Crystal Universe - [Crystal Singer 03] - Crystal Line (6 page)

By the time they exhausted the contents of their sacks, the Junk had accepted every single offering, the metallic ones with noticeable alacrity and reaction.

“Omnivorous.”

“Not grateful though,” Killa added. “Not so much as a centimeter has it expanded. Humpf.”

Lars regarded the central mass. “No, but I think it’s brighter. Should we see if any of the others are more receptive?”

She was standing in a pose of thoughtfulness, one arm across her chest, propping the elbow of the gloved hand supporting the tilt of her helmet. “I’m thinking!”

“Are you?”

“And what are you thinking?” Brendan asked.

Killashandra began slowly, formulating her thoughts as she spoke. “I think we ought to return the piece we took. I don’t think we ought to carve up the Junk.”

Lars regarded her for a long moment. “You know, I think you’re right. That should put us in their good … gravel? dust?”

“Cinder?” Killa offered coyly.

“Well, we’ll just do that wee thing then. Especially as it isn’t doing us a blind bit of good as a specimen.”

“Which reminds me. When we excised that bit of stalactite, there was that shaking. Was that just a tremor, or an incredibly rapid beat of some kind?”

“A percussive-type signal?” Lars asked.

“Ah, like some primitive groups who wished to make long-distance communications,” the ship said. “I’ll analyze. Never thought of that.” There was a pause during which lights and flicks of messages crossed the main control screen. “Ah, indeed! Spot-on, Killa. The tremor does indeed parse into a variety of infinitesimal pulses of varying length.”

“We need some drumsticks, Bren,” Killa said, grinning at Lars.

He put his hands on his hips in an attitude of exasperation. “Neither of us could rap
that
fast.”

“So we’ll be
largo
, but it’ll be a beat. We can at least use rhythm to see if we’d get any sort of response. Open some sort of a communications channel to this intelligence.”

“Intelligence? The retreat could be no more than a basic survival impulse.”

“Impulse is the word,” Bren said. “I have no wood in my stores, but would plastic do?”

“Anything strong enough to beat out a pulse … Maybe we can get an ‘in’ to our Junk.”

Lars groaned at her whimsy, but he was quite ready to return to the ship and take delivery of two pairs of taper-ended plastic lengths. He gave Killa one pair and, with the other, practiced a roll on the bulkhead of the airlock.

“A little ragged,” she said.

“Who’s had time to practice for the last seventy years?”

Killashandra frowned in surprise that Lars would even mention a time span. Most singers ignored time references. Seventy years? Since they had been singing duet? Or since they had last done much instrumentalizing? She really didn’t want to know which. Unlike herself, Lars often input material to his private file. And after a session in the Ranges, he also accessed his file. She couldn’t remember when she had thought to add anything to hers. She shook her head, not wanting to think about
that.
She had far more important things to do than worry about relative time—it was rhythmic time she had to play with right now.

“We are armed and ready,” she said flippantly, holding the sticks under her nose as she had seen ceremonial drummers do on some old tape clip. “Front and center, and forward into the fray.”

“ ‘We go, we go,’ ” Lars sang out.

Long-forgotten neurons rubbed together properly, and Killashandra came out with the beginning of that chorus, altering it slightly to suit their circumstances. “ ‘Go, we heroes, go to glory/we shall live in song and story …’ ”

“ ‘Yes, but you
don’t
go!’ ” And Brendan’s baritone entered the chorus.

“ ‘We go! We go!’ ” Lars toggled the airlock to open, awkwardly hanging on to his drumsticks as he resettled his helmet. Killashandra fastened hers.

“ ‘Yes, onward to the foe!’ ” Brendan sang melodiously.

“ ‘We go! We go!’ ”

And then the airlock completed its cycle and they could
go
back out into the darkness of Opal. They marched into the nearest of the Junk caves and came to a militarily abrupt halt.

“All right, Ki,” Lars said, “where—and what—do we beat?”

“Let’s see if we can get its attention. Do we both happen to know a ceremonial roll?”

“I do.” Lars proceeded to beat it out.

“Show-off. Now, let’s do it together.” They did, heads up to see if there was any reaction in the Junk.

“I think you got through,” Brendan said. “A hemisemi-demiquaver of a response, but definitely just after your roll duet.”

Lars grinned drolly at Killashandra. “Having said that, what do we say next?”

“Howdy?”

Hunger drove them from the cave, and once they got back into the B&B, sheer fatigue required them to stay. They had beat every tempo they knew, with all the power in their arms, until their muscles had protested. Brendan kept reporting reaction, and once or twice, a repeat—at a much faster speed—of what the two crystal singers had just tapped out. Other patterns of response made no sense to Brendan. But as Killa and Lars reboarded the ship, he told them that he was trying to figure out any code, or pattern, in the Junk’s response to their rolls. When he started to tell them, they begged a reprieve.

“Save it, will you, Bren?” Lars said, an edge to his voice.

“Sorry about that. You’ve seemed indefatigable. I was beginning to think you were crystal analogues. You have, after all, only been on the go today for twenty-seven hours. I’ll reprise after you’ve had some sleep. And I mean,
sleep.
”

“Wicked little man,” Killashandra said, struggling out of her suit and tiredly cramming it into the cleanser. Lars had to prop himself up against the wall to balance while he pulled off his suit.

As she stumbled into the main cabin, she yawned, feeling those twenty-seven hours in every sinew in her body—and especially in her weary hands. “I’m almost too tired to eat,” she said, but roused herself when the aromas of the feast Brendan had prepared wafted through the main cabin.

“I’m
never
too tired to eat during Passover,” Lars announced, and picked up the biggest bowl. He half collapsed into the chair, then settled back with a plate on his chest so he didn’t have so far to reach to get food into his mouth. “Can you analyze any particular response from the Junk?”

“In all the caves, it has stopped retreating,” Brendan said. “And while I do perceive a definite pattern in the rhythm of its tremors, that’s the problem. You could never rap fast enough to ‘speak’ to them, and they can’t seem to slow down enough to ‘speak’ to you.”

“How about us recording something, and you play it back at their tempo, Bren?” Killa asked. “Use one of your extendable tools to hammer the message home?”

Lars tipped respectful fingers in her direction for that notion. “Yeah, but what exactly are we trying to tell them?”

Killa shrugged, her mouth too full to answer just then. She swallowed. “We’re singers, not semanticists. I think we’ve done very well!”

“I concur,” Brendan added stoutly. “There are specialists who could handle it from here, now you’ve established an avenue.”

“Yeah, but what about the disease?”

“The specialists do not need to exit their vehicle. I’ve just monitored the dust your suits left in the cleanser’s filters. I can find no contaminants. So the planet must be safe enough. Remember, the geologists had that specimen on board to examine, and I doubt they thought of keeping it shielded.”

“You know,” Killashandra began, interrupting herself with a great yawn. “We forgot to put the piece back.” Her head lolled back.

They fell asleep as they were, half-empty plates balanced on their chests. Brendan decided that he had not been scrupulous enough in monitoring them today—he’d been as fascinated as they had by their attempts to communicate with the Junk. In future, he must remember that singers had phenomenal powers of concentration, as well as appetite.

Then Brendan noticed that weary fingers had left splotches on chairs and carpet. Though he could send the cleaner ’bot to attend to floor spillage, he resigned himself to spots on the chairs until they reached port again. Not that Boira was any neater all the time. He dimmed the lights and raised the ambient temperature, since he couldn’t exactly arrange covers for them. Being a ship had a few limitations in dealing with passengers who insisted on falling asleep
off
their bunks.

He was also obscurely delighted by their resolve to restore the specimen to the Junk. It was one thing to take samples of inanimate objects, but to do so to a living, feeling, communicating sentience was quite another matter in his lexicon. Singers were not as insensitive and unfeeling as he had been led to believe. In fact,
his opinion of the breed had been raised by several singular leaps.

He must remember to mention it—adroitly, of course, for even to
imply
that he had had his doubts about this mission, and them, was embarrassing. He had a lot to relate to Boira when she was restored to him.

A
s soon as they returned to the original site with the excised “finger,” Killashandra and Lars noticed the increase of the luminescence.

“Well, we fed it, didn’t we?” Killa said. “Big Junk looks fatter, too, don’t you think?”

Lars shrugged. “Brendan?”

“Ambient light has increased in your present location, but, as you both know, I can read nothing of the Junk itself.”

“It should look fatter after all we gave it to eat yesterday,” Killashandra repeated, more to herself than to the others.

“I don’t see as much expansion on the rib we cut, though,” Lars remarked, peering up at it. That extrusion had not moved from the position into which it had retracted.

“Muhlah! I hope we haven’t done irremedial harm,” she said with genuine remorse.

“The other end had no trouble absorbing what we gave it to eat. Maybe it can …” Lars began.

“Can, can, cannibal?”

“Omnivorous, certainly,” Lars replied wryly.

“It didn’t exactly ‘eat,’ it sort of absorbed substances,” Killa said.

Lars took the “finger” out of the duraplas sack with duraplas calipers and reached up, his extended arm not quite long enough. “Damnation!”

“If you hoist Killa to your shoulders, Lars, that will give you sufficient height,” Brendan said.

Lars eyed his partner. She was a lean-bodied woman, and long in the leg.

“C’mon, lover boy, play acrobat. That’ll be dead easy in point-seven gravity.”

“Just don’t wriggle around on my back. Be careful of my oxygen tanks.”

“Hmmm. You’ve got a point. Whoops!”

Lars handed her the tongs and the “finger,” then ducked under her legs and, in an athletic heave, raised her from the ground.

“
Don’t
obscure my vision!” he exclaimed. Involuntarily, she had grabbed at his helmet before he steadied her with his hands on her belt.

“Two steps forward, and one slightly …” Killa caught her balance. “To the left and … here we are. Steady!” Even with his most two meter neight, she had to stretch to reach the end of the rib.

“You’re wiggling!”

“Am not! I’m stretching. You’re the one who’s wiggling. To your right half a step. There!” And she whistled in disbelief as, before her very eyes, the Junk turned even more liquid and flowed over the amputated piece, reabsorbing it. Lars started to waver. “Hey!” She dropped the tongs and clung to him. “Don’t move!”

“
I’m
not moving!” And suddenly Lars was down on one knee, Killa falling forward off his shoulders.

“Wooof!” she muttered as she lay sprawled on the ground, automatically checking the panel of lights that ringed the bottom of the helmet join. They were all green, not a flicker into the orange.

“You okay, Ki?” Brendan asked, his tone anxious. “That was a quake, not a tremor!”

“Quite a thank-you!” Killashandra got to her feet.

“Certainly a reaction,” Brendan said. “Lars?”

“Oh, I’m all right,” Lars replied, checking both knees. “Well, lookee there,” he added, pointing to the ceiling. “Come home, all is forgiven!”

Neither could see a demarcation on the rib end.

“Absorption? Not the same reaction though,” Killashandra said, “as it gave when we offered it merely metal. Should we recommend that the other piece be returned?”

“After four years or more?”

“It’s worth a try—as a peace offering.” She grinned at the deliberate pun. Lars groaned.

“It would establish human
bona fides
,” Brendan said. “That the people who return it have recognized the attempt as mutilation?”

“Not merely amputation for the sake of investigation,” Killa said in a caustic voice.

“So? What do we do for an encore?” Lars asked.

Killa shrugged. “Have we been in all the caves that have Junk?”

“All those recorded,” Brendan said.

“And we still haven’t found the source, if there is one?”

“That wasn’t in our brief, was it?” Lars asked, brushing his gloved hands. “We were to discover if this stuff had some commercial value to the Heptite Guild.”

“It doesn’t belong under the Guild’s aegis. It’s sentient,” Killa said with more vehemence than she intended.