Æstival Tide w-2

by Elizabeth Hand

  The Aviator Imperator gazed down at the shivering gynander, the corpse with its long black hair spilling onto the pillows. He raised one hand to his face, and by a trick of the light glancing from his sleek mask it seemed that he had a mouth, and that mouth smiled.

  “But how could I kill her, when by my own admission such a thing is impossible?” He stepped over Shiyung’s body to the door and paused there, his blue eyes huge and brilliant. “Perhaps, after death, we are controlled by a will even stronger than our own.”

  For a long moment his gaze lingered upon her.

  “Dreams are dangerous things, Reive Orsina,” he said, and left her alone with the corpse of the margravine Shiyung.

  Chapter 6

  THE BEAUTIFUL ONE IS HERE

  IN THE DARKNESS SHE sleeps. The darkness moves about her, touches her steel breasts, the chromium arc of her mouth, the downcurved lapis petals that are her eyelids. There is a secret to waking her, a little joke really, if only the darkness knew.

  The woman had named her Nefertity, The Beautiful One Is Here; but the name could also be read as Great Fortune Comes, or again as I Am The Million Years, or even as The Beautiful Ones Are Here. She had not yet known great fortune, nor had she lasted a million years, at least not this shell of metal and plastic and shining magnetized wire. Had she remained outside as her siblings had, those other gilded husks wherein the dreams and memories of the Last Days had been encoded, she would have been lost like they were, or melted into streams of hissing metal and mercurial thought, the glories and songs and warnings of the fin de millénaire so much poisonous gas choking the fiery air.

  But she was the Beautiful One. She was beloved: she had been saved. The woman had kept her in a stone-and-steel bunker with her, alone, while outside the years spun by in a silent fury and inside the woman’s hair grew white. The woman’s name was forgotten now; but once other women, a million women, five million, had known her name and sang it and tapped it out upon their monitors, upon their breasts, upon the sleeping faces of their daughters.

  But the woman died four centuries before, of old age. One of the few women of her century to do so—many more succumbed to plague, or childbirth, or the gynocides, or were executed as political prisoners, or herded into research facilities where their wombs were used to give birth to the Ascendants’ nightmares.

  And so now only Nefertity might recall the woman’s name; but the Beautiful One is sleeping. As she sleeps she dreams of the woman in the bunker, the woman eating krill paste and halvah with her fingers and afterward leaving a sweet smear across Nefertity’s mouth. In another time or place, mice or flies would then have crept across the nemosyne’s sticky mouth to feed; but the woman had long since eaten them. Decades passed and the woman lived on, alone in the bunker with her books and her ’files and the gorgeous machine she had stolen when the American Vatican fell to the recusants. And through all those after years she alone spoke to the Beautiful One, whispered her secrets, warned her of the enemy, shared with her ’files and books and paintings and programs and films and holos and songs. Into Nefertity’s cold and boundless heart the woman poured all her dreams and memories, like shining sand into a glittering pit; and Nefertity swallowed them all, she embraced them, she recalled them, she recorded them, she devoured them. The woman would die one day but Nefertity would not. Nefertity would remember, Nefertity would never ever forget.

  And so the woman brought them on, raging as she strove against madness and age and illness, struggling to recall for the nemosyne’s databanks all those other women whose histories would otherwise be forgotten. The woman groaned and mumbled, dragging them by hair and breasts and hands, pummeling them as she tore volumes and photographs and tapes from her shelves, until one by one they all fell into the maw of the Beautiful One—

  The Venus of Willendorf, the Animal Wife, the Bog Woman, the Iron Age Princess, Queen Hatshepsut, Cleopatra burning on the Nile, Nike headless and winged like dawn, Brisingamen wearing the rainbow’s ardor about her neck, Demeter’s tears burning grapes upon the vine, Sappho’s leap, George Sand’s trousers, Mary Godwin sneezing as she molded the new Prometheus from the Mediterranean mud, Judith and Salome carrying their lovers’ heads beneath plump arms, Garbo talking, Sarah Bernhardt sleeping in her coffin, Queen Victoria spinning in hers, Mary Pickford, Mary Quant, Mary Magdalene, Mary Queen of Scotts, Sei Shonagun, Lady Murasaki, Yll Peng-Si the Tyrant of the Mongolian Nuclear Republic, Sylvia Plath, Gracie Allen, Hedda Morestein, Anne Frank, Indira Gandhi, Fasa Manh-Tul, Kyra MacDougal, Gertrude Stein, Artemis, Astarte, Inanna, Kali, The Norns, The Fates, The Grey Sisters, the Supremes, Margaret Thatcher, Magda Kurtz, Lizzie Siddal, Kwan-Lin, Loretta Riding, Nefertity…

  A thousand of them, a million—

  And when she died the woman left the nemosyne in her case, and on the case a set of hieroglyphs spelling out her history, and instructions for her use, and beneath that the nemosyne’s name scratched into the plasteel shell—

  NFRTI: Nefertity. I Am The Million.

  The Beautiful Ones Are Here.

  Hobi could not sleep. For hours he tossed in bed, listening for the sound of his father’s return from the dream inquisition, staring glassy-eyed at the mess surrounding him while he rubbed his feverish cheeks. He kept seeing that black pit in the Undercity, hearing the chilly voice of the Architects intoning There is a breach in the fundus of Angels as the monitors filled with glowing letters spelling out terrible warnings he could not understand.

  But mostly, he thought of Nefertity. That was what filled his mind: the golden face of the sleeping nemosyne with the twisted hieroglyphs and archaic letters across her brow. The sharp nose, the arched cheekbones tipped with silver, the chin pointed but rounded at the end (like his own, if he had only known it) and chased with silver threads like water flowing across her crystal flesh. Most of all, her eyes. Slanted eyes, even as she slept he knew they were beautiful eyes, and trapped such strange things! What face had she looked on last? When she awoke now to see him, would she falter and perhaps cry out?

  Hobi moaned and turned onto his back, threw his arm across his forehead as he stared at the ceiling. She was a replicant. Even when designed for sexual congress (and few of them were: there were other things for that, argalæ and aardmen and even, he had heard once to his disgust, rasas), even when created as robotic courtesans, replicants could not respond appropriately to their human partners, not really: because of course they were only machines. Beautiful machines, sleek and clean of line as dolphins, but no more capable of loving response than one of Shiyung Orsina’s mutated animals.

  Hobi knew all this, of course. He had slept with boys, more often with girls; and with one of his human tutors he had visited a brothel on Principalities, and engaged a moujik woman. All of these experiences had been, if not precisely memorable, at least satisfactory. He knew from books and ’files that there was supposed to be some more severe level of attachment involved with other humans; all the great stories said so. But one didn’t see evidence of these attachments on the upper levels of Araboth. His father had been grief-stricken by his wife’s murder, but when she was alive he spent a good deal of time pursuing girl children and leaving her to the ministrations of her own cohort of artistic young men. To be sure, the affairs that convulsed Cherubim and Seraphim were nearly always between men and men, or men and women, or women and women. There had been Zubin Billimoria’s obsession with the rasa of a deformed moujik child, of course, but everyone agreed that his passion was sentimental to the point of grossness. And on the upper levels it was considered very gauche to tryst with androids.

  Why then couldn’t Hobi forget Nefertity’s metal face, or the sound—a chime that seemed to have followed him back to Cherubim, he swore that thin silvery sound was what kept him from sleeping—he had heard when first he gazed upon her? The Beautiful One, Nasrani had called her; Nasrani the clockwork man.

  Hobi closed his eyes and thought of the exile going from one cabinet to the next in his cyclorama, waking
the Titanium Children and Maximillian Ur. He would find Nasrani and go with him to the Undercity, and find her once again. And somehow, somehow he would wake her.

  He did not rise until the following evening. Red-eyed and smelling of brandy, he stumbled out to where his father sat in the dim main room, staring at a mercury lamp. Sajur wore the same black suit and turban he’d had on yesterday. He had removed his emerald mourning bands and lined them up neatly on the small table in front of him. His Imperator’s chain of office, with its golden crucifix and opaline eye, hung around the neck of the lantern.

  “Good morning,” Hobi muttered. He sank onto a brocade pillow and called to Khum down the hall, “Kehveh please.”

  Sajur Panggang reached out to the mercury lamp and touched its glass chimney, watching the silver liquid stream toward his hand. “ ‘Good evening’ is more like it. Are you ill?”

  “A little.” Hobi shivered and pulled his robe tighter around him. With surprise he noted an empty decanter on the table by his father. Next to it was a crumpled sheet of allurian tissue from one of the computer imprimaturs, flickering gold and purple upon the marquetry tabletop. ziz’s stationary. He’d last seen it after his mother’s death. “Has—did something happen?”

  Sajur sat in silence for a few minutes, tapping the edge of the crucifix against the mercury glass and humming a tune that had been popular last Æstival Tide. Tomorrow the gamelan orchestras would be banging it out again, as the crowds waited for the Lahatiel Gate to swing open. Hobi cleared his throat and started to ask about the Investiture, but thought better of it.

  At last the replicant Khum returned with a salver of kehveh. Sajur Panggang’s demitasse steamed at his elbow unnoticed. Hobi spooned sweetener into his and sipped it, eyeing his father uneasily. Outside, Cherubim’s residential canyons glowed crimson and gold, and the nuclear CLOCK read near midnought, but still Sajur had not switched on any lights save that single glimmering lamp.

  Finally he turned to his son and said, “You weren’t at the dream inquisition.”

  Hobi looked surprised. This wasn’t normally something his father would care about, certainly not enough to send him reaching for the Amity and sitting in the dark. “No. I’m sorry, I just—”

  “There was a gynander there. A new one, someone from the lower levels. She served ziz’s dream—”

  He hesitated and stared at his son. Hobi suddenly felt cold. He had the terrible feeling that his father was going to announce, “—And I know where you went with Nasrani Orsina.”

  Instead his father said, “And she said it was the dream of the Green Country.” He paused and turned again to gaze at the flowing interior of the mercury lamp. “ziz Orsina: she said ziz dreamed of the Green Country.”

  Hobi swallowed his kehveh. Despite the sweetener it tasted bitter and he pushed the cup away. “The Green Country,” he repeated uneasily. “But— ziz? The gynander must have been drunk.”

  Sajur spread his hands as though warming them. Now it almost seemed that he was trying not to smile. “They had her imprisoned, of course. The morphodite. I wish they hadn’t, at least not yet. I—”

  He looked up at his son. The lines around his eyes looked as though they had grown less taut since yesterday. “I would have liked to have spoken to her first. It’s—rather an unusual thing for a margravine to dream of, just days before Æstival Tide. Don’t you think?”

  Now he really was smiling. Hobi looked away hastily and gulped his kehveh. The Green Country. He stared down at his demitasse, so that his father wouldn’t see his face. “How could she? ziz, I mean—how could she have dreamed it? And—well, what happens now?”

  “Now?” Sajur shrugged and held his empty cup up to the mercury lamp. The silvery light made the porcelain glow like melting ice. “I guess we wait and see if the story gets out to the ’files. There’ll be riots, if it does. The entire city is at fever pitch already, anticipating the festival. I’ve never seen anything like it, in other years. You’ve heard the rumors, of course.”

  Hobi’s stomach knotted. “Rumors?”

  “Yes. Some sort of tremors shaking the lower levels. One supposedly caused a refinery explosion on Archangels. I’ve heard they’ve even been reported up here.”

  His father smiled, so unexpectedly that Hobi shivered. His father took no notice. With both hands he removed his turban, pausing to glance critically at the artificial tourmaline nearly buried within the folds of black silk. He removed the stone, dropping the turban, then carefully placed the tourmaline on the floor. Hobi watched him, too stunned to do more than stammer.

  “The Green Country—that’s supposed to be a prophesy, right, a storm or something. The domes—the domes failing. Are we—are we safe here?” he babbled as his father stared ruminatively at the tourmaline.

  Sajur shook his head. “Safe?” he repeated. “ Safe? ” He lifted his foot, then very slowly crushed the tourmaline beneath the sole of his boot. It made a grinding noise, then suddenly exploded into gray powder and flying chips of glass. The Architect Imperator raised his head.

  “Of course we’re safe. The Architects monitor everything, and I monitor the Architects, and the Orsinate monitors me. How could anything possibly go wrong?”

  He turned, reaching for the little gold crucifix that hung against the mercury glass lantern.

  “Father—” Hobi choked; but Sajur ignored him. He smiled, wider and wider, tapping the crucifix against the glass until suddenly it shattered. Volatile spirits flamed up in a flash of silver and blue, and just as suddenly were gone. The crucifix lay in a hissing pool of liquid on the marquetry table.

  Hobi stared at him, his heart throbbing so painfully that he thought he would faint, but his father did not look up or even move his hand from the caustic mess, only continued to smile and stare, until at last he said, “One trembles to think…”

  From the room down the hall came the click and whir of the Architects where they had been left to their mœbius loops, abandoned to their terrible employment.

  The Architect Imperator had gone quite mad.

  In the vivarium Zalophus dreams. It is a dream of open seas, of waters full of leaping fish and creatures with claws strong enough to rip through the wings of any animal foolish enough to let its flight bring it within inches of the roiling surface. There are many of these animals in Zalophus’s dream, just as there are more fish here than he has ever glimpsed in all the centuries he has been imprisoned in the vivarium. The fish and the flying creatures spin and toss, and when Zalophus heaves himself through the air they fall into his gaping mouth. Then he smacks back into the ocean, and feels himself sink down, down, through the blue and churning water until it grows cooler around his huge body and he feels the current that will lead him back to them, back to those others like himself, his dark and massive sisters. He has lost them, the pod left behind as he chased a great eel through the arctic night. He has lost them and now, five hundred thousand years later, he is still searching for them.

  But he has never really seen the open sea. Not this sea, at least; not this Zalophus. Through his dreams he sounds and bellows, and sometimes through his waking days as well, calling through the watergate to where the Gulf pounds against the silent shore that encircles Araboth. Come back, come back, he thunders; but his sisters do not hear him. It is as the gynander told him: they are millennia dead, and there are no others of their kin left to answer him.

  Now something else shakes his sleeping as well, though this is harder for the zeuglodon to comprehend. Not the smell or taste or rush of water along his sides and fins but another thing, a smaller thing that is more frightening, because it has nothing to do with water at all.

  It is a sound. It is a voice: a human voice. The great carnivore cannot understand what it is saying, but he knows it is speaking to him. It reminds him of the voice of the gynander who lured the siren into his tank one evening; or rather, the gynander’s voice reminds him of this other dream-voice, high and fluting and plaintive. It is a voice beseeching him. H
e understands that it is desperate, it is pleading, but he cannot understand what it is saying or what it wants. He cannot really understand its desperation, except insofar that it is a kind of hunger, a yearning akin to his own awful dreaming of the open sea. It cries and begs beneath the waves of that other, larger and less complicated mass of memory; it weeps and pleads without ceasing.

  The voice maddens Zalophus. In his sleep he turns, scraping his head against the side of the tank, and moans so loudly that the walls of the vivarium shudder. But the voice does not sleep. It cannot sleep, because it is part of the oldest geneslave. It is the sliver of consciousness of the other thing that went into the creation of the sentient zeuglodon, the thing that had been a man before some researcher centuries before decided to make of it a new thing, a new creature. It moans and pummels inside of Zalophus as the whale moans and thrashes inside its prison; and like Zalophus it will never be free.

  But now the dream of Zalophus changes. The sea falls away and suddenly there is another element all around him, the terrible air that he feels so briefly when he throws himself from the water and for a few seconds is surrounded by a vast glittering desert. Only now this other element is everywhere; and the whale moans in terror, because while the sea is still there it has changed. It is not the smooth unwavering field he flows through but something new, something brilliant that hurts him, slashes against his brain and stabs his puny eyes.

  But even as Zalophus rolls over and over in his sleep, that other stab of memory, that tiny voice, welcomes this new and hurtful, thing: because what has frightened Zalophus is color, a rush of remembered blues and violets and golds and greens that the other thing, the thing that was once a man, recalls.

  And the memory of the man rejoices. As suddenly as the terror flooded Zalophus, it is gone. The voice inside him is abruptly silenced. Across the glowing grid of the whale’s thoughts there rolls the image of a vast and shining plain, a surface smooth and gleaming and alive even though it is not the sea. It stretches forever, from one horizon to the next, an immensity of hills and fields and prairies and mountains gleaming beneath a sun that is not deadly, a sun that flickers not silver-gray but golden, where rains that are not poisonous sweep the blue-washed sky. Everywhere that plain shines and gleams in a way that baffles the zeuglodon. And if Zalophus had only understood what it was that he glimpsed, the sad monster would have known to name these colors, known to name them green; would have seen the silvery rains and known they were the massive storm system whorling above the western ocean, the storm that battered the coast year after year, growing stronger through the decades as the coast fell away like splintered shale; the storm they called Ucalegon.