by Paul Lucas
The four marines were somewhat more friendly. At first they were almost as aloof as Polara, but after they scouted out the area, both around, in and under the Tower, and assessed there were no immediate threats, they began to relax and interact with us much more. Lerner mentioned that their friendliness, though sincere, was also actually part of their training. Outland Marines, drawn from all members of the Known Nations and placed at the service of the Outland Exploration Commission, could not be expected to be employed in any large numbers or be able to count on back-up of any kind when on missions deep in the Outlands. As a result, they were expected to cultivate alliances with local peoples whenever possible, to give them potential support and back-up from that angle.
As my pregnancy came nearer its term, I felt bloated, achy, cranky, and convinced I had made one of the worst mistakes of my life. Occasionally, Lerner and I had good moments, as we felt our child kicking within me, but for the most part I simply felt tired and sore and fat.
When I went into labor in the dark deeps of a cool, rainy night, the pain was the worst of any I have ever felt, only comparable to the Xique crèche-mate savaging my leg. I hoped and prayed that when all this was over and I finally held my child in my arms, the worst would be over.
If only that had been true.
THIRTY-NINE
Insanity, not foolishness, is the opposite of wisdom.
--from Myotan Oral traditions.
* * *
My heart thundered in my chest as I cradled little, crying Sunset in my very weary arms. So tiny, with large, bewildered eyes, tiny fingers holding the beginnings of paper-thin wing membranes. His weight was nearly inconsequential, yet I was aware of every rise and fall of his chest as he lay against me, suckling gently at his first meal.
We named him Sunset, the human word, after the prettiest pictures I had seen of old Earth in the KN's Great Library, to remind him that he had a human, as well as a Myotan, heritage. Besides, it was an unusual and poetic name, as befitting his origins. With our much subtler and richer inflections, his full Myotan name was Sun Bestriding the Horizon Haze with Many Colors.
Lerner kneeled beside me on our sleeping mat, watching me with an awe-struck smile as I nursed our son.
A contented warmth passed through me. Sweet Spirits, I truly had a family of my own.
Sunset did not do much those first few days. Cry, suckle, excrete, sleep, with no awareness of day or night. That was enough for me, though, as exhausting as it proved to be. My was son beautiful. How could anyone not fall in love with this new little spirit among us, full of such hope and life?
But on the fifth day, sometime during the night when Lerner and I slept the exhausted sleep of new parents, Sunset disappeared from his crèche, not a wingspan away from where we lay.
* * *
A spear through the heart would have been more endurable than the dark horror we experienced the next morning when we saw Sunset's crèche was empty, an hour before the sun emerged from behind its disk of darkness. Shouting disbelief and irrational accusations at each other, we frantically searched our quarters. The entire community was soon roused to join us. We even brought over Highleaf's dogs to help sniff out Sunset's scent.
That's when we got our second shock of the day. The scent led us to one of our remote storerooms. Almost all of the preserved meat had been eaten, and many of our food storage sacks were ripped into.
People immediately began buzzing about a raid of some sort, that maybe the Xique had come back or some nomad tribe decided to forego the usual bargaining and just take what they wanted, somehow. Everyone was a little too careful not to mention around me that one of the things they must have taken was my newborn son.
I began screaming at everyone present, my words inconsolable and incoherent even to myself, before I settled into helpless sobs. My mind just blanked with grief and panic.
Why wasn’t anyone doing anything? Great Spirits of the Earth and Air, why would anyone want to steal my child?
I quieted down as Lerner comforted me as well as he could. A dull ache settled deep in my stomach, and I knew it would only worsen with every hour Sunset was not in my arms. I held Lerner close, rigid and crying, as all the panic and terror of the situation suddenly burst open in me.
That was when we first heard the gunshots.
* * *
Every one of us ran toward the sound, simply on instinct. Those who had human rifles unslung them from their shoulders as we ran, fearing the worst.
What we found toward the main entrance of the Tower made us all stop short. A mangled human body, wearing the tatters of the ballistic cloth uniform of one of the Outland Marines, lay just inside the entrance. Blood and viscera were splashed everywhere, staining the silver-black UTSite walls four meters apart.
More gunfire, from outside. When we arrived two of the human marines were firing their weapons on full automatic into the night, attempting to hit something crashing through the light underbrush a hundred wingspans away.
The human stopped when it became apparent that they no longer had a viable target. They turned back toward us, the large male in charge of the squad swearing heavily through his computer translator. "That bastard thing took out Kevitte! Son of a bitch!"
The other marine, a female, gritted her teeth as she slammed a fresh magazine into her weapon. "We're going after it! I winged it, I'm sure of it. With infrared we should be able to follow it no problem."
The sergeant shook his head. "Kamiko, no. We follow it into the forest now it'll just ambush us like Kevitte."
Flier strode up, eyeing the night warily. "What happened here?"
"Damn thing jumped us, sir," the Sergeant said. "We were on our regular pre-dawn sweep when this thing came out of nowhere, biting and clawing. And that fucker moved fast! Kevitte was already gutted by the time it took us to swing our weapons around. We seemed to have scared it off, though."
Kamiko grimaced. "For now. It might be back, though."
"What about my son?" I blurted. "What about Sunset?"
The marines looked at me quizzically. Flier explained what had happened in the Tower, with my missing youngster and the ransacked storage room.
The sergeant met my eyes briefly, then looked away in sympathy. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Lerner. We didn't see the intruder carrying anything. If we did we wouldn't have shot at it."
"What did it look like?" my husband asked. "Was it a Xique?"
The sergeant rubbed his chin. "I couldn't tell you for sure, never seen a Xique myself except in a book and we only caught a brief glimpse of it. It was kind of humanoid and furry and seemed to be all claws and teeth, so yeah, maybe."
Cloud finally arrived, and after a brief, fierce explanation, he growled and hefted his human made rifle, calling out for other hunters. "We'll track the thing. We can see better in the dark than you humans can."
The sergeant shook his head. "I don't think that's a good idea."
"Neither do I," Flier said. "I am sorry, Cloud, but with too many hunters, it will easily avoid you. With too few, you will be too vulnerable. For now, let us pool our numbers and defend the Tower. When daylight comes we can use the youngsters and the humans' helistat to help us search by air."
"But Gossamyr's baby..."
Flier raised his voice hoarsely. "You think this is an easy decision, Chief Hunter? Sunset is my grandchild! But I have the safety of everyone to think about."
Our chieftain walked up to me, looking me deep into my eyes. I could see the anguish in him, almost as great as my own. Children had always been our most precious commodity, and having one in peril like this tore at Flier deeply. "Every hunter who is not on garrison duty tonight will continue searching the Tower for Sunset. I swear, upon everything I have ever loved, that we will find him, Gossamyr. No matter what. I swear."
He rewarded me with as reassuring a hug as he could manage before he handed me off to Lerner, who held me again. I felt moisture seep through the thin fur on my forehead and I knew he had joined me with his o
wn tears of worry.
* * *
Days passed. No sign of Sunset, though the creature who took him was glimpsed fleetingly here and there, in the wilderness surrounding the Tower.
Rumors flew fast about what had happened. Many speculated that my son had ended up as a meal for the beast, though of course people mentioned this only when they thought me well out of earshot.
But that made little sense. Why feast on my small child when the creature clearly could sniff out our storerooms full of food and have himself a feast? Plus we had found no blood or any sign that Sunset might have been attacked. And, of course, I find it impossible that even the stealthiest of creatures could sneak into a corridor crowded with Myotan residences and not have his alien scent detected by a single one of my peoples' superior senses. And why did it attack the KN marines when it left the rest of us alone?
My husband began thinking that the whole sequence of events was not coincidence. That the contact with the Others, Sunset's unusual method of conception, and now this creature coming to steal him away were all connected. How could they not be, he said? Too many coincidences.
We comforted for each other in our apartment for a while. Both Flier and Windrider told us that the best we could do was just stay and wait and let others search. We were too emotionally distraught to join in, and might do something rash and dangerous.
Of course that lasted for about an hour before we went and joined the searches anyway. It wasn't in either of our natures to just sit and wait while others took all the risks.
And this was my son. I braved a forest full of Xique to find my husband. I would face down a Shard full of them to find Sunset.
We all carried weapons. We would take no chances. Lerner carried a pistol, myself a human-made rifle that more comfortably fit into my Myotan tool fingers.
We tromped around the wilderness with a party of hunters, all of us quiet except for Lerner, who murmured low to himself. To a human he would have been inaudible, by we Myotans could discern his words. At least those of us who understood Borelean. He tried out theory after theory in his head about Sunset's disappearance, rejecting each one.
Finally, he stopped up short, scowled, and began stalking back toward the Tower with a brisk, deliberate pace. The hunters and I all exchanged bewildered glances before I broke off and ran after him.
"Lerner! Lerner where are you going?"
"To the Laboratory," he said, never slowing his pace. "Its about damn time someone asked the Others exactly what's going on."
FORTY
You always hear about some stuck-up overeducated pundit anointing an old Earth authors as the "father" of the Eden Sphere, or the Known Nations, or this or that. Freeman Dyson, Albert Einstein, H.G. Wells, blah blah blah.
You ask me, we should move H.P. Lovecraft to the head of that paternity list, because you wouldn't believe some of the screwed-up shit our expeditions are finding out there.
--Uthriel Vonagi, assistant deputy director of the Outland Exploration commission, in an interview in Outland Zealot magazine, 544.
* * *
I heard the scraping sounds long before Lerner did. They were odd, bone on metal. I held a hand on his shoulder, stopping his forward motion. Someone--or something--was in the Laboratory.
He opened his lips to ask what was going on when I placed my fingers over them. He clamped them shut, nodding. He understood his human senses were not as acute as my own, and trusted me to take the lead for now because of that.
Lerner had told our companions in the search party not to come with us when we talked to the Others. He did not say why. They looked confused but were not insane enough to argue with two grief-stricken parents with guns.
The search parties had gone over the Laboratory after Sunset's initial disappearance, but found nothing amiss. As had become the custom, Dumas left one of his element-bodies in there to monitor equipment. Flier and the other searchers had tried to contact the Others, but they either did not receive the transmissions or did not deem it necessary to respond. We had had other periods of long non-communication with them, and no one thought it particularly odd that they were silent now.
We both gripped our weapons tighter now as we heard more movement within the chamber. We shut off our flashlights, as we were close enough to the light spilling out from the doorway that they were no longer needed. We approached the portal as quietly as we could and peered inside.
The creature was inside, sniffing at the security barriers the KN bureaucrat Polara had insisted we erect around the Underworld Elevator. It clawed at it experimentally.
It definitely was not a Xique, though it was as big as one, nearly three meters tall. Heavily furred and heavily muscled, it seemed vaguely Myotan, and even possessed remnants of wing-like membranes under its arms. Its finger claws were enormous, as long as our skinning knives, with no less fearsome-looking fangs as it snarled at the blockade.
From the moment I had first heard about the creature from the human Marine Sergeant, I think somewhere deep in my subconscious I realized the truth. But it was so horrific, my mind kept banking away from it. It was only when my nostrils flared wide to take in its scent that I could no longer ignore the evidence right before me.
I had been expecting the smell of a foreign creature, a pungent mixture of strange soils and exotic blood. But the scent that hit me descended right into my hindbrain, trigger so many deep, uncontrollable instincts just by its powerful familiarity.
The Others had not trusted us to carry out our end of the bargain. It was the only explanation. They had no means of forcing us if we decided to dishonor our side of the deal. So they took the only opportunity they could to place an agent of their own at the Tower. Obviously they had done something to me, or to Sunset directly, when they conceived him in that augmentation chamber. Something all of us missed.
The form of the creature even made a kind of utilitarian sense. Strong and fearsome enough to handle most threats, making the most of the natural weapons of the original form, but not so big and muscular that it couldn't manipulate tools or fit into Myotan-sized spaces. All that food had been to allow it gain mass, to feed the nanotech-driven transformation of bone and muscle and nerves.
An agent that the Others could plant and activate as needed, when suspicion of them was at its low ebb. Had they planned this from their first communication, offering to heal Brightwind just so we could trust them enough to give them access to my womb? Had my child never been anything more than a means to an end?
I looked at Lerner. His eyes told me he had already figured out the truth back in the forest.
Our son--if Sunset had ever truly been our son--had been changed using technology we could never hope to comprehend. My poor child was not even a week old, and had been made into a monster and a murderer.
I suppressed a deep shudder of despair and horror. The Others could not even be remotely human or Myotan, to do this to a child. For the first time in my life I began to understand what the word alien could truly mean.
Lerner opened and closed his mouth several times, his eyes darting back and forth between the creature and myself, completely at a loss as to what to say. I could only guess at the thoughts avalanching through his mind all at once.
I saw him come to a decision. He stepped out into the doorway, conspicuously noisy enough to draw the creature's attention. The beast twirled and snarled, its claws spasming on open air in warning.
I hissed, "Lerner, what are you doing?"
"Its Sunset, Gossamyr."
"I know," I whispered, joining him in the entrance.
The creature eyed us warily, but took no action. The surreal possibility of the two of us being torn apart by our week-old son didn't escape me.
Lerner nodded slowly. "Maybe he only attacks what he sees as a threat. We should try--try to help him."
"Sweet spirits, how?"
"I don't know. Maybe that augmentation chamber can reverse whatever they did to him."
"Why? Why did they d
o this? We were going to give them their crystal!"
Lerner frowned. "They played us like idiots. And that's exactly what we were."
"But how did they do something like this?"
"Dumas could probably guess better than me. Probably hid a number of things in Sunset's DNA that looked innocuous to us on a cursory scan. Or maybe they hid programmed nanites in his blastocyte. Or both, maybe." He seemed to crumple into himself for a moment. The creature still looked quizzically at us, shifting from foot to foot. Did it recognize its parents after all? "We have to help him, Gossamyr. Let's give the Others the crystal, see if that will placate them enough to reverse this..."
I slowly shook my head, setting my lips in a grim line. "No."
"What do you mean?"
"We will help our son, Lerner. But not through the Others, not after this. They have proven beyond any doubt that we cannot ever trust them again."
I looked up at the creature, into its dark, glassy eyes. It showed no comprehension, even a kind of innocence, reflected there. I realized he still had the mind of a newborn, only his body had become a puppet of something far more sinister.
Something broke deep inside me. A thousand possibilities of saving my son flowed through my mind all at once, all utterly impossible. This was far beyond Known Nations technology or Matrix Manipulation. Even if the augmentation chamber could reverse the change, it would take us a lifetime or more to learn how.
I prayed quickly, fervently. Only one possibility remained that gave my son any kind of real hope or redemption. And it did not lie in this world.
I brought the barrel of my rifle up, leveling it at Sunset. It weighed heavier than mountains. My finger slid to the trigger. "We must free his spirit, so he can fly free."
Sunset growled low, shoulders hunching and clawed hands spreading wide, knowing a threat when he saw one. Incredibly, Lerner stepped between me and Sunset, his arms spread wide. "Goss, no! How can you even think that?"