The Namura Stone (30 page)

Mandalon went to the nearest tridiscreen and began to push buttons quickly. “You can have one of the new Hadron class traders. We have developed them for resale to Coriolis and Kwaide. There is likely to be a growing demand for personal traders in the future, our planners suggest. The Hadron class vessels are smaller, quicker and lighter than the normal traders, and incorporate a variation of the new propulsion engine that has been successful in the freighters. I have one already built which I can let you have.”

Arcan seemed pleased. “That will be acceptable. Can I leave Aracely to draw up the contract with you?”

Mandalon smiled at Aracely. “Of course. By the way, I hear congratulations are in store. You are about to enter into a life partnership, I believe?”

Aracely went slightly red. “Yes, with Amoton 49, heir to the 12
th
skyrise.”

“Ah yes, the exochemist skyrise. Well, congratulations.”

Aracely went even pinker. “Thank you.”

“Let me know when the ceremony is to be. I would like to attend.”

That was unexpected. Aracely, normally a quiet and unpresuming girl, felt a shameful shaft of triumph run right through her. That would show her father that the work she was doing was not just a ‘girlish hobby’ that might ‘keep her busy until she married’. Her father wouldn’t be able to get the head of Sell to
his
ceremonies! Then she felt mortified. She shouldn’t be thinking such unworthy thoughts.

She stammered her thanks, then the two Sellites got down to business. Arcan soon had his new trader, and the foundation would be able to continue with the commitments already made. It was a good contract.

BACK ON XIANTHA, after they had christened the new trader, which was inevitably called ‘the New Independence’ after the old New Independence, Six turned his back on all of them and headed down to the corral on the canth farm, leaving Grace and Ledin to take the others to the house on the Emerald Lake. Grace encouraged him to go this time. She knew that he was in a better state than he had been and that this was something he needed to do.

It was blisteringly hot when he finally got there, and, as he opened the gate, he hardly knew what he was hoping to find. All he knew is that he and Diva’s seal brown canth had to be together; he couldn’t leave it to whatever its fate was alone.

He stumbled as he opened the gate, and let himself through into the corral which was shaped like a segment of a circle, bounded by another, smaller segment at the top where the gate was.

At first he could see no sign of Diva’s canth; then he spotted a lump, spread out under one of the trees. He ran down the rest of the slope to get to it.

It was Diva’s canth, and it was lying on its side in the dust, its beautiful coat slick with sweat, its legs sticking straight out.

Six saw that the man who spoke to canths was sitting by it, stroking its head gently. He skidded to a stop, and the dying canth rolled the whites of its eyes at the disturbance.

“Sorry.” He bent down to touch the white line of sweat along its neck. Sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb it.”

The canth keeper got rather unsteadily to his knees. “I am glad you are here. I shall take the opportunity to see to the other canths, if you don’t mind. I have been here since last night.”

Six looked up at the canth keeper. “Is it … is it time?”

The Xianthan nodded. “It is.”

“Do you get the impression … I mean … Do you think it is happy? Happy to go? Do you think it knows it will become a morphic?”

“I have not been able to tell. I know what you are hoping for, Six, but I can’t be of any help. Doesn’t Arcan know?”

Six shook his head. “The part of Arcan that got out of the trap doesn’t know what happened to the part that was left. He only got a vague sensation of what their last seconds were like, and then he says there was simply a white-out, a total blankness. He says he has no idea whether the conditions were met for a trimorph to form. We still don’t really know for sure what those conditions are.”

The Xianthan patted him on the shoulder. “You will be able to smooth its transition, in any case. You were so close to Diva that there is a bond between this canth and you. At the very least, your presence will reassure it. That is important, too.”

“I will do that gladly.” Six slipped down to a sitting position and took the large head onto his lap. The canth gave a long sigh. Six began to stroke it along its neck, back and forth just under the mane. He didn’t care how long it took; he would take care of this last link he had with Diva.

The sun powered down onto the paddock and then began to slide towards the horizon. Neither Six nor the canth noticed. They were each living the last moments of its life in their own way.

Six was remembering the mad journey with this canth and his own dapple grey when they were trying to save the trimorphs on Kintara, in the centre of the galaxy. He and Diva had huddled under a foil sheet spread over the legs of this beautiful animal. He remembered that he had said he wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else in the universe that night, and she had agreed. It had been a memorable moment then but was bitterly painful now. His fingers traced out one of the many scars the canth had brought back from that adventure, and he sighed.

The canth grunted, which brought him out of his reverie. “You are right.” He stroked the whorls along its damp neck. “I have to remember those times with a smile, not with pain. I was lucky to have them. I should not make them bad memories now. They must still shine in my mind, just like they did then; anything else would be unfair to them.”

The seal brown gave the tiniest of grunts and then began to tremble all over. Six pressed down on its neck, trying to keep it steady, but the convulsions were becoming unstoppable now.

He whispered fiercely to the exquisite animal as it breathed its last breath. “Go with Sacras,” he told it. “Find her for me, please, if you can. I miss her so much.”

Six sat holding the head of the dead canth as the night passed, and dawn slowly came. The canth-keeper found him there shortly after first light; a figure frozen into place against the rising rays of sunlight.

The Xianthan lifted him to his feet and helped him up the hill, towards the sunlight. Six’s face was grey with fatigue. He seemed drained. The man who spoke to canths put him onto one of the spare beds he had for visitors and covered him with a light blanket. Six closed his eyes, and, for the first time in over a week, fell into a fitful sleep.

Chapter 15

WHEN SIX GOT back to the Emerald Lake, the following day, he found everything organized. The house was spotless, Bennel had been dispatched to get more food and the children were playing quietly together by the lakeside. Sanjai was watching Raven’s every move, immensely proud to have been allotted such responsibility. He seemed to have grown at least two inches overnight.

Raven was happily making little castles out of the sand beside the lake, but shouted out gleefully when she saw her father. She stretched out her hands, running towards him as fast as her small legs would take her.

Six swung her up above his head and smiled. There was so much of Diva in this little girl’s face. She had Diva’s eyebrows, mouth and nose, and her eyes seemed to examine you in exactly the same way, although the little girl’s were a wonderful light glowing tawny brown which seemed to hold the sun inside them. Diva’s had been bluer, sharper.

Six felt his heart miss a beat. He shouldn’t think of Diva. He should think only of this small being, his daughter. He hugged her tight, before setting her down again and smiling towards Sanjai and Quenna, both staring up at him in awe.

“Good job, Sanjai. I see you are going to have your work cut out with these two on your hands!”

The thin boy flushed and looked at the sand.

Six put Raven down again. “Be good, poppet. Don’t go too far into the water, and don’t start any fights!”

He heard himself speak and felt a small twinge for a past life, one in which he himself had started fights, leapt fearlessly into water and looked forward to new adventures. That boy had vanished forever.

He gave a sigh and walked slowly back through the trees to the house. He didn’t notice the wonderful vegetation, or the blue sky, or the hot sun which was shining down. He trudged through the long grass, walked into the house, made his way to the room which was to become his office, shut the door and picked up some papers.

Grace, who had visited Lannie to bring her some herbs she needed, stared as Six went past. There was little trace left of the insouciant boy she had known and loved, and her own heart curled in compassion for his loss. She wondered if she would ever see the boy she knew again. This stranger was a man – a cold, withdrawn man with no trace of laughter in his face or his mind. She closed her eyes for a moment before turning back to Lannie.

“I’m sorry, what was that you were saying? I … I was thinking about something else.”

SIX APPLIED HIMSELF to the new idea of a university for Xiantha. It needed a great deal of organization: something completely new to him. It also required thousands of hours of work, which was lucky; he had thousands of hours stretching out in front of him like a desert. He tried to calm his mind, and began the mammoth task.

Tallen dragged him out for combat practice during half an hour each morning. Six allowed himself to be coerced into it, but showed none of his usual ferocity in the fights. He practiced, but it was abundantly clear that his heart was not in it.

Grace came over once a day and insisted on taking him out for a ride on their canths. Six’s dapple grey was now completely recovered from its ordeal on Kintara, although the once immaculate coat was criss-crossed with scars from the volcanic fragments which had showered down on them.

She made him put his face back to feel the sun on these rides. She tried to make him laugh. Sometimes she even succeeded; he was willing to try. Even when he laughed, though, his smile was brittle and lasted only fragments of a second. It was like a brief shadow of the real thing, a copy.

Ledin became accustomed, when he was on Xiantha, to walk down to the lake with Six and Raven in the early evening, where Six would patiently teach his daughter how to dive and swim underwater. While the little girl was splashing and giggling in shallow water, the two men would chat about old times on Kwaide or the new laws being passed now, carefully avoiding everything that had involved Diva.

Bennel and Lannie took such good care of the house, and the family, that Six needed to take no decisions at all for the next four months. He worked, and worked. Then he worked some more, and tried unsuccessfully to sleep.

Hardly anybody was aware that he crept out of the house most nights. Only one of them knew that Six was wont to climb one of the big trees on the shoreline, pulling himself up the metallic stakes set into the trunk, one at a time. He liked to draw out this process, making it last as long as he could, because then he could imagine Diva sitting in the small cabin at the top, waiting for him.

But when he did arrive at the top of the iron rungs, the miniscule cabin was empty. He would pull himself inside and sit watching the stars as the nights dragged past, watching until the sky lightened with the dawn. He never felt anything during those lonely night watches. His mind was numbed; he was simply a lonely sentinel whose only reason to be was the vigil itself.

Then he would trail back to the house, shortly before dawn, to pretend he had slept. He would smile wanly, hug Raven, and try to get some morsels of food down the throat that still closed up when he swallowed. He gave smile after smile, until he almost believed himself that they were real. He existed, although it was in a limbo. The short times he did fall asleep it was to dream vividly of laughing with Diva. Then every awakening was a moment of tremendous hope followed by the flooding of black despair as he remembered, reliving her loss over and over again.

He became so thin and grey that Grace called Vion over to check him out.

Vion shook his head. “It will take time, Grace. Years, even; you know how he felt about Diva.”

“But he will make himself ill!”

“I don’t think he cares. He seems to know that he has a duty to Raven and the other children, and they are probably the only reason he is still here. You can’t do anything. Just try to make sure he gets food and some rest.”

Vion left a couple of bottles of tonic for Six, but Grace knew that he would never take them.

Even Arcan, when he came over, was unable to get through to Six. He brought the trimorphs and the visitor occasionally but, after grilling them on whether they had seen any unusual movements of the ortholiquid on Pictoria, Six slumped back into apathy.

“—At least he is working,” pointed out Ledin. “Three of the first lecture theatres are ready, in the annex to the donor headquarters. I believe the first students will start there next month. He is doing a great job on that.”

Unfortunately Ledin wasn’t there all the time. He had been running the Kwaide Orbital Space Station ever since turning down the offer of Kwaidian Ambassador to Xiantha. Although his job on the space station was routine, and meant occasionally dealing with the likes of Tartalus, he felt he couldn’t separate himself completely from Kwaide. He lived four days of the week on the orbital station, and the other three days on Xiantha, in their house beside the Emerald Lake – Arcan having generously offered to help out with the commute.