Though that fire swiftly died, its aftertaste lingered and grew into a salt-and-scarlet symphony, utterly new to him, so delicious that his first cautious sip seemed far too small. He wanted the golden chalice for a deeper drink, but a swift expansion of time and distance had swept it from him into a strange infinity where every breath occupied an age.
His own heartbeats had slowed and swollen into immense reverberating quakes. The long room had become a vast and separate cosmos nothing else could penetrate. Outside it, Malili’s milky glow on the lake was now so blinding that he blinked and turned away.
Shining with a new glory of her own, Nera came closer, and her intoxicating scent wrapped him in a quivering diamond mist. Her first velvet touch charged him with a resistless joyous longing.
“Nera . . .” His breathless whisper rumbled like thunder. “Nera Nyin!”
Though amazement at himself still lingered in some far, cool comer of his being, that didn’t matter. He was no longer Kai Nu, no longer bound by the stem restraints of habit and custom and law he had been learning all his life. Transfigured by the crimson drink, he was Leleyo.
He turned hungrily to her, and she came to him. His own uniform was soon in their way, and she helped him shuck it off. She herself was incandescent joy, multiplied beyond imagination. Afterwards, it all seemed another reality, a remote realm of incandescent truth from which he could recall only a few precious fragments.
The first electric sweetness of her mouth, her deft hands helping him slide into her, the yielding power of her gentle body. Her soft laugh, magnified in her golden chest to a drumming melody when he whispered in panic that he mustn’t make her pregnant.
“Body control is the first art of feyo.” Her breathed words were soaring music. “We limit our numbers to fit our world. I won’t get a child until I wish.”
They were dwellers in their own private universe, where they themselves filled all space and all time, each magnificent instant expanded into eternities of splendor. Only their joy in each other was real, and nothing else could touch them. Whenever its burning glory was about to fade, another searing sip ignited it again, always more divine.
Desolation chilled him when he reached a last time for the cup and found it dry. She laughed gaily at his greediness. Feyokoor could never last forever. It was time for them to sleep.
The wonder was dead when he woke, though she lay slight and lovely in his arms. Restored to the common universe, that great bare room was cold and gloomy and still. Beyond the thermal window, a gray fringe of moontime ice had rimmed the black lake, and the magic had vanished from Malili’s light. That incandescent aftertaste had turned bitter on his lips, and his whole body felt numb and clumsy, aching unexpectedly.
“Keth . . .” She breathed his name faintly, without really waking, when he bent to kiss her, the sound nearly too faint for his deadened hearing. “Come back to me.”
He found his uniform and let himself out. Returning through the nondescript litter of unswept tunnels and the occasional rumble and clatter of early traffic, he had to grope his way painfully back from that lost wonderland to the old realities, to the cramping customs of Kai and the demands of his classes and the intolerable possibility that she could be a humanoid agent.
At the gate, a different duty officer demanded the liberty pass he didn’t have and made him sign the penalty book. Back in his room, he sat for a long time, staring at his own golden cup, dreaming wistfully of that evaporated wonder, and regretting all he had failed to learn.
Where did the braintrees grow? What were the tenets of the feyo faith, which she had managed to say so little about? How did her nomad race stay alive in their cloud-shrouded homelands he could never even hope to know? Without machines or clothing, tools or vehicles, dwellings or records, without any apparent social order, how did the Leleyo manage to exist?
More painful questions nagged him. Why had she elected him for such shattering friendship? Only because of the Kyrone name and what she hoped he could tell her? That likelihood was at first almost too painful to consider, but he sat suddenly straighter, grinning at his gloomy face in the shaving mirror. Even if she never spoke to him again, or wanted to, his recollection of their night together would remain as precious to him as that magic monopole.
Oddly happy, he got up to pee. drink cold water, and plug a math tape into his holotutor. Brimming with a breathless eagerness, he went early that day to Kai lit and sat watching the door, heart throbbing hard, waiting for her.
She didn’t come.
“Don’t know and never will.” The aged instructor gave him a shrug and a stabbing glance, perhaps of envy, when he went up after class to ask about her. “The Leleyo way. Safer not to get involved because you’ll never understand them.”
He tried to call her, but she had no listed holo number. He was wondering that afternoon if he dared to go back to her place, at the risk of some scornful rebuff, when his tutor called him to the commandant’s office.
A tall, tight-lipped man, the commandant had been with his father on the dwindling Lifecrew staff at the Academy before he resigned from the Crew to stay with the school. He stood up when Keth came into his office, his stiff little smile changing into grave concern.
“Kyrone, where were you last night?”
“Off campus, sir. I had to sign the penalty book.”
“Who were you with?”
“A girl, sir.” Dim alarms confused him. “A fellow student.”
“Her name?”
“Nera Nyin.” The commandant waited until he had to add, “She’s Leleyo.”
“What happened?”
“We talked. We ate—ate her native foods.”
“I suppose you were intimate?”
He stood silent, offended by that crude invasion.
“Did she offer you a drug?”
“She did.”
“Which you accepted?”
He had to nod, and the commandant scowled.
“Kvrone, your record here has been good. I know your father and I respect your name. I met the girl—she brought me a voicecard from Admiral Vorn. Having seen her, I can’t blame you for whatever happened, but now you’re in a regrettable situation.”
He waited, chilled with colder apprehensions.
“I suppose you know the natives don’t want us on Malili. Clean as she seems, the girl must be regarded as an enemy of Kai. Admiral Vorn did arrange her visit, because we need information about the natives, but he also alerted the shipwatch. She has been observed. Her apartment was searched this morning. Traces of an illicit psychochemical were found. You will be asked to describe its effects.”
“Sir—” He tried to smooth his voice. “Where is she?”
“So you don’t know?” The commandant’s frown grew graver. “The shipwatch hoped you would.”
“Has something happened to her?”
“If you don’t know . . .” The commandant looked baffled and unhappy. “The shipwatch had been watching her place, waiting permission to raid it. You were seen to enter with her late yesterday, and to leave alone this morning.
“Permission for the raid came through today. The officers found a vast collection of information on Kai—objects of art and tapes on every subject. They found her imported hoard of native food, and kilograms of the gold nuggets she was selling to support her operation. The girl herself was gone.”
The shipwatch officers were waiting for him in another room. Tired-faced, hard-eyed men, they demanded more than he knew about Nera Nyin, but seemed to disbelieve nearly everything he told them. They shouted more questions than he had answers for, about Cyra and his father.
Where were they now? Had they been in touch with Nera Nyin? What had they been up to, shuttling back and forth between Kai and Malili? Where were they getting funds? How were they linked to Bosun Brong, and why had he himself received a gift from Brong?
They showed him the golden chalice they had found in his own room and demanded facts about it. What were the symbols
on it? What was it meant to contain? How was it used in what native ceremonials? If he claimed not to know, how did he account for the traces of illicit feyolin they had found in the cup and also in the raided room?
He said as little as he could, and said it many times. The interrogation went on until his first stunned bewilderment had turned to seething anger, until that had cooled to savage hatred for the shipwatch, until even the hatred had died into total exhaustion.
At last they left him. He sat there alone, sprawled back in his chair, too empty even to wonder what might happen next, yet clinging to one thread of secret satisfaction. They hadn’t asked about the monopole, and he hadn’t told them.
The commandant came back at last, seeming faintly relieved.
“You’re free, Kyrone. They’re convinced that you told them as much as you know—which leaves them in the dark about how the girl escaped from her apartment or where she is now.”
He hesitated, his troubled eyes on Keth.
“One of them suspects that she used that drug to get away. Puzzling stuff, you know. Chemically strange. The Leleyo are said to believe it gives them supernatural powers.” He squinted expectantly. “What do you think?”
“I did try it.” Keth shrugged, carefully silent about Bosun Brong’s equally inexplicable disappearances. “I can’t describe the way it made me feel, but we didn’t leave the room. She said nothing about any escape. I don’t think she was expecting any raid, and I’ve no idea what became of her.”
“Another watchman thinks you murdered the girl and somehow smuggled her body out.” The commandant paused to peer at him. “However, he can’t suggest either motive or method. The whole affair is still an ugly riddle. They’ve decided not to hold you, but I imagine they’ll keep an eye on you.”
When he reached his room, the hammered chalice was back on his desk. Midnight had passed. Falling wearily into his berth, he dreamed of Nera Nyin. She was lost on the Darkside ice-barrens, nude and shivering, ill with bloodrot. He was searching for her, carrying the drug to cure her in the golden chalice, but he could never find her.
Tired and dull the next day, he hardly heard his tutors. A burst of illogical hope spurred him early to Kai lit, but of course she wasn’t there. Sitting at late mess with no appetite, he heard a rumor that she had been arrested on drug charges and deported back to Malili.
Doubting that, he longed for news that never came. A voicecard from Cyra and his father said their health was the same and their work still in progress. That final year dragged on. He applied again for space training, and again the classes had been filled with fleetfolk. The midterm passed. Unexpectedly, Chelni Vorn called from Terradeck.
She had come home to marry him.
13
Duskday The day after Sunset, marked traditionally by the end of the harvest festivals and withdrawal underground.
He met her at the gate. Taller than he recalled her, tanned richly brown from the UV screens, she looked trim and athletically appealing in the bright blue jumpsuit she had worn on the shuttle.
“Dear Keth!” She kissed him with a vigorous warmth and pushed him back to inspect him. “You’re looking splendid.” Deep emotion edged her husky voice, and her blue-gray eyes dimmed with tears. Thinking she looked nearly as lovely as Nera Nyin, he felt a surge of his old affection for her.
She wanted a melonade, and they went to the snack bar. She talked about her years on Malili. The Zone was a frigid little prison where life was limited and hard, sometimes dangerous. She had hated it bitterly at first, till she got a better sense of what it meant.
“A seed!” Her eyes shone now. “I wish you could hear the Admiral tell how it will grow. Into a tree of life for Kai, bearing rich new harvests for the Vorns. A wonderful dream, Keth, that we can turn into something wonderful for us.”
Her uncle was now commander of the Zone. She had worked for a time in his office and then moved through a dozen different jobs at the spacedeck, at the import and export branches, in the thorium division, in exploration and general management. She had dispatched shuttles and ridden ore trains in the mines and driven a sanicraft to inspect the new perimeter.
“But I need you, Keth.” She leaned abruptly across the tiny table. “Come back with me,”
Caught off guard, he fumbled for words and reminded her that he still had half a year at the Academy.
“That won’t matter.” Her smile was brightly hopeful. “You’ll find the Zone a better school than Crater Lake.”
Her melonade was finished. She wanted to see the lake, and he took her out across the topside deck. It was the middle of a moontime in the long summer season when the polar sun never set. Orange-red and veiled in glowing haze, it hung low in the north, tiny-seeming beneath Malili’s vast narrow crescent. Beyond a single tiny sail, its light lay splashed like blood on the bright blue water and made yellow fire of the long plume of dust rising from a soil mill below the dam.
A splendid view.” She leaned across the rail to drink it in before she turned back to him. “I’ll always love Kai—hard and bare as it is—but we won’t have to mill stone to make soil for Malili.”
Delaying what he saw he would have to say, he objected that Malili offered graver problems than merely grinding soil.
“We’ll solve them all,” she promised. “The new perimeter will triple the size of the Zone. The UV and laser screens are already up, the neutron blasting done. We’re just waiting now to make sure the whole area is really sterile.”
Eagerness lit her ray-darkened face.
“The Admiral is planning to make the opening a special event. The Navarch is coming out for it on the Vorn Fortune—our new flagship. I’ve made reservations for us, but the shuttles won’t be taking off till Duskday. We’ll have the rest of the suntime here.”
She wanted to open her uncle’s lakeshore lodge. Pointing, she tried to show it to him. He found the green point where it stood, jutting out from the black crater wall, but the building itself was too far for him to see. They could sail the lake and lounge in the gardens, she said, enjoying the finest season of Kai.
“I’ve meant for us to marry ever since we were swabbers together at Greenpeak.” She had turned from the rail to him, quietly ardent, eyes dark with emotion. “I know you’ve always been fond of me . . .”
She had seen his face, and her voice began to falter.
“I—I do love you, Chel.” His own voice shook. “But I can’t marry you.”
“Are you still crazy?” A sudden scorn turned her pale beneath the tan. “About the humanoids?”
He couldn’t speak of the monopole.
“They killed your father, Chel. I hope to help my own father keep them off our planet.”
“You are insane.” She turned away for a moment toward the lake, her blunt chin quivering. “But I’ve come a long way to see you, Keth.” She looked back at him. “We’ll never know about my father. We’ve our own lives to live. Listen to me, please.”
Wrenched with pity, he could only nod.
“You’ve met Zelyk. My fat cousin. A fleet commodore now—he’ll be commanding the Fortune. He wants to marry me. I—I despise him, Keth. An egotistical bastard. Both my aunts have always wanted us to marry, to hold the fleet together. That’s half the reason I went out to the Zone. To get away from his slobbery sort of love.”
Her urgent fingers clutched his arm.
“The Admiral likes you, Keth. He encouraged me to come, and he wants us on Malili—he doesn’t care if we make my aunts unhappy.” Her wet eyes searched his face again, and her voice began to break. “I’ve always loved you, Keth. But the family . . . the family . . .”
She choked and looked away.
“I guess—guess I’ll have to tell you, Chel.” His own voice trembled. “I met a Leleyo girl. A student here. I fell in love—”
“With Nyin?” Her hand jerked off his arm. “The spy?”
“If she was a spy.” He shrugged. “I talked to her about the Zone. She—her people don’t wa
nt us on their world. Killing her sort of life so we can move in—”
“That jungle slut!” Her contempt exploded. “Baiting every man she meets with her stinking nakedness. My uncle told me how she got past him and duped the Academy and hoodwinked the shipwatch and finally escaped. I hope—hope you enjoyed her!”
His own anger held him silent.
“You utter idiot!” Straight and defiant in the trim blue jumpsuit, she stepped away from him, arms folded, so lovely in her wrath, and yet so deeply hurt, that he longed to take her in his arms.
“Chel,” he whispered. “Chel . . .”
“Maybe I’m the fool,” she muttered bitterly. “Loving you—even when I always saw you were an indecisive weakling. You never tried hard enough. Not for anything. You’ll never be a leader in the fleet. But still—” Her quivering hands opened toward him. “If you’ll come with me: now—your last chance, Keth!”
Wet eyes watching, she waited.
Gulping for words, he found nothing at all to say. It was true he would never lead any fleet. He had never wanted to. The drive to dominate had never obsessed him, perhaps because he knew the pain of being dominated. He had never liked hurting anybody, but he couldn’t help her feelings now. Lovely enough, still dear to him, she wasn’t Nera Nyin.
“That’s it.” She caught a ragged breath. “I hope—hope you’re never sorry.”
“I’m sorry now—”
She was stumbling away. Hands clenched, he watched until the air doors swallowed her, then he turned slowly to look across the rail for the lodge where they might have honeymooned, sorting out his feelings.
He had never longed to become a power on the Bridge or an owner of the fleet. His ache of pity was all for her. She might have been as tine as Nera Nyin, he thought, if she had grown up free. It seemed to him that the life of Kai had bound her too cruelly, even born as she had been to the best of it. The stem demands of ship and school and fleet and family had crippled her forever—as he might have been crippled, he reminded himself, but for those fortunate freaks of chance that gave him the monopole and that night with Nera Nyin.
The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy Page 35
