Dragons in the Stars Page 6

  It was like the dreamlink, but far better. The golden light that swelled into her awareness was like nothing she had ever felt, but it was like a feeling she had often imagined—a feeling not only of warmth, but of companionship and love—all of the feelings of love that she had ever dreamed of but never felt in reality, emerging from that light and spilling through her in a caressing stream. Unlike the dreamlink, this did not ask her to open herself, did not invite vulnerability. Unlike the dreamlink, this was purest pleasure and fulfillment. It was like floating in a warm, pulsing amniotic sea. It was like being safe again in the womb . . . .

  Chapter 6: The Pallisp

  SHE SHIVERED as the warmth ebbed away. Don't stop! she wanted to cry. But it was already disappearing; the glow was fading. She felt as though she had just been to Heaven, and she wanted to go back! Blinking, she wondered how long the feeling had lasted; it seemed only moments, but it was like a dream fleeing, intangible. She might have been under the pallisp for hours.

  "Are you awake, Jael?"

  Drawing a breath, she raised her head and focused. Mogurn was standing in front of her, nodding in apparent satisfaction. He slipped the silver-and-grey pallisp into a pocket inside his vesta. "Um," Jael muttered, suppressing an urge to reach out and seize the pallisp from him. Whatever that instrument was, it was wonderful. Wonderful!

  "I told you it would be interesting, Jael. Would you agree with me?"

  Slowly, drawing her awareness back in, centering herself, she nodded. Interesting, she thought. Indeed it was.

  "Would you like more?"

  She peered up into his face and could not read what she saw there. His eyes seemed to focus on her with a greater intensity, a greater curiosity, than she remembered. "I . . ." She faltered without finishing her answer.

  "This will become a regular reward for you, for work well done." Mogurn returned to his chair and rested his head back, observing her as she stretched, coming back to full alertness.

  "What does it do?" she asked, choosing to let her puzzlement show, rather than her desire for more. "It must stimulate—somehow, I guess—the pleasure center of the brain?" She sounded like an idiot, she knew. But it was not an idiotic question.

  "Something like that, Jael. The important thing is that it will help you to release your own greater potential when it comes to flying." He lifted a bushy, half-grey eyebrow. "It's not dangerous, if you're still worried about that. I told you that before." He pursed his lips and let out a deep sigh. "And now, I require your help. Would you come here, please?"

  Jael rose unsteadily and approached.

  Mogurn shifted restfully. "I'm going to ask you to help me with my own synaptic augmentor. My reward for work well done." His thumb and forefinger stroked away a smile that had come to his lips. His gaze sharpened. "But first you must have your instructions. While I am under the augmentor, you may sleep—after first double-checking our position. You are not to fly, however, unless extraordinary conditions demand it. I will tell you when your next shift begins. Until then you will maintain stability in the Flux, and no more. Is that clear?"

  Jael nodded uneasily. She acknowledged, but did not understand his unusual request. Ordinarily, a rigger would determine her own flight routine. Still, she didn't suppose it mattered. She closed her eyes for a moment, remembering the blissful warmth of the pallisp, and she sighed softly. Opening her eyes she saw, hanging from the padded arm of Mogurn's chair, a small holotronic unit with what looked like a headpiece attached to a thin fiber-op cable.

  Mogurn's eyes followed hers, and he nodded. Reaching for the headpiece, he said, "I must ask you to help me adjust this." He donned the headpiece, showing her how to adjust the slender contact arms to the proper points on his temples and the back of his neck. "Yes. Now, you must set the controls on the unit. Two hours at intensity four. You must observe the power fluctuation for a moment to make the adjustment. Do you see it?"

  When she had followed his instructions, she stepped back warily. Mogurn no longer seemed to notice her presence. He sighed deeply, his eyelids fluttered, and a broad smile came over his features and grew to a grin. His eyes did not close, but appeared to focus on nothing at all. "Are you . . . is that all right?" But Jael realized, when he did not answer, that there would be no answer—not, at least, until the unit switched itself off, two hours from now. And what was Mogurn experiencing under the influence of the synaptic augmentor? Was it like the pallisp? She backed away a few steps and watched him. His hands began to twitch, as though he were in a deep dream-state; they began to take on a life of their own, making squeezing and stroking motions. Jael began to feel embarrassed.

  She backed toward the door, fascinated but repelled. Was this what she looked like under the pallisp? She remembered only peacefulness and warmth and light. Whatever this augmentor was designed to do, it looked more powerful than the pallisp, and more dangerous. It looked like nothing she would care to experience.

  She crept into the corridor with a feeling of relief. The door turned opaque behind her, leaving Mogurn to his solitude—leaving her alone with the starship, perhaps the only conscious human being between here and the distant star system of Lexis. With a shiver, she circled around the hallway, exploring what little she had not yet seen of the deck: one other empty cabin, and one storage compartment. There was not much else to look at. But she did have another duty to perform.

  As she entered the bridge, she could not help remembering the glow of the pallisp. She wished it could have lasted just a little longer; it was so comforting, so reassuring, so restorative. Just a little more . . . She exhaled deliberately and walked forward to the rigger-station. A glance at the readouts told her that nothing had changed much in the net; a glance at the instruments in the nose of the bridge confirmed that all systems were functioning normally.

  Should she enter the net? Mogurn had said not to fly, but he'd also said to make sure that all was well. That, in her mind, meant taking a firsthand look. Besides, she wasn't ready to sleep yet.

  Slipping into the station, she entered the net. Her senses darkened and reached out of the ship, into the glowing realm of the Flux. It looked exactly as she had left it: tangerine sky and gently sighing breezes bearing the ship like a stately, royal barge toward the horizon. Toward whatever lay beyond. She extended her vision, trying to discern what that might be. Was her sensitivity any sharper now? She couldn't tell. Were there mountains ahead? She felt a presence of something strong and substantial, perhaps mountains. It felt like a living presence. Sometimes the landscape of the Flux was like that; it was as though it were itself alive. Soon they would be close and she would see.

  But now it was time to readjust the stabilizers, to close the net and retire. She sighed as she withdrew, as her eyes blinked open, as she studied the hard cold presence of monitors overhead. There were times when she wished she could stay in the net forever. With a frown, she climbed out and took one last look around the bridge, and went to her cabin.

  Sleep did not come quickly, or easily. Her thoughts danced between memories of the net and of the pallisp, and feelings of hope and excitement fluttered helplessly against her uneasiness about Mogurn, against the recurring image of the man twitching and sighing under his synaptic augmentor.

  At last she drifted off, carried on the winds of sleep and dream.

  * * *

  She awoke to the sound of Mogurn's voice on the intercom, summoning her to breakfast. They ate in silence, Jael trying to wake up fully for the flying that lay ahead, and half wanting to remain in the somnolence that still enveloped her. But Mogurn, once done with his own breakfast, rose and hurried her to the bridge.

  To her relief, he sent her directly into the net, with the same cautions as before. She was on her own to fly. It was Jael and the sparkling net. Jael and the endless currents of the Flux. She reveled in the freedom.

  The imagery changed, with a little coaxing from her half-conscious thoughts. An orangish sky turned into an autumn forest in full color, leaves and
needles of gold and crimson and russet, rustling in the wind and dancing against the sun. Jael and her ship were a great flying creature, diving and swooping over the forest with whispering speed.

  She flew for several hours, threading her way along a twisting wooded valley, along a thin gleaming river, along the twists and turns of spatial dimension that, paradoxically, so shortened the distance between the star systems. She flew with a confidence that her path was straight, figuratively speaking, and true. In time, she found herself remembering the sensations or the pallisp, and while it did not particularly affect her flying, she found herself eagerly awaiting her next exposure to those sensations.

  When the time came to leave the net, she did so with a feeling of accomplishment and pride. And, as she'd hoped, Mogurn ushered her into his cabin, and there she bent her head—this time with greater anticipation than nervousness—and received the softly glowing warmth of the pallisp.

  And afterward, with the glow still warm in her heart, she gratefully assisted Mogurn with his own synaptic augmentor. She slept then, and awoke eager and ready to fly once more.

  * * *

  The fourth time she emerged from the pallisp, she did so with what she recognized for the first time as a deep reluctance, a feeling of almost physical attachment to the sensations. It required an effort of will to leave it, and not ask for more. Still, she shook off the feeling and flew her next shift with greater determination, and a greater than ever desire to return to drink again of the pallisp. Almost, she asked Mogurn if they might skip their meal so that she could have the pallisp sooner; but Mogurn's stolid expression, and her own sudden sense of fear and shame, caused her to remain silent and to wait impatiently.

  It wasn't until the next day that it dawned on her that she now wanted the pallisp even more than she wanted to fly. She began to wonder if she was perhaps in danger of growing dependent upon the artificial feelings of warmth and companionship that the pallisp gave her, feelings that she craved, but couldn't find elsewhere. She said nothing of her worries to Mogurn, but as she flew over a seemingly endless series of scarlet and umber mesas and canyons, she decided that she would forbear from the pallisp today—just for today—to ensure that she did not actually become addicted to it.

  Mogurn's eyes glinted as she said haltingly, over lunch, "I'd like to . . . just rest for a while. I'd like . . . not to use the pallisp this time."

  Mogurn studied her, without betraying his thoughts. "Of course, Jael. I wouldn't force you to do anything you don't want to. But if you change your mind, well, the next chance will be—"

  "I'm not going to change my mind," she interrupted, wondering, even as she said it, whether it was true.

  "Very well, then. Come help me in a few minutes. And then you may relax as you wish." Mogurn rose, and his expression seemed to flicker between irritation and a faintly amused smile.

  "Yes," Jael said to the empty room after he'd gone.

  "Yes," she repeated a moment later, when she realized that she really did, in fact, want the pallisp.

  No. Not this time. She drew herself a cup of fully caffeinated coffee and sipped it slowly, savoring the rush that the caffeine sent to her brain.

  When the time came, she went into Mogurn's cabin and, trembling a little, adjusted his synaptic augmentor before retiring to her own cabin. It was only moments later, when genuine crushing despair set in, that she knew she should not have denied herself her reward. The world seemed to close in upon her. Lacking the warmth of the pallisp, she felt only the ponderous weight of her friendlessness, the emptiness of knowing that she might never again fly with a registered shipper, and the haunting chill of the suspicions she harbored in the back of her mind about Mogurn's character. She felt a terrible weight of oppression. And edging around the corners of her consciousness was the fear that she had been tricked terribly, that she had, in these past few days, succumbed to a force that would never release her—the force of the pallisp.

  She wanted it badly now; her heart ached for it.

  She sat in her cabin, dreaming of the pallisp, of the golden warmth of it; and she shivered in the air that suddenly seemed cold, and she began to cry a little, but only for a few moments. Taking a deep breath, she blew her nose and began pacing the tiny floor of her cabin. She toyed with a book-cube, then put it aside, and she put on her music necklace and paced some more, with symphonic music swelling in her bones. Nothing helped. She thought of going to Mogurn and begging him for the pallisp, but to do that she would have had to interrupt his own pleasures, and that she dared not do.

  Finally she left her cabin and went to the bridge. She took the seat up front and tried to find some comfort in the flickering presence of the instruments. But what she really wanted was to go back into the net. She knew she wasn't supposed to while Mogurn was under his wire . . . except to check on the stability of the net and the Flux.

  So, go check.

  But I shouldn't, really.

  But you know you will in the end.

  And, in the end, she did. She took her place in the rigger-station and let her senses expand outward, beyond the ship. They were drifting smoothly, she found, with no sign of instability. She remained in the net, comforted by the scenery—a warm buttery sun shining down on the placid waters of a smooth-flowing river. She felt comforted for a little while—until she began to remember what she had missed in the pallisp . . .

  And then she began reflecting upon other things: Dap's heartlessness in the dreamlink, two nights before her departure; and her father, and how he had once been a decent man, or so she'd heard, until his changing fortunes in shipping had changed him as well.

  The net began to rumble.

  This pattern of thought was not a good one for flying. The sun slid out of sight behind a dark thundercloud. The river's surface began to swirl and eddy and roil. Alarmed, she tried to readjust her thoughts, to keep them focused. Rigging required a delicate balance: the currents and patterns of the Flux were objectively real, but it was her imagination, her thoughts and emotions transmuted through the net, that provided color and detail. And the detail was no less real, coming as it did from her mind. When a rigger's thoughts became disturbed, danger to the ship was always a possibility. And if her sensitivities were growing keener as a result of the pallisp, so too was the danger from imagining the wrong things.

  She knew she ought to set the stabilizers and withdraw until she had her thoughts under control again. But she worried about what might happen if she left the ship in this condition. And she worried about what Mogurn would say. And so she flew a little longer to see if she could straighten it out, and straighten herself out. And after a time, she managed to calm herself, and she stayed with the river image, but found smoother waters and set a steady course upon them. And though the bright warm sun did not return, the threatening storm clouds thinned into a grey canopy which reflected her feeling of melancholy, but also seemed to offer safety and stability.

  At that point she readjusted the stabilizers and withdrew. As she came back to her own senses, she realized how tired she was, physically as well as emotionally. She climbed out of the rigger-station and stretched.

  "Jael!"

  She jumped, startled. Turning, she found herself facing a grim Deuteronomous Mogurn. "You have been rigging," he accused, his voice harsh but controlled. His eyes were lined with blood vessels. He looked furious. She wondered how long she had been in the net; she had not expected him to be awake this soon. "What were my instructions about rigging while I was not here?" he demanded.

  Jael glanced down guiltily. "You said . . . only to check on instabilities." She felt cornered; she had to defend herself. "And I . . . when I was in there, some instabilities came up, and I . . . had to deal with them."

  Mogurn stroked his chin warily. "I see." He studied the external instruments for a moment. "Perhaps so. But you were in there a long time. And the readings do not look that good. They do not look that good, Jael." He stared back at her, and she could see that he was no
t convinced. "Are you certain you did not just decide to stay in the net for a while because you missed something else?"

  Nervously, she shrugged. What's so wrong with flying the ship? she wondered. And what have you done to me, anyway, you liar? She thought of what she might have missed; she thought more than longingly of it.

  Mogurn seemed to be reading her thoughts. "Did you miss the pallisp, Jael? Was that it?"

  She frowned, not wanting to answer. Finally, she nodded unhappily.

  "I see." Mogurn nodded, rubbing his temple. "I'm not incapable of understanding that. I'm not an insensitive man, Jael. Would you like the pallisp now?"

  She tried not to look at him, but she couldn't help it. "Yes," she whispered. And as she said it, the smile that flickered across his face gave her a shiver of fear. But it didn't change her mind.