Hatani. Or tanun guild.
There was long silence. Eventually there began to be a hole in space, small at first, that grew and ate the stars. "Something's out there, Duun. Isn't it?"
"Dust," Duun said. "Particles. We won't use the lights. We're conserving all the power we've got and we can't dodge it anyway."
(How long can it take us? What if a mostly whole ship were in our path?)
(Fool's question, Thorn.)
Wait and wait and wait. All the stars were gone. The ships talked now and again. They talked about the cloud.
Static began. Transmission broke up. A noise penetrated the helmet, a distant hammer blow. Another. The sounds accelerated to a battering. It stopped.
"We're still in it." Weig said. "This is going- uhh!"
The shock rang through the structure and up through the deck. Thorn clenched his gloved hands on the armrests and forgot the pain. Silence a time.
"Clipped the left wing," Mogannen said. "We've got a little spin now. Don't-"
Another shock. Shock after shock. Silence then. An occasional strike, none large.
(Pieces of the ghotanin. Or of one of our own. We're flying through dead ships. Dead. Bodies. Or bits of them. Blood out there would freeze like snow.)
The stars came back. "Hey!" Weig shouted. We're through!"
(For me. For me and Duun, the dead back on earth. Ganngein and Nonnent. Ghota and hatani ships.)
"There's a ship out there," Spart said, and Thorn's heart stopped. "It's Deva. It's going to serve as pickup. It's about nine hours down."
"Thank the gods," Mogannen said.
"We go out to it," Duun explained. "They can't stop our spin to pick us up. We're easier to manage in suits."
Deva shone a light for them. The shuttle turned slowly, wedge-shaped shadow against the sun. Debris trailed from one wing edge, and from the tail. A touch came at his leg and Duun snagged him, maneuvered and got him by the hand. Near them three became a chain. One of them was still loose but in no danger. Deva's beacon brightened among the stars, a white and blinding sun.
Deva was not so fine inside as the shuttle- was all bare metal and plastics; but it had shonunin in it. It had welcome.
"Duun-hatani," the captain said.
"You're a good sight, Ivogi-tanun," said Duun.
Thorn held his helmet in his hands. He saw the others' looks, the crew who stood gazing at him. As they might look at some strange fish they had hauled up in their nets.
"This is Haras," Duun said. "Hatani guild."
"We heard," Ivogi-tanun said.
XV
There was silence from Ganngein now. For four days. Static obscured Nonnent's voice. Earth spoke in code, and Deva had no facilities. Gatog spoke back, constantly; and that was coded too, even when it was Deva's code. Machines read it out. There was seldom a voice, until the last, when Gatog began to shine in Deva's viewport like a scatter of jewels.
(It seemed sinister till we saw it. It's like an ornament. Why is it out here?) "Duun, what is this place?" Duun was silent. Thorn trembled, looking at it from the place on the bridge where Ivogi-tanun called them. It was foolish. Perhaps it was all the other shocks. But there seemed no other destination. Earth and Gatog spoke in some hieratic tongue past them, sharing secrets; and earth had drunk down Ganngein-"Gods," the last transmission had been, or it had sounded like that. Then static from Nonnent too. "They're behind the earth," Duun said. They expected transmission to pick up again. But they never found it, though Deva asked Gatog. "We've lost it too," Gatog said, one of the few uncoded transmissions they had gotten from this secretive place.
(Can silence be worth so much here, so far from earth?)
The lights shone against the stars, white and gold, a cluster here and removed from it, another.
"Five minutes to braking," Ivogi said; and: "Go aft," Duun said. Deva had no spare seats for six passengers. They had to brace themselves in a narrow place where Deva had provision for passengers during maneuvering: there was no viewport there, and nothing more than padding. Thorn went with them. Duun did not.
But Duun came for him after the hard burn. "We're going to suit up to cross," Duun said.
It was a cold place, Deva, gray and smelling of chilled metal and electrics and their own bodies and their own food. But Deva was a known place, and Thorn looked over it while he fastened up his suit. He did these things for himself and looked at Deva and thought of Sheon's woods, and the hearthside. His mind leapt from one to the other. From that to the glittering lights.
(Duun, I'm afraid. I want the world again, Duun, I want to go home. I knew things there; but I go from one thing to the other, and you change, Duun, you go away from me, you talk with Weig, you talk with Ivogi, you talk a language I don't understand and you've lost interest in me. You go farther away.)
(Don't look at me like that. Don't think about leaving me. I can read you, Duun, and it scares me.)
"Good-bye," Ivogi said, and Deva's hatch spat them out as impersonally as it had taken them in.
Thorn's hand froze on the maneuvering gun in all that unforgiving dark. He drifted. His eyes jerked wildly from light to light to light-a great dish suspended, building-wide, or close to them; his eyes refused perspective. A web of metal stretching to insane thinness in the distance, dotted with brilliant lights. "Gatog," Duun said, a voice gone strange with the speaker. "That's the great ear, that dish. It listens. So does another, considerably across the solar system. Out in Dothog orbit."
(What does it listen to?) But Thorn could not ask any question. His soul was numb, battered with too many answers. Duun dragged at him and turned him, and aimed him at another down with such a shift in perspective his sense of balance sent terror through him.
A great pit yawned, all lit in green: it went down a vast rotating shaft to a core; and his peripheral vision formed it as the hub of a vast wheel.
Yet another turn, and Weig and the others were there, their backs to them, their faces toward a great lighted scaffolding prisoning something from which the lights could not utterly remove the darkness-it looked older than the shining girders which embraced it: a cylinder of metal no longer bright.
"That's a ship," Duun said. "The ship."
Thorn said nothing. He hung there, lost, held only by Duun's hand. He had no more wish to be inside, wherever inside was, than to hang here forever in the blaze of these lights. (Is this the place? Is this what cost so much? Do I go beyond this place or is this the stopping-point for us? Duun, Duun, is this your Solution?)
Duun held him by the hand and dived down (or up) into the well, which was green as Sheon's leaves. The walls spun and turned about them.
In the heart of the well in the hub, was a hatch that flowered with gold light. They came into it, and Weig and the others did.
Then it closed and delivered them to another chamber with several metal poles in it and a sign that told them where down was. Duun grabbed a pole holding onto Thorn; Mogannen and Chindi did; Spart and Weig took the other; there came a great shock that made them sway and then rise.
"Hang on," Duun said when Thorn grabbed the pole for himself. "It does it one more time. We're bound for the rim."
It was like a ship moving; down began to feel alarmingly sideways, and the cylinder seemed slowly to change its pitch before it jolted into contact and the door opened.