Highlander's Love: Winter Solestice (Against All Odds Series 3)

by Veronica Wilson

  "I'm not proud of some of my people for that," Norah admitted.

  "And if you wish to speak of pomposity and arrogance, I should not wish you to hear some of the things that are said in our governing halls," Vashar admitted in return. "It appears we have more in common than our distant ancestry, Dr. Slattery."

  "That's certainly how it looks, Your Lordship."

  A softness came over Vashar's handsome face; a softness and a kindness born of what Norah sensed was a genuine fondness. "Perhaps," he suggested, "when we are outside of our official capacities, you would care to address me as something other than 'Your Lordship.' Would it please you to address me as just Vashar?"

  Norah could not help but smile openly at that. It felt as wonderful as the touch of his hand. "I actually would like that... Vashar."

  "Then so shall it be... Norah.” He smiled in return. "And I am sure, now that you are properly fed and settled, you are anxious to have a first look at the almost-completed device before the other functionaries arrive and the last piece is delivered."

  Norah nodded. "I'd like that, yes."

  "Then let us away to the ballroom of the estate, which for this purpose has been made an amphitheatre," he said.

  And Vashar rose and helped Norah up from her seat to lead her from the dining hall to the amphitheatre. In his most courtly manner, he escorted her with her arm linked with his, and in the back of her mind Norah felt again like the slender, glass-slippered girl in the fairy tale.

  _______________

  The ballroom was a large space with windows that reached from floor to ceiling. Norah tried to imagine what kind of ball a race of warriors would give. How would they behave? How would they dress? How would they dance? What would the music be like? She felt at a disadvantage somewhat. In her studies of the technologies of other worlds, she had not familiarized herself to any great extent with other parts of their culture. She would have to ask Vashar about what exactly went on in a Sarmian ballroom when the opportunity arose. In the meantime, other things called for her attention.

  On one side of the room, rows of tiered seats and a section of other seats behind a separate dais had been installed for the viewing of what stood on the other side. Mounted in a sturdy metallic base on a raised, stage-like platform was the almost-complete circle of components forged of unknown metal alloys, which Norah guessed were probably mixed in a zero-gravity environment. It had been well-known for centuries that metals that would not ordinarily mix in the gravity well of a planet could be combined in zero-G. There could be all sorts of exotic metal combinations in this apparatus, and all sorts of other interesting and novel compounds as well. All that was missing, if one stood directly in front of the structure between it and the seats, was the upper right-hand section of the circle. One of the three already-assembled parts was the one found here on the sprawling grounds of this very estate. Once the original part still to come from Sigma Cephei was in place, the Shaper device would be finished—for good or ill.

  "Do you feel that?" asked Vashar at Norah's side. "Even now, unfinished, its circle not yet closed... it hums."

  Norah smiled, lost in fascination. He was right. There was a distinct vibration in the air, and it was coming unmistakably from the alien artifact. She could just barely pick up the hum at the lower register of her hearing, but perhaps even more distinct was the low buzzing at the base of her neck and in the pit of her stomach. It was not unpleasant. It was almost hypnotic. And the glow and shimmer from inside the circuits appeared to have a rhythm of its own, a flow and pulse that Norah could swear reminded her of blood pumping through veins and arteries. She glanced over at Vashar and saw her own smile reflected in his. "I've never felt anything like that," she said.

  "There is a levitator on the stage," he said. "You may use it to examine the connection if you like."

  "Yes," she said in an almost dreamy voice, and stepped across the space between seating and stage and up onto the platform. Next to the alien arc, a circular dish-like device rested on the stage. From the edge of the dish, a tall stalk extended, with a control panel on its end. Norah stepped into the dish of the levitator and touched her fingertips to the control panel, commanding the device to lift her up. In a couple of seconds it had her hovering at the unfinished part of the device, the empty space where the final arc of the circle would be attached. She tapped some other commands on the levitator's controls and it projected holographic readouts of the ends of the arc and the parts that were already joined. She examined the microscopic and molecular readings and the schematics of the exposed circuitry and connections. She recognized many of the compounds that the sensors had detected and mentally noted the substances that were not recognized. And one other thing captivated her the most.

  "The way these parts fit together... it seems almost organic, doesn't it?" she marveled. "These compounds—some of them almost seen to mimic some of the functions of proteins. The way the pieces fit together at the molecular level, they're made to blend and combine seamlessly and work like the parts of an organ system in a living body. It's like a machine simulating life, the way it would in the kind of android that's just in the theoretical stages for us." Norah looked again at the way the parts were made to fit together, like the parts of some mysterious organism. The way they combined reminded her of something, and she was loath to say what it was. She only looked down at Vashar, at the look that played upon his handsome face, and wondered if he had enough of a scientific background to have made the same association.

  Vashar added to the tingle that the unfinished machine gave off when he called up to her, "Touch it, Norah. Put your hand on it and feel it." Looking down at him, she saw him place his hand on one arc of the device and shut his eyes, as if some invisible massaging hand were working its way down his back. Her curiosity heightened all the more, Norah commanded the levitator to bring her closer to the device. She wondered what would happen if she touched one of the ends. She had not heard of any ill effects from anyone trying it while the pieces were apart, and it had not occurred to her to ask if anyone had tried it now that they were together. She opted against the risk and reached up and out to put her hand on the upper arc. At once, a powerful feeling thrilled its way through her body, making her eyes bulge for a moment until they fell shut—and the sensation throbbed its way up and down her spine as if it were an instrument being played by some unseen musician.

  They stood that way in silence, Norah floating above the stage and Vashar standing below her, both of them laying hands on the arcane device. They could not say how much time passed wordlessly with the emanations of the machine singing in their bodies. Though she still did not put it into words, Norah could not help comparing the sensation to an uncanny sort of foreplay, as if the mechanism were somehow preparing to make love to them. She almost wanted to laugh at the thought, it was so absurd. But then, this was as thoroughly alien a thing as Norah or anyone else had ever found. They were faced with something made for purposes completely unknown.

  At length—how long, she could only guess—Norah somehow found it in herself to pry her hand away from the surface of the device and make the levitator take her back down to the stage. The soft sound of the levitator touching down made Vashar reluctantly take away his own hand and face her with the look of a man waking from a very pleasant dream.

  Stepping off the dish, Norah said, almost breathlessly, "And people think this is a weapon?"

  Vashar replied, "The military thinking is that it is a device meant to subdue opposition, quell resistance and aggression, remove an enemy's will to do battle."

  Norah shook her head at the thought. "That is what the military would think, isn't it? And that's where people like me come in. It's a big assumption on their part, thinking that the nervous system, the endocrine system and neurotransmitters of every sentient life form—no doubt including some species we've never even met—would all work exactly the same. Somewhere there would be an exception."

  "Perhaps," Vashar allowed. "And perhaps t
he device was designed to operate on specific organisms, such as our two related species and others similar to us."

  Norah sighed and passed her fingers through her hair. "I guess that's a possibility too. Add it to the list of mysteries."

  "Still," said Vashar, keeping his eyes fixed on her, "the feeling is most extraordinary, is it not?"

  She met his eyes, nodding, keeping fresh in her mind the sensations that the device gave her—the sensation that they shared. "Extraordinary. That's a good word for it."

  They stood quietly together at the side of the alleged Shaper device, agreeing on the extraordinary nature of it. Other words to describe it hung unspoken between them. Tantalizing. Sensual. Arousing. Sexy. Norah could see Vashar's response to it on his face, and tried to imagine what his other responses, further down his body, might be. The leggings of his suit did not disclose what might be going on beneath them, but Norah had heard things about Sarmian men and how they were as well-equipped for pleasure between the sheets as for punishment on the battlefield. She was certain of her own response in the corresponding regions. Things were getting rather moist under her own garments—though, if she were honest, she had felt that way ever since watching his hologram. The experience of the Shaper device had only made it more acute.

  _______________

  Vashar walked Norah out of the ballroom to her accommodations, trying his best along the way to ignore the stiffness under his leggings. The attempt did not meet with complete success, and once he had wished Norah a pleasant rest before dinner, he quickly returned to his private suite, stripped off his suit, and relieved himself of the pent-up feelings from the time he’d spent with Norah in the ballroom.

  Overnight, the invited guests from other regions of Sarma and other planets continued to arrive, along with chosen members of the media covering the event. The newly enthroned King of Sarma and his new human consort, who were quickly becoming the talk of known space, caused a stir of their own when they arrived by royal floater with the king's guards attending them. The guests, after a formal reception in the dining hall, quickly filed into the ballroom, where most of the attendees filled the tiered seats and the king and consort were seated at the dais. Interspersed across the room and stationed at the portals were Sarmian warriors, fully armored and armed and ready for anything. The king's personal guard stood behind him and his consort at the dais. The anticipation in the air felt almost like the hum of the device itself.

  Norah and Vashar joined the delegation of scientists from Sigma Cephei on stage to put the last part of the device in place, and Norah's thoughts turned back to the earlier part of the day. During the proceedings Norah had had a chance to talk with King Dantar and his bride-to-be, Gwendolyn Rush, an Earth woman not unlike herself. Each of them was a member of a scientific discipline. Gwendolyn was an archaeologist, and the story in general circulation—which she did not deny—had it that she had been abducted from an archaeological dig for Dantar to court her. He must have courted her very well indeed, for she had somehow consented, even after he'd had her kidnapped, to be his queen, and she had recently announced his support for her plans to build a new Sarmian University. Norah was especially intrigued to see that Gwendolyn was a woman of her own physical type, full and round of figure. It made her consider further what possibilities might exist for her with a hard and sinewy Sarmian man—perhaps even the one who had so graciously made her his personal guest. Throughout the little gala, Norah continually stole glances at Vashar while he entertained the king and the attending scientists, and had a couple of times found him casting a gaze in her direction. And her mind kept returning to their shared experience of touching the Shaper device.

  After the requisite speeches from King Dantar and from Vashar about the significance of their find and the interstellar and cosmic importance of their reason for being here, Norah and the Cepheid scientists—tall, willowy, long-haired humanoid beings with coarse brown and almond-colored skin and eyes that were all jet-black with no whites—conferred about the final linkage of the remaining part of the device and the energy fluctuations that they detected from it and the other segments. The flux of energy in the segments curved higher with all four parts in the same place, as if they were all waiting to be united. After it was ascertained that the buildup was not dangerous, all that remained was the lifting and placement of the last piece.

  In deference to the Cepheids, from whose planet the last piece came, Norah stood by and used her linker to monitor their work holographically while they levitated themselves up to fit the segment in place. With Vashar at her side and their distinguished audience watching in a nearly breathless hush, Norah observed the display of the molecules of the last piece knitting themselves together with the pieces to which it was joined. She called out everything that she saw, and her pulse quickened by the second. She had no doubt that everyone else in the amphitheatre was feeling the same way. When she found that the molecular bonding was complete, she and Vashar turned their gaze together to the completed circle of alien technology. Just as the Cepheids lowered themselves to the stage, the hum of the device ceased to be subtle. It rose steadily in volume until it was a rumbling, throbbing, pulsing bass that every being in the room could feel in its bones, cartilage, exoskeleton, protoplasm, or whatever structure its body possessed. Voices began to rise along with the hum. Beings cried out in surprise, fear, anxiety, dismay, even arousal. From the corners of her eyes, Norah saw the king's guards raising their weapons.

  The rising hum reached a volume that made it the prevailing sound in the room and remained there. At the same time, the pulsing of light along the circuit patterns of the device became an ever-brightening glow, and its rhythm quickened. Norah remembered how it had seemed like a bloodstream of light, and now it seemed like the racing blood of a heart beating faster and faster. The dazzling shimmer poured out into the ballroom, making those with eyes squint and flinch and raise hands and appendages to cover their faces. The flowing light and the celestial humming became everything... until there was more.

  Out of the alien mechanism poured a feeling. That was what it was; that was the only way to describe it. Where the pieces had given off a vibration and a glow, the entire unit now sent a mighty, massive feeling cascading out across everything and everyone. It registered physically as a balmy, tropical warmth, like summer sunshine beating down on exposed skin. But the warmth penetrated body and mind alike, filling all present with a sensation both physical emotional. If Norah were pressed to put it into words, she could only call it the feeling of something first curling up inside her head, then uncurling and spreading out like a blooming rose. Whatever it was, it made her feel suddenly breathless, excited, exhilarated, and almost drunk. It made her want to reach out and touch the nearest living thing. She instinctively held out a hand—which clasped at once with the strong, soft hand of Vashar that was also reaching for her.

  Gasping in a wonder beyond expression, Norah turned from the glowing, humming device to the face of Vashar gazing at her, seeming to radiate back the same warmth that the machine was pouring into both of them. And amazingly, astonishingly, delightfully, she felt as if she were standing at the same time in her place and in his, and as if he were feeling the same. Suddenly, she was both herself and Vashar, and Vashar was both Norah and himself. There was no division between her being and his, no place where she left off and he began. There was no difference between them. They were one being, as if they had always been and would always be so.

  In this moment of one-ness, there was total understanding. Every joy, sorrow, fear, love, hope, and pain of one was known to the other. Vashar knew what it was to be Norah, to be so curious about the workings of the universe and so fascinated by the mechanisms that enabled humans to harness and command nature that she would make it the calling of her life. Norah knew what it was to be Vashar, a warrior in spirit, yet called to lead not in battle and conquest but in the making of laws, which was a kind of warfare all its own. She discovered the pride that he took in
a newly drafted proposition, hammered out in hours and days of debate, and in presenting it to the king to be made law. The power of the device glowing and humming near them made it possible for Norah and Vashar each to live the life of the other, just by holding hands.

  The feeling was so wondrous, so amazing, so transcendent, that neither of them wanted it to end. But slowly it faded, as did the hum and glow of the alien machine. With a dream-like feeling, the engineer from Earth and the Lord of Sarma let their hands slowly slip apart. Even as they did, a chorus of voices human and alien welled up in the ballroom as a reaction to... something. As if coming out of an intoxication, Norah and Vashar looked from each other to the machine and were as dumbfounded at what they saw there as they had been awestruck at what the finished machine first did.

  What had been the inner, empty space of the circle was now filled--with an image, like a hologram. It was a picture of a planet, its surface studded and patterned with trails of light like the glowing circuits of the machine. The planet sat in space, amid the stars—until in a sudden, shocking moment, its circumference glowed like the corona of an eclipsed star. Cruel and terrible bursts of redness erupted up and down the face of the planet, spilling red light like blood over the surface. In their wake, the planet, once rippling with light and life, turned grey and black and cold.

  Gasps and murmurs filled the room, with all eyes fixed on a sight that none had ever before witnessed, an entire world caught in the moment of its death. It seemed almost a mercy when the image of the planet's grey and smoldering corpse disappeared, and another shimmered into view where it had been.