Sundowner

by Claremont, Chris

  This Hal was big, even by human standards, taller than Nicole and much broader; where Shavrin was lithe power, he was raw brute force, the kind of elemental battering ram you turn loose on wayward mountain ranges. He was a blond, head to toe in rippling shades of tawny gold that most reminded Nicole of a mountain lion; he had no natural markings and affected no cosmetic ones. He was as handsome as he was majestic, knew it, and used both assets to full advantage. Unlike Shavrin, he was casually dressed, loose slacks and sandals, a wraparound tunic and a jacket, wearing a cloisonne pin on his lapel emblazoned with his coat of arms instead of the full, formal chain of office.

  “Forgive my trespass, domna,” he said to Nicole, showing a hint of teeth, “but your door was ajar.” She didn’t believe that for a moment and resolved immediately to install a set of locks of her own. Maybe two.

  She recognized the emblem on his pin, this was the Lord President of the Council of Clans.

  He steepled his hands, chest high, with the tips of his claws barely touching, and inclined his body forward into a slight bow. It was a deliberately awkward stance and left him momentarily vulnerable to attack.

  “R’ch’ai,” he told her. The formal statement of trust, warrior to warrior. By entering your home, I do you the honor of placing my life in your hands. “I am M’gtur.”

  She responded in kind, and held out her own hands, palms upward. She felt a pinprick as he grasped his hands about her wrists—she couldn’t close hers around his, they were too massive—the claw point of each forefinger had broken her skin, right above the big vein. His grip tightened; she knew from the first that she couldn’t break his hold and so didn’t try.

  He made a sharp, huff-ing outrush of breath and again flashed fighting teeth in grudging approval as he let her go. There was a sharp tang to his scent, a fragrance Nicole had no name for, that made her blood run hot and cold at the same time. The Hal in her suddenly hungry, the human recognizing itself as prey.

  “You are what you seem,” he acknowledged, “yet you cannot be. I can fault the wisdom of Shavrin’s decision, but not her choice.”

  He had hunter’s eyes, like Ciari only more so, but there was something deep within, tucked away so far in the back that Nicole hoped she was imagining it, a hint that the hunt itself was nothing without the kill. He held her gaze a few moments more, as though daring her to make some response. Two came to mind, each equally strong, to flee and to strike out at him. When she did neither, he finally turned his gaze to Shavrin, leaving Nicole to wonder if she’d passed this test, and how many more there’d be to follow?

  “You are determined in your purpose,” he demanded of Shavrin. Before replying, she made a hand sign to Nicole, who obediently folded herself to her knees, touching her forehead to the floor in a posture of total submission.

  “She is my daughter,” Shavrin said simply. Of course it was anything but. In a foster-oriented society like the Hal, where family can have a score of meanings and cover a multitude of relationships, the word she’d used specifically referred to the issue of her body as well as her blood. She had bound Nicole as close to her as any biological child, and the earring Nicole wore meant she stood closer to her than any of them.

  “She is OutWorld.” There was no analog for the concept in High Speech, he had to use Trade Tongue. But he spoke with a spitting snarl that made his feelings plain.

  “She is Blood,” was Shavrin’s calmly implacable reply. Nicole wanted—desperately—to stand up for herself, but she knew she had no right. Until she celebrated her own Harach’t’nyn—the ceremonial coming of age, a walkabout to mark the transition from the four-footed way to the two—she had no place in a dialogue between Elders. To a great extent, she didn’t even exist.

  “Then what must be, shall be.” Shavrin must have made a gesture of protest; Nicole heard nothing from her, but M’gtur responded as if she’d spoken aloud. “In this youngling’s case more than any, the spirit of the Way is not sufficient, the letter must be observed.”

  “For the first time in a score of generations,” Shavrin scoffed.

  “That will change, you have my pledge on it.”

  “You’d have us crawl, old man, after we’ve learned to fly.”

  “Crawl, fly, whatever, gracious lady, I would have us remain us.”

  “In the ways that matter, nothing has changed.”

  “To you. But I have a different vision of which ways... matter. Prepare your daughter, Shavrin”—and the term M’gtur used was a world apart from Shavrin’s, implying only the most superficial relationship, the kind used for a creature one step removed from a pet—“she will walk her road once the Terrans have departed.”

  Nicole felt the breeze of his passing and again the heady mix of atavistic fear combined with an equally powerful instinctive desire to leap for his throat. She kept her head down, thankful Shavrin couldn’t see her own bared teeth, and struggled to regain what was left of her composure.

  “Damn,” she heard in Trade. And then a grumpy, “Get up, Nicole. We’re alone, there’s no need for protocol.”

  Nicole started a sleek athletic rise to her feet, as a Hal would, then stopped herself and defiantly unfolded a slow stiff leg at a time.

  “How very human of you,” Shavrin acknowledged.

  “It’s an effort to remember sometimes.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “But you couldn’t warn me?”

  “There was nothing to be done on Earth, child.”

  “Don’t call me that!”

  They locked eyes. Shavrin blinked.

  “I would rather have you tormented by dreams,” the Hal Chieftain said, “than run the risk you face here. I am half-tempted to put you on your ship and send you home.”

  “M’gtur would have your heart.”

  “Dear one, he means to have both our hearts. He may yet, too, before we’re done.”

  “Unless you get his first?”

  “No. Regrettably. He may have a head as thick and impenetrable to new ways as the planetary crust but he’s also an honorable foe. He’ll take all that’s due him from a victory, but he’ll also accept defeat with becoming grace. Behind him, though, are those with less scruples.”

  “Sounds like home.”

  Shavrin took a seat at a small table on the terrace, with its view of the city beyond, and motioned for Nicole to do the same. There was a bowl of fruit, which Nicole offered to the older Hal, slicing her selection and laying it attractively on a plate before sitting herself.

  “You look surprised,” she said to Shavrin.

  “Kymri’s report didn’t do you justice.”

  “I’m just doing what I find comes naturally.”

  “I did not want this to happen, Nicole. I wish I could say I would have done anything to prevent it, or that I will do anything to cure it.”

  “You don’t need to justify anything, Shavrin. I’m angry, yes, but I understand.” Nicole didn’t want to sit, every aspect of her being—Hal and human—demanded some form of physical expression for her agitation, but she forced herself to stay where she was, at attention in her chair, with hands folded politely behind her on the table. “I’ve never liked being lied to. Lately, that’s all anyone seems to be doing. Not the most pleasant revelation for someone who thought her society was built on a foundation of trust.

  “You never answered my question, Shavrin,” she finished suddenly, “has Ben gone walkabout?”

  “To be honest”—and there was no irony, intentional or otherwise, in her use of the phrase—“no one is sure. Only that he is gone. The indication in his notes and belongings—and his behavior—are that such is indeed the case.”

  “And you haven’t a clue where?”

  “Nicole,” she said with some asperity, “try finding a lone man wandering through the wilderness of your own world.”

  “Can I help?”

  Shavrin’s gesture was negative, and not to be questioned.

  “You may not,” she said flatly. />
  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You are my daughter. The Lord of the Council of Clans has accepted that. Until you face your own Harach’t’nyn, you may not be human. In all ways and all things—publicly, as an absolute necessity, but I would prefer in private as well—you must be Hal.”

  “I have oaths that supersede this insanity, Shavrin.”

  “I do not ask you to betray them.” Yet, Nicole thought.

  “And afterward,” she wondered aloud.

  “Like any Hal, you will be free to choose your own trail. My hope is, the experience will restore the balance within yourself.”

  “I’ll still have the memories.”

  “But not as the dominant aspect of your personality.”

  Nicole broke from the table and took a stand by the balcony, eyes slitted against the golden sun, as she let a wayward afternoon breeze cool the bare skin of her shoulders. In the distance, diamonds of blinding light flashed off the curved crest of the metropolitan arcology’s primary hemisphere.

  “I want to hit something,” she said. “A response,” she continued, with a sidelong look towards Shavrin, “from both sides of my skull.”

  “Restrain yourself,” was her Chieftain’s acid reply. “You don’t have the equipment for an alley fight.”

  Shavrin rose to her feet. “We may never find Ciari-Marshal,” she said.

  Nicole turned to face her. “You think he’s dead.”

  “The disservice we did you was nothing compared to what was done him. Five of your years and more have given you a mental cushion that allowed the Hal aspect of your self to integrate wholly with its human counterpart. The asset is, you are one being; the liability, you may never be the being you were. In Ciari’s case, there was no such equivalent, gradual evolution—more like, instead, a violent overthrow. We were able to effect a successful counterrevolution, but it still left him struggling to cope with the aftereffects of the experience.”

  “You raped us, only with me you managed to turn it into a successful seduction.”

  “Call it what you will, I would do it again. Perhaps we would have been kinder to leave well enough alone with Ciari and let his Hal persona claim complete ascendancy.”

  “Perhaps I should have let him go, you mean, so he could’ve died with the rest of those bastards when we blew the raider base to atoms?”

  “We both have our mistakes to live with, Nicole... ”

  “Fuck you!” Neither High Speech nor Trade, the expletive popped out in English. Her hands were clenched, her stance as wholly human as it was aggressive.

  “Your presence is required at certain diplomatic functions,” Shavrin said in that special way parents have to warn off their children from doing something fundamentally stupid. “A schedule has been posted to your buffer. M’gtur’s pronouncement to the contrary, be prepared for your Ordeal at any time. Once you embark on that sacred path, Nicole, you are alone. Neither I nor Kymri, nor any friends, human or Hal, may help you.”

  “I’ll be ready.”

  “This is such a goddamned, fucking pain,” she cried, without a care who heard her.

  Then, she sank down onto her haunches and wrapped her arms about her knees, holding the pose for the better part of a minute before rolling backward onto her butt and then her back, flopping arms and legs out full length. Since the sun was still a good half hour below the horizon, all that did was make her cold, and she pulled herself grumpily up to a sitting position.

  Jenny was more sensibly dressed, in thermal sweatpants and a long-sleeve RAF pullover. Nicole favored shorts and though she wore a long-sleeve sweatshirt, she wished for an extra layer like her friend. It was the Hal equivalent of spring, and while the days were delightfully warm, the nights could be bitter.

  They weren’t jogging so much as hiking with speed, blazing trails along the ridge line above Nicole’s house, following a different route every morning and seeing where it would lead them in an hour before they began to circle back home. The escarpment was Shavrin’s territory—each of the major Clans had their own piece of turf overlooking the city proper, as well as all manner of residences within, from apartments to palaces. The city had one key function—much like Geneva in the days of the League of Nations, or Washington—the governance of the community. In this case, the whole of the Hal Federacy, a concordance of rival Households as reluctantly bound together by the headlong advances of technology as were the nations of the Earth. And as uncomfortable about it. That had been made plain to Nicole the night after her arrival, when she’d been formally presented to Shavrin’s nearest and dearest.

  Everything had gone passably well—some wouldn’t speak to her, some were fascinated by the freak, most did their best to endure the situation, with only Kymri and Raqella (of all people) relating to her as friend and kinsman—until some bravo from one of the more remote septs decided to see what she was made of. The attack was ferocious, but she recognized from the start that it was a bluff; problem was, they were all nearly undone by his state of drunkenness. He misjudged both distance and timing and a swipe of the hand intended to miss by the merest fraction of a millimeter instead drew blood. There was instant shock and consternation—mixed with a fair dollop of admiration at how Nicole had stood her ground and later bore what had to be considerable pain. The incident earned her a measure of respect. It also resulted in Jenny’s summons to the estate, to look after Nicole’s wound.

  Nicole was glad to see another friendly face, even if neither of them could speak the other’s language. Hana was still struggling with Trade and Nicole’s grasp of English had proved limited to that one outburst to Shavrin.

  “That’s probably why they let us hang together without supervision,” she groused further. “They know we can’t make bloody sense out of each other!”

  The view was even more spectacular than from her balcony, presenting an unobstructed panorama that swept across the whole of the valley, encompassing the city and the lake far beyond. One of the odd aspects of s’N’dare was its lack of surface water. There were ice caps, north and south—although precious little visible evidence of recent glaciation—and a number of large lakes. No seas or oceans, though, and none of the lakes were exceptionally deep. Indeed, they appeared more like rivers that had overflowed their banks to form perpetual floodplains. The bulk of the planetary water appeared to come from underground sources, either freestanding or in aquifers.

  The city sprawled along the slopes of this modest highland range, following a design philosophy that preferred a horizontal orientation to a vertical one. The highest structures were the central arcologies, one dedicated to government operations, another to business, another to commerce. The Hal didn’t mind commuting to work—considering the sophistication of their computer and communications technologies, that often meant simply strolling from one room in the house to another—but they were absolutely insistent on having a space to call their own. An individual habitat and land to put it on.

  By nature and inclination, they were solo creatures, with a passion that the American Libertarians of the last century would have admired. They understood the advantage of acting in concert, but made sure to always guarantee the rights of each member of that group. That’s why they called themselves a Federacy: each belonged to the whole as a matter of personal choice. It was their privilege to walk away at any time; it was the group’s responsibility to be sufficiently aware of the needs and concerns of the individual, and responsive to them, that they would never feel the need.

  Hence, the evolution of the Speaker concept, a class of mediator/facilitators, beholden to none, bred and trained to bring an objective eye to any dispute and settle it to the best workable advantage of all concerned.

  Nicole caught a flash of movement overhead, and spotted the triangle wedge of a hang glider riding the dawn thermals. It was still twilight where she stood, but as she stared she saw another glint of sun off the polished metal spars. She knew as well there’d be morning sail races on the flats clos
e by the lakeshore, young Hal aboard wheel-equipped roadboards, horrifying their elders by playing so close to the water’s edge.

  She found herself suddenly thinking of Raqella, thankful that she’d been in a wholly human frame of mind when he’d dunked her in the ocean back in—and suddenly she paused, her face ghost pale as she groped for the right name, with a shiver that had nothing to do with the predawn chill.

  “San Diego,” she said, the Hal shape to the words making them incomprehensible. She focused all her will, gritting her teeth, clenching her fists ’til they were as white as her face beneath its tan, and tried again, “San Diego!”

  She still spoke with an accent, but at least it came out right. Or so she assumed from Jenny’s reaction.

  “San Diego?” the young Scot queried. Which forced Nicole to wave off further questions. It was too complicated to explain, even if Jenny could understand.

  Blessed earth, Nicole thought, he was waiting for me out on the pier. On a bay that opened into blue water ocean. He must have been terrified. For no Hal she knew had ever gone out on a boat. Even Kymri, on the one occasion he’d yielded to Nicole’s invitations to visit the beach, hadn’t stepped off the porch of the friend’s house they’d stayed at, and for the duration looked ready to bolt for high ground at the merest provocation.

  She couldn’t help a small smile then, at the memory of one of Ciari’s later letters, when he related how he’d scandalized the Terran diplomatic community and almost caused a crisis in Council by taking a sailboard out onto the lake. Raqella, she recalled, had been one of the few to follow him, more as a matter of pride than anything else. Anything a Terran could do, these young Hal were determined to do better.

  With one exception. She knew, whatever the provocation, she’d never voluntarily get a Hal out on blue water. The oceans were the cradle of life, you didn’t trespass on the front doorstep of God.

  Eminently sensible, she agreed to herself, except that s’N”dare doesn’t have any deep water oceans to speak of.

  She did a three-sixty pivot, scanning the horizon without a clue as to what she was looking for; Jenny picked up on her sudden agitation and stepped close, only to spring back, tucking her hands back close to her body as Nicole visibly flinched.