Guardian of Night

by Tony Daniel

  If he were lucky, they’d allow him a final passing of his gid to his children.

  “I do believe, Director Gergen, that you have identified with a host animal too thoroughly,” said the Chair. Her calm-scented words cut through the suddenly stilled chamber like a bracing wind.

  “Forgive me, Excellency.”

  He gazed up at her, his political salvation for all these cycles.

  Now his doom.

  Not really a surprise. He had merely wondered when, not if, he would be destroyed by the power he sought to shape. To wield.

  The question was resolved.

  The answer was: now.

  “This extrusion of defeat is a stench that must never suffuse this chamber again. It does us dishonor.” The Chair waved a hand in front of her muzzle, as if to clear to the air. “You’re dismissed, Gergen.”

  “Thank you, madame.” Gergen fell to one knee in the traditional leave-taking genuflection due the Chair and the chamber.

  And as he turned to exit, as the chamber guards moved in on either side of him at a gesture from the Chair, Gergen understood.

  I am for the knives. I am not to be allowed even the gid passage. Pity for the children.

  So many things I have seen, done. Risked for a life that meant something. So much lost.

  Everything.

  And even as Gergen exited the chamber, his last act of protocol accomplished, the odor of his final pronouncement still hung in the air. A mere waving of the hand could never remove it, could not dissipate that name.

  It was the odor that would linger with Gergen to his death.

  The scent of oranges and musk.

  A mere smell.

  At least so the humans might pronounce it in their unsubtle attempt to describe what was to them sensation, as meaningless as a loud clap of thunder, the whistle of nothing but wind.

  But, to a Guardian, the wind would always have a voice.

  And to a Guardian, this particular scent would always have a name.

  Oranges and musk.

  Ricimer.

  Curse him.

  29 February 2076

  Walt Whitman Station

  I know you’re not really there. And I know you always will be there, at the other end of these messages.

  I’m sorry I didn’t show up that weekend. I could have hung around the same city where you lived, been a better dad.

  You know that. I know that.

  I thought I had to apologize. All the things I would never teach you, all the talks we would never have.

  I couldn’t save you.

  I couldn’t protect you.

  I will mourn you forever. I love you always.

  But now I have to let you go.

  Little Shadow, I will always, always remain—

  Big Shadow,

  Your dad

  Leher placed the three postcards it had taken him to write his message into the MDR compartment along with the material that Coalbridge and Sam had brought along. Coalbridge’s contribution had been a jar full of red earth taken from his native Oklahoma. He’d made a pilgrimage to the home sites and workplaces of his extended family and collected a pinch of dirt from each place. It was a big jar. Coalbridge hadn’t been exaggerating about how huge his family had been.

  Sam’s contribution was a single small item—an old-fashioned thumbdrive with, she said, an MP3 of the song she’d been listening to on the night when the sceeve first attacked.

  An old October Lincoln pop ditty. Leher remembered it well.

  “My innocence,” Sam said. “My lost chance to be a normal woman in a normal world.”

  Now the drone was fully loaded and the three of them stood upon the edge of forever waiting to find the right moment to release it.

  Actually they were standing on the lip of Walt Whitman’s dry-dock portal, a football field long and as high as one of the remaining skyscrapers of Dallas. It was an enormous cavity within the space station, and at the moment, the lip was oriented toward Earth. In five minutes, it would find the sun and they would release the bottle drone.

  The idea was to send it into the heart of their local star. To burn it all to smithereens.

  An ancient practice. Leher was sure it was somehow useful to the human psyche. Would it take away their pain, cure their various neurotic maladies—well, be honest, his neurotic maladies—give them closure? Probably not.

  But standing on the dock between his friends, it occurred to Leher that the ritual might have less to do with the past and more to do with the future.

  “So, we made it,” he said.

  “We made it,” said Sam. She gave him a peck on the cheek.

  Coalbridge, who held the MDR drone in his hands, was staring out as the world turned below him. “The sceeve will be back,” he said. “But we’ll be stronger.”

  “We already are,” Sam replied.

  “And now we have a few sceeve of our own,” Leher added.

  Coalbridge nodded. “Tell me somebody remembered to bring some hooch.”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” Sam said. She curled out of the daypack she was wearing, swung it around and unzipped it. From inside, she extracted three bottles of beer.

  Shiner Bocks. Leher had always thought the Texas concoction a little bitter, but, then again, something was better than nothing. He took the bottle Sam proffered and twisted off the cap.

  She and Coalbridge looked over at Leher.

  Great, he thought. I get to be the toastmaster, of course. Ex-lawyer. Word man.

  What to say? Too much. Never enough.

  One. Two. Three tugs at his beard.

  Trim? Not yet.

  Maybe he’d shave the thing off.

  Maybe not.

  He raised his beer.

  “To families,” he said. “To those we must leave behind.” Leher nodded to the drone in Coalbridge’s hands. “And to this family. Our family. God help us, we’re all we’ve got.”

  Leher clinked his beer against Sam’s and the one she’d kept for Coalbridge while he held the messenger drone. All three bottles touched and let out a single clink. And as they did, the Walt Whitman spun to face the sun. Coalbridge released the drone, and it quickly buzzed off through the containment wall that held the atmosphere in the dry dock and out into the emptiness that was the general condition of space.

  Sam handed Coalbridge his bottle. Leher turned his to his lips, took a sip.

  The dry-dock containment field shaded to semiopacity as they faced the sun full-on.

  Leher drank.

  And then, as quickly as it had spun into the light, the space station turned away. Soon they would see the broken beauty of their home planet again. But for now, all that was visible were stars.

  And of course Coalbridge did the one thing he ought not to have, and the one thing Leher knew he couldn’t resist.

  He jumped.

  The containment field kept him in, bounced him back. Right into Sam. She fell on her ass. Pulled herself up, laughing.

  “Hell with it,” Leher said. “It’s time I learned to do that.”

  And then Leher stepped up to the brink and leapt into the stars.

  15 March 2076

  Western Oklahoma

  “So, are you telling me there are no Mutualist enclaves? That everything I’ve believed in is as much a lie as the Administration was trying to sear into my footpads?”

  “No, Hadria, there may be Mutualist vessels, a small shiro or two, perhaps. Somewhere in hiding. Or perhaps not. The enclaves that are easily discovered have all been eliminated. What I’m telling you is that there never was a credible Mutualist resistance for you to join. Not in the way you imagine.”

  “But—all the stories, all the communications?”

  “Think, my dear. Every story was told in a whisper. Have you ever seen what happens when a whisper travels from muzzle to muzzle? The words are not interpreted correctly. The meaning begins to shift. Sometimes meaning is lost altogether and hopes and fears and dreams are substitu
ted in its stead.”

  Talid lifted her feet from the small tub of gruel both she and Ricimer were sharing. She set them down gently upon a towel nearby. Ricimer leaned over and toweled them for his former XO. She really did have lovely feet for a Nebula hypha female. And her hands were not so shabby, either, now that he could allow himself to think of her as something other than a colleague.

  Yet such a thing would probably never happen between the two of them. They would probably never become lovers because Ricimer knew that Talid was made for a pair-bond. Once she engaged her desire, her love would follow. And Hadria Talid lived and breathed commitment.

  He was not ready for that yet.

  He probably never would be.

  Ricimer sloshed his own feet about in the galvanized tub. The humans had been thoughtful. They’d provided Ricimer and his refugees with much. But proper eating facilities were difficult to recreate. The Extry Xenology Division had made heroic efforts to locate the nearest food source that seemed to satisfy the taste receptors as well as the body of a Guardian. Ricimer and many of the others had had a difficult time adapting to the nitrogen-based mix of the atmosphere and had gone through excruciating atentias of helium withdrawal. Some had not survived—most of the deaths occurred among the very old or very sick. All the children had adapted. The Xenology officer Leher’s large hyperbaric chamber had saved many a life in this regard. And now Ricimer was adapted.

  They all were. There was a village that looked to him for guidance. That had, of all things, elected him as governor.

  He was, through no fault or attempt of his own, the leader of the last known Mutualist enclave.

  The enclave had even created this dacha for him with human help, here where the refugees had settled in the wilds of—what did they call it? Oklahoma. The Wichita Mountains. Ricimer had to admit the landscape was . . . amenable. This portion of Earth was not so bad. The weather was dry and difficult, with the occasional enormous storm flowing through and soaking the landscape, barely slowed by this little clump of hills.

  “Do you like this—what is the gruel called?” asked Talid. “I do not.”

  “I believe the human word to be a play on the material’s sandlike qualities. But who can understand their grunts?”

  Ricimer attempted to recreate the word for the food substance by exhaling quickly through a closed muzzle membrane. He believed he’d approximated the correct sound. He hadn’t. It would sound, to a charitably inclined human ear, like a balloon letting out air. A human certainly would have trouble picking out the word “grits” from the expulsion.

  Talid laughed, leaned back in her lounging chair. “Arid, what am I to do?”

  “I think you know the answer to that.”

  “Give up on my beliefs? Is that your advice?”

  “Not at all.” He pulled his own feet from the gruel, allowed Talid to towel his foot gills for him. “I said that there was not a Mutualist resistance. There is now. It is you, Hadria. It is us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you understand what we’ve done here?”

  “Stolen a battlecraft. Settled a group of castaways and renegades. Gotten away with it.”

  “Much more than that, Hadria, much more. Where do you think the philosophy you so adore is being put to its ultimate test? Do you think any of those vaunted Mutualist enclaves out there—if they really do exist—would attempt to cohabitate, to live symbiotically, with another species? You know the answer to that, Hadria. No Guardian, however charitably inclined, would contemplate it. But here we are, doing so by necessity. And because two species wish it so.”

  “But Arid—”

  “No buts. This was not my plan, I admit. Not the means I thought to employ. But we are vectoring toward the end I always sought.” Ricimer brought his hands together in a gesture of reflection. “The Administration took my family. Took all that I loved. And so I decided that I would have to take what they hold most dear in return.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Their power.”

  “You are going to take the Administration’s power?” she said, suppressing a laugh when she saw he was serious. “You are going to bring down the Council?”

  Yes. He was serious. He hadn’t realized this about himself, not completely, until this moment, this conversation with his trusted friend. But now that he did, the logical path lay clear before him—as clear as a line of diamonds through a desert of salt.

  “We are,” Ricimer said. “It’s us. We have the means. We have an ally in the humans and their servants—an ally whom our enemies underestimate at their peril. We are a living example of the doctrine of symbiosis.”

  “So we become philosophers? Lawyers?”

  “A people. A nation,” Ricimer said. “And do not forget, we already possess a vessel of war.”

  “You mean the humans have a vessel. This United States does. This national government that does not even represent the entire species. A sort of bloated hypha with delusions of grandeur. They have our vessel.”

  “Let me worry about that, my dear,” said Ricimer. “I took the Guardian before. I can take her again. Although this time I believe we can accomplish the task through politics. These humans are as politics-crazy as ourselves, it seems.”

  “Then, thank you, but I will leave the politics to you, my captain. I have no talent for it.”

  Ricimer cocked his head in a Guardian nod. “Politicians we must become. But remember—in the gid, at center and core, you and I remain what we always were, Hadria. Warriors.”

  Talid flared her muzzle into a smile. She cracked an ammonium hydroxide nebulizer of Old Fifty-five. Its pungent odor filled the little porch with intoxicating freshness. A new start.

  Talid raised the vial in toast.

  “Until the Final Rotting,” she said.

  “Until the Final Rotting, indeed,” answered Ricimer.

  “And to the Mutualist resistance, wherever they are,” she continued, and breathed in deeply.

  “To us,” Ricimer replied softly. He took the proffered vial from her lovely hands. “To Earth.”

  ——

  GUARDIAN GLOSSARY

  Agaric Pogrom, the: a recent genocidal move against the Mutualists in the Shiro

  Agaric, the: a Mutualist-leaning neighborhood in the Shiro; made up of curved, pre-Regulation architecture, 25-hand ceilings in living quarters

  ammonium hydroxide: this chemical gets Guardians drunk; see nebulizer

  Arc 7: a causeway that connects the Agaric to the main Shiro

  atentia: see time terminology

  benzene: this chemical provides Guardians a less intense, but longer lasting drunk than ammonium hydroxide; see nebulizer

  biomatrix computer: part of a bicameral computer system on Guardian vessels, the governing computer on a Sporata vessel; referred to as Governness; see quantum computer

  blisters: bubbles on nebulizers that are stroked to release the esters within

  BODY POSITIONS:

  Muzzle flare, widening

  smile

  Movement of head to right

  nod, agreement

  Uptilt of head, turning the nose up at

  disagreement, disbelief

  Stiff-necked

  truculent

  Hand over muzzle

  thinking, lost in thought

  Palm to chest, then palm out as if blowing a kiss

  Sporata salute between equals, or higher rank to lower rank

  Locked knees, shoulders to attention

  salute, lower rank to higher rank

  Wide muzzle flare

  predatory indicator

  Wave head side to side

  shrug

  captain’s atrium: a circular portion of the bridge of a Sporata vessel; has interface mesh on floor for feet, manual override

  cartilage lacework: Guardian under-skin skeletal system

  cinc: see time terminology

  cinqueta: see time terminology

  c
inquintium: see time terminology

  Civitas, the: a general term for Administration government

  cleansing: pogrom

  COM control patch: on Sporata uniform sleeve; selects communication channel

  Combs, the: a generic term for a distinct living/working area of the Shiro

  conquest technology: see gleaned technology

  Craft Orders: general mission orders for a Sporata vessel

  cycle: see time terminology

  DDCM: Disambiguation of Codes and Mandates; part of the Administration Directorate

  DIA: Innovation Assimilation; part of the Administration Directorate

  ester: general term for Guardian scent “word”

  false liaison: Guardian officers having sex with crew members while those rates are under the control of Governess. There is a back door into the program that allows officers to instruct the monitoring computer to blank such transgressions from crew memory.

  friend of the gid: friend of the heart

  gid: the collective-memory portion of the Guardian nervous system

  gleaned technology: tech taken from conquered species

  Governness: see biomatrix computer

  gripping gills: gills on a Guardian’s palm, used in a fingerlike manner

  hand: a common unit of Guardian height measurement, about a foot in length

  Lamella: see quantum computer

  manual control stick: located on the captain’s atrium on a Guardian vessel; usually secured to one side

  MODES OF GUARDIAN ADDRESS:

  Companion “First Name”

  indicates friendship

  Receptor

  political operations officer

  Sub-receptor

  political portion of Sporata captain’s job

  Storekeep

  Sporata vessel quartermaster

  molt: see time terminology

  momentia: see time terminology

  naphthalene: this chemical provides Guardians a fast and steady drunk; see nebulizer

  nebulizer: Polymer bubbles that hold what is normally a gas in a pressurized, semiliquid state. A straw protrudes from one side of each bubble, and ends in a device similar to a perfume atomizer. The object is to squirt the contents directly onto the muzzle and suffuse the nasal membranes with what is, for a Guardian, a powerful stimulant, depending on the concentration. See ammonium hydroxide, benzene, naphthalene, and Old Fifty-five.