Nightfall

by Moshe Ben-Or

  He’d been twelve, thought Miri. Twelve, and raised by pacifists. And small and weak, like her. And sick. But he’d fought. He’d fought for his people, and his home and his life, and just for the heck of it, simply for the sake of not sitting about helplessly, waiting to be murdered. And he would fight again. That’s what they did, the Leaguers. They fought. No matter what. That’s what they did…

  Once, when Mom and Dad had really gotten into it over the League maybe swallowing Paradise whole, Mom had said that you couldn’t become a belter or a heavyworlder, but she’d heard that you could become a Jew. If it came down to it and the Leaguers really did invade, Paradise would suddenly be full of handsome, single, uniformed young men from New Israel. If the girls knew the right things, Mom had said, maybe it would all work out for the best.

  She didn’t really know the right things, thought Mirabelle. They wouldn’t let her learn. Guns and knives and martial arts and war, those were all bad stuff. Good little blanco girls didn’t learn such things. Good little blanco girls didn’t defend themselves by themselves. Good little blanco girls ran away and locked the door, and called the policia.

  Until suddenly there came a really bad day, when invaders from above the sky just showed up out of nowhere and blew up the world. And there were no policia to call. And she didn’t know what to do, except run and hide and cry and pray, and starve to death in the poisonous woods. Because they wouldn’t let her learn…

  But she could speak his language. That was a start, wasn’t it? And he wanted her, she knew he did…

  But did she want… that? Would it work out? Could she be… like him? Did she want to be?

  What was the alternative? What happened to Dad and Brandon and Mom and Annie?

  Wolves and sheep, right? Dad had always said that the Leaguers divided the whole of mankind into wolves and sheep. Maybe they did. Her Leaguer did, didn’t he? And he would teach her. She knew he would. But first she had to prove to him that she was worth it, didn’t she? Worth teaching. Worth wanting. Worth having, if it came to that. That she could be a real woman, a League warrior’s proper companion, not some helpless little schoolgirl whom he had to babysit. She had to be tough, like all those Leaguer women in VR, right? Vicious she-wolves with souls of steel… Baby in one hand and gun in the other… Cut your enemy’s throat and feed his flesh to your offspring… Not helpless, not soft. Not at all like a good little blanco girl from Paradise.

  “Could I do it? Could I?” spun through Miri’s head as her eyelids drooped, “Could I be a wolf like him, and not have to be afraid anymore?”

  “I don’t want to be afraid…” she mouthed silently.

  “I don’t want to be afraid…

  “I don’t…”

  In her dreams she was a huge, shaggy, gray wolf and her mouth was full of big, sharp teeth. And the stomps came to the house to hurt everybody. But she wasn’t a good little helpless blanco girl anymore. She was a big, vicious she-wolf and she would never, ever be helpless again. She jumped at the one with the gun, and bit him and bit him and bit him…

  The blood filled her mouth, warm and coppery and sweet. And she was not afraid. Not afraid at all.

  * 28 *

  There was a bird sitting in the bramble just above Yosi’s head, warbling happily to greet the dawn. That’s what woke him up. That, and the beavers splashing about in the pool.

  It was time to go.

  The tent dissolved away at his command, the ponchos coalescing back into a pair of simple garments.

  Mirabelle lay sleeping with her back to him, curled up into a fetal ball, though her dreams seemed peaceful.

  “Wake up,” he whispered softly into her ear.

  She came awake with a start, rolling quickly away from him and sitting up. The rising sun shone through her tangled straw-blond hair, turning it into a kind of reddish-yellow halo. The effect was entrancing.

  “We have to get moving,” Yosi muttered, trying to figure out why his thoughts were suddenly muddled, “It’s already six.”

  The girl nodded, standing up.

  Why did he feel the urge to just sit there and stare at her? Dammit, his hindbrain was running away with his thoughts. Again. This was no time for some silly infatuation, for God’s sake. He had work to do.

  Glowering, he turned toward the ice-crowned peaks that towered off to the north. Leo was waiting for him.

  With this girl in tow, he couldn’t make any sort of decent pace. They could make it back in time, but only just. If nothing else went wrong, anyway.

  The real question, thought Yosi as he shouldered his rucksack, was whether the aliens had given up looking for him or not. If they were still looking, were they still looking for one man or were they now looking for an organized force? Did they think their quarry had gone up into the mountains or did they search nearer to the city?

  He couldn’t simply go back the way he’d come…

  “Give me a gun,” said the girl.

  “What?” muttered Yosi under his nose, still plotting a route back to Leo in his mind.

  Her hand slapped him lightly on the shoulder.

  “You have four guns, counting the two pistols. I’m surprised you don’t clatter when you walk. I want one.”

  Yosi’s hand instinctively reached out to unsling his rifle…

  And stopped halfway.

  How did she manage to put him off balance like that? He was getting annoyed at himself.

  “I can’t give you a firearm,” he snapped at her, “You don’t know how to use one. You’d be more dangerous to yourself and to me than to the enemy.”

  He could feel an answering surge from the girl, part annoyance, part determination.

  She stepped in front of him, blocking his way, and growled:

  “Look, you arrogant League bastard. I wasn’t taught to kill in grade school, like you. But that doesn’t mean I can’t learn. If you are going to do anything more useful than killing one rapist and saving one girl, then you’re going to need an armed force to fight alongside you. That means you have to get off your high horse and start teaching what you know to the wimpy natives. Or do you think you can take on the whole alien army all by yourself?”

  “She feels everything I feel,” thought Yosi, doing his level best to stay calm, “She responds to everything that I feel, even without knowing why.”

  He had to calm down, or this new, assertive, independent Miri business could rapidly turn into a screaming match, or worse.

  The problem was, he didn’t want to calm down. Who was she to make demands of him?

  “For all I know,” he replied out loud, “a Navy task force is already on its way to this system, ready to drop the Shock Corps down here tomorrow. Frankly…”

  “Wrong!” she interrupted him.

  “Paradise has the best jump zones in known space. We sit between two of mankind’s most powerful navies. Any force that’s managed to keep this place for almost three weeks now against the kind of opposition the League and the Empire together can throw at it is no joke! There is no League task force coming to our rescue, and no Imperial task force either, not any time soon.

  “You need to start thinking past your own survival. This is going to be a long war and I, for one, am not going to sit around and wait to be rescued. You Leaguers always say that there are two kinds of people in the universe – the wolves and the sheep. I’m through being a sheep.”

  Yosi’s anger drained as suddenly as it had built up.

  She was right. Her reasoning was sound. The thing was, he didn’t want to be part of some ad-hoc armed force, let alone command one. What he wanted was for this whole thing to just go away. To wake up safe in his bed in Castle Freeman and tell Leo all about his weird dream over breakfast.

  So how did that make him different from the refugees on that road last week? They were Outsiders and untrained in war and thus sheep. He was a Citizen of the League, a trained warrior with plenty of combat experience, a wolf by definition. He had no right to delusions of wishfu
l thinking.

  “All right,” said Yosi as he came to a decision, “we have to stop by the cache anyway. No point in lugging the damned Znamensky all over creation when we’re in a hurry. I’ve got a submachinegun stashed in there that should fit you just fine. It’s fairly light as far as real guns go, and it has less recoil than an assault rifle.

  “In the meantime,” he continued, setting his rucksack back down onto the ground, “lesson one. Watch.”

  It was a basic kids’ drill, the first thing they taught to four-year-olds in kindergarten, reflected Yosi as he picked out a wrist-thick acacia about five meters away.

  There was a lightning-fast blur of motion. The tree fell, cut clean through at waist level.

  “It could have been steel,” remarked Yosi as he returned his vibro to its sheath, “or reinforced plascrete, or granite. A good-quality vibro can carve diamond as if it were hardwood. And it just so happens that I have a perfectly good, League-made vibro right here in this rucksack, just for you.”

  Miri beamed at him as if he’d given her the best present in the world.

  Suddenly, Yosi grinned back. He just couldn’t stay annoyed at her for more than a couple of minutes. And wasn’t that weird?

  * 29 *

  “You know, that poncho really scared me. You should’ve told me it would morph after you turned it to full stealth. I’m not used to clothes doing that without permission. When it crawled up over my face, I thought I was about to die.”

  Mirabelle lay on the ground in front of Yosi, her straw-blond hair tinted red by the setting sun.

  Yoseph looked up from the bloody sores on her feet. She had walked nearly thirty kilometers cross-country, without a word of complaint. She was fit, for an Outsider, and she clearly had excellent genes for athletics. But her body was still recovering from two weeks of starvation, and she had probably never walked so far at one go in her entire life. Without the girl, he could have readily made half again that distance in this terrain.

  “Sorry. I guess I’m so used to the damned things that it never occurred to me that you wouldn’t know.”

  The wounds having been sterilized and bandaged, Yosi was about to apply a painkiller. She had to be in agony with her feet rubbed raw like that.

  “Are you allergic to any medicines?” he asked, setting the dose on the hypo.

  “No.”

  She paused for a moment as if gathering her courage.

  “Don’t give me any medicine. You must be short as it is.”

  “You sure? Your feet have to hurt like hell.”

  “I’m sure,” she said, “Save that stuff for tomorrow.”

  Yosi had to admit that she had a point.

  He couldn’t exactly walk into a pharmacy around the corner and get more supplies. He’d already dipped into his meager store of pills to treat both the girl and the infection that was spreading from the splinters embedded in his back.

  Painkillers could keep you going for quite a while. Right now, when she wasn’t going anywhere, she might as well stand the pain. Tomorrow, her feet would hurt more. And so, for that matter, would his back.

  “As you wish,” he sighed, lying down beside her.

  He could feel her mind, intermittently, only a few centimeters away, like a shiny metal ball or a sound that is almost within hearing range, a prickling at the back of his head.

  It was a strange thing, to have a Talented so close by, after all these years. It made him nervous, yet somehow happier than he’d been in a long while.

  “Yosi?”

  Mirabelle’s voice startled him out of his reverie.

  “Um?” he grunted, turning his head back toward her.

  “We are connected. Why?”

  Yoseph turned over. Her gray eyes locked with his. He was suddenly and acutely aware of how close her half-open lips were to his own.

  How many years since he’d had a woman outside a red-light district? He couldn’t remember.

  “You have the Talent. So do I. Yours is stronger.”

  “That tells me nothing.”

  He could almost hear the thoughts behind those beautiful gray eyes.

  What was it about her? She wasn’t even from the League, let alone Jewish. And whatever he was feeling, it wasn’t simple lust. He knew the difference.

  “The Talent is an ability. Empathic, mostly. Sometimes borderline telepathic. Almost everyone has it, to one degree or another, but it’s so weak most of the time as to be completely irrelevant.

  “In a rare few, it intensifies. Comes out. You get flashes of what other people are feeling, even what they are thinking, sometimes. Sometimes, you can tell where people and animals are, even when you can’t see them. Ninety percent of the time it dies down again after a while, never to emerge again. Then there are people like me, in whom it never really goes away once it has emerged. It just gets stronger, then weaker again, goes away for a year or two, then comes back again, in no predictable pattern.

  “Why does it happen? How does it work?”

  “Nobody knows.

  “Psychologists and neurochemists have racked their brains over it for centuries. Faraday cages block it, so there has to be an electromagnetic phenomenon involved, but that’s about all we know for sure about the mechanism.

  “The brain is an electrical system, so it makes sense that it could be influenced by electromagnetic phenomena, but good luck figuring out the details.

  “There are critters, like sharks, that can sense electric fields produced by other living things, but as to whether or not the shark’s sixth sense is related to the human one – good luck again.

  “The exact nature of the thing wasn’t well understood even during the Golden Age, as far as we can tell from surviving records.

  “It’s strange. The deadliest Golden Age memes, like Zombi and Multera, can spread telepathically. You would think that whoever created that stuff would have had some idea of how it actually worked…

  “Anyway, the Talent is more common in some populations, rarer in others. The Spartans get it a lot, probably more than anyone else in the universe. Their doctors know the most about it, but there’s a big stigma attached to it.”

  “Why?” asked Mirabelle.

  “Even before they crash-landed on Sparta, their founders were carrying Zombi,” explained Yosi. “And not just any plain old Zombi that would have just killed them all en-route, but a completely unique, highly modified terror strain. It was designed to perform a silent install and a silent build-up, like Multera. But, unlike Multera, the trigger wasn’t just a simple timer, it was a timer coupled to a set of specific physical cues. A loose signature for a specific world, or maybe several worlds, that somebody had targeted during the End Time War.

  “It was a horrific first-strike weapon. Imagine it. You infect some unsuspecting people. Merchants, visiting businessmen, tourists on vacation, who knows. They go back home to their world as asymptomatic carriers. Not infectious, not detectable without special measures. Silent install.

  “Periodically, unbeknown to them, based on ambient temperatures and length of day and elapsed time and whatnot, the meme wakes up and silently infects others, or forces the carrier to unknowingly write it onto electronic media. And waits. For months on end. Maybe for years.

  “Until one day, when enough time has passed and the weather is just right, and the day is just of the right length, and there is just so much ambient light at night…

  “Boom! A single carrier activates. And then it spreads, like wildfire. Because all these other, previously silent carriers activate the moment they so much as hear about it, or see a news report…

  “Pure genius. Evil, monstrous genius without a single shred of humanity.

  “Anyway, the thing broke out right after The Crash, and kept breaking out at random, whenever enough inputs had been received to match its target profile. But even when it was fully active, some installs would be performed silently, creating ‘survivors’ who would carry the meme along after all the active carriers h
ad dropped dead. And the ‘survivors’ would carry it over to the next settlement, and over to the next bit of complex electronics…

  “That’s what finished off all the Spartans’ technology and left them fighting wars with swords and black powder, dying of old age by fifty if cholera or the neighbors didn’t kill them first, until the ships from the Serpent Swarm showed up.

  “The asymptomatic carriers, the Death Bringers, were all Talented. Every single one. A side effect of the silent install.

  “The Spartans spent three hundred years living with this terror, before the belters showed up and helped them to wipe it out. It shaped their whole culture.

  “During the Time of Isolation, most Spartans thought that all Talented were Death Bringers. But some natural Talented could detect Death Bringers. The ones who could do so were more likely to survive, and pass on their genes. But if they told others about their abilities, they’d get accused of doing black magic, or of being a Death Bringer.

  “It was a giant mess. Witch-hunts and mass hysteria and burnings at the stake, the works.

  “Today, supposedly, people know better. Nobody calls people ‘witches’ or ‘mind stealers’ anymore. But, deep down, the fear persists. They suck it in with their mothers’ milk out in the boonies, and even the upper classes can’t help it. It’s everywhere, from nursery rhymes and children’s books to high literature. There is no escaping it, no matter how hard you try.”

  “So why do some people get it and others don’t?” asked Miri, “It’s not like we’re all infected with some meme.”

  “Stress brings it on. Stress during childhood or puberty, most often. It’s less and less likely to emerge as you get older. There are a mere handful of cases on the books of it emerging past the age of eighteen. None past the early twenties.”

  “Why? Biochemical changes? Neural pathways in the brain becoming too well set?”

  This was strange. Scary, even. Definitely distracting. Yosi wasn’t in the habit of falling for sixteen-year-old girls he’d just met.

  Love? He loved Leo. He loved Duke Reginald. He’d loved Leah and Rachel.