“Please, no,” Nuluba said, gesturing with her fingers making a light rolling motion. A varvax laugh. “I like things simple.”
“Piloting can be simple.”
“No, pilots are too important,” she explained. “I like being ignored. That’s why I picked the job I did in the somewhere. I prefer to just sit in the corner and putter. It was…distressing that I caused so much of a fuss with my discoveries.” She hesitated, then grew more solemn. “Not that I’d go back. I hate the lies we’ve told.”
There was a heroism in those words, a type I’d never acknowledged. To me, being a hero had always been about fighting. But Nuluba reminded me of Cuna, the quiet diplomat who had done so much to resist Winzik.
“Before you suit up,” Nuluba said, pointing, “I believe Shiver wanted to speak to you.”
We still had a good amount of time until takeoff, so I dodged around Maksim as he jogged past with a spare power matrix, then entered the resonants’ corner of the room. Here, I always felt as if I were stepping up to a large geode. They’d leaked lines of crystal—like veins in stone—out from their ships, then over to this section. When I’d asked Shiver why, she’d explained that the crystals grew naturally, and so they needed to send them somewhere.
Each time they flew away, they broke connections to this place—but so long as they returned soon enough, they could reconnect. If they moved to Surehold, what would happen? Would this crystal network in the corner eventually crumble to dust?
Up close, I could distinguish their crystals from each other. Shiver was slightly more violet, and Dllllizzzz slightly more pink. They had grown over one another in a way I was led to understand was common among friendly resonants. The two beings chatted softly in their musical language; they did that almost constantly when near each other.
“You wanted to talk to me?” I asked Shiver, settling down beside one of her larger crystals.
“Yes, Spin,” Shiver responded. “I wished to thank you. For making this possible.”
“The assault today?”
“Indeed,” Shiver said. “Peg has been planning this for years. I…vibrate with joy, knowing the plan is finally moving forward. But I also wish to thank you on behalf of Dllllizzzz. If we are successful, we will again have access to the icon at Surehold—and the reality ashes. I maintain hope that having more of those, over the long term, will continue to help her.”
“How’s she been lately?” I asked, glancing toward the array of crystals.
“It is difficult to cleave that question, Spin,” Shiver said. “Sometimes she seems almost ready to speak. At the very edge of layered words, sentences. And then…she withdraws to unlayered words. Hints at meanings. I’ve heard true words from her only a handful of times now, including when she spoke to you.”
“I don’t think I understand. Layered words, and unlayered words?”
“I apologize,” Shiver said. “Let me reverberate. We can make different crystals vibrate with different tones, and language is always two or more of those together. Dllllizzzz makes single tones. More ideas than true words.
“It is communication, and I can investigate her feelings, comfort her, encourage her. But her responses are rarely true words, more the tones we make while learning. This is our equivalent of what you would call ‘baby talk.’ Yet Dllllizzzz is old. Older than I am. And she flies a ship just fine.”
I nodded, studying the overlapping lattices of blue crystals, with pink or violet undertones. I’d seen Shiver help with repairs—a few days back, she’d overgrown part of Peg’s shuttle looking for a short. It was incredible the level of detail Shiver could sense with her crystals—though actually doing repairs took her much more time than it took someone motile. She could technically grow as many “arms” as she needed, but moving things usually involved encasing them in crystal and then growing that crystal to reposition the object.
I found it amazing that the resonants had developed space-age industry under those limitations. But I guessed when members of your species commonly lived thousands of years, you had other advantages. And there was something hardcore about an entire civilization made up of singing crystals. Even the wildest of Gran-Gran’s stories couldn’t compete with the universe’s biodiversity.
Admittedly though, I was still miffed about the whole sand worm thing.
“Could reality ashes actually help her?” I asked.
“I hope so,” Shiver said. “But it has been—some time? Much time?—since we found her.”