Seas of Ernathe Read Online Free Page A

elite, by the way. But the truly important drug is mynalar-g ." Racart looked blank. "It hasn't actually been used successfully yet."
    "So?"
    "It's a—hallucinogen. An unusual, and actually rather mild hallucinogen." Seth chose his words very carefully, trying to explain in a straightforward manner. "All right, let me go back a bit. You know that we, and I mean the council as well as the Transport Guild, have been trying to duplicate the old techniques of star-flight. Or maybe you don't know. Our flux-drive ships do the job, they tie some of the worlds together—but they're terribly, terribly inefficient. They bludgeon and struggle their way between the stars like fish trying to walk between streams.
    "The Old Cluster had a better way—starship-rigging. Most of the actual technology has been preserved, but it's really the art that was lost, not the science. And what an art—sailing huge vessels on the winds and tides and currents of flux-space, guided by nothing more than the pilot's mind! It was graceful and efficient, and we don't know how to do it.
    "We need it, Racart—we need to learn it again, it's the only way we can bring all the worlds of the Cluster back together."
    "Need?" Racart asked doubtfully. "Or want?"
    Seth breathed sharply and looked straight into his friend's eyes. " Need. There are only fourteen star systems joined now, and shakily at that, by the biggest fleet we can manage. Fourteen, out of nearly a hundred before the entropy wars—and that in the Cluster alone, never mind the Beyond. We've been to other systems, many of them still civilized if not spacefaring. Most of them would like to join the Cluster or could be persuaded, but we haven't the strength to bring them together, the distances are too great."
    "You spoke of need ," Racart reminded him. His mouth and brows were set in stubborn resistance, barely softened by the gloom of the bar.
    "Yes—because if we don't do it now we may never have another chance." Seth was frustrated; he knew he was speaking of something that seemed to be beyond Racart's world. But it did matter to Racart and to Ernathe. "I don't know how much history or news reaches you here, but there are bad relations in the Cluster—races that would like us to fail. Holdover from the entropy wars, I suppose. The Lacenthi, who were human-friends in the Old Cluster, aren't anymore. And the Querlin have always been enemies—not just of humans but of all mammaloids. Racart, in not too many years this universe is coming alive in full bloom again, and we'd better have some accord when it happens—and not be just dozens of scattered worlds."
    Racart stared at him thoughtfully, his eyes not denying Seth's words, but also not yet conceding their importance. He clenched his mug with interlocking fingers and lowered his eyes to the table. "The council protects us here on Ernathe, doesn't it?"
    "There is a Lacenthi system only half a dozen light-years from here," Seth said, shrugging.
    "Okay, so maybe the Cluster has to be reunited—don't ask me, mind you, Ernathe is the only place I know—but supposing you're right. What does that have to do with us, with mynalar , with the Nale'nid?" Racart's eyes were directed into his ale, and his voice was low, seeking.
    Seth frowned, realized he had lost his original track. " Mynalar-g may be the answer to starship-rigging—or at least a part of it. The drug, itself, sets the mind free to ramble and blunder about in a fantasy world. And according to what we know that's the beginning of learning to fly a rigger-ship."
    He hesitated. The real argument had been made. Did Racart want to hear, now, about starpiloting? "It was the pilot who counted in those ships, Racart—not a machine, but a man who reached into the flux with his own mind through a sensory net, a sail. He visualized the tides between the stars and steered like a sailor on the sea, with rudder and keel and oars. He flew by building a fantasy—an image so real that it matched the