Realms Unreel

by Audrey Auden

  Dom closed his eyes, his mind swimming with the heady mix of his rising frenzy and the seductive voice of the Oracle.

  “Do you accept your task?” said Serapen.

  Dom looked down at the water seeping up through the immovable rock now concealing the path Ava had taken. Ava had given him the chance to follow her, but in his fear he had let that chance slip away. A pact with the Oracle offered him a second chance to stand at the entryway to darkness. He had never before fully understood what desperation had driven Ava to accept a task from the Oracle. Now his own extremity forced his mouth to shape the words,

  “I do accept this task.”

  Serapen nodded, sending a ripple down the curtain of shining white hair that fell almost to her knees.

  “Very well,” she said.

  Serapen knelt to lift Ava’s sodden mantle from the place where Dom had dropped it. Dom lunged forward, hand extended to grab the mantle from her, but Serapen stopped him with a warning gesture. From her belt, she withdrew a small flask of oil, which she emptied into the folds of fabric. She laid the mantle in a loose circle around the base of the pomegranate tree, lifted two flat stones from the ground, and struck them together with a great crack, showering the fabric with sparks. Dom gave a shout of horror as a small flame rose from the mantle and crept slowly up the trunk of the tree, gradually engulfing the twisted bark, the spreading branches.

  “This is the sign of our covenant, Dom Artifex,” Serapen intoned, eyes dancing with flame, “Now you must leave this place. Do not look back.”

  The ground trembled, and a great river of fire began to run down the slopes of the smoke-spewing mountain in the west. The blazing tree and the burning horizon momentarily blinded Dom. When his vision returned, Serapen was gone. He was about to turn and run when he caught a glimpse of the scarlet mantle, still twisting in the flames at the base of the tree. Heedless of the searing heat, he rushed forward and seized the burning cloth.

  He plunged the mantle into the shallow water pooling above the buried fountainhead, extinguishing the flames and cooling the burns that even now were healing on his hands. Falling to his knees, he pressed the charred fabric to his heart. Every fiber of his being cried out,

  Lost. Lost. She is lost to me.

  And so she was, for a time.

  CHAPTER 2

  Emerald Bridges

  Dom raised his arm and delivered another stroke of his hammer. The ring of metal on stone faded into the rustle of the white pavilion shading his makeshift studio. He stepped back to survey his work.

  An unfinished marble statue of a woman stood before him atop a pedestal. Her robes flowed in elegant folds down to bare feet planted in a bed of herbs and flowers. In her left hand she held a ripe pomegranate, split open to reveal clusters of plump seeds. A cascade of loose curls fell over her shoulders. Her head tipped slightly to one side, lips parted in the delight of understanding. In his mind’s eye, Ava always took this form, the embodiment of his ancient regret.

  A sharp sting ran down his arm, and he winced. He rolled back his sleeve, turning his palm up to scan the web of fine pink lines just visible beneath the skin of his forearm, a tidy grid overlaid on the irregular paths of blue and violet veins. Near his wrist, one line stood out brighter than the rest, a scarlet thread having just been pushed to the surface by the straining of his muscles.

  He stepped toward the bench and found a small leather pouch, from which he withdrew a fine needle. Tracing its sharp point lightly over his wrist, he freed the end of the emerging thread and drew it out. The long, damp filament swung slowly from his fingers as he threaded it through the needle. He gripped the needle tightly as he touched the sharp point to the mark at his wrist that had already healed over. He bore down into the sun-browned flesh and worked the needle from wrist to elbow, burying the remnant of Ava’s mantle in the only hiding place he had found from the prying eyes of Serapen and her handmaids.

  The mantle of a Mohira was one of the greater mysteries, woven from living thread and bound to the one who wore it. By defying the Oracle’s command and saving Ava’s mantle from the flames, Dom had preserved not merely a memento, but an enduring connection to her.

  Just as the last inch of scarlet thread disappeared beneath his skin, the world tilted, and Dom fell to his hands and knees, dropping the needle into the grass beside him. He gasped as the threads woven into his skin constricted from his neck all the way down to his ankles. Despite the pain, his heart leapt.

  He scrambled on hands and knees to close the heavy flaps of the entryway. Enclosed by the relative privacy of four canvas walls, Dom crawled back toward the center of the pavilion. With his back pressed to the cool marble base of the statue, he let go of his grip on Dulai.

  ∞

  Ages had passed since Dom watched Ava disappear into the underground river, and nineteen years since he last felt the pull of her awareness along the living threads of her mantle. Now she had returned once more.

  Dom closed his eyes as gravity vanished. He felt his disembodied consciousness slipping into the void between the worlds. He forced down a rising panic, focusing on the pull of Ava’s awareness. At last, light and sound flooded around him. The tension that had guided him slackened, and he felt himself drifting weightless in an enclosure that slowly resolved into a small pink room. With some effort, he gathered his diffuse sensations into a single position, reorienting himself.

  He found himself standing beside a narrow bed looking down at a dark-haired woman in a loose white robe. In her arms rested a newborn wrapped in a soft yellow blanket. Here was the new life that Ava had chosen.

  A fair-haired man leaned over the mother, his fingers tracing the rounded lines of the baby’s face. A middle-aged woman dressed in blue bustled about the room gathering loose linens. She paused at the foot of the bed to smile at the baby’s parents, until a beeping sound outside the door caught her attention.

  “Everything all right in here for now?” she asked briskly.

  The parents nodded, and the woman slipped out the door.

  Father and mother adored their child in hushed tones, awestruck, until the mother looked up and said,

  “Should we let them in, Travis?”

  Dom saw the woman’s face for the first time, and his eyes widened in surprise. Anatolia. She had grown up, but there was no mistaking her.

  “Are you sure you’re ready?” the father, Travis, asked with a grin.

  Anatolia smiled ruefully.

  “Do your worst.”

  Travis left the room, and Dom resumed watching the baby. Anatolia was whispering to her, kissing the dark down on the top of her head, touching her tiny hands and lips. Dom wondered whether Anatolia might recognize in this infant form the essence of the sister she had lost nineteen years ago.

  Travis returned a few minutes later to usher in three eager visitors. Dom looked up at their approach, scanning the faces that would form the backdrop of Ava’s new life.

  An older woman with bleach-blonde hair entered speaking loudly into a headset (“We’re going in now! I’ll call you back!”). Behind her followed a tall scarecrow of a man with a high, lined forehead and thinning hair through which his sunburned scalp could be seen. He carried a sleepy-eyed, tow-headed little girl.

  “Ah! She’s beautiful,” the woman exclaimed, eyes sparkling as she leaned in over her grandchild and said to her headset, “Yes, yes. Yes. Okay. Bye.” Anatolia winced almost imperceptibly. Dom recalled the comparatively calming presence of Anatolia’s own mother.

  “Grandpa,” the little girl said solemnly, “Would you please put me down?”

  “Of course, my dear,” the grandfather said with equal dignity.

  Once on the floor, however, the little girl lost her composure entirely. She rushed to the bedside and squealed,

  “Mama! She’s so tiny! Can I hold her?”

  “Can you be very, very careful?”

  “Ple-e-e-ease?”

  The little girl reached up, arms wide, and Travis knelt
to show her how to cradle the baby. He eased the yellow bundle into her arms, and the little girl rocked the baby gently, prattling to her quietly.

  The door burst open, and Dom looked up to see a lively young man with spiky blue and green hair enter, waving a pair of eyeglasses before him.

  “Travis!” he cried, “I think I figured it —”

  The young man shut his mouth at the glare from the grandfather and folded the glasses, chastened. He hooked the glasses carefully to the collar of his form-fitting, glistening black shirt, which did not quite cover an elaborate tattoo that stretched from his shoulder to his elbow. A row of green LEDs blinked on the shiny metallic belt holding up his skinny jeans.

  “Do you know what you’re going to call her?” the grandmother asked Travis.

  “We were thinking of naming her after Ana’s mother. Isidora.”

  “Isidora. That’s a pretty name. Is it Turkish?”

  “Greek, Ma. Ana’s mother is —”

  “Right, right, right. Well, it’s a nice name.”

  A wail of protest interrupted them, and all eyes turned to the little girl holding the baby. Her grip had slipped a bit, and the baby was squirming in her arms.

  “Careful, Ollie!” Anatolia said sharply to the little girl.

  “She’s fine, Ana,” Travis soothed, reaching down to adjust Ollie’s hands.

  “Oh, look!” Ollie squealed, “Look, Mama!”

  The baby had turned an unfocused gaze up at her sister, revealing vivid green eyes. Anatolia stopped mid-scold and pressed her lips together, her eyes welling up. Travis took her hand.

  “What is it, love?” he asked gently.

  Anatolia shook her head, pulling back her hand to brush away her tears. She sniffed and gave him a watery smile.

  “Nothing, just … Those eyes. Just like my sister’s.” She reached out and touched the baby’s head. “What about Emerald? Emerald Isidora Bridges.”

  “Emerald,” said Travis, drumming his fingers against his lips, “Hmmm. Emerald. Emmie. I can see that.”

  “Emmie,” Ollie said, wiggling her forefinger, which Emmie was now grasping tightly in a tiny pink fist, “It’s so nice to meet you.”

  The young man with the shiny belt surreptitiously slipped on his eyeglasses and began narrating softly into his collar, the fingers of his right hand sliding along the front of his belt while his left hand pressed the side of his glasses.

  “We’re recording!” he said. Dom realized with amazement that the eyeglasses must contain some sort of camera. The speed of technological change on Earth continued to accelerate since Ava’s last appearance here. “Okay, it’s April — what day is it, now? — April sixth, 2012, and we’re welcoming little Miss Emerald Isidora into the Bridges clan. There she is!” he said, swooping down over Ollie until his eyes were three feet away from the baby, then backing up to say, “What do you think about your new little sister, Ollie?”

  “Jesus Christ, Frank! Will you cut it out with that video scanner?” the grandfather exploded. Dom drew back, alarmed by the outburst.

  “Patrick!” the grandmother scolded, “Language!”

  The room fell silent. Patrick, the grandfather, took in the anxious looks and slowly exhaled.

  “I thought he had finally managed to break those damn glasses,” he grumbled.

  Travis and Anatolia exchanged an amused glance. Frank cleared his throat, then edged over to Travis.

  “So,” said Frank in an undertone, switching off the patch mic on his collar, “Did you ask her?”

  Travis considered Anatolia, who was carefully overseeing the transfer of the baby from Ollie’s arms into her grandfather’s. Travis cleared his throat.

  “Sweetheart …” he began, “So, Frank and I were wondering …”

  Anatolia looked up, waiting for him to finish before seeming to realize what he meant. She rolled her eyes, saying,

  “Oh, all right. But —” Frank hauled Travis from the room by the arm before Anatolia could change her mind or even finish saying, “— I still don’t see why we can’t just video conference.”

  “What are they doing, Nanna?” Ollie asked her grandmother.

  “I’m … well, it’s something your daddy and Uncle Frank have been working on over at the Lab. Sensory augmentation —” she flapped her hands, unable to find the right word, “Sensory projection? Something. There are some fancy clothes involved. I guess we’ll see in just a minute.”

  “Just a minute is probably a bit ambitious, Marie,” Anatolia laughed.

  Nearly an hour later (“We’re almost there! Just give us five more minutes …”), Travis stood in the middle of the room wearing a form-fitting black shirt and glasses like his brother’s, as well as a pair of dark gloves enmeshed in golden seams. He was speaking patiently through a headset to his mother-in-law, as he had been for the last forty-five minutes. At last, he turned to Frank.

  “Okay, she’s got it on. You can switch to projection.”

  The background hubbub that the rest of the group had kept up for the last hour subsided somewhat.

  “Thank God,” said Frank, heaving a sigh of relief. He tapped out something on his shiny belt, and a three-dimensional, translucent projection of an older woman with chin-length silver curls and stylish square-rimmed glasses appeared facing Travis.

  Dom’s mouth fell open in astonishment, and he drew nearer to the projection, circling it slowly. Here stood Anatolia’s mother, Isidora, or so at least it seemed. She had perhaps grown a bit plumper, and the smile lines around her eyes and mouth had perhaps deepened, but she exuded the same warmth he remembered from nineteen years ago.

  “Hi, Yaya!” cried Ollie, bouncing up from the seat beside her mother to wave at the projection.

  “Hello, my darling,” said Isidora, waving back. A light source in the unseen room where Isidora stood glimmered on the golden seams of her gloves and the black threads of her form-fitting shirt.

  “Isidora,” said Travis, “I just need you to press this patch on the belt near the — yes, that’s the one.”

  “Oooh,” Isidora straightened up, “That felt strange.”

  “Good. That means it’s on. Now, just mirror my movements,” said Travis, “Frank?”

  Frank snapped to attention and transferred baby Emmie expertly from her mother’s arms to her father’s. When Frank stepped away, Isidora mimicked Travis uncertainly, cradling empty space in her arms. Then she gasped. In her projection, a baby had appeared.

  “I can feel her in my arms!” Isidora exclaimed.

  Dom shook his head in wonder. This world Ava had so longed to inhabit was truly miraculous.

  “Touch her cheek, Travis,” Frank urged.

  “Isidora,” said Travis, “Watch me.”

  Travis stroked the baby’s cheek with the fingertips of his gloved hand. Isidora repeated the movement, shaking her head as she murmured,

  “Amazing. Amazing.”

  After admiring her granddaughter’s tiny face, hands, and feet with the help of Travis and their linked sensory augmentation gear, Isidora turned, still cradling the projection of the baby, and said to Anatolia,

  “I wish I could be there, my love. Papou does, too. We will come to visit soon, just as soon as the semester ends.”

  “I wish you could see her, Mama,” Anatolia said softly. Dom saw her eyes glistening as she looked from the real baby in Travis’ arms to the simulated one in Isidora’s, “I mean, really see her. It’s just not the same as having you here.”

  “Pretty damn close, though!” Frank muttered to Travis.

  ∞

  The Bridges brought Emmie home in a streamlined silver car that ensconced its passengers in preternatural silence as they glided over the uneven surfaces of a tangled freeway system. Dom sat unseen in the back, wedged between Emmie, who was sleeping in her car seat, and Ollie, who was fidgeting in hers. Ollie kept up a stream-of-conscious dialog with her parents, who patiently predicted when the baby might crawl and walk and talk, denied Ollie’s reques
t to sleep in the baby’s room, and suggested that Ollie’s teacher might not like her to take the baby to school for show-and-tell.

  As they slowed to a crawl at a particularly ill-conceived juncture, Dom considered that, while the quality of vehicles had changed since his last sojourn on Earth, the quality of city traffic had not.

  “Travis,” Anatolia murmured. Dom turned to face the front seat. Anatolia was gripping her husband’s knee and pointing. They were approaching a disturbance in the road.

  Ahead of them, a sign-waving crowd, hundreds strong, was marching up an exit ramp toward the oncoming freeway traffic. Four police officers in navy blue uniforms were climbing out of a pair of police cars parked at the top of the ramp. Sirens wailed in the distance, and seconds later another half-dozen police vehicles swept past.

  “It’ll be fine, Ana,” Travis said calmly, squeezing Anatolia’s hand, “They’re just making a spectacle.”

  “It was just a spectacle at city hall, until it wasn’t. Is there another way around them?”

  “Mama?” said Ollie, picking up on her mother’s worried tone, “Why are those people walking on the freeway? Aren’t you not allowed to do that?”

  “They’re protesters, Ollie,” said Anatolia, forcing the anxious note out of her voice, “They want people to know that they’re very angry, so they’re breaking the law.”

  “What are they angry about?” said Ollie, pressing her hands to the window and staring out wide-eyed as they inched by the gathering crowd on the exit ramp. Dom read the signs — some scrawled by hand on dirty canvas, some printed neatly on shiny banners — waving above the crowd. Heal America. Take Back Oakland. This Is My Occupation. Though the car muffled the sound impressively, Dom could just hear the dull roar of the protestors’ chants.

  “Well, they’re angry about a lot of things,” said Anatolia, watching the front line of the crowd edging toward the police cordon, now twenty officers strong, “But the biggest thing is that they can’t find any work right now. So they don’t have anything better to do than —”