I was certain Sugden’s story was fabricated and wasn’t sure if I should tell him that. He would not enjoy the alternate version of the story that involved Tura’s kind coming here and having children, only to be chased by the predators they had originally fled. If fabricated, did Sugden’s story hold a shred of truth? A lifeform intent on not hiding—so perhaps the predator and not the prey.
Which was Sugden? Which was I?
I did not say anything for a long while. I gestured to the food Tura and I had been nibbling, but Sugden shook his head. He sank back into the chair and looked around my garden, suspicious of everything. As well he should be, I supposed, but for the lilacs. I didn’t think they were Tura’s kind.
“Are you still suggesting that I travel?” I asked.
Sugden’s answer was swift. “Given that this creature has infiltrated your garden, why don’t we start there, and should you have success with this...perhaps then we shall dispatch you elsewhere.”
“And to what purpose do you think the King...” I trailed off, my question lost in a haze of confusion. I didn’t remember what I’d been going to ask. To what purpose what, Bréone? Sugden waved my question away though, oblivious to any difficulty I was having.
“If there is a purpose, perhaps your conversations shall reveal it. If not, you travel, and shall learn the purpose at its source.”
I wanted to tell Sugden he was presuming an awful lot, but I didn’t. It was not the way to begin a diplomatic conversation, and Sugden should have known better, but if he knew, he didn’t appear to care.
That would be another problem, I knew, but didn’t know if I would know it tomorrow. Caring was part and parcel of our work. We couldn’t presume something had been done out of hostility. Tura’s story could have been the truth—they had come to hide, and they had been discovered. Humans didn’t have a stellar record when it came to welcoming anyone who was unlike them.
“All right,” I said carefully.
“We won’t take up too much space here,” Sugden continued. He gestured to the house, to the many windows that looked down on the garden. “You are only one small woman, and this house has many rooms.”
I knew that Sugden didn’t require an answer. He walked back to the kitchen and vanished inside, along with his security detail. My skin prickled at the thought of them inside my house. My house. My space. Sugden wanted me to converse with Tura, and would he be listening? Watching?
I abandoned the table with a speed I had not known in many years. I went into the garden, as far from the house as I could. The long grasses grabbed my legs but didn’t slow me down. I hoped Tura was following, that Tura would come, but when I reached the orchard on the far side of the lily pond, I was still alone. The trees above me were heavy with shadows and fruit, but I did not reach for either. I leaned, exhausted against the trunk of one tree, trying to breathe.
Sugden was in my house. I did not want him here, but wishing would not make it so. Would he leave if I told him it was necessary for the work to be done? In years prior he might have, but now—Now. If this were a plot from the Kingdom—or even if he only believed it was—he would never go. He would stay until a result had been achieved. Even if it were a bad result. Sugden wouldn’t care.
Or would he?
Sugden could be a fool, but he loved the power his position gave him. He ate the best food, drank the best coffee, lived a very rich life, despite the wreck of the world. He didn’t have to concern himself with where his next meal would come from. He didn’t have to worry about the water levels rising, because he would always be five steps ahead, living only ever at elevation. Where else to look down on the masses he wished to control?
The idea that this event could propel the UN into the spotlight once more was, I will admit, delicious. We don’t all love the organizations we work for, but we generally do love the work. I had always loved talking with people—amusing, given how often I could not speak to my own husband—and I had always loved puzzles. Mysteries. Riddles, maybe. People were the best riddles of all, and if I could understand them, I could understand everything.
The idea that I could be part of this was humbling—even as I understood it was simply dumb luck that had placed me there. Tura could have chosen any garden. Could have picked any place. But it had been this place. My garden. To feel...necessary. That was the word again—necessary. I could not breathe for it. I could have a hand in reestablishing the UN into a force that could change the world. For the better.
If Sugden meant to put the UN back in control after all these years—to take the chance he had surely been looking for—this could be the way. Either the Kingdom had created and unleashed something terrible, or Tura and their kind were extraterrestrial. Either way, Sugden saw that he could make a name for himself. That he could be in control of everything and everyone once more.
With all that in mind, at least for the moment, I knew I had to tread carefully. Sugden would not be played a fool, nor would he take a backseat for any great length of time. I would need to establish boundaries and rules for his being here—surely he would expect that, because he knew how I worked. He would allow me my space, at least until my methods didn’t bring him the results he wanted.
I bent my head against the trunk of the tree, and thought I felt the press of cold, shadowy fingers against my temple. Tura, I thought, but no—Tura had said not yet; they had not taken my skin, they had not touched me. I could remember it, but it had not happened. I took comfort in the idea that it would.
8
The following morning, I woke to find a message I had left for myself the night before. Before I lost the ideas I’d had in Sugden’s wake, I’d written them all down into a notes file. Some of them didn’t make immediate sense—The Nebula, I’d written, and underlined it twice—but I hoped that most of that came from the haste with which I’d written them, and not because my mind was losing a bit more of itself. Did Sugden think Tura and his kind were from a nebula? I wasn’t convinced that was it—my notes said Sugden believed they were lab-created beings, created in the Kingdom for what purpose no one knew.
Thinking of a nebula, though, made me shudder. I could close my eyes and see the blue-black of space, and know that it felt like velvet—and surely it did not, given space was a vacuum and you couldn’t touch the thing I remembered touching. I exhaled as I brushed out my hair. t “I am Bréone Hemmerli,” I told myself, “and I am the Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations. We can solve this.”
I worked my creams and colors onto my face and told myself, “I am Bréone Hemmerli, and only she could sit down with—”
But the names escaped me. I stared into my own eyes, and saw planets turning slow and sure. As if Saturn had fallen right into my eye. I blinked and the image vanished, but I could not remember the names. The Kingdom—who ruled it? And the land they had claimed for their own, but had lost when those people sought their own independence?
I couldn’t liken my mind to even Swiss cheese; it wasn’t that tidy and reliable a process. Sometimes the words were there and sometimes they were just gone. I smoothed my fingers over my silvered eyebrows and whispered, “I am Bréone—”
They hauled me from the pond. Saved me from being cracked open.
I wasn’t sure if I had forgotten my last name or if the sharp sound from the kitchen stole it from me. I jumped at the clatter of pots, and held a hand over my mouth, uncertain whether I had shrieked. No one came running to check on me, so I presumed I hadn’t made any kind of undignified noise.
Over breakfast, I made certain that Sugden understood his place when it came to my dialogues with Tura. I recorded the conversation to be doubly certain we were both on the same page—and left a bookmark to the conversation for myself on the screen of my notepad. I knew there would come a day when I didn’t remember any of this had happened. Belt and suspenders, Delphine would have said—and it was her I scurried off to speak with ahead of meeting with Tura.
“Sugden�
�s staying here?” she asked as she bent to tend her roses. She dug her fingers into the damp soil to root out a weed. “In your house.”
“At Irislands,” I murmured; it was easier to think of him being on the estate and not actually in the house, even though he was actually in the house. I’d put him in the bedroom farthest from my own, with his security detail between us. “Delphine—”
I wanted to tell her about Tura—what Tura could do for me, what they had done for me. They had saved my life and now I would save theirs—but the words wouldn’t come. The nebula, I thought—and I knew what I meant. Tura’s body, brushed with dust and glowing like a star, but I was the star—I was the thing to be consumed, transformed. Stars simply were.
Delphine smiled at me, soft and reassuring, as if I had forgotten the words again. I could have, but I hadn’t. Tura can be me, the way they are the trees, and together we would be able to—solve this curious predicament, would be able to live like neither one of us can live individually. Delphine, Delphine!
“These are beautiful,” is what I said, and touched a finger to her roses.
“Félicité et Perpétue!” she said, and leaned into my outstretched arm. “How is it that they still grow here, Bréone? How?”
She didn’t expect an answer, but I still looked up at the tangle of trees above us. “There is still hope in the world, do you suppose? And if—”
The silence between her question and whatever I would have said was broken by the sound of the world cracking open. The tree nearest to Delphine uprooted itself, pushing branches onto the ground to haul its roots onto the grass. I grabbed Delphine by the shoulders to pull her away from the creature as it advanced, but I could not pull Delphine very far. The tree roots hooked around her ankles and up her legs—
The lily pond. The stems.
—and hauled her away from me, into the depths of her garden.
A monstrous howling arose and it was me making the noise—me who tried to pick her old body from the ground to follow, me who was too frail to do any such thing. I sprawled in the grass and screamed a name—Tura! Tura!—over and over, until the darkness flowed from the trees like water and there they were, loping after my Delphine and the other tree. Not a tree. Sugden? Naked Sugden, and then a blur of dispersing shadow. How long had Sugden been something other? I did not know. The idea made me sick.
Tura brought Delphine back to me. Placed her in my arms, for she was unconscious and streaked with blood, with mud and spit and I could not look at her without crying. Still hope in the world, she had said. I blindly reached for Tura, who reached back for me and held us both.
“We must do this together,” I said.
“Stars do not explain themselves, Bréone,” Tura said.
9
The doctor came and went—surprised, I think, that it was not me he tended. I held to Delphine’s hand until she woke, until she could look at me with those eyes I loved so well. We only looked for the longest time, then her hand tightened around mine.
“What,” she whispered.
Stars do not explain themselves, but for Delphine I had to find the words. All the words that had slipped away from me. I needed to put them together in the right order, so that she might understand what crowded my heart. “The shadows are not shadows,” I whispered back.
“Are...” She swallowed and looked at me plainly, her eyes clear. “You were going to tell me something.”
I said nothing. Delphine struggled to sit up and I tried to push her gently into the pillows, but she wriggled until she was sitting up and could touch my cheek. Her fingers were warm and real and I had never felt their like, I was certain.
“This is how your garden grows,” she said. “The shadows. They’re alive and they...” She paused only a breath. “They can give life to what was once dead. What is dying.”
“Not only gardens,” I said. “They remember how the roots go, how the petals form. They remember... I could remember. Everything.” My voice broke that word apart in the middle, until it lay there between us, and we breathed and we said nothing more until in the half-dark, Delphine leaned closer, her temple pressed against mine.
“I don’t want you to forget this,” she said.
“How could I ever?”
We both knew how something could be taken without consent. How even beautiful things could be lost. I rested my hand against her neck and gently held on.
10
When I don’t remember my name, I will remember this.
I went to the garden to find Tura, but Tura was not ready to be found. We had talked about this, about me coming to them, when I was finally ready. Ready to become.
What did it mean? Tura could not explain, was certain that I could not understand. But I felt that I could, and that I did, as I stripped my robe off and walked naked into the garden. The night was cool, almost cold, and the grass tickled my feet. The iris whispered past my thighs and I thought surely I was twenty-one all over again, walking to the lily pond where I meant to take a lover. (That is not what this was.)
The iris left streaks of pollen on my skin, so that by the time I got to the pond, I looked as though I was ready for battle. Or that perhaps I had already been in one. I stepped a foot into the pond and the chill of the water shocked me. It felt like April, winter having lingered overlong.
I didn’t once think about turning around..
I dived into the pond, washing the pollen from my skin, and the style from my hair. I let the water envelop me and wash everything away. I used to swim often; I had loved the weightlessness, the freedom. I told myself it was like being in space—we had cursed ourselves to this world, and would never go to the stars, but in the water, I could dream. I hadn’t allowed myself to dream in a long while.
The lily pads stroked over my arms, tangled around my legs, but easily let me go when I emerged on the pond’s far side. I stood dripping and tipped my head back, to look at the tangle of darkness above me. Trees, but more than that.
“Tura,” I said.
They stepped down as if waiting to be called. Their branch-long legs solidified on the grass, their trunk and arms knitting together before I had finished wringing pond water from my hair. Tura was the color of a Normandy sky, ten-thirty in the evening. A June. Darker in the east, lighter in the west, the echo of a sun-bright day refusing to fade entirely. The length of them rioted with storm clouds, a blue-black horizon sinking into starless murk. Their naked torso was slashed from shoulder to thigh with the colors of the Milky Way, eggplant blooming from the blue, spilling into apricot and cream before being swallowed by blue again. They would have been invisible but for the moon glowing.
You have decided, Tura said, and stars burned in the valleys of their palms. The coal black nails glittered as they moved, like dust would lift from them if I blew the breath I was holding.
I cannot do this alone—and neither can you. Tura laughed at the idea of no longer being alone. Did I ever think aliens would laugh? Perhaps I had hoped they would. You saved me and now I can save you.
This is how we do with the trees, Tura said. Skin to skin.
Tura would become me and I would—I would remember. I would no longer fret over what I did and did not know, because I would know everything. Tura would read me as they had read the tree rings; they would know everything and more.
But Tura paused, my skin nothing like a tree. We stood silent in the moonlight. Tura’s fingers played over my smooth skin, and their eyes met mine. If their body was the sky itself, their eyes were planets therein, thousand-ringed Saturn and blue Neptune.
“Bréone, may I touch you?”
“Consume me.”
When a touch provoked a blushing response, the heat of my skin making my pleasure apparent even in the moonlight, Tura wanted to understand the why and the how—trees did not do this—and I said stars did not explain themselves, they just were.
Tura let me be.
Tura drank in everything I did, everything I was. My every memory became the
ir every memory. Tura unknitted me, and put me back together. Slipped in and out of my skin the way you would a cloak; slipped in and out until I was dizzy and I thought I would fall into the grass.
I fell into the grass, but the world did not go black and when I picked myself, it was without pain or agony or despair. I picked myself up. Myself.
“Tura,” I said, but the darkness in the trees above did not move, because the darkness was beneath my skin. Was my skin.
When I don’t remember my name, I will remem—
11
Memory is a form of fiction.
Memory is a story you tell yourself, a story that keeps the days threaded together in proper order. Experts in memory function say your first memory probably never happened, that it is a fiction you've told yourself so many times you've simply come to believe it as truth.
The first thing I remember of my life is this: I am standing in a pond under a sky that stretches forever. It is night and the air vibrates with sound, with song, with life. This planet was supposed to be dead, but here, this pond is filled with life, life I can hook into. Life I can foster. Outside the circle of trees, there is a stone house. There is a dirt road. There is a dying city. Outside the city there is a river in flood. There is an ocean in heatstroke. There are people trying and there are people failing.
I remember:
I returned to the trees, back to the pond. I became the darkness between both, flooding into the tree, skin to skin. I flowed into every tree ring, I devoured every time, I felt the planet burn, and I felt the planet flood. I watched the alien stars, and the alien planets, and I ate the alien life that filled the pond, that filled the trees—the sunlight, the sunlight! It filled me and made me whole.
I remember:
Others—there were others. Of my kind and not. Of my kind, I told them to cleave to the trees, we would never be found. We would be as the trees, long-lived and spreading everywhere. Of my not-kind, I watched them—I watched her. She was Bréone Hemmerli, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations. What did these words mean? I was slow to know—and never meant for her to catch me.
The Necessity of Stars Page 6