Sundowner

by Claremont, Chris

  They’d brought the Great Old One at last to the surface and even at that great distance, in the stark glow of the single moon, the awful wound was plain to see. It was as though someone had gutted Him, opening Him to the heart—yet Nicole was certain He still lived.

  “I think those tentacles reach all the way to shore,” Ciari murmured. Even as he spoke, the creatures nestled close around their Elder began shunting Him forward.

  “Nicole,” Ciari said, taking gentle hold of a sleeve.

  “Go,” she told him, finishing his thought but putting her owri twist on it. “Go to the others.”

  “I won’t leave you.”

  “You have no place here, Ben.” For emphasis, she stripped off her savaged shirt, followed in quick movement by shorts and swimsuit, to stand naked in the moonglow. Her skin was pale as alabaster, she seemed at a glance more statue than living woman; all her markings—the stigmata, the triad stripes, the dried blood of her wounds—registered as black. She looked wild and fierce, neither Hal nor human, something more formidable than both. Even Ciari felt himself taken aback by the sight of her, the quintessential Huntress, the Questing Soul.

  “Nicole”—his voice was barely audible, made hoarse by the depth and complexity of emotions—“what have they done to you?”

  “My words exactly,” she replied with a gentleness to balance his horror, “on Range Guide, do you remember, a long, long time ago?

  “See to the others, Ben, do that for me, please. I’ll be fine.”

  He didn’t move until she was halfway to the edge, and even then his first impulse was to follow. He could hear the sound of Sundowner’s motors, heralding its approach to landing; he was tempted to scoop her up and carry her bodily into the plane. He didn’t need a closer vantage point to confirm that the mortally wounded creature’s tentacles were dragging themselves laboriously up the face of the cliff. And had no doubts they’d be long enough to reach the top.

  But Nicole put her faith in that creature, as she had in Ciari; he didn’t know about them, but he had to trust her.

  That was actually a lot more equanimity than Nicole herself felt as she padded silently up beside Ch’ghan, allowing herself an inner smile at the incongruity of being stark naked save for her sneaks.

  The Hal had a fixed stare on his face, that of a man who’d never believed the stories told of the Burning Bush until one day he’d torn a shrub out of his garden earth to have it blaze to life in his hand.

  “There is where you come from,” Nicole said pitilessly. “The beasts in the hills, the ones that look like Hal, they’re what you once were.”

  He paid no attention, she wasn’t even sure he heard. She pressed on regardless.

  “Until she fell in the ocean... ” A shape was taking form before them, floating on open air, Nicole’s ghost and Shavrin’s ancestor. “ ...and He taught her how to stand on two legs, where she’d run on four.”

  She wondered suddenly if that was why Speakers were invariably female, if the sexual resonance somehow made the cross-species interface more compatible.

  “You’re not the dominant species on this world, Ch’ghan,” she told him. “You’re their adopted children.”

  With a squall of fury, leavened with heartbroken despair—a cry that spoke of ultimate loss—the Hal rounded on her; he had barbed combat tips on his claws and his hands were already moving to cut her open at throat and belly. Nicole had no time to defend herself, he was so quick; she hardly had time to register the attack—even though she was expecting it, watching for it. She had a sense of movement from him, a response from the ghost—a lunge forward to intercept the blows with her own insubstantial body—but nothing beyond that. Not pain, not blood, no sensation of contact at all—because there’d been none. Ch’ghan had been caught in midstrike, by tentacles around wrists and neck, torso and legs, pinning him as expertly as Nicole herself had been underwater.

  “No!” Nicole cried, thinking he was about to be carried over the edge.

  Then, she stepped back—physically and mentally—and took a look around herself. (At the same time, her alternate perception—the part of herself just throttling back on the engines after touchdown on the flat behind the headland proper—gave her a panoramic overview of the scene. She saw Hana leaping from the main hatch, MediKit in hand, and wondered about the rough and ready bandage wrapped diagonally across her friend’s torso and shoulder; she saw herself and Ch’ghan and other things besides that told her the ghosts had a tangible presence. And, of course, the Great Old One’s multitude of limbs, wrapping themselves around the entire brow of the cliff as He pulled himself the last stretch to the top, the last of His life pouring out of Him in an obscene cataract.)

  She felt the ground groan with the phenomenal weight of Him, and a geological stress analysis immediately confirmed her unspoken apprehension. The cliff had already taken a heavy hit from the blaster. The Old One’s exertions were adding geometrically to the instability .

  “Get to Sundowner,” she said, her words transmitted from the plane to Hana’s headset. “Everything here could let go at any minute.”

  “I’m not leaving you!” Hana cried, and Nicole heard the words from a tinny distance in her ears and with full-throated passion in her thoughts.

  “You’ll do as you’re bloody told, Murai. I got no time to argue. This thing starts to crumble, you dust-off, no waiting, no arguments.” Hana got the message, as Nicole’s other self saw her and Ciari gather up the wounded. Rossmore and his fallen SEAL, they’d leave for last.

  Ch’ghan’s eyes had opened so wide, they looked about to pop from their sockets, and she thought at first he was being squashed. His mouth was at its full extension as well, as though uttering the most awful scream imaginable, though Nicole heard not a sound from him.

  The Old One had cleared the crest, to gaze at His murderer with an eye that was as big as a barn. He just had the one, the other had been caught by the blaster beam.

  All the ghosts had materialized as well, Speakers from every generation across the whole of Hal history.

  “That’s how You keep tabs on Your creations, isn’t it?” Nicole spoke in hushed tones, the way she would in a cathedral. She’d always considered herself religious—it was hard to find an astronaut who wasn’t, even among the confirmed atheists, space inspired too great and fundamental a sense of wonder—it was the established hierarchies that gave her trouble. But this moment went far beyond any experience, and all her prejudices. The paradigm for her life was her boat—and her plane—forms and structures that she could materially affect, and ultimately control, functioning in an environment over which she had very little. She couldn’t alter wind and water, any more than she could dictate the circumstances of birth and upbringing, or forestall her death. Within those parameters, though, she had what she considered an unlimited scope of operations.

  Now, staring into that ancient eye, trying to relate the mayfly span of her own being to His unimaginably older existence, she found both icons in the grip of a monster hurricane, being blown helter-skelter into new seas and skies. The neatly ordered structures were long gone, and the storm was tearing at her foundation.

  At the same time, she understood how much harder these same realizations must be for Ch’ghan.

  “Forgive me,” she heard from him, hardly spoken words at all, but an exhalation given the barest possible coherent shape. He used the most formal expression. A child begging its parent, who was also the Lord of the Clan.

  The little ghost passed through Nicole—not with a shiver, as she’d expected from all the stories she’d ever read or heard, but a faint flush of heat—to take a stand before Ch’ghan, the marks on her face and shoulder and left arm growing as distinct as the identical ones she’d made on Nicole.

  “Arach’n’yn,” Nicole said in the same archaic ritual dialect, the judgment coming to her in the same manner as data from Sundowner, manifesting on demand as natural thought. “Blood price, Ch’ghan. Is owned and must be paid.”
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  To his credit, he didn’t flinch; he scarcely could have expected less. The surprise came when the tentacles let him loose. Nicole was still within easy reach, but he knew better than to try for her. The Speaker ghosts had taken up position in a rough semicircle, allowing a fair expanse on the brow of the headland for what was to come.

  Nicole couldn’t help a glance skyward. The SpaceCap Rossmore spoke of had been faked out by Sundowner’s landside approach. There was a fair chance they weren’t even aware of the plane’s landing. But that window was rapidly closing. She was using a passive sweep, because active scans would only telegraph her position, and knew that the moment the opposition appeared, had to go.

  Yet she knew as well, to the core of her being, that her place was here.

  The little ghost began her dance, but with none of the wild abandon she’d displayed the night she and Nicole were together. The opening steps were a challenge, and Ch’ghan responded in kind. His claws were manufactured, the ghost’s a natural part of her; Nicole was hard-pressed to say which were the more deadly. Ch’ghan didn’t know what to expect, whether his claws could hurt her or hers, him. He decided to take the opening lunge.

  They were out of direct line of sight from Sundowner, so Nicole had only her eyes to see with—although the data was being digitally transcribed for later playback and analysis—and the initial flurry of moves proved too fast to follow. When the two separated, Ch’ghan was clutching his chest. The ghost had caught him with a full hand, in a sweeping diagonal slash that should have been a brutal wound. Only he was unmarked.

  The ghost hadn’t been so lucky. He’d cut her as well, opening a gash off the curve of a hip. Nicole hissed with the pain, and lifted a bloody palm from her own skin. A look passed between her and the little ghost—complemented by a snarl of delight from Ch’ghan as he took note of the sympathetic bond between the two women—just as Nicole provided the ghost’s anchor to reality, so was harm done her reflected in Nicole.

  Screw this, she thought. If my ass is on the line, I’m going to fight for it myself!

  But a small tentacle touched her ever so lightly on the shoulder, as it had on the Cat when it tapped her between the eyes, a gentle beseeching that she stay her ground.

  There was a dullness to the Old One’s eye and while the tentacles had lost none of their strength—that she could see—Nicole knew they couldn’t hold much longer.

  She felt a tickle on the edge of her perceptions, and quickly closed all Sundowner’s scanning windows, willing the plane to become electronically invisible. It was only a stopgap measure. A few minutes closer and the SpaceCap fighters would see all they needed to with optical.

  She stroked the little tentacle, it was warm to the touch. The much larger one that stretched behind her like a fallen, rubbery redwood was as cold as the stone.

  Ch’ghan was enjoying himself. As a blade fighter, there was no comparison between him and the SEAL—who’d been pretty much the best Nicole had ever seen—but he was still poetry in motion, almost admirable if it weren’t for the consequence of every successful strike.

  He hit the ghost a half-dozen times to her one, mixing claw slashes with a random blow. Those appeared to have an impact on the ghost, she staggered or fell as though actually struck. It was only the cuts that carried over.

  Ch’ghan went for the ghost’s eyes—Nicole couldn’t help a cry of protest, thinking she was to be blinded—and nearly lost one of his own instead. That made him more wary, but no less confident. Yet, even as Nicole watched, the tone of the duel began to alter. Ch’ghan had lost none of his quickness, his reactions and attacks were as focused and precise as ever. But none of them landed. In turn, the ghost began to have more and more of an effect. It was much like the duel between her and Nicole; the more she connected, the more solid she became, while Ch’ghan increasingly took on the aspects of a spirit.

  It was becoming clear to Nicole that she was driving him as well, away from the edge of the cliff and the Old One, and towards the sentry line of Speakers. It was also clear that Ch’ghan was losing vitality along with substance. There was no longer a crisp economy to his movements; he was increasingly reminding her of a punch-drunk fighter, sloppy of action and slow of thought. This was new; so far as she could recall, her duel with the ghost had actually gotten more intense as it progressed, each inspiring the other to greater efforts and achievements.

  Ch’ghan swung for the ghost, a flailing roundhouse that was far mightier in presentation than any potential impact, and which the ghost should have avoided with ease. Instead, she let it connect.

  It passed through her as if she wasn’t there—or rather, as if Ch’ghan wasn’t. The inertia of the swing pitched Ch’ghan off his feet. He recovered as an old man would, befuddled and confused by events beyond comprehension. He kept trying to stand, and managed to get partway a couple of times, but it struck Nicole that he seemed less and less aware of how to make his legs work that way. She saw that before her stood an evolutionary crossroads, demarking the boundary between what was and was to be. Somehow, all that the ghost had taken from Ch’ghan had placed her more firmly on one side of the line, and cast him irrevocably to the other.

  The tentacle left her shoulder and tried to reach towards Ch’ghan, but it hadn’t the strength. Nicole picked it up, using all her force of will to make a gift of some of the warmth left in her own body. Pulling the thing wasn’t as simple as she’d first thought. Regardless of girth, the tentacle’s length was another matter, making it as hard to handle as a fire hose. She tried not to hurt it but she also couldn’t find a way to keep from dragging it across the rock—until the ghost (who now appeared as substantial as Nicole herself) came to help.

  Proximity to Ch’ghan seemed to revitalize the tentacle, and it stirred from the two women’s grasp to touch the crown of Ch’ghan’s forehead, as it had Nicole’s—and, she knew, the ghost’s—and draw forth the glittery helix of the Hal’s DNA.

  Nicole’s companion drew her away, their place taken by the line of Speakers. Each in turn lashed out at the helix strand with their claws, casting some elements free, scrambling others, savaging the glorious molecular mosaic beyond conceivable repair.

  Nicole had never witnessed so terrible a sentence, as Ch’ghan was stripped methodically of all he was, all he had ever been, all he would ever be. Not simply in a personal sense, but a genetic one as well. As each Speaker executed her aspect of the sentence, they faded to nothingness. And with them went that much more of the Old One’s life.

  Ch’ghan had been almost fully erect when they began, somehow he’d managed to regain his feet. He was on his belly when they finished, legs tucked underneath in a position they weren’t biologically designed for, hands curled uselessly before him. Physically, he was unchanged, but in all the intangible aspects that differentiated him from a beast, Ch’ghan was no more. He would never understand why he couldn’t run as fast or jump as high, why his joints would always hurt, what the bloody, broken stumps that had once been fingers were for.

  He would live alone, and probably not for very long, because the winters here could be cruel and he wasn’t equipped to fight them. Nicole wondered if the Old One had left him any shred of awareness of what he had been and immediately looked away, so she wouldn’t have to see the answer.

  She and the ghost were alone on the headland with the Old One, and she knew these were the last moments of a promethean life.

  The ghost offered a lopsided grin that didn’t look at all correct on a Hal face and yet also was irritatingly familiar until Nicole realized it was her own.

  She tapped Nicole on the arm, a peremptory, commanding gesture that was the faintest forebear of Shavrin’s own manner, and pointed towards the waiting plane. Past time for Nicole to go. Her other self confirmed that, tagging a flight of three cresting the upper atmosphere, matching the configurations to the attack group that came after them on Earth. Too far away still for target acquisition by either side.

  As Nicole glance
d away, the ghost stepped forward, Nicole crying out as she felt a sudden twisting sensation within herself—an icy heat that blazed through her like an erupting solar flare yet left a refreshing coolness in its wake—and beheld the ghost (now once more a ghost in every respect) emerging through her skin to take a stand before her.

  Nicole looked at herself and saw that all the wounds Ch’ghan had inflicted were gone. By the same token, the stripes were more a part of her than ever.

  She blinked her eyes and in that moment became the only living, sentient being on the headland.

  She knew she had to leave, but had one more responsibility to fulfill before she did.

  The mallet didn’t seem as heavy when she lifted it, or perhaps it was that she felt whole in ways she hadn’t known she was missing. And for the first time in her life.

  She swung the mallet once around, then twice, to settle the heft of it and build up a greater velocity, before finally sending it crashing against the side of the tocsin. The resounding gong shook her to the core; nothing she’d heard before came even remotely close. She hit it again. And again, each stroke more powerful than the preceding.

  She was weeping, as she had when she faced this moment with Paolo DaCuhna, as she would when the time came for her parents, for Judith Canfield and Shavrin, for any one of the friends waiting for her on Sundowner. Even Amy, she had to concede—and, with a small flash of insight, realized the girl wouldn’t be returning to Earth. She’d reached a crossroads of her own, with Raqella and Nicole both, she’d found a definition of life and being that transcended the limiting parameters laid down by her father. Or, in the girl’s favorite phrase, “Hey, why serve in Hell, when you can rule in Heaven, y’know?”

  In its own way, the silence was as complete and all-enfolding as the chimes had been. It lasted for as long as the resonance of those three strokes.

  She felt the response before she actually heard it, as a faint vibration under her fingertips where they lay lightly on the tocsin. She had no sense of the meaning, or even that it was a song, she’d have to live the Old One’s lifetime to comprehend that Mystery. Ch’ghan couldn’t bear it, he scampered off the headland, uttering howls of dismay that intensified when he encountered blocking his path. He hadn’t a clue what it was, there were no circuits in his brain that applied labels to things, only that it was strange and he didn’t like it and he had to run away. Which he did.