Dark Matters_ Ghost Dance (Book 2) - Christie Golden [53]
"You are making rhythmic sound from it," she said, edging away from him. "The Culilann do that. It's forbidden."
"We eat fresh-grown foods, and create art and music and poetry," said Kim, pushing his point frantically. "But we build starships and understand warp drive and sometimes listen to artificially constructed music, too. It's okay, Khala."
"No. No it's not. It's-it's wrong, Harry. It's sick. Excuse me, I have to go." She turned and hastened out, but not before he saw tears glistening in her beautiful sapphire eyes.
Harry's stomach was knotted. He wondered if he'd be able to keep dinner down. She couldn't have hurt him worse if she'd tried, and he knew that her reaction was something she couldn't help. But oh, God, the look on her face, as if he were doing something terrible just by playing the clarinet.
Music had been the constant love of Harry's Me.
It had kept him sane and comforted during the separation from his parents, from Libby, during the wrenching agony of his relationship with the Varro woman Tal, during the long trip into the Void. It was his touchstone. No one could be close to him without accepting and understanding the call that playing the clarinet had on his soul.
Khala thought playing music was sick, was wrong. He knew it wasn't. It was something he'd always been proud of, was good at-something he did that other people enjoyed and admired. In many ways, he was his music.
He lay down on the bed and curled up with his clarinet. The shame and pain that washed through him told him all he needed to know. Harry Kim was falling in love with a woman to whom the most precious thing in his life was an abomination.
And he couldn't stop it.
INTERLUDE
THE PLANET THE ENTITY APPROACHED WAS STILL LUSH
and fertile. It was not almost dead, as that of the Baneans had been. There was not much dark matter here to be collected, but as it drew closer, the Entity realized that there did not need to be much for dreadful damage to be done.
It settled down, an invisible cloud, and brushed lovingly across the surface of an ocean, afforests, of beautiful, graceful buildings. A molecule here, a few more there. And then there was the darkness.
It had not ravaged the man's body, nor his mind. It was something else that had been broken and twisted, something some spiritual peoples called a "soul." Almost the Entity recoiled from the man, and
in so doing learned something about itself: it was inherently good.
Resolute, it moved toward the man. His name was Gath. He had once held a high rank among his people, the Sikarians. More information came to the Entity, though somehow the knowledge was already familiar. Gath had once been what was called a minister. The Sikarians were famed for their hospitality, though even before the coming of the wrong things the Entity sensed that this "hospitality" had been self-serving. The Sikarians lived for amusement and pleasure, and all too quickly they grew tired of something that had once entertained them.
Such was still the Sikarian way, the Entity sensed, but in Gath, the drive for pleasure had been perverted. Gath obtained his pleasure from the pain of others. Once he had been thoughtless and lacked compassion. Now he was cruel. Evil. The dark matter inside him had made him so.
The woman who had given him so much pleasure earlier that evening now lay sobbing in another room. She bore bruises and burns and cuts. Perhaps a bone or two had been broken. Gath did not care. Her sobs annoyed him. Already, the pleasure that had filled him at her suffering was fading, and he was thinking of what else he could do to the girl to rejuvenate his interest in her. He had never killed, but now that he thought of it....
Horror and anger racked the Entity. This must be stopped. The Entity could not prevent the damage Gath had done, but it felt certain that it could stop
future wrongs. It descended, unseen by Goth, and gently swept