by Dan Glover
Luciana... how did he know that name when all else faded from his memory? What was it about her that called out to him so? He'd always experienced vivid dreams, or so he supposed. Each night was an adventure yet come the morning those night visions faded into the obscurity from which they were born.
He had forgotten when the dreams became more real to him that waking life, or if there was ever a time when he was truly awake. His whole life had been lived in a sort of fugue state where people and places came and went of their own accords while only he remained.
"Don't you remember me, Father?"
She seemed so sad that he might have forgotten her and though he searched his mind for any hint of familiarity he found himself shaking his head before the memory of her burst into view. Of course he remembered her... how could he not?
"You are Daughter."
The way she shouted with joy gladdened his hearts as if he had presented her with a treasure without measure. He wondered how he could have ever forgotten her. She was a light in his world of gloom, a twinkling in a lifetime of black foreboding.
If he could choose anyone to spend eternity with, it would be Daughter. Yet he knew better. She had her own life... one of color and glory... while his was dismal and malignant with the seeds of yesterday.
No one needed him... moreover, he was sure that his usefulness had long ago left him. Now he only troubled those around him even though he had sought to temper the flares bursting forth from the powerful currents raging through his mind.
He wasn’t welcome. Even those who should have loved him best agreed that his presence was detrimental to living beings all around him. Though he had never attempted to re-ignite the love affair that once blossomed between he and Lily, it had happened anyway.
"You are my son and I'll always love you, but you must leave here, my precious Kāne. You are like a drug to our Lily. As long as you're within a day of travel, she will continue to seek you out despite her best intentions."
His mother had come to him in his old abode at Edinburgh Castle. He didn’t want to tell her that he couldn’t remember who Lily was yet the sadness in Lauren's voice had compelled him to do as she desired. He wanted to tell his mother that he would have left anyway but it felt better to simply do her bidding.
He took the blame upon himself: to make excuses never occurred to him. He had left the island the same day never even bothering to bring anything with him... possessions meant nothing more than being bound up in things from which he was better free of.
Though old Australia had been his home for centuries, traveling to old Africa a thousand years ago had done a great deal to settle the ragings of his mind. His artwork blossomed. When Daughter showed up with news of Lily's kidnapping he had once again left everything behind in an instant. Though he couldn’t remember her, the love still abiding deep inside of him and doubtlessly always would.
Even though the darkest part of old Africa was many thousands of kilometers from Orchardton Hall, he still felt the pull of that place. Immense beasts of the jungle became his pets as did the tiniest shrews that quivered in the grasses that grew thick and lush in the savannas surrounding the area where he made his abode.
He would have liked to see old Africa once more before he died but now he had other business. Though he had long ago forsaken both friends and family when the call sounded he could not ignore it.
Making Cape Horn during good weather instilled hope within him that he would not be late. His destination had become murkier with time, however, and he was being pulled toward Toulon. Someone there was in trouble... someone he once loved. Sailing west past the old British Isles he passed through the Firth of Fife before setting his course for the Isle of Skye.
He feared nothing in the world but a feeling of consternation grew ever thicker and tighter in the pit of his stomach as he sailed along the wild coasts searching in vain for a spot amid the rocks that might more easily accessible. Finally he dropped anchor near a cliff that seemed less tall than in other spots.
A rugged surf pounded the rocky shore line as a rip tide kept pulling his skiff out to sea. About the time he was ready to give up and make for his schooner, the tides shifted and pulled him into shore.
A chill wind pummeled him as he climbed the cliff. It wasn’t nearly as easy as it looked from the water but within a couple hours he had managed to mount the top to overlook the land beyond. In the distance a ragged villa seemed to sprout out of the rocks like a overgrown mushroom.
He had found Luciana.
Chapter 42—Back Again
"Do you still love me, darling Micah?"
Her words still rang in his head as he felt himself falling. Grasping at the edges of the open door did no good as between the lurching of the craft and the pull of gravity he was drawn into the nothingness of space.
It was a dream he'd had since a child. All he had to do was to open his eyes and he'd find himself home in Toulon, in bed and safe from the horror of the earth rushing up at him.
He flailed about with his arms and legs hoping to latch onto something and break his fall but there was nothing there. It was as if he had fallen into a pit of pitch... he couldn’t breathe, though his eyes were open he couldn’t see, and there were no sounds... only the feeling of falling.
As he fell memories came rushing back. His first day of school had been one filled with the dread of knowing he would be required to speak. By speaking, however, he knew he would remove any doubt of his being unlike the others.
The teacher called out names in alphabetical order—Adam, Billy, Cathy, Daniel, Fred, George—and as she did each child answered with a clearly enunciated here. He willed her to skip over his name. Even that one would was too much for his mind to comprehend.
"Micah."
He couldn’t answer. The teacher looked up from the sheet she was reading from to scan the room. Maybe if he just put up his hand, that signal alone would suffice to enlighten her to his presence.
"Micah."
She said his name again as some of the children next to him began tittering. Someone kicked his leg. One of the boys sitting in front of him turned and threw a wadded up piece of paper at him striking him in the forehead. It didn’t hurt so much as it startled him and the gas he'd been holding in since class started exploded into a bowel-shaking fart.
The whole class erupted in laughter, the same kind of hilarity that his peers seemed to share whenever he failed at an appointed task. He wanted to tell everyone that he didn’t do it... it was someone else that farted so loudly, not him. But the looks in his classmates' eyes told him that they knew who the culprit was.
He had wet his pants once and he was equally certain they all remembered that incident too. He had to use the loo but he didn’t want everyone to know, so he'd waited, hoping he could hold it in until recess.
When it finally let go, he sat in his seat as he heard his urine dripping onto the floor. He wondered if anyone else would notice and if so how long it would take. Maybe he might still manage to get away with it.
But then the little girl who sat next to him wrinkled her nose as she looked at him and then down to the floor and the puddle of piss gathered there under his seat. She got up, went to the teacher, and whispered something while pointing toward Micah.
"I don't understand you, Micah. You're ten years old. Why didn’t you just raise your hand and tell the teacher you had to use the toilet?"
Mother was mortified when she was called to school and informed as to what her only son had done this time. He remembered wanting to tell her about his phobia—his horror—of someone hearing him as he urinated, but he was sure she would never understand.
It was similar to the time he puked. He'd eaten something disagreeable at lunch, probably the minced meat that smelled as if it might have turned. Back in class, he could feel his stomach roiling. He knew he was going to vomit but he couldn’t seem to bring himself to raise his hand and ask permission to go to the toilet.
Instead, he sat there f
eeling the gorge rise in his throat and issue forth spilling over his textbooks and his test paper as it splashed into his lap and cascaded onto the floor where it formed a vile pool of liquid mixed with chunks of lunch.
When the school nurse called her to inform Mother about her boy's illness she had asked him the same question on the ride home... why didn’t he ask permission to go to the toilet? He couldn’t answer her that time either.
As the memories of his most embarrassing moments flooded his mind, he gradually grew aware that he didn’t know where he was. Certain that he'd been with Ena flying back to old America. He felt good that she asked him to go and so despite his trepidations he agreed. Now, though, he discovered he wasn’t with Ena at all.
Instead, he seemed to have regressed somehow. His body was smaller, more fragile, and the old pains he once felt were returning to his bones. He was back at the elementary school he had attended during the years before his genius had become manifest and he was transferred to the academy that was more in keeping with his advanced intellect.
A fast-fading memory of Ena tilting the anti-gravity craft to the side filtered through his brain as he shook his head attempting to wake from a nightmare that he sensed had no end. He had fallen out. He remembered grasping at the strap that was meant to keep him in place but in his arrogance he had neglected to fasten.
His fingers caught hold of the fabric for an instant before the weight of his body became too great to hold on any longer. He had fallen and though the earth had seemed to rush up to meet him he was suddenly transported to another time and another place.
He was sick. The familiar symptoms of his malady rushed up to greet him like long lost friends. Straight and strong only moments before, his back was twisted into a grotesque posture that made sitting in a standard school desk an experience nearly too painful to tolerate.
Shifting in his seat as he tried to wake himself from the dreadful slumber that he must have fallen into, Micah felt something running down his legs warm and wet. As the liquid pooled in his shoes he thought he might escape the embarrassment that he recalled enduring all those centuries ago.
That nasty and wicked little girl was staring at him, however, and then her eyes shifted to the floor and the puddle of urine beneath his seat. He thought her name was Ena but that wasn't right. Ena was someone else he once knew though as his mind seemed to fold in upon itself the memory of just who she was faded into a dull mist of time yet to come.
The nanobots were somehow interfering with the electrical impulses which allowed the machine to stay aloft. He had programmed them himself but he hadn't realized the full implications of his actions. Ena must have suspected what was happening as she had banked the malfunctioning anti-gravity craft sharply to the right. He had fallen into the warp field.
"Take care you keep your arms inside the vehicle while we are underway, sweet Micah. We are essentially inside a singularity. If you or any part of you were to fall into the warp field you would disintegrate and reintegrate elsewhere, either in this universe or an alternate one."
"Are you saying we're riding inside a teleportation device, darling Ena?"
"That is right, my perceptive Micah. We're inside a sort of wormhole. Although we're connected to our universe, we are also connected to the multiverse that exists outside of both space and time.
"Grandfather Nate and Mr. Pete finally managed to close up the entanglement they inadvertently opened between earth and a moon circling a gas giant in the Bernard's Star system... before that, you would have been sweep to Miranda in no more than an instant."
"Bernard's Star is six light years away, darling Ena... how is that possible?"
"You aren’t listening to me, my precious Micah... our sense of time and space fail when we encounter a wormhole."
She had warned him about this eventuality yet he never expected her to fling him into the abyss. He thought she had the same feelings for him that he had been harboring for her.
"Do you still love me, darling Micah?"
The words rattled through his brain as he watched the little girl sitting next to him get up to approach the teacher droning on by the blackboard in front of the class about some dull mathematical equation as he helplessly shuffled his feet in an effort to shuffle the urine beneath him to the seat in front of his desk.
The disgust in the eyes of the teacher looming over him reminded Micah of something though for the life of him he couldn’t remember what it was. Not here. Of all the places he might have ended up, why did he have to end up here?
Chapter 43—Drink
The man had once been a friend, perhaps, or at least someone he knew.
But now, Kirk was frightened of him. Though the man had never done anything overtly hostile to his person there was an air of dread that seemed to hover over and around Nate, as if he knew secrets too terrible to tell.
"I've come to take you home, Kirk."
The words rang in his head like the little tin bell that his father had kept fastened to the refrigerator to alert him in case Kirk tried to pilfer a bit of food or perhaps a bottle of beer. He had hated that bell. If he had more nerve, he would have ripped it from its moorings and discarded it into the black waters of the river that ran through town on its way to the sea. Instead, he learned to live with it.
Niall and Chester stood not far off. Somehow they must have found the key to the trap he'd sprung upon them... he had thought the nanobots were more fully evolved now and could deal with the presence of the Lake people but he must have miscalculated.
Standing before Nate, he felt the insightful knowledge that filled what used to be the patterns of his brain slowly leaking away. Just moments ago, Kirk had been full of resolve. He had long ago plotted to become a king. Now, he saw how he would be a god, both cruel and terrible to behold.
"I am home."
Even as he spoke the words, Kirk knew he was lying... or rather, something was home here but it wasn’t him... it was what he'd become, a bloated monster capable of apprehending even the most insignificant of secrets while simultaneously wrapping the whole of reality into one sinuous texture to be eaten at his leisure.
"Do you remember me, Kirk?"
He thought how puny this man was standing in front of him and how he could quash him into a billion bits with merely a twitch of his mind. He considered for a moment that he might demonstrate his power upon Niall. The boy was expendable. Chester seemed to know his thoughts, however, as he stepped up to block Niall from any oncoming assault with his own body, as if he knew Kirk couldn’t bring himself to hurt the big cat again.
"Go away while you still have the chance, Mr. Nate."
He had been thwarted once. The man standing before him was as responsible for that as anyone. If he didn’t leave right away, Kirk sensed the barrage of nanobots that waylaid Niall and Chester would seem tame compared to what was coming.
"Not without you, my old friend. I'm sorry that we had to leave you here. Micah told me you were dead and I believed him. You weren’t breathing and I could detect no heartbeat. Come away with me now. It's not too late. Luciana is waiting."
The mention of her name reminded Kirk that his loneliness here was far greater than anyone could imagine. Though he no longer had the need to sleep he often found himself trapped in a sort of fugue state. He had but to visualize a scene and he was there.
He could see across both time and space. Even oceans were no obstacle to his penetrating gaze. Though he had left her in Toulon, when Kirk didn’t find her there, he looked toward the home she had left.
Lately he'd been watching over Luciana but when he attempted to make contact with her, someone stepped up to stop him. He remembered having met the man at Toulon though he could never work up his nerve to actually talk to him.
His name was Kāne.
The man held a power much greater than the Ladies of the Lake... a clout that could destroy all his careful planning. It was as if a sort of electricity poured off his body in waves annihilating any hope of
overcoming him by way of pure strength.
Instead, Kirk was reminded that subterfuge was and would always be the ultimate art of warfare. When seeking to obliterate the enemy, it was best to include them in the plans.
"Luciana is dead to me, Mr. Nate. Look at me. How could I ever go to her like this?"
Though he'd been tempted many times to show himself, Kirk had remained in the shadows as he watched his wife waste away into a wraith, a ghost of her former glory. Though it troubled him to see her like that, at the same time it lent him hope that if he offered to restore her vigor and her youth, she might listen.
Now, meddlers had come to yank him away from the destiny that was rightfully his. First Niall, and then Chester, and now Nate appeared, all with unspoken intentions of luring him away from the promise of the metal and restoring him to the frailties of the flesh.
"Listen to me, Kirk. Your brain has been invaded by Micah's machines. They have made it into their own network. These thoughts that you have are not your own."
Was Nate really so dense? Did he think he was actually talking to the old Kirk... the man who used to pretend at being his friend? He had evolved far beyond that pitiful creature who used to wallow in alcohol and self abuse.
Still, something stopped him from pouring the full brunt of his powers into turning Nate into a thrall despite knowing what it would mean to have him as an ally instead of an enemy. Hadn't Nate saved Kirk's life once? What would it mean to forget the kindness Nate had shown to him over the long centuries not only at Orchardton Hall but in Toulon?
This was his destiny... he had known it since the day of the Great Dying when he made his way to Orchardton Hall knowing the Ladies presence would keep him safe. But how did he know that? Each time he thought he had the answer it slipped away from his mind like the rabbits used to run from his clutching hungry fingers when he was a boy and had nothing else to eat.