Shadowkill

14

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.

“I permitted that as an exercise in futility.”

“I know that voice,” Shadith said. “Ginny?”

“Singer.”

“What do you want?”

“Not your death.”

“That’s obvious. You don’t waste words on targets.”

“Yes. I will be joining you in one moment. I prefer not to have to wait for you to recover from a stunning, so stay where you are.”

“All right.”