by Linda Nagata
Someone touched her cheek. She flinched. Sandor crouched beside her, the whites of his eyes reflecting his natural horror. He’d tried to warn her she was going too far. A Commonwealth atrium could support one ghost in good detail, or two, if resolution and verisimilitude were sacrificed. Phousita had set herself to constructing an atrium that could contain three: herself, Sandor, and Nikko. Her mind had been fixed on the effort of construction for so long, so intently, that she’d essentially forgotten Arif. She’d wanted to forget him. She’d been so tired of his anger, his latent violence.
Sandor brushed his rain-chilled lips against her forehead. “I’m sorry, Phousita. I should have let you go. I’m sorry. It was my fault.”
“No.”
His hand slipped between her legs. His fingers swiped at the threads of sticky semen he’d left there, as if he could remove that evidence of himself, recover it, change what had happened. But to change the past was beyond anyone’s power.
“I didn’t want to leave you!” she cried. “I didn’t want to leave you.”
Shattered. Shattered. She’d given all but a veneer of her attention to Sandor, his body and hers, illusory ghosts tangled in mock-reality. He’d wanted it so much. Just once more, he’d begged her. Just once more, before Nikko comes, while we’re still alone.
But something had told her to be afraid. She’d held Sandor tighter, but she’d let a wisp of herself go, a breath of mist drifting up out of the forest in search of her other self—
—where she sat cross-legged on the carpet of the living room, her hands tenderly stroking Arif’s hair as he lay with his head pillowed in her lap, watching a medieval Asian drama. She didn’t want to be here. His presence cut her like an accusation, a reminder of the children she’d lost for him. She didn’t want to spend any time at all with him. So she spoke quickly, without thought, wanting only to return to Sandor and screw, screw, screw, forever seeking the orgasmic ecstacy that enclosed her like a swaddling cloth, insulating her from the bitter, bitter world. “My atrium is ready,” she said without preamble. “I can take Ghost-Nikko from you now.”
“Phousita!” Sandor said. His hands on her shoulders, his fingers pressing painfully into her flesh. She gazed up into his deep blue eyes, wanting to wrap herself in their color, so clean, like a twilight sky at the end of a rainy day when all the pollutants had been washed out of the air.
Her hand knotted into a fist. She pounded her thigh in impotent anger. “How can you come to me?” she cried. “How can you bear to look at me? I killed your brother. I was too slow. Too stupid. I killed him.”
She wrenched away from him. But he tackled her before she’d gone a step, rolling her down into the humus, her back pressed against the spongy, rotting layers of decay, the feet of a hundred wriggling insects tramping across her skin. Rain fell in her eyes. “But I love you,” he said.
It was too much. She dissolved in his arms, rising up out of the forest in a drifting pillar of mist.
Her eyes were closed, but she could feel the gravity of Arif beside her. He raised her up, cradling her in his sinewy arms, rocking her like a baby, sobbing over her. Her head throbbed where he’d kicked her. She sent tiny servants to ease the pain and a moment later her eyes fluttered, focused.
“Phousita,” he sighed. His relief stung. She couldn’t meet his eyes, so she looked away.
Queen of witches.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.” Maybe he really was. “You’re all I have left.” Again, that sense of latent accusation. Curtains of fire seemed to blaze across the field of her vision. “We don’t need Nikko,” he said.
She flinched.
He held her tighter. “Forgive me,” he begged. “I’d be lost without you. Don’t leave me. Don’t ever leave me alone.”
She felt smothered by his touch; his need. It felt mechanical, impersonal. He wore her like clothing; a utilitarian garb to keep the sun from burning his skin. He didn’t need her; only her talents, the thin comfort she could offer him. “What am I to you?” she demanded.
He didn’t hesitate. “You belong to me. You are mine.”
The despised object of his desire. A talisman he’d held close on dark nights in the Spill when she’d been able to offer him the faith he lacked. “You don’t want me,” she told him. “You want what I have. And that’s all right. I’m happy to give it to you. I can do that now.”
He drew back, the handsome lines of his renewed face reflecting a sudden wariness. She noticed that his eyes were a little violet still. She told him: “Sandor warned me that the spirit of the evil sorcerer was dangerous. Nikko said the same thing. But we’re far beyond the reach of the cops now.”
They were in a tiny room on a tiny vessel that sped at unimaginable speeds across a great abyss of utter emptiness hostile to all natural life. Beyond the walls of this ship there was nothing for miles so numerous they could be comprehended only in dreams.
“If you want to take the spirit of the sorcerer into your own body, I can give it to you. You can heal yourself, Arif. You won’t need to keep me anymore.”
“It’s not like that,” he objected, his voice pained.
But she was tired, irritable, insistent. “Do you want it?”
His arms shook as he held her, but he nodded.
So she began to weave a spell between her hands that would pass the seed of the sorcerer to Arif.
“But it’s not that easy. It can’t be.”
She sat up, startled by the sudden presence of a stranger. He crouched on the carpet, not an arm’s reach away, a small, lean man, with a breathtakingly precipitous forehead and astonishingly fair skin. His fashion was European, his white-blond hair arranged neatly about his shoulders.
“What is it?” Arif hissed.
“A ghost,” Phousita whispered. Then louder: “You are a ghost?”
“Yes, it’s true. I’m a ghost,” the gentleman acknowledged. His lips twisted in an uncertain little smile that was quickly washed away by a sigh. “I’ve had a world of trouble getting in touch with you. I almost gave it up as hopeless, if you want to know the truth. Then I remembered Zeke Choy. It would be natural for you to try to copy his atrium, I thought. Even duplicate it down to the address. And so you did . . . duplicate the address, that is. But you’ve designed your own atrium, haven’t you? An awfully complex one. Two levels of synthetic reality. Very impressive.”
“Who are you?” Phousita asked. Her hands still prepared the spell for Arif. The task divided her attention.
“Ah, forgive me.” A red blush crept across the stranger’s cheeks. “I’m Leander Bohr. I guess I’m responsible for your troubles in a rather roundabout way. I designed the Maker, you see. Though I hadn’t intended it for general use.”
“You’re the evil sorcerer?” she asked, incredulous.
“Is that what they’re calling me now?” He laughed nervously. “Seriously. Don’t give away the Maker. Not until we’ve had a chance to talk. I thought you might come visit me. Soonest, you understand? I wouldn’t want to give away your position to the police, but if I have to, I will. This is my address. Do come, please. Good-bye.” He vanished as abruptly as he had appeared.
Fear set in as soon as the sorcerer was gone. Phousita stared at the soft, blank face of the carpet. Her hands began to shake, and she dropped the spell she’d been trying to weave. It dissolved into harmless traces. Numbly, she communed with her atrium, instructing it to withdraw her soul from her body in the way Sandor had explained.
Arif plucked at her arm. “What is it?” he hissed. “What have you seen?”
She turned to look at him, her eyes wide with dread. “The evil sorcerer has summoned me.”
Arif swallowed hard. “You aren’t going to him, are you? You can’t go. You know he only wants to steal his spirit back. Then he’ll destroy you.”
Phousita feared this. She didn’t want to lose her soul. And yet Sandor had carefully explained that the spirit now forming in her atrium wasn’t really her soul at
all, but only an image of herself, something akin to the image she might see in a mirror. Perhaps. Yet she knew from the old woman’s teachings that the soul wandered free of the body in dreams. . . .
She shook her head. She knew so very little. With all that she’d learned, with all that had been revealed to her, she still knew almost nothing. Worse, what she knew was in pieces, and she didn’t understand how to fit them together. “I have to go,” she insisted. “The sorcerer has summoned me.”
In the old woman’s stories the world had always been strictly divided between gods and human beings. The one to command and challenge and torment. The other to struggle, to obey. Phousita was a minor woman, at best. The evil sorcerer though: she suspected he might dwell on the other side of the divide. How could she not obey him?
“He said he would tell the police where we are, if I didn’t go to him.”
“Can the police still reach us?”
“I don’t know.”
Arif looked away. “Be careful,” he said. “Don’t let him—”
“Oh, you came. Oh good. I didn’t want to scare you.”
It was the sorcerer who spoke. Phousita blinked at him in confusion. Just a moment ago— But no. Though it seemed as if no time had passed, somehow she knew that many hours had gone by since her spirit had left Arif. How did she know that? She couldn’t say. Some new sense. A tiny servant. . . .
The sorcerer stood before her, clasping and unclasping his hands, his bright blue eyes seeming anxious as if he wanted her to speak.
They were in a courtyard. There were walls of white limestone on three sides nearly obscured by a lush garden. The air was heavy with the scent of flowers. Dark wooden doors led through one of the walls, presumably into a building. A fountain bubbled merrily under a large frangipani tree. The courtyard was U-shaped. It opened onto a view of a barren, jumbled slope of cold black lava that fell away at a steep angle until far below the slope vanished abruptly as if cut off by a knife. And where there should have been something far below—a valley or mountain, an ocean or a desert plain—to meet the jagged, lifeless slope, there was only a sea of stars. And overhead a great round moon loomed, like a huge sea as blue as the sorcerer’s eyes. Phousita gasped in fear, expecting it to pour down upon them at any moment. But for now, it held.
Shivering, she looked once again at the sorcerer.
“This is my home,” he said softly. (Almost shyly, she realized with a start.) “It’s not real, of course. But then you must have guessed that. No atmosphere on a rock like this, is there? Shouldn’t be, anyway. But since my home is a fiction, I can furnish it with fictional elements. Everything you see is a ghost, including me.”
Phousita calmly rearranged the folds of her sarong as she weighed the implications of this confession. She understood the structure of this place. It was very similar to her own inner world. Too simple for a god. Could that mean the sorcerer was only human? Drawing a deep breath, she decided to find out. “Tuan, you have summoned me, and I have come. But could you please tell me, so that I might offer you the proper respect, are you a god? And is this the spirit world?”
The evil sorcerer laughed, but only for a second. Then he grew thoughtful. “I’m not a god, no,” he said. “I’m just the ghost of a man called Leander Bohr. He died quite a long time ago, you see, and I’m all that’s left of him. But is this the spirit world? I never thought of it that way before, but I like that idea, I do. Certainly the physical basis of this existence is very small. And there’s always room for a new mythology, isn’t there? The spirit world. Yes, I like that very much.”
Phousita frowned at this answer. Did he toy with her? It was too much to think that one as learned as this sorcerer might be ignorant of the structure of the world and his station in it. The spirit world, the world of people: they were two parts of a whole, a fundamental that ran through every tale the old woman had ever spun. She studied this Leander Bohr thoughtfully. Had some god stripped him of this most essential knowledge? Oddly, she began to feel a bit sorry for him.
“Tuan,” she asked, when the silence had grown long and she sensed he waited for her to speak. “Are you that which inhabits me?”
He shook his head. “No. That’s a thing I made. You’ve kept it to yourself, haven’t you?”
“Yes, tuan.”
“Good. Good.” He smiled: shy and charming.
She wasn’t lulled by his expression. She knew she’d trespassed on his interest. He must want the spirit back. Why else would he have summoned her?
His smile faded. He seemed confused; concerned. “You mustn’t give it away to anyone else, you know. It would be very dangerous. You wouldn’t want to be responsible for that.”
His warning seemed to conjure bright waves of fire: a sea of flame that rolled in and surrounded her, licked her legs, kissed her skirt. She squeezed her eyes shut, fighting the vision.
“The Maker’s brought you nothing but terrible pain,” Leander said, his voice gentle, persuasive. “I know you’d never wish that on another.”
She stiffened. Anger edged her thoughts as she began to see beyond his words. Yes, she’d trespassed on his interests. But the spirit was hers now! It had come to her. It was a gift, not a curse, and she would share it out as she liked.
She met his gaze. “I won’t give it back to you. My people need this thing.”
That startled him. “Your people?”
His doubt fueled the flames. They leapt again on the edge of her vision. But her anger quickly chased them back. Did he believe she had no people left?
“My people!” she shouted in open defiance. Her finger thumped hard against her breast. “The people of the Spill. I will share what I have with every one of them.”
His eyes widened in sudden panic. “You can’t mean that!” he squeaked. “You can’t mean to release the Maker on Earth.”
“But why not?” Her frustration twisted like a wire through her voice. “With this spirit, every person would be able to heal his own life. If that could happen, then naturally the world would be well too.”
He shook his head, his gaze reflecting deep fear. “Other people aren’t like you, Phousita. They don’t want to be healed. They want to be more than human. They want to remake the world. They will murder the spirit of our Mother. You must destroy the Maker. I have to ask you to destroy it.”
Her lips pressed together in a bitter line. “I cannot do that, tuan.”
She would not betray Arif and Sandor, her vanished children, everyone she’d ever known who might benefit from this thing, even the memory of the old woman, just to satisfy this man. Just because he didn’t want to share his talents? He said he wasn’t a god . . . yet he acted like one. She told him so: “I’ve heard that gods are stingy with their gifts, that they enjoy the suffering of the people . . . it makes their own lives more sweet.”
“Ah.” He turned half away, to stare dejectedly at a fruit tree laden with huge, colorful bats. “Well, at least now you know my wishes. Perhaps you can be persuaded, I don’t know.”
“Will you torture me?” Phousita asked.
“Oh. I never—I—” His moon-white skin blushed a shy pink and he spoke as if his tongue had suddenly grown thick and clumsy. “Yes. Yes, it may come to that. You can’t leave until I let you go, and you can’t erase yourself, you know. I’ve edited your persona that way. Bit of a fascist, I guess. So sorry.”
Oddly, Phousita wasn’t afraid anymore. How could she be? Of this man who seemed like a shy and demure little boy and not a great sorcerer at all. Perhaps this was only a guise he wore to put her off her guard. That would be a familiar ruse; the old woman had told her countless tales in which demons masqueraded as friends. So she held on to her suspicions, even while she tried to approach him. “You don’t seem evil,” she said.
His gaze shifted nervously, never meeting hers. “Don’t be too confident of that. I’m a coward myself, but I can command Makers to do the dirty work.”
“Why do you want to destroy this spir
it you’ve made?”
“Because if it becomes naturalized, it will destroy our past.” He immediately suppressed her first objection. “Oh, not our memory of the past,” he snapped. “Of course the Maker remembers everything. That’s one of its functions. But it will destroy our connection with the past. The biological continuum. The billions of years of change, the billions of deaths of human and nonhuman entities, the constant, unconscious improvisation of a trillion genetic lines. The body of our Mother will be laid to waste. After the Maker there will be no place left for chance and no history.”
Phousita turned away in disgust. This man made no sense. He had to be a man. No god could be so foolish.
“You see the Maker as a savior,” he said, speaking from behind her. “And I commend you for that. I don’t condemn you at all. You’ve seen horrible sufferings, I know, and it’s a credit to you that you want to end them. But the Maker’s a destroyer, not a savior. It will preserve the individual, but not the continuum of life.”
The continuum. What was that but pain passed from one generation to the next? She turned on him suddenly, anger flaring sharply from her tongue. “No one suffers in the Commonwealth—”
“Fah! The Commonwealth is not important. You are important. You are real. The Spill is important. And so is every other place that refuses the insured existence of the Commonwealth. Life needs risk. It needs uncertainty. Or it becomes passive; vulnerable.”
Phousita forced her hands to her side. Her gaze wandered out across the starry sea while she drew three calming breaths. Somewhere, a frog began to softly call. “You live alone, don’t you?” Phousita asked at last.
The sorcerer backed off a step; cleared his throat as if she’d brought up something unpleasant. “Well, I, uh, yes, I do.”
Phousita scowled her contempt. “Forgive me, tuan, for my stupid question. You have already told me you are a ghost. And ghosts don’t live at all. Do they?”
His fingers began to tremble against his thigh. “Not in the way you mean, of course—”