Sundowner

by Claremont, Chris

  “He died?”

  “Physically, no. I still visit, from time to time, but there’s no real point anymore. He takes no notice. In all the ways that matter, he’s been dead for years.”

  “You were there with him, Kymri, what did you see?”

  He leaned on the railing, again with that fixed stare off into the sky. Nicole filed the angle in her memory, resolving to take a look herself after sunset, but she already had a fair suspicion what she’d find.

  “Nothing.”

  “At all?”

  “The world as it is.” He bared teeth in a particularly humorless Hal grin. “The curse—or perhaps blessing, who’s to say—of no imagination.”

  “You never went back on your own?”

  “It’s a singular experience, Shavrin’s-Daughter. If God isn’t of a mind to chat, why press the point?”

  “Is that what’s in store for me?”

  “I don’t know. Truly. You could ask every living Hal who’s walked the Path. Or consult every Speaker with the memory of a forebear who has. It wouldn’t mean a blessed thing. The experience is unique, for we are all unique—or at least, so we like to think—you, I’m afraid, far more than any.”

  She stepped to his side and laid a hand ever so lightly on his. He looked at her sharply, her approach and the gesture had caught him off-guard, and she caught a sense deep within his eyes of a lifelong regret, the ache of a wound that had never really healed, for him as for his friend. She began to speak, but he placed his fingers gently on her lips, to stop her voice. She leaned against him instead, drawing from the warmth that radiated through his close-cropped fur. After a time, he put his arm about her shoulders and drew her closer still.

  Then, it was his turn to follow her gaze, as the sunglow finally faded from the heavens and the first of the twilight stars came into view. He wasn’t surprised, he also wasn’t happy, as they stared at the twinkling planet.

  “It’s at aphelion, I’m told,” Nicole commented, as though making idle conversation. The evening breeze was off the forest, rich with wondrous, myriad scents—but not the ones she was looking for. “Making its closest orbital approach to s’N’dare.”

  He said nothing, but from the whisper of tension beneath his skin, Nicole knew he wanted to change the subject; at the same time, she marveled at his self-control, which allowed so little overt awareness of his feelings. A casual onlooker—or even a ferociously interested one, like Jenny, watching with inscrutable patience from her chair—wouldn’t have known anything was amiss.

  “A formal dinner has been scheduled to mark the departure of the Constitution” he said, as though she hadn’t spoken. “You will sit by Shavrin’s right hand.”

  “As you require, Kymri ShipMaster.”

  “I’d put you on that bloody starship, if I could.”

  “If you tried, I’m not sure I’d fight you.”

  “You’ll be returning home with me, tonight.”

  “No.”

  Her refusal didn’t register at first. When it did, Kymri dropped his arm and took a step away from her, to say, dumbly, “Your pardon, Shavrin’s-Daughter?”

  “You heard.”

  “That is unacceptable.”

  “I am done with the Council, Kymri. With respect, I am done with you. And my foster mother. And all her damnable machinations. I am tired and I hurt and I would like some time to myself.”

  “Nicole, you have responsibilities... ”

  She cocked a jaundiced eye his way. “You really think so? As far as that aspect of my being here is concerned, you and I both know I’m just a distraction. More in the way than not. That may change after the Harach’t’nyn, but then, isn’t that the point? You said it yourself, Kymri, that is the test that matters.”

  “The rest does matter, Nicole. How well—or poorly—you do beforehand builds the context within which the Challenge will be judged.”

  “Fine. I’m willing to stand on what I’ve said and done ’til now.”

  “Very well then,” he said, although he conceded nothing. “I assume you have other plans?”

  “Ben Ciari has a place along the Saudakar Range. He said it’s very private.”

  Kymri looked amused. “He has a Hal gift for understatement. The only safe way in or out is by air. There is a walking trail, but that is p’m’taie country.”

  “He sent video. To me, it’s the perfect place to hide out.”

  “How do you propose to travel there?”

  “I was hoping some friend might give me a lift.”

  “Ah.”

  “Otherwise, I’ll take my life in my own hands and hike it.”

  “M’gtur won’t be happy.”

  “Then he can hike in after me.”

  She fixed him with a gaze that was as disconcertingly level as it was fierce, both qualities Kymri recognized in her the moment they first met. She was daring him to call her bluff—for bluff it was. All he had to do was appeal to Shavrin; for all her defiance, with all that was at stake, Nicole wouldn’t refuse a direct command.

  “Be on the ramp at dawn,” he said. “And pack warmly. Where you’re going, the world hasn’t heard yet that the season’s turned.”

  The flight out had been on an executive Jumper, outfitted with the plush luxury the Lord Councilors took for granted. It was a breathtaking ride, as the hypersonic RamScoop whisked them to the edge of space and halfway around the world in barely an hour.

  This was something altogether different. Very low, very slow, in a V/STOL bush plane built more for reliability than comfort. The wings were short and exceptionally broad—with triple-slotted flaps to provide maximum lift and maneuverability—the whole assemblage mounted on gimbals that allowed the engines to rotate through ninety degrees, thereby giving the aircraft the mated capabilities of a fixed wing vehicle and a helicopter.

  Kymri was pilot, Nicole beside him, with Jenny on the jump seat behind and between them. Nicole was familiar with the aircraft, she’d honed her skills aboard Constitution in Virtual Reality simulations. Only to discover yet again the perceptual gulf that still existed between facsimile and the real thing. She’d learned to fly by the manual; now, she was leavening and embroidering those instructions with experience. And reminded once more how the first major technological breakthrough for the Hal had been flight.

  They watched the birds from their high-country dens and worked to find artificial ways to make up for the natural gifts they lacked. They discovered the ball by watching boulders cascade down the mountain slopes in an avalanche, and from that observation—with a bit of work and some inspirational deduction—came the wheel. Useful to help with hauling loads, but as far as transport went not for much else. The Hal themselves could move faster unencumbered than they could pulling a cart. And there were no animals with speed better suited for domestication than prey. That was on the ground. The air proved to be a wholly different arena.

  They made their way smoothly along the mountains after leaving the lodge, gradually building altitude until they were well clear of the peaks. Then Kymri turned west, paralleling the sun across the northern hemisphere, from highlands to fertile lowlands to the next major range. As this new line of peaks came into view, it was quickly clear to Nicole that here was much older and more elemental terrain than what she’d seen previously. There was a strange but essential harmony to most of the continental landscape that was missing here.

  She was flying the aircraft, Kymri having turned over the controls with the stern injunction to call him in case of the slightest trouble, while he repaired to the cabin for a nap. They were on the third leg of their flight, after two refueling stops. The air was clear and smooth, visibility all but unlimited, with nothing to worry about on any panel displays.

  Jenny had clambered into Kymri’s chair, visibly impressed—as she had been from the start—by the panorama.

  She touched Nicole’s arm. Then, plainly frustrated at the language barrier, Jenny spread an expansive hand across the window.

&n
bsp; “Very impressive view,” Nicole agreed. “Been like that all day. Shouldn’t be much longer now, though,” she went on, even though aware that Jenny didn’t have the slightest notion what she was saying. She indicated the nav screen. “This”—tapping a dot within a square one grid ring inbound from the edge of the image—“Ciari. Where we’re going.” She indicated her watch, then held up three fingers, hoping her friend would understand she meant three hours.

  This only seemed to increase Jenny’s exasperation.

  “You could save us all a lot of bother by asking Kymri to translate,” Nicole told her, fatigue and aches in rude places inspiring some of the same emotions in return.

  “Kymri,” she repeated, with a poked finger back towards the main cabin for emphasis. “Help. You. Speak. Me.”

  Jenny shook her head violently, the vehemence of her reaction and the subsequent set to her jaw clearly indicating her opposition to that idea. She scrabbled in her bag for her PortaComp, punched up a program, showed it to Nicole.

  The first image was a spectacular shot of the Grand Tetons, above Jackson Hole.

  Jenny pointed to the display, then at the window, and said emphatically in Trade, “Same!”

  Then she twisted in her seat to point to the way they’d come, “Not same!”

  Nicole couldn’t fathom her meaning. What are we talking here, Jenny, she thought. Not basic geology, am I right, something as obvious as mountains are different from plains.

  She rolled a hand, prompting Jenny to continue. But before the woman did, she snuck a glance into the cabin, to check on Kymri.

  Next came a scroll of images on her comp’s display, beginning with an old tintype that showed the construction of New York’s Central Park; a tap on the small keyboard advanced the presentation to the next picture, an overhead panorama of the finished project. Followed by Tokyo’s famed Akasaka Gardens, in progress and after completion. The “Mona Lisa” Gardens on the Moon. She presented a score of images, but try as she might Nicole couldn’t discern any linkage between them.

  Jenny shook the computer at her, slapping the display—which now showed the Constitution’s Garden—and said emphatically, “Same!”

  She slapped the screen again, then the canopy, indicating the land leading up to the continental divide, to say just as assertively, “Same!”

  She looked hopefully at Nicole, who for the life of her couldn’t make the connection. There was a tremble from the aeroplane, like going over a line of speed bumps, as they encountered the leading edge of some light high mountain atmospheric chop. Nicole scanned the panel, then the panoramic vista beyond. The sky was still mostly clear, there looked to be nothing to worry about from the weather.

  She sensed Kymri’s quiet approach, and wondered suddenly whether he’d been feigning sleep. His expression gave no sign as he and Jenny exchanged places, the look he offered her as bland as hers was searching. Nicole let him take the controls and slumped in her seat, letting her eyes droop half-closed so she could replay Jenny’s pictures in her mind’s eye. Again, there were no resonant associations.

  Yet the answer was blindingly obvious to Jenny, she thought. And the image came to her of the ambush in near-Earth space, during the test, when all their calls for help went unanswered because the computers that oversaw the orbital communications systems had been programmed not to hear them. Am I blind to what she’s telling me, she thought further, biting her lower lip in worry, because it’s in my nature not to see?

  Which, in turn, presented the larger question, right in her face: What is my nature now? I know who I am—but what does that mean?

  She took a deep breath, her lungs filling reflexively to their full capacity, and held it, before finally letting go in a deliberately controlled exhalation. Because she had a sudden sense—a teetering glimpse into the Abyss—of Maenaes’t’whct’y’a, the Void Between. And a terrible insight into its true meaning—to be neither one thing nor another, not four-footed, not two. Too evolved to return to the hunting pack, yet not enough to take her place among those for whom such concepts as Honor and Name had meaning. A part of neither world, forever apart from both.

  “The scents are wrong,” she said, standing on the balcony overlooking the lake and taking in the glorious smells of the forest at twilight. The breeze was stiffer out on the water; what only stirred the branches where she stood was creating little wave caps in the distance.

  The lake alone made this setting markedly different from any other she’d seen since her arrival—in person or Virtual—it was a glacial trough, a valley filled by the runoff from a massive ice field farther along the range. Five klicks wide and nearly twenty-five long, it was probably the only body of water on the entire planet with any sort of decent depth.

  Except for the clearing where Ciari had built his house, and laid out a landing pad for air transport, the trees marched all the way down to the water’s edge. Kymri didn’t ask to stay, though Nicole knew he wanted to. Once he’d off-loaded their gear, and made sure they had sufficient supplies in storage, he was on his way.

  Nicole was out of the house immediately, knowing it was a rotten thing to leave Jenny with the unpacking, wishing she could have come here wholly on her own. That was an aspect of herself, she knew, where human and Hal were a match. The friends she made, the relationships that thrived, were invariably long distance. Even now, her best friend was aboard Constitution, and her newest, she couldn’t effectively talk to. She never thought of that as a problem—mostly, she figured it as a major asset. Whatever came her way, she had to be able to cope on her own. Backups had their place, but she was the aeroplane driver.

  Ciari was cut from that same mold.

  She blinked, and realized that she had stopped her stroll a good twenty meters from the shoreline. She took a step forward, and had to stop again as her heartbeat picked up speed. She knew the symptoms, she’d heard them from a sailing buddy describing how he felt on the Observation Deck of the Millennium Tower, with only a pane of safety glass between him and a quarter-mile freefall. Intellectually, there was no danger; the man knew that. Didn’t matter a damn, because emotionally he was just as certain that the window would blow out the moment he touched it.

  She forced another step, and another, refusing to yield to a surge of anxiety that seemed to be increasing at an exponential rate. She knelt, going to hand and knees on the damp earth, and stared at the water lapping darkly just out of reach. She tried to fill her mind with memories of coastal scenes, but that didn’t help much. Almost the opposite in fact, making her feel as if she were playing Russian roulette and added another bullet to the cylinder with every spin. She kept telling herself there was nothing to be afraid of, there was nothing in the lake that could possibly harm her—Goddammit, she raged, I’m a sailor as much as a pilot, I bloody love to swim—to no avail. She’d never felt her heart beat so fast, and feared that if she stayed much longer it would explode.

  She stabbed an arm forward in a convulsive gesture, deliberately throwing herself off-balance, so that her hand landed in the water. And threw herself away so violently it was as though she’d just received a high-voltage shock.

  “Ow,” she said, stating the obvious, hoping to head off the pain with a stab at humor. Every nerve in her body felt like it had been strung out to the limit and tied into pretzel knots.

  “So much,” she breathed, “for catlike reflexes.”

  She placed both palms on her face, then pulled her left hand for a look. There was hardly any natural light left, dusk having almost totally given way to true night, but the water on her hand was a deliriously cool antidote to her flushed skin.

  She rolled up to a sitting position, ignoring the cascade of protests that came from each joint and muscle in turn as it was called into play. Then, pushed forward—noting that while she still felt anxious, it was with nowhere near the previous intensity—to crouch at the water’s edge, where she cupped her hands under the surface and properly splashed her face.

  Didn’t t
aste like home.

  No reason why it should, she thought with a laugh. And then realized that she hadn’t meant the Earth.

  The stars were out, free she realized for the first time of the light pollution that dimmed the sight of them in the city.

  Automatically, she looked for the benchmark stars, but nothing was quite where it was supposed to be.

  She stood erect to her full height, putting her back to the water—ignoring the part of her shrieking that this was something no sane Hal would ever do—to gaze at the trees and remember her initial comment upon landing.

  She picked her way up the path, noting now what she’d missed before, that Ciari had laid a walk all the way down to the shore. From the breadth of the passage, and the way the stones had been set into the ground, it was one he’d used frequently.

  Interesting. In some ways, he was far more overtly Hal than she, yet he deliberately built himself a house by deep water, in a place no Hal could conveniently reach. And made a point of giving himself easy access to the lake.

  Jenny was in an easy chair, reading, when Nicole came in. She watched, saying nothing, while Nicole found and rummaged through her bag, and came up with the PortaComp. Then, of course, Nicole’s intentions unraveled completely—because, while she knew what she wanted, it was etched in her mind like cut crystal, she had no way to express it through an English language keyboard. The letters simply made no sense.

  Ciari had sent plenty of video on his hideaway, so she was fairly familiar with the layout. His study was upstairs, and she quickly got hold of a pad and pencil, making another notation as she did that there was an awful lot of paper about, but precious little electronics. Not many books. Pity. She was ready to kill for a decent, and accessible, astronomical atlas. Her foot snagged and she almost fell; she untangled the trapeze harness from her foot and tossed it onto the most convenient chair, muttering about the uncharacteristic clutter. Ciari couldn’t bear to live this way in space, how could he stand it on the ground? The answer of course was obvious: to make it difficult for anyone to find anything, or know what’s important even when you saw it. Poe’s “Purloined Letter,” hide everything in plain sight. Still, she thought, as she rejoined Jenny before the living room’s stone hearth and its cheerily blazing fire, a man should take better care of his sailing rig. Treat a p-suit that way, you’ve signed your death warrant.