Crystal Singer (24 page)

The fourth day, she casually asked Concera if she’d encountered the Guild Master and was told that Trag would know better where to find him. Trag was not the easiest person to question or converse with at all except in the handling of cutter or about incisions into crystal. Gathering all her self-assurance, Killashandra resorted to stratagem on the sixth day.

Trag had her shaving cones: she had ruined three the day before and quite expected to spend the morning’s lesson avoiding future failures. After she had made a cut, she would look behind her. The fourth time, Trag frowned.

“Your attention span has been longer. What’s the matter?”

“I keep thinking the Guild Master will appear. He does, you know, when I least expect it.”

“He’s on Shankill. Attend to your business.”

She did, with less enthusiasm than ever, deeply grateful that the morrow was a rest day. She had half promised to spend that evening and the next day with Rimbol: half promised because her urgency to reach the ranges was in no way shared by the young Scartine. Trag released her at the end of the gruelingly precise session, his impassive face giving her no indication that she had learned to cut cones properly, though she felt in every muscle of her aching hands that she had achieved some proficiency.

She considered a radiant bath before the afternoon’s flight practice. Instead, she put in a call for Rimbol: his company would be a soothing anodyne for her increasing frustration. Waiting for his answer, she had a quick hot shower. She paced her apartment, wondering where in hell’s planets Rimbol had got to. Her mealtime was nearly gone, and she hadn’t eaten. She ordered a quick meal from the catering unit, bolting the hot food, adding a seared mouth to her catalog of grievances before she went to the hangar level.

She was now one of many using the sled simulator so she had to be on time. She knew the flight was only an hour long, but this one, a complicated wind and night problem that kept her preternaturally alert and made her wish she’d taken the radiant bath instead of the shower, seemed endless. She was very pleased to avoid several crashes and emerge unscathed from the simulator. She waved impudently at the flight training officer in his booth above the sled and passed the next student, Jezerey, on her way.

“He’s either crash happy or he hates me,” Killashandra commented to Jezerey.

“Him? He’s crazy. He killed me three times yesterday.”

“Kill or cure?”

“That’s the Guild’s motto, isn’t it?” Jezerey replied sourly.

Killashandra watched the girl enter the simulator, wondering. She hadn’t been killed yet. She thought of going to the ready room and watching Jezerey’s flight. No one else was in the ready room, so she dialed a carbohydrate drink to give her blood sugar level a boost. She was watching Jezerey take off when she became conscious of someone in the doorway. She turned and saw the Guild Master.

“I understand you’ve been looking for me,” he said to compound her astonishment.

“You’re on Shankill. Trag told me so this morning.”

“I was. I am here now. You have finished your afternoon’s exercises?”

“I think they’ve about finished me.”

He stood aside to indicate she should precede him.

“The severity of the drills may seem excessive, but the reality of a mach storm is far more violent than anything we can simulate in the trainers,” he said, moving toward the lift while touching her elbow to guide her. “We must prepare you for the very worst that can occur. A mach storm won’t give you a second chance. We try to insure that you have at least one.”

“I seem to hear that axiom a lot.”

“Remember it.”

Killashandra expected the lift to plummet to the Singers’ level. Instead, it rose and, tired as she was, she swayed uncertainly. Lanzecki steadied her, hand cupped under her elbow.

“The next bad storm is Passover, isn’t it?” She was making conversation because Lanzecki’s touch had sent ripples along her arm. His appearance in the ready room had already unnerved her. She glanced sideways at him as unobtrusively as possible, but his face was in profile. His lips were relaxed, giving no hint of his thoughts.

“Yes, eight weeks from now is your first Passover.”

The lift stopped, and the panels retracted. Killashandra stepped with him out into the small reception area. No sooner had he turned to the right than the third door opened. The large room they entered was an office, with one wall covered by a complex data retrieval system. Printout charts hung neatly from the adjacent wall. Before it, a formidable console printed out fax sheets that neatly folded into a bin. Several comfortable chairs occupied the center of the room, one centered at the nine screens that displayed the meteorology transmissions from the planet’s main weather installations and the three moons.

“Yes, eight weeks away,” Killashandra said, taking a deep breath, “and if I don’t get out to the ranges before it comes, it will be weeks, according to every report I’ve scanned—”

Lanzecki’s laugh interrupted her.

“Sit.” He pushed two chairs together and pointed a commanding finger to one.

Amazed that the Master of the Heptite Guild laughed and infuriated because she had not been able to state her case, she dropped without much grace into the appointed chair, her self-confidence pricked and drained. Presently, she heard the familiar clink of beakers. She looked up as he handed one to her.

“I like Yarran beer myself, having originated on that planet. I’m obliged to the Scartine for reminding me of it.”

Killashandra masked her confusion by drinking deeply. Lanzecki knew a great deal about Class 895
.
He raised his glass to her.

“Yes, we must get you out to the ranges. If anyone can find Keborgen’s claim, it’s likely to be you.”

Feeling the beaker slip through fingers made nerveless by shock, she was grateful when he took the glass and put it on the table he swung before her.

“Conceit in a Singer—voice or crystal—can be a virtue, Killashandra Ree. Do not let such single-mindedness blind you to the fact that others can reach the same conclusions from the same data.”

“I don’t. That’s why I’ve got to get out into the ranges as soon as possible.” Then she frowned. “How did
you
know? No one followed me that night. Only you and Enthor knew I’d reacted to Keborgen’s crystals.”

Lanzecki gave her a long look that she decided must be pity, and she dropped her gaze, jamming her fingers together. She wanted to pound him or stamp her feet violently or indulge in some release from the humiliation she was experiencing.

Lanzecki, sitting opposite her, began to unlock her fingers one by one.

“You played the pianoforte as well as the lute,” he said, his finger tips gently examining the thick muscle on the heel of her hand, the lack of webbing between her fingers, their flexible joints and callused tips. If this hadn’t been her Guild Master, Killashandra would have enjoyed the semi-caress. “Didn’t you?”

She mumbled an affirmative, unable to remain quite silent. She was relieved, taking a deeply needed breath as he leaned back and took up his drink, sipping it slowly.

“No one did follow you. And only Enthor and I knew of your sensitivity to Keborgen’s black crystal. Very few people know the significance of a Milekey transition beyond the fact that you somehow escaped the discomforts they had to endure. What they will never appreciate is the totality of the symbiotic adjustment.”

“Is that why Antona wished me luck?”

Lanzecki smiled as he nodded.

“Does that have something to do with my identifying black crystal so easily? Did Keborgen have a Milekey, too?”

“Yes, to both questions.”

“That totality didn’t save his life, did it?”

“Not that time,” he said mildly, ignoring her angry, impudent question. Lanzecki voice-cued a display screen, and the guild’s chronological roster appeared. Keborgen’s name was in the early third. “As I told you that evening, the symbiont ages too, and is then limited in the help it can give an ancient and abused body.”

“Why Keborgen must have been two hundred years old! He didn’t look it!” Killashandra was aghast. She’d had only one glimpse of the injured Crystal Singer’s face, but she never would have credited twenty decades to his age. Suddenly, the pressure of hundreds of years of life seemed as depressing to Killashandra as her inability to get into the ranges.

“Happily, one doesn’t realize the passage of time in our profession until some event displays a forcible comparison.”

“You had a Milekey transition.” She shot her guess at him as if it were undeniable.

He nodded affirmation.

“But you don’t sing crystal?”

“I have.”

“Then . . . why . . .” and she gestured around the office and then at him.

“Guild Masters are chosen early and trained rigorously in all aspects of the operation.”

“Keborgen was . . . but he sang crystal. And you have, too.” She sprang to her feet, unable to assimilate the impact of Lanzecki’s quiet words. “You don’t mean . . . I have to train to be . . . You’re raving!”

“No, you are raving,” Lanzecki replied, a slight smile playing on his face as he gestured her to her seat and pointed at her beer. “Steady your nerves. My only purpose in having a private talk with you is to reassure you that you will go out into the ranges as soon as I can arrange a shepherd for you.”

“Shepherd?”

Killashandra was generally quick enough of wit to absorb the unexpected without floundering, but Lanzecki’s singular interest in her, his awareness of intentions that she had kept utterly private, and his disclosures of the past few minutes had left her bewildered.

“Oh? Concera neglected to mention this facet of training?”

“Yes, a shepherd, Killashandra Ree, a seasoned Singer who will permit you to accompany him or her to a worked face, probably the least valuable of his claims, to demonstrate in practice what, to that point, has been theory.”

“I’ve had theory up to my eyeballs.”

“Above and behind them is better, my dear, which is where your brain is located, where theory must become reflex. On such reflexive knowledge may lie your survival. A successful Crystal Singer must have transcended the need for the
conscious
performance of his art.”

“I’ve an eidetic memory. I can recite—”

“If you couldn’t, you wouldn’t be here.” Lanzecki’s tone reminded Killashandra of her companion’s rank and the importance of the matter under consideration. He took a sip of his beer. “How often has Concera told you these past few weeks that an eidetic memory is generally associated with perfect pitch? And how often that memory distortion is one of the cruel facets of crystal singing? Sensory overload, as you ought to know, is altogether too frequent an occurrence in the ranges. I am not concerned with your ability to remember: I am concerned with how much memory distortion you will suffer. To prevent distortion, you have been subjected to weeks of drill and will continue to be. I am also vitally concerned in a recruit who has made a Milekey transition, retunes crystal well enough that Trag cannot fault her, who drives a sled so cleverly that the flight officer has given her patterns
he
wouldn’t dare fly, and a person who had the wit to try to outsmart as old a hand at claim-hiding as Keborgen.”

Lanzecki’s compliments, though delivered as dry fact, disconcerted Killashandra more than any other of the afternoon’s disclosures. She concentrated on the fact that Lanzecki actually wanted her to go after Keborgen’s claim.

“Do you know where I should look?”

Lanzecki smiled, altering the uncompromising planes of his craggy face. He crossed one arm on his chest, supporting the elbow of the other, sipping at his beer.

“You’ve been doing the probability programming. Why don’t you retrieve the data you’ve been accumulating?”

“How do you know what I’ve been doing? I thought my private voice code was unbreakable!”

“So it is.” The sardonic look on Lanzecki’s face reproved her for doubting. “But your use of data retrieval for weather, sled performance, and the time you have recently spent programming was notable. In a general way, what recruits or newly convalesced Singers do is unregarded. However, when the person in question is not only sensitive to black crystal but signs out a skimmer to track the crash of a sled known to have transported black crystal, a quiet surveillance and a performance check are justified. Don’t you agree? My dear girl, you are a very slow drinker. Finish it up and call up your program on Keborgen.” He stood and indicated that she was to sit at the big console. “I’ll get more beer for us and something to munch.” He sauntered off to the catering unit.

Killashandra quickly took her place at the console, voice-coding the program. Though she might have doubted before now, Lanzecki’s reproof reassured her. Nor did she doubt that he wanted more black crystal from Keborgen’s claim, and if she offered the Guild the best chance of retrieving the loss, he would support her.

“Did you know Keborgen?” she asked, then realized that this must sound a stupid query to his Guild Master.

“As well as any man or woman here did.”

“Part of my theory”—and Killashandra spoke quickly, tapping for the parameters she had stored on sled speed, warning time, and storm winds’ velocity based on Keborgen’s crash line—“is that Keborgen flew out direct.”

Lanzecki put a fresh beaker on the ledge of the console, a tray of steaming morsels beside it, and smiled indulgently at her.

“No consideration, even his own safety, would have weighed more with Keborgen than protecting that claim.”

“If that was what was expected of him, mightn’t he once, in his desperate situation, choose the straight course?”

Lanzecki considered this, leaning against the console edge.

“Remember, he’d left escape to the last minute, judging by his arrival,” Killashandra added earnestly. “The sled was not malfunctioning: the medical report postulated that he was suffering from sensory overload. But when he set out, he would have known from the met that the storm would be short. He would have known that everyone else would have cleared out of the ranges so a direct route wouldn’t be observed. And he hadn’t cut that claim in nine years. Would that be important?”