by Platt, Sean
“Meyer isn’t even here,” Stranger said as Peers trailed off. “How could any of this ‘force a change in the King?’”
“The King has two heads.” Peers wasn’t just speaking. He was reading from a book inside his brain.”
“Kindred and Meyer,” said Stranger.
“Kindred and you.”
Stranger shook his head. Peers was thinking, barely seeing.
“If I’m not the Magician …”
“Clara is the Magician.”
Stranger was looking at Peers in disbelief, but Peers had never been more certain of anything. The Fool lost his foolishness. In time, even a jester could become a sage.
“All that’s left is the Villain,” said Stranger. “Are you trying to say that Meyer is the Villain?”
Movement in the distance caught Peers’s eye. He looked past Stranger and saw four people rise to peek above the dune. Two were men with dark skin — one older, another near Peers’s age. The third and fourth, close enough to be holding hands, almost looked like a young couple, their pigment too pale for the beating sun. The woman was tall and lean, the man taller but broad. Behind the front four was a small group of robed desert dwellers, but even from a distance Peers knew this was a reunion rather than a raid.
“No,” Peers said, feeling déjà vu as Clara recognized their group from the dune and began to jog forward. “Meyer is something else.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
By the time Divinity reached the storage room where Eternity kept its surrogate, she was in a foul temper. Her mood wasn’t just unpleasant; it also made the need for a quick solution that much more obvious. Divinity tried to focus on that — the evidence this anger gave her to do what had to be done — but it was impossible. She kept thinking of how Eternity would look at the evidence and declare that the anger, rather than justifying Divinity more, made her irrational. Then maybe she’d roll her eyes like so many of the human men in the human media they’d processed and say, Women.
She pressed the wall panel. The door did not open. She tried again, and the organized collective monitoring ship security informed her that the door had been secured and would only open for Eternity’s surrogate.
At first, Divinity couldn’t believe it. She pressed again, ignoring the unmistakable fact that the collective had already placed into her own mind as if the thought had originated inside herself … ahem, inside the node of the collective responding to her true form, which definitely was not this hunk of flesh she’d been wearing for twenty trips around this planet’s star.
The door would only open for Eternity’s surrogate? That was like a broom closet only opening for the broom.
She projected: Override.
Was it sleeping and didn’t want to be disturbed? Eternity didn’t need to sleep any more than Divinity, but the animated bodies sure did. It was one of the things she hated about being so damn corporeal. You lost a third of every day to unconsciousness. And in that insentience — more and more often now that the wall had been breached — strange, otherworldly visions came to haunt her.
The door opened. Of course. Because even though Eternity organized the ship’s local collective, Divinity and Eternity were as much “one” as Divinity and Titans. Or Eternity and Reptars. They were all the same thing, sharing a single consciousness. Only their temporary bodies made the difference.
But still, she hadn’t liked Meyer’s idle threat, about killing the body. Hated it more than she cared to admit.
Divinity entered the storage room as the hallway door closed behind her. It had been expanded. The collective had shifted the build matrix, pushing walls back and making new divisions. Whereas a surrogate’s storage room was usually a small thing meant for recharging the body through the loathsome process of sleep, this one was as large as the apartment they’d seen Meyer Dempsey living in during their trip to Earth from the Jupiter rift.
This much space? For a surrogate? And locking the door, even though Eternity’s surrogate was obviously somewhere else on the ship?
It was ridiculous. Seeing the way Eternity had enlarged her surrogate’s space made Divinity’s temper ratchet up a notch. This was supposed to be a utilitarian space, no more. But Eternity had turned it into a palace. She’d had furniture made. She’d had decorations made. The space had white walls like the rest of the ship’s spaces, but it was filled with fabrics — including hanging ones that gave the illusion of veiling windows — in all colors of the human visual spectrum.
She’d enlarged her bed. She’d had the machines make her at least eight large soft-looking pillows, one of them the size of a surrogate body.
The space was, in fact, bigger than Divinity’s own storage room on her own ship. She hadn’t expanded or decorated her own surrogate’s space nearly this much, and her own colors didn’t harmonize nearly this well.
She walked through what seemed an expansive living room, floored with a parody of hardwoods over the white base. There was a rug in the middle that the fabricator had done a superb job of replicating. Eternity had put paintings on her walls — recreations, Divinity seemed to recall, of famous human art. She’d had lamps made. Modern-looking, jet black and accented with chrome.
The waste was extraordinary.
The oddity of it all was troublesome. As troublesome, in fact, as the anger percolating still unquenched in Divinity’s center.
Something had gone terribly wrong, the species irretrievably tangled.
At first, the leak of human pollution into the collective had been a minor issue. The collective managed to purge it, the way it had purged the offal from the Meyer Dempsey stream when it created the one they called Kindred. Upon his making, he had none of the first substitute’s pollution. The rebelliousness and attachment to Meyer’s old mate had been purged away — along with whatever had bubbled up when that first Meyer had learned of Trevor Dempsey’s death. That was the way it used to be with the rest of the collective. The filter between it and the humans was once enough to catch any junk trying to seep in.
Not anymore. Not if Eternity couldn’t see reason due to an infiltration of human emotion. Not if Eternity was willing to expend so much time and so many resources creating living quarters that were so much finer than Divinity’s.
Her hand circled the lamp. It stood on the floor, its neck rising to her shoulder, placed beside a comfortable-looking chair as if Eternity’s surrogate planned to plop itself down for some reading. The lamp had a cord even though its power source was induction. The cord, just for show, was plugged into an outlet that was also just dressing.
She put a second hand on the lamp’s neck.
She hefted it, ripping the cord from the wall.
With the heavy end of the lamp held high, choked up on like the baseball bat so recently under discussion with the problematic Mr. Dempsey, Divinity paused for a second before swinging.
Then she smashed the lamp’s business end through the glass top of a coffee table. She swung it at a painting (Matisse? She wasn’t sure; she’d studied only the human culture that mattered to her function, which just so happened to be what interested her most) and when she did, the lamp’s heavy square base dug its corner through the canvas, ripping it. She pivoted, teeth bared, and took a second to study her crazed reflection in Eternity’s beveled mirror before reducing it to shards.
Her pulse quickened with every assault. Chemicals flooded her surrogate’s brain. Her arms grew momentarily strong, wanting to flex and extend of their own accord. She saw everything with fresh clarity, heart hammering high in her throat, the air so unnecessary to her usual (old) form raking in and out. For a half minute — no more — there was only the delicious pulse of fury. Then it ended as quickly as it began, and Divinity was left heaving great gulps into her lungs, hair askew and eyes all whites in the shattered mirror’s leaning shards.
She dropped the lamp. Then, after a thought, Divinity kicked it aside. Then, because the lamp had won each of its bashing encounters and that didn’t seem fair, she pick
ed it up again and this time swung it with arms, legs, and torso working together into the bare concrete of a hearth around a patently unnecessary fireplace. It snapped more than broke, but she let it fall for good this time, staring at it as if daring it to rise up and challenge her again.
Divinity wanted to run. Something in her told her to leave this place.
Instead, she flopped into a black chair with chrome legs and surveyed the carnage.
Look what you made me do, she thought at no one in particular. The collective wouldn’t hear her. These days it was more natural to not feed into nor draw thoughts from it. Doing so took a small act of mental switching, to light the connection.
This situation was intolerable. She’d come here to argue a point with Eternity, and instead she’d made the point’s tip finer on her own. Either way, difficult choices needed to be made. Perhaps she’d frightened Meyer into giving up his people — his Archetypes that were causing so much worsening from the human end — but there were no guarantees that his mind would even be able to locate them. Even if it could, it wasn’t a certainty that Meyer would tattle. She might have frightened him with the bluff of destroying their planet for good. But on the other hand, Meyer was seeing things clearer and clearer — and he might have seen that threat for the bullshit it was.
Of course they couldn’t simply destroy humanity. The bond had grown too strong. Divinity had checked the stream after Eternity’s return from abducting Carl Nairobi, and knew just how much diving deep and hurting Carl had injured Eternity, too. It’s why Divinity had spoken with Meyer instead of hooking him up to a mind probe. But he was starting to understand things. He might have known why Divinity didn’t do what she could have, and seen it as a weakness.
It was a good thing they’d set their contingency plan into place. Divinity didn’t want to use it any more than Eternity (well, okay, that wasn’t true; right now, she felt a lot like ruining things), but contingencies were there for a reason.
She should find Eternity and discuss moving forward with Plan B.
But, looking around the surrogate storage room, Divinity somehow doubted that Eternity would listen as objectively as she would have had Divinity found her instead of an empty apartment.
Well. They were a collective. Nobody was truly in charge. They did what was best for all, every time. She didn’t need Eternity’s support. Not when Eternity was so focused on primping and decorating and giving herself a human name.
Divinity had her ace in the hole.
She still had the Villain, already working.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The sun was hot. Liza marched on with her shirt off, ancient brassiere showcased as half of the new world’s first bikini. Most of the women here went commando up top, but not Liza. She hadn’t forgotten as others had, so she’d spirited those bras away and kept using them under her shirts, damn the anachronism. Maybe it was more natural to let ’em hang. But she’d been set in her ways and wasn’t about to go hippie now.
She draped her doffed blouse across her shoulders, vacillating between two equally unappealing options: the intense heat of her unfortunately dark clothing or sunburn from exposure. She’d never tanned well. Her hair was light brown but fair and fine, and she had her father’s freckles. She’d survived this place in the shade but now could practically smell herself sizzling like bacon.
Liza stopped again, sloughed sideways in the shade, and gave thanks to a God she didn’t believe in that she’d been zapped to whereverthefuck with a bag still hanging from her shoulder. She still had the half-full bottle of water, plus an unopened one from the cache on the bridge. But on the flip side, she also had no clue where she was. One moment she’d been running around the freighter deck and seeing Reptars everywhere; then the next she’d been in the middle of nowhere with zero landmarks in sight. It was a lot like what had happened earlier, only without the sleepy awakening. This time the memory webs between one place and the next weren’t fuzzy as they’d been when she’d appeared near the monolith after tending her plants. This time, the jump-cut between freighter deck and open desert was instantaneous, as if she’d blinked and been transported like in I Dream of Jeannie.
Well, it almost made sense. Lost time and a sense of dislocation, be it a smooth or snap transition? Either fit. Liza was simply losing her mind.
She screwed the plastic cap off the half-full bottle. She should ration her water given that she didn’t know how far she had to go, but kind of fuck that. So instead she raised the uncapped bottle to a pointy succulent at the edge of her shade hollow and said, “Cheers.” Then she downed it all and tossed the bottle into the sun. If the environmentalists were right, that bottle would last a few thousand years before degrading. Maybe she should stuff a note inside, and leave it for the aliens’ next return.
Liza considered staying put until she starved to death. What would it matter? She was off her gourd. Maybe dying would be fun for her ruined mind. Maybe she’d even lose all the time between now and then, waking up a half skeleton this time, remembering the good old days when she’d had love handles.
But eventually Liza stood — a position that regrettably took her halfway out of the small patch of rock-thrown shade. She raised a hand to her forehead and squinted into the distance. The sun was lower but not low enough to offer any real relief. And maybe that was, finally, a better argument to stay where she was and not set out to gather more skin cancer. But there was urgency beside her apathy, and of the two, the first was stronger.
It’s in the canyon, at the bend, beneath where the sun sets.
What a bunch of bullshit. She didn’t even know what it was. And even if she did — and if she agreed it was worth hauling a bit more ass through the desert to find right now — she had no idea where that wise bit of instructions assumed she was starting from. Head for the setting sun from Place A, and you’ll find Spot B. But if you start a thousand miles north at Place C and do the exact same thing, you’d end up somewhere entirely different. An instruction as helpful as “park under the moon.”
“This is stupid,” Liza said aloud.
But she walked on anyway. And within a half hour or so, Liza saw a dark slash in the sand ahead. Another fifteen or so minutes showed her, once up a rise, that the slash was a canyon. The sun had been taking its sweet time descending all day and wasn’t moving much faster now, but there was a bend in that dark slash, and Liza’s eye predicted it’d set right at the curve, perfectly on target.
It’s in the canyon.
What was?
But at this point it didn’t matter. Liza hadn’t wanted to be at the monolith, but at least it had given her a signpost. She knew approximately where the village was from the old beached ship, and she’d been with people, even though they’d been people she knew of more than knew — let alone cared about. They hadn’t exchanged more than a few words, but still they’d been humans. Now she was alone. Without any landmarks. She could be a half mile from a known location, or on a different continent. Anything could happen when you kept finding yourself teleported to strange new places and slowly going insane.
“Fine,” Liza said, marching on because there was nowhere else to go. And then she added inside her own head because speaking aloud felt so funny, But you could at least tell me what I’m after.
She didn’t expect a response, mostly because there was no one around and the thought had been confined to her own crazy skull.
But she got one. Clear as day, before internal eyes, Liza saw a familiar-looking backpack — one she’d used as a twentysomething to trek across Europe, saved for no reason through all her years in Roman Sands, and finally dug from hock and packed once she realized the end was finally nigh.
That backpack had disappeared from her home one night not long after they’d settled in at The Clearing, vanished like so many other belongings. The culprit had left valuables in exchange for things of no consequence. It hadn’t made sense.
Liza had always wondered why someone had raided their village i
n such a specific way. She’d suspected whom — her money was on Stranger and his minions. Because whereas Liza had formed her religion for control, Stranger’s competing religion seemed based on faith. And with faith always came fear.
The image persisted, like a picture burned into an ancient TV.
Why the hell would her old backpack be out here?
And if that’s what she was really after, why did she feel such a burning impetus to recover it from its apparent hiding place right now given that it had been gone for twenty years?
“You suck,” she said to whoever or whatever was inside her head.
Liza walked. The image of her old hiking pack strobed before it faded, unseen hands at her back, shoving Liza toward her puzzling prize.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
By the time night descended on the second day of human memory, the small settlement had bunkered itself down in what was, despite all the chaos, upheaval, and death, now feeling like the dawn of a new normal. Clara doubted she’d spend many hours in Kamal’s little village, but another night felt comforting. She had Piper back; she had Kindred back; she had Stranger back … Hell, she even had Logan back, for what that particular loose end was worth. She hadn’t spent half her day in a trance for a while, and for once was getting used to living without the feel of an Astral boot on her neck. It was nice to simply exist after twenty long years of fighting.
Clara turned her head. Logan was spooned behind her, his hand draped over her side. He’d come to comfort her, but as hours passed he’d finally fallen asleep. She supposed the whole thing was okay. Maybe she even liked it, though in truth it was hard to say. In the purest sense, she and Logan had once loved each other — and despite what he’d surely thought, Clara hadn’t stopped loving from her end just as he’d never stopped from his. But the days when her endless work hadn’t been wedged between them were long ago.