Free Crystal Universe - [Crystal Singer 03] - Crystal Line by Anne McCaffrey

behind in the mountains.
    But they had done all they could of the snow sports, and so they moved from the mountains to the vast bowl of the internal plains of Nepal. There they did take to the water and acquired a new guide without the imperturbability of Mashid. With him, they canoed through tortuous canyons on flumes of water, shooting dire-toothed rapids.
    Once in a while they checked in with Brendan, who informed them that he was quite content and they needn’t hurry. So they hunted for two months in the lake districts with a party of mixed planetarials, and rode and camped along the coastline for a month with another, during which time Lars so pointedly said nothing about sailing that Killashandra was sure she would burst with not hearing the words he didn’t speak.
    “We’ve done everything else,” Killashandra said the night before they were to turn inland, back to the vicinity of the spaceport. “We really can’t leave Sherpa without sailing, can we?”
    “Can we not?” Lars retorted placidly.
    “If you wanted to, we could.”
    “Wrong,” he said, and with his index finger pressed her nose in. “If you wanted to, we could.”
    Perversely, she ducked away from him and rolled off the bed, unaccountably annoyed with his self-sacrifice.
    “It was my turn to pick,” she said in a savage tone.
    “Hey, honey-love …” Lars sprang from the bed to catch her in his arms, his face anxious. “Don’t be like this. It
was
your turn to pick the place and activities, and I’ve enjoyed everything we’ve done together.”
    She struggled in his arms, furious with his acquiescence, even with his concern.
    “Hey, hey …” He tried to gentle her, pulling her against his bare body. “Need a radiant bath?” He stroked her to judge crystal resonance in her body.
    “I don’t need one. I don’t need crystal that badly yet. Ahhhhh!” And her irascibility disappeared as she arched in his arms. “Crystal! We didn’t try crystal.”
    “
Try
crystal? Where? What are you talking about, Killa?”
    “We never gave the Junk any crystal.”
    “It would have absorbed—oh, I see what you mean!”He blinked in sudden comprehension. “D’you really think Ballybran crystal wouldn’t be absorbed by the Junk?” he asked, catching a bit of her excitement despite his skepticism. “What good would that do?”
    “Communication. A lot easier than rapping out rhythm. There’d be a useful link with it, if nothing else.” Killashandra was as tense with eagerness as she had been with irritation.
    “We’ve done our job,” Lars protested. “We’ve acquitted the assignment …”
    “But we didn’t find out anything.”
    “We found out the Junk is not a Heptite concern.”
    “But we didn’t try crystal!” she repeated, struggling to release his grip.
    “Well, if it means that much to you, let’s see what Brendan says about taking us back there—with crystal. There, there, love-heart.” Lars soothed her with hand and voice until she relaxed against him again. “Only where will we get some Ballybran crystal here?”
    “They’ve black crystal …”
    “Huh? You think they’ll loan black for this escapade?”
    Killa glared at him. “It’s not an escapade. It’s a point of investigation we neglected to make.”
    “Well, if they use black crystal, they use others,” Lars said, releasing her and marching to the comconsole. “And if they use others, they also abuse them and there’ll be sour crystal somewhere on this planet. We can offer to retune, and take the slivers as part of our fee.”
    “We can’t give the Junk sour crystal.”
    “I don’t think anything would give it indigestion,” Lars remarked, pausing as he punched in Brendan’s on-planet code. “Any scraps large enough can be tunedto some sort of pitch. You know, it might be fun to tune crystal when we don’t have to.”
    Brendan was willing enough to return to Opal, though Killashandra could hear the reservations in his tone.
    “I