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  Farfetch

  ( The Dushau Trilogy - 2 )

  Jacqueline Lichtenberg

  JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG

  The Dushau Trilogy# 2

  FARFETCH

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Tom Baker, who portrayed the Fourth Dr. Who and reawakened my sense of wonder by juxtaposing depth of understanding of the universe with joie de vivre. He has given me new aspirations, new definitions of the art of drama, creating, among many things, this series of books. May each reader of this book say a special blessing for this man. May each writer among you aspire, as I do, to create a part that could be played only by Tom Baker.

  I must thank the people who helped by commenting on the first draft of this novel: Jean Lorrah, Judy Segal, Roberta Mendelson, and Susan DeGuardiola. In addition, the staffs, contributors, and readers of the three fanzines dedicated to the Sime/Gen universe have been indispensable, particularly Karen Litman, editor and publisher of Companion in Zeor; Kerry Schaefer, who is now the editor for Ambrov Zeor; Anne Pinzow, Ambrov Zeor’s executive editor; and Katie Filipowicz, editor and publisher of Zeor Forum; all of whom can be reached through the post office box below.

  I’m already working on the third novel in the Dushau Trilogy, and the quick help and encouragement of these people has been vital to this project. But I’m still most eager for comments from the readers—those who have read my Sime/ Gen novels and can compare them with Dushau and Kren, and those who have not yet read any of my other series. I write primarily to entertain, but I can’t know if I’ve achieved that unless you tell me.

  So here I want to acknowledge and thank each reader who will write to me about this trilogy. What do you want to see in the next book?

  For information about forthcoming Dushau novels, or on any of my other series, send a legal size, self-addressed

  STAMPED ENVELOPE to:

  Ambrov Zeor, Dept. D-2 P.O.B. 290

  Monsey, N.Y. 10952

  It may take several weeks to get a response, but be sure that each note, each inquiry is treasured. Writers, too, have bad days, and it could be that your question or criticism will spark the answer to a plot problem or bring you a free copy of a fanzine and a flood of new friends when it’s published. If I should ever move, you may still find me through the Scott Meredith Agency in New York City, or through any of my publishers.

  ONE

  Crash Landing

  ELEVENTH OBSERVATION OF SHOSHUNRI

  “The Third Law of Nature is vigilant cognizance of the purpose behind action.”

  SIXTH OBSERVATION OF SHOSHUNRI

  “Fidelity is the most demanding Law of Nature, thus the most highly rewarded.”

  From: Purpose and Method

  By: Shoshunri, Observing Priest of Aliom

  The computer was moaning to itself, dribbling sparks onto the twisted and buckled bridge deck, dying in agony.

  By the glow of those blood-red sparks and the faint emergency lights Krinata Zavaronne could see a small puddle of her own red blood spreading to mix with the deep purple blood of the warm Dushau body she sprawled against. Dying.

  No! Not dead yet! We survived the crash!

  Driven by sharp urgency, she fought for consciousness, fastening on the nonhuman rhythm of Dushau breathing, groping for the scintillating thrill of the curious psychic resonance she’d once shared with two Dushau.

  But her eyes drooped shut, and she slipped back into darkness, swept into what seemed only a dream.

  Dazzling sand dunes marched away into the mauve-hazed distance. An unforgiving copper fireball of a sun beat from the bare magenta sky. A small metal sliver lay half buried. in a large dune. She became every grain of sand in the desert. She •was the metal sliver, and the sky and sun, air and sand, balanced in ecstasy, celebrating within herself, the perfection of the Celestial Artist.

  Then, subtly, the vision changed.

  Death baked the hollow sliver and the protoplasm within. The huge dune ached to swallow the sliver and heal the wound the foreign thing had made in it.

  In the far distance a sinister dirty haze smeared the horizon. A vibration in the sands identified it even as vision expanded to encompass it: sandstorm.

  But it was veering away from the metal sliver. The rage of the dune, which was herself yet separate from her, reached out and dragged the scouring menace toward the helpless sliver that was also herself, anticipating a vicious satisfac tion, a healing triumph. For a moment she fed all her energies into the dune’s effort to cleanse itself, and the hissing, seething wind that moved mountains swerved to ward the sliver.

  Within the turbulent wall of sand, a face appeared–a Dushau woman, young, elegant, bitterly hostile. The face withered with illness before her eyes, becoming suddenly familiar. It was the face she’d seen on the viewscreen as she’d fired on the Emperor’s flagship, Desdinda’s face, come to life to wreak her sworn vengeance.

  Krinata squirmed and wrenched and beat free of the nightmare, pursued by the rising howl of the anguished winds, a howl of betrayal. “How could you!”

  The keening wail of storm faded to the electronic sound of the computer’s agony. She put one hand to her forehead and found a bruised slash. Head injury. That explains it. The helpless fear and rage had nothing to do with her real self. Already the details of the nightmare were gone.

  She wiped blood from one eyelid and focused her eyes on the whirling kaleidoscope of colored shapes—die bridge monitor displays and control stations of Ephemeral Truth. It all began to come back to her. They had outraced the Allegiancy Empire’s Squadron, found this system, and crash-landed the orbit-only ship. And we made it!

  She pulled herself up, holding her breath against the pain in head and ribs, and found the bleeding gash on her arm. Gripping the pressure point of her left elbow with her right thumb, she twisted free of the torn crash webbing—meant only for Cassrians, not strong enough to hold a human—and staggered to the mangled console that had been her station during their mad flight across the galaxy.

  The answer to her inquiry about this planet was still etched faintly into the screen, mocking her. the dushau

  OLIAT TEAM, RAICHMAT, DECLARES FOURTH PLANET OF XB333291MS NOT FIT FOR HABITATION, COMMERCIAL EXPLOITATION, OR DOME COLONIES. SYSTEM FILE CLOSED.

  Clinging to the warped edge of the console, she turned to look at the only other person on the bridge, Jindigar. He had lied; this was no safe-haven. He’d surely known that. Centuries ago he’d been a member of Raichmat, the exploring team that had evaluated the planet. But he had told her the planet was marginally habitable and had never been reported because it was not commercially useful. So, according to Jindigar, this official record did not even exist.

  As the shock of betrayal swept through her, she had to fight off a dizzy wave of deja vu.

  The computer’s wails became barely articulate pleas for relief. It was a Sentient computer, a half-protoplasmic brain plugged into the ship’s circuits. He had named himself Arlai, and had been her friend. But clearly they’d never repair him now. Tears in her eyes, Krinata turned to tug loose Arlai’s power cable. Put him out of his misery.

  The blood on her hands made her grip slippery, and as she struggled to perform the act of mercy, she didn’t hear Jindigar gain his feet. She gasped as his warm, finely napped skin brushed her. He gripped her wrist with his seven-fingered, nailless hand, stopping her. “Not yet,” he said.

  She desisted. It was his ship, and Arlai his oldest friend.

  Limping, blood flowing from a ragged hole in his thigh, he climbed the tilted deck to the astrogator’s station, which he had been covering for their dive into atmosphere. In a velvety voice as midnight-deep as his eyes, he crooned to his computer as he worked the controls. “Arlai, I’m sorry
. You did your best. I must ask one last service, then I’ll give you peace. Please—we must know.”

  Through his agony the computer responded, “Serving.”

  “Thank you, Arlai. Can you show me your previous display—the one just before we entered atmosphere?”

  “This is the best I can do. Too many circuits out.”

  The screen before Jindigar flashed. Krinata scrambled up the canted deck to look around the tall Dushau’s elbow. Despite the blurs on the screen, she identified the stellar array that had been on their rear viewscreen for days. But near the edge of one blur there was a new symbol—a massive hyperdrive trace—the Allegiancy Squadron!

  “We didn’t outrun them!” she groaned. A single ship had traced them as they fled the Emperor’s flagship and had called the Squadron in on them. They had crossed the galaxy in short dashes to elude the Squadron and had finally lost them just before entering this system.

  But they’d known the Squadron would search every system in the quadrant for any trace of them. So they had voted to try for a landing, Arlai insisting he could get the ship and its cargo of colonization materials down safely, though Ephemeral Truth would never make orbit again. When she accused Arlai of volunteering for a suicide mission, he had pointed out that he’d meet a worse end left helpless in orbit.

  Arlai had planned for his passengers to take to the landers while Arlai brought the ship in empty, but while they were loading, Jindigar had suddenly called them to strap in and had Arlai take the ship down immediately.

  Krinata had been looking for a good colony site when she’d found the official report on the planet. Before, she’d only studied Arlai’s other files on the place, coded under the name Phanphihy, confirming Jindigar’s statements. If Jindigar had lied to her, if she’d been wrong about him, it was way too late to change her mind. The crimes against the Allegiancy Empire they had committed together had already condemned her to be executed with him. • “Arlai,” whispered Jindigar, “can you show us any sort of scan of this planetary system?”

  “Atmosphere distorts, and—”

  “Anything, Arlai,” begged Jindigar.

  The monitor cleared and another view sketched across it, one corner of the screen whited out by the planet’s sun, for they were on the dayside. The rest was a blurring haze that shifted as Arlai struggled to find functional sensors and circuits. But the hyperdrive trace still showed clearly at the bottom of the screen. “Jindigar,” said Arlai, “I’m sure. The Squadron is still there—and I think they’re changing course in this direction.” Numbers appeared on the screen. “There’s the data. You’ll have to plot it. I can’t.”

  Jindigar’s head drooped as he leaned on stiffened arms, a very human posture of dejection. “They will search every asteroid in this system until they find us.”

  “Their instruments will find this ship,” she agreed, “but I doubt if they have anything that can locate thirty-one protoplasmic beings on a planet this size.”

  Arlai interjected, “Eighteen living protoplasmic beings—

  that I can discern. So many sensories out”

  ‘If it was a livable planet, we’d have a chance,” she accused bitterly, grieving for the dead she’d hardly known.

  Jindigar twisted his head to focus his midnight eyes on her. The Dushau face was so humanoid, despite its short nap of dark indigo, large midnight eyes, and nearly bridgeless nose, that she believed she could read his expression: excitement and a revivification her words had given him.

  “Of course it’s livable. I told you that!”

  She pointed to the other screen that still held the faint impression of the Raichmat team’s report. She knew how those reports were generated because that had been her job.

  His eyes held hers from a bare handspan away, and his voice was penetratingly honest, as he said, “That record is in error. We will lose ourselves on this planet until the Squadron leaves, and then we’ll be able to live here.”

  She knew how those records were made and how ships’ Sentients accessed the master files. There was no way the record could be wrong—unless a Dushau had lied, just as the Emperor had accused them of doing. A chill shook her. She’d defended the Dushau, sure in her heart the Emperor had persecuted them unjustly. If she was wrong—

  She was about to ask Jindigar how he knew the record was in error, when Arlai groaned and his screen went into a pyrotechnic whirl. Jindigar said compassionately, “Easy now, Arlai, it’s all over. You’ve been the very best, and we’ll never forget you.” As he spoke he moved to the cables Krinata had been struggling with, cables exposed by the sprung seams of the cabinets. “Krinata, help me!”

  She gripped, and together they terminated the computer’s agony. His last intelligible words hung in the air. “I’m sorry, Jindigar. You were so good to me, and I failed you.”

  Tears sprang to Krinata’s eyes as she remembered all the times she’d felt that she’d failed Jindigar’s trust and had been driven to find unsuspected reserves within herself. She couldn’t have been wrong about Jindigar.

  She sighed as the last of the echoes died away. “Oh, Arlai, I’m so sorry.”

  “In a way it’s for the best. Arlai would have gone mad left alone here while we hide in the hills. He couldn’t just turn himself off, you know.”

  Dushau feared insanity almost more than death. Krinata wiped at a tear. “I know.” She’d often wondered if Arlai had been Jindigar’s only real friend for the last three thousand years of the Dushau’s incredibly long life.

  But there was no time to mourn. “Only eighteen survivors,” muttered Jindigar, surveying the dead bridge.

  She moved her left hand to cover his where he still gripped the cable, needing to comfort him. Jindigar caught her arm, examining the bleeding. “Here, let’s tend that,” he said, and noticed the blood on her face. He fumbled for a handlight. “Hold still.” He shined it in her eyes, searching for signs of .concussion.

  She squinted against the ultrabright Dushauni light, protesting, “I’m all right.”

  “It seems so,” he answered, setting the light aside as he fetched down the first aid kit.

  In the hours that followed, Jindigar’s pragmatic, one-step-at-a-time way of dealing with the emergency got them all over the shock and into motion. Injuries were bandaged, roll call and inventory taken, and the bodies respectfully gathered and laid out, as if it were all routine.

  But Krinata saw his face in the unguarded moment after they found the seven dead Dushau in the nearly crushed cargo hold above the landers’ docking bay. With a lifespan of well over ten thousand years, death by accident was different for Dushau than for ephemerals. The death of a friend close for thousands of years could be a paralyzing blow. She alone saw how shattered Jindigar was by the seven deaths, and knowing more of what he’d just been through, she alone marveled at his regained composure. He’d pay a price for that stoicism.

  Soon after that they assembled outside the ship in the desert afternoon sun to plan their next moves.

  Only eighteen survivors gathered in the shade of the half-buried hull of the Ephemeral Truth. The ship’s nose was buried deep in a sand dune, the tail stretching out farther than Krinata would care to walk in the loose sand. The bottom of the hull had crumpled, but even so, the ship rose many times Krinata’s height. Around them, white sand dunes showed ripples from the action of ferocious winds, and no hint of vegetation as far as the eye could scan. The sky was a vivid magenta behind the blinding copper sun. A pale rosy peach moon was rising near the horizon.

  Krinata hugged her ankle-length desert cloak around her. She’d never been to such a place, yet it was oddly familiar. Seized with inexplicable anxiety, she found herself searching the horizon for she knew not what. Lots of habitable planets have places like this, she told herself, trying to be the professional ecologist she’d trained to be. They’re vital to the biosphere and shape the weather. The sourceless anxiety receded, and she told herself it had been mere rational terror at being marooned, a qua
rry at bay who’d just found she’d been lied to by the only one she trusted.

  Using all the discipline learned during the last few months’ adventures, she refused to think about the dead and considered the survivors and their possible choices.

  None of the eighteen were of desert species. There was the small family of Cassrians, two adults and three nearly grown children, as tall as Krinata but wasp-slender. They had their heat-repelling desert cloaks drawn tight around their dark exoskeletons. The male, Trassle, was a fair space pilot, a shrewd businessman, and quick in an emergency. The children were well controlled and responsible. The three of them had taken over the care of the ship’s two mascots, a mated pair of piols. But the male piol, Imp, had not been seen since the crash. Now the children consoled Rita, the female, who was busily trying to shred the hems of the children’s desert cloaks with her long fishing claws.

  Next to the Cassrians, squatting on the soft sand, were the four Lehiroh men. So humanoid you could mistake them for a Terran race at first glance, they had vastly different organs, could eat substances humans could not, and could tolerate radiation exposures fatal to a human. They were professional explorers who worked with the Dushau Oliat teams, the ecology specialists like Jindigar. Their young bride, Bell, had been among the dead. Krinata wondered if they’d be too grief-stricken to function.

  The two Holot—a mated pair—huddled beneath two of the silvery desert cloaks so you couldn’t see their six-limbed forms at all. They were warm-blooded, densely furred, and miserable in the unrelenting heat.

  The other four survivors were humans, from Terran colonies much younger than Krinata’s home world. Two men and two women, though Krinata wasn’t sure if they were paired. They had hardly spoken to her since they’d come aboard. Such uncivilized pioneers had a much better chance of surviving here than Krinata did. And they were the only humans she’d ever know now. She had to make friends with them.

  So she chose her place near them, seating herself with a glancing smile at the older woman. Jindigar, and the only other surviving Dushau, a male named Frey, whose nap was a lighter indigo than Jindigar’s, indicating he was centuries younger, came out of the ship last.