Thales closes his eyes against the sun, listens to the branches moving in the wind.
He feels every blade of the grass bending under his palms. More detail here, he suspects, than in the world.
He could lie in the sun for a thousand thousand years. He’s come to pity the living, hounded by death, struggling through their brief and restive spans.
He wonders if anyone else has ever been this happy.
And yet, despite everything, there’s the slightest sense of absence. He could erase it, and even its memory, but doesn’t. He’s interested in this residuum of suffering, and how it draws him.
He thinks of Lillian, who is reading at the pool by the white pile of the Chateau.
As he walks through the woods, he notices once again how he always feels like he’s just woken up.
Lillian is alone by the pool in her bikini, straddling a chaise longue. She was twelve when she died, and is twelve still. She’s beanpole thin, and always will be.
He’d found her memories in the wreckage of the world and couldn’t just let her go.
Smell of chlorine. Dragonflies dart over the wind-rippled water. The Wind in the Willows is open in her hands.
“How is good Mr. Toad?” Thales asks.
When she looks up he sees she’s wearing oversized movie-star sunglasses. He doesn’t know how she got them, but they’re suited to the milieu.
“This is a very strange book,” she says. “Sometimes they’re like animals, and sometimes they’re like people. I can’t even really tell what size they are. And it’s such a sad book, and such a happy one at the same time.”
“Isn’t it just? Let me know when you’re done with it, and I’ll find you something else.”
“When’s my father coming?”
Her father, the hard-charging venture capitalist, who’d pulled Ars Memoria out of bankruptcy, however briefly, to get her the next-to-last implant. She still expects her father to save her, and Thales can’t bear to tell her he already has, as best he could.
“It might be a while,” he says. “Do you need anything?”
“No,” she says, almost singing it, like a child, as she turns back to her book. He kisses the warmth of the top of her head.
“Come find me later,” he says. “We’ll watch old movies—Pixar and early Disney.”
She nods abstractedly, already immersed.
He leaves her and walks into the woods toward where the mountain house last was. Things move around, here, and not always in accord with his will.
In the shadows below the trees it occurs to him to lie down in the leaves, let go of everything, let the centuries wash by, but Lillian needs him, and, in light of his work with Irina, so does the world.
He steps into a clearing and sees the wall.
It’s usually higher up on the mountain, but sometimes it’s in the woods, and now the gate is right before him, and there’s Akemi with her ear pressed to the keyhole.
He makes no noise, but presently she turns and looks up at him without expression.
“Who was it this time?” he asks.
“The woman,” says Akemi. “Like the magician but not. The warped one. Her, I can understand. The other one sounds like music, or the wind.”
“What does she want?”
“She asks me to explain things, things from the real world. She says she’s too far away now to do it for herself.”
“What else?”
“She says it’s time we opened the gate. She’s … persuasive.” Her voice catches on the word, and he wonders what she’s not telling him. “She says she’s learned secrets, and knows how to make everything better, transformed, somehow. She says we can’t even imagine what it’s going to be like. But for it to happen we have to open the gate.”
He finds himself clutching the key in his pocket.
“Perhaps not yet,” he says.
Her burgeoning frustration is in her face and she looks like she’s going to argue or maybe start screaming but then her outline wavers and Hiro is standing where she was, looking at him like he’s fitting him for a coffin, and then it’s Cromwell, peering around the wood, bemused and shaking his head, and then it’s Irina, who says, “Don’t do it, there’s no way to know who she’s become,” and then, for just a moment, it’s himself, in his threadbare shirt and cutoffs, looking more tanned and relaxed than seems natural—this other Thales raises an eyebrow, and then there’s no one there at all.
When he’s certain she’s gone, he rattles the gate to make sure it’s still locked. It’s Victorian, ornate, slightly rusted. It worries him a little that the lock looks easy to pick. He presses his ear to the cold iron of the keyhole, hears what might be rocks clattering, maybe wind, then nothing.
* * *
He finds the mountain house deep in the wood, all but smothered under roots and arm-thick vines. It looks ancient, weathered, like it’s been rotting here for a thousand years.
The monitor on the desk comes to life as he sits, and there are the folders for his and Irina’s projects. There are new files today, apparently Japan’s plans for the invasion of South Korea. He’d argued for preventing the war, but Irina said it was inevitable, that they couldn’t do more than nudge it toward a draw. Her convictions, based on fragmentary insights, are hard to articulate, but she said it has to be that way, and by now he’s learned to trust her.
He often worries about her, though he tries to hide it when they talk.
He stares dully at plans for the orbital bombing of Seoul, but can’t concentrate.
He closes all the folders and sits there, tapping his fingers. Then, though he knows it’s unwise, he opens a link to the cam in his mother’s study in her beach house in Vancouver.
He’s in luck, for there she is, the early light glowing on her face as she stares out to sea. Morning, then, in British Columbia. Her laptop is on her lap, apparently forgotten, and her phone is on the table beside her. She looks older than she did when he was alive, more drawn, and her thoughts are far away.
Helio comes in, broader-shouldered than ever, with an absurd red streak dyed into his hair. All the microphones in the room are off, so he can’t hear what his brother is saying, but he seems to be reporting, and there’s something new in his manner—Thales has the sense he’s trying to be responsible.
Helio leaves, and his mother’s vitality, of which she’d made a display, wilts, and her gaze turns back to the water.
Something shifts in the cam’s software. There’s unexpected structure there. An alarm? He tries to stop it, but too late. A window appears on his mother’s laptop’s screen reading INTRUSION DETECTED.
Suddenly intent and entirely awake, she peers at her laptop, and then looks up at the cam like she’s trying to make eye contact.
Now she’s talking rapidly, though no one else is in the room. He turns on the cam’s audio in time to hear her say, “—you’re there, and it’s okay, please, talk to me, talk to me, say anything, please.”
He looks back at the cam’s software, sees the trip wire. It’s artfully done. She was waiting for him, and must have hired the best. But she has no way of knowing who it was—he could be a random criminal or some curious hacker—and he could still say nothing and just disappear.
Even so, he wants to talk to her. It would be easy to call her phone, though of course he never will.
With abstract interest and a sense of being moved by irresistible forces he watches himself place the call.
She snatches up her phone at the start of the first ring. “Thales,” she says.
“Not exactly.”
“I know. I buried him. But even so, it’s you.”
“I won’t have you deceived. You need to understand what I am.”
“I’ve already made an educated guess.”
“And?”
“At first I thought I’d dreamt you, when you called, but I looked into it, and there was a call, from the San Francisco airport. I guessed it had something to do with your implant. I brought pressure to bear against the trustees of Ars Memoria. I made them do forensics. Their archives had been violated, and your memories stolen.”
She hesitates.
“And it is you,” she says. “Whatever your circumstances. I knew it from the moment I heard you.”
“I’d have thought you’d be … appalled,” he says.
“I’ve always been open to unconventional relationships,” she says. “I love you, and I’m not giving up on you. Do you need help? Are you in trouble? Are you … comfortable? Your uncle is minister of defense now and I will compel him to do whatever is necessary.”
“I’m okay. Better than okay.”
“So tell me about that. Tell me all about it, and what it’s like, and where you are, and everything else. I have time. I have nowhere special to be for the rest of my life.”
He hesitates. He’d always assumed his existence would be a secret, forever veiled from the world, but things change.
He starts to tell her what happened.