by Eden Wolfe
But she’d had them firmly fixed in place.
She crossed, her toes gliding along the smooth surface of tree trunks that had felt the power of the river in the winter wet season. She landed on the other side careful not to slip on the moist underbrush. A hundred feet away from the river, through the dense deciduous trees, she found the place still hidden to all who passed, though no one ever passed here. There was no way anyone could fall upon the place by accident. They would have to be looking. And even if they were, they most likely would never find it.
That had been the idea from the start.
Daphna had tried to think of everything. But she knew one day her limitations would meet her head-on. She was grateful that day had not yet come.
She bent down and grasped the iron hook, giving a solid yank upwards to dislodge the platform from the dirt. It lifted just a couple of feet. She sat on the ground, sliding her feet under the elevated cover. It was just high enough for her to slip in. Her feet landed on wooden steps and the platform slammed shut over her head.
Stepping forward gently, feeling the edge of the stair with her toes, she made her way down until her foot was no longer on wooden step but on firm concrete.
She reached to her right and pulled a chain that illuminated the underground lab.
The lab could have been any lab in Central Tower. That had been the intention from the beginning. If the Sisters were to rival the abilities of the Tower, then they had to be equally equipped.
Fortunately, Lucius had agreed.
Those days had been long before Daphna had taken over leadership, but she was ever grateful for the foresight of her predecessors. How much harder things would have been for her had she not had this sacred space in which to operate.
In fact, the only betrayal that the lab was anywhere other than the center of Geb was the slightly damp scent that, despite their best efforts, would not dissipate.
Such were the consequences of an underground riverside laboratory.
Daphna rubbed her forehead. Some things weren’t coming to her as easily as they used to. She was beyond her fiftieth year, but she was certain it had more to do with the chaos of these last few months of Sisters degenerating into death before her eyes.
Although Daphna knew she had many strong years before her, this unknown illness was taking a toll. She only hoped it wasn’t too great a toll for her to continue her work.
The other Sisters who had defected from Central Tower had already reviewed Elgin’s DNA and run experiments that had been wholly inconclusive. It had to be Daphna now. She was the only one left who might be able to break the back of the crop virus.
The pressure weighed on her chest.
She sat down at the stainless steel table. Her lab was a place where no one else was allowed. All the rest had access to the general labs in the Strangelands. There was more than enough equipment for their needs. Daphna needed a place where she could get away. A space of her own, separate from the women she had grown to love, but who also relied too heavily on her for even the smallest decisions.
I must help them to become more autonomous. This way of living isn’t sustainable. Perhaps when Sahna set this up, back in the day, such central decision making was necessary. But now it’s a liability.
The cool table was like an old friend to her now. The lab was the place where she took on the most complex problems, pseudohalios efferesens bacteria and Leesides disease, and now Elgin virus. The Strangelands had been thriving since they’d overcome the vast majority of common bacteria that infected the crops. Pseudohalios efferesens had been particularly challenging. Daphna had spent days and nights alone in the lab reviewing and analyzing sequences, opening windows, gene matter, every aspect she could to kill it off. She’d been in a haze of exhaustion when at last she saw the bacteria’s weakness. She remembered how a cloud of peace rolled over her body as she’d realized she’d found it. She understood why Lucius did what he did: the gift he had, the gift he had bestowed on her genetic sequence, it had a life of its own.
She herself had tended to the fields after treating efferesens. It had been a surprise to the Sisters. It wasn’t that it was below her station, as nothing was below the station of any Sister in the Strangelands, but she had never been focused on the implementation stage in the fields. That could be managed by more junior members.
But after solving efferesens Daphna felt compelled. She dreamed of plunging her hands into rich soil to pull out the root vegetables on which they were so reliant, and find them pristine. Without a sign of the bacteria. She was determined that she would do it with her own hands.
And so she did. She accompanied the farmhand Sisters, forty or so of them waited for her on the edge of the fields as Daphna felt the soil gently bouncing under her soles. The sun had been low at the end of the winter season. The air with a bit of crisp in it. For a moment she closed her eyes and was certain she understood how the settlers had felt when they had prepared their crops in Lower Earth for the first season.
Feelings had mingled in her. Feelings of pride, of joy, and of history.
This new challenge was different. She couldn’t solve the problem of the illness among the Sisters; she had to barter for their lives. And to have a strong negotiating position, she had to solve Elgin. And fast.
She projected herself into the code before her, swimming through combinations of ATG, AAA, and GTC. The code sang like music, each sound ringing off another, and she could see it moving in her mind, living within the helices of each strand, off the chromosome into the gene. She read the sequence and then lived it.
Just like Lucius had taught her.
She would crack Elgin. It was not so complex. Perhaps the crux was slightly more hidden than efferesens and Leesides, but she would conquer this one too. She just had to sing the song of the sequence long enough for its colors to vibrate in her mind.
The black spot, the weakness, the hole in the sequence would rise up when she was warmed up enough to find it.
She stayed with ATG and GTC. She reached the sixteenth gene, the dance of Elgin’s DNA alive behind her eyelids, her head rested on her hands. Something in it warmed her, calling her attention with a quiet voice, like a child’s whisper on winter winds.
She memorized the sequence, reading it forward and backward, lest there be some overlap. Eyes closed, head down, the model took shape in her mind. It spun around her, this world within their blood as visible as a sculpture in three dimensions, spinning on a stool before her. It turned gently, clockwise, counter-clockwise. Flipping top to bottom, twisting.
And there it was.
Daphna jerked her head up from the table. The muscle in her neck protested, but Daphna hardly noticed.
I found it.
I found it.
I found it.
She strode in the early morning air, not having realized the entire night had passed. Her body was stiff; she rubbed her neck, the consequences of her brusque movement becoming more and more apparent.
Now she could negotiate. She had something they wanted. Now she could lead the Sisters into Geb with her chin held high.
14
Ariane
Little snippets came back to Ariane when least expected and least wanted. The space between night and day when her body was at rest and her mind was playing tricks on her. It would start like a blinking star far off in the sky, whether her eyes were open or closed made no difference. It twinkled, this beautiful little star of felt-memory and she would find herself under its spell. Whether she wanted it or not, whether she knew its dangers or not, whether she hated it or not.
The twinkling star came in the fresh morning before warmer air of ending summer had time to sneak in. The air sat like a mist, but clear as anything in the distance, and in the comfort of her bed she saw the star twinkling, rotating, a beacon calling to her. A beacon showing her the way home.
She clasped her hands and rested them on her stomach, the weight of them pushing down on her as she tried to breathe. Somethi
ng about the quality of the air at this hour made it hard for her to take in a full breath.
She watched the star’s rays of light shooting out from it, the aura circulating around it. She lay transfixed, her body completely under the spell of the star in the distance, of the life she was living in parallel while she lay in her bed.
And when her consciousness was fully there, completely absorbed into the star, it split, two stars, it split, four stars, and split, eight stars, and split, and split, and split like the cells in her body. Like the cells in all their bodies, she and her sister selves.
She looked up at the stars and she saw them.
Aria, Ariane, herself. Three sides of a triangle. The strongest shape in nature. That’s what they had been.
Stars splitting, cells colliding, blood spread across the sky, so it painted her vision. Hallucination, mirage, whatever it was, it was her life painted in blood before the morning began.
She braced herself, her muscles tensing though she was reclined in bed. The blood would spread, it would drip from the painted sky. It was coming to envelop her.
She prepared.
Thoughts came to her though her mind felt blank.
What torture now? What image, what memory. Will it even be my own? This sickness in the air, air where their memories live. Is there nowhere in this country I can get some air that isn’t charged with them?
Memory of the main city square.
She was standing in the middle of it. Two years old. Settlement Day.
Yes, Settlement Day, with the Settlement Day coming, it’s logical this would come to me now.
She let out her breath, muscles relaxing a little. At least the vision was a Settlement Day that she had lived herself. This was a memory and not a reflection belonging to someone else’s eyes. How those other visions grated on her, fraying her nerves. Images that belonged to others should stay with others and not invade the peaceful consciousness of someone else.
Peaceful consciousness. Has my consciousness ever been peaceful?
Inside the vision, she watched the square, looking left to right, a frozen scene before time caught up to the memory. Soon everything clicked into action. She took these frozen moments of memory to explore, walking in front of people’s eyes without being seen. She was two years old but in these moments before the memory turned vivid she was herself, full height of a woman walking, curiously observing, but never daring to touch.
Archer.
She hadn’t thought of Archer recently, the heat rolling under her skin. How she loved Archer, always from afar.
Archer, tall Archer, broad-shouldered with dark eyes and dark hair that almost reached his shoulders. Archer who defied time when all men were degrading into puddles around him. Archer who had the blood of the old King running through his veins.
She loved him alone for that.
And yet, he had never come to her.
Archer always belonged to the twins. He was never hers. She didn’t know why he favored them so. But when the memories belonging to the others came to Ariane, even when she was so young an infant, a child, an adolescent – Archer was across all their memories.
But never her own.
She’d waited for him. Logical reasoning told her that he would come to her too, be her confidant, be her friend, be her father. Just like he’d done with them.
He never came.
She stood before him, the woman he never saw her become, the woman who became Queen. Archer frozen in time, during the period when she had wanted him so. Ariane waited for time to catch up and hate boiled in her stomach, bile rising, burning her throat. She looked at Archer’s face, frozen deference as he looked up at the balcony.
She spat on him.
It was futile, she knew. It would dissipate in the air before ever reaching his skin. Such appeared to be the rules in the land of memory before waking. Archer remained, standing before her, untouched as Ariane held her fists tightened at her sides.
Even in the memory, she had no power over him.
Her breath quickened, she didn’t have long now. Small physiological effects, first her breath. Then her eyes. Like a sandstorm rushing into them. She blinked but it wasn’t enough, never was. Then her waist. Like her body was being pulled into itself, all rolled into the inside. Her head pulled downwards, her torso collapsed, legs dehydrated into empty balloons stuffed inside her own body until she was the size she had been on the day of the memory.
Two years old.
Ariane took her position. She had no choice. Her body moved in spite of her will to the place she had stood when the memory had been lived. Time would soon be catching up. The mannequins of former life around her would click into action when her feet reached the place. Two-year-old feet on two-year-old legs, she tried to walk with the grace of her current self but it was impossible with the ground so close. Her child height. Her thick legs. She cursed her body of old, body so young. She approached, knowing the spot, turning then to face the balcony. Small steps backward, left, right, left, right.
She arrived.
Bodies began their movement and breath, chaos, noise, shuffling, hands flying and wind breezing past her where she stood no higher than the knees of most spectators. Dust floated in the air where it had been a frozen haze. She knew the memory. She recognized the place and the people. Her hand reached up. How she hated her hand for pulling itself without her own accord. It arrived inside the warm palm of her carer, whose name Ariane had never cared to know.
Had she realized then how often this carrier would reappear, how she’d have to live in pre-morning repeated worlds with her, Ariane would have at least asked her name. As it was, the nameless face existed through these living memories.
Ariane knew why this was the memory that came back. She knew why she was here. It wasn’t the most common memory, but it was frequent nonetheless. It was one of her earlier memories. It was her Queen Mother’s birthday: Festival Day.
And it was the earliest where she was in the same place as her two other sister-selves.
She couldn’t see them from her knee-high observation point, but she didn’t need to. She felt them.
Blood rolling in veins, the sound of them, their breath on her cheek though they were nowhere near to her. Ariane felt them. Air hissing through their teeth, their two-year-old teeth, as everyone waited for an announcement, for the Queen to begin her discourse. For the Settlement Day celebrations to begin in earnest. Swimming and games of strength and games of wit would stretch out before them, simple joys in a complex world.
“Who are you?” one sister-self asked the other.
Ariane heard it, heard the words passing unseen and silent through the crowd from one sister-self to the other, and yet she was mute. She didn’t know how to speak this way. She was witness to it, she perceived it even amongst the thousands and thousands of voices and words and ideas and thoughts that bounced over the crowd.
This voice was crystal clear. And she couldn’t return its call.
“But who are you?” the other answered in question.
“What are you?” the first one asked in silence across the crowd.
It was a conversation to which she was a bystander, and could play no role. Her sister-selves there, sharing a consciousness across the crowd, and Ariane had to watch like an outsider. A stranger. An outcast.
Her cheeks stung, slapped with words, words that somehow seemed to complete her, and yet with which she could not share any of herself.
That was the moment she realized the world wasn’t fair. How dare they, she thought with her adult mind, but the heart of the two-year-old. How dare they have one another without me.
It didn’t matter now that Ariane could hear the distrust between them. At the time, all she had known was that they could speak to each other and she could only watch through a two-sided mirror.
They, alone in their world. She, set apart.
Always apart. Always alone.
She knew now that many of her mother’s entourage ha
d judged Ariane as the lesser of the three. Less gifted. Her mother had said it. Lucius. The Commandante. Maybe others.
They judged her as lesser, but she had been put at a grave disadvantage. The two shared their thoughts, their strengths, their insight, their intellect. Ariane had known it even at the age of two on the Festival Day in the square with them.
And what do I have? What is mine and mine alone?
Her adult self tasted the iron in the back of her two-year-old throat.
They may have everything else, but what I have is myself. They do not know I’m here. They do not know I exist. They cannot see me, I am behind the mirror.
And one day I’ll be able to use it against them.
I will be everything they can’t be.
Then I’ll have Archer.
Then I’ll have Mother.
Then I’ll have all of Lower Earth eating out of the palm of my hand.
Her two-year-old consciousness and adult awareness collided into one, her skin stretching across itself, words of then clashing with words of now, and she couldn’t tell the difference between who she was years ago versus herself now standing in the square outside her current window, while also lying in bed in her twenty-four-year-old body.
Light streamed in as the morning sun crested over the horizon. Two suns between memory and day blended into a star in the distance as her body stretched further, legs pushed out, arms reanimating, her torso strengthening until she was lying in bed alone.
Cool sheets against hot skin.
Hot from double life lived. Hot with sweat of devolving and re-growing body. She scanned from the inside, knowing she was fine. She was always fine. The memories left no trace.
She closed her eyes just as the morning sunrays landed on her face. A burning strip from between Central Tower and her window frame. Firmly back in her own body. Her mind still somewhere else. She looked for it, like the mind of today had somehow remained behind in the past she lived.