Dark Tempest

by Manda Benson

  “In that case, let us walk and discuss these more complicated options simultaneously, if that’s not beyond us.”

  Jed grimaced at Wolff and turned away. His arm suddenly caught her around the waist and pulled her back. Jed beat him upon the shoulders and kicked his knees as he waded upstream with her.

  “I’m sorry,” said Wolff politely. “Would you like me to put you down?” He loosed his grip for an instant, and Jed slipped down with a shout and grabbed him about the neck with her arms. The water was up above his knees.

  “It gets shallower in a moment,” said Wolff. Sallow reedy strands from the overhanging banks brushed past them, depositing slime in Jed’s hair. She was facing backward over Wolff’s shoulder and could not see ahead. He sloshed several more paces before setting her down. Jed turned and looked about. The stream ran swift over a stony bed, ankle deep where she stood. The ground rose shallowly on either side, the lank reeds giving way to pallid vegetation that looked to be withering in the hot sun. Tortuous branches with blunt bracts trailed and snaked among the stones, and humped thickets of grey thorns clustered together. Along the banks of the stream lay pools of stagnant water scummed over with a reddish substance Jed could only assume was colonies of single-celled organisms. The local sun—a white spectral type A—had been steadily moving away from the zenith as the planet’s rotation turned its surface, and now when Jed looked it was beginning to sink beneath the bulk of the western horizon, and another sun, reddish and turgid, brimmed like molten lead in the cusp of the mountainous crags in the south.

  “Well, come on then,” said Wolff, and splashed off upstream.

  Jed did not want to follow him, through a combination of perversity and fear, but she also disliked this landscape and feared what organisms it might contain asides from these primitive plants. Her education told her bacteria and vegetative organisms evolved long before animals, but she had no concrete evidence there were no animals here. It was possible that men had artificially seeded the planet as an experiment at some point in the past. She went after him.

  The scrubby bushes that clung to the scree became scarcer as they climbed. Moss-like plants grew in tiny crevices where earth had collected, coloured bracts rising on long stalks to dispense wind-borne seeds. Over level, even ground the stream ran quickly over a shallow, rough bed, and where the land became steeper and rougher it cascaded down short drops and meandered around outcrops. Dust hung in the air, irritating Jed’s nose and throat.

  Wolff halted halfway up a steep bank, and sat on a boulder, breathing heavily. “Here, sit beside me,” he said.

  Jed sat and Wolff drew her close to his side and took in a deep breath, and released it again. Together they gazed upon the ocean.

  The air carried a sharp tang, and the horizon ended abruptly ahead, where dark promontories bordered the mouth of the river. A stretch of water, tinged red by the sun’s light, filled the gap in the headland, reaching out to a flat horizon that merged into the sky. Looking upon it, an agoraphobic unease came upon Jed. There were no walls, and no ceiling. There was nothing to protect and contain. She could not sense the frontier where sanctuary ended and darkness began, and she could not look upon it, and turned away.

  “Look at it!” Wolff commanded her, and he turned her about.

  “I cannot! It alarms me!”

  “Then face it! You’re a star Archer. You’re not supposed to fear anything! You’ve seen the whole galaxy, and now you won’t see this?”

  Jed turned, breathed, and opened her eyes slowly, squinting and unfocused at first and gradually allowed herself to take in more detail.

  “Do you think it a fitting last resting place?”

  “You speak of the morran again. Do not use me as a prism for your own guilt.”

  Wolff caught hold of Jed by the jaw, and rotated her head, lowering his own to stare her fiercely in the eyes. “It angers me that you will not acknowledge Rh’Arrol’s sacrifice.”

  Jed shook him off. “I have said all there is to be said. Yes, Rh’Arrol acted with honour, and elevated itself above the station of a common urchin, but that does not make it equal to a man. It was you who did grant the morran sanctuary which was not yours to offer. Any blame that remains lies with you.”

  “Morrans and men. Blood and dirt. It’s all drivel. It is not real. We are all living, thinking creatures.”

  “Some think and live better than others.”

  “Bollocks,” said Wolff, almost under his breath.

  The wind pulled Jed’s belt out behind her, and she pulled it back in irritation. The skin on the back of her hand had turned red, as though a foreign substance had irritated it, and an itchy pain had started up on the back of her neck.

  “I am allergic to this environment.”

  Wolff looked at Jed’s hand. “I think it’s the radiation from the suns. It looks like there’ll be shade up ahead.”

  “And people are evolved to live on these planets?” Jed stood with her arms folded, glaring sceptically at Wolff’s back as he searched for an easy way up.

  “I think you develop a tolerance to it after so much exposure.”

  They climbed farther, and the air became humid. The vegetation changed to hairy mosses and plants with corky, thick boles and overhanging leaves. The air was so saturated with vapour it condensed on the rocks and plants, and on Jed and Wolff, and it was desperately, stiflingly hot. They sweated ineffectually, their own perspiration mingling with the water from the atmosphere.

  At last they encountered a waterfall that roared from over the edge of a twenty-foot cliff and plunged into a deep pool below. Wolff explored the locality while Jed sat on a rock with her feet overhanging the water.

  “Looks like this is as far as we can go,” he eventually said, his voice raised so Jed could hear him over the noise of the water.

  A movement below caught her attention. Something moved languidly in the shadow at the stream’s muddy bed, a dark, torpedo-shaped thing, about six inches long and with brilliant red gill fronds trailing from its throat. Jed pulled her feet back from the surface of the water. “There are animals!”

  Wolff hurried to crouch beside her and look over the edge of the rock. “It’s all right,” he said. “I doubt they’re ferocious.”

  “Size is not an accurate gauge of danger. They may have a venomous bite.” Jed noticed another two hidden in the shade.

  Wolff shrugged. “What reason would they have for one?” He sat down on the mosses upon the stone. For several moments, neither of them said anything. Then Wolff fidgeted, and spoke.

  “What I said before, about this world being a final resting place. I wasn’t speaking of Rh’Arrol. Jed, when you and Samphrey leave, leave without me. I don’t want to endanger you anymore. At least if I am gone, the Archers may leave you alone.”

  Jed looked him in the face, and as she did, she remembered she had not done so for a long time. “Stay here, alone? There is nothing to eat. No civilisation.”

  “Leave me a recyce unit, and some levigated esculents, if you are able.”

  “But why? You are spurning everything men are! How can you possibly survive like this?”

  “I stand alone among men, for no man will suffer my company, neither the common men nor those of the Blood. Yet still I crave the companionship of other men, that which I cannot have. Their presence only serves to deepen my sense of being alone. Perhaps if I were truly alone, then I would not feel it so sore.”

  Jed stared at the lines on her palms for several moments, saying nothing. Then Wolff spoke again. “What is your opinion, then, highest of all the Blood castes? How do you find your fellow men?”

  “I fear men. They’re unclean, foul. I could not walk among them even if it were permissible.”

  “But you abide with me?”

  Jed drew her brows. “Not of my choosing.”

  “But you have come to tolerate me.”

  “Tolerate? Perhaps that much would be right.”

  “The same as the life you have c
ome to lead was not your choice, but you have come to tolerate it?”

  “Perhaps it was not my original choice, but I have come to embrace it. I was a child when the choice was made for me, and unfit to choose. Surely the choice of the wise is better than the choice of a fool?”

  “But when the choice that must be made concerns the fool alone, surely the fool’s own judgment is most valid?”

  “I do not know,” said Jed. “For what else could I have become if the choice was otherwise? It is easy to find fault with a path taken in retrospect. Even the path we used to climb this gradient.” Jed waved in the direction of the scree leading down into the valley. “It would be simple for us to think one could run straight up it, ignoring the river’s course, but in practice that is not the case. For what else would I have been, if not an Archer? A man of the Blood, high in caste and pressured to honour my lineage with a worthy marriage and an heir of the Blood? Surely if those parallel circumstances had been played instead of these, I should still look back and lament, and pine for the false ideals of freedom. For there is no freedom under any sun, and all men are slaves and masters unto their selves and their circumstances, one and same.”

  Wolff looked at Jed, until the thought occurred to her he had not understood.

  “Then stay here with me.”

  Jed opened her mouth, but she could not speak. The emotions that had come upon her were too violent in magnitude for any utterance to do them justice. Inexorably, she turned her head to look at the mark upon the land where the Shamrock’s spiny dorsal vane rose among the stones. Although she did not see Gerald Wolff, she knew he was looking at her, and she knew what he would be thinking.

  “So long as it exists, they will find it. It is a part of me, and I cannot part from it.”

  “Even if the Bellwether leaves unsatisfied, the Archers will find us?”

  Jed nodded silently.

  Wolff stared at her, and she stared at her hands and the creatures in the water.

  “Take off your clothes,” said Wolff.

  Jed turned her head to stare back at him. “I will not!”

  Wolff got up briskly. He took off his belt and threw it down on the rock. “You want to know why I say these things, Jed of the Shamrock? Because I don’t care what you think of me, I don’t fucking care if you find me offensive.” He took of his tunic and dropped that with his belt. “Because after today, you and I will never meet again, and so I’m just going to speak my mind.”

  Wolff threw down the rest of his clothes, and he set his arms akimbo and stood in front of Jed, almost proudly. Even when she had lain with him, she had not seen him like this, and she looked away in embarrassment.

  The splash as he jumped into the pool flecked her with spray. When she looked to him, he was below her, and bending toward the creatures.

  “Look,” he said, and there was one in his hand and he lifted it into the air. It flopped soddenly in his hand without the support of water. “It has no predators. It just let me pick it up.” He held the thing’s front end toward Jed’s face. It had no eyes or other features, just a slit where its mouth was, and she pulled back in disgust.

  He put the animal back in the water, and it wriggled away.

  “If we are to part, let it be on a good memory,” said Wolff. “Just let go, for once! If you do not, you will look back and regret it forever more!”

  “You flatter yourself, Gerald Wolff!” Jed widened her eyes.

  “Be what is true to you, if only just for this once! You desire it! I know you do. I know you!”

  “You do not know what I think!”

  “Tomorrow you will be an Archer of hortica once more, and you will take your new apprentice and ascend to the stars, and it will be as it always was.”

  “I am a traitor to the Code! I will trespass no more! I have sullied what is honourable with our wretched impulses enough already.”

  “Then let that tide of impulse carry us one last time. For surely we cannot further desecrate what’s defiled already?”

  Jed stood. In consternation, she looked back toward the Shamrock’s dorsal vane, and where she knew, but could not herself see, Samphrey sat on the shore. She looked back at Wolff, who stood waist-deep in the water. “I don’t know,” she said. Then suddenly she did know, and she was struggling to take off her own tunic, and she jumped off the rock and Wolff caught her as she landed next to him. She did not feel the coldness of the water, only the heat of Wolff’s embrace.

  They found a hollow worn out in the rock behind the waterfall, and climbed onto the cool, slimy moss covering the rocks. Jed did not know for how long they lay there, she did not remember if they slept, behind the luminous fan of the falls. She did not know how long she forgot the Code, forgot the Shamrock, forgot everything she had ever been taught to value. The cold emptiness of the galaxy and all the stars therein, it was not real. This was real. This was alive.

  They climbed out from under the waterfall together and waded to the shallows where they could climb out.

  Wolff held Jed to him, and looked her in the face, and she saw again that sorrow and loss in him as she had seen in her father, and her eyes became hot and her throat tense.

  “Is the ship repaired?” he asked.

  Jed thought once more to the Shamrock. “Yes.”

  “Then you must go.” He released her.

  Jed took up his hands. “Then know you that I go of necessity, and not of my own will.” She looked back at him. “If.”

  “If the galaxy were different, if nothing was the way it was, if anything was just. If. If so, and then we would never have met.” Wolff forced a smile.

  Another signal from the Shamrock’s feedback alerted her. “There are ships in the atmosphere!” Jed looked up to the sky. Rock had screened her from the Shamrock’s signal! She had forgotten...

  “Go quickly!” Wolff commanded her. “Don’t look back. Forget the esculents. There must be something I can eat here.”

  She put most of her clothes back on and pulled the others on as she ran back downstream. She located Samphrey immediately and ran straight toward her, fighting her way through undergrowth and over uneven land. Fool! She had forgotten everything, she had surrendered it all to worthless, feeble passion! Now she would pay, and consequence would follow cause and the Code would have its vengeance! She fell twice, getting up immediately on both occasions, fear and anger with herself subjugating the pain. She jumped over the reeds and down onto the shore. Samphrey was sitting down behind the rock, where Jed had left her.

  Jed rounded the rock and yanked the girl up by the shoulder of her tunic. “What have you done?”

  “Nothing! I did naught!”

  “You must have done aught. To the ship, at once!”

  It was too late. Ships descended rapidly, cutting the two of them off from the Shamrock. Men leapt from their craft in pairs, landing on the ground and training their weapons on the Archer and her apprentice. They quickly spread out to encircle the two of them.

  “Samphrey, get behind me,” said Jed, and she drew her neutron pistol and started firing desperately. She shot them, in the heads, in the guts. She shot to kill and to kill alone as many of them as she could, and yet they did not return fire, but just closed in with their weapons pointed at Jed and Samphrey as those among them fell. Through the adrenaline, Jed began to notice things. All the men were males, and that the pairs of men were identical among themselves, and that if she shot one of a pair, the other would stumble closer to her, almost suicidally, ensuring he was the next to be shot. She kept firing, and yet they kept coming closer, and their expressions were as though there was something behind them that they feared worse.

  Jed shot a man, and he cried out and put his hand to his chest where he was hit. He took his hand away, and the fabric of his jerkin was not broken, and he did not bleed. The neutron pistol was losing power. Jed fired again, frantically, winding one man and bruising another’s forehead. This was what they had been waiting for. Jed could feel Samphrey trembl
ing against her calves as they closed on her, determination overcoming their fear. Their smell and touch revolted Jed as they pulled her and Samphrey apart, and Samphrey shrieked and fought uncontrollably.

  A single man approached, with two, identical, men at his heel. He was a squat man with curly brown hair, and Jed recognised him. Taggart.

  “The Archer,” he said as he halted before her, his face twisted and distorted by a smirk of triumph. “At last we meet. Where is Gerald Wolff?”

  “He is dead,” said Jed vehemently. “I killed him myself. As I once did kill you.”

  The smirk fell from Taggart’s face. He bared his teeth and then spat at Jed.

  “Search the planet!” he ordered his troops. “There will be not much else on this world that moves and gives off heat. If you lie, I will have him! Now these prisoners get on board the runner, and secure the Archer’s ship!”

  Chapter 15

  Bellwether

  The walls themselves are tortured,

  The air we breathe is pain,

  All once noble is thwarted,

  Immured in the prison of the insane.

  Wolff knew what would happen when he heard the search craft pass overhead. Nowhere on this world would shield the signs of his living body from his pursuers, but he ran and hid anyway. He climbed up a small tree and tried to hide himself in its foliage.

  Soon he heard footfall below. He looked down to see two identical men looking up.

  “I was given instructions to capture the Archer alive,” one of them said. The second man appended smoothly, “I was given no such specification regarding your capture.”

  “Get down, or I will shoot you down,” said the first.

  Wolff slithered down the tree, and the men took hold of him by the arms. They led him to where they had landed their craft, a small thing made from grey metal, and another two men, different from the first two but identical to each other, searched him and took away Rh’Arrol’s diary. They seemed delighted with it, and Wolff couldn’t fathom why. The four of them manhandled him through the airlock and flung him into the cargo bay. Jed, who sat on a narrow bench beside Samphrey, pulled her feet back as he fell on the floor in front of her.