by Melanie Rawn
He would never understand. He would never wish for death. He wanted his life back. His own life. Whatever his struggles, whatever his doubts, Sam Beckett believed in the Tightness of what he did. Whatever his weaknesses, whatever his sins, she could imagine none that could mar that flawless edge or tarnish that bright, bright steel.
Even so, what he wanted and what she wanted intersected at one point. She wanted to be Alia again. He wanted to be Sam.
"We are alike," she murmured, and opened her eyes. Finding matches on the table, she relit the wick of a slim blue taper in a hurricane lamp resting on a chair. The pair of flames shone from opposite sides of the tent. "We do understand each other, Sam."
She reclined once more on the cot after selecting a dozen pieces of glass from the scatter on the table. She gazed at the two flames through the fragments, one by one, color by color, until he came to her as she had known he would.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
After Al stepped back through the Imaging Chamber door, Sam fought a brief, inconclusive interior battle. He saw all of it in his head, as if the various players were ranged about on a chessboard, but not as the traditional pieces. Instead, the latest in Medieval Action Figures ($59.95 plus shipping and handling; not sold in stores) came to life in a waking dream.
Philip Larkin and Roger Franks were garbed in gleaming chain mail, their swords, shields, and helmets mirror-bright under a glare of summer sun. Cynthia Mulloy stood in the White Queen's square, resplendent in pink velvet and crystal, holding a thick manuscript. And then there was Alia, looking astonishingly like Joan of Arc (Sam's only reference for a woman in armor—but was she Knight or Pawn?). Behind her in rainbow shadows lurked her controller, centered on the Black Queen's square. Sam himself sat on horseback smack in the middle of the board—and whimsy or self-mockery made noble steed and shining armor white as snow.
Philip and Roger were yelling at each other, striding back and forth in completely illegal moves. Cynthia was swearing with admirable creativity at them both. Alia began an inexorable march from black square to white and then black again, armor chiming with each step, the dark rainbow swirling from the point of her steel lance like a war pennant. Sam heeled his horse first one direction and then the other in an agony of indecision. Should he keep Philip and Roger from skewering each other? Or ride forth to his own private battle with Alia? When the Larkin Capacitor—a blue-black-yellow thing spitting sparks and humming with energy like a million angry bees—materialized and threatened to outflank him, he gave it up and retired from the field.
But sulking in his tent like Achilles was not an option. He could do nothing, decide nothing, without information. So he strode through the campground and arrived at Cynthia's tent, bursting through the blue canvas door flap and fuming with indignation.
Believing himself prepared for anything Alia might be up to, he was totally unprepared to find her dozing quietly on the cot, looking like a gentle white-and-golden angel in a flowing lacy nightdress. Her eyes blinked open: wide, blue, softly drowsy until she recognized him. A corner of her mouth quivered in what might have been a smile. She pushed herself a little more upright on the pillows, and the movements of her body were like silk.
"Sam. I was wondering how long it would take you."
"Why are you here?" he demanded without preamble. "No—let me guess. Your artificial intelligence unit—"
"Lothos."
Sam nodded curtly. "Lothos. He's been looking for me, hasn't he? So he could send you."
"Or someone else."
"No, you." He began to pace, boot heels sinking into the lush Navajo rug, scarring the nap. "There's some kind of link between us. I felt it last time, and I can feel it now."
"So can I, Sam." One sleeve slipped a little, revealing a curve of shoulder he remembered as velvet and cream in his palm. He ground his teeth and saw that same tiny smile lift her lips. "That makes you angry, doesn't it? That we're connected somehow. But are you angry with me or with yourself?"
"Just tell me if I'm right. In order for you to get to where I am, the person you Leap into has to be touching me." He was talking too fast, revealing too much tension. But he couldn't slow down or shut up; he had to know. "And when the touching happens, the physical link focuses your Leap. That must be how it happened last time."
"Considering your famous Swiss Cheese Theory, I must be difficult to forget. I'm flattered."
He ignored the jibe. "Cynthia and I didn't touch until that moment—and you were there an instant later. That's how it works, isn't it, Alia?"
"It's an interesting theory," she admitted.
"But that's how it works," he insisted.
"What's important is that we found you, Sam— just as Zoey and I promised Lothos."
"You're here for me. Not Philip or Cynthia or Roger. Me."
She nodded, blond hair tumbling around her cheeks. She raked it back, then let her hand fall to her side. "We have that in common this time."
That stopped Sam in his tracks. "What do you mean?"
But he knew. Oh, yes.
"You're here for yourself, too, Sam," she said. "For your own life."
He could hear his own voice saying it to Al: "This time, it's for me. . . ."
He took a step back from Alia, treading on Cynthia's discarded blue gown. "What will you do?" he breathed.
"I know who Philip Larkin is—was," Alia corrected herself with another smile, "and what he invented. By the way, compared to Lothos, your Ziggy is quite inefficient."
"I'll tell her next time I see her," he snapped.
Alia shook her head ruefully, as if Sam were a child who stared the answer in the face but was unable to see it. Not his fault, poor thing, that he must be led by the hand. The expression scraped Sam's nerves raw.
"Don't you want to know how I know her name?" she asked.
"I must have told you."
"Did you?"
An overwhelming urge to shake her until her teeth rattled was countered by an equally strong need to find out what the hell she was talking about with that knowing little smile on her
face. The conflicting emotions effectively paralyzed him.
"You've asked your Ziggy about me, haven't you?" she murmured.
"You—" He choked on it.
Lothos knew about him. That "article on that crazy guy at M.I.T.," a dozen more articles and interviews—hell, a hundred more, accessible to anyone who could read—oh God, she'd have access to all of it. All the things Al wasn't allowed to tell him. All the things that haunted him by not being there.
Yesterday upon the stair
I saw a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today. . . .
Alia probably knew more about him than he remembered about himself.
And suddenly it was a horrible temptation to ask her.
All the questions he asked about other people at the beginning of a Leap, she could answer about him. Who Sam Beckett was, what he had done and when, where he'd lived and studied and worked—his family, friends—was he married? A father? (Somehow, the answers were yes and no simultaneously; had he done something in a Leap or Leaps to alter his own history?)
There was so much he didn't know. So much he needed to know. Just something as simple as the color of his eyes.
"I know you, Sam." Alia's voice; he listened in agony. "I know where you got all those doctorates,
your favorite food, your mother's maiden name, that you played baseball—"
He could hardly breathe for the pounding of his heart. She knew—she had access to endless information about him—she could tell him anything and everything about his life.
But at what price?
"Basketball," he said with an effort. "I was on the basketball team—"
"Yes," she replied, nodding. "But you also played baseball."
"So does every kid in the United States," he managed. "Easy enough deduction, Sherlock."
"Ask me, Sam," Alia sug
gested softly. "Ask me anything."
Just one thing—surely it wouldn't hurt to ask just one—
No.
Sam met her gaze with an effort. "You could tell me anything for an answer, and I'd never know if it were true or not."
She gave a quiet sigh. "You may or may not believe that I know all about you, Sam, but that doesn't really matter."
"What does matter, then?"
"If you'll ever see home again."
His muscles spasmed involuntarily, and he knocked into a set of wind chimes. The noise jangled his already shaky self-command. "Is that why you're here? To keep me from going home?"
"Oh, Sam!" Her brief laugh was almost pitying. "Don't you see? I don't even have to try."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"Only that we'll just keep running into each other ... from time to time." She smiled again at the wordplay.
"You and Lothos will keep hunting me down," he accused, "trying to stop me from doing what I have to do. Can't you think up a better way to spend your time?"
"Time isn't ours to spend." She sat up, staring down at her hands—clasped as if at prayer. The twinned candle glow and refracted stained-glass light shone off her gold-and-whiteness, off the shards of color in her lap. "Think of it, Sam. Think about how I find you, and what that means. You don't dare touch anyone during a Leap again, for fear I'll be there the next instant. You don't dare let anyone touch you. Not for love ... or loneliness ... or even to save a life."
"I'm not afraid of you."
But did he say it to convince her—or himself? He hurried on, not wanting to examine that question any more than he wanted to be tempted with what she might or might not know about him. (An exquisite face, a cloud of dark hair, being so much in love that he wanted to laugh and dance with the crazy joy of it every time he looked at her—)
"You're not evil," he insisted. "Lothos is. Whatever it is he makes you do to people—you don't have to obey him, Alia! You can break free, you don't have to be a pawn—"
"What about you?" she countered. "Can you break free? You're as trapped as I am. Neither of us will ever get home. All we have is each other."
"You've got Zoey," he managed.
"And you have your friend Al," she answered readily. "Your only contact with home. Someone else you can never touch." Alia bit her lip suddenly. "What do Al and Zoey know about it, Sam? They go home whenever they like. They look in a mirror and see their own faces. They don't have to be afraid that they'll never see home again."
He knew what she was doing. She was pushing, pushing, making him doubt, playing on his weariness and loneliness and resentment, appealing to the dark despair in him exactly as he once appealed to any light left in her.
Quick study.
"Sam ... do you remember you? What you look like? Do you even know the color of your own eyes?"
Damn her—damn her! She could get to him and she knew it. He knew it. After all, it was the same technique he'd used on her. But full awareness of what she was up to didn't make this any easier to hear.
"I can't remember me." Her voice was a brittle whisper, edged in pain that cut into him, too. "I can't remember my own face."
"Alia—"
"You get tired, Sam. Just like me. You've told me so. But don't you ever get angry? Don't you ever want to scream that you've had enough? There are times when I—" She shook herself, raking both hands back through her hair. "I hate what's been done to me, Sam! All the things I endure at Lothos's whim—all I want is—"
"To go home." He heard himself finish it, his voice as bitter as hers.
"Is it so much to ask?" she pleaded, as if he could fulfill her wish. "To be myself again? To be Alia, not some stranger—to see my face in a mirror again?"
Sam took one step back, then two. These were his words, his feelings—
"Stop it," he breathed.
With swift grace she rose. Glass pieces tinkled to the rug. Sam flinched at the sound, backed into another clanging chime, flinched again. Alia was simultaneously dejected and defiant: shoulders slumped and chin lifted, blue eyes filling with tears of rage and grief. Real tears? Yes. But—real emotions? He thought so; the places where he and she were the same ached in empathetic understanding. But did she use her genuine fear and sadness the way Roger and Philip had used Cynthia's blond hair and blue eyes to create a character that wasn't Cynthia at all?
Her hands reached tentatively for him, then fell helplessly to her sides. "Only you and I can understand this, Sam. We're the only ones who know how it feels. Yes, we're linked—but do you know how strongly, and why?"
God, she was good at this. Very, very good. He wondered what Lothos would do to her if she wasn't— and decided he didn't want to know.
"I'm sure of just one thing, Sam." The tears spilled down her cheeks, shining like scars by candlelight. "You've helped so many other people—people you don't even know—and I know that somehow, some way, you'll be able to help me. We're linked for a reason. I have to believe that it's because you can set me free." She bit her lips together, then burst
out, "You're the only one who can!"
The words leaked from his lips like blood from a stone. "By ... my death?"
"No!" she exclaimed, and continued quickly, feverishly. "Zoey said killing you could be my way home. But she was wrong, Sam. You were right—if I destroyed you, I'd be destroying myself."
Does that work both ways? he thought, a shiver running through him.
"You're me and I'm you, Sam Beckett. We know the same weariness, the same emptiness—we feel the same anger and resentment. We both want to go home. Just to go home. And they won't let us. Ever. We're too useful. Too good at what we do. But we never chose to do it, Sam—they chose for us! And they'll never let us go!"
She was right, and yet he knew she was so wrong—she had to be wrong. He didn't know what he felt anymore. He backed into the tent corner, chimes clanging and clamoring all around him, a chair toppling when his awkward foot caught at it.
"Alia—no—that's not—"
She looked bizarrely innocent in the lacy shift, blue eyes brimming. She held out her hands. They trembled, frail as captive frightened birds. He saw then how truly fragile she was—poised precariously between stark terror and desperate loneliness, between Lothos' malign imperatives and the simple human need to be herself. One day, perhaps soon, she would lose her balance.
For now, whatever had been done to her and with her, there was still something left in her eyes of
whatever she had been before Lothos. The something he had reached in her last time. But if they were mirror images, then he could also see himself in her eyes. She was a reflection of what he might become, should fear and loneliness and anger overwhelm him.
"They'll never let us go home," she whispered. "You're my only home now, Sam. I'm the only person you can touch."
"Alia . . ."
She flinched. "I—I'm the last person in the world you'd want to touch, aren't I?" she said, her voice a mere quiver of breath. Her fingers clutched the pristine whiteness of her nightgown, twisting the material. "But—Sam, don't you see? You don't dare touch anyone else!"
Before he knew it he was gripping her shoulders— one of them bare and pale and velvety in his palm— and she was looking up into his eyes as tears rolled like liquid crystals down her cheeks.
"Alia—it doesn't have to be—I don't know how, but we can do something, we have to be able to do something!"
"How? When? Do you know what Lothos does to me when I fail?"
He shook his head mutely.
"And even after he's done with me—" She shook briefly, a clenching of every muscle in her body, and he believed that the horror in her eyes was genuine.
"Don't think about it," he said. Probably the stupidest thing he'd ever said in his life.
Her shining head bent, and her voice was small and defeated. "I'll always come back, Sam. Your
touch will call me to wherever you are in Time.
You can't escape me any more than I can escape you. And neither of us can escape what's been done to us."
"I don't believe that. I can't." Hoping he sounded more certain than he felt.
She broke free of his grasp, knuckling her eyes like a little girl. "We're trapped. Forever. All we have is each other. I've accepted it. Perhaps you should, too."
"No. It's not true!"
Swinging around to face him, she cried, "So you cling to your delusion that one day you'll go home? What have they done to you, Sam, that you won't see what's so obvious? Why won't you believe me?"
"Because . . . because if I did—"
He didn't dare finish the thought, not even in his own mind. He took the only escape open to him— physical escape, fleeing into the night.
"Sam!"
He was gone.
Alia collapsed back on the cot, wiping her eyes. "Well," she said aloud, furious at the way her voice quivered. "If Zoey were here, she'd ask me how much of that I actually believed. . . ."
Quite unaccountably, she put her face in her hands and began to weep.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
Sunday morning, and the campground was abustle. Most people were up early, toting ice chests and tables, cots, chairs, and garment-bagged costumes to the parking lot a quarter of a mile away, getting a jump-start on their packing before the long drive home. But no one even considered leaving before the epic joust.
Zoey regarded all this activity with a shudder of distaste. "Sunday morning after a Saturday night banquet—how can these people be up at this hour and look so bloody cheerful about it?"
"It's nearly nine." Alia had been awake since dawn. She shook out her dress—a yellow cotton skirt over a white petticoat, with a green laced bodice and blouse, rather like an inverted buttercup—and kept walking through the tiny village of collapsing tents. There was much chatter about the Fair, which Alia had not yet seen; the crafters would be the last to tear down their stalls, hoping for last-minute sales. Perhaps, Alia thought, if she led Zoey to a place where a conversation with thin air would be remarked on.
