The Shadow of the Ship, page 18
Glenavet stuck his head in, then entered diffidently. “Talk to you, Eiverdein?”
“Sure.”
Glenavet gestured, then sidled into a corner. He leaned against a cloth wall hanging and waited until Rheinallt had moved next to him before he spoke. “About that girl, Susannilar.” His voice was barely audible.
“Is she all right?” Rheinallt asked sharply.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“I just spent some time with her. She was telling me her life story—second installment. A strong, strange person.”
“She sure is. The little of her I’ve seen, I mean. Say, how come the only times I can find her, she’s got someone hanging around, a chaperon? Course, no one can stick to Susannilar if she wants to give them the slip.”
“Some of the crew have been alerted to keep a friendly eye on Susannilar. Not to chaperon. She is a handful, as far as the caravan’s concerned.”
Glenavet smiled, glancing sidelong at Whitnadys. “Not especially your handful, though, Eiverdein. Is that right?”
“If more people spent time with Susannilar it’d be all to the good. Give her some cushion.”
“Is somebody bothering her?”
“She and Nollinsae have some critical disagreements. Ask Susannilar, why don’t you? She’ll give you an earful.” Rheinallt felt sorry for the state of Glenavet’s head after Susannilar got through overdosing him with her memories, but another friend for her would be nice.
“You know, Eiverdein, it’s funny, but I didn’t notice her all this time on the trip until just a few days ago. She must have been around, out of her cabin sometimes, but I don’t remember ever seeing her.”
“Protective coloration?”
“Huh?”
“She’s hard to focus on when she doesn’t want to be seen. I’m not sure if it’s a fully conscious process or not. I didn’t notice her until recently, myself.” Had he encouraged Glenavet sufficiently?
Glenavet smiled again, out of words.
Surely the man didn’t really need Rheinallt’s permission. Probably just bubbling with his discovery, and wanting to share it. Rheinallt signed a casual dismissal, and ambled to rejoin Whitnadys and Arahant.
“Well, thanks a lot, Eiverdein!” Glenavet moved awkwardly to the door and left.
“What was that all about?” Whitnadys asked.
“Lovesick,” he answered shortly.
“Uh-oh,” she said. “Deep water.”
Arahant made puffing sounds from the air sphincters under his armpits. They sounded like a chorus of dubious sniffs, which Rheinallt supposed was the intention. Sometimes it’s hard to tell with a catadrome, even one he had known as long as Arahant. For instance, if Glenavet’s love life somehow turned out tragically, and Rheinallt upbraided Arahant on his callous sniffs, the aircat would claim they were gasps of dismay given in great sympathy for all concerned. Arahant was a high flyer, but not above playing them close to the fluff and then sandbagging you.
“Well,” Rheinallt said heavily, “I don’t know what Susannilar’s going to do, but I think it’s time to force a couple more confrontations.”
“Recovered from Susannilar, I trust?” Arahant asked.
“Well enough.” Rheinallt rubbed his face between hairline and beard.
“Who are you going to see?” Whitnadys wanted to know.
“Nollinsae, for starters.”
Whitnadys frowned. “I think he’s avoiding you. He made as if to let you in on his big plans, with that note he passed to you. But he didn’t.”
He regarded her thoughtfully. “Could be.” He steepled his hands, one finger at a time. “Do you think he’s added me to the official enemies list, along with Susannilar?”
“As an enemy of Fleurage? How could you be?” She looked worried, though.
“As an obstacle to Nollinsae,” Arahant interjected.
“I wouldn’t want to be an obstacle all unknowing.”
“And be removed, all unknowing,” Arahant agreed sarcastically.
Rheinallt shrugged. “I think I can handle Nollinsae, if it becomes absolutely necessary.”
Arahant gave the man the look that meant he thought Rheinallt was beyond rational redemption.
After some minutes of mutual silence, Whitnadys said, “I hope you aren’t forgetting that Detenebrator thing.”
“It’s not a thing, it’s a creature. That name it calls itself just means ‘dispeller of shadows,’ or some such. Like a light source, although physically at least it’s not much of one.”
“But it’s not human—” Whitnadys began.
“On the contrary,” Rheinallt said, slashing the air with his hand, “it’s all too human to suit me. I don’t think it’s an alien at all, a member of an alien race.”
Arahant simultaneously twitched his ears toward each other, while swinging his tail up and over his back in a swift arc. The tips of his ears caught the tip of his tail in a neat pinch, then released it. The ears snapped back into verticality, while the fluffy tail descended slowly back to the floor.
“‘Too human,’ is it now, that you don’t like?” Arahant said, widening the slits in his pupils. “I’ll remember that the next time my activities seem tainted by unnecessary humanness.”
“We didn’t mean you,” Whitnadys told him in her best beast-master voice.
“Can’t vamp me, Whitnadys,” Arahant said, chuckling. “Save it for the big and slow.”
“Anyway,” Rheinallt said, “I’d like to get Nollinsae to show more of his hand.”
“I’m far more distressed about the Detenebrator,” Whitnadys maintained. “Remember what happened on that sled trip. You two were lucky. Suppose it pulls something like that again? What would you do with a whole caravan full of madmen? You two might come through all right: Hendrik because you’re tough, and Arahant because your mind’s not speaking the same signs, or something. Can you take a risk like that for all the other caravaneers?”
It took Rheinallt a while to figure out an answer to this. Mostly because he had no answer yet. Did his friends, though?
“Let’s take a poll,” Rheinallt suggested. “The easier one first. Do you think I ought to kill Nollinsae?” He paused. “Arahant?”
The aircat let out his breath slowly. “No grounds yet.”
“Whitnadys?”
“There are other—”
“Other choices later. Yes or no?”
She was less stoical about the possibility than Arahant. “You can’t! He hasn’t done anything yet. Right, I know he’s dangerous, I’ve said so myself. But then so am I. All you really have against him so far is that tale of Susannilar’s, which you said yourself was more hypnotic than rational.”
“What about the telescope business?”
“Research,” Arahant grunted.
Whitnadys took it up. “Sure. All these scientific types are hugging little theories to their chests, on the best way to crack the secrets of the Ship. They’ve been like that since before we left Blueholm. I’m sure you’re aware, Hendrikal, that the adventurers are as secretive as the scientists. They’ve got schemes too. Now, don’t look at me like that! My point is that those schemes are harmless: research sort of things. Not guileful tricks to wrest the Ship from the rest of us and hightail it.”
“You mean,” Rheinallt said agreeably, “that we can’t rightfully prejudge our companions, in accuracy any more than in principle. Which I’ve maintained all along.”
A faint blush appeared on her face. “Have I been overadvising?”
Arahant laughed. “Of course not. He needs it. I always remind him not to trust too much in his admittedly high-class mind and skills. Time and chance wait for us all.”
Rheinallt smiled at Whitnadys. “I’ll bet Arahant doesn’t even remember the first time he gave me advice.”
Arahant’s slit pupils opened wide for an instant, then snapped to slits again. “Good Lord of the Air, how could I? The wind has blown away worlds since we were young!”
“I do.”
“Really? Well then, out with it.”
Rheinallt drew out a pause. “You told me not to catch the lightning.”
“The devil in a dream!” Arahant exclaimed. “You’re right. But so long ago.”
“And did he do it anyway?” Whitnadys asked, her eyes sparkling.
“Of course, my child,” Arahant told her, still looking at Rheinallt. “It accounts for his electric personality.”
“Is that a joke?”
“Not really,” Rheinallt said. “I’ve told you a little about ‘mastering the blood,’ the group of psychobiological processes that Arahant and I use as a discipline to maintain our health. ‘Mastering the lightning’ covers the related processes of electroneuronic and electromuscular nature.”
“Is that another discipline? You don’t do that, Arahant, do you?” She moved to sit on the arm of Rheinallt’s chair, needing the physical contact.
“I value my life,” Arahant said.
Whitnadys leaned her cheek gently against Rheinallt’s. “Does that mean that you don’t, Hendrikal?”
“Becoming a bloodsweater was a necessity obvious to us in our youth. The other was thrust on me through my own innocent bravado.”
“Tell me!”
“There was a legendary challenge, old tales about the exquisite sensations available to a person with electrotoned nerves, about the thrill of having the power of the lightning at your beck and call. This was pretty heady to young people who didn’t know better, who didn’t realize that there were no living ‘masters of lightning’ not because no one had ever thought to try for it, but because those who had tried had died.”
Rheinallt slipped his arm around her waist and squeezed her. “It was a discipline,” he went on, “like bloodsweating. We thought if we could master passing blood, with all that means for internal control, we could master anything. So once, in a high place, I took the challenge.”
“You don’t mean you actually tried to catch a lightning bolt!”
“I mean exactly that. When my friends saw that I hadn’t been killed immediately, some of them tried too. Nature’s airy dare, to stand in front of the lightning and make it your own. They were equally brave, equally foolhardy. I was too stunned to warn them, still struggling internally with the awful shock. I suffered through a mad, painful juggling of high-energy potentials for a few terribly sizzling minutes, an internal blitzkrieg, but I was lucky enough to survive. I lived through the internal burns and the neural overload.”
“Oh,” she said very quietly after a moment. She brushed a few tears from her lashes. “I’m sorry, Hendrikal. I thought this was another funny story between you and Arahant. I didn’t mean you to bring up old hurts.”
“It was a long time ago, and being a bloodsweater I could block a lot of the pain.”
“I meant your friends,” she explained, still more quietly.
He smiled affectionately at her. “I knew what you meant. Thank you. The memories, like the discipline, are old clothes now that fit me comfortably enough.”
Whitnadys blotted her eyes. “So Eiverdein’s consort is not totally in the dark now as to the springs of his character,” she observed with satisfaction. “Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever catch up.”
“In Rheinallt’s house are many mansions,” Arahant commented cryptically.
Rheinallt stood, gently disengaging Whitnadys. He hooked his airsuit out of its locker and headed for the door. “I’m leaving,” he said over his shoulder. “Later.”
As the door was closing behind him, he heard Whitnadys saying to Arahant, “He has a well-ballasted soul. That may save him.”
With this thought echoing in his mind, Rheinallt headed down the linked corridor toward Car Fourteen, where the airtent was attached. He passed a few people on the way but managed to avoid conversation. The expedition’s healer was calming a woman who had let herself get overly frustrated about the inherent secretiveness of the shadow hulk. A bad sign, but her flash of anger was already on the ebb.
He passed through the open hatchway which from Car Fourteen gave on the big airtent. The tent was crowded,with people fussing over their equipment, overhauling suits, eating, and arguing about the Ship. There was a portable latrine in one corner, out no facilities for sleeping. That they would have to do in their relatively cramped compartments on the caravan; it was too noisy in here anyway.
Some passengers had suggested breaking up the caravan into segments, or drawing the cars into a circle with the tent bridging the middle, or other schemes they thought would be convenient. But he had vetoed all these, as being too immobilizing. They were not, after all, breathing warm air and treading solid ground where they could fix the little problems that such gratuitous hassling with the caravan would cause. The airtent he had planned all along: that was standard practice. Even short-haulers carried them in case they needed elbowroom in an emergency.
Rheinallt was running his fingers up the pressure seal on the front of his suit when the Detenebrator whipped up to him. Through the outer lock of the airtent it had come, humming compactly like a bee swarm. Rheinallt held still, but the effort to suppress the impulse to snap his head back and away from the Detenebrator made his neck muscles ache. It came within a yard, and he could have felt its breath if it had had any.
The hubbub in the tent, after an intermission of shocked silence, resumed in whispers and exclamations. He caught the word “corposant” a couple of times.
Rheinallt was quick enough this time to take the initiative. “You’re not helping my reputation,” he told the Detenebrator thing quietly. “They think you’re some kind of spirit, and I’m a spirit-monger.”
“That’s all right, Eiverdein,” the Detenebrator boomed out in its fibrous, mouthless joviality. “Such little worries as that ought only to stimulate you to a greater concentration on your real problem.”
After a moment the man said, “I’ll bite. What is it?”
“Ho, ho. You, of course.”
“Your comments are the usual jagged blades, Detenebrator. Have they barbs to break off in my flesh, to keep their poisoned wounds open? Come on, give.”
“Very well, my dear Eiverdein,” it boomed. “Your concept of yourself is too confining. You are all dressed up in conventions, but what is your core doing? Have you no internal compass, that you need help to see the route you need to travel? Are you determined to be unworthy of your mind, unworthy of your body? Now, scarcely anyone wears his self easily, but that isn’t much excuse: certainly not for someone like yourself, who I suspect has lived long enough to almost have come into your maturity.”
Rheinallt glanced aside and around at the fascinated, though fearful, researchers and adventurers. They all were silent now, listening carefully, gathering material for wonder. And for what else?
He studied the fuzzy spheroid of the Detenebrator. “Go on.”
“You are no fool,” it said with admiration in the great voice. “I wish I could have had the time you’ve had—but never mind; that’s neither here nor there.”
In a way Rheinallt felt they were both glad of that previous encounter near Whitecloud on the Green Trail. It had tried to twist and re-mind him, and couldn’t; he had tried to shoot and electrocute it, and done it no damage. That cleared the air for the current series of encounters. Made talking easier by eliminating more extreme alternatives.
If he had had an energy weapon, though, it might have been different.
“Have you done anything worthwhile yet, Detenebrator?” he asked it. “Or are you all words, a bag of bluster?”
“Leave goading to the herdsman.” It sounded offended. Good.
“I am no herd.”
“In a way you are, Eiverdein,” it said surprisingly. “You are a bundle of force vectors and creative urges, with an inadequate governor.”
“So I need a herdsman? No thanks.”
“No, no! You need to be a herdsman, as well.”
“Interesting,” he conceded. “I thought you had yourself slated for that job.”
“I have, and have had, no such intention,” it boomed almost sadly.
Among the restless movements at the open doorway into Car Fourteen, Rheinallt suddenly noticed one man moving less furtively, more assertively; actually daring to come into the airtent. A bright uniform: it was Nollinsae. He slipped down onto the tent floor and stepped sideways into a group of the watchers. Great.
The Detenebrator seemed to be having trouble making up its mind what to say next. He felt a flash of sympathy for it, because a conjecture had come to him, that it was dying. The Detenebrator was alone; it had so far failed in what it was trying or it would not be around talking to Rheinallt; and whatever internal flows held it together were coming unglued. Its appearance had mottled since he had seen it first on this expedition; and, thinking back to the Whitecloud trip, then it had looked crisper.
“Your time is running out?” he prodded it speculatively.
“I am a bundle of potentialities,” it rumbled.
“When do you become actual, or shall you? Not only me, but the others here”—Rheinallt waved his arm toward the onlookers—“would like to know what in space you’re doing.”
“In good time. It remains to be seen whether any of you can profit by what you see before you, or if all your thoughts will remain in the darkness of your skull. I’m not speaking metaphorically; I’m describing the structure of your mind, the terribly real landscape in which you live. You walk in the land of death, Eiverdein, and only you can find the way you need to go.”
“Why me?”
“Not just you. Of course not. All of you, particularly Susannilar, because she was the first I worked with.”
Ah, Rheinallt thought, but he said harshly, “The first people you worked with you killed.”
“Not so. Actually I’d worked with her mother first, but on a simpler plane; she was murdered before she could realize her full potential. Susannilar, though, has great things in store for her. The difficulties of reaching her mind from this kerneled form of myself have proved far more than I anticipated. I am still trying.
“Every communication must have a beginning, Eiverdein, and before Whitecloud I’d observed that you, of anyone among the Trail worlds, had a good chance of making a breakthrough out of our shiny net-with-floats.”
