by Barry Lyga
But in the days after his last visit here, he’d learned the truth: The psychosylum existed because of and exclusively for Sui-San. She was its sole patient, its only ward. A’Lars had built it and maintained it not out of generosity of spirit but out of disgust and evasion. He’d shoved Sui-San in there and left her.
And now. Here. An entire building devoted to the care of one person. Sui-San. The runaway mother. The Mad Titan.
How long, Thanos wondered, had A’Lars considered a similar fate for his grotesquerie of a son? How had Thanos avoided a cell alongside his poor mother? Sheer luck? Surely not a father’s mercy—A’Lars had none.
My brain, Thanos thought. A’Lars had recognized his offspring’s intelligence and thought it might be useful. That was the only logical reason to keep Thanos around.
In the years since his birth, Thanos had yet to prove himself worthy of that leniency to his father’s satisfaction. How much longer would A’Lars suffer his presence?
The kiss with Gwinth had awakened him to the possibility of belonging, of family, of love. Thanos feared the Isolation Room more than he feared losing his own life, and so until now, he’d never returned. But there was the kiss. The kiss that made him realize that he could fit in; he could belong. He deserved to belong.
Sintaa had once told him that all living things had mothers. Thanos knew there was a hollow spot at his core, the place that was supposed to be filled with his mother and her love. He hadn’t thought he’d deserved those things, but Gwinth, with her kindness and her kiss, had proved him wrong. He had to see Sui-San and seek that connection and at least try.
If nothing else, he would get a DNA sample from his mother. She might not tell him what he wanted to hear or know; she might not even speak to him. But at the very least, he would get that DNA. Figure out what had happened to him within her womb. And maybe—just maybe—fix himself.
Licking his lips, Thanos entered the hospital. A wave of memory struck him, dripped from him, puddled at his feet. What had seemed large and bright when he was a child now seemed cramped and dim. The sound-swallowing walls were to keep Sui-San’s screams from leaving the building, he now understood. Fingers splayed, he pressed one hand against the yielding wall, feeling it give against him. How many cries for help had these walls ingested?
A flame of hatred burst in his chest. This could not pass. His position in society to the contrary, A’Lars could not get away with treating his spouse this way.
Thanos made his way to the welcome room he’d entered as a child. Then he’d had a child’s understanding, a child’s tenuous grasp on his temper and emotions. Now he was nearly a man.
A synthetic biped stood before him, garbed in the same black tunic as the “doctor” he’d beaten years ago. It seemed identical. The same one, or merely the latest version of that model? His hands suddenly felt clammy. Sweat, not the biofuel he’d mistaken for blood all those years ago. Still, the memory was tangible and potent.
“Thanos,” the synth said in a disapproving tone. “I was told you were coming.”
He parsed the sentence: Security sensors detected your presence and transmitted it to my synthetic cortex, which then ran a preprogrammed subroutine. Because your father thought of everything, including your trying this again.
Stifling his anger at A’Lars, Thanos instead forced himself to recall his father’s words from ages ago:
The “doctor” is a new synthetic life-form I bred specifically to care for your mother. Designed with enhanced empathy and compassion. Congratulations, Thanos—you bludgeoned to death something that was not truly alive… and something that was designed from the start not to know how to fight back.
Enhanced empathy and compassion…
Spreading his arms wide in a gesture of peace and humility, Thanos said, “I’m so sorry for intruding. I mean no harm or disrespect.”
It was just a moment, but the synth’s hesitation told Thanos that it was switching its response parameters. Now that he knew he was dealing with something artificial, something programmed, he could manipulate it as if he were executing code.
“You haven’t hurt anyone,” the synth said gently.
“I need your help.” Thanos spoke with as pitiful and needy a tone of voice as he could muster without descending into outright whining. Enhanced empathy and compassion. He was deliberately triggering the synth’s help-and-aid protocols by appearing weak, defenseless, and in need of assistance. “Please,” he said. “Please help me. I need your help.”
The synth tilted its head to one side. “My directives are to ask you to leave.”
“I want to leave,” Thanos lied smoothly, “but I can’t. I need your help in order to go.”
The synth offered its version of a smile. “I would be happy to help you in that endeavor, Thanos.”
Thanos nodded gravely. “I want to leave, but I can’t. Not until I’ve spoken with Sui-San. Won’t you please help me?”
The synth shook its head, but Thanos detected micro-spasms in its eyes as its bioware attempted to reconcile its now-conflicting missions. Help people. Don’t let Thanos in. They were incompatible directives.
“Please,” Thanos said, and considered dropping to his knees. Such theatricality, though, would have been anticipated by A’Lars, who had no doubt programmed against it. Thanos would need something beyond empty and easily recognizable gestures. “I need your help if I am to be whole again,” he said. The words tumbled out of him without forethought, and they were so damned true for the lack of guile. “I’ve never known my mother. Never even seen her except in dreams. I want to know her, to know myself, to understand. Please,” he said again, “please let me see her. Let me speak to her. She’s the only one who can tell me who and what I am. The only one who cares.”
The synth’s eyes vibrated back and forth, then jittered up and down. Its expression went from neutral to soothing to stern and then, just when Thanos had given up, its mouth wrung itself into a simulation of a smile.
“Of course, Thanos. Let me escort you.”
It took little time, the hospital being a smallish affair designed for a single occupant. The synth led Thanos down a corridor and around a bend. Along the way, he saw other synths, dressed similarly, all of whom nodded pleasantly and vacantly to him.
“Here,” said the synth, and gestured to a door. Thanos thumbed the control, but nothing happened.
The synth happily thumbed the pad for him, and the door slid up. Thanos hesitated.
“This is her room,” the synth said with bright confidence.
He knew. He knew that this was her room, and yet suddenly his feet would not move.
“Are you ill?” the synth asked. “I can procure medication if necessary. Describe your symptoms.”
The synth’s solicitous tone had grated on his last nerve. That, more than anything else, unglued his feet and propelled him into the room before the door shut.
It was small and well lit. The walls were soft, and that datum alone told him volumes about his mother’s condition. Soft walls meant that she tended to fling herself at them.
There was a bed floating against one wall, but no other furniture. No personal belongings that he could identify. A wave of rage toward A’Lars swelled in his breast. His mother was not being treated. She was being warehoused. Like old furniture.
Warehoused here. Right in front of him. For the first time ever, he beheld her.
His first thought was, She’s beautiful.
Maybe children were predisposed to find their parents pleasing to look at. He didn’t think so; he found A’Lars entirely average in appearance. His mother, though, was exceptional.
Even in this constrained, antiseptic setting, her beauty shone. Her skin glowed, and her hair seemed fluid, a spill of black ink cascading over her shoulders. Looking at her, he found himself thinking what no doubt everyone in the world thought:
How could something so beautiful have given birth to me?
She sat on the floor, legs crossed, hands resti
ng on her knees. Her eyes were closed and her breathing was even. He immediately reconsidered his rage at A’Lars. She seemed in good health, at peace, relaxed. Perhaps this denuded environment suited her. Low sensory stimulation. Nothing to upset her.
As he watched, her head tilted gently side to side and up and down, tracing a relaxed infinity symbol. She was humming ever so slightly.
He took a step toward her and cleared his throat. Her eyes opened slowly, dreamily.
“Mother. It’s me. Your child. Thanos.”
Her head continued its lazy sideways figure eight, her eyes focused on absolutely nothing. He came closer and, with tenderness and a gentle touch, took her chin between his thumb and forefinger, guiding her attention to his face.
“Mother,” he said again. Her eyes still had not focused. The pupils were pinpricks. “Mother, I’m here. Here to help you.”
And her eyes snapped into focus on him. They widened as she drew in a horrified breath. In an instant, she slapped his hand away from her and scrabbled backward, scuttling away like a crab, her indrawn breath now exploding out in a shriek of terror.
Thanos checked over his shoulder but remembered the pliant, sound-absorbing walls. No one would hear.
“Mother,” he said again, holding out both hands to show he meant no harm. “Mother, it’s your son. Your child.”
“You!” she gasped, coming up short against a wall. “You! I saw you! I’ve seen your face!”
“Yes. When I was born. You held me, didn’t you?” Tears glimmered in his eyes as he crept closer to her, moving slowly so as not to frighten her further.
She drew in another breath, squeezing herself into a corner. “You’re a demon!” she cried. “You’re death! I saw it in your eyes! It crawled out of your ears and bled on my bare bosom when you were born! You are death! You are death!”
One hand outstretched to smooth her hair back from her brow, Thanos froze at her words. “Mother.” He wiped the incipient tears from his eyes. “Mother, no. I’m just your son.”
“Death!” she screamed, curling into a tight ball, knees clutched to her chest, face buried. “Death! Death! Death! You breathe it! You eat it and sweat it out! You! Are! Death! Death! Death!”
She said it over and over, until the words blurred and merged into a single, repeated nonsense syllable, her teeth clacking together on the D so violently that he was astonished they did not break out of her mouth. Every time he tried to approach her, to comfort her, she threw back her head and howled, a high keening sound that drilled through his ears and into his soul. Backing away, he froze in the center of the room. He could not help her, but he could not leave her in such a state, could he?
Eventually, feeling behind him, he slid the door open and stumbled out into the corridor, where the synth waited for him patiently.
“She needs your help,” he managed to say, and the synth immediately rushed into the room, followed by two identical ones. They crouched by Sui-San and administered a dose of a bright-blue medication. Thanos watched until the door automatically slid shut, cutting off sight and sound.
Outside, Thanos nearly collapsed, catching himself with one hand on the outer wall of the psychosylum.
His mother.
His own mother.
He hadn’t even obtained a DNA sample. He had been so anguished, so cowardly. Such a puling little boy, fleeing at the first sign of trouble… He gnashed his teeth and struck the wall with one large fist; it was a thermic wall reinforced with an exotic, rigid steel alloy, and it yielded not in the slightest. He punched it again, then did it again and again and again, until the waves of pain reached his elbow, and his fingers went numb.
Tilting his head up, he caught a glimpse of the panoply of stars in the arcs of space that framed Hyperion, Titan’s dwarfish, deformed sibling, a wart on the night sky.
Sinking to his knees, he braced himself against the wall. A great darkness overcame him, followed by a great weakness. The world swam and blurred, the colors blending together. When he found the strength to look up, the sky had gone awash in puddles of color, reflections from the City’s lights melding with the black of space, the white speckles of stars, the bluish hue of Hyperion.
They were no longer separate and distinct things. They had merged. They were of a piece. They connected and they belonged.
He thought of earlier that night, of the touch of Gwinth’s lips.
Damn it all, he was connected, too. He was not an outcast. He was a part of Titan, whether Titan wanted it so or not.
He loved Titan, even if Titan hated him.
It would be easy to meet hate with hate and fear with fear. Flexing feeling back into his fingers, balling his fists, he knew that he could be more than Hyperion to Titan. He could contribute.
For now, there was nothing he could do for Sui-San. Her madness was beyond his knowledge and his abilities. For now.
He would meet fear with love. His father had told him there was nothing he could do to change the way Titan saw him, so he realized that instead he must change. Perhaps there would be reciprocity. Perhaps not. But it was better than nothing. At the worst, he would help people and never be appreciated for it. But they would still have his help, even if they learned only how to conceal their hate and fear behind a curtain of benign and anodyne neglect.
He would channel the love of his missing, demented mother. He would love Titan and everyone on it. For no other reason than because he could.
Thanos returned home.
He had work to do.
CHAPTER VI
IT TOOK HIM MORE THAN AN HOUR TO TRAVEL THE SIXTEEN blocks home on the crowded streets and walkways. The skyways were clogged, too, so thick with vehicles as to create a canopy that blotted out the sky in great moving patches. Eventually, these people would have their new homes in MentorPlex II and III, he thought.
The overflow will be directed up, Sintaa had said.
Thanos stopped dead in his tracks at the entrance to MentorPlex.
The overflow will be directed up.
He stood there, immovable. Titans pressed around him, desperately avoiding even a mere brush against him.
His whole life, he’d known there was something wrong with Titan, but he’d never truly tried to figure out what it was. Now he could rectify that oversight, he decided.
The overflow will be directed up.
The fatal flaw at Titan’s core… He understood it now. And if he could wrench Titan’s rotten tumor from itself and leave behind the healthy tissue, then maybe attitudes like Gwinth’s would flourish. They would see him as an equal, not a predator.
The elevator systems in MentorPlex were artificially intelligent. They balanced their own traffic and could deposit a resident at the appropriate floor among five hundred in less than thirty seconds.
That was thirty seconds too long. Thanos burst from the elevator and exploded into his apartment. In the distance, the cryovolcanoes simmered and brooded, but Thanos had no time for their beauty. He flung himself into the chair at his desk and began to work.
The overflow will be directed up.
The overflow will be directed up.
Not if I can help it, he thought.
A’Lars returned from his trip in a fury. The domicile’s artificial intelligence alerted Thanos to his father’s presence as soon as A’Lars crossed the threshold, but Thanos ignored it. He had risen from his desk only four times in the last two days. He had not eaten in more than a day, and he still wore the same clothing he’d worn to the silencurium days ago, adding only a dataglove for easier and more precise hologram manipulation.
He was haggard and he stank, but he was focused, as though a lack of food had honed rather than starved his mind. He was staring at a holochart of data when his father thumbed open his bedroom door and stood in the doorway, enraged.
“You’ve been to see your mother,” A’Lars began, his voice deep with wounded fury. “Did you think I was so foolish as to not monitor the facility?”
“I have no ti
me for this,” Thanos said without even turning to glance at his father. The holochart swiveled to the left; numbers climbed. Thanos groaned. It was as he had suspected. It was all true.
“You have…?” A’Lars strode into the room. “You will rise and speak to me now, Thanos!”
Thanos wrenched his attention away from the holograms. His father stood over him, cheeks flushed, eyes flashing. The chair floated back slightly, and Thanos stood, facing his father.
“I have something to tell you,” he told A’Lars. “It’s very important.”
“I no longer trust your perception of importance, if I ever did,” A’Lars said through clenched teeth. “You were specifically instructed not to seek out your mother, yet as soon as my back was turned—”
“You took her from me!” Thanos shouted. He hadn’t planned on allowing himself to be drawn into a conversation about his mother—there truly was something vastly more important to discuss—but his father’s hypocrisy and sanctimony chafed at him. “You spirited her off and locked her away from me and from the world. Why should I trust your orders, Father? Why should I trust you at all?”
The words spilled out of him in a single breath, and he stood there, laboring to breathe as his father took a small step back. For the first time in his life, Thanos thought his father was reconsidering. Reconsidering what, he couldn’t tell, but for A’Lars to reconsider at all was a monumental achievement.
“Your mother went mad the moment she laid eyes on you,” A’Lars said quietly. “I took her away to protect you from her. From her madness. It was a kindness to you, my son.”
“A kindness?” Thanos ground his teeth together. “Kindness would have been to allow me to see her, at the very least. To speak her name. To tell me about her. To let her live in my mind, if not in my presence!”
A’Lars clucked his tongue. “I can’t expect you to understand. Your mind is exceptional, my son, but you are still a child, and you understand as do children. This is a matter for adults, and you have violated the rule I established for you.”