Shadow's End

by Sheri S. Tepper

  "Mother and Father of peace, come to me,

  Tomorrow will be easier. And the day that follows easier yet. And I will grow to age in tranquillity, In contentment approaching you, whom my kindred have forgot."

  After a time my body went away somewhere, flying, as though lifted by a blessed wind. I lay down on the bed and nothing hurt. Oh, when I was a child, I would never have dreamed the pleasure that comes from the mere absence of hurt. Such a sweetness was, for the time, enough. I set the rolled leaf in the covered, spouted bowl beside the bed and turned my nose into the braided skein of smoke. I breathed and breathed, watching the guttering candle dwindle into dark. And I slept.

  On Perdur Alas, Snark made her way toward the sea. Her hands were empty, for all the things needful for her survival had long since been stored in the cave. The stealing was over. The scurrying and sneaking were over. Behind her in the camp the other shadows slept, weary at the end of a tiresome day spent weeding the test gardens. The seeds of a sedgelike native plant came floating on every breeze, sprouting in mere hours to form a network of thick stolons in which nothing could grow but themselves. They had to be sprayed, early and often. They had to be cleared by hand from around the food seedlings. Despite this annoyance, the ag-tests were coming along. They knew now what would grow, or at least what would germinate and sprout, though it would still be some time until the harvest. A small victory among workers who did not care enough to count victories. The planet could be homo-normed. It would support human life.

  There were other coups that had been counted, and these were Snark's own. Though technical knowledge had been forced upon her, it seemed to fit her mind as mate fits mate, making a comfortable fullness instead of an aching vacancy. It was like being transported from a barren desert into an orderly jungle, where every byway was lined with interesting bits of information, where techniques and processes grew on every tree, like fruit. She had been moved to create a microorganism to fixate nitrogen on plant rootlets. She had grafted genetic instructions for a flavorful grain onto the basic stock of one of the furzelike plants of the moor. There had been excitement in these experiments, in thinking of them and finding within herself the knowledge to accomplish them. She had felt elation, a hen cackle of victory at each successful outcome.

  Tonight she was late in her journey, delayed by a stack of report forms. She had been tempted to stay in the dormitory with her fellows, but the retreat to the sea's edge was habit now. Let it go on. Whatever changes the day might bring, let comfortable habit sustain each evening.

  "Sustain," she said to herself, as though quoting. Someone else had said that. "Sustain each evening with comfortable … " No. Not comfortable. Essential. Essential habit.

  Whichever it was, she went through moonlit darkness toward the sea, past the tea-dark pools and the marshy places, through the rustling bracken, toward the roll of stones upon the sea shelves, the incessant grinding of gravel beside the waves. Which was, tonight, making a curious sound.

  She stopped, confused. A curious sound. Not the usual one. This was flattened, muffled sounding. As though some enormously thick bandage had been pressed down upon the world.

  She crouched, making herself as small as possible, then crept silently into a nearby tangle of bracken from which she peered out through slitted eyes. Near on her left, she heard a dack-chitter-chitter-clack as a small shelled creature made its laborious way across an outcropping of stone. From some distance to her right came the shrill cries of the seabirds in their spiraling gyre above the hammered sea. She was not far from the rim of the cliff. Not far from the cave itself. Perhaps a few hundred yards, all told. Still, better not move. Better merely wait to see what this oddness portended.

  Whatever-it-was went on being odd. She turned her head seaward.

  The bird cries piped without resonance. Even the sound of the waves was wooden and flat, reaching the ear as a single impulse, a slap with no following susurrus. Everything seemed damped. And then, moving to the left, between her and the sea, a wallowing darkness, a silent, heaving immensity.

  The thing had no edges! She could not see its shape. Though it swallowed stars, they were not thickly enough strewn to show an outline. At the advancing edge, a star winked out, then another, and at the trailing edge one winked into being, then another. Huge it was. Like a building. Yet moving … moving soundlessly. Invisibly.

  She burrowed her face in her hands and did not look up for a time. When she did so again, the darkness had turned inland, toward the camp. Before her the stars winked out, one by one.

  She could run, perhaps, and warn them! She could sneak quickly along under the bushes and get there in time to tell them … what? That a monstrous shadow was coming?

  Her flesh tingled, as though an electrical field had been generated around her. Her hair stood on end. Her breath left her lungs in a sudden rush as the air pressure increased, more, and more, and more, then was suddenly gone, leaving her gasping into her cupped hands, desperately achieving silence.

  The shadow was between her and the camp, approaching it from the south. She squirmed silently, turning so that she faced the camp. Everywhere, shadows.

  Shadows. Immensities.

  One approached from the north. And another yet, from the southeast. Wallowing darknesses, with no distinguishable features, no identifying characteristics …

  Except the taste coating her tongue. Like carrion and cold and something hideously oily-rancid. She held her nose. It was not smell. The taste flowed between her teeth, making her salivate profusely, a copious, mucilaginous spit that trailed sickeningly from the corners of her mouth and refused to be spat away. The taste of moldy mastodon. The flavor of Behemoth. The savor of absolute immensity.

  "Are you getting this?" her shadow mind mocked the distant observer, the monitor on Dinadh, the evaluator at Alliance Prime. Despite terror and discomfort, her rebellious ego thumbed its nose at that distant watcher, wherever, whenever it might be. "God, I hope you're getting this. This is them, fellows. The Ularians. Just taste them!"

  She almost screamed, for she felt it then. A vibration in the soil beneath her. Perhaps she heard it too. So deep a sound. Once and again. And again. The sound of earthquake breeding but not breaking. The sound of unimaginable hooves, slowly treading.

  A shriek from the direction of the camp, only momentarily human. More surprise than pain. Cut off in midhowl. The darknesses gathered thickly there, around the camp.

  And at this evidence of purpose concentrated away from herself, Snark scurried silently on all fours toward the sea, toward her landmark stones and her polished branch, throwing only one terrified glance behind her when she arrived there, seeing nothing toward the camp but the absence of stars, hearing nothing, smelling nothing, but tasting … oh, that foul grizzly smell, that flavor of old fur, long and matted, of bloody hooves and a hugeness past belief.

  She dropped into the cave in one frenzied movement, then thrust her head outside to spit into the ocean far below, scraping her tongue with her fingers, taking out her knife and using the back edge of that to scrape with, only then able to stop retching. The taste was still there, but diminished. Here it was diluted by the sea air, by its salt tang and chill cleanliness.

  She crawled under her blankets and was still as any animal petrified by fear, self-hypnotized into quiet. Time passed. The plod of those unimaginable feet came again, then once more. In her reverie, the shapes against the stars assumed form, like a puzzle her unconscious kept probing at. Maybe they weren't really that big. Maybe they had like … wings. Bats looked a lot bigger than they really were. And birds. Perhaps, in the daylight, one could see that they were quite imaginable, only with wings. If they returned in daylight.

  Except that winged things did not plod in that obdurate, inescapable way. Did not stalk across a world as though it were a pasture.

  Light flushed the horizon and she squinched her eyes shut against it, refusing to admit the audacity of daylight. It was still night, she told herself. Sti
ll safe dark, hiding dark, friendly dark.

  Sunlight allowed no such fiction, for she had forgotten to wall herself in. The sequined surface of the sea flashed into her eyes, blinding her. She emerged slowly, cautiously, drew down the branch, and lifted herself to peer above the rimrock across the moor. There was the camp, as she had left it, all the landmarks as she had last seen them. Nothing else. No residue of the disgusting taste. The flatness gone. Sounds once more familiar. Echoes coming from far hillsides and nearby stones. She crawled onto the rim and lay there quietly, waiting. Nothing. Nothing. Whatever it had been, whatever they had been, they had gone. For now.

  It took a long time for her to decide to go to the camp, for she knew from the beginning what she would find. A vacancy. Everyone gone. Kane the Brain and slob-lipped Willit and even Susso. No blood. No mess. Not even the feathery ash a disposal booth would have left behind. Nothing at all.

  Crumpled blankets on the beds, fallen into body shapes. Here a light left on, where someone had been up, maybe on the way to or from the toilets. And yes, there a pair of slippers, a stride apart, where the feet had been lifted from them all at once, the nightsuit fallen into a heap between them. Living things, human things gone, but their belongings untouched.

  Except for the test gardens. There were barren plots. Not all of them. Not all the tests. Just some. This one and that one, apparently at random.

  But, of course, it would not be at random. This clean-edged selective destruction could not be by chance. The plots destroyed had been selected; they would have to have something in common!

  Snark dug into her pocket for her notebook and dictated into it, listing the plots destroyed, grains type 178 and 54 and 209. Root crops 89 and 102 and 5 and 27. Virtually all the leaf crops, leaving only half a dozen standing. Destroyed because of what? Dangerous? Or merely not nutritious? Or perhaps not smelling nice to whatever the monstrous shadow had been. Or not tasting nice. Or not something nice, some other sense that Snark could not even imagine. Perhaps the destroyed crops made the monstrous shadows itch? Or made their eyes water. Assuming they had eyes. Which one would be wrong to do. The missing crops made their enormous membranous verticals twinge, that was it.

  She found herself thrashing on the ground, laughing hysterically.

  The sounds she was making frightened her, and she stopped all at once, horrified at herself. She choked the sound with her own hands, terrified at her own panic. She had been conditioned! She shouldn't be able to feel anything of the kind!

  Conditioned to be among others, she told herself. Conditioned to be one of a group. Not to be alone. Not like this. She clicked on her notebook once more, setting down her thoughts, her impressions. "The sound was damped, like big curtains hung in open space might do," she said. "Absorbing sound waves." After a moment's thought, she described what she had unconsciously resolved about their shape. "Winged," she said. "I think they must have wings, or some membrane of some kind that covers a wide area. But … I got the feeling of shagginess. Of fur … "

  The laboratories were undisturbed. Her grain furze grew glossily green and spiky in its hydroponic tank. The lights above it were still on. The generator hadn't been touched.

  If she were to make changes, would the darknesses notice? If she moved something here, now, would they return and realize someone had escaped their raid?

  Who could tell? Better change nothing. Better move nothing. Or, better yet, move some tiny inconspicuous thing and see if they noticed.

  She had left a bundle of furze-grain seedling stored in the back of a coldframe. They were in an unlabeled container. Probably the darknesses had not even seen it. In case they had, she divided some other seedlings and put the container back, now holding something else. She would plant the seedlings near her cave, where in time they might stand between herself and hunger.

  There were food stores, too, that she could shift, leaving everything looking much as before. When she returned to the cave, she did so heavily laden. Everything had to be swung into the cave at the end of a rope and then tucked away in crannies before she, herself, had room to stretch out. It was late afternoon before she was finished. Too late, that day, to plant the seedlings. Tomorrow she would get them in. Not in rows or patches, but one by one, among the native plants they much resembled. And tomorrow, if the darknesses did not return, she would take more food, carefully, just as she'd learned as a child. Leaving no trail. Making everything look just as it had before.

  From my room in the hive, I heard Lutha and Leelson and Trompe talking. It was early morning. They thought I was still asleep, I suppose, for they were talking about me.

  "The emotion was shame," said Trompe in an argumentative tone.

  "Also anger," Leelson insisted. "She was ashamed, but also angry."

  "Wouldn't you be?" demanded Lutha. "My God, gentlemen. Wouldn't you be? The anger part I can certainly understand."

  "So can we," said Leelson in a tone even I thought to be patronizing. "It's the shame part we're finding intriguing."

  "What they did to her was a rape," said Lutha furiously. "Our persons are in our faces. When we show ourselves to the public, we show our faces. That's what we recognize about one another, those of us who see, at any rate. Our faces portray our personas. Her persona was violated, just as in rape. Rape evokes emotions of shame and anger because of the violation."

  "Why was it done?" Trompe asked.

  She replied, "We won't understand it until we find out a lot more about this society." She paused, breathing furiously, enraged on my behalf. Even from where I lay on my bed, I could hear her fuming.

  "And I will find out," she said firmly.

  I thought she might indeed, for she seemed a very determined woman. I would have told her what she wanted to know if I could. But could I say, yes, it was my own fault, for sometimes I have doubts, and my sisters in sorrow tell me they, too, have doubts. But, so my sisters say, we are not alone in this! Our mothers, siblings, cousins, our dearest friends, they have doubts. Most of those who emerge unscathed from the House Without a Name, they, too, have doubts. Doubts are not peculiar to those who have been maimed, so why … why we? Was our doubt of a particular kind?

  More had been maimed lately, so the sisters said. In our great-grandmothers' time, almost no one was maimed, but now it is more than half! Why? What was happening? The sisterhood argued over this again and again, finding no answer. What does one say? I was guilty of doubting. I did not doubt more than others, or differently from others, but I was selected for punishment. My punishment was particularly horrid because … because of who did it to me …

  Lutha was right. There is no rape on Dinadh, but I can imagine it would be as shaming, as cruel as this. In a way, it was like what the two Fastigats were doing to me, questioning me, searching at me, examining me, bending their Fastigat sense upon me. That, too, was rape. They increased my shame and sorrow for no good reason, for they could not learn something I did not know.

  It is better to do as the sisters recommend, to say nothing at all, to admit nothing. Let them seek elsewhere, among others for answers. And if they find answers, let them tell me.

  A voice from the door.

  "Saluez? Are you awake?"

  Lutha.

  I sat up, pulling my veil into place. "I was up earlier," I confessed.

  "Leelson and Trompe and I've been talking," she said. "We have an offer we wish to make you, in return for your help."

  I had heard nothing of an offer. What offer?

  She said, "It's possible … your face can be fixed. Restored … "

  "No," I cried, thrusting away with both hands. "No. Do not say that!"

  She looked shocked, horrified. "But surely … "

  "I would have to leave Dinadh," I cried hysterically. "I would have to go away from my people. They would not let me live here if you healed me."

  "But … but I thought … "

  "It was my fault," I cried. I who had decided to say nothing! I, who knew it was not my fault! "M
y face is evidence of my sin. Do you think you can erase my sin by healing me? Do you think my people will let me live among them if I am healed!"

  She backed away from me in confusion. Leelson came from the study and put his hand on her shoulder. "What?" he demanded.

  She turned and led him into the room, shutting the door firmly behind them. And I sat on the edge of my bed and cried. Oh, if I were healed, Shalumn might be mine again. Oh, if I were healed, I would have to go away. Oh, if I were healed, it would change nothing, it would change everything!

  After a time I dried my face, straightened my veil, and went to knock upon the closed door.

  "I will help you," I said when they opened it. "But you must not talk of … what you said earlier. Not at all. Not ever!" I could not bear it. It set all my hard-won peace at nothing.

  They stared at me, all three of them. The boy was curled on a bench beneath the window, playing with his fingers. They cared, but he did not.

  "Why?" asked Leelson. "Why will you help us?"

  "You say there is great danger for everyone, perhaps for Dinadh too. Perhaps the outlander ghost found something to avert this danger, so I will help you search for the outlander ghost or for what it was he knew."

  Leelson ran his hands through his hair. He was a handsome man, Leelson. Tall, bright-haired, with one of those rugged, rocky outlander faces that always seem strange to us Dinadhi, who are round-faced and smoother looking. The boy looked something like him. More like him than Lutha. But he had a big-eyed strangeness to him, something I thought I should recognize.

  "Where could Bernesohn Famber have gone, Saluez?"

  It was a foolish question. He knew as well as I. "You heard his own voice," I replied. "He spoke of the southern canyon, of the omphalos. You yourself said he must have walked. That is where he walked."

  Leelson frowned as he seated himself. "All right, let's take it point by point. Last night you told us certain gods were abandoned on your former world."

  I nodded. Unwisely, I had said it.

  "And these gods were abandoned for"—he gestured toward the window—"the beautiful people."