Sunborn (42 page)

   
/// Do you want me to help?

   
A little alpha wave or something? ///

   
/I don’t need help./

   
/// Yes, I can see that. ///

   
Bandicut snarled softly and closed his eyes again.

    Eventually, he calmed down a little, and in time he must have dropped off to sleep, because he started awake when Antares slipped in beside him. “Hi,” he said.

    “John Bandicut,” she answered, her voice sounding strained. He woke up enough to realize that she was radiating strong emotions. Distress and relief and need and worry. It was hard to sort them out.

    “I’m here. Is he—is Ik okay?”

    “Put your arms around me.”

    “Huh? What’s wrong?”

    “Put your arms around me.”

    He rolled and did as she asked. Something in her gave then, and she melted against him, shivering with jangled emotions. He was definitely awake now. “John,” she whispered, and sighed into his shoulder.

    “Is it all right? Is Ik—are
you
—?”

    “I’m okay.”

    “Are you really? Are you sure?”

    “Yes, but Ik—it was hard. So much pain from watching stars die. Did you know he’s unusually sensitive to stars? His stones were damaged; my stones helped repair them.”

    He pulled back just enough to see her face. “Was that all there was? Damage from seeing stars die?”

    Antares shook her head. “The Mindaru—they infected his stones, too—not as badly as they did the AI, but enough to make it difficult for him to function. My stones worked long and hard. They think they rooted it all out.”

    “They
think?
 Don’t they know?”

    “It’s impossible to know for sure. But they’re pretty sure.”

    “And you?”

    “I’m okay, but—” she sighed softly against him “—it was exhausting. To watch. And to share with Ik. I think it did draw us closer together.” She shivered a little. He couldn’t tell quite what she was feeling.

    At that moment, his own embrace felt inadequate. “Oh. I guess I—”

    “No,” Antares said. “You
don’t
 see.”

    “Huh?”

    “He’s our friend. We must stay close to him—all of us. He may need help again. He
probably
 will. We must be ready.” She hugged him more tightly. Her touch sang with need, fear, confusion, passion.

    His head was now spinning.

    “John...” Antares rested one thigh against his and hooked his calf with her ankle. “John, I think I need you right now.”

    His confusion ebbed away. “I’m here.” He slipped his fingers into her hair, stroked her soft mane, sank his hands into the thick, rich hair between her shoulder blades. Her stones were flickering in her throat. “I’m here,” he whispered.

    She practically enveloped him with cascading emotions. Grief and fear and gladness and urgent desire and restlessness and anxiety. “John, will you make love to me, please? Now? Slowly?”

    He closed his eyes and drew a long, silent breath. Then he touched Antares’s chin and raised her face to his. Her small nose quivered as she breathed; her eyes probed his with their black orbs, deep wells encircled by golden halos. He bent to kiss her, brushing his lips to hers. She pressed back with humanlike urgency, her lips not letting him pull away. Her fingers tightened on his shoulders as she moved against him, and the waves of her emotions washed over him like an incoming tide.

*

   
For Antares, it felt like slipping from a tangled jungle into a cool, blue sea, like the sea of the Neri, salty and refreshing. With each of John Bandicut’s caresses, she felt a little more able to breathe after the frightening experience she had just been through, more able to open herself to his touch. She was aware of his jangled emotions, and she tried to offer solace, but right now she needed far more than she could give.

    This was all wrong, she knew, by all that her training had made a part of her; wrong that she should be joining this way; wrong that she would be
taking
so much right now, and giving so little.
But I just gave all I had. I cannot give more, cannot be all things all times to all people. Not even one I love. And yes, I do love him.
All that she had done for Ik was right, just as she had been trained. Why should she feel it a weakness that now she should
need
?

   
John’s arms enveloped her, and that was what she needed. She shivered with pleasure at his erection pressed against her, and she shivered at his lips and hands touching her breasts and shoulders and back, and she shivered to feel his acceptance and his love, washing over and enveloping her.

    She wished it could last all night.

*

   
As Bandicut lay tangled with Antares in long afterglow, he studied her eyes, trying to locate a window into her emotions. She was nibbling at his fingers, with which a moment ago he had been tracing circles around each of her four breasts, noting how like and yet how different they were from human female breasts, smaller but with larger tips, nipples he supposed. Antares clearly enjoyed his touch. But now she was gently biting his fingers, stopping him from continuing the touching. Was she laughing? Or was it something else? He thought he sensed something welling up inside her. Worry. Fretting. Something was wrong. “What is it?” he asked.

    “John.” Definitely wrong. Was she wondering if she should have done this?

    “Yah?”

    “I have to go now.”

    He grunted, closed his hand, felt a stinging in his cheeks.

    “I’m sorry. I have to go back to Ik.”

    He swallowed and nodded. “I understand.”

    She raised herself on one elbow, making no attempt to cover herself. And yet something in the aura was gone. She was no longer open, no longer—what? Available? “Do you? I hope so. I needed...and I thought perhaps you needed...and I am glad...very...”

    “Yes.”

    “Glad.”

    “But...”

    “Ik is in a fragile state. His stones and, I think, Ik himself. I need to be there in case he needs me.”

   
I need you now,
he thought.
I love you.

    “So—that’s why I have to go.”

   
/// Tell her what you just thought! ///

   
/Not right now. She doesn’t need to hear it now./

    Antares sat up, pushing back her thick mane of auburn hair. She had never looked more desirable. She got to her feet, slipped her clothes back on. Sighing, she bent and touched her lips to his. He reached up for a moment to caress her cheek. And then she slipped out of the room.

    He stared at the closed door for a long time, and then at the ceiling for an even longer time, unsure just exactly what he was feeling.

Chapter 26

Distant Memories

    Ik passed the night in a kind of dream state, not quite sleeping and not fully awake. He was aware, but felt unable to influence what was running through his mind, or between his mind and his voice-stones. It was a strange, timeless state; he knew some kind of healing or repair or change was taking place, but it was beyond him to know what kind. He felt occasional flashes of pain. After a while, the pain became less frequent, but in its place came a hollow, ringing sensation, like a reverberation in a large steel chamber. With it came...he wasn’t sure what. A sense of striving, maybe. But striving for
what?
    As the room lights brightened with ship’s morning, he slowly came to, wondering where he was. He shifted his eyes. He was sitting cross-legged in...sleeping quarters? If so, they no longer looked the same. It looked like a Hraachee’an comfort den, a place where a Hraachee’an on holiday or in transit might rest for a few nights. The smooth walls were curved asymmetrically, like the interior of a natural cave. On one side, however, a wide window appeared to look out over a rugged mountain slope.
Rrrm,
he thought.
Am I hallucinating? Or have the stones gone mad?
And then he remembered the lounge last night, transformed into Hraachee’an form.

    He heard his name, and turned his head. Antares was sitting up on the padded floor, a long arm’s reach away from him. Had she been here all night?

    “Hrah,” he murmured. “Hello.”

    “How are you feeling? Can you understand me?”

    “Yes, I seem to be able to now.” And he gasped, suddenly realizing what that meant. He placed his fingers to the sides of his head. He could hear and understand Antares’s spoken words; he could also sense her thoughts and feelings, hovering around the edges of his own. /What is our condition?/ he asked his stones.

   
*Improved. Major traumas appear to have been corrected. Functionality has been restored to the verbal translation module. Linguistic accuracy may now exceed ninety percent.*

   
/That’s good. Was that the only problem?/

    Hesitation.
*Still evaluating.*

    They hadn’t mentioned what he most worried about. The Mindaru. He felt reluctant to mention it himself. He realized Antares was still gazing at him expectantly. “It seems you have done, hrrl, remarkably well in repairing the damage.”

    “And how do you
feel
?” Antares repeated.

    He honestly didn’t know how to answer that question. For a moment, he felt the ringing sensation again. How
was
 he doing? The connection between his inner sensorium and the stones was definitely clearer, as was his thinking. Was this all due to Antares’s efforts? It made him lightheaded just to think of it. For a moment, he was carried back to the undersea world of the Neri, where he’d used his stones with John Bandicut to guide the sick Neri back to health, guided their minds and bodies to heal themselves. Was that what Antares’s stones had done for him?

    No. There was more. He
had
 been infected, or his stones had. And Antares’s stones had worked half the night rooting out the infection.

    But it wasn’t just his stones that were hurting. What of his heart and soul, where the memories still burned? They had been reawakened by the star earlier, reawakened to a fire he had not been able to put out. In the presence of the stellar inferno, he had been wrenched back to the destruction of his homeworld. For so long, he had managed not to think of it much. But now, it burned and burned in his mind.
Hraachee’a.

    So many losses. So many people to remember. Onaka, his lifebonder. He missed her desperately. His young heirs, offspring of his egg-brother Aon. He’d cared for Edik and Sar as though they were his own. But they were gone, too. They hadn’t deserved to die. Had Onaka, had Aon, had the young ones gone quickly, quietly? Or had they endured terrible pain in the holocaust of an exploding sun? Why had he been spared?

    He and Onaka had planned and hoped for a groupbond one day. During his long, solitary sojourns in space, he had often thought of what such a groupbond might have been like, if he and Onaka had found one. Even after his arrival on Shipworld, he’d wondered if perhaps one day he would find his own kin among the millions of beings in that strange place. But that hope was stretched thin now, very thin.

    Somehow entwined with the remnants of that hope was the reality of this company, his new friends, Hraachee’an or no. He felt now just how much a family this company had become. He gazed at Antares and thought of Li-Jared and Bandicut. There was much good they had done together, the four of them. Li-Jared, for all his bluster and excitability, would throw himself in front of a charging bull-mammoth to save any of them. And John Bandicut: as trustworthy and courageous as anyone Ik had ever met. Even his robots had become friends. And Antares. Before, she’d kept herself at a distance. But she had just risked her own stones to help him in his need. They were now joined by their stones—and more, by a personal bond. There was healing in her touch, as there had been healing in his and Bandicut’s touch to the Neri. But Antares’s healing touch seemed a part of her fundamental being, and not just something made possible by her voice-stones.

    “Ik?”

    He shifted his gaze. Antares had been waiting patiently the whole time he’d been lost in his own thoughts. “Hrah. I am still sorting out...” As he spoke, his head filled again with the hollow ringing. He could feel his face tightening.

    “I’m here to help,” said Antares.

    “Thank you. Thank you for what you have already done,” he said softly. “I believe...the rest may be up to me.”

*

   
Jeaves felt that it was up to
him
to conduct some serious thinking and analysis during this quiet interlude, while
The Long View
crossed the cavernous hollow at the center of Starmaker. There were some questions that really had to be answered soon. Foremost was, what exactly were the Mindaru doing to bring a star to the brink of violent explosion? And what could they on
The Long View
 do to stop it?

    Jeaves, in another time and place, had been present for the triggering of a supernova. That had been a carefully orchestrated event: collectors siphoning mass from a companion sun; satellites within the star’s atmosphere reflecting neutrinos back into the core to make it hotter and hotter; and an n-space connection to a cosmic hyperstring, strengthening the gravity at the heart of the star. Even with all this, it had amounted to little more than an extra push, tipping a star that was already on the cusp over the edge.

    Could this be something like that? It felt different, though Jeaves could not pinpoint how. Soon they would arrive at the Trapezium, and try to contact the one of the four called
*
Thunder
*
. That was good; but he needed more information, he needed everything the ship’s sensors could give him about
*
Thunder
*
, and even more so about the one floating in the mists of the cavern walls beyond, the one called
*
Nick
*
. Without knowing
why
*
Nick
*
was on the verge of exploding, they might as well be flying into a deathtrap.