Ceremony

"You never do. But ... All right. Be careful."

"I will. Indeed I will. There is much I want to see before I rejoin the All."

Marika's first exploration was a four-star voyage rapidly taken. It did not lead her out of the dust. She did not find a world suitable for resting her bath. She returned to the starship with her crew strained to their limits.

She found that her absence had gone u

She tried another route a month later, with no more success. The dust was deep and the stars in that direction unfriendly.

Not until her sixth venture outward, late in the second year after she had reclaimed the alien ship from the Groshega, did she establish an advance base and begin preparations for venturing beyond it. By then it was common knowledge that she slipped away occasionally, but she kept her comings and goings unpredictable. She did so mainly out of habit, for she no longer feared trouble from the dark-faring silth. Her hold on the system had been accepted because she had fulfilled her promises.

Midway into her third year of ruling the alien ship she finally broke out of the far side of the cloud and caught her first glimpse of skies ablaze with stars numerous beyond any imagining, great reefs of starlight that beggared anything she had seen on the nether side. Her awe remained undiminished when she returned to the alien ship.

Bagnel was impressed by the film she brought back. "Incredible," he breathed. "Absolutely incredible. Who would have guessed?"

"Bagnel, you have to see it. I don't care what you have going here. I don't care what you have to do. Come see it. This will make your life. Remember how we talked about flying off into eternity when we retired? Come. See this. It will make you lust to do that now."

Bagnel looked at the film again, and he quivered all over. But he was the most responsible of meth, bound by his notions of duty. It took her a week to pry him away from his work.

He had become enamored of the alien mysteries. But pry him away she did, and get him aboard her fey darkship she did, and carry him through the cloud she did. And his response to those shoals of stars was all she expected. He could find no words to describe his feelings when he saw them, even months after he had returned to his mundane work.

For months after that venture Marika stifled herself and did not go out again, though those stars called to her incessantly. She concentrated on making her presence felt among visitors from the homeworld, who were becoming more numerous now that the starship had begun to yield some of its secrets.

She anticipated being away a long time on her next voyage.

Chapter Forty

I

"I do not think this journey is wise, Marika," Bagnel said. "Still, if you must go, take me with you."

"Not this time. This is going to be a far journey. Every pound of weight will have to be useful."

Grauel and Barlog were startled. Barlog asked, "Does that mean you are leaving us behind too?"

"I'm sorry. This time, yes. I must go without you. I will be taking extra bath and supplies instead. Do not look at me that way. I will behave and be careful."

She had no trouble finding herself a double set of bath. Bath from all the dark-faring sisterhoods journeyed to the starship in hopes of spending some time on her darkship. Bath who had served with Marika were much in demand. Somehow she opened hidden cha

There were times when Marika had to resist pressures to become a teacher and trainer of dark-faring silth. "Can you imagine me an instructress?" she complained to Bagnel. "Spending the rest of my life developing crews for the Communities?"

The notion had amused him.

Pursued by his displeasure and the unhappiness of Grauel and Barlog, Marika left the starship on her first far flight of exploration.

Double-crewed, she could make vastly extended flights, hopping as many as twelve stars before having to take a rest landing. She needed that capability if she was to venture beyond the dust cloud into that vastness on the other side, to satisfy the exploration bug that had been tormenting her since she had discovered those endless shoals of stars.

It was to be a voyage of terrible moment.

She was in the seventh hop of her second twelve-star run out from the edge of the dust. For this venture distance was her principal concern. She wanted to see how far she could travel before conscience and dwindling stores compelled her to turn back. A fever of excitement rolled along with the darkship. The bath were animated by the emotions surrounding the doing of a thing never before tried. Instead of becoming increasingly uneasy as they ventured even farther from home, the opposite was true. Every hop outward raised the level of excitement.

The darkship dropped out of the Up-and-Over, and even before Marika regained her equilibrium she knew that they. had made an enormous discovery. Listen!

Awe gripped the bath.

The void reeked with electromagnetic radiation. It was not natural. In moments Marika detected a world in the star's life zone. A satellite network surrounded it. The space of that system sported moving objects that could be nothing but ships. Closed ships of the sort built by tradermales and others who did not have the talent. She nudged the darkship inward, caught ghosts and sent them ahead.

The creatures of the system were the creatures of the alien starship.

Marika turned toward the nearest ship, reaching with the touch. She could get no response. The creatures were deaf to the touch!

She considered climbing back into the Up-and-Over, to make a hop to planetary orbit.

The bath inundated her with a babble of touch, urging her to be more cautious in her thinking.

They were right. She knew little about these creatures. The one contact they had had with meth had proven disastrous. She continued to drift, probing with ghosts.

The world ahead was not the alien homeworld, that was evident immediately. It had all the roughness and wildness of a colony, like the world the crippled starship orbited. The aliens were numerous, but they occupied only limited areas-those apparently most hospitable to their species.

The colonies had the rough new look of settlements perhaps only a few decades old. Marika saw much that looked familiar, and as much more that she did not understand. She allowed the bath to ride the back of her thoughts to get their reactions to what she saw, but they were more baffled than she. They had not studied the information gained from the derelict and they had not lived on the frontier at home.

Everything supported Bagnel's conviction that the alien was not just deaf to the touch but ignorant of its existence, and equally ignorant of those-who-dwell, the otherworld, and what, for want of a better term, meth called the silth ideal.

They are a bunch of tradermales, Marika thought.

Males and females appeared to be equal in number and status, though that was difficult to determine while riding a ghost. They lived in simple structures easily understandable by meth, but the guts of the planet contained far more complex installations that recalled those of the rogue brethren she had seen during the last sweep. Those places were not places to live.

She had to communicate with the creatures. But how?

Fear grew down deep inside her, a knot that tightened yet swelled like a cancer, feeding on the fear already gnawing at the bath and tainting the aura of touch around them. The primitive in all of them wanted to flee from the monsters. It insisted that she forget she had found them. Grauken, grauken, grauken, it chanted.