by Lucia Ashta
Her comments didn’t bother me in the way I thought she hoped they would, but I still deferred to Dolpheus. When it came to Lila, neither one of us possessed the temperament to deal with her easily, but at least Lila liked Dolpheus.
Dolpheus’ steadying breath was subtle, but I knew him well enough to catch it. He proceeded with forced calm. “Well, we need to figure out if this Ilara is the princess or not. You were there. You heard Aletox. If what he says is true, then the real princess might still be on another planet, in danger.”
“Or she might not,” I added quickly.
“Or she might not,” Dolpheus went on. “Either way, we need to know, and we need to know now.”
“And why does it matter so much? It sounded like it didn’t make much of a difference to lover boy either way last night. Whether she’s the princess or not, she looks like the princess. That should be enough to prop up the monarchy or whatever else it was you suggested to Aletox you wanted to do.”
“If she’s not the princess,” Dolpheus said, “we can’t very well leave the real princess on another planet, now can we?”
“I don’t know. Why can’t you? If you have one woman here able to fill the role of princess, why do you need two? It hasn’t been my experience that the royals do much for O, so what good is it to have an extra royal? Besides, it’s not like the princess, if it really isn’t the woman standing over there, is in terrible danger or anything. We know enough about Planet Sand to know it’s similar to our world.”
“Planet Sand,” I said mostly to myself, my eyes widening and going to Dolpheus. We’d both missed it in the overwhelm of our circumstances. But of course! If the princess was a different woman, then the King had sent her to Planet Sand. After all, hadn’t I nearly perished in his vile memories to discover this one fact?
Dolpheus’ expression changed, from burdened to excited in a flash. “You could ping her just as you did this Ilara. If the princess is out there, certainly she’ll respond to you. You’re both so used to communicating through your minds, she’ll hear you more easily than this Ilara did.”
“Yes,” I said, his enthusiasm contagious. “And if she doesn’t respond, then that means she isn’t on Planet Sand, which means this Ilara must be the princess.”
“Wow. Are you guys for real?” Lila said. “Did you really not realize that if the princess was somewhere out there she was on Planet Sand?”
Neither Dolpheus nor I responded. It was unusual for us not to register the essential facts of any important situation right away. This one realization would have made everything easier to figure out from the start. We wouldn’t have had to bother calling Lila over, and that would have been nice.
She continued, “Wasn’t that the whole reason you went into the King’s memories, Tanus? To discover what planet the princess was on?” She laughed. “Man. You guys are too much. I totally thought you were smart. Good to discover that I was wrong now and not later. Better to know who I’m dealing with up front.” She laughed again.
My jaw twitched. I purposefully didn’t look at Dolpheus. If I did, I’d feel even more foolish and get even angrier that this she-dragon was including my friend in my error.
I reined myself in. If there was no more reason to share in Lila’s company, I wished to be rid of her. “Is there any other independent way of determining whether this Ilara is the royal? Does your science provide for some way that is more unfailing than my trying to deliver a message to Ilara on another planet?”
“So now you need science because you can’t be sure you can do this, even after finally getting what planet she’s on?”
“Hey,” Dolpheus interjected. “As far as I know, you’re not even capable of mind speaking across planets. So back off.”
I shot Dolpheus a warning look. We needed Lila to remain friendly with him at the least, even if her being friendly was like having my nose hairs pulled out one by one.
She chuckled but put her hands up in mock surrender. “Okay, okay. I’ll back off. Jeesh.”
I forced myself to remember why I was doing this and proceeded with calm I wished to feel but didn’t. “I’m certain I can communicate with Ilara if she’s on Sand. She’ll hear me if she’s positioned to hear me. But that doesn’t account for any unforeseen circumstances. All we know of Planet Sand is what the sand industry’s told us. I’m not in the habit of believing things I can’t prove. Something or someone could interfere with her receiving my messages. And if that were the case, I’d never know it.”
“I thought no one knew she was on Sand but the King, who’s unwaking, you, and now, well, us.”
“That’s still true, except for now I have to wonder if Aletox doesn’t know. He didn’t say he knew her precise location, but he didn’t say otherwise either. But that’s a bit beyond my point. Even without purposeful interference, something could’ve happened that would prevent her from answering. I could assume she wasn’t answering because she wasn’t there, when she just couldn’t.”
“Assumptions are dangerous,” Dolpheus added.
“So what are you saying?” Lila said. “That some… what? Thing would force her not to answer?”
“Well, right now, as far as we know, the King is unwaking,” I said. “There are many kinds of illnesses and accidents that could cause that state.” I shifted the conversation. I didn’t like where it was going. I had enough to worry about without allowing my imagination to run down dark, unknown paths. “All I’m asking you, Lila, is if there is some scientific way that we might be unaware of that would allow you to determine, scientifically, whether this woman is or isn’t the princess. So is there or isn’t there?” I’d used up the last of my patience on this one she-dragon. She’d better give me a straight answer.
“Well,” she said, mischief lending life to her flat brown eyes, “it just so happens that I have been working on a little side project of my own. Now, no one else knows of it, so don’t go telling anyone.”
“Lila, your secrets are safe with us,” Dolpheus said. “That much I can promise.”
She studied him and me quickly. “Yeah. Okay.” She must have known we were capable of keeping secrets already. “I’ve been researching if there’s a way to catalog a person’s unique makeup. We’re all different, right? All unique. Even infants born identical to each other. Even they have unique makeup patterns.”
I exchanged a look with Dolpheus. This was all news to us.
“I’ve been doing all this work at the splicing lab, where the whole idea is to remove a piece of someone’s eternality, of that essence, so to speak, that makes the person uniquely him or her so as to eventually replicate the person. Well, it got me to thinking, why are we all unique? What makes us unique? Is there some specific signature or pattern that makes us the individual that we are?”
I wasn’t about to interrupt Lila no matter how roundabout her explanation became. We still knew far too little about the splicing process, and we knew nothing about this makeup or signature she spoke of. Dolpheus and I were different than most soldiers. We realized that the best soldier understood human nature and not just the nature of fighting. The best of men strove to learn why we were here and what the purpose of our existence was, because we understood that it wasn’t fighting.
“So, whenever I had to run tests for the splicing clients, I ran a few extra on the side, just for me. I didn’t need to gather any larger samples or any different ones, so no one noticed. And I ran the additional tests when no one was around to notice.” Lila smiled again, this time, not at our expense, but at the expense of the splicing clients.
“Just an extra drop or two of urine and blood, an extra drop of sweat and tears. No big deal. Not enough for anyone to care or notice, but enough for me to conduct my own experiments.”
“What about the eternality?” I asked. “Did you study that too?”
“Unfortunately, no. That’s the one thing I was never able to get my hands on. Brachius handles the extraction, study, and storage of the eternalities all on hi
s own. I’ve tried to find out, but I can’t even figure out where he stores them. He has so many rooms that are off limits to the rest of the splicing lab staff that I imagine it must be in one of those rooms. But I don’t know. He might keep them at his estate instead.”
That was a thought. Not even I, his supposed son, was allowed free access at his estates. Nor was I allowed in his splicing lab, for that matter.
“So what did you discover?” Dolpheus asked. “Even without the fragments of the eternalities, did you discover something?”
“Oh yes, yes I did.” Her eyes twinkled, and for the first time, I thought her brown eyes were lovely. “I found that the blood of each person has a very specific pattern, one completely unique to each person. I further discovered that, those that were related to each other through blood, say like a father and a son, shared some patterns in their blood. Their blood makeup continued to be identical from anyone else, but some of the pattern was the same. Are you guys following?”
Dolpheus nodded, and I said, “It’s fascinating.”
She chuckled. “Well, good. I’m glad to see you do have some useful parts to your brains after all. Basically, to answer your question, even if you happened to have a vial of the princess’ blood lying around somewhere—wait, do you?”
“No,” I said, and Dolpheus said, “No one else we know of carries around a kit of vials containing the starts of all sorts of wild science experiments.”
When Lila raised her eyebrows, Dolpheus hurried to add, “Which we’re quite grateful for. Even if becoming Lord Dingaling for a spell isn’t one of my best memories, we couldn’t have gotten where we are now if not for you and your kit of vials.”
“It’s true,” I said. Lila was lots of things, but she’d also been helpful to us, more than once. And it wasn’t her fault in the least that where we found ourselves now was a big twisted disaster. Undoubtedly, Dolpheus and I would’ve found our way into a giant catastrophe without her. At least with her, we realized the princess, if she was out there, was on Planet Sand. “You’ve helped us a lot, and we’re grateful for that.”
She was suddenly cheery, proving her emotions as unstable as ever. “If that’s your way of saying thanks, then you’re welcome to my aid.”
I smiled. “I don’t, however, have a vial of the princess’ blood. Without it, can you determine whether this Ilara is the princess or not?”
“I can’t. I think your best chance is to ping away as you’d originally planned to. With your target narrowed to one planet, it should be easier to do. And if there are circumstances interfering with the princess’ ability to answer you, well, I guess you’d just better hope there aren’t. Because even if you did happen to have a vial of the princess’ blood, and if it were me, I would—you never know when something like that will be useful—I’m not entirely sure it would make a difference. Aletox implied that there are multiple replicas of individuals scattered across different parallel dimensions, holograms of our own world. If that’s the case, and I still need to sit with the situation to analyze the range of implications of something like this, then it’s entirely possible that the princess’ blood would possess an identical signature makeup as any of the other replicas of her. I can’t say whether an analysis of the blood would lead to any useful conclusions. Whether the blood of two Ilaras showed the identical signature or a similar one, I don’t know what conclusions I could draw from either situation. This is a wholly new and unconsidered premise.”
“All right,” I said, unwilling to entertain defeat. If pinging my mental call to Ilara on Planet Sand is what I needed to do, then I’d ping away. “We’re back to pinging and hoping the princess is able to answer me if she’s out there.”
“I’m afraid so,” Lila said, and she genuinely seemed as if she wished she’d been able to help.
“Thanks anyway,” I said.
“However, if you want to find out who your real father is, just get me Brachius and Aletox’s blood, and I can tell you.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Really. Now, I don’t know how you’d get their blood. They certainly aren’t the trusting sort that’d just hand over some of their blood without understanding why, but you can try. And you can’t tell them why, you promised. Under no circumstances can they know about my research. They’re evil enough as it is. I don’t want to give them anything more to wield against us peons.”
I didn’t either. “Don’t worry. Dolpheus and I keep our promises. Always. And you have my word that your secret is safe with me. I won’t reveal it under any circumstances. Not even if it’d allow me to secure the blood samples needed to determine my patrimony. My word means more to me than any one of these potential fathers.”
“That’s because either one of your potential fathers is a big cock,” Lila said, simultaneously speaking truth and insulting the male anatomy worldwide.
10
Feeling that we’d made little progress toward assuring our next steps were the right ones, we set off anyway. I wasn’t tolerant of inaction, especially my own, for long. Better to do something than to continue doubting and deliberating over our next steps, lest I grow mad from all the uncertainty and indecision. There appeared to be no clear answer of how to proceed, regardless. We could have spent additional days searching for it and still not landed upon it. We were navigating unique events, without a clear map to any of them, because no map existed.
So we said our farewells and thanks to the tribespeople, mounted our horses, and left them in peace. Ilara and I led the entourage of mishmashes. Whether she was the princess of Planet Origins or not, she was going to act like one, which meant she didn’t follow anyone. She led. I was half a step behind her, a subtle nod to her position.
I made the Royal Guard leave several horse lengths between us and them. I needed Ilara to feel comfortable expressing herself without eavesdroppers. Mostly, I needed Ilara to be able to relax and recover from the stress of all the happenings since she arrived on O. It had been little more than a day and a half since she fell through a lake, but that time was replete with sufficient inexplicable events to make even the most calm and centered of heads spin. The Ilara I’d long loved might have been centered during the best of times, but I’d never claim she was calm. Even if she appeared to be so, she could erupt into fury or passion in an instant. Her emotions ever close to the surface, she wielded them as well, and as fully, as she did everything else in life.
If pussyfooting wasn’t my style, then half-assing wasn’t hers. If Ilara bothered to do something, then she gave it all she had. She didn’t bother with reserves. She contained enough power to do whatever she set her mind to, I’d always believed it.
Even if I loved this woman, there’d been times when she’d intimidated me. After the battles I’d fought and the beasts I’d stared down, it took a lot to intimidate me. Yet she had. Not often, but enough. She was a woman, princess or not, to contend with. But every challenge I’d risen to face where she was concerned was worth it.
She didn’t hold back in any area of her life, and her lovemaking with me was no different. In that one way at least, the Ilara who rode to my left was the same. I experienced a familiar stirring against the pommel of my saddle as I replayed how she’d been with me last night: eager, hungry, wanton, wild, and unconstrained, many of my favorite words in the Original language.
But was she my Ilara? Was she the one who’d told me she wanted to share her life with me, even if we had to do so in secret? Did it matter, when the woman next to me needed me even more than my strong princess, and who’d already told me she loved me, and meant it? I couldn’t always tell when someone lied to me, but I thought I’d know if Ilara didn’t feel it when she told me she loved me last night.
She loved me. So how much did it matter who she really was so long as I had her within my reach?
She turned to me then, and I allowed myself to dive into the cosmos of her eyes. The cosmos were calmer now, the raging storm of earlier past.
Dolpheus rod
e at the back of our group, with Kai and Lila directly in front of him, and the Royal Guard, with its traitorous Father Billius at its helm. Even if Chauncy was its new father, Billius’ sense of self-importance remained. But Dolpheus would watch him. He’d monitor all of them.
So I allowed myself to indulge in what mattered most to me. Ilara met my eyes for a long while before breaking the silence we shared. “So where are we going? We’re traveling back in the direction we came from. Does that mean we’re headed back to your estate and not to the splicing lab like you’d originally said?”
“Indeed we’re no longer heading toward the splicing lab, but there was no assurance that we’d find anything helpful there anyway, although we certainly would’ve found plenty of danger to all of us. We aren’t heading toward my estate either. Perhaps we’ll end up there, because I would like to find a place to be at ease and try to connect with… uh…” I’d never been dishonest with Ilara. I didn’t plan to change that now. But what woman would like to hear that her lover was going to attempt to reach out to another woman, even if it was a potential alternate version of her? I suspected that my answer was none.
One hard look into the cosmos of her eyes assured me that the only way to deal with this woman was the way I always had: naked truth. “I intend to try to call out to you, to another version of you, on Planet Sand, what you call Earth, to see if you answer. I know of no way to determine for certain whether you are or aren’t the princess.”
“And if she answers you, you’ll know I’m not the princess.”
“Yes.”
“How will you call out to her?”
“The same way I did with you, through my mind. You heard me. If the princess is out there, she’ll hear me too. She’s used to mind speaking with me. If she’s able to answer, she will.”
“But she might not be able to answer?”
“That’s right. There’s always the chance that something or someone might be interfering with her ability to speak back, but it’s small. It’s more likely that if she hears me, she’ll be able to respond. But if she doesn’t, that lends more credibility to the idea that you are the princess.”