Something More Than Night

by Tregillis, Ian

  She’d been alive, with her own life, with a new job at the museum, and she was ready to start dating again and maybe even looking forward to it because she hadn’t even thought about Ria for a day or two; then Mom died, and they’d gone to Australia for the funeral, and she could tell Martin was backsliding, but it was just the two of them from now on, so she was going to help her big brother because she loved him, because he needed her help, and she had promised herself she wouldn’t be so distant from him and maybe other people, too. But then Bayliss showed up and now she was dead and nothing he said made any sense and somebody had been killed and she was assaulted, and all she had were her memories but those had been ransacked.

  Even scarier was the realization Bayliss was driven by fear. He wouldn’t come out and admit it. Yet clearly he’d been hiding on Earth for who knew how long. But why, and from what, he’d only hinted.

  It was all so overwhelming that she wanted to scream. So she did until she could taste blood.

  The partygoers on the Rhine got rowdier. Their laughter taunted her. She had fallen into hell while a boatload of strangers got stoned. Molly jumped to her feet.

  “Shut up!” she yelled. A wave surged up the Rhine. The boat bobbed like a cork; its lights went out. Molly slammed the closet door to shut out the babble of confused and drunken German. The slam cracked like a home run.

  The vibration knocked a fender bender from a shelf above the refrigerator. It hit the floor with the screech of brakes on wet pavement, the crumple of plastic, and the clump of a self-sealing hydrogen breach, followed by Molly’s raised voice and Ria apologizing. The memory cracked open; the warm, wet sensation of being instantly smitten seeped under the fridge. Somewhen, standing in a cold rain on the corner of wistfulness and Winnetka Boulevard, Molly and Ria exchanged telephone numbers. A lyric from an Édith Piaf song stretched from the crook of Ria’s elbow to her wrist, the spidery copperplate etched into her flesh with cobalt ink: Even if I’m wrong, leave it to me.

  Oh, Ria.

  For months after they’d broken up, Molly had kept a scrap of blue-lined notebook paper affixed to the fridge with a hula-girl magnet. Ria’s forwarding address. She had it in the cloud, of course, but seeing it there, as a physical tangible thing, somehow kept Ria closer. Kept the apartment less empty. Sometimes her junk mail still came to the old apartment. She had moved a couple of times since then, but Molly had always kept track of her. And then a fire reduced their former home to ash. But that didn’t matter. Here, now, in Molly’s Magisterium, the apartment building still stood. Here, now, in the prescribed reality of the Magisterium, their relationship was as strong as it had ever been. Bayliss’s shitty diner had people in it. Why not here? Why not Ria?

  The tattoo, the ragged fingernails, the way she chewed her lip when thinking hard … Molly could remember it all. Every mole. Every filling. The trigger point for every countercultural rant. Her lub-dub heartbeat. Her bare soles slapping softly on the kitchen floor. The dream-catcher earrings she’d only worn once before deciding she hated the way dangly earrings brushed against her neck.

  A gap appeared in the upside-down drizzle. It widened with every recollection, like a balloon slowly taking shape. It bloomed into a woman-shaped hole in the rain. But where the woman should have been, there was nothing but a cold mist. A rain wraith. A banshee built of fog and memory, a loose conglomeration of sensations bundled together with the twine of selfish longing.

  The more Molly pushed, the more ephemeral the apparition became. It wasn’t quite the same as trying to mend Bayliss’s cigarette burn. The false Ria didn’t resist in quite the same way as the floorboards. She resisted by virtue of complexity. She resisted by virtue of missing flesh, bones, and blood vessels; tonsillectomy scars and pink lungs; nerve fibers and lymph nodes; vertebrae and ventricles. Compared to an inanimate floorboard, a person was incomprehensibly vast.

  Overwhelmingly vast. Molly couldn’t hope to do something like this.

  She released the memory construct. It dissolved like cotton candy in the rain. Little bits and pieces of Ria-ish memories flittered into the darkening sky. Molly drew a shuddery breath. Held it until she knew it wouldn’t become another sob. Released it. If she wanted to see Ria, she’d have to do it for real.

  What had Bayliss said? Yeah. “It’ll take some practice before you can interact.”

  Screw this noise, thought Molly. She needed comfort. She’d keep practicing until she could find Ria and tell her what was happening. Ria would understand. She’d be there for her. They’d been together for so long. Surely they still had a connection.

  And so what if they didn’t? Molly wasn’t human any longer. She could force a connection. Resurrect it. Couldn’t she? She could change everything. If she could sculpt reality now, she’d damn well make it something worthwhile. She could put things back to the way they used to be. She could change Ria’s feelings.

  Molly rummaged through the chaotic wreckage for clothes. She wiped her eyes on a scarf, then realized it was the scarf she’d been wearing when the tram tore her apart, and tossed it aside. The scarf disintegrated into a rain of sand that joined the grit on the floor from when a savage cold snap shattered the water pipe in the kitchen. She went from closet to closet, seeking clothes but finding nothing but dusty broken memories and hoarded personal triumphs. Then she caught a dozen glimpses of herself in the shards of a broken mirror.

  She was already dressed. Slacks and boots and the cashmere coat with the wide belt. Hadn’t she been barefoot? In a nightgown? And before that, when she first awoke, wasn’t she wearing footie pajamas in her old childhood bedroom?

  Molly closed her eyes and concentrated. A final teardrop fell from her lashes with a chime like a wedding toast on fine crystal. When she opened her eyes, the slacks had become blue jeans; the cashmere coat a red leather jacket over a faded Hershey’s t-shirt. The necklace was gone, and her earrings with the tiny rubies had reverted to simple studs. Her bumming-around-town clothes.

  She looked at her feet. Early spring in Australia meant early fall in Minneapolis. The seasonal distinctions might have meant something in her grandparents’ day. Warm days, warm nights. The boots became sandals.

  And then she realized she didn’t know how to get back to the real world. If she went out through the cathedral in the pantry, as Bayliss had done, would she end up in France? Would the closet send her to a German waterfront? If she went out through the hole in the wall near where the fifteen-year-old still wept, would she come out in the wrong time? This apartment didn’t exist in the real world any longer. Anything contiguous with her Magisterium would be displaced in time. It was confusing. It made her head hurt.

  But Bayliss’s diner looked like it was a hundred years old or more. Yet they’d entered it straight from a present-day Melbourne laneway. A seamless overlay on the real world. She needed to figure out how to do that if she didn’t want to be trapped here forever.

  It took more rummaging to find the front door. Like the missing stairs, it had become an amalgam of concepts—a thought-cloud encompassing all manifestations of doorness. It was part revolving door, part Aldous Huxley novel, part rickety gas-station rest stop door, part elevator door, part of the car door that had broken Molly’s pinky finger when she was thirteen.

  But none of that mattered. It was a door. What mattered was the other side. Where did Molly want to go?

  * * *

  Sunset cast sanguine shadows across rings of terraced landscaping. Molly stood at the lip of the floundering agricultural co-op where the Calhoun lake bed had been. Molly had seen old photos. Hard to believe there had been a time when there had been that much freestanding water right in the middle of the city. The water crisis had peaked before Molly was born; things were slowly improving. Maybe someday they’d let it be a lake again.

  For now it was neither fish nor fowl. The lake was long gone, but the site wasn’t yet a productive grower. Lake Calhoun had rested upon a bed of glacial till packed into a trough etched eons ago i
nto the limestone detritus of an ancient sea. Ria led the effort to remediate the soil one hard-fought quarter acre at a time, leaching away countless decades of motorboat oil and Jet Ski fuel leaked from the surrounding jetties, fertilizer runoff from the surrounding homes, and industrial runoff from the surrounding city. All without removing what few nutrients the biological decay of lake grasses had sprinkled into the cold, lightless lake bed.

  It was hard work, and, so far, a losing battle. Most of the terraces were empty. They stepped down in an irregular ring defining contours of the original lake bed, almost a mile across at the widest spot; the bottom was almost eighty feet deep. Molly stood at ground level with six levels stretched beneath her like the edges of an inverted ziggurat. Perhaps someday it would be Ria’s very own hanging garden of Babylon. If she had her way with nature.

  A few dozen feet, maybe fifty, of the terrace lacked the ochre and butterscotch tones of poisoned soil and the glassy blue-gray of low-carbon stonefoam. There, a cool breeze ruffled a green fringe of soy, alfalfa, and wheatgrass. Beans of some variety had thrown feelers over the terrace wall. A handful of people labored on the first and second levels. Sweaty men in sleeveless shirts, women with bandannas over their hair. Everybody had a suntan and thick shoulders. Nobody was Ria.

  The soil, Molly knew, was planted with genetically engineered low-water varieties. There had been a time when people made a distinction between the genetically enhanced varieties and “heritage” strains of domesticated plants, but nowadays nobody gave a shit about something so obviously pointless. Too much cross-pollination between test plots; too much apathy. Too many hungry people left behind as the grain belts shifted and withered.

  The new growth wouldn’t be mature and ready for harvest before winter. Nobody would eat from these plants. A waste of water, energy, and hard-earned nutrients. But, Molly supposed, that wasn’t the point. It was also a proof of concept. Demonstration of a healthy, viable project. She read Ria’s handwriting in that. Even if I’m wrong, leave it to me.…

  Stately homes with vast green lawns and towering oaks encircled the lake bed. Neo-Tudor manses, coral pink Bahamian villas, modern knife-blade houses built of glass and ceramic, Spanish-style haciendas, some fat shed-style houses, even an earth home or two. This had been a well-heeled part of town for well over a century; these people could afford water. Here, conservation was a crisis-driven mandate: the unwelcome collision of distant concerns with a comfortable life.

  The breeze stiffened into a gust; Molly inhaled. The wind carried the stink of mud and compost from the lake bed, but even that couldn’t hide the humidity or the fecund scent of the trees and grasses all around her. It lay on the air so thickly even her human senses could pick it out. But there was so much more. She could smell trace amounts of century-old boat fuel, the lifeblood of a two-stroke engine, wafting from a remediation mound on the second level of the terraces. And just as easily as she could smell the microscopic flakes of rust deposited by a damaged tiller blade in the zen-garden undulations of freshly raked tillage, she could eavesdrop on the argument unfolding behind closed doors and windows in a house a hundred yards behind her, hear the electric hum of a thousand vehicles, the clicking of steel rails beneath another tram.

  … men kneeling, wearing purple gloves, picking flecks of bone and meat from the bloodstained snow …

  Molly shuddered. She shook herself, forcing the unwanted recollection aside. Just as abruptly, the wind died. It left a layer of grit on her skin, fine enough to fill the ridges of her fingerprints, like soft house dust.

  Ria’s passion dwelled in this muddy pit. Ria herself wouldn’t be far. The co-op had taken over the old pavilion on the northeast edge of the lake, where the dock had been. The pavilion looked like a Midwestern interpretation of a hacienda, with tall arches of smooth white stucco roofed in red clay tiles. Molly remembered how Ria talked about it after her co-op bought the property and entered the boarded building for the first time. It had served as public restrooms for visitors to the lake, as well as an ice-cream stand, a restaurant, and a rental office for bicycles, canoes, and pontoon boats. But that had all come to a halt long before they were born. According to Ria it had been just a dilapidated shithole. The local neighborhood association had wanted to tear it down to drive off the squatters. But Ria’s passion had won the day.

  Wheelbarrows and the strides of countless work boots had swept away the wild grasses to leave a dusty gray path like a bathtub ring around the lip of the crater. Molly followed it to the pavilion. The dirt held a thousand partial impressions of footsteps and tires and, here and there, cigarette butts. They made her think of Bayliss. She concentrated on the pavilion before she got angry again.

  The low murmur of tired voices came to her from inside. “Shit,” said one of them, “I’m exhausted.”

  Another cold gust whistled through the hollow spot where Molly had kept her self-confidence. Ria’s voice.

  Without remembering the intervening steps, Molly found herself loitering just outside the pavilion. A man and a woman came out together, their dirt-streaked flesh smelling of sweat and loam and satisfaction. They startled Molly. She jumped.

  “Hi,” she said. They didn’t respond.

  Just like the cop. Just like Martin.

  Not a ghost, thought Molly, concentrating. Not now. She focused on what it had been like to be real, to be seen, to be felt, to be a presence in the world. To make eye contact with another human being. Easy. Natural. Even babies could do it, right?

  She went inside. The de facto office was a long, narrow, windowless space illuminated by the yellow-green corpse light of biochemical glow strips. It had probably been the kitchen where high school students had cooked hamburgers and hot dogs, once upon a time. A corrugated metal shutter in the wall had been welded shut and painted over with a decent approximation of a Klimt. A warped door had been laid across stacks of cinder blocks to form a desk.

  Ria sat on it. Her toes just touched the floor. Her unlaced work boots lay in a heap beside the desk, stinking. She had her eyes closed and her fingers laced behind her neck. A woman in French braids sat on a lawn chair beside the door. She looked equally tired.

  “Ria.” It came out as a cough. Molly cleared her throat and tried again. “Hi, Ria.”

  Ria opened her eyes. Molly gasped.

  “Ria! You can see me?” she asked.

  A frown furrowed Ria’s brow. She stopped kneading her neck. Her expression was cloudy.

  “You see me, don’t you?”

  The woman on the lawn chair exhaled heavily. Impatiently. Her eyes were closed, too. Rivulets of sweat cleaned paths through the grit on her sunburned neck.

  “I know it’s been a really long time, and I know you’re probably not very happy to see me, but things are really fucked up right now, and I just … Just wanted…” Molly took a long slow breath, strangled a sob in its crib. It was okay to turn to Ria for comfort. But damned if she’d let herself fall apart. Her voice quavered. “I really need to talk to somebody who knows me, you know?”

  The smile that touched Ria’s lips was slippery and wistful as an ice cream cone dropped on a summer sidewalk. “Jesus,” she said. “You look like shit.”

  Molly cried and laughed at the same time. Tears ran into her mouth. They tasted like the primordial sea. (How did she know that?) “I feel even worse.”

  Ria hopped to her feet; her soles slapped the bare concrete. Molly’s stomach gave a flutter. She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her jacket. Nothing could hold back the tears. Not even an angel’s willpower. Ria came to her.

  Molly said, “I’m sorry I just dropped in on you like this. I would have called but—”

  Ria went to the lawn chair. She kissed the other woman on the forehead, then sat on her lap.

  “Did you hear what I said?” Ria whispered. “I said you look like shit.”

  “So do you,” said the other woman. “And you reek to high heaven. Take a shower, you cow.” Ria laughed. They cuddled.

&n
bsp; Molly ran her hands through her hair. “Ria! Look at me, goddamn it!”

  The couple on the lawn chair started to kiss. Molly loomed over them. She put a hand under Ria’s chin and gave a gentle tug. She’d forgotten how smooth Ria’s skin felt. Even beneath the sweat and dust. Ria jolted upright. They pulled apart.

  “What?” said her girlfriend.

  Ria shook her head as though clearing it. “Got a little shock.”

  “Sparks flying, huh?”

  They laughed again.

  Molly stepped behind the chair. She leaned over Ria’s girlfriend, laid her hands on Ria’s shoulders, and shook her. “See me!”

  “Ooh, you’re shaking, babe. You okay?” The girlfriend rubbed her hands up and down Ria’s arms.

  Ria hugged herself. Shrugged. “I dunno. Just had a chill.” She leaned forward again, laid her head on the other’s shoulder. “I’m tired,” she yawned. It came out a little slurred, like a noncommittal yawn.

  Molly knelt and stared at Ria’s eyes, concentrating. See me. See me. See me. You must sense me. You have to know I’m here. You knew me so well. Can’t you sense me? You have to see me. Don’t you dare ignore me.

  Ria shivered again. She closed her eyes, and slumped more heavily against her girlfriend. The other woman flinched slightly, as though startled by an unexpected touch.

  “You drooling on me now?” She shifted her weight.

  Ria’s head rolled back. Her nose was bleeding. A long crimson streamer trailed down the other woman’s shoulder and the front of her shirt. Molly and the other woman gasped in unison.

  “Ria?” said Molly, her voice sounding like somebody else’s, so weak and querulous.

  “Babe?” said the other woman. She tried to sit up, but Ria’s slack body toppled backward. They both tried to catch her, but she tumbled to the floor like a rag doll. Her head clunked on the floor. A wet spot stained the crotch of her cargo pants. Strong odor—Ria had eaten asparagus today.