Jo Clayton - Shadowkill

It was two hours later when she woke, she was sticky and sore, she had a crick in her neck and a hollow feeling in her stomach. The shadows were longer, thicker, the sun low in the east. She sat up, rubbed at her neck and felt around for the ponies.

They’d stayed close by; they were nosing among the dried grasses under the trees, nipping at choice bits and chewing patiently once they had a mouthful.

She dug her fingers into her hair, scratched extravagantly. “Half a day… Sar!”

She dug the map out of the saddlebag and sat studying it. “Well, Shadow, I might as well spend the night here, can’t reach the next water before dark. Hmm. Looks like I’d better do some planning, isn’t going to work riding straight through, that sun’s a killer.” She scowled at the map, dismayed by the tiny distance she’d covered in those hours of riding. At this rate, it’d take forever to reach Nirtajai.

A high whining broke through the whisper of the leaves, the mutter of the river.

Off to her left a black dot arced by, cutting in and out of sulfur-colored clouds, gone before she could get to her feet.

“Mingas. Ahead of schedule. Hunh.” She yawned,

She sat watching the fire die. The wind was rising; the clouds had blown away, taking the heat with them; the blanket round her shoulders actually felt good.

Alone. She was starting to feel comfortable with that. As long as there was an end to it. Comfortable. Even happy.

I know what it is. I’m not drifting any more. I’m doing something.

She wrapped the blanket around her, stretched out on the groundsheet, her head on the saddle.

Even if I had to get booted into it.

She sighed with pleasure and gazed up at the sky; the moon hadn’t risen yet, the stars were thick and brilliant. It was like the sky she’d seen as a child when she was so young she still had the skin on her eggsac slinging.

A spark popped from the circle of stones, landed on her hand, startling her awake.

The Raska Tsipor pa Prool was sitting across the fire from her, watching her.

“You built it up,” Shadith said.

“Yesss.”

“Why?”

Tsipor shrugged her narrow shoulders.

“You want something?”

“Omphalos.”

“What?”

“You going to make them hurt.”

Shadith wriggled free of the blankets and sat up. “That good or bad?”

“I felt your purpose. I came.”

“Huh?”

“To ss-see them hurt.”

“At the moment, I’m not too capable of hurting anyone.”

“You will. I feel it.” Her black eyes reflected the flames; she undulated her torso; her mouth was open a little and her thin black tongue flickered in and out of the gap. There was a force in the woman, something unleashed, in her that she’d kept hidden all the time she was in the truck and at the Rinta.

“How? I mean, what’re you talking about?”

Tsipor did an odd, twisting movement of her hands. Talking seemed difficult for her. “I know. I come with you.”

Shadith frowned. Oh, hell with it, she thought. “Why not.”

Tsipor nodded. She came round the fire, reached out, held her hand above Shadith’s arm, not quite touching the skin. She waited.

“All right,” Shadith said.

The hand touched her, soft, warm, dry. Power flowed into her, jolting her, as if she’d stuck her finger in a light socket. After her first startle-reflex, she reached .

There was a horse a short distance off, tied to a tree with a tether long enough to let him graze on a patch of grass.

There were l’bourghhas sniffing round the ponies. She twitched a nerve in the predators and sent them running off. The ponies kept on grazing and didn’t know what had just passed by them.

Her reach leaped beyond the horizon, all the way back to the Kuysstead. She felt Allina’s anguish, Mingas-she wrenched herself away from him, sickened.

She touched the back of Tsipor’s hand.

The Raska moved away, the powerflow was gone and Shadith felt deeply diminished, as if she’d suddenly gone deaf or blind. It took minutes for her sense of herself to settle.

She contemplated Tsipor. “I look through beast eyes, do you look through mine?”

Tsipor nodded.

“Telepath?”

Tsipor shook her head. “Not thinking, feeling.” She held up her narrow hand. “Only touching.”

Shadith relaxed. “Why don’t you go untie your horse, let him graze. I’ll bring him in when it’s time to start on. Unless you…”

“No. Is feeling, is not riding. Is not like yours. Is other things, but…” Once again she did that painful twist of her hands, it seemed to be her equivalent of a shrug.

“You had something to eat?”

“Yess. You sleep. I watch.”

On the second night, Shadith gazed across the fire at Tsipor. “Tell me,” she said.

The Raska nodded. Her story was a performance, part body (a dance of torso and arms and face), part words (single words, short phrases), part ghost images that appeared and dissolved between them.

Despite her resemblance to the Cousin baseform, Tsipor pa Prool was not a Cousin; her way of seeing and saying was skewed at an odd angle to Shadith’s so Shadith was never quite sure she understood what Tsipoor was saying to her in her multilevel langue.

IMAGE: Sipayor siRasaka, Tsipor’s homeworld. Sense of dryness, of complexity-crystalline? Scoutship finds it, the sigil on the ship is the circled spiral of Omphalos. Something happens. Omphalos controls the world now. Omphalos is doing things to the Raskas, making them different? Surgery? Forced breeding? Terror, anger, grief

IMAGE: Raska males, conical mounds of flesh, can move some, slowly, sloooowly, prefer stillness, contemplation. Makers of songs and joy. Receivers of life, taking, fertilizing, incubating the eggs of the Raska females.

IMAGE: Mating rite, wonder, power, pleasure. Raska females dancing in the light of seven moons, rubbing themselves against the male, mindflow as music. (Shadith heard it as a grand symphony played by an orchestra of hundreds).

IMAGE: Time has passed. The Raska females return to the male, deposit eggs in the prepared cavities of his spongy flesh. Explosion of tenderness. Love. Joy. And then, Omphalos came.

Tsipor wept, not tears, but with her hands and her pain.

IMAGE: The eggs cut from the male. He keens his agony and his loss. The females tied to him come racing to him. Are captured or killed. Tsipor is one captured. The male dies. He cries out his grief, his pain, and dies. She feels him die. Her sister/mates die. She feels them die. Omphalos keeps her alive. Alive and alone.

Tsipor cut off the story at that place. What happened after that did not matter; she would not speak of it. “Why?” she said finally, her hands and body repeating her confusion, her anguish. “Why make such pain?”

“Don’t ask me,” Shadith said. “I didn’t understand Ginny, I don’t understand Omphalos. Tell you true, I don’t want to. I’d be afraid it’d rub off on me.”

They rose before dawn, rode and walked, walked and rode to the next water on the map, slept through the worst of the heat, rode and walked, walked and rode for several hours after sundown.

Day faded into day.

They saw no one, no traveling chals, no wandering Brushies or tumaks, no trucks on the road or skimmers overhead.

After the second night they didn’t say much to each other; there was no need.

On the fifteenth day, shortly after dawn, four silver spheres flared into sudden visibility, before, behind and on each side of them. Tsipor and Shadith shot at the same time, each hit their mark, but the pellets rebounded from the spheres without damaging them.