Crystal Universe - [Crystal Singer 03] - Crystal Line

by Anne McCaffrey

  “Killa!”

  Someone had her by the shoulders, firm hands giving her a shake to focus her attention.

  “Killa?”

  “What?”

  The Guild Master frowned at her with concern. “One thing sure, Killashandra Ree, you’ve got to get back to the Ranges whether you sing black, green, or pink! You left your return mighty late. How do you stand the itch?” The sudden tender concern in his voice startled her, but she gave no hint of that surprise.

  “I’ll be all right as soon as I make the Ranges,” she said wearily, her spine twisting with crystal hunger.

  “If you can in this condition. So I’m not asking permission now. I am coming with you. It’d be outright murder to send you out solo in your present state. I’ll meet you at the Hangar. Donalla …”

  Killa peered at the woman who stepped forward. Her face was vaguely familiar, and although her smile was warm and friendly, Killa felt a flash of anxiety.

  “Glad to see you safely back, Killashandra.” When Killa recoiled slightly, the woman smiled reassuringly. “We’re only going straight to the Hangar. You really can trust me that fan, you know.”

  “I’ll need …” Killa pulled at the clothes she was wearing—they wouldn’t last an hour in the Ranges. “I’ve no boots …”

  “Let Donalla take care of the details, Sunny, will you?” The loving tone of the Guild Master was gently supportive.

  Some part of Killa was unconvinced, but the other, more dominant need for a respite from the crystal itch made that hesitation short. The hands that replaced Lars’s were gentle, warm, and subtly persuasive. It was easier to submit and be guided.

  Killa rubbed at her forehead. How could she have let herself get into such a state? She ought not to be led about like a child. Surely, she wasn’t that bad, that decrepit? She had walked off the transport ship on her own, hadn’t she? Found the shuttle bay with no trouble! Why was she suddenly incapable of managing something as simple as getting to the Hangar? Her feet ought to know the way even if her head didn’t.

  But she let herself be taken. She really couldn’t think straight with all that noise in her head and that buzz along her veins, spiking into her heart and lungs—a crystal shiver that no amount of radiant fluid would reduce, only cutting crystal.

  She hated to admit it, even to herself, but the Guild Master had been correct. She had cut it fine. She ought to have started back to Ballybran the day she had felt the first shock of crystal deprivation. And that was what was shorting out her decision-making faculty, too.

  Now that she put a reason to her mazedness, she also knew how to cure it: cut crystal! Let it sing through her body, bones, and blood. Let it clear the confusion in her mind and strengthen her flagging energies. Crystal! The worst addiction in the galaxy: difficult to live with and impossible to live without.

  She stumbled, and Donalla’s helping hand steadied her.

  Then the noise and ordered confusion of the Hangar swirled about her. Faces peered at her; large blurred objects moved slowly past. She was gently propelled into a space that shut out much of the noise. Hands turned her body this way and that as she was inserted into a shipsuit; her feet were pushed into the familiar restriction of boots.

  “My cutter …”

  Her right hand was pressed against a hard cold surface, and her fingers, of their own accord, fitted themselves around the grip, slipping into grooves exactly carved to fit her grasp. The tension within her eased further.

  She was settled into the appropriate contour chair, and the harness was buckled about her. Passive now, because she didn’t have to make any movement or decision, she waited. The air around her smelled familiar—and new, of paint and oil, with enough of the pungent fuel odor to be acrid—and somehow comforting.

  A sudden burst of noise, and a wave of fuel- and grease-laden air whooshed across the sensitive skin of her face. Someone had entered the sled, not so much noisily as confidently. She felt the throb of engines revving up, increasing the stink of fuel in the air, which also oddly reassured her. The sled moved forward, and she sighed with relief. Slowly she was pushed back against the seat cushions as the sled gathered speed. Sunlight pierced the windows, too brilliant for her tired eyes, and she made a protest as she closed them against the glare. Had she remembered to put in the refractive lenses? She blinked. She had, but it always took a few seconds for them to alter to the necessary refractory index. The blaze diminished, the backward pressure of takeoff eased, and she opened her eyes, suddenly more aware of her surroundings. Lars’s lithe figure occupied the pilot’s chair.

  “Get some rest, Sunny,” he said as he had so often said as they departed the Guild for the Ranges.

  Because it was easier to obey than resist, she wriggled into the cushions, dropped her head back against the rest, and let herself slip into sleep.

  “Eeny, meeny, pitsa teeny …” The old choosing phrase roused her.

  “Muhlah! Any time I need to blackmail the Guild Master …” she murmured.

  Lars laughed, the infectious laugh that had been one of his most endearing traits, and despite herself, she felt her mouth curving up in a grin.

  “Works every time,” he replied, and when she gargled a denial at him, he amended it. “Well, sooner or later, it works.”

  She struggled upright in the seat, biting her lip as the movement stirred up the crystal sting that pinched at blood and bone. She was in the Ranges, and it would ease soon … ease when she finally cut again. She released the harness and peered out at the steeples and ridges of deep Range. “Where are we?”

  “Scouring the parameters of an old claim.”

  She frowned and stared at him until recent memory returned. “Oh? Whose?”

  Lars grinned. “Such details are irrelevant. The marker’s on the list: that’s enough.”

  “Where did you find a statute of limitation in Rules and Regs?”

  “In the Guild Master’s prerogatives.” Lars grinned at her. When she snorted derisively, he added, “Why have the rule and not put it into effect? The Guild has to supply legitimate demands. Like Lanzecki, I use every trick I’m allowed—”

  “You’re not Lanzecki!”

  “Thank you for that vote of confidence,” he replied, and the buoyancy had gone out of his voice. After a long silence while she rubbed surreptitiously to ease the crystal sting, he asked, “Is it bad?” His tone held genuine concern.

  “I’ve been worse,” she said diffidently—though, candidly, she doubted that. She would have remembered it—and tried to avoid a repetition.

  “Ha! Try that on someone who doesn’t know you as well as I do, Sunny. Take heart. We’re nearly there.”

  “Where?” Her voice had an edge on it. “Oh, quick! Mark there!” And she pointed imperiously to starboard. The evening sunlight had just briefly glinted off crystal shard.

  Lars gave an appreciative chuckle. “You may be writhing with crystal itch, but your eye’s as keen as ever.” He veered to the right, slowing the sled and neatly landing it on the bottom of the ravine. “You’re one of the best in the Guild,” he murmured as they saw the unmistakable evidence of a cutter’s discards.

  Killa could not control the trembling that racked her body. She fumbled with the door release, managed it the second time, and half fell from the sled.

  “Careful now, Sunny,” Lars called, rapidly flicking through essential landing procedures at the console.

  She stumbled forward to the shards, crouching to gather handfuls, closing her fingers about them, oblivious to the sharp edges, even grateful for the caressing cut of crystal, grateful to spill blood and ease the sting that made artery, vein, and capillary itch.

  “Easy, Sunny, easy,” Lars cried, and gripped her firmly by the shoulders, pulling her to standing position.

  “Muhlah!” she sighed with relief. “I needed that!”

  “I don’t think you need go to extremes, however,” Lars said dryly. He leaned down and picked up a hunk that had crazed in faulty cutt
ing. He tilted her bloody hands to tip the fragments out and replaced them with the larger, blunter piece. Putting his arm about her, he guided her back into the sled and washed each hand, while she held the shaft against her in the other like the talisman it was. The tiny crystal slices were already healing as he finished.

  “You’d better eat, Sunny,” Lars went on, still using that gently matter-of-fact tone. And he prepared a meal while she sat rocking the crystal against her, feeling it draw the sting from her, damaged as it was, as contact warmed it to her body temperature.

  As she mechanically ate the meal he placed in front of her, she kept up her rocking motion, shifting the crystal to her thighs, bending her knees so the crystal touched her belly. She didn’t resist when he put her to bed, letting her wrap herself around the crystal in a semifetal position. And that was how she spent the long night, comforted by crazed crystal.

  When crystal song woke her the next morning, the damaged shaft sent out painful emanations. With a cry, she unwound, pushing the crystal from her as if it were polluted. Lars picked it up and flung it from the sled, relieving her of the sudden agony.

  Then he spread himself across her body—she was arching in the agony of crystal song, too long away from it to be stimulated in the usual way.

  “It’ll ease, Sunny, it’ll ease …” he murmured, struggling to keep her from straining herself in the paroxysms that were shaking her. If she had been alone in such a state, she would have launched herself to the nearby lode. In such disorientation, compelled by the irresistible need to reestablish contact with the ecstasy of sun-warmed singing crystal, she could have done herself a fatal injury.

  Writhing against his restraint, she screamed at him, desperate to get to the crystal face and ease the intolerable sting and achings.

  “Let me go! I’m begging you, Lars, let me go! I’ve got to get to—”

  “You do and you’re dead,” he yelled back at her, resetting his hands on her wrists, managing, each time she nearly squirmed free, to cover her body with his and deny her freedom. “Hang on, Sunny. It won’t be long now. Just let the sun get up!”

  She twisted and bit at him, tried to knee his crotch, but he was quicker, stronger, and fitter than she and evaded her savage attempts to inflict enough pain to get free.

  Abruptly the dawn chorus ended as the sun’s rays flicked up and over the surrounding ridges and lit the ravine. She sagged against the hands that held her, limp, weeping because the itch was back, intensified. The compulsion to seek crystal, however, had eased. Wearily, she rubbed sweat and tears from her face on the quilt beneath her.

  “Let me up, Lars,” she said dully.

  He kept his grip a moment longer, and then his fingers slowly released her wrists and he slid off her.

  “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 tangler,” 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 onto her shoulder.

  “Let’s go.”

  As she descended from the sled onto the rock- and shard-strewn ground, she was vaguely aware that he had slung more than his cutter over 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, in the way 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, disgusted by 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 onto 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.”