A Door Into Ocean Read Online Free Page B

they’re not even human!”
    Galena shook her head and sank into a chair, which creaked as her weight settled like a sack of gold coins. “My poor son, what can I do with you?” she muttered. “Will you never get some sense into that troll’s skull of yours?”
    Spinel did not care to be compared with Valedon’s extinct native race of anthropoids, and Beryl’s laughter only made it worse. It was true that the notion of his adventure seemed less solid in broad daylight than it had beneath the mysterious Sharer plantlights, but he was set on it, nonetheless. He clenched his fists. “Why can’t I go, just for a while? Just for once? Nobody needs me around here.”
    â€œGo to Karnak of Iridis,” his mother urged him. “There you’ll get a good place and see the city, besides.”
    Beryl shook her head. “You’ll never grow up, that’s all.”
    The voices closed in on him. Spinel fled from the kitchen and burst out of doors onto the sun-baked flagstones. Automatically he headed out toward the shore beyond the harbor, where he would cool off in the sea. He loped past the back of the granite town hall, whose arched windows carried ornaments of chrysolite, like glass eyes that mocked
him. Angry tears blurred his vision. His parents would never let him go. Why could they not understand his longing to see something of the universe beyond this troll’s nest of a town?
    As he rounded a corner in haste, he ran smack into Uriel the Spirit Caller. Spinel gasped and started to frame an excuse, but Uriel spoke first. “Never mind, son; the wind blew you in.” Uriel looked windblown himself in the loose cowl that wrapped his head like a potato in a sack. Yet his gnarled hands adjusted the chain of his stone with slow dignity. The stonesign of the Spirit Caller was a star sapphire, a deep blue oval lit by three intersecting lines of light. This gem alone, by unwritten law, was never bought or sold.
    â€œYour face tells me,” Uriel said, “that you may need some wisdom of the Patriarch.”
    Spinel winced and fought back his annoyance. “What’s that to you? Why should the Patriarch care a flint chip for me?”
    Uriel did not answer but passed his hand over the starstone. The six points vanished, then returned as the shadow lifted. “If we cut off the light, the star is gone. So, if we ignore the light of wisdom, how shall we see?”
    The starstone intrigued Spinel despite his bitter mood. Cyan had drummed into him its physical nature: aluminum trioxide tinted by iron, and inclusions of titanium that reflected a star, if one cut the stone en cabochon, just so … . Still, the sight of it tasted of magic, to him. And could there be any other explanation for spirit calling?
    â€œDo you really hear the Patriarch’s thoughts in an instant?” Spinel challenged. “Across four light-years?”
    Uriel nodded slowly, almost reluctantly, Spinel thought.
    Spinel glanced at the sky, which shone clear as if polished, the inside of a porcelain bowl. Yet high overhead an Iridian jet scored it like a diamond-tipped glass cutter. His bitterness washed back. “Then why do Iridians use radio?”
    Spinel broke off and walked quickly the rest of the way to the shore.
    The water splashed and eddied around his legs, and clouds of fine pebbles sifted over his toes. As he waded out his arm plunged to grasp a flat rock, which he tossed with a twist. It skipped several times, and he followed its flight until the brilliance of the water’s reflections hurt his eyes. Down beyond his feet spread masses of seaweed, dark and mysterious as a woman’s hair. He stood very still. The wavelets muttered and seemed to whisper: merwenmerwen … . Spinners, soldiers,
or spies; somehow he would figure out those Sharers who lived without stone on a world with no shore.

4
    IF THE SHARERS were spies, Spinel decided, then he would spy on