This whole thing is strange.
Galenos reappears in a flurry of ascender speed. He’s carrying a tray with covered cups and food: bread, fruit, and an aromatic, spiced meat. I have to shut my mouth to keep the drool inside.
“The poor dears are ravenous,” he says, holding out the tray to us. “Take as much as you like. There’s plenty more.”
I have no idea where he gets his human supplies, but I don’t care. I only hesitate a fraction of a second before grabbing an apple and some bread. Kamali does the same while Celeste beckons us over to a couch. Kamali and I sit together, stuffing food in our mouths.
Belatedly, I say, “Thank you,” and Kamali echoes it.
Lenora is staring out the window, but once we’re settled—Kamali and me on the couch, Celeste next to us with the tray, and Galenos standing nearby—she speaks up.
“We need a place to stay.” She’s still looking at the towers. “A day or two at most. Until we have a plan for where to go next.”
“Of course,” Galenos says, all animosity and suspicion apparently banished now. “As long as you need. We have everything your darlings could want here. But you will have to tell me all about them and how you came to be in such straights that you’d land in my apartment with them.”
Lenora turns to face him. “You’re still boycotting the Olympics, aren’t you?”
Galenos’s indignant expression ripples purple across his bald head. “I refuse to watch that abuse. You know how I feel about that entire enterprise.”
Lenora strides away from the window to stand next to Galenos, then gestures to Kamali and me. “These are two of this year’s gold medalists. They were… disqualified.”
His face opens in surprise, then he rakes another gaze over Kamali. “A dancer,” he nods with appreciation. “Exquisite. I would love to see you perform, my dear. Only if you don’t mind, of course.”
I’m kind of amazed when Kamali’s cheeks darken: I think she’s blushing.
“And you…” Galenos wags a finger at me. “Let me guess: Shakespearean actor?”
“Painter.”
“Ah!” he says, apparently delighted. “I should love to see your work as well, young man, if you would choose to share it.”
“Elijah is also the son of Agatha Brighton,” Lenora says softly.
Galenos whips his head to her, then back to me. The intensity of his stare trips all my alarms. “He’s the one,” Galenos says in a whisper. All color has fled his bodyform.
“The one who survived,” Lenora confirms.
There’s a crash next to us: Celeste has risen from the couch, and the tray with all its contents have dumped to the floor. Her face twists up, but before I can even think about what has happened, she flees the room.
“Celeste!” Galenos follows after her, then hesitates and turns back to us. “It’ll be all right. I’ll return in a moment.” Then he disappears with ascender speed after his wife.
“What’s going on?” I ask Lenora quietly. “Should we head back to the ship?”
Lenora shakes her head, then bends to pick up the tumbled food from the carpet. A household bot drifts from the corner to clean the mess. Kamali and I stand to get out of its way. Lenora hands us each some of the recovered food: spiced meat for Kamali, more bread for me.
“How about you explain exactly what is going on here?” I nervously eye the hallway Galenos and Celeste have disappeared into, afraid he’s going to reappear full of over-the-top rage and a sentry to back it up. Meanwhile, I keep eating, because I’m starved, and I’m not sure when the next meal is coming.
Lenora keeps an eye on the hallway as well. “Galenos was one of the original, well, fathers for lack of a better term. He was part of our core group as well, a true believer in the idea of creating an answer to the Question.”
Kamali frowns, but I’m aghast. “Galenos conned Celeste into carrying one of your experiments?” This makes their relationship even more twisted.
Lenora scowls at me. “I understand your anger, Eli, but at the time, we were creating a wonderful thing. It was done with love—well, at least for some of the ascenders involved, it was truly an act of love. For Augustus, it was different. He was the leader, and what we were doing was very much illegal. We needed his protection to keep it secret. Naturally he wanted to be intimately involved—”
She cuts off at the livid look on my face. She’s talking about my mother.
“There were dozens of experiments,” she says stiffly. “Each had their own unique relationship between patron and donor.”
“Donor,” I say, my voice cold. “What a nice term for my mother.” But this makes my mind spin. So, Galenos was a patron as well, just like Augustus was my mother’s patron of the arts? I’m starting to wonder if the entire patronage system was just a sleazy way to get human females to fall in love with their male patrons and carry their experimental children.
“Celeste was a donor, too,” Kamali says quietly.
It takes me a moment, but I figure out what she means. My anger ratchets down. “She lost the baby.”
“As they all did,” Lenora says. “At least, in those first rounds. Galenos was always committed to the cause, but he didn’t become personally involved with Celeste until the round when you were gestated. Of all of us, he always loved humans the most. He was irretrievably convinced that your kind held the answer to the Question. That you would be our future. He fell madly in love with Celeste. And when the baby was lost, it was too much. He left the project, taking her with him. I haven’t had contact with him since. Until today.”
I frown and wonder what my life would have been like, had Augustus actually loved my mother instead of abandoning her after I had been conceived. “Why didn’t Augustus stick around? I mean, my mom obviously was the success case. She carried me to term.”
“Augustus’s intentions were… larger.” She’s holding something back. “We were supposed to produce dozens of bridges, not just one. Even though you lived, he still deemed the experiment a failure. Unrepeatable. He had no use for us or the result.” She means me. “The group was officially disbanded even before your mother gave birth.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t stay here.” Kamali frowns at the hallway. “I mean, it’s obviously upsetting to Celeste.” She’s taking this all remarkably in stride, but then I’m coming to expect that from Kamali: there have been precious few things I’ve seen rattle her. The up-close death of her friends has been pretty much it.
“We don’t have much choice at the moment,” Lenora says quietly. “This is one of the last places Augustus would suspect us of coming, so that buys us a little time. We need to use it to figure a way out of the city.”
“Out?” I ask. “Not without my mother and the rest.”
“Eli,” she complains but stops from saying more as Galenos strides from the hallway.
“I’m terribly sorry,” he says when he rejoins us. “She’ll be all right soon. It was a long time ago, but it’s still a sore subject, I’m afraid.” He’s holding his hands out in apology, but I’m the one who should be asking forgiveness—we did barge into his house and send his wife fleeing in tears.
“I’m sorry my being here upset her,” I say.
“It’s not you, lad. She gave up a lot to stay with me. I like to think she gained something as well, but I never could give her the one thing she lost.”
I don’t know what to say to that. A “lifetime” marriage between an ascender and a human isn’t a lot of commitment on the ascender’s part—but it’s everything the human has to give. And it would have to be a union without children. Or at least, none conceived in the normal way. I don’t ask why they didn’t pursue other means because the answer is: they did. And it failed.
“Well,” Galenos says, clasping his hands together, as if that finishes the subject, “now that you’ve had a bit to eat, perhaps you would like to clean up? There’s a shower and clothing laid out for the both of you in back. Meanwhile, Lenora and I will discuss the many matt
ers that lead to you coming to my home. I’m sure we’ll figure out something to take care of whatever difficulties you’re facing.”
His effusive offer of help is both comforting and somewhat disturbing.
“I want to be involved in any decision-making,” I say to Lenora.
“And I have several things to discuss with you as well.” Lenora’s pointed look reminds me that I haven’t disclosed everything to her about the fugue—not even close.
I give her a nod. Kamali and I follow Galenos’s urgent gestures down the hall. Lenora stays in the main room while he leads us to a bedroom with garments laid out on the bed and artwork on the softly glowing walls. Holo images of nature—a waterfall and a rainforest—fill the large embedded screens, and the quiet sounds of a stream float through the room.
Galenos taps a blank section of the wall, and a translucent door springs to life. Beyond it is a room with white tiles and a flat-gray control panel in the wall. “The shower controls are touch-sensitive. Fresh clothes are on the bed. Take your time.” He smiles then strides from the room. I wonder if he’s not flitting around at ascender speed simply because he’s used to living with a human.
Kamali scoops up the black t-shirt and jeans from the bed. “I call these.”
I scowl at the ascender toga she left for me, then pick it up. “Then I get the first shower.”
She reaches for my arm as I turn toward the bathroom door. “Eli.”
I check my stride. “Yeah?”
“This whole thing about your mom and Augustus… I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
I duck my head. “I’m not going to let him use her again.”
“I know.” She has that determined look on her face—I know she doesn’t want me to do anything that might help any ascender, least of all Augustus.
I grimace and head for the shower. Thankfully, the door goes back to opaque once I’m inside. I have to stab the “touch sensitive” controls several times in order to get them to work, but then I’m drenched in a downpour of hot, steamy rain. I haven’t even taken off my clothes. Marcus’s toga slides off like it’s made of air, but the Resistance’s tanktop and shorts are a soggy, clinging mess. I toss them to the side where my fresh toga awaits, just out of the spray.
I plunge my face into the stream and let the water gush over me.
My mother and my friends are being held by the ascender who created me. Lenora wants me to flee. Kamali would rather die than betray the Resistance. And I’m just barely realizing the stakes involved in all of this. Why Marcus and Lenora and now Augustus all want to control me.
Because I talk to dead people.
As far as most of them know, that’s all the fugue is. But it’s enough—and they were all involved in my creation. They know they were trying to create a bridge to some other realm where gods and souls are supposed to live. Or something. It’s just a matter of whether I’m actually expressing what they hoped for with their design. My abilities—and I’m just barely beginning to discover what they are—would be important to the Resistance, too, if they weren’t in tatters, half imprisoned, half scattered to the winds. Maybe Kamali’s right. Maybe the other Resistance forces are trying to get my mom and Cyrus and the rest free.
But I can’t count on that.
Right now, all I have on my side is Lenora. And maybe this odd couple of Galenos and Celeste.
The billowing clouds of steam are so thick, I can’t even see the controls. Suddenly, the heat is too much, choking me with the heaviness of the air. It reminds me of when I was drowning in Orion, lost in that soup of information and color. I blindly reach into the fog to bang on the controls until the water is replaced by a hot blast of air.
It quickly blows away the droplets from my skin and steam from the air, and I suddenly have the solution to all of this.
One that no one would see coming: I need to steal Augustus’s personal key.
My hair is still wet from the shower, and my toga clings way too much.
To say the ascenders are less modest than humans is an understatement. Considering a bot whisked away my sopping wet shorts, I’m glad the toga has at least some modesty built in. Still, the appraising look in Lenora’s eyes flushes heat to my face.
“We have a few things to discuss,” I say. Kamali is still in the shower, which makes this a good time to say the things I have to, without her disapproving looks making it more difficult to make my case to Lenora.
“Agreed,” she says. “And I have a private place for it.”
Lenora leads me past several rooms—Galenos’s apartment is substantially larger than the others I’ve seen—to a door at the end of the hall. It opens to an enormous room, easily the size of the entire rest of the apartment combined. The walls are the same softly-glowing ones, only now the uniform whiteness is studded with blue dots in a matrix that covers the floor, walls, and ceiling.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“A virtual chamber.” There’s a gleam in her eye.
A moment later, the space around us transforms into a towering cathedral. We’re standing at the altar, and a multitude of colored-glass windows shower mystical light upon us. The walls are adorned with gold icons, like the ones in my mother’s shrine at home, but the most impressive parts are the rows upon rows of paintings rendered in glass—mythical scenes from antiquity infused with rich, backlit colors. They form a blurred mosaic that stretches the vast length of the church.
“Where are we?” It looks like a virtual of a real cathedral from the pre-Singularity era.
“It’s an amalgamation of several ancient holy places.” Her voice is quiet, and just as it drops off, a twitter of chimes rises and falls, then a distant bell gongs, long and deep. “You mentioned that Kamali helped you meditate to reach the fugue. Marcus induced it with a device, a shift in brain chemistry most likely. But humankind has sought to evoke ecstatic states for several millenniums before the Singularity, often by creating spaces like this. They used sound and light and architecture to create a medium to transport themselves. To open their hearts to the divine.”
As an artist, I can see it. The light and colors confuse the senses and blur out reality, expanding the mind and drawing the senses inward at the same time.
“But I’m not reaching for the divine. The fugue is just…” I don’t really know how to describe it. “A different plane of reality.” That’s what Marcus called it, and that seems to fit.
She pulls her gaze down to look into my eyes. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” I say, even though I’m not sure about any of it. “Look, I have an idea—” She cuts me off by stepping closer.
“I need to tell you something first,” she says. “You are incredibly special, Eli.”
I hardly need a reminder. “That’s what I want to talk to you about.”
“You said once that you wanted to know everything about yourself: how you were made, what our purpose was in creating you. Well, your purpose was this.” She gestures to the cathedral glowing around us. “You were our attempt to reach for the divine.”
I fold my arms. My shoulders hunch up. “I’m sorry that’s not working out for you.”
“Oh, but it is.” She steps even closer and touches my arm. “From the very beginning, I knew your humanity would be the key to bringing out your gift. Your ability to pierce the veil was lying inside you, dormant, because of the immensity of it—if you came out of the womb fully expressing your potential, it would have destroyed you. That’s what I think happened to the other children—they expressed too soon. They knew what they were, even in their mother’s wombs, and their human side could not withstand it. They were consumed in a rush of the divine and returned to it. But you… you lived. And by every measure we could take, you were an entirely normal human boy. Somehow, your gift was waiting until you were ready for it. Until your human side was strong enough to be the vessel. You only needed the right channel, the right trigger, to merge the two parts of you together.”
He
r words are seriously freaking me out. I want to shrink away from her, but the soft glow of the cathedral lights are playing some kind of havoc on my senses, and she’s glowing with even more beauty than normal. “What two parts? Do you mean the fugue and the real world? Or my human DNA and whatever else you used to create me?”
“Yes.” She smiles and draws even closer. “Both. There is a duality inside you, and the merging of those two sides is your calling, Eli.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not sure I want to answer the call.”
She slides her hand along my arm, and it sends a shiver racing up my skin. “Do you know what will happen when you do?”
“I’m hoping the answer isn’t what happened to the other experiments.”
Her eyes are shining again. She’s close enough that I can see the tiny dilations of her eyes as the stained-glass colors move across her face. Those beams of light on her skin compete with the flush of silver-pink rippling across it.
“You’ve already begun to express, Eli,” she says, breathless. “You’ve already survived the transition. Now it’s just a matter of learning to control it, manifest it, integrate it… to call into being the full expression of what you are. And when that happens…”
I frown. “What?”
“You will no longer be mortal.”
I draw back. “What do you mean?” Is she saying I’ll ascend? Like her?
Her hand slides farther and unlocks my folded arms. She grasps my hand between her two, and hers are incredibly soft. It’s like being touched by the smoothest of silks—only her skin on mine is racing heat throughout my body like no mere fabric ever could.
“You will still have this form,” she says, her smile growing into something excited. “You will be fully human. But you will also be fully divine. You will live as long as any ascender, but you will be more powerful than all of us combined.”
My heart is pounding so hard it is physically hurting my chest. “How can you know any of this?” This can’t be real. None of this can be real.
“Because it’s what I designed you to be.” She reaches for my face and touches it with two fingers. “Perfect. Immortal. Transcendent.”
The Duality Bridge (Singularity #2) (Singularity Series) Page 19