Starfire Saga, page 73
Jemeret and I had agreed to spend the roll time in the cargo hold with Tynnanna, because the roll was lengthy enough so that even if we put him to sleep at its beginning, he might awaken in the course of it, and there was no telling what effect it might have on him if he were alone. We were both a little tired; Jemeret’s pathfinding and my probing had taken a small bite out of our reserves, but nothing that would demand repair yet.
We had decided to go to Nogdala 7 as fast as possible so we could emplanet and begin readying the population for hardships to come, while simultaneously seeing if we could quash the talent worship that might have begun there.
Because of the skeleton nature of the crew, we’d all been relatively busy before the first roll warning sounded. When its chime reverberated through the ship, Jemeret took my hand, and we left the bridge surround to go down the cargo arm and into the big space where Tynnanna was pacing restlessly. He’d come to associate the chime with unpleasantness. He roared when he saw us and came bounding over, feeling more secure now that we were there. I wished I could keep him in our cabin, but he was simply too huge now. It was almost as if he were growing constantly.
Jemeret idly scratched the cat’s forehead and horn bases, which were increasingly difficult for me to reach unless he was lying down.
The second chime rang through the cargo hold just as Tynnanna had finally been persuaded to curl up, and he growled at it. Jemeret and I tucked ourselves into the curve of his body and against each other, moving with the motion of the klawit’s great rib cage and touching him to soothe him through the imminent discomfort of the roll’s beginning.
The series of beeps began counting down, and then, as smoothly as I’d ever felt it, we were seamlessly encompassed in the motionless motion of the roll, its nauseating qualities dissipated as much as a good Lumeship could dissipate them, rising nevertheless to the point at which most rolls ended, and then sinking away into the stasislike nullity of this particular roll.
Because we had both lightly stung Tynnanna, and because we were both receptive to him, Jemeret and I knew the instant his consciousness changed, opening into a vastness so great, so awesomely endless, that we were bounced backward from it to escape the threat of pain that underlay such power. Tynnanna said, “You cannot call us from normal space without the metal, whose atomic structure is a focal point, but you may call us here.”
I was struggling to form a sentence, because Lumespace scrambles passages, but before I could bring the words, How did you get here? into proper alignment, the starfire answered the question I had been unable to speak. “We live here,” said the starfire. “That is why we come to you physically in forms of light. Listen now. There is a danger near which you do not suspect and which may not be evoked. If it is, then you can lose much. It can possibly be repaired from a source you cannot now guess. Remember that enemies are sometimes only opponents, and opponents can sometimes be allies.”
Jemeret, once again stronger than I, had been able to attain coherence. “How can we talk again?” Five words seemed to be the effective limit of what we could strive to assemble in Lumespace.
“We do not speak only to you,” Tynnanna said, and we fell out of the roll into normal space. Tynnanna licked the side of my face, nearly drowning me, his purr rumbling up around our bodies.
“I’ll be damned,” Jemeret said softly.
“So huge,” I murmured. “I’ve never had my sting so close to something so—”
Jemeret’s face went grim and tight for a moment. “We weren’t trying to sting the starfire, and it knew it. That’s why we’re still alive.” Before I could ask, he went on, “What do you think it meant about not speaking only to us?”
“Glon,” I said with sudden insight, and saw from his face that that was only a nonsense syllable to him. “The protodolphin who sent us the message to come to Sargasso. I’ll bet Glon is the one the starfire was referring to, and that’s why he thought they could help.”
Jemeret frowned. “That’s quite a leap of assumption. I’m more concerned with the near danger we don’t suspect. The crew?”
“I probed the crew, and I’m satisfied that they’re safe,” I said insistently. “Perhaps the starfire meant near in time and not in distance.”
“Perhaps.” Jemeret sounded doubtful.
It was wearing, feeling in constant danger, constantly off balance. I’d never known such uncertainty before, and it threatened to stretch onward to an end whose outlines I couldn’t see. Tynnanna had fallen asleep and was beginning to snore, a sound only slightly quieter and less sonorous than his roar was. We got up and went back across the bridge surround and into the cabin wing. Mortel John and his three pupils—Keli and Gabon seemed stunned by the idea of studying a talent-exclusive process, and Tial was lording his own greater prowess over them with the unmitigated arrogance of young talent in a talentless world—were studying in the conference room and did not seem to notice us as we went past. Coney and Sandalari were in their cabin. Jasin Lebec, Lendo Dell, and Vazhny Lastone were sitting in the lounge, playing percosul three-handed and complaining about every play as only old men can. Sinet was sitting by herself in a corner, reading.
“I’m going to deep and fill my reserves,” Jemeret said to me. “If there’s some sort of danger around, I may need them.”
I probably should have joined him, but my reserves were more than two-thirds full, and I was both uneasy and exhilarated from the unexpected encounter with the starfire. “I’ll be there in a little while,” I said. “I want to have some time to talk privately to Sinet.” He squeezed my hand and went on to our cabin. I stood still for a moment, watching Sinet, wondering which tribe of the Samoth had given her birth and lost her. Then I went to the corner in which she sat.
Rollship lounges, while spacious, are not nearly so well-apportioned as lounges on transports, because people are expected to remain on transports for much longer periods of time. Nevertheless, Detralume had been furnished with some comfort in mind. Sinet had curled herself into a vidchair, where holos of books and various other kinds of entertainment could be called up on the swing-out platform. Unwilling to interrupt her, I sat in the vidchair opposite hers and simply waited. After a few minutes she glanced up, saw me, dotted her place, and swung the arm away. “Ronica?”
“Sinet, we don’t know each other very well,” I began, hoping it was the right note to strike, “and since we’ve been thrown together like this, I thought we might talk a little.”
She inclined her head, indicating her assent, then folded her hands on her thigh and sat quietly, watching me.
I wasn’t certain where to begin, and I didn’t read her to help myself along. Somehow I was determined to use my Caryldon-developed skills at interaction, not merely my talent. I took the plunge. “Did you and Lage work together for a long time?”
“Fifteen years,” she answered readily enough. “At her graduation ceremony it was agreed that she should apprentice to me for a time, since I’d been handling Class B assignments for about fifteen years before she graduated. She wasn’t—confident yet as a talent. She was studying on her own then, because you three were just starting as she was finishing, and because Mortel John was, at the end of her education, spending much more time with you.” She had been gazing very steadily at me as she spoke; now she looked down at her hands. “She developed more confidence and skill over the next few years, but it turned out that she lost them when she was tried on her own. So they left her with me.”
“I didn’t realize that our training gave her less than she should have had,” I said slowly. “I guess it doesn’t do any good to say I’m sorry now.”
Sinet raised her head to me again. “Oh, don’t be sorry.” Her voice was firm. “I had the pleasure of working with another talent all those years, and Mortel John knew what he was doing emphasizing you. Your value was comparably greater.”
That made me a little angry, but I gathered it down. “About Mortel John...” I said hesitantly.
Sinet was no coward. “Why am I sleeping with him?” she asked bluntly. She took my silence for the acquiescence it was. There had been an edge of aggression in the question as she asked it, but she seemed not to need to continue that tack. “Kray told me that talent automatically removes the obligation to be courteous,” she said, in an unconscious echo of something Morien had once said to me about power. She mentioned Kray’s name with a casual ease that both shook and gratified me. “I never found it to have any effect at all on loneliness.”
“But you’re a beautiful woman,” I protested sincerely, for I had always thought her much more classically beautiful than I.
“And I’m a talent,” she said, a little caustically. “There aren’t that many other talented men, Ronica, and unfortunately, I never found a man without talent who didn’t want to use me for some agenda of his own. I haven’t been gifted with a man, like you and Sandi have. And what I had with Lage was fine, but it wasn’t enough for me by itself. That’s why I went with Kray when I had a chance to, even though he was twenty-five years younger than me. Because the only thing he wanted to use me for was sex, and that was fine with me.”
“But Mortel John—” My voice dropped almost without my willing it to.
“Isn’t fully human,” she said. “Yes, I know.” She looked at me closely. “That’s part of his charm. Ronica, I’m afraid you’re still something of an innocent in this life.”
“Me?” I was truly astounded. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh yes,” she said categorically. “I’d bet two years of my work that you’ve had no experience with perversion.” I must have goggled at her. “There you are. I win my bet,” she said with some satisfaction.
Rude curiosity got the better of me. “Have you—had that kind of experience?”
She nodded, seemed to debate something, then leaned across between our chairs. “Did you know that Kray—experimented with perversions?”
Since I had no idea what “perversions” were, and since I was fairly certain I didn’t want to know, I just shook my head. Sinet sat back in her chair again, saying only, “He should have known better than to play a rape game with you.”
A twinge of horror shot through me. “A game?” I repeated incredulously. “He thought he was playing a game?”
“I don’t know,” Sinet said. “I only know he’d done it before. With others.”
Suddenly I thought I understood better why the MIs had not acted. What Kray was doing to me was something they’d observed him doing on other occasions, and the women had come to no harm. They had no way of judging that it would be different for me, no way of judging that my reaction would vary from those of the others. Perhaps Kray had not known either, and it cost him his life.
The impolite curiosity was still tugging at me. “I’m sorry, Sinet, but I have to ask,” I said. “Did he do it to you?”
She turned her eyes away from me again. “No,” she said. “He did—other things with Lage and me.”
“Cruel things?”
“They’re not cruel if you agree to them,” she said. “I agreed to some things, and Lage to others. Some things we all did. Kray had fairly eclectic sexual appetites.”
I gathered that Kray had not taken them singly, as I’d always assumed, but rather that all three had been together. I didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to dwell on Kray. I only said, “I suppose I should have handled it—less forcefully than I did.”
“Funny,” she said. “I’ve always assumed that if you could have, you would have. And don’t ‘should’ yourself, Ronica. There’s certainly no good in it now.”
The picture she painted of Kray was not one that accorded with most of the scenes of my childhood. “Thank you for your honesty, Sinet,” I said, the words totally unfeigned. “This wasn’t what I meant to speak to you about when I sat down.”
She shrugged. “Conversations don’t always go the way we plan them,” she said. “They’re a lot like life in that respect.”
“I’m sorry if I was prying.” I slid out of the chair.
“I think you needed to know,” Sinet said. “You probably don’t get any benefit from idealizing a man you killed.”
I fled, needing to talk to Jemeret, as she swung the arm in again and went back to her reading. I didn’t intend to wake him, but my agitation preceded me, and he met me at the cabin door and closed it behind me. “Tell me,” he said.
My conversation with Sinet poured out of me, and when he realized the substance of it, he pulled me over onto the bed and put his arms around me, stroking my hair lightly. “You have so much power that I keep forgetting how young you are,” he said I softly.
“Do you know what she’s talking about?” I demanded. “The things she and Kray did?”
“I can probably guess,” he answered.
“Have you ever done anything like that?”
He kept stroking my hair. “My tastes don’t incline in that direction,” he said, “but I don’t necessarily condemn people whose tastes do.”
I was reminded in a flash of Tuvellen and Morien. “Jemeret, I always thought Kray was my friend—I thought I knew him. All the time we were growing up, I never guessed—”
“The Kray you knew is not materially different from this Kray,” Jemeret said firmly. “He made a mistake with you at the end, and it was an appalling misjudgment on his part, but that doesn’t alter the fact that he was the boy you knew, and the young man who saved your life when the Drenalion attacked you.”
“Sinet said I was idealizing him.”
He drew me tighter against him, his lips on my hair. “You do that with the people you love,” he said. “You did it with Coney and Kray. You do it with me.” I started to deny it, but even as he laid his fingertips on my lips, I knew he was right. I’d done it on Caryldon and I had since we’d come back to the Com, when I’d needed his approval for my choices. I still did it in constantly bowing to his greater strength, in hoping there would be no confrontation between us, in letting him take the lead in so many ways.
“I don’t mean to do it,” I said softly.
He said, “It’s all right. I think you’ll grow out of it.”
“What will I grow into, do you think?” I asked him, a little shakily.
He didn’t answer me, just kept on stroking me.
XII. A Question of Belief
Nogdala 7 was not a great world in terms of size nor of posterity nor of population. It had developed as a factory planet, highly skilled in taking the raw materials from some worlds and making them into products for still other worlds. As a result, its requisite wilderness area was carefully domed, its ambient temperature ranged from tepid to downright torrid, and all of its living areas were in the three levels of its great Structure, which—with the exception of the huge spaceport, the wild, and one large body of water—dominated the surface of the planet.
We had decided we could not go to the surface as who we were—Com talents—so we fabricated identities as a team of business travelers from Causaday, a relatively new world to the Com and one that had been successfully resisting all of the Nogdala government’s efforts to pull it into a trading partnership, due to opposing attitudes on each of the two worlds toward many of the basic principles of Com life.
Causaday was one of those straitlaced worlds, vaguely like Brochid had been, though not as bad, in which patriarchal authority had reigned unquestioned until the Com moved in after analysis of the planetary spectrum showed large deposits of generium, a rare substance used in the eftel and eftel vid communication devices. Prior to the discovery, it had been believed that only Marga Morena’s science personnel, working hard to synthesize the ore, could save production of the eftel technology from becoming even more expensive and increasingly scarce. The need for the generium had caused the Com government to surreptitiously bend the rules for acceptance of a member world, and as a result Causaday was accepted without having to make any of the normally requisite social changes prior to admission into the Com. Unlike many worlds that begged for membership, the Com government introduced itself to Causaday, appointed an ambassador, and sent Terrill Guthrie’s predecessor with a squad of Drenalion to explain the facts of life to the inhabitants.
Thirty years later, the Causadayans were beginning to be more at ease with their Com membership—no one called it occupation—and were getting fairly rich from the Merchant Fleet’s extraction of ore.
Nogdala 7 eyed the credit balance and wanted to sell them goods; so far, until we accepted for them, Causaday had rebuffed their efforts. Now the governor of Nogdala 7, a man named Parwick Cue, which I thought sounded like a curse of some kind, was in possession of a response that said a four-person trade delegation was willing to visit Nogdala 7, arriving on the Detralume, to begin the (lengthy implied) process of exploring whether or not there were any products the Causadayans could buy without being corrupted either by them or by the all-too-liberal attitudes of the people who created them.
We hoped the very lightly veiled threat would keep Cue and his staff on their best behavior.
As for which four of us would go—Jasin Lebec couldn’t. He was too well known on every Com world, his face as familiar as people’s own; Jemeret and I had to go, for the influencing we needed to perform couldn’t be done by anyone else. His face was not known at all, and while my graduation had been vidded everywhere, I had then vanished for more than three years, and my return was considered uncertain enough for its pictures to be confined only to core worlds. Were I to vanish again, the damage control the government would need to do would be minimal.
We needed two more men. The Causadayans might have come a long way in three decades, but women were still only grudgingly given any positions of responsibility. So we decided to take Coney, and then our choices were Lendo Dell, Vazhny Lastone, or someone without talent. Mortel John had to stay with Tial, and Jemeret didn’t want him along anyway.
