Shadow's End (47 page)

Lutha knew he was staying to keep an eye on her so she wouldn't do anything motherly! She was so angry the blood hammered in her ears.

“We're being sensible,” said Leelson, his forehead wrinkled in apparent concern. “We really are, Lutha.”

“I know you think you are!” she cried at him, hating him. “Stop feeling at me!”

He only held her closer. “I can't stop feeling you. I do feel you, Lutha. I've felt you since the moment I first saw you. I was high up in that library, all by myself, quite contented, and I … heard a summons. I tried not to answer it. And when I'd met you, that first time, I went away, fully intending never to see you again.”

She laughed shortly, wrenching herself away from him.
“You did? I did too. When I told Yma about you, we both decided you were like a case of the plague, better avoided and very hard to cure!”

“More or less what my mother said.”

She flushed angrily. “Damn your mother.”

“She's a product of her heritage. If you damn her, you'll have to go on damning former generations, all the way back to Bernesohn's time or earlier.”

“You're just like her! You and Limia are so much alike I can't figure out why she can't understand about … about us.”

He shook his head. “Why should she understand? I don't. I've been with other women. I've loved some of them. But when I've decided to go, I've always gone.”

“You went from me! Damn it, Leelson, you went!”

“I went.” He laughed in wry amusement. “But I wasn't gone. Or rather, you weren't. You were there, love. Every morning when I woke, like an invisible rope, tying us together. Every night when I was alone, I felt it tugging. Even when I wasn't alone, you were there, between me and whoever.”

She tried to laugh, tried to pretend he was lying, knowing all the time that Fastigats didn't lie. It was one of the infuriating things about them. They might not see the truth the way others saw it, but they really couldn't misrepresent what they thought was true.

“Why? Why did you go?” she demanded, a question she'd been wanting to ask for years.

“I told you why. In the note.”

“You call that a note? Five words! ‘I can't get to him.'”

“I couldn't get to him. And I couldn't … couldn't bear to see you …”

“See me what?”

“Wasting all that caring.”

“Wasting? On my own child!”

He threw up his hands. “That's why I went, Lutha. This
is why I'll go again, when this is done. If this is ever done.”

“Don't say it.” Lutha banged her fist against the stone, hurting herself. “We can't change each other. We can hammer and hammer, and in the end we'll be the same. Things happen. We can't go back and make them unhappen.”

Lutha saw Leelson's lowering expression and laughed out loud. “This is ridiculous! We're marooned, we're in danger of death, we're sitting in a rock cavern with nothing but a few blankets and a rather modest stack of food, my child is missing, and you and I are—”

“Are doing exactly what I wanted to avoid,” he said firmly. “But you're right. We won't change our views in this matter. The more we talk, the more pain we'll cause, but we won't change.”

“But he's—”

“Lutha!” Leelson glared at her. “Don't talk about what Leely is!”

Then a voice from among the stones! “Dananana. Dananana.”

He danced into the cavern as though Leelson had summoned him, shining as brightly as one of those vagrant rays of sun.

Lutha gasped. He was bleeding! Round wounds on his arms, on his face. No. Perhaps not. Not wounds exactly. There was blood, but not … not so much. “He's been bitten,” she cried.

Though maybe he'd only scratched himself on the stones. His little shirt was torn, a fragment of the striped fabric missing, his skin abraded beneath. But already the redness was paling, the rough edges of skin were smoothing.

“Can't get lost,” breathed Saluez, from some great distance.

“He's not hurt,” Leelson said in an ugly tone. “Look at him, he's not hurt.”

“Can't get hurt,” said Saluez, her voice fading into silence.

Lutha held Leely close, he waving his hands, kicking his feet, caroling the way he did when he was contented. “Dananana.”

Leelson turned his back on them and slowly moved in the direction the others had taken. “Be back,” he said, the same words, the same tone as before. Definite. Dismissive.

Lutha heard the sounds of his going away, the tumble of small stones, the crunch of his feet.

“Poor Lutha,” breathed Saluez.

“My own damned fault,” she mumbled. “Maybe you're right. Maybe Leely can't get hurt, or lost. People used to believe strange ones like Leely were protected by the gods.”

There was no response. Saluez was gone, back to wherever she'd been since the omphalos. Lutha tucked the blankets around her once more, then sat quietly by while Leely drew pictures in the sand, saying over and over, “Dananana. Dananana.” When he tired of this, he curled up beside Saluez and went to sleep.

E
ventually the others returned to the cavern and, unaccountably so far as Lutha was concerned, set about making ready for an excursion.

Now, Leelson said, they would go out and look around.

Lutha stared at him in wonderment. He didn't notice. Mitigan raided the supply pile once again for mottled gray-green overgarments he said would hide them among the bracken. Snark suggested that they smudge their faces with dust so as not to show up pale or dark against some contrasting background. Lutha went along with all this for a time, though all the preparations seemed rather melodramatic, but finally she could stand it no longer.

“Will someone please tell me why we're going outside?”

Leelson cast her a lofty glance. “Anything Snark experiences
feeds back to Simidi-ala, where the Procurator is no doubt even now planning our rescue. The feedback includes not only what Snark sees and hears but anything she sees us do or hears us say. We've had no chance to look around in daylight. One of us might come up with some insight that may be useful in planning the rescue attempt. Even the scanty information we have now is more than the Alliance has known previously!”

Mitigan, busy checking his own armament, raised the subject of weapons for the others, and Snark suggested they go first to the camp to pick up heat guns like the one she carried. These were tools used by the shadow team to sterilize soil before planting homo-norm crops, but they would serve to discourage attack as well.

While Snark demonstrated this device to the others Lutha checked her arrangements for Leely once more. Saluez's knife was put away in Lutha's own pocket so he couldn't get at that. His tether was tight—she checked it for the third or fourth time—so he couldn't get loose. While she did this Snark was instructing the others: “…turn it on … press the button.” Even distracted as Lutha was, she thought she would be able to manage that.

They went down the slope into the camp, exploring from building to building, Mitigan, Leelson, and Snark half-crouched, looking in all directions at once, the ex-king and Lutha shambling along, feeling faintly ridiculous. Lutha was reminded of the vacated world the Procurator had showed her, where Mallia had lived. Here, as there, was clothing out of which bodies had been stripped. Here, as there, were artifacts, tools, games left behind when their users had been taken away. Through open doors the wind keened softly, a chill murmur that never ceased. In a window a tuft-eared, short-nosed animal sat quietly, staring at us interlopers.

“Is that a live cat?” Lutha asked, disbelievingly.

“Left behind when the real team was evacuated,” Snark
said. “Her name's Zagger. There's another one somewhere. Zigger.”

“Animals? Real animals? Left behind? The Procurator told me the Ularians left nothing alive!”

“I know what he said,” snarled Snark. “I was there, pouring your damn tea!”

Lutha fell silent. The cat jumped down from the window and came to rub itself against her legs. A strange sensation. It looked up intelligently. Lutha realized that it, like the gaufers, knew things. Not as humans knew them, but in its own way. She saw language in its movements. Not her own language, not a spoken language, but … Smells, maybe? A combination, perhaps, of smells and gestures and sounds.

“You're right about what the old Proc said.” Snark leaned down to stroke the cat. “He talked about all life being gone. But you remember that world he showed you—there was a little pet animal crying along the fence. And there was trees and plants and birds. It was only the humans gone. It's just, the old Proc, he's like a lot of people spend all their lives in Class-J cities, with only humans around—he gets to a point of thinking
life
means
human.
People like that, maybe they got a flower in a pot and a clone fish in a bowl, but they get like Mitigan, so set on humans being the top of the heap, they don't give anything else credit for living.”

“What do the cats eat?” asked the ex-king.

“I put out food for 'em,” said Snark. “They'll eat fish. I used to catch 'em fish. Now I dunno. Won't be many fish left, the way the shaggies're gulping 'em down.”

Though they had come to the camp for heat guns, Lutha took the opportunity to do a superficial inventory of supplies available. She was looking particularly for a medical diagnostic unit for Saluez. Such a unit should have been a standard item in any human-occupied area, but there was none in any building they visited. Lutha
didn't mention the omission to Snark, considering that Snark had quite enough to be angry about already.

With the heat guns in their pockets, they left the camp and walked down the narrow vale to the pebbly beach, the only place for several days' walk in either direction, said Snark, where the cliffs did not close off access to the sea. They stopped in what Snark called a storm hole, a hollow eaten out by storm waves above the usual high-water line. From this cover they stared at the shaggies from a new angle. The shaggies took no notice.

After some little time Mitigan strode down onto the beach and strutted back and forth to see if the shaggies would react. When they did not, Leelson joined him in his stroll, then Snark and Lutha. Still no attention from the fishers. They walked the length of the beach, not a great distance, noting that the long wave-washed piles of shaggy body parts had much diminished. The remainder was liquescing, trickling into the gravel in inklike runnels.

“You'd think this would smell, or taste, or something,” said Snark.

To Lutha, it looked disgusting, but it did not smell or taste, and the shorebirds took no notice of the remains. Neither did the shaggies, who merely hung like lumpy balloons above the sea, their amorphous, knotty tentacles reeling up and down, the fringed tips stirring the water. Whenever a fish was encountered, the lines twitched and drew upward by a process of gradual thickening, becoming a bulbous extrusion from which the catch was drawn into the main sac. Each shaggy had at least a hundred appendages of various lengths, some coming down, others going up, some quiescent, just hanging. Lutha thought them clumsy looking, as though they had been botched or left unfinished. They seemed uncommitted to their present shapes, as though wearing an expedient disguise.

She started to mention this to Leelson, when Snark looked up and said, “Whoa …”

Lutha smothered a shriek. While they'd been staring
westward one of the shaggies south of them had floated to a spot between them and their cover. It was far larger than Lutha had estimated. Very wide. With many tentacles.

“Split up,” said Mitigan. “Spread out. Start inland.”

Lutha's instinct was to stay close to someone else, but Mitigan gestured her away, so she moved obediently apart from the others, a full shaggy diameter away southward, swiveling her head to look in all directions above. The shaggy was hanging roughly between Mitigan and Leelson, tracking them, its underside bulging with incipient filaments and with others already partway extruded. The two men were to Lutha's left, and though they moved rapidly, the shaggy had no trouble staying above them.

Snark was nearest Lutha, on her right.

“More of them, moving in from the sea,” she said, breaking into a trot.

Lutha ran beside her, realizing that she had no idea where the nearest bolt-hole was.

Snark saw her confusion. “The rocks just ahead,” she said. “Aim for the shadow to your left.”

There were several shadows. As they came nearer, Lutha saw the one Snark meant. A hole with space behind it. She hurried, hearing Snark's feet racing away toward another hole, one farther south. Out of the corner of her eye, Lutha saw tentacles at her side, left and right. She leapt toward the shadow, making it under cover just in time.

A slithering sound came from behind her. She turned to see a tentacle slide down the rock behind her, its end plopping onto the ground she had just left.

“Safe,” shouted Snark.

“Safe,” shouted Mitigan.

Then Leelson's voice shouted the same word. Lutha breathed easier.

“Lutha!” shouted Leelson. “Jiacare!”

Oh. “Safe,” she cried breathlessly. “I think.” She heard
no responsive shout from the ex-king, but then she had other things to worry about.

The plopping tentacle had fallen on a rootlet that led inward. Now it had wrapped itself around the rootlet and was pulling itself slowly into the shallow shelter where Lutha crouched. The tip explored, feeling its way, reaching out for the next thing it could get hold of. Each time it stretched thin, a bulbous thickening somewhere behind it moved up, allowing the slenderer tip to move forward again. The tip was fringed all around with cilia that moved independently, giving it an odd sort of expressiveness. As though it might be thinking.