The Rosetta Codex

by Richard Paul Russo

  They moved through a series of windowless corridors, ceiling lights brightening as they approached and dimming as they passed, then entered a long wide hall with glass walls that echoed their footsteps and looked out onto more gardens.

  “Do you remember me?” Meyta asked.

  “No,” Cale answered. “I’m sorry.”

  Meyta coughed out a harsh laugh. “Don’t apologize, young man. You’ll have plenty of other things to be sorry for.”

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “You’ll want to see your mother.” When Cale didn’t reply, Meyta turned to him and said, “Yes?”

  Unnerved, he glanced at Sidonie, but there was no help from her. He breathed deeply and said, “Yes.”

  She nodded once. “I don’t blame you for being unsure.”

  “Should we wait?” Sidonie asked. “Should we prepare Elizabeth?”

  “No,” Meyta replied firmly, turning back and continuing. “You’ll see, it doesn’t matter. The shock might even be good for her.”

  Sometime later they passed through a wide doorway and a vast atrium opened before them, bright with sunlight and awash in brightly colored plants. Birds flew high above, moving among the upper branches of trees that pressed against the glass panels. Water flowed over rocks in a dozen small brooks and pools, dripped from wide-leafed plants and down slopes of stone and moss. Paths of white crushed shell wound among the plants and waterways, leading to a kind of island near the center of the atrium.

  Atop a rise on the island, a white-robed woman sat in a wide-backed wicker chair, looking out onto the largest of the atrium’s pools where two bright green serpents carved their way across the surface of the water in complicated patterns around one another. The woman’s hair was quite long and straight and very dark but for several wide streaks of silver. On the table beside her was a black teapot and cup, and a plate with pastries. As Cale and Sidonie and Meyta approached on one of the paths, the woman turned and faced them.

  Cale’s breath and forward motion ceased abruptly and all sound became a rushing in his ears. He knew that face. It was the first truly familiar sight on this world and it made him dizzy and weak, and he wondered if he could remain standing. Breath returned and he tried to take a step forward, but his legs wouldn’t move.

  He hadn’t expected this. He didn’t know what he had expected . . . perhaps nothing.

  Meyta and Sidonie had stopped a few feet ahead and looked back at him. Meyta’s expression had softened. “Cale,” she said quietly yet firmly. Hearing his name, he was able to move again and they resumed walking toward the island and his mother.

  They crossed a thick wooden plank that spanned a tiny stream, then continued up a set of shallow stone steps.

  “Good morning, Meyta,” Cale’s mother said as they approached.

  “Elizabeth.”

  “Who have you brought to me today?” She glanced briefly at Sidonie, then regarded Cale with a steady gaze. “Who is this person?”

  “Your son, Elizabeth.”

  She smiled. “Which son is it this time?”

  “Cale.”

  His mother’s smile faltered for a moment, then returned. She sipped from her cup, then gestured to him with her hand. “Come closer.”

  Cale came forward until she could have touched him had she chosen. She stared at his face, into his eyes, and nodded once.

  “Yes, you could be Cale grown into a young man. But you’re still dead.”

  “No, Elizabeth,” Meyta said. “Not dead. This is Cale. He’s survived.”

  She turned to Meyta. “I appreciate your efforts, Meyta, but it’s no use. All of my children are dead.”

  “No, Elizabeth,” Sidonie repeated, stepping forward. “We escaped from the Exile Prince. We survived. He’s your son, and he’s alive.”

  Elizabeth looked at her with disdain. “Who are you?”

  “Sidonie.”

  “Sidonie.” She tipped her head from one side to the other. “What happened to your face? You should get it reconstructed. Yes, I can see it could be you. It’s a shame you’re dead, too.”

  “Elizabeth!” Meyta’s voice was sharp and loud. “They are not dead. Elizabeth, listen to me. This is your son Cale, and he’s alive!”

  Elizabeth’s face tightened, she glared at Meyta, then violently swept the pot and cup and plate from the table and across the rocks, where they shattered. She stood abruptly. “Never do this to me again, Meyta.” Without looking at either Cale or Sidonie, she turned and walked off the island, striding quickly along one of the paths, not slowing until she reached the far end of the atrium and disappeared through a doorway.

  Cale stared after her, at the empty doorway, once again unable to move, unable to speak. To his great surprise, he felt his heart breaking.

  THREE

  Cale spent the following days in exploration, sometimes with Sidonie but more often alone. An air of dissolution permeated the House and Estate, becoming outright decay in some of the less-frequented rooms and tracts.

  The House itself was larger than any of the villages he’d grown up in on the other side of the Divide, a sprawling web of single- or multileveled wings and individual rooms, passages and stairways, bright open sunrooms and windowless underground chambers. One hundred thirty-seven rooms, Meyta told him. At one time there had been over three hundred.

  . . . A cavernous room filled with rotting wood furniture so heavily coated with dust and mildew that Cale hardly dared to breathe.

  . . . Two narrow adjoining rooms with tiled floors in mosaic patterns depicting fanged creatures engaged in combat. Five floor drains in each room, but no fixtures of any kind, no clue to what the rooms had been used for—nothing but blank windowless walls and shining metal doors.

  . . . Facing north, a small worship kiosk constructed of pale wood with windows open to the outside, where several of the House staff came to pray or meditate every morning before sunrise.

  . . . An entire wing of steelglass walls with a southern exposure, ceilings filled with skylights, but every room empty and silent and still, the walls absorbing any hint of echo, abandoned sunrooms waiting futilely to be revived.

  Outside of the House, the Estate itself seemed to have no organization, no coherence.

  . . . On the eastern perimeter, a large tract of overgrown forest that Sidonie said had once been the site of weeklong treasure hunts organized by the Alexandros Family and attended by hundreds of Lagrima’s elite. Now Cale would have needed defoliants to penetrate more than ten feet into those woods.

  . . . A vineyard that was still well-tended and grew imported grapes and sarlets that were harvested and made into wines for the House.

  . . . Two crystal quarries long abandoned, one half-filled with water that had become the home of floating plants and nests of bright yellow birds, the other dry and dusty yet sparkling with thousands of tiny dots of color.

  . . . Stables for llamas and poylets and musk goats, all of which were meticulously groomed and cared for, ridden by the children of the servants.

  And finally, at the main entrance to the Estate, the Consortium’s offices, a high narrow building of polarized glass where more than a hundred people worked daily running the Family enterprises, executing the trades and investments and daily business dealings that kept the Alexandros Consortium from going under. Barely.

  Then, too, there were the encounters with his mother. . . .

  In the main kitchens one morning, the air filled with the warmth and aroma of the yeasty spice bread that was baked fresh every day for the House, his mother stood by a window, drinking tea. Cale approached her.

  “Mother . . .”

  She glared at him and raised her hand, saying, “Don’t dare say that to me again. I’ll speak to Meyta, and you will be dismissed from service immediately. Do you understand?” When he didn’t respond, she repeated herself, louder and with a harsher edge. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” he replied.

  Her expression soften
ed. “I know you’re new here, so I’ll let it go. Still . . . Mother?” A faint smile of amusement. “An odd salutation, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” Cale said again.

  She turned from him and left the room, shaking her head.

  “Who are you?” she asked him. They stood in one of the House’s glass corridors, looking into an abandoned greenhouse. Through the cracked and dirty glass panes they could see networks of pipes and hoses dangling from the ceiling, dirt and rock scattered about the floor, and dusty tables and shelves and the desiccated remnants of once-flowering plants and shrubs.

  “Cale.”

  “That was my son’s name. Did you know that?”

  “I am your son.”

  “You look very much as I imagine he would have looked had he lived to be your age. Has anyone told you that?”

  “Yes.”

  “He died when he was quite young,” she went on. “A child.” Her gaze was far away now, looking past him and into the greenhouse. “All of my children are dead, all eleven of them.” She paused, as though recounting all those deaths in her mind. “This family is cursed.”

  “Cursed, maybe,” Cale said. “I won’t disagree. But your children are not all dead. I am still alive, Mother. I’m alive.”

  “All dead.” Her voice was quiet, and she didn’t look at him. “Like the gardens. Our family, barren. When I die, it ends.”

  “Mother,” he said firmly. “I am your son, and I am alive.”

  “I tried.” She went to the glass door and opened it. “I gave him six daughters and five sons, and they all died.” She stepped out onto the cracked earth. “Every one. . . every . . .” Her voice faded as she wound her way among empty pots and planter boxes, dry and leafless branches, upturned roots, brown clumps of dead grass. Cale stood in the doorway, watching her. Beside a dry pond was a plant with one flowering stem. She knelt before it and plucked the stem. The dried petals fell away and dropped silently to the brown earth.

  His mother sat in the shade by an artificial waterfall that emerged from the wall of the House and fell in three stages over rocks and into a pool at her feet. A dense cluster of tiny yellow flowers floated atop the water, encircling a spray of bright green stalks topped by buds that were just about to bloom.

  Cale sat in a wooden chair a few feet away so that, while he was not directly in front of her, he was sure he was in her field of vision. The day was hot, but the waterfall’s fine mist helped cool the air, especially in the shade.

  “Mother.”

  She didn’t respond. She continued to watch the water moving in ripples across the pond, her hands folded in her lap.

  “I know you’ve been through a lot, the deaths of all of my brothers and sisters—your children. The death of your husband. My father. I guess you’re afraid, afraid of believing, maybe, and then finding out it isn’t true. Or maybe afraid of having to grieve again, I don’t know.

  “But I’m not dead, Mother. I’m your son. Cale. Sidonie and I survived the attack on the Exile Prince, we survived a crash on Conrad’s World, we survived years of . . . of. . . . We survived, Mother. We are alive, both of us. I’m alive. Your son.”

  She stood, took a couple of steps, then knelt at the edge of the pond and dipped her hand into it. When she raised her hand she kept her fingers cupped, holding a little of the water, then brought it to her forehead and let the water drip down her face.

  “Mother . . .”

  She set her hands in the thick moss on either side of her legs and leaned forward, staring into the pond.

  Cale couldn’t stand it anymore. He got up from the chair and cried out, “Mother!” When she still did not respond, he closed his eyes for a few moments and breathed deeply, trying to hold himself together, then opened them, took one last look at her, and walked back into the House.

  Cale’s mother had requested snow, and snow had fallen over the House and much of the Estate all day. The snow continued to fall into the evening, a light emerald green in the bioluminescent lights that hung about the House.

  She sat in the library before a fire that burned in a fireplace of transparent bricks set in the corner where two glass walls met, topped by a half-domed glass ceiling. The snow fell onto the dome, melted, ran along the curved surface, then dripped to the ground. Cale sat in the back of the room by the two high walls of ancient bound books that had not been opened or read in centuries, and watched his mother watch the snow and fire.

  With both hands she pulled her long hair together at the nape of her neck and held it there. Cale thought her hands were shaking, but he couldn’t be sure. Gradually uncurling her fingers, she released her hair so that it draped across the back of the chair. She tilted her head back and watched the snow falling directly toward her.

  After a seemingly interminable silence, her head tilted forward so that she was once again looking into the fire, into red and orange and blue flames that waved listlessly above glowing lengths of scaled wood, at embers that pulsed with some great creature’s hibernating heartbeat.

  Then, so quietly he was certain she could not hear him, Cale whispered, “Mother.”

  He sat silent and still, and watched.

  At sunrise Cale sat in a rooftop garden atop the highest level of the House, ten floors up and atop a tower that rose from the kitchens. From this vantage he could look out over the entire Alexandros Estate and discern all the perimeter walls that surrounded it. The rising sun was hidden behind one of the taller city buildings to the east, and long shadows lay across the Estate.

  This was all his now. That’s what everyone kept telling him. Sidonie, Meyta, the managers who had been running the Family business as his mother had retreated from active participation. They all waited for him to take control, give them direction. It was absurd.

  Sidonie came up the stairway in the center of the roof and joined him. “I’ve been looking for you since last night.” She stood at his side, looking out over the Estate. “Surveying your domain?”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “I know,” she said, “but that doesn’t matter. It’s yours. Still, you can just walk away from it, if you want. It will go on as before.”

  “A slow and steady decline until the whole thing completely collapses. My mother might be right.”

  “About what?”

  “This family is cursed.”

  The edge of the sun came out from behind a tall building near the heart of Lagrima, forcing them to squint and turn so that they were facing south toward a copse of diseased spine trees set back a hundred feet from the House.

  “She still doesn’t acknowledge me,” he said.

  Sidonie nodded. “It’s possible she never will.”

  Cale closed his eyes, focusing on the warmth of the sun and the morning aromas: the fresh spiced bread, incense from the worship kiosk, the perfume of starflowers opening up on the roof around them.

  “Why were you looking for me?” he asked.

  “Do you want to know what your father was doing? Why we were going to Conrad’s World?”

  Cale opened his eyes and turned to her. “Of course I do.”

  “I’ve found the person who knows.”

  “Who?”

  “The Family horoscoper.”

  “Oh, yes, the Family horoscoper. No wonder we’re dying.”

  “Cale, all of the consortiums use horoscopers. I tried to explain to you before, the real ones, they’re not the charlatans you think they are.”

  Cale shook his head. “All right, where is this horoscoper?”

  “Stygon’s in exile. He’s living in West RiverRun, on the Tze Kang River.”

  “Why exile?”

  “Your mother exiled him when she heard that our ship had been destroyed.”

  Cale smiled. That might have been the last rational decision his mother had made.

  “We can go today,” Sidonie said. “He’s expecting us.”

  Cale hesitated, suddenly fearful. He breathed deeply and looked out over the Est
ate, his domain. “Let’s go.”

  FOUR

  Prolastaya piloted them to the edge of Lagrima and set the sedan down at the perimeter wall, where he would wait for their return. Cale and Sidonie disembarked and passed through one of the city’s gates, entering West RiverRun on foot.

  The air was hot and sticky and reeked of garbage and stagnant water and rotting meat. Lining the dirt roads and the river were shacks and lean-tos on the verge of collapse. Crowds of people milled listlessly in the streets, making their way among food and merchandise vendors, among diseased beggars so weak they could barely sit upright, among smoking coals and chanting monks and screeching birds perched atop ten-foot-high wooden poles. A few children with bloated stomachs ran squealing through the crowds, but most were as lethargic as the adults. The thick muddy river flowed sluggishly toward the city, its surface mottled with filthy yellow foam. Cale had seen the Tze Kang within the walls of Lagrima—clean and clear and alive with colorful fish as it meandered through the city and eventually flowed into the sea. People swam in the river inside Lagrima; the closest anyone came to that here was two men on the bank pissing into the water.

  After weeks of Lagrima with all its wealth and sophistication and seemingly endless wonders, Cale felt as if he’d been suddenly transported to some other place—back to Conrad’s World and the other side of the Divide.

  Sidonie led the way off the main streets, across a barren field and through clusters of thorny brush, then up a gentle rise away from the river. A small but clean and well-maintained house sat at the edge of a lush stand of trees. A tall graying man stood in the open doorway, wearing sandals and a loose tan shirt and trousers. The man’s face tightened as Cale and Sidonie approached, his attention on Sidonie. He said nothing, just bowed slightly and shook her hand. Then he bowed toward Cale and took his hand as well. “I’m Stygon. You probably don’t remember me, Cale.”

  His face was familiar, though, and his smell, and those two things made his legs weak and his stomach turn. “I think I do,” he managed to say.