"Oh," Helva gasped. Her surmise that she was broadcasting to all the Aliothites, was confirmed as this new exclamation was repeated by the crowd. She had been mistaken for the voice of their Temple female.
Oblivious to the multi-vision, Helva stared at the cylindrical top of the Temple and recognized what she had not consciously identified before. The cylinder was a ship on its long axis, nose and fins buried in the lava of the old eruption. The Temple entrance was nothing more than an airlock, and by the entrance, Helva could trace the faintly visible designation of a Central Worlds brain ship.
As clear as the day she had heard it, the day Jennan had died, Helva recalled what Silvia had told her about another grief-stricken ship. This had to be the 732. And what better place to mourn than a red-dark violent world, so conducive to the immolation of grief? Or had the 732 aimed at the fiery maw of the erupting volcano and somehow been deflected from the seething cone at the last moment, lodged immovably in the lava-flow at its base? Had the 732 turned her tortured mind on the grim world and urged thousands to die in expiation for the death of her beloved?
The requirements of duty were suddenly lucid to Helva and the plans to discharge it sprang to mind. With the genius of sheer desperation, Helva began to sing, her voice a deep, caressing baritone, coloring her resonances with minor-keyed longing, suspending reason to the dictates of sheer instinct.
"Death is mine, mine forever," she intoned, repeating the phrase a third above as the responsive Aliothites chanted the first phrase in obedient mimicry. It was like having an incredibly well-rehearsed world-chorus at your disposal. Helva exploited the phenomenon ruthlessly.
"Sleep I cannot, rest eludes me." And down a fifth "Dreams to plague me, tortured I."
Up to an augmented seventh as the chorus chimed in on a dissonance, calculated to raise inner hackles and pierce the gut with longing.
"Let me sleep, let me rest, let me die."
Helva sang, her voice sliding into the edged timbre of a harsh, yearning tenor. Down again to the original musical phrase, but this time the baritone quality was tinged with scorn.
"Death is mine, mine forever. Let me sleep, let me rest, let me die."
The last word became a vibrant crescendo of derision, diminishing to a mocking whisper long after the supporting chorus had completed its cry on the augmented seventh.
"Cencom calling KH-834, will you acknowledge? ACKNOWLEDGE!" the hard official voice of Regulus Base Cencom broke through Helva's fantastic musical improvisation.
"Mayday, mayday," Helva replied in a jolting soprano on both tight beam and the Aliothite contact band. The chorus obediently shrilled out the resounding emergency challenge. Helva caught her breath as she saw Kira stagger with instinctive reaction to the cry.
"Mayday?" Cencom demanded. "You sent with a crafty fool Dylanizing on Alioth?"
With a shock, Helva realized that was exactly what she was doing, Dylanizing. Her appeal to Kira, though couched musically, the one medium with which she could hope to reach the entranced scout, had crystallized further into the subliminal form of a Dylanesque protest. Exultant, she knew how to manipulate this to her own ends. With a barely perceptible increase in tempo, she repeated her first phrase, no longer a longing legato, but a mocking staccato. As the chorus responded idiotically true to its model, she hurriedly reported to Cencom.
"Alioth's religious head is the rogue ship 732; the religious motivation is death!"
"The brawn, where is your brawn?" Cencom crackled.
"What is the release word for the 732?" Helva hissed, then chanted the second phrase of her Dylan, again picking up the tempo so that the beat as well as the sound had urgency to it.
"Report!" Cencom demanded.
"I don't have time to report, you nardy fool. The release word!" Helva snarled. She jumped her voice an octave and a half, switching registers to helden-tenor, her phrase ringing through the plaza in an arrow of sheer emotion, packed sound to pierce the trance of her scout.
Kira's guards were lurching now, half-dazed by the treacherous fumes that filled the plaza. They had Kira by the arms, and Helva, trapped in the background of the mighty chorus, couldn't tell whether they were restraining Kira or hanging onto her for support. The girl alone was unaffected by the hallucinogen.
"Let me sleep, let me rest, let me die!"
Helva's tenor rang, scornfully, lashing viciously at Kira's deathwish.
"You fool," Cencom said. "She wants to die!"
"GIVE ME THE RELEASE WORD!" Helva cried at the tight beam in a strident soprano, then projected her voice, bitterly powerful, angrily compelling, thundering the protest:
"Let me sleep, let me rest, let me die!"
The phrase echoed tauntingly through the plaza. The chorus, unable to imitate the incredible pitch of Helva's voice, dropped to the lower octave. The challenge rocked back across the plaza, punctuated by the massive thunder of erupting volcanoes.
With a sudden, soundless, soul-shattering wrench, the massed glimpses of chaos dissolved and Helva was suddenly of single sight, Kira!, in a darkly curtained chamber, unevenly lit by red braziers. Increasing her dark vision, Helva penetrated the gloom, her attention focused on the hideous object that dominated the room.
On a raised, black basaltic slab lay the decomposing remains of what had once been a man. The teeth were bared whitely through the decayed flesh in a travesty of a smile. The tendons of the neck were stark ridges and the cartilage of his esophagus ended in the indestructible fabric of a scout coverall. His hands, crossed on the chest cavity crumpled by a massive fatal blow, were linked by the intertwined overgrowth of fingernail. The 732's dead brawn lay in state.
And Helva was seeing him through Kira's contact button. . . at last.
A wailing chant filled the chamber, a meaningless, mournful dribble of sound, emanating from the walls, the ceiling, the floor. The mad brain encased in its indestructible titanium shell, had all circuits open, keening, oblivious to everything.
In as soundless a whisper as she could broadcast, Helva muttered swiftly to Kara. "It's the rogue 732. It's gone mad. It's got to be destroyed." It was easier, somehow for Helva, knowing what she must do, to think of the 732 as an impersonal 'it', rather than the female the brain had once been.
Kira swayed, making no reply.
For one paralyzing demisecond, Helva wondered if the girl had inadvertently opened the contact, if Kira were still in the thrall of the powerful death wish. Had Helva's Dylan protest pierced Kira's self-destructive trance with its mockery? Had Helva succeeded in jolting her brawn to sanity? The release word would be no mortal use if she did not have her mobile brawn's cooperation to immobilize the rogue.
With slow steps Kira approached the bier and its ghastly occupant. The keening grew louder, the mumbling became articulated.
"He has been taken. He Who Orders has been taken," chanted the 732 and the crowd echoed the chant as readily as they had Helva's. "He is gone. Seber is gone."
Not helpless again? Helva cried, silently, her mind overwhelmed by hopelessness.
Eerily another sound was superimposed over the 732's wail.
"Now that dwarf presents a definite problem, Lia," the wowwing, muffled words could barely be distinguished. "I wouldn't be surprised. . ."
It was a man's voice, Helva realized, played back at a lagging speed which distorted the words into a yawing parody. The ship was broadcasting, had broadcast this tape so many times that the sound of Seber's taped voice was as decayed as his corpse on the bier.
Kira continued to sway in her graceful circumnavigation.
"Speak, O Seber, in singing tones that thy servant, Kira, may hear the music of thy beloved voice," Kira crooned, making an obeisance to the column behind which lay the shell of the mad 732.
Helva barely managed to suppress the cry of intolerable relief at the cues Kira was feeding her.