Sundowner

by Claremont, Chris

  “Why am I not surprised to find this?” she asked rhetorically.

  She didn’t need to wonder how he got here. Only one effective way to traverse solar distances unnoticed, especially when the worlds themselves were in such close proximity as s’N’dare and this. A Solar Sailboat, a solo life-support module tethered to a silver polymer sail, to catch the energy wind streaming from the sun, very much like riding a current of air. Not a very fast means of travel, but the wind never died and over time it was possible to build up a respectable velocity. Add to that the advantage of traveling down the solar gravity well and this became an eminently feasible trip. If you ignored the risk of something going wrong, a fouled line, a tear in the sail, some failure of capsule support systems, an error in navigation. In this kind of circumstance, there was no margin for error. Screw up a reading or a computation, mis-enter a coordinate, and you could be all by yourself in the Big Dark, without sufficient supplies to get home. Certainly, you could call for help, but that would mean you’d never get this opportunity again. The Hal would be ready for it, then.

  Precisely the kind of challenge Ben Ciari thrived on.

  But how’d he get down? A capsule with shielding enough to survive reentry would also survive impact. And probably be noticed on the way down. And if the capsule bore the brunt of the atmospheric friction, why was the suit so scored.

  The suit was rich with the smell of him. She assumed he’d lived in it for the entire flight, which meant that he had to have cleaned it after landing. For that, she was sincerely grateful. The scent of Hal cinnamon added a welcome texture and she suddenly found herself blinking back tears. She blinked harder, stretching her lids as wide as they’d open to clear her eyes, because there wasn’t enough play within the suit for her to wriggle an arm free to wipe them clean. Her eyes burned from the moisture and the salt made her skin sting a little; blurred her vision a little, too, but it was getting on past sunset and she didn’t mind taking a pass on the sights for tonight.

  She hadn’t seen him—to touch him—in better than six years, since their last farewells on the Moon, when he left to help establish Earth’s Embassy on s’N’dare. She’d wondered all along how she’d feel when they met again—they’d crammed more passion into less time than she’d ever thought possible, perhaps because both had known it wasn’t meant to last—but if she was expecting anything wildly dramatic, it wasn’t happening. Yet.

  “Sorry, Marshal,” she muttered, “that damn cat got a better rise out of me.”

  She didn’t want to think about that, so she turned her focus back to Ciari and the problem of crossing the last leg from sky to ground. Most pressure suits maintained their environment from a separate backpack; this one had a shaped torso, with integral life support, all self-contained. Provided better security but it was murder to deal with in case of a malfunction. Even then, he’d put in extra padding.

  “You madman,” she said full-voiced in disbelief. “You bloody, suicidal lunatic!”

  There was only one answer. Skim the top of the atmosphere with the capsule, along a meteoric trajectory—hitting enough air to slow down some but not so much that the capsule would initiate its own insertion. The slingshot effect on the flyby would most likely send the module off on some unplottably wild-ass trajectory—knowing Ciari, Nicole bet it was a long loop the rest of the way down the well and into the sun. In the meanwhile, he simply bailed out.

  There was no suit made to provide a controlled freefall descent into an atmosphere. It wasn’t simply a matter of the heat to deal with, but raw speed as well, and the absolute need to reduce orbital velocity to something that a floatwing or even a paraglide chute could handle.

  Had to be a balut. Essentially an inflatable heat shield, to protect you from reentry friction and provide active deceleration. It was called a SCRAM scenario, for getting survivors down from a low-orbit accident. Without proper optics, anyone watching from the ground would most likely assume that a chunk had broken off the core meteor and wouldn’t think twice about it. When a thing looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and even floats like a duck, who expects it to be a hawk in disguise?

  “That got you here, Ben,” she said. “And obviously, you were expecting me to follow. But where have you gone since?”

  She slept more easily than she had in ages and when she dreamed of water, she was sailing.

  That led her back to Ciari’s house by the lake, and the harness she’d tripped over. A trapeze harness. For a man who’d never sailed a day in his life.

  She opened her eyes to morning twilight, the eastern sky glowing but still the better part of an hour to go before she saw the sun.

  She asked the suit for a proximity scan and was thankful for a negative response. Next, on impulse, she inquired about incoming messages, but again came up empty.

  She cracked her helmet, then the torso latches, and clambered stiffly into open air. The morning chill made her shiver and her breath visible as she started for the trees to relieve herself, with a last-minute grab for her knife. She was prepared to rely on the proximity alarm but it never hurt to be extra careful.

  Afterward, she hunkered down over the carryall, to see what Ciari had left her. Clothes, bless his heart, an eclectic mix of human sensibility and Hal style. She pulled on underwear before continuing her exploration, then came up with a pair of military-cut trousers, socks, and hiking sneaks. Lightweight but rugged. Short-sleeve polo shirt went over her sleeveless singlet, then a long-sleeved bush shirt over that. Bandannas for throat and forehead, another knife, a collapsible canteen, and a carton of rations. Essentially, a standard SAR survival pack. Then, at the bottom, a major surprise: a set of sailing gear. Bathing suit, light shorts, boat sneaks, a foul-weather pullover, gloves. It wasn’t new, either, it was hers.

  She stood straight and looked east, past the shore to the sunrise horizon, but there was nothing to see but the smooth, unbroken line of ocean. She knew what was out there, a good fifty miles across the water, the Memorial Mount of Shavrin’s Clan, atop a bluff that towered over three hundred meters above the coast. The only way a Hal would reach it would be to follow the near shore until the bay narrowed and shallowed enough to provide a decent ford. A long hike, and a formidable one, through some ferociously rough country, especially once she reached the other side.

  That was her Quest, the route of her Harach’t’nyn. A route that kept her within sight of the ocean nearly the whole way but never brought her close to it save for one point. Always she came up against this fundamental dichotomy, this association with the ocean combined with a fundamental aversion to it. A race who apparently transplanted itself completely from a world with seas to one that they intentionally designed to have virtually none.

  What the hell are you so afraid of, Kymri? she asked silently. Ciari and she had both been dosed with the heritage DNA of the same Speaker, only Ciari’s awareness was always more surface than hers. She knew how his mind worked, in fair measure because he’d taught hers to think the same way. He’d be asking these same questions. The search for true answers had brought him here. With a specific intent. Not to follow the traditional Harach’t’nyn, but to strike out on one uniquely his own.

  She zipped the carryall closed and proceeded to do the same with the suit. Spacer’s Rules—always leave equipment as though you’re going to need it yourself. But before sealing the helmet once more, she initialized the Homer Beacon. There were two frequencies. Broad Band, designed to make the most amount of noise over the widest possible frequency spectrum, and Security. Designed so that its signal was virtually impossible to trace to the source—unless it heard the proper, coded response—this was for use in hostile territory, so that only your own people would know where you were. Nicole chose the latter, and took a pocket transmitter with her, slaved to the main unit. If the right people found the suit, they could also find her. Another traveling beacon was already gone from its slot; Ciari was plotting along the same wavelength.

  There were some fairly
evident trails, leading along the ridge line, a couple back into the woods, but she went the other direction, over the edge and down the rock face. It was as steep as it looked from up-top, but nowhere near as hairy a climb as she’d feared. She let her body set the pace, curious to see what sort of rhythm it would fall into. She saw no sign, felt no sense, of the Hal male—for that was how she’d come to think of him—she’d run another proximity scan just to be sure. At the same time, she didn’t have anything approaching yesterday’s dramatic physical responses to the thought of him. That intrigued her, and she filed the observation away for later study.

  The valley was more open, thanks in part to the fast-flowing stream. Another curiosity—Hal had no problem with high-country cataracts, with water that came from rock and was in a major hurry to get somewhere else. They even had a taste for freshwater fish, and had taken to the Terran art of fly-casting like they’d invented it.

  She paused, head cocking quizzically to the side, as though listening to some silent tune. In quick movements, she stripped to the skin and strode forward to the water, grimacing at the shock of the cold around her ankles. It was as if entering the stream had calved her, like an iceberg or a diamond cracking in two. Part of her watched with an anthropologist’s excited dispassion as she moved her hands and arms and body over the surface in a simple but elegant dance; she was singing as well, a gentle croon that mothers sing to their young, telling of the leap the crawling child must make to become a walking adult. Yet somehow, the same song had resonances for the race as well, reaching back to the moment where four feet gave way to two. The water that sustained the world also sustained the Hal, the two casting a tidal cadence that all were bound to. She plunged her hands deep into the soft earth; they came up coated with rich, dark mud and she stroked fingers across temples, cheeks, plunging down the long column of her throat and out over her breasts. She was on her knees, the rushing water at hip level as she faced upstream. She had a sense of her flesh dissolving, the river bursting the walls of her blood vessels and racing headlong through her system. She was aflame within and without, her blood molten, the sun beating on her upraised face, filling her eyes with glorious light even through closed eyelids.

  She could barely walk as she staggered ashore, unsure her body could bear her weight, working and wiping her eyes to restore at least a semblance of sight. She let herself sprawl on the smooth-pebbled riverbed—dry now since the spring floods had receded—allowing the cool stone to counteract the extraordinary heat radiating off her skin.

  This was a Young Female’s Mystery, for someone more than a girl, not yet a blooded woman. By rights, Nicole should have sung it over a decade before, but because this was all new to her, she was experiencing all at once the benchmark moments of a lifetime.

  She filled her canteen and treated herself to an early lunch, water and biscuits, as tasteless as they were nourishing.

  She was starting to get dressed again when she realized she’d drawn patterns all over her front. It was hard to make sense of them—she couldn’t get a proper view from this close and upside down—there were crossbars and swirls, arrows on the collarbones and the stiff feel of dried mud on her face.

  She only had that moment to look, because the moment the mud dried, it powdered at the touch or even the smallest movement of her body, leaving no sign that it had ever been.

  The day was warming quickly, and she confined herself to sneaks, trousers, and singlet before pressing on. The rest went into her carryall.

  She followed the river for as long as it seemed to be heading her towards the sea, then struck out cross-country when it turned meanderingly away. The forest was giving way to grasslands, a stretch of coastal prairie that she remembered from her dream. Then, she’d come from far behind her, the interior mountains that compared to the escarpment she’d just descended the way a DC-3 did to a 747. Or better yet, her spaceplane to the Constitution.

  Thinking of the ship prompted thoughts of Hana, and a surge of longing that was wholly her own. It was like being apart from the other half of her self, the one person in whom she had absolute faith. She wanted a proper dance suddenly. Loud, driving music, rippling lights creating a cascading rainbow over a dance floor big enough for them to have room to strut their stuff. Clothes to die for and men to make the offer. Passion and energy, as raw and untamed as mountain lightning.

  “That, Ancestors of my adopted House,” she cried aloud, full-voiced, “is my mystery!”

  Right at sunset, with half the sky painted in streaks of flame, came a flash from beyond the top of the world, which prompted a smile of recognition from Nicole, watching for stars. She heard or saw nothing unexpected afterward, and filed that moment away with all the rest, tucking herself in for what she hoped would be a dreamless night.

  She was nervous at first, without the suit. Through the day, she’d seen sign of the four-footed Hal, and long-distance glimpses of the creatures themselves, singly and in what she assumed were family groupings. A couple of times, she modified her trek slightly to accommodate them, erring on the side of caution and allowing as wide a berth as was practicable. But they showed no interest in her.

  She found a burial platform, crudely constructed, as savaged by the elements as the body it supported, which had long ago been reduced to bones. Gifts had been left, to provide sustenance and amusement in the Hereafter, and the structure arranged to allow the body a view towards the sea, still out of sight in the distance beyond the last line of coastal hills.

  Before dawn, the world still dark, the sky overhead decorated like a velvet cloth splashed with all the diamonds that ever were, Nicole faced another Mystery as the Ancestors came to answer the implicit challenge of her call.

  She didn’t think it was a dream, there was too much physicality. Her body ached from the way it was lying on unyielding ground, her innards were all growly from her stingy diet. She heard her breath, in spaced, deliberate huffs, and felt the pounding in her chest—her heart seemed determined to announce the fact of her continued existence with every thunderous beat—but nothing beyond that. The night was still. No breeze to stir air or grass, nothing making even a ghost of a move—nobody wanted to draw attention to themselves, it seemed. All were content to leave that role to Nicole.

  Her visitors didn’t know what to make of her, these forebears of Shavrin’s House, an attitude she shared completely. Spectral forms hovering around her, temptingly close enough to reach—she kept her hands to herself—as though waiting for a cue.

  It came from a spunky girl half Nicole’s age and barely two-thirds her size. Tall for her own era, most likely, but not even close anymore. She strode forward like she owned the place, striking a ballsy, cock o’ the walk stance that made plain she was ready to follow Nicole to any club she named. She was such a firecracker that Nicole couldn’t help bursting out loud with a laugh.

  The noise startled the ghosts, it wasn’t a Hal response, nor anything they could relate to from the catalogue of their collective experience. The girl, though, she took it in stride and tried to shape her mouth to match Nicole’s smile. She knew it didn’t quite work—too different an arrangement of facial muscles—so she tried the laugh instead. This time, it was Nicole’s turn to jump. She hadn’t expected the ghost could talk. The exchange of tit for tat eased the mood somewhat; she saw a subtle volley of teeth that signaled their approval.

  The girl moved forward, back, forward again, then sidestepped with a languorous, inviting grace that drew Nicole around after her as though they were linked by a tether. Nicole rose to her feet, the girl going big-eyed at the size differential, and Nicole felt like a fumble-footed hulk by comparison. After a few more moments, though, she no longer cared. All she had eyes and thoughts and feelings for was the girl and their dance.

  The other ghosts took positions in a great circle around them, the combined glow of their bodies giving light enough to see—not that the girl needed any. As for Nicole, it didn’t really help. She couldn’t watch the ground an
d the girl and after a couple of stumbles—the second nearly planting her full length on her face—she locked in on her partner. In tone and structure, this most reminded her of the Memorial Service aboard Range Guide. There was music all around, none of it heard, but rather felt—in the pulsing of the blood, the pounding of the heart, the slice of arms through air, the slap of feet on earth.

  There was a distinct progression to the dance. Comparatively slow to start, gradually integrating Nicole into the choreographic structure the girl was establishing. Then, a progressive escalation in the complexity of the movements and the speed of their execution. The girl flashed around Nicole like a dervish, every gesture, every expression, a dare to the human woman to catch her. Try as she might, Nicole always fell short. Desire—no matter how fundamental and heartfelt—couldn’t change her physiology.

  So, since she couldn’t win on the girl’s terms, she threw down a gauntlet of her own. She called up memories of music from where they lived inside her soul and cast them loose.

  The girl watched until she had a sense of the dynamic idiom, and then she joined in with a vengeance.

  The more they moved, the more their movements began to match, as two solos merged into a duet. Each drew on elements of the other’s style, using whatever worked to craft a whole that was increasingly more than the sum of its parts. There was no sense of fatigue, even though Nicole knew she’d been going flat out since they started, and even less of effort. Once again, she asked herself if this was a dream.

  Only problem there, she thought in response, is that if this is a flipping dream, shouldn’t all this come easier?

  Features blurred around her, a vague awareness that her ghosts had begun to join the Hal, as if the energy she was throwing off was somehow shaping itself into tangible form. The girl’s features shifted, quicksilver, to Alex, to Paul DaCuhna—bringing a surge of moisture to Nicole’s eyes, momentary tightness in her chest, reminder of grief and friend long buried, so much so that she tripped a step—to Ben Ciari. With him glowed a surge of worry, a prayer that he still be alive. At the last, joyously, Hana. Here, Nicole cast care and caution aside, letting go with a freedom she’d never allow herself before living beings. She still thought of this as fantasy—dream at best, hallucination at worst—which made things all right.