Esper was a bitter ability. Because there was no bond, he could reach out for the ship, as he had not been able to reach out for Piree. With his head resting against his knees, Stenell 'snooped' around and through the ship.
Finding the crew was easy enough. Extracting the information he needed was bafflingly difficult until he saw that the problem lay in how he perceived the question. The engineer and the cargo master simply turned so little of their attention beyond their own quarters that what he thought of as basic was to them on the periphery of their attention and the background of their minds.
But with what little of their attention they did pay the outside world, he saw that they expected the pilot to return within a few hours. It was when the privacy latches tumbled into locked position, he finally decided. The latches that automatically locked all other doors when any one of the crew stepped out of their private areas into common areas. When the privacy latches locked, they knew she had returned.
And if she were to come back to the ship to retrieve something and leave again for a short time?
Nothing indicated any emotional investment on their part. As long as the precious locks worked so that nobody could be surprised by physically encountering another human and break the months, years of isolation regarded as luxury by the crewmen, they couldn't care less.
God, he was tired. For a few moments, he folded his long frame around itself and just slumped there, easing his back and shoulders and eyes. If he ever slept again, it would mean that he had gotten away with it and was off planet with a captive esper pilot.
A large 'if' and the concept of a captive esper - he grinned to himself and scrubbed his face roughly - at least this wouldn't be a replay of the last half dozen futile moves. Amusement welled up from some hidden pocket of himself. This would be a completely NEW futile move. He was still grinning as he wove his way down the hill of coppery stubble and stopped when the security fence hummed against his extended senses.
Back to classical theory, he decided. That was the safest counterbalance to blind instinct. Finally he had found a use for all the pieces of antique information he had gathered over the last twenty years as an escape from the tedium of his surroundings. It appeared he'd been preparing for escape long before the idea reached his conscious mind. Part of him had been escaping from something as far back as he could remember, or trying to escape and never knowing towards what he ran. Or from what he escaped.
An obstacle - he could go over, under, around or through. 'Over' and 'under' took either more preparation time or some extremely physical experiments. He tended to shy away from those, reluctant to voluntarily begin a chain of events when he had no idea in what state the first step would leave him.
'Around' might be brightest. He could lope around the field, using more time than energy and then fox the senses of the guards and have most of the width of the field to cross again. The problem there lay mainly in cutting it too close to the pilot's return and him too short of time to prepare - whatever he could prepare.
'Through' seemed most attractive. He refused to look too closely at why. It would certainly be quicker, a definite abort if unsuccessful, with the prospect of his molecules being scattered evenly around the field. A more mental challenge that long consideration would not reduce.
Closing his eyes, he sensed the fence, found the rate of vibrations of the strobing pulse, and in a sense of color, thought he saw hint of the power level. The power field was an old one, shabby, the generator neglected, the structure around the power plant surrounded by drifts of that metallic vegetation.
Regretfully, common sense suggested a safer path through the barrier. Extending a part of himself, much as he had in order to separate Piree from himself, he helped the generator shed door to swing open and the metallic grasses to float slowly, easily inward on the same faint breeze that swayed the door gently.
They weren't even surprised when the power failed. He read the guards' disgust at the nature of the grass and existence itself on that ugly chunk of rock, even as he swung easily over the dead fence and headed for the ship he'd chosen.
Entry was simple. In the hatch lock, the patterns of use showed up like a well worn trail and mentally nudging the lock into that path, he was aware again of the ease with which he transgressed.
Life, his life, might not stretch out for decades ahead but his moment to moment needs were being readily met...
He wondered if those who had set all the first prohibitions on espers living outside of one of the training planets and created the list of grotesque penalties for being caught using esper for - anything, anywhere - he wondered if they had realized that no matter what horror they fought to avoid, once people depended on those laws, the danger only increased. Especially when there were no tests devised or even attempted for finding espers. If one chose to conceal or refuse such an ability, or even exercised it with caution...
Unless one went berserk, an esper could avoid all detection. Only the impact of the tortuous penalties blocked the temptation to experiment and experimenting would have revealed both that the claims of instruments able to detect the smallest use of esper were exaggerated to the point of lie, and that what did exist were child's play for an esper to manipulate.
Those first prohibitors had worked themselves into a narrow alley with a fictitious weapon for defense and the masses held off only by myth. But in considering that myth, his automatic pursuit on the trail of WHY the first prohibitions - a trail he'd begun countless times and never pursued for some reason - that pursuit again died stillborn...
Reaching through the open hatch, he found the privacy latch and felt locks clicking into place throughout the ship. He was home at last, he thought, for what penetrating this illusion of impossibility was worth.
A wedge-shaped corridor stretched out ahead. In his mind, the ship's layout opened before him.
Behind the smooth looking walls would be compartments holding atmosphere suits, emergency equipment. In the core of that first level, around the upward access would be the powerplant and propulsion units. To either side would be the quarters of the engineer and cargomaster, with a central living area in each, sided by sleeping area at one end and work and computer station at the other. At the upward access, he would see another mirror image passageway out of the ship's core, dividing the first level totally in half, doubling access and emergency equipment and protection against any breach in the hull.
The next level would be slightly smaller in circumference and divided into four sections, able to be used as cabins or cargo storage and with pie-shaped utility storage wedges separating each as added protection and insulation.
Above that would be the pilot's world, a circle divided into three sections. Half would be the bridge, one quarter sleeping area and one quarter work area.
The pilot. A female esper pilot. What would he see of her in those quarters? Would it help anything to add a personality to an already uncertain equation?
The ship was sound. Not tainted. That was all that mattered. He turned away from recognizing that he would - if he were lucky, eventually have to deal with another human. As he resisted recognizing any traits shared with the reclusive crew.
In his mind, the blueprints of the ship's structure unrolled and only the middle level qualified as a possibility. With the hatch sealed behind him, he began the climb upward in search of a nook or cranny, finally deciding on one of the cabins, empty except for two large containers holding an experimental alloy of some type. The name on the loading label was nothing he'd heard of through his lab. It had to be something that one of the VIP's of that line wanted to play with.
Settling down between them, his back against one and feet braced on the other, he gave himself a moment to clear his head. The more and faster he probed everything around him, easy as it was, the more 'stuff' accumulated to make confusion easier and mistakes begin to happen. That knowledge at least he had painfully acquired in his flight.
Other knowledge - what needed to be done - and how he must do it... He fought back a shudder whose intensity racked his bones and sinews. And he had only begun. Physical presence on the ship was the least of his problems. But he did not have to attack the thing blindly. He could use his head.
He could try and go through one of the specialized consoles. Sighing, he reached out for the console in the cargo master's quarters and nearly broke free in distaste.
The cargo master, a short, troll-like creature, was amusing himself in a remarkable way with a delicately voluptuous similacrum. Stenell's attention flickered for a second and then steadied. He had heard of course, that the solitaries who lived out their lives on the esper ships amused themselves as they chose with artificial life-forms as companions. After all, in their self-chosen isolation, who could be harmed by their choices? He witnessed the swarthy, long-armed and thick torsoed creature basically torture the captive female similacrum. After all, who could they hurt? Other than themselves?
Abruptly, Stenell projected boredom and within a moment, the cargomaster had tossed the female aside and moved to drop into the console seat, not bothering to switch off the projection that constantly enhanced his surroundings to match his programmed fantasies. Electronics being what they were now, Stenell thought that, for all practical purposes, variations of any general fantasy would be infinite. That thought left him faintly queasy. As did reminding himself that these were NOT androids. These were something very different. Deliberately different.
They called them similacrums. Simulated life forms. Sims.
Five minutes later, the cargomaster had, for some unaccountable reason, called up the weight of the two containers of alloy and finding their weight was underestimated by exactly the weight of the no longer empty space between them, had corrected his mistake and the cargo listing that determined the overall weight for the ship's calculations.
In the small cabin, Stenell grimaced, aware that far from releasing his grip on that shard, he fought the impulse to drive the edge deeper into himself and seek out some vital organ. Similacrum or no, reality of that particular nature burned through his frozen control to scald him. His life had been in the laboratories and libraries of Stele for - too many years. All the years after Maidan.
He had been alone for a long time, but after his parents' sybaritic lifestyle and - his mind edited itself - after what had seemed to him a morass of emotional confusion, voluntary isolation on Stele had been clear and clean. A skeletal, Spartan esthetic of beauty and peace.
Celibacy had seemed a small price for the - precision - of solitude.
But after watching the troll-like crewman, the logic that it was only a similacrum he abused did not removed the unpleasantness - or his unease.
If he lived to get off the planet...
He pulled himself away from the concept of the crew's entertainments and triggered the privacy locks, giving the crew reason to think she had left again, so that when she did appear, there would be no incongruities to attract attention.
If he seriously intended to attempt this, he had to pay more attention, he reminded himself. He had to have some kind of masking over his hiding place, but then, looking ahead, if this were to do any good at all and accomplish some as yet undetermined end, he also had to have a measure of control. And he had to do things that could not be done through a console. Do them in a way that would not be seen. At least not seen right away.
He knew what had to be done. And there was no other way.
He turned some part of his mind that could not be touched in a direction that could not be described and there it was. The ladder of light. Something he had never seen. Something he knew. Something - something he skirted, turning somehow sideways again and sliding off some preset scale to flash along the edge of an invisible barrier at faster and faster speeds until he was shot out into an electrical storm...
Too far, too fast. Slowing himself, he drew back until he felt the barrier's edge again and then, from the edge, as though he peered down aisles of goods, he searched for functions and choice nodes.
It occurred to him as he extended himself into the electronic maze that was the heart of this ship, of all the esper ships, that perhaps he had deceived himself in thinking he had turned his back on those other abilities until the last weeks of flight. That perhaps his way of going into a problem, a question, had always had a large portion of more than rational guidance. And when he thought he had done all he could, Stenell slumped against the container and wished that he could draw on the ember in the heart of that rocky world just one more time. Whatever the theory of weaving his way through the mine-fields of a ship's computer and altering them as he went to try and disguise his actions and his presence and his intent, the actuality was mentally and physically exhausting. And there was still the masking of his particular hiding place.
Had he done enough? Would this work? Again and again, he forgot how far he had come from the reality he had known to the reality that existed around him. That realization left him little faith in his perceptions. Projecting the image of empty space between the containers, he steadied the image and himself to hold for an extended period of time. There would be no sleep for him until - if - this had all worked. Piree - worrying about him now would no nothing except endanger them both. Wedging his back more securely against the container, he settled under the image of empty air, as though it were a blanket.
The man waiting on the outskirts of the cluster of buildings had only the anonymity of his scruffy coveralls behind which to shelter. In the open, as one of score of loiterers in that place, with no visible means of self defense, he waited as he had been instructed to wait, looking for the one due to appear.
They were odd instructions, but nothing he was about to challenge. The one from which they came had paid him well, and he had always known that the end goal of the help he had been given would lie in the receipt and carrying out of some such request.
There could have been harder requests. It was not necessary for him to understand. Only to respect and obey. Respect he had and obedience was what he intended.
Recognizing at last the one he had been sent to find, the man stepped forward.
The two guards at the gate were aware of the solitary woman who approached. A single, slender woman, with dark hair cropped short and wearing coveralls. A pilot.Both men watched her advance without regarding her directly. Nobody chose to deal with esper pilots, let alone female esper pilots. Nobody wanted to speculate on either their abilities or their isolation.
And since nobody knew what led to those questionable abilities, the only protection against being so singled out by either fate or biology was not to see espers at all.
They saw little more of the identification she extended, working on the assumption that nobody sane would even want to mimic such as her.
Stepping through the security gates, Valenn slid her identification back into the pocket of her jumpsuit. She was all too aware of the sentiments of the guards and even more contemptuous of those who spent their lives not knowing they saw only faint shadows of what was. Preferring to see only the shadows, if they had to see at all.
Not that she saw what she was as anything but a curse. But breathing was a curse. Feeling was a curse. Being born... If she had to be cursed, she preferred it not to be blindly. Relief flooded through her at sight of her ship, but she maintained the same steady stride across the field as had led her to the gates.
She had gone into what passed for a city for two nights because it was regulation that esper pilots had to leave their ship for a minimum of one night after accumulating a predetermined number of hours off planet. The regulation was supposed to prevent mental imbalances thought to stem from isolation.
Since every esper she had trained with had fled to or sought out the school in a frenzy for isolation from non espers, Valenn did not see what point there was in such a measure at that late stage.
Neither did she see any point in wrestling with reality, nor did she intend to attract attention to herself. Since less than two nights off ship was automatically scrutinized and after a childhood on the streets of a mining planet, she could smell unwritten rules, she had spent two nights in one of the better accommodations where sensuround sound was available. There she had simply waited until she could return to her ship.
A redline layover like any other - except for the anonymous man who had stopped her on her way back to the field and offered to sell her something.
Automatically, she shielded her thoughts, curbed them, shuttered them. She was not yet safe. She would not forget she was still outside of Ship. Outside, where such as those at the gate were the rule. But even as she reminded herself of that, her mind circled around the edges of what had happened. What the man had offered her. Why her? And something like that on a misbegotten cinder of a world?
Aware of the shape in the thigh pocket of her coveralls, bulky in its wrapping of blanking cloth, as well as of how many credits had changed hands, Valenn moved through the metallic darkness of the field.
The other two crew were on board as always. Not for them the regulations separating them from the ship, but then for them there was no bond. Only refuge. She felt their life threads as she palmed the lock.
Narrow, somber, twisted life threads, unchanged from when she had left the ship.
At the top of the ramp, she hesitated. Scanning the ramp and the space around the ship, she frowned and then stepped inside to slap the privacy lock on and the hatch closed.
Exhaling, she felt herself drop back into perfect stillness before she let herself drift through her alloyed corridors and up through the core into her home, her heart.
"Ship." Laying her hand on the translucent panel beside her chair, she felt the link tighten and hold even as she drew her hand away. It was a habit with her. She didn't know about others. Just a ceremonial greeting, as formal as passing the guards on the field.
And as lacking in substance. Ship would have locked onto her patterns when she had entered, if not long before. She knew what she had been told of the link only existing within the skin of Ship. She did not have a reason to disbelieve what she had been told. Nothing but instinct. But whatever was the right of it, Ship had long since stabilized and balanced with the most basic and to her, inaccessible level of her subconscious.
Aware of that linking, that bond, she backed away and moved to palm a panel that slid back revealing her work space. The desk and shelves and cabinets that followed the curve of the corridor glowed and brightened as she entered.
Her personally selected library, much of it on outdated memory storage systems, took up a large portion of the storage, along with the reproduction interface with Ship itself. Behind clear panels rested her collection of recreated antique decks of prediction, their gem colors bright through transparent cases.
At the end of the curving workspace, closed cabinets held the raw materials for the virtually indestructible reproductions.
Drawing the artifact for which she had exchanged so many credits from the pocket of her coverall, she slid it into the compartment below her console without removing the wrapping and closed it firmly.
Later.
Passing through the panel that opened at the far end of the work space, the opening through which she had entered closed, as did the second opening as she pushed the illumination for her sleeping quarters to full bright.
She was back. She was safe. She was home.
It would be months before her next redline, before she was again forced to leave the safety of Ship for the murky peril of other people.
Unzipping the clumsy coverall she wore only at those times as camouflage behind which to hide, the coarse cloth slid down to lay around her feet. Her skin FELT the pearly iridescence surrounding her, branding that place hers and her belonging there.
She stood there for a long moment, mingling with the feeling of welcome, of returning. Then, she scooped up the offending garment, dropping it into the cleaning slot and stepped into the fresher.
When she stepped out, she felt clean for the first time in days. Since before the last few weeks when this port time had loomed so near. Her skin sang with the humming freed by the low moisture mist that, charged with negative ions, truly renewed the user.
Opening the narrow compartment beside the fresher, a dozen sim-silk gowns shimmered. She chose one of midnight blue and even as the blue sim-silk slithered down her thighs to swirl around her bare ankles, she curled her toes in the thick sliver plush carpet.
As a child in one of the pleasure houses, when she had been young enough for her mother to overlook her existence and even, occasionally, be kind in an offhanded manner, she had seen a holographic representation of a shell from a forgotten sea. When she had been bonded with the ship, she had chosen those colors for her bridge, for the space that would be her world.
Silver gray iridescent carpet and silvery plush chair were the fixed elements. The pearl metalloy walls and ceiling shimmered with underlying waves of all the colors of the spectrum. Colors which, after bonding, reflected her unconscious moods.
A significant portion of Ship's abilities were dedicated to just that task. The task of monitoring her emotions, using her subconscious as counterpoint to all her other actions. Monitoring what she hid from others and what she hid from herself. If she chose to regulate her emotions to achieve a particular tint in the shimmer, it was her choice and an ever present means of fine-tuning her control. But regulated or not, her emotions surrounded her.
Constantly ranging from midnight blue, rose, turquoise, violets and even finer shimmers of pure yellow, blood red or emerald, the metalloy walls lived and breathed in their own fashion, outlining the viewport and the meager visible telemetry, cradling her in the sleeping and work areas, completing the ring with the bridge.
Tones of yellow predominated in the shimmer when she leaned towards curiosity and challenge, rose and softened reds for warmth and relaxing, blues and blue-greens for introspection and meditative calm.
And violet...
Violet stained the iridescence of her walls only in deep space and only for short periods of time...