-flung, and sleds from all sectors began pouring into the Hangar. Lars was calling for assistance to unload their crystal just as the flight officer handed him a comunit with the message that the call had top priority.

  "I'll take ours through Sorting," Killa told him when he looked expectantly at her.

  For a moment she watched his tall figure stride to the nearest exit, his head bent as he listened to the priority call. Someone else needing black crystal?

  Guild Master's cut also took priority in the Sorting Shed and Killa waved her cartons toward Clodine's stall. She ignored the Sorter's initial nervousness and did her best to be pleasant. It was the cut that helped restore Clodine to their previous easy relationship. The market price of the blues would have been enough to appease the most desperate singer.

  Once assured of the hefty credit balance, Killashandra became aware of externals—like the crystal pong emanating from her person and her clothes. Jauntily she strode to her quarters. As she palmed open the door, she heard the radiant liquid ploshing into the tub and smiled. That was nice of Lars. A good long soak, something to eat, and she would be back to normal. Well, as normal as any crystal singer ever was. At least she had worked free of all that crystal cramp. Good cutting was what she had really needed to cure it.

  The moment she toggled the food dispenser, the screen lit up to display Lars's face.

  "Killa? That's a handy total on the blues," he said.

  "Shards, I wanted to tell you myself," she said, feeling a surge of disgruntlement.

  "I've ordered up a meal here, if you'd care to join me . . ." The hesitant tone of his invitation struck her as atypical, but it pleased her that this Guild Master was not as autocratic as Lanzecki had been.

  "I think I might at that," Killa said graciously, and canceled the order she had just placed. Dinner with Lars, or for that matter, dinner with the Guild Master, tagged elusive wisps of memory, most of them pleasant.

  Looking at the garments in her closet, she picked the one that suited a slightly smug mood and dressed carefully, spending time to comb out her snaggled hair and arrange it attractively. She ought to get it cut short again, she reflected. It had been a nuisance in the Ranges, sweating up and falling into her eyes when she wanted a clear view of her cuts. She peered at her face: she had a tan again, making her eyes brighter, canceling the yellow that had begun to tint the white. She pulled her hands down her cheeks: they were still gaunt, and were those age grooves from her nose to her mouth? She grimaced to smooth them away. Then she frowned. She did look older. She must be very careful not to tax her symbiont again as badly as she must have done to look this way.

  As she entered the Guild Master's offices, the first thing she saw was the empty desk, its surface clear of pencil files or any work at all. She frowned. Trag? No, Trag was gone. Lars had not found a suitable assistant. He would have to. No wonder he had been snapping at her in the Ranges. She knew from the amount of work she had seen Lanzecki get through—and that with Trag's help—that the Guild Mastership was no sinecure. She snorted to herself: Lars had been a damned fool to get roped into the job. She bet he hadn't been sailing once since he had become Guild Master!

  "When" was not a word she often used, but it suddenly flicked across her consciousness. When ha
d he taken over from Lanzecki? She grunted, canceling that irritating consideration as she continued across the floor to the inner office.

  Lars was deep in contemplation of whatever was on his desk screen. He had had time to shower and change; his hair was still damp. To one side, in front of the wide window that overlooked the immense doors of the Hangar, a table had been set, and the enticing odors of some of her favorite foods wafted to her. Becoming aware of someone else in the room, he looked up with a scowl that shifted into a smile as he jumped to his feet.

  "Sunny!" He gestured for her to join him at the table, then seated her.

  "What are you after now?" she asked, a teasing note in her voice to draw the sting of her cynicism.

  "Ah, lovey," he said, dropping a kiss on her cheek before he took his own seat, "give me credit for some altruism."

  "Why should I?"

  Grinning at her, he searched her face and was evidently satisfied by what he saw. She cocked her head at him.

  "So?"

  "Eat first, talk later. I'd like to see a little more flesh on your bones before we go out again."

  She groaned. "So we're not going back out as soon as the storm clears?"

  In place of an answer, he served generous portions of her favorite foods on to her plate. When he started to help himself, she saw that he had ordered the nicco spikes she hated even to smell. He grinned when she twitched her nose in disgust.

  "You see, I'm not catering entirely to you, Killa Ree, and no, we're not able to go out immediately. Black crystal's not the only one of our products in demand." He ended the sentence abruptly. "I'd be able to go quicker if you could see your way clear to giving me a little help."

  "I thought helping you was finding black. I'll go alone."

  "No!" The single word was so forceful that she stared at him in surprise. Lars hadn't used to take such a tone with her. She bristled, but he reached for her arm, shaking some of the milsi stalks from her half-raised spoon, before his touch softened in apology. "No, Killa. Too dangerous. You're not completely over the deprivation and you'd thrall. Especially if you were cutting black alone."