What shall I tell you about the Era of the Children—that it lasted the better part of a century in the unworld’s accounting, and that most of it was made up of such repetitious despair that it nearly seemed time had forsaken us entirely? Margo succumbed to love for the little beamers again and again, suffered again and again, until it seemed a single circular occurrence, a misery escaped from all ordinary progress and all hope of relief. Oh, if I could live again—which I cannot—I swear I would cherish in myself those processes dependent on days and hours, the hair that needs cutting, the jagged nail, the skin sagging under my eyes!
Never mind. In fact Gus and I began spending rather long periods in the unworld, so keen was he to avoid Margo’s harrowed stare. He went to one city or another, restlessly, with no apparent motive other than discontent. It was plain that Nautilus was starting to bore him.
And he aged.
Oh, only by degrees, a few weeks’ worth here, two months there, for every return to Nautilus suspended time’s slow conquest and froze Gus at some approximation of twenty-five, or thirty, or thirty-five, until he entered the unworld again.
We dipped in during the War Between the States a few times, but fled when Gus was nearly frog-marched to a draft office; we returned to New York to hear drunks bickering over Boss Tweed and his ledger; on another occasion, in Pittsburgh, Gus’s debauchery was interrupted when troops began a massacre of railroad workers. We watched light bulbs flare like eyes in a strange awakening, we heard the rasp of radios. If Gus regarded the sweep of unworld history as nothing more than an annoyance, I was always eager to absorb what news I could—and always during these interludes, time snagged my former friend in its grind again.
The process was subtle enough, intermittent and broken enough, that Gus himself could be nearly insensible of the changes in his face and frame.
But I was not. To me the lines appearing around his eyes and mouth were like treasure in a dragon’s hoard. Behind my unvarying scream I crooned to each new crease, I caressed and fondled every mark of dissolution and decline.
And then there was always the chance that on these trips out of Nautilus Gus would meet with some fatal accident and I would be free. Everyone we met I eyed appraisingly: did this scarecrow man with the beetling brows happen to conceal a knife on his person? Might that knife, while on its innocent peregrinations, perhaps stumble into the labyrinth of Gus’s bowels? Gus’s magic was so obsessively specialized that it included few skills he could use in self-defense. He carried money looted from his parents’ house, he drank in sordid company. I thought a violent demise wonderfully possible.
But I was not the only one who considered such eventualities. On one of our returns to Nautilus we found Asterion waiting for us, one leg flung across the other, suspended foot jiggling furiously.
Oh, Asterion had prospered in the long smear of timeless time since I had first met him! Gus was plainly not his only mark. The violet velvet frock coat he now wore was figured with jewel-bright songbirds wrought in living embroidery, flitting restlessly around his arms. And he no longer stood and stared uncomfortably at the filthy and wanting contents of Gus’s home, but rather drew the nacreous substance of Nautilus itself into a very accommodating wingchair—an expensive flourish for what might have seemed a small occasion.
Mind, it was not that our visits to Asterion had ceased during this era. Gus’s projects still required far more magic than he could produce by himself, and his habit of exploiting me was now entrenched. But our prolonged jaunts had inserted periods when the cow was unavailable for milking, and Asterion was displeased.
“And how long was it this time, Gus?” Asterion snapped the instant we slipped through the wall. Gus wobbled at him, unequal to the question. His days-long drunkenness was receding, but like a flood it left wrack and refuse scattered across a muddy plain. “In unworld time, I mean. Presumably you saw that there were days and nights passing in their idiotic way while you were out there? Did you bother to notice how many?”
“I—” Gus started. And then, “You had no business picking my lock.”
Locks in Nautilus, like so many other things, were of the magical variety: wards that kept the doorways from yielding. Gus hadn’t bothered with a good one. Asterion paid the objection no mind.
“Don’t tell me,” Asterion pursued, rather unreasonably considering that he had asked. “I’ve checked for myself. There were sixty-seven of them. Sixty-seven consecutive unworld days, and you aging recklessly the while! Why, if our Catherine could have averaged ten talens for each of those days, that’s nearly seven hundred gone to absolute waste!” Asterion’s hands petted the emptiness in his lap, as if mourning over the wealth not heaped there.
But Gus by now had a better grip on his thoughts, however disorderly they were. “Oh, why should I bother squeezing every talen I can from her? What’s the use? A holiday from her racket—and Margo—and now you’re nagging me as well! All so I can fiddle about with those mewling infants, one after another after another, making this or that trivial refinement—but my real goal gets no closer. Asterion, I’m very near—”
To giving up? To desolation? I quickened in delicious anticipation of Gus’s next words. But he regrettably broke off and slumped down on the floor, burying his head in his hands. In the ensuing silence, Asterion’s bovine lips wrinkled and he stared down at Gus with naked disgust, considering himself unobserved.
Then he recalled that he was not unobserved, strictly speaking. And gave me a look—of what? A sneering knowingness, a sense that our common contempt for Gus did nothing to unite us, for Asterion allowed no sympathy for anyone but himself.
Gus raised his tear-streaked visage, and Asterion’s vacuous geniality snapped instantly into place.
“Well, if that’s all it is,” he said smiling, and bent to clap Gus on the back. “Sick of working on your boy beamers, eh? Buck up, my friend. It’s time to try your hand at full-grown models, that’s all.”
Gus gawped very fishily indeed. Then: “Why? I could hardly send them out to hunt Catherines. Not when I still lack the means to give them proper corporeality.”
I cannot adequately convey how much aggrievement Gus contrived to balance on the tightrope of these words. If I had possessed anything resembling breath, I would have held it in suspense.
“Oh, your Athenian youth? I didn’t think you were ready yet, that’s all. I can make inquiries. Of course, it will be expensive. All the more reason, then, to take full advantage of Catherine’s production, rather than letting it drift away into that useless unworld air.”
Gus shook his head as if he were trying to dislodge it from his shoulders. “Why? Why? Say you bring me some drugged boy—say even that I haul one back from the unworld myself—what am I to do with him? I’ve been thinking about it without cease, and I can’t see a way. How do I make use of his materials? Carve him up like a turkey? I’m a sorcerer, Asterion, not a butcher.”
My scream had to stand in for debating his last proposition. But this was the first I had heard of Gus’s latest difficulty; not being a sorceress myself, I could not often anticipate where he would encounter obstacles.
Asterion smiled in that too-familiar way of his, the one he used when he had successfully herded Gus into a corner of his own construction.
“Oh, I’m sure you’ll manage. Once you have the constituent bits in a cloud, the process of arranging them isn’t so different from what you do already. Ordering matter instead of illusion—it’s all an act of attention, isn’t it? Mind, not much has been done with truly embodied beamers. So many different specialties are required to make a good one that they’re far more trouble than they’re worth! But you’ve never been afraid to break new ground before.”
“That—” Gus shrugged wearily. “I haven’t tried it, but of course I grasp the general principles. I could cobble some sort of usable body together, I expect, and slap a mind in the thing. Minds I’m very good at, now. Appearances. That’s not what worries me.”
It was plain, from Asterion’s expectant gleam, that he knew perfectly well what worry Gus was alluding to and chose not to supply the words for him. He raised his hands as if in a question and Gus stumbled on.
“But the—the disassembly! Taking a living person apart on such a minute level, and botching none of it—preserving the functionality of every damned blood cell, keeping every tiny membrane intact—ugh, it doesn’t bear thinking of. One false move, and you’re swimming in worthless gore. I don’t even know how to start.”
I would like to remind you, my inhuman reader, that what they were discussing in these blasé terms was the murder, cold and unprovoked, of some random young man. A murder designed to beget more murders.
“True,” Asterion said after a moment. “I did say I thought you weren’t ready. When the raw materials are so expensive, it would be a pity to waste them. But if you’re so eager you could always try.”
“But then—”
“There are sorcerers expert in disintegrating and reassembling living flesh—not necessarily human, some of those who practice zoourgy like to build from scratch. Much too finicky for me, all that business, but there are those who seem to enjoy it. You could become one of them; start with algae, move on to wriggling things in pond scum. In fifty or so unworld years you could attempt a mouse perhaps.”
“Fifty years!”
“Restrain these impulses to go gallivanting around the unworld,” Asterion said pointedly, “and you’re in no hurry.”
“Fifty years! On top of everything I’ve done already!”
“Yours is an ambitious project. I did think you knew that.”
“Ambitious, yes, certainly. But with an end in sight!”
Allow me a moment to admire the venomous irony of this ejaculation. If there is an end—something for which I devoutly hope, and of which I often despair—I assure you that Gus won’t be the one to achieve it. He will never renounce his obsession, not when obsession is the only thing that spares him from confronting his own emptiness.
He is hardly the only sorcerer in Nautilus to discover that power and near-immortality do not in themselves grant purpose, or meaning, or even distraction from a desolate heart. If anything, it may be easier to achieve a sense of deep purpose where life is finite. Where its limits dictate that one must love and feel and hope now.
“Or you could save time by hiring one of them to do the disassembly for you. Not everyone will agree to do such work on a living person, of course. And those who do will charge a premium on top of the tremendous expenditure of magic already involved. A little something extra to cover the moral contortions, if you like.”
“A premium,” Gus groused. “And I suppose you’d like your cut for making the introductions.”
Asterion said nothing to this. His pretense of friendship for Gus was spotty at best.
“All right,” Gus said at last, quite as wanly as if the magic in question were truly his own and not mine. “How much?”
“Oh, well.” So great was Asterion’s expanse of flaccid lip that when he mused, or pretended to muse, it rippled in a truly revolting manner: a babbling brook made flesh. “Let’s say eighty—or a hundred at the outside—”
Gus’s head perked. “A hundred talens? Why, from how you went on I thought—but that’s no trouble!” A small laugh squeaked out. “No trouble at all!”
“A hundred thousand, of course I meant.”
I could not join Gus in his appalled silence, but for once my feelings neatly matched his. Asterion, of course, stood to profit thrice, drawing his share as the magic was drained from me, next his payment for the living boy, and again when Gus yielded up the minotaur’s commission for this unholy operation. Oh, how plainly the vista opened before me, of being drained, and drained, and drained, until that exorbitant sum could be achieved—that ghastly sipping static, that thirsting buzz, as the umbrastring was jabbed into my immaterial person and sucked—
Asterion had kept his promise to me and proofed his umbrastring against abrupt surges. I could not even take advantage of our sessions to try again to destroy Gus.
Gus meanwhile had jumped up—for he had been huddling the while at Asterion’s feet, pitiful as a beaten puppy—and began to pace, kicking drifts of dirty laundry from his path. The flash came back in his lichen-pale eyes, the thrill of a challenge accepted.
“No,” Gus said. “No. There has to be another way.”
I greeted these words with thoroughly misplaced relief. Why did I imagine even for an instant that Gus would leave me out of his schemes?
Asterion had worn a sort of butter-fed smirk as he counted his imaginary riches. Now his long mouth drooped and the brow furrowed between his horns.
“Another way? How could there be? Put in the effort yourself, or pay to have it done. Those are the choices, here as in the unworld. Dear Gus, don’t delude yourself. Only in the silly fantasies of the common herd is magic ever a shortcut!”
But Gus’s steps acquired an excited snap that I remembered well from his adolescence, and he shook his head with dismissive vigor and held up a hand for silence. Asterion watched with limp sullenness as his imagined talens whisked away in the blast of Gus’s inspiration.
“Catherine,” Gus said. He stopped short.
What? I thought.
And, “What?” Asterion said, in perfect synchronicity. “Of course Catherine—of course she’ll continue to supply you with the power you’ll need to, to pay. But my dear friend—”
Gus waved a hand, brushing the words away. “That isn’t at all what I mean. Yes. Catherine!” He beamed at me as if we were tangled together in some playful conspiracy. “We’ve drawn magic from her mind. Well, it’s time to make use of her body!”
Asterion reeled at this. He covered his eyes with one hand, as if to shield them from the sight of such madness.
“Gus. Gus, Gus, Gus. She doesn’t have one. How long has it been since she did?” An unwelcome thought struck him. “If you mean to dig her up, I feel confident you’ll find she’s not in usable condition.”
“No, no.” Gus was glimmering now, his every movement jerky with excitement. “That one.” He flourished in my general direction. “The cloud of energies that presently composes her, of course I mean. We know she can’t interact with the physical world under ordinary conditions. Can’t lift a feather, can’t even seem to control her own movements in any but the sloppiest way—ugh, the way her hands and arms flail—”
“Exactly. And something that can’t affect material things in the slightest isn’t going to be very helpful when it comes to a procedure involving a material body. Gus, if I may be plain, you are often an original thinker. But this is simply preposterous.”
“It must be tremendous, the energy of which Catherine is made. The force of an entire life, released all at once and then caught in a permanent field, an oscillation—the energy that would have borne her children, powered decades of laughter. Think of it!”
Oh, I did. I was surprised to discover, though, that Gus had considered me in such terms.
“Well?” Asterion snapped. “So? Say your theorizing holds, say that’s what a ghost is. Whatever she is, we can’t touch it.”
“That’s not true.” Gus stopped his pacing and pivoted toward Asterion, spreading his hands as if he held out his triumph for inspection. “Your umbrastring sticks in her. It creates a local stabilization, enough that we can skim off her power.”
Asterion sighed with a great flubbering of his lips, as much as to say that the point of all this eluded him. But I began to guess where Gus’s reasoning tended. I felt my flashing tumble into a queasy acceleration, a spasmodic dread.
“Who made it?” Gus demanded. “Your umbrastring? I must speak with him at once!”
“I haven’t the faintest,” Asterion lied. His voice took on a sort of puckered sound, so loath was he to surrender this information. If Gus acquired a similar implement of his own, how would the minotaur continue to profit off him? “I bought mine secondhand, from a very seedy dealer who was later exiled. Cornelius somebody. Now that you mention it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen another one.”
Gus shrugged off this attempted discouragement, pacing again and nodding briskly to himself. “I’ll need two, I think. But they might require a few modifications; I suppose I can practice on birds or some such until I get the knack of it. Well, if you don’t know, I’ll make inquiries on my own. Not many umbrathurges out there, as I believe you’ve mentioned. Ghosts aren’t a popular specialty, isn’t that right? Shouldn’t be too difficult to find someone who can direct me.”
Asterion’s globe eyes protruded so far at this show of unwelcome independence that it put me in mind of a snail’s eyestalks. He had overreached, grasped too greedily, and now he was in danger of losing even his regular percentage of my magical production. Appalled though I was at what I suspected Gus was planning, I yet found the inner resources to enjoy Asterion’s consternation.
“I can introduce you to someone,” Asterion sputtered, desperate now to retain any hold on Gus at all. “A certain lady, perhaps more a dabbler than an actual expert. But—”
Gus swung toward him. “Now,” he said. “Now, this very instant!”
I’ve spoken a great deal of memory, and it’s true that much of my hideous existence has been given over to visions of the past. One might be forgiven for supposing I do little else than remember. But no: I also watch. I plan. I’ve learned over the centuries how to perform several tasks simultaneously.
Take as an example the present moment. I go on screaming in my crevice of Nautilus, of course; I cannot do otherwise. I remember Gus’s revelation as to how he might make an additional and still viler use of me. But I also watch from a second, a secret redoubt.
I watch you.
Distractible creature that you are, you stare out a broad glass window and slurp sugared coffee through a hole in a plastic lid. I’ve had time to grow familiar with such innovations, you see; I know about parking lots and cell phones and bright orange chairs swiveling on dirty metal branches.
You stare, so caught up in your inhuman thoughts that you forget what your own hands are doing. Those hands, so olive-golden and strong and finely crafted, are presently in motion with cup and pen. And only one of them is taking its orders from you.
Those hands, those arms, shoulders, jaw, every detail of every part excessive in its beauty: you, of course, have never given the least thought to the substance of which your body is made. You believe, quite mistakenly, that that substance is unquestionably your own, hair and nails, pores and particles. But oh, it is not yours; not one cell of it is your property, any more than I was.
It belonged to a boy named Christopher Flynn.
And I killed him.