Ceremony (7 page)

“Most of us do not worry about what they are or why. We just use them. But there are those sisters, seekers after knowledge, who have been debating about them for centuries. One popular hypothesis about their distribution says that they feed upon one another, like the creatures of the sea, larger upon smaller, and the largest are least able to withstand the distortion of space that occurs near large masses. The perceived size gradient does run right down to the surface here, each ghost seemingly pushing as close as it can. The feeding theory would say for safety from larger ghosts and because if they get closer they might catch something smaller.

“I do not accept an ecological-feeding hypothesis myself. I have been silth more years than you care to imagine and never have I witnessed one ghost preying upon another. And I know for a fact that the gradient, while generally true, will not hold up to close examination. Among the several thousand forms ghosts take there are those who refuse to follow theory. Even out near the big black there are several different small forms. I have seen them. Ones no bigger than my paw flashed about in swarms of millions.

“The hypothesis of our age, perhaps growing out of brethren disbelief in anything not subject to measurement and physical analysis, not yet widely accepted but becoming more so, is that they do not exist at all. This hypothesis says they exist only mentally, as reflections of silth minds trying to impose patterns upon the universe. The hypothesis makes of them nothing more than symbols by which powers entirely of the mind are able to manipulate the universe. This hypothesis would have it that silth trained that way could do everything the rest of us can without ever summoning those-who-dwell.”

“No one actually has done that, though. Right?” Marika asked. She like to believe she had an open mind, but she could not see this. She had seen ghosts before she had heard of silth or silth powers. Her very conception of them, as supernatural entities, came from that time, when nothing else in her experience could explain what she had sensed and experienced.

“Silth tend to be conservative, as well you know. They remain devoted to methods that work. From a purely pragmatic point of view it does not matter if those-who-dwell are real or symbolic. What counts is the result of the manipulation.”

Marika reminded Kiljar, “I saw ghosts before I ever heard of silth. I still recall the first instance vividly. It was right after we found out that the nomads were watching our packstead. I had developed a feeble grasp on the touch and was trying to track my dam while she was out hunting them.”

“That has been explained away as genetic imprinting, the argument being that the touch itself is proof enough that we rely on the powers of the mind. It has been pointed out that we never summon those-who-dwell to make a touch, only to physically affect our surroundings. And the summons itself is with the touch.”

“Mistress, we are entering an age when meth, even silth, prefer explanations that are not mystical or magical. They will search for new reasons. I am content to accept what is, without explanation. If it works, I am satisfied. I do not need to know how it works. But, to change the subject, I believe I am ready for my solo star flight. What do the Mistresses who have been instructing me say?”

“They agree with you. Almost. But you have yet to make a supervised crossing to another star. It is a rule: The first time you go you must take someone with you who has experience. Just in case.”

Marika was mildly irked, yet could not understand why she should be. Kiljar made perfect sense. She supposed it was the rebellious pup within her still, the pup with the overweening self-confidence. “Very well. I will go do that. If I can find a Mistress willing to go with me.”

“Be careful, Marika.”

“I shall. I have goals I have not yet achieved.”

Kiljar’s ragged face tightened momentarily. She was not pleased by the way Marika had fixed herself on stalking the Serke and rogue brethren. “Be very careful, pup.”

“Pup, mistress?”

“Sometimes you are. Still. You came to your powers too early.”

Grauel and Barlog looked grim as they took their places. They controlled the appearance of fear, but they were afraid. Grauel had been into the void only once, and that time she had not passed beyond the orbit of Biter. Once returned to the surface, she had stated a strong preference for remaining there the rest of her life. Barlog never had been up.

Now Marika wanted to drag them with her to one of the fabled starworlds. Worlds in which they still did not wholly believe.

“Relax,” Marika told them. “It will seem strange, but it will be no more difficult or dangerous than a surface flight from Ruhaack to Skiljansrode.”

“It isn’t the same,” Barlog insisted. “Not the same at all. Inside.”

“We’re still Ponath huntresses, Marika,” Grauel said. “Very old ones, too. Very near the end of our value as huntresses. If we were in the Ponath still we would be on the edge of becoming Wise. A year or two more at the most. And you know the Wise. They are not inclined toward risk.”

“I’ll do my best to keep it from becoming too harrowing. After all, the purpose is to instruct me, not to take off on an adventure. That time lies a way down the river yet.” She beckoned the senior bath, who brought a bowl of the golden drink. “Each of you drink about a cup of this elixir.”

The Mistress who was to share and chaperone the journey tossed off a drink after Grauel and Barlog finished, then settled her tail upon the axis platform. She had been to the starworlds countless times. For her this journey would be routine.

The bath drank, then their senior brought the bowl to Marika. She finished it, feeling the drug taking effect immediately. “Have you finished your rites?”

The senior bath said she had.

“Good. Is everyone strapped?” She noted the tight grips Grauel and Barlog had upon their weapons. This was one time she had not needed to remind Barlog. The huntress had brought her arms as talismans against the unknown.

Marika touched her own weapons. Rifle across her back. Revolver inside the tattered otec coat that had been with her almost forever. She carried a knife in her boot, another on her belt, and a third concealed under her arm. She had ammunition enough for a small battle and dried meat enough for a week.

She felt foolish when she gave it a thought. She, too, was carrying amulets into the unknown.

“Take it up,” the practiced Mistress said. “Time is wasting.”

Marika closed her eyes, gathered the strongest of those-who-dwell, and began the long ascent into the void.

The dream of a lifetime was coming true. Her feet were upon the path to the stars.

She was terrified.

Though during the long climb she attained velocities not to be imagined onplanet, she became impatient. She wanted to get into it in a hurry, get through it, get it over, get the fright thoroughly tamed.

The void demanded new realms of thought of those who would navigate it. Mental habits from the surface could not be transferred. Often dared not be, lest they be fatal.

It was traditional not to enter the Up-and-Over before passing the orbit of Biter, the outer of the major moons. Seldom were the appropriate ghosts numerous enough closer to the planet. Impatient as she was, Marika began seeking those-who-dwell long before the proper time. Her guide refused to allow her to gather them. She pushed the darkship hard till she reached a point where her tutor found the ghost population acceptably dense.

Marika felt she could have called them to her much earlier, but she did not argue. She had not come to argue. She had come to get a final test over so she could walk the stars alone.

Sight on the star, the Mistress sent, and Marika fixed her gaze upon the Redoriad star she had chosen as her destination. Gather those-who-dwell. Keep that star firmly fixed in your mind. Do you have them? Star and those-who-dwell?

I do.

Make the star grow slowly larger in your mind’s eye. Squeeze those-who-dwell with all the will you have. Let them know that you will not release them till that star has become a sun.

The horde of ghosts Marika gathered was larger than any she had seen any void-faring Mistress gather before. She did as she was instructed, squeezing down with a mind strong on the dark side.

The stars around her went out like electric lights suddenly extinguished. For an instant she almost lost the spark that was her destination. She resurrected it in imagination, pounded it into those-who-dwell, who boiled around the darkship, frenzied by the effort she exerted, furious in their effort to escape.

The spark swelled swiftly in sudden jerks, as though she and the darkship were skipping vast tracts of intermediate void. That star became the size of a new coin.

Let go! the Mistress sent. Let go now! Marika had become so fixed upon driving toward her destination that she had not thought to release her bearers.

What did I do wrong?

You almost hurled us into that star. The Mistress was in a state approaching shock.

I apologize, Mistress. I was concentrating upon controlling those-who-dwell.

You did so. You definitely did. Never have I seen a passage made so swiftly, so suddenly. We will see how you manage the return journey. If you are more aware of your destination. If so, I will tell the most senior you are ready to fare on your own.

You seem distressed, Mistress.

I have experienced nothing like this. I have encountered no such overwhelming demonstration of power. You hardly needed the bath. She then let it drop, and refused to be drawn forth on the matter again. Feel for the world. You are on the sunward side of its orbit.

Marika found it, to the left of and slightly beyond the sun. Up-and-Over?

Carefully. You do not need to set records getting there.

Marika repeated her performance, though with a gentler touch. How was that, Mistress!

Less unsettling. But you need to develop a subtler touch. Take the darkship down. The Mistress presented a mind picture of their destination.

From orbit the planet looked little different from Marika’s homeworld. Less icy, perhaps, but even here, according to her tutor, the interstellar cloud had begun to have its effect. In a few hundred years this world, too, would be gripped by an age of ice.

As stellar distances go, Marika, we are still very close to home. We see very few stars in our home sky. If we go out in the right direction, so that we pass beyond the cloud, we can see stars by the tens of thousands.

As Marika watched the world expand and become down, she realized, with a chilly feeling of déjà vu, that she had fulfilled her dream. She had walked among the stars. As a dream it had lost meaning and impact in the pressure of more immediate concerns.

“Stars beneath my feet,” she whispered.

The darkship dropped through feeble clouds and turned out over a desert, an environment familiar to Marika only from photographs and tapes. There were no deserts in those parts of her own world that she knew. She realized that she had no broad, eyewitness familiarity with her native planet. She knew only a long, narrow band running from the Rift through the Ponath, Maksche, TelleRai, and on south to Ruhaack. She had seen perhaps a thousandth of her world. And now she was stalking the universe!

Toward the sun, Marika. Two points to your right. Can you feel it?

Yes.

This world felt nothing like her own. It felt incredibly empty, lonely. Her touch rang hollow here, except in one very well-defined direction, sharp as a knife stroke. She pushed the darkship forward, through a wind she found unnaturally warm even at that high altitude.

Barren mountains rose above the horizon. They were bizarre mountains, naked of vegetation, worn by the wind, each standing free in a forest of stone pillars. Some reached five hundred feet into the air, striated in shades of red and ocher, and each wore a skirt of detritus that climbed halfway up its thighs.

She found the cloister without further aid from her tutor. It lay atop one of the pillars. It was a rusty brown color, built of blocks of dried mud made on the banks of a trickle of a river running far below.

Sisters came into the central courtyard as the darkship slowed, hovered. They peered upward. Marika let the darkship settle.

“Welcome to Kim,” her tutor said once the darkship had grounded. “We will rest for a day before we start back.”

Marika stepped down onto alien rock, hot rock, under a sun too large and bright, and shuddered. She was here. There. Upon a starworld. The pup who had shivered in the chill wind licking the watchtower at the Degnan packstead and had stared at the nighttime sky, had achieved the impossible dream she had dreamed then.

She watched Grauel and Barlog dismount, their fur on end, their weapons gripped tightly, their eyes in unceasing flickering motion. They felt the strangeness too. They felt the absence of the background of unconscious touch that existed everywhere at home.

Marika met Redoriad silth whom she did not remember five minutes later. They asked questions about the homeworld, for their cloister was off the main starpaths and they had little news. She and the Mistress answered, but she paid little heed to them or what she said. She was unable to get over the fact that she had done what she had done.

Marika did not sleep much during the time set aside for resting. Her curiosity was too strong once the impact of achievement began to lessen. She spent hours learning everything she could about the world.

That was not much. The silth had little commerce with the natives, who were very primitive and had nothing to offer in trade. The Redoriad maintained the cloister on Kim only as a means of enforcing their claim upon the planet and as an intermediate base from which further starworlds could be explored and exploited.

II

The homeworld flashed into. being. Very good, Marika’s tutor sent. Almost perfect this time. You will do, Marika. You will do. You need to study your stars now, so that you can recognize them from any distance and angle. Then you will be ready to roam on your own.

Do darkships get lost?