Æstival Tide w-2

by Elizabeth Hand

  “Ah.” She stepped before him into the gloom.

  For a moment the boy remained, and gazed back into the room: the banners torn and furled about broken beams, the pale, nearly luminous bodies half-buried beneath the rubble, and Nasrani’s ancient toys shattered where they had been sleeping.

  “No known remedy,” the Anodyne Physician murmured. In the darkness a rasa whispered, and something moved, slithering across the floor. Hobi bit his lip, and turned to where Nefertity waited for him.

  “This way?” she asked.

  He nodded: there was no other way to go.

  They walked in the eerie darkness, Hobi running his hand against the damp wall and Nefertity gliding noiselessly beside him. Her aura deepened from azure to cobalt and then faded to a pale sapphire, barely enough light to see by; but her adamant heart shone brilliantly, a golden orb flashing in the darkness. The tunnel pressed close around them, dank and cold. Hobi’s feet slipped through shallow water, and he heard water rushing very near to them, as though an adjoining tunnel served as a conduit or sluiceway. Other sounds echoed from far away: soft roars and crashes, sudden cracks and booms. And always the sound of water, seeming to grow louder now, as though the sluiceway had opened onto a river. Hobi hugged his hands in his armpits, shivering, his jaw clenched, but after they had been traveling a little while he relaxed. He was cold, true, his feet nearly numb from sloshing through chilly stagnant water; and he had seen what no one else in Araboth had, the breach in Angels that would send the whole thing crashing down in a day or two.

  But oddly enough he was no longer afraid. He almost felt elated, if it hadn’t been that his feet were damn near frozen he might have run down the narrow passageway instead of slogging through the muck.

  “You are tired,” Nefertity said. They had come to where the passage opened onto the larger tunnel. Hobi leaned against the archway, panting.

  “Tired?” He looked up into those huge depthless eyes, the silvery whorls and deltas of her face. Suddenly he grinned. “No, I’m not tired—just trying to figure out which way to go.”

  She nodded. Splinters of gold and green flecked the air about her face, and without thinking Hobi reached to touch her cheek. It grew warm beneath his fingertips. When he drew his hand back the imprint of his fingers remained, azure petals glowing against her quicksilver skin, then slowly faded.

  How can she be so beautiful? he thought. His chest felt tight with a longing so intense it made him dizzy. Something warm brushed his forehead. He blinked, saw the nemosyne staring at him, her eyes wide, reflecting nothing, her voice sweet and heartless as a bird’s.

  “Do you know the way?”

  He started to say no, then stopped and nodded.

  “Down there,” he said, and pointed away from the direction he had first come with the rasa. “I don’t know where it goes, but that way leads back to the Undercity, the gravator—” They started to walk once more.

  For a long time they went without talking. The sound of rushing water grew louder, the water splashing about their feet rose higher, until it reached the tops of Hobi’s knees. Around Nefertity the water glowed. When Hobi looked down he could see tiny shapes darting about her legs, tiny black fish like feathers streaming through the water as they followed her. He could no longer hear the boom and crash of the Undercity’s foundation shifting. He could no longer hear anything but water. It didn’t seem quite so dark. Algae and fungi still blotched the curved walls above the waterline but did not glow, only covered the ancient tile like a dark stain. The air was warmer here, too. It flowed through invisible vents and stirred Hobi’s long hair matted on his neck, and carried with it the overwhelming reek of the sea.

  And, absurdly, as that smell grew stronger, he grew more frightened. A few feet in front of him Nefertity moved effortlessly, the water streaming from her silvery thighs. As though sensing his fear she turned to look back. Hobi coughed, wiping his face with his wet sleeve and trying to compose himself. He asked, “What was she like? The woman who made you?”

  The nemosyne waited until he caught up with her. “She did not make me. Others made me; she programmed me. She was my archivist.”

  “Loretta?”

  She nodded. The water had grown shallow again, and the nemosyne stooped to gaze into it, where a black mass pooled like ink around her glittering feet. She dipped her hand into the water and brought it up full of tiny wriggling shapes, let them slide between her fingers back into the shallows. “They will die if they keep following me,” she said, gazing ahead. “Up there the water stops—”

  Hobi squinted and sloshed on. Nefertity followed.

  “Loretta Riding,” she said after a minute. “She was a Sister, a member of the American Catholic Church.” She tilted her head toward Hobi. “You know who they are?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve heard of them. Heretics, like the rest of them—they were purged after the Third Shining.”

  Nefertity said nothing. Her shimmering heart dulled to bronze as she walked, the water about her feet in small pools now that reflected her pale blue form.

  “Purged,” she said at last. Hobi nodded, embarrassed. “You killed them, then?”

  “ I didn’t kill them!” His voice rose sharply and he blushed. “I mean, none of us did, really—this was hundreds of years ago. It was Prophet Rayburn—well, his father, actually—Roland Orsina—and the Tel l ibn Waba, the Prince of the Plague. You know. The first Ascendants. The Chosen.”

  Nefertity stopped. “The Chosen.”

  Her voice suddenly did not sound so calm. A deeper tone cut into it, more like a woman’s voice than a replicant’s. When Hobi looked at her he saw that the emerald had drained from her eyes. Now they glowed dead white, like the eyes of a rasa just pulled from its tank.

  “The Chosen: you mean the recusants, don’t you? The zealots who survived the Second Ascension?”

  Hobi started to agree, but the nemosyne cut him off. Her voice was husky with anger. Loretta Riding’s voice, he realized suddenly—one of Nefertity’s programs had been encoded with the dead woman’s persona, like the palinmplants that gave some rasas the memories of their earlier lives.

  “The Chosen! They murdered children so that only they would survive, did you know that? In Meritor, Nebraska, where they’d sent them to be away from the cities, to be safe from the plague. Loretta was there, she’d volunteered to set up a folklife program recording the children’s accounts of the Holocaust. She left one day to come back to Evanston and the following week it happened. The Chosen came. They slaughtered the children and their teachers, and then they commandeered the Children’s Encampment and moved in with their own children and their drudges, their deacons and their mullahs. They claimed that their prophets predicted a Second Ascension, and they were right, of course; but is that any reason to butcher children like sheep?”

  The husky voice grew quite shrill. Hobi shook his head anxiously.

  “No—no, of course not—” he stammered. The nemosyne stared at him, through him; she had become something quite different from the beautiful automaton he had first glimpsed in Nasrani’s hidden room. Tongues of light rose and flickered from her shoulders and her arms. Her body glowed a fierce cobalt, like an android’s cooling in its adamant saggar. He had to look away from her, away from that face like a burning torch, those white-hot eyes piercing the dim tunnel.

  She said, “That was why she went into hiding, with me—in one of the bunkers they built after the First Ascension. She shouldn’t have taken me with her, of course—I belonged to the Church—but by then everything was falling apart again. She moved her entire library into that little place. Books, videos, films, syntheses; and of course she had me, I’d recorded over ten thousand hours of material by then. And for the rest of her life she read to me, and recorded what remained. Her books, mostly, and her memories. What she recalled of the world before the First Ascension, and just after. She never went outside again.”

  Hobi’s feet ached from the cold. He wanted to start moving
again. He wanted to run. The nemosyne was silent. Slowly her eyes cooled, until they shone a very pale green, and the angry blue drained from her limbs and torso. She could have been a reflection on the surface of the water, a rivulet of light.

  Hobi shivered, rubbed his prickling arms and was absurdly grateful that he could feel them. He asked, “What happened? In the end, I mean. How did she die?”

  As she replied Nefertity’s voice was a woman’s voice, weary and sad. “She was not a young woman when we entered the bunker. She was old, and she grew very old. For some years I cared for her, when she could no longer move easily. I prepared food from what remained in her stores, and purified the water she obtained from her ground still, and carried her when she could no longer walk; but she grew more and more forgetful, and finally one day she must have commanded me to sleep. Perhaps she knew she was going to die soon, and wanted to spare me—although of course it would only seem that I grieved, and if there was no one else there to see me, why then what would it matter? A robot alone in a steel bunker, mourning her dead mistress—but it must have seemed too much like one of her old stories, the idea must have saddened her. She was the kindest and wisest of women, Sister Loretta. Some people said she was a saint—a real saint, not one of those cowards who waited until the bibliochlasm and what came after, before they grew bold enough to speak against the Ascendants—and before we went into hiding there was much talk of canonizing her among the women of the Church.

  “Those were dark days, after the Second Ascension and the Third Shining. In the west they hunted women down like horses and bred them, until they saw the monsters they gave birth to. Then they just killed them, or used them in their experiments. That was when they started breeding the geneslaves. You told me there are geneslaves everywhere now. Well, then the notion was a new and monstrous thing. Loretta organized a movement against it, and the women tried to stop it. And failed, of course; I can see now that they failed.”

  Again she was silent; if she had been a real woman he thought she would have sighed, or wept. Finally she said, “That was why she became so obsessed with me, with the project. ‘We cannot forget,’ she told me, ‘but we are human and we will forget—but not you, Nefertity, never you—’ ”

  Her voice grew soft, almost a whisper, and she chanted,

  “Let the stars

  Plummet to their dark address,

  Let the mercuric

  Atoms that cripple drip

  Into the terrible well.

  You are the one

  Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn.”

  She was silent. Almost Hobi could have seen her, then, standing before her inhuman muse: a white-haired woman, thin and strong as a steel wand, with eyes blue and raging and a voice scraped raw from reading, her knuckles swollen from the ceaseless effort of turning pages, turning dials, turning history into myth and myth into a woman who would not die, would not fail her, would not forget.

  “A saint,” he whispered, and Nefertity slowly nodded.

  “But even saints die,” she said at last. “And to spare me from witnessing that, Loretta ordered me to sleep; and so I slept. For centuries, I slept. Then someone found the bunker, I suppose, and took me from it. I do not remember. By then they had forgotten about the nemosynes; they had lost the means to wake me, or even the desire. If what you told me is true, they must have brought me a very great way, and then forgotten me, for me to end up in this place. But again, I cannot remember. My files have been disturbed, my random memories were accessed. But they never woke me: in all these years and years, Hobi, only you came to wake me.”

  She raised her hand, cool and heavy as glass, and placed it upon his. She said no more.

  Hobi stared at her, embarrassed and awed and ashamed. This lovely thing, this creature of light and steel, woven with the memories of a dead Saint and the dreams of a million dead women: how could she have come to him, how was it he had been the one to call her from the darkness after all this time? The thought terrified him; suddenly Nefertity terrified him. What was she, really, this robot that was centuries old, this thing that had called him and his people murderers, monsters?

  “You don’t believe me.” Nefertity’s voice was soft as her hand slid from his shoulder.

  “No! I do, of course I do—”

  He turned so quickly he nearly slipped and fell into a shallow pool at her feet. “It’s just—well, it’s so strange, I can’t understand it all. You’re so strange.” He shrugged, and looked away. “I—I don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t know what will happen, when we get Outside. If we get outside.”

  Nefertity nodded. “We should continue. Until we find the way out; we should go on.” Her voice was cool and uninflected once more. When she began to walk again it was with an android’s detached and fluid grace. “Shall I tell you some more stories, while we walk?”

  Hobi followed her numbly. “Yes, please,” he said.

  “ I know nothing, (the nemosyne chanted), I am a tabula rasa, a blank sheet of paper, an unhatched egg. I have not yet become a woman…”

  Her words echoed gently in the darkness. Behind them, the tunnel receded into gray haze pocked green and yellow where phosphorescent algae glimmered. Ahead of them stretched pure night. The sound of rushing water had died. In its place Hobi heard a faint and regular booming, and felt the tunnel’s floor quivering beneath his feet. More explosions, he thought at first, but as the air grew warmer and more humid and the smell of salt ripened with other things —soft decay, the fetor of green strands rotting on old wood—Hobi knew that they were, at last, approaching the bottommost rim of the Quincunx Domes, the edge of the world, Araboth’s very brink.

  They were coming to the end of all things. They were coming to the sea.

  Chapter 9

  BENEATH THE LAHATIEL GATE

  THEY WERE BROUGHT TO THE prison on Archangels—a true prison, not the last refuge of unfortunate diplomats or Orsinate appointees fallen out of favor. Their cell was small but clean. The Architects modeled it after the oubliettes the Ascendants had developed after the First Shining, when it was important to detain political prisoners but equally important to keep them alive, in the face of radiation sickness and plague and the various viral strains decimating the continents. The translucent walls glowed soft white, as did the floor and ceiling, a color that made your eyes ache. After a short while even closing your eyes did no good: pallid amoebic shapes drifted across the inner field of vision like parasites afloat in the orb’s humors. Reive had heard of a particularly nasty torment engineered by the Orsinate—a strain of bacterium was furtively injected into the eyes and temples, which then induced a softening of the brain into fatty matter within a few hours. It was better not to close your eyes, to go blind staring at the gently pulsing walls, than to wonder whether such an entozoan was probing your consciousness.

  There were no chairs or beds. The floors and walls radiated heat, not an intense heat but unrelenting. Whenever Reive tried to lie down she felt as though she were being slowly parched upon a grill, and Rudyard Planck skipped back and forth across the cell hissing to himself, his face bright red and his palms glistening with sweat. Only Ceryl seemed unaffected. The amphaze given her in the Four Hundredth Room had done nothing except to rouse her for a brief while, before she subsided back into moaning and twitching restlessly in a corner. The bruise on her forehead had swelled and bulged slightly, a deep purplish-red. When Rudyard very gently touched it, it felt hot, and Ceryl cried out, her eyes rolling open for an instant to stare at him in horror.

  “She will die if she is not treated,” the dwarf said, looking up at Reive. Ceryl’s head dropped back onto her chest. From the other side of the cell, a few feet away, the gynander stared at him dumbly. “Her brain is swelling and that bump has gotten infected.”

  He crossed the room to a glass door facing a bank of tall cylinders filled with dark fluid, within which swam the prison’s aurible monitors, hand-sized, flat yellowish forms like para
mecia or spermatozoa.

  “She is dying!” he shouted at them, his hands leaving a smear on the thick glass as he pounded it. “Damn it, call someone, a healer, for god’s sake—”

  One of the cylinders blinked dull red, warningly; but nothing else happened. Abruptly the dwarf turned away, and began to hop across the cell again as though nothing had happened.

  “She’s going to die,” whispered Reive. Her pale face was flushed. The mullah who had shriven them had also shaved her head, in deference to her being a hermaphrodite, and with cauterizing needles had drawn an intricate ward upon her scalp, an open hand with a mouth gaping in its palm. The mullah’s excitement over shriving a morphodite had been too much: his hands shook and he climaxed while tattooing her. Now the assassin’s ward bled steadily, the gaping mouth oozing a watery discharge that steamed when it dripped onto the floor. “She will be fortunate if she dies before Ucalegon devours us all.” Then she bowed her head and wept.

  The dwarf stopped hopping long enough to give her a shrewd look. His red hair stuck up in damp tufts like a basilisk’s cockscomb. But before he could agree with her Ceryl moaned again. The dwarf turned to stare at her pityingly.

  “It would be better if she died now,” he murmured. He moved his hand in a gentle gesture above Ceryl’s head, reluctant to touch her and cause her further pain. Reive nodded, clasping her arms about her chest. The mullah had taken her clothes, her scarf and jewelry, and she had been given a linen shift to wear, grass-green and of coarse weave. It itched terribly in the heat. “But I can’t kill her. Could you?”

  The gynander shook her head and looked away. Rudyard Planck bowed, tears filling his eyes. “This is terrible—to leave her in such pain like this until tomorrow….”

  “Better that than be given to the Redeemer.”

  The dwarf said nothing. Since they had been taken from the Four Hundredth Room neither he nor Reive had mentioned the Compassionate Redeemer, although the mullah who had shriven them spoke of little else. After his impulsive ejaculation he had left the shriving chamber for several minutes. He returned wearing a fresh robe and carrying a polemnoscope that he unfolded and directed toward the wall.