Æstival Tide w-2

by Elizabeth Hand

  It was a woman: a woman of glass. He could see her veins, filaments of glowing jade and cerise, twisting around joints of silver metal. Her ribs curved like two hands cupping the softly glowing air, and behind them, where a human heart would be, was a sphere of the most perfect gold. Electrical fibers chased across it, and when Hobi touched the front of the sarcophagus threads of light streamed toward him. Even her face was transparent. It was as though someone had taken a living woman and replaced all her inner atomies with ice and crystal. Everything except her eyes. They glowed through translucent eyelids, beneath lashes that were like splinters of light—orbs like globes of living water, the deepest green he had ever seen. At the corner of each was a drop of blood. As he gazed transfixed her eyelids flickered. Blood welled from each eye and spilled to the bottom of the sarcophagus.

  “Only when she sleeps,” whispered Nasrani. He too had outstretched his hand to graze the glass above her cheek. “Because then she dreams that she is human.”

  “She’s beautiful,” said Hobi, hardly daring to speak. And she was: in spite of the arcane array of metal and glass, her antique, almost doll-like features, she was breathtakingly lovely. “What— who —is she?”

  Nasrani only stared at her without answering. After a moment Hobi asked again. Nasrani turned away, to look out at the room where the other replicants engaged each other in witless conversations. When he spoke his voice was soft, almost a whisper.

  “She is a nemosyne. One of the memory units devised after the First Ascension, when people feared that the holocausts would destroy all records of humanity. They were designed and then given to various wise men and women, who programmed them to record, oh, everything. There were nemosynes for agriculture and meteorology, oceanographic units and military units and units that had entire libraries of books and films and ’files on them.”

  Hobi shook his head. “What happened to them?”

  Nasrani shrugged. “Like everything else, they were destroyed over the centuries; most of them at least. But some must have survived—this one did—and probably they are out there now, keeping their secrets until we can find them and learn from them again.”

  In the silence Maximillian Ur’s blades whickered and snapped, and Apulieus scolded noisily. Finally, Nasrani said, “If we could find them, we could rebuild the world. We could locate and renew the fallen cities. We could find the lost arsenals and defeat our enemies at last, and end the wars with the Emirate and the Commonwealth. We could do anything, if we could find more of these—they have blueprints for machines and computers, they could teach us how to stop the plagues, how to repair the starships, how to revive the poisoned deserts. They remember everything.”

  He fell silent, staring at the imprisoned nemosyne.

  Hobi pressed his face against the cool glass. From inside he could hear a very faint whirring, a sound more like running water than the pulse of circuitry. She had skin of some very thin fine metal stretched across the sharp planes of her cheeks and jaw. As he stared the translucent skin shivered, and her eyelids trembled.

  “How do you know?” he asked at last.

  Nasrani shook his head. “I found ’files about them. I even have records of where some of them were stored. But those cities are dead now, and the nemosynes like everything else in them were destroyed. Or else they are waiting until we find and wake them once again.”

  His eyes as they gazed at the nemosyne were brilliant, almost feverish. For the first time Hobi noticed what an odd color they were. Nasrani’s voice rose plaintively.

  “But I can’t even figure out how to get this one to operate correctly! All she will do is state her operating history and serial number. Sometimes she recites things at random, things from her datafiles. She was a storage unit for minority histories. Women’s folktales. Poems. Useless things—she’ll recite them forever. But I can’t get any response beyond that. She won’t answer my questions.”

  His annoyance faded. “She is still half-asleep, and I don’t know how to wake her,” he ended sadly.

  “Wake her,” murmured Hobi. He gazed with wide brown eyes at the glass woman, once more rested his cheek against hers to listen to her receptors softly pulsing.

  “If I could wake her,” Nasrani went on, “ I could find out about the rest. They were supposed to be linked. I might even be able to access the others, if they still exist.”

  “What would you do with them? I mean, if you could talk to them?”

  Nasrani straightened, glanced at the boy, and cleared his throat.

  “The world is too large now,” he said, as though addressing an audience. “Too small in some ways—how many people here, besides the Aviators, have ever been Outside? But too large as well. Too difficult to travel Outside, too many dangers, too many enemies. The nemosynes could— teach us —things.”

  “But her?” Hobi stroked her cheek. “What could she teach?”

  Nasrani sighed. “If I could find out how to access her interactive mode I might be able to question her, link with the others or at least access some of her classified files. But I just can’t figure it out. There must be a trick to it, but I’ve spent years trying and I still can’t wake her.” With a sigh he turned and walked away.

  For a few minutes Hobi remained. “Wake up,” he whispered, his breath clouding the cool glass. Within her sarcophagus the Beautiful One slept on, heedless of him, heedless of all the world. He looked away, embarrassed.

  In the middle of the room stood Nasrani, surrounded by the last few guttering candles. He seemed dispirited; even the tails of his greatcoat drooped to brush the floor.

  “Moghrebi,” he called softly. “Apulieus, my good man. Come now, Moghrebi. Be a sweet girl, Jackie.”

  One by one they returned to their sleep: the Anodyne Physician entering her cabinet with good grace, bowing her golden head to Nasrani and staring out at Hobi with unblinking glass eyes. Apulieus waved mockingly and disappeared behind his case’s oaken doors. The monads buzzed into their tiny compartments, their noise silenced as the doors snapped closed. Last of all went Maximillian Ur, his four arms with their glittering knives whistling through the air as he groaned and clicked and threatened, until Nasrani slammed the door after him.

  In the hollow silence that followed Nasrani’s voice echoed mournfully. “ I keep them so she won’t be lonely,” he said, “so that in case one day she wakes, she won’t think she is the last of her kind.”

  He bent to blow out another candle, then started for the door, motioning for Hobi to join him.

  For a long final moment the boy gazed at the nemosyne, her staring green eyes with their golden veins, the sanguine tears welling up in them to spill upon the floor. His hand lingered on her face until he heard Nasrani shuffling impatiently.

  As the boy went to meet him the last few candles began to sputter and go out. Nasrani fumbled for his key. The encroaching darkness frightened Hobi, and he stepped a little closer to the exile. It was silly, but when the replicants had been moving about, the place didn’t feel so desolate. At home he had often been in a room full of servers and tutors and scholiasts, but he had never felt like this, as though the replicants had characters of their own. The nemosyne most of all, of course: beautiful and tragic, trapped within her glass coffin. But the others too, although he had known them only briefly. Wicked Maximillian. Sarcastic Apulieus. The gentle Physician. His own robotic Physician had about as much character as his toothbrush.

  But here for a little while, he had felt as though he were in a crowd; almost as though he were at a party. And he remembered something his mother had once said about Nasrani Orsina.

  They had been at a gathering in the Orsinate’s sanctuary, the Four Hundredth Room. It was several years before Nasrani was exiled for his attempted murder of his sister—

  “Look at him,” His mother raised her glass, a tiny bell-shaped tumbler dancing with the emerald spirits of Amity-in-Occis, and peered through it as though it were a spyglass. “Your father’s friend, Nasrani Orsina.” T
he name sounded like a curse in her mouth. “He’s like a clockwork man. Nods and talks and laughs on cue, bows to his sisters and smiles as he slices out your liver. A perfect gentleman. A perfect clockwork man.”

  His mother was given to such blunt pronouncements. She had once, to her face, called Nike and her sisters “inbred swine,” a slur that had caused Nike to laugh with her hooting voice. The truth was that Angelika frightened her: Nike thought she was a witch. But now Angelika was looking not at Nike but at her brother Nasrani. Hobi wondered what it could be about this tall man, elegant in lavender moleskin trousers and crimson greatcoat, that reminded his mother of an automaton.

  “His eyes,” she’d said. A drop of Amity clung to her upper lip like a petal of lime blossom. “His hands, his feet, everything. He has everything that a real person has, except a heart. Even that sow ziz has a heart, although it’s a sick rotten thing.” She’d turned then to greet ziz, kissing her and leaving a carnal smear of red across her cheek.

  Hobi thought of that now as he watched Nasrani stoop to retrieve the failing lumiere. A clockwork man.

  “What brought you down here? The first time, I mean.”

  Nasrani turned to him, brandishing the lumiere so that Hobi shrank from him. But then he realized that Nasrani’s expression was not angry but tormented. Without a word he yanked the door open and stepped outside. Sudden terror seized the boy: that he had offended the man and would be left here alone. He started after Nasrani, stammering apologies.

  “No, no,” said Nasrani. He held the door until Hobi stood beside him. Behind them something squeaked and chittered. Hobi looked over his shoulder in time to see a tiny form dart out to seize a bit of tallow. “I’m not angry, my dear. It’s just that—”

  The exile’s eyes were immensely sad. “It’s just that I come here to forget. About all that—”

  He shook his hand, indicating the ceiling and what lay beyond, level after level of misery and tumult and twisted steel, humans reduced to living in the ruins of monstrous machines and computers endlessly designing unlivable new habitats. “All that up there. The Holy City; the family curse.” He drew a hand to his face as though he were in pain.

  In the doorway Hobi hesitated and looked back. For a moment he glimpsed the room, lit by a single pallid flame. In their cabinets the replicants and androids stood, gazing blindly or else with eyes closed, returned to that terrible dreamless state wherein they would wait forever until someone, came to rouse them. He stared at the nemosyne, her body shimmering blue and rose as the last blue flame leaped and tossed its feeble light upon her frozen smile. Then the flame went out. He heard tiny voices twittering, small feet pattering from the corners, and looked away as Nasrani locked the door.

  Outside of Ceryl Waxwing’s chambers the nuclear CLOCK clanged twenty. Reive waited to see if this woman would say more. She had already said too much. But Ceryl was silent, her face pale as she stared at the window.

  “That’s all,” she said at last. She would not look at Reive.

  In her chair the gynander nodded and bit her lower lip, her brow creased as she debated how best to answer. Her breath felt heavy inside her; her head spun as she gazed at Ceryl and thought, She is mad, to have even dreamed of telling this to anyone, she must be crazy….

  But Reive said nothing; only closed her eyes and wished she had brought the little brass case that held her joss sticks and incense burners, anything to gain a little more time, a few more minutes before Ceryl grew tired of waiting for her answer.

  The meaning of the dream was clear. Reive had never before heard of a dream so obvious in its portents. Usually she had a little more trouble than the other mantics; just as she looked subtly different from them, so it was more difficult for her to scry the truth behind the mundane fantasies of bored technicians and anxious diplomats. The hermaphrodites had been bred for their sensitivity to the unconscious whims of others, but somehow Reive lacked their insight. She even wondered if she was a true hermaphrodite at all; but of course the physical evidence was unmistakable. It was simply that she had no gift for scrying. Often she just sat there, listening to the tiresome recitative of a nervous aristocrat while a yellow plume of smoke rose from her incense burner. When her patron finally grew silent, waiting for her to interpret the dream, Reive would make something up.

  This time that would not be necessary. The back of her neck prickled, excitement burgeoned inside of her like a drug as she realized that this must be what it was like for the others, this certainty that she could read Ceryl’s sleeping thoughts like a map. As sure as she knew her name she knew what this dream portended. She took a deep breath and opened her eyes.

  “You have dreamed of the holocaust that will destroy Araboth.”

  Her voice sounded too deep, hollow as though it boomed up from some great depth. Across from her Ceryl Waxwing blinked.

  “It is the dream of Ucalegon the Prince of Storms, and Baratdaja the Healing Wind.” Inside of Reive’s head was a pounding that threatened to drown the sound of her own voice. She gasped, “It is growing Outside; it is waiting for the gates to open….”

  Ceryl nodded slowly. Her hands shook as she drew them to her face. “What else?” she whispered.

  Eyes wide, the gynander shook her head, unable to speak. The thudding inside her head became a roar. She heard the voice of Zalophus shrieking—

  I hear my sisters calling and the winds gathering for the great storm, I hear the voice of Ucalegon shouting in its sleep ….

  The gynander began to shake. Behind her closed eyelids a light pulsed and words whistled through her skull—

  Ucalegon. Baratdaja. Prince of Storms and the Healing Wind. The holocaust that will destroy Araboth.

  She recalled the tremor that had shook her room that morning, and a hermaphrodite crying The domes moved, we saw the walls shake ….

  And then once more the voice of the imprisoned leviathan warning her,

  “… in the Undercity the rift is widening: soon it will breach the open sea ….”

  “Zalophus,” Reive whispered.

  He had not been mad. The city was in danger. It was all real, somehow he had sounded the very depths of the Undercity and seen it there; somehow this woman Ceryl had seen it too. It was not a dream that haunted Ceryl Waxwing. It was The Dream, the Great Portent, the Final Warning that the Orsinate had been searching for so desperately with all their occult games. They had placed all their trust in the Architects, in things that could be measured and quantified and engineered, but the one thing the Architects could not do was dream.

  They had thought to keep the world Outside at bay, and had, ever since the Long Night of the First Ascension, when the prairies turned to glass and the sky choked beneath black and frozen rain. After that Araboth had been raised, the Architects set to guard the people who fled the poisoned world Outside the domes. In all those centuries they had never left. The ruling families retreated to the upper levels, where they bred with each other like mad wary spiders. And gradually the world Outside faded to nothing but children’s stories, a green monster resurrected each Æstival Tide and ultimately defeated when once more the Lahatiel Gate clanged shut. An emerald nightmare; the dream of the Green Country.

  She saw it now as though it were etched upon her brain. A fissure splitting the Undercity like a wound, prying apart the monstrous colonnades upon which the city rested. Outside, the Green Country overtaking the city. Araboth crushed beneath the wave, a wave like a verdant cape covering the spires and struts and domes of the Holy City.

  Reive’s eyes flew open. Ceryl cried out at the sudden flash of color in the gynander’s masklike face. They stared at each other, neither one daring to speak as they thought the same thing.

  Treason. Torture. Execution. Death.

  Ceryl spoke first, her voice trembling. “There is no other meaning?” Her tone was without hope.

  The gynander shook her head. “No. But this is not the only sign. There have been other things,” she said slowly. “We have s
een them—on Virtues Level the ground shook, and we heard a warning, from—”

  She fell silent, reluctant to speak of Zalophus.

  Ceryl nodded. She kneaded the sleeves of her catsuit, her palms leaving damp stains on the fabric. “I have too,” she said hoarsely. “Now that you mention it. A crack in the pavement…”

  Such a tiny thing, it had seemed a few hours ago; now Ceryl stared at the floor of her room, terrified that she would see something there, a rift that would widen until it swallowed them all. She looked at Reive.

  “You can’t tell anyone,” she said. Her hands tightened as she clenched her arms. Reive said nothing and she went on, desperately, “You know what will happen if you do—they’ll take me, the Reception Committee will come and take me away. This close to Æstival Tide, they’ll give me to—”

  “The Compassionate Redeemer,” Reive said softly.

  Ceryl nodded. She looked around her room at the alembics and vials of dried herbs, the weights and measures she used in her work. She could hear the steady crash of waves against the outer domes, a sound that thrummed counterpoint to the panicky beat of her heart. It all seemed tainted now, as though her dream were a sickly odor that had seeped into all her things. When she glanced back at Reive she saw the gynander watching her with wide frightened eyes. A pang shot through Ceryl. A feeling she had not had since Giton died: that there were other people in the world beside herself, and somehow she might be held responsible for them.

  She took a deep breath. “I think I’d like for you to come with me. To my chambers on Thrones Level. It—I think we might be safer there. At least the rooms are larger than here, there would be room for both of us.”

  On Thrones they would be closer to the Orsinate, and that was dangerous. But if the city was really threatened with destruction, it seemed they might be safer on the upper levels than here. And there was something to be said for hiding in plain sight. “Will you come with me?”