The Daydark

THE THREE-WHEELED GROUNDCAR FISHTAILED around every curve in the rutted cart track, spraying dust and pebbles into the purple roadside weeds. The alien hobbling down the middle of the road didn’t even glance at it. Only metres away from her, it skidded to a shuddering, reluctant stop.

Peter Campbell tossed back the canopy. “Out of the way!” he shouted. The Altorian turned dim eyes on him. White tinged the blue fur of her muzzle, above once-sharp teeth now yellowed and dull. “You’re blocking the path, old one! Move!”

The Altorian’s long, feathery-furred tail twitched, but she edged to one side. Peter accelerated past her, spewing dust in his wake, and instantly forgot her. His mind boiled with his latest argument with his father.

“I didn’t ask you to bring me here, and I’m not going to spend the rest of my life here!” he’d shouted. “I’m going to be a spacer and that means off-planet school. I’m taking the next ship and you can’t stop me. I’m sixteen. In the Commonwealth that makes me an adult!”

His father hadn’t even raised his voice. “Your mother and I believe young people should remain with their parents. Commonwealth law cannot dictate how we raise our son. Nor does it apply to this planet. Here our law is molded by our faith.” His eyes, startling blue, locked on Peter’s. “Ask yourself, Peter—is it education you want, or the imaginary pleasures of far-off worlds? Remember the prodigal son.”

Peter had shouted himself hoarse, but his father had remained implacably, infuriatingly calm. “You will not leave until we think you are ready. And no ship will take you without our permission; not while I am governor.”

Peter swore and braked the ground car hard, skidding to a halt at the end of the cart track. Before him rose Shield Mountain.

Keltor emerged from his grandmother’s hut into air still full of dust. His grandmother, coughing, hobbled up the track, and he ran to her and took her arm. She patted his hand. “Where does that one go in such a hurry?” he asked, muzzle wrinkled.

“I do not know or very much care,” replied his grandmother, whose talk-name was Lia. “Though I suppose I should be pleased he ordered me off the road, instead of just running me down.”

Keltor’s tail lashed. “He ordered you, an elder of the People, off our road?”

“What does he care about the People? He did not even speak our language to me, but used his own harsh tongue.”

“May the Shield fail him!” Keltor snarled.

Quick as thought, Lia’s claws stung his arm. “You will never again say such a thing about anyone—even Peter Campbell!”

Keltor hung his head. “Yes, grandmother.”

“That’s better.” She took his arm gently again. “The other Earthers are not like that one,” she mused. “I wonder what made him thus...his father is a good man.”

The waning growl of the ground-car ceased abruptly. Keltor glared down the cart-track. “If he comes back—” he began threateningly, then stopped. “Where is the fool going?”

“What do you see?”

“He is climbing Shield Mountain!” Keltor cried. “But today is Daydark!”

Lia released him. “His parents—”

“Too far!” Keltor started running, hearing his grandmother’s cry of fear behind him—a cry that echoed silently in his own throat.

It took Peter an hour to reach the broad plateau atop the mountain. Breathing hard, he looked west. Mountains rolled away from him like frozen waves of stone, piling higher and higher until they broke on the mighty Worldwall two hundred kilometres distant.

But today black clouds hid that incredible granite cliff. Rushing toward him, they swallowed the snow-covered peaks rank by rank. Lightning flickered in the darkness.

Peter turned, knowing he should leave the mountain before the storm arrived, but eastward at the colony sun still glinted off the nose of the ship he had hoped to take off-planet, and he spun back to face the onrushing clouds. He had climbed Shield Mountain to get as far away from his father as possible, and also because his father forbade it, honouring some foolish taboo of the Altorians.

They can take me away from my friends and drag me to this planet, they can even make me stay here, but they can’t make me obey their stupid rules, Peter thought. But there would be little defiance in slinking back with his tail between his legs before anyone even noticed what he’d done. He cast about for shelter, and spotted a dark hole in an upthrust, tumbled mass of rock roughly centred on the plateau. Perfect, he thought, and set out across the barren ground.

As Peter disappeared from view upslope, Keltor swallowed the shout he had been about to make. “Fool,” he muttered. He resumed climbing, praying the Daydark held off.

By the time Peter reached the cave the clouds covered a quarter of the sky. A grey curtain of rain hung beneath them, only two valleys away. Lightning stabbed downward. Peter winced as an icy blast stung his face with flying grit, and plunged into the cavern.

Keltor, just reaching the plateau, saw the human disappear. “No!” he shouted in Terran, but the rising wind tore the word away.

He looked westward. It would be a race between him and the Daydark—a race he wasn’t sure he could win. He remembered his grandmother, coughing in the humans’ dust, ordered into the ditch like a servant—but with a curse, he dashed into the ever-rising wind. The human might be a barbarian, but Keltor was of the People. He had to try to save him.

Otherwise his grandmother would never forgive him.

Peter followed a narrow passageway down into a broad, hemispherical chamber. He’d reached for the glowrod on his belt as he entered, but he didn’t need it. At the entrance to the chamber he stopped, open-mouthed and staring.

Huge, radiant eight-sided crystals lined the walls, filling the cavern with light. They brightened as he watched, and he backed up a step, but then the madly howling wind thrust a bit of itself down the passage, and thunder shook the rocks, and he stumbled forward into the heart of the chamber.

Awed, he watched the light wax until he had to close his eyes—and then someone smashed into him from behind, drove him to his knees, seized him by the waist and began dragging him back up the passage.

Peter struggled madly in the Altorian’s viselike grip, but managed only to bang his shoulder painfully against a rock. The alien burst out into the open and started to drag Peter toward a nearby gully. But the wind screamed as though it had been waiting for them, and slapped them to the ground like an angry giant. Tumbling helplessly, they rolled in a tangle into the ravine.

Protected but bruised and deafened, they cowered there together. Squinting his eyes against the wind-blown grit, Peter poked his head up, wondering if he could crawl back into the cave—and gasped.

Brilliant light streamed from the cave entrance into the gloom. Lightning struck the far side of the plateau, then only a hundred metres distant, then fifty, and then—

Like the sun come to earth, energy arced from the clouds to the cave, ancillary bolts lancing from point to point of the rock formation. Peter felt his hair stirring. Muscles twitched in his face. The Altorian’s fur stood on end. Tingling filled Peter’s bones–

And then the bolt vanished.

Air rushed into the vacuum. Thunder rocked the mountain like an earthquake. Shrieking winds tore at the peak, sucking rocks and dirt into cyclonic funnels. Peter screamed involuntarily and buried his head in his arms, trying to block the sight and sound of what seemed the end of the world.

But the world survived, and so did he. The wind still howled, but it no longer deafened. Rain began, became a downpour. Lightning flashed, but the bolts seemed only harmless sparks after the vanished fury. Peter stared at the alien. Mud streaked the Altorian’s blue fur, plastered flat by the rain. “What—”

“The crraich—the Daydark,” the Altorian said in halting Terran.

Keltor’s throat ached with the harsh alien sounds, but he wanted this incredibly foolish human to understand what had just happened—and what could have happened. What should have happened. Praise the One they still breathed!

“The Daydark—every three years comes. Your people not see yet. But we tell you, climb not mountain. Why you climb?”

“I—I wanted to get away from home.”

Keltor didn’t understand. Surely this whole planet was away from home, for the humans! He wanted to ask why they had left Earth to trouble his home, but couldn’t frame the words. Instead he said roughly, “Almost you go far, far from home—we die, almost.”

“Yeah, close call, wasn’t it?” The human wiped rain from his eyes. “But I still don’t understand. What was that beam of light? And what happened to the storm? The…Daydark. It’s nothing like what it was.”

“My people make cave—long, long ago. Turns crraich from death, to life. No kill—make grow.” Abruptly Keltor spat an oath and gave up on the throat-tearing Terran. Let Peter do the struggling. “Ask the real question, hairless one!” he growled in truespeech. “Ask why you live! Ask why you deserve to! You insult my people. You treat us like animals. You despise my planet—my home. You break our laws. Ask, then, why I almost died to save you!”

Keltor broke off suddenly. Why had he climbed the mountain? Because his grandmother would be angry with him? That had been his answer earlier, but he knew it wasn’t entirely true. He had saved the human because failing to try would have made him no better than the human. He had done it because People helped People—and the humans, however strange, however unlovable, however ugly, were still People—of a sort.

He stood, combing the worst of the mud from his arms with his claws. “We have a saying, Peter Campbell. Treat others as you wish them to treat you. I am sorry your race has not learned that lesson.” He started toward the slope. He had upheld the honour of the People; he had saved Peter Campbell.

That didn’t mean he had to like humans.

Peter did not follow for a long time. He sat in the rain, under a sky no longer midnight-black, but only grey and sodden. Not until true night approached did he get stiffly to his feet and hobble down the mountain.

Lia took the empty clay bowl from the table before her grandson knocked it to the floor. Keltor, head cradled in his arms, slept soundly amidst the remains of supper.

Rain pattered on the roof, falling from an overcast sky barely lit by the last of the hidden sun. Lia looked out at the dark bulk of Shield Mountain, then lit a candle. It would not need to burn long. Once she had cleared the table, both she and Keltor could go to bed.

She did not know Peter was near until he spoke from the doorway behind her. “Peace to this house,” he said in heavily accented Altorian.

Lia dropped the bowl, then picked it up and turned, having smoothed the astonishment from her expression. “Peace to you,” she said neutrally. “How may I serve?”

“I bring gift, respected one.” From behind his back, Peter brought out a bouquet of flowers. Their petals glowed bright red in the candlelight. “From Shield Mountain.”

Lia took them with wonder. “Beautiful!” She breathed deeply of their sweet scent. “But why...?”

She could not read human expressions well. What did that unlovely flush mean? “I...wish apologize. To you. For—on road. Dust?” He swept his hand through the air and made a growling noise. Lia backed up a step, then realized he was imitating a groundcar. She laughed, and at the strange sound the human also backed away. Quickly she swallowed her mirth, and bowed gravely instead.

“Apology accepted. And my thanks for the gift.”

Peter’s flush deepened. He hesitated in the doorway for a moment, looking at the sleeping Keltor, then said, “Walk in peace!” and almost ran away.

Lia glanced at her grandson. As the saying went, in the hands of the One, all things could be molded to beauty. She put the flowers in a bowl and returned to clearing the table.

Outside, the rain fell gently.