Sundowner

by Claremont, Chris

  They reached it late in the day, after cresting the last of the phalanx hills that formed a natural breakwater to the ocean beyond, just as the great cliffs did on the far side of the giant estuary. The first thing Nicole noticed was a marked drop in temperature, the warm sunlight leavened by a chill offshore breeze picking up strength as the day waned. Raqella was visibly disturbed by the sight of so much water, which provoked a gentle reminder from Nicole about the weekend in San Diego.

  He groaned at the memory, choosing an intentionally human response. “Do you know how drunk I was that whole time?”

  “Enough to allow you to walk out onto a floating dock and shove me in.”

  “You won’t tell Shavrin.”

  The thought had never occurred to her, but she saw instantly what effect it would have.

  “She wouldn’t be amused, would she?”

  “She’d have me skin myself and hand over my own heart in the bargain. I must have been insane, that’s the only way I can explain it.”

  “You made up for it on the test flight.”

  “Hardly. It was Ch’ghan’s place to speak; he’d seen the same intelligence reports as me, I’ll never understand why he held silent.”

  The Homer beeped, demanding attention.

  The signal led them down to the edge of the shore, and a narrow but deep arroyo set well above the highest tide line but with fairly easy access to the beach. It was one of a series of winding defiles that lined the hills like grooves cut into the face of an old man, places where the land had folded from crustal shifts, brought about by the never-ending expansion and contraction of the surface from tectonic pressure deep within.

  The natural expression of a living world, Nicole thought, and chuckled at the contrast between the rough-and-tumble features of this planet, the arroyos worn deep over the aeons of rain and perhaps the ebb and flow of much stronger and higher tides, and those of s’N’dare. One face wears the cares and experiences of its life, she continued, and the other’s the product of plastic surgery. Much prettier to look at but nowhere near as interesting. This place proclaims its history for all to see; the other denies it.

  The Homer didn’t lead them to Ciari—Nicole had suspected all along it wouldn’t—it led them to his boat.

  * * *

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Once he heard Nicole’s intentions, Raqella was so angry, so upset, he wanted to carry her bodily away from shore. He didn’t care a damn for Ciari’s plans, he wasn’t interested in her explanations, he thought she’d lost her mind and said so. Often. More and more loudly, as though brute volume would succeed where reason and logic continued to fail.

  The tide turned towards the end of the afternoon and Nicole spent as much of the evening as there was light to see watching it progress across the beachfront. She didn’t recognize the lie of the land but the movement of the water itself struck a resonant chord with her basic dream. She remembered the warmth of rock under back, sun on her face, the sudden shock of water—the desperate, doomed race for shore, the sick horror of being swept out to sea. Moments that touched both sides of her double self, fears the human could relate to as fearfully as Hal.

  “Doesn’t look so tough,” noted Amy, overplaying the exertion of clambering up the dune. “There isn’t much of a surf ’til the water comes in close,” but from that point on, the ocean hammered the beach with combers that would give the most experienced and eager surfer pause. This was a tidal race that put Newfoundland’s Bay of Fundy to shame, with a water rise that Nicole calculated at nearly twenty meters.

  “You hump the boat out midway,” Amy was saying, “maybe onto one of those sandbars, and float it when the leading edge of the tide goes by. Water enough to sail on without getting busted to bits.”

  “Good analysis,” Nicole said, “as far as it goes. The real trouble’s a lot farther out. Something I spotted when we came over the last line of hills. The flats give way to a reef, out where the shallows drop off to deep water. That surf’s even bigger.”

  “Double your pleasure,” the girl hummed, “double your fun... ”

  “That’s what makes this so nasty. The reef acts as a barrier, holding back the gradual flow of water, until enough pressure builds up to pop it over the top in a great big surge. Then, everything comes hard and fast. A legitimate tidal wave.

  “I’ve got to cross the flat before the tide turns. Ideally, float the boat over the reef while it’s still ebbing, when all the water factors are in my favor. At the very latest, when it’s just starting to return, before the wave action has time to build.”

  “Kymri won’t consider this, even for you, but I could come with. It’s a helluva load to carry, you could use another back.”

  Nicole gave her a long, searching look. They were both mostly in darkness, the last swirling shades of dusk casting their features more as suggestions than reality, defining them by degrees of shadow. The offer sounded genuine, but she couldn’t help thinking, Why? To trip me up and push me under until I drown?

  Amy must have been on the same wavelength, because Nicole was sure she’d offered the girl no other clue to her reactions.

  “No reason to be scared, Nikki-Tikki-Tavi,” she said in a casually matter-of-fact way that only partially masked a bitter undertone. Nicole caught the thread of anger, but also realized it wasn’t directed at her. “Cobris never take direct action, you of all people should know that. Always through surrogates, always with cutouts to protect the home office.”

  “I feel so reassured.”

  “Your Marshal brought a boat,” Amy said, to change the subject. “Why didn’t he use it?”

  “He did. All the equipment’s been properly stowed, but there are also signs of use. I think he tried, maybe more than once, and gave up.”

  “That’s not like him, is it?”

  “Quite the contrary. If he quit, it’s because of something he couldn’t beat—almost certainly something he didn’t anticipate... ”

  “And you’re determined to follow in his footsteps.”

  Nicole gestured a silent yes.

  “So much for your precious walkabout.”

  “Where do you get off judging me, girl?”

  “I could ask the same in return, y’know?”

  “I have the right.”

  The mood was changing, as quickly, as markedly, as inexorably, as the tide, the words—for all that they were still soft-spoken—taking on barbed edges intended to cut.

  “What, you figure I owe blood price for my brother, Nicole?”

  “No. That one’s between you and Alex’s ghost. Or better yet, you and your father, since he’s the one made you what you are.”

  Amy stared as if she’d been slapped.

  “The debt you owe me—girl”—and Nicole’s voice had grown softer still, without a shred of gentleness, flattening to razor keenness—“is for Paolo DaCuhna and Chagay Shomron and Cat Garcia.”

  “Your Air Force renegade, Morgan, did them, Nicole.”

  “And who put him in business, Amy? Who deserves the real blame, the chess pieces that do the dirty work or the hand that moves them?”

  “They were just games.” The sentence had all the underlying passion of a full-throated scream, yet Amy spoke it almost as a throwaway, as though she didn’t dare give true voice to her emotions. She turned bodily away from Nicole and fixed her gaze at the newly risen moon, the first of three they would see during the night.

  Nicole wasn’t aware of any time passing, yet somehow the moon was a measurable distance up the sky before she replied.

  “People died, Amy.”

  She heard a rude sniff of dismissal, a rebuke for stating the blindingly obvious, but realized as well that Amy was crying.

  “Like I was supposed to care,” the girl said. “They weren’t friends, they weren’t even people I knew! I saw opportunity, I took it. Most natural thing in the world.

  “I am what my daddy made me,” she said suddenly and looked Nicole in the face, her eyes glowing
a dull, dusky red as they reflected the moonlight. “How long have you known?”

  “Since you were a kid. Since Alex.”

  “I hated him, I couldn’t help it. He was my rival. I knew he was brilliant, in ways I could never hope to be. But more than that, he was natural!”

  Now teeth flashed, in a self-mocking smirk. “Poor Daddy,” the savagery of her tone trashing the overt sympathy of the words, “he could alter all the physical parameters, lengthen the legs, shape the line, smooth out the cosmetic rough edges, he could make me the best version of ‘him’ money could buy, only just different enough so’s nobody would notice. But that was the limit. With a clone, he could only improve on what already existed, he couldn’t introduce anything new into the mix. Alex’s gifts came from somewhere outside.

  “You know, Alex’s mom had herself a hysterectomy after I was born?” Nicole could only shake her head. “She’d made her contribution to the Cause, she didn’t want any more Cobris knock-knock-knocking on her door. Can’t say I blame her. ’Cause the first thing I thought of after Alex”—a pause, and Nicole knew Amy was referring to her brother’s death—“was to try again, consider Alex’s life the Beta Test cycle of the Mode One wetware, fix the glitches with the second release. Keep trying ’til I get it right.” Her voice broke as she finished, “Just like my old man.

  “That’s why I was so crazy,” Amy said, “that day you came to visit the house on Staten Island.” The images were burned into Nicole’s memory and popped into view as clearly as the Hal ghosts the night before. She saw herself striding through the foyer, ignoring the increasingly strident and out of control cries of the teenaged girl on her top-floor landing high overhead. “You killed my brother,” Amy had shrieked, until her voice splintered like breaking oak, leaving it with an incongruously husky quality she still possessed, “you killed my brother!”

  “I’d just found out, about Alex’s mom.

  “Antigone’s got nothing on me, y’know. I’m a fucking Greek tragedy, three thousand years too late.”

  “And you tell me to get a life?”

  Amy actually grinned, and the thought came to Nicole of Persephone, looking for release from Hades, wanting to stay as much as she yearned to go. “We’re a matched set, you and me. Both as much the product of the genegineer’s splicer as nature.”

  “I’m not Alex, Amy.”

  “Yeah? Well, you’re not Nicole anymore, either. Just like I’m not my daddy.”

  She launched well before dawn, using the light of the other two moons to see by.

  “Since there’s no sign of Ciari near his boat”—they’d ranged as far afield as they could the previous afternoon in an unsuccessful attempt to find either the man or some indication of his trail—“we have to assume he’s gone ahead on foot. Your job,” she told her companions, “is to find him.”

  “Assuming he’s following the profile of the Harach’t’nyn,” Amy offered.

  “Each in our own way, that’s what we’re both doing. Who knows, kiddo, maybe even you, too.”

  “Shea Shavrin’s-Daughter,” Raqella was more impassioned than she’d ever seen him, going so far as to stand between her and the shore, putting his back to open water (which no sane Hal would ever do), as he made his plea, “must I beg you not to do this?”

  When she said nothing, he cried, “It is madness!”

  “No argument,” she conceded.

  “But you will go forth nonetheless.”

  “Ciari isn’t a precipitate man, Raqella. None of this was done on impulse. His dreams—like mine, I suspect—led him to the sea. I have to know why.”

  “Must I sing your soul skyward from the Memorial Mount?”

  “If it comes to that, I hope you’ll do me proud.”

  He had a lot more to say—and Nicole suddenly sensed his intent was to keep her occupied until she missed the tide, reasoning (rightly) that she wouldn’t embark on a night sail on unfamiliar waters aboard an unfamiliar craft—but Amy cut him off.

  “Yo, Rocky, waste of breath.”

  He wasn’t pleased with her interruption but she wasn’t fazed in the slightest by his reaction.

  “Save the snarls, guy,” she said tolerantly, “for anyone we meet along the path.”

  She shooed Raqella up the dune face and when she caught Nicole looking at her strangely, she demanded, “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh. That. Every so often, I see it in people, this thing they can’t quite figure about me, how come I’m just a kid but I have such a force of command.”

  “Manuel must have been some piece of work when he was young.”

  “Who knows? Everyone tells stories, your guess is as good as mine how much embroidery goes on to get in good with the boss.” She indicated the bundle stretching back from Nicole’s feet. “That gonna be good enough to get you where you’re going?”

  “Depends on what that means, doesn’t it? Out to sea, yeah, no problem.”

  “And after that you’re where you love it best.”

  Nicole looked questioningly, not sure what the girl meant. Amy sounded surprised, as though she considered the answer too obvious for words.

  “On your own,” she said.

  The catamaran was a masterpiece of design and engineering. Six meters long by two and a half wide, molded out of a polyfiber laminate that was as strong as steel yet light enough for a single person to manhandle, its heaviest components were the sails and tackle. Ciari’d done the skunk work, putting her together, and when Nicole did her own check, she saw he’d done well.

  She stuffed her hiking gear into the carryall and stood naked atop the dune, flesh goose-bumping from the perpetual breeze.

  Raqella was right, she was insane. The water was no place for Hal—she was trembling, and no longer from the cold.

  She closed her eyes and put herself back on the quay of the San Diego Yacht Club, letting the distant rush of the waves stand in for the duller slap of surface water on the pilings. There was more salt to the air of memory as she filled her inner view with the image of that first sight of Sundowner at her moorings. The boat Alex had rescued from the breaker’s yard and lovingly restored, just as she had her own beloved Beech Baron.

  The sea was as much a part of her as the sky, twin facings of the same coin. She took tight hold of that thought, as though it were the last lifeline between her and the Void, and opened her eyes.

  The clothes she’d worn on land had been mostly Hal; not so what she pulled from the carryall, marveling as she did how Ciari had managed to get ahold of them. Single-piece racing maillot went on first, followed by a pair of shorts and a polo. Boat sneaks and her foul-weather pullover, with mountain shades, gloves, and a baseball hat to complete the ensemble. Lastly came the harness, pulled snug against her backside and snap-shackled securely at the front. All her gear from home. She wriggled inside her skin, the clothes provoking a multitude of conflicting emotions, as welcome and familiar as they felt uncomfortable.

  “Enough,” she said flatly, stifling a debate that only action would truly end. Her stomach twisted into a Gordian knot. She’d never felt such fear—and she wasn’t yet on the bloody beach!

  “I said, enough!”

  She slung the tow rope over a shoulder and put a double wrap of line around her left hand. Then, she began to pull.

  She’d marked the route to follow, down the shallow slope of sand to where erosion had created a channel that still had water in it. She had a rough moment at the high water mark, especially once the water began soaking through her shoes, but she pressed on regardless, a step at a time, occupying her thoughts with a review of all she’d ever learned about handling a Cat.

  It was a couple of klicks to the reef—the last stretch wading waist deep in the tidal outflow—and by the time she reached it she was moderately exhausted. She couldn’t for the life of her figure how Ciari had brought the Cat down from the highlands and admired him all the more for that success. She was bumped and bruised from the effort of
keeping the Cat in tow; its low mass and shallow draft made it a ferociously lively boat, susceptible to every shift in wind and water, until at last she was yanked off her feet and dunked. Her fear became a palpable thing, then, as she floundered like a novice, forgetting everything she’d ever learned on Earth, remembering only what was Hal, and believing she’d been buried alive in a medium that couldn’t be properly fought.

  She wasn’t sure how she reached the surface, only that when her senses finally cleared, she was draped over a pontoon, with the stench of vomit in her face and the sight of it on the canvas platform. Even as she watched, she heaved again, the convulsion worse than being punched in the belly. And followed that with a fit of sobbing that was a long time passing.

  There was a lot less water when she finally straightened to her full height, resisting an instinct—only slightly less powerful—to scamper for the high ground on all fours. Resisting as well a far more analytical assessment that prompted essentially the same course of action.

  Her hope had been to reach the reef while it was still substantially underwater. But she’d lost too much time for that. It stretched before her like a squatly massive seawall, as far away on either side as she could see, a far more spectacular sight in the night than during daylight. All three moons were down and in the hour or so left before the eastern sky would begin to herald the approaching sun, the creatures whose chitinous bodies formed the living fabric of the reef set up a tremendous light show as they were exposed to the air. Ripples of color cascaded before her in sheets and rainbow streamers like an aquatic aurora borealis. Despite her misery, Nicole couldn’t help but be impressed by the never-ending display.

  She had as far to go as she had come, a klick for sure and more likely the better part of a mile. The sensible play would be to wait for the next tide—which for her purposes would be tomorrow night. But she couldn’t guarantee for herself which ghosts would be waiting for her on shore, any more than she could what she’d do after a day staring at the water with the Hal aspects of her in ascendancy. Coming this far was a supreme act of will; she wasn’t sure she had it in her to try again.