Crystal Heat

4

As Shadith was doing a last runthrough of her kephalos files, checking to see if there was anything else she should download to transfer over to Aleytys’ Tigatri, the announcer tinged to let her know she had an incoming call.

Aleytys’ face had a brittle quietness. “Shadow, I’m coming up to Tigatri in an hour. Would you be ready to transfer by then?”

“Fine. I’ve about got things wrapped up here. Let me know when you’re in and I’ll sled across.”

“Will do.”

Shadith scowled at the screen, shook her head. “I say good-bye to my sisters’ ghosts and now Lee’s life is starting to break up. I never thought how much it meant, knowing she was here, a place I could always come back to All-erased. Or will be in a few years. Not a place I want to visit after this. No Digby. No job. No idea what I want to do. Funny how it’s all happening at the same time. The Flux is fluxing royally.”

She sighed, got wearily to her feet, and went to start packing the bubblesled for the transfer to the other ship.

Tigatri’s prime mobile waited at the lock to greet her. “Welcome aboard, Shadow. Your quarters are ready for you. Is there anything you need immediately?”

“‘Llo, Abra. No, all that gear can be stowed.” She. took the flake case from her belt sac. “If these could be read into the kephalos, I’d appreciate it.”

“Of course. Simply stowed, or do you wish Tzgatri to comment?”

“Comments would be more than welcome, along with any data you have on Bol Mutiar. And she might check the flakes for sneaky hitchhikers. Hm. And my other gear, too. For the same thing.”

“Understood.”

She stepped onto the skimmer flat beside the mobile and hummed through melting mutating interior space until walls stabilized about her and she was standing in a pleasant, ordinary room, much like her apartment on University.

“Your gear has been put away. Doll will be your serviteur. If any questions occur, she will have the answers for you. You are free of all areas of the ship except for the Archira’s quarters.” Abra bowed with liquid grace and was gone.

The last time she’d seen Tigatri’s prime mobile, he’d looked rather like Grey. That was gone. Now he might have been a twin to Swarda if he’d had anything resembling flesh.

That startled, her, and when she thought about it a little, depressed her, because it told her more than she wanted to know about the way things were going between Aleytys and Grey. 71gatri was sensitive to Aleytys’ moods because her kephalos was configured to be in part amp;duplicate of Lee’s mind/brain and it was that which took care of Abra’s appearance. It wasn’t a good sign to see Aleytys wiping Grey away so completely and retreating, symbolically at least, to the days before she settled on Wolff, when she still had that drive to ’find her mother and a place where she could fit in.

“Doll, what’s the estimated travel time to Bol Mutiar?”

“Four days, nine hours.” Doll was a small, delicate mobile with huge eyes and daintily pointed ears. She was a remnant from the time when Aleytys’ old enemy Kell had owned this ship, an image dredged up from who knew what corner of that Vryhh’s twisted psyche. Her only changes were interior; she no longer cringed when you spoke to her but grinned like a happy child. How much of that was illusion born of programming, how much a result of the Al Doll shared with the ship, was something Shadith didn’t know and didn’t worry about.

“Tell me what Tigatri knows about the tung organism on Bol Mutiar.”

“The organism is indeed a collective awareness, its intelligence unmeasurable but probably not much above the higher animals. It is rather more complex than you assumed; that which exists within the tung akar produces toxins which slow the rate of reproduction to tolerable levels within the bodies of the hosts as long as the host is in contact with the totality. Remove the host from such contact and the organism will reproduce in such numbers that it will eat the body. One must spend more than a day or two on the surface for the organism to invade all the cells of the body, which is why the Archira only discovered the fragments cysted and dormant in you, Shadow. There is a single exception to that. If a host is attacked or seriously threatened by a nonhost, the collective awareness reacts to protect the host by a massive invasion of the attacker’s body. This counterstroke is usually fatal.”

“Would it count an attempt to remove a host from the surface as a threat?”

“Yes.”

“How quickly would it strike?”

“The moment it felt the loss. As a speculation, this might occur at some arbitrary location within the atmosphere, perhaps that point where the density of the ambient organisms approaches nil.”

“Vindictive little merds. Kill the hosts to get the attacker.”

“As I said, it is not a particularly intelligent organism.”

“Hm. Might be possible to construct a warning device with a bit of Lylunda’s blood in it. When the organism begins its explosive growth pattern…”

“Yes. That would be possible. I would suggest a more sensitive warning device already exists in your empathic response. It seems quite likely that you will sense its agitation before the multiplication actually begins.”

“Maybe so, but it never hurts to have a backup, so if you’d construct such a device and have it ready for charging with the blood…”

“I’ll do that.”

“And work on a plan that will let us take Lylunda offworld without getting ourselves killed in the process. I’m thinking this is going to be very complicated.”

“Yes, I will do that.”

Shadith sighed. “And I hope you’ll come up with something better than the mishmash I’ve been churning out. Take me to the garden, I’ve got a song starting in my head and it wants to come out.”