Shadow's End Read online

  "You have some problem concerning Leelson Famber?" she prompted, brushing crumbs from her lips with one of the folded finan skins provided as napkins, soft and silky to the touch. On its own world, the finan is rare, almost extinct. Using its skins for napkins would be a conceit had the animal not been made for that purpose, as the Firsters aver. They are the hierarchs of homo-norm, of whom there are many, even upon Alliance Central. Besides, the finans' genetic pattern had been saved in the computers at Prime. So Lutha told me.

  Instead of answering, the Procurator asked, "Are you familiar with what is now called the 'Ularian crisis'?"

  Familiar, Lutha thought. Now there was a word. The crisis had been when? Almost a century ago. And on the frontier, to boot. Why in the world would a linguist like herself—a document expert, yes, but withal a mere functionary—be expected to be "familiar" with such distant and ancient history?

  She put her mind in neutral and stared at the table, noticing the foods she found most attractive were now closer to her and the disgusting dishes had been removed. How did the shadows know? Was her face that easy to read? Or were the shadows taught to interpret the almost imperceptible twitches and jerks most people made without realizing it. Were they empaths, like Fastigats? Perhaps they actually were Fastigats, turned invisible as penance for some unseemly behavior. Fastigats were great ones for seemliness.

  What had the old man been talking of? Of course. "Ularian crisis," she said. "Around twenty-four hundred of the common era, a standard century ago, give or take a little. Alliance frontier worlds in the Hermes Sector were overrun by a race or force or something called Ularians." She paused, forehead wrinkled. "Why was it named that?"

  "The first human populations that vanished were in a line, a vector, that led toward the Ular Region," he replied.

  She absorbed the fact. "So, this something wiped all human life off a dozen worlds or systems or—"

  The Procurator gestured impatiently at this imprecision.

  She gave him a half smile, mocking his irritation. "Well, a dozen somethings, Procurator—you asked what I knew and I'm telling you." She resumed her interrupted account, "Sometime later the Ularians went away. Thereafter, briefly, occurred the Great Debate, during which the Firster godmongers said Ularians didn't exist because the universe was made for man, and the Infinitarians said Ularians could exist because everything is possible. Both sides wrote volumes explaining Ularians or explaining them away—on little or no evidence, as I recall—and the whole subject became so abstruse that only scholars care one way or the other."

  The Procurator shook his head in wonder. "You speak so casually, so disrespectfully of it."

  She considered the matter ancient history. "I shouldn't be casual?"

  He grimaced. "At the time humans—at least those who knew what was going on—feared for the survival of the race."

  "Was it taken that seriously?" she asked, astonished.

  "It was by Alliance Prime, by those who knew what was happening! All that saved us from widespread panic was that the vanished settlements were small and few. Publicly, the disappearances were blamed on environmental causes, even though people vanished from every world in Hermes Sector—that is, every one but Dinadh."

  She shrugged, indicating disinterest in Dinadh. She who was to learn so much about Dinadh knew and cared nothing for it then.

  The Procurator went on. "My predecessors here at Prime could learn nothing about the Ularians. The only evidence of the existence of an inimical force was that men had disappeared! Prime had no idea why they—or it—attacked in the first place."

  He leaned forward, touching her lightly on the knee. "Did Leelson ever speak to you of Bernesohn Famber?"

  She was suddenly intrigued. "Oh, yes. Leelson's great-grandpop. One of the greatest of all Fastigats, to hear Leelson tell it. A genius, a biochemist."

  "Do you remember the name Tospia?"

  Lutha smiled. "Bernesohn's longtime lover. A Fastiga woman, of course." She frowned. "A diva in solo opera. Leelson played some of her sensurrounds for me. Very nice, though I think the senso-techs were owed as much credit as Tospia herself. To my taste, one person's performance sensed six times, however differentiated and augmented, does not have the interactive passion of six separate actors. I've yet to experience one that has true eroticism."

  The Procurator peered at her over the rim of his cup. "But Leelson never mentioned Bernesohn and the Ularians?"

  She gave the question to her subconscious, which came up empty. "I recall no connection."

  He settled himself with a half-muffled groan. "I beg your patience:

  "A century ago, there were twelve human populations on planets in Hermes Sector. Eleven of these were only settlements, six of them homo-normed, the other five at the survey stage. The twelfth world, Dinadh, had a planetary population. Dinadh is a small world, an unimportant world, except that it is near us in a spaciotemporal sense, though not in an astrophysical one. Everything into and out of Hermes Sector, including information, routes through Dinadh and did, even then.

  "So, it was customary for freighters to land there, whether going or coming, and one did so a century ago, bringing the news that two of the settlements in Hermes Sector had vanished. Prime sent six patrol ships carrying investigative teams; two ships returned with news of further vanishments; the other four did not return. We sent more men to find the lost men—frequently a mistake, as in this case. None of them returned. Dinadh's government, such as it is, refused to consider even partial evacuation, which would have been the best we could do. Evacuating a populated planet is impossible. There aren't enough ships to keep up with the birthrate." He sighed.

  "And?" she prompted.

  "Dinadh is the only occupied planet of its system, the only one suitable for occupation. The Alliance did the only thing it could think of, englobing the system with unmanned sentinel buoys. We might as well have done nothing, for all the good it did. No one came out of the sector toward Dinadh. Every probe we sent into the sector from Dinadh simply disappeared.

  "Ten standard years went by; then twenty, then thirty. Planets applying for colony rights were sent elsewhere. Then, thirty-three standard years after the crisis, the sentinel buoys picked up a freighter crossing the line from Hermes Sector into Dinadhi space! The holds were stuffed with homo-norm equipment. The crew claimed they had found it abandoned and therefore salvageable, after falling into Hermes Sector accidentally, through a rogue emergence. Later we checked for stellar collapse and found an enormous one about the right time—"

  "Stellar collapse?"

  "The usual cause of rogue emergences is stellar collapse. The dimensional field twitches, so to speak. Things get sucked in here and spat out there. Well, the crew was brought here, and more questions were asked. It turned out they'd picked up equipment from four worlds in the sector and had noticed nothing at all inimical. We sent volunteer expeditions to investigate. All of them returned shrugging their shoulders and shaking their heads. Nothing. No sign of what had happened to the human population thirty-odd years before, and no signs of aliens at all. We assumed the Ularians, whatever they or it had been, had departed."

  "So there were no survivors?" mused Lutha.

  He shook his head. "Oh, we looked, believe me! We had no information about Ularians, no description of them, no actual proof that they existed, which gratified the Firster godmongers, you may be sure, for they'd claimed from the beginning there were no such things as Ularians. Since government is always delicately poised vis-a-vis godmongers, we were extremely interested in what survivors might tell us, but we never found a thing in Hermes Sector. Oh, there were some children who turned up on Perdur Alas around twenty years ago, but they were probably emergence castaways also."

  "Unlikely they'd have been there for eighty years. They'd have had to be third or fourth generation."

  "Quite right. All this is mere diversion, however."

  "You started by asking me about Bernesohn Famber," she said impatiently.r />
  "The relevant fact is that Bernesohn Famber was on one of the ships that went into Hermes Sector right after the vanishments."

  "One of the lost ships."

  "No! One that came back. Bernesohn was erratic and secretive. A genius, no doubt, but odd. Sometimes he didn't appear outside his quarters for days and days. His colleagues didn't expect to see him regularly, so they didn't realize he was gone! When the ship got back here, they didn't have any idea where or when he'd gone. We couldn't find him."

  The Procurator leaned back in his chair. "Imagine our discomfiture sometime later when we learned he was living on Dinadh."

  "How did you find that out?" Lutha asked.

  "Well, a year or so after Bernesohn disappeared, Tospia, his longtime companion, gave womb-birth to twins. In Fastiga."

  Lutha knew where Fastiga was. It might be called a suburb of Prime. Leelson's mother lived there.

  The Procurator went on. "Tospia's twins were entered in the Famber lineage roster, but nobody at Prime made the connection."

  She said impatiently, "You intend to make the point, I presume, that the twins were conceived after Bernesohn's disappearance?"

  The Procurator assented. "Years later a sensation sniffer for one of the newslinks did a so-called biography of Tospia—unauthorized, need I say—in which he alleged that Bernesohn Famber could not have fathered the twins. Tospia threw a memorable and widely publicized tantrum and sued the sniffer for misprision of media freedom, asserting that Bernesohn had been living on Dinadh and that she had visited him there."

  The Procurator set down his cup and went on:

  "Enormous consternation, as you might imagine! Alliance officers were sent to Dinadh immediately to debrief Bernesohn about the Ularians."

  "And?"

  He shrugged, mouth downturned. "And the Dinadh planetary authorities turned them all away, saying that Bernesohn had bought a hundred-year privacy lease, that even though he was no longer at his leasehold, his lease was still in effect and no one could be admitted but family members, thank you very much. His 'family members' were notably uncooperative, and since our only reason for questioning Bernesohn was the Ularian threat, which was seemingly over, we couldn't demonstrate compelling need. In the absence of compelling need, we had no authority to invade a member planet, and that's what it would have taken."

  He nodded to himself, then resumed in a thoughtful voice: "Of course, we drew what inferences we could. We assumed Bernesohn had gone there because he expected to find something on Dinadh, but if he'd come up with anything useful, he hadn't told Prime about it."

  "You said he was no longer at his leasehold?"

  He sighed, turning his cup in his hands. "All Dinadh said about the matter was that they 'had welcomed him as an outlander ghost.' "

  "Which means?"

  "We presume it means he died. And there the matter has rested until now … " His voice trailed off disconsolately.

  "But?"

  "But, now they're back."

  Lutha stared at him, disbelieving. "The Ularians?"

  He nodded, swallowed, shredded the finan-skin napkin between his fingers. "Almost a hundred standard years! Why not fifty years ago? It was then Prime decided it was safe to open up Hermes to colonization once more. There are three populated worlds and several colonies in there; there are homo-norm teams on half a dozen other worlds, and survey teams everywhere worthy of survey."

  "And?"

  "And two of the colonies are gone. Like last time."

  Lutha turned away from his distress, giving herself time to think, holding her cup over the table and feeling it grow heavier as it was filled with tea by an almost invisible shadow.

  "What has all this to do with Leelson?" she asked.

  "Now we're desperate to know whatever Bernesohn Famber knew. As long as Bernesohn's privacy lease has any time to run, however, the only people Dinadh will allow to poke about among Bernesohn's belongings are family members. Family is a very big thing on Dinadh. Since Leelson is descended from Bernesohn, Leelson is Bernesohn's 'family,' so far as the Dinadhi are concerned."

  Now Lutha understood what they were asking of her. "You need Leelson, but Leelson has disappeared." She tapped her fingers, thinking. "Did you think I might know where Leelson is? Or did you have some idea the Dinadhi would accept me as Leelson's 'family'?"

  "I don't think you know where Leelson is, no. I know the Dinadhi will accept you as family. You are Leelson's wife as they define wife."

  When Lutha told me this, I laughed. It was true, in a way. She was Leelson's wife as we on Dinadh define wife. Some of the time.

  "Because we were lovers?" she asked him.

  "Because you bore his child," the Procurator said.

  She felt the blood leave her face, felt it drain away to disclose a familiar sorrow, an endless ache. "My son is a private matter."

  He sighed. "Believe me, Lutha Tallstaff, under other circumstances I would not challenge your privacy. The Ularians give us no choice. Do you remember Mallia Stentas? From Keleborn?"

  Lutha answered distractedly, "We were at upper school together. She became a manager for some agricultural consortium … "

  "You may mourn her now—she and her lifemates and all their many children—gone from Tapil's World. And the people on Up-dyke-Chel. They are not merely dead, but dust in the wind, vanished and gone, no stone to mark the place they were. Whatever the Ularians may be, when they come upon a world, they leave behind no monuments … "

  He stood, walked across the room to the wall retriever, and flicked it into life. "Tapil's World," he murmured. "Beamed by our recorders."

  An empty town materialized before them. Everywhere evidence of interruption. A doll lying abandoned by a fence. A child's wagon, half-full of harvested vegetables, standing at the side of a fenced garden. A sun hat caught in a thorny shrub. A fuzzy native animal—either useful for something or a neutered pet, as it would not have escaped homo-norming otherwise—hopping slowly along a hedge, crying plaintively. Kitchens with food half-prepared, rooms with tables still littered, desks still piled. The probe came down over one desk, focusing on a holo that stood there. Herself. Mallia and herself, young scholars, arms around one another, grinning into eternity.

  "Damn you," Lutha said without heat.

  "I want you to feel it," he admitted. "It could be your house. It could be you, and your son. It could be all humanity."

  During our time together, Lutha described his voice, full of a sonorous beauty, like the tolling of a funeral bell. He was working Fastigat stuff on her, wringing her emotions like a wet towel, making her all drippy. Leelson had done that from time to time, worked Fastigat stuff on her, though he had done it for their mutual pleasure.

  "Nothing like a romantic moon," she told me. "A little wine, and a silver-tongued Fastigat to make the worlds move."

  "It does not take wine or a Fastigat to move the world," I told her, thinking of my own love.

  "I am relieved to hear it," she said then, laughing as she wept. We had then a good deal of reason to weep.

  But even then, during her meeting with the Procurator, she thought all that Fastigat stuff unnecessary. The memory of Mallia alone wrung her quite enough.

  So, she took a deep breath and said to this old, conniving man: "You want me to go to Dinadh, is that it?"

  The Procurator nodded. "We want someone to go, and the only people they will allow are Leelson, his mother, or you. Leelson's mother has refused to go. Leelson himself, we can't find. That leaves you. You're already proficient in basic Nantaskan. Dinadh speaks a dialect of Nantaskan. And I'll send a Fastigat with you."

  "Please. No," she cried.

  He reached toward her, pleadingly. "Lutha. Please. We'll pick someone who isn't … intrusive. Someone tactful."

  She snorted.

  "Some Fastigats can be," he said in an offended tone.

  "The Dinadhi will allow me a companion?" She sneered. "Someone nonfamily?"

  "If he goes as your ass
istant or servant, yes. You'll need some such to help with your son. You'll have to take the boy."

  She laughed again, this time incredulously. "You're joking, of course." He knew how ridiculous the idea was. Even the invigilators who had summoned her to this meeting had been aware of the problem Leely presented. They'd brought a whole crèche team with them to take care of Leely while she was away.

  He shook his head at her, leaning forward to pat her knee, an avuncular gesture. "Believe me, Lutha, I wouldn't ask it if it weren't necessary. The Dinadhi won't accept you without the boy."

  "You expect me to drag a child across half a dozen sectors to … " This child, she said to herself. This particular child, with his particular problems.

  "Spatiotemporally, it's not half a dozen sectors," he told her. "I wish it were, quite frankly. We'd be safer!"

  She made herself relax, slowly picked up the cup once more, finding it fresh, steaming hot.

  "Will you go?" he asked.

  "Do I have a choice?" she grated. "If I don't go, you'll—"

  "Nothing," he assured her. "Really nothing. We have the power to compel you, but compelling you would be useless. We need your willing, intelligent cooperation. It's up to you whether you give it or not."

  As though that old devil conscience would have let her say no! "You know me," she said angrily. "You knew I wouldn't say no. Didn't you?"

  As he did. As Fastigats did. Lutha told me all about Fastigats. Fastigats get to know people very quickly, very well, very completely, as had this bald, quirky old empath across from her who hadn't come right out and told her he was one of them. Who hadn't needed to, any more than Leelson had, when they had been together.

  "You're going to be fine," Leelson had said often during her later stages of pregnancy, soothing her in moments of dismay.

  "I know," she'd snapped. "Women have been having babies for hundreds of thousands of years."

  "Well, yes. But I don't regard that as particularly comforting, do you?" He made a face at her, making her laugh. "Stars have been blowing up into novas for billions of years, but that doesn't make their near vicinity desirable."