The Tropic of Eternity

by Tom Toner

  He leaned against a tree, too confused to stand.

  “I think you’d better come inside,” she said.

  *

  Lycaste, Huerepo, Poltor and Percy walked up the beach to the house of Impatiens. A Melius grave, a simple wooden pole with a crook at its tip for hanging flowers, stood solitary in the garden.

  Lycaste knelt before it, and Percy watched his broad red back shaking as he wept.

  “Who was it?” asked Huerepo, retreating a little to let him grieve.

  “An old friend of his,” Percy said. He read the Tenthling inscription. “The owner of this place.”

  “Hello,” muttered Poltor, nudging Huerepo, “who’s this?”

  Percy looked. A gangly Melius boy was watching them from the house.

  Lycaste noticed him last, ears pricking. He stood, sniffing, rubbing a clumsy fist into his eyes and motioning that they stay where they were.

  “Briza?” he called.

  The boy almost went inside then, lingering in the doorway. Lycaste went cautiously to the threshold, talking with the boy out of reach of everyone’s hearing.

  All except for Percy, who could read their lips as if he were standing beside them. The boy did not remember Lycaste, but was going to fetch his father.

  Lycaste went in, and the three of them dawdled in the shady garden, Poltor and Huerepo daubing sandy mud onto their skin to protect themselves from the ferocity of the Tenthling sun and rolling a couple of strong Amaranthine cigarillos to smoke. Together they watched the waves sweeping up the stony beach. It was as peaceful a place as Perception had ever been, and some atavistic urge put there by his father told him it would be a nice place to stay, perhaps for ever.

  But then that sensation returned, that feeling of being observed. Percy turned and stared into the palms on the hill, his eyes searching their shadows. “I’m going for a stroll,” he said to the two Vulgar, who had opened a bottle of something and were happily smoking and chattering with the arriving Oxel. “Won’t be long.”

  Lycaste followed the boy into the back garden, a courtyard shielded from the sea by a high bonestone wall. The man Drimys had clearly heard their talk from the garden and sat waiting on a shaded bench, his eyes wide.

  Lycaste felt a familiar shyness sweep over him as he saw his old friend. All he wanted to do then was turn tail and run, run back into his quarters on the Epsilon, back up into the Void, anywhere but this impossible, bewildering place where time, apparently, had dashed on without him.

  It’s your choice, he reasoned to himself, seeing the tiny but appreciable age that Drimys’s face had accumulated since their last meeting. You are free to do as you wish.

  Drimys, Briza and Lycaste looked at each other, the sound of the waves carrying softly over the walls.

  “Where have you been?” Drimys said, leaning forward, shaking his head gently at the ridiculousness of it all.

  “There are some odd sorts with him, Papo,” Briza said, a depth just coming into his voice.

  “Keep an eye on them,” Drimys replied, not taking his own eyes off Lycaste. “And what in the world have you been eating? You’ve hardly changed.”

  Lycaste reached instinctively to his face, touching his rough beard. “That woman in my house said it’s been twelve years. I’ve only been gone—”

  “It has been twelve years! It’s six fifty-nine! Have you been asleep all this time? And who are those people with you?”

  Lycaste looked into the blue sky, as if it somehow contained the answer. “Percy!” he shouted, waiting. “Percy will know,” he muttered, nodding and scrubbing a hand through his short hair and sitting down on the bench.

  Drimys was looking at him as if he’d lost his marbles. “You left before the Plenipotentiary died. I remember the night you disappeared. Why did you leave? Was it Callistemon?”

  Lycaste stopped smoothing his hair and glared at his old friend. Once again, he felt as if it was he that had died and was locked now in some strange, maddening afterlife where nothing was quite as it seemed.

  “Before he died?”

  *

  Percy reached the first rise, scrambling on some loose earth as he realised he’d never climbed anything steep before. Below him, the cove had unfurled, a great glittering bite in the rocky coast, the sun on the green water dazzling his eyes. He sat, breathing hard, still getting used to the mingled pleasure and torture of exertion.

  At once, he became very still. There was someone, something, behind him. He remembered Lycaste’s stories of home, some mention that the young man had felt watched.

  Percy turned.

  Deep in the shadows of the trees, a presence regarded him cautiously.

  What are you? it asked, slinking closer, dappled with shade.

  Something must have changed since Percy had last encountered Aaron’s Spirit. He could see so much more now than he ever could before.

  It was a deeper shade of darkness, something that disappeared when the light touched it. He extended his finger and felt the weight of something touch him in return.

  You aren’t a man, the shadow said suspiciously, in Percy’s head. He comprehended with a smile that this was how he himself must once have sounded. It was unsettling, to say the least.

  “No,” he said, “I’m not.”

  The weight on his finger and hand increased as something, invisible now in the light, slithered across his body. Immediately Percy sensed their souls reaching out to one another, trying to merge and blend.

  Lycaste walked slowly into the surf, watching the water run between his toes and drag the fine sand away with it. Never in his life had he been told so much in so short a space of time. By rights he should now be sixty-three, for the Old World had somehow turned faster than all the others, speeding time along.

  His life here had been taken from him, but from what they’d told him, he had not deserved that.

  When he left here, Callistemon had still been alive.

  Instead of relief, he felt sharp-edged fury, bitter tears stinging his eyes, an ache rising in his throat. Lycaste looked into the water, spotting the same garishly patterned fish investigating his toes, and splashed his foot, shooing them away. He remembered all the women, and men, who had arrived at his door with proposals of marriage, wondering what might have come of his life had he accepted just one of them, where he’d be right now. A dream of another world filled his mind, a dimension where he lived happily, unaware of how close he’d come to ruin. But it was not this life. This life had been taken from him for nothing. Now his friend Impatiens was gone, his house sold, his name all but forgotten. He might as well have died—

  But then he saw Huerepo and the Oxel watching him, concern rumpling their little faces, and his rage flowed away with the tide between his toes.

  “All right?” Huerepo asked awkwardly as Lycaste walked up to them. He patted the Vulgar on the head, smiling at the Oxel, and sat with them on the pebbles. Poltor offered him the bottle—another fine, sweet Amaranthine wine liberated from Maneker’s cellar—and he took it with a smile.

  “We can buy this place back for you, if you want,” said Huerepo, flicking stones at Poltor’s plackart. Together they had amassed enough Amaranthine sapphires to clog up the Epsilon’s hold, weighting it so awkwardly that it leaned at a visible, drunken slant on the beach.

  Lycaste thought for a moment, surprising himself. “I don’t know if I really want it any more.”

  Percy trudged back along the stones, walking parallel with the incoming surf and wetting his dust-caked feet. He saw Lycaste and the Prism sitting together a little up the beach, noticing how the sun had almost sunk below the rocks of the distant caves.

  He looked at Lycaste with solemn interest, trying to see the resemblance.

  You don’t believe me, the Epir presence - a female - said at his side. But you will.

  “Percy,” Lycaste said when he saw him coming, “everyone’s saying—”

  “I know,” he interjected, picking up a pebble and looking ap
ologetically at it. “I appear to have buggered up my Bilocation. It’s clearly more difficult than I thought.”

  The two Vulgar chuckled. They didn’t seem to care. Percy wouldn’t have been surprised if they both had numerous debts out in the Investiture that would now be forgotten. The sunburned Oxel, dozing off the heat beside them, had very little comprehension of time as it was. Only Lycaste was looking at him sternly.

  You see it now, don’t you?

  Perception swallowed, choosing his words carefully. The resemblance was clear.

  “I did warn you that it was an experiment, Lycaste. I’m sorry.” He thought for a moment, his human brain sluggish. “You know, I’m quite relieved, actually. It could have been a lot worse.”

  Are they one and the same? he asked her as he spoke. Are you sure?

  I’ve watched him since he was a boy. There is no doubt.

  “And Pentas’s child is queen now,” Lycaste said suddenly, mystified, taking a large swig of the bottle. “Can you believe it?”

  Percy, who had never met the girl, could very well believe it. He could believe a great deal these days.

  KIPRIS

  They took the Epsilon, soaring high above the moonlit Nostrum Sea and landing in the rocky fields on the outskirts of Alvege, his parents’ estate, on the lonely Eleventhling Protectorate of Kipris Isle.

  Lights shone from the towers of the house, bathing the dry grass with glowing stripes. As the cool salt wind ruffled his hair, Lycaste was suddenly very glad he’d come under cover of darkness. He didn’t want to be seen by old childhood acquaintances, didn’t want to be recognised and questioned. They had done nothing but mock and torment him, these bored island folk, and he owed them nothing.

  “Lycaste,” Percy said, obviously sensing his nerves. “Sit for a moment. Breathe.”

  They sat on a wall together, listening to thin music coming from the open windows. Lycaste couldn’t believe they were just in there, on the other side of the wall; so close, so distant.

  “They used to like to embarrass me,” he said, turning to Percy. “Why? I’ve never felt the need to do that to someone. Perhaps that makes them the strange ones . . .” He could feel his heart hammering, panic only a few breaths away.

  “Remember the breathing I taught you,” Percy said, puffing out his naked brown belly as a demonstration. “In through the stomach and hold.”

  Lycaste did as he suggested, feeling calmer with each big breath. He looked at their feet as they dangled from the wall, clear in the green of the moonlight. “What a silly story I’ll have for them.”

  He slid from the wall, moving to the window and pressing his eye to the thick, distorted glass.

  There they were.

  Lycaste’s father was picking at something on the end of a fork, apparently ignoring his old wife as she spoke. Their Butler Birds hovered at the end of the table, in the process of conveying the remains of a large dinner back to the kitchens. Lycaste watched their distorted faces through the glass, calculating that they were both in their second century now, understanding that he was looking upon the calm lives of two people who thought him dead and gone. It wasn’t often that you got to see the aftermath of your own life.

  He chided himself, stepping away from the glass, remembering that it was supposed to have been more than a decade. Any grief could scar over in that time, he supposed.

  Lycaste hesitated at the door, the sounds of their sharp, cultured voices coming through the carved holes in the wood. If they looked to their left, they would see his shadow through the lattice, but they did not. Lycaste remembered what a burden he once was to them, how very exasperating he must have been as a shy, dysfunctional young man, presented to expectant society only to disappoint. He pressed his ear to the door, closing his eyes, weeping softly as he made up his mind.

  Lycaste stepped away from the door, their voices growing softer, taking another step, and another, until he could no longer make out a word they said. He moved beyond the light of the windows and they disappeared from view. And then he was gone.

  “Ready?” Maneker asked, lingering like a shadow in the hangar. Lycaste nodded, pushing past him and making his way to his chamber. He fell into his pile of clothing, nestling like a hibernating animal in the rumbling, insulating darkness of the Epsilon. He opened his eyes in the gloom and went to his slot of porthole, a wedge of reinforced, yellowed plastic, looking out into the darkness of the island. His parents would undoubtedly hear of something lifting from their gardens and disappearing into the sky. They’d never know how close he’d been.

  Lycaste began to tremble, wondering if he’d done the right thing. He hurried to his door, shoving it into its slot and jogging down the passage. Maneker was already striding through the scullery towards him, the hiss of the closing hangar flanges following at his feet, the pitch of the motors changing. Lycaste moved aside to let him pass, sitting heavily at the table, and felt them lift away.

  Percy sat in the flight deck, bathed in the green light of the moon. Maneker was trying to speak to him, but instead all Percy heard was her.

  He came looking for me, the Epir Spirit said. Percy nodded. He knew. Their souls were so intertwined that all her knowledge, all her memories, were now his.

  He saw the world as it had been, seventy-nine million years ago, and what had happened to cause all this.

  And he saw the future.

  MEETING

  Lycaste took care to clasp his trembling hands together, trying with all his might to look interested in the chapel’s astonishing ceiling.

  Even someone like him, a simple coastal landowner born up in the outlying Provinces, had heard of this place, the chapel at the top of the Sarine City, the jewel in the First. His uncle Trollius had even been here, once, and brought back a tapestry copy of the ceiling that had long fallen prey to the moths by the time Lycaste came along. He saw now that it was no great loss; no tapestry could have come close. Percy, munching contentedly on something that dribbled down his chin, looked equally captivated, and they were both so engrossed that neither heard her enter.

  “It’s you,” came the voice he hadn’t heard in twelve years. “It’s really you.”

  Lycaste inhaled a deep breath, finally taking his eyes from the ceiling. An image of someone he might have known stood a little way off. At once he remembered why he’d fallen in love with her.

  But it wasn’t love, he told himself. You know that now.

  Pentas was watching him gravely, unsure, and Lycaste suddenly understood that the clock was ticking. Say something, that interior voice continued. Say something or she’ll think you’re the same awkward shutaway she was glad to leave behind.

  Percy nudged him sharply in the ribs and he burst into life.

  “Sorry,” he gasped, “your ceiling—it’s . . . wonderful.”

  Her eyes crinkled into a smile. “I made some additions myself. Can you—”

  “The household scenes,” he said instantly, pointing, and she laughed.

  They stepped closer to one another, the last few moments before Lycaste’s disappearance weighing heavily on the silence.

  Lycaste felt Percy move away, no doubt genuinely distracted by the ceiling. He felt such love for his old friend the Spirit then, and all they had been through, that suddenly Pentas became just another person, standing before him as a thousand others had, waiting for him to speak.

  Instead of speaking, he smiled and began to laugh. “What a ridiculous story, eh?” he asked, tears in his eyes.

  She grinned. “What a mess.”

  “I went away for twelve years,” he said, shaking his head in wonder. “By accident.”

  “You idiot.”

  They were laughing now, looking into one another’s eyes, the relief surging through them.

  Pentas wanted to reach out, to hold him in some way, but could see that their closeness was too fragile to ruin with a touch. The twelve years that separated them seemed to have dissolved in an instant, and she was back meeting the shy, cl
umsy young man who owned a house by the sea. She remembered what had charmed her into telling him her deepest secrets, knowing that in doing so she had conferred too much upon him.

  A muttering arose behind the bronze chapel doors and they swung open. Lycaste straightened, watching tear-blurred people come walking slowly in, eyeing him expectantly. He recognised the Amaranthine Jotroffe at once—he at least had not changed at all. Jotroffe nodded to him, a twinkle in his eyes, and Lycaste nodded back.

  To the man’s left was a Melius girl, not yet in her teens but easily the Immortal’s height already. She wore the half-mask and facepaint of the West, the Shameclothes of the East, and was smiling broadly as she lifted the mask.

  Instantly he recognised who her mother and father were, seeing in her the man Lycaste thought he’d pushed to his death.

  Callistemon’s daughter.

  “Come, Babbo, meet Lycaste.”

  He bowed awkwardly as she came before him, noticing how the Shameplague had lightly scarred her features, and remembering the red welts that had covered Callistemon’s face at the end.

  “That’s not necessary,” she said in Tenth, grinning a gap-toothed smile. Lycaste straightened, some instinctive part of him liking her immediately. “Babbo?” he asked clumsily. “That’s your name?”

  “No.” She giggled. “It was my first word, and it must have stuck.”

  “May I present Arabis the First, Queen of the Fifteen Provinces, Empress of Sligos and Mansour, Custodian of the Isles of Storn and Ion, Protector of the West and Friend to the East,” Jotroffe said grandly, clearly delighted by all her titles, as if he’d made them up himself.

  Lycaste smiled back, still somewhat baffled by the quirks of fate that had led them, all of them, here, to the grandest room in all the Provinces.

  An Amaranthine with a soft, kind face appeared at Jotroffe’s side, perhaps the one they called Holtby, and further back he spied another seated, dark-skinned Immortal, smiling from one of the wooden chairs that lined the wall.

  Holtby appeared suddenly shocked, even angry, and Lycaste followed his gaze to see that he was glaring at Percy.