Asimov's SF, June 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The forest's branches were now so criss-crossed as to give no sense of light or sky. It was more like a vast and twisty ceiling from which drapes of a livid moss provided the only illumination.

  Then Elli stopped.

  “Where are we?” Bess asked.

  “Just have to go up here . . .”

  Here being a winding step of roots that then became branches, leading through a wanly glowing archway inside a rotting trunk. Was this where Elli lived? Oddly, though, this strange little hideaway had a further stairway within it, lit by strips of light that gleamed as they ascended over beautifully carved stretches of floor and roof. The fine-grained stairway swirled on and up. There were intricate settings of jewel and marquetry. And now, at last, there was sunlight ahead.

  “. . . Nearly there . . .”

  * * * *

  An ivy-embroidered gate screeched on a final rise of marble steps. Bess had expected to emerge at some eyrie close to Ghezirah's roof, but it was immediately apparent that they were on solid ground. This was a kind of garden—trees, buildings, and strange eruptions of statuary tumbled all around them—yet it was oddly quiet; filled with a decrepit kind of peace.

  “Where by Al'Toman is this?”

  “Can't you tell?”

  It wasn't so very hard. In fact, now that Bess was getting her bearings, it was obvious. Over there, seen at a slightly different angle from the view she was used to, lay the placid browns of the farm islands of Windfell. That way, churning with what was surely the beginnings of a storm, was the vast seawall of the Floating Ocean. And below them, yet curling upwards in ways that the air and Bess's own senses struggled to bridge, marched the green crowns of the nameless forest, and beyond that, flecked with the red hollows where the bloodflowers flourished, lay the small circle of her meadow.

  “You can't live on the Isle of the Dead?”

  “Why not? You live inside that iron carbuncle.”

  It was a given even in nursery books that the island city of Ghezirah was more than simply a smooth globe encircling Sabil's star in three plain dimensions. Yet it was dizzying, and more than a little disturbing, to think that they had contrived to reach this place of the dead by climbing through the forest's roof. Still, Bess followed Elli as they explored.

  Most of the tombs were very old, but older ones still were said to be buried in their foundations. Indeed, the most fanciful version of the tale of the Isle of the Dead's origins told of how the entire island consisted of nothing but mulched flesh, bone, and memorial. The place was certainly alarmingly uneven and ramshackle, and little frequented in modern times. The major churches now all had their own mausoleums, while many of the lesser ones favored remote planets of rest. The Warrior Church, meanwhile, found no home for its servants other than in its memories, for its acolytes were always expected to die in battle.

  Hayawans ambled around carved sandstone pillars. Spirit projections flickered and dissolved like marshghosts. The voices of ancient recordings called from stone mouths muffled by birds’ nests. But it was the fecund sense of life in this place that struck Bess most. The bumbling insects. The frantic birdsong. The heady scents and colors of the blooms. There were fruits, as well, which would have made the pomegranate seem homely, and Elli explained that this island was also a fine place for trapping foxes, for catching airhorses, for collecting honeyseed, and for digging up and broiling moles.

  “So you live here alone?”

  Elli gave a shrugging nod. That much was obvious, Bess supposed.

  “So how did you—”

  “Come here? Is that what you're wondering?” Elli's face was suddenly flushed. “You think I'm some kind of grave-robber or ghoul?”

  Bess attended to removing a speck of grit from her scabbard. After all, she could hardly accuse someone else of being secretive about their origins when there was an empty space where there should have been her own. Just that noisy dormitory, and no sense of anything before. As if, impossibly, she had been born into her novitiate fully functioning and whole. Apart from that locket, which meant nothing at all. But no, there was something more than that, she thought, looking around at this pretty home of the long-dead. Some bleak moment of horror from which her mind recoiled. The most sense she could make of it was that her church had plucked her from something so terrible that the best way to keep hold of her sanity had been to empty the knowledge from her brain. And now, somehow, the shivering thought trickled through her, something was pulling her back there.

  Elli pointed. “You see that building, the one with the copper birch tree growing out of the middle?”

  It was a dome that still partly retained its covering of mosaic glass. It looked to be on fire, the way the leaves flickered above them.

  “Do you want to take a look?”

  Bess's head gave its usual slow nod.

  “There was a girl buried there. Oh . . . a long time ago,” Elli explained as they clambered over the ruins. “Before the War of Lilies, when the seasons were unchanging, and even time itself was supposed to run more slow. Anyway, she was young when she died, and her birth mother and her bond mothers were stricken. So they made this fine mausoleum for her, and they filled it with everything about their daughter, every toy and footstep and giggle and memory. You see . . .”

  They were standing beneath the dome. The tree shifted through its fractured lenses, giving the displays a dusty life. Animatronic toys seemed to jerk. Strewn teddy bears still had a residual glint of intelligence in their button eyes. But that, and the swishing leaves, only made the sense of age and loss more apparent.

  “And they visited her here . . . And they prayed . . . And they cried . . . And, dead though their daughter was, they swore that her memory would never die. But of course—”

  “What was this girl's name? Are you—?”

  “—Shut up and listen, will you, Bess! Her name was Dallah, and I'm called Elli if you haven't noticed. So no, I'm not Dallah. Although Dallah was my friend. My best friend, you might say. In fact, my only one. You see, Dallah was like most only children who've been longed for a bit too much by their mothers, and find themselves over-protected and alone. Of course, Dallah had all these toys . . .” Elli pinged a bike-bell. “And she could have anything else she ever wanted. She only had to ask. But what she really wanted, the one thing her mothers couldn't give her for all their kindness and wealth, was a friend. So . . .” Elli ran a finger over a cracked glass case that seemed to be filled with nothing but leaves and dust. “. . . she did what most girls have done since Eve first grew bored with Adam. She made one up. And her name was Elli. And that's me. That's who I am.”

  Bess had been gazing into a hologlass pillar that contained the floating faces of three women. They looked kindly, but impossibly sad.

  “I was just intended as another part of the memorial,” Elli said. “They extracted me from every breath and memory of their beloved daughter. Sweet little pretend-Elli, who always had to have a place laid for her at table, and did all the naughty and disruptive things to which Dallah herself would never confess. Elli who stole all the doughnuts, even though it was Dallah who fell sick. Elli who crayoned that picture of a clown's face on the haremlek wall. They'd come to me in the years after to reminisce. This whole mausoleum, they couldn't stop building and refining it. Nothing was ever enough. They kept Dallah herself within a glass coffin inside a suspension field so she didn't decay. Not, of course, that they could ever bring themselves to actually look at their dead daughter, but she was unchanging, perfectly there. They couldn't let her go. Even when they were old, the mothers came. But then there were only two of them. And then just the one, and she grew so confused she sometimes thought I was Dallah. Then she stopped coming as well, and the slow centuries passed, and the gardeners rusted and the maintenance contracts expired. And people no longer came to pay their respects to anyone on the Isle of the Dead. There were just these crumbling mausoleums and a few flickering intelligences. The thing is, Dallah's mothers had tried too hard, done too m
uch. And the centuries are long when you're an imaginary friend and you have nobody to play with—and I mean body in every sense . . .”

  Elli had been wandering the mausoleum as she talked, touching color-faded stacks of studded brick and dolls with missing eyes. But now she was standing beside that long glass case again. Which, Bess now saw, was shattered along one side.

  “So you took hold of Dallah's corpse?”

  “What else was I do to? She had no use for it, and her mothers are long dead. If I looked in a mirror, if there was a mirror here that was clear enough, I suppose I might see a face that would remind me a bit of Dallah. But I'm not Dallah. Dallah's dead and mourned for and in Paradise or wherever with William Galileo and Albert Shakespeare and all the rest. I'm Elli. And I'm me. And I'm here.” She stuck out her tongue. “So there!”

  Bess had heard of the concept of body-robbing, and knew that most of the major churches forbade it. The punishments, she imagined, would be severe, especially if the robber happened to be something that couldn't properly call itself sentient. But Elli's tale, and that final pink protrusion of her tongue, made the deed hard to condemn. It was better, though, that she stayed eating berries and broiling moles on the Isle of the Dead. In any other part of Ghezirah, or any of the other Ten Thousand and One Worlds, life for her would be not so much difficult as impossible, and would most likely be brought to a rapid end.

  “How long have things been like this?”

  Elli now looked awkward. “I don't know. I . . .” She looked up at the hissing, dancing roof. “. . . Can we leave this place?”

  It was good to be back out in the warm afternoon, even if all the falling memorials were now a constant reminder to Bess that this was a place of the dead. But as for Elli, she thought, as she gazed at her friend sitting on a pile of rocks with her arms wrapped around her grubby knees, she's right in what she says. She isn't some ghoul or monster. She's truly alive. Then Bess's eyes trailed down to that lightgun. The reason it looked like a toy, she realized, was that it had probably once been one. But she didn't doubt that it was now deadly, or that Elli knew how to use it. In her own way, this little grave-runt was as much a warrior as Bess was.

  It seemed a time for confidences, so Bess explained what little there was to explain about her own life. The long days of endless practice. The even longer dormitory nights. The laughing chants. That sense of not properly belonging even in a community of outcasts. And now—the way her entire church and all its intelligences seemed to have withdrawn from her, when she'd been expecting to face some kind of ultimate challenge through which she could prove her worth.

  “You mean, like a dragon or something? A monster that needs killing?”

  She nodded. A dragon, or even a quasi-dragon, would certainly have done. Anything, no matter how terrible, would have been better than this. It was as if she'd been thrown back into the empty nowhere from which she had come, but pointlessly trained in swordplay and changed into the thing she now was . . .

  Something patted down Bess's scales, leaving blurry silver trails that her camouflage struggled to mimic. After a long moment's puzzlement, she realized it was tears.

  “Don't you have any idea of your earlier life?” Elli asked. “I mean, some hint or memory?”

  Bess gave an armor-plated shrug, and rumbled about the piece of jewelry that she happened to possess. A thing on a chain, oval-shaped.

  “You mean a locket?”

  “I think it's called a locket, yes. You've heard of them?”

  “Of course I have. I've got one myself. So—what's inside yours?”

  “What do you mean, inside?”

  Elli laughed and laid her small hand over Bess's much larger gauntlet.

  “You really don't know much about anything other than killing things, do you, Bess?”

  Then she explained how lockets came in two hinged halves—there were, after all, plenty of examples of this and every other kind of trinket to be found on this isle—although the main thing that Bess was conscious of as they talked was her friend's close presence, and the strange and peculiarly delicious sensation of a hand touching her own strange flesh.

  * * * *

  It was getting late. The dawn-singers had already made their first preparatory cries, stirring up an evensong of birds. Contrary to the once-popular saying, it proved far easier to depart the Isle of the Dead than to get there, and Elli soon led Bess back toward the same marble steps through which they had entered, and down into the depths of the forest that lay below. Moving through the pillared near-dark, Bess was conscious again of the danger of this place. Far more than the island above them, this was a landscape wherein monsters and wonders might abide. Yet Elli led on. The clearing lay ahead.

  “You'll be here tomorrow?”

  “Yes.” Elli smiled. “I will.”

  Bess shambled across the meadowgrass, which, amid darker patches of bloodflower, already shone with dew. The caleche hissed open its door. She climbed in and laid down her sword. The keyhole eye at the center of the cabin's altar, which would surely soon bear her a fresh instruction, and perhaps even apologies for this pointless waste of her time, remained unseeingly dark. The food tray hissed out for her, and she ate. Then, as she prepared to lie down, she remembered what Elli had said about lockets. Vaguely curious, but somehow still feeling no great sense of destiny, she opened her small chest and lifted the thing out. After a moment of struggle, the two sides broke apart.

  * * * *

  Another morning, and, although it was still too early for dawn, Bess was standing in the dim clearing outside her caleche with her sword. She, too, was a thing of dimness; her armor saw to that. But already the dawn-singers were calling. Light would soon be spilling from tower to tower. And there was Elli, standing out from the shadow trees, pale as stripped twig.

  “Bess! You're here!” She was almost running. Almost laughing. Then she was doing both.

  “I said I would, didn't I?” Bess's voice was as soft as it was capable of being. And as sad. It made Elli stop.

  “What's happened?” They stood a few paces apart beside the rusty beetle of the caleche in the ungreying light. “You seem different.”

  “I haven't changed,” Bess rumbled. “But I've brought you this. I want you to take it . . . “ She held out the locket, glinting and swinging on its silver chain, from her hand's heavy claw.

  “It's that thing you described . . .” Elli looked puzzled, hesitant. “The locket. But this is . . .” She took it in her own small fingers. Here, in the spot in which they were standing, the gaining light had a rosy flush. “. . . mine.”

  “Open it.”

  Elli nodded. Red flowers lay all around them. The silver of the locket was taking up their color, and Bess now seemed a thing entirely made of blood. Swiftly, with fingers far more practiced and easeful than Bess's, Elli broke open the locket's two sides. From out of which gleamed a projection, small but exquisite, of the faces of three women. They were the same faces that hung in the hologlass pillar of Dallah's mausoleum. But in this image they looked as happy as in the other they had been sad.

  “Dallah's mothers.” Elli breathed. “This thing is yours, Bess. But it's also mine . . .”

  “That's right.”

  Elli snapped it shut. Dawn light was flowing around them now, and the bloodflowers made Elli beautiful, and yet they also made her pale and dangerous and sharp. “This doesn't really have to happen, does it?” she whispered.

  “I think it does.”

  “Don't tell me, Bess.” She almost smiled. “You remember it already . . . ?”

  “I didn't—not at all. But I'm beginning to now. I'm sorry, Elli.”

  “And I'm sorry as well. Isn't there some way we can both just go our separate ways and live our own lives—you as a warrior and me just as me? Do I really have to do this to you?”

  “We both do. Nothing is possible otherwise. We're joined together, Elli. We're a monstrosity, a twist in spacetime. Our togetherness is an affront to reality.
It must be destroyed, otherwise even worse things will break through. There are no separate ways.”

  The killing moment was close. Bess could already hear the lightgun's poisonous hum. She knew Elli was quick, but she also knew that the use of any weapon, be it blade or laser, was the last part of a process that any trained warrior should be able to detect long before the final instant came. But how by all the intelligences was she supposed to do such a thing, when Elli was her own younger self?

  Then it happened. All those hours of practice and training, all the imam's praises and curses, seemed to collide in a moment beyond time, and emerged into something deadly, precise, and perfect. For the first time in her fractured life, Bess executed The Cold Step Beyond with absolute perfection, and she and her blade were nowhere and in several places at once. Elli was almost as quick. And could easily have been quicker.

  Yet she wasn't.

  Or almost.

  And that was enough.

  Bess swung back, a blur of metal and vengeance, into the ordinary dimensions of the spreading dawn. Around her, still spraying and toppling, spewed the remains of Elli of the Isle of the Dead. Nothing but hunks of raw meat now, nothing you could call alive, even before the bits had thunked across the ground.

  Bess stood there for a moment, her breathing unquickening. Then she wiped and sheathed her sword. She knew now why the bloodflowers bloomed so well across this meadow. Without them, the strew of flesh that surrounded her would have been too horrible to bear. But something glinted there, perfect and unsullied. She picked it up. Her blade had cut through everything else—time, life, probability, perhaps even love—but not the chain and locket. It was the one strand that held together everything else.

  She remembered it all now. Remembered as if it had never been gone. Playing with Dallah—who had called her Elizabeth, or sometimes Elli, or occasionally Bess—all those aeons ago when she'd been little more than a hopeful ghost. Then pain and emptiness for the longest time until some kind of residual persistence took hold. It was, Bess supposed, the same kind of persistence that drives all life to strive to become, even if the body of someone once loved must be stolen in the process. Long seasons followed. There was little sense of growth or change. The once-sacred island around her slid further toward decay and neglect. But now she was Elli, and she had Dallah's discarded body and she was alive, and she learned that living meant knowing how to feed, which in turn meant knowing how to kill.