“What lies has he been feeding you about crystal singing?” What glamorous tales has he used to lure you there?''
Valdi whirled toward Killashandra, his stocky figure trembling with outrage.
“I asked to go.”
Valdi's wild expression hardened into disbelief at her calm answer.
“You asked to go?”
“Yes. He didn't ask me.” She caught Carrik's smile.
“You heard her, Valdi,” Carrik said, then glanced at the officials witnessing the admission.
The maestro's shoulders sagged. “So, he's done his recruiting with a master's skill.” His tone registered resignation, he even managed to effect a slight break in his voice.
“I don't think so,” Killashandra said.
Maestro Valdi inhaled deeply, obviously to support one last attempt to dissuade the misguided girl. “Did he tell you about . . . the mach storms?”
She nodded, hiding her amusement at his theatricality.
“The storms that scramble the brain and reduce the mind to a vegetable existence?”
She nodded dutifully.
“Did he fill your mind with garbage about mountains returning symphonies of sound? Crystalline choruses? Valleys that echo arpeggios?” His body rippled upward in an effort to express the desired effect of ridicule.
“No,” she replied in a bored tone. “Nor did he feed me pap that all I needed was hard work and time.”
Esmond Valdi, maestro, drew himself up, more than ever in an exaggeration of a classical operatic pose.
“Did he also tell you that once you start cutting crystal, you can never stop? And that staying too long away from Ballybran produces disastrous convulsions?”
“I know that.”
«Do you also know» – Valdi rocked back on his heels – «that something in the water of Ballybran, in its very soil, in those crystals, affects your mind? That you don't re-mem-ber?» He separated the verb carefully into syllables.
“That could be a distinct advantage,” Killashandra replied, staring back at the little man until he broke eye contact.
She was the first of the three to feel a peculiar itch behind her ears in the mastoid bone; an itch that rapidly became a wrenching nauseating pain. She grabbed Carrik by the arm just as the subsonic noise touched him and as Esmond Valdi lifted protecting hands to his ears.
“The fools!” Carrik cried as panic contorted his features. He threw aside the door panel, running as fast as he could for the control-tower entrance. Killashandra scurried after him.
Carrik vaulted the decorative barrier and landed in a restricted area, where he was deterred by a hastily engaged force curtain. “Stop it! Stop it!” he screamed, rocking in anguish and clawing at the curtain, oblivious to the sparks flying from his fingers.
Though the pain was no less bearable for Killashandra, she had presence of mind enough to bang on the nearest communit, to strike the fire buttons, press the battery of emergency signals. «The shuttle coming in – something's wrong – it's dangerous!» she yelled at the top of her operatically trained lungs. She was barely conscious of the panic in the vast reception hall resulting from her all too audible warning.
The possibility of a stampede by a hysterical mob was evident to those in the control tower, where someone, in reflex action, slapped on the abort signal to warn off all intransit craft. Moments later, while the communit demanded an explanation from Killashandra or from anyone who could make himself heard over the bedlam in the reception area, a nova blossomed in the sky and rained molten fragments on the spaceport below. The control tower was unable to contain the destruction within the grappling field, and soon parts of the shuttle were scattered over several kilometers of the Port Authority and the heavily populated business district.
Apart from bruises, lacerations, and a broken arm, there were only two serious casualties. A technician on the tarmac was killed, and Carrik would have been better off dead. The final sonic blast knocked him unconscious, and he never did fully recover his senses After subspace consultation with Heptite Guild medics, it was decided to return him to Ballybran for treatment and care.
“He won't recover,” the medic told Killashandra, where-upon Maestro Valdi instantly assumed the role of her comforter. His manner provided Killashandra with a fine counter irritant to her shock over Carrik's condition.
She chose to disbelieve the medic's verdict. Surely, Carrik could be restored to mental health once he was returned to Ballybran. He had been away from crystal too long; he was weakened by the seizures. There'd been no mach storm to scramble his mind. She'd escort him back to Ballybran. She owed him that in any reckoning for showing her how to live fully.
She took a good look at the posturing Valdi and thanked her luck that Carrik had been there to awaken her senses. How could she have believed that such an artificial life as found in the theater was suitable for her?" Just look at Valdi! Present him with a situation, hand him the cue, and he was "on," in the appropriate role. None existed for these circumstances, so Valdi was endeavoring to come up with a suitable one.
“What will you do now, Killashandra?” he asked somberly, obviously settling for Dignified Elder Gentleman Consoling the Bereaved Innocent.
“I'll go with him to Ballybran, of course.”
Valdi nodded solemnly. “I mean, after you return.”
“I don't intend to return.”
Valdi stared at her, dropping out of character, and then gestured theatrically as the air-cushion stretcher to which Carrik was strapped drifted past them to the shuttle gate.
“After that?” Valdi cried, full of dramatic plight.
“That won't happen to me,” she said confidently.
“But it could! You, too, could be reduced to a thing with no mind and no memories.”
“I think,” Killashandra said slowly, regarding the posturing little man with thinly veiled contempt, “that everyone's brains get scrambled one way or another.”
"You'll rue this day – " Valdi began, raising his left arm in a classical gesture of rejection, fingers gracefully spread.
“That is, if I remember it!” she said. Her mocking laughter cut him off midscene.
Still laughing, Killashandra made her exit, stage center, through the shuttle gate.
CHAPTER 3
Captain Andurs alerted Killashandra when the ship emerged from hyper-space and Ballybran was fully visible.
“Good view,” he told her, pointing to the two inner moons, positioned at 10 and 5, but Killashandra only had eyes for the mysterious planet.
She had heard enough to expect just about anything from her first glimpse. Consequently she experienced an initial disappointment – until she caught sight of the first crystal glare: a piercing stab of light as the sun's rays reflected from an open crystal on one of the three visible continents. Cloud cover swirled across most of the ocean area, occluded two subcontinents in the Southern Hemisphere, but where the sun shone, occasional pinpoints of blinding light were visible – light that was all color, yet white and clear.
“How can they stand the intensity down there?” she demanded, squinting to reduce the keen glare.
“According to what I hear, you don't notice it on the surface.”
“According to what I hear” had prefaced most of Captain Andurs' statements about Ballybran, a sour comment on the restriction against his landing on one of the richest planets in the galaxy.
From fellow passengers and garrulous crew members, Killashandra had gleaned additional information about Crystal Singers and Ballybran, a lot of which she discounted since most merely paraphrased Maestro Valdi's comments. Andurs, despite his limited first-hand knowledge, had proved to be the most informative. He had been on the space run from Regulus to Ballybran for nine standard years and was always listening, so he had heard more than anyone else – certainly more than she had been able to extract from the cryptic vidifax of the three ships she had traveled on during the voyage. There was something mysterious about Ballybran and the Heptite Guild and its members – a mystery that she deduced from what wasn't said about those three subjects. Individuals had privacy; so did certain aspects of any interstellar mercantile company, and one understood that references to certain planetary resources were understated or omitted. But the lack of routinely available printout on Ballybran, the Guild, and its select members doubled her suspicions.