Crystal Singer (9 page)

She had just finished her meal when the door announced a visitor. She hesitated a long moment, unable to imagine who would be calling, then the door added that the visitor’s name was Rimbol, who required a word with her. She pressed the door release.

Rimbol leaned in, grinning. “C’mon out for bit. Just for a drink. It’s free.” Then he winked. “Neither Carigana nor Shillawn are present. Just some others who’ve already passed their prelims. C’mon.”

The amusement in his wheedling voice was the deciding factor. Killashandra knew herself well enough to realize that even if she tried to sleep, she’d only play back the tests and become so depressed over omissions and commissions that she’d never achieve a true rest. A few drinks and a bit of relaxation in Rimbol’s infectious company would do her much more good, especially if both Carigana and that nervous Shillawn were absent.

She was a bit taken aback, however, when ‘just some others’ numbered twenty-nine. Rimbol, sensing her surprise, grinned and gestured at the catering area.

“A brews what you need. This is Killashandra,” he announced in a slightly raised voice to the room in general. Her presence was acknowledged by slight nods or smiles or a brief hand gesture. A certain degree of informal companionship was already enjoyed by the others. The group, involved in some sort of four-player card game, didn’t even look up as she and Rimbol collected their drinks.

“You make thirty, you know,” Rimbol said as he guided her to a seat on the one unoccupied lounger. “Shillawn and Carigana thirty-two, and there’s supposed to be one more going through prelim today. If that’s a pass, it means we’ll all go down to Ballybran tomorrow.”

“That is if no one gets scared after disclosure,” said a girl who wandered over to join them. “I’m Jezerey, late of Salonika in the Antares group.”

“I didn’t think they canceled after disclosure,” Rimbol said, frowning in surprise.

“You may well be right, but I do know that thirty is the smallest group they’ll train,” Jezerey went on, settling herself on the couch with a long sigh. “I’ve been waiting seven weeks standard.” She sounded disgusted. “But Borton”—and she gestured toward the card players—“has been here nine. He’d just missed a class. Nothing will make him decline. I’m not so sure about one or two of the others—and we’ve got a few to spare. Rimbol says that nothing would unpersuade that Carigana, and from the look on her face when old Crookback brought her in, I’m as glad she decided she didn’t like us either and stayed in her room. Space workers are odd lots, but she’s—she’s—”

“She’s just intense,” Rimbol noted when Jezerey faltered. “I don’t think she trusts space stations any more than spaceships. She was tranked to her brows on the trip here. Shillawn”—and Rimbol favored Killashandra with a wry expression—“was knackered out of his bones, so I invaded Privacy and put a knockout in his brew. Got him to bed.”

“Why would someone like him want to be a Crystal Singer?” Killashandra asked.

“Why do any of us?” Rimbol answered, amused.

“All right, why would you?” Killashandra fired the question right back at him.

“Wasn’t allowed to continue as an instrumentalist. Not enough openings on my mudball for a string player. Crystal singings the next best thing.”

Killashandra nodded, looking to Jezerey.

“Curiously enough,” the girl said with a bemused expression, “I was redundant in my profession, too. Limb-replacement therapist. And the Dear knows there’re enough accidents on Salonika.” She wrinkled her nose and then caught the puzzled expressions of Rimbol and Killashandra. “Mining world, asteroid belts around us and the next planet out. Next to mining, you might say replacement was our biggest industry.”

“Space workers aren’t apt to be redundant, either,” Killashandra commented, looking at Rimbol.

“Carigana wasn’t. Psyched out when her safety cable snapped—I get the impression she was deep-spaced a long time before they found her. She didn’t say”—and Rimbol emphasized the last word—“but she’s probably unstable for such employment.”

Jezerey nodded sympathetically.

“Shillawn?” Killashandra asked.

“Told me he was a chemotech,” Rimbol replied. “His project was finished up, and he was given an assignment he didn’t like. Underground. He’s a touch claustro! I think that’s what makes him so nervous.”

“And we all have perfect pitch,” Killashandra said more to herself than the others because the phrases Maestro Valdi had spat accusingly, particularly the one about a ‘silicate spider,’ came appropriately to mind. She dismissed the niggling suspicion as invalid.

An explosive curse burst from one of the card players, and his earnest request for arbitration from any and all in the room interrupted their private conversation.

Although Killashandra took no part in the intense discussion that followed, she deemed it good sense to lend her presence to a group with whom she might be spending considerable time. She also saw them as a group with no other common factor—aside from the invisible prerequisite of perfect pitch—than age. All seemed to be within their third decade; most apparently just finished with tertiary education; no two from the same system or planet.

Killashandra remained on the fringes of the good-humored but volatile game discussion until she had finished another glass of the very good brew. Then she quietly retired, wondering as the prepared for sleep just how thirty-plus people from so many different planets had all heard of the Crystal Singers.

She had just finished her morning meal when a soft, deep chime brought her attention to the screen. She was requested to go to the lounge room.

“You sneaked away nice and early,” a cheerful tenor said behind her. She turned to find Rimbol approaching, the awkward figure of Shillawn just behind him. “Missed the fun, you did.”

“Who won the argument?” she asked after a courteous nod to Shillawn.

“No one and everyone. It was the arguing that was fun!” The red-headed lad grinned.

They had reached the lounge by then, and from the other corridors the rest of the successful filed, some re-forming the groups she’d noticed the previous evening. Only Carigana seemed apart; she sat on the back of one of the loungers glowering at everyone. Something about the angry girl was familiar to Killashandra, but she couldn’t place what.

Just then, from the fourth entrance, limped a tall woman holding the left side of her long gown slightly away from her thigh. Her gaze swiftly scanned the room, counting, Killashandra thought, and made her own tally. Thirty-three. Out of what gross number of applicants, she wondered again, over the nine weeks Jezerey had said Borton had waited?

“I am Borella Seal,” the woman announced in the clear, rich voice of a trained contralto. Killashandra regarded her with closer interest. “I am a miner of crystal, a Crystal Singer. Since I am recovering from an injury sustained in the ranges, I have been asked to disclose to you the dangers of this profession.” She pulled aside the long gown and revealed wounds so ugly and vividly contused that several people recoiled. As if this was the very reaction she had wanted, Borella smiled slightly. “I will expose the wound again for a specific purpose other than arousing nausea or sympathy. Take a good look now.”

Shillawn’s elbow nudged Killashandra, and she was about to give him a severe reprimand for such a private insult when she realized he was drawing her attention to Carigana. The girl was the only one who approached Borella Seal and bent for the close inspection of the long gashes scoring the upper leg.

“They appear to be healing properly, though you ought to have had them bonded. How’d you get ’em?” Carigana was clinically impersonal.

“Two days ago, I slipped on crystal shale and fell fifteen meters down an old worked face.”

“
Two
days?” Anger colored Carigana’s voice. “I don’t believe you. I’ve seen enough lacerations to know ones as deep as these don’t heal that much in two days. Why the color of the bruising and the state of the tissue already healed show you were injured weeks ago.”

“Two days. Singers heal quickly.”

“Not that quick.” Carigana would have said more, but Borella Seal gestured dismissal and turned to the others.

“By order of the Federated Sentient Planets, full disclosure of the dangers peculiar to and inherent in this profession, must be revealed to all applicants who have satisfactorily completed the initial examinations.” She accorded them a slight nod of approval. “However, as is also permissible by FSP law, professional—problems—may be protected by erasure. Those to whom this practice is unacceptable may withdraw.”

“How much is erased?” Carigana asked.

“Precisely one hour and twenty minutes, replaced by a recollection of oversleeping and a leisurely breakfast.”

“On record?”

“If requested, the Guild supplies the information that a minor but inadmissible physical defect has been discovered. Few question the Heptite Guild.” For some reason Killashandra thought that fact amused Borella. Carigana’s frown had deepened. “Any objectors?” Borella asked, looking straight at the space worker.

When no other voice was raised, she asked them to file before the screen she then activated, giving their name and stating their willingness to comply with erasure. The process didn’t take long, but Killashandra felt that she had taken an irrevocable step as her acceptance was officially and indisputably recorded.

Borella then led them down a short hall to a door, Carigana the first to follow. Her gasp and half halt as she passed the entrance forewarned the others but in no way prepared anyone for the display in that short corridor. On either side were bodies in clear fluid—all but one glinted as if coated with a silicon. The planes of the faces looked rock hard; limbs, fingers, and toes were extended as if solidified, and not by the rigor of death. The crystalline sheen couldn’t be some trick of the light, Killashandra thought, for her own skin showed no change. What roiled her stomach were the facial expressions: three looked as if death had overtaken them in a state of insanity; two appeared mildly surprised, and the sixth angry, her hands raised toward some object she had been trying to grasp. The last was the most grisly: a charred body forever in the position of a runner, consumed by a conflagration that had melted flesh from bone.

“This is what happens to the unprotected on Ballybran. It could also happen to you, though every effort is made to reduce such risks to a minimum. If you wish to retire now, you are completely at liberty to do so.”

“External danger does not constitute a Code 4 classification,” Carigana said, her tone accusatory.

“No, it doesn’t. But these are representative of two of the dangers of Ballybran which the Heptite Guild is required by Federated Sentient Planets to reveal to you.”

“Is that the worst that can happen?” Carigana asked scornfully.

“Isn’t being dead enough?” someone asked from the group.

“Dead’s dead—crystal, char, or carrion,” Carigana replied, shrugging her shoulders, her tone so subtly offensive that Killashandra was not the only one who frowned with irritation.

“Yes, but it is the manner of dying that can be the worst,” said Borella in such a thoughtful way that she had everyone’s attention. She accorded them the slightest smile. “Follow me.”

The grim corridor opened on to a small semicircular lecture hall. Borella proceeded to a small raised platform, gesturing for the group to take the seats, which would have accommodated three times their number. As she turned to face them, a large hologram lit behind her, a view of the Scorian system, homing quickly on Ballybran and its three moons. The planet and its satellites moved with sufficient velocity to demonstrate the peculiar Passover of the moons, when all three briefly synchronized orbits—a synchronization that evidently took place over different parts of the parent world.

“The crystallization displayed in the corridor is the most prevalent danger on Ballybran. It occurs when the spore symbiont, a carbon silicate occurring in an unorthodox environment peculiar to Ballybran, does not form a proper bridge between our own carbon-based biological system and the silicon-based ecology of this planet. Such a bridge is essential for working on Ballybran. If the human host adapts properly to the spore symbiont, and I assure you it is not the other way round, the human experiences a significant improvement in visual acuity, tactile perceptions, nerve conduction, and cellular adaptation. The first adaptations are of immense importance to those who become miners of crystal, the Crystal Singers. Yes, Carigana?”

“What part of the body does the symbiont invade? Is it crystalline or biological?”

“Neither, and the symbiont invades cellular nuclei in successful adaptations—”

“What happens to the unsuccessful ones?”

“I shall discuss that shortly if you will be patient. As part of the cell nucleus, the symbiont affects the DNA/RNA pattern of the body, extending the lifespan considerably. The rumor that Crystal Singers are immortal is exaggerated, but functional longevity is definitely increased by fifty or more
decades
beyond actuarial norms. The adaptation provides an immunization to ordinary biological disease, enormously increasing the recuperative ability. Broken bones and wounds such as mine are, I warn you, part of the daily work of a Crystal Singer. Tolerance to extremes of heat and cold are also increased.”

And pain, no doubt,
Killashandra thought, remembering not only the test but Borella’s lack of discomfort with her deep wounds.

Behind the Singer, the holograms were now views of Ballybran’s rugged terrain, quickly replaced by a time-lapse overview from one of the moons, so that the planet’s twelve continents were visible in seconds.

“On the negative side, once acclimated to Ballybran and adapted to the symbiont, the Singer is irreversibly sterile. The genetic code is altered by the intrusion of the symbiont into the nuclei, and those parts of the DNA spiral dealing with heredity and propagation are chemically altered, increasing personal survival traits as opposed to racial survival—a chemical alteration of instinct, if you will.”

Carigana gave a pleased sound like a feline expression of enjoyment.