Chapter 8
Melusine
This blind search for a mind that would open to hers was never easy, but it had never been as difficult, or as disturbing as this. Too, she had to find one that had ties to her quarry, at least if not personal ties, physical by means of proximity. And she could force that proximity if she had to.
This planet teemed with the minds of billions of thinking creatures, but they seemed to flee before her like dust motes in the wind. Each of the countless times she felt a barrier weaken, a door open, before she could even begin to separate that mind from the others, it was lost.
Finally, in sheer frustration, Melusine simply steeled herself and reached out and grasped with all the power the augmentor could give. It was like forcing her hand deep into resistant, wriggling protoplasm, closing her fingers blindly around a single organism and then, instead of withdrawing the hand with its captive, plunging in after it instead, to find herself submerged and suffocating.
Until, at long last, her connection solidified and she was able to look out through eyes not her own.
An image of a flat, almost treeless plain sprang into being. After the briefest instant Melusine felt the body struggle to its feet. Arms like dark sticks flailed at the air, and then clutched at a bulbous head. The barren landscape whirled around her. Other stick figures, black and nearly naked, spun in and out of view. In the distance a machine of some kind was trundling by.
And she was cast out.
The connection broke.
Half angry, half relieved, Melusine allowed herself to be drawn back to her waiting body.
“Go back,” the shipkeeper said.
“Not yet, not yet. I must rest.” A wave of sadness swept over her as the last of the augmentor’s tendrils withdrew from their insertion points beneath her once-again-pale curls, and she wondered, as always, whether the sadness was hers or the creature’s, whether it was truly sadness or merely the result of some biochemical change triggered when a parasite detached from its host.
As the last of the restrainment pod was reabsorbed, she stepped away from the augmentor. “They resist,” she told the shipkeeper, moving past him to the liaison. “They cannot possibly be aware of me, and yet they resist.”
“You learned nothing, then?” The shipkeeper’s voice, unfiltered by the liaison, was a mixture of querulousness and anger.
“I learned that these creatures resist me! If we are to have any chance of success, you must bring me closer to the world.”
“You are incompetent!”
“Perhaps. Nonetheless, you must bring me closer. Unless you wish to return to Elthor and have me replaced.”
The shipkeeper’s eyes went blank for a moment before the anger returned. “You know that is not possible,” he said, thrusting his own hands into the liaison. For another long moment, it seemed to pull back. In the reservoir beneath the central core, the navigator stirred silently, more restless than Melusine had ever seen him. A bright thread at last extended to the shipkeeper’s hands. It thickened and pulsed, as if trying to withdraw, but the shipkeeper, his features grim, tightened his control.
With a glance at him for permission, Melusine, too, put a hand to the liaison and was rewarded with a shimmering linkage.
“And you, navigator,” the shipkeeper said sternly, “have you learned nothing as well? Does the Bright One still exist?”
The liaison seemed to ripple in time with the liquid in the reservoir. It is impossible to be certain, the liaison transmitted. There is about this world a glow, a strength, which permeates everything, as Melusine has discovered. If he exists, that glow will conceal him until he exercises his power. I felt a strength and presence, briefly, as we arrived. But I sense it no more.
“You wish to move closer as well,” the shipkeeper concluded bleakly.
That is the only way.
Around them, the entire ship pulsed, as if in anticipation of the shipkeeper’s order.
***