Crystal Heat

2

The dot in a semicolon of islands trailing across one of Pillory’s southern seas, Glin Paran was a wheel with a lake at the hub and a high jagged rim around the periphery. It was a big island, almost a subcontinent.

Shadith suppressed a sigh as the flier dipped from the-scatter of clouds and fought the choppy winds; the trip had been as rough as the Kliu pilot could make it and Pillory cooperated with his malice by throwing storm after storm at them. Despite the support of the exo, she was battered and exhausted; some of her bruises felt as if they went to the bone.

The Kliu slammed the flier down, waited only long enough for Shadith, the ’bot mule, and her sullen guard to disembark, then he shot away, vanishing into those clouds they’d left such a short time before.

Shadith glanced at the guard, but he had his eyes nearly shut against what was for him the glare of the sun, though the reddish light was more like a cloudy twilight to her. He was radiating stubbornness and revulsion and his speaking mouth was pressed shut with such determination that she didn’t bother saying anything to him. She looked around.

They were standing on a gritty landing pad, wind whipping debris against their legs and into their faces. On every side there were tangles of squat trees. Several stands of reeds taller than the trees grew out of the water, a cross between rules and bamboo with short stubby leaves like knife blades, tough enough to stab with. Each reed was different from its neighbor in color and configuration, a red like dried blood, a green so dark it was almost black, fire orange, a deep sapphire blue, plus blends and shades of all these colors, mottling and stripes; a few had feathery sprays of seed pods bursting from their tops.

In the open spaces between the tree clumps there were patches of low brush with brown, dead-looking leaves clinging to branches that were as crooked and knotty as arthritic fingers.

The xeno settlement was sited a short distance into the lake with only a spidery catwalk joining it to the bank. The buildings were constructed from those reeds and took some getting used to because whoever supervised the construction seemed to have been colorblind. Apart from that, though, they were simple boxes with peaked roofs made from the leaves of the reed, overlapping like shingles. The area where the catwalk reached the bank had been cleared though she could see new sprouts just breaking the surface of the water; apparently the reeds had to be cut back again and again. She wondered about the catwalk and why the Kliu had gone to so much inconvenience with their building. It seemed to suggest that the Taalav arrays were hostile and dangerous. If not them, then some other predator flourished here. Which made the guard rather more useful than she’d supposed. Or maybe it was simply because they didn’t want to harm the juvenile body parts of the Taalav.

Reasoning without data was a singularly futile process, so she gave it up and followed the guard toward the settlement.

A man in an exo stood on the platform at the end of the catwalk. He had a shaggy black beard and heavy eyebrows, so his face seemed mostly hair. Despite that there was something familiar about that face. She didn’t know him, but she’d seen his phot recently. Ambela? University?

She tapped the mule with her toe, sent it humming onto the narrow walk, followed it. Halfway across, she remembered when and where she’d seen him and nearly misstepped off the edge.

It was a big scandal around the middle of her first year at University. His picture was everywhere. Saklavaya. That was his name. He’d been skimniing and selling exotics from expedition stocks-which would have been bad enough, but he had the misfortune to be caught pinching off genetic material from the rarer of the alien sentients he had access to and selling these interesting bits to one of the Gray Market meatfarms. The uproar when this was discovered nearly destroyed the Xeno School. The Regents Board fined him all his voting stock and convinced Helvetia to freeze his accounts; then they barred him from ever returning to University or using University services. If he was here as a result of some further predations and not just hired, she suspected the Kliu had better keep a close eye on their crystals.

She’d gotten to watch his hearing. Her friend Aslan was a member of the Xeno Department and went every day to glare her fury at this man who’d polluted everything she believed in. Shadith wasn’t afraid he’d recognize her. She was in the Music School and the various Departments of University were self contained units.

She stopped in front of him. “You are?” ’

“Vannar. I run this place. What’n pyag you think you’re going to learn here? The last xenobi is long gone and I’ve got his rooms. There’s nothing there.”

“Desp’ Vannar. If you’ll show me where I’ll stay while I’m making my investigation, I can get on with it and out of your hair.”