Sand and Stars

by Diane Duane

  The door opened, and she began to shout “Go away!” but it was Hanesh, and he had as much right to the room as she did. Unfortunately. He was all over grease: he had been in the mechanical grappling systems again, by the look of him.He spends more time with the machinery than he needs to, said a suspicion in her mind.Or he seems to. I wonder —

  “Pekev’s bringing in one last stone tonight, to see if it won’t calm Nomikh down a little,” he said softly. “Come on up and do the assay on it when he gets it in, so we can all have a little peace from the old man.”

  “I did my work this morning,” Alieth said, and started to lie down on the couch again. “Let T’Aria or Tasav do it—they haven’t been doing much of anything lately.” She sniffed. “I should have trained to be a pilot. Three seconds of work in a half day and then eating and drinking and sleeping for a week after. Besides, I’m having my rest now.”

  “You’re not,” Henesh said. “You’re on the link. You’realways on the link.”

  “I do my share of work,” she said. “Just because you don’t care for the link, don’t dictate how I can spend my spare time.”

  He said nothing, but down the bond she could hear him thinking.I just wish you would spend a little more time with me.

  She ignored this. “Go on,” she said. She lay down again and waited for him to go away: but he would not. Finally, because it was the only way to get rid of him, she said, “All right, then. I’ll come, but only when the stone’s up in the hold, and not a minute sooner.”

  He nodded and went out.

  Alieth sighed and felt around for the neural connection, slipped it cool against her neck, lay back. The shadows swallowed her, and then the light turned to the wild heat of the sun again.

  The high priestess lifts her hands and says, “Go with the blessing of our order on you. And that you may prosper, take these gifts—” More horns are blown, and the tiny bells are sounded, and jeweled treasures of antique make are borne forth on brocaded cushions. She accepts them, and the underpriests and priestesses cry her praise.

  Their voices drown out the bond very satisfactorily.

  “It’s in range,” Pekev said from outside the ship. “Got a lock on it, Hanesh?”

  “Locked,” Hanesh said, not needing to look up from the console to check the image on the screen. He was strapped in his seat, as was T’Vei beside him: there was no gravity in the core, which was just as well for handling asteroids anyway.

  Hanesh put his arms into the control boxes and flexed his fingers as they fit into the gauntlets. Outside the ship, the grapples flexed too, mirroring his action, and reached out slowly and carefully for the asteroid. One had to be careful. The carbon-matrix asteroids were not nearly as solid as the nickel-iron ones, and could shatter…and when they did, you had wasted fuel and energy, and Nomikh would make your life miserable. Every now and then Hanesh wished the ship had a tractor beam, but such things were much too expensive whenRasha was built, and they certainly couldn’t afford one now.

  He reached out iron arms for the asteroid, watching his progress using the stereo cameras mounted on the outsides of the “fingers.” The asteroid was a medium-sized one, perhaps as wide across as a man was tall, but easily within the hold’s ability to handle. The outer part of the hold was already evacuated, waiting to have the asteroid placed in the handling cradle.

  Hanesh reached out carefully. This maneuver was always the trickiest part of the business, because typically one did not stop the ship’s spin unless the stone was of unusual size. His arms, therefore, were spinning on their vertical axis, just as the ship was. Pekev had done his part, carefully aligning the asteroid with the ship and putting the proper spin on it so that they seemed to be stationary relative to one another.

  “Here we go,” said Hanesh, reaching out close. The arms were within a height: a half-height: they closed.

  And he felt the clutch, and the crunch, through the remotes, and swore.

  “What?” T’Vei said.

  “It shattered.”

  She peered at the screen. “Not very badly. Look at it. Just bring it in carefully: it’s too big to waste the energy that throwing it away would take.”

  Hanesh considered this, then thought of the mood of the old man downstairs, and agreed. “Handling a cracked stone,” he said, as he carefully pulled the arms in, “is not easy, you know.”

  “Yes,” T’Vei said, and was silent: but she smiled at him.

  Hanesh watched the view. The arms turned inward on themselves, rotating on universal gimbals so that the evacuated hold yawned before them, and the cradle came up on its tracks to meet them. Very carefully he snugged the asteroid down into the cradle, and its own servos came up with soft-tipped probes and secured the stone all around.

  “Well done!” T’Vei said. “Let’s get it in.”

  It took very little time to seal up the outer hold, repressive it, and open the secondary doors to bring the cradle down into the main lab area. “You might as well page Alieth now,” T’Vei said, launching out into the middle space of the corelab and using handholds to pull herself over to the cradle.

  “Must I?” Hanesh said. T’Vei flashed a smile at him and turned her attention to the stone. Carbon matrix of one of the harder sort: it had that heat-seared look about the outside of it. She floated around the circular crack, looking at the stone. “You did a nice job on this one,” she said. “Very little fracturing from the remotes. A little bit of flaking here—”

  “I’m not surprised,” he said. He used the mechanical page to the comm network, rather than the voice comm, then grabbed another set of handholds and launched himself down toward T’Vei. “I squeezed it pretty hard. What are you looking at?”

  She was gazing at the crack, which was about half an inch wide. “Would you reach me one of the hand tools?” she said. “The sonic chisel, the little one.”

  He handed it to her: she thumbed it on and applied it to the crack. A few flakes of stone sprang away.

  Something translucent and white showed underneath them, about an inch wide.

  She used the chisel again. Another inch of translucence was revealed, roughly paralleling the surface of the asteroid.

  T’Vei looked at Hanesh with astonishment. “I don’t think we’re going to need an assay on this one,” she said. She chiseled once more, and another flake of stone fell off: and inside the crack, another inch of diamond showed.

  “Get Father,” she said.

  His first response was to hang staring from a handhold, without speaking, for nearly fifteen minutes, as T’Vei ran an ultrasound scan on the asteroid. There were three diamonds inside it, two in the upper half of the asteroid, undamaged, and one that Hanesh had unfortunately squeezed and cracked with the rest of the stone. The cracked one was the biggest: nearly a hundredweight in mass, and roughly half a height in diameter. The whole family came to see: the children, the pilots, everyone. Even Alieth had stayed, even after finding that she wasn’t needed. Ten astonished faces stared at the diamond on top as T’Vei’s skilled hands freed more and more of it.

  Finally Nomikh turned to Tasav, one of the pilots. “Set us a course for Ashif Belt Station,” he said, “and don’t spare the fuel.”

  Tasav nodded eagerly and went off to see to it.

  “This is it,” Nomikh said. “The stone, the stone of stones. We are rich!”

  “Let me get it out of the matrix safely first, Father,” T’Vei said, not looking up from her work. “I’d prefer not to crack any more of these.”

  He nodded, and fell silent. T’Vei felt fairly sure she knew what they were thinking about. Gemstones from space were highly prized on Vulcan, and brought a great deal more at market than ones that originated onplanet. What diamonds of this size could bring—she hardly dared think. She suspected that Nomikh could buy a fleet twice as big as the one he’d had, and still have plenty left over afterward.

  But what would he do?

  Funds that came to the family in the course of work were used
to fuel the ship and take care of its running expenses: after that, what was left over was usually divided evenly among the crew. Even the children got a share. The only problem was that there was usually nothing left after the ship was taken care of: a little extra for a few luxuries, some food other than the standard dried reconstitutable rations. T’Vei sighed, remembering a time on Ashif Station when she had had fresh meat for dinner. Well, perhaps it had been frozen. She hadn’t minded.

  But now—there would be no question of keeping the ship running anymore. There would be enough money, enough for everything. And would all the members of the family want to keep mining?

  Why should they? We can all retire, wealthy.

  But to where? And to whom? Will we never see one another again?For indeed there had been and were often times when T’Vei heartily wished one or another of the family dead, and doubtless they had had the same wish about her. It was hardly to be avoided, when people had been in such close quarters for so long. What was going to happen now?

  She had a horrible feeling, as flake after flake of stone fell out, that she would find out soon enough.

  Nomikh did not come to dinner that night. Many of the others didn’t care: their spirits were too high as they discussed their plans. Some of them were extraordinary. Almost everyone wanted to buy a house on Vulcan, abig house. A couple of them were more interested in a “sealed cottage” on T’Khut, in one of the colonies, away from the trouble on the planet. But most seemed to be willing to take their chances with trouble, convinced that money—the kind of money they were dealing with now—would buy them plenty of protection. And then there would be luxuries. Fine clothes, personal vehicles, servants, ships of their own, trips to all the places they had wanted to see. It would be a wonderful life.

  T’Vei was not so sure. Several times she looked with concern at Pekev, and once he said to her, down the bond,I am beginning to wish that you had never made me go out and get that thing.

  She looked at him quizzically.I didn’t make you go, she said,and I would have gone out, if you hadn’t. I think we had better take this as an intended thing.

  He shook his head, but inwardly agreed with her.

  The discussion kept going long after the meal was done. T’Vei slipped away, after a while, and went down to Nomikh’s cabin. She knocked, but there was no answer: she peered in.

  She found him lying on the narrow bed, eyes open, staring at the ceiling, with the tears streaming down either side of his face.

  “It doesn’t work anymore,” he was saying. “It doesn’t work.”

  She slipped in softly and sat on the floor by the bed. “What doesn’t work, Father?” she said.

  “The bond,” he said, and wept hard.

  T’Vei bowed her head. There were mate-bonds that broke, at death, and ones that did not. There were always the tales of the ones that did not break, when one bondmate could still feel the other, regardless—even sometimes speak to them. There was no predicting it, and you never knew which kind you had until it happened.

  “She never,” Nomikh said. “So hard she worked, and she never had anything. I wanted everything for her. But all I had was this. Forty years, without her. And now this—!” He wept again. “She should have been here,” he said; “this should have been forty years ago. Riches, leisure, everything she wanted. But it comes now. Why now? Why now?”

  And then a long pause, and whispered, the worst, “This was not it. This wasn’t what I wanted after all…”

  There were no more words in him, only tears. T’Vei touched his brow gently, then went out to go upstairs and finish the assay, the weighing and measuring of the stones. She had no heart for the talk around the scruffy dinner table, all the ornate plans. She was afraid, to the core of her, but Nomikh would want a reckoning of the stones in the morning.

  She climbed up to the core and tried to do her work without looking at them more than necessary. But they looked at her, the cold white eyes of the stone, the eyes….

  In the morning they met again around the table, after the mornmeal things had been cleared away, and T’Vei sat down with her pad. Nomikh was last at the table, and he sat down with an odd quelling expression on his face.

  “Tasav?” he said first, to the pilot.

  “We will be at Ashif Station in four hours,” he said.

  “Good. T’Vei?”

  “Well.” She looked at the pad with a great desire to say,They are worthless. “We have three stones, as you have all seen, and some fragments. They mass, all together, seventeen point six three hundredweight.” Astonished glances went around the table. “At present market value—well, there would be some change in the value as the stones are cut. But I estimate the value of the stones at around two billionnakh.”

  Silence.

  Nomikh breathed in, breathed out. “Very well,” he said. “We will dispose of them to the gemological service group at Ashif. And then”—he cut in on the happy gabble that rose up around the table—“we will refuel and go out again.”

  Everyone looked at him in shock. Then the gabble started again, but loud and angry.

  “—why—”

  “—we can retire—”

  “—don’t want to work anymore—”

  “—not fair—”

  “Haven’t I taught you anything about thrift?” he said. He did not shout in return at their anger. His eyes were strangely cool. “What happens when this money runs out?”

  “Runs out??” said Tasav incredulously. “Even divided eleven ways, we could all be dead before that happens!”

  “Divided?” The cool eyes looked at him. “There will be no divisions. The money stays with the ship. And we go out and earn our keep.”

  The silence that followed this statement had a terrible waiting quality.

  “This is not the one,” the old man said, looking at them one by one. “This is not the great stone, the stone of stones. This will keep us for a while, for as long as it takes us to find that other. We will keep looking until we find it. And then we can all retire. But for the time being we must be thrifty, we must be prudent, we must save our air and energy. Someday we will be rich. But we are not now. Not yet.”

  Eyes sought one another around the table, and what they mostly said was,He’s gone mad at last. We always saw it coming. Now here it is.

  “You’re just afraid we’ll leave you all alone,” Hanesh said, jumping up from his seat. “Don’t you trust us? Can’t we be trusted to keep working together—or living together, even if we don’t have to work—aren’t we still a family, even if we don’thave to be? Won’t we be a family still, even if we’re not cooped up in this wretched metal can? Father!”

  “Children must stay with the family,” Nomikh said placidly, “until they are old enough to take care of themselves.”

  There seemed no answer to that.

  “We will be at Ashif soon,” Nomikh said. “Alieth, make a shopping list. We’re getting low on dry stores.” And he got up to leave.

  “Getting low!” Alieth screamed. She had not been on the net for almost a day, to everyone’s astonishment, and there was a greed in her eyes that was terrible to see. “We’re gettingdead, trapped in here, nothing but work, and want, scrimping oxygen and eating scraps, and hurting, and never having any of the good things—Let us out of here, let us free, give us what’s our right, let us go home and never have to be out here again in the cold and the dark!Let us away from you!”

  Nomikh looked at her gently. “Not until you’re older,” he said, and left the room.

  “We could kill him.”

  The silence into which this suggestion fell was awful. More awful was the feeling that some of the people around the table agreed to the idea.

  The mutiny had been going on for an hour and a half now. That was the only thing T’Vei could think of to call it. All the adults on the ship save for Nomikh were still around the table, where Nomikh had left them. They had risen, sometimes, several of them, to pace, to shout, to strike the walls
in frustration: but they always sat down again, to mutter, to lay bitter plans. No one had mentionedthis one before…but T’Vei had feared it. And now her fear was upon her.

  She shook her head. “He is Head of House!” T’Vei said, looking around the table, trying to meet their eyes. They would not look at her. Not Hanesh: not Pekev, next to her, his heart oddly closed to her, purposely shutting down the bond: not Tasav, his fists clenching and unclenching: not T’Aria, his bondmate, the other pilot. And not Alieth, who had made the suggestion, the terrible one, the one that everyone had thought of, and no one had dared utter, until now.

  “He is Head of House!” she said again. “There is no relationship more sacred, none! Without him, who are we?”

  “Free,” Hanesh muttered. “Free to do what we want, for the first time in our lives.”

  “And defiled!” T’Vei said. “Just because we are angry at him, does not give us leave to kill him! To kill the Head of House is as good as to kill the House!”

  “The Houseis dead!” Alieth shouted, and this time she looked up at T’Vei, and the expression in her eyes, of anguish, and horror, and anger, was terrible to see. “It has been dead sinceGelevesh was taken from us, since the fleet was broken and nine-tenths of the House became groundlings, scratching at the hide of the world for a living, begging other houses for their sufferance! Now comes a chance to finally be something, to become something, and what does he do? He forbids it to us, and says he will doom us to the rest of our lives out in this cold waste—”

  “Alieth,” Pekev said, “give him a little time. The shock may have unsettled him, but he may yet come back to his senses. Give him a few—”

  “What? A few moons? A few sunrounds? How many? Ten? Twenty? Fifty? How long are you willing to live this life, Pekev? It’s all very well for some, who have the bond as you do—” Hanesh flinched hard: Alieth never saw it. “But what about the rest of us, who are a little more interested in the rest of the world, who weary of living our lives like container cargo? Who would like a little more to drink than water, and a little more to eat than dry protein extender, and a little more to see than the dark, and the inside of a metal can? Who would like anakh of our own to spend, and somewhere else to spend it than a filthy, smelly orbital station full of broken-down scrapings of the system—” She gasped for breath. “How long do you think it will take Nomikh to come back to his sanity? If he ever had it, these twenty years gone? There he lies in his cabin, blubbering and wishing he were dead, and I for one wouldn’t mind seeing him get his wish!”