Analog SFF, July-August 2006 Read online

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  WITHERSPIN

  by ALEXIS GLYNN LATNER

  Human beings excel at creating complications—both in their surroundings and in themselves.

  Wendis was a realm of wind, always, and frequent fog, and at aphelion, the wind and fog were cold. Nia Courant was glad to be wearing a supple but warm field jacket today. Martan seemed content with only a thin windjacket, wrapped in grim memory and oblivious to the chilly weather.

  The cool air smelled of wet rock and pine needles. Their breath condensed into visible wisps. The trail twisted around a flat boulder where a gorge dropped below the path. On the far side of the gorge a waterfall leaped from a rocky rim high above the overlook to a foamy pool far below.

  The water's path slanted. It looked like a vast crystalline scarf trailing behind the incessant rotation of Wendis. “Canting Fall—the highest waterfall in the Wend Range,” said Nia.

  Martan didn't quite smile, but the lines of his face relaxed. “You were right. This is beautiful."

  “And peaceful, and private, and you promised to tell me about your enhanced abilities.” Nia seated herself on the flat boulder. “Start with just one?"

  “If you insist.” Martan sat beside her, depositing the knapsack that contained their lunch. “The university is there.” He pointed up into the fog. “Seventy degrees spinwise."

  “How do you know?"

  “I excel at situational geometry—the relative geometry of everything around me—including closing distances."

  “That would have been useful in your previous life."

  “With you, I'd like to forget my past,” he said quietly.

  Damn. She'd invited him to the Canting Fall Overlook to demonstrate trust in him, in the hope that he would open up to her. Instead she was feeling trust. And a great deal of attraction. He sensed it. He reached toward her face.

  “No!” She drew back. “I know about that one!"

  He looked stung. “You don't understand it. Yes, I am wired for artificial telepathy through the neo-nerves in my fingers. But I never use it except when I need it."

  “Like three weeks ago?"

  “That was an accident. I didn't mean to—” he faltered.

  Invade my mind. Find out the most painful secret of my life. Derail our romance. Shocked indignation washed over her again, and it still had an undertow of fright.

  “I didn't think. It was a—a kind of reflex.” He made an odd, one-shouldered shrug.

  “Don't touch me,” said Nia.

  “It's not like hearing, always sensitive.” He jammed his hands into the pockets of his windjacket. “It's not a sixth sense at all. My telepathy stays off until I turn it on."

  “Does it work only through your fingers?"

  “Just through the tips of my fingers, I swear."

  “All right. Don't put your fingertips on my skin."

  Martan's shoulders drooped, but he nodded. His acceptance of Nia's resolve encouraged her. She put her hand on his upper arm, feeling the contours of supple muscles under the thin jacket. “See, I'm not asking for a total embargo on touch."

  His lips quirked.

  Come on, smile. She had seen him truly smile only once before, but it had been as dazzling as the end of an eclipse.

  A grating warble broke the silence. Martan tensed. A dark winged shape flitted in the fog above them.

  “Condor,” Nia said.

  “No. It has a crested red head. That's a Faxen bird.” He snatched up the knapsack. “It's a carrion eater, but in the early colony days on Faxe they called it the deathbird. The species is intelligent enough to create carrion. We better get away from these trail drop-offs."

  * * * *

  Martan moved with the fluid coordination of an athlete, or a predator, on the steep trail as it zigzagged down from the edge of the gorge. With much less grace than Martan, the Faxen scavenger loosely flopped in the air above them. Martan scowled. “Unpleasant species, and in no danger of extinction on Faxe. Why in God's name would they have it in a park?"

  “For one thing, this is not really a park, except for the part of it called Haven. For another thing, it's not really under anyone's control. You don't believe me,” Nia observed.

  “Hah! Everyone on a dozen worlds has heard the hype about finding danger, adventure, and romance here. Pick a theme, pick a dream, wend your way, play a game, win or lose the prize of your life, in the Magic Mountains!"

  “Saying Magic Mountains makes you sound like a tourist. To insiders, it's the Wend Range, or the Wends, or the Strange Range."

  He frowned. “In my travels I saw the Rings of Ruin, the blue star of Goya's Sea, and the Lights of Vere—and other beautiful and terrible things. I'm not very interested in an amusing park for tourists. Or what to call it."

  “It's not always amusing. Since portable communications devices are forbidden, visitors have to handle anything that goes wrong on their own, unless they can find a park ranger,” Nia said. “Haven is the lowest sector, not really a zone, because access is uncontrolled and the park rangers are easy to find. All of the zones have some degree of real danger, and more danger the higher you go in the zone numbers. This is Zone Four, and we could slip and break a leg. Or the Faxen bird could dive at us and try to knock us off the edge of a cliff, if that's what its instincts are."

  “Hah. They just allow a little risk to pique the interest of jaded interstellar travelers."

  Nia counted six separate misconceptions in what he was saying. Unfortunately, he wasn't the type to argue constructively. He'd stonewall. “All right, it's a park—like Zaber, Specter, and Chance are mountains.” Invisible in fog, Specter's unnatural peak loomed above them.

  Point taken, he clamped his mouth shut.

  When they came to a log serving as a footbridge over a cold, turbulent stream, he extended his arm to her. As soon as she stepped onto the log, she felt perilously off-balance. Slipping off!—her planet-born reflexes shrieked. She clutched Martan's arm. For people who hadn't been born in spingravity, Coriolis effect was the poltergeist of Wendis—invisible, unpredictable, and sometimes destructive.

  Steadying Nia, Martan walked over the log slowly, precisely, and backwards.

  “Superb coordination in spingravity must be another ability of yours,” Nia muttered when her feet rested on level ground again and her heart stopped tripping.

  “Yes,” he said with a half-smile. He tended to smile and gesture in an odd, one-sided way. Not always the same side. It was as though part of his soul smiled and another part stayed secret.

  With a cascade of wingbeats, a small gray bird fluttered out of the fog, alighting on a rock by the stream. It bobbed its whole body up and down several times. Then it strolled out into the swift stream, submerging itself further with each unruffled step until the crown of its head disappeared under the icewater.

  “What was that?” Martan asked.

  Nia checked the Magic Mountains Guidebook. “It's called an ouzel. That's a species from Old Earth."

  “Some of the amusing oddities here are authentic?"

  “Most of them are.” Nia touched the guidebook's access button. Its floppy pages reconfigured into a pocketable square the size and texture of a folded handkerchief. She put it back in her jacket's breast pocket.

  The trail led to a lawnlike meadow that cradled a frosty pool. Canting Fall's waters slanted into the pool with far less commotion than an equally high waterfall planetside. That was just as well, since cold spray would not have been pleasant in weather this chilly.

  “Good place for a picnic.” Martan raised an eyebrow. “Can we just enjoy it while we eat—no questions asked?"

  * * * *

  The Engineers’ Guild maintained the world a
nd gave it Earthlike seasons by varying the flux of heat and light. When Wendis neared aphelion in orbit around its star, the engineers caused it to have winter, and the weather was more stable than in any other season, clear and bright, reminding Nia of her home planet, Azure. She had packed an Azure-type lunch of synthmeat sandwiches and hot kavva. She let herself fantasize that she had a less complicated life, on a terraformed world with normal gravity, with an uncomplicated male companion. After lunch, Martan stretched out on his back on the dry, cool grass, near the empty knapsack. Nia sat cross-legged beside him.

  The Canting Fall fell slower than the eye insisted it should, and twisted as it went. From this close, it looked like sculpted crystal. It reminded Nia how perplexing her existence really was. Martan attracted her very much, but he had been a killer—not born, but made. But he had repented of it. But he could read her mind with a touch, if he wanted to. But he needed her.

  But he was what he had been.

  She kept her consternation to herself.

  Through a rift in the clouds, light from the sunspar flooded the meadow. The traveling sunball was just west of midspar. A bank of rhododendrons shielded the meadow from the cold spinwinds. Nia felt warm enough to unfasten her jacket. Deliberately keeping her tone light, she said, “Wildway is the part of the Wends most like wilderness on Earth."

  He gave her his one-sided smile. “Until you look up and see the foothills on the far side, with the university's towers and the hospital dome."

  She'd seen those sights from Wildway on clearer days, but she'd never seen anything like him. He had medium brown skin and dark brown hair, and eyes so dark that the irises looked black, even in sunsparlight. Could that be evidence of his visual enhancement?

  Martan's gaze met hers. “When I was little, I never imagined a woman like you."

  At some point, soon, she'd ask him where he had been a little boy—presumably in the Faxen Union, on one of the five partly terraformed, incompletely civilized worlds under the dominion of imperious Faxe. “What do you mean?"

  “Your blue eyes and silver hair. I didn't meet any Azureans until after I left home."

  Azure was a half-terraformed but quite civilized world, not a part of the Faxen Union, but in close enough proximity to the Union to be acutely aware of Faxe's power and politics. “Even here in Wendis, lode-silver hair is far from rare,” Nia pointed out.

  “Huh. Next year the trend-following young people of Wendis will change their hair to a different color. But yours is real.” Reaching up, he touched a long stray curl. “I can tell by the way the strands catch the light.” He twined her hair around his finger.

  The slyly possessive gesture shot a thrill through Nia. Damn! Aside from (surely not because of ... ?) his scary past and special abilities that included telepathy, he fascinated her. She should remain aloof until she better understood him. But she would be warmer in his arms. She let his arm slide under her jacket. He obediently kept his hands on the fabric of her shirt as he pulled her into a close embrace.

  Then he jerked away. “Something in your pocket moved!"

  A green tendril dangled out from under the flap of one of the main pockets of her field jacket. Unfastening the pocket, Nia lifted out an untidy little bundle of leaves and tendrils. “What are you doing in there?” she asked it sternly.

  * * * *

  Martan sat back. “What is a plant doing in your pocket?"

  “It's a hugwort—an alien species they recently discovered at the xenobiology field station on Jumala.” She placed the hugwort on her knee. It balanced there like a small, potless and badly misplaced houseplant.

  Martan leaned closer. “No roots?"

  “It has a single root, of a sort. See? In the middle of the leaves, here, what looks like a tuber but it feels like a mouse, fuzzy and warm."

  The hugwort wriggled out of Nia's grasp to scramble down her leg and onto the grass. Both of Martan's eyebrows went up.

  “They're mobile. And incredibly cute. Even Professor Zeng's official write-up lapsed into phrases like ‘enchanted morning glory.’ He gave me one because I'll need to design some legal protection for them, to save the species from poachers and the illegal pet trade."

  “Can you design legal protection for me?” Martan said suddenly.

  Nia was surprised and pleased, and careful not to let it show. She said levelly, “Yes, though you're a stranger legal case than it is."

  “I am not stranger than an enchanted morning glory!” Martan said with offended dignity.

  “But it never killed anyone,” Nia said.

  A shadow flopped in front of the sunspar. Martan cursed it under his breath.

  “There are plenty of Faxen flora and fauna in the Wend Range,” said Nia. “They thrive in the same conditions as Earth creatures. Faxe was the new Earth—the Promised Land on the other side of the stars—when it was first colonized. Too bad it's become a police state."

  “I of all people know that. I was the sharpest tool of the state against its enemies. In the end, I defected.” Nia knew that part of his story, though only from a dry medical report. He had defected to Wendis under the cover of a fiery explosion. It had taken the Wendisan doctors months to heal him, while they catalogued all the physiological features that made him what he was. “The price I paid to defect was that I almost died. Does that count for something?"

  “Yes, it does.” To define exactly how much it counted for would take the best work of her whole career in interstellar law. To win Martan the legal freedom to leave Wendis without fear of arrest and deportation to Faxe would take better work than she had ever done before. It would vault her into the elite circle of those who shaped interstellar law. She was unsure how she felt about Martan—her feelings were a highly charged muddle—but she was crystal clear about what she wanted from him right now: information about himself. “Was there a formal word for the kind of operative you were?"

  He laughed humorlessly. “Not among insiders. A hellhound is a hellhound."

  Well! That was the first time he'd voluntarily uttered the word to her.

  The hugwort ambled toward the bank of rhododendrons. It wouldn't get lost; it had a talent for exploring new places and finding its way back. Smuggling itself in its owner's pocket for an outing was a new trick, but Nia was glad it had done so. The hugwort had somehow cracked Martan's reticence to talk about himself.

  Hellhound. People across a dozen worlds and particularly those in the lonely way stations between the worlds had heard of Faxe's hellhounds. Very few people had knowingly looked a hellhound in the eye and lived, and she was one of them.... A shiver went down Nia's back. She made sure not to let it chill her voice. “Please tell me what hellhounds can do. It doesn't have to be personal, you. Just say what your kind can do, if it's easier for you."

  “It's not. We were brain-trained to give nothing away."

  “Brain-trained?"

  “Juvenated and then retrained in thinking—and feeling. The doctors in the University Hospital believe they undid the dehumanizing parts of the brain-training, while they were putting me back together. They couldn't give me back the memories that were stripped away in the juvenation, but they think I can learn to be human again. Is it really unthinkable for us to start again where we stopped three weeks ago?"

  Caught off guard—still processing the implications of what he'd told her about brain-training—she said, “I'm a university lawyer, advising the university on what to do with you, since you're in its employ. The ethical aspect of having a relationship with you is not a problem."

  “Ethical aspects don't matter to me."

  “That is a problem!” she retorted.

  “Then help me understand ethics—or law—the way you see it. Give me a second chance with you. I—"

  A green streak darted out of the bushes. It scurried toward Nia. Climbing up her jacket to its pocket, it stuffed itself in, and managed to fasten the button with a tendril, which it then retracted within the pocket.

  * * * *


  “What kind of intelligence do they have?” Martan asked.

  “No one knows. I've never seen it do anything like that."

  He looked at the rhododendrons from which the hugwort had emerged so suddenly. His spine went stiff. “Get up. Are there real predators here?"

  Nia pulled out the guidebook, which unfolded itself back to the natural history pages. She scanned the list under Animals, Biological.

  “There's a big animal behind those bushes. Is it a trick?"

  “This says Wildway harbors a few mountain lions. Young male lions may become aggressive. If you encounter one, just move away slowly."

  He shoved her toward the open end of the meadow, away from the bushes. She was still reading the guidebook. “But that's only in spring, not winter. I don't see where—"

  “The deathbird is circling overhead."

  “You hate it because it reminds you of Faxe?"

  “It's too focused!” he hissed.

  “Things in the Wends can go wrong,” Nia said slowly, “what the insiders call witherspin. It's never happened around me, but I know what to do.” She flipped to the orange section of the guidebook. When she touched the schematic map for their location, a bright series of arrows appeared on the map. “We're in Zone Four right now. From any zone, you can always reach Haven. The door to Haven is that way."

  He herded her along, looking back over his shoulder.

  “Around these little trees—there—it's in that cave."

  Martan stopped short. “Not good. No way out."

  “Look at the back of the cave. Those numbers mark two gates to higher zones, but the bright orange door leads to Haven, and it'll open as soon as we touch the doorplate. Come on.” She went to the orange door and demonstrated.