José moved his hands slowly, cupping them and scooping where he expected the water to be, then bringing it to his mouth. He tasted the faint saltiness of seawater and an abundance of mountain minerals, the thin tang of carbonic oxide. It was the mineral springs. The hotel had been built over them, drawing from them for a variety of health-related amenities. He had crawled under the hotel as a boy, finding the springs in their subterranean chamber of stone. Its ceiling was domed and unsettlingly high for an underground structure, and the sound of the water welling up echoed until it became an ear-numbing drone—not because of its volume, but because of the mysterious state of saturation it created. At this memory, José realized that this was the sound he was hearing now.
“No hard feelings, I hope, but I have your senses under control. Little Langoni’s at work inside you as we speak, after all.”
The voice from above was not overloud, but it was clear, sharply separated from the sound of the water around them. It seemed to use a different layer as carrier.
José’s fatigue was overwhelming. After going to all that trouble to gather his senses together, he could not keep them sharp. He let them scatter again, as if spilling from his hands.
And then, high up in the darkness that filled his field of vision, he saw a faint point of light wink into existence.
It looked like a single snowflake, as if it had fallen from the sky of some other Realm where it was winter. He watched it drift toward him.
It shone very weakly, but it was bright enough for José’s eyes, which had adjusted to the darkness. The pale light illuminated the stone chamber just enough for him to see that the curve of the dome was as he remembered it. As the fragment of light descended, its illumination reached the lower half of the chamber. The walls were lined with pillars carved like ancient Roman statues.
The fragment passed lightly before José’s nose. He put out a finger and stopped it going any further. It was pearlescent and tiny, a thin, almost weightless thing.
He had thought it might be warm, but he felt nothing.
Perhaps, he had thought, it had a heartbeat, but it lacked this too.
It was simply a thin, fluorescent slice of some pearl-like mineral.
“Is this the Angel?” asked José, using the light to illuminate his body and learning that he had been stripped naked.
On his chest was the boy’s face.
Langoni’s face.
The texture was exactly the same as José’s skin, so that it looked like a lump on his chest that had somehow taken the form of the boy’s death mask.
He brought the light near the face’s eyelids and got no reaction. Its eyes were closed. But it was breathing regularly through its nose, and did not seem to be asleep.
“That’s right …”
He understood that this was a reply, but it had arrived after a noticeable delay. Was Langoni’s will beginning to flag?
So this was the Angel?
“There’s no need to be afraid. That fragment of light has been rendered inert.”
“Inert?”
“Like a pathogenic vaccine. Made using material that peeled off the main body of the Angel during battle. It’s tiny, but very precious. To make even this much inactivated vaccine takes effort you wouldn’t believe.”
“And I should …?”
“Give it to the face.”
José wrinkled his nose. “I think not,” he said.
But his fingers moved of their own accord.
Little Langoni’s lips had parted slightly. The tips of his white teeth were showing. José’s fingers were inserted lightly between the soft lips. The warmth of the mucus membranes and the sucking sensation inside were as innocent and defenseless as a baby. Despite himself, José felt the kind of pleasure that comes with feeding a small animal, and even some affection for the boy himself.
The boy’s face slept through this, only moving its tongue to lick up the fragment of Angel. His lips closed and the chamber fell back into perfect darkness. José had taken the fragment of light into his body …
The voice began to speak again.
“The chronicles of the Clement family are the key to decoding the Realm of Summer. Three generations caught up in a majestic rolling river of a story. And here and there along the river spin whirlpools, some large, some small, none related to the main narrative. That discursiveness has a charm of its own.
“Let me give you an example. This is the story from a branch of the family far from those who lived in the mansion—a poor farmer and the young woman he has just taken as his wife.
“No sooner are they married than the woman realizes that she has a genius for embroidery. No one can compete with her—not the old women in the village, not the young women in town. Her designs are wonderful, unforgettable, and she seems to have an endless supply of them within her. Losing herself in embroidery lets her forget her tiny house with its noisy chickens. She focuses her senses so well that the little wooden hoop with fabric stretched across it becomes her whole world. She begrudges the baby the time she must spend nursing it, forgets to plow the fields, eventually turns her back on the farmer at night in bed, so intent is she on keeping the hook moving. ‘But this will let us buy you new clothes, darling,’ she says to her husband, cheeks flushed. She’s right: her embroidery already brings in more than her husband’s fields. But he knows the truth. His wife cares for nothing but the shining world she sees on the fabric. The household he thought they would build together is the barest shadow of that world to her. And so one morning the husband begins to build a small cage beside the chicken coop. He means to imprison his wife and take away her hook and thread by force. Madness has seized him. But his wife has eyes only for her embroidery hoop, and does not hear the ring of the hammer. Wife inside the house, husband outside it, both engrossed in their respective projects …
“That’s how the story starts.”
José had remained silent. He knew well what the voice meant to say. Just before (although, was the sense of time still meaningful?), he had submerged his full sensory powers, tracing the folds of that mental state one by one.
“Everything is like this, José.
“The Clement family chronicles contain the Realm of Summer’s character molds—its prototypes for human relationships. My guess is the Realm’s designers wrote the Clement saga first. Then they took the whole century’s worth of stories and rearranged them across space instead of time—scattered them throughout the town in a single summer. Those days you thought were your own as you lived them over these past thousand years were nothing but weathered old stories from centuries past. Your great-grandfather’s grandfather’s time.
“Now, how do you suppose this episode goes?
“The man catches his wife, takes away her hook and hoop and throws her into the cage. It’s very small, this cage. Too small for an adult to stretch out inside it. No standing up, no lying down. Just being in the cage is enough to make your body scream before long.”
All at once, a memory began to come back to José.
It was something he should have forgotten long ago. What surfaced in memory now was not the event itself but the slant of light when it happened, the rustle of the trees. The irrelevant details around the edges.
He felt no nostalgia.
What he felt was fear.
These were memories he had apparently decided never to recall. Memories he had, in fact, never recalled even once. Fear so strong it made him nauseous.
And now they were beginning to move within him of their own accord …
“The farmer threw his young wife into the cage dressed only in her nightgown. By morning her rosy cheeks were gray and sunken, and her hair, once like waves of golden wheat, was a withered snarl of thorns… or so the chronicles say.
“Once a day, her husband gave her a bowl of oat porridge. That was all. Sometimes he would seem
to remember she was there, and poke her with a stick hammered together from scraps of the timber he had used to make the cage. The villagers remonstrated with him, but he insisted that he was driving the demons out of her, and sent them away.
“As his wife’s nightgown, damp with her own waste, began to rot, so too did her sanity. Without resistance or rebellion, she curled up in the filth and accustomed herself to the cage. Accustomed to its closeness, its smell, and to the way her body warped and screamed under the unnatural positions it forced upon her.
“Day by day she lay there, fidgeting in her rotting nightgown, curled up like a crayfish.
“One day her husband noticed something odd. Her teeth were disappearing. In three months, she’d lost all her front teeth, top and bottom, and her canines and molars had begun to go too. He couldn’t think of what might be causing this, no matter how he racked his brains.
“Eventually he noticed a more terrible change in her.
“She was with child. He knew it from the change in her breasts.
“He was furious. There was no way the child could be his. He demanded the father’s name from his wife, and she gave it to him willingly, laughing. The man she named was a vagrant who survived by begging. ‘I pressed my rear to the bars of the cage so he could do it,’ she said with a toothless grin. ‘He was much, much better than you.’
“The husband decided to drag his wife out of the cage.
“The lock had rusted in the rain, and the key wouldn’t fit. He had made the cage too strong to break easily.
“‘Why not call the villagers for help?’ his wife sneered. ‘All I’ll do is scream the child’s father’s name.’ The husband looked her in the eye and froze. Her face was aglow with well-being. She was smiling the way her embroidery had always made her smile. Stealing that from her had been his whole reason for imprisoning her, but she had only put down broader, harder roots inside her cage.
“A whirlwind rose within him.
“He disappeared into the barn, then burst out with a hatchet and an axe. Arm spinning like a windmill’s vanes, he chopped the cage to pieces, then dealt a single blow to his wife’s abdomen and the ‘child of sin.’ Eyes clouded with her spattered blood, he saw her make an obscene gesture at him as she breathed her last.
“In his wide-open wife’s toothless mouth, he saw little nubs of white protruding from the gums.
“The man drew closer to see what they were.
“Ground-down teeth.
“She had removed her teeth, somehow ground them down to little round nubs, and then put them back in their sockets.
“The husband turned slowly to look at the inside of the cage. On the inside, sturdy bars were covered densely and completely with intricate, deeply carved patterns. Embroidery patterns. His wife had pulled out her own teeth to carve these designs into her cage. Once they wore down from use, she pushed the nubs back into her gums to hide them from him. Only a few unused teeth remained in her mouth. The complex, exquisite patterns pressed in on him with unsettling force. He felt the terror of someone who has somehow stumbled into a place of worship for an alien god. His entire body was covered in gooseflesh, bumps like tiny insect bites.
“Then he realized something else: half of the cage was still uncarved.
“Her own teeth would not have been enough.
“The question of why she had intentionally fallen pregnant surfaced and connected with this new knowledge in his mind.
“He heard the wordless whisper of his brain shrinking in terror.
“The farmer was unable to follow his train of thought a step further. He was eventually found in the cage, holding his wife to his breast and staring stupefied into space. He did not move or respond to anything. They say he wouldn’t even blink if you clapped your hands in front of his eyes. Wife in his arms, he survived a few days before expiring. His open, staring eyes were completely dry.
“Whether the farmer feared rightly I do not know. But the thought became a stout cage in its own right. A cage that imprisoned his mind, and was adorned with minute patterns …
“Thus ends the tale as recorded in the chronicles.”
José felt cold sweat beading on his forehead. The vague terror he felt was drawing closer.
“Is Little Langoni starting to take effect?
“Well, never mind that for now.
“Listen to this, José.
“I tried eating one of your number. A man named Pierre. Simply by eating him—in the literal sense, by taking him apart and devouring him alive—I obtained all sorts of information that wouldn’t be revealed in a standard analysis of an identity boundary’s interior. The taste of blood, the taste of flesh, the taste of bone, the taste of organ meat. I took my time in savoring it, and this let me understand every last fold of that shadow cast on Pierre’s personality.
“I felt firsthand how rich the character design is here in the Realm of Summer, even compared to other Realms in the Costa del Número. The taste was truly unpleasant.
“His meat was foul.
“The Clement chronicles had the same stench. I wanted to cover my nose sometimes as I read them. I felt as though that awful smell was seeping into my psyche like cigarette smoke gets into your hair and between your fingers.
“Abuse, confinement. The imagery was stamped on every page, clear as day.
“And you’ve been stamped with it too. All of you—I mean, you’re dolls who were cast with the chronicles as molds, right?
“The Realm of Summer’s an attraction that’s meant to balance nostalgia for the humanity and style of a very low-tech era—back when the hegemony of electricity was limited to lighting and motive force and analog communications—and the sadistic urge to crush that innocence underfoot. Your characters are the perfect foils for human users. The guests come here practically giddy with anticipation, knowing that this backwater village is theirs to overrun, and that they will never be held to account for their sins.”
José was thinking about something else.
What had his interlocutor been hinting at with his story?
A cage.
Suffering born of a cage.
Was that it?
Were they here to gather up AIs and Glass Eyes and Spider-web and weave them into an aggregation of pure pain?
“And who should the guests find waiting for them but you AIs, knowing you’ll be treated cruelly but welcoming them all the same, wearing your frightened smiles? The guests see your fear of and dependence on them as plainly as if it were branded on your forehead. And they are comforted by the sight. The Realm of Summer: stunning scenery and unspoiled beauty fashioned into a cage for its inhabitants.
“So the guest sits down on the chair assigned to his empty role and begins to play his part as a family member. He savors the smell of the coffee his wife brings, admires the charming wildflowers in little bottles of indigo glass, is moved anew at the carefully finished spines on the books in the wooden bookcase, then turns to the ‘son’ smiling beside him and slowly, deliberately violates him.
“You are all those sons, and you accept this treatment, not even from obedience but simply because it is as natural to you as breathing. You grow accustomed to the pain, live with it as sustenance as you make your home in the cage. What was the decisive factor behind this character of yours?”
José heard a sound in the distance.
The crash of breaking glass, again and again. He also heard what sounded like a stone wall being destroyed.
He wanted to give that sound more of his attention. What were Jules and Julie doing? Suddenly, he became unable to hear anything but the man’s voice. He had been cut off. He realized anew how utterly unfree he was in his own body.
“Am I boring you? Well, it won’t be long now. You must understand clearly, José, exactly what Little Langoni is doing inside you.”
Another faint light
appeared in the underground chamber again.
Points of light, similar to the fragment of Angel but not quite the same, danced in the air like fireflies.
Someone familiar with the work of the Realm’s developers would have recognized them as task lights—authoring tools for use in dark locations.
The task lights flew to one of the great classical statues that lined the wall, hugging its surface before finally coming to rest on its shoulders.
The statue began to walk.
With each step it took it became less like stone and more like flesh. Color rose in its face. At three meters tall, it was a giant.
Big Langoni dragged a wake behind him he waded through the central pool fed by the mineral springs. Finally he reached José, who lay by the pool on its opposite side, and came to a halt. Several of the task lights left his shoulders and descended onto José’s chest and his stomach.
“Beautiful, José,” said Big Langoni. “You’re beautiful.”
His voice, filled with admiration, had an irresistible allure and mass at such close quarters. It had body that was so well-defined it was almost palpable. It penetrated its listener, intoxicated him.
“Right now,” Big Langoni continued, “Little Langoni is searching inside you for all those memories and internal injuries that even you never uncovered. I’m monitoring what he finds from out here. It’s a complex, José, as delicate and subtle as Yve’s lace—a beautiful mesh of thought and feeling. Inside you lies something as vast as the TrapNet, and just as fine. And, like the TrapNet, it is studded with precious stones: your long-forgotten memories. Some have fossilized, some are become pearls, but all adorn you beautifully and cruelly from within.
“Soon, Little Langoni will help you remember.”
José was terrified. He understood too well about the unknown memories inside him. To confront them would be unthinkable.
He vomited with repulsion.
Big Langoni bent his gigantic body at the waist and tenderly lapped the filth from around José’s mouth. His eyes, each nearly ten centimeters across, peered into José’s own.
The Thousand Year Beach Page 23
