The Ship Who Sang

In the tail scanners they saw the guards retreating to safety as the gantry tumbled leisurely down. Bright jewels dotted the receding planet as it gave them a volcanic sendoff.

"Scout Kira of the KH-834 reporting," the slender girl said crisply to Cencom, shedding her cloak. Helva half-expected a shower of hairpins to follow but Kira remained tautly erect before the tight beam. She gave a terse report, demanding to know why traders had not reported the presence of Service-type contact buttons plainly visible on every Aliothite. And why, a far more criminal omission, the hallucinogenic gas eruptions had not been reported.

"Hallucinogenic gas?" Cencom echoed weakly. Such instances were the nightmare of colonization; entire populations could be subjected to illegal domination by such emissions, as indeed had happened on Alioth.

"I recommend strongly that all traders dealing with Alioth in the last 50 years be questioned as to their motives in suppressing such information from Central Worlds. And discover who was the semi-intelligent CW representative who cleared this freak-off planet for colonization."

Cencom was reduced to incoherent sputters.

"Stop gargling," Kira suggested sweetly, "and order an all-haste planet-therapy team here. You've got an entire society to reorient to the business of living. We'll file a comprehensive report from Nekkar, but now I've got to inspect our children. That was a rough take-off. Over and out." And Kira closed the tight beam down.

With a fluid motion she propelled herself to the kitchen, shaking her braids free and massaging her scalp with rough fingers.

"My head is pounding!" she exclaimed, reaching for coffee. "That gas was unbelievably malodorous." She leaned wearily against the counter, her shoulders sagging in fatigue.

Helva waited, knowing Kira was sorting her thoughts.

"The closer I got to that temple, the deeper the terrible miasma of grief. It was almost visible, Helva," she said, and then added scathingly, "and I wallowed in it. Until that Dylan of yours reached me, Helva."

Her eyes widened respectfully. "The hair on the back of my neck stood up straight. That final chord got me, right here," she groaned, jabbing at her abdomen with a graphic fist. "Thorn would have given his guts to compose such a powerful Dylan." Her shoulders jerked spasmodically in a violent muscle spasm.

"That awful corpse!" She closed her eyes and shuddered, shaking her head sharply to rid herself of the effect. "I think. . ." she murmured, her eyes narrowing with self-appraisal, "I have been thinking, I had done the same thing to Thorn."

"I think perhaps you had," Helva agreed softly.

Kira sipped at her coffee, her face tired but alive, the mask of vivacity replaced by an inner calm. "I have been so stupid," she said with trenchant self-contempt.

"Not even Cencom is infallible," Helva drawled.

Kira threw back her head in a whoop of laughter.

"That's Eternal Truth!" she crowed, dancing back into the main cabin.

Helva watched the victory dance, immeasurably pleased with the outcome of the affair as far as Kira was concerned. She could not regret that she had had to kill one of her own peers. Lia had really died years before with her scout. That tortured remnant had peace at last, and so had Kira. She and Helva would continue together on their stork run, picking up the seeds from. . .

Helva let out a yip of exultation. Kira stared at her, startled. "What hit you?"

"It's so ridiculously simple I can't imagine someone never suggested it to you. Or maybe they did and you rejected it."

"I'll never know unless you tell me what it is," Kira replied caustically.

"One of the facets of your grief psychosis. . ."

"I'm over it now," Kira interrupted Helva, her eyes flashing angrily.

"Ha to that. One of the facets has been the lack of progeny from your seed and Thorn's? Right?"

The scout's face turned starkly white, but Helva plunged on.

"Neither one of your parents was stupid enough to have ignored their RCA duty. Right? So their seed is on file. Take some of your mother's and his father's and. . ."

Kira's eyes widened and her jaw dropped, her face lighting with incredulous radiance. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Delicately she stretched out her hand, touching the access panel softly.

Helva was ridiculously, embarrassingly delighted at her acceptance of the idea. Then Kira drew her breath in sharply, her face concerned.

"But for you. . . wouldn't you take your mother's and. . ."

"No," Helva said sharply, then added more gently, "that won't be necessary." She knew in mind and heart now that the resolution of grief is highly individual, that both she and Kira had reached it by different means, just as Theoda had.

Kira looked unaccountably stricken, as if she had no right to take the solution Helva offered if Helva did not, too.

"After all," the ship chuckled, "there aren't many women," and Helva used the word proudly, knowing that she had passed as surely from girlhood to woman's estate as any of her mobile sisters, "who give birth to 110,000 babies at one time."