ALEXANDER JABLOKOV
With only a handful of elegant, coolly pyrotechnic stories such as “At the Cross-Time Jaunters’ Ball,” “A Deeper Sea,” “Living Will, “Summer and Ice,” and “The Last Castle of Christmas” and a few well-received novels, Alexander Jablokov has established himself as one of the most highly regarded writers in Science Fiction. He is a frequent contributor to Asimov’s Science Fiction, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and other markets and occasionally places stories with other magazines, such as SF Age, Amazing, and Interzone. His first novel, Carve the Sky, was released in 1991 to wide critical acclaim and was followed by other successful novels such as A Deeper Sea, Nimbus, and River of Dust. His short fiction has been assembled in the landmark collection The Breath of Suspension. His most recent novel is the Wide-Screen Space Opera Deepdrive. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Here he takes us deep into a very strange far future, for an intricate and evocative pavane of identity and revenge, art and obsession … and murder.
The snowshoe hare’s half-eaten carcass lay under the deadfall of the figure-four trap, frozen blood crystallized on its fur, mouth still closed around the tiny piece of desiccated carrot that had served as bait. The snow was flattened around it, the rabbit’s fur thrown everywhere. Jack London sniffed at the trap, laid its ears back, and growled. Canine bona fides reaffirmed, it settled on its haunches and looked expectantly up at the man. Part Samoyed, part husky, Jack’s thick white fur concealed a body thin from hunger.
Elam didn’t have to sniff. The stink of wolverine was malevolent in the still air. It turned the saliva that had come into his mouth at the thought of roasted hare into something spoiled. He spat. “Damn!” The trap couldn’t be descented. He’d have to make another. No animal would come anywhere near a trap that smelled like that. The wolverine probably hadn’t even been hungry.
He pulled the dry carrot from the rabbit’s mouth and flung the remains off among the trees. The deadfall and the sticks of the figure four followed it, vanishing in puffs of snow.
“That’s the last one, Jack,” Elam said. “Nothing, again.” The dog whined.
They set off among the dark smooth trunks of the maples and beeches, Elam’s snowshoes squeaking in the freshly fallen snow. The dog turned its head, disturbed by the unprofessional noise, then loped off to investigate the upturned roots of a fallen tree. A breeze from the great lake to the north pushed its way through the trees, shouldering clumps of snow
from the branches as it passed. A cardinal flashed from bough to bough, bright against the clearing evening sky.
Elam, a slender, graceful man, walked with his narrow shoulders hunched up, annoyed by the chilly bombardment from above. His clothing was entirely of furry animal pelts sewn crudely together. His thick hat was muskrat, his jacket fox and beaver, his mittens rabbit, his pants elk. At night he slept in a sack made of a grizzly’s hide. How had he come to be here? Had he killed those animals, skinned them, cured their hides? He didn’t know.
At night, sometimes, before he went to sleep, Elam would lie in his lean-to and, by the light of the dying fire, examine these clothes, running his hands through the fur, seeking memories in their thick softness. The various pelts were stitched neatly together. Had he done the sewing? Or had a wife or a sister? The thought gave him a curious feeling in the pit of his stomach. He rather suspected that he had always been alone. Weariness would claim him quickly, and he would huddle down in the warmth of the bear fur and fall asleep, questions unanswered.
Tree roots examined, Jack London returned to lead the way up the ridge. It was a daily ritual, practiced just at sunset, and the dog knew it well. The tumbled glacial rocks were now hidden under snow, making the footing uncertain. Elam carried his snowshoes under one arm as he climbed.
The height of the ridge topped the bare trees. To the north, glowing a deceptively warm red, was the snow-covered expanse of the great lake, where Elam often saw the dark forms of wolves, running and reveling in their temporary triumph over the water that barred their passage to the islands the rest of the year.
Elam had no idea what body of water it was. He had tentatively decided on Lake Superior, though it could have been Lake Winnipeg, or for that matter, Lake Baikal. Elam sat down on a rock and stared at the deep north, where stars already gleamed in the sky. Perhaps he had it all wrong, and a new Ice Age was here, and this was a frozen Victoria Nyanza.
“Who am I, Jack? Do you know?”
The dog regarded him quizzically, used to the question by now. The man who’s supposed to get us some food, the look said. Philosophical discussions later.
“Did I come here myself, Jack, or was I put here?”
Weary of the pointless and one-sided catechism, the dog was barking at a jay that had ventured too close. It circled for a moment, squawked, and shot off back into the forest.
The lake wind freshened and grew colder, driving the last clouds from the sky. The exposed skin on Elam’s cheeks tightened. “Let’s go. Jack.” He pulled off a mitten and plunged his hand into a pocket, feeling his last chunk of pemmican, greasy and hard.
Aside from a few pathetically withered bits of carrot, which he needed to bait his traps, this was the last bit of food left him. He’d been saving it for an emergency. Every trap on the trapline that ran through these woods had been empty or befouled by wolverines, even in a hard winter
that should have driven animals to eat anything. He would eat the pemmican that night.
Man and dog started their descent down the twilit reach of the ridge’s other side. As they reached the base, Elam, his hand once again feeling the pemmican, afraid that it too would vanish before he could eat it, took too long a step and felt his right foot slide on the icy face of a tilted rock. His left foot caught in the narrow crack of an ice-shattered boulder, which grabbed him like a tight fist. The world flung itself forward at him. He felt the dull snap in his leg as the icy rock met his face.
He awoke to the warm licks of Jack London’s tongue turning instantly cold on his face. He lay tumbled on his back among the rocks, head tilting downward, trees looming overhead. Annoyed, he pushed back and tried to stand. Searing agony in his leg brought bile to the back of his throat and a hot sweat over his body. He moaned and almost lost consciousness again, then held himself up on his elbows. His face was cut, some of his teeth were cracked, he could taste the blood in his mouth, but his leg, his leg … he looked down.
His left leg bent at an unnatural angle just below the knee. The leather of his trousers was soaked black with blood. Compound fracture of the … tibia? Fibula? For one distracted instant naming the shattered bone was the most important thing in the world. It obscured the knowledge that he was going to die.
He shifted position and moaned again. The biting pain in his leg grew sharp burning teeth whenever he moved, but wore the edges off if he lay still, subsiding to a gnaw. With a sudden effort, he pulled the leg straight, then fell back, gasping harshly. It made no difference, of course, but seeing the leg at that angle made him uncomfortable. It looked better this way, not nearly so painful.
He patted the dog on the head. “Sorry, Jack. I screwed up.” The dog whined in agreement. Elam fell back and let the darkness take him.
His body did not give up so easily. He regained consciousness sometime later, the frenzied whining and yelping of his dog sounding in his ears. He lay prone in the snow, his hands dug in ahead of him. His mittens were torn, and he could not feel his hands.
He rolled onto his back and looked over his feet. Full night had come, but the starlight and the moon were enough to see the trail his body had left through the snow. Elam sighed. What a waste of time. The pain in his broken leg was almost gone, as was all other feeling from the thighs down. He spat. The spittle crackled on the snow. Damn cold. And the dog was annoying him with its whining.
“Sure, boy, sure,” he said, gasping from the cold weight of death on his chest. “Just a minute, Jack. Just a minute.”
He pulled what was left of the fur glove off with his chin and reached the unfeeling claw of his hand into his pocket. It took a dozen tries before it emerged holding the pemmican.
He finally managed to open the front of his jacket and unlace his shirt. Cold air licked in eagerly. He smeared the greasy, hard pemmican over his chest and throat like a healing salve. Its rancid odor bit at his nose,
and despite himself, he felt a moment of hunger. He shoved the rest of the piece down deep into his shirt.
“Here, Jack,” he said. “Here. Dinner.” The moon rode overhead, half in sunlight, the other half covered with glittering lines and spots.
The dog snuffled, suddenly frightened and suspicious. Elam reached up and patted it on the head. Jack London moved forward. Smelling the meat, the dog overcame its caution at its master’s strange behavior and it began to lick eagerly at Elam’s throat and chest. The dog was desperately hungry. In its eagerness, a sharp tooth cut the man’s skin, and thick warm blood welled out. The tongue licked more quickly. More cuts. More blood, steaming aromatically in the cold air. And the dog was hungry. The smell penetrated to the deepest parts of its brain, finally destroying the overlay of training, habit, and love. The dog’s teeth tore and it began to feed.
And in that instant, Elam remembered. He saw the warm forests of his youth, and the face, so much like his, that had become his own. Justice had at last been done. Elam was going to die. He smiled slightly, gasped once, then his eyes glazed blank.
When it was sated, and realized what it had done, the dog howled its pain at the stars. It then sprang into the forest and ran madly, leaving the man’s tattered remains far behind.
“Is that all you are going to do from now on?” Reqata said. “Commit suicide? Just lie down and die? Nice touch, I admit, the dog.” She held his shoulder in a tight grip and looked past him with her phosphorescent eyes. “A real Elam touch.”
Five dark ribs supported the smooth yellow stone of the dome. They revealed the green gleam of beetle carapaces in the light of the flames hanging in a hexagon around the central axis of the view chamber. Rows of striated marble seats climbed the chamber in concentric circles. The inhabitants of these seats stared down at the corpse lying in the snow at their feet.
Elam was himself startled at his clone’s acquiescence in its own death, but he was surrounded by admirers before he could answer her. They moved past him, murmuring, gaining haut by their admiration for the subtlety of his work.
Elam stared past them at his own corpse, a sheen of frost already obscuring the face, turning it into an abstract composition. He had died well. He always did. His mind, back from the clone with its memories restored, seemed to rattle loosely around his skull. His skin was slick with amniotic fluid, his joints gritty. Nothing fit together. Reqata’s hand on his shoulder seemed to bend the arbitrarily shaped bones, reminding him of his accidental quality.
“An artist who works with himself as both raw materials and subject can never transcend either,” Reqata said.
Her scorn cut through the admiration around him. He looked up at her, and she smiled back with ebony teeth, flicking feathery eyelashes.
She raised one hand in an angular gesture that identified her instantly, whatever body she was in.
“And how does the choreographer of mass death transcend her material?” Elam’s mind had been gone for weeks, dying in a frozen forest, and Reqata had grown bored in his absence. She needed entertainment. Even lovers constantly dueled with haut, the indefinable quality that all players at the Floating Game understood implicitly. Reqata had much haut. Elam had more.
He squirmed. Was his bladder full, or did he always feel this way?
“Mass death, as you put it, is limited by practical problems,” Reqata answered. “Killing one man is an existential act. Killing a million would be a historic act, at least to the Bound. Killing them all would be a divine act.” She ran her fingers through his hair. He smelled the winy crispness of her breath. “Killing yourself merely smacks of lack of initiative. I’m disappointed in you, Elam. You used to fight before you died.”
“I did, didn’t I?” He remembered the desperate struggles of his early works, the ones that had gained him his haut. Men dying in mine shafts, on cliffsides, in predator-infested jungles. Men who had never stopped fighting. Each of those men had been himself. Something had changed.
“Tell me something,” Reqata said, leaning forward. Her tongue darted across his earlobe. “Why do you always look so peaceful just before you die?”
A chill spread up his spine. He’d wondered the same thing himself. “Do I?” He squeezed the words out. He always paid. Five or ten minutes of memory, the final instants of life. The last thing he remembered from this particular work was pulling the pemmican from his pocket. After that, blackness. The dying clone Elam understood something the resurrected real Elam did not.
“Certainly. Don’t be coy. Look at the grin on that corpse’s frozen face.” She slid into the seat next to him, draping a leg negligently into the aisle. “I’ve tried dying. Not as art, just as experience. I die screaming. My screams echo for weeks.” She shuddered, hands pressed over her ears. Her current body, as usual, had a high rib cage and small firm breasts. Elam found himself staring at them. “But enough.” Reqata flicked him with a fingernail, scratching his arm. “Now that you’re done, I have a project for you to work on—”
“Perhaps each of you just gets a view of what awaits on the other side,” a voice drawled.
“Don’t lecture me on the absolute inertia of the soul,” Reqata said, disconcerted. “No one’s giving our clones a free peek at eternity, Lammiela.”
“Perhaps not.” A long elegant woman, Lammiela always looked the same, to everyone’s distress, for she only had one body. She smiled slowly. “Or perhaps heaven is already so filled with the souls of your clones that there won’t be any room for you when you finally arrive.”
Reqata stood up, fury in the rise of her shoulders. Because of her past irregularities, Lammiela had an ambiguous status, and Reqata hated risking
haut in arguing with her. Usually, Reqata couldn’t help herself. “Be careful, Lammiela. You don’t know anything about it.” And perhaps, Elam found himself thinking, perhaps Reqata feared Death indeed.
“Oh, true enough.” Lammiela sat. “Ssarna’s passing has everyone on edge. I keep forgetting.” Her arrival had driven the last of the connoisseurs away, and the three of them sat alone in the viewing chamber.
“You don’t forget, Mother,” Elam said wearily. “You do it quite on purpose.”
“That’s unfair, Elam.” She examined him. “You look well. Dying agrees with you.” She intertwined her long fingers and rested her chin on them. Her face was subtly lined, as if shaded by an engraver. Her eyes were dark blue, the same as Elam’s own. “Ssarna, they say, was withered in her adytum, dry as dust. The last time I saw her, which must have been at that party on top of that miserable mountain in the Himalayas, she was a tiny slip of a girl, prepubescent. Long golden … tresses. That must be the correct word.” She shook her head with weary contempt. “Though she disguised herself as young, old age found her in her most private chamber. And after old age had had his way with her, he gave her to Death. They have an arrangement.”
“And the first of them is enjoying you now,” Reqata said. “How soon before the exchange comes?”
Lammiela’s head jerked, but she did not turn. “How have you been, Elam?” She smiled at him, and he was suddenly surrounded by the smell of her perfume, as if it were a trained animal she wore around her neck and had ordered to attack. The smell was dark and spicy. It reminded him of the smell of carrion, of something dead in the hot sun, thick and insistent. He found himself holding his breath, and stood up quickly, suddenly nauseated. Nauseated, yet somehow excited. A child’s feeling, the attraction of the vile, the need to touch and smell that which disgusts. Children will put anything in their mouths. He felt as if maggots were crawling under his fingernails.
“Air,” Elam muttered. “I need … .” He walked up the striated marble stairs to the balcony above. Locked in their own conflict, the women did not follow. The warm summer air outside smelled of herbs and the dry flowers of chaparral. He clamped his teeth together and convinced himself that the flowers did not mask the smell of rotting flesh.
Sunset turned the day lavender. The view chamber’s balcony hung high above the city, which flowed purposefully up the narrow valleys, leaving the dry hills bare, covered with flowers, acacia trees, and the spiky crystal plants that had evolved under some distant sun. The Mediterranean glinted far below.
Lights had come on in the city, illuminating its secret doorways. No one lived here. The Incarnate had other fashions, and the Bound were afraid of the ancient living cities, preferring to build their own. A Bound city could be seen burning closer to the water, its towers asserting themselves against the darkening sky. Tonight, many of the Incarnate who had witnessed Elam’s performance would descend upon it for the evanescent excitements of those who lived out their lives bound to one body.
So this place was silent, save for the low resonance of bells, marking the hours for its absent dwellers. The city had been deserted for thousands of years, but was ready for someone to return. The insectlike shapes of aircars fluttered up against the stars as Elam’s audience went their separate ways.
A coppery half-moon hung on the horizon, the invisible half of its face etched with colored lines and spots of flickering light. When he was young, Lammiela had told him that the moon was inhabited by huge machines from some previous cycle of existence. The whole circle of a new moon crawled with light, an accepted feature. No one wondered at the thoughts of those intelligent machines, who looked up at the ripe blue-green planet that hung in their black sky.
“You should lie down,” Lammiela said, “and rest.” Her perfume was cloying and spicy. Though it did not smell even remotely of carrion, Elam still backed away, pushing himself against the railing, and let the evening breeze carry the scent from him. Starlings swooped around the tower.
“You should get up,” Reqata said, from somewhere behind her, “and run.”
A blast of freezing air made him shiver. He took a step and looked down at the now hoarfrost-covered corpse in the deserted rotunda.
No Incarnate alive knew how the ancient machines worked. The corpse: was it just an image of the one in the frozen Michigan forest? Or had the rotunda’s interior moved its spectators to hover over that forest in fact? Or was this body a perfect duplicate, here in the hills of Provence, of that other one? The knowledge was lost. No one knew what lay within the sphere of image. But Elam did know one thing: the cold winds of winter did not blow out of it.
Elam spotted the zeppelins about two and a half hours out of Kalgoorlie. Their colors were gaudy against the green fields and the blue Nullarbor Sea. Frost glittered on the sides away from the morning sun. Elam felt a physical joy, for the zeppelins had been caught completely by surprise. They drifted in the heavy morning air, big fat targets.
They were shuttling troops from somewhere to the North, in central Australia, to participate in one of those incomprehensible wars the Bound indulged in. Reqata had involved herself, in her capricious way, and staked haut on the outcome of the invasion of Eyre, the southern state.
Elam could see the crewmen leaping into their tiny flyers, their wings straightening in the sun like butterflies emerging from their chrysalis, but it was too late. Their zeppelins were doomed.
Elam picked his target, communicating his choice to the other bumblebees, a few Incarnate who, amused at his constant struggle with Reqata, had joined him for the fun. The microwave signal felt like a directed whisper, save for the fact that it made his earlobes itch. He aimed for a bright green deltoid with markings that made it look like a giant spotted frog. For an instant the image took a hold of his mind, and he imagined catching a frog, grabbing it, and feeling its frightened wetness in his hand, the frantic beating of its heart … .
He pushed the thought away, upset at his loss of control. Timing was critical. A change in the angle of his wing stroke brought him back into position.
Elam was gorgeous. About a meter long, he had short iridescent wings. A single long-distance optic tracked the target while two bulbous 270-degree peripherals checked the mathematical line of bumblebees to either side of him. Reqata was undoubtedly aboard one of the zeppelins, raging at the unexpected attack. The defending flyers were wide-faced black men, some odd purebred strain. Elam imagined the black Reqata, gesturing sharply as she arranged a defense. It was the quality of her movement that made her beautiful.
A steel ball whizzed past his left wing. A moment later he heard the faint tock! of the zeppelin’s catapult. It took only one hit to turn a bumblebee into a stack of expensive kindling. Elam tucked one wing, tumbled, and straightened out again, coming in at his target. He unhooked his fighting legs and brought their razor edges forward.
The zeppelins were billowing, changing shape. Sudden flares disturbed Elam’s infrared sensors, making him dizzy, unsure of his target. Flying the bumblebees all the way out of Kalgoorlie without any lighter-than-air support craft had been a risk. They had to knock the zeppelins to the ground and parasitize them for reactive metals. The bumblebees would be vulnerable to a ground attack as they crawled clumsily over the wreckage, but no one gained haut without taking chances. He dodged past the defending flyers, not bothering to cut them. That would only delay him.
The green frog was now below him, swelling, rippling, dropping altitude desperately. He held it in his hand where he had caught it, amid the thick rushes. The other kids were gone, somewhere, and he was alone. The frog kicked and struggled. It had voided its bowels in his hand, and he felt the wet slime. The air was hot and thick underneath the cottonwoods. Something about the frog’s frantic struggle for life annoyed him. It seemed odious that something so wet and slimy would wish to remain alive. He laid the frog down on a flat rock and, with calm deliberation, brought another rock down on its head. Its legs kicked and kicked.
The other zeppelins seemed to have vanished. All that remained was the frog, its guts lying out in the hot sun, putrefying as he watched. Fluids dripped down the rock, staining it. He wanted to slash it apart with fire, to feel the flare as it gave up its life. The sun seared down on his shoulders.
With a sudden fury, the zeppelin turned on him. He found himself staring into its looming mouth. A hail of steel balls flew past him, and he maneuvered desperately to avoid them. He didn’t understand why he had come so close without attacking.
Two balls ripped simultaneously through his right wing, sending flaring pain through the joints. He twisted down, hauling in on the almost nonfunctional muscles. If he pulled the wing in to a stable tip, he could glide downward. Green fields spiraled up at him, black houses with high-peaked roofs, colorful gardens. Pale faces peered up at him from the fields.
Military vehicles had pulled up on a sandy road, the dark muzzles of their guns tracking him.
The right wing was flopping loose, sending waves of pain through his body. He veered wildly, land and sky switching position. Pulling up desperately, he angled his cutting leg and sliced off the loose part of his wing. Hot pain slashed through him.
He had finally managed to stabilize his descent, but it was too late. A field of corn floated up to meet him. For an instant, everything was agony.
“I want something primitive,” Elam said, as the doctor slid a testing limb into the base of his spine. “Something prehistoric.”
“All of the human past is prehistoric,” Dr. Abias said. He withdrew the limb with a cold tickle, and retracted it into his body. “Your body is healthy.”
Elam stood up, swinging his arms, getting used to his new proportions. His current body was lithe, gold-skinned, small-handed: designed to Reqata’s specifications. She had some need of him in this form, and Elam found himself apprehensive. He had no idea if she was still angry about her defeat over Australia. “No, Abias. I mean before any history. Before man knew himself to be man.”
“Neanderthal?” Abias murmured, hunching across the floor on his many legs. “Pithecanthropus? Australopithecus?”
“I don’t know what any of those words mean,” Elam said. Sometimes his servant’s knowledge bothered him. What right did the Bound have to know so much when the Incarnate could dispose of their destinies so thoroughly?
Abias turned to look back at him with his multiple oculars, brown human eyes with no face, pupils dilated. He was a machine, articulated and segmented, gleaming as if anointed with rare oils. Each of his eight moving limbs was both an arm and a leg, as if his body had been designed to work in orbit. Perhaps it had. As he had pointed out, most of the past was prehistory.
“It doesn’t matter,” Abias said. “I will look into it.”
A Bound, Abias had been assigned to Elam by Lammiela. Punished savagely for a crime against the Incarnate, his body had been confiscated and replaced by some ancient device. Abias now ran Elam’s team of cloned bodies. He was considered one of the best trainers in the Floating Game. He was so good and his loyalty so absolute that Elam had steadfastly refused to discover what crime he had committed, fearing that the knowledge would interfere in their professional relationship.
“Do that,” Elam said. “I have a new project in mind.” He walked across the wide, open room, feeling the sliding of unfamiliar joints. This body, a clone of his own, had been extensively modified by Abias, until there were only traces of his own nature in it. A plinth was laid with earrings, wrist and ankle bracelets, body paints, scent bottles, all supplied by Reqata. He began to put them on.
Light shone from overhead through semicircular openings in the vault.
A rough-surfaced ovoid curved up through the floor in the room’s center. It was Elam’s adytum, the most secret chamber where his birth body lay. After his crash in Australia, he had woken up in it for an instant, with a feeling of agony, as if every part of his body were burning. The thought still made him shudder.
An Incarnate’s adytum was his most strongly guarded space, for when his real body died, he died as well. There could be no transfer of consciousness to a cloned body once the original was dead. The ancient insolent machines that provided the ability to transfer the mind did not permit it, and since no one understood the machines, no one could do anything about it. And killing an Incarnate’s birth body was the only way to truly commit murder.
Elam slid on a bracelet. “Do you know who attacked me?”
“No one has claimed responsibility,” Abias answered. “Did you recognize anything of the movement?”
Elam thought about the billowing froglike zeppelin. It hadn’t been Reqata, he was sure of that. She would have made certain that he knew. But it could have been almost anyone else.
“Something went wrong in the last transfer,” Elam said, embarrassed at bringing up such a private function, even to his servant. “I woke up in my adytum.”
Abias stood still, unreadable. “A terrible malfunction. I will look into it.”
“Just make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
The party was in the hills above the city of El’lie. Water from the northern rivers poured here from holes in the rock and swirled through an elaborate maze of waterways. It finally reached one last great pool, which extended terrifyingly off the rocky slope, as if ready to tip and spill, drowning the city below it. The white rock of the pool’s edge extended downward some thousands of feet, a polished sheet like the edge of the world. Far below, cataracts spilled from the pool’s bottom toward the thirsty city.
Elam stood on a terrace and gazed down into the water. Reqata floated there, glistening as the afternoon sun sank over the ocean to the west. She was a strange creature, huge, all sleekly iridescent curves, blue and green, based on some creature humans had once encountered in their forgotten travels across the galaxy. She sweated color into the water, heavy swirls of bright orange and yellow sinking into the depths. Until a few hours before she had been wearing a slender gold-skinned body like Elam’s.
“They seem peaceful,” she whispered, her voice echoing across the water. “But the potential for violence is extreme.”
Reqata had hauled him on a preliminary tour of El’lie, site of her next artwork. He remembered the fresh bodies hung in tangles of chain on a granite wall, a list of their crimes pasted on their chests; the tense market, men and women with shaved foreheads and jewels in their eyebrows, the air thick with spices; the lazy insolence of a gang of men, their faces
tattooed with angry swirls, as they pushed through the market crowd on their way to a proscribed patriarchal religious service; the great tiled temples of the Goddesses that lined the market square.
“When will they explode?” Elam said.
“Not before the fall, when the S’tana winds blow down from the mountains. You’ll really see something then.” Hydraulic spines erected and sank down on her back, and she made them make a characteristic gesture, sharp and emphatic. If she was angry about what had happened in Australia, she concealed it. That frightened Elam more than open anger would have. Reqata had a habit of delayed reaction.
Reqata was an expert at exploiting obscure hostilities among the Bound, producing dramatically violent conflicts with blood spilling picturesquely down carved staircases; heads piled up in heaps, engraved ivory spheres thrust into their mouths; lines of severed hands on bronze poles, fingers pointing toward Heaven. That was her art. She had wanted advice. Elam had not been helpful.
Glowing lights floated above the pool, swirling in response to incomprehensible tropisms. No one knew how to control them anymore, and they moved by their own rules. A group of partyers stood on the far side of the pool, their bright-lit reflections stretching out across the glassy water.
“This water’s thousands of feet deep,” Reqata murmured. “The bottom’s piled up with forgotten things. Boats. Gold cups. The people from the city come up here and drop things in for luck.”
“Why should dropping things and forgetting about them be lucky?” Elam asked.
“I don’t know. It’s not always lucky to remember everything.”
Elam stripped off his gown and dove into the dark water. Reqata made a bubbling sound of delight. He stroked the spines on her back, feeling them swell and deflate. He ran a cupped hand up her side. Her glowing solar sweat worked its way between his fingers and dripped down, desperate to reach its natural place somewhere in the invisible depths.
“Put on a body like this,” she said. “We can swim the deep oceans and make love there, among the fish.”
“Yes,” he said, not meaning it. “We can.”
“Elam,” she said. “What happened on the balcony after we saw you die in the forest? You seemed terrified.”
Elam thought, instead, of the frog. Had his memories been real? Or could Reqata have laid a trap for him? “Just a moment of nausea. Nothing.”
Reqata was silent for a moment. “She hates you, you know. Lammiela. She utterly hates you.”
Her tone was vicious. Here it was, vengeance for the trick he had pulled over the Nullarbor Sea. Her body shuddered, and he was suddenly conscious of how much larger than he she now was. She could squish him against the side of the pool without any difficulty. He would awake in his own chamber, in another body. Killing him was just insulting, not fatal. Perhaps it had been her in that frog zeppelin.
He swam slowly away from her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you don’t. You’re an expert at forgetting, at just lying down, dying, and forgetting. She hates you for what you did. For what you did to your sister!” Her voice was triumphant.
Elam felt the same searing pain he had felt when he awoke for one choking instant in his adytum. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, as he pulled himself out of the water.
“I know! That’s just the problem.”
“Tell me what you mean.” He kept his voice calm.
Something moved heavily in the darkness, and a row of chairs overturned with a clatter. Elam turned away from the pool. His heart pounded. A burst of laughter sounded from across the pool. The party was continuing, but the guests were impossibly far away, like a memory of childhood, unreachable and useless.
A head rose up out of the darkness, a head twice the size of Elam’s body. It was a metal egg, dominated by two expressionless eyes. Behind dragged a long multilimbed body, shiny and obscene. Elam screamed in unreasoning and senseless terror.
The creature moved forward, swaying its head from side to side. Acid saliva drooled from beneath its crystal teeth, splashing and fizzing on the marble terrace. It was incomprehensibly ancient, something from the long-forgotten past. It swept its tail around and dragged Elam toward it.
For an instant, Elam was paralyzed, staring at the strange beauty of the dragon’s teeth as they moved toward him. Then he struggled against the iron coil of the tail. His body still had traces of oil, and he slid out, stripping skin. He dove between the dragon’s legs, bruising his bones on the terrace.
The dragon whipped around quickly, cornering him. With a belch, it sprayed acid over him. It burned down his shoulder, bubbling as it dissolved his skin.
“Damn you!” he shouted, and threw himself at the dragon’s head. It didn’t pull back quickly enough, and he plunged his fist into its left eye. Its surface resisted, then popped, spraying fluid. The dragon tossed its head, flinging Elam across the ground.
He pulled himself to his feet, feeling the pain of shattered ribs. Blood dribbled down his chin. One of his legs would not support his weight. The massive head lowered down over him, muck pouring out of the destroyed eye. Elam grabbed for the other eye, but he had no strength left. Foul-smelling acid flowed over him, sloughing his flesh off with the sound of frying bacon. He stayed on his feet, trying to push imprecations between his destroyed lips. The last thing he saw was the crystal teeth, lowering toward his head.
Lammiela’s house was the abode of infinity. The endless rooms were packed with the junk of a hundred worlds. The information here was irreplaceable, unduplicated anywhere else. No one came to visit, and the artifacts, data cubes, and dioramas rested in silence.
At some time in the past millennia, human beings had explored as far inward as the galactic core and so far outward that the galaxy had hung above them like a captured undersea creature, giving up its light to intergalactic space. They had moved through globular clusters of ancient suns and explored areas of stellar synthesis. They had raised monuments on distant planets. After some centuries of this, they had returned to Earth, built their mysterious cities on a planet that must have been nothing but old legend, and settled down, content to till the aged soil and watch the sun rise and set. And, with magnificent insouciance, they had forgotten everything, leaving their descendants ignorant.
Lammiela sat in the corner watching Elam. Her body, though elegant, was somehow bent, as if she had been cut from an oddly shaped piece of wood by a clever wood-carver utilizing the limitations of his material. That was true enough, Elam reflected, examining the person who was both his parents.
When young, Lammiela had found a ship somewhere on Earth’s moon, tended by the secret mechanisms that made their lives there, and gone forth to explore the old spaces. No one had any interest in following her, but somehow her exploits had gained enough attention that she had obtained extraordinary privileges.
“It’s curious,” she said. “Our friends the Bound have skills that we Incarnate do not even dream of, because the machines our ancestors left us have no interest in them.” She looked thoughtful for a moment. “It’s surprising, some of the things the Bound can do.”
“Like make you both my father and my mother,” Elam said.
Her face was shadowed. “Yes. There is that.”
Lammiela had been born male, named Laurance. But Laurance had felt himself to be a woman. No problem for one of the Incarnate, who could be anything they wished. Laurance could have slept securely in his adytum and put female bodies on for his entire life. But Laurance. did not think that way. He had gone to the Bound, and they had changed him to a woman.
“When the job was finished, I was pregnant,” Lammiela said. “Laurance’s sperm had fertilized my new ova. I don’t know if it was a natural consequence of the rituals they used.” Her muscles tightened with the memories. Tendons stood out on the backs of her hands. “They kept me conscious through it all. Pain is their price. They slew the male essence. I saw it, screaming before me. Laurance, burning.”
It had cost most of her haut to do it. Dealings with the Bound inevitably involved loss of status.
“I still see him sometimes,” she said.
“Who?” Elam asked.
“Your father, Laurance.” Her eyes narrowed. “They didn’t kill him well enough, you see. They told me they did, but he’s still around.” Her eyes darted, as if expecting to find Laurance hiding behind a diorama.
Elam felt a chill, a sharp feeling at the back of his neck, as if someone with long, long nails were stroking him there. “But you’re him, Lammiela. He’s not someone else.”
“Do you really know so much about identity, Elam?” She sighed, relaxing. “You’re right, of course. Still, was it I who stood in the Colonnade at Hrlad?” She pointed at a hologram of a long line of rock obelisks, the full galaxy rising beyond them. “I’m sure I remember it, not as if I had been there. It was legend, you know. A bedtime story. But Hrlad is real. So is Laurance. You look like him, you know. You have your father’s eyes.”
She stared at him coldly, and he, for the first time, thought that Reqata might have spoken truly. Perhaps his mother did indeed hate him.
“I made my choice,” she said. “I can never go back. The Bound won’t let me. I am a woman, and a mother.”
Lammiela did not live in the city where most of the Incarnate made their home. She lived on a mountainside, bleak and alone, the rigid curving walls of her house holding off the snow. She moved her dwelling periodically, from seashore to desert to mountain. She had no adytum, with its body, to lug with her. Elam, somehow, remembered deep forest when he was growing up, interspersed with sunny meadows. The vision wasn’t clear. Nothing was clear.
After this most recent death, Elam had once again awakened in his adytum. He’d felt the fluid flowing through his lungs, and the darkness pressing down on his open eyes. Fire had burned through his veins, but there was no air to scream with. Then he had awakened again, normally, on a pallet in the light.
“Mother,” he said, looking off at a broad-spectrum hologram of Sinus that spilled vicious white light across the corner of the room, too bright to look at directly without filters. “Am I truly your only child?”
Lammiela’s face was still. “Most things are secrets for the first part of their existence, and forgotten thereafter. I suppose there must be a time in the middle when they are known. Who told you?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes. It was thrown at you as a weapon, wasn’t it?”
Elam sighed. “Yes. Reqata.”
“Ah, yes. I should have guessed. Dear Reqata. Does she love you, Elam?”
The question took him aback. “She says she does.”
“I’m sure she means it then. I wonder what it is about you that she loves. Is that where the discussion ended then? With the question?”
“Yes. We were interrupted.” Elam described the dragon’s attack.
“Ah, how convenient. Reqata was always a master of timing. Who was it, do you suppose?” She looked out of the circular window at the mountain tundra, the land falling away to a vast ice field, just the rocky peaks of mountains thrusting through it. “No one gains haut anonymously.”
“No one recognized the style. Or if they did, they did not admit it.” The scene was wrong, Elam thought. It should have been trees: smoothtrunked beeches, heavy oaks. The sun had slanted through them as if the leaves themselves generated the light.
“So why are you here, Elam? Are you looking for the tank in which that creature was grown? You may search for it if you like. Go ahead.”
“No!” Elam said. “I want to find my sister.” And he turned away and ran through the rooms of the house, past the endless vistas of stars that the rest of the human race had comfortably forgotten. Lammiela silently followed, effortlessly sliding through the complex displays, as Elam stumbled, now falling into an image of a kilometer-high cliff carved with human figures, now into a display of ceremonial masks with lolling tongues. He suddenly remembered running through these rooms, their spaces much larger then, pursued by a small violent figure that left no place to hide.
In a domed room he stopped at a wall covered with racks of dark metal drawers. He pushed a spot and one slid open. Inside was a small animal, no bigger than a cat, dried as if left out in the sun. It was recognizably the dragon, curled around itself, its crystalline teeth just visible through its pulled-back lips.
Lammiela looked down at it. “You two never got along. You would have thought that you would … but I guess that was a foolish assumption. You tormented her with that thing, that … monster. It gave her screaming nightmares. Once, you propped it by her bed so that she would see it when she woke up. For three nights after that she didn’t sleep.” She slid the drawer shut.
“Who was she?” Elam demanded, taking her shoulders. She met his gaze. “It’s no longer something that will just be forgotten.”
She weakly raised a hand to her forehead, but Elam wasn’t fooled. His mother had dealt with dangers that could have killed her a dozen times over. He tightened his grip on her shoulders. “Your sister’s name was Orfea. Lovely name, don’t you think? I think Laurance picked it out.”
Elam could remember no sister. “Was she older or younger?”
“Neither. You were split from one ovum, identical twins. One was given an androgen bath and became you, Elam. The other was female: Orfea. God, how you grew to hate each other! It frightened me. And you were both so talented. I still have some of her essence around, I think.”
“I … what happened to her? Where is she?”
“That was the one thing that consoled me, all these years. The fact that you didn’t remember. I think that was what allowed you to survive.”
“What? Tell me!”
Lammiela took only one step back, but it seemed that she receded much farther. “She was murdered. She was just a young girl. So young.”
Elam looked at her, afraid of the answer. He didn’t remember what had happened, and he could still see hatred in his mother’s eyes. “Did they ever find out who did it?” he asked softly.
She seemed surprised by the question. “Oh, there was never any doubt. She was killed by a young friend of yours. He is now your servant. Abias.”
“I have to say that it was in extremely poor taste,” Reqata said, not for the first time. “Death is a fine performance, but there’s no reason to perform it at a dinner party. Particularly in my presence.”
She got up from the bed and stretched. This torso was wide, and wellmuscled. Once again, the rib cage was high, the breasts small. Elam wondered
if, in the secrecy of her adytum, Reqata was male. He had never seen her in any other than a female body.
“Just out of curiosity,” Elam said. “Could you tell who the dragon was?” He ran his hand over the welts on his side, marks of Reqata’s fierce love.
She glanced back at him, eyelids half lowered over wide violet eyes. She gauged if her answer would affect her haut. “Now that was a good trick, Elam. If I hadn’t been looking right at you, I would have guessed that it was you behind those glass fangs.”
She walked emphatically across the room, the slap of her bare feet echoing from the walls, and stood, challengingly, on the curve of Elam’s adytum. Dawn had not yet come, and light was provided by hanging globes of a blue tint that Elam found unpleasant. He had never discovered a way to adjust or replace them.
“Oh, Elam,” she said. “If you are working on something, I approve. How you fought! You didn’t want to die. You kept struggling until there was nothing left of you but bones. That dragon crunched them like candy canes.” She shuddered, her face flushed. “It was wonderful.”
Elam stretched and rolled out of the bed. As his weight left it, it rose off the floor, to vanish into the darkness overhead. The huge room had no other furniture.
“What do you know about my sister?” he asked.
Reqata lounged back on the adytum, curling her legs. “I know she existed, I know she’s dead. More than you did, apparently.” She ran her hands up her sides, cupping her breasts. “You know, the first stories I heard of you don’t match you. You were more like me then. Death was your art, certainly, but it wasn’t your own death.”
“As you say,” Elam said, stalking toward her, “I don’t remember.”
“How could you have forgotten?” She rested her hands on the rough stone of the adytum. “This is where you are, Elam. If I ripped this open, I could kill you. Really kill you. Dead.”
“Want to try it?” He leaned over her. She rested back, lips parted, and dug her fingernails in a circle around his nipple.
“It could be exciting. Then I could see who you really were.”
He felt the sweet bite of her nails through his skin. If he had only one body, he reflected, perhaps he could never have made love to Reqata. He couldn’t have lasted.
He pushed himself forward onto her, and they made love on his adytum, above his real body as it slumbered.
Abias’s kingdom was brightly lit, to Elam’s surprise. He had expected a mysterious darkness. Hallways stretched in all directions, leading to chambers of silent machines and tanks filled with organs and bodies. As he stepped off the stairs, Elam realized that he had never before been down to these lower levels, even though it was as much a part of his house as any other. But this was Abias’s domain. This was where the magic was done.
His bumblebee lay on a table, its dead nervous system scooped out.
Dozens of tiny mechanisms crawled over it, straightening its spars, laying fragile wing material between the ribs. Elam pictured them crawling over his own body, straightening out his ribs, coring out his spinal column, resectioning his eyes.
Elam touched a panel, and a prism rose up out of the floor. In it was himself, calmly asleep. Elam always kept several standard, unmodified versions of his own body ready. That was the form in which he usually died. Elam examined the face of his clone. He had never inhabited this one, and it looked strange in consequence. No emotions had ever played over those slack features, no lines of care had ever formed on the forehead or around the eyes. The face was an infant turned physically adult.
The elaborate shape of Abias appeared in a passage and made its way toward him, segmented legs gleaming. Elam felt a moment of fear. He imagined those limbs seizing his mysterious faceless sister, Orfea, rending her, their shine dulled with her blood, sizzling smoke rising … he fought the images down. Abias had been a man then, if he’d been anything. He’d lost his body as a consequence of that murder.
Abias regarded him. As a Bound, and a cyborg to boot, Abias had no haut. He had no character to express, needed no gestures to show who he was. His faceless eyes were unreadable. Had he been trying to kill Elam? He had the skills and resources to have created the zeppelin, grown the dragon. But why? If he wanted to kill Elam, the real Elam, the adytum lay in his power. Those powerful limbs could rip the chamber open and drag the sleeping Elam out into the light. Elam’s consciousness, in a clone somewhere else, wouldn’t know what had happened, but would suddenly cease to exist.
“Is the new body ready?” Elam said abruptly.
Abias moved quietly away. After a moment’s hesitation, Elam followed, deeper into the lower levels. They passed a prism where a baby with golden skin slept, growing toward the day that Elam could inhabit it, and witness Reqata’s El’lie artwork. It would replace the body destroyed by the dragon. Lying on a pallet was a short heavy-boned body with a rounded jaw and beetle brows.
“It was a matter of genetic regression, based on the markers in the cytoplasmic mitochondria,” Abias said, almost to himself. “The mitochondrial DNA is the timer, since it comes only from the female ancestor. The nucleic genetic material is completely scrambled. But much of it stretches back far enough. And of course we have stored orang and chimp genes as well. If you back and fill—”
“That’s enough, Abias,” Elam said impatiently. “It doesn’t matter.”
“No, of course not. It doesn’t matter. But this is your Neanderthal.”
Elam looked down at the face that was his own, a few hundred thousand years back into the past. “How long have I known you, Abias?”
“Since we were children,” Abias said softly. “Don’t you remember?”
“You know I don’t remember. How could I have lived with you for so long otherwise? You killed my sister.”
“How do you know that?”
“Lammiela told me that you killed Orfea.”
“Ah,” Abias said. “I didn’t kill her, Elam.” He paused. “You don’t remember her.”
“No. As far as I’m concerned, I have always been alone.”
“Perhaps you always have been.”
Elam considered this. “Are you claiming that Reqata and my mother are lying? That there never was an Orfea?”
Abias lowered all of his limbs until he was solid on the floor. “I think you should be more worried about who is trying to kill you. These attempts are not accidents.”
“I know. Perhaps you.”
“That’s not even worth answering.”
“But who would want to go around killing me repeatedly in my clones?”
“From the information we have now,” Abias said, “it could be anyone. It could even be Orfea.”
“Orfea?” Elam stared at him. “Didn’t you just claim she never existed?”
“I did not. I said I didn’t kill her. I didn’t. Orfea did not die that day.” His eyes closed and he was immobile. “Only I did.”
It was a land that was familiar, but as Elam stalked it in his new body, he did not know whether it was familiar to him, Elam, or to the Neanderthal he now was. It was covered with a dark forest, broken by clearings, crossed by clear icy streams scattered with rocks. The air was cold and damp, a living air. His body was wrapped in fur. It was not fur from an animal he had killed himself, but something Abias had mysteriously generated, in the same way he had generated the fur Elam had worn when he died in the Michigan winter. For all he knew, it was some bizarre variant of his own scalp hair.
Since this was just an exploratory journey, the creation of belowconscious reflexes, Elam retained his own memories. They sat oddly in his head. This brain perceived things more directly, seeing each beam of sunlight through the forest canopy as a separate entity, with its own characteristics and personality, owning little to the sun from which it ultimately came.
A stream had cut a deep ravine, revealing ruins. The Neanderthal wandered among the walls, which stood knee-deep in the water, and peered thoughtfully to their bricks. He felt as if he were looking at the ruins of the incomprehensibly distant future, not the past at all. He imagined wading mammoths pushing their way through, knocking the walls over in their search for food. At the thought of a mammoth his hands itched to feel the haft of a spear, though he could certainly not kill such a beast by himself. He needed the help of his fellows, and they did not exist. He walked the Earth alone.
Something grunted in a pool that had once been a basement. He sloshed over to it, and gazed down at the frog. It sat on the remains of a windowsill, pulsing its throat. Elam reached down … and thought of the dying frog, shuddering its life out in his hand. He tied it down, limbs
outspread, and played the hot cutting beam over it. It screamed and begged as the smoke from its guts rose up into the clear sky.
Elam jerked his hand back from the frog, which, startled, dove into the water and swam away. He turned and climbed the other side of the ravine. He was frightened by the savagery of the thought that had possessed him. When he pulled himself over the edge he found himself in an area of open rolling hills, the forest having retreated to the colder northern slopes.
The past seemed closer here, as if he had indeed lived it.
He had hated Orfea. The feeling came to him like the memory of a shaman’s rituals, fearsome and complex. It seemed that the hate had always been with him. That form, with his shape and gestures, loomed before him.
The memories were fragmentary, more terrifying than reassuring, like sharp pieces of colored glass. He saw the face of a boy he knew to be Abias, dark-eyed, curly-haired, intent. He bent over an injured animal, one of Elam’s victims, his eyes shiny with tears. Young, he already possessed a good measure of that ancient knowledge the Bound remembered. In this case the animal was beyond healing. With a calmly dismissive gesture, Abias broke its neck.
The leaves in the forest moved of their own will, whispering to each other of the coming of the breeze, which brushed its cool fingers across the back of Elam’s neck.
He remembered Orfea, a slender girl with dark hair, but he never saw her clearly. Her image appeared only in reflections, side images, glimpses of an arm or a strand of hair. And he saw himself, a slender boy with dark hair, twin to Orfea. He watched himself as he tied a cat down to a piece of wood, spreading it out as it yowled. There was a fine downy hair on his back, and he could count the vertebrae as they moved under his smooth young skin. The arm sawed with its knife, and the cat screamed and spat.
The children wandered the forest, investigating what they had found in the roots of a tree. It was some sort of vast lens, mostly under the ground, with only one of its faces coming out into the air. They brushed the twigs and leaves from it and peered in, wondering at its ancient functions. Elam saw Orfea’s face reflected in it, solemn eyes examining him, wondering at him. A beam of hot sunlight played on the lens, awakening lights deep within it, vague images of times and places now vanished. Midges darted in the sun, and Orfea’s skin produced a smooth and heavy odor, one of the perfumes she mixed for herself: her art, as death was Elam’s. Elam looked down at her hand, splayed on the smooth glass, then across at his, already rougher, stronger, with the hints of dark dried blood around the fingernails.
Abias stood above them. He danced on the smooth glass, his callused feet slipping. He laughed every time he almost fell. “Can you see us?” he cried to the lens. “Can you see who we are? Can you see who we will become?” Elam looked up at him in wonder, then down at the boy’s tiny distorted reflection as it cavorted among the twisted trees.
The sun was suddenly hot, slicing through the trees like a burning edge. Smoke rose as it sizzled across flesh. Elam howled with pain and ran up the slope. He ran until his lungs were dying within him.
The Neanderthal stopped in a clearing up the side of a mountain. A herd of clouds moved slowly across the sky, cropping the blue grass of the overhead. Around him rocks, the old bones of the Earth, came up through it sagging flesh. The trees whispered derisively below him. They talked of death and blood. “You should have died,” they said. “The other should have lived.” The Neanderthal turned his tear-filled eyes into the wind, though whether he wept for Orfea, or for Elam, even he could not have said.
The city burned with a dry thunder. Elam and Reqata ran through the crowded screaming streets with the arsonists, silent and pure men. In the shifting firelight, their tattoed faces swirled and re-formed, as if made of smoke themselves.
“The situation has been balanced for years,” Reqata said. “Peace conceals strong forces pushing against each other. Change their alignment, and … .” Swords flashed in the firelight, a meaningless battle between looters and some sort of civil guard. Ahead were the tiled temples of the Goddesses, their goal.
“They feel things we don’t,” she said. “Religious exaltation. The suicidal depression of failed honor. Fierce loyalty to a leader. Hysterical terror at signs and portents.”
Women screamed from the upper windows of a burning building, holding their children out in vain hope of salvation.
“Do you envy them?” Elam asked.
“Yes!” she cried. “To them, life is not a game.” Her hand was tight on his arm. “They know who they are.”
“And we don’t?”
“Take me!” Reqata said fiercely. Her fingernails stabbed through his thin shirt. They had made love in countless incarnations, and these golden-skinned slender bodies were just another to her, even with the flames rising around them.
He took her down on the stone street as the city burned on all sides. Her scent pooled dark. It was the smell of death and decay. He looked at her. Beneath him, eyes burning with malignant rage, was Orfea.
“You are alive,” Elam cried.
Her face glowered at him. “No, you bastard,” she said. “I’m not alive. You are. You are.”
His rage suddenly matched hers. He grabbed her hair and pulled her across the rough stone. “Yes. And I’m going to stay that way. Understand? Understand?” With each question, he slammed her head on the stone.
Her face was amused. “Really, Elam. I’m dead, remember? Dead and gone. What’s the use of slamming me around?”
“You were always like that. Always sensible. Always driving me crazy!” He stopped, his hands around her throat. He looked down at her. “Why did we hate each other so much?”
“Because there was really only ever one of us. It was Lammiela who thought there were two.”
Pain sliced across his cheek. Reqata slapped him again, making sure her nails bit in. Blood poured down her face and her hair was tangled. Elam stumbled back, and was shoved aside by a mob of running soldiers.
“Are you crazy?” she shouted. “You can’t kill me. You can’t. You’ll ruin everything.” She was hunched, he saw now, cradling her side. She reached down and unsheathed her sword. “Are you trying to go back to your old style? Try it somewhere else. This is my show.”
“Wait,” he said.
“Damn you, we’ll discuss this later. In another life.” The sword darted at him.
“Reqata!” He danced back, but the edge caught him across the back of his hand. “What are you—”
There were tears in her eyes as she attacked him. “I see her, you know. Don’t think that I don’t. I see her at night, when you are asleep. Your face is different. It’s the face of a woman, Elam. A woman! Did you know that? Orfea lives on in you somewhere.”
Her sword did not allow him to stop and think. She caught him again, cutting his ear. Blood soaked his shoulder. “Your perfume. Who sent it to you?”
“Don’t be an idiot. Something in you is Orfea, Elam. That’s the only part I really love.”
He tripped over a fallen body. He rolled and tried to get to his feet. He found himself facing the point of her sword, still on his knees.
“Please, Reqata,” he said, tears streaming down his cheeks. “I don’t want to die.”
“Well, isn’t that the cutest thing.” Her blade pushed into his chest, cold as ice. “Why don’t you figure out who you are first?”
He awoke in his adytum. His eyes generated dots of light to compensate for the complete darkness. His blood vessels burned as if filled with molten metal. He moved, pushing against the viscous fluid. Damp hair swirled around him, thick under his back, curling around his feet. It had gathered around his neck. There was no air to breathe. Elam. Where was Elam? He seemed to be gone at last, leaving only—
Elam awoke, gasping, on a pallet, still feeling the metal of Reqata’s sword in his chest. So it had been her. Not satisfied with killing everyone else, she had needed to kill him as well, repeatedly. He, even now, could not understand why. Orfea.
He stood silently in the middle of the room and listened to the beating of his own heart. Only it wasn’t his own, of course, not the one he had been born with. It was a heart that Abias had carefully grown in a tank somewhere below, based on information provided by a gene sample from the original Elam. The real Elam still slept peacefully in his adytum. Peacefully … he had almost remembered something this time. Things had almost become clear.
He walked down to Abias’s bright kingdom. Abias had tools there,
surgical devices with sharp, deadly edges. It was his art, wasn’t it? And a true artist never depended on an audience to express himself.
He searched through cabinets, tearing them open, littering the floor with sophisticated devices, hearing their delicate mechanisms shatter. He finally found a surgical tool with a vibratory blade that could cut through anything. He carried it upstairs and stared down at the ovoid of the adytum. What was inside of it? If he penetrated, perhaps, at last, he could truly see.
It wasn’t the right thing, of course. The right instrument had to burn as it cut, cauterizing flesh. He remembered its bright killing flare. This was but a poor substitute.
Metal arms pinioned him. “Not yet,” Abias said softly. “You cannot do that yet.”
“What do you mean?” Elam pulled himself from Abias’s suddenly unresisting arms and turned to face him. The faceless eyes stared at him.
“I mean that you don’t understand anything. You cannot act without finally understanding.”
“Tell me, then!” Elam shouted. “Tell me what happened. I have to know. You say you didn’t kill Orfea. Who did then? Did I? Did I do it?”
Abias was silent for a long time. “Yes. Your mother has, I think, tried to forgive you. But you are the murderer.”
“You were not supposed to remember.” Lammiela sat rigidly in her most private room, her mental adytum. “The Bound told me you would not. That part of you was to vanish. Just as Laurance vanished from me.”
“I haven’t remembered. You have to help me.”
She looked at him. Until today, the hatred in her eyes would have frightened him. Now it comforted him, for he must be near the truth.
“You were a monster as a child, Elam. Evil, I would have said, though I loved you. You were Laurance, returned to punish me for having killed him … .”
“I tortured animals,” Elam said, hurrying to avoid Lammiela’s past and get to his own. “I started with frogs. I moved up to cats, dogs … .”
“And people, Elam. You finally moved to people.”
“I know,” he said, thinking of the dead Orfea, whom he feared he would never remember. “Abias told me.”
“Abias is very forgiving,” Lammiela said. “You lost him his body, and nearly his life.”
“What did I do with him?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know, Elam. He has never said. All these years, and he has never said. You hated Orfea, and she hated you, but somehow you were still jealous of each other. She cared for Abias, your friend from the village, and that made you wild. He was so clever about that ancient Bound knowledge the Incarnate never pay attention to. He always tried to undo the evil that you did. He healed animals, putting them back together. Without you, he may never have learned all he did. He was a magician.”
“Mother—”
She glared at him. “You strapped him down, Elam. You wanted to … to castrate him. Cloning, you called it. You said you could clone him. He might have been able to clone you, I don’t know, but you certainly could do nothing but kill him. Orfea tried to stop you, and you fought. You killed her, Elam. You took that hot cutting knife and you cut her apart. It explodes flesh, if set right, you know. There was almost nothing left.”
Despite himself, Elam felt a surge of remembered pleasure.
“As you were murdering your sister, Abias freed himself. He struggled and got the tool away from you.”
“But he didn’t kill me.”
“No. I never understood why. Instead, he mutilated you. Carefully, skillfully. He knew a lot about the human body. You were unrecognizable when they found you, all burned up, your genitals destroyed, your face a blank.”
“And they punished Abias for Orfea’s murder. Why?”
“He insisted that he had done it. I knew he hadn’t. I finally made him tell me. The authorities didn’t kill him, at my insistence. Instead, they took away his body and made him the machine he now is.”
“And you made him serve me,” Elam said in wonder. “All these years, you’ve made him serve me.”
She shook her head. “No, Elam. That was his own choice. He took your body, put it in its adytum, and has served you ever since.”
Elam felt hollow, spent. “You should have killed me,” he whispered. “You should not have let me live.”
Lammiela stared at him, her eyes bleak and cold. “I daresay you’re right, Elam. You were Laurance before me, the man I can never be again. I wanted to destroy you, totally. Expunge you from existence. But it was Abias’s wish that you live, and since he had suffered at your hands, I couldn’t gainsay him.”
“Why then?” Elam said. “Why do you want to kill me now?” He stretched his hands out toward his mother. “If you want to, do it. Do it!”
“I don’t know what you are talking about, Elam. I haven’t tried to kill you. I gave up thinking about that a long time ago.”
He sagged. “Who then? Reqata?”
“Reqata?” Lammiela smirked. “Go through all this trouble for one death? It’s not her style, Elam. You’re not that important to her. Orfea was an artist too. Her art was scent. Scents that stick in your mind and call up past times when you smell them again.”
“You wore one of them,” Elam said, in sudden realization. “The day my death in the north woods ended.”
“Yes,” she said, her voice suddenly taut again. “Orfea wore that scent on the last day of her life, Elam. You probably remember it.”
The scent brought terror with it. Elam remembered that. “Did you find some old vial of it? Whatever made you wear it?”
She looked at him, surprised. “Why, Elam. You sent it to me yourself,”
Abias stood before him like a technological idol, the adytum between them.
“I’m sorry, Abias,” Elam said.
“Don’t be sorry,” Abias said. “You gave yourself up to save me.”
“Kill me, Abias,” he said, not paying attention to what the cyborg had just said. “I understand everything now. I can truly die.” He held the vibratory surgical tool above the adytum, ready to cut in, to kill what lay within.
“No, Elam. You don’t understand everything, because what I told Lammiela that day was not the truth. I lied, and she believed me.” He pushed, and a line appeared across the adytum’s ovoid.
“What is the truth then, Abias?” Elam waited, almost uninterested.
“Orfea did not die that day, Elam. You did.”
The adytum split slowly open.
“You did try to kill me, Elam,” Abias said softly, almost reminiscently. “You strapped me down for your experiment. Orfea tried to stop you. She grabbed the hot cutting knife and fought with you. She killed you.”
“I don’t understand.”
The interior of an adytum was a dark secret. Elam peered inside, for a moment seeing nothing but yards and yards of wet dark hair.
“Don’t you understand, Orfea? Don’t you know who you are?” Abias’s voice was anguished. “You killed Elam, whom you hated, but it was too much for you. You mutilated yourself, horribly. And you told me what you wanted to be. I loved you. I did it.”
“I wanted to be Elam,” Elam whispered.
The face in the adytum was not his own. Torn and mutilated still, though repaired by Abias’s skill, it was the face of Orfea. The breasts of a woman pushed up through the curling hair.
“You wanted to be the brother you had killed. After I did as you said, no one knew the difference. You were Elam. The genes were identical, since you were split from the same ovum. No one questioned what had happened. The Incarnate are squeamish, and leave such vile business to the Bound. And you’ve been gone ever since. Your hatred for who you thought you were caused you to kill yourself, over and over. Elam was alive again, and knew that Orfea had killed him. Why should he not hate her?”
“No,” Elam said. “I don’t hate her.” He slumped slowly to his knees, looking down at the sleeping face.
“I had to bring her back, you understand that?” Abias’s voice was anguished. “If only one of you can live, why should it be Elam? Why should it be him? Orfea’s spirit was awakening, slowly, after all these years. I could see it sometimes, in you.”
“So you brought it forth,” Elam said. “You cloned and created creatures in which her soul could exist. The zeppelin. The dragon.”
“Yes.”
“And each time, she was stronger. Each time I died, I awoke … she awoke for a longer time in the adytum.”
“Yes!” Abias stood over him, each limb raised glittering above his head. “She will live.”
Elam rested his fingers in her wet hair and stroked her cheek. She had
slept a long time. Perhaps it was indeed time for him to attempt his final work of art, and die forever. Orfea would walk the Earth again.
“No!” Elam shouted. “I will live.” Abias loomed over him as the dragon had, ready to steal his life from him. He swung the vibrating blade and sliced off one of Abias’s limbs. Another swung down, knocking Elam to the floor. He rolled. Abias raised himself above. Elam stabbed upward with the blade. It penetrated the central cylinder of Abias’s body and was pulled from his hands as Abias jerked back. Elam lay defenseless and awaited the ripping death from Abias’s manipulator arms.
But Abias stood above him, motionless, his limbs splayed out, his eyes staring. After a long moment, Elam realized that he was never going to move again.
The adytum had shut of its own accord, its gray surface once again featureless. Elam rested his forehead against it. After all these years he had learned the truth, the truth of his past and his own identity.
Abias had made him seem an illegitimate soul, a construct of Orfea’s guilt. Perhaps that was indeed all he was. He shivered against the roughness of the adytum. Orfea slumbered within it. With sudden anger, he slapped its surface. She could continue to sleep. She had killed him once. She would not have the chance to do it again.
Elam stood up wearily. He leaned on the elaborate sculpture of the dead Abias, feeling the limbs creak under his weight. What was Elam without him?
Elam was alive. He smiled. For the first time in his life, Elam was alive.