Get Off the Unicorn (38 page)

“Yes, we can transfer,” she said, trying to keep the growing apprehension out of her voice. And she'd thought, Dobrinon had assured her, that she'd made a good adjustment to this return. She'd fooled only herself.

Niall swung the chair round, helmet half-raised to his head.

“Is it still that bad, Helva? I can go alone if it's that hard.”

“This we have to do together.”

“That's the operative phrase, m'girl, together.”

“Let's go—together.”

“That's my Helva.” The helmet masked his eyes but not the eager confident smile.

Helva fought/released herself to the experience, knowing an instant of fleeting terror at being outside her safe shell. But as the transfer occurred, she reminded herself that she had survived a worse terror of complete sense deprivation on Borealis, survived it only because of the Corviki episode.

And Niall was with her this time!

The pressure enveloped her in a deceptive comfort. She shuddered and the streamers floated up from beneath her.

“Niall!” she exuded, anxious lest in that instant she might have transferred at a distance from him.

“I'm a bloody sea monster.” Niall's reassuring dominance was just beyond the large frond. “There you are!” And he emerged, a creature like herself, already coloring the shell with his own personal intensity.

A creature like herself!

“Helva! You're . . .” And they spun toward each other.

“Do not express energy in such a sequence!” A new dominance, dark, dense, powerful, overwhelmed them with its authority. “You have imperfect control of your shells.”

By a force more potent than their pent-up frustrations, they were held apart. The energies which they yearned intensely to combine were dampened by the dominance.

Deliberately, Helva now sought to bury her all-too-human reactions into the Corviki ethos. “Conserve energy. Reduce spin. Lock suborbital speeds.”

Niall's shell pulsed and shook with his effort to control his emotions in an alien context and because of the totally unfamiliar, for him, subjection to a supra-authority.

“The emanations are unusually rich,” the Corviki emitted, withdrawing some of the repressive authority. “No similar wastage has been observed despite the variety now available for analysis.” There was approval in the comment, but also a reinforcement of the initial warning.

With dark and awful despair, Helva forced her attention to the dominance, anything to distract herself from Niall's proximity. In doing so, she recognized a familiar aura in the dominance.

“Manager?”

“Of the same thermal core. There have been recombinations within the mutual group,” and the entity turned such a lavender-purple of Corvikian pleasure that Helva interpreted “smugness” in his tone.

Taking cowardly refuge in the mission, Helva immediately explained the purpose of their unsolicited return. As she got to the point, she recognized approval in the Manager's density.

“From such an extrapolation of the data for use in the parameters of your race's limitations, undesirable factors might indeed result from exposing irreconcilables to stability forms,” the Manager commented, rippling with muddy blues. “The multiple interaction shows commendable concern for the proper conservation of mass energies. The hypothesis is being examined. Improper equations cause ineffectual results and perverse conclusions. Matter must be expended only in constructive quantities.”

Simultaneously a host of other dominances was felt, compounding the authority about her and Niall. The newcomers were, to Helva's mind, dense with experiential energies, held in lease by immense controls. Helva had not encountered similar energy groupings in the first Beta Corvi mission, and began to emit tiny distressful losses which she was unable to contain.

“Why are you so afraid, Helva?” Niall asked. She came close to resenting his self-control.

“These entities are so gross with power,” she said. “But fear is not a component in my energy loss. On Corvi, we have nothing to fear . . .”

“But ourselves,” Niall finished for her, his trailing tendrils floating gently beneath him.

She kept hers tightly entwined lest they stray without her volition . . . and touch him.

“Do not waste energy so,” she was advised by one of the new power group. But the directive held no censure and Helva let the suborbitals begin to spin gently so that her tendrils drifted easily, if inevitably toward Niall's. The Corviki would protect her from herself.

She was distracted by a series of condensations and dissipations, expansions and contractions, darting, it sometimes seemed, through both her shell and Niall's, as their interrogators fused momentarily or attenuated in the discussion of the problem presented by the visitors. Apparently such a use of stabilized isotopes had never occurred to the Corviki. Helva thought that amusement dominated their discreet emissions. Dense as these ancient entities were, they had never considered the possibility of such a direction for familiar energies.

One entity reasoned that, of all the handicaps through which life forms must evolve, the adolescent vigor of this particular species was, at least, divertingly resourceful.

Helva and Niall drifted in this limbo, amused by an occasional storm of colorful discussion.

Suddenly the aura changed. With paternal forbearance, the Corviki approved the c-v drive. However, there were modifications which would reduce the
cuy
particles imprudently released by such a clumsy process. An inhibiting feedback was required. Otherwise, although the envelope was unbelievably awkward and totally unnecessary, dictated as it was by the exigencies of protecting frail protein matter, they could deduce no annihilative perversion of the applied data.

They did stipulate that any further application must be accompanied by a similar inhibitor. They would know, by virtue of
cuy
particles in the galaxy, if that restriction had been ignored. Punitive action would instantly result.

As abruptly as the dominances had assembled, they dispersed, leaving Helva, Niall, and the Manager in a welter of loose fronds and burping ochre eruptions. Distant novae of emissions drifted back like the light laughter of the godly, seen and felt, rather than heard.

“Has the drive really been approved?” asked Niall, bewilderment apparent in the action of his tendrils.

“The emissions were favorable,” Helva and the Manager agreed in chorus.

“Who are you now? Helva?” he demanded, swinging from one to the other, confusion making his tendrils rigid.

“I am Helva, here,” she said, fighting with the desire to remain Helva for his sake and the need to remain Corvikan enough to control precarious excitations.

“Let's find out about the others and leave.”

“I have,” Helva said.

“Did you not feel that thermal group near you?” asked the Manager of Niall, shading to ochre neutrality.

“He had not previously encountered their dominances, Manager.”

The Manager assumed more color and then, bleeding a little blue, he disappeared.

“You did have a chance to speak to Prane and—”

“I encountered them in one of the thermal groups. I'll tell you later when we're back on the ship.”

“Then the mission's completed?” The triumph in Niall's tone colored his shell a brilliant orange-red and he pressed toward her eagerly.

From behind a frond, first one, then another Corvikan appeared, but Helva was diverted from their arrival by Niall's rapidly changing color.

“We cannot combine!” she cried, and tried to keep her distance from him.

One of the Corviki brushed against her, pushing her back toward Niall.

“Don't play the professional virgin with me now, Helva!” His furiously human response was emphasized by the fiery glow of his shell as every particle became excited. The Corviki who had pushed her was now throwing power toward Niall, exciting him further. It flashed through Helva's awareness on two levels that the Corviki was familiar to her. She'd no time to identify it; she had to avoid Niall.

“You don't understand! Don't, Niall! We've got to get back to the ship!”

“Helva!”

“It's not safe for us. The energy levels are too hot . . . Integrity will be violated and—”

The outer edge of his shell touched hers. Sane thought, Corvikan or human, was impossible. Explosively they began to excite one another, each level in her seeking its equal in him, slowing, speeding, delicately adjusting, seeking the merger that would be the imposition of one pattern over the other, all levels matched, all energies mutual, all . . .

Other thermal groups were attracted by the emissions, attracted and held, transferring power so that Helva felt her Corvikan envelope engorge to incredible dimensions, giving her unlimited mass to energize at an even higher excitation level. Faster the particular forces spun, faster, to match speeds, to combine, neutronic shifts of dazzling force . . .

Fission . . . an incredible stoking of the available energy . . . the atmosphere splitting with thunder as immeasurable positive forces began to recombine . . .

 

Distance was where she was, some black, sense-deprived consciousness, some tiny flicker of ego, lost, lost, lost. Unwilling to resume. A slow return to awareness. Exhaustion, death-deep in an overstressed mind. A shuddering violent release to fall with an endless spinning grace into unawareness, comforting and kind.

Offensive odor, acrid, strong, staining the lungs, reviving the senses that must escape that burden.

To be aware and wish for deprivation! How strange!

Reality came into focus. And, sadly, identity.

Niall's body was sprawled by the console, the helmet upturned on the deck, his grasping hand a scant inch from it. His shipsuit was dark and damp with stain. Though he seemed motionless, she never questioned that he lived. She knew that, knew it as deeply as she knew her own vitality, low as it was.

It was comforting to look at him: the fatigue-lined face unguarded and boy-young, the dark hair tousled, the wiry body limp. Soon he would rouse and then that dear form would change, would vary and not be wholly hers.

No . . . Helva hesitated. No, an intangible difference impinged on her growing awareness. She was not wholly herself. There was a subtle alteration.

Curious, she began to explore her ship self. The critical difference was not in her systems or hull. She had full command of every area.

The steady vibration of power in her idling drive, however, resonated at a new frequency.

A long groan was wrenched from her, reverberating in the cabin and down the quiet corridors, humming through the deck plates to rouse Niall.

The c-v drive was functioning. Beta Corvi! Helva's mind reeled, fighting to deny/accept the experience that surged back over her in a tsunami of emotions, abrading stunned sensibilities.

Niall crawled on his hands and knees, staggered to his feet, swaying as he took the two steps to the pilot's chair.

But they were here. They had been . . .

She hadn't the energy to transfer back. She hadn't the strength to tell Niall, who wouldn't have been strong enough to pick up the dislodged helmet anyway.

Instinct marshaled a response. She must break this disaster orbit, flee from Beta Corvi. Strange the Corvikans were silent. Humans must interdict that system to prevent the unwary from ever encountering those devastating sentients. Some progress was too costly in terms of human emotions. Who'd suggested that? She'd remember later. Right now, instinct and conditioning prevailed. She had to escape. She began to compute a flight pattern, and stopped. The ship was not in orbit around an invidious planet. They were drifting in space, far from the light of Beta Corvi.

Startled, Helva examined and identified star magnitudes, was relieved to find familiar ones about her, comfortable light-years from Beta Corvi. Safe!

She'd already escaped. How? She couldn't remember. She scanned the recording banks and realized that three days, Galactic standard, had elapsed since they had initiated that fantastic transfer to Corviki III. And, judging by the distance they'd come, she must have used the c-v drive. What had the Corvikans said about an inhibitor? Had they left a trail of
cuy
particles? Punitive action?

Niall was stirring, groggily seeking his face with hands that trembled. He leaned forward, elbows jabbing with awkward force into his knees as he held an aching head. His wiry body shook with an uncontrollable paroxysm and an oily sweat exuded from his pores.

“Drink something, Niall. It's partly lack of food,” she heard herself say in a voice she scarcely recognized. “It's three days since we made that transfer.”

As he lurched to his feet and stumbled to the galley, she checked her nutrients and adjusted the acid balance hastily. Niall clutched at the counter for support and fumbled for a restorative spray, gave himself a massive dose. He pulled open the first container he could reach, gulping its contents before they'd heated. He knocked down several more cans in an attempt to close his fingers around one. He finally opened a container of soup, drank it, and the shaking subsided. Still holding the restorative spray, he half staggered to his cabin, into the shower. He fumbled to turn the water on, alternating hot and cold sprays, unconcerned that he was still dressed. The treatment and liquid began to revive him and he stripped, carefully washing away the accumulated filth of three lost days.

Freshly dressed, he returned to the galley and found coffee. As the container was warming, he carried it into the lounge, dropping to the couch that faced Helva.

“Did you check yourself?” he asked anxiously.

“Yes. Acid!”

“Not surprising. What was that about an inhibitor? How did we get away from Beta Corvi? No, don't explain how. I know. Fardles! Did we leave a trail of those
cuy
particles?”