Seas of Ernathe Read Online Free Page B

real currents and storms of flux-space. That's all the flux is, Racart—a deep, unbottled fantasy that happens to be real.
    "You couldn't take any man and teach him to fly—no, he had to have the gift of imaging, he had to be crazy enough and sane enough to run in the fantasy and carry a ship on his back. And it worked, that's how this Cluster was settled, and how the galaxy beyond it was settled!" Seth's eyes blurred. A painting vibrated in his mind, a painting from a gallery on Venicite: a gleaming graceful ship of the past, gliding gull-like, submarinelike through the flux that underlay the cold and the empty blackness of space itself.
    "Ah!" Racart said, his face suddenly alight, his brows furrowed with interest. He stabbed with a finger at Seth's heart. "Then I can forget this stuff about the Cluster and we can talk about the important things. You want this yourself , don't you?" He nodded to his own question, not expecting Seth to answer. "Have you taken the drug yet?" His eyes flashed bright, green, intent upon Seth's.
    The pilot was startled by Racart's bluntness. He should have guessed—Racart wanted to hear about a friend, not about politics out among the worlds. "Yes," he said, "I have taken it. I'm not sure how to describe it. Frightening, terrifying. Exhilarating. Mind-twistingly strange." He frowned, lost again in the powerful, disturbing memories of the drug: tumultuous visions hurled bright against the black emptiness of space, dashed against the diamond maelstrom of stars; soul-aching longings fulfilled for the briefest of moments and then wrenched away to leave bare, cold sweating reality.
    He nodded. "I've taken it, and it failed for me. At least it failed in what we wanted it to do—but I hope not forever. One day a man will find a harness for that drug, and the techs will harness him into a ship's rig—and we'll have our new way to fly the stars. And then another man will learn to do it without the drug. And maybe I'll get a chance, again, and maybe all those other things will happen, too." He tapped his fingers thoughtfully on the table. "After that—who knows?" He drank his lukewarm ale, suddenly embarrassed by his own speech.
    Racart was silent, pondering; but he was obviously impressed. When he spoke, his voice was so soft that Seth had to strain to hear. "I have always had a good feeling toward the Nale'nid, and I guess I still do." He smiled faintly, his expression changing. "But you'll have to know what happened today, if you and we are to decide where to go from here. Mynalar means our way of life, too, though I think we could find a way of life without it, if necessary. I don't know why the Nale'nid are keeping us from the mynalar , but I do know that we've a people out there whom we must understand." His eyes flickered across Seth's gaze and took on their more usual dream-reflecting intensity.
    His next words were drowned in a clatter.
    A stutter of pulsed air-bursts rocked the lounge, echoed through the street outside: pok-a-pok-a-pok-a-pok! The bar was instantly still, a dozen faces staring at one another from the crouched or flattened positions that every person had taken instinctively. The stutter repeated itself and whined off to the sound of a dying pulse-generator. A border-weapon coughed, and then the air was still. Seth looked at Racart in astonishment and horror—and received in return a gesture of bewilderment. Someone near the exit crept to the door and cautiously peered out. "Looks okay," the man said. "People are moving out into the street." He glanced back, shrugged, and went outside himself.
    Seth and Racart followed, looking carefully up and down the street. The sun was liquid red just above the western horizon, and the street awash in its glow suddenly began filling up again with the people of Lambrose. Two uniformed perimeter guards made their way down the street, one of them shouting reassuringly, "The Nale'nid set off the perimeter defenses! No one was hurt, and we're