Killashandra experienced a certain rush of elation as she guided her flitter up over the Guild field, dipping eastward to follow Ardlor’s brightly striped flyer.
There were five crystal-bearing areas on Ballybran, the largest of which was whimsically named Milekey Mountains. Various theories circulated as to why: the most popular was ascribed to the discoverer of the Ballybran crystal (whose name no one ever remembered). It was bruited about that he’d ventured a mile into the range before he’d notice the crystal, the planet’s unsuspected treasure.
Now, Ardlor and Killashandra penetrated a hundred and fifty kilometers into the Milekeys. Then Ardlor turned, speeding suddenly as if trying to lose her. One good look at the ripples of apparently identical deep troughs and canyons, and Killashandra wanted to be nearer him, who knew, presumably, where he was going.
“Stupid twit’s forgotten I’m supposed to be with him,” she muttered grimly and steeled herself for a chase.
Ardlor was a wild flitter-pilot and she was hard pressed to keep him in her viewplate as he swerved and tumbled deep into this canyon, zooming up, out and over into a still darker gorge so that she almost lost sight of him a couple of times in the shadows. Only the sun’s telltale refraction on his bumble-bee striped flitter cued her as to his whereabouts.
At length he settled to a ledge, barely big enough for the two flitters.
“Why are you following me? Claim-jumpers are fined to the fullest extent, Section 2, Paragraph 3. You’ll not get credit from my hard work!” He was jumping up and down in rage as she emerged exhausted from her flitter.
With a desperate and totally uncharacteristic display of diplomacy, she got Ardlor to switch on the Playback. She soothed him further with an exceptional feast from her own galley.
“Well, you’ve got to remember that you can’t stay here all the time,” Ardlor finally said, demurring, once the Playback proved to him he’d agreed to shepherd her. “Two days and then you’ll have to go the next range over. And if you ever. . . .”
“Section 2, Paragraph 3. I won’t claim-jump,” she vowed earnestly. “Not that I’d ever be able to find my way back here anyhow. I was so busy keeping you in my sights, how could I remember directional changes?”
Ardlor grumbled but that admission pacified him as much as the well-cooked food.
Flitters were equipped with tracking devices and homing signals. Traditional compasses, excellent guides on most Earth-type planets, tended to be unreliable on Ballybran: something to do with the storms and the crystal and the absence of much heavy metal in the planet’s crust. A directional finder could have been further developed to surmount such problems, but the crystal singers raised such a fuss about how that would facilitate claim-jumping that the research was abandoned. After all, the singer could get home on the directional finder and if he were “gone,” the Guild Cruiser could locate him.
As Killashandra was to discover, instinct caused something to blossom in the inner ear that enabled a singer to find his or her way back to a lode they’d once cut . . . some familiar note in the special crystalline chorus.
For the hills did sing back at you, in harmony, counterpoint or descant. Sing out a note and the whole side of a canyon answered you, ringing up and down the valley; velvet in the unseen shadowy depths that the sun might never lighten; high, clear, sweet on the crest of the ridges.
Nighttime was an exquisite pain of beautiful sound as the crystal sang and cried in the cooling air, diminishing to pianissimo multiple-part harmonies, so gentle the whisper was a mere caress in the blood.
“Crystal song is addictive and exhausting,” Killashandra announced (softly—so as not to start echoes) to herself on the fourth morning. She’d managed to sleep that night by wearing the padded helmet and closing the flitter’s ports.
She’d stayed beside Ardlor the first two days, watching him closely and noticing his mistakes, too, though he didn’t appear to note his errors in judgment. She did remind him about rose quartz in octagons and he thanked her gratefully the first nineteen times. After that he’d sullenly told her as he’d obstinately cut another tetrahedron that he’d been cutting crystal for longer than she’d been alive and she’d better mind her own business.
The third day she took his advice and hopped her flitter over not one but two ridges. Someone had worked this mountain before. She could see the old cuts, now wind-beveled and roughened by bombardment of shard and dirt.
Despite her self-confidence, Killashandra could not keep her hand from shaking as she held the supersonic cutter, preparatory to making her debut as a crystal singer. She took a good deep breath or two, pressed against her diaphragm and let an A-sharp above middle C emerge from her throat.
Instantly she was bombarded with echoes. It was one thing to listen to Ardlor making crystal sing, another to hear your own note bounce back at you from all sides. Slightly sour to the left, her ear told her, but true and pure directly in front of her where the rock face was scarred by old cuttings.
“Octagons,” she told herself firmly and made the first cut.
Crystal cries! A dissonance like no other, a complaint of an agony so primitive that it shook Killashandra to the roots of her teeth. She was so startled by the unexpected “pain” that she froze, and the agony turned to pure sound, as clear as the note she then hurriedly tuned on the cutter.
As she’d been forewarned, it was different cutting live crystal and different when your hand was guiding the cutter, and your bones echoed the sound. She excised the octagon from the quartz face, pared the outer sides and turned off the cutter. Almost reverently she held the finished prism in her hands. Reverberations from the cut-echoes vibrated against her flesh and she experienced a genuine awe for the dazzling object she had wrested from such a dull womb. Sunlight coruscated from all faces. The last thrum of sound was absorbed in her skin and yet Killashandra could not part with this, her first crystal song.
How long she stood musing over her handiwork she never knew, but a cloud passing over the sun roused her to sensations of cold and hunger. As much because she was yearning to repeat this magical rapport with her victims, Killashandra forced herself instead to eat and find a heavier jacket. She remembered the storm alarms. They were comfortably inactive.
She approached her second cut with more confidence, working about the first incision. This crystal sounded true, a third higher, and the finished octagon was smaller. But the experience of cutting, of holding the finished crystal like a warm pulsing rock-heart in her hand, was as exquisitely beautiful.
She’d cut only four crystals by the time the range began its night song. She puzzled over this phenomenon, having watched Ardlor cut thirty and more crystals as large or larger in a single day. She wondered if she was working too slowly, though she had no sense of slacking, knowing herself to be manually dextrous.
She was forced to the conclusion that she must be spending an inordinate amount of time communing with the finished prism. She took herself sternly to task the second morning and determinedly placed each crystal in the protective casing as soon as she made the final slice.
Obviously she’d lost hours of time in the sensual contemplation of her handiwork for that day she cut 19 rose quartz octagons in A-sharp or higher, triumphantly finishing the day with a five-tone dominant of matched rose crystal.
She woke in the night, suddenly, an odd apprehension driving sleep from her mind. Uneasily she checked the crystal, wondering if something might be causing them to sing, but the smooth sides were silent when she flicked back the protective sheathings.