by Lucia Ashta
“But it’s not?”
“I don’t know what this is anymore. But I do know you’re the same woman I’ve loved for years. The same woman that I believed loved me.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “I see.”
“We spent the night making love, and then you left my bed for your own in the palace. I never saw you again after that.”
The palace? I couldn’t begin to wrap my mind around a palace any more than I could the thought of making love with him. I didn’t make love. I fucked, so that I couldn’t hurt the way Tanus appeared to be hurting right now.
“Do you seriously believe that you just brought me over from another planet?” The question should have been hilarious, and I would have laughed at it just a few hours before. But indisputable evidence surrounded me, and I was in no mood for laughing. Instead, I did what I could to trudge forward through this surreality from my place on the settee, which was upholstered in fabric unlike any I’d seen or touched before. It was shiny and smooth like plastic, yet it felt like fine velvet, or maybe silk.
“That’s the easiest part to figure out. Of course I brought you over from another planet. That’s an interesting point though.” He brought up a hand to rub the stubble across his chin. “My desire to bring you back to O, which was foremost on my mind, must have triggered the transport. My desire made manifest, so to speak. If you truly had no idea what was going to happen, then you would have been a blank canvas upon which I painted my desire. My desire, my thoughts, my intention to bring you back to O must have overtaken both our brains at the same time, making what we didn’t know possible exactly that.
“What is transporting after all but the moving of energy from one point to another? In theory, it should make no difference whether we’re moving the energies of our physical bodies across a street or across a universe. The process should be the same.”
He paced the length of the picture window. “I need to talk this over with Dolpheus. He’ll flip out. All this time, we had no idea it could be this easy. These clunky transport machines that are so much less refined than the human mind. And now it turns out that we don’t even need them. I was planning on using the transport machines of the splicing lab instead of those of the sand industry because I thought my father’s were more sophisticated. But they’re as outdated as the machines from pre-Andaron times when compared to the mind.” He turned to tap a finger to his temple, hidden beneath loose waves of chestnut.
His eyes met mine for the first time since he rose from his seat. I wanted to shrink away from them but wouldn’t let myself. Hiding from this surreality wouldn’t get me far, and the need to understand was building. He approached me a little at a time. When he reached the edge of the settee, he stopped. “Can I sit with you?”
I hesitated a few moments, long enough to see the hurt he’d tried to stash away resurface. When I nodded, the pain receded, but not all the way.
He lowered himself and sat gingerly. My body, still putty, tensed more than I thought it had the energy to. I was aware of his body next to mine as much as I ever had been with any lover. I could feel his breath and blood pulsing through his body as I experienced them racing through my own.
When he reached a hand out to cup my cheek, everything within me stopped. My breath hitched. My heart waited to beat again. A tingle of anticipation ran through my body like a shiver.
“I’ve always loved your eyes. What have you done to them?” This question was as heavy as any other he’d voiced since I arrived here, wherever this truly was. Was it really another planet? Or an elaborate ruse in some kind of show room? A prank, pulled off by someone with far too much time and imagination on his hands?
“Oh, I… ah, had to cover them.”
Tanus’ eyes widened. The full circle of his irises pierced my own, beneath the contact lenses. “But you should never cover your eyes! It’s forbidden, and with good reason. If you cover them completely, it extinguishes the eternality within. The eyes are the windows of life.”
“I had to,” I said.
Tanus seemed as if he were about to say a hundred different things. In the end, all he said was, “Why?”
“Because everyone thought me different. I was ridiculed. Singled out for being strange.”
“You are different. And that’s amazing. There’s no one like you on all of Origins. You’re the only one alive to have the eyes that you do.”
“My parents didn’t want me to become a research project, some kind of science experiment. And I would have. It wouldn’t have taken long before someone dangerous found me and wanted to understand what made my eyes the way they were.”
“Parents,” he muttered to himself, before saying to me, “So you don’t know why your eyes are the way they are?”
“No. Do you?” I barely dared ask the question. Could it be that this man could tell me what I’d wondered most of my life, since I was old enough to understand what it meant to be different? Could he begin to unravel the secrets of my life, even if this were but a dream?
“Can you remove whatever contraption or faithum you have in place masking your eyes?”
“Faithum?”
“You don’t remember what faithum is either?”
I shook my head, and he sighed. “Faithum is that which can’t be explained by the normal physical workings of the universe. That which the Devoteds attribute to a greater power, something more important than any one of us, that supposedly dictates what happens and what doesn’t in this life, what they call the Something Greater.” He paused. “For some, even transporting is faithum, but that’s only because they don’t understand it and don’t think themselves capable of doing what they otherwise could. In the end, I suppose that faithum’s merely what our science doesn’t yet understand. Faithum’s the precursor to understanding. It’s that which simply is, without explanation.”
He looked at me with a softness to which I wanted to respond. “Can you take the shields off then, and show me your eyes?”
“Yes.”
“Then do so, and I’ll tell you what I know about them.”
With shaky hands, I popped out my contact lenses. Tanus watched while I looked around for a sanitary place to put them. Of course, I didn’t have my contact lens case or solution with me. They would dry out in minutes if they weren’t on my eyes. “Do you have a glass of water I could put them in?”
He received them from me, studying them with fascination. He moved toward his desk, where he poured water from a pitcher into a black glass. He dropped them in and watched their descent until they settled on the bottom of the glass.
Then he returned to his seat. This time, he sat closer. He breathed in, as if smelling the fresh scent of flowers. “That’s much better. I can actually see you now.” He smiled. It was a contented expression that chose to put aside a heap of problems for enjoyment of a simple moment.
“So? Why are my eyes the way they are?” I insisted.
“Because you’re a princess of the Andaron line.”
SEVEN
MY BRAIN HAD SHUT down most of its advanced processing capabilities in order to cope. I’d been listening to Tanus speak for minutes, long enough to know that almost all of what he said was impossible. I stared at him while he talked, and he stared back. I knew what he must be seeing: all of the cosmos swirling through the irises of my eyes. My parents couldn’t look at them without struggling to resist their desire to look away, to shut out the infiniteness that my eyes contained, to run from the evidence that I was some kind of freak or aberration, a mutation of humankind.
But Tanus didn’t shrink away from them. Instead, he appeared as if he wished nothing more than to jump into them, and to there forget whatever stories he was weaving to attempt to explain what still remained largely inexplicable. He was the first person ever to look into my eyes and appreciate what he saw.
“You aren’t the first to have the eyes you have,” he was saying again, after I’d asked him to repeat his explanation, because I couldn�
�t accept it. Not yet. “There have been several before you. All women. All from the Andaron line.”
“And the Andaron line is the bloodline of the royalty here?”
“Right.” Like it was nothing. He’d told me I was a princess of a ruling line of royalty as if it were a given fact.
“And the Andarons rule the entire planet?”
Tanus smiled. “Yes. Your father’s king, although he’s unwell. He’s still recovering from an assassination attempt that occurred after you left. It’s still unclear whether or not he’ll survive. They’re saying he’ll recover, but information coming from the palace can’t always be trusted, as you know… or should know.”
It was difficult to feel the concern of a daughter that was just told her father might not live when I had no notion of the man. “My father isn’t a king. He’s a manager of an auto plant.”
Tanus’ eyebrows drew together. “What’s this plant? Does it grow autos?”
I chortled despite… everything. “It’s a factory that produces cars.”
“Cars?”
“Devices, uh, that allow a person to travel… in them.”
“People go inside these cars?”
“Yes. And they use them to go from one place to another.” It was clear that, whatever I was, I hadn’t lost out on a calling to any profession that required eloquence.
“So they’re like transport flyers?”
“I suppose. But cars don’t fly.”
“What do they do then? How do they get from one place to another?”
“They use roads.”
“Roads? For machines to use?” Clearly, this was an absurd notion. “Why don’t they just fly? Do they cut across fields to create these roads?”
If this was how much time we needed to discuss something as simple as cars without achieving resolution or understanding, I didn’t want to think about how long it might take us to unwind this mess we were in. We’d have to skim over details to preserve our sanity, as my reserves of it were waning already.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, although of course, it did. “I just meant to tell you that my father isn’t a king. He’s a manager.” Another set of sentences I never thought I’d hear myself say.
“But he is a king. And your mother was a queen.”
I could imagine how telling him that my mother actually sold makeup in the mall, at one of those counters for a high-end company would go, so I didn’t. Instead I registered that this mother he thought I had was a queen, meaning she wasn’t one any longer.
“Tanus, I’m not this person you think I am. And my parents aren’t either.”
“Impossible,” he said, too quickly.
“It’s as possible as anything else you’re describing.”
“No, it isn’t. I’ve known you since you were a girl. Or maybe I didn’t know you then, certainly not like I know you now, but I knew who you were even when we were both children. We’re nearly the same age. You had the same eyes you have now when you were a girl. It was a big deal for the people. You incarnated with a visible sign of the power of the Andaron dynasty. The people took it as confirmation that the Something Greater sanctioned the rule of your bloodline.
“You changed as you grew, of course. But you’re the same girl I knew. And you’re definitely the same woman who took me as her lover. You look exactly the same. You have the same eyes. The same nose and lips. The same chin.”
His eyes began to slide down my body. “The same curve of your neck.”
I stopped him before he could continue itemizing my body parts, especially those concealed beneath clothing. “But I’m not her.”
“You even have the same name, and names are powerful.”
“My name may be Ilara, but I’m not who you think I am.”
He extended a hand to point at the swell of my left breast. “You have a heart-shaped beauty mark, just there.” His fingers brushed the fabric of my rain slicker, marking the precise spot where I’d had a heart-shaped mole surgically removed months ago. I’d regretted it since. The heart had been part of me, and I’d traded it for a much less pleasant scar.
I didn’t say a word but trailed my eyes across his hand, still at my breast. Eventually, he pulled his hand back, and my breathing resumed. But I still didn’t say anything. No clarity would pass through my lips. For the first time since I plummeted into the lake atop the mountain, a concise thought formed in my mind, unwilling to drift away like the others until I gave it the attention it deserved: Maybe Tanus is telling me the truth. Maybe this is home. I couldn’t deny that something within me responded with familiarity to my surrounds. But it made zero sense. Regardless, I couldn’t deny the feeling.
Tanus was watching me closely, until a thought struck him. He got up. Right away, I missed his warmth, and I didn’t like that he’d already been able to have such a tangible effect on me.
I was still sprawled out on the settee like a body without bones. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but I heard him pulling open drawers and rummaging through them. Then the noise stopped, and he reappeared at my side.
He handed me what I would have thought a newspaper, except that it was some kind of cloth instead of paper, and its images moved in looping reels of highlights. As I stared, aghast, his energy shifted yet again.
He said, “I couldn’t believe it to be true. I couldn’t. I knew you weren’t dead. I just knew it.” He put his hand on my thigh, high enough to imply intimacy, not so high as to suggest more than the comfort offered between lovers. “I wanted to throw the story reel away. I tried to. But I never could. It was the only recent image I had of you.”
My hands shook. Looking back at me was the same face I’d seen reflected in the lake, the very same one I’d seen in every mirror I’d ever looked into. With my real eyes, those unhidden behind contact lenses that barely did their job.
A bold headline spanned the entire top portion of the newspaper—or story reel, or whatever Tanus would call it. It read: “Princess Ilara Assassinated. The People of Planet Origins Mourn Their Beloved Princess.” The face in the photograph beneath the caption was mine, with eyes that shifted to reflect the cosmos even in the short loop captured on the paper (or whatever it was). There I was, headline news, smiling and waving at a crowd I couldn’t see.
EIGHT
I STILL DIDN’T FULLY BELIEVE the wild stories Tanus was telling me; I just couldn’t. But I didn’t completely disbelieve them either. I clutched the story reel in my hand as if it were a lifeline to comprehension and its associative sanity. The spinning sensation I’d suffered after first arriving here, potentially on another planet, had finally ceased, only to be replaced by the swirling of disorienting thoughts nearly as dizzying. I possessed no framework to deal with the incongruity that my sudden departure from a lake in an electric storm implicated.
I’d settled uncomfortably into a state similar to PTSD, except that I was in the midst of experiencing the trauma of trading one story, one life, one planet for another. I hadn’t moved from my place on the settee once the physical vertigo passed because I couldn’t deal with any more external stimuli than I already was. I avoided looking to the right, where the picture window revealed an eerie landscape that was impossible on Earth, where I thought I’d come from until Tanus kept calling it Planet Sand.
I’d begun to doubt even those things that I’d previously accepted as fact. When one thing—or a thousand—I’d taken for granted suggested itself untrue, it brought everything else I’d also believed a truth into question.
I lay unmoving, removed from my surroundings. I heard every single word Tanus said, hanging on each one, trying to absorb all that he spoke. But it was as if I were listening to him from far away, as if I were eavesdropping as he informed someone else of her life story. The fortitude to experience emotional reactions had abandoned me. It was more than shock; it was as if I weren’t even there, still on Earth, dreaming a vivid dream.
But I knew it wasn’t a dream. I wouldn’t wake up from this. Whate
ver it was, it felt real. That was the problem. Everything he told me, everything I saw, felt right even as it contradicted every belief system I’d ever held.
Tanus had been pacing. Now he was at my side again, back on the settee. “Ilara?” I realized he was saying. “Ilara, can you hear me? Are you all right?”
The concern in his voice brought me back to myself. “Hmm. I’m here. I think I’m here, anyway.”
“I know this must be a lot to handle since you seem to have forgotten everything about your life before you left. But the memories might come back. Once you get used to being home again, maybe everything will come back to you.”
I smiled weakly. I didn’t think they would. I couldn’t explain it; it was just a sense I had. In this disorienting space where I didn’t know what to believe, the best I could do was to pay attention to my intuition.
He reached out to caress my hair. His hand slid down one side of my head like he was petting a wet dog. “It’ll be okay, my love. You’ll see. It’ll all become clear soon enough.”
I tried to speak and discovered my tongue thick and uncertain. “I hope so.” I’d experienced a sensation like this before. At the university, I’d partied just like the other students who left home to discover freedom without limits or maturity. I’d gotten too drunk for my own good often enough to remember what it felt like in the exact moment when the sluggish thought would scroll across my mind: Fuck. I drank too much. I feel sick. It was the thought one had too late, when there was little to do but ride the wave and hope you could make it somewhere on your own where you could throw up in private.
I responded to Tanus as if he were in a world fully apart from my own, even while a part of me recognized that he was right next to me. The way I looked must have frightened him, because he pulled me toward him with a murmur of sympathy and held me against his chest. I thought I could stay there forever, against his solid chest, until he started to rock me, as one does with babies.
“Ugh. No,” I groaned. His careening made the vertigo return with renewed vigor. “Lay down. I need to lay down,” I slurred.