Crystal Line

by Anne McCaffrey

  "They ought to watch out," she murmured under her breath. "Ledges can fall down on top of you."

  "What say, Sunny?" Lars asked, and she grinned as she waved at him to ignore her.

  It was late in the morning when he began to circle the sled. "Think I found one," he said, bringing them down to hover over the spot.

  "Are you sure?" Killa squinted down at rocks bearing the barest hint of color: the herringbone pattern was all but indistinguishable.

  "Sure as I can be. Shall we put down and see what we remember of the site?"

  "We certainly have to renew the marker," she said, annoyed that the paint, which was supposed to have a long sun-life, had faded so badly. Markers were what kept other singers from usurping claims. A claim was circular in shape, with a radius of a half kilometer radiating from the painted logo. No one was supposed to enter a space so marked. As further protection, the mark was not required to be at the lode itself—or even anywhere near. The lode could be right at the edge of the enclosed space and still be claimed by the singer.

  "Paint first, look later," Lars said, calling the order.

  They painted and then took a meal break, all the while looking around the circle, hoping to trigger recollections of this particular site.

  "We've got to go down," Killa said after she'd swallowed her last mouthful. "Nothing's familiar at this height."

  "Eeny meeny, pitsa teeny," Lars chanted as he circled up from the peak. At "teeny", Lars left the circle in that direction, bringing the sled down into the small canyon. He grinned at Killa: a random choice had often proved lucky. He neatly parked their vehicle in the shadow cast by the higher side, and she nodded approval of his caution. They would be hidden from an aerial view until the morning.

  She was first out of the sled, running her fingers along the uneven rock walls of the canyon and hoping to catch a trace of crystal resonance. Or find the scars of a previous working.

  Lars struck off in the opposite direction. They met on the far side, having seen nothing to indicate this canyon was the one they were looking for.

  "Shall we go left or right?" Lars asked as they got back into the sled.

  "Off the top of my head! Right!" Killashandra said after a moment's sober thought. "Not that that's any indication."

  But she turned out to be correct—for in the narrow ravine to the right of their first landing they came across evidence of cutting.

  "I'd know our style anywhere," Lars said.

  "You mean yours," she replied, settling in to another of their long debates as they returned to the sled and unpacked their sonic cutters.

  "We'd do better if we waited until the sun hits them," Lars said.

  "No better or no worse. Hit a C."

  Inhaling deeply, he sang a fine powerful true mid-C, his eyes sparkling at her, daring her as he so often did. She sang out a third above his note, as powerfully as he had. Sound bounced back at them, making them both flinch at the undertones.

  "Some of it's cracked," Killa said but, as one, they both moved toward the resonating point. "Green, from the power in its echo."

  "I told you I remembered where we'd cut green."

  Once at the side of the ravine, they sang the pitch notes again and set their cutters to the sound. Killa indicated the cut she would make and set herself for the first wrenching scream of cut crystal. No sooner had she set the cutter than Lars set his a handspan to the right.

  The first set cleared away the imperfect crystal to reveal a wide vein of fine green.

  "Shards, but those Apharians are going to be furious when they hear about this," she said, slicing away additional marred quartz.

  "What'll we try for?"

  "Comunit sizes, of course," she said with a snort.

  Once the debris cleared, they sang again in case they had to retune the cutters, but Lars's C and her E rang clearly back at them. Together they placed their cutter edges and, taking a simultaneous breath, turned on the power.

  Chapter 5

  Darkness forced them to stop with twelve fine crystals cut and stored in the padded carrier case carefully strapped in the cargo bay. Quietly, from the ease of long practice, they made a meal and ate it. Then, continuing their rituals, they washed—there would come days when crystal song would override such habits. While Lars made entries in the sled's log, Killashandra pulled down their double bunk and got out the quilts. They were both ready to settle at the same time.

  The morning sun, stroking the Ranges awake, provided an alarm no singer could resist: the insidious chiming of crystal as the first rays dispelled the chill of night. The notes were random, pure sound, for only perfect crystal could speak on sunlight. The ringing stirred senses and awoke desires as it grew louder and more insistent. Killashandra and Lars simultaneously turned to each other. She could see his smile in the shadowy cabin and answered it, lifting her arm to his shoulders, eager for the touch of his bare skin against hers. It seemed to Killashandra that as their lips met an arpeggio rippled through the air, excitingly sensual, deliciously caressing, ending on a clear high C that shivered over them just as their bodies joined.

  This was the real reason men and women sang crystal together—to hear such music, to experience such sensations and such ecstasy as only crystal could awaken on bright clear mornings. Such unions made up for all the mundane squabbles and recriminations between partners when crystal cracked or splintered and a whole day's work might lie in shards at their feet. There was always the prospect of the incredible combination of sound and sensation in sunlit crystal to reanimate their relationship.

  "We must get moving, Sunny," Lars murmured, making an effort to move. Too languorous with remembered passion, Killashandra murmured a throaty denial and shaded her eyes from the sun splashing into the cabin.

  "C'mon now. Hell, we'll be having a spate of good clear weather," he said, pushing her toward the edge of the bunk. "We can afford to do a little work today. I'll start breakfast. Your turn in the head."

  He used the light jocular tone that he knew Killashandra would accept. As she rose and stretched luxuriously, she glanced enticingly over her shoulder at him.

  "That won't work on me today, Sunny," he said wryly and gave her a slap across the buttock. Sometimes the sight of her at full stretch was enough to tempt him, despite the fact that they both knew a repeat performance once the sun had risen would be less satisfying than the first.

  She strutted sensually across to the head, flirting with him, but he only laughed and stuck his right leg into his coverall, pulling the garment up past his unresponsive member. She grabbed up her own clothes and slid open the door. As he took his turn, she finished making the substantial breakfast they would need to fuel them for working crystal all day. On clear days, singers rarely stopped to eat, cutting as long as there was light enough to see where to place their blades.

  Killashandra recalled, without remembering when, that there had been a time or two when she had cut throughout a double-moon night: the times when she had struggled to cut enough to afford passage off the fardling planet to get some respite from crystal song.

  They had been profitably working that vein for five days when Killashandra's weather sense began to pluck at her consciousness.

  "Storm?" Lars knew her so well.

  She nodded, and set her cutter for a new level. "Not to worry yet."

  "Nardy hell, Killa, we've got eight crates of the stuff. No sense in taking a risk. And the marker's new enough to draw us right back here after the storm."

  "We've time. Sing out," she told him in a tone that was half command, half plea. "Greens aren't easy to find, and I'm not about to quit when there's still time to cut. The storm could ruddy well splinter this vein to nothing good enough to spit at."

  Lars regarded her levelly. "Just let's not cut it too fine!"

  "I wouldn't let you get storm-crazed, lover."

  "I'm counting on it. I think this tier's going to be minor key," he added, humming a B-flat and hearing the same tone murmur back at h
im.

  "I'll make mine E, or would A be better?"

  He nodded crisp agreement for the A, and they sang, cutting as soon as they heard the answering notes the crystal flung back at them, its own death knell.

  But storm sense caught at Killashandra again, not long after they had crated the nine crystals of that cutting.

  "I think we're going," she told him, hefting the cutter in one hand and bending her knees to take one handle of the crate. He did the same, and she set a rapid pace back to the sled. As Lars settled the crate into its strappings, Killa racked up both cutters and took the pilot's seat, closing hatches and starting up the engines.

  Lars peered out of the window of the right-hand side and muttered a curse. "Angle of the wall's wrong. Can't see anything. Where's it coming from?"

  "South." Just then the weather-alert klaxon cut in. It got one hoot out before her hand closed the toggle.

  "You're ahead of the best technology the Guild can beg, borrow, or steal, aren't you?" Lars grinned at her, proud of her ability.

  "Yup!"

  "Don't get cocky."

  "It's going to be a bad one, too." She shifted uneasily in the seat, her bones already responding to the distant stroking of the crystal. "I swear, the longer I cut, the more sensitive I get to the intensity of weather systems."

  "Saves our skins, and our crystal."

  She lifted the sled vertically, and as they rose above the sheltering walls of the ravine, storm clouds could be seen as a smudge of dark, roiling gray on the horizon. She veered the sled about to port and lifted above the higher cliffs, hovering just briefly over their paint mark, satisfied that it would survive this storm and a few more before wind-carried abrasives scoured the rock clean again.

  They were nearly out of the Ranges when their comunit lit up.

  "Mayday, Mayday," cried a frantic voice.

  "Mayday? What the—" she demanded indignantly, leaning to one side to close the connection.

  Lars's hand masked the plate. "That's Bollam's voice."

  "Bollam?" Killashandra stared at him in puzzlement: the name meant nothing to her.

  "Lanzecki's new partner," Lars muttered, and responded. "Yes, Bollam?"

  "It's Lanzecki, I can't get him to stop!"

  "Take the crystal out of his hand," Killashandra said angrily. It irritated her that she still couldn't place this Bollam fellow.

  "He's not holding crystal. He's cutting and he won't stop. He won't listen. He's—he's thralled!"

  "You dork, of course he is, that's why he doesn't cut often. It's your job to stop him. That's why he takes a partner into the Ranges," Lars replied, his tone still reasonable.

  "But I've tried, I've tried everything. He's bigger than I am!" Bollam's voice had turned to a distressed whine.

  "Knock his feet out from under him," Lars said, concern deepening in his expression.

  "I tried that, too."

  "Cross-cut with your cutter. Tune it off-pitch, queer his note," Killa roared, becoming more incensed with this dork's stupidity. Where had Lanzecki found such an ineffectual partner?

  "I can't. I don't know how to cross-cut. This is my first time in the Ranges. He was shepherding me!" Now there was grievance and indignation in Bollam's voice. That particular tone triggered the appropriate memory in Killashandra's mind: it was exactly how Bollam had sounded when he couldn't find the Apharian files.

  "So this is why Bollam suited him," Killashandra said, bitter with realization of exactly what Lanzecki was doing.

  Lars stared at her, jerking her arm to pull her around to face him. "Turn the sled. We've got to try."

  "No." She reset her hands on the yoke, gritting her teeth against the pain that suddenly scored her and the tears that threatened to blind her. "No, we can't! Rules and Regs! Mayday means nothing on Ballybran!"

  " Nothing?" Lars roared at her. "Lanzecki's been our friend, your lover! How can you abandon him?"

  "I'm not abandoning him," Killashandra shrieked back, glaring her anger, her hurt, the pain of knowing what Lanzecki wanted! "Get out of there, Bollam," she bellowed at the comunit. "Save your own skin. You can't save his."

  "But I can't just leave!" Bollam sounded shocked, horrified at this heartless advice. "He's the Guild Master. It's my duty . . ."

  "There is no such duty in the Rules and Regs, Bollam. There never was and there never will be. Get out of there, Bollam, while you still can. Leave Lanzecki."

  "I don't believe I'm hearing you say this," Lars cried.

  She swiveled around at him, tears streaming down her face, her throat closing so that she was momentarily deprived of speech.

  "He wants it this way," she managed to choke out. Then she swallowed hard on her grief and glared straight into Lars's appalled face. "Consider, Lars, would there be any other logical reason why Lanzecki would team up with a dork like Bollam? A novice in the Ranges? Physically too weak to knock him out of thrall? We haven't the right to interfere. We owe Lanzecki his choice."

  She hooked her elbows through the yoke so that Lars would have to break her arms to get control of the sled. But he didn't try. He sat staring at her as she sent the sled roaring out of the Range, using every ounce of power in its powerful new engines.

  "Lanzecki intended to opt out?"

  "Singers have that option, Lars," she said in a voice as low as his. Her throat thickened again, her eyes stinging with tears. It was a hard reality to accept, but she didn't doubt for a moment—now—that that had been Lanzecki's intention. She could even hear his deep voice replying to her puzzled query about Bollam: that the man had his uses. She ought to have known what Lanzecki was about and tried to—tried to what? Talk a tired man out of ending a life that had grown too tedious with responsibility, too tiresome with problems, too lonely with his longtime partner dead? "He's been Guild Master for centuries."

  Lars was silent until, behind them, they could both hear storm wail creeping inexorably nearer.

  "Then is that also why he was so intent on me understanding Guild politics?" Lars asked, softly, shakily.

  "What do you mean by that?" she demanded.

  "I'm not sure I know," Lars replied, raising his hands in doubt. "It was just that—well, Lanzecki knew you and—whenever we were in from the Ranges, he sought out our company, but I always thought it was you . . ." His voice trailed off.

  "Don't get any ideas, Lars Dahl," she said coldly, harshly. "You may be a Milekey Transition . . ."

  "So are you."

  "But there's no way I'd be Guild Master." She glared at him, willing him to respond in the same vein. "Damn it, Lars, you're my partner. And there's a lot more to being Guild Master than understanding the politics of the job."

  "That is true enough," he replied in a muted voice, his eyes looking directly ahead as they passed over the last hills before the Cube.

  The flight officer signaled them to park their sled near Sorting with the other half-dozen vehicles that had fled the storm. Killashandra killed the engines and turned to Lars.

  "Start with the crates, will you? I'll report," she said bleakly.

  "I will, if you want me to," Lars offered, suddenly human again in his unexpressed sympathy.

  "No, I was pilot."

  The flight officer, a lanky lean man whom Killashandra didn't recognize at all, was trotting in her direction, signaling her to wait for him.

  "Were you within range of Bollam? The one Lanzecki was shepherding?"

  "Yes," Killashandra said so flatly that the man blinked in surprise. "He couldn't break Lanzecki out of thrall. We told him to get the hell out of the Ranges."

  "You mean . . .?"

  The cargo officer arrived at that point, her face grim.

  "I mean Lanzecki chose!" She dared the flight officer to argue her point.

  "You're sure, Killa?" the cargo officer asked.

  Killashandra rounded on her, away from the accusing eyes of the flight officer.

  "Why else would he choose a dork like Bollam? And a novice? Too inexper
ienced to know how to break thrall and too physically insignificant to be a threat!"

  The cargo officer bowed her head, her eyes closed.

  "I don't understand . . . Were you near enough, Killashandra Ree, to reach them in time?" the flight officer demanded.

  "I accepted Lanzecki's choice. You'd better."

  With that Killashandra turned on her heel, returning to her sled at a pace that was nearly a run. Behind her she could hear the flight officer arguing with Cargo, whose low and curt rejoinders told Killashandra that she, at least, accepted Lanzecki's option.

  As she helped her silent partner unload their cut, she knew that Lars's feelings about that option were ambivalent. The news seemed to seep through from the Hangar into Sorting, and conversations were muted, arguments over crystal prices conducted in low tones. When the Sorter told them how much they had earned for the green, Killashandra felt none of the elation such a figure should have elicited. Lars only arched his eyebrows, nodded acknowledgement and turned away. The Sorter shrugged. Dully, Killashandra followed Lars to the lifts. She did listen to the Met report that was being broadcast, even in the lifts, since weather had top priority with most singers. Nothing was said about missing sleds. Nothing ever was.

  "That's a relief," Killashandra muttered as the report concluded. The storm had been one of those quick squalls, fierce in its brief life, its only damage that of taking Lanzecki's life in its fury. "We can be back out in the Ranges by tomorrow evening."

  "Fardles! Killa." Lars rounded on her. "Lanzecki's not even found and—"

  Her livid expression stopped his words. "The sooner I'm in the Ranges, the sooner I'll forget."

  "Forget Lanzecki?" Lars was stunned.

  "Forget! Forget!" The lift door opened, and she ran down the hall to their apartment. She heard him following her and wasn't even grateful.

  As she slammed into their quarters, she heard the radiant fluid slopping into the tub. Pulling off her coverall and boots, she stumbled into the room and clambered into the bath. The fluid was no more than calf-deep, so she stood under the spigot and let it roll down her back and shoulders. Dimly she heard Lars's voice, updating his records. She began to curse, so she couldn't possibly hear a word he said.