Korval's Game

by Sharon Lee

  Pat Rin heard Penn Kalhoon’s “They won’t last a week!” amid a chorus of agreement.

  Privately, he thought that the two renegade bosses would do well to last a week, but the Balance was no more than precise. Pat Rin inclined his head.

  “With Boss Cruther’s loan of a car and Mr. McFarland’s assistance as an escort, I believe that our party may continue. Please—take them away.”

  He looked ’round the room, remembering to smile, and set about putting his guests at ease, which was the duty of a host.

  “My apologies for the disturbance,” he said to the room at large. “I direct everyone’s attention to the buffet, where we still have many delights to share! Please, friends, party on!”

  DAY 51

  Standard Year 1393

  Departing Lytaxin

  DAAV HAD BEEN taught patience, years and worlds away, at the tent of an expert, but he had never learned to delight in its practice.

  Therefore, he waited, patiently, at the airfield with a small kit-bag composed mostly of necessities others thought he needed. Before he had departed Erob’s house, young Alys Tiazan had come to him with a tin of tea, as well as a surprise: A flatpic of Val Con and Miri, captured, so Alys said, on the night Miri was acknowledged kin to Erob. Miri’s expression was grave to the point of grimness, as she stood very close to full attention, as if her dinner dress were a particularly uncomfortable uniform. Val Con stood easier, as a scout would, bland-faced and non-committal.

  Daav had thanked the child for her gifts, and was rewarded with a beguiling smile and a bow so accurate in its complexity that he thought she must have practiced for hours—a bow to the parents of one’s most admired mentor.

  Now, rather than pace—which would not have been patient—or taking the offered observer’s seat at the temporary control tower, where he might have been diverted by this or that happenstance, Daav lounged on a small hummock, with the airfield, the Truax Liftmaster Plus which was the Clutch turtle’s idea of a world-to-space shuttle, and his kit-bag all in view.

  The kit was, as he well knew, inadequate. Even dangerously inadequate. Beyond the gifts, and a few odds and end of toiletries, he had packed several changes of clothes, a pocket recorder, extra ammunition . . .

  “Daav, don’t fret so,” her voice murmured in his ear.

  “Well enough for you to say it;” he responded, glaring at the kit as if he might transmute its contents by will alone into the appropriate and needful equipment—aye, and a working team of scout specialists, too. “I’m merely waiting for the Honorable to arrive—and doing quite a creditable job of it, too.”

  Aelliana’s voice carried an undercurrent of amusement. “Ah, yes. I see you being patient, patient, patient. Truly, van’chela, if you become any more patient you will kick your poor bag down the hill and—”

  He laughed, half-hearted, for all that she was right; and ran a quick rainbow to center himself—and perhaps to buy some real patience.

  “I am concerned of this mission, too,” Aelliana continued. “But I cannot see how we might have altered event in order to accompany those returning to Liad—not when Korval Themselves gave us the task.”

  “Light-witted, ill-conceived . . .” Daav began and heard his lifemate chuckle.

  “Yes, as much you like,” she said, soothingly. “Of course we cannot create from thin air a proper scout diplomatic mission, outfitted with experts of protocol, biology, language, and geology. Nor could our delm. We are the cards they had to hand—and so they play us. You know very well that you had done just the same, when you stood Korval! And while we are not a scout team, we are certainly better than thin air. Besides, the Tree of Erob has gifted us at our new daughter’s bidding, and so we are doubly fortified!”

  “That,” Daav admitted, “was unexpected. For her to calmly hold out her hand and expect to catch such gifts as if she had been born beneath a Tree and spent her childhood at home in its branches—and for the Tree to so willingly comply . . .”

  “Here,” Miri had said, handing the two seedpods to Daav. “One for each of you. Eat ’em when Edger shows you to your cave.”

  “See,” Aelliana murmured, at the near edge of memory, “she too masters thin air!”

  Daav laughed again, more fully this time.

  “How not? Our son and our daughter expect that all of us are the masters of thin air—and we cannot disappoint.”

  “Just so,” she agreed. “And, now, you have been patient long enough—the Honorable approaches his ship.”

  Startled, he looked down to the field, saw the large, green shape, striding ponderously toward the Truax, and swept forward to pick up his kit.

  “Do you think we will truly have a cave to call our own?” he asked as he walked down the hill, but Aelliana was elsewhere, and did not answer.

  ***

  BRACED IN a custom-built gel-stand, Edger flew the Liftmaster like a scout. Designed to take compact, heavy objects into orbit, it was a most perfect ship for its purpose, a Clutch turtle being no one’s light packet. Daav noted the ship’s near-new condition with nothing more than the twitch of an eyebrow, yet Edger made answer, as if he had expressed his surprise aloud.

  “When my brother, your egg-son, required the use of the clan’s vessel in an earlier phrase of this artwork, I perceived that I was challenged to provide proper access to all human ports. Many of the smaller ports-in-space cannot receive the clan’s vessel, for its mass is much greater than theirs; likewise, our vessel cannot access planetary ports without risking grievous damage to the facilities. In the past, we had merely by-passed those ports and dockings which could not accommodate us, reasoning that we could not trade with those who could not receive our ships. However, the possibility that my brother the dragonslayer might require the services of the vessel of the clan and be unable to board—this is not how kin care for kin. And so we have acquired a solution.”

  Aelliana remained quiescent, gone to wherever it was she went when she was absent from his awareness. Daav, strapped in to what would have been the observer’s seat in a normally configured Truax piloting chamber, found the pattern of the lift so reassuring that he very nearly fell asleep during the zero-g phase.

  “I would be honored,” Edger boomed, breaking him out of his doze, “if you will scan the frequencies of which I might not be aware, or which those who have aligned themselves with scouts might find informative. We will dock very soon, now.”

  You should have thought of that, Daav scolded himself silently.

  “Of course,” he said, reaching for the board. “The honor is mine.”

  While there was some chatter on bands Edger was not otherwise listening to, neither its quantity nor its quality was worthy of note, excepting that it was so very earnestly normal. An uninformed listener might well suppose that all was well; the Clutch transport rising from the surface the merest commonplace; the mop-up phase of Erob’s little difficulty stabilized; and that nothing was in the least out of order.

  In the interests of thoroughness, Daav assayed an excursion through the side bands, which were also achingly normal. His explorations had brought him fully awake and he watched with interest as “the clan’s vessel” made its debut on the screen, looking like nothing so much as an asteroid, sitting tamely in orbit about Lytaxin. Of course it was, as near as Daav understood the matter, precisely an asteroid, from which the Clutch had carved a space-going vessel adequate to their standards and needs, filled with whatever strange machinery was necessary to make a ship work the way Clutch vessels worked.

  Daav had read technical analyses of the Clutch’s so-called Electron Substitution Drive. Human research into the drive had been given up hundreds of years gone-by as its peculiarities resisted control and its necessities warred with common sense.

  In short form, the ESD took advantage of the amusing tendency of electrons to show up in orbit elsewhere before they quite leave the orbit they are departing. Left to behave naturally during alterations in energy levels, this eccentricit
y goes unremarked by the larger universe, the trick being omni-directional.

  However, it had been found that motion could be induced in certain plasmas and fields—and, by extension, to entire macroscopic bodies—simply by imposing direction upon the electron’s absurd little dance.

  Terran and Liaden researchers had struggled mightily, and had at last managed, by dint of applying outrageous amounts of energy to a test object about the size of a human head, to propel said object for very short distances. Having achieved this double-edged success, they had then thrown up their hands and conceded that the drive was less than cost-effective. For humans.

  In the meanwhile, the Clutch had solved the scale problem, and effortlessly moved worldlets through space, one electron at a time.

  The Clutch ship filled the viewscreen, now. Daav held his breath as Edger brought the Truax in at a speed nothing less than breakneck, plying the board nimbly with his three-fingered hands. Daav scarcely had time to note the new metal mated to native rock, and the lock hubs braced against pitted stone, before the shuttle latched solidly home.

  ***

  AS FAMILIAR as he was with spacecraft, stations, and even moon-based research colonies, yet Daav was unprepared for the scale of things inside the asteroid ship. The piloting chamber could easily accommodate the expansive main control room of Dutiful Passage; the primary corridors wide enough for twelve battle-ready Terran mercs to march abreast; high enough that they might each stand upon the shoulders of a comrade and never scrape helmet along ceiling rock.

  Even the “guesting room” where he and Edger carried the various boxes of supplies hastily culled from a stone-clad storeroom, might easily sleep a squad of soldiers.

  Trotting along at the turtle’s heels, feeling positively buoyant in the slightly-lighter-than-Lytaxin gravity, Daav idly did the math. Estimating the size of the “ship,” he assumed that only an inner core approximately forty percent in diameter of the whole was habitable. Of that forty percent, non-trivial portions must house power sources, machinery, shielding . . . All of which meant that—conservatively speaking and with no real number in sight—that “the vessel of the clan” encompassed a living space roughly equivalent to the entire inside area of the twenty-nine story building where he had taught on Delgado.

  “If you will attend me now,” Edger said, as the last carton was stowed. “We shall walk through those areas of the vessel that are most likely to be of need or interest to you. I fear that we are but an eyeblink away from commission of a grand and hasty side work. In celebration of the haste that will soon come upon us, then, I would ask that we address each other in the shortest form possible. As you are aware, the short-form of my name is Edger.”

  Daav had inclined his head, wondering what sort of haste might be coaxed from such a vessel.

  “I am honored if you will use my personal name,” he murmured, gravely.

  “I thank you, Daav,” Edger rumbled and fell silent, huge, cat-slit eyes looking down upon him.

  The silence stretched, becoming uncomfortable even for one who had prospered as a scout. Daav was begin to wonder if he had perhaps missed a cue, when Edger said, as delicately as his big voice would allow . . .

  “Might I ask the short form best used for the other pilot?”

  Daav felt the familiar stirring. His vision faded somewhat, as he heard his voice—though not quite his voice, really—reply, with suitable gravity. “Forgive me, Edger; I was reposing at a distance. My favorite sister had sometimes called me Aelli, and so does my nephew, Shan. It would please me if you would use it.”

  The turtle sighed, great eyes blinking once, twice. “Aelli is a name rich in vibrations. I shall speak it with great pleasure.”

  It was a quick tour, then, with Daav aware of his lifemate, awake and receptive just behind his eyes. It seemed to him as though she walked at his right hand, though he was well aware that she did not. Following Edger, they passed several garden rooms—one remarkably similar to Erob’s inner garden—and an area for swimming and taking one’s ease beneath sun-bright lamps. Edger displayed a rather startling book room, several large empty spaces, the purpose of which he apparently assumed was self-evident, by-passed yet another pool-room, cut through the cathedral-like piloting chamber, and returned by a secondary corridor to the “guesting room,” with the supply boxes and his kit bag stacked neatly along the far wall, and the lighting which was adjusted for human eyes.

  “I leave you now to nourish and rest yourselves,” Edger said. “We will become underway as closely as I am able to approximate ‘immediately’, and will be utilizing our vessel in the upper ranges of its capacity. A gong will sound to warn you of impending motion. If you are standing or walking, it would be wise to immediately sit upon the floor with your back against the wall. A second, lesser, gong will signal when it has become possible to perambulate. Should you elect to rest, please engage the webbing over the bed.” There was a pause, not nearly so long as the previous pause.

  “We three here—we understand that haste is of the essence. Therefore, it will be necessary that the journey be taken in several episodes. These are not the Jumps of which your ships partake with such elegance, and it is possible that you will experience altered conditions—even discomfort. It is my understanding that any feelings of disorientation are but passing, neither harmful to the body nor the song. However, if you experience difficulties, merely speak my name in the direction of this object—” He put a three fingered hand against what appeared to be a sculpture of red stone—“and I shall hear you.”

  He bowed then, surprising, and very nearly nuance-perfect: “From one who is honored to be permitted to act for a master of the art,” Aelliana read—and left them, moving with quite fearful haste down the stone corridor, toward the piloting room.

  Daav shook his head and turned on a heel to survey their quarters once more.

  “It seems we should have invited a dozen of our closest friends!” Aelliana commented, as their eye fell upon the Clutch-sized bed.

  He grinned and flung them onto the thing, laughing aloud when the low gravity rewarded them with a high, gentle bounce.

  The quilt, when they were on it again, proved to be handmade, of a material Daav thought might be real cotton, and showing the precious irregularities of hand-sewing.

  Acceleration webbing hung at the foot of the bed, to prevent rest-period lifts to the high ceiling, and a pair of what proved, upon experimentation, to be nothing more exotic than light plates were set into the rocky headboard.

  Daav climbed out of the bed—no easy task, lacking a piton and ropes—and gazed meditatively at the carefully stowed supplies.

  “Do you suppose we have been hoodwinked, Aelliana? That our delm has sent us off on this quiet, safe little mission to keep us out of harm’s way? I begin to think that we might have remained on Delgado, oblivious and content, and left the proper ordering of the universe to our children.”

  “Had you not become just a trifle bored,” she asked, “since Theo left us?”

  He snorted. “That was not boredom, my lady. That was relaxation. Doubtless you misunderstood the state, having seen it so seldom these last twenty years.”

  Aelliana laughed.

  “My own beloved lady mocks me,” Daav said mournfully, crossing the room to the sculpture of red rock which their host had indicated was a communication device.

  The structure proved to be an amazement, for it was not, as he had first thought, bonded to the stone floor, but grew out of it, as if some natural vein of rock had been purposefully and carefully mined out from the more common rock of the walls, then faceted and polished into a pleasant work of art. Daav ran his fingers along each of the seven faceted sides, marveling at the texture of the stone . . .

  “I believe we have the cave we were promised,” Aelliana said. “It pleases, odd though it is. Shall we honor our daughter’s wishes?”

  “Why not?” Daav returned, abandoning his contemplation of the red rock. “Though I warn you, she wi
ll never believe us so obedient.”

  THE SEED PODS became desert to a snack foraged from the assembled supplies. Aelliana concurred in the wine, and in the crackers-with-cheese-spread from a commercial camping pack. Daav opened the bottle with his utility tool, and sipped slowly.

  It was his belief that Aelliana and he tasted different essences; that when she wished to put herself forward wines were slightly more complex. This hour she was alert—even playful—and he found the wine very good, indeed. The crackers were amusing, like a return to some childhood picnic, a theme that the seed pods continued, for how long had it been?

  Daav sighed. Why, only since he had fled Liad, seeking Balance, sanity, and heart’s ease.

  In the dark days just after her death, he had been concerned—overly concerned—for his sanity in everything he did, for Aelliana had yet to find a way to let him know she was truly with him. Well he knew the power of habit and wishful thinking; and the willingness of the heart to cling to hope, despite whatever brutal facts the mind might wearily recite down the endless hours of grief-filled nights.

  He refused to believe that he heard her voice. He knew better than to believe. Had not Master Healer Kestra herself assured him that theirs was a lifemating of uncertain prognosis? Was it not true, and despite all their efforts and wishes to make it otherwise, that Daav had never once rejoiced at the touch of his lifemate’s thought against his own? Aelliana—she had some small bit of that: Touching him, she could read him. He had never envied her the gift—gods knew, she had few enough joys in her life—but the gift had been hers, not his. And she was dead.

  He would never hear her voice again.

  Desolate, he perversely attempted to embrace yet more desolation—deliberately refusing the Tree’s urge that he take seedpods with him; refusing to tell Er Thom his plan; refusing to contemplate a return. Refusing to believe with every bit of his will that he heard his beloved’s voice, until desolation itself betrayed him, and Aelliana caught him nodding in exhaustion before a computer screen . . .