The Dark Path

by Walter H Hunt

  As Jackie sat, trying to compose herself, she felt something on her back begin to move. Her shoulders began to hunch against her will; she reached back with her hand to find that her back had begun to sprout wings! As she brought her hand slowly back into view, she noticed that her fingers were elongating and melding, the fingernails extending into sharp talons, four replacing five.

  That was not the only change. As she watched, the room began to become perceptibly brighter, almost unbearably so. She put her transformed hands over her face and realized that her head, too, was changing shape: her mouth was forming into a sharp beak and her ears were elongating and flattening.

  Somewhere in the back of her mind she could feel a stirring, as if a long-dormant part of her brain were awakening. A wave of fear swept over her and cascaded as alien perceptions followed, one after the other, fighting for her attention. She felt herself slipping, then being pushed, farther and farther back in consciousness. Shortly she could only barely feel the transformations that were rapidly taking place. There was another personality in her mind: it was first surprised, then hostile and then jealous, binding and gagging her, trapping her within her own mind, controlling her so that she could not even scream.

  As the light in the room dimmed in response to Ch'k'te's mental command, she let her hands drop from her face, to look at the handsome form opposite her.

  As the aura of emotion washed out from her form, she heard herself say, "In the name of esLi I greet you, my mate."

  Chapter 8

  At A'alu Spaceport (named for the High Lord of the Unification) traffic was as heavy as always. On the diplomatic concourse, inaccessible to any but officials of the Solar Empire and High Nest, the bustle and commotion was no more than background noise; workers and lesser officials kept a respectful distance as T'te'e HeYen, High Chamberlain of the High Nest, swept through with his entourage on the way to the berth of his private shuttle.

  T'te'e cut an imposing figure most times—he was taller than many of the People, and his wings were often held in a haughty posture as befit his rank—but as he passed through the largely empty concourse this afternoon, he conveyed a taut anger that made him even more to be avoided. This emotion made those on the concourse even more eager to please or avoid him.

  When he reached his berth, however, he stopped short and re-formed his wings to the Posture of Polite Approach when he saw who was waiting for him.

  "se Byar. I am honored," T'te'e said quietly. "I did not expect to see you here."

  "I thought it appropriate," Byar said. "If you have a few moments before your voyage . . ." He gestured offhandedly toward the 3-V reporters, kept at a respectful distance, but still permitted to record and report. The Act of Normalization with the Solar Empire had created this circumstance, which T'te'e still felt to be an affront; but there was nothing to be done for it but to endure.

  "Of course."

  The two flew up to a quiet alcove a dozen meters above the concourse and turned their backs to the invasive cameras. Their wing-positions would be partially visible, but their speech could at least be concealed—and Byar touched a control on the comp tucked into a sleeve of his robe to mask it even further.

  "Is it done, then?" Byar asked.

  "It seems so. I will know more when I reach Adrianople. hi Ke'erl has felt the esGa'uYal at Cicero."

  "And the gyaryu . . ."

  "Taken. Even I felt that. There is no conclusive evidence that se Sergei has transcended the Outer Peace, but prolonged separation from the blade can only lead to that."

  "It pains me to think of this."

  "I know." T'te'e's wings formed the Enfolding Protection of esLi. "Nonetheless, se Sergei is a warrior; he understood the danger when we first chose this flight. We all did: si Th'an'ya, se S'reth, the High Lord himself . . . esLi wills this, se Byar. Nonetheless, one thing is clear: Qu'u may not emerge as we expected."

  "If Qu'u does not emerge—" Byar began, alarmed, but T'te'e's wings changed to a posture of reverence to esLi.

  "Peace, se Byar. I did not say that Qu'u would not come—merely that he will not take the form we had thought, hi Ke'erl has dreamed this as well."

  Byar thought about this for a moment, then placed his wings in a similar position, indicating assent. "Did the humans respond to hi Ke'erl's message?"

  "se Mya'ar said the emperor understood the gravity of the warning, but did not sense the wing of esGa'u. It could hardly be otherwise." T'te'e's wings dropped to a posture of distaste; he glanced over his shoulder, and noted the interest of the 3-V reporter below.

  "We cannot defeat the esGa'uYal without the humans, se T'te'e. I need not remind you of that."

  "esLi protect us. I pray that we can defeat the esGa'uYal even with their help."

  ***

  As the aura of emotion washed out from her form, she heard herself say, "In the name of esLi I greet you, my mate."

  While the transformation had been taking place, Ch'k'te had remained frozen in position. He was unwilling or unable to move as he watched the image of his dead mate slowly replace that of his commander and friend. Emotion and a terrible longing had welled up in him, making him realize how painful it was to know she had transcended the Outer Peace and that this was just a memory.

  "li Th'an'ya," he began, and then stopped. Her eyes looked back at him, the eyes of his recollection of their last meeting, just before she departed Zor'a with the exploration team.

  Somewhere within the image of his lost mate was Jackie Laperriere, who trusted him . . . It was such a temptation to give her hsi away—

  No, he realized. This must not be.

  "li Th'an'ya." He sighed heavily. "I . . . have summoned you back to aid me with your Sensitive skills."

  "Summoned me back? What do you mean?"

  "I . . . You are a memory, my dear soul-mate. I have used the hsi of my link-partner and overlaid your personality, though my joy is mixed with pain."

  "Link-partner?" She looked at him quizzically. "But am I not your link-partner?"

  "No," he said slowly. "You are not. There is another in this link, one who yet lives."

  "Another? I—" Th'an'ya stopped and looked down as if contemplating. Then her head snapped up in anger. "A naZora'e female? What madness is this?"

  "se Jackie is my friend and my commanding officer. I needed her strength, but I need also your skill. She gave me leave to summon you forth. I have used her hsi-form to house you. I cannot betray her trust."

  "You would choose a naZora'e—over me?"

  "She lives, li Th'an'ya, and you do not. And she placed herself in my hands. I am idju if I trapped her hsi in this way."

  "You need not make that choice," Th'an'ya replied. "esGa'u has toyed with you, but I will rectify matters on my own."

  "No, you will not."

  Th'an'ya had raised her hands and wings in an invocation. She stopped and looked around her as a voice sounding remarkably like Ch'k'te spoke those words. She looked across at the image of her mate, but he, too, was looking around.

  "Though it pains me to have summoned back your memory," the voice continued, "I am in dire need of your skill. Yet I need also the strength of my link-partner. I had not expected you to thrust her aside so suddenly, yet I am sure that you will not and cannot destroy her. You can only destroy yourself."

  The tent-image faded away; yet they remained suspended in the void, surrounded by an ethereal image that enfolded them. It was the image of Ch'k'te—a sort of meta-Ch'k'te, less tangible but measurably more powerful.

  "It is not a part of the Th'an'ya I remember, to destroy beings out of wanton anger. I need you, my dear one, and in this crisis I have formed a link with a human, untrained and unready, yet brave and trusting. I need her as well."

  "Crisis?" Th'an'ya asked quietly.

  Neither Ch'k'te nor meta-Ch'k'te replied, but the void slowly formed itself into images, vignettes depicting all that had happened in the past few days: the return of the Sargasso expedition, the transformation of the N
oyes-creature, the hurried escape from Cicero Op, their trek across the ice, and finally the searing, bright cry of anguish when the gyaryu was torn from the hands of its keeper.

  When it had all faded away, another image surfaced and played itself out—a scene on a space-station, parsecs distant and years ago, the last farewell between the two. It was a touching of minds that revealed to Ch'k'te for the first time that Th'an'ya had known then that she was parting from him forever.

  "It was my choice. I recall this now, mate of my soul: I gave my hsi to you so that I could be here for this shNa'es'ri. But with so much of my hsi here, then . . ."

  Her wings altered to a position of submission. "I am lost," Th'an'ya whispered. "I have transcended the Outer Peace."

  "Part of you still lives," meta-Ch'k'te replied gently. "And you will live on forever, as long as I live."

  "What of this naZora'e? I hold her hsi."

  "If her hsi is strong, she will summon herself back by Remembering. If she cannot, I may have to dismiss you to return her. But if I do so I will have failed, for I need both of you to accomplish the task."

  "Does she have the skill to realize this?"

  "I do not know. But we can pray to esLi that she does."

  ***

  In the void Jackie could feel her own body, strangely altered by the process it had just undergone. Her hunched shoulders could feel the weight of their articulated wings; her hands were now four-fingered claws with sharp talons; her face ended in a pointed beak . . . and yet in another sense she had none of these things at all. She was curled up, fetuslike, in a dark nowhere, waiting for something to happen.

  She was terribly frightened. The transformation and sudden emergence of Ch'k'te's mate had only accentuated that fear, making it even more apparent that the entire experience was out of her control.

  It was beyond her comprehension. The Th'an'ya personality had thrust her aside without even thinking, casting her out of her own body with a thought—

  No, she thought to herself, and at once a pale-colored sense of wonder washed over her, realizing that there still was a "self" to think to.

  No. She did not cast me from my body. My body is still in the tent, out on the Cicero ice plain. This Th'an'ya is a memory, a construct, just as Ch'k'te said—she no more has a body within Ch'k'te's mind than I do.

  He has linked his mind with mine for a purpose; he has summoned her back from his memory for a purpose. The purpose is to contact se Sergei and to learn what has happened to him.

  She opened her eyes and saw the gray, featureless plain she had seen from within the "tent." She saw her own body floating there, halfway through the transformation from her own figure to that of a female zor.

  She touched her taloned hand with her human fingers and flexed her single wing.

  I am Th'an'ya ehn E'er'l'u na HeYen, she thought. I first held the Inner Peace on the twenty-fifth day of the month of the Bright Sun, in L'le E'er'l'u of Sharia 'a.

  I am Jacqueline Laperriere, she thought. I was born on March 18, 2359, in Stanleytown, North Continent, Dieron.

  I live, thought Jackie/Th'an'ya. I live.

  I remember.

  Remember the fine bright days in the hills of E'er'l, when the sun would play down on the waving grasses, and the wind would blow the clouds tumbling across the sky / and the deep forests of North Continent, with their hidden streams teeming with life / remember running through the brightly decorated halls of the L'le, bare-taloned feet taking purchase in the soft wood floors that would spring back into place when we would pass / and feeling the hot sand of the beach between our toes / and the waves crashing onto the shore / and the thunder in the mountains at night/

  Some of those are not my memories, she thought. They be long to Th'an'ya. Remember your own past, as painful as it might be.

  Remember Jackie Laperriere.

  Once again she felt that odd sense of progression, one event leading to another, each bringing her closer to where she was now. The events stood out in stark relief as images etched in the void, taunting her with the choices she had made and the turnings she had made her life take. She was alone now, lacking even the ability to cry out.

  Remember, she told herself. Accept the past that is yours.

  Slowly she felt the talons retreat again into fingers; her shoulders relaxed as the remaining wing shrunk and gradually disappeared. But the memories were bright lights in the darkness, twinkling like stars . . .

  ***

  There were always the stars, to be gazed at and longed for, in reach and yet unreachable. Our ancestors did not have the power to escape the binding confines of the surface; yet we had learned to navigate the depths of space and to try and fathom just how limitless it all was.

  The Academy was at Moonbase, man's oldest space facility, built in the twenty-first century: before the War of Accession, before the Empire. There were still parts of the base that had ancient inlaid tile floors bearing the blue-and-white symbol of the international organization that had built it. It had been a traditional challenge for cadets to find every location inside Moonbase that still had a recognizable United Nations emblem.

  It was strange after all this time to remember that particular bit of trivia, but it was of a piece with the rest of the Academy experience. Centuries of tradition weighed heavily upon everything they did, from survival training in the vacuum wilderness of Luna, to breaking out sail on a clipper at sea on Terra's Pacific Ocean. Intimidation and humiliation were part of it, too—what the instructors liked to call character-building. But when they stood on the parade ground at Admiralty HQ in Greater St. Louis with the Imperial banner snapping in the wind and gave the salute to their commandant, there was no doubt they were truly the cream of the crop. The last cadet in the class—the so-called anchorman—was kilometers ahead of non-Academy officers and felt it, too. Many came before them and many would come after, but that slice of time was theirs eternally, like a framed portrait on a wall, as if it were all that had ever been . . .

  Jackie had specialized in navigation. She had served for a while on the carrier Charlotte Amalie, piloting aerospace fighters; it hadn't been as exciting—or as dangerous—as it had been decades before, when the Solar Empire was fighting the zor, but it had been a thrill ride all the same. After two years of survey and rescue missions, she had been posted as a junior navigator to Kennewick, named after an Imperial estate in central Washington in North America. The chief navigator aboard was a burly man named Bartholomew Fredericks. When she first came aboard, she'd addressed him as "Commander Fredericks," and even (once, in a staff meeting in the Old Man's ready-room) as "Astrogator Fredericks"—his official title, though the term "astrogator" had never really replaced the more archaic "navigator" in the hearts or official dispatches of the Imperial Navy.

  But after a few weeks aboard Ken, she took to calling him "Big" just like everyone else did. Big Fredericks was a hard-drinking, hard-fighting officer who doubled as the Old Man's chief of security. The Marines assigned to his command seemed to identify with him because they thought he was much like them.

  Those who served under Big knew better. He had a fierce loyalty to the Empire and to his comrades; he was a stabilizing influence for young officers on their first deep-space cruise . . . He had a big heart and turned out to have the same love of folk music as Jackie did. One off-watch when they'd drunk too much, he took her off to the ship's hydroponics section and confessed his love for her, but Big was too much the father and not enough the lover figure. She'd laughed it off—which had hurt him.

  Less than a month later, the Kennewick took a broadside from a rebel ship during the insurrection at Allara. Big Fredericks, the Old Man and the rest of the bridge crew were blown into the vacuum. Somehow the Ken had limped home under Jackie's command, leaving her shattered survivors on the beach for three months: R&R at half-pay, waiting for another opportunity to ship out.

  For some of them that chance never came, but the door was always open for an Academy grad. Her ne
xt opportunity came with the Royal Oak II. After two years, attrition and the Thompson's World rebellion had promoted her to chief navigator, one of the youngest in His Majesty's Fleet. It took two more years for her to obtain her own command, as CO of the newly commissioned starship Torrance.

  It was during her tour with the Torrance that she met Dan McReynolds. They were from different worlds, really—he had been conscripted by the Mothallah System defense force and had clawed and scratched his way into engineering school. He had originally intended simply to acquire a skill so that when his hitch was up he wouldn't have to return to his poor home-world and go "on the dole," as they called it in Mothallah. But a brave and foolhardy emergency repair conducted during battle convinced someone in the Imperial Navy that his talents were too good to let escape.

  The Imperial Navy bought his contract from Mothallah System. The patron who discovered him made sure that he entered Officer Candidate School. By the time he was assigned to the Torrance as its chief engineer, he had as good a reputation as any engineer in the fleet. He had a way with machines. It was almost as if he spoke their language; his memory was phenomenal, his diagnostic skill uncanny. He could make anything work . . . with one notable exception.

  He fell in love with Jackie almost from the start. His over-confidence and brashness struck her as rather boorish; she mentally labeled him as an ass, then as immature. Then there'd been the rescue mission at the Tsing research colony, where they'd worked for forty-eight hours saving thousands of people threatened by a biodome collapse. In the end, all of her barriers broke down and she found herself drawn into an affair that was the talk of the Fleet. They seemed so incompatible at first: one partner outspoken, the other reserved; one optimistic, the other gloomy; one an officer the hard way, the other Academy-bred. But it worked somehow; each found in the other the missing element that had made them restless and unfulfilled.

  It worked until Dan was offered his own command. He accepted at once; he gave over his formal request for transfer with a stony face, without hesitation. It was probably career suicide to refuse, especially given his background and the stiff competition. She agreed with his logic and signed the transfer, accepting it then as she had a thousand times since.