Nightfall

by Moshe Ben-Or

  “So there I was, all alone, one with Creation, sitting on the roof of the world, waiting for a sign from On High, when up the South Face come this bunch of Imperials.

  “They thought they were so tough, you know. Up San Sebastian in the winter; climb suits, smart pitons, millipede ropes, climate-controlled tents, oxygen, Sherpa bots, the works. And they get to the summit with their little flagpole, just their two toughest guys and a Sherpa bot making the climb up from the base camp… And there’s this Leaguer sitting up there in the Lotus Position with a Stone Age spear across his thighs, ice in his beard, wrapped up in a handmade cloak of beaver pelts! And he says: ‘Hi? Have a nice climb? You should try the North Face next time, it’s much more challenging.’

  “You should have seen their faces! It was priceless!”

  “So what happened?” laughed Mirabelle.

  His laughter was so… infectious. Just like that, and he was a different man. Except that he wasn’t, was he? It was all still there, underneath…

  “So we took some pictures up on the summit and I accepted a hit of their oxygen, and came back down to their base camp with their two intrepid explorers. They had rice and pickled fish, and green tea, and a bunch of freeze-dried fruit. I contributed some beaver jerky and some dried blueberries. We had a nice dinner, and then I climbed down the South Face with them. Gave me a chance to practice my Standard and eat fishcakes with rice. Once we got to Station H, I made a call to the Embassy and hung around with the ski bums for a couple -- three days, until they could get an aircar up there to pick me up.”

  He was so… normal all of a sudden, thought Mirabelle.

  She could just imagine those Imperials, too. Talk about feelings of inadequacy! Kind of a reminder of why they’d never subdued the Leaguers, right?

  “So, how did you get up to the peak without a climb suit?” she asked curiously.

  “That’s what the Imperials wanted to know, too,” smiled Yosi.

  “Crampons and a pair of ice axes and a spear, and leather thongs and v-anchors all the way up.

  “You know how Spartans love the whole living history thing, fencing with rapiers and hunting with spears and whatnot?” he asked, in response to her confusion.

  Mirabelle nodded expectantly.

  “On Sparta, there are a bunch of folks who do traditional mountain climbing, the way their ancestors did during their Time of Isolation. No smart materials; just solid metals and primitive fibers. To climb ice, they use these steel things called crampons, that attach to boots with straps, and specially designed steel axes; and they thread pieces of rope called thongs through v-shaped holes in the ice, and tie them off to make anchor loops.”

  “Hold on!” exclaimed Mirabelle, “I thought you brought nothing but a water filter and a mini-kettle. Where did you get all that gear?”

  “I made it,” replied her not-so-scary Leaguer, without missing a beat.

  “Ever see a horn’s lizard hanging out upside-down on a vertical cliff face? They can do that because their claws and climbing spikes are tougher than most steel. If there is ice, or even soft rock, they’re good to go. One good smack, and they’ve got a heel spike or a tail spike anchored in. Then they can sit there all day and graze on whatever their tongue can reach.

  “So I went up to the snow line and got myself a big old horn’s lizard. Took him with an obsidian-tipped spear through the eye.

  “Huge thing, a good three meters long, maybe forty kilos or so all told. Mean as…” Yosi cleared his throat in embarrassment, making Miri giggle.

  It was kind of sweet, she thought, the way he was embarrassed to curse in front of her.

  “Well, meaner than the average horn’s lizard, and that’s saying a lot,” he continued.

  “Charged me the moment I came near him. Almost got me, too.

  “Between the claws, the heel spikes and the tail spikes, I had enough material for crampons, ice axes, everything. And that spiky skin made absolutely wonderful non-slip gloves and moccasins. Especially the stuff he had on the soles of his feet. I could walk on flat, smooth ice in just my moccasins, and it would feel like I was walking across a lawn, or something.

  “Mother Nature provides, right?

  “I’m telling you, when they first saw me, the Imperials thought I was a Yeti!”

  “Listen, Miri,” he said as their laughter died down, “I need you to do me a favor. I’ve got a bunch of splinters stuck in my back. I need you to pull them out for me, and then we’ll have some stew.”

  “Why do you have splinters stuck in your back?” she asked, still beaming at him.

  “The aliens,” he answered casually, beaming back, “They just wouldn’t go quietly.”

  And he was suddenly scary again.

  “Not me, he’s not going to hurt me!” thought Mirabelle desperately.

  He was just like the big scary cattle dogs, right? Not dangerous if you were part of his pack.

  Her hands were shaking. She could hardly breathe, as if someone had shoved a tennis ball down her throat.

  “So… what are the aliens like?” she asked, trying to calm herself down.

  “Deep breaths,” she thought, “Take deep breaths.”

  Yosi took hold of her hands to keep them from trembling.

  “Miri,” he said gently as he looked into her eyes, “What did you promise me?”

  “It… It’s hard,” she muttered back in a trembling voice.

  “I keep seeing the blood… And the head rolling off his body… I know that he deserved it and everything, but… But you did it. And I keep remembering that.

  “Until… until the last two weeks, I’ve never seen anyone die, not even in VR. I’ve never been near anyone who just… killed people. Just like that. Like… like it’s nothing.”

  “It’s ok, honey,” he replied softly. “I understand. The more you try to fight it, the worse it’s going to get. Just focus on the task at hand, ok? Here, take the tweezers. We’ll talk about something less scary, all right?”

  “Right,” she replied.

  “So what are the aliens like?”

  “From what I’ve seen so far,” answered her companion, “they’re an arrogant lot. Brave and tough and decently trained, most of them, but not very disciplined when it comes to a fight. If the bunch I’ve met so far are the best they’ve got, then the Omicronians are definitely better soldiers. Although these guys might turn out to be more creative.”

  “No,” she said, “I mean, what do they look like?”

  “That’s not a very calming topic, I’m afraid,” he smiled.

  “They look like great big cats, sort of. A bit bigger than me, most of them, so think big leopards, or small tigers. Orange or yellow fur, black or dark orange stripes. Sometimes spots. I saw one that was completely black, too, like a panther.

  “Nasty sharp claws, slice right through you like a knife through butter. Big, sharp teeth, too.

  “Wouldn’t want to be in a fistfight with one, that’s for sure. And it seems they like to eat humans for lunch.”

  “Actually,” said Mirabelle, licking her lips nervously, “maybe it is kind of calming.

  “I mean… I’d rather have someone really big and scary around, to keep me from ending up as cat food. Ending up as cat food is definitely not high on my list of preferences.

  “But… Isn’t that weird? That they can eat us and all?”

  “Yeah, Miri,” replied Yosi.

  “It gets even weirder. I took this rifle from an alien. I am wearing a poncho made in the League. But the rifle will talk to the poncho. Everything the aliens use runs UCIP.”

  “Paklamam?”

  She pronounced the Hebrew acronym as a word.

  “What’s that?”

  “Universal Contact Interface Protocol. UCIP for short.

  “It’s the protocol that makes everything talk to everything else. Your Tailor, your Chef, your front door, everything around you. UCIP is how you can touch a wall and make it into a picture window, or a screen to wa
tch the news on, if you don’t mind 2-D. UCIP is how the little stringy nanites that clothes are made of talk to one another so everything fits the way the Tailor told it to, and the way the big tough nanites that spaceplane wings are made of talk to one another so the wings can change shape in flight. UCIP is how your tee shirt can instantly display an image you just downloaded off the net. UCIP is how touching the customs desk at a spaceport gets you a free translation module for the local language. UCIP is how your net glasses stay on your face and how your furniture adjusts to fit you. UCIP is everywhere. Without UCIP, the modern world doesn’t exist.”

  “So… they just got the software somewhere, and downloaded it to all their stuff for some reason, right?” asked Mirabelle.

  “Nope. Doesn’t work that way. UCIP is not just a software interface standard. It’s a hardware interface spec, too. And the kicker is, UCIP predates the Golden Age. It’s been the micromachine interface standard for something like sixteen hundred years.

  “And there’s more. I can switch power packs between my vibro, an alien vibro and this spare League-made vibro here. My vibro was made during the Golden Age.

  “And all the rest of their gear is so like ours, it’s not even funny. Their gun calibers are different, but the power packs in the guns are the same as ours. And they’ve got rifles with hundred-round mags, five-hundred-round drums on the machineguns…

  “You name it, it’s the same, or close enough that it doesn’t matter. When my poncho and this rifle did their first handshake, it took them a couple of seconds to dig up some generic legacy driver that they could both live with, and that was that.”

  “So… You’re saying that these aliens are from the Golden Age? That we used to know them?” asked Mirabelle.

  “I don’t think they’re aliens at all,” replied Yosi.

  “Once you eliminate the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth. And, frankly, this is not even all that improbable.

  “I think that they’re just like the belters or the heavyworlders, or the Omicronians, or you and me, for that matter. Some obscure Golden Age designer decided for some reason that it would be somehow useful or interesting, or just plain fun, to make intelligent cats, or humans who looked like cats, however you want to look at it. When the End Time War happened, their ancestors ran, just like ours, and ended up Heaven knows where, so we never even heard about them. And here they are, six hundred years later, trying to eat us for lunch.”

  “Well,” shrugged Mirabelle, “that makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  That was the thing about him that made her feel all right, she thought. That he always made sense. Even when he was truly terrifying, he still made sense, in a cold, scary, Leaguer way.

  What was it that mom had once said about the Jews? That their whole history for the past three thousand years was non-stop fighting for their lives, and running when they lost, and fighting again, until they got so deadly and so ruthless that they stopped losing no matter how badly they were outnumbered.

  Not a bad thing to have one of them around, was it, if she was stuck in the woods while a bunch of giant man-eating cats ran around trying to conquer the world? No, not a bad thing at all.

  If he made sense, then she could figure him out. And if she could figure him out, then she could predict things. And if she could predict things, then she could control things. And then she’d be safe and it would all turn out all right in the end.

  And he… liked her, didn’t he? He liked her a lot, even when he felt guilty about it. And she kind of liked him back, didn’t she? Even when she was scared of him. Which was… weird, wasn’t it? How could she be scared of him and like him at the same time?

  Mirabelle swallowed, and the tennis ball in her throat was gone. Her hands weren’t shaking anymore. She could do this.

  “All right,” she said, “turn around. Let’s get those splinters out.”

  Yosi’s poncho receded, revealing the upper half of his body.

  Mirabelle gasped.

  He was covered in scars. There were great big craters and thin long lines and giant tears with jagged edges and raised round things ranging in size from as big around as a tennis ball to little pinpricks… There was more scar than skin, most places.

  She could see fresh crusts of dried blood where the splinters had gone in. And big angry red welts and streaks of red around some of them. And leaking yellow pus, now that he had pried off his tallit katan and disturbed it all.

  “Looks pretty bad, huh?” asked Yosi.

  “Red streaks, pus leaking and everything? Smells like bad cheese?”

  Mirabelle leaned in closer, sniffing.

  “Yeah,” she gagged, “Smells awful.”

  “Damn,” he replied, “I was afraid of that.

  “All right, stealth up so you don’t get any of that stuff on you, grab our last few wipes, clean up my back a bit and start yanking ‘em. All that you can get with the tweezers. Afterward, squeeze out all the pus you can, until it’s just clean blood coming out, and then we’ll get the iodine and the silver in there.”

  “Is…”

  She swallowed to keep her voice from shaking.

  “Is it a League custom to keep war scars?”

  “No,” chuckled her companion, “I just don’t heal too well.

  “It’s the sytoxin. Seventeen years, and it’s still in my system. My sweat isn’t poisonous anymore, and my blood isn’t, either. But I don’t know about the pus.

  “My poncho claims that there’s no danger, but hey, it’s just a poncho, what the heck does it know? Once you start squeezing things out, all bets are off.”

  “You’re… poisonous?!” thought Mirabelle, “How can you be poisonous?”

  And sytoxin…

  Wasn’t sytoxin one of those horrible Golden Age things that just killed everything it touched?

  “S…so,” she asked hesitantly, “what will happen if poison starts coming out?”

  “Well,” replied Yosi, all calm and reassuringly businesslike, “your poncho’s WMD alarm will go off. There will be a new warning icon up in the status area, and all kinds of warning attributes on the housekeeping icon, reminding you where the stuff is on you. The poncho will highlight where the sytoxin is on me, too, so you’ll be able to see it. The concentrations should be pretty low, and it won’t get through your poncho, because you’re already stealthed up, so the poncho is on guard for this sort of thing.

  “You’ll have to wash off in the creek, though, and once everything is done coming out, I’ll have to take a dunk, too.

  “Look, don’t worry about it. I’ll walk you through it if it happens. Trust me, it wouldn’t be my first time.

  “Oh, before you get started, go ahead and move that mini-kettle a bit further away. Wouldn’t want to ruin the stew, eh?”

  He was chuckling about it, so it couldn’t be that bad, right?

  So, stealthing up… There was that spot on the collar, right? She could feel the big old button with her fingers, now that she was looking for it. And there was the ghost attribute on the housekeeping icon, too. It was so huge, it looked almost like an independent icon. To make it easy to hit in an emergency, right.

  “To stealth up…” said Yosi.

  “Clever girl!” he chuckled with pleasure as the ghost attribute went all green and tiny.

  “You only saw it once, but you remembered about the manual emergency button. That one will work always, as long as the power pack has juice, even if the poncho is hard reset and completely turned off.”

  “I can do this!” thought Mirabelle, “I can! It’s a simple eye interface, just like school VR. All I have to do is learn the icons, and even those I can mostly understand already. And he likes me more now.”

  He liked clever girls? She thought boys didn’t like girls who were too clever. That’s what Corazon always said. Mom, too, when she was being all annoyed with dad.

  But… he wasn’t a boy, was he? And she could do clever. Clever was easy. Pretty, pretty w
as hard. She had to work at being pretty.

  * 22 *

  Leo sat and stared at the water. The stream ran past him with a tireless tinkling, like a thousand crystal chimes whispering in the wind. It seemed so small, this stream, so weak. And yet it had moved mountains. It had eaten and eaten at the stern, proud granite and the haughty basalt with endless patience, gnawing and biting at the ancient snow-capped peaks until their pride was gone and their strength had ebbed. Until the noble mountains parted, and made way for the lowly little stream.

  Soft can defeat hard. Weak can defeat strong. You must meditate upon this.

  The ancient quote popped unbidden into his mind, surfacing like a sudden ripple, and was just as swiftly gone.

  There was a stream just like this one back home, up in the mountains near the Ducal hunting lodge. He had camped there just two months ago, before summer turned abruptly to winter without warning, as it was want to do back home.

  Leo missed Sparta. He missed her squat firs and birches, her fat, round hills, her white, desolate mountains and her green valleys, teeming with life. He missed the campfires that would line the hills on Harvest Night and the songs that would rise from them to the stars they reflected.

  But most of all, he missed the crystal chimes. You couldn’t go anywhere on Sparta without seeing them. From the largest, richest castle to a shepherd’s mountain shelter to an arkology to a suburban house, they would follow you. Glistening in the sun, shining like a thousand pieces of the rainbow, they would wash you in a thousand colors and a million sounds at the slightest movement of the air. Pale echoes of the all-permeating, inaudible, loving Voice of the Allmother Who Sustains All Life. The Voice that no living man could hear, but that enveloped him nonetheless. The chimes were Her symbols. Her reminders.

  Leo loved them like he loved few things. He never really realized how much until they were gone. He’d come back home and there would be nothing special about them. He could go for days without noticing a single one. But every time he left, they drew him back with a magic string.

  He wanted to go home. Now, when nothing was certain anymore, he wanted it more than ever before in his life. He needed something in his world that was stable, that wouldn’t change tomorrow or the day after that or the day after that, while he wasn’t looking.