Sundowner

by Claremont, Chris

  She felt a blind surge of frustration, so great an urge to strike out—at something, anything—that she flexed a hand to extrude her claws. She caught herself then, and closed the hand into a fist, watching how naturally the fingers folded over while noting at the same time that the gesture felt utterly wrong.

  She loved the sea, as much as she did the sky. She’d grown up surrounded by water on Nantucket—and quailed within at the image—she’d learned to sail as soon as she could walk. All the memories were there; in that sense, nothing about her had changed. Only the way she related to them. The her she saw today in her mind’s eye had no place in those scenes, creating a growing schism that threatened to shatter her like a poorly cut diamond.

  “For what it’s worth,” she heard and swiveled on her chair to see Hana framed in the doorway of her room, “I’d say pretty fucking crazy.”

  Nicole made an acknowledging bow of the head, a tilt and change, with a follow-through of the hands that signified acceptance and agreement. She’d learned early on—simply from observation—that communication between Hal was as much contingent on body language as the spoken word, but there was no comparison between that intellectual awareness and actual physical being. Life for them was a constant dance, with crucial information conveyed by the inflection of a hand, the set of their torso. Reversing perspectives had made plain to her how limited interaction with humanity was for them. She saw it now with Hana, her stance painting the subtext of her words in broad, almost garish brushstrokes, where a Hal would have presented a far more complex symphony.

  “We need to talk,” she said, and Hana stepped aside for Nicole to pass by into her room.

  One hallmark about spacers was that they were invariably tidy, a place for everything, everything in its place. The reason being that they had to know where to find things, in a hurry, and not always under the best of circumstances. That attitude Nicole learned on a racing sailboat, long before the Air Force. With Hana, it was always a struggle. Being Pacific bicoastal—Japan to California—the natural order of one society was constantly at war with the equally passionate and ingrained chaos of the other.

  California was in the ascendency, that was immediately clear from the clutter. Hana hadn’t picked up in days and was probably sleeping in her clothes.

  Nicole kept her feelings off her face but to her surprise, Hana picked up on her reaction anyway.

  “Don’t start,” she said, “I know it’s a mess.” There was no apology in what she said; she was merely acknowledging a state of being.

  “You’ve gotten very good,” Nicole told her, looking now to see how her friend was presenting herself, and recognizing what she’d missed before, that Hana was deliberately exaggerating the link between body and speech, presenting herself as the equivalent of a loudmouthed New York Mama or the classic Ugly American tourista so that anyone dealing with her would perceive only the cliché.

  Hana strode past Nicole, permitting herself a small smile of delight to show how pleased she was with the compliment. Her desk was thick with hardware, three portable CPU modules mated to a pair of flatscreen displays. None of it was tied into the ship, not even via a direct power cord.

  “I’ve got the room screened,” she told Nicole as she took her seat. “Anyone taking a peek will see and hear the pair of us talking about what you’ve been going through”—a humorless smile from Hana, echoed by Nicole—“thick with the appropriate existential angst. I think there’s even a good cry in there somewhere. And, in case they get truly anal, I patched in a bioscan profile to match the scene. Our telemetry will be wholly and completely consistent with the pictures.”

  “Suppose they just drill a hole in the wall?”

  “So sue me, Ace. I did my best.”

  “This is a lot of trouble, Hana.”

  “No argument. We’re in a lot of trouble. These computers”—she waved an arm over the desk—“are mine. I cut the chips, built the motherboards, designed a proprietary operating language. User specific to me alone.”

  “Power?”

  “If I wanted to patent the little suckers, I’d be set for life.” She shrugged. “Maybe I will, we get out of this.”

  “Think we won’t?”

  “I have questions, fearless leader.”

  “Not half so many as me, I bet. This in aid of what we were talking about in the Garden?”

  Hana nodded, the shallowest inclination of the head. Being very careful, Nicole thought. I suppose this is where devouring a lifetime of espionage fiction in books and films finally pays off. Sort of. I should be so lucky.

  Nicole decided to follow Hana’s lead.

  “Should I assume there’s more involved than what you told me?”

  Not even a nod this time, just a flicker in the eyes.

  “Am I going to like it?”

  “Depends on the context.”

  Nicole sighed, making it obvious in order to buy herself a little time for thought.

  “I’m going with Kymri,” she said at last, when the silence between them grew long.

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t give a damn about the scrambled circuitry in your head, woman, you’re not Hal.”

  Nicole quietly arched her neck to present Hana a better view of the pattern on her throat, and raised a hand as well.

  “Don’t flash your stripes at me, Nicole.” Hana sprang to her feet, pacing the floor with a controlled and furious intensity that would have done a Hal proud. “They don’t cut shit with me, not a bit of it! That’s surface, a cosmetic adjustment; soon as your head’s straight, they’ll fade.”

  “That doesn’t matter. This is something I have to do.”

  “It’s fucking politics, Nicole.” Hana spaced her words with bitter, incremental pauses, as though firing a sequential volley. “Shavrin fucked you. She fucked us all. We don’t owe her a blessed thing. Least of all your life.”

  “I have no life,” Nicole replied patiently, “until this is straightened out. I can learn English, Hana.” I hope, she thought, because her early attempts were not encouraging. “But I’ll always remain an outsider in my own head. The contexts, the resonances, the being of my humanity will always remain alien to me. I can’t explain it any better, I only know it’s true. I have to resolve the schism in myself, and that means taking on the Hal part of me in its totality.

  “And yes”—she raised a hand to head off another outburst from her friend—“that’s only part of it. I have a place in Hal society. What I may have assumed before, I understand now, more completely than I can say. I have obligations”—and the term she used was one closest to the Japanese giri, Hana’s reaction telling her she’d caught the specific reference—“that must be fulfilled. That must be fulfilled.” With emphasis both verbal and physical, understated but unmistakable.

  “I for one think Shavrin could do with a little disgrace.”

  “We need her where she is.”

  “Or what, Nicole, the whole damn Treaty goes south? I think it’s a little late for that.”

  “Tell that to the clowns who tried to shoot us down.”

  “Well,” Hana said, offering a gesture with her hands to echo her wholly human nod as she reluctantly conceded the point, “at least you’ll have me to cover your back.”

  “I’m counting on that. Only from a distance.”

  Hana looked at her sharply, her silent question as obvious as it was demanding.

  “I’m going in alone,” Nicole told her. “I want you to stay here.”

  “The hell you say! You need me.”

  “Agreed. But if I have you by my side—where everyone expects to see you, by the way—then we have no one to make sure things are okay here aboard the Constitution. Or keep tabs on Ch’ghan.”

  “You think he’s part of this?”

  “I prefer to hope not. I’d rather be certain. Raqella has the same obligations waiting for him that I do, and he’s injured besides. They’re sending him home. And I c
an’t think of a better test bed for you than Sundowner.”

  “Starswift,” Hana corrected automatically.

  Nicole started a negative gesture with her hands, then stopped herself, set her jaw ever so slightly and deliberately shook her head. It wasn’t a comfortable gesture and she could see how disconcerted Hana looked watching.

  “What?” Nicole asked, and then tried humor. “Didn’t I do it right?”

  “It looked funny,” Hana said lamely. “Like it does every time I see a Hal try the same thing. It’s artificial, isolated from the physical language of the rest of the body.”

  “At last,” Nicole sighed with a sad smile, “my dear friend gets the bloody point.

  “Between us,” she continued, “I want the ship to have its own private call sign.”

  “Understood. Who’s with you when you’re down there? From our side, I mean.”

  “Jenny Coy. Kymri.”

  “He’s Hal!”

  “I trust him.”

  “More fool you, Shea.”

  “I need his voice. Jenny doesn’t speak the language.”

  “There’s Ben Ciari.” She saw something in Nicole’s expression. “What?”

  “I don’t know really. A deliberate ambiguity in Kymri’s responses.”

  “And you have the nerve to tell me you trust him?” In frustration, Hana shifted to Japanese and cut loose in wholly incomprehensible fury. Nicole waited patiently for the verbal storm to pass, reaching into her bag while she did for a small box buried at the bottom.

  “As much as I do you, yes,” she said finally, carefully choosing the most personally intimate form of the pronoun. It was partly a test—the phrasing was the far more sophisticated High Speech, rather than the Hal Trade Tongue—to gauge the breadth of Hana’s knowledge.

  No nod in response, nor words, but a gesture of acceptance that was wholly Hal.

  Nicole stood before Hana, cradling the small box in cupped hands. Even in the indirect and neutered light of the room, the dark, polished wood gleamed with a marvelous richness that created the illusion of an ocean’s unfathomable depths. Hana seated herself on the corner of her bed, watching with a quizzical but interested eye.

  “This is wholly improper,” Nicole said, and the casual observer might be forgiven for assuming she was talking to herself. “There’s a ceremony.”

  “The chn’chywa,” Hana guessed.

  “You are very good. Yes, the chn’chywa. The way Kymri explained it to me”—and Nicole trembled ever so lightly as she flushed with remembered heat and smelt once again the intoxicating fragrance of a jungle—“it’s a bonding. To Hearth and Family. Those of blood on one level. And on another, those who reside in the Household of the Heart.”

  “I’m sorry, Nicole, I won’t do this. I won’t have it. I want no part of that fuzzy bitch.” Hana spoke with intentional disrespect. Nicole ignored it.

  “Too late. We’re all part of her, like it or not. This isn’t about Shavrin, it’s about me. The linkage with the House is through me, the Bonding is between us.”

  With a fluid grace that seemed so natural a part of her it was impossible to recall that it didn’t exist a few short weeks before, Nicole went to her knees before Hana, making a deep obeisance until her bow touched her forehead to the floor. As she came up, eyes still downcast, she held the small box before her, open now for Hana’s view.

  The other woman had gasped at the sleek elegance of Nicole’s movement; she gasped again at the piece of pure wrought silver she beheld.

  It was an earring, a single pendant gemstone wrapped in a Celtic knot.

  “Lapis,” Hana breathed, not yet daring to touch the piece of jewelry.

  “Lunar lapis,” Nicole acknowledged. “Found the piece myself. And mined the raw silver.”

  “And the frame?”

  “From my cousin Kit, on Skye.”

  “How long you been planning this, Ace?”

  “The gift,” Nicole subvocalized the questing chirrup that was what passed among the Hal for a shrug, “awhile. The context, well I’m afraid that’s wholly improvised.”

  She still hadn’t looked up from the floor, although every part of her shrieked its demand for a sense of Hana’s reaction. Nothing was forthcoming though, neither in word nor gesture.

  Nicole was shaking inside, furious with herself for this sudden flash of weakness. She closed her eyes tight, determined to reassert control by any means necessary. When she came back to herself, Hana was on her feet.

  “I don’t know what comes next,” Nicole heard, in a voice as soft as her own.

  Again, with that same infernal grace, Nicole rolled to her feet. Hana had placed the gem on her right ear, matching the position of the single stud Nicole wore in her own.

  “Me, neither,” was Nicole’s reply. “Like I said, I’m making this up as I go along.”

  She held her hands out, palms upward. Hana took the cue, and placed hers over Nicole’s, so that their fingernails lightly touched the skin on the inside of each wrist, right over the blood vessels. Then, each woman reached for the other’s neck, again the barest touch atop jugular and carotid. No big deal, for human hands, with their blunt, square-cut nails. But Hal fingers were tipped with claws and even though they were mostly for show these days, the old memories remained. This was the greeting that said, I place my life in your hands, to give or take as you desire.

  They broke apart, as if by command. Hands to sides, with a body’s width between them.

  “I have to go,” Nicole said.

  Hana’s voice made her pause at the door. “Be careful,” she said.

  Jenny was thankfully gone from the common room; there was no one to see Nicole stride through the shadows to her own room and slip inside. The lights brightened automatically, as the internal sensors marked her entrance.

  She stood with her back to the closed door, taking deep, gulping breaths, as though she’d just run a mile sprint, or come up from nearly drowning. The last image opened her eyes wide in a proto-panic she quashed with such ruthlessness that her teeth set in a snarl.

  She couldn’t help wondering if this was how Shavrin felt, all those years ago on the Moon, when she named Nicole as her daughter. The difference being that Nicole hadn’t a clue back then of the ramifications of the Hal’s act. No such luck with Hana. Both of them knew full well the depth of the commitment offered. The piece of lapis was etched with Nicole’s personal sigil, and the cartouche of the Bond between them; wearing it, Hana could follow her anywhere in Hal society. No door could be closed to her. In effect, she was Nicole.

  She growled in amusement, the sound not so rich to her ears as it should be, and making her throat hurt besides. Shavrin would not be amused when she found out what Nicole had done.

  As if Nicole really gave a damn anymore.

  On impulse, she crossed the room in quick, long-limbed strides, to grab her guitar off its rack. She sat on the bed, holding the instrument awkwardly, wondering if this was a mistake, debating whether or not to return it to its place. The door was locked. Even if Hana used the override, she wouldn’t be able to stop Nicole from smashing it this time.

  She strummed a chord, experiencing again that awful duality of consciousness that told her it was in tune but that the sound it made was most unpleasant.

  She took a deep, calming breath and just sat there. She would play or she wouldn’t; either way, it would be what felt most right.

  Her fingers twitched on the strings, hesitated, began again. Not random strumming but the opening chords of a song. Not classical, either, it was raw and passionate rock’n’roll.

  She grinned. Lila Cheney’s HighFlight. The music that came to her most often when she was stressed, pushing herself and her machine way beyond the outside of the envelope.

  Her grin widened, at the recognition of a wholly human response to wholly human pleasure.

  The words came.

  The accent was a little odd and Nicole’s voice as rough as it had ever been—she h
ad a lot of talents, with skills to match, but singing wasn’t one of them—but the words were English.

  When she slept that night, the guitar snug in her arms and a smile on her face, there were no dreams.

  * * *

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  She’s drawn deep, to where she can no longer make out the shimmer of sunlight on water surface. Her lungs burn, pain such as she’s never before felt. She opens her mouth a final time, putting the last of breath and—she believes—life into a hunter’s cry, to let the Shadow know that while she may have been defeated, she has not surrendered.

  “What do you mean he’s disappeared?”

  Nicole was so angry, there was no room left in her for excitement. She appeared to tower over the Hal Majordomo who’d been sent to greet her, and she deliberately used all the aspects of language—words, tone, gesture, the set of her body—to convey her fury in no uncertain terms.

  In a way, this was the perfect ending to a perfect trip, almost something that should have been expected. The latest wrinkle in Murphy’s Law. Relations between human and Hal had become increasingly strained ever since Kymri had informed Captain Hobby that Nicole’s presence was required on s’N’dare. Of all the Hal Nicole had met, Kymri had proved most adept at conveying and comprehending the fullest range of human expression; in effect, he was the Hal equivalent of Ben Ciari. Not a Speaker, but in many respects just as useful.

  In his meeting with Hobby and Ramsey Sheridan, he was polite to the point of diffidence. He was also adamant. Nicole chose to sit very quietly in her own chair, watching the scene unfold from as unobtrusive a vantage point as possible. She still couldn’t understand what was being said—the exchange was in English and that language was still lost to her, despite her earlier breakthrough with Lila’s song—and had trouble reading human physical expression, so she contented herself with watching Kymri. He kept himself under splendid control but she was able to read nuances of response, elements only a Hal would notice, that told her as effectively as a running commentary how things were going.