Crystal Healer (26 page)

I ran through the columns, dodging them as I tried to find my way back to the encampment and Duncan. Only the sudden appearance of a frowning red-haired female made me skid to a halt.

"Well, well. If it isn't my favorite, heavily armed doormat." She made a triangular server appear in her hand and sipped it, sighing with pleasure. "How are you, Jarn? Want a drink? No one distills a better mind-altering intoxicant than the Terrans."

I watched as a structure built itself around us. It enclosed us like a dark box, and furnished itself like a large galley, only not nearly as clean. Terrans of various ages and genders began appearing, some drinking together and laughing, others silent and alone. In one corner, a life-sized, rusted drone tried to blow through a complicated-looking alloy instrument, causing it to produce squawking sounds that reminded me of a ptar caught in the throat snare.

I recognized nothing. "What is this place?"

"Where it all began," Maggie said, and made a sweeping gesture with her hand. "Welcome to the Slow, Lazy Sax."

I breathed in. It smelled more vile than it looked. "I want to wake up now, please."

"You don't get a vote this time, Akkabarran." The Terran female handed her empty glass to a passing service drone and took my arm. "Over here. We need to talk."

With her usual indifference to my feelings, Maggie dragged me around the tables and Terrans to a dark corner and shoved me into one of the chairs. Before she sat down, she obtained another beverage and put it in front of me.

"Stop looking as if I'm going to hit you," she said, templing her red-nailed fingers. "I came to rescue your submissive little ass."

"Why? I'm on oKia, sleeping next to my husband, who would kill anything that tries to touch me." A pity he couldn't enter my dreams. "I'm not in any danger."

"Clueless as ever." Maggie looked down at her drink and began toying with the plas stick, spearing the two dull green seed pods floating in the liquid.

"Can I interest you ladies in a personal encounter?" A humanoid-sized drone stopped beside us and unfastened the front of the tunic draped over its chassis to display its artificial muscles.

I frowned. "What?"

"I saw you looking at me." The drone grabbed my shoulder and squeezed it. "You know you want it."

"I didn't look at you." I shoved the appendage away.

It braced a hand on the sticky surface of the table. "I am programmed for one- to nine-hour sessions, and can accommodate multiple partners."

I stared up at its lifeless, handsome face. "What does this thing want?"

"It wants to have sex with you." Maggie gave me a sour grin. "Or me. Or both of us. It's a sex drone."

"Get away from us," I told the machine.

"Thank you for your consideration." It moved on.

"I never cared for that model," Maggie said idly as she watched it solicit the interested young male occupying the next table. "Too heavy-handed. Whoever programmed it must have had a taste for rough trade."

"What danger am I in, Maggie?" I demanded. "Will I die of boredom in the next five minutes?"

She laughed. "One reason we're so fond of your species--other than the mesmerizing amount of narcissism you're capable of--is your tenacity. You hold on to life with white-knuckled fists, and you just won't let go. For a bunch of puny, weak primates who still like to kill as often as you breed, that is astounding. No matter what the cosmos throws at you--plagues, famines, climate changes, planetary disasters--you do whatever it takes to survive."

"All species struggle for the right of existence," I said. "Terrans are no different from them."

"Trust me, you are. We should know. We tried to wipe you out a few times." Maggie used her teeth to remove one of the dull green seeds from the stick. "Like the time we diverted a decent-sized asteroid toward prehistoric Terra, and flash-fried North America and everything on it. The few cave dwellers who weren't turned into charcoal endured incredible hardships, relocated, and started breeding again, like nothing happened. Then there was my favorite, the bubonic plague. That came with a personal guarantee from the manufacturer to wipe out all sentient life on the planet. About half of you died, and the other half? Went and developed immunity to it."

"I don't believe you," I told her. "You couldn't have done those things."

"Oh, sweetie, it wasn't malicious," she assured me. "We were simply trying to keep you out of the mix. The grand plan didn't allow for a bunch of clever apes from a hellstar system meddling in things they didn't understand. But despite our best efforts, you evolved into the biggest bunch of troublemakers since the slugs that would one day become the Hsktskt crawled out of the primordial soup."

Her insensitivity made any further discussion pointless. "Can I go now?"

Her green eyes flashed up, bright and narrow. "Your charming doormat qualities make me forget sometimes what lies beneath them. I can't do anything about you or the danger you're in, sweetheart, so a warning would be totally useless."

I didn't say anything. When Maggie spoke of things I didn't understand, silence seemed the best response.

"Such a trooper." Her smile turned vicious. "How did you like the crystal dream?"

"Not at all."

"Can't blame you there. When the universe decides to fuck with your head, it doesn't do it halfheartedly." Now she seemed to be avoiding my gaze. "Despite what we did to your species in the past, we Jxin actually believe in the laws of survival. You fight for life; you earn it. You win; you should get to keep it. It's always been our schtick, and, pains in the ass that Terrans are, eventually we had to accept that you deserved the right to exist. Remember that the next time you dream of crystal."

To be polite, I took a sip of the drink. It tasted vile. "What do they mean? The dreams?"

"Believe it or not, it's kind of an apology." She bared some teeth. "Aka, things have not gone according to plan, we're all very sorry about that, blah, blah, blah."

She was lying. I could do the same. "Then I thank you for your concern."

"Don't even go there." Maggie reached across the sticky surface of the table and seized my arm. "If I could have killed you the moment that stupid skela bitch shot Cherijo in the head, I would have. I knew--we all knew--that you should have never been born. But once you're here, baby, you get your very own bill of rights. No matter who you are or what body you possess. So say the Jxin."

Like her words, her grip was meant to hurt.

"I am sorry that Cherijo died." I leaned forward. "But I live, and I am not giving up my husband, my child, my body, or my life. They belong to
me
now."

"No being undergoing a dimensional transformation preserves its sense of spatial relation," Maggie said flatly in Shon's voice.

Something pushed at the bottom of my footgear, and I glanced down. The seven-pointed apex of a crystal had pierced the pitted surface of the flooring and was thrusting itself up through it. It rose so fast I had to shove back my chair to keep it from impaling me.

Terrans knocked over tables and chairs as they ran to escape a hundred other crystal columns shooting up through the foundation. A crystal silenced the drone making the squawking noise and crushed it between two other columns. The explosion of its power core lit the room with a burst of yellow sparks.

I turned, trying to see an exit, and saw Maggie's image reflected on the surface of the largest and widest of the crystal pikes. Then she pressed her hands against it--from the inside.

I picked up the chair I had been sitting in and smashed it against the surface of the crystal. That failed to leave even a scratch.

"Maggie." I placed my hand on the outside of the crystal, which felt like blue ice. "Can you hear me?"

A web of cracks appeared under my palm and spread out jaggedly in all directions, causing irregular shards to fall from the column. Inside, Maggie underwent her own transformation; her red hair turned black and her features refined themselves into a non-Terran countenance.

"As you have fought for us, child of mind." Her fingertips touched mine through one of the flaws. "So will we fight for you."

Blackness.

I sat up, my body shaking, my skin slick with sweat. The icy air inside the shelter tried to freeze it and my tear-streaked face. I looked over and saw Reever was still sleeping, and slipped out of the blankets, taking care not to let the cold get under them.

I left the shelter and walked out into the frigid night. The sky above the encampment stretched wide and dark blue; the thin atmosphere made the stars seem enormous.

I went to the fire pit, the flames of which had died down to a glowing pile of scarlet embers, and sat on the edge of the still-warm stones to wait for the dawn.

Thirteen

Just before the sun rose, I returned to the kiafta and woke Reever, who prepared a quick meal while I read ied what we would need to take on the trek.

"Here." He placed a bowl of cooked grain on the stone table, and then winced. "Can you give me an analgesic? I can't seem to get rid of this headache."

"Of course." I retrieved a syrinpress and, after scanning him to ensure that the pain was not from another cause, administered the drug. "What brought this on?"

"I think the smoke from the cooking fires," he said. "The smell of burning meat does not have pleasant associations for me."

Qonja and Hawk soon joined us, as did Uorwlan, who seemed much more relaxed and happy. Of Jylyj I saw nothing until he arrived with Seno's guide, an experienced scout who said little and seemed impatient to leave.

As she played a male in front of the oKiaf, Uorwlan couldn't show much affection to the Skartesh. Still, she hovered around him and used any excuse to touch him. For the most part Jylyj ignored her, although once or twice I caught him giving her a faintly exasperated look.

With the guide at the front, we left the encampment and traveled north, using another old path through the groves of heartwood. The air began to warm a little as we emerged from the trees into a narrow clearing around the base of the two facing cliffs, both of which were so tall that I nearly had to bend backward to see their snow-covered tops. Beyond them the mountains stood like worn monuments, each forming an uneven procession that never ended but disappeared over the horizon.

The guide halted at the entrance to the cliff pass and spoke in a low voice to Jylyj, who nodded and turned to Reever.

"The scout says that stones sometimes fall from the sides of the cliffs in the summer season," the Skartesh told my husband. "We must move quickly now, but if you hear stone cracking, go to the face of the cliffs and stay there."

The guide increased his pace to a trot, and I held on to the straps of my pack as I tried to keep up. My short legs had to take two strides to match one of the others', and by the time we emerged from the pass my face and longshirt were damp with sweat.

A secluded valley stretched out before us, the red soil completely covered by reedlike amber grass with three-sided seed heads. Here and there I saw the broad-leafed blue plants with the white berries, but no trees grew here. All through the heartwood we had heard the rustling of animals in the brush, but here the silence seemed almost eerie.

"This is the tribe's burial ground?" Reever asked. The Skartesh nodded. My husband said something to the guide, who didn't seem to understand him. To Jylyj, Reever said, "Ask him where the graves are, so that we won't walk over them."

"There are no graves," the Skartesh said after conferring with the guide. "I believe they bring the bodies of the dead here and leave them on the ground to decompose naturally."

"Then the place should be littered with bones," I said.

"It feels as if it is." Uorwlan looked about and wrapped her arms around herself. "I don't see any remains. Do you hear that humming?"

Reever listened and then looked down. "No, but I can feel something in the ground." He took out a scanner and used it, turning in a slow circle. "There is something vibrating under the soil."

"We should try to signal the
Sunlace
," Qonja said. "We told the captain we would relay our status every morning."

I glanced at the guide. "We agreed not to use our equipment in front of the natives."

"Seno said the exposed deposit of shining stones was somewhere over there," Jylyj said, pointing to one side of the cliffs. "I will go with the scout and see if we can locate it. While we are gone, send your signal."

The oKiaf and the Skartesh walked off, while Reever set down his pack and took out the small transceiver. After calibrating it several times, he was able to send off a brief signal. No reply came, however, and after a few moments he switched off the unit.

"Whatever is moving under the ground is also causing relay interference." He handed out scanners to Qonja, Hawk, and Uorwlan. "Walk along the perimeter of the meadow and see what you can detect."

Reever and I walked carefully through the amber reed grass. While I looked for any signs of oKiaf remains, he scanned the surface.

"There are enormous deposits of a crystalline mineral under the soil," my husband said.