by Jeff Wheeler
Tiberius smiled. “That’s a natural enough mistake. You accused me of being Tiberius the Third when you were ten; I was quite insulted.”
“Why? Because he was a bad emperor?”
“No, because he was short and ugly!”
She laughed out loud. “Well, I’m sorry, then.” Her eyes twinkled merrily. “You certainly aren’t short . . .”
He put his fingertips to his chest in mock offense. “You, madame, are clearly no judge of masculine beauty. I’ll have you know that I was considered quite handsome in my day; my profile was much admired.”
She grinned. “No one tells an emperor that he’s ugly, Tiberius. I’m sure they told Orthrus he was lovely as a rose and tall as a mountain—and prodigiously endowed with manhood as well—if that’s what they thought he wanted to hear.”
He inclined his head. “A point to the lady.”
“Anyway, don’t change the subject.” She paused, frowning a little, and rubbed her belly absently as she continued. “You are different, Tiberius. You’re aware of the passage of time—you know where you are, and when you are. You learn new things, and remember them over the years: you can tell stories about emperors who died centuries after they buried you. And you always recognize me as your niece, even if I’ve gone from twenty-one to thirty-one since our last meeting.”
He gave her a wry lopsided smile. “I’m surprised that you’ve given this so much thought. Did you have a point to make?”
“The point is, you’re not just a ghost. You, Tiberius, are alive.”
He made a dubious face. “Let’s not exaggerate, dear.”
She shrugged. “To me, a man who thinks, feels, and learns is alive—regardless of whether his body is made of flesh or light. Perhaps I’m too simplistic, but philosophical points don’t really interest me. What does interest me is the difference between a ghost like you and one like Quintus.”
Tiberius regarded her silently. “Your question has more to do with the workings of the garden in general than with me in particular. If you’re not interested in philosophy, I may as well say ‘I don’t know’—because I have only theories and speculations to answer you. No firm facts.”
She turned away, another ripple of disturbance passing over her face. Tiberius, looking down, saw her hand pressed hard to her stomach. “I’ll take your theories and speculations.”
“All right. Then I’ll answer your question. But before I do, I have a question of my own.”
She gave him a little shake of the head. “Always bargaining!” She took a few steps along the bridge. “Ask your question, but we should move on; I’d like to be back to the palace before dusk.”
“As you wish.” He led her through the trees casually, following the course of an old road, its pavement long ago shattered by twisting roots. “I’m curious to know why you chose a body birth for your heir. Surely it’s not necessary. Even if they don’t have incubators nowadays, you could still use a surrogate to carry the child. Why would you adopt such an antiquated mode of reproduction? Is it the fashion these days?”
She shook her head, smiling. “No, it certainly isn’t the fashion. Not for those who have a choice.”
“Why, then?” He ducked under a branch, leading her over a mound of jumbled rock. “It seems an unnecessary risk—body birth is dangerous and damaging to your health, even under the best of conditions.”
“True.” She paused, bending a little to pick her way down the incline. “Believe me, there are times when I regret my decision—times like now. The baby’s kicking like mad; it feels as if she’s dancing on my liver.”
Tiberius looked down at her gravid midsection again, dismayed; seeing his expression, she laughed out loud. “Don’t look so worried, old man! It’s a fetus, not a parasitic growth. It’s perfectly normal for a baby to kick and wiggle at this stage; she’s just becoming more active, that’s all.”
“I . . .” He looked into her eyes. “I’m sorry.” He finished lamely. “I don’t have much experience with this sort of thing. I suppose I find it . . . disturbing.”
“Well, you’re not alone. Just about everyone is looking at me strangely these days. There’s no such thing as a pregnant empress, apparently.” She sighed, running her fingers through her hair. “I’ve had to make up a variety of excuses for this ‘outlandish behavior.’ At this point, I think they’re all ready to dismiss me as another mad Severan, and let it go at that.”
“Well, I don’t need to hear the excuses. What was the real reason?”
She gave him a sly look as she continued up the trail. “The truth? I warn you, you’ll think me a fool.”
“I can keep such thoughts to myself.”
“The truth is, I wanted to love her. My heir. There aren’t many body births among the nobility, but I’ve seen the bond that exists between plebian mothers and their children—it’s very deep.”
“And you felt that this bond was somehow . . . physical?”
“It is. I can feel it.”
She looked down at her belly for a moment, running her hand over it lightly. Tiberius abruptly realized that the hand she placed on her stomach was not for her benefit, but for the child’s—an indirect caress for the unborn.
“I’ve become the vessel for her life, Tiberius.” She looked up at him and smiled. “I know you won’t understand it. You never had any children of your own. But she’s part of me, a piece of my living body—not just some detritus thrown together out of my cast-off cells. I feel intimate with her in a way that I could never be with something growing in an incubator—and I feel somehow subordinate to her as well, as if my own survival and interests were secondary to hers.” She sighed, brushing a strand of hair away from her face. “Strange thought, isn’t it?”
“Is she a clone of you? Did you use a consort, get a donation from someone—?”
Cleona flushed a little, quickening her stride. “She has a father. I used DNA from a man—new blood to mingle with the old. The Severans need that from time to time, you know, or we’ll all turn into feeble-minded mules.”
“A man . . .” Suddenly he halted in his tracks. “Good gods. It was Casca; wasn’t it?”
The weight of sadness descended on her visibly, bowing her head as she walked. “He was an officer. His genes were still on file at the war office. It was just a matter of getting to them.”
“Oh . . . oh, my child. I am so sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Her eyes were strangely luminous. “I’ll see him every time I look at her. And I’ll love her . . . for his sake and mine.” She smiled. “Casca will live again.”
Stricken, Tiberius said nothing more.
“What about my question? We had a deal, didn’t we?”
“I . . . I feel foolish talking about it now. Perhaps you could come again some other day. We could talk about the garden then.”
“Bah. You’re just stalling. Pay up, old man—I don’t like to be cheated.”
Tiberius cast around for words, fighting to swallow the pain in his chest. “The garden is very old. It was old beyond record or recollection when I was a boy. But back then, there were gardeners—priests—who spent their entire lives here.” He licked his lips nervously. “It was very beautiful. Nothing like the mess you see now.” He made a vague gesture, indicating the wild wood and the undergrowth, the choking weeds and broken obelisks by the roadside. “The gardeners kept things up. They planted and pruned, weeded, watered . . . there were wonders here, beautiful things kept alive by their hands. Exotic birds, lovely fish . . . in this area, there was an arboretum. Trees from five hundred different worlds, each one a treasure in its own right.” He smiled. “Have you ever seen a helium tree, Cleona?”
“No.” Her face was pinched with distress. “Never even heard of one.”
“Are you all right? You seem—”
“It’s fine. She’s a busy little devil today, that’s all. Giving me a bit of a pain.” She gave him a weak smile. “Please, don’t let me interrupt.”
“There
was only one of them. It was my very favorite. Lovely bark—white as snow. The flowers were strange; they came out in fall instead of spring, fleshy little things that looked like ears. The local insects didn’t care for them. The gardeners had to climb a ladder and pollinate them by hand, with a little paintbrush.”
“Why did they call it a helium tree?”
He smiled. “The fruits. They came out every spring. Great, glorious metallic bunches of them, each one as big as a man’s head, in every imaginable color: green, blue, pink, gold. The gardeners would let me climb up and shake the branches, and masses and masses of them would rise on the wind and sail away.”
She laughed. “So they really were filled with helium?”
“Yes. When I was older, they explained it to me; the helium fruits were seed pods, designed to rise into the upper atmosphere and explode. The cold at those heights was favorable to the seeds somehow—I think it caused them to germinate—and then the wind would scatter them.” He glanced at her face; the natural rosy luster of her golden cheek had been replaced with clammy gray pallor. “Cleona, perhaps we should—”
“Talk,” she gasped. “It helps keep me moving. I have to get back to the palace, Tiberius; I think I’m getting that ‘morning sickness’ I’ve been reading about . . .”
“Yes. Right. The old gardeners.” He quickened his stride. “Well, I befriended them. I spent hours here. The ghosts weren’t just ‘taped messages’ back then, as you say, but living spirits, like me . . . interested in gossip, fashion, current events, full of opinions and advice. They were my friends; I knew them better than my living relations.” He glanced at her quickly, then barreled heedlessly on. “The old men could see I loved their garden for its own sake, so they confided in me a little—even though, in their eyes, I was no one special. Just a future emperor . . . one of many subjects for a great art form. To them, the greatest art form of all.”
“Art. So, the gardeners made the ghosts? For the sake of art?”
“No, not exactly.” He was distracted by the sound of her increasingly labored breath. “But they helped. The garden itself made the ghosts. The garden is the artist.”
She stopped suddenly, bent double with a grunt of pain; he stopped with her, grimacing in sympathy. When she looked up at him, her eyes were hot, golden, fierce as a hawk’s. “Talk,” she commanded.
“It’s all under our feet,” he said helplessly. “The woods, the water, the tombs . . . those are only surface trappings. The most important parts of the garden are all underground. Beneath everything you see here, there is one great machine—an engine of the First Empire, built before the Fall.” He shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, looking down at her. “The gardeners thought that it was built for our benefit. Designed to make the Severans better emperors. They thought if we could learn history from those who’d lived it, we would be less likely to repeat their mistakes.”
She straightened and began to walk again, slowly. “You don’t sound . . . as if you agree with them, old man.”
“They were men of faith. They thought the builders of the garden were men like them, driven by high ideals and lofty visions.” He shook his head. “I was a man of power, and I thought that power of such magnitude doesn’t need to hang a halo on its motives. If I could have built a thing like this—a machine that would record and preserve a human soul—I would have. Just because I could. And for the sake of vanity. Who better to live forever than me?”
She laughed unevenly, stumbling a few more steps onward. “It’s funny to hear you use a word like ‘soul,’ Tiberius. You sound . . . like a priest.”
“Stop a while,” he begged. “Let me find you a place to sit and rest.”
“No.” She turned and staggered off the trail. Holding her stomach with one hand and leaning against a gravestone with another, she bent low in the bushes to be sick.
“We can’t talk about this any more now. For heaven’s sake, girl!”
She spat repeatedly into the weeds, ignoring him for several seconds, and then straightened again. “Tell me how it went wrong,” she croaked. She was moving more slowly now, but seemed somehow calm—as if she had passed through a crisis. “What happened to the gardeners?”
“My nephew.” He still winced at the memory. “Decimus didn’t like the tomb they built for me: he said the man who had murdered his mother and siblings deserved a wooden box, if that. So he had my mausoleum demolished, and executed them for ‘sentimentalizing.’ ”
“The machine.” She breathed the words, suddenly struck by understanding. For the first time in several minutes, she looked him in the eyes. “It needed them, didn’t it? Without the gardeners to care for it, it began breaking down.”
“Yes.”
“It made . . . bad recordings.”
“Not bad. Just . . . incomplete. When a living person comes into the garden, the machine still tries to do its work—but now it can only capture part of the whole. Sometimes it’s just the dimensions of the body, the vibrations of the voice, a fleeting gesture. Other times it forms a more complete picture, including all that a person was thinking and feeling at that moment. So we have Quintus Valerius on a summer day, when he walked by the wall: a single man, frozen in a single moment, knowing only what he knew then.”
“Summer,” she gasped. “Summer, by the wall. That’s why I only saw him . . . a few times.”
“Yes. The garden will not place him out of his proper context; he remembers coming here in a certain season, on a cloudless day. He will only appear if the light, the wind, and the clouds are right . . .”
Cleona cried out, clutching her abdomen in agony. When she looked up at him, her eyes were glazed with confusion; shadows stood out sharply against her skin. “Tiberius?” She looked down at herself, bending to gather her skirts with both hands. “I think . . . I think that I . . .”
Cleona raised the hem of her dress; a slow dark trickle of blood was running down her brown thigh. She looked up at him in mute supplication—as if to ask that he take this back, unmake it somehow.
“I’m sorry.” His voice broke. “So sorry, child.”
Her eyes rolled up toward the darkening sky, lashes closing over white sclera. When she fell, he couldn’t catch her.
* * *
The highest point in the garden could almost be called a mountain. For those hardy enough to climb to the summit, the towering bluffs offered a complete view of the imperial city—from the white walls of the palace to the dingy roof of the meanest bayside tenement. Tiberius could not bring himself to make the climb often, but when he smelled the salt on the wind and saw the broken clouds above, he knew that it was time to go.
There had once been a trail up the mountainside, an exhausting switchback snaking back and forth all the way to the top. Time, rain, and erosion had destroyed the easy way, however; now he could only climb directly up the mountain, scuttling up slopes of broken tallus and clinging to steep rock faces like an old gray spider.
She was waiting for him when he reached the end of the climb, sitting cross-legged on a boulder. “I wondered if you would come!” she cried, shouting down the wind.
He straightened up slowly. “I knew you would be here today. I didn’t want to leave you alone.”
She turned away and looked out at the sky; clouds raced across the horizon, beams of bright light slashing down amid the falling rain. “Tell me how long I’ve been dead.”
He went down on one knee beside her, his robe whipping in the wind.
“Go on, tell me. I want to know. Tell me how long I’ve been dead—and who did that.”
She jabbed an angry finger at the lands below, but there was no need to point. The city was in ruins; vast swaths of it had been reduced to pools of glass, with the half-melted skeletons of many high towers still standing, twisted and naked, like trees drowned in a flood. Elsewhere there had been heavy bombardment, and sweeping fires that eradicated everything but a few low broken walls. Whole districts had been replaced by impact craters, and
whatever was left standing was windowless and gaunt with long neglect. The streets were white with human bones. Nova Roma was dead—and she had died by violence.
Cleona trembled, her gray cloak whipping in the wind. “How long?”
“It happened fifty years ago. The last survivors were forced to abandon it when biological weapons were used against them—this whole planet will remain uninhabitable, until someone finds a cure.” He looked down at the devastation. “If anyone ever does.”
“What do you mean, ‘if’?”
He held out his trembling hand, and somehow this one gesture seemed a general indictment: of the city, of the empire, of the species that had destroyed them both. “We are in decline, Cleona. War is devouring us, and with it will come darkness and ignorance—just as it did before. Those who create a virus today that will target and eradicate all human life may die before they can teach the next generation how to cure it.”
She made a halfhearted nod, unwilling to argue. “And how long has it been since . . . me?”
He stood silently for a time, trying to read her face. “Over six hundred years. Give or take a few. I’m afraid I never really understood the new calendar.”
She looked at him and smiled. Years had creased and folded her skin, but the eyes had not changed; they were still bright, beautiful, heartbreaking golden brown. “Shame on you, Tiberius.” She shook her head.
“Why?”
“You’re lying. And what’s worse, I caught you at it—your naive little niece!”
He smiled back feebly. “You’re not so little anymore, old woman.”
“Apparently I’m not anything anymore.” The wind caught the lip of her cowl, blowing it back from her face; coarse white dreadlocks spilled around her shoulders. She turned again to look down on the ruined city, its streets and squares slowly succumbing to an invading army of trees. “Was this my doing, somehow? Is that it?”