I am the light. Catharine is the shadow. Two entities, telepathically interlaced, spatially phased ninety degrees apart, like twin compass needles forever spinning, forever perpendicular, always together and always apart.
And from Catharine's perspective, she would be the light, and Gillian the shadow. From Catharine's perspective, he existed ninety degrees off center.
But Catharine was dead. She had no perspective.
The pain began as a dull ache in the pit of his stomach, grew quickly into a mass of unpleasant ripples somewhere beneath the level of existence that he defined as flesh. An inner world of electric currents aligned themselves, creating subliminal havoc, forcing his body to react.
A full-body spasm bolted him upright.
Catharine is dead.
He corralled the pain, controlled it, repressed it, made it return to the shadows from which it had arisen.
He was seated on a small cot in a tiny hexagonal room with warm golden walls and no windows. Recognition came. It was the meditation chamber located in Thi Maloca, the Brazilian Ash Ock base where he and Catharine—and the others of their breed—had been created. The meditation chamber was the place where he and Catharine usually retreated when they needed to close themselves off from the demands of their highly structured world. It was a place reserved for them alone. It was the place where they usually made love.
The light and the shadow, whispered Empedocles. Focus on those aspects. Consider the fact that both still exist. Consider the fact that the shape and essence of the interlace has not changed. It remains intact.
Anger came to Gillian. Of course the interlace was intact.
If it had not been intact, his monarch would no longer be here to torment him.
Remember the nature of what has been lost, urged Empedocles. Remember what it means to be truly a part of the whole. Remember a time of no anger, no guilt—when you were of the Ash Ock.
Gillian tried. But he could only recall the bitterness and longing, the smashed fulcrum, the crescendo of loss.
Empedocles went on. I am alive. You are alive. Catharine is gone, but the capacity of the triumvirate can be restored. I never realized that such a thing was possible, but now I know the truth. This tway of Aristotle—this pale remnant of departed majesty—can actually help us reverse the terminal disease of our arrhythmia. This Timmy can bring us back.
Gillian thought about it for a while, concluded that it remained a fantasy, a dream born of desperation. If restoration is really possible, why hadn't Aristotle's tway restored himself?
Maybe he could not. Maybe it was too late for him. But such questions are not important. We will learn the truth of him eventually. For now, all that is of consequence is that Timmy can bring us back. We can be whole.
How do you know? How do you know he is not lying to us?
Empedocles writhed with excitement. Gillian sensed the emotion as a deep tickling, feathery strokes on the inside of his skin.
Can't you feel it! cried his monarch. This place! It is like nowhere we have ever been!
Gillian frowned. He got up from the cot and gazed serenely at the soft golden walls, at the security of this hexagonal chamber. This is our meditation chamber. We've been here many times ... He stopped, suddenly aware that something was terribly wrong.
I can't be in the meditation chamber. It's gone, destroyed centuries ago. Following the raid that had killed Catharine, E-Tech had subjected Thi Maloca to nuclear annihilation.
"Where am I?” he demanded, no longer trusting in his private dialogue with Empedocles to provide truthful answers. He moved to the nearest section of wall, reached out to touch it. His hand passed right through the golden partition as if nothing was there.
"It must be another holo,” he whispered, feeling cheated.
"Awake,” uttered a voice.
Gillian awoke. He was still lying on his back, but within some weird darkened place—a wide curving tube with brighter light glimmering at both ends. Timmy stood quietly beside his bed.
Gillian tried to sit up, discovered that he could not. His muscles were so weak that he could not even raise his arms.
"Is this real?” he asked.
"Another form of reality,” Timmy explained, the fat face leering over him, full of amusement, full of itself. “But to answer your question with the digital precision which you demand: Yes, this is real. This is reality as you have been accustomed to defining it."
"Why can't I move?"
Timmy stared. “You don't remember?"
Gillian shook his head. Even that slight motion took an extraordinary effort. “Yes. Now I remember ... you asked me to take off my suit ... to follow you through ... a wall. We came to this place."
Recollection bred recollection. It had been Empedocles who had urged Gillian to obey Timmy's instructions. “You gave me something ... an injection..."
"An infusion,” clarified Timmy. “It was a decelerative drug, containing a soporific. It was spread on a neuropad, which I laid across your brow. A direct injection of this particular enhancer would have been instantly fatal."
"Yes! A drug which enhanced my abilities to perceive the interlace!” Gillian shook his head again; this time the movement came easier. He was beginning to feel stronger, in control again ... at least in control of his memories.
Timmy asked, “You saw the interlace?"
"Yes. And I dreamed ... about Thi Maloca ... I was in the meditation chamber."
"A not surprising side effect of the drug. It is understandable that as your consciousness focused upon the interlace, your subconscious invoked visions of a place that had been pleasant for you and Catharine."
"We were there when E-Tech raided the facility,” Gillian murmured. “That chamber was the last place where Catharine and I saw each other as individual tways."
"I did not know that,” said Timmy, looking sad.
Gillian forced himself up on his elbows. “Empedocles—I can barely feel him now. But his presence was very strong while I was asleep."
"He will be strong again,” promised Timmy.
"My monarch said something ... about this place. He said: ‘Can't you feel it?’ He was very excited. What did he mean?"
Timmy turned away. When he finally spoke, his voice carried a solemnity worthy of any Church of the Trust recruiter.
"All of the Earth and all of the Colonies—this entire sector of space, this kascht—it reeks of the lacking. But here within this cell of the Os/Ka/Loq ... here, there is no such defect. Here, the purities are maintained.
"Your monarch boasts a sensory capacity beyond your own. Empedocles feels the restorative potency of this cell."
Gillian did not understand. But before he could question Timmy further, a hint of movement focused attention. From one end of the weird tubular room, shadows danced across the pale bluish light. Someone was coming.
* * *
Susan rounded the bend and saw him for the first time, stripped of his protective suit, naked and alert, a raw slab of a man. In the dim light, sweat shimmered across his flesh. He did not look young and he did not look old; instinctively, she knew that those keen gray eyes had seen places and times far beyond the experiences of her own twenty-six years. She felt her palms tightening on the handles of the flash daggers. But she did not unpocket them.
Timmy stood beside the man, a smile filling his jowled face. “Welcome, Susan. Allow me the pleasure of formal introductions. Gillian, meet Susan Quint. Susan, meet Gillian."
She halted ten feet from the bed.
"Susan Quint?” whispered Gillian, shocked. “You're Inez Hernandez's missing grandniece! You vanished after the Honshu massacre!"
Susan grimaced before she could think to restrain herself. Although she occasionally thought about Aunt Inez, it had seemed like years since anyone had actually spoken to her about her former life.
She found her voice. “Are they still looking for me?"
Gillian nodded, awed into silence. She was more beautiful than Inez's holos
had portrayed. Tall. Long-legged. Molded from some patrician form that perhaps once had garnished the walls of an earthly estate. She looked too extraordinary to be a real person. She did not look at all like Catharine and she looked exactly like Catharine.
Susan felt her fingers tightening on the flash daggers.
"Susan still resists her fate,” explained Timmy. “She continues to entertain notions of something she refers to as ‘freedom.’ She refuses to acknowledge that ultimate freedom is nothing more than the acceptance of our true natures."
Susan knew she could kill both of them, here and now. She could whip out the daggers and strike. Timmy would go down quickly. Gillian was still weakened from the drug infusion. In that state, he would be no match for her speed.
Gillian perceived her intentions and her doubts. “If you're going to attack, then attack.” He hesitated. “I know what it means to contain yourself, hold in all that raw energy. But that's a mistake. Choose a path. Follow it."
She had vowed to resist Timmy's mad plans for her. Becoming a tway of a Paratwa ... the very notion of it was ludicrous. How could he truly expect her to do such a thing?
But Gillian's words meant something. They were real. He was real. She released her grip on the flash daggers and moved closer to him. Timmy stepped back from the bed, allowed her the intimacy.
This is insane. She reached down and touched his bare arm.
His flesh radiated warmth. Her own arm, from fingertips to shoulder, tingled. A scampering parade of delicate images seemed to crest at the corners of his lips.
Gillian felt it too: a heat between them, more intense than the passions of sex, more inclusive, closer in nature to the ancient longings of infancy. It was a base need, flesh touching flesh. He thought of Sasalla, his wet nurse, her sleeping body now contained within the stalagmite prison. He thought of his cribmate, Catharine, the cherubic smile on her tiny elfin face, her hands patting and touching him.
Catharine.
Full-body flush.
Gillian reached out. He drew Susan down onto him, pulled her mouth close to his. She began to cry. Warm tears spilled onto his hands.
"Cry,” he whispered. “Cry for what was lost."
Susan tried one last time to turn away, succeeded in pivoting her head just far enough to see that Timmy was gone. She was alone with Gillian. She was together with him.
From the depths of Gillian's consciousness, Empedocles projected his blessing; soothing thoughts poured across a waterfall of endless desire.
It is the algorithm of rediscovery, the process of rebirth. Today, in the sanctity of this cell of the Os/Ka/Loq, we begin our return.
O}o{O
Irrya fell rapidly into the darkness, the colony shrinking in perspective, homeland warmth dissipating, the village consumed until it became a mere shell, sharply-etched against the cloak of night. The Lion, observing the transformation from the flight deck window, found himself wondering how something which had recently felt so real and solid could be abruptly rendered insignificant.
It was bewildering.
The rapid loss of gravity as the shuttle dropped away from the Capitol also contributed to his growing sense of unease. Yet he could only indirectly fathom why today's deorbital was affecting him so. He had shuttled out from colonies countless times in the past half century. It was a simple routine, one that begged to go unnoticed.
I'm tired. That explains it. Today's Council meeting, following Meridian's departure, had been long and tedious. But his own retort sounded whimsical, unconvincing. He continued to observe the scene through the forward portal, hoping for comprehension.
The growth of a spacescape: from the human scale of the docking terminal to the widening arc of a land sector seen from the outside—a sliver of dirty white metal pinched between encroaching ribbons of glimmering cosmishield glass. And then the Capitol was stretching itself out, yawning into a seventy-mile-long cylinder, becoming a thing beyond even the mere technological—a fallopian tube with one end aimed at the Earth and the other at the stars, transferring its seeds from past to future.
Seeds from past to future. That was important. Perhaps someday those seeds would be returned to the planet, to the lands and oceans from which they had first arisen. But even as he acknowledged such a hope, he feared it could never happen. The Earth was gone. Forever.
He now recognized that this visual metamorphosis, this falling away from home, offered yet another effigy to his altar of foreboding. How can we repel an invading force that most certainly possesses technology centuries ahead of our own? How can the Colonies hope to fight an enemy who has returned in a single starship larger than all of the cylinders combined?
His guts began to ache again. He forced himself to ignore the pain, determined to avoid the use of yet another needle pad.
I'm at war with myself.
The thought brought to mind an event from ages ago, when he had first arrived in the Costeau colony of Den, in the company of his mother. It had been shortly after she had told him the true story of his dead father—the man whom the twelve-year-old Jerem Marth had never known. In the heat of an argument, she had related what his real father had been like: an opium-addicted smuggler, a pirate thief, a Costeau rejected even by his own clan.
He had not been able to accept his mother's portrait. In a fit, he had lashed out at her. She had lashed back, her own pain triggered by his bitterness. Out of control, full parental fury unleashed, she had hit him.
That event had caused him to run away.
It's the same feelings I suffer from today, the same overwhelming discord of repressed emotions, which temporarily drove me away from my mother fifty-six years ago.
In both instances, he had been faced with circumstances beyond his abilities to control. In both cases, he had sought to escape from his feelings. For the child Jerem Marth, that escape had been, of necessity, literal—a wild flight to Sirak-Brath. But for the Lion of Alexander, evasion now assumed the more subtle cloak of adult denial.
His shuttle companion spared him from further introspection. “I need that course data now."
The Lion withdrew his attention from the receding cylinder and turned to Vilakoz, who sat in the adjacent pilot's seat. The Lion handed his security chief a tiny data brick. Vilakoz snapped it into a receptacle, frowned as the monitor translated.
"This heading and coordinates takes us into an empty sector. Is this a rendezvous?"
"Yes,” said the Lion. “A rendezvous."
Vilakoz stared at him for a moment, waiting for more information. When the Lion remained silent, the towering pilot turned back to his controls.
A good man, thought the Lion. Vilakoz had not inquired as to why they were the only ones aboard the craft; normally, the Alexanders utilized five-person crews. The security chief knew when to keep his mouth shut, when to accept unspecified parameters.
Vilakoz was a lucky man, too, according to his doctors. He still carried a set of thick diagonal scars across the bridge of his nose where the medics had performed restructuring. Vilakoz's facial encounter with the tripartite assassin's energized attack gauntlet had come perilously close to being fatal: another inch or so upward and the force of the blow might have caused brain damage.
The Lion, however, knew that luck had not been a factor. The tripartite assassin did not rely on chance. It had needed Vilakoz alive in order to effect its escape from the Alexanders’ retreat. The security chief's survival had simply been another aspect of the plan.
The Lion did not want to dwell further on such matters. “Have you picked up any signs that we're being followed? Anomalies that might indicate long-range tracking?"
"We're alone. No other vessels in the neighborhood and no shadows."
The Lion nodded. “I'm going to take a nap.” He manually adjusted his acceleration couch into its hard-G contour, more suitable for sleeping. “Wake me up as soon as we arrive at the coordinates."
"Dream the dreams of Ari,” murmured Vilakoz.
Become w
hole, the Lion instantly translated. It was an ancient Costeau expression, a cross-cultural idiom used by many of the major clans. Ari Alexander, the first Lion, had been one of the founding fathers of the Costeau movement.
He fell back into the softness of the couch but he did not dream the dreams of Ari. Instead, he drifted immediately into a weird realm of consciousness barely distinguishable from that state he considered definitive of the waking world. Within this phantasma, hundreds of the Irryan colonies began to slowly emerge from his abdomen in a grotesque mimicry of birth, a labor of terrifying proportions.
The illusion thankfully departed as the Lion slipped into a deeper place, where pleasure and pain merged, where all images and thoughts condensed into one vast extrusion of ancient stone, poised on the periphery of a great abyss.
He awoke to someone squeezing his arm, shaking him gently, and for a few precious moments he thought it was his wife, Mela, priming him for a new day. The fantasy dissolved, palpable sensations driving it back to a netherworld of desire. Vilakoz appeared in its place.
"We're here,” announced the pilot.
Mela remained at their true home, in the Costeau colony of Den. Until recently, the Lion had shuttled there regularly—at least twice a week. But the turmoil of the past few months had put an end to his frequent homecomings. Although they communicated every day, the Lion badly missed the primacy of her touch. It had been nearly three weeks since they had last been together. Mela gladly would have made the journey to Irrya. But the Lion insisted she remain within the sanctity of their ancestral home.
She would be safer there.
Vilakoz extended a weightless arm in front of his face, aimed a finger at the window. “Up there, about sixty degrees. That bright reddish light is a repo freighter with Sirak-Brath registry. ID blip says they're on a four-colony hop, picking up industrial wastes for recycling back at ‘Brath.” The security chief paused. “Is that our rendezvous?"
The Paratwa (#3 in the Parawta Saga) Page 19