“No,” Goth said. “It wasn’t me. I don’t think it was you either, exactly.”
The captain looked at her. He’d grabbed off a few hours sleep on the couch and by the time he woke up, Goth was up and around, energies apparently restored.
She’d been doing some looking around, too, and wanted to know why the Venture was running on half power. The captain explained. “If we happen to get into a jam,” he concluded, “would you be able to use the Sheewash Drive at present?”
“Short hops,” the witch nodded reassuringly. “No real runs for a while, though!”
“Short hops should be good enough,” he reflected. “I read that item in the Regulations. They right about the klatha part?”
“Pretty much,” Goth acknowledged, a trifle warily.
“Well …” He’d related his experiences with the lamp then, and she’d listened with obvious interest but no indications of surprise.
“What do you mean, it wasn’t me, exactly?” he said. “I was wondering for a while, but I’m dead sure now I don’t have klatha ability.”
Goth wrinkled her nose, hesitant, and suddenly, “You got it, captain. Told you you’d be a witch, too. You got a lot of it! That was part of the trouble.”
“Trouble?” The captain leaned back in his chair. “Mind explaining?”
Goth reflected worriedly again. “I got to be careful now,” she told him. “The way klatha is, people oughtn’t to know much more about it than they can work with. Or it’s likely never going to work right for them. That’s one reason we got rules. You see?”
He frowned. “Not quite.”
Goth tossed her head, a flick of impatience. “It wasn’t me who ported the lamp. So if you didn’t have klatha, it wouldn’t have got ported.”
“But you said …”
“Trying to explain, Captain. You ought to get told more now. Not too much, though…. On Karres they all knew you had it. Patham! You put it out so heavy the grownups were all messed up! It’s that learned stuff they work with. That’s tricky. I don’t know much about it yet… ”
“You mean I was, uh, producing klatha energy?”
But he gathered one didn’t produce klatha. If one had the talent, inborn to a considerable extent, one attracted it to oneself. Being around others who used it stimulated the attraction. His own tendencies in that direction hadn’t developed much before he got to Karres. There he’d turned promptly into an unwitting focal point of the klatha energies being manipulated around him, to the consternation of the adult witches who found their highly evolved and delicately balanced klatha controls thrown out of kilter by his presence.
A light dawned. “That’s why they waited until I was off Karres again before they moved it!”
“Sure,” said Goth. “They couldn’t risk that with you there, they didn’t know what would happen… “ He had been the subject of much conversation and debate during his stay on Karres. So as not to disturb whatever was coming awake in him, the witches couldn’t even let him know he was doing anything unusual. But only the younger children, using klatha in a very direct and basic, almost instinctive manner, weren’t bothered by it. Adolescents at around Maleen’s age level had been affected to some extent, though not nearly as much as their parents.
“You just don’t know how to use it, that’s all,” Goth said. “You’re going to, though.”
“What makes you think that?”
Her lashes flickered. “They said it was like that with Threbus. He started late, too. Took him a couple of years to catch on-but he’s a whizdang now!”
The captain grunted skeptically. “Well, we’ll see…. You’re a kind of whizdang yourself, for my money.”
“Guess I am,” Goth agreed. “Aren’t many grown-ups could jump us as far as this.”
“Meaning you know where we went?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I … no, let’s get back to that lamp first. I can see that after your big Sheewash push we might have had plenty of klatha stirred up around the Venture. But you say I’m not able to use it. So – .”
“Looks like you pulled in a vatch, “ Goth told him.
She explained that then. It appeared a vatch was a sort of personification of klatha or a klatha entity. Vatches didn’t hang around this universe much but were sometimes drawn into it by human klatha activities, and if they were amused or intrigued by what they found going on they might stay and start producing klatha phenomena themselves. They seemed to be under the impression that their experiences of the human universe were something they were dreaming. They could be helpful to the person who caught their attention but tended to be quite irresponsible and mischievous. The witches preferred to have nothing at all to do with a vatch.
“So now we’ve got something like that on board!” the captain remarked nervously.
Goth shook her head. “No, not since I woke up. I’d rell him if he were around.”
“You’d rell him?”
She grinned.
“Another of the things I can’t understand till I can do it?” the captain asked.
“Uh-huh. Anyway, you got rid of that vatch for good, I think.”
“I did? How?”
“When you ordered the lamp to move. The vatch would figure you were telling him what to do. They don’t like that at all. I figure he got mad and left.”
“After switching the lamp off to show me, eh? Think he might be back?”
“They don’t usually. Anyway, I’ll spot him if he does.”
“Yes….the captain scratched his chin. “So what made you decide to bring us out east of the Empire?”
Goth, it turned out, had had a number of reasons. Some of them sounded startling at first.
“One thing, here’s Uldune!” Her fingertip traced over the star map between them, stopped. “Be just about a week away, on half-power.”
The captain gave her a surprised look. Uldune was one of the worlds around here which were featured in Nikkeldepain’s history books; and it was not featured at all favorably. Under the leadership of its Daal, Sedmon the Grim, and various successors of the same name, it had been the headquarters of a ferocious pirate confederacy which had trampled over half the Empire on a number of occasions, and raided far and wide beyond it. And that particular section of history, as he recalled it, wasn’t very far in the past.
“What’s good about being that close to Uldune?” he inquired. “From what I’ve heard of them, that’s as blood-thirsty a bunch of cutthroats as ever infested space!”
“Guess they were pretty bad,” Goth acknowledged. “But that’s a time back. They’re sort of reformed now.”
“Sort of reformed?”
She shrugged. “Well, they’re still a bunch of crooks, Captain. But we can do business with them. “
“Business!”
She seemed to know what she was, talking about, though. The witches were familiar with this section of galactic space, Karres, in fact, had been shifted from a point east of the Empire to its recent station in the Iverdahl System not much more than eighty years ago. And while Goth was Karres born, she’d done a good deal of traveling around here with her parents and sisters. Not very surprising, of course. With the Sheewash Drive available to give their ship a boost when they felt like it, a witch family should be able to go pretty well where it chose.
She’d never been on Uldune but it was a frequent stop-over point for Karres people. Uldune’s reform, initiated by its previous Daal, Sedmon the Fifth, and continued under his successor, had been a matter of simple expediency, the Empire’s expanding space power was making wholesale piracy too unprofitable and risky a form of enterprise. Sedmon the Sixth was an able politician who maintained mutually satisfactory relations with the Empire and other space neighbors, while deriving much of his revenue by catering to the requirements of people who operated outside the laws of any government. Uldune today was banker, fence, haven, trading center, outfitter, supplier, broker, and middleman to all comers who could afford its services. It never asked embarrassing questions. Outright pirates, successful ones at any rate, were still perfectly welcome. So was anybody who merely wanted to transact some form of business unhampered by standard legal technicalities.
“I’m beginning to get it!” the captain acknowledged. “But what makes you think we won’t get robbed blind there?”
“They’re not crooks that way, at least not often. The Daal goes for the skinning-alive thing,” Goth explained. “You get robbed, you squawk. Then somebody gets skinned. It’s pretty safe!”
It did sound like the Daal had hit on a dependable method to give his planet a reputation for solid integrity in business deals. “So we sell the cargo there,” the captain mused. “They take their cut-probably a big one-“
“Uh-huh. Runs around forty per.”
“Of the assessed value?”
“Uh-huh. “
“Steep! But if they’ve got to see the stuff gets smuggled to buyers in the Empire or somewhere else, they’re taking the risks. And, allowing for what the new drive engines will cost us, we’ll be on Uldune then with what should still be a very good chunk of money… Hmm!” He settled back in his chair. “What were those other ideas?”