She looks at me and laughs.
What do you think, José? Look at the state your brother’s in.
Long eyebrows. Big mouth. Thoughtful, kind-looking face.
Her incisors gleam. Her teeth are sharp and silvery, brutal fangs that almost seem glued on and certainly ruin the effect of her well-formed face.
“What did you do? I ask her. What did you do to my brother? Something you didn’t do to me?”
I had met the woman alone at first.
She had called out to me after I sneaked into the cemetery alone, given me chocolates. These sweets have bad medicine in them, but they taste very good, she had said. I wonder if you’re brave enough to eat them? Even as a boy, I had recognized the sexual implication in her challenge. Nervously, I ate the chocolates. They were bite-sized and decorated with violet petals steeped in some strong flavor. Under the influence of the drugs inside the chocolates, my body had relaxed completely even as it became impossibly sensitive. I had been unable to resist as she enfolded me inside her white coat. And inside it, even whiter, was her naked body.
She toyed with me inside her coat for an hour or more.
It was a warm, oily-smelling, milky darkness.
The woman laughed silently, her large, crimson mouth adopting all manner of shapes.
The thoughtful cover came off her face, revealing something I could not look at directly.
Cruel loneliness.
Elegant sadism.
Imbecility dressed as intellect.
Silvery teeth.
And I …I was fascinated by that intricate insanity.
Next time, bring a friend, the woman had said as we parted.
I decided to bring my little brother.
My reserved, quiet, obedient, only little brother.
“Something you didn’t do to me?
“That’s right, the woman replies. Isn’t it obvious?
“After all, you didn’t end up like this, did you? She smiles. Now, watch!
“Her cover of sanity has long since been removed.
“My little brother looks back and forth between the woman and I. He does not quite seem to understand what has happened to him. The blood has drained from his face, but his eyes are wide open. The fear in them, the uncertainty is unbearable to look at. No, that isn’t true—I wanted to see it. Perhaps I wanted him to take my place, this brother whose face looked so much like mine. Perhaps I wanted to make him the target of whatever power this woman wielded.
“Her broad mouth smiles. The long nail on her index finger, blue like the rest of her fingernails, peels tiles off my brother one by one. It sounds like she is pulling his nails off, and my brother cries and screams. I can only watch, unable to move a finger.
“The woman continues to peel off the tiles. She takes her time deliberating over which to remove next, enjoying the indecision, removing them from spots all over his body. My brother’s surface is full of holes now, exposing his red, wet insides to the air and light.
“Eventually, after removing perhaps half of the tiles, the woman lowers her hand.
“And then she opens her coat.
“I cannot see into it from where I am.
“I cannot see into it from where I am.
“But my brother appears to see all too well.
“His eyes have opened wide. What they saw I do not know.
“And then, the woman …”
The woman begins to “suck” my brother in.
“The first thing I see is a thin red thread.
“It sways in the air between the two of them.
“Next comes blue. Then green. The threads grow in number.
“They look like the streamers connecting a passenger ship to its wharf.
“Countless threads in every color, twisting and dancing like living things.
“I look closer.
“Where are the threads coming from?
“My brother’s body.
“Lines of color extend from the gaps where tiles have been removed and snake toward the woman, there to be sucked into whatever lies beneath her parted coat, blocked from my view.”
And then I realized that this was an illusion.
The threads had come from the woman’s body.
Transparent, hollow threads, extending from her body and inserted into my brother’s. She must have implanted them one by one as she removed the tiles.
She is using the threads to suck something out of my brother’s body. They are tiny, transparent pipes, and they are carrying my brother’s flesh and blood, broken down to minute fragments.
Finally the woman is finished.
The tiles are still there.
There is nothing inside them.
Just a hollow that still retains the form of a boy.
His terrified eyes look like part of an outdated poster.
The woman’s heels smash his face in. I hear a fragile sound, like old paper.
I can do nothing. Nothing but cry coldly as the dappled sunlight comes down through the leaves.
The woman’s coat is opened again and she wraps me inside it. I smell flowers.
This is your reward. The woman’s voice.
I writhe.
In the ecstasy she gives me.
And in the guilt cast at me by my brother’s eyes.
“Beautiful.”
The spectrum of Langoni’s solemn voice fills the subterranean chamber.
Having finished recounting the sealed memory, the boy’s face—my own face as a boy—falls silent once more and closes its eyes.
“What beautiful, cruel imagery. This, José, is the infection that breeds within you. The guilt of having succumbed to temptation and caused your brother’s death binds you. It regulates your every action.
“You can never again ignore the pain of another, because the experience left you determined to act, in future, as a protector should. A debt that can never be repaid. The wellspring of your political function. Something you, José, will never escape.
“And that is exactly why I chose you.”
Tears have begun to trickle from between the closed eyelids of the face on my chest.
“Come, José. There is still so much you must remember for me. To ensure the reliability of your function, there must be countless memories like this buried within you.
“With my help, you will remember every last one.”
Langoni enfolds me once more in darkness—insensate darkness. At once I see nothing, hear nothing.
I close my eyes.
I cannot bear any more of this.
I cannot bear any more remembering.
On my chest I feel my eyes as a boy open once more.
Like a flower that blooms in the dark.
“There’s something I’ve wanted to ask you about for a while.”
“What?”
“Your name.”
“Julie? It’s what Mom named me. I like it.”
“No, your surname. Printemps.”
“That’s not my surname. Why does everyone think that if two names are together one of them must be a surname?”
“You named yourself that, right? You were the one who chose it.”
“Right.”
“Why? Why choose your own name?”
“Hmm … I’m not sure. Maybe I forgot.”
“You didn’t like your real name?”
“No, that’s not it.”
“When was it, again?” Jules wondered aloud, mostly to himself.
Julie Printemps sat up languorously and slid off the sofa.
Moonlight spilled in through the window.
The thick atmosphere that had filled the room was gone now, as if some tide had gone out, and the room was still.
“What a beautiful moon.
“Hey, Jules. Did you know that the moon’s an AI, too?”
“What?!”
Julie giggled.
“You’re always teasing me,” Jules complained. He let himself fall back onto the sofa and lay there staring upward.
“Mom gave me my name,” Julie said. “But not really, I suppose. It was just part of my design. I do love my Mom. You too, Jules. But are those real feelings? I don’t know. Who is it who feels my emotions?”
“Don’t dodge the question. You know what I meant to ask.”
“Printemps. ‘Spring.’ I wish I could see it just once. What do you think it’s like? There’s nothing but summer here, after all.”
“You’re not even pretending to answer now,” Jules said, laughing despite himself. “Do you like it as a name, ‘Printemps’?”
“Yes. I do. I like things I’ve never seen before. Do you know about spring? The weather’s not too hot. The greens are softer and the rain’s thin and gentle. It’s not summer. What do you think about that?”
Still looking out the window, Julie ran her hand over her hair. The short hairs at the nape of her neck rustled like grass in the wind. Jules wondered if that might be what the thin, gentle rains of spring sounded like.
He could not see the expression on her face from where he lay.
Jules closed his eyes and imagined the sound of spring rain behind his eyelids.
The Mineral Springs Hotel and its gardens, enveloped in gentle spring rain. A pitter-patter that gradually blurred into background noise, became a curtain of silence erasing other sounds and beckoning sleep. A spring nap. Sleep to grow and develop in. Sleep to prepare for the future. Clear droplets lodging themselves at the tips of leaves, the edges of petals. The paving stones warmly wet. The afternoon hotel at peace. All of these things he imagined.
I like things I’ve never seen before …
“I wonder what happened to everyone?”
There was no sound at all.
The Mineral Springs Hotel was perfectly quiet. They almost felt as if they might hear the moonlight blanket the ground.
There was no sound of life. No hint of anybody’s presence.
“They’re probably …”
They’re probably already gone.
Julie turned to face Jules.
The window was at her back. Her face was a dark silhouette.
But something was shining at her eyes.
Jules stopped himself any number of times before finally opening his mouth.
“I have to say something,” he said.
The thing he had never been able to say.
“I … I loved …”
Julie placed her finger on his lips to stop him before he could get the last word out.
Jules closed his mouth.
Julie crouched on the ground in the moonlight.
Picking up the whale earring, she carefully put it back on.
Like a flower that blooms in the dark.
That had been José’s final coherent and meaningful thought.
He was no longer functioning normally as an AI.
Big Langoni gazed down at José from his lofty vantage point.
Not long before, the man had sprawled at Langoni’s feet like a young prophet just taken down from a cross.
Long black hair. An aquiline nose honed by the ocean winds. Sharp cheeks. Mouth like a wolf. Long, splayed-out limbs.
All gone, now.
José’s body was beginning a supernatural transformation like the one his brother had undergone in that forgotten memory.
A transformation into a suitable keystone for the crown of pain that Big Langoni intended to make.
A flower blooming in the dark.
José’s body had been segmented into minute tiles, or perhaps blocks, and opened wide.
In his brother’s case, only the surface had been tiled, but every part of José, right through to his inner core, had been dissected into units like toy blocks which were then eased away from each other. This pitiful form was all that remained after the comprehensive dissection and probing that had salvaged his store of forgotten memories. The unit resolution was not much larger than a pixel. It was impossible to tell now where José’s face had been. With difficulty, the final orientations of his arms and legs could be made out, but no more. If he was a flower, the remains of his limbs were petals.
Every single one of the countless memories buried within him had been too hideous to watch.
The sheer number of wounds on José’s psyche had surprised even Langoni. Even with the damage sealed away, how had the man possibly been able to function? Each memory Langoni carved out had dealt José a powerful psychological blow, breaking him bit by bit where he lay. Not even an AI could gaze unblinking at the darkness within itself.
But that was exactly why he would make such an excellent trap.
The scent of the night wind blew through the subterranean chamber.
Langoni felt a great satisfaction.
The walls in every direction crumbled silently, and Langoni watched as the clear, dense, viscous mass outside poured in.
An accretion of pain.
He had reached this milestone at last. Langoni sighed.
However, the mass had no internal structure yet. It was simply a uniform, undelineated mob.
And so …
Langoni watched as the viscous mass mingled with the mineral spring water that accumulated in the pool at the center of the room, slowly transforming them both.
And then he watched as the subterranean chamber was remade into the fulcrum of the grand structure of his conception.
The night’s pitched battle was moving toward its final, perfect contraction at last.
Only one element remained.
Langoni waited for her to be delivered, excited and impatient as a man expecting a love letter.
Arcs of white stone crossing overhead.
Beneath their shoes, the crunch of sand.
Jules Tappy was walking down what had once been a corridor in the Mineral Springs Hotel, with Julie right behind him and Cottontail in his hand.
A petrified forest. A dead coral reef. A three-dimensional maze of enormous vitrified branches piled high and precarious. Or perhaps it was more like a cage, pieced together from the shuffled bones of thousands of dead elephants. Floors of broad, angled hip bones; great tusks as curved roof beams, supported by sturdy femurs made into pillars; the rhythms of vertebrae in closely-linked chains.
And all made of glass. Smooth and hard and cold.
Looking up they saw the night sky between the branches, pitch-black and dotted with tiny, sharply shining stars. The raging clouds of the morning were gone. The same chaos of glass that rose above their heads extended below their feet as well. They walked on, tiny specks against a white staircase spanning the dark of night.
“Still a way from sunrise,” Jules said to no one in particular. The sand crunched beneath his feet. Minute particles of glass.
The arc of glass above their head had partly melted into a thin, milky-colored pillar that plunged straight down. It looked like cream that had been petrified at the moment of being poured into coffee. Jules saw his face reflected in its vitreous surface.
A powerful wave of heat, perhaps, had washed through here at some point.
The glass bones had melted into each other, smoothly joined together.
“I’m at the limit of the little knowledge I have,” said Jules in a low monotone, again to no one in particular.
Cottontail was acting as a portable lantern.
It led them forward, adjusting its beam of light deftly as the need arose: narrow and bright to peer into the difference, broad and soft to illuminate their feet. As Jules breathed, the light breathed too. With each step, some utterly altered part of the hotel loomed into view,
then vanished again. Faces swam out of the dark—AIs, melted into the glass or sealed away inside it—then disappeared behind them.
This was what had become of the TrapNet and the Mineral Springs Hotel.
The TrapNet remained attached to the hotel as it became the network of pain, allowing it to swallow the building and the AIs inside it whole, dissolve them together, and bring the mixture to a boil.
And then it had frozen, contracted.
This forest of glass was the result.
Ten minutes ago, back in the Clement Memorial Room, Julie had finished reattaching her earring and said, “I’m going to look for José.”
Success in this endeavor had seemed deeply unlikely to Jules, but it was clear she meant to go anyway, so he said, “I’m coming with you.”
Julie nodded. But when they opened the Memorial Room’s door, both of them froze in place.
What lay beyond the door was changed almost beyond recognition. The Mineral Springs Hotel had become an entirely different place. All floors and walls had been replaced by a structure of tangled glass branches, beyond which they could see the starry night sky.
The two of them glanced back instinctively.
For a moment, the Memorial Room remained as tasteful and unchanged as ever. Jules and Julie did not know, of course, that Old Jules and the three sisters had built a shielding program to protect the two of them even as the quake that rocked the hotel reached its climax. But the program’s efficacy had been lost with the opening of the door, and as Jules and Julie watched, the Clement family’s beautiful furnishings silently liquefied, memories and all. The liquid boiled and cooled again, leaving a shrunken glass skeleton. The bower of glass bones that surrounded the room remained unaffected.
Jules and Julie looked forward, back, left and right. They had no idea which way to go.
Up? Down? The two of them exchanged rueful smiles.
“I think maybe we’re survivors,” Julie said.
“Definitely. Well—probably,” Jules agreed. “So, which way?”
“Down. That’s where we’re supposed to meet.”
“Meet?”
“For a date. José and I.”
“A date?”
“Right. We decided to meet in the underground chamber after the chess tournament was over.”
The Thousand Year Beach Page 26