Realms Unreel

by Audrey Auden

  “Ana,” Travis shook his head, sounding mildly exasperated. He looked at Ollie in the rearview mirror, “Mama’s right that it’s hard for people to find jobs, but people are angry because they think the government is doing a bad job, and that big companies are to blame.”

  “Are they mad at you and Uncle Frank?” Ollie asked in alarm. Travis laughed.

  “No, sweetheart. Our company isn’t nearly big enough to catch their attention.”

  They came through the traffic in the end without incident, and a few miles later they turned onto a road that ascended a forested incline and wound its way along a ridge cut into a steep hillside. Stands of tall redwoods and silver eucalyptus gave way at intervals to sweeping views of the flatlands below.

  A few miles later, Travis turned onto a short driveway that led to a tiled deck projecting out over a cliff. A second car containing Travis’ parents and younger brother pulled up behind them.

  As Travis and Frank hauled bags out of the car, Ollie skipped off to a low pedestal at the edge of the deck. She pressed her palm to the pedestal, and a section of the deck slid away before her feet. She descended from view.

  Dom followed Anatolia curiously as she carried baby Emmie from the car to the opening into which Ollie had just disappeared. He found himself looking down a broad staircase that descended into a spacious but minimally-furnished living room adjacent to a large kitchen and dining room. At the far wall, floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the lowland flats of Oakland and Berkeley toward the well-trafficked waters, bridges, and islands of the San Francisco Bay. Dom followed Anatolia down the stairs, admiring the improbable cliffside construction with the eye of a craftsman.

  Anatolia sank into the deep cushions of the sofa facing the grand windows, rocking the baby in her arms. The rest of the family descended the stairs noisily behind her.

  “Who wants Nanna to make breakfast?” called grandmother Marie.

  Several hearty shouts of approval met this offer, and everyone but Anatolia passed through to the kitchen.

  “Do you want anything, love?” Travis shouted back to Anatolia.

  “Just some quiet time, for now.”

  In the relative peace of the living room, Dom stood looking down at Anatolia and the child. As he leaned over her, Anatolia shivered. She pressed the baby to her breast, looking up apprehensively at the place where Dom stood unseen.

  Dom drew back. Perhaps he could spare the child this lifetime, let go of their connection, set her free. She must desire that, in some ways. Even so, he felt Ava’s pull, strong as ever. Perhaps she could not let him go, either.

  For now, though, he could let her enjoy the fleeting obscurity of childhood. He loosened his hold on her and reached for the body that anchored him to Dulai.

  ∞

  Night had fallen, and Dom’s awareness returned to a body cold and stiff, still propped against the base of the statue. He rose unsteadily, reaching out in the darkness for the flask at the end of his tool bench. Finding it, he threw back a long draft of water to moisten his dry throat, then rubbed his arms and legs, which tingled with the taut awareness of his renewed connection to Ava.

  He made his way slowly toward the closed entryway, guided by the dim glow suffusing the canvas walls of his pavilion. He pushed through the flap and stepped out into the light of the full moon. To the east, across the dark, still waters of a vast lagoon, loomed a massive wall of volcanic rock scaled by the delicate marble tiers of the Temple City, the work of his hands and his offering to the Oracle. The city gleamed in the moonlight.

  The sight of the child had kindled in him such fierce longing to be free of this place that for a moment he thought he must scream with the frustration of it and rouse the sleeping city. Yet he knew well that whether he raised his voice in defiance or bowed his head in obedience, he was bound as surely to his task now as he had been the day he accepted it. He turned away from the city, facing westward and listening to the long inhalations and exhalations of the sea as it washed the unseen foot of the cliff far below him. Feeling his desperation ebbing somewhat, he returned to his pavilion.

  He tossed and turned on his sleeping mat all through the night. In his mind, the face of the newborn child merged into the faces of a thousand other children. From each he had hoped to learn the secret of crossing into Death, but each had slipped away from him too soon.

  He was awoken from his restless sleep hours later by the sound of someone entering his pavilion. He jumped to his feet and faced the entryway. There stood a skinny girl in blue novice robes, silhouetted against the rosy light of dawn. A length of fine red ribbon fluttered from her fingers.

  “Dom Artifex?” she said timidly.

  He gazed at her expressionless for a long moment before answering,

  “Mohira?”

  “I —” she swallowed, “I bring you word from Serapen.”

  Dom’s nostrils flared, but he beckoned her to approach. However much he despised Serapen, this girl was not to blame.

  “Speak, then,” he said.

  The girl stretched the ribbon between her hands, reading aloud from the pattern worked into the threads,

  “Come to Musaion at dawn. The Oracle summons you.”

  Dom ground his teeth. In the ages that had passed since Ava departed, these occasional summonses from the Oracle had lost their power to inspire hope and now served only to taunt him. His question remained unanswered.

  He dismissed the girl with a gesture and waited impatiently for her to leave, but she shifted nervously from side to side, her eyes darting from his face to the unfinished statue behind him.

  “Would you like to take a closer look?” Dom asked brusquely. The girl nodded. “Well, go on.”

  She edged around Dom, stopping an arm’s length from the statue. She reached up and traced one finger over the perfectly sculpted pomegranate seeds, an echo of the statue’s thoughtful expression in the line of her chin, the curve of her lips. She glanced back at Dom and said,

  “She is very beautiful. Is she one of the Mohirai?”

  Dom looked away.

  “Not any more. She …” he searched for words a novice might understand, “She left Dulai to cross over into Death.”

  “Death?” said the girl, mouthing the strange word, “Where is that?”

  Dom’s jaw worked for a long moment until he managed to growl through clenched teeth,

  “That is one of the secrets you Mohirai keep from me, in your great wisdom.”

  The girl shrank away from the harsh words, eyes wide in her pale face. She bowed and departed hastily. Dom remained rooted to the spot, fists shaking, burning with anger.

  ∞

  Dom did not hurry to answer his summons from the Oracle. Whatever else the Oracle might be, she was not impatient. Only when his anger had cooled did he depart.

  A steep, narrow trail through the sunburnt grass led from the ridgetop where his pavilion stood down to the shoreline. There stood a lone dock, fashioned by Dom from some of the scrubby trees that grew atop the ridge. The dock projected over the jagged rocks of the shoreline and out to the water. He stood at the end of the dock and looked out across the vast lagoon.

  The pilgrims’ ferry crossing from one end of the great volcanic caldera to the other came into view, and Dom hailed it. The ferry took a long time coming, and when it pulled up alongside the dock, he jumped aboard wordlessly. He ignored the half-dozen other passengers as the ferry made its way slowly across the still waters toward the Temple City.

  At the Temple City harbor, broad, shallow stairs emerged from the dark blue depths of the lagoon. The stairs climbed up to meet the lowest tier of the city before continuing on a steeper and narrower path that scaled nearly one thousand vertical feet to join the domed temple crowning the city. The marble tiers connected by this central staircase formed the shape of a stylized tree, white branches spreading across dark stone.

  Two barefoot girls in bright blue robes hiked up to their knees stood on a low stair, ankle-deep in
the water, ready to secure the ferry to the heavy metal rings bored into the stairs. The pair of novices offered their hands to help him ashore, but Dom stepped off without looking at them, leaving his fellow pilgrims behind.

  He ascended the stairs swiftly, cutting through the slow current of foot traffic on the boulevards and promenades that interrupted the staircase at intervals, pulling the hood of his traveling cloak over his face to avoid the curious eyes of the young priestesses in their colorful robes and mantles.

  The long climb concluded at a white marble plaza. Dom stepped out upon it, facing the massive domed form of Musaion, the jewel of the city, his greatest offering to the Oracle. Even this had not been enough to satisfy her.

  The great doors of Musaion stood open, and Dom passed through the archway, pausing for a moment at the threshold to let his eyes adjust to the dim light of the vestibule, the first stage of the elaborate ritual of enlightenment.

  At the far wall, between two narrow archways, stood a woman arrayed in the saffron and scarlet that signified an initiate of the mysteries.

  “Greetings, Mohira,” he began, inclining his head just enough to indicate respect.

  “Greetings, Artifex,” she replied, “What business brings you to Musaion?”

  “I come seeking audience with the Oracle.”

  “You are most welcome,” she said, involuntarily spoiling her attempt at solemnity with a bright-eyed smile. She was a new initiate, then, still delighting in her role as Musaion’s gatekeeper.

  She turned to a small recess carved into the wall between the two archways. Water spilled from a silver spout at the back of the recess into a shallow stone basin, spiraling down an open drain. She lifted a chalice from its place beside the basin, sprinkling a handful of herbs into it from a pouch suspended from her belt, filling it from the fountain and raising it to Dom’s lips. He drank, knowing no amount of sweet herbs could take away the bitterness of that cup.

  Smiling again, she ushered him through the rightmost archway, the entry to the inner chamber.

  The hall beyond the archway turned almost immediately to the right, and then again to the left, a light trap that plunged Dom into complete darkness, the second stage of the ritual. He pressed his hand to the wall to steady himself, his fingers tracing unseen symbols carved in relief upon the stone. He walked slowly along the winding path through darkness until at last he saw the light up ahead.

  He emerged blinking into the inner chamber, which drew his eyes irresistibly upward.

  Soaring above the immense space, a massive central dome of translucent white stone seemed to float atop four golden half-domes that vaulted the great semicircular wings flanking the central chamber. Filtered sunlight illuminated wall frescoes of staggering scale and fell soft upon the free-standing sculptures arranged on the white tile floor. Echoes of women’s voices and footsteps drifted through the open archways leading out from each of the four wings, but the only other person in sight stood upon a dais at the center of the temple. He crossed the great space between them, stopping at the foot of the dais.

  Before him stood Serapen, pacing back and forth before the great loom that ordered Dulai and the lives of all within it, her bare feet padding over smooth white stone, brown fingers guiding the shuttle through the warp, snowy robes and long white hair flowing in waves behind her. The finished lengths of fabric that lay in folds upon the dais were threaded missives in which the Mohirai would read small pieces of the Oracle’s will. To Dom, the indecipherable rags were simply a reminder that the knowledge he so desperately sought was hiding in plain sight all around him.

  “Greetings, Dom Artifex,” she said, running her fingers along the gathering threads one last time before turning to face him. She looked down upon him, eyes glowing with living colors. He held her gaze, trembling but unable to look away.

  “Greetings, Serapen Mohira.”

  Serapen tipped her head to one side, considering him for a long moment before saying,

  “You sought the counsel of the Oracle once, Dom, did you not?”

  Dom closed his eyes, remembering the desperation that had led to this foolishness. After a long silence, he said,

  “I did.”

  Serapen’s voice grew lower and fuller as she intoned,

  “And so you must respect the Oracle’s words. Complete your task. If you would follow Ava, first you must let her go.”

  Dom felt the Oracle’s command closing in around him, one more link in the chain that bound him to this place. He bowed his head and forced his voice to say,

  “I submit to the word of the Oracle. Let it be so.”

  But in his heart, he rebelled. Whatever the consequences, to him or to the newborn child, he knew now that he would stop at nothing to escape the life that had, in Ava’s absence, become a source of unending sorrow.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Alternet Generation

  Dom made a show of diligent obedience to the Oracle, but he used his labors on the Temple City to mask sojourns to Emmie’s side. The construction of a new library wing gave him weeks of solitude between rising stone walls. Sculpting a fountain for the plaza before Musaion allowed him afternoons of reverie within the canvas pavilion of his movable studio. And, when all other attempts to find privacy failed, his nights overlapped Emmie’s days, giving him many uninterrupted hours in which to withdraw from Dulai and immerse himself in Earth. This was how Dom watched Emmie’s early years unfold against the backdrop of her father and uncle’s Emerging Media Lab.

  Uncle Frank’s omnipresent video scanner captured Emmie’s first steps across the bare cement floor of the Lab’s makeshift lounge and into her father’s arms before a cheering audience of engineers.

  “Oh, no, Travis,” Anatolia groaned through her three-dimensional projection, watching the replay from her law office a few blocks away, “How are we going to child-proof that place? You know she’ll head straight into that death trap if you give her half a chance.”

  “The spliner’s not a death trap, Anatolia,” Frank blustered, his face turning almost as red as his freshly-dyed hair.

  “We’re working on putting walls around it,” said Travis, walking over to an unprepossessing square of spongy grey material covering a large section of floor. The programmable extrusion mechanics of this expensive new device could replicate three-dimensional environments with great accuracy, enabling the Lab to use interactive, life-sized terrain models as they tested out their sensory augmentation prototypes. Travis pointing out to Anatolia the chalk lines where the walls and door would go. He met his wife’s eyes through the projection and said solemnly, “We’ll keep an eye on her. Don’t worry.”

  “You could just put her in daycare, you know,” grumbled Frank.

  Anatolia bit her lip. Until now, Frank and Travis had accepted without criticism the neurotic overprotectiveness that rendered her unable to leave Emmie in the care of anyone outside the extended family of Lab team members. Dom felt a pang of sympathy for her, seeing in her anxiety the legacy of her sister’s death.

  “Let’s talk about this later, Ana,” said Travis, shooting a warning look at his brother, “We just wanted to give Emmie her moment in the spotlight.”

  Anatolia directed a strained smile at Frank.

  “Thanks for helping me be a part of it,” she said, “You boys are the best.”

  Regardless of the origin of Anatolia’s fears, her concerns about safety at the Lab were more than a little justified, as Dom learned firsthand over many months at Emmie’s side. The Lab, housed in a sprawling warehouse near the West Oakland waterfront, was a trove of experimental electronics of all shapes, sizes, and degrees of quality assurance. A litter of sharp metallic thread snippets, button-sized batteries, and tiny microelectronics covered the floor. Travis more than once caught Emmie on the verge of swallowing a shiny, blinking, mouth-watering prototype, before the engineers learned to keep their work out of little arms’ reach.

  Though that would have been enough to worry any mother, the wareho
use was also an active construction site. Dom watched with interest as the Lab team methodically repurposed the building as a hardware prototyping facility. Emmie’s father invested heavily in workstations and lab benches but maintained a guise of dereliction about the building exterior to blend in with its immediate surroundings. West Oakland was a battleground between community reclamation efforts and socioeconomic deterioration, and baby Emmie became accustomed to an occasional gunshot from beyond the slapdash security fence.

  Despite the apparent hazards of the neighborhood, the Lab’s interior showed every sign of a healthy, growing enterprise. Spread out across makeshift lab benches of reclaimed plywood and cinderblocks, beneath the glare of bare light bulbs, the team assembled retinal projection glasses and sensory feedback garments, motion simulation headsets and olfactory augmentation patches. In the fenced-in lot beside the warehouse, the team ran daily gauntlets of simulation and feedback tests with their product prototypes, dictating and typing copious notes, initially with the aid of run-of-the-mill tablet computers, but increasingly, as time went on and their prototypes improved, with a few taps of fingers on a wrist or a few jabs in the air with a stylus. Notes in hand, they trooped back into the warehouse, ripping and replacing, reworking and tweaking, and returning to the testing lot once more. The bright lights of the Lab burned round the clock.

  Though the curious goings-on at the Lab might have provided a welcome diversion from his unending labors in the Temple City, Dom observed everything with a pragmatic eye, knowing Ava had not chosen this place and time lightly.

  ∞

  “You’ve got to see this!” Frank called up to Travis, who was crossing the newly-constructed catwalk connecting two upstairs office wings, hurrying back to his office after an important conference call with the Lab’s investors.