Psion (14 page)

I was the only one of Kielhosa’s new recruits who hadn’t made it to the mines right after we landed; it didn’t make him real happy. But when he led me out of the starport at last, I got enough of a shock to make me forget all my problems. The port town was cheap duraplast on one muddy street, but the world around it was . . . beautiful. The mountains rose up on every side in wild fingers with the town lying in their palm, like something out of Nebula Pioneers on the threedy. But this was real; I was real, standing with the planet pressing against my feet, breathing in the fresh, sweet air. I felt weak and clumsy, I was shivering, and my eyesight seemed dim somehow. But none of that mattered. I turned around and around, and started to laugh because I couldn’t believe it. The sound startled me; I hadn’t laughed for a long time.

“What’s so funny?”

“It’s beautiful!”

“Hunh.
This poisonous hole?
That is funny. You didn’t come here for the scenery, bondie. You’re a working boy, remember? It was an inconvenience, letting you sleep it off in that hospital. You’d better be worth it.” He started on again. I followed him, hardly listening. “Watch your
step,
you’re moving in one and a half gravities. It makes you awkward until you get used to it.”

“Uh, why do you need somebody to drive a snow-track here?” Maybe it was only for the winter; it was cold here, but I didn’t see any snow. It was crazy to hope my luck had changed, but . . .

“You’ll see.”

I didn’t say anything more.

We walked out past the edge of town. A whitish, sandy track ran through a field of rust-colored grass spotted with yellow flowers-and craters, spitting steam, and pale blots of mud. The biggest of them wasn’t more than a meter across, and some of them were only dried mud pits; but up ahead the track swerved around a fresh break in the earth, where white mud crusted the dying grass. The scent of flowers and the stink of sulfur mixed in the sharp wind.

On the far side of the field was a blue stone building. Out beyond it the land dropped off like the end of the world. The view as we reached it made me ache. All of it real: green hills folding into long, green-golden valleys, bright water spilling over slate-blue rocks all the way down to . . . I shut my eyes and looked again. “What the-
“ The
hills ended, and beyond them the land lay flat clear to the horizon. Endlessly flat and
silver,
and the sun’s reflected light burned your eyes, like sunlight on metal. “Is that-?”

“Snow,” Kielhosa said, behind me.

Disappointment caught in my chest. I swore under my breath. Kielhosa frowned and rubbed his head; I’d projected it without meaning to. I shut my mind tight, looking back at the mountains again. They were still green. “But . . . how?” Even I knew that what I saw just didn’t make sense.

“Steam heat, in a manner of speaking-lot of volcanic activity in those mountains.”
He pointed past me, and following his hand I saw plumes of smoke hanging in the sky over a couple of the highest peaks. “Cinder is a piece of
star,
it was the companion to that sun up there until it blew itself up. The fragment’s still hot enough to melt rock at its core. Where the heat leaks up to the surface it keeps the ground warm, makes hot springs and geysers, that sort of thing. That stream down there would scald you. Water freezes solid out past the foothills, though. Temperature never gets up to freezing.”

I ignored everything he’d said past: “’A piece of star’ . . . you mean, Cinder? Is this the Crab Nebula?”

“Where did you think you were, kid? What do you think all that garbage is up in the sky?”

I glanced up, into a sky the color of sapphires. Shining across it like cobweb was the end of the star that was Cinder. The sun made me squint, but I couldn’t see its circle, just a starpoint of light that flickered, cold and pale, like a strobe. It was only six miles wide-that was why everything seemed dim-and they called it a pulsar. I heard Cortelyou’s voice in my mind: Forty-five hundred light-years from home.

So I’d made it to the Crab Colonies, after all. I looked down again, at the bond ring on my wrist, and down the green-gold valley at the snow.

“Nice view,” Kielhosa said. He was laughing at me.

I spat.

We went back to the stone house. It was covered on the outside with the slate-blue rock I’d seen pushing out of the hillside; someone’s strange idea of decoration, I supposed. I couldn’t see why they were showing off a pile of stones. The inside of the building was wooden; it looked even stranger, with the computer console set into the board walls. We put on thermal clothes from a locker, and then went on through to an outside loading area. “What’s that?”

Kielhosa walked over to the transparent room-size bubble hanging from a steel wire.
“A cable car.
It’s the cheapest thing here for moving ore up the hill.” He nodded at me. “Get in.”

I came up beside him and caught hold of the waiting entrance. The whole bubble moved under my hand, as fragile as a crystal glass. I jerked my hand away and looked back.
“Oh, no.
I ain’t getting into that-
“ Kielhosa’s
face said I’d better not give him any more trouble. I caught the doorway again and stepped inside. My feet didn’t go through the floor, but the bubble rocked like a hammock and threw me forward; I staggered and fell onto a platform at one end. Kielhosa stepped in just like it was home, and we barely shifted. He sat down on a seat at the other end, balancing our weight. There was a clear square with lights on it; he pushed a button and the lights went green, from red.

The bubble bounced once, and then swung out away from the building . . . into the air. The ground dropped out from under us; I could see it far down below our feet. We were suspended up there between spidery towers in nothing, not even a mod; just a bubble, drifting down . . . .

“Where’s your faith in modern plastics, bondie?” Kielhosa thought it was funny.

I stuck my hands into my pockets and tried not to weigh anything.

It was almost a relief to stand in the trampled slush at the bottom of the hill. Someone was waiting with a snow vehicle, though; and out beyond him the snow was waiting for us all.

The other man said, “Get what you came for?”

“I got him, Joraleman.” Kielhosa nodded. He treated Joraleman like an equal, not like a bondie. I wondered who he was. “Supplies loaded?”

“Right.
Check the list if you want.” Joraleman looked over at me.
“The new driver taking us back?
I’ve had it up to here with double duty.”

I shook my head but Kielhosa said, “That’s what he’s here for. You’re lucky I got you a replacement so fast. Not many ‘track drivers end up in the labor pens.”

I looked for a way to change the subject. “Uh, why don’t you use some kind of mod for moving your stuff? Wouldn’t it be faster-“

“The air currents are too erratic, and the gravity’s too high. It would take a magician with psi to keep anything flying out there.” Joraleman shrugged. He was a big man, tall and heavyset, still young. He had a beard, and his hair was nearly as blond as mine; but his skin was pale and freckled. I couldn’t see his eyes behind his opaqued goggles, but when he smiled it wasn’t like he thought I was the joke. “We tried it.”

“Oh,” I said, knowing I couldn’t fly a mod either, even with psi. Right then I didn’t feel like anybody’s magician. “Well, I . . .”

“Let’s go.” Kielhosa nodded.

“I still feel a little sick. You mind if I don’t drive?”

“You’ve had a week already,” he said. “A person might get the idea you were stalling for time.”

I started toward the snow-track. It looked like an orange egg lying on its side on balloons. That didn’t help much. It was a lot bigger than I’d thought by the time I reached it. I climbed up into the cab and looked at the instrument panel. Kielhosa sat beside me, and Joraleman slid into the narrow seat behind us. I tried to pick their minds for something to help me; but my own tension got in the way and I couldn’t pull out a clear thought to save my life. There was a touch-board with letters on it, but I couldn’t tell what most of them stood for. I made a half guess on one and got the power started. It made me feel braver and I touched another. It didn’t work. The snow-track gave a god-awful screech and leaped about a meter. Kielhosa pushed me out of the seat and got it stopped. Then he kicked me out into the snow and called me some things I’d never been called before, and a lot more things I had been called.

When he ran out of ideas, he told me to get up, and Joraleman asked me if I’d ever driven a snow vehicle before. There wasn’t any reason to lie now, so I didn’t. Kielhosa looked at me funny and I knew he’d finally figured things out. By now it wouldn’t take any brains.

“Take them off.” He meant my mittens.

I took them off. The cold made my hands smart.

He looked at my bond tag. “It’s been stamped over.”

Joraleman frowned. He pushed back his goggles and looked at the bond tag, too; then up at me. He said, “Did you decide to gamble?”

I just shrugged.

Kielhosa caught me by the front of my jacket and brought up his fist. “You little whoreson, you’re going to be sorry you were ever-“

“Let him be, Kielhosa.” Joraleman pulled Kielhosa’s arm down. He looked tired, and disgusted. “He’ll have plenty of time to regret it when he gets to the mines.”

Kielhosa let go of me, grimacing. “If
it’s
one thing I don’t need, it’s a goddamn godlover standing on my conscience when I have to deal with these animals!” But he only shook his head, and Joraleman smiled just a little.

I backed away from them, looking at Joraleman. “I could learn to drive a snow-track! Just show me how. I learn fast.”

Kielhosa unlocked the doors at the back of the van.

“Sorry, bondie. You didn’t learn fast enough.” Joraleman gave me a shove. “Get in.”

I climbed into the back. All I could tell was that it was dark and full of crates, until my eyes adjusted. Then I saw two other bondies sprawled on the crates. I figured they must be there to do the loading. One of them was asleep; he didn’t wake up even when the doors slammed behind me. The other one stared at me with flat black eyes. Both of them had blue skin. I’d never seen anybody with blue skin before. The first thing I said, before I even thought, was, “Where you from?”

He said, “Hell,” softly, and shut his eyes. I wondered if that was an answer.

The snow-track started up with a jerk, dumping me back against the door. I slid down to the floor and stayed there, folding my legs up, since there wasn’t anyplace more comfortable. It was a long ride. But not long enough.

I knew from things Cortelyou had told me that Cinder was only a hundred twenty kilometers in diameter; its surface area was hardly equal to a good-size island back on Ardattee. But the gravity was one and a half times heavier than standard, because Cinder was made up of impossible things: compounds with inert elements, super-dense rocks with incredible crystalline structures, super-heavy elements that were never supposed to occur outside a lab.
Things that would only form naturally in the heart of a supernova-like telhassium.
They could mine the rest, but it would barely be worth the trouble by the time they’d shipped them back to the heart of the Federation. The telhassium made everything worth it.

Telhassium ore was the blue stone I’d seen on the building side; maybe half the planet was made of it, and perfectly formed crystals lay all through the matrix of the rock. Federation Mining could go on picking them out forever. Or the bondies could do it for them. Till hell froze over . . . the bondies said it already had. They cursed the day the FTA ever set down on this godforsaken star corpse, and it didn’t take me very long to learn why.

I was already wondering, riding stiff and cramped in the freezing hold of the snow-track; thinking about the faces of the two bondies lying a couple of meters away from me. It was night by then; night and day didn’t last long on a world the size of Cinder. The domed mines compound blazed against the darkness like a sun half-buried in the snowfields as we closed the final distance. . . .

I jerked out of dark daydreaming, wondering where I’d gotten that image, when the sealed blackness around me was total now. Then I realized it had come out of Joraleman’s mind, falling into my own drifting thoughts like a warm spark. He wasn’t a psion, but something about his mind was both looser and more focused than Kielhosa’s.

I breathed on the image spark, let it grow and warm my thoughts for a while, until the snow-track stopped again. The doors banged open; guards shouted us out into the spotlit compound yard. The bondie who’d been asleep from the start didn’t get up. A couple of the guards dragged him away. I tried to reach into his mind as they took him past me, hating myself for trying. . . . He wasn’t dead, but his mind wasn’t anywhere I could reach, either. I shivered.

And then I was in his place, following the other blueskin, unloading crates of supplies. The guard who stayed with us had an electrified prod-a soft, glowing switch with a bite like acid. He liked using it. Joraleman stood watching us work for a couple of minutes, before he turned suddenly and walked away across the yard. Kielhosa stayed, smirking, until we were finished.

I could hardly pick up my own feet by then. My arms twitched and my knees trembled from working in gravity half again as heavy as what I was used to; the backs of my legs smarted with small burns where the guard had used the tip of the prod on them. When he started us away finally to whatever came next, I did my best to stay ahead of him. On every side of us were towers winking with lights, endless black bulks of refinery buildings, cranes and gantries; a grim, dark city grown out of the frozen desert . . . my new home. Finally I began to see low white-lit buildings up ahead-anonymous, silent,
expensive
-looking. We were heading toward one of them, but the sight of it didn’t feel right to me, not with my legs smarting and my breath coming in heavy gulps. Those buildings were only a mask. This wasn’t what came next; not for us. . . .