Sundowner

by Claremont, Chris

“You should rest, Shavrin’s-Child,” Kymri told her. “You were very lucky, no need to push that.”

  “Raqella,” she asked.

  “You know it was him you rescued?”

  “Not that many Hal aboard to choose from. Ch’ghan’s broader across the chest, built more like you.”

  She felt the faintest tickle of claws on the inside of her left wrist and with her next breath a wisp of cinnamon, and closed her eyes tight against a flood of associations, too many of which she recognized as being wholly alien yet all of them hers.

  “I stand beside you,” he said, “on your heart side.”

  Where else, she thought, and pondered a response that was as automatic as it was natural. She touched her own, far blunter nails to the inside of his wrist and offered a formal greeting.

  “R’ch’ai.”

  “S’m’ch R’ai,” he replied, and then, “Raqella has a room of his own, suffering the effects of his exposure somewhat more than you.”

  “That’s a little hard to believe,” Hana offered acidly. “And it strikes me, ShipMaster, you stand in a place to which you have no right.”

  Kymri made a shallow nod of acknowledgment, but before he stepped aside, he bent low, his mouth next to Nicole’s ear and whispered something for her alone, in a High Speech she was certain none but they would understand.

  “Trust me, Shavrin’s-Child,” he said, while she retained her most guileless poker face, “whatever comes. More than your life depends on that.”

  “What’s happened,” Nicole demanded of Hana, when she took his place and Nicole’s free hand was well.

  “Hard to explain,” her friend replied, her frustration evident. “I’m not as fluent in Hal as Kymri ShipMaster is in English.”

  Jenny looked outraged as she faced off against Hana and Kymri. Nicole tried to make some sense of what she was saying, to discern at least a pattern to her words, but there was no music to them.

  “She’s upset,” she said, stating the obvious.

  “With reason,” was Hana’s retort.

  Nicole wanted to say more, but she was too dry and her throat hurt.

  “That’s to be expected,” Jenny told her through Hana, after she made the plaintive complaint. “Dehydration of the tissues in the airway, caused by the decreasing air pressure. And the fact you were screaming pretty loudly.”

  “Was I? Don’t remember.”

  “Slight disruption in immediate short-term memory is consistent with this kind of event.”

  “What do you mean?” Hoarse as Nicole was, the flash of fear in her voice was unmistakable.

  Jenny understood her concern. “Follow my finger, will you?”

  She held it up before Nicole’s face, a foot or so out, and moved it back and forth, up and down; Nicole had no trouble tracking or keeping it in focus.

  “We’ll be running additional tests to be sure, but I think they’ll confirm the initial results: you weren’t deprived of oxygen long enough for there to be any cerebral damage. Other than the mother of all headaches, of course.” She offered up a smile to give the last observation a humorous twist, and Nicole made a wan and weary effort to return it.

  “That obvious, is it?”

  “The good news is, it’ll pass.”

  “I’m so happy. When do I get to speak English again?”

  “Yes, Kymri,” added Hana pointedly, “when?”

  “Answer me true, old lion,” Nicole asked him, forcing her voice to remain calm and steady through sheer act of will, “was I infected with the Speaker genetic virus as well as Ben Ciari?”

  “Yes.”

  Hana’s hand tightened convulsively on Nicole’s.

  “To one extent or other,” he continued, “you all were. There were too many unknowns, our computer models didn’t apply; we were desperate, we had no way of knowing if the virus would work at all, much less who would be the best subject. You, Nicole, had the greatest potential, far too much of a good thing as it turned out. Your natural personality would have been overwhelmed, subsumed completely by its Hal counterpart—as Ciari’s very nearly was. We aborted the procedure as soon as the danger became evident. But some mistakes are more easily done than undone.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Hana added bitterly.

  Kymri faced her, eye to eye across Nicole’s bed. “In your case, Hana, and Dr. Zhimyanov’s, there was no true need. In Nicole’s”—a pause, and a sense to Nicole that this was a decision Kymri had disapproved of and fought—“we thought it best that she not know. That was the reason for your adoption,” he told her, “to guarantee you—should the worst happen—a place among us.”

  “I’m not one of you!” she cried.

  “More so than you might think, Shavrin’s-Child.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “This happens occasionally to Speakers,” he told them all, pausing every so often to repeat himself in English for Jenny’s benefit. “A traumatic shock scrambles the brain’s circuitry, rearranges the patterns of Self. A Speaker is the repository of what you might call the institutional genetic memory of our race.”

  A Shaman, Nicole thought.

  “What happens,” he continued, “is that the walls between past and present become porous, the component aspects become intertwined, sometimes inextricably. There are no identities to contend with, it’s not a question of absorbing past lives, but past life experiences. You are not your ancestors reborn, you have access to the signal events of their existence. You’re unable to differentiate where you end and they begin; all are one.

  “A school of philosophy among the Hal considers this a desirable attainment, a way of communing more completely with our history, and, they believe, our Creator.”

  Nicole caught sight of a plastic bracelet about her left wrist, idly lifted it into view. She lay her head back against her pillow, blinking rapidly as unexpected tears washed the surface of her eyes.

  “Nicole,” asked Hana in concern.

  Nicole’s acknowledgment was in as flat and toneless a voice as her Hal speech could manage. “That tag on my arm, Hana, what’s written there, is that my name?”

  “Yes. It’s a standard hospital ID.”

  She took a deep breath, then another, filling her lungs until she could feel her ribs ache and then letting it out ever so slowly.

  “They’re squiggles,” she said, but Hana didn’t comprehend the Hal term she used. Nicole uttered a foul mental curse and threw in an alternative before Kymri could offer his own translation. “Shapes,” she snapped. “They have no meaning. They’re not even recognizable to me as letters. Like looking at Hebrew or Cyrillic or Arabic or kanji for the first time.“ She smiled thinly, humorlessly, at a spot flash of memory. ”Like how we felt aboard Range Guide the first time we saw Hal text.“

  “We’ll have to run tests,” Jenny said through Kymri, with hints of strain and concern about her eyes and mouth that spoke of far more history than simple years would indicate. “To determine the extent of this syndrome and whether its cause is psychological or organic.”

  “Can you fix it?” Nicole asked.

  It was Kymri who answered.

  “We tried.”

  She couldn’t help staring. She stood alone in her bedroom, naked before her reflections being displayed on the VideoWall. There were three ScanCom sources, allowing her to see front and back simultaneously. Patterns had formed on her skin—“akin to stigmata,” Jenny had said, caused by her body trying to adapt itself to the new image of herself being dictated by her mind—as though someone had taken a brush and drawn a trio of interweaving russet stripes down the length of her spine, in a design eerily reminiscent to Nicole of Celtic knotwork. Two began under each ear, just behind the knob of her jaw, the third at the base of her skull, just above her cranial hairline. They joined along the column of her neck, and branched once more where the curve of her spine was most pronounced, into three distinct double-knotted motifs, one fading away jus
t past her coccyx, while the other two followed the hollow of her hips to her pubic bone. There were similar markings on the backs of each hand, wrapping around her wrists, and on her feet and ankles.

  She’d seen them before, they were part of the vision of herself that came in dreams and hallucinations, the vision of Nicole as a Hal.

  She stroked her fingertips along the frontal hip stripes, very lightly, to see if there was any difference in texture between the two shades of skin. Then, harder, she rub-rolled one hand across the other and back again. The change in her coloring was striking; she had no trouble acknowledging it as beautiful. From the first, she’d accepted this without question, as part of the natural order of her being. So much so, in fact, that when Jenny first brought it to her attention—while she was still in hospital—Nicole hadn’t known what she was talking about. It wasn’t until Hana thrust photos of herself under her nose that she finally understood—and even then the figure of herself that looked strange was the one in the pictures.

  She’d been confined to quarters since being released from hospital; Hobby had no practical choice in that regard, everyone—Nicole most of all—knew there was no way she could function effectively in her present state. At least, she thought, and not for the first time, aboard a human vessel.

  There was a lot to get used to, very little of it pleasant. She could manage food, but only by substantially ignoring the taste and texture. She was too angry to turn to Kymri for dishes from the Hal stores, and Hana and Jenny too tactful to attempt preparing anything themselves. Videos she found boring—it wasn’t simply being unable to comprehend any dialogue, the physical action itself, the actors’ behavior, often made no sense—and music had become disturbingly hard to listen to. That shook her far more than losing her language, because it was one of the means she and her Wanderer crew had used initially to expand and enrich their contact with the Hal aboard Range Guide. She tried her guitar one night, delighted at first when her fingers remembered all the right moves and she found herself launching into one of her favorite pieces. Moments later, Hana had to tackle her to keep her from smashing the instrument against the nearest wall. She’d struggled like a crazy person, lashing out with words and fists, giving her friend a spectacular black eye for her trouble as Hana buried her on the couch until the outburst passed.

  True, her body could play, but the sounds it made gave her ears no pleasure.

  Clothes, too, presented a problem and here she had to turn to the Hal for help. Nothing of her own looked right, felt right. Not uniforms, nor casual attire. To no one’s surprise, Kymri produced a traveling bag outfitted specifically for Nicole. She hadn’t said a word when he offered it, but for the first time in days felt decently dressed.

  She’d asked Jenny about the stigmata when they’d first appeared, darkening by the day until they were the same black with red highlights as her hair. Mainly to discern, if possible, what else might be in store for her.

  “Don’t think you’ll grow fangs or claws, if that’s any help,” the young Scot had said, in cheery Highland gallows humor that provoked a snort of agreement from Hana (who as usual was translating).

  “I am suitably reassured,” was Nicole’s deadpan rejoinder.

  “Stating the obvious,” Hana went on seriously, “the mind executes absolute control over the body’s systems. That’s one of the governing principles of yoga. We can adapt quite remarkably to external environmental realities. In your case, the dynamic catalyst is internal. How far it’ll go, how long it’ll last”—she shook her head—“I’ve no idea.”

  “Some help you are,” Nicole had told her.

  “I feel like a freak,” she said flatly, to her reflection. And heard the silent rejoinder in her thoughts: Get used to it, Ace, you are a freak.

  She found herself a pair of loose shorts and a pullover shirt. They were natural fiber, as were all Hal clothes, combining the durable comfort of soft cotton with the elegance of silk. The cut was full, the idea being to look as attractive as possible without sacrificing any ease of movement. She grimaced ruefully at memories of herself, snugged into outfits that on occasion’ were cut as tight as skin; she knew how good she looked, how good they made her feel at the time, yet now just the thought made her shudder with distaste. For the Hal, probably because the designs of their bodies and their fur made those bodies as much a part of their costume as the clothes that adorned them, sensuality was a far more essential aspect of social presentation than simply looking sexy.

  Another smile, no sadness in this one at all but eager anticipation, as she scrabbled through her traveling LockBox for the mail disks Ben Ciari had sent her from the Hal homeworld, s’N’dare. Even after better than five years, he was still considered essential personnel, but she suspected from his letters that he’d stay on no matter what, regardless of his official status. Thanks to the Speaker virus—and here, her expression twisted momentarily into something dangerous, her eyes flashing an anger she wasn’t bothering to hide—he, like she, had a unique insight into Hal society. Which in turn sparked an insatiable fascination.

  His first letters were basically a travelogue, written in Hal of course; he told her the reason was to hone her own knowledge and facility with the language, but Nicole had decided from the start that it was really to drive her nuts. He would video some and write others, using the classically oriented Trade Tongue—their equivalent of Standard English—and then a growing number of street dialects, forcing her to learn to read and write. He told her initially about the world, the people, the sights and smells and sounds, painting a mural in words and pictures that would make up for her not being there in person. She couldn’t wait now to compare his descriptions with the actual reality; that was why she wanted to look over her mail, to refresh her memory.

  Yet, as she shuffled the deck of plastic squares, letting her fingers and blind fate do the choosing, she found herself thinking about his most recent communiques. There hadn’t been as many of late—and her brow furrowed as she realized “of late” meant the better part of a year. She’d been so caught up in her own work, and the attendant neuroses, that she hadn’t paid more than superficial attention. He’d apparently gotten himself hooked on Hal philosophy; the last letter had been so thick with allegory and folk tales that had neither meaning nor resonance for her that she gave up trying to read it. Instead, she skimmed for any sign of something comprehensible and seriously contemplated forwarding a note to Judith Canfield recommending a psychiatric evaluation for Ciari.

  Now, she thought she understood some of what he must have been going through.

  Be interesting, she noted to herself as she tucked a disk into the appropriate I/O slot, to see what I think of those stories now.

  She never got the chance. The entire Wall popped to life, presenting a panoramic image of hurling itself through a phalanx of Pacific swells. The camera was mounted on a fantail stanchion, the lens encompassing virtually the same field of view as the human eye. In the foreground, in the cockpit, was Nicole, bundled into a suit of foul-weather gear; she took a wave head on with a terrific crash that sent spray cascading the length of the hull. The boat was groaning under the pressure of wind and water, but handling the strain with ease, as was its Master, Nicole’s ear-to-ear grin visible even in partial profile.

  For Nicole, watching this playback, there was no such excitement and not a hint of the joy. Only an awful, atavistic terror that sent her reeling across the room, stumbling over furniture, scrambling across the bed, uncaring that her nails were tearing the sheets in a frantic desperation she didn’t understand and couldn’t control. She was howling, a noise neither human nor Hal, yet stark in its presentation of an absolute and all-embracing fear.

  The reaction was so fast, so physical, that there was no way for her rational self to reassert control before she tumbled into a ball and tucked herself as tightly as could be managed into the farthest corner of the room. She screamed to herself that there was nothing to be afraid of, that she was safe aboard a
starship for God’s sake, that she was reacting to a damn image! Not to mention one representing a memory that she cherished.

  Didn’t matter. All she could see, all she could sense, was the fearful immensity of the ocean.

  “How do you feel?” Jenny asked, much later, in the common room of their suite, while Nicole nursed a steaming mug of tea and the hangover induced by the cocktail of sedatives Jenny had spray-shot into her arm.

  Nicole offered a wan smile in return and gently corrected the doctor’s pronunciation.

  “Fine,” was her reply, although that was a concept with many meanings for the Hal, ranging from “fine,” as in “I’m ready and able to hunt,” to “I’m still alive and breathing.” Nicole chose the latter, though she still had her doubts.

  Her scream had been heard, of course. As Hana noted acerbically afterward, all the way to the Bridge. When the door to her bedroom had opened, she’d sprang for it, ready to kill any who blocked her way. Ramsey Sheridan caught the full brunt of her panicked charge, managing to wrap his arms about her legs as he went down, to keep her from going any farther. It had taken three more people to hold her still enough for Jenny to administer the tranquilizer and even then Nicole was so jazzed on adrenaline that she never wholly lost consciousness.

  “How crazy am I?” she asked Jenny, staring down at her tea and wishing there were leaves at the bottom of the cup to tell her the answer.

  Jenny touched her hand and, when Nicole looked up, spread her arms in what Nicole recognized—after some thought—as a gesture of helplessness.

  “I’m sorry,” Jenny said, “I don’t understand.”

  Nicole nodded—another consciously remembered gesture, not common to the Hal—while Jenny was mastering the basics of Trade Tongue in surprisingly short order, she was still at fundamentally the phrase book level of communications. With all the attendant limitations. Even if she’d understood Nicole’s question, she didn’t have fluency enough to convey any sort of effective reply. And this wasn’t something Nicole wanted fed through an interpreter.