She looked at him a long moment. “I think ...” she began, pausing as she voiced an opinion that had been subconscious till that moment, “... you remind me too much of someone I’ve been trying to forget.”
“Oh, just remind you?” Shamus’ voice was soft and coaxing, almost like Tucker’s. She put that young man firmly out of her mind.
“Not to worry, Shamus. The resemblance is purely superficial.”
His eyes twinkled merrily and Killashandra realized that the resemblance had been indeed purely superficial, for the other man would have responded with dark suspicion and urgent questions she’d have left unanswered purely to annoy him more.
“So, dark and mysterious lady, when you get to know me better. ...”
“Let me get to know you better first.”
They flitted back to Trefoil, circling over quays empty of any fishing craft.
“Lunk is moving offshore,” Shamus said. “Season’s about over, I’d say.”
“Does Tucker have enough for a ticket-off?”
“I wouldn’t know.” Shamus was busy landing. “But Tir needs one more good haul. And so, I suspect, does Skipper Garnsey. They’ll track school as far as there’s trace before they head in.”
Which was the substance of the message left for Shamus at the Golden Dolphin. So Killashandra, Shamus, and Biyanco talked most of the evening with damned few other drinkers at the bar.
That was why Killashandra got an invitation to go with Biyanco fruit-harvesting. “Land fruit for harmat,” Biyanco said with an odd shudder.
Shamus laughed and called him an incorrigible lubber. “Biyanco swears he’s never touched sea-fruit in his life.”
“Never have been that poor,” Biyanco said with some dignity.
The brewman roused her before dawn, his tractor purring outside her veranda. She dressed in the overall he’d advised and the combi-boots, and braided her hair tightly to her skull on the outward leg of their trip.
Trefoil nestled on the curved sands of a giant horseshoe bay, foothills at its back. Rain forests that were all but impenetrable swept up the hills, sending rank streamers across the acid road in vain attempts to cover that man-made tunnel into the drier interior.
Biyanco was amiable company, quiet at times, garrulous but interesting at others. He stopped off on the far side of the first range of foothills for lorries and climbers. None of the small boys and girls looked old enough, Killashandra thought, to be absent from schooling. All carried knives half again as long as their legs from sheaths thong-tied to their backs. All wore the coveralls and combi-boots with spurred clamp-ons for tree-climbing.
They chattered and sang, dangling their legs from the lorries as the tractor churned through the acid road. Occasionally one of them would wield his knife, chopping an impertinent streamer that clasped itself to a lorry.
Biyanco climbed farther above sea level by the winding acid road until he finally slowed down, peering at the roadside. Five kilometers later he let out an exclamation and veered the tractor to the left, his hands busy with dials and switches. A warning hoot brought every climber’s legs back into the lorries. Flanges, tilting downward, appeared along the lorry loadbeds and acid began to drip from this shield. Acid sprayed out, arcing well past the tractor’s leading edge, dissolving vegetations. Suddenly the tractor’s treads locked and ground on metal. Biyanco pushed a few toggles, closed a switch, and suddenly the tractor purred smoothly along the hidden track.
“Own this side of the mountain, you know,” Biyanco said, glancing at Killashandra to see the effect of his announcement. “Ah, you thought I was only a barman, didn’t you? Surprised you, didn’t I? Ha.” The little man was pleased.
“You did.”
“I’ll surprise you more before the day is over.”
Which he did, sprier than she’d ever thought him, and elated with his success. She was glad for his sake and somewhat puzzled on her own account. He was adept enough so that she ought to have enjoyed it, too. Was there crystal in her soul, after all? Was she too old to love?
They’d reached their destination, a permaformed clearing with acid-roofed buildings that housed his processing unit and temporary living quarters. The climbers he’d escorted went farther on, sending the lorries off on automated tracks, six climbers to each lorry. They’d evidently climbed for him before and in the teams they now assembled, for he gave a minimum of instruction before dismissing them to pick.
Then he’d shown Killashandra into the processing plant and explained the works succinctly.
Each of the teams worked a different fruit, he told her. The secret of good harmat lay in the careful proportions and blending of dead ripe fruit. There were as many blends of harmat as there were fish in the sea. His had made the Golden Dolphin famous; that’s why so many Armaghans patronized the hostelry. None of this vapid, innocuous stuff came from his stills. Harmat took months to bring to perfection: the fruit he’d process today would not be fermented for nine months and would not be offered for sale for six years. Then he took her below ground, to the cool dark storage area, deep in the permaform. He showed her the automatic alarms if the vicious digger roots of the jungle ever penetrated the permaform, he wore a bleeper on his belt at all times (he never did remove the belt but it was made of soft tough fiber). He let her sample the brews and it amused her that he would sip abstemiously while filling her cup full. Because she liked him and she’d learned about harmat from him, she gradually imitated drunk.
He’d had a good deal of experience, Killashandra had to admit, and he tried his damnedest to bring her to pitch but the frequency was wrong, as it had been with Tir, would have been with Shamus, and this badly puzzled Killashandra. She ought not to have such trouble off-world.
While Biyanco slept, before the full lorries glided back to their clearing, she probed her patchy memory, again and again stopped by Larsdahl’s cynical laugh. Damn the man! He was haunting her even on Armagh. He had no right to taint everything she touched, every association she tried to enjoy. She could remember, too, enough snatches to know that her previous break had been as disastrous. Probably other breaks, too. In the quiet cool dark of the sleeping room, Biyanco motionless with exhaustion beside her, Killashandra bleakly cursed Larsdahl. For he’d sworn she would find fulfillment with no other lover if she left his bed. Laughing, she’d left him, sure then of herself where she was completely unsure now. “Crystal in her soul?”
Experimentally she ran her hand down her bare body, to the hard flesh of her thighs, the softness of her belly, her firm breasts. She’d had her children decades before, they’d be grown and parents. Maybe grandparents. You never conceived once you sang crystal. Small loss, she thought, and then, suddenly, wasn’t sure.
Damn, damn! Damn Larsdahl. She’d found the Milekey lode. She had the priority right. He couldn’t have mined it, he couldn’t sing the right resonances, he didn’t have the cutting skill for the light quartzes. She’d tried, grant her that, to show him but they’d crack, he simply hadn’t the sense of pitch. At least for rose crystal. And then he’d withheld the gift of peace from her body because she wouldn’t . . . because she couldn’t . . . teach him her trick of pitch.
“You have it or you haven’t, Larsdahl,” she’d told him, implored him, shouted at him. “You can’t be taught any more than you can teach crystal singing to the deaf! I can’t help you!’’
There’d been bitter recriminations, physical battles, because Larsdahl hadn’t wanted to let her go even after he’d jeopardized their partnership with his insistence. She’d had to invoke guild protection, something a crystal singer ought not to have to do. But it had sobered Larsdahl and he’d let her alone. Not entirely alone: there’d be the odd message from another singer. Or, the verbal communication for Lanzecki to pass on. Lanzecki ought to know better.