Free The Crystal Variation by Steve Miller, Sharon Lee Page A

same time, so close as if it came from the same furnace.”
    He sipped the last bit of coffee in his cup, saw the glance between the instructors from beneath hooded eyes.
    “The sheriekas ,” he murmured, almost as quietly as the younger instructor. “They use timonium as if it were the commonest of metals. If anyone can find it at a distance, they can. If anyone knows how to make it act, or how to act on it at a distance, they can.”
    A chime then, and the instructors looked to chronographs and hastily rose.
    “Destroy your working files,” said the elder tutor, “and whatever hard copies you may have made. Eventually, of course, others may see the same thing, assuming they can access the information.”
    The younger instructor sighed audibly.
    “You have—given the information we brought together over our careers—duplicated our thinking. This information has been shared only at the highest levels. Your commanders understand and act upon it; all others ignore it and deny it.”
    The elder instructor picked up a travel bag and looked pointedly at Jela.
    “Do not doubt yourself,” he said sternly. “The particular crystal that we protect, that we live within, is in danger. You, Captain, are one of a few who know the depth of the danger, and one of the fewer still who might do something about it. “
    Then, with a most unexpected flutter of pilot hand-talk, signaling, most urgent, most urgent, most urgent he continued. “My studies show that there are universes entirely inimical to life. And there are universes not inimical which yet have none . . .”
    From without came the sudden snarl of an air-breathing engine. The speaker lost his train of thought in the noise and looked to his fellow.
    A second chime sounded, and amid a checking of pockets and carryabouts the instructors saluted Jela as if he were an admiral, and hurried off.
    “Carry on, soldier,” the quiet instructor said over his shoulder—and that was the last he heard or saw of them.
    He carried on. He saluted the empty space, poured the last of the coffee into his cup, and sat with it cradled between his palms until it grew cold. Shaking himself, he rose, leaving a hint of a drop in the bottom of the hard-used cup, and returned to his interrupted sim.

Seven
    SEVEN
    Awaiting Transport
    JELA STOOD QUIETLY in the arid breeze, fascinated—or so it might have appeared to an observer—by the pair of contrails crossing the cloudless blue-green sky on exactly the same heading, one perhaps a hundred of Jela’s calm breaths behind the other.
    There was no way that a man without instruments could positively say which was higher, though Jela felt he knew. The leader, he thought, would land and be on its way to rotating its wheels for takeoff before the second touched down. After all, that’s what had happened when he’d landed here, many days ago.
    Yet the observer—and there was no small chance that there was such, likely watching from a camera or sensor stand for one last bit of measurement, one last bit of information about this particular candidate—the observer would have been wrong.
    Far from being fascinated, M. Jela Granthor’s Guard had pitched his mind as close to a dream state as he might while continuing to stand upright at the edge of the runway, and was himself observing: Listening to the keening echo of ancient, dead-and-gone flying things and concentrating on templates that fell almost visually across his concentration. The tree sat companionably by his side, its topmost leaves moving in a pattern not entirely wind-driven.
    Leaning against the tree’s lightweight traveling pot was the small kit he’d been given on his arrival at the training grounds. Anything else he owned was elsewhere, perhaps not to be seen again. He hoped, as he stood watching the contrails approach, that he’d soon be allowed his name back. The trainers had, without fail, called him Captain M, and while his name was nothing more than a quartermaster’s joke,