Star Rigger's Way Read Online Free PDF Page B

the net, he looked out through the clearplex port into normal-space.
    The ship drifting alongside Sedora was squat, strange. Alien.
    Suited, he left through the sidelock and floated across. He rested, enjoying weightlessness and gazing off into the galaxy; it was splendid and brilliant around him, exotically beautiful. From space, Sedora was silent, a gun-grey cetacean linked to him by a snaking lifeline. He turned, and his soles touched the alien hull. As he searched for an airlock he wondered who or what he might find—and whether, perhaps, the strangeness was only beginning.
    (Hyiss?)
    Before the disaster, though, was departure—boarding Sedora at Deusonport Field, with mixed and hurt feelings. It was Lady Brillig he wanted to fly. But if they said that a tour as helper-rigger on a slowship might teach him, then helper-rigger he would be. Deusonport Field: scattered clouds, blue-tinged sun, green hills and forest about the perimeter. Should be a cheery sight upon return. Relaxed, amidst the frenetic commerce of the Aeregian planets.
    But what should be so troubling about the leaving behind of friends? (Who asked that? Who is wondering?)
    Earlier still, Lady Brillig out of Jarvis on Chaening's World: Legroeder and Skan as usual; and Janofer, never quite stationary—her moods like air currents, never remaining simply petulant or contemplative or buoyant or depressed, but always a turbulent mixture, and her attention rarely focusing for long upon any one friend, but forever shifting from one to another to somewhere beyond thought. Why could he not have been closer to them? To her?
    But why desire closeness? Rejoice in isolation. (Who?) (Whass?)
    Before Lady Brillig there was only the training, the school. The buffeting among childhood peers. Homeless, familyless. (Hyiss!) (What?)
    And . . . earlier? . . . later? . . . the flight-shell of another spacecraft altogether: the battery of riffmar in turmoil, working to confused commands while he fought to control his fury and discover what was wrong. The riffmar were maddeningly inept, never mind that they responded directly to his control. Mindless plants! he shrieked soundlessly, but it was not a curse so much as a statement. Oh, why oh why had he come such a way to this nowhere place in space to be stranded? Why had he let Corneph get to him like that?
    A riffmar, confused by his unsure control, stumbled near. He swatted it with his left paw and flattened it. Six more left, by damn, and they'd better start flying! But they wouldn't, not unless he determined what was stalling the craft, and instructed them. If only he knew more about these things!
    (Strange, to be flying without knowing  . . .)
    Bring me syrup, he ordered, and glared at the two riffmar scurrying to comply, wrestling between them a large stalk from the bin. He took it moodily in his jaws and sent the two off to tend the riff-bud cultures, and then to feed themselves. While they were wriggling their tendril toes into the nutrient beds, he crunched the sweet stalk and brooded.
    He had left Syncleya in a terrible fury. Actually, a tantrum. True, it wasn't his time yet to learn to fly (not for another four seasons), and he had taken the shell from the space-docks without knowing if it had been properly checked and prepared—all right, that was questionable judgment, admittedly, and perhaps he had compounded the error by heading for deep space rather than one of the worlds—but who would have thought that a simple shell could malfunction? Everyone knew that flying was bloody simple—use your riffmar to run the shell, nothing complicated, and let your mind steer the ship, like the interdreaming of the quarm, but with no other broil-damn minds cluttering up your thoughts.
    (You had never flown before? But  . . .)
    (Hone-ly held-hers f-hly!)
    (Elders? Then you aren't . . . very old. Oh.)
    Lord-o, it wasn't the same for the others. He just had to get away from the quarm and from Corneph's incessant