Shadow's End Page 19

  Why did they come at all? After that first night, they changed nothing. They took nothing away. They added nothing at all. They merely came and wandered about, black against the stars, occasionally trembling the earth, shaking the hills, shaking Snark herself in absolute terror.

  At first she survived on this terror, letting it drive her deep into her cave and keep her there. As time went by, however, curiosity asserted itself, and she found herself speculating more and more about what the presences were, and what their enigmatic business might be. She wanted to see them. She wanted to get a good look! She did not consider that she might have been conditioned to be curious. The feeling was natural to her. She had always been that way. Mother had …

  Mother had always been that way too. Mother had been here with her, long ago, and Mother had always been curious about Perdur Alas. The others … the other people used to warn her. Don't take chances. But Mother had taken chances. The memory came and went, evanescent as a breeze.

  It was time to satisfy curiosity. Since the beings seemed no longer particularly interested in the camp, she stealthily removed a number of items to make night spying easier: devices for seeing in the dark; recorders activated by change in air chemistry or pressure, by sound or movement, by temperature change; solar-powered lights, solar-powered reference files. More food and blankets, to make her other hidey-holes warm enough to spend whole nights in, if necessary. The things that wouldn't fit into her cave or into the new hidey-holes, she hid elsewhere. The solar devices she secreted here and there in newly dug holes or among piles of stone, covering them with layers of furze that she could remove each morning to allow the devices to charge. The night eyes she secreted in her hole above the camp. There, lying in the mouth of her tunnel, rolled into a pair of soft blankets and screened by carefully positioned branches, she propped herself in a comfortable position, one she could wake from silently.

  They didn't come. Toward morning she roused, tasting them. They were somewhere, but not here, not at the camp. The taste was mild, barely discernible. She stood up, yawned, and made her way to the cave over the sea.

  Twice more she waited fruitlessly.

  On the fourth night they came. She gagged on her own saliva and knew they were nearby.

  She focused the device, propping it in the opening, careful not to move the screening grasses and leaves. She watched them come from the west, over the sea, watched them traverse the moor between, watched them gather south of the camp as though waiting for something or checking on something or, perhaps, merely assembling there prior to departure. Through the device she could see the shape of them, the way they moved. They had no legs. These could not be the earth tremblers; these were the others. Monstrous and shaggy, they floated in air, multiple appendages hanging limply below, a few of them reaching to the sides as though feeling the way.

  Snark put down the night eyes and clawed at her mouth, cleaning it out with her fingers. Too much of this and she would choke on her own spit! She put a wad of leaves between her teeth to hold them apart so the sticky saliva could flow—if it would—and lifted the device to her eyes once more.

  The shapes had no faces, nothing that looked like ears or noses or mouths. Occasionally two of the creatures would pull in all their appendages, making their bellies smooth and shiny, and would then turn toward one another while wavering blobs of deep-hued color flowed across the smooth integument. The next time two of them paired in this fashion, she took the device from her eyes to see if the color was visible to the naked eye. It was detectable only because she knew it was there. A shifting red shadow, a depth of blue or purple, at this distance hardly discernible without the device.

  On Prime, while living in the sanctuary, she had gone with the other children to an aquarium. She remembered a multiarmed sea creature that had changed color, being in one instant white and gray, in another dark, marbled with red, and in another so gravelly that it disappeared into the sandy seabed it lay upon. So the skin on these creatures changed, from dark to light, from pattern to pattern.

  One of them had a winy-red patch that repeatedly moved diagonally downward, left to right. Diagonal Red, she named it, turning her attention to the others. By the time night was over, she had named Four Green Spot, Blue Lines, Big Gray Blob, and Speckled Purple, these particular ones because they were at the top of the hierarchy. Diagonal Red was the one who moved first, the one the others followed. Blue Lines and Speckled Purple were next, then Four Green Spot and Big Gray Blob, and after them, a host of others whose characteristics she had been unable to identify. Over their next few visits she counted them, seeing as many as eighty at a time. Her count never came out the same. There were at least eighty. Maybe as many as a hundred, all huge as hills. All truly and unbelievably horrid.

  For a time she stopped watching them, too exhausted to do otherwise, but curiosity reasserted itself and she came back to her hidey-hole, back to her blankets, watching. Very late, choking on the taste of them, she wakened from restless sleep. Two she later identified as Diagonal Red and Speckled Purple had returned alone and were moving through the vacant camp. After making colors at one another several times, they separated, one stopping at the seaward edge of the camp, the other stopping on the inland side. There they poised themselves, turned on their sides, settled onto the soil, and extended three or four appendages on each side, these tentacles becoming longer and longer, wider and wider, creeping along the edges of the camp, surrounding it, until at last the tips approached one another and touched.

  From her carefully dug hole on the hill, Snark could see down into this squat cylinder of alien flesh, five hundred paces across. The outer surface was shaggy. The inside was bare and shiny. She watched fascinated as colors developed upon the bare bellies of the participants, then moved sideways onto the appendages, moving right to left, onto the other creature, color succeeding color, shape succeeding shape, an unending flow of luminescence, now bright, now dark, now vivid, now pale, flowing uninterruptedly from the bare flesh of Diagonal Red across the appendages to the bare flesh of Speckled Purple, thence around onto Diagonal Red once more, a slowly whirling vortex of color and movement. She didn't need glasses to see it. It was perfectly visible without!

  Despite the strangling taste, the strangeness of the sight, something teased at Snark's mind, something she should see, should understand. She strained, trying to think, what was it? Something … something …

  Then it was over. The two shapes darkened, the appendages separated, curled into tentacle shapes, shrank languidly back to their usual size. The central creatures rose like shaggy, bulbous balloons and moved away. Propelled, Snark told herself, by thought. Or wish. Or by something else, somewhere else.

  A few moments later the taste vanished. Snark scraped her tongue, rinsed her mouth with water from her canteen, spat repeatedly, getting rid of it. What had she just watched? What kind of ceremony? Oh, to be a Fastigat right now! Able to sense whatever emotion had been present, whatever those two immensities had been feeling! Something solemn, she thought. Some color litany, some ritual observance. Or perhaps they had been mating!

  If so, why would they pick a human encampment to mate around? No. It had more the sense of a ritual. Sacrifice, maybe? Explaining to their weird gods that they had wiped out a few dozen humans as required by their religion?

  Again something teased at her mind. Something she should know! She held very still, hoping it would come to her. It did not. Merely that teasing sensation, something she should hold on to and could not get hold of!

  Ah, well. Let it go for tonight. She hid her night-eye device once more, picked up her canteen, and trudged down the hill toward the moor paths to the sea. The stars told her it was still some hours until morning. Still some hours to stay hidden in. She had not known them to come twice on one night, but this evening's exercise indicated how little she really knew.

  The way seemed longer than usual. When she dropped into the cave at last, she was in a mood of weary indifference. She wante
d to live, but not much. What she really wanted to do was understand these creatures, but what she had seen tonight was unintelligible. Perhaps they would remain unintelligible.

  She stripped off her clothes and laid them in a pile at the back of the cave. Tomorrow would be wash day. She pulled other clothing from her sack and put it on. She always slept fully dressed except for her boots. One never knew when one might have to move quickly. She checked the emergency pack by the entry hole. Water. Food. Medical supplies. A change of clothing.

  "Now I lay me," she told herself, curling into her blankets, knees to chest, one arm cradling her head. "Now I lay me." Outside the surf repeated sea words, over and over. Shush. Soof. Fwoosh. Again and again.

  She dreamed. She was walking on the moor, coming to the cave by the sea, but she was not alone. Someone held her by the hand.

  "We must go very carefully," the someone said. "Try not to go the same way too often. Not to make a trail, you understand?"

  Snark jerked her chin resolutely, saying she understood. Things could follow trails. She had to be careful, or the things would get her.

  They came to the edge of the cliff. "Hold on tight," said the someone.

  Snark's arms were locked around the person's neck, her legs around the person's waist. The person leapt, and Snark's stomach came up into her throat the way it always did. Then they were swinging, swinging, then the hole was there, and they were in.

  "Home is where the heart is," said someone, kissing Snark. "Home is where my girl is."

  Snark looked up at the person …

  Color flowing, blotches flowing, making a pattern …

  The person held her tightly, patting her on the back.

  Bright and dim, pale and vivid, colors on the huge fleshy barrier. Shaggy skin outside, bare skin inside …

  The person smiled.

  Shapelessness became shape. Shades flowed into one another. Blotches and colors combined to make a face on the body of an alien monster, a huge face that moved and spoke and smiled and called her by name!

  "Sweetheart," the mouth said. "Love."

  Her mother's face!

  Snark's cry went out over the sea like the cry of a wounded animal, totally alone, infinitely sorrowful.

  "Mother," she cried. "Oh, Mother, Mother, come back to me!"

  Night on Dinadh. In the leasehold, Lutha and the two Fastigats had had their evening meal. We had packed the last few things we intended to take with us. Then Leelson insisted that everyone lie down and get as much sleep as possible, promptly thereafter making it impossible for anyone to sleep by getting into a fierce argument with Lutha. I had felt it coming during our evening meal, like thunder just beyond the horizon, a muted mutter, scarcely heard and yet ominous, making one's whole body tense, awaiting the flash of lightning, the crash of riven air!

  The flash was Leelson's pronouncement to Lutha: "When Trompe, Saluez, and I leave in the morning, I want you and the child to stay here, Lutha. Give us a few days to get well away, then ask the people to take you back to the port."

  "The hell," she snarled, a thundercrack.

  Hurriedly, I left the room. They were so intent upon each other, they did not see me go. Trompe, who had been half-asleep in the neighboring room, had evidently felt the emotional storm going on, for he emerged, blinked at me, and mouthed, "What?"

  I shrugged and kept going. While I fully intended to listen, I didn't want to be involved. We mutilated ones are observers of life, not participants. So says the sisterhood. And safer so, so says the sisterhood. And more peaceful.

  So I took myself beyond the storeroom door and then shamelessly leaned against the wall while I listened to what was going on. Lutha was saying at great length that having come this far, she had no intention of going home.

  "Besides," she cried, "you and Trompe aren't linguists, and I am."

  "We are Fastigats," said Leelson.

  "Fastigats aren't gods!" she snarled at him. "Much though you like to think so! You can tell how people feel, maybe, but you can't tell why. Sometimes, it takes words to tell why."

  It was true that neither Trompe nor Leelson had a really good command of our language. I spoke far better aglais than they did Nantaskan. But then, a lot of us learn languages as children, in order to cater to our leaseholders. Why would they learn our dialect? There are few of us who speak the tongue.

  "You will be safer at home," he said, like a father cautioning a child. "You will be better off."

  "I'll decide where I'll be better off," she said. "If you'd had the common sense and decency to tell people you were coming here, I wouldn't have been sent. Now that I have been sent, I've no intention of going home until the job is done."

  "The boy will be in the way." His tone said she would be in the way, too, which perhaps she noticed.

  "Leelson," said Trompe from the doorway. I could see him through the hinge gap at the side of the door I stood behind. "Leelson. Stop talking and think."

  Leelson stopped talking. I assumed he was looking at Lutha. The silence had a peculiarly penetrating quality to it, one I have noticed before when he or Trompe reached out. So, he was reaching at Lutha, into her, understanding her.

  "Stop it," said Lutha. "Stop digging at me! I'm fully capable of telling you how I feel. I am not a gofer to be sent hither and thither at the whim of any presumptuous Fastigat who gets a burr up his rear! I'm a person. Until the Great Gauphin comes down from heaven and appoints you his lieutenant, I've got the same rights you have. I decided to come here, and I've decided to stay until our mission is finished. Since I had to bring Leely in order to get here, he'll come along, no matter how much 'in the way' he is."

  Silence. I saw Trompe make a helpless gesture.

  After a time Leelson said calmly, "Have you thought about your career? A lengthy interruption certainly won't forward it."

  "Having a child didn't forward it," she said. "Quite frankly, I don't anticipate it forwarding much in the future. About the best I can hope for is keeping my head above water."

  "She's bored, Leelson." This was Trompe.

  More silence. Then her voice, quieter: "He's right. I'm bored with my life on Alliance Central! I'm bored sick with it! I'm also terrified at the threat of the Ularians. I may mock the Firster assurance that men are the meaning and soul of creation, but that doesn't mean I welcome being slaughtered by something bigger and meaner. The Procurator used fear for motivation, succeeding better than he knew!"

  Even I, who am no Fastigat, knew she was not telling all the truth. Later, when the men had gone to sleep, she came to the storeroom door and peered in, looking for me.

  "You're still up," she said, trying to be surprised. No doubt she had seen the light of my candle.

  "I'm too … too something to sleep," I confessed.

  She sat on a sack of grain, crossing her ankles, then recrossing them, twiddling her feet, wanting to talk about something, obviously.

  "Leelson was right," I murmured. "You would be safer back in your home. And so would the boy."

  She looked up at me blindly. "I don't want to be safe, Saluez." There was a sob in her voice, betraying a feeling I knew well. She wanted to die. It is not so much an active thing, this feeling, not so much a desire to kill oneself as it is a desire not to be. An absence of hope. Despite everything she told herself about the boy, she had no hope. She saw herself getting older and older while he got bigger and stronger, his demands got bigger and bigger, more and more difficult. She saw herself victim to a helpless love for him, unable to help him or herself, desiring rather to be dead.

  I found myself holding her, cuddling her as she had cuddled me, laying my own fingers on her lips.

  "He should get to know his son," she said, taking my hand in her own. "Get to know him."

  What was there to know? I wondered. I didn't say it aloud.

  "Leely has many … many interesting qualities," she insisted.

  "Of course," I murmured. "Children do."

  "His artistic talent alone
… "

  "Shhh," I whispered, rocking her. "Shhh."

  So we sat together in the dark, reaching for light. My sisters tell me so women have done for lo these thousands of years.

  CHAPTER 6

  In the hive of T'loch-ala, which is Old Place in Lutha's language, Mitigan of the Asenagi and Chur Durwen of Collis, being neither 1 linguists nor Fastigats, found that getting information out of the Dinadhi was easier assumed than accomplished. Though they were well served by the two women appointed to the task, one veiled and one barefaced, the women had no more to say than any other member of the hive. True, they spoke a little aglais, as did Chur Durwen, and Mitigan spoke enough Thibegan, which was a Nantaskan tongue, to make his wants known if he used sign language along with it, but neither of the men had any luck whatsoever in finding out where Bernesohn Famber might once have lived and even now held lease upon Dinadh.

  "I've told you we don't know," said the barefaced servitor, an older woman whose voice verged upon annoyance. "We would have no reason to know. We do not discuss such things. Until you said the man's name, I had never heard of him. We have our own pattern here on Dinadh. Why would we ignore our own pattern to enter that of some outlander ghost?"

  Both men were Firsters of the more primitive sort, accustomed to treating every itch in the groin as though it were divine commandment, and after several days of utter boredom in the hive, Mitigan thought he'd try a bit with the veiled servitor. She had a seductive shape beneath her robes and a pleasant voice from behind her mask. He managed to twitch the veil a little bit to one side before she got away from him, but that little bit was enough to leave him sweating and cold, like a man who had just escaped dropping over a precipice.

  "My god, man," he whispered to Chur Durwen. "She looked chewed. Like a viper bat had been at her, or one of those hovolutes they have on Zeta Nine."