Shadow's End (23 page)

Small pleasures, stored against the darkness of despair. Taste something savory. Smell a little sweetness. Let a sister rub your shoulders where they ache, or brew a special pot of tea, or even join in making bodily delight as some of the sisters do, as I would do if Shalumn were among us. That is the greatest loss. Love is the greatest loss. We make a life of remnants, of details, and so each hour's shadow is delayed, another day, another day. But, oh, the nighttime is hurtful when you lie down and your body longs for the body of the beloved. When your breasts tingle and your nipples get hard and you taste the beloved's skin on your tongue and between your legs, you are on fire. Even being pregnant does not stop that. Animals have more sense. They do not go on rutting and mating once the female has kindled. They do not stand knee-deep in sweet grass and long for apples. But we, we
people do. We go on longing and longing and longing, and all the beautiful people and all their teeth and talons do not change that!

So I lay breathing like a bellows, panting, trying to imagine I was as I used to be and she was beside me, we two moving together in the bed dance.

All … all for nothing.

I sat up, tears flowing, unstoppable, as though another dam had broken. There was a water pitcher in the corner. I put my head over the basin and poured the cold water through my hair, gasping when it ran around my ears and into my eyes. Beside the basin was the packet the sisterhood had given me. At first I had taken it, thanked them, told myself I would not use it, but more and more I did use it. Now I took one of the leaf rolls and lit it at the candle, drawing the smoke deep into me.

“Say, ‘Mother Darkness, come to me,'” the sisters had said.

“Mother Darkness, come to me.”

“Say, ‘Father Endless, come to me.'”

“Father Endless, come to me.”

“Say, ‘Mother and Father of peace, come to me.'”

“Mother and Father of peace, come to me,

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.

O
n 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
clack-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. Still 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 vorticals 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.