Crystal Universe - [Crystal Singer 03] - Crystal Line

by Anne McCaffrey

  “Try to follow me now, you dorks! Shatter yourself on the hills trying!”

  She let out a musical hurrah as the ground hurtled past her. Lyrics to the aria deserted her, but she sang on, using vowels and singing at the top of her lungs, reveling in her renewed freedom.

  Killashandra came in from the Milekey Mountains with a load of blue-quartz prisms and cylinders in A-sharp or higher. She had always worked well solo in the upper registers, which gave her a distinct advantage over most crystal singers.

  She made it into the Hangar on a windy blast from the oncoming storm. Cutting it fine again, but she grinned at having made it without harm to herself or her sled. That was all that mattered: coming back in the same state of mind or body as she had gone out. Still, and in the back of her mind, she allowed herself to be relieved that her recklessness had not exacted a penalty.

  Being one of the last in, she had to wait for Clodine to be free to assay her crystal. It was a long wait, especially with every nerve in her body screaming for the radiant fluid that would reduce the resonance to a mild discomfort. The storm outside seemed to stroke her body to an intense pitch. She shuddered from time to time, but managed to survive the waiting.

  When Clodine told her she had hit the top of the market, she could feel the physical relief course through her despite storm scream.

  “I’ve been due a change of luck,” she said, wincing as she remembered the last week in the Range. The sun had been fierce on the scars of her cuttings, half blinding her, and the scream of crystal had sliced through her mind as she had cut. But she had been desperate to hack enough cargo to get off-world for a while—away from crystal song, far away, so her mind would have a chance to heal. “How much?”

  Clodine peered up at her from her console, a little smirk bending the left corner of her mouth. “Don’t you trust me anymore, Killa?”

  “At this point, I wouldn’t trust my own mother—if I could remember who she was,” Killa replied. She forced a smile for Clodine on her grimy lips and tried to relax. Clodine was her friend. She would know how badly Killa needed to get away from Ballybran and crystal whine. “Is it enough?”

  Clodine altered her enhanced eyes and gazed at Killashandra almost maternally. “You’ve been a singer long enough, Killa, to know when you’ve cut sufficient crystal.”

  “Tell me!” With totally irrational fury, Killashandra brought both fists down on the counter, jarring the crystal and startling Clodine to blink into enhancement. Immediately she relented. “I’m sorry, Clodine. I shouldn’t shout at my only friend. But …”

  “You’ve enough,” Clodine said gently. She reached to grasp Killa’s arm encouragingly, but drew back her fingers as if she had been burned. The Sorter’s expression altered to sadness. Then her gaze switched to someone over her shoulder.

  Killashandra jerked her head slightly sideways to see who had joined them. It was the Guild Master. She looked back at Clodine, ignoring the man as she had done for a long time now.

  “Killa,” he said, his tenor voice pitched to concern, “that was cutting it too close by half. You shouldn’t work solo for a while. Any singer in the Guild would partner you for a couple of runs.”

  “I’ll work as I please,” she said, forcing her wretchedly tired body into a straight and obstinate line. “I’m not so ancient that I can’t scramble when I have to.”

  The Guild Master pointed to the weather displayed on the back wall of the Sorting Shed, and despite herself, Killashandra followed his finger. She maintained a show of diffidence, but she felt cold fear in her belly. She hadn’t realized the storm was that powerful: twelve-mach-force winds? Had her weather sense betrayed her? Lost its edge? No, but she had been deeper in the Ranges than she realized when she started out. She could well have been caught out over crystal. But she hadn’t. And she had safely brought in enough crystal to get off-planet again.

  “A good blow,” she said with a defensive shrug and a wry twist of her lips, “but it’s going to knock hell out of my claim.”

  The Guild Master touched her shoulder lightly; he did not pull away from her as Clodine had. “Just don’t go back solo, Killa.” She dipped out from under his hand. He continued, “You’ve sung crystal a long time now. You kited in here just ahead of a mach-twelve storm and one day you’ll stay just that moment too long and—poof!” He threw his hands up, fingers wide. “Scrambled brains.”

  “That’s the time, Guild Master,” she said, still with her back to him, “that I get some of my own back.”

  She saw the pity and concern in Clodine’s eyes.

  “With your ears ruptured and your mind a balloon? Sure, Killa. Sure. Look, there’re half a dozen good cutters who’d double you any time you raised your finger. Or don’t you remember”—and the Guild Master’s voice turned soft—“how much you made singing duet …”

  “With Lars Dahl!” Killashandra made her voice flat and refused to look around.

  “We worked well together, Killa.” His voice was still soft.

  “How kind of you to remember, Guild Master.”

  She turned away from the counter, but he stepped in front of her.

  “I was wrong, Killashandra. It’s too late for you to cut duo. Crystal’s in your soul.” He strode out of the shed, leaving her standing there.

  She tried to be amused by the accusation—but, from him, it cut like crystal. As if she would want to sing duet again. Especially with Lars Dahl. She cast her mind back, trying to recall some details of those halcyon days. Nothing came. They must have happened a long, long time ago: many storms, many Passovers, many cuts past.

  “Killa?”

  At the sound of Clodine’s voice, Killashandra jerked herself back to the present: the tote was up on the screen—and the news was good. Even with the Guild tithe, she had enough to keep out of the Ranges for close to a year. Maybe that would be enough to take crystal out of her soul.

  The Guild Master had to be wrong about that! He had to be! She thanked Clodine, who seemed relieved that her friend’s mood had altered.

  She stopped in the Hall long enough to tap in her name and get a locator keyed into her quarters. It had long since stopped irritating her that she couldn’t remember where she lived in the great cube of the Heptite Guild. She merely let the locator guide her. The mach winds seemed to follow her, echoing through the lift and the corridor. The key vibrated more imperiously in her hand and she hurried. The sooner she immersed herself in the radiant bath, the sooner she would be rid of the angry pulsing of crystal in her blood.

  No, it wasn’t in her blood. Not yet.

  So there were men willing to cut duo with her, were there? Well, Guild Master, what if it’s not just any man who is acceptable to me? The door to her quarters sprang open as she neared it, so she began to trot. It was going to take so long to fill the radiant bath. Somehow there ought to be a way to trigger that amenity from afar, especially for singers as crystal-logged as she was. Once, someone—what was his name?—someone had done her that courtesy and she had always returned to her room to find the tub full.

  As she turned the corner into the sanitary facility, she was amazed to see the tap running the viscous liquid in a bath that was nearly full. But that someone—she pulled at memory even as she pulled off her grimed jumpsuit—was long dead. She was eternally grateful to whoever had started the bath. The Guild Master? Not likely. What had been that other man’s name?

  She could abuse her mind no longer with pointless attempts to remember. With an immense sigh of relief, she eased into the liquid, feeling it just slightly heavy against her skin, filling her pores. Her flesh gratefully absorbed the anodyne and she placed her head into the recess, slipping her legs and arms into the restraining straps. She forced muscle after weary muscle to relax, willing the resonances to stop echoing through her bones.

  She must have slept: she had been exhausted enough to do so. But she felt slightly better. This would be a four-bath cleansing, she decided, and let the used fluid out.


  “Dispenser!” she called, loudly enough to activate the mechanism in the other room, and when it chimed its attention, she ordered food. She waited until the second chime told her the food was ready. “Now if they’d only invent a ’bot to bring it to me …”

  In her past, she hadn’t had to worry about that detail, had she? That much she remembered. She crawled out of the tub, setting it for refill, and, flinging a big towel about her, she made for the dispenser slot, ignoring the puddles made by the fluid that sheeted off her body as she walked. The aroma of the food activated long-unused saliva.

  “Don’t eat too much, Killa,” she warned herself, knowing perfectly well what would happen to her underserved stomach if she did. That much she always remembered.

  She had a few bites and then forced herself to bring the tray back to the tub, where she rested it on the wide rim. Climbing back into the filling tub, she moved her body under the splash from the wide-mouthed tap. With one hand on the rim, she scooped milsi stalks into her mouth, one at a time, chewing conscientiously.

  She really must remember to eat when she was in the Ranges. Muhlah knew her sled was well-enough stocked, and since the provisions were paid for, she ought to eat them. If she remembered.

  By her fourth bath, she recollected snatches and patches of her last break. They didn’t please her. For one thing, she had come in with a light load, forced off the Range a few klicks ahead of a storm. She had reaped the benefits of that blow this trip, of course—that was the way of it with crystal. If a singer could get back to the vicinity of a lode fast enough, the crystal resonated and told her body where it was. But she hadn’t had enough credit to get off-planet, a trip she had desperately needed then—though not half as much as she did now.

  She’d had to take what relief she could from a handsome and somewhat arrogant young landsman on the upper continent: tone-deaf, sobersided, but he hadn’t been man enough to anneal her.

  “Crystal in my soul, indeed!” The Guild Master’s words stung like crystal scratch.

  She made a noise of sheer self-disgust and pulled herself from the tank, knocking the tray off. She turned to the big wall mirror, watching the fluid sheet off her body, as firm and graceful as a youngster’s. Killashandra had long since given up keeping track of her chronological age: it was irrelevant anyway, since the symbiont kept her looking and feeling young. Not immortality but close to it—except for the youth of her memory.

  “Now where will I go off this fecking planet this time?” she asked her reflection, and then slid open the dresser panel.

  She was mildly surprised at the finery there and decided she must have spent what credit she’d had for pretty threads to lure that unwary landsman. He had been a brute of a lover, though a change. Anything had been a change from Lars Dahl. How dare the Guild Master suggest that she’d better duo! He had no right or authority, no lien or hold on her to dictate her choice!

  Angrily Killashandra punched for Port Authority and inquired the destinations of imminent departures from Shankill.

  “Not much, C. S. Killashandra,” she was told politely. “Small freighter is loading for the Armagh system …”

  “Have I been there?”

  Pause. “No, ma’am.”

  “What does Armagh do for itself?”

  “Exports fish oils and glue,” was the semidisgusted reply.

  “Water world?”

  “Not total. Has the usual balance of land and ocean …”

  “Tropical?” For some reason the idea of a tropical world both appealed to and repelled her.

  “It has a very pleasant tropical zone. All water sports, tasty foods if you like a high fruit/fish diet.”

  “Book me.” Crystal singers could be high-handed, at least on Ballybran.

  “Blast-off at twenty-two thirty today,” Port Authority told her.

  “I’ve just time then.” And Killashandra broke the connection.

  She drew on the most conservative garments in the press, then randomly selected a half dozen of the brighter things, tossed them into a carisak, and closed it. She hesitated, midroom, glancing about incuriously. It was, of course, the standard member accommodation. Vaguely she remembered a time when there had been paintings and wall hangings, knickknacks that were pretty or odd on the shelves and tables, a different rug on the floor of the main room. Now there was no trace of anything remotely personal, certainly nothing of Killashandra.

  “Because,” Killashandra said out loud, as if to imprint her voice on the room, “I’m nothing but a crystal singer with only a present to live in.”

  She slammed the door as she left, but it didn’t do much to satisfy her discontent. She found slightly more pleasure in the realization that, though she might have trouble finding her apartment after a session in the Ranges, she had none finding her way up from the subterranean resident levels to the shuttle bays.

  She took the time to get the protective lenses removed from her eyes. It didn’t change her outlook much. In fact, Ballybran looked duller that it should have as the shuttle lifted toward Shankill. The storm had cleared away, and she felt a brief twinge as her body ached for the resonances she was leaving, for the dazzle of rainbow light prisms dancing off variegated quartz, for the pure sweet sound of crystal waking in the early morning sun, or sighing in the cold virginal light of one of the larger moons, for the subsonic hum that ate through bone in black cold night.

  Then she dealt with the formalities of lifting off-world and was directed to Bay 23, where the Armagh freighter, Maeve 18, was docked. She was escorted to her cabin by a youngster who couldn’t keep far enough ahead of her—and the crystal resonance that pinged off her—in the narrow corridors.

  “Is there a radiant-fluid tub on board?” she asked him with a grim smile at his reaction to her condition.

  “In your cabin, Crystal Singer,” he said, and then scooted away.

  It was a courtesy to call it a tub—it was a two-meter tube, just wide enough to accommodate a body. To reach it one had to perform certain acrobatics over the toilet; and, according to the legend on the dials, the same fluid was flushed and reused. Well, she could count on three to four washes before it became ineffective. That would have to do. She opened the tap and heard the comforting gurgle of the fluid dropping to the bottom of the tub.

  From there she flung her carisak to the narrow bunk, shucked off her clothes, and did her acrobatic act, inserting herself just as the flow automatically cut off. There were hand and ankle grips, and she arranged her limbs appropriately, tilted her head back, and let the radiant fluid cleanse her.

  She entered the common room for the first time the third day out, having purged sufficient crystal resonance from blood and bone to be socially acceptable. She was hungry, for more than food, a hunger she could keep leashed as far as she was concerned. But the eight male passengers and the two crewmen who circulated in the transit area were obviously affected by her sensuality. There wasn’t anyone she wanted, so she retired to her cabin and remained there for the rest of the trip. She had traveled often enough in the shape she was in to practice discretion.

  Armagh III’s Port Terminal smelled of fish oil and glue. Great casks were being trundled into the hold of the freighter as she bade an impatient farewell to the captain. She flashed her general credentials and was admitted unconditionally to the planet as a leisure guest. She didn’t need to use her Guild membership—Armagh III was an open planet.

  She rented a flit and checked into the Touristas for a list of resorts. The list turned out to be so lengthy that she merely closed her eyes and bought a ticket to the destination on which her finger settled: Trefoil, on the southeastern coast of the main continent. She paused long enough to obtain a quick change of Armagh clothing, bright patterns in a lightweight porous weave, and was off.

  Trefoil reminded her of somewhere. The resemblance nagged at her even as the interoceanic air vehicle circled the small fishing town. Ships tacking across the harbor under sail caused her heart to bump with a curiou
sly painful joy. She knew she must have seen sailships, since the nomenclature—sloop, lateen-rigged, schooner, ketch, yawl—sprang to mind with no hesitation. As did a second pang of regret. She grimaced and decided that such clear recollection might even be an asset on this backward little world.

  The landing field wasn’t that far from one of the longer wharves, where a huge two-master was moving, with graceful and competent ease, to a berth alongside the port side. That term also came unbidden to her mind. As much because she would not give in to the emotion of the recall as because the ship excited her, she swung the carisak to her shoulder and sauntered down to the wharf. The crew was busy in the yards, reefing the last of the square sails used to make port, and more were bustling about the deck, which glinted with an almost crystalline sheen.

  “What makes the decks shine?” she asked another observer.

  “Fish oils” was the somewhat terse reply, and then the man, a red-bearded giant, took a second look. Men usually looked twice at Killashandra. “First time on Armagh?”

  Killashandra nodded, her eyes intent on the schooner.

  “Been here long?”

  “Just arrived.”

  “Got a pad?”

  “No.”

  “Try the Golden Dolphin. Best food in town and best brewman.”

  Killashandra turned to look at him then. “You pad there?”

  “How else could I judge?” the man replied with charming candor.

  Killashandra smiled back at him, neither coldly nor invitingly. Neutral. He reminded her of someone. They both turned back to watch the docking ship.

  Killashandra found the process fascinating and reminiscent, but she forced memory out and concentrated on the landing, silently applauding the well-drilled crew. Each man seemed to perform his set task without apparent instruction from the captain in the bridge house. The big hull drifted slowly sideways toward the wharf. The last of the sails had now been fastened along the spars. Two crewmen flung lines ashore, fore and aft, then leaped after them when the distance closed, flipping the heavy lines deftly around the bollards and snubbing the ship securely.