‘I can’t say “so soon?”‘ Killashandra said with a light laugh- ’But isn’t the decision sudden?’
He gave her an odd smile. ‘Yes, but most of my decisions are, aren’t they? Like showing you another side of fusty fogey Fuerte.’
‘And now our idyll is over?’ She tried to sound nonchalant but an edge crept into her voice.
‘I must return to Ballybran. Ha, that sounds like one of those fisherfolk songs, doesn’t it?’ He hummed a banal tune, the melody so predictable she could join in firm harmony.
‘We do make beautiful music together,’ he said, his eyes mocking her. ‘I suppose you’ll go back to music now.’
‘Doing what?’ she asked. ‘Lead soprano for the chorus of some annotated, orchestrated grunts and groans by Fififididipidi of the planet Grnch?’
‘You could tune crystals. They obviously need a competent one at your spaceport.’
She made a rude noise in her throat and looked at him expectantly.
He smiled back, turning his head politely awaiting her verbal answer.
‘Or,’ she said in a drawl, watching him obliquely, ‘I could apply to the Heptite Guild as a crystal singer.’
His expression went blank. ‘You don’t want to be a crystal singer.’
‘How do you know what I want?’ She flared up in spite of herself, in spite of a gnawing uncertainty about his feelings for her. She might be fine to loll about on a sandy beach, but as a constant companion in a dangerous profession?
He smiled sadly. ‘You don’t want to be a crystal singer.’
‘Oh, fardles with that nonsense in the print out!’
‘They mean what they say.’
‘Then if I’ve perfect pitch, I can apply.’
‘You don’t know what you’re getting in for.’ He said that in a flat, toneless voice, his expression at once wary and forbidding. ‘Singing crystal is a terrible, lonely life. You can’t always find someone to sing with you, the tones don’t always strike the right vibes for the crystals. You do make terrific cuts singing duo.’ He seemed to vacillate.
‘How do you find out?’
He gave an unamused snort. ‘The hard way, of course. But you don’t want to be a crystal singer.’
There was an almost frightening sadness in his voice. ‘Once you sing crystal, you don’t stop. That’s why I urge you not to consider it.’
‘So you’ve urged me not to consider it.’
He caught her hand. ‘You’ve never been in a mach storm in the Milekeys,’ he said, his voice rough with remembered anxiety. ‘They blow up out of nowhere,’ he gestured vigorously, ‘and crash down on you like all hell let loose.’ She felt the tremor through his body into her hand. ‘That’s what that phrase means, “the Guild maintains its own.” A mach storm can reduce a man to a vegetable in one sonic crescendo.’
‘There are other - albeit less violent - ways of reducing a man to a vegetable,’ she said, thinking of the attendant in the restaurant, of the bustling supercargo worrying over drone-pod weights, of teachers apathetically reviewing the scales of novice students. ‘Surely there are instruments that warn you of approaching storms, even mach ones in a crystal range.’
He nodded. ‘But you get to cutting crystal, and you’re halfway through, you know the pitches will be changed once the storm has passed and you’re cutting your safety margin fine but that last crystal might mean you get off-world ...’
‘You don’t get off-world with every trip to the ranges?’
He shook his head. ‘You don’t always clear the costs of the trip, particularly if you cut the wrong shape or tone.’
‘As you said, you have to pay attention to the news and outguess what’ll be needed.’ She was serenely confident that she could master that facet of the new profession.
‘You have to remember the news,’ he said, oddly emphasizing the change of verb.
Killashandra was contemptuous of such a lapse. Memory was only a matter of habit, of training, of handy mnemonic phrases which easily triggered vital information.
‘You wouldn’t by any chance let me go back to Ballybran with you to see if I can join that chorus?’
His hand on hers, his body, even his breath, seemed to halt for a moment. ‘You asked. Remember that!’
‘Well, if my company is so -’
‘Kiss me and don’t say anything you’ll regret,’ he said, abruptly pulling her with rough urgency into his arms and kissing her so thoroughly she couldn’t speak.
The second convulsion caught him so soon after the climax of their love-making that she thought, guiltily, that overstimulation was the cause. The spasms were even more severe and he dropped into an exhausted sleep when they finally eased.
He looked old and drawn when he woke some fourteen hours later. And he moved like an advanced geriatric case.
‘I’ve got to get back to Ballybran, Killa.’
‘For treatment?’
He hesitated and then nodded. ‘Get the spaceport on the comunit and book us.’
‘Us?’
‘You may come with me,’ he said, nodding, though she was piqued at the phrasing and the invitation was more plea than permission. ‘I don’t care how often we have to reroute. Get us there as fast as possible.’
She got the spaceport and routing, and, after what seemed an age and considerable ineptitude on the part of the ticketing clerk, they were confirmed passengers on a shuttle flight leaving Fuerte in four hours, with a four hour satellite wait before the first liner due to relay in their direction.
There were a good deal of oddments to pack and Killashandra was for just walking out and leaving everything.
‘You don’t get such goods on Ballybran, Killa,’ Carrik told her, and began, slowly, to fold the bright gaudy shirts of a pounded tree fibre. The stimulus of confirmed passage had given him a surge of energy. But Killashandra had been rather unnerved by the transformation of a charming, vital, if domineering man, into a frail shadow. ‘Sometimes, something as flimsy as a shirt helps you remember so much.’
She was touched by the sentiment, and vowed to be kinder to him.
‘There are hazards to every profession. And the hazards to crystal singing-’
‘It depends on what you’re willing to consider a hazard,’ Killashandra replied, soothingly. She was glad to take along the filmy wraparounds in luminous dyes. They were a far cry from coarse durable student issue. Any hazard seemed a fair price for these bouts of high living. And only four hundred twenty-five in the Guild.
‘Do you really understand what you’d be giving up, Killashandra?’ His voice had a guilty edge.
She looked at his lined, aging face and did experience a twinge of honest apprehension. Anyone would look appalling after the convulsions which had racked him. She didn’t much care for Carrik in a philosophical vein and hoped he wasn’t so dreary all the time back on Ballybran. Was that what he meant? A man on holiday was often a different personality to a man at work?
‘What have I to look forward to on Fuerte?’ She asked with a shrug of her shoulders. She wouldn’t necessarily have to team up with Carrik once she got to Ballybran. ‘I’d rather take a chance no matter what it entails in preference to dragging about on Fuerte!’
He stroked her palm with his thumb and, for the first time, the caress didn’t send thrills up her spine but then, he was scarcely in a condition to make love and the gesture reflected that.
‘You’ve only seen the glamorous side of crystal singing ...’
‘You’ve told me of the dangers, Carrik, as you’re supposed to. The decision is mine. And I’m holding you to it.’
He gripped her hand tightly and there was a sort of gladness in his eyes that reassured her more thoroughly than any glib phrase.