But there were deeper pits to dig than the biannual justification of her efforts. Most Walchemians hewed far more seriously to the practice of religious devotion than was customary in Camrain or Cowak or Rumannal. Twice a year—the same frequency as the Countess’s accounting—Anell was required to subject herself to temporary Surrender.
She had no family or friends to come express their mourning before or to celebrate the reprieve of life afterward. At dawn on the required date she would present herself to the high temple on the meridian closest to her apartments. She had dressed in her best, or what must pass for finery among the rough choices of her closet. She did not hesitate to spend the Countess’s coin where duty or desire called, but pouring money into a garment she would wear but twice a year did not tug at her purse-strings.
Outside the Temple narthex, attendants greeted her solemnly as she presented them with the elaborate bouquets she must make beforehand: lilies for peace, white alpinum for eternity, pale purple anemones for regret and loss. They would adorn her tomb for her four-hour vigil, and then their petals would be crushed into a perfume by the attendants to anoint her when she emerged.
Typical for the good people of Leth Marno to enjoy a family feast afterward, or to join a friend in drinking away the sour tang of Death’s kiss. After her first few Surrenders, Anell had gone home alone and hurried through the day’s work that she’d been deprived of. Surrender was supposed to remind her to grasp hold of life with both hands, but mainly it provided her with ample and unwanted time to ruminate on the failures of her personal project. Like most other House scientists, she would serve the family well for a few decades, then crumble into ash and be forgotten.
On her fourth such effort, after nearly three years in the Countess’s service, she emerged from the suffocating darkness of her borrowed tomb to find that she was not, in fact, alone. Not even after the attendants smeared her brow with crushed and weeping petals and departed to minister to another soul brought back from its brief sojourn into the simulated void. The Countess’s son Arantha rested at the kneelers where vigilant loved ones might wait and grinned up at her when she approached. “Finally!” he said. “My legs have gone entirely numb, you know. Did you have to be dead quite so long?”
Her time in the tomb had equally benumbed Anell’s mind. The best response she could manage was, “Why are you here?”
Arantha stood and stretched with a groan. Anell might have done the same, if her patron’s eldest son weren’t in the room. Over the past year they’d exchanged polite greetings, the occasional conversation about what art troupe was displaying in the meridian plaza; they’d been seated adjacent at a few of the Remembrance holiday dinners that Anell was obliged to attend in the family home. “My mother mentioned in passing that you would be here today. I hope you’ll forgive me for inviting myself to come celebrate with you and your friends.”
Anell rested her hands on the belt of her grave robes. “Are we friends, Liel Arantha?”
“Are we not?” Arantha turned his head side to side, taking in the otherwise empty reception room with his good eye. “It seems to me you could use a friend, Anell Nath.” He smiled, not unkindly. “Likely more than just one, but I have only myself to offer.”
Walchemian society didn’t smile upon those who fraternized with rival Houses; its stance on taking up similar associations with the highest members of your own House was more opaque. Possibly more dangerous, too, whichever way she stepped. Anell thought of the waiting ex vivo womb in her study, the scrawled experimental outlines in her books, all the work yet to do. But perhaps the Countess had pushed her son here, in the hopes of a less-formal assessment of Anell’s research. Even at the bottom of a bottle of wine, she was certain she could stay her tongue about her secret work. Best give the Liels what they wanted, so that they would continue to do the same for her. “I am always at the service of House Liel. If you would like to celebrate my return, I would be honored.”
Arantha flushed. “Eternal After! This isn’t a House order. If you’d much prefer to go home, pour a pot of chocolate, and read one of Martis’s Dialogues, you mustn’t let me stop you.”
“What do you want?” The despair she was meant to have left in the tomb carried into her voice.
“What do you want?” he countered. “Shall I take my leave? Or shall I wash your hair with wine in the square?”
Again Anell’s thoughts darted to the recalcitrant womb and the nib-slashed pages of her notebooks. The looming probability that this life was all she would leave behind her, and with it, her chance to touch a moment’s fleeting pleasure. “The square,” she said, and the breathless words were crushed out of her by the weight of that terrible, enchanting chance.
Arantha washed her hair with dark red wine that smelled of old wood and tasted like smoke and vanilla. Many others danced in the square, laughing and toasting another six months of life. Sweet wine dripped from their noses and chins too, and friends kissed each other on the lips and eyes to share the vintage. Only Arantha, though, drank the wine from the hollow of Anell’s neck, and when she took the taste back from his lips, he shed his robe upon the stones and laid her back upon it.
The sun of Leth Marno bled sunset-red on Arantha’s shoulders and her breasts as he undressed her. When he penetrated her, she remembered the bubble of Permanence. Perhaps she should have cleaned it out and tried a different man’s offering, lest there were some defect in the Cadist line. Her hips rose to meet Arantha’s. Behind him, a celebrant cheered and released a spray of sparking wine over them both. The wine stung her eyes, but she had no mind for the cold.
After, they lay naked in the sunshine, sticky and empty-headed on wine fumes. The dancing had not ceased nor the music quieted; no one stared at them save Anell at herself, marveling at her own nudity. “You’ve wanted this for a while,” she said, as he lazily stroked himself.
He laughed and rocked his hips to match the motion of his hands. “Since before you arrived. I know! Foolish to romanticize the idea of this stranger, hurrying toward our doorstep with dark rumors biting at her heels. That idea shattered when you showed up, all Camrainian chill and dolor.”
His hand moved, slid between her legs, which she parted. As he explained the joys of reacquainting himself to the reality of her rather than the shade he’d conjured, his fingers slid inside and melted against the shape of her. Images of their past meetings shifted and bent under her fresh consideration as she rose to meet him, and whether she or him had curved to fit she could not say.
• • • •
At thirty-four years of age, Anell made an extra journey to the great Temple of the After on the city’s central node to perform the rite of Reproductive Annihilation.
Half an inch of water stood in the street, the last gift of the dying rainy season; the air buzzed faintly with the wings of the gnats and midges that had taken advantage of the floodwaters to lay their eggs. Anell’s clogs slashed through the water and clattered on the dry temple steps that rose above street level. There, above the water line, a few supplicants suffering with waterborne flesh-rot waited in the hopes of attention from the temple physicians.
Arantha, who had accompanied her from her apartments, stood beside her as an attendant walked out from the narthex, an older woman named Mylish. Mylish was Death-touched, as most attendants of the After were, having lost or sacrificed her arm below the elbow. A common enough injury; nearly half of those here had once worked in the grain-threshers of Lesser Marno. Perhaps in some other lifetime, Arantha would have served here too, if he had been less valuable an accountant to the affairs of his House, if his brother had feared him more as a rival to inheritance. “Don’t let my mother talk you into anything you don’t want to do,” he said, as Mylish pressed a kiss to Anell’s forehead.
“This is what I want, too.” The sacrifice would bind her to Liel service for the rest of her life, or as long as she desired it. A long bargain, and in the offing all the Countess wanted was the guarantee that Anell’s attentio
n would not be split away to the minding of offspring. That rival Anell had taken into her bed so long ago—Ismela? Oshmal?—had tried to strike a similar deal with his House and been turned away by his Count.
Anell’s position had been more firmly secured by the successful application of her research to stave off the growth of a small mass the Countess’s doctor had identified on her kidney. A further experimental use of her angiogenetic inhibitors had staved off vision decay in the Countess’s husband until his death of apoplexy last year. Anell wasn’t certain whether the securing of her services was what concerned the Countess, or whether the Countess feared that after all this time Anell would get a child and call it Arantha’s to claim an heir to the Liel name.
Arantha had asked her for such a child, of course, though she didn’t know if his mother knew about those late-night requests that sometimes slept in the bottom of a brandy-glass or under a listless starlit night. Before she could submit to the Rite, the Temple had required her to undergo ritual intercourse with an attendant, without the shield of medicine or magic to prevent pregnancy. Life and After were constantly struggling for dominion over every human existence; the After always won in the end, but she must give it the battlefield of her body first. In this, she hoped for Life to lose this one fight so that she might advance her own private war against the After.
She’d chosen Arantha for the attempt, of course, and had spent the next weeks cold and flushed, angry and melancholy by turns, counting down the days of her moon-month. She had made nearly two dozen floral arrangements by the time her blood came, elaborate and increasingly overwrought affairs that nearly collapsed under their own weight. Her fathers and grandmother had always hoped she’d take an interest in that gentleperson’s art, though likely they hadn’t expected it to be purposed toward funneling away nervous energy.
To finally see her undershift stained with blood had sent her to the bathroom to vomit in relief. Of course the rite itself meant nothing to her except as a means to secure her future. Now she could guarantee all her effort would be poured into the eternal war against the After—what else was there, when to choose otherwise was to sentence one’s entire potential lineage to permanent silence? But there were other irons still in her fire, and she looked forward to searing her hands with their heat. There was the small quiet pleasure of producing solid work on behalf of House Liel. There was Arantha. It was enough.
Mylish held her hand to guide her through the Temple, past the open nave. Inside, cleaners swept up the sand that had not clung to the fingers it whispered through during the morning’s remembrances. It would be collected, Anell supposed, and used again on the morrow. On the far side of the nave were the Temple’s care-rooms, where attendants had counseled her on what was to come, where she would undergo the procedure and recover. “It’s a challenging moment,” said Mylish, reading reluctance into Anell’s quiet. “It’s not weakness to mourn what the After takes from us.”
The After took nothing. Anell gave. “I’m ready for what comes next.”
At the door of the care-rooms, Arantha was obliged to bid her goodbye. Only the physician-attendants and their patients were permitted past that point. He kissed her on the forehead and held her hands as she stepped backward across the threshold. She turned away only when Mylish murmured to her and led her away.
While Mylish undressed her, scrubbed her body with astringent cleaners, and drew arcane marks to guide the surgeon’s blade, Anell’s mind wandered. It was a good life she had here, yet not a great one. That was enough. Wasn’t it?
They laid her down on cold clean linen sheets and bared her to the waist. The hairs on her legs prickled in the chill as the attendants sang the Rite, to bless the surgeon’s blade and to mourn the death of Anell’s line. When the priest-attendant bent over her face, to mark her with the sigil that would send her mind away from her body for the duration of the procedure, she stilled his hand with a word: “Wait.”
Mylish knelt beside her, ushering the priest aside. “It’s not too late to turn back now,” she said. Anell’s grandmother sprang to her mind, and the sharp edge of memory raised tears in her eyes. Surely her father’s mother had passed on to the After by now. “Many do. It’s no shame.”
“It’s not that.” Her eyes flicked to her folded robes, which lay on a shelf beside the door. “It’s silly, perhaps, a bit strange.”
“If we could ease your passage through the Rite…”
The words almost stuck to Anell’s dry tongue, but she forced them past her lips. “It sounds petty to call it a souvenir. But if I could keep an ovary with me, as… let us say, as a remembrance. Of what I have given up. And of… and of…” She struggled, briefly, with the words: trying to turn them just the right way so that they meant something to the attendants and still held true for her. The thought of lying to Arantha cut her across the grain, in parts of her soul that were too tender to bear it, and she was glad he was not there to hear her. “Of what may yet lie ahead for me.”
Mylish squeezed her hand. “I think we can honor this request. Unusual though it is.”
Anell directed Mylish to the clothing pile, where she produced the little pocket of Permanence. Long dormant these past years, cleaned and bereft of whatever specimens it had once held; though Anell had never yet managed to throw it away. This time when the priest advanced, she did not stay his hand.
It was Arantha who pressed the bauble back into her hands, afterward. She did not recognize it for what it was, at first, her senses still benumbed as they were by the dull haze of laudanum that smogged the air in her lungs. “I hope,” said Arantha, as his fingers left hers, “that this choice will lead you to ever greater victories in the endless battle, if that is what you want.”
Anell studied the whitish organ, still stuck about with fragments of clear membrane. It was smaller than she would have thought; no bigger than a walnut. “I am ready to do great things.”
• • • •
The fragment of Permanence endured while Anell recovered enough to be returned to her own apartments. Arantha visited her, during her convalescence and after, bringing her a dessert from the ice-fruit vendor on her meridian or an extravagant floral arrangement. Anell sometimes attempted to return these gestures, but she had not the fine eye for the gentleperson’s art, nor the peculiar patience for it. Some weeks after the Temple physicians had permitted her the full range of her former activities, Arantha brought her perfume of olibanum, with which they anointed one another before an evening’s gentle love.
“You’d be welcome in the family home, if you wanted to move your sleeping quarters,” Arantha said, as he combed the sweet citrus scent into her hair. Her breath slowed, but he did not offend her by asking next for her to consider upmarriage. She’d never made a secret of her disdain for the popular representation in market-dramas and songs of the destitute foreigner, saved from a lifetime’s empty drudgery by a wealthy benefactor. She would offer him the equality of lovers, not more and not less.
She turned her face to kiss his mouth. “This is home enough for me. But let me be a frequent visitor in the lovely country of your company.” The braid and comb slipped from his hand. Her hair, long and unbound, fell all around them like curtains of silk.
That night when he had gone, she opened the ovary-case for the first time, parting the fragile strands of magic that had held the thing closed. In her study at home, Anell cut into the cold organ, and, under a magnifying glass, excised tiny fragments to examine under her lightscope.
When at last she put her eye to the lens, she stifled a cry—of alarm and exaltation. The previous studies of female reproductive cells had left behind drawings of vast, indolent spheres: nothing exciting compared to the vibrant life contained in spermatozoa. But here, under Anell’s lightscope, she could make out the faint lines of a tiny form contained at the heart of the ovum. She changed the focus and increased the light output by only a fraction, in case too much more heat would desiccate and destroy the slide’s contents before sh
e could fully observe it.
Yes: it was unmistakable. Anell’s hand shook as she drew what she saw. In the ovum there slept an animalcule, the equivalent to what dwelt inside spermatozoa. As Anell watched, its tiny fists clenched and loosened, its mouth puckered silently, its legs idly flexed. It was dwarfed by the ovum around it; small wonder that earlier scientists had missed it with their more primitive lightscopes, before the reproductive arts had been dismissed in favor of further advances in the delay of death.
The vast ovum must be the answer to why the spermatozoon’s animalcule had failed to thrive: the spermatozoon was simply not equipped with the resources to endure implantation into her artificial womb. The existence of that lesser animalcule was likely an evolutionary relic, both necessary and useless in the same way as nipples without mammary tissue behind them.
Anell swept aside the lightscope and its pinned slide, where the animalcule’s fitful twitching had slowed—perhaps she had overstimulated it with the light after all. She withdrew a fresh sample from the flayed ovary and without hesitation deposited it into the artificial womb. This time, she was certain, the conception would take hold. She would show the masters of the Hollow Universities her work, when she had something worth showing. An immortal child, forged in the ex vivo womb sewn through with every thread of Permanence that Anell had ever mastered. Anell would die, but through her creation and its future siblings, her work would live forever.
The Long List Anthology Volume 6 Page 38
