Continuum 1, page 12
part #1 of Continuum Series
“How could I what?” the Maestro asked in surprise.
“How could you lead me on?”
“Lead you on? But, my dear girl, I didn’t.”
“You did! You said… you said all I needed was hard work and haven’t I worked hard?”
“Of course you have worked hard.” Valdi was affronted. “My students must apply themselves. It takes years of hard work to develop the voice, to learn a repertoire of even a segment of the outworld music that must be performed…”
“I’ve the repertoire? I’ve worked hard and now… now you tell me I’ve no voice?”
Maestro Valdi sighed heavily, a mannerism which had always irritated Killashandra and was insupportable in this instance. She opened her mouth to protest but he raised a restraining hand. The habit of four years made her pause.
“You haven’t the voice to be a top-rank singer, my dear Killashandra, but that does not preclude any of the many other responsible and fulfilling…”
“I won’t be second-rank. I want… I wanted” — and she had the satisfaction of seeing him wince at the bitterness in her voice — “to be a top-rank concert singer. You said I had —”
He held up his hand again. “You have the gift of perfect pitch, your musicality is faultless, your memory superb, your dramatic potential can’t be criticized. But there is that burr in your voice which becomes intolerable in the higher register. While I thought it could be trained out, modified…” he shrugged his helplessness. He eyed her sternly. “Today’s audition with completely impartial judges proved conclusively that the flaw is inherent in the voice. This moment is cruel for you and not particularly pleasant for me.” He gave her another quelling look for the rebellion in her manner. “I make few errors in judgement as to voice. I honestly thought I could help you. I cannot and it would be doubly cruel of me to encourage you to go further as a soloist. No. You had best strengthen another facet of your potential.”
“And what, in your judgement,” demanded Killashandra in a voice so tight that her throat ached, “would that be?”
He had the grace to blink at her caustic tone but he looked her squarely in the eye.
“You don’t have the patience and temperament to teach, but you could do very well in one of the allied theater arts where your sympathy with the problems of a singer would stand you in good stead. No? You are a trained synthesizer? Hmmm. Too bad, your musical education would be a real asset there.” He paused, had a thought and dismissed it. “Well then, I’d recommend you leave the theater arts entirely. With your sense of pitch you could be a crystal tuner, or an aircraft and shuttle dispatcher.”
“Thank you, Maestro,” she said, more from force of habit than any real gratitude. She gave him the half bow his rank required and withdrew. She did slam the panel shut behind her and stalked down the corridor, blinded by the tears she’d been too proud to shed. She half wanted and half feared to meet some other student who would question her tears, commiserate with her disaster, but was inordinately grateful when she reached the door of her study cubicle without encountering anyone. There she gave herself up to her misery, bawling into hysteria, past choking, until she was too spent to do more than breathe.
If her body protested the emotional excess, her mind reveled in it. For she’d been abused, misused, misguided, misdirected. And who knows how many of her peers had been secretly laughing at her for her dreams of glorious triumphs on the concert and opera stage. Killashandra had a generous portion of the conceit and ego required for her chosen profession, with no leavening dollop of humility: she’d felt her success and stellar-dom only a matter of time. Now she cringed against the panoramic memories of her Self-assertiveness and arrogance, hugging her fractured, deflated self as she recalled the agony of that audition this morning. She had approached it with such confidence, so sure of receiving the necessary commendations to continue as a solo-aspirant. She remembered the faces of the examiners, so pleasantly composed — one man nodding absent-mindedly to the pulse of the test arias and lieder. She knew she’d been scrupulous in tempi — they’d marked her high on that. How could they have looked so — so impressed? So encouraging? She wanted to erase the morning’s fiasco completely from her memory!
How could they record such verdicts against her? “The voice is unsuited to the dynamics of opera; unpleasant burr too audible.” “A good instrument for singing with orchestra and chorus where grating overtone will not be noticeable.” “Strong choral leader quality: student should be positively dissuaded from solo work.”
The judgements burned in her mind, abrading the tortured strands of her ego and shattered aspirations.
Unfair! Unfair! How could she be allowed to come so far, be permitted to delude herself, only to be dashed down in the penultimate trial? And to be offered, as a sop, choral leadership? How degradingly ignominious!
Wiggling up out of her excruciating memories were the faces of brothers and sisters, taunting her for “shrieking at the top of her lungs.” Teasing her for the hours she spent pounding out finger exercises and attempting to “understand” some of the weird harmonics of off-world music. Her parents had surrendered to her choice of profession because it was, for starters, financed by the planetary educational system; secondly, it might accrue to their own standing in the community; and thirdly, she seemed to have the encouragement of her early voice teachers. Them! Was it to the ineptitude of one of those clods that she owed the flaw in her voice? A mishandling in the fragile early stages of training? Killashandra rolled in an agony of self-pitying memories.
Then she realized that it was self-pity and sat bolt upright in the chair, staring at herself in the mirror on the far wall, the mirror which had reflected all those long hours of study and self-perfection… Self-deception.
What was it Valdi’d. had the temerity to suggest? An allied art? A synthesizer? Bah! Spending her life catering to flawed minds in mental institutions because she had a flawed voice? Or mending flawed crystals to keep interplanetary travel or someone’s power plant flowing smoothly?
All in an instant, Killashandra shook herself free of such wallowing self-indulgence. She looked around the study, a slice of a room with its musical scores neatly filed by the viewer, with the built-in keyboard and console that tapped the orchestral banks of the Music Center for any aria or song ever composed. She glanced over the repros of training performances — she’d always had a lead role — and she knew that she’d do best to forget the whole damned thing! If she couldn’t be top rank, the hell with the theater arts! She’d be top in whatever she did or die in the attempt.
She stood up. There was nothing for her now in a room that three hours before had been the focal point of every waking minute and all her energies. Whatever personal items were in the drawer or shelves, the prize certificates on the wall, the signed repros of singers she’d hoped to emulate or excel, no longer concerned nor belonged to her.
She reached for her coat, ripped off the student badge and threw the cloak across her shoulders. She remembered, hand on panel, that she’d better take her credit plate with her. As she fumbled in the slip drawer for it, she saw the notation on her engagement pad.
“Party at Rory’s to celebrate!”
She snorted. They’d all know. Let them chortle over her downfall. She’d not play the bravely-smiling-courageous-under-adversity role tonight. Or ever.
Exit Killashandra, quietly, stage center, she said to herself as she ran down the long shallow flight of steps to the Mall in front of the Culture Center. Again she experienced both satisfaction and regret that no one witnessed her departure.
Actually she couldn’t have asked for a more dramatic exit. They’d wonder this evening what had happened. Maybe someone would know… someone always did know even the most confidential things about fellow students. She knew that Valdi would never talk… not about his failures, or anyone else’s. They’d not know from him. And the verdict of the examiners would be classified in the computer; but someone would “know” that Killashandra Ree had failed her vocal finals, and what the grounds for the failure were. In the meantime, she would have effectively disappeared and they could speculate. They’d remember, when she rose to prominence in another field. Then they’d marvel that nothing could suppress the excellence in her.
These reflections consoled Killashandra all the way to her lodgings. Students rated supported dwellings: no more the terrible bohemian semi-filth and overcrowding of old, but her room was hardly palatial. After she had failed to re-register at the Music Center, her landlady would be notified and the room locked to her. Subsistence living was abhorrent to Killashandra: it suggested an inability to achieve. But she’d take the initiative on that too. Therefore leave the room now. And all the memories it held.
Also, it would spoil her mysterious disappearance if she were to be “discovered moping in her digs.” So, with a brief nod to the landlady who always checked comings and goings, Killashandra ascended to her floor, keyed open her room and looked around it. Really nothing here to take but clothing. Despite that decision, Killashandra packed the lute which she had handcrafted to satisfy that requirement of her profession. She couldn’t bear to play it but she also couldn’t abandon it. Clothes in carisak, lute in case, she left the key in the lock. She nodded to the landlady just as she always did and exited.
Having fulfilled the dramatic requirement of her assumed role, she now didn’t have an earthly idea what to do with herself. She skipped onto the fast belt of the pedestrian way, heading into the center of the city. She ought to register with a work bureau, she ought to apply for subsistence. She ought to do many things but suddenly Killashandra discovered that “ought to” no longer ruled her. No more tedious commitments to schedule, to rehearsals, to lessons, to study, to any of her so-called friends and associates. She was free, utterly and completely free, with a lifetime ahead of her that ought to be filled. Ought to? With what?
The walkway was whipping her rapidly into the busier commercial stations of the city. Pedestrian directions flashed at cross-points: mercantile purple crossed with social services” orange: green manufactory and dormitory blue-hatching; medical green-red stripes and then airport red and spaceport star-spangled blue.
Killashandra was enmeshed by indecision. And while she toyed with the variety of things she ought to do, she was carried past the crosspoints that would take her where she ought to go.
Ought to, again, she thought. And stayed on the speed-way. Half of Killashandra was amused that she, once so certain of her goal, could be so irresolute. It did not, at that moment, occur to her that she was suffering an intense, traumatic shock. Nor that she was reacting to that shock, first in a somewhat immature fashion with her abrupt withdrawal from the abortive sphere of interest; secondly in a mature one, as she divorced herself from the indulgence of self-pity and began a positive search for an alternative life.
She couldn’t know that Esmond Valdi was concerned about her, realizing that the girl would be reacting in some fashion to the death of her ambition. She might have thought more kindly of him had she known, though he hadn’t pursued her further than her study or do more than call to the Personnel Section to report his concern for her. He’d taken the comfortable conclusion that she was in some other student’s room, having a good cry. Knowing her dedication to music, he’d come to the equally incorrect assumption that she’d undoubtedly continue in music, accepting a choral leadership in due time. That’s where he wanted her. It simply didn’t occur to him that Killashandra would be able to discard ten years of intensive training in one split second. He would not have done so, faced with her decision. He’d have been shocked if he’d known how completely she was to reject all references to those ten years.
Killashandra was halfway to the spaceport before she came to the decision that that was where she ought to go. “Ought,” this time not in an obligatory but in an investigative sense.
This planet held nothing but distressing memories for her. She’d leave it and erase all vestiges of its painful associations, domestic and career. Good thing she had the lute. She had sufficient training credentials to go along as a casual entertainer on some liner at the best, or as a crystal tuner at the worst. She might as well travel about a bit to see what else she “ought” to do with her life now.
The “now” both exacerbated and amused her until the speedway slowed to run into the spaceport terminal. For the first time since he’d left Maestro Valdi’s studio, Killashandra was aware of externals — people and things.
Come to think of it, she’d never actually been to the starburst-design spaceport. She’d never been on any of the welcoming committees for off-planet Stellars. A shuttle took off from its bay, its powerful plasma engines making the port buildings rumble. There was, however, a very disconcerting whine that she was subsonically aware of, feeling it down the mastoid bone right to her heel. She shook her head. The whine intensified — it must have to do with the shuttle — until she had to clamp her hands over her ears to cut the irritation. The sonics abated and she forgot the incident, wandering around the immense, bubble-domed reception hall of the port facility. Consoles were ranked across the inner wall, each one labeled with the name of the freight or passenger service, each with its screen plate. Faraway places with strange sounding names: an ancient fragment of song obtruded and was suppressed. No more music.
She paused at a portal to watch a shuttle off-loading cargo, the dockmen working with aircushions to remove odd-sized packages which had traveled by drone from who-knew-where in the galaxy. A supercargo was scurrying about, checking numbers against the arm-computer he wore, juggling weigh-units and arguing with the dockees. He was a bustling portentous man, utterly involved in his lot of life. Killashandra snorted. She’d have more than such trivia to occupy her energies. In the process of inhaling, she caught the whiff of appetising odors not entirely cleansed from the air.
She was hungry! Hungry? When her whole life had been shattered? How banal! But the odors made her salivate. Well, her credit plate ought to be good for a meal. She’d better check the balance lest she be embarrassed if the plate was spewed back out in the restaurant check-desk.
She slapped the credit plate into one of the many public outlets in the reception hall and was agreeably surprised to see that there’d been a credit that very day. A student credit she was forced to notice. Her last one. The fact that the total represented a bonus did not please her. A bonus to signalize the fact that she could never be a soloist?
She walked quickly to the nearest restaurant, noticing that it was not an economy establishment. The old, dutiful Killashandra would have backed out hastily. The new Killashandra entered imperiously.
At this hour the place was uncrowded so she took a booth on the upper level by the viewplate so she could watch the flow of shuttle and small space craft. She’d never realized how much traffic passed through the space port of her not very important planet. She had heard it was a change-over point. She ate, with relish and appetite, of some piscine casserole purportedly composed of off-world fish. Exotic but not too highly spiced for a student’s untutored palate. An off-world wine included in the selection pleased her so much that she ordered a second carafe just as dusk closed in on the planet.
She thought at first it was the unfamiliar wine that made her nerves jangle so. But the discomfort increased so rapidly that it couldn’t be the effect of the alcohol. She looked around for the source of irritation, rubbing her neck and frowning. She shook her head and then, with the appearance of a descending shuttle’s retro-blasts, realized that it must be a sonic disturbance — though how it could penetrate the shielded restaurant she didn’t know. She had to cover her ears, pressing as hard as she could against her skull, but there seemed to be no escape from that piercing ache. When she thought she couldn’t bear the agony a second longer, it ceased.
“I tell you, that shuttle drive’s about to explode,” a man’s baritone voice cried in the ensuing quiet.
Killasandra looked round, startled.
“How do I know? I know!” A tall man was arguing with the human attendant of the restaurant and trying to get to the comunit which the attendant was covering with his body. “Let me speak to the control tower. Is everyone deaf up there? Let me at the unit, man. Do you want a shuttle explosion? Are you deaf that you can’t hear it?”
“I heard it,” Killashandra said, rushing over to the pair. Any action might relieve the itch which had replaced the agony in her skull.
“You heard it, miss?” The attendant was genuinely surprised.
“I certainly did. All but cracked my skull wide open. What was it?” she asked the tall man. He had an air of command about him, frustrated at the moment by the officiousness of the stupid attendant. He carried his overlean body with a haughty arrogance that went with the fine fabric of his clothes, obviously of an off-world design and texture.
“She heard it, too. Now get that control tower, man.”
“Really, sir. We have the most explicit orders —”
“Don’t be a complete sub,” Killashandra said insultingly and gestured with operatic imperiousness at the console. “He obviously knows what he’s talking about!”
The fact that she was obviously a Fuertan like himself did more to persuade him than the insult but he was still reluctant until the man, ripping off an off-world oath as colorful as it was descriptive of bureaucratic stupidities, flipped open his card case. Whatever identification he showed made the attendant’s eyes bug out and his fingers dash out a call code on the comunit.
“I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t know, sir. Here you are, sir.” There was awe and a certain amount of fear in his manner.
The off-worlder ignored his reaction. “Control? That shuttle which just landed? It can’t be permitted to take off. Crystal drive’s gone sour. Must be recut or you’ll have an — No, this is not a drunk and this is not a threat. It’s a fact. Why that shuttle pilot didn’t insist on a hold, I can’t guess, but he must be deaf! Of course I know what I’m talking about! For the sake of whatever gods this mudball worships, don’t send that shuttle off again! What do you want, a drive check or a blasted port facility? Is this shuttlestop of a world too poor to employ a crystal tuner?”
“How could you lead me on?”
“Lead you on? But, my dear girl, I didn’t.”
“You did! You said… you said all I needed was hard work and haven’t I worked hard?”
“Of course you have worked hard.” Valdi was affronted. “My students must apply themselves. It takes years of hard work to develop the voice, to learn a repertoire of even a segment of the outworld music that must be performed…”
“I’ve the repertoire? I’ve worked hard and now… now you tell me I’ve no voice?”
Maestro Valdi sighed heavily, a mannerism which had always irritated Killashandra and was insupportable in this instance. She opened her mouth to protest but he raised a restraining hand. The habit of four years made her pause.
“You haven’t the voice to be a top-rank singer, my dear Killashandra, but that does not preclude any of the many other responsible and fulfilling…”
“I won’t be second-rank. I want… I wanted” — and she had the satisfaction of seeing him wince at the bitterness in her voice — “to be a top-rank concert singer. You said I had —”
He held up his hand again. “You have the gift of perfect pitch, your musicality is faultless, your memory superb, your dramatic potential can’t be criticized. But there is that burr in your voice which becomes intolerable in the higher register. While I thought it could be trained out, modified…” he shrugged his helplessness. He eyed her sternly. “Today’s audition with completely impartial judges proved conclusively that the flaw is inherent in the voice. This moment is cruel for you and not particularly pleasant for me.” He gave her another quelling look for the rebellion in her manner. “I make few errors in judgement as to voice. I honestly thought I could help you. I cannot and it would be doubly cruel of me to encourage you to go further as a soloist. No. You had best strengthen another facet of your potential.”
“And what, in your judgement,” demanded Killashandra in a voice so tight that her throat ached, “would that be?”
He had the grace to blink at her caustic tone but he looked her squarely in the eye.
“You don’t have the patience and temperament to teach, but you could do very well in one of the allied theater arts where your sympathy with the problems of a singer would stand you in good stead. No? You are a trained synthesizer? Hmmm. Too bad, your musical education would be a real asset there.” He paused, had a thought and dismissed it. “Well then, I’d recommend you leave the theater arts entirely. With your sense of pitch you could be a crystal tuner, or an aircraft and shuttle dispatcher.”
“Thank you, Maestro,” she said, more from force of habit than any real gratitude. She gave him the half bow his rank required and withdrew. She did slam the panel shut behind her and stalked down the corridor, blinded by the tears she’d been too proud to shed. She half wanted and half feared to meet some other student who would question her tears, commiserate with her disaster, but was inordinately grateful when she reached the door of her study cubicle without encountering anyone. There she gave herself up to her misery, bawling into hysteria, past choking, until she was too spent to do more than breathe.
If her body protested the emotional excess, her mind reveled in it. For she’d been abused, misused, misguided, misdirected. And who knows how many of her peers had been secretly laughing at her for her dreams of glorious triumphs on the concert and opera stage. Killashandra had a generous portion of the conceit and ego required for her chosen profession, with no leavening dollop of humility: she’d felt her success and stellar-dom only a matter of time. Now she cringed against the panoramic memories of her Self-assertiveness and arrogance, hugging her fractured, deflated self as she recalled the agony of that audition this morning. She had approached it with such confidence, so sure of receiving the necessary commendations to continue as a solo-aspirant. She remembered the faces of the examiners, so pleasantly composed — one man nodding absent-mindedly to the pulse of the test arias and lieder. She knew she’d been scrupulous in tempi — they’d marked her high on that. How could they have looked so — so impressed? So encouraging? She wanted to erase the morning’s fiasco completely from her memory!
How could they record such verdicts against her? “The voice is unsuited to the dynamics of opera; unpleasant burr too audible.” “A good instrument for singing with orchestra and chorus where grating overtone will not be noticeable.” “Strong choral leader quality: student should be positively dissuaded from solo work.”
The judgements burned in her mind, abrading the tortured strands of her ego and shattered aspirations.
Unfair! Unfair! How could she be allowed to come so far, be permitted to delude herself, only to be dashed down in the penultimate trial? And to be offered, as a sop, choral leadership? How degradingly ignominious!
Wiggling up out of her excruciating memories were the faces of brothers and sisters, taunting her for “shrieking at the top of her lungs.” Teasing her for the hours she spent pounding out finger exercises and attempting to “understand” some of the weird harmonics of off-world music. Her parents had surrendered to her choice of profession because it was, for starters, financed by the planetary educational system; secondly, it might accrue to their own standing in the community; and thirdly, she seemed to have the encouragement of her early voice teachers. Them! Was it to the ineptitude of one of those clods that she owed the flaw in her voice? A mishandling in the fragile early stages of training? Killashandra rolled in an agony of self-pitying memories.
Then she realized that it was self-pity and sat bolt upright in the chair, staring at herself in the mirror on the far wall, the mirror which had reflected all those long hours of study and self-perfection… Self-deception.
What was it Valdi’d. had the temerity to suggest? An allied art? A synthesizer? Bah! Spending her life catering to flawed minds in mental institutions because she had a flawed voice? Or mending flawed crystals to keep interplanetary travel or someone’s power plant flowing smoothly?
All in an instant, Killashandra shook herself free of such wallowing self-indulgence. She looked around the study, a slice of a room with its musical scores neatly filed by the viewer, with the built-in keyboard and console that tapped the orchestral banks of the Music Center for any aria or song ever composed. She glanced over the repros of training performances — she’d always had a lead role — and she knew that she’d do best to forget the whole damned thing! If she couldn’t be top rank, the hell with the theater arts! She’d be top in whatever she did or die in the attempt.
She stood up. There was nothing for her now in a room that three hours before had been the focal point of every waking minute and all her energies. Whatever personal items were in the drawer or shelves, the prize certificates on the wall, the signed repros of singers she’d hoped to emulate or excel, no longer concerned nor belonged to her.
She reached for her coat, ripped off the student badge and threw the cloak across her shoulders. She remembered, hand on panel, that she’d better take her credit plate with her. As she fumbled in the slip drawer for it, she saw the notation on her engagement pad.
“Party at Rory’s to celebrate!”
She snorted. They’d all know. Let them chortle over her downfall. She’d not play the bravely-smiling-courageous-under-adversity role tonight. Or ever.
Exit Killashandra, quietly, stage center, she said to herself as she ran down the long shallow flight of steps to the Mall in front of the Culture Center. Again she experienced both satisfaction and regret that no one witnessed her departure.
Actually she couldn’t have asked for a more dramatic exit. They’d wonder this evening what had happened. Maybe someone would know… someone always did know even the most confidential things about fellow students. She knew that Valdi would never talk… not about his failures, or anyone else’s. They’d not know from him. And the verdict of the examiners would be classified in the computer; but someone would “know” that Killashandra Ree had failed her vocal finals, and what the grounds for the failure were. In the meantime, she would have effectively disappeared and they could speculate. They’d remember, when she rose to prominence in another field. Then they’d marvel that nothing could suppress the excellence in her.
These reflections consoled Killashandra all the way to her lodgings. Students rated supported dwellings: no more the terrible bohemian semi-filth and overcrowding of old, but her room was hardly palatial. After she had failed to re-register at the Music Center, her landlady would be notified and the room locked to her. Subsistence living was abhorrent to Killashandra: it suggested an inability to achieve. But she’d take the initiative on that too. Therefore leave the room now. And all the memories it held.
Also, it would spoil her mysterious disappearance if she were to be “discovered moping in her digs.” So, with a brief nod to the landlady who always checked comings and goings, Killashandra ascended to her floor, keyed open her room and looked around it. Really nothing here to take but clothing. Despite that decision, Killashandra packed the lute which she had handcrafted to satisfy that requirement of her profession. She couldn’t bear to play it but she also couldn’t abandon it. Clothes in carisak, lute in case, she left the key in the lock. She nodded to the landlady just as she always did and exited.
Having fulfilled the dramatic requirement of her assumed role, she now didn’t have an earthly idea what to do with herself. She skipped onto the fast belt of the pedestrian way, heading into the center of the city. She ought to register with a work bureau, she ought to apply for subsistence. She ought to do many things but suddenly Killashandra discovered that “ought to” no longer ruled her. No more tedious commitments to schedule, to rehearsals, to lessons, to study, to any of her so-called friends and associates. She was free, utterly and completely free, with a lifetime ahead of her that ought to be filled. Ought to? With what?
The walkway was whipping her rapidly into the busier commercial stations of the city. Pedestrian directions flashed at cross-points: mercantile purple crossed with social services” orange: green manufactory and dormitory blue-hatching; medical green-red stripes and then airport red and spaceport star-spangled blue.
Killashandra was enmeshed by indecision. And while she toyed with the variety of things she ought to do, she was carried past the crosspoints that would take her where she ought to go.
Ought to, again, she thought. And stayed on the speed-way. Half of Killashandra was amused that she, once so certain of her goal, could be so irresolute. It did not, at that moment, occur to her that she was suffering an intense, traumatic shock. Nor that she was reacting to that shock, first in a somewhat immature fashion with her abrupt withdrawal from the abortive sphere of interest; secondly in a mature one, as she divorced herself from the indulgence of self-pity and began a positive search for an alternative life.
She couldn’t know that Esmond Valdi was concerned about her, realizing that the girl would be reacting in some fashion to the death of her ambition. She might have thought more kindly of him had she known, though he hadn’t pursued her further than her study or do more than call to the Personnel Section to report his concern for her. He’d taken the comfortable conclusion that she was in some other student’s room, having a good cry. Knowing her dedication to music, he’d come to the equally incorrect assumption that she’d undoubtedly continue in music, accepting a choral leadership in due time. That’s where he wanted her. It simply didn’t occur to him that Killashandra would be able to discard ten years of intensive training in one split second. He would not have done so, faced with her decision. He’d have been shocked if he’d known how completely she was to reject all references to those ten years.
Killashandra was halfway to the spaceport before she came to the decision that that was where she ought to go. “Ought,” this time not in an obligatory but in an investigative sense.
This planet held nothing but distressing memories for her. She’d leave it and erase all vestiges of its painful associations, domestic and career. Good thing she had the lute. She had sufficient training credentials to go along as a casual entertainer on some liner at the best, or as a crystal tuner at the worst. She might as well travel about a bit to see what else she “ought” to do with her life now.
The “now” both exacerbated and amused her until the speedway slowed to run into the spaceport terminal. For the first time since he’d left Maestro Valdi’s studio, Killashandra was aware of externals — people and things.
Come to think of it, she’d never actually been to the starburst-design spaceport. She’d never been on any of the welcoming committees for off-planet Stellars. A shuttle took off from its bay, its powerful plasma engines making the port buildings rumble. There was, however, a very disconcerting whine that she was subsonically aware of, feeling it down the mastoid bone right to her heel. She shook her head. The whine intensified — it must have to do with the shuttle — until she had to clamp her hands over her ears to cut the irritation. The sonics abated and she forgot the incident, wandering around the immense, bubble-domed reception hall of the port facility. Consoles were ranked across the inner wall, each one labeled with the name of the freight or passenger service, each with its screen plate. Faraway places with strange sounding names: an ancient fragment of song obtruded and was suppressed. No more music.
She paused at a portal to watch a shuttle off-loading cargo, the dockmen working with aircushions to remove odd-sized packages which had traveled by drone from who-knew-where in the galaxy. A supercargo was scurrying about, checking numbers against the arm-computer he wore, juggling weigh-units and arguing with the dockees. He was a bustling portentous man, utterly involved in his lot of life. Killashandra snorted. She’d have more than such trivia to occupy her energies. In the process of inhaling, she caught the whiff of appetising odors not entirely cleansed from the air.
She was hungry! Hungry? When her whole life had been shattered? How banal! But the odors made her salivate. Well, her credit plate ought to be good for a meal. She’d better check the balance lest she be embarrassed if the plate was spewed back out in the restaurant check-desk.
She slapped the credit plate into one of the many public outlets in the reception hall and was agreeably surprised to see that there’d been a credit that very day. A student credit she was forced to notice. Her last one. The fact that the total represented a bonus did not please her. A bonus to signalize the fact that she could never be a soloist?
She walked quickly to the nearest restaurant, noticing that it was not an economy establishment. The old, dutiful Killashandra would have backed out hastily. The new Killashandra entered imperiously.
At this hour the place was uncrowded so she took a booth on the upper level by the viewplate so she could watch the flow of shuttle and small space craft. She’d never realized how much traffic passed through the space port of her not very important planet. She had heard it was a change-over point. She ate, with relish and appetite, of some piscine casserole purportedly composed of off-world fish. Exotic but not too highly spiced for a student’s untutored palate. An off-world wine included in the selection pleased her so much that she ordered a second carafe just as dusk closed in on the planet.
She thought at first it was the unfamiliar wine that made her nerves jangle so. But the discomfort increased so rapidly that it couldn’t be the effect of the alcohol. She looked around for the source of irritation, rubbing her neck and frowning. She shook her head and then, with the appearance of a descending shuttle’s retro-blasts, realized that it must be a sonic disturbance — though how it could penetrate the shielded restaurant she didn’t know. She had to cover her ears, pressing as hard as she could against her skull, but there seemed to be no escape from that piercing ache. When she thought she couldn’t bear the agony a second longer, it ceased.
“I tell you, that shuttle drive’s about to explode,” a man’s baritone voice cried in the ensuing quiet.
Killasandra looked round, startled.
“How do I know? I know!” A tall man was arguing with the human attendant of the restaurant and trying to get to the comunit which the attendant was covering with his body. “Let me speak to the control tower. Is everyone deaf up there? Let me at the unit, man. Do you want a shuttle explosion? Are you deaf that you can’t hear it?”
“I heard it,” Killashandra said, rushing over to the pair. Any action might relieve the itch which had replaced the agony in her skull.
“You heard it, miss?” The attendant was genuinely surprised.
“I certainly did. All but cracked my skull wide open. What was it?” she asked the tall man. He had an air of command about him, frustrated at the moment by the officiousness of the stupid attendant. He carried his overlean body with a haughty arrogance that went with the fine fabric of his clothes, obviously of an off-world design and texture.
“She heard it, too. Now get that control tower, man.”
“Really, sir. We have the most explicit orders —”
“Don’t be a complete sub,” Killashandra said insultingly and gestured with operatic imperiousness at the console. “He obviously knows what he’s talking about!”
The fact that she was obviously a Fuertan like himself did more to persuade him than the insult but he was still reluctant until the man, ripping off an off-world oath as colorful as it was descriptive of bureaucratic stupidities, flipped open his card case. Whatever identification he showed made the attendant’s eyes bug out and his fingers dash out a call code on the comunit.
“I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t know, sir. Here you are, sir.” There was awe and a certain amount of fear in his manner.
The off-worlder ignored his reaction. “Control? That shuttle which just landed? It can’t be permitted to take off. Crystal drive’s gone sour. Must be recut or you’ll have an — No, this is not a drunk and this is not a threat. It’s a fact. Why that shuttle pilot didn’t insist on a hold, I can’t guess, but he must be deaf! Of course I know what I’m talking about! For the sake of whatever gods this mudball worships, don’t send that shuttle off again! What do you want, a drive check or a blasted port facility? Is this shuttlestop of a world too poor to employ a crystal tuner?”
