A second bottle hit him, splashing him with lukewarm beer. “Dude, what the hell?”
Annison’s rage, the full fill of nearly a whole year, came upon him in a wave, the second time in five months, and he lost his temper with the audience. With the utterance of a few brief lines, he hurled the great face of a giant dragon forward from himself. It appeared so suddenly and appeared so solid, so real, the six-member crowd all screamed at once, not that anyone could have heard it for the thunderous roar that came from the dragon’s mouth. Along with the roar, he sent a blast of illusionary fire much like he’d done last time, filling their liquor-soaked minds with more things to be afraid of.
The people flung themselves over the backs of their seats, stumbling and tripping, falling flat as they tried to straddle and climb over the rows. In moments the theater was empty of patrons again.
Black Sander’s voice laughed in Annison’s head, and there were rumbles of mirth from the others included in the spell as well, one of which felt tainted with a note of instability.
The Incredible Spectacularo turned to his right in anticipation of the onslaught to come from Slick Danny, surely charging out at him now. But the man was not. He lay facedown on the ground instead, unmoving.
Annison barely had time to turn back and look to the other end of the stage when the dart hit him in the neck. He reached up and grabbed it with the reflex of one who’s just been stung by a bee.
He was vaguely aware of Black Sander’s querulous thoughts mixing with the seer’s tainted ones. Then he slumped forward and fell onto the stage. The last thing Annison saw was a pair of brown leather shoes, polished to a high shine and standing right before his face. For a moment he stared into them, watching in the reflections as the stage lights faded to black.
Chapter 30
A
nnison woke up slowly, his vision returning bit by bit. As he became aware of that fact, he also became aware of a sharp pain in his throat, like a pin stabbing him. He reached for it, or at least he tried to, and found that he was bound tightly to a chair, straps at the wrist, elbows, ankles, waist, chest, and head. He sat reclined in such a way that he might have been at the barber’s for a haircut or at a healer’s for the treatment of a tooth. But he was here for neither.
A breeze blew gauzy white curtains into the room at an open window, and on the breeze came the smell of ocean air and the shrill laughter of seagulls not far away. He strained to turn his head to look, hoping vainly to get his bearings on a planet where he’d been almost nowhere, but he could not. There were two padded wedges jammed up against his cheeks, making it so that he could not move his head at all. He might as well have been set in clay and baked in place, he was so securely held.
Something beeped faintly behind him, and from time to time, he could hear the whirring of some small electrical device or another, familiar in a way, but not so much so that he could name it or its function, just some thing of Earth. To his left there was a long counter with jars and boxes along the wall, and above it cabinets, all of it painted a pale yellow. There were pictures on the wall, done in black and white, depicting men in extremely wide-brimmed hats and wearing strangely studded belts that crisscrossed their chests. The men in them looked proud or triumphant, standing before dirty walls or amongst rocky landscapes where tufts of scraggly brush and cactus dominated.
Panic began to rise, and he quickly started a teleportation spell, but the first word wasn’t even fully shaped before his throat constricted painfully, instantly, his neck and face and upper chest all contracting with the violence of electricity. It stopped almost as quickly as it began, and he lay there panting, the pinprick in his neck throbbing. His head hurt so badly he could hardly keep from vomiting, and he was dimly aware that if he did, he would likely drown in it.
A door that he could not see opened, and someone came in, a man with brown skin and brown eyes and a very serious look on his face. He wore a wide mustache like the men in the pictures did, though he wore a neatly cut suit of the sort that was in fashion with the well-to-do on Earth, a dark brown jacket in shimmering fabric worn over a shirt that nearly matched the yellow of the walls, and shiny slacks to match the jacket.
The man peered down at Annison lying there and smiled a wide smile that rounded his cheeks to the point where they shone a little in the sunlight coming through the window. He said something in a language Annison had not learned, though Annison did catch the phrase
El Segador
.
The man patted Annison on the cheek, affectionately, as he might a prize racehorse, and then left the room, calling out names that Annison had never heard.
Annison tried to cry out, but just as when he’d started the teleportation spell, his face and neck and chest were once more wracked by electrical agony. He tried to stop speaking, but in the pain of it, he had a hard time stopping the rasping
gahhhh
that came out on its own, perpetuating his suffering. And so it went until somehow, without really any volition of his own, the sound in his throat stopped, the muscles having finally seized too tightly to vibrate any more.
He lay there panting, tears running from the corners of his eyes. He closed them and tried to calm himself. He tried to remember what had happened to him. He remembered the rabbit, and that someone had reached him telepathically. Black Sander had been involved. It hurt his head to think of it. In a few hazy moments he recalled it all, and he immediately sent out a telepathic call to the strange seer again, intent on finding Black Sander and begging for help. Black Sander could come get him. He sent the request across the mana stream, sent on waves of terror and absolute urgency.
He pushed rather brutishly against the mind of the man whose thoughts he’d only ever touched once, the Z-class seer who had found him across all that space. On Prosperion his approach might have gotten him a reprimand from the Seers Guild, whose bailiwick telepathy was. As he concentrated on the thoughts he sent, as he hung there in impatient misery, he noticed the whirring growing more incessant from the back of the room. No sooner had this thought struck him than the door opened again.
In came two women and three men, two of whom he recognized. One was El Segador, and the other was the man in the brown suit with the wide mustache. One of the women went around him and disappeared, but he could hear the now-familiar sound of someone tapping on the glass panel of a computer console. He’d been on this miserable world long enough to recognize that.
“He’s trying to use it,” she said. “Look at all this activity, only partly in the frontal cortex. It’s all down here, like base functions.”
“Well, stop it,” demanded El Segador. “You’re supposed to have set it for that.”
The second woman, wearing a white coat that hung to her knees, came forward and touched something just out of sight behind Annison’s chair. Again came the painful electrocution in his throat. His face cramped, and he jerked about in his restraints until after a few seconds she released whatever it was she’d touched.
The man in the brown suit was laughing, and he came right up and leaned down into Annison’s face. He smelled like cigar smoke, and tattoos ran all the way up his neck and wrapped around his ears. Small
x
’s had been inked at the outer corners of his eyes, three on the right, two on the left. He said something else in the language Annison didn’t understand. He patted him on the face again, not quite a slap, once more like a fine thoroughbred. He stood up and spoke to the woman, then said something else to El Segador before he went out. He could not possibly have looked happier.
“Jefe likes you,” said El Segador. “He says it’s been a long time since he had a gringo he liked.”
“Well, damn it,” said the woman in the white coat next to him. El Segador looked up with the question in his eyes. She saw it, then directed his gaze downward with her own.
He laughed and shook his head as he looked briefly at Annison’s lap. “You pissed yourself already, Prosperion? We’re hardly even started yet.”
Chapter 31
A
ltin leaned forward, the spotlight of his spacesuit shining into the hole that the professor had cut out with the machine, cut straight into the cave wall where the old heart chamber had been. Water still ran out of it as he looked, and Professor Bryant was accepting compliments from the team about how perfectly this hole matched the readings, or at least the partial readings, taken from Doctor Singh’s carefully excised heart stone back on the moon where Yellow Fire was.
The crystal bed in which Red Fire’s heart had lain prior to Orli’s blowing it to pieces with mining explosives was laid bare and ragged by the blast. The plain stone, the rocky components that made up the planet prior to its having become host to a Hostile, was visible in places, particularly where they’d had to excavate room for the water saw and its mounts prior to beginning. They knew from the work on Yellow Fire that the barest tip of the heart stone would need to touch this rocky stuff, but all the rest of Yellow Fire had been nestled into the Liquefying stone. This was going to be a problem that had to be resolved.
Before they’d started the cut, Professor Bryant and his team had concluded that the crystal bed here would need to be regrown before the transplantation would work. “It’s dead,” he’d said. “And I mean
dead
dead, not dormant dead. In fact, I’ll bet Orli and the whole
Glistening Lady
crew a massage and a steam bath that the circuit is open right now, in a way it isn’t open back on Yellow Fire. Look.” He’d made his point by pointing a laser at the crystals all around, and to Altin’s and Orli’s horror, it acted differently. As in, it shone right through them, altered some by the dull gray of the crystals, sure, but it went right on through. The crystals might as well all have been formations of quartz or salt.
Live Liquefying Stone didn’t work like that. Light went in, but it didn’t come out. At least not exactly. Not like that. The dead crystals on Yellow Fire hadn’t either. They had no glow, but they didn’t let light right through. They’d just been sort of dull.
Professor Bryant had then taken a small hammer off of his tool belt and tapped the tip of a long crystal a few times. A portion broke off, and bits of what remained turned to powder like crushed glass. He looked up and grinned. “See. Someone owes me a steam bath and some shoulders time,” he’d said.
Altin had grown very nervous at that point. He went to the broken shard of crystal and pressed a finger to the powdered part. It stuck like sand to his glove. He studied it for a moment and then harrumphed. What did it mean? Clearly that something was different. So now what? Was it going to work?
And that was the conversation now that the hole was cut, ready for Yellow Fire’s heart. Or nearly ready. Now they had to figure out what to do about the difference. They had to fill that space where the explosives had cleared the crystals away. But should they cut out more crystal from Yellow Fire and transplant that too, or should Professor Bryant actually regrow the crystals that were already here to fill the space? He’d said he could do it. Now they were going to have to decide.
“Well, a perfect cut,” the professor concluded. “So now you people just need to tell me which it’s going to be, transplanted crystal or regrowth. I can set up a containment field on the open areas, and we can make a bed for it right here. Now that we can actually study the damn things, we’ve found the valence shell, and it’s not really any different than any other crystal from there.”
Altin knew better than to ask what that meant, and he relied entirely on Orli to decide. “So we have no way to know if these crystals are any different than those back on Yellow Fire?” Orli asked, standing beside Altin and staring into the opening. “What if there is some subtle difference between male and female? What if there’s a huge difference?”
The professor climbed down out of the water saw’s cab, splashing into the runoff as he jumped from the last rung of the short ladder bolted to its side. He came over and looked into the hole with them. “What an incredible cut, if I do say so myself. I’ve done an outstanding job here, I have to tell you all.”
“I thought this cut was based on a template created by the cut Doctor Singh made back on Yellow Fire,” Altin said. “Wasn’t one of the main purposes for this particular machine being employed that it could trace a pattern with absolute accuracy essentially on its own?”
“Listen, Meade, I don’t piss in your oatmeal, so you don’t piss in mine, okay?”
Altin wrinkled up his face and looked to Orli, who was barely holding in a laugh, as he said, “I have absolutely no idea what that means.”
The professor moved on to Orli’s question anyway. “Like I said, I can’t study that other stuff, the heart stone, anyway, at least not much. So your guess is as good as mine. I suspect when we pull that out all the way, the gray crystals on that moon are going to get just like these, delicate and breakable. But that doesn’t change anything. At some point, somewhere, material from there is going to have to come together with what is here. Which means you need to decide which part and where. Are we crating all this equipment back up and taking it back to Yellow Fire for a skin graft, or are we growing these to fill in the gap? Either way, the semester is going to start in a few weeks. I’m going to have to go back or burn my sabbatical.”