The Ship Who Sang

by Anne McCaffrey

  Nothing could be clearer than that, but the reasoning behind such restrictions was unfathomable. And Kira was a practicing Dylanist, whatever that was. The name had a familiar ring and the guitar that Kira cherished suggested a musical group of some sort. Well, mused Helva, she’d let it come up in conversation naturally.

  The 6 days to Talitha were livened by Kira’s rapid switches of mood and manner, from gamine to queen, welcome to Helva after Theoda’s stolidness and as counterpoint to her painful memories of Jennan. Helva literally did not know what Kira would do next. However, when it came time to check their passengers, Kira was deftly professional and painstakingly thorough.

  Dubhe, the second planet on their tour, called in to confirm a contribution of 40,000 fertilized ova, to be ready at touchdown. Kira checked computations on ETA at Dubhe, arriving at the same figure simultaneously with Helva. Child she might look, child she might play, but Kira’s working mind was sharp and accurate.

  The transfer at Talitha went without undue incident because Kira’s acute attention to detail averted the one possible accident. An attendant, too eager to finish his assignment, tripped over the leads to a fluid tank in the now-crowded cargo hold.

  Kira lit into him with a furious catalogue of his ancestors, his present worth, his future career potential, and his probable imminent demise if he repeated his awkwardness. She did so in three languages other than Basic that Helva knew and several that had the advantage of sounding ever more vicious. Yet the minute she had exhausted her choler, she turned, coolly collected, to the head of the detail with apologies.

  Once lifted from Talitha, Kira shook loose the pins that held her braids and settled in the pilot’s chair with a sigh of relief.

  ‘I caught three of your descriptions of him, but the others were beyond me.’

  ‘I find that old Terran Russian, mixed with liberal neumagyarosag, is extremely vitriolic in sound,’ Kira said. ‘Actually I was only repeating a recipe for a protein dish called paprikash. It sounds much, much worse, doesn’t it?’ She grinned broadly at Helva, her green eyes wide.

  ‘Effective, too. The oaf positively blanched.’

  ‘Thorn . . .’ and Kira cut off her words, pressing her lips firmly together, her face, for one tiny moment, showing inner pain. ‘I think,’ she murmured, closing her eyes, ‘I’m hungry.’ Her voice was breathless, like a child’s. ‘And,’ her eyes flashed open, her face composed again, ‘I think I shall make paprikash! Since, you realize, I have just furiously remembered the accurate recipe.’ She danced across the floor. ‘Taught me by an old gypsy.’ She waggled her finger at Helva. ‘Promise not to peek. It’s a family secret.’

  She pivoted on her toes, round and round into the galley, laughing breathlessly as she caught the counter for support.

  ‘Doesn’t it smell heavenly?’ Kira demanded of Helva, later pausing with the dish raised to Helva’s column. ‘Be better with noodles and thick crusty bread. Hmmm!’ she mumbled happily over a full mouth. ‘Oh, perfect. I have not lost my touch.’ She put her fingers to her lips, releasing a kiss to the air in the extravagance of gustatory enjoyment. ‘Marvelous.’ She curled her legs under her on the wide pilot’s chair and ate quickly, licking her fingers occasionally when the stew splashed.

  ‘You make me wish I wasn’t nourished by a bunch of flagons,’ Helva remarked. ‘I’ve never seen anyone enjoy the simple business of eating as much as you do. And you don’t seem to suffer from excess calories.’

  Kira shrugged negligently. ‘Excellent metabolism. Absolutely unalterable. That’s me!’ That fleeting edge of bitterness crept into the gay voice.

  Helva began to suspect that these sudden switches of mood were less the product of a naturally volatile spirit than the elaborate defenses of a badly hurt woman, struggling to suppress her pain by overriding all references to it.

  Helva remembered how carefully the guitar case had been stowed in the closet. Not so much as a hint had Kira made that it was there, silently waiting. Was this out of deference to Helva’s recent tragedy? – for surely Kira knew of Jennan’s death and the legends that had already begun to cling to the 834. Or was Kira avoiding the guitar for a reason of her own?

  Kira had finished her meal. The dish lay on her lap. Her face was brooding, eyes fixed on a spot at the base of the control console.

  Her whole attitude was apathetical and unhealthy. Helva knew she must break this mood. Kira had somehow been touched on too vital a point – despite the overtly innocuous conversation – to help herself.

  Softly, without conscious choice from her wealth of musical references, Helva began to sing an old air:

  ‘Music for a while

  Shall all your cares beguile;

  Wond’ring how your Pains were eas’d.’

  ‘How my pains are eased?’ hissed Kira, her eyes great green globes glittering with hatred at the titanium column. ‘Do you know how my pain will be eased?’ She was on her feet in such a violent upward heave that there seemed to be no intermediate motion of rising. Tall in fury, Kira frightened Helva with the sudden strength in the slight body. ‘In death! In DEATH!’ and she held her arms straight up, wrists turned toward Helva so that she saw the thin white scars of arterial cuts.

  ‘You,’ and Kira’s arms dropped rigid to her side. ‘You had the chance to die. No-one could have stopped you. Why didn’t you? What kept you living after he died?’ the girl demanded with trenchant scorn.

  Helva drew in her breath sharply, against the tantalizing memory of an anguished desire to dive into the clean white heart of Ravel’s exploding sun.

  ‘Do you realize that even if a person wants to die, it is not allowed! Not allowed!’ Kira began to pace wildly, graceful even in this savage mood. ‘No. You promptly are subjected to such deep conditioning you cannot. Anything else is permitted in our great society except the one thing you really want – if it happens to be death. Do you realize that I have not been left alone in three years? And now . . .’ Kira’s face was contorted in ugly anger and contempt, ‘. . . now you’re my nursemaid. And don’t think for one moment I’m not aware you have had a confidential report on my emotional instability.’

  ‘Sit down,’ Helva ordered coldly and activated the final section of the mission tape with its restriction. As the import of the message reached Kira, she did sit, slumped lifeless in the pilot chair, her face drained of all emotion.

  ‘I’m sorry, Helva. I’m really sorry.’ She raised trembling hands in apology. ‘I just didn’t believe they would leave me alone at last.’

  ‘They are very good at conditioning,’ Helva remarked softly. ‘They must be and they have to be. They can’t have ships or people going rogue from grief. But I think they have let you alone. They’ve merely made sure you can’t get to those few worlds where ritual suicide is permitted, like Baham, Homan, Beid and Keid. And they can’t allow you to commit suicide because the ethos of Central Worlds is dedicated to extending life and propagating it wherever and whenever possible. I’m a living example of the extremes to which they are willing to go to sustain a human life. The RCA is another aspect of the same ethos. For you to seek suicide means a breakdown in this ethos which cannot be permitted. Even the Pegasus and Eridani planets limit the conditions under which suicide is condoned and prescribe certain grotesque ceremonies to insure that only the most desperate attempt it.

  ‘You’d think,’ Helva sighed with exasperation, ‘they’d figure out some way to alleviate loss, since death is the one thing the great and glorious Central Worlds hasn’t been able to cure.’

  Kira’s tumbled hair hid her face from Helva’s view. Even the slim fingers were motionless. The girl had abandoned herself to grief and suddenly Helva was immeasurably irritated with this immolation in self-pity. True enough, she had been tempted to suicide, but her conditioning had held. She had keened her loss to black space, but she had lifted with Theoda to Annigoni and gone on with the business of living. Just as Theoda had after her own tragedy. As many people had, all over the uni
verse and throughout time. When her medical advisers had realized that Kira was wallowing in sorrow, they should have applied a block . . . oh, no, not when Kira had nearly finished brawn training, Helva remembered that factor. She had been made block-resistant so the only therapy was intensive conditioning. They couldn’t erase, only inhibit.

  Helva looked dispassionately at her brawn, furious at her situation, realizing that Central Worlds had known exactly what they were asking of Helva when they assigned Kira to her. That, too, was part of the ethos. Use what you have that will get the job done.

  ‘Kira, what is a Dylanist?’

  The lowered head jerked up, the curtaining hair falling away from the face. The scout blinked and turned to stare at Helva’s bulkhead.

  ‘Well, that is the last question I would have expected,’ she said in a quiet voice. She gave a little snort of laughter and then tossed her head, shaking her hair out of her way. She looked at Helva thoughtfully, speculatively. ‘All right. I’ll absolve you of the guilty crime of psychotherapy. Although,’ and Kira pointed an accusatory finger at the column, ‘I was coerced to make this mission and I thought it awfully suspicious you were my ship.’

  ‘Yes, that would follow logically, wouldn’t it?’ Helva agreed calmly.

  Kira laid a slim hand on the bulkhead, on the square plate that was the only access to Helva’s titanium shell within the column. It was a gesture of apology and entreaty, simple and swift. Had Helva been aware of sensory values it would have been the lightest of pressures.

  ‘A Dylanist is a social commentator, a protester, using music as a weapon, a stimulus. A skilled Dylanist and I wasn’t one,’ and from the emphasis on the pronoun, Helva assumed that Kira considered her husband, Thorn, had been one such, ‘. . . can make so compelling an argument with melody and words that what he wants to say becomes insinuated into the subconscious.’

  ‘Subliminal song?’

  ‘Well, haven’t you been haunted by a melody?’ Kira paused at the door of her cabin.

  ‘Hmmm, yes, I have,’ Helva agreed not sure that the theme from Rovolodorus’ Second Celestral Suite was exactly what Kira had in mind. Still the point was well taken.

  ‘A really talented Dylan stylist,’ Kira continued, returning with the guitar case, ‘can create a melody with a message that everyone sings or hums, whistles, or drums in spite of himself. Why, you can even wake up in the morning with a good Dylan-styled song singing in your head. You can imagine how effective that is when you’re proselytizing for a cause.’

  Helva roared with laughter. ‘No wonder you’d be considered an embarrassment to Central Worlds on the Ophiuchus circuit.’

  Kira’s grin was impish. ‘I got the chapter, verse, and section on that, plus what a waste of time, talent, and ability that could be put to worthwhile use in service to CW.’

  She made a face as she struck chords, sour from the instrument’s long disuse. She tightened the keys, tuning up from the bass string, her expression unexpectedly tender as she worked. She struck a tentative chord, tightened the E string a fraction more, to nod satisfaction at the resulting mellow sound.

  With flashing strong fingers she wove a pattern of chords and notes, drawing more volume from the instrument than its fragile structure suggested. To Helva’s amazement she recognized an ancient Bach fugue just as Kira struck an angry discord, clamping both hands on the strings to keep them from resonating.

  ‘Achh,’ she exclaimed, sharply flapping her hands and then clenching them into tight fists. ‘I haven’t played since . . .’ She struck a major chord, then modulated to a diminished minor. ‘I remember we spent one entire night . . . till noon the next day, actually . . . trying to analyse an early Dylan song. The trouble was, you weren’t supposed to analyse Dylan. You had to feel him and if you tried to parse what he was saying into Basic or into psychological terms, it . . . it was meaningless. It was the total imagery of the music and the words that made the gut react. That was the whole purpose of his style. When the gut reacts the mind gets the whiplash and another chip is knocked off the solid block within.’

  ‘I’d say his work might be good therapy,’ Helva remarked dryly.

  Kira flashed her an angry look that dissolved into a grin. She made her guitar laugh. ‘The trouble with therapy is you tend to find too many confusing alternative meanings to the simplest motions and words, and then you’re so confused, you suspect everyone and everything.’ And Kira’s guitar echoed the pitch of her words derisively.

  A red warning light flashed on the panel simultaneously with an impulse to Helva’s internal monitors. The guitar was the sole occupant of the pilot’s chair and Kira was halfway down the passageway to the No 3 hold before Helva could activate her own visual check.

  Kira paused at the hold door long enough to assess the damage before she spun to the farther hold, where their additional supplies were stored.

  The clumsiness of the technician had, to all scrutiny, been remedied at the time of the accident by securing the tubing in the demijohn of nutritive fluid. What had not been apparent at that time was that the closure at the other end of the line had been loosened. Sufficient of the fluid had dripped away from the weakened joint to register on the telltale. Helva anxiously checked with her magnified vision along the section of embryos serviced by that tank. There was loss at the joint, but the ribbon was still full.

  Kira was back with new tubing and joints. Deftly she removed the faulty equipment, careful in her transfer to prevent air bubbles seeping in along the ribbon. Then she checked the entire length of ribbon and each minute sac under magnification to make certain there were no visible bubbles or disruption to the contact between sac top and the nutritive nipple fastening.

  Then she checked the joints in the other ribbons, each line, each flask, every connection. It was a job of several hours’ duration but she made no attempt to hasten the process.

  Reassured, she and Helva did another check of the internal monitors before she closed the hatch.

  ‘I should have cut him up and made him into the paprikash. That would have served him right!’ Kira muttered as she disappeared into the privacy of her cabin.

  Helva eavesdropped until she heard the slow, even breathing. All the while the mute guitar stared back at her from the pilot’s seat, threads of that haunting melody plaguing Helva as she maintained her vigil.

  At Dubhe, Kira insisted on an elaborate spectrum inspection on the disturbed ribbon to make sure none of the several thousand fetuses within the strand had suffered impairment. Whatever emotional problems tormented Kira, she held them apart from her professional life. Her objectivity was the more appreciated by Helva because she had had a glimpse of Kira’s personal turmoil.

  The KH-834 sped onward from Dubhe to Merak, where another 20,000 waited. On the short voyage between Dubhe and Merak, neither Kira nor Helva mentioned what Helva styled ‘the paprikash’ incident. Kira did not put the guitar away but spent some time every ‘evening’ giving Helva additional samples of Dylanist wit and social penetration, from the ancient dreams songs of the Protest Decade in early Atomic history to contemporary examples.

  When the call from Alioth came, it interrupted Kira’s masterful rendition of a very early Dylan, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’

  Kira carefully laid aside her guitar and answered the call, her face registering polite surprise at the origin.

  ‘Fifteen thousand?’ she repeated for confirmation, and received what Helva felt was an unnecessarily curt rejoinder and cutoff.

  While Kira had been dealing with the call, Helva had activated the ship’s memory files for facts on the planet.

  ‘That’s odd,’ she remarked.

  ‘How so?’ asked Kira, jotting down eta computations.

  ‘There’s no record of their having a bank. Grim planet. In a highly unstable volcanic period. Use a lot of molten mining techniques. Highest mortality rate in the Central Worlds.’

  ‘I think,’ commented Kira dryly, ‘you’d better see what Cencom has
to say about our landing there.’

  ‘It’s not on the restricted list, Kira,’ Helva replied, but she activated the tight beam.

  ‘Alioth?’ Cencom exclaimed, surprised out of its formal voice. ‘The mayday didn’t go out to them. We’ve no record of a bank there. Ethnically speaking, it’s possible. Hold.’

  Kira cocked an eyebrow at Helva. ‘They’re checking with I know who. Two gets you one they abort the call.’

  ‘Two gets me one of what?’ jibed Helva.

  ‘KH,’ Cencom returned. ‘Proceed to Alioth. No bank listed but traders report improvements in mining techniques indicate technological advances at proper level for race propagation. Religious hierarchy powerful, so do not antagonize. Repeat, do not antagonize. And report soonest.’

  ‘You just lost two whatever it was you bet,’ Helva taunted.

  ‘Okay,’ Kira said with a shrug. ‘Filmbank have any clips?’

  Helva flashed them on the viewer. The first were aspects of the small spaceport. The main city was dominated by an enormous temple built against the side of an extinct volcano; the broad multiple steps leading to it reminding Helva of a ziggurat. She didn’t much care for worlds with a religious hierarchy, but she was aware that her opinion was at the moment jaundiced. Too many religions were gloom and doom. Alioth, fourth planet of its solar system, was far enough out from its primary to get little of its brightness and its volcanic era predisposed it to Dantean excesses. One last scene showed a procession of torch-bearing cowled figures crossing a huge central plaza in front of the temple.

  ‘A truly cheerless place,’ Kira said, making a face. ‘Well, with only 15,000, we can’t have to stay long.’ She strummed a gay tune to counteract the morbid pictures.

  ‘They are in the ethnic group required by Nekkar,’ Helva remarked dubiously.

  ‘Can’t see a thing with all those hoods,’ Kira said. ‘You don’t suppose the embryos come complete with cowl, do you? That’d be a facer for the Nekkarese,’ and she giggled, adding a guitar laugh.