Aestival Tide (29 page)

Hobi nodded sadly. “There was another Long Night. And—and some other things happened too.”

“And they are lost, the others like me.” Her emerald orbs inside their eyesockets flickered with golden lightning. “They divided us among the remaining churches and governments and reservations, to be sure that some of us would survive. Some of us were imprinted with a program-memory of our archivist. I was—I am—Loretta Riding. But the others…”

Hobi would not have believed a replicant's voice was capable of displaying such grief. He felt horrible now for waking her, and wondered if somehow he could manage to switch her off, return her to her sleeping state before Nasrani returned once more and saw her like this.

“Mother,” the
rasa
whispered. It slipped next to Hobi and raised its head, its ruined eyes wide and hopeful. “More stories now?”

Nefertity lowered her hand to touch its head. “Is this all that remains?” she asked Hobi. “The others like you—they are dead?”

“Oh, no! These are just—
rasas.
Regenerated corpses. You know,” he added lamely.

“Regenerated corpses,” the nemosyne repeated slowly. She looked past the
rasa
at the others in the darkness. “All of them? Dead? But that is a terrible thing to have done! Why have they come to me?”

Hobi shrugged. “Well, no—I mean, they're not really dead, not anymore—” He looked at the floor, ashamed. “I'm not sure why they're here, really.”

The nemosyne drew her hand back from the
rasa.
Her voice was cold. “What happened, then? Was it more bombs? Or the nuclear tides? What happened?”

Hobi felt hot, in spite of the dank room. “I don't know,” he muttered. “No one knows.”

“Europe? Africa? The L-5 colonies?” The boy shook his head and shrugged. “All of it gone? You remember nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“Where are we now?”

“Araboth. Araboth—it had another name once, that's what Nasrani said. Texas.”

“Araboth.” Motes of light glittered in front of her face. “Texas. Not Chicago?”

The boy looked away, defeated. “I never heard of Chicago.”

“Mother,” the
rasa
interrupted, and tugged at her hand. “Tell us again. Stories. The Frankenstein monster.”

“Little Red-Hood,” whispered another.

“Amelia Earhart.”

“The Woman in the Moon.”

“Stories,” the nemosyne said slowly. She turned and walked to the center of the room. A slithering sound as the pallid forms followed her, staying just outside her nimbus of shimmering light. “I have been telling my stories to corpses.”

Her eyes flashed as she pointed again at Hobi. “You have forgotten all the rest of it. The cities, the space stations. The wars, the gynocides, the Bibliochlasm?”

Hobi bit his lip. Her words frightened him. These were forbidden things, things that had to do with the First Days, the lost days; things to do with Outside.

“Yes,” he admitted. He glanced about the room, trying to see where the door was, praying for Nasrani to appear, or for the nemosyne to be distracted long enough for him to escape. “Yes. We have forgotten all of it.”

Nefertity nodded. Her body pulsed a deeper blue now, and her voice had grown louder. “But there are women and men perhaps who might want to remember? Who might have need of me?”

Hobi swallowed nervously. “I don't think so. I mean, it might be better if you just stayed here. At least until Nasrani comes back. He would know.”

“Please, Mother,” the
rasa
beseeched her. In the darkness its eyes were wide, almost childlike. “More stories. Please. We waited, we waited.”

The nemosyne gazed down at the
rasa,
at the other white soft figures crouched in the shadows. Her jadeite eyes glittered, and she nodded as she extended her arms.

“Yes,” she said, beckoning them to her. “Yes: come closer.”

The first
rasa
looked back at the others, then slowly they dragged themselves forward, until all huddled in a semicircle at the nemosyne's feet.

“Yes,” whispered Nefertity. There was a loud humming; when she spoke again it was in a clear high voice, the voice Hobi had heard when first he entered the chamber. “Let the dead listen to me, and learn, and remember if no one else will—”

And she began to recite.

“I was, being human, born alone;

I am, being woman, hard beset;

I live by squeezing from a stone

The little nourishment I get.

In masks outrageous and austere

The years go by in single file;

But none has merited my fear,

And none has quite escaped my smile…

“Now I will tell you the story of ‘The Dreaming Child,' by Isak Dinesen, the Baroness Blixen…”

As she spoke a single great sigh rippled through the dim chamber, soft and comforted as a child's. But as Hobi gazed up at her it seemed to him that the nemosyne's features looked less lovely than they had before; that within her crystal body her adamantine heart did not burn as steadily as when she had slept, and dreamed that Sister Loretta Riding was alive.

If you have ghosts

then you have everything.

—
Roky Erickson

S
AJUR PANGGANG WAS ON
Principalities when he heard the news of Shiyung's murder.

“The margravine Shiyung,” a moujik guard told him, his face swollen from weeping. “How can this be, Your Grace, I cannot understand it….”

The Architect Imperator turned away, so that the guard would not see his expression. “The Prophets tell us that there is little we can truly understand, my brother,” he said softly, his mouth twisting into a smile. “Only the Architects can understand all, only the Architects….”

He left the guard sniveling on his watch and wandered along the Mulla Nasrudin Promenade. The stench of the medifacs was nearly overwhelming here, but the Architect Imperator seemed not to notice. He crossed the promenade heedless of the clots of offal beneath his feet, the clouds of mucid steam that belched from the grates beneath his velvet-soled boots. Those moujiks who saw him, in his black suit with his turban of office slightly askew, pressed their fists to their heads and bowed, and afterward marveled that the most powerful of the Imperators had been so moved by the margravine's death that he ventured thus onto the hellish rim of Principalities, that his grief took him to the immensity of the Lahatiel Gate itself.

The truth was, the Architect Imperator had awakened some hours after his son's departure, to a scene of quiet domestic wreckage—broken glass, empty bottles, the replicant Khum's confusion at being left without commands. He had spent several minutes wandering around the house, not, as one might expect, checking the progress of the Architects but looking for a particular robe he had worn ten years before during Æstival Tide, a robe his wife Angelika had given him for the festival. He finally found it in the chamber that had been Angelika's dressing room, the robe wrapped in tissue paper scented faintly of lavender. He put it on, smoothing the sumptuous folds of forest-green jacquard and striking poses in front of a tall mirror. He was mindful that the color made his pallor stand out rather too severely, and that in his present state—unshaven, hair awry, a streak of blood on his chin where he had rubbed it with his cut hand—he looked more than a trifle deranged. Then he set out for the gravator that would take him down to Principalities.

Beneath the Lahatiel Gate he finally paused. Hundreds of feet above him the barricade gleamed a blinding argent. Scaffolds swayed precariously where a few unfortunate moujiks still worked, polishing the steel ribs and spars in preparation for the
timoria.
But it was not the sight of the Gate that had drawn Sajur Panggang here, but what lay beneath it.

“Your Grace.”

Another moujik guard. This one obviously had not yet heard of Shiyung's death. An obsequious smile creased his flat face, and he bowed so low that his stained violet sash trailed the ground. “Your servants are honored—”

“Yes, yes, thank you.” The Architect Imperator gave him a small smile and waggled his fingers. He looked distractedly about the cavernous space, and began walking toward a barred doorway to one side of the Gate. The guard's face fell. He hurried after the slender man, pulling at his sash in dismay.

“Your Grace! It is not safe within there, it is too near the festival, it is starting to wake—”

The Architect Imperator turned to regard the moujik with bemused hauteur. “I know quite well the status of the Redeemer's slumber,” he said, his voice mild. “I wish merely to inspect it, and make certain that the temperature of its chamber is not dropping too quickly. You have noticed some disturbances in the last few days?” This last with a slightly raised eyebrow.

“Why, yes, as a matter of fact, we were speaking of it yesterday—”

Sajur Panggang nodded, smiling that absently ironic smile, and walked on. “You might check the 'files,” he called back gently; “I believe there is unfortunate news regarding one of the margravines—”

There was no human guard at the door leading to the cage of the Compassionate Redeemer. Sentries from the lower levels had proved unreliable. They would succumb to morbid curiosity, their subsequent terror rendering them incapable of carrying out their duties. More often they simply refused to go near it. The ranks of Seraphim and Cherubim had slightly more fortitude in confronting the Redeemer, steeled by their long indulgences in timoring and the other rarefied abominations of the upper classes. But even they usually fell prey to an unanticipated sickening when, upon the occasion of the Great Fear or some reckless and spirited party-visit to the Redeemer's pen, they peered through the tiny viewing-glass and glimpsed the monster in its suspended state.

No such qualms beset the Architect Imperator. He had grown inured to such horrors, as he had grown insensible of the reek of Principalities' human smelting chambers and abattoirs. Now he simply peered into an opticon, permitting the Redeemer's robotic sentry to scan his retinafile and pronounce his name with chilly efficiency. An instant later the gate clanged open and Sajur Panggang slipped inside, dabbing delicately at his forehead with a handkerchief.

A narrow hallway, dimly lit, led a few yards to where a single steel-and-glass chair stood before a small window. The chair creaked as Sajur settled into it, the cracked leather seat emitting a smell of dust and roses. Even from here he could feel the oppressive heat of the Redeemer's cage. The glass window in front of him was so thick that he had to press his face against it to see anything, and even then it was with some difficulty that he made out the figure below. This was no failure of design on the part of the Architects. It was better for most visitors to doubt that they had had a clear glimpse of the cage's inhabitant; better that they fall back, choking, when at Æstival Tide they saw the blind colossus lumber from its cell onto the summer sands.

Sajur had no such reticence about viewing the Compassionate Redeemer. Orsina blood ran in his veins, no matter how diffuse, and for centuries the Redeemer had been the Orsinate's
enfant gâté,
their demonic familiar, the terrible rector presiding over the hecatombs every ten years, and in between times awakened every year or so and fed during public sacrifices. Sajur gazed upon it now with a sort of hunger, a yearning fired by a fraternal sympathy. Were they both not the Orsinate's prisoners, toys kept hidden away until the perfect moment arrived, when their exquisite chains might be tweaked by their captors? This was what had brought him here, here at the end of all things: the desire to look for the last time upon another monster, and feel something like sympathy. He sighed, a sound of pure regret.

As if sensing him the Redeemer stirred. Its blind head snaked upward and twisted back and forth, trying to pinpoint him, then sank back to the stone floor. Sajur drew back, his heart racing. He had not thought it would be this far into its cycle, already roused from aestivation by the temperature dropping within its cell. In a few hours an inch of ice would have formed on the thick glass window; the Redeemer would be fully awake and making its obscene ululating cry. Gazing down upon the creature's vast bulk the Architect Imperator allowed himself the luxury of a small grimace. It was truly an exquisite and hideous thing; as though by serving as the Orsinate's lictor it had become the physical embodiment of all their transgressions. Body of an extinct saurian, an alioramus, gorgeously scaled in silvery-gold and green, its deceptively slender legs with their curving dewclaws powerful enough to sprint across the scar and disembowel a man before he had a chance to turn away. Its long graceful neck ended in the head of an olm, broad and flat and eyeless, the color of cream stirred with a petal of gentian, and feathered with an olm's vestigial gills. Its yawning mouth was nearly perfectly circular, twice the height and breadth of a man. A lamprey's mouth, ribboned with rose-pink flesh without and within—long venom-tipped tendrils that whipped at its prey and stunned it, and then twitched the stupefied unfortunates into its maw. Circular rows of triangular teeth lined the inside of its mouth, layer upon layer like a manticore's, leading deep into its throat where hollow filaments fastened upon the body and sucked the nutriments from it. The Redeemer had no stomach proper. Digestion took place within those individual tubules and the drained bodies were excreted within a few minutes, slack and bloodless, bones crackled to bits. As Sajur Panggang stared, the fleshy tendrils dangling from the creature's mouth quivered, lifted into the air like so many blind worms and writhed toward the wall where he sat. At the sight his nose prickled and he pulled back from the glass; too late he realized he should have worn a protective mask. An overpowering scent of myrrh and roses filled the tiny room, so warm and sweet it clouded the senses, made one only want to crawl toward whatever it was emitted that smell and drown luxuriously as the odor filled one's nostrils.