Changer (Athanor)

by Jane Lindskold

  “It might be,” Isidro says, waving his own pastry like a baton, “except that ignorance of wonder leads to easy destruction. If nothing is at risk but monkeys and orchids, people don’t care. Even local residents need to examine South America with new eyes.”

  “I can see your point,” Amphitrite says, “and looking at the wonders of South America is precisely what we are here to do.”

  Isidro leans back in his seat, sets his pastry down, motions for a servant to fetch more coffee.

  “Yes, you are. I hope that this will be a memorable trip and the beginning of great things to come for us all.”

  The air voyage takes many hours but, although he did not sleep much the night before, Isidro does not nap. Even when he takes over piloting, his eyes shine with the fervent belief that long-sought-after desires will soon be realized.

  After the activity of the previous month, the hacienda seems very, very quiet. Leaving his private suite, Arthur trudges down the kitchen stairs seeking companionship. The kitchen is empty, too, but there is conversation from the courtyard. Getting a beer, the King goes to join his much-diminished court.

  Eddie and Anson are sitting at the patio table playing a game that Arthur remembers from his days in Egypt. Then it was called sekhet but there are many variations throughout Africa—mancala, awalé, woaley, aju, ouri—each slightly different from the other, even as they all differ from their nearest European cousin, backgammon.

  Arthur, then called Akhenaton, had played sekhet on boards made of ivory with markers of gold. The board that Anson and Eddie are using is a long rectangle with six cups at each side and a seventh cup at the end. The entire board is made of polished wood and the markers are smooth pebbles. Nothing but the skill of its crafting makes it valuable.

  Walking to where he can watch the play, Arthur observes silently for a few rounds.

  “What variation are you playing?”

  “Nigerian ayo,” Anson says, looking up with one of his brilliant smiles.

  “Ah.”

  Arthur pulls up a chair, leans back, sipping slowly on his beer and trying not to think about work. The easy pace of the game, the slight rattle of pebbles against wood, soothes him.

  “I never thought that I’d admit it,” he says during a pause in play, “but I miss that coyote pup.”

  Eddie nods, drops pebbles into various cups, counts his take. “Me too. Maybe we should get a pet.”

  “Animals are so short-lived.” Arthur’s words are not quite a protest, more a reminder. “They age so swiftly.”

  “There are turtles,” Eddie says, “like the one that Salome had in Vierek and Eldridge’s novel.”

  “Turtles don’t wag their tails or yip when they see you coming.”

  “Parrots?” Anson suggests, dropping pebbles into cups in rapid succession and chortling at the look on Eddie’s face. “I’ve often considered a parrot. I would get one, I think, if I didn’t travel so much.”

  “That’s a better thought,” Arthur admits. “I’d need to check what types are legal to own in the United States.”

  “Or we could ask Frank MacDonald if there are any athanor animals in need of a home,” Eddie suggests, warming to the idea. “I know that he keeps track of many of them. An immortal animal wouldn’t offer the same emotional risk.”

  “True.” Arthur sips his beer. “Of course, that extends our responsibility for quite a long time.”

  “Nothing comes without cost,” Anson reminds him. “Nothing at all.”

  “True.”

  The phone rings just as Anson and Eddie are counting up their score. Arthur rises and answers it.

  “Pendragon Productions.”

  “Are you a big man?” a shrill voice giggles. “Are you the biggest of the big? Tallest of the tall? Most important indeed?”

  “Excuse me? I believe you have the wrong number.”

  “Number! You’re number one!” More giggles, these so shrill that the receiver vibrates in Arthur’s astonished grasp. “Hail to the King! Kingy thingy! Hip-hip hooray!”

  Arthur cuts off the connection.

  “What was that?” Eddie asks, brown eyes wide with wonder.

  “Prank caller,” Arthur says frowning. “I think.”

  “Press the code for last caller,” Anson suggests.

  Arthur does so, checks the readout. “Tabular Risa. No one I know.”

  “Nor I,” Eddie says.

  Anson shakes his head. “Sounds sorta like tabula rasa—a blank slate, an empty mind.”

  “Or ‘no one,’” Arthur adds. “Interesting. I’ll make a note of it. We do get some strange calls. Even with this number unlisted, sometimes people learn of Pendragon Productions and decide it would be fun to taunt the ‘King.’”

  His sour expression makes quite clear what he thinks of this.

  “And we did just hire a great deal of outside help,” Eddie offers. “Caterers, rental furniture, even hotel accommodations.”

  “True.”

  Anson glances up from counting his ayo stones. “Twenty-three. I think you’ve beaten me, Enkidu.”

  “I have—at last,” Eddie agrees, tumbling his twenty-five pebbles back into the reserve at the end of the board. “Arthur, why don’t you play a round? I’d like to stop while I’m winning.”

  “I’ll need a refresher on the rules,” Arthur says, “but that would be smashing.”

  Anson rubs his long fingers together briskly. “At last, I have a chance!”

  Eddie snorts. “You won three out of our last five games!”

  “Don’t try to cheat, Spider,” the King warns.

  “Cheat? You wound me, Majesty.” Anson laughs.

  Arthur pulls his chair closer and listens to Anson and Eddie’s recounting of the rules. When dusk falls, an automatic light flicks on. None of them notice the eyes watching from one of the upper rails of the balcony, tengu eyes in a long-nosed face, eyes that are filled with gleeful laughter.

  Sven Trout ambles into the Prima! gallery just after noon on a sunny day. The tourist season has begun, but at this moment the pristine gallery spaces are empty—perhaps because the art on display is not the clichéd Western and Indian work tourists expect. Perhaps because an empty shop is more intimidating than one filled with gawking others.

  Lil Prima, dressed in an ankle-length patchwork skirt and a scoop-necked ivory blouse whose décolletage shows her rounded cleavage, saunters over to meet him. Her blond hair is twisted up, and she looks vaguely, intimidatingly, French.

  “Hello, Lil,” he says.

  “Bonjour, Sven.” Her smile is perfectly correct. Only a glitter in her green eyes reveals some distrust.

  “I decided to stay around for a few days and do some touring. I haven’t seen Santa Fe since the wagon-train days.”

  Lil cocks a shaped eyebrow at him. Although they are alone in the gallery’s white spaces, such talk is in poor taste. How is he to know that she does not have an assistant in the back?

  “I hope you are enjoying your visit.”

  “I am. It’s changed, though. I can hardly believe that this is the same mud village.”

  “Santa Fe has always been the capital.”

  “A courtesy, you must admit.”

  “Oui.”

  She waits, her gaze fixed and level. Sven remembers certain meetings long ago. He has desired Louhi, but she is cold, his desire the thrill of a conquest. Now, as he looks upon Lilith, he wonders that he could have lusted after the other woman.

  Here before him stands a woman who can suck out a man’s soul and give it back to him wrung free of anything nonessential and somehow more purely his own for the loss. The embrace of her arms and her legs had bound him to her, but he had struggled only to stay within their prison. Her eyes had been brown then, her hair dark as night, her figure voluptuous. When she had put him from her, he had fled, knowing that if he did not, he would be her prisoner forever.

  He swallows a sound suspiciously like a whimper. A glitter in those green eyes tells hi
m that Lil knows quite well the train of his thoughts. Bitterly, he knows that she let him go because he could not do for her what she did for him. He wonders if even Tommy fills her lust for creative annihilation.

  “I…” He swallows the sentence, begins again in a stronger voice. “I heard Tommy play at the Review. Impressive.”

  “He has recovered at last from his previous incarnation,” Lil answers. “I think he will be a success once I learn how to use the new media successfully. Last time, our ventures into video were less than a tour de force.”

  Sven nods, recalling a parade of horrible movies, movies that captured the image of the pouting, dark-haired, blue-eyed singer without capturing his charisma.

  “Somehow,” Lil continues, “I must find a way to record his image as successfully as we have recorded his voice. Today, a singer without a good music video cannot break into the market.”

  “Tommy told me that you had a video for this new album.”

  “We do, but it relies heavily on animation and computer generated effects. I want to bring him alive for his audience.”

  “Quite a challenge.”

  “What else is left to us?” She shakes back her blond hair, making her breasts bounce, and Sven swallows hard. “I certainly do not care to crusade for wildlife or ecology. The world has destroyed itself in ice several times in my memory. To believe that this ecosystem is permanent is foolishness.”

  “So you go for more immediate pleasures?” Sven says, thinking of a few pleasures rather carnal and immediate. He imagines ravaging her here on the gallery floor amid the staring faces of her sculptures and paintings. Let the tourists watch! They’d probably dismiss it as performance art.

  “I do,” she answers, and her inflection is so provocative that for a moment he believes that she has agreed to his fantasy. “I enjoy managing Tommy—both in art and life. It has given purpose to an existence that was getting too lengthy.”

  “I was wondering if you’d mind if I gave Tommy a commission,” Sven says, ambling over to a sculpture as if to admire it, but in reality wanting the pedestal between his crotch and her line of sight. Thank fashion that baggy trousers are in!

  “A musical commission?” she asks.

  “Yes, a song-and-dance number.”

  “Intéressant.” She doesn’t ask for more details. Doubtless she will enjoy trying to get them out of Tommy. “Certainement, you can speak with him. I can’t make him take the commission. I’m merely his manager, not his muse.”

  She looks vaguely sad as she makes the final statement.

  “I’ll speak with him, then. Where can I find him?”

  “We have a couple of town houses on the northern edge of Santa Fe. I’ll give you directions.”

  Sven swallows. His anatomy is under control again.

  “Are you free for lunch?”

  “I ate early.”

  “Dinner?”

  She licks her lips and his rebel member stiffens again.

  “What do you have in mind?”

  He resists an urge to shout, “Fucking you!” and answers suavely, taking a turn around another statue.

  “Why don’t you pick the place?”

  “I have expensive tastes.”

  “That’s fine. You’re worth it.”

  “Dinner, then. Eight o’clock.” She stretches luxuriously, making Sven wish her skirt were not quite so long. “Now, I’ll get back to my cataloging.”

  “I could pick you up at home,” he suggests hopefully, “seeing that you live nearby.”

  “I’ll meet you,” she answers. “I have a client coming by later. Call here at about four, and I’ll tell you where.”

  “It wouldn’t be any trouble,” he says. If he could just get her in his car. She might be a witch. She might be among the first, but if he could just get her in his car…

  “No,” she purrs. “It will be better this way.”

  “Right,” he says, not believing it. “Right.”

  Still throbbing from unrequited lust, Sven contemplates finding a prostitute before going to visit Tommy. Reluctantly, he decides against it. Not only isn’t he precisely certain just where the Santa Fe red-light district is located, but even one of the athanor needs to fear the specter of AIDS. Their more potent immune systems are still vulnerable to the AIDS virus, as the recent deaths of several promiscuous womanizers has proven, and Garrett Kocchui, their own Aesculapius, had issued dire warnings based on his studies of the virus.

  Sven sighs, contemplates condoms, risk, and masturbation, eschews all and, drives out to Tommy’s town house.

  He raps on the door and is surprised when it is promptly opened by Tommy. The singer is clad in faded black jeans, the amethyst eagle pendant, and nothing else. An acoustic guitar hangs by an embroidered strap around his neck.

  “Hey, man.” Tommy holds the door open wider. “Cool.”

  “Hey yourself,” Sven replies, momentarily envious when he discerns the faint red marks of a woman’s fingernails on Tommy’s shoulders and, as the musician turns, back. There’s a bite mark on his left biceps as well. “How’s it going?”

  “Cool. Isidro Robelo gave me a couple recordings of some Andean music. Neat. Haunting. Lots of pipes, drums, and chimes. Reminds me of when I was young.”

  “Pipes? Like syrinx?”

  “Yeah. Good lady, that. Don’t wonder that she didn’t go for Pa Faun, though. Rough rider, him. Split a little thing like her in two.”

  “Still, did she have to suicide?” Sven has never really understood any behavior so counterproductive to survival.

  “Guess she did,” Tommy says, closing the door and leading the way down to his music-strewn living quarters. “She did.”

  “You’re right.”

  Taking his customary seat on the couch, Sven decides to get down to business before he loses Tommy’s surprising alertness.

  “I want to commission you to write some music for me.”

  “Yeah?” The guitar rests on Tommy’s knee, but he only idly strokes the strings. “What?”

  “I’ve been thinking about the Harmony Dance.”

  Tommy’s expression grows tranquil. “Yeah. Me too. Wish it wasn’t just every five years.”

  Sven suddenly comprehends the reason for Tommy’s unusual attentiveness and alertness. The Harmony Dance, with its supernatural music, must knit his self-destructive soul back into something resembling wholeness. Some years, when Tommy is already far gone into drugs or drink, the force of Harmony must not be enough to heal him. This year, however, with his newly rejuvenated body almost untouched, when, due in part to Sven’s own meddling, intoxicants have less of a hold on him, the Dance must have filled him with an abundant vitality.

  Quickly, Sven changes his tactics. It would not do to ask directly, as he had been about to do, for music to a Disharmony Dance. He must be more subtle.

  “I wish the Dance happened more often, too,” Sven says, seeing his way with that preternatural clarity of invention that has long been his gift and his bane. “Wouldn’t it be great if we had a Dance that would bring each individual into Harmony with him- or herself?”

  He doesn’t mention that doing this would, almost by definition, weaken Harmony with the whole. Very few can carry both self-interest and altruism in their hearts simultaneously. Only saints manage complete altruism. Among their people both the saints and demons have long gone the way of the dragons.

  “That would be cool,” Tommy agrees, his eyes sad. “A Harmony with the self. Yeah. I wish…”

  “Don’t you think that if anyone can compose such a piece it would be you?” Sven says, dangling the bait. “Music is the universal language, and for all that good King Arthur and his merry minions appoint a new trade tongue every century or so, we are a people of many natal speeches.”

  “I know,” Tommy says, and the language he speaks is a northern Greek dialect only suspected by scholars.

  “Music could make us each hear our birth language speaking softly to our souls,” Sven s
ays, warming to his topic, forgetting his hypocrisy. This is another of his gifts. He always believes his pitch when he is making it. “A song to sing to the heart. A dance to lighten the feet and reveal the inner passions. What a beautiful thing that would be!”

  “Beautiful, man!” Tommy agrees. “A medicine for the wounded soul, one that doesn’t have any side effects. I wish I could write that song.”

  Sven leans forward, intense, his sharp features like a greyhound’s scenting a rabbit. He runs his hands through his fiery hair. For this moment even his unrequited lust is forgotten.

  “If you can’t do it, no one can, Tommy. Time and again you have composed songs to touch the soul. The Elysian mysteries are still spoken of with reverence. Your last life is rapidly becoming deified.”

  “But those are all songs of sorrow,” Tommy protests. “The king dies to feed the land. Love is unrequited. Shoes are tread upon. Man, I can’t make the whole world sing! I’m a mess!”

  “You’re not trying to make the whole world sing, Tommy, just a few lonely souls cast adrift in time.” Absently, Sven compliments himself for the artistry of that last phrase. “You’re trying to reach a people who know the fragility of life and still strive on. You’re trying to reach those who cannot even call bedrock solid because too many of them have seen bedrock shift. You’re trying to reach your own people!”

  “My people.” Tommy tastes the words.

  “Your people. Not fans, not poor mortals, but athanor who do our best in an increasingly uncaring world.”

  “Yeah!” Tommy’s shoulders straighten. He strikes a vibrant chord on the guitar in his lap. “My people. A song to strengthen the self between the times when we’re all drawn together. Sven, that’s beautiful!”

  Sven smiles shyly. “The Harmony Dance has always had a deep effect on me.” (That’s why he avoids it as often as possible). “Even when I’m far away I feel its pull.” (Even when dead drunk or stoned or in bed with a dozen women or serenaded by the screams of a tortured prisoner—he’s tried all the ways he can to break that damned Dance’s pull).