The Ship Who Sang (12 page)

Kira was fumbling with the draperies at the bulkhead. Her escort, roused from their euphoria as they sensed sacrilege, dove toward Kira. Her swift hand caught one on the voice box in a deadly chop. She ducked under the other man, using her body to throw him against the bier so squarely that his head cracked ominously against the stone and he slumped down.

‘KH, the release is na-thom-te-ah-ro, watch the pitch!'

And Helva, knowing she was in effect
executing one of her own kind, broadcast the release word to the 732. As the syllables with their pitched nuances activated the release of the access panel, Kira caught the plate, reached in deftly and threw the valve that would flood the inside of the shell with anesthesia.

‘I can't see you, Seber. Where are . . .' and the 732's despairing wail was stilled in longed for oblivion.

Kira whirled, the panel clinking behind the concealing draperies as cowled figures lurched into the main cabin from the quarters behind.

‘Hold!' Helva commanded in Lia's voice. ‘He Who Orders has decided. Take the barefaced woman back to the ship. Such blasphemous seed is not for the chosen of Alioth.'

Kira, again trancelike, followed the dazed hoods back down the steps.

‘Helva, what in the fardles is happening there?' Cencom demanded within the 834.

‘He has decided,' the fanatical mob in the plaza groaned and swayed in the thrall of the hallucinogenic fumes.

‘Helva!' snapped Cencom.

‘Oh, shut up all of you,' said Helva, near a breaking point.

‘He has ordered. That is Eternal Truth.'

She watched just long enough to be sure that the reeling, freak-drunk Aliothites would not interfere with Kira's return. How they could, Helva couldn't imagine, for they were dropping by the hundreds, exhausted by fumes and frenzy.

‘You better have a good explanation for deliberately abrogating specific restrictions in your journey tape regarding Dylanistic . . .'

‘I'll Dylanize you, you fatuous oaf,' Helva cut in angrily. ‘The end justifies the means, and might I remind you that for some reason, unknown forever to God and man, your list of restricted planets did NOT include Alioth, as by the fingernails of that God they should have!'

Cencom sputtered indignantly.

‘Control yourself,' Helva suggested acidly. ‘I found your long-lost rogue and I have killed her. And I did some rough but effective therapy on your precious Kira of Canopus. What more do you want of one brain shell? Huh?'

Cencom maintained silence for 60 stunned seconds.

‘Where is Kira?' and Helva could swear Cencom sounded contrite.

‘She's all right.'

‘Put her on.'

‘She's
all right
!' Helva repeated with weary emphasis. ‘She's on her way back from the Temple.'

The spaceport rocked under a multiple eruption just as the vehicle bearing Kira screeched to a halt at the lift. Helva unlocked the mechanism and Kira leaped on before the guards came to their senses. The ground danced under the ship's stabilizers and, as Kira dove from airlock to pilot's couch, Helva slammed the lock shut and precipitously lifted from grim Alioth.

In the tail scanners they saw the guards retreating to safety as the gantry tumbled leisurely down. Bright jewels dotted the receding planet as it gave them a volcanic sendoff.

‘Scout Kira of the KH-834 reporting,' the slender girl said crisply to Cencom, shedding her cloak. Helva half-expected a shower of hairpins to follow but Kira remained tautly erect before the tight beam. She gave a terse report, demanding to know why traders had not reported the presence of Service-type contact buttons plainly visible on every Aliothite. And why – a far more criminal omission – the hallucinogenic gas eruptions had not been reported.

‘Hallucinogenic gas?' Cencom echoed weakly. Such instances were the nightmare of colonization; entire populations could be subjected to illegal domination by such emissions, as indeed had happened on Alioth.

‘I recommend strongly that all traders dealing with Alioth in the last 50 years be questioned as to their motives in suppressing such information from Central Worlds. And discover who was the semi-intelligent CW representative who cleared this freak-off planet for colonization.'

Cencom was reduced to incoherent sputters.

‘Stop gargling,' Kira suggested sweetly, ‘and order an all-haste planet-therapy team here. You've got an entire society to reorient to the business of living. We'll file a comprehensive report from Nekkar, but now I've got to inspect
our children. That was a rough take-off. Over and out.' And Kira closed the tight beam down.

With a fluid motion she propelled herself to the kitchen, shaking her braids free and massaging her scalp with rough fingers.

‘My head is pounding!' she exclaimed, reaching for coffee. ‘That gas was unbelievably malodorous.' She leaned wearily against the counter, her shoulders sagging in fatigue.

Helva waited, knowing Kira was sorting her thoughts.

‘The closer I got to that temple, the deeper the terrible miasma of grief. It was almost visible, Helva,' she said, and then added scathingly, ‘and I wallowed in it. Until that Dylan of yours reached me, Helva.'

Her eyes widened respectfully. ‘The hair on the back of my neck stood up straight. That final chord got me, right here,' she groaned, jabbing at her abdomen with a graphic fist. ‘Thorn would have given his guts to compose such a powerful Dylan.' Her shoulders jerked spasmodically in a violent muscle spasm.

‘That awful corpse!' She closed her eyes and shuddered, shaking her head sharply to rid herself of the effect. ‘I think . . .' she murmured, her eyes narrowing with self-appraisal, ‘I have been thinking – I had done the same thing to Thorn.'

‘I think perhaps you had,' Helva agreed softly.

Kira sipped at her coffee, her face tired but
alive, the mask of vivacity replaced by an inner calm. ‘I have been so stupid,' she said with trenchant self-contempt.

‘Not even Cencom is infallible,' Helva drawled.

Kira threw back her head in a whoop of laughter.

‘That's Eternal Truth!' she crowed, dancing back into the main cabin.

Helva watched the victory dance, immeasurably pleased with the outcome of the affair as far as Kira was concerned. She could not regret that she had had to kill one of her own peers. Lia had really died years before with her scout: that tortured remnant had peace at last, and so had Kira. She and Helva would continue together on their stork run, picking up the seeds from . . .

Helva let out a yip of exultation. Kira stared at her, startled.

‘What hit you?'

‘It's so ridiculously simple I can't imagine someone never suggested it to you. Or maybe they did and you rejected it.'

‘I'll never know unless you tell me what it is,' Kira replied caustically.

‘One of the facets of your grief psychosis . . .'

‘I'm over it now,' Kira interrupted Helva, her eyes flashing angrily.

‘. . . Ha to that. One of the facets has been the lack of progeny from your seed and Thorn's? Right?'

The scout's face turned starkly white, but Helva plunged on.

‘Neither sets of your parents were stupid enough to have ignored their RCA duty. Right? So their seed is on file. Take some of your mother's and his father's and . . .'

Kira's eyes widened and her jaw dropped, her face lighting with incredulous radiance. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Delicately she stretched out her hand, touching the access panel softly.

Helva was ridiculously, embarrassingly delighted at her acceptance of the idea. Then Kira drew her breath in sharply, her face concerned.

‘But for you . . . wouldn't you take
your
mother's and . . .'

‘No,' Helva said sharply, then added more gently, ‘that won't be necessary.' She knew in mind and heart now that the resolution of grief is highly individual: that both she and Kira had reached it by different means, just as Theoda had.

Kira looked unaccountably stricken, as if she had no right to take the solution Helva offered if Helva did not, too.

‘After all,' the ship chuckled, ‘there aren't many women,' and Helva used the word proudly, knowing that she had passed as surely from girlhood to woman's estate as any of her mobile sisters, ‘who give birth to 110,000 babies at one time.'

Kira dissolved into laughter, crowing with
delight over Helva's analogy. She snatched up her guitar, strumming a loud introductory arpeggio. Then the two, ship and scout, surprised the stars with a swinging Schubert serenade as they sped toward Nekkar and deliverance.

HELVA TURNED THE
sound down, pleased that all the embryo-tube racks and the great beakers of nutrients were being pulled out, but not at all pleased with the mauling the crewmen were giving her in the process.

They didn't really need to add to the scars already made by the metal frames on her decks, or the stains of spilled nutrients on her bulkheads. But she was silent because even the pilot's cabin showed unmistakable marks of long tenure and Kira Falernova had been a tidy person. However, Helva had no wish to go to Regulus and show this shoddy interior to whichever brawns were waiting to team up with her.

She said as much to the other brain ship sitting near her, to one side of the commercial pads at the Nekkar spaceport.

‘That's a silly waste of credit, Helva,' Amon, the TA-618, replied, his voice slightly peevish. ‘How d'you know your new brawn will like
your
taste? Let him, or her, pay for it out of his quarters' allowance. Really, Helva, use some sense or you'll never buy free. And I don't see
why you're so eager to be saddled with a brawn anyway.'

‘I like people.'

Amon made a rude noise. Since he'd landed, he had steadily complained to her about his mobile partner's deficiencies and shortcomings. Helva had reminded herself that Amon and Trace had been together over 15 standard years and that was said to be the most difficult period of any long association.

‘When you've had a series of brawns aboard you as long as I have, you won't be so philanthropic. And when you know what your brawn is going to say before he says it,
then
you'll have a little idea of the strain
I'm
currently under.'

‘Kira Falernova and I were 3 years on this storkrun . . .'

‘Doesn't signify. You
knew
it was a short-term assignment. You can put up with anything on that basis. It's the inescapable knowledge that you've got to go on and on, 25 to 30 years' worth . . .'

‘If he's all that bad, opt a change,' Helva said.

‘And add a cancellation penalty to what I'm already trying to pay?'

‘Oh, I forgot.' Her reply, Helva realized the moment the words were out of her mouth, was not very politic. Among his many grievances with the galaxy at large, the extortionate price of repairs and maintenance made by outworld stations ranked high. Amon had run afoul of a space-debris storm and the damage had
required a replating of half his nose. Central Worlds had insisted that the cause was his negligence, so it was therefore not a service-incurred or compensable accident.

‘Furthermore, if I opted,' Amon went on sourly, ‘I'd
have
to take whoever is up next for assignment with no refusal right.'

‘That's too true.'

‘I'm not fat with double bonuses from grateful Nekkarese.'

Helva swallowed a fast retort to such an unfair remark and meekly said she hoped that things would soon look up. Amon wanted a sympathetic listener, not an adviser.

‘You take the advice of one who's been around, Helva,' Amon went on, mollified by her contrition, ‘and take every solo assignment you can get. Rack up bonuses while you can.
Then
you'll be in a position to bargain. I'm not. Oh, here he comes!'

‘He's in a hurry, too.'

‘Wonder what lit
his
jets.' Amon sounded so disagreeable that Helva began to wonder just how much the brawn was at fault. Brain ships were people, too.

Just then, Helva could hear the brawn's excited greeting over the open ship-to-ship band.

‘Amon, man, get us cleared and lifted. We got to get back to Regulus Base on the double. I just heard . . .'

The band went dead.

It was so like Amon to be selfish with good
news, too, that Helva did not take offense. Good luck to him, she thought as she turned on the outside scanners and watched him lift off. If he did get a good assignment and the delivery bonus, he could pay off his debt. He might even resolve most of his problems with his brawn. The man had seemed nice enough when he'd paid a courtesy call on Kira and herself the day they arrived at Nekkar. But it was petty of him Helva thought . . . if the brawn had heard, the news could not come via tight beam.

‘Nekkar Control, XH-834 calling.'

‘Helva? Had my hand on the switch to call you. Our ground crew treating you right? Anything you want them to do, you just let 'em know,' answered the affable com man.

Considering Nekkar's recent disaster, you'd think
they'd
be as sour as Amon.

‘I was wondering if you could tell me why the TA-618 left in such a hurry.'

‘Say, yes, that's something, isn't it? Never know who's around in the next system over, do you? I always said, a galaxy's got room for all kinds. But who'd ever think people . . . I guess you could call 'em people . . . would want any old archaic plays. Can you imagine that?' and infuriatingly the com man chuckled.

Amon had problems knowing ahead of time
what
his man'd say? Helva thought, impatiently waiting for this jovial soul to say anything worth listening to.

‘Well, not really, because you haven't told me
what you heard yet,' Helva cut in as the man seemed likely to continue editorializing.