The Alchemists

by Geary Gravel

  But finally she was forced to face the basic unreality of daily life on this world. The Hut was not, in fact, a house that

  she lived in, not a dwelling at all as she knew the concept, but the habitable interface between human beings and their mechanical servant on an alien world. The illusion was achieved with such unfailing cleverness that she went from day to day barely conscious of the essential falseness of it all, eating the food that was not really food, surrounded by the clothes, the tools, the toys that had not been made, but wished for, in this magnificent machine that was only incidentally a house. The humans were like parasites, small creatures living on sufferance in the Hut's body. She remembered the night of her arrival, when half in dream and half awake she had groped her way down the upstairs corridor, convinced she was exploring a huge, many-chambered shell afloat in a great blue sea. In the bare room, she felt as if she had finally reached the true heart of the shell and found no occupant: the creature was dead, the shell empty. There was no one at home, and she was alone.

  Barely a whisper: "Hut?"

  "Yes, Per Raille." Immediate, as always, the silver lilt, the crystal whisper, the golden hum blended into words for her.

  "Where are they all, Hut?"

  "Per Marysu, Pers Emrys, and Per March have gone out to the eastern meadow to fetch the kin. Per Choss is still in his room, and Pers Jefany and Cil are in theirs. Per Jack sits among the golden flowers that border the outside wall, drawing pictures of them."

  Raille smiled wryly, as if in amusement at a precocious child. "Per, Per," she said. "One would think we'd only just met."

  "Forgive me, Raille." The golden voice was benignly self-deprecating. "A touch of formality seems appropriate every now and then. I have a tendency toward pomp and ceremony that is quite difficult to suppress."

  "And Chassman, you didn't mention him. Is he with Emrys?"

  "Yes. That—person has gone to the eastern meadow with the others."

  "What time is it supposed to happen, Hut? Do you know?"

  "Emrys has chosen the thirteenth hour for the experiment to commence."

  "I see. That gives me time..." She stared abstractedly at

  the light-gray wall. "I want to go outside myself for a little while."

  "If you would like, you can put on one of the silver contact rings, and I will guide you to where the others are. As a matter of fact, they are on their way back in and should reach the outer doorway very shortly."

  "No, no. I don't want to be with them." She paused, feeling foolish. "Is there any other—I mean, there's no way I could go out through another door, is there?" She looked over her shoulder at the arched doorway. 'To be alone?"

  "Certainly. If you would care to go through the portal to your right—"

  She turned in surprise and saw an open doorway on the far side of the room, where there had only been blank wall a moment before.

  She followed the Hut's voice up a long, sloping corridor, walking in a circle of light that moved with her, and aware of a constant rustling whisper coming from the darkness behind and ahead of her. She suspected that the passageway was being formed as she walked through it, opening up just ahead and coming back together instantly in her wake. She shuddered and hurried her pace, feeling like a rodent being ushered toward the belly of a snake.

  Then the silver daylight was before her and she was stepping through a scalloped oval onto firm ground. She felt the cool, scented wind on her face. She had emerged on the opposite side of the building from the only true door she had known to exist.

  Everything is mutable, she thought, staring at the dark trees.

  "Thank you, Hut," she said, as the light faded in the passageway.

  "Not at all." The oval closed silently behind her and she walked into the forest.

  Candles, incense, muttered invocations—Raiile half expected to see a pentagram chalked on the cold floor, or at the very least a hologram flickering in the air above it. But there

  was only the dragon, ever faithful, welcoming her through the arched doorway for the second time that morning.

  The scene was very archetypal, she decided, having recently learned the word from Choss—stylized, like the Speechless Play at Year's Turn in New Kiruna, with white tapers burning around the rim of the floor and everyone's shadow dancing madly. There were paintings on the walls again, dark portraits which seemed to twitch and leer, looking on like voyeuristic demons or March's bloodthirsty ancestral spirits.

  She looked to the center of the room.

  The empath knelt by the side of the plush coffin, eyes closed, pale lips moving silently in some blasphemous hymn. He was communing, she imagined, with that dead mind inside his head, and the thought sent a chill up her spine. The lid of the sensebath was open; inside, the kin lay motionless against the velvet, staring serenely past the empath's shoulder to the vaulted ceiling where wanderlights bobbed and winked once more.

  The empath reached into the coffin and adjusted the angle of the creature's head, his lips still forming unheard words.

  He didn't know that he could intercede for me. They'd have listened to him, Raille thought.

  Old Emrys squatted at the head of the casket, long dark fingers poised like birds of prey above a newly grafted panel of fingerplates and toggles. He was wearing an expression that Raille had seen once before, when a Darkjumper had exploded on the landing stage at the Port in Gammelstad on Weldon. A huge crowd had formed to watch the bodies carried from the burning carcass of the ship. Raille had watched the watchers as the dead rolled by, and she still held the image like a jewel in her mind: the gaping mouths, the restless tongues, the eyes straining wide in anticipation. "Ember won't help them now," an old man at her side had remarked to his neighbor, something like satisfaction in his voice.

  Emrys licked his lips, and Raille turned away, a mood of dark expectancy seizing her. She scanned the room.

  Jefany and Cil were whispering by one candle, hands linked. Marysu and Jack sat silently by another. Choss slumped in the shadows beneath the dead Screen, shoulders hunched and head bent forward against his chest; she thought his lips were moving also, but couldn't be sure. March leaned easily against the opposite wall, face lifted toward the center of the room and

  fingers tapping impatiently on the tiles. He turned to stare at her for an instant, and the flickering candles kindled green fire above his left cheek.

  Emrys exchanged a word with the empath, then leaned forward and touched the fingerplates. Raille could not decide whether she was hearing or feeling the low-pitched hum that filled the room.

  The empath raised his hand.

  Emrys said softly: "It's time to begin."

  There were three in attendance when the kin was born into the flesh: the young adept, the ageless noumenon, and—

  A pattern. A presence, the Other had reported before it was taken from him. A will.

  Raille stepped back against the wall near Marysu, automatically bracing herself for what was to come. But when seconds passed and there was nothing, she began to feel silly with her spine rigid and her hands splayed out against the curving wall.

  She heard murmurs, saw restless movement in the others. Heads lolled to one side, bodies shifted fitfully, as if in sleep. Remembering her duties, she activated the tiny, portative medipal unit.

  She was moving toward Marysu when she began to feel an intermittent sensation, almost like pressure in her head, then a blurring as of something hovering near her face, just at the edge of vision. She had to fight to maintain her balance as the room tilted and swayed, beginning to revolve slowly beneath her.

  But this is like that nonsense in the meadow, she thought.

  She took another step. Someone cried out in terror, the words slurred as if they came from deep within a dream.

  "Raille!" Emrys pointed past her to the others. "Raille, help them!"

  Help them...

  She forced herself to stumble the remaining steps to Marysu, sank gratefully to her knees beside the linguist, a
nd brought the medipal sensor to a limp brown arm.

  When their skin touched, the bright-blue eyes opened suddenly and stared at her without recognition.

  "Are you—"

  "Shhh," Raille said softly, "I'm here."

  They sit on wine-blue cushions by a huge curving window at the edge of a dimly lit room. There is music from somewhere: intricate, leisurely melodies. She recognizes the skyline: De-launce on Babel, city of her youth.

  There is someone sitting across from her, half-hidden in shadows. Candlelight picks out a glimpse of quiet features, still hands, a many-colored skirt.

  "Are you—"

  "I'm here," comes the soft reply.

  "I was talking about him again, wasn't I?" She turns back to the window, gazes at the light-spangled city below.

  "Our best times were on Earth in the Bosmas, walking at night with him wheeling about me like a bird, darting ahead to the food vendors' stalls, or chattering with people he'd never seen before in his life and making them laugh—allowing me to be scornful and superior, because through him I was larking and laughing and stirring up love and amusement—things 1 cannot do in front of other people. His freedom was my own. And he always brought it back with him, he always came home with me at the end of the night. What a wonder that was to me—is to me still—because I don't know why he stayed. Even when I was no longer Ravenswing he was still Jack, still willing to squander so much time and affection on me."

  There is a ghost of movement from the other side of the table. "You cut off your hair because of him, didn't you?"

  "Because he liked it." The gleaming skull bows into the shadows. "Because I was afraid—it sounds so pathetically foolish to say it—afraid it was my hair or—" Her face comes up tortured. "Why would he stay? Why? I've let him see me pared to the bitter, ugly core, for months I've given him nothing. You know I dragged him with me to the Evaluation for one reason—because I knew I'd never see him again if he stayed behind. I knew he'd wander off in a few days and meet someone, anyone else. But out there, I thought, he'd have to be with me, and there'd be no one else to meet." She gives a small laugh.

  "I should have told him to stay behind, I should have made him leave me. It's terrible to do this to a person, like a carrion bird gnawing at him. I'll kill him this way." She shudders, drawing up slender shoulders. "But to put myself back in that cage—it's not fair to have to make that choice, it's not fair."

  "What makes you think it's your choice to make? What makes you think it's up to you to let him go?"

  She half rises, stung by the calm words, then rocks back on her heels, the expressive mouth crumpled, tears burning down her cheeks.

  "Here."

  Hands thrust toward her out of the darkness. She flinches when the fingers touch her shoulders, but they persist, pulling her closer. She tries to speak, but the words come out garbled, hiccupped with sobs, and finally, clumsily, the weeping woman allows herself to be held.

  She was rising unsteadily to her feet when she heard her name called. Emrys beckoned her over with a confidential wink. The medipal unit trailed her, bobbing lower as she knelt at his side.

  "You'd be surprised," he told her. "I know what it is now."

  "Do you? That's nice." She guided the sensor threads to his left forearm and wrist.

  "Mm." He nodded rapidly. "We discussed it before, he and I. It's a—a manifestation of his power, a visual by-product of that-which-propels—compels, I mean, whatever." He raised an unsteady hand to wipe at his cheek, stared at the moist palm. "Lords, it's hot!"

  She touched a key on the floating unit, waited a few seconds with her eye on the readout, removed one of the threads. "This should help." She touched two more keys.

  "All right." His eyes rolled, focused. "Anyway, that-which-compels and the other one, that-which—what? perceives—

  they both of them involve TK to some degree, that's the theory."

  "What is TK?" she asked, to keep his mind off her ministrations.

  "Telekinesis. Physical manipulation of substances, objects, through nonphysical means." His speech was becoming increasingly slurred. "Manipulation of parts of the brain, in this case. Paleocortex, mainly. Depends on how skillful the com— communicant is." He gestured over his shoulder in the direction of the empath. "Our friend, he couldn't do this on his own, you know. Maybe you didn't know that. But that Other, the noumenon—there's a smart one! Fits down over his own mind like a template, like a yoke. And with that he's got the mind-patterns and the skill of a real master to help him. Must be cozy in there, you know, but hot."

  He chuckled, then laughed out loud, pointing at the empty air above the bain-sense.

  "So—fantastic—and it's not really there! But while he's in here with all of us"—he tapped his forehead clumsily— "wandering around, bumping into our sight centers, I suppose, stirring things up—" He snapped his fingers. "Well, there's the result." His expression became completely serious for a moment. "I think it's very pretty," he said solemnly, and closed his eyes.

  Raille detached the second thread from his arm with a shake of her head, rose, and moved back out to the circle of dreamers.

  "/ don't think you understand," the golden man is telling her as they lie together on the yielding floor. "I was killing children in those days."

  He shifts slightly, so that he can watch her face while he speaks.

  "I was born in Heartsdesire, a city on a world so foul and low you couldn't begin to imagine it. Never got the smell of sewers out of my nose, but I finally got myself out of that pit. I grew up thieving, but I never had enough ambition for anything big. Heartsdesire—you've got to be a thief. Nobody gives it to you there.

  "But then I found the Dance and I knew it was the way to make myself do things, things I'd never have tried otherwise. It was a way to get around myself, to trick the body into

  working. And with me not around to see how the job got done— that was even better. Company brecks were always hanging around the Dance halls in those days, looking for poor but talented types, and 1 signed up first time I was approached. I never thought about it as soldiering, only as a way out. We were called the Spurs. It was a good life."

  He shifts position again, up on one elbow, for he sees best when he focuses with both eyes together: the real one for clarity and surface detail, the false for colors and depth.

  "Then the call would come and I'd snap the word and slip away down deep for a slice of no-time—but 1 knew the body was working hard for me up there Topside, busy splicing death into the threads of my life. Lucky, I never considered the thing till I got down dark and quiet, and then there was nothing at all I could do, for we were like two thoughts, death and me, circling each other in the dark till I lost track of which was which. Then I'd come up and there they'd be: whole bodies, mostly, or pieces of bodies, pieces of meat tossed here and about, doll-limp and toy-broken at my feet. And sometimes— / won't say often, but sometimes—there'd be children."

  He strokes the long waves of auburn hair back from her bare shoulders, touches the skin that lies pale and strange beneath his golden fingers, marveling for a moment that she is there so close to him, naked and not afraid.

  "I remember most how inefficient it was, looking down on them and beginning to mourn the energy wasted in popping off those thin little arms, or pounding in that tiny skull, when all the while it was a child, and not worth the body's effort.

  "After I started feeling the kills, there was nowhere for me to go while the body worked. Then I stopped. Then I kept the skin as a wall, and I took up the true slumtalk again as another wall, to protect me—to protect other people from me. And to keep remembering, most of all, to do penance for all of them."

  His hand tightens on her shoulder, loosens, slides downward, leaving marks that fade slowly from her fair skin.

  "But I have to ask you something, because lately I've been wondering how I'll know when it's finally enough. How long will it be—do you know? How long do I have to pay?"

  Sh
e opens her mouth at once to speak, but he covers her lips with his rough hand. He closes his eyes so he does not

  have to see the expression in hers. Then his hands move down again and soon he covers her body with his own.

  When it is finished and he opens his eyes, he finds her weeping silently, face averted.

  "I'm sorry," he says roughly. "I meant to give you pleasure."

  "Why didn't you stay?" she whispers finally, fragile fingers rubbing the tears from her cheek.

  "What?"

  "You don't even know the difference anymore, do you?" In her brown eyes there is a look of sadness, a look of pity.

  "What are you talking about?" He reaches to take the delicate hand, but she withdraws it, turning slowly away from him in the growing darkness.

  "It was a Dance, of course." The words come to him faintly. "It was just another Dance."

  Raille found herself moving toward the silent center of the room: a vast distance to the tail of the golden dragon, miles to the narrow silver box, the three still figures.

  Emrys was slouched between her and the empath, his eyes wide and unfocused, his face transfigured with wonder. "I think it's getting larger," he hissed as she drew near. "Over there— in the air above him!"

  Raille glanced to where the trembling finger pointed and blinked in surprise. There was indeed a slight troubling of the air, a flash of whirling motion just above the open coffin. She squinted at the apparition and slowly began to see it more clearly, like a great whirlpool spinning rapidly, nearly invisible.

  "What is it?" She moved forward.

  "No! Stay back!" Emrys whispered urgently. "Ah, it bleeds colors when you come near." He raised his arm in a vague shielding motion. "Too bright now—too fasti Get back!"

  She stood for a moment in mild surprise. Why didn't he tell the thing to go away if it bothered him so?

  Shoo! Scat! she thought.