Keeping It Real

by Justina Robson

  “Consider yourself invited,” Dar said after moment. “Follow me and do not show fear.” He walked forwards into the water.

  Lila frowned but followed—she’d come this far, why not further? The water felt unnatural as soon as it touched her. It didn’t run into her boots or soak her clothing. Glancing down she saw that she was protected by the extent of Tath’s aethereal body which was projecting a few millimetres beyond her own. Where it made contact with the water a surface formed, like the surface of an air bubble, and the water kept away. She wondered what would happen when it reached her nose and got ready to engage a gas recycler mechanism, but when the water closed over her head she found that she was walking downhill beside Dar as though they were both on dry land, though they moved with the slow grace of divers and had to push the water’s weight around them. They did not float and they did not drown.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Lila and Dar walked slowly, wading, slightly afloat with every stride, like swimmers who reach for the ground with their feet, each stride a bound, their hair in clouds around their heads, the water like a heavy air they could breathe, though it was a struggle to breathe it. The water itself was green and the light which fell through it was quickly smothered, leaving them in a khaki umbra where all colours became green. Lila saw the silver shapes of fish dart close in curiosity and then flash as they turned their sides and flicked away with a snap of tailfins. She felt her boots catch in clumps of weed as they slowly trod a stone-paved road, sinking ever further by its guidance down and down into the depths.

  Soon it was so dim that Lila had to use infra-red to enhance her vision. As she turned it on she felt Tath’s permanent low level of contempt for her vanish in a moment of surprise. Dar saw well, even in low light his elfin vision had a much greater range and colour capture than Lila’s, but by the time they reached a huge stone door that barred their way Lila could tell by the way his movements grew more tentative that he was finding it hard. The barrier before them was a smooth block of stone, a monolith carved and decorated with a low relief of animals and plants and words in an old form of elvish that even Lila’s AIs didn’t recognise. But they did recognise the simple frame and its scale as something that must be a door, though there was no sign of a handle or a keyhole or even anywhere for a guard to look out.

  Lila watched Tath’s pale, aethereal hair sliding around her face though she could not really feel it, and gave Dar a questioning shrug as they came to a halt one arm’s length from the stone.

  Dar said something and his words went up in bright bubbles from his mouth. Lila heard a soft sound, felt a vibration that seemed to come out of the stone under her feet. It was an ominous sound, and soon it came again. She felt Tath’s focus attenuate—his listening felt like her nerves expanding and lengthening into the cold water that pressed them on all sides. It made her nervous. But she remembered that Dar had told her to show no fear and so she stood and did nothing, concentrated on relaxing and tuned into her AIs. The vibration soon became distinguished enough for her to identify it as the drumming of more than one drum. Together three instruments wove a syncopated beat which she could feel passing through into her body from the water. As the drum beat became stronger the water shivered.

  A shadow, darker than the simple sedimentary gloom, crossed them with a distant cold touch as a large, sinuous, long body slid past somewhere above their heads. Lila felt the turbulence of its wash press her clothing against her. Movement, infra-red and heat-based vision fed through her AIs and told her in a clean readout at the left of her vision exactly what she’d guessed just by the size and power of the creature. A water dragon had passed them by. Its sensitive whiskers would have picked out everything it needed to know from their scent in the water, the disturbance they made in moving, the sound of their breath and heartbeats, the magic or lack of it that ran through them. Lila glanced at Dar, but he was watching the door. Tath’s andalune prickled throughout her body. She wanted to scratch, but she wouldn’t have known where to start.

  The door moved, the hairline gap between it and its frame suddenly darkening as it shifted position, moving straight back into the stone itself before rolling aside. Before them a circular entrance led into a new subaquatic darkness which none of Lila’s senses could penetrate. She wanted to object, to confirm the impossibility of there being such a space but Lila didn’t need to. Tath did it for her,

  Do try, you won’t succeed, he said, silently, from his safe place inside her heart. Your hesitation will only make her think you unworthy. The magic that guards the palace is primal magic and not even your mechanical appendages witll serve to do what it will not allow.

  He was pleased when she believed him—and she had to, because she would have felt it if he lied. She felt his pleasure in her fear which rose up suddenly at his words and made her shiver in a tiny, convulsive motion she couldn’t help. Lila knew the water was simply transmitting everything she did to all the watchers hidden in the silty murk. She didn’t feel that she could cope with dragons, internal hostile agents and ! the rest of it all at once. Tath in particular was in too close a contact to her true feelings all the time. She decided, with misgiving, to allow her Al-self to execute the routine to bypass her emotional centre and replace its decision making finesse with cold calculations.

  What was that? Tath demanded, able to feel the change but not understand it. He had no links to her AIs. Well, that was something, she thought. A red warning icon flashed in her upper right vision, to remind her that this was strictly an emergency procedure and that she should return to normal as soon as possible to avoid lasting psychosis. It was very distracting against the black background of total nothing in front of her. Lila switched it off.

  Dar led the way inside. As they stepped through the circle they passed out of the lake and into air. Lila found herself unexpectedly plunging forward into the dark as the resistance fell away. She quickly got control of her feet and then stood firm on the stone road.

  “Now we follow the air,” Dar said from a short distance away. “The entrance to this palace is via the primary elements. Water is the first. Void will lead us to the Air Gate. Air’s the third.”

  “What’s the second?” Lila asked, hearing Tath’s voice speak where hers should have been. It almost died completely in the strange space they stood in. She expected to feel uneasy but she felt nothing, only a calm kind of mild interest in what was going on, the all pervasive calm of Nirvana. In spite of her orders the AIs signalled her regularly to turn it off—Nirvana was highly psychologically addictive, bad for the brain, bad for the nerves and with many other possibly unpleasant effects including sudden death. But Lila wasn’t alarmed, of course. She tried to use the echo of her voice to map the space so that she could locate Dar but all her readouts came back zeroed, even though she could hear him perfectly well.

  “It is the Void,” Dar said in answer to her question. “The nothing in which you now stand. It is the fundamental in-between, the gap between one breath and the next, between last and first. Tath would know more about it. Necromancers must cross the Void to enter Thanatopia.”

  Lila had been studiously ignoring Tath. She found that at maximum capacity on all sensors and using as much power as she dared she was able to use her sonar system to trace a picture of Dar when their voices bounced off his body. She could also decipher a large hole not far in front of them. It was an irregular and ugly shape. Paths which seemed to offer good passage to either side quickly became useless ledges and smooth wall. There was a way across, set in widely spaced stepping-stones which moved in a snaking trail through the empty space although they seemed to be floating in mid-air. In Nirvana, this was all right.

  “There’s a big hole here,” she said confidently, noting Tath’s annoyance. “I can see it.”

  “I can feel it.” But Dar did not object when she moved closer to him and touched the edge of his hand.

  “We can go this way, to my side,” Lila said. “As long as we keep talking, I can see t
he edges. There is a path of stones.”

  “I have been here before,” Dar told her coolly. “But if you like you can go first” She heard him getting something out of the bandoleers and then heard the tones of a chain of softly sounding glass chimes. Immediately, the sensitive nerves in her skin began to decipher the strange pathway much more clearly. It looked almost like a computer rendition of a series of platforms. If elf ears could pick that up without technology or magic then they were much more sensitive than she’d thought.

  Lila led the way out. The steps were sturdy, but no matter how hard she tried to, she couldn’t see anything between them. “What if you fall here? Do people fall here?”

  “I don’t know,” Dar said. “Nobody came back to tell us.” He sounded tense and Lila left him to the chimes and concentrated on her footing until she was across. As she waited for him she peered into the hole, which was beginning to look much less like a hole and more like something perfectly flat. She thought she could detect the slightest traces of electrical activity, either big and far away or very slight and close at hand, but then Dar landed beside her and they were safe. His andalune touched hers and Tath’s briefly and, with a keenness as though it were her own, she felt the truth of Dar’s fear in the contact. It pulled at her, as though he wanted to catch hold of her, Tath flared on the instant with a brief, victorious contempt and Dar instantly stepped aside as though burned.

  She ignored them. “The air,” Lila said in a strong voice to counteract the Void’s giant swallowing mouth that strove to eat the sound. The Nirvana icon blinked at her, scarlet, alarmed. Whatever emotions she denied now, using its artificial bypass, had not gone away. They were simply active in a place where she couldn’t feel them. After a certain load stress, if she did not re-engage her experience they would begin to emerge in unpredictable ways. The red light was telling her that this moment was not far away. She glanced at the numbers and deleted it. Even if she went back right now she didn’t think she’d stay as frosty as Dar could, not with Tath waiting like a scatter of crows to descend on her every weakness. “Which way?”

  “Wherever the elemental is,” Dar said. His voice was composed, cool and confident, nothing like what she’d felt second-hand through Tath.

  Lila turned her face this way and that. There was a distinct wash of air moving in a steady, cool stream which she could easily follow.

  “Not that way,” Dar said as she set off.

  “You said…”

  “An elemental is a being,” Dar said. “And we need its help to get through the Hall of Fire. Air and fire work together here.” As he was speaking, Lila began to see him with her own eyes. The presence of light made her search for the source and she saw that the walls and roof of the cavern they were in were giving off a faint, lichen-like, glow. Behind them, where the Void had—had not—been, there was a flat, ordinary rock floor. Their stepping stones were scattered boulders lying on it Dry sandy earth spread between them like any ordinary piece of ground. In the gloaming, Lila saw Dar reach into the bandoleer he wore again and bring out a whistle. It was fashioned from a pebble which had been hollowed and carved with a patience Lila could barely imagine into a slender ocarina shape with a perfect mouthpiece though it had no finger holes. Dar blew it and it made no sound.

  “What is that?”

  “A whistle for bringing down the wind,” he said. “Blow hard enough to hear anything and you get a hurricane.” He started to put it back.

  “Can’t I see it?” Lila stepped towards him, holding her hand out.

  “No,” he said.

  “Well, who made it?”

  “They’re not made, they’re found…” He glanced meaningfully at her. “Are you quite all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I was just curious, that’s all. No reason. I never saw one before.”

  Dar narrowed his long blue eyes and his ears flattened close to his head like a horse’s do when the horse in question is feeling vicious. “As you say.”

  “What do you mean by that?” she asked, intent on becoming very clear about everything before matters progressed any further. Was Dar being deliberately obtuse? Tath glowed like a smug beacon in her chest.

  Dar’s left ear tip came forward again, though his facial expression didn’t alter. “Air elementals are curious. It will either let us through this hall, or it will not. It would be wise to be quiet and allow it to question you.”

  Lila felt unpleasantly dizzy and slightly seasick. She could see the door they had come in by, just, if she squinted past Dar. For some reason her thinking seemed to be getting foggy. “What hall?”

  Dar took hold of her shoulders and turned her around. Behind her a series of dark tunnels led off in different directions. He pointed at the central, largest tunnel, which was carved smooth, perfectly cylindrical and straight, and through which could clearly be seen a disc of brightly lit space across which figures moved easily. The round mouths of each end—magical gates—Lila could understand. The cylinder itself was quite empty.

  “Throw something into it,” Dar suggested.

  Throw? She didn’t get it. Perhaps it was a signal and if she did it then the game would be up and Dar would betray her. Or it was a dare.

  Tath, watching from the inside, tried to make a kind of contact with her AI while she was distracted in the act of looking through his pockets (her pockets) for something to throw. In the end he couldn’t quite bring himself to touch the machine in the way he would have had to. His repulsion was too intense. Lila hacked and retched suddenly.

  “Are you quite well?” Dar said again, with a touch more concern as Tath said simultaneously to her,

  Much as it pains me to observe this, I do believe you should undo your binding spell upon yourself, Agent, lest both of us soon have cause to regret it.

  Lila’s fingers closed around a small item in the close-fitted pocket of Tath’s jerkin, over her breast. She pulled it out. A tiny flower lay in her hand, a white daisy. It was old and flattened and quite dried, though it had kept its colours surprisingly well. She tossed it, vaguely aware as she drew her arm back that Dar had started forward and that a sudden knot of anguish was unleashing itself inside her with startling acuity, making her gut spasm and her legs suddenly become weak.

  The flower was very light, almost featherlight, but Lila’s Al-self had calculated perfectly and it crossed the magical boundary set in the stone just as it began to fall and tumble erratically in the air. As a warm tongue of air wound around her and curiously lifted the aethereal masses of Tath’s glamoured hair Lila saw the daisy burst into brilliant yellow and white fire. It was almost instantly embers that flared to red for a microsecond before a few motes of pale ash fell to the floor of the Hall of Fire.

  Dar caught hold of her arm. She saw that he was greyish white with shock for some reason and noted that even though he was holding onto her his andalune body had entirely withdrawn, as though he was in mortal danger and must hide. Within her body Tath recoiled and she felt the glamour flicker and fade. She saw the metal and synthetics of her hands begin to emerge from beneath Tath’s illusory knuckles. Her moment of deadly anxiety had drawn back from her like a tide from the shore. She felt Tath poised, silent, waiting, as though he was a held breath.

  The Nirvana icon returned and would not be banished. It had gone black and beneath it the load stats informed her in cold blue digits that she was now on an automatic countdown to a return to fully authentic experience, whether she liked it or not. A report would automatically be sent to Headquarters for the attention of Dr Williams. It would not be favourable.

  “You told me to throw something,” Lila said calmly. “So I did. The Fire Hall is obviously pure oxygen and the elemental in there ignites everything it doesn’t think belongs in there. If we go in like this we’ll burn up just like any other remotely flammable material. I get it. I’m working on a solution. Why are you acting like that?”

  Only the compulsion of his naming kept Tath anywhere close to competen
t as he continued to project his aetherial self through her. Lila felt as if she were contained in an emotional storm, lit by bursts of strange lightning, as if emotion itself had a unique energy and Tath was generating it. His anguish created real static charges that built in her prosthetics and caused her senses to flicker. Meanwhile from the outside world micro gusts of various forces lifted her clothes, wound beneath them, even blew through her lips and into her mouth, up her nose and across her eyes in tiny flicks that made her blink furiously. The same thing was happening to Dar. As he stood, his arms held out to his sides to permit the frisking by the air elemental, his gaze met hers. It almost looked as though nobody was home.

  “Don’t move,” he whispered. “Don’t do anything. Air is very sensitive,”

  Lila was deeply, deeply puzzled.

  4...3...2…1...

  She opened her mouth, drew in a huge breath, and screamed at the top of her lungs. It was a raw, terrible sound and it expressed an equally raw and devastating onslaught of feeling which Lila was powerless to deny. All her senses were blotted out by the internal storm as though it was a tornado which ripped up her nerves and shredded them into chaff. Her heart faltered and the life-support systems came on with all their alarms in silent flaring yellow. Her reactor powered up. Most strangely of all the clear division between Tath and herself blurred. His emotions and hers were very similar and in their collision she saw what he had seen and realised what it had meant.

  She saw the little white flower burning.

  She saw the ashes falling.

  She heard the magic in the bloom die, and felt the spell it had held fast break up and shiver away to nothing though she didn’t know what it was.

  She saw Dar’s face as he had seen the daisy in her hand, in his hand, in Tath’s hand. His eyes not looking at her, but into Tath’s face, at Tath.

  Tath had been telling the truth. Tath was Dar’s ally. More than his ally. There was some kind of choice-brotherhood between them founded in silent spirit, a bond and a relationship that Lila had no name for.