Shadow's End (35 page)

“This girl who seems still to be there,” said Codger. “This XZ51.”

The other three in the room exchanged looks of amazement.

“What girl is he talking about?” asked the ex-king.

Poracious Luv sat down and held her hands high, commanding silence and attention. “Let's make sense of this! Anent seems to be saying the entire team on Perdur Alas has disappeared except for one girl or woman designated by the code number XZ51. That one is still on Perdur Alas with a functioning sensory recorder. Is that more or less correct?”

“Said that,” muttered Master Spy, biting hard upon his pipe stem, his lips writhing back to disclose a gray-coated tongue and stumpy, smoke-blackened teeth, at the sight of which Poracious averted her eyes. “Already said that!”

“You have the records.”

“No,” he said between clamped teeth.

“You don't have the records? Where are they?”

“At my house.”

“You will provide them?”

“That was the plan.” It was a favorite saying of Thosby's, used in reply whenever anyone asked him when he would do something he had said he would do a long time previously.

“Not a plan,” whispered the Procurator, his hand at his throat, which felt raw and dry. “Not a futurity, not a possibility, not a matter to be thought over. It is now, an immediate order. Go, at once. As rapidly as it is possible for you to do so. Without doing anything else or going anywhere else. Go to your house, and get the records. Bring them here!”

“I'd better go with him,” said Poracious, heaving her bulk from its chair. “He might get sidetracked.”

The two got only as far as the slightly open door when a young woman of Dinadh pushed it open, bowed politely, and spoke to Thosby Anent in a cheerfully guileless voice:

“Sir Thosby, when I learned you were on your way to meet with the Procurator of the Alliance, it occurred to me you might want the records you have been so assiduously compiling.” She held out several datachips, offering them to Poracious.

Poracious broke the astonished silence.

“And you are?”

“Chadra Tsum, ma'am. I am housekeeper for Thosby Anent.” She relinquished the datachips with a significant glance, which said, “I am who and what I am, but this matter is larger than who and what I am.”

“You were both thoughtful and correct,” the large woman said.

“I believe this room is equipped with retrievers. If the Procurator wants the latest information.” Chadra bowed
to Poracious, to Thosby, a perfect model of polite servitude.

“Pushy, unpleasant woman,” Thosby snarled as Chadra turned away. “Always interrupting me when I'm busy.”

“Perhaps she wishes to direct your attention to something important,” whispered the Procurator. “Had that occurred to you?”

“Oh, sir,” said the Codger with a patronizing smile, “we are too concerned with things we believe are important. When one considers the infinite nature of time, that all races including our own are doomed to live and perish like the candle flame in that infinitude—”

“Good day,” said Poracious, taking him by the shoulder and moving him gently toward the door. “We can't thank you enough for your help.” She shut the door behind him, then turned, the datachips in her hand, murmuring, “Where's the retriever?”

“What's that beside the window?” the Procurator asked plaintively. “Surely that's a retriever.”

The ex-king took the plat from Poracious and inserted it into a wall-mounted retrieval complex that had been designed to look like a landscape sculpture. “Is there a code?” he murmured, stepping politely aside and averting his eyes.

Poracious referred to her wrist-link before entering an activation code. The unit hummed briefly, then the walls of the room disappeared and the three were on Perdur Alas, assailed by sounds, sights, smells. And a taste!

They gagged.

Before them, observed from some distance, through a twiggy growth, monstrously shaggy flesh encircled something they could not see, great cliffs of hair reared high as hills, walls of old dog, of lairs deep in layers of fatty bones, the taste of beast, hot reeking blood, and sour spit. From behind them came the sound of the sea. Between their teeth a twig was jammed to keep their mouths slightly
open so they wouldn't gag on the taste … on the dreadful taste.

The scene jiggled and moved as they rose laboriously. Their point of view changed. They climbed, up and up, then peered out once more from above, down at the inside of that wall of flesh, seeing bare skin upon which patterns moved, around and around the abandoned camp, memories of slaughter, retelling of the chase.

They raised their eyes. Through the air, from the south, three things came toward the others, reaching out with appendages that seemed to stretch forever, joining others, making other enclosures. In the middle distance, a dozen shaggy mountains moved in a slow procession.

What was it they tasted? Oily, soapy, rancid, bitter, nasty …

Poracious Luv, from her vision of Perdur Alas, stretched her arm through the vision to find the reality of the retrieval control on Dinadh. She turned it off. While the other two retched and gagged she unashamedly wiped out her mouth with the hem of her garment.

“Technician!” she said. “Call for a technician to filter out the tastes. We can't analyze this until we filter out the tastes.”

“Do it,” sputtered the Procurator, heading for the door labeled
SANITARY FACILITY.
“Summon that rememberer back, and have him find someone. Now!”

F
rom behind a clump of furze, Snark watched Diagonal Red, Four Green Spot, Big Gray Blob, Blue Lines, and Speckled Purple—the ones she'd come to call the Big Five—gather over the camp. Recently these particular ones had been assembling more and more frequently, sometimes only three or four of them, often all five, looming aloft for a while, then descending to encircle the abandoned camp with appendages that seemed almost liquid in their ability to flow together. Peering at them from her hole at the top of the nearest hill, Snark had decided this
was either the way they conversed or the way they remembered. Each new picture coalesced on one Ularian before it moved across the united flesh to the next Ularian, where some other details or actions were added. Each Ularian augmented or complicated the picture created by the previous ones, and the event continued accreting finer and finer detail until the sequence was completed. Or until the Ularians got tired of it.

She had watched them kill her mother half a dozen times. Since she had first realized that the color blobs were pictures, she had counted the number of different pictures they shared. The most frequent one was Snark's mother, a huge mother one who covered the whole front of one of the things. Soon Mother would run across the moor, her hair streaming behind her. The shape of running Mother would move to the left, racing along that great wall of flesh. The next Ularian added the shapes of the pursuers. This picture went on, left, farther left, until Snark lost sight of it. When it came into view again, to her right, the pursuers were pouncing, sending Mother fleeing this way, that way, playing with her. Every time the same, the sea coming nearer and nearer, safety almost within reach …

Each time Snark had seen it, Mother had almost reached the edge before they caught her.

Why did they show it over and over? Tell it over and over? It wasn't a story one of them told, it was a story they shared. Sometimes Diagonal Red would start it. Sometimes one of the others. And the details were always the same, as though they'd all agreed just how it was, just what had happened, remembering it all the same.

Snark told herself the pictures were not necessarily true. The chase might not have happened at all. Maybe it was something they wanted to have happened. Maybe it was a religious thing, a kind of ritual they went through, like primitives did, counting coup, telling tall tales, even
painting lies on their tombs to make their gods think they were better, or bigger, or stronger than they actually were.

Today they weren't telling the mother-chase story. Today they were showing another favorite, a fish story. The picture was of shaggy forms that hung over the sea, dropping their tentacles into the waves, drawing them up again, laden with silvery fish. The detail was so complete that Snark could see the fish flapping inside the tentacles that had caught them.

When they were finished telling stories, they would float away, like monstrous balloons. There was a wrong-ness to them. Balloons should be festive, not repulsive. Snark put her face onto her hands, waiting for them to finish showing the fish story and go away. Close as they were, she dared not move, though the taste was hard to bear. When she watched them for a long time like this, the taste seemed to permeate her own flesh until she herself tasted as they did, sick of her own saliva, nauseated by the rottenness of her own tongue. When they left, she would lie in the mouth of her cave with her mouth open, letting the sea wind wash around her teeth, cleansing her into humanness once more.

During the past few days, they had been around more frequently and had stayed for longer times. Maybe they were planning a fishing trip. Maybe they'd taken over this whole planet just to go fishing! Though all they'd done so far was talk about it, that is, show pictures about it. They themselves hadn't caught any fish, not that Snark had seen.

She clamped her eyes shut and concentrated on breathing deeply: one breath, two breaths, three, four, the smell of the sea, the sound of the birds, thirty-two, the sound of the waves, eighty, one hundred, a hundred thirty, seventy….

When she raised her head, they had gone. She didn't move. A few days ago, she'd thought they were gone and had been about to move when she realized they were
hanging directly above her. She'd come that close to being eaten. Or transported. Or cat-and-moused like her mother. Whatever it was they did. Would do.

She risked a look up. Clear sky. Nothing. Nothing near the camp. Nothing between herself and the cliff. Still, one had to be careful. They could move with horrid alacrity. One minute they wouldn't be anywhere around, the next moment they'd be present.

Maybe they knew she was here. Maybe all this was part of the ritual. Showing her what would happen to her.

She wouldn't think that. Wouldn't let herself think that. If she thought that, she'd run screaming right at them, out in the open, panicked. She couldn't do that. She had to hold on, hold on….

For what? There was no one here. No one to protect, no one to talk to, no one to lie beside, sharing warmth, sharing comfort, even.

Untrue. Somewhere was a monitor. Seeing what she saw. Feeling what she felt. Somewhere on Dinadh was someone watching over her.

Though the monitor might not be the only thing watching over her! Sometimes in the night she woke to that flattened sound, that curtained feeling, that almost subliminal shudder, as though a mighty hoof had touched the planet, moving it slightly in its orbit. What was that? Did
it
know she was here?

“Lonely,” she whispered. “God, I'm so lonely! I'm all alone. Please. Help me. Come get me. Please!”

L
ate Dinadh daylight filtered chill through multiple windows, making puddles of grayed gold upon the floor. Three sat stunned, facing one another, only just returned from Perdur Alas, returned from fear, pain, hunger, cold. From weary loneliness.

“Well,” said the Procurator in an exhausted whisper. “At least we now know what they look like.”

They did not know whether they had been living
Snark's life for a day or two or three. Only when she reached the safety of her cave and curled into sleep had they turned off the retriever and let the Dinadh evening surround them once more. The Procurator's words were the first intelligible ones any of them had made, though their experience had been punctuated by cries and grunts and indrawn breaths.

“Can't we do something for her?” the ex-king asked, his voice breaking. “Send a ship or something.”

Poracious Luv arched her brows disbelievingly. “You? The King of Kamir, the practitioner of ultimate ennui? Touched by the plight of another human being?”

“She's alone,” he blurted, flushing. “I've … I've been alone. It would touch anyone!”

The Procurator rubbed his forehead wearily. It ached from the battering he, Snark, had received. It had ached before, and now it was worse. He had, after all, sent her there. He was responsible for her.

He said, “Touched or not, right now there's no ship to send. Even if there were a ship, we couldn't risk it for one survivor.”

“Particularly inasmuch as we now have records of everything she's picked up,” said Poracious Luv in a dry, cynical voice. “So there'd be no advantage to rescuing her.”

“Advantage,” Jiacare Lostre snarled. “Advantage!”

“Would you trade a hundred lives for one?” the Procurator said, looking him in the eye. “Surely you don't think those …creatures would let us go to Perdur Alas and simply remove her? We'd have to send a cruiser at least. Would you trade a shipload of men on a gesture?”

“How do we know they wouldn't?”

Poracious sighed. “We know what happened to ships in the Hermes Sector a hundred years ago. Any ship approaching a world that had been stripped was taken. They went, just as the people went. Gone. Whisk. Away. Nobody
knew where. That's what has happened to the evacuation ships this time, too.”

“I didn't realize,” mumbled the ex-king. “Sorry. This is all … very new to me. I've tried not to care about anything for a very long time, but this …”

“Nothing like a heady dose of danger to wake one up,” Poracious agreed. “Well, Procurator? What do we do next?”

“With what we've seen happening currently, there must be dozens of episodes in the record that will warrant perusal by experts.”

“Experts.” She laughed. “Ha!”