“Ah,” Reuben said.
“There are thousands of them!”
“Yes. Um. Garden knights, if you are not needed here, ride forth. Heal the city. Replicate as needed to complete your task.”
He saw the first shuffling movement, but then turned back to Vairya, who was still clutching his hands frantically.
“Reuben,” he said, voice shaking, “I feel very strange.”
Reuben’s heart sank. He believed that Vairya would survive, refused to consider the alternative, but how to tell him that he was crippled?
“You were hurt,” he started.
“I know that! I was there! My toes hurt. How can my toes hurt when I’m sure five minutes ago I didn’t have any toes!”
Reuben was pretty certain Vairya knew about phantom pain, but he was a little intrigued himself.
“Can you wake?” he asked.
Vairya swallowed. “If I do, will this be a dream? Are you really alive?”
“I am,” Reuben promised.
“Then let us wake,” Vairya murmured, and he closed his eyes.
THEY awoke in a green and silver world.
Reuben’s hand was still resting against Vairya’s cheek, but grass had sprung up in the space between them, bright blades uncurling further as Reuben blinked.
“You’re silver,” Vairya whispered and sat up, staring at Reuben. “Your throat, your arms, your cheeks. You’re streaked with silver and I’m… I’m whole. I think.”
And he was, no longer ragged and broken, but naked and entire, skin covering even the places where he had been metal before.
“Are you flesh and blood now?” Reuben asked, reaching out to touch his chest.
“No,” Vairya said uncertainly. “I still have all my original parts, although they’re not all quite in the right places. Oh.” He grimaced. “Okay, now they are. That was really unsettling.”
“What happened?” Reuben said, looking past Vairya to where a scatter of cogs and casings were entangled with the grass. As he watched, the grass covered them, and then reached higher.
“Everything just clicked into where it was meant to be. What is this?”
“The nanites we gave you to fix your memory,” Reuben said. “They’re in your blood, and mine, and in the soil now. Think a command, and they will obey.”
“That’s rather unnerving,” Vairya said.
“We’re alive,” Reuben said.
“Us, the grass, the trees— those trees were very dead a few minutes ago.”
Reuben rolled onto his back, looking up. The trees were alive, every dancing leaf rimmed in silver.
Vairya crawled across to lean over him. “What are we? Are we like them, the Enemy?”
“The opposite, I think,” Reuben said and reached out to touch Vairya again, just to reassure himself.
Vairya pulled him into a tight embrace, and Reuben hugged him back, pressing his face against Vairya’s shoulder to reassure himself that it was real.
“Get a room,” a disgusted voice said, interrupting them, and Reuben jerked back to stare up at Meili.
“You’re alive,” Vairya said to her, his eyes wide again.
She shrugged, her face taut with frustration. “Stating the obvious there. Get me out of this!”
The sheet of diamond which had encased her was peeling away, drooping like petals, but her legs were still trapped. Reuben hurried to help pull the rest off, watching the sunlight catch on the flashes of silver dusting her hair and bare shoulders.
“Why are you the only one with clothes, Cooper?” she demanded.
“I didn’t die quite as much as the rest of you,” he said vaguely and regretted it when a spasm of panic made her face clench. To distract her, he said, with as much gleeful malice as he could summon, “If I’m breaking you out of your chrysalis, Meili, does that make you a beautiful butterfly?”
Her hand was free now, and she lifted a finger at him with a scowl. “Have you looked in a mirror lately, Cooper? You’re not one to be casting aspersions.”
“Been a little busy,” he said, and they all sighed in relief as Vairya dragged a limp leaf of diamond away far enough that she could step out.
“Where are the trolls?” she said, looking around.
“Now that,” Vairya said, “is a very sensible question. Have either of you still got coms? Drone eyes would be useful.”
“Nothing but skin and implants here,” Meili said.
Reuben lifted his hand to his ear to check his coms, and brought away a marbled mass of silver, diamond, and crushed wires. “No.”
“I can’t see anything through the trees,” Meili said, squinting around them. “Would they come back to tackle this?”
“Yes,” Vairya said, looking around as well. He was starting to look jittery.
“Up the hill,” Reuben said. “Let’s see exactly what is happening here.”
Vairya nodded and led the way. Reuben followed, and Meili fell in beside him, picking her way barefoot along the grassy path. She didn’t seem in the least bit self-conscious about her nudity, so Reuben tried his best to ignore it too.
“It’s silver,” she said. “That’s our nanites, isn’t it? Cooper, what the hell have you done?”
“I’m not sure,” he admitted and took a deep breath. The air tasted green and sweet, and it calmed him. “I didn’t want to be at war any longer.”
“Reuben!” Vairya called. “Meili! Quickly!”
He didn’t sound afraid, but Reuben ran anyway, grass brushing at his heels and the sunlight hot between the swaying branches of the trees, filling the world with warm shadows.
Out on the crest of the hill, it was hotter, enough to sting his skin and make Meili swear. Vairya was standing at the highest point, gazing down at the city with parted lips. Reuben stopped beside him and looked out.
After a few stunned moments, Meili whispered, a note of awe in her voice, “Reuben, what have you done?”
The diamond wasteland was turning green once more. Wherever Reuben looked, the diamond was dissolving, and grass was breaking through the cracks. After the grass came tiny trees, lifting their leafy heads towards the blazing sun, leaves shivering in delight.
And there were roses, twining over every still-shining wall in long briars, breaking into swollen flowers as he watched.
“Look for the trolls,” Vairya said, his hand gripping Reuben’s.
“Where?”
“The roses have them.”
Now Vairya had said it, Reuben could see them. The trolls of old Earth no longer roamed freely through Caelestia’s streets. Instead, they stood, imprisoned by thorns, as the grass rose up around them.
“Watch!” Vairya said, lifting his free hand to point.
At the foot of their hill, a troll lifted its arm, struggling to pull it free of the briars that were growing around it faster and faster. Then, as silver thorns pressed against its hard skin, it shuddered faintly.
And then it fell apart, shattering into countless shards of diamond that flew into the air like beads of water. They fell to the grass below, and then sprouted, not into new diamond warriors, but into green shoots.
“Come on!” Meili cried and went dashing down towards them.
“It’s not safe,” Reuben protested.
She looked back, laughing. “I don’t care. I want to know what’s happening!”
“I’m with her,” Vairya said and released Reuben’s hand to go running after her, their bare thighs flashing through the long grass. Reuben threw himself after them, laughing at the sheer madness of it all.
When he reached the bottom of the hill, they were both staring at the new plants, startled into silence.
Roses grew from glittering seeds, but they were strange in form, their stems ridged and twisted.
“They look like people,” Meili said uncertainly.
“‘Get with child a mandrake root,’” Vairya murmured.
Make them live, Reuben had screamed at the garden knights.
“Vairya,”
he said. “The only limit is your imagination. If you want them to be human, think it so.”
Vairya understood, of course, and he turned to stare at Reuben, his eyes bright with shock and doubt. “I don’t have your imagination. I don’t know how to—”
“Then remember,” Reuben said urgently, seizing Vairya’s hand and pressing it against silver-tinged rosewood. “Remember one of the people you saved, just one of them. Remember!”
Vairya closed his eyes, breathing out slowly. For a moment, nothing moved, save the wind rippling through the newborn trees.
Then the rosebush changed, shuddered like a man rolling out his shoulders, and became human.
He looked like an ordinary enough man, middle-aged, broad, laughter lines around his eyes, and a farmer’s tan on his arms. When he opened his eyes, blinking, they were just an ordinary brown.
“Vairya,” he said, lifting his feet to shake off the last husks of his stem. “Is that you, lad? I had the strangest dream.”
Vairya’s eyes flew open, and he lunged forwards to throw his arms around the man. “John! It worked. It worked!”
The man flailed a little, holding his arms out. “Hey, that’s— kid, did you know we were both naked, and much as I like working with you—”
“Alive,” Vairya sobbed and pulled away to hurl himself at the next plant, pressing his palm to it in turn.
The first man rubbed his forehead and then looked at Reuben and Meili. He obviously noticed the state they were in, from his expression, but then he looked around them.
“I’m guessing there’s one hell of a story here,” he said, holding out his hand. “I’m John Ng. I usually work in the Botanical Gardens, but they seem to have overflowed. Who are you, and what’s happening?”
“Reuben. This is Meili. We’re doctors.”
“She’s a naked doctor.”
“It’s all the rage in Alpha Centauri,” Meili said and grabbed Reuben’s arm. “He did another one.”
A middle-aged woman was blinking at them with the horrified expression of someone who had never expected to find herself naked in the company of her co-workers. Silver patterns were still lacing across her skin, like the veins in a leaf, but she seemed healed enough to say, “John?”
“Rupa,” John said, covering his eyes. “I’m hoping I’m still asleep.”
“No such luck,” Meili said, as two more people came pushing forwards to join them. “There’s been a bit of a situation— Cooper, where are you going?”
“After Vairya,” Reuben said, rolling his eyes because that much should have been obvious. “See if anyone knows how to turn the self-destruct off, will you?”
“Self-destruct?” a frightened voice said from the crowd, and Reuben left Meili to it. Vairya was still dashing ahead, seeking new plants, and Reuben could only follow, chasing him across the ever-widening garden as trolls became showers of light, and roses became men, and Vairya remembered and remembered and remembered, until his people were free again, free and safe.
EVENTUALLY, Vairya woke someone other than gardeners and artists, and Reuben found himself striking out across the remaining wasteland with Caelestia’s Deputy Chief of Police and a very shaken city councillor.
Out here, the sun blazed off the diamond ground brightly enough to blind them. Before they had gone more than a few steps, Reuben rethought his initial plan to walk straight to Defence Command and reached out to the nearest crystal spear, touching it and imagining all the things it could become. Thin cloth was easy to pull from it and translucent visors for their eyes, and by then he had the trick of it and could simply will the nanites shimmering over every surface to give him shoes.
They set out again, the other two regarding him with fear.
At last, the Deputy Chief of Police cleared his throat and asked hesitantly, “What will the Fleet do to us when they arrive?”
“I don’t know,” Reuben said, “but if we keep heading into the sun, it won’t matter. Let’s hope the fact you’re all alive stays their hand.”
Chapter Eleven
IT WASN’T that simple, of course. First they had to get to Defence Command, past the last few stumbling trolls, (“Roses,” Reuben whispered, “remake them.”), and then they had to actually turn the self-destruct off, which should have just taken the codes and palm locks of the two Caelestians. Their input did turn off the sirens and flashing warnings, but didn’t stop the thrusters from carrying them sunward.
Fixing that involved dragging Eskil down from the Juniper, frantic consultations with several newly awoken engineers, the commandeering of the Juniper’s shuttle, and finally Eskil slamming his palm against the surviving diamond edge of the windowsill and snapping, “Infect me, then, if it’s going to take magic!”
Reuben had thought that might be the end, that moment of sheer relief when the stars above them, just starting to show through the dusk, started to move in the opposite direction.
But Vairya was still conjuring his people out of rosewood and memory, and not all of the transitions were flawless. Reuben found himself beamed back to the woods to treat people whose bodies had twisted or flowered in strange ways, laying on his hands to guide the nanites in healing them.
Hours in, so long after it had begun that he had lost all sense of time, he looked up to find Chanthavy beside him, silver threads shining in her hair as she bent over a crying child.
“Captain,” he said. “You too?”
“Needs must,” she said, “but we must not forget why it was forbidden. I dread what will become of us, Reuben.”
He nodded, sobered for a moment, but then saw Vairya coming towards him through the trees, and couldn’t help smiling. Vairya looked exhausted, so tired his steps were slurred, as if he was dancing, but he was smiling, so bright with joy that Reuben felt a burst of new energy himself.
“They live,” Vairya called to him as he got closer. “Every one of them who I saved. They’re here! They live again!”
“I’m glad,” Reuben said, holding out his hand to pull Vairya closer. “I’m so glad.”
His patient, an elderly man who had returned with thorns growing along the top of his ears, looked up urgently. “Alive? How many? Do you know if Katya Lopez lives? Her daughter Femi? Sasha who lived in Old Park Lane?”
“Katya and Femi, yes,” Vairya said, and his smile dimmed a little. “Not Sasha.”
“How many survive?” Reuben repeated.
“Six hundred thousand, three hundred and forty-one,” Vairya said.
The word was spreading, murmurs and cries of amazement echoing around them. Reuben looked out across the crowd, watching the excitement and sorrow. Someone had put up hanging lights in the trees, and brought out sleeping mats. Some people, he knew, had gone back to their damaged homes, but most had stayed here, reluctant to leave, anxious for news or reassurance or just company.
“So many,” he said to Vairya.
“So many dead too.”
Reuben lifted Vairya’s hands, saw the grazes which covered them, the scrapes of thorns, and smears of sap and oil and kissed them lightly, willing healing upon them. “You performed miracles.”
“Not I,” Vairya said, leaning against him. “I wasn’t the one.”
The old man cleared his throat and said, “Will thorns in my ear kill me, Doctor?”
“I don’t know,” Reuben said and tried to drag his attention away from Vairya. “I don’t think so.”
“Then see me tomorrow.”
Reuben blinked at him. “It won’t take long, and there’s still a queue behind you.”
“Any of them dying?”
“No,” Chanthavy said, and he nodded. Meili was good at triage, and they were down to small wounds and aches now, and puzzling symptoms.
“In the morning, then.”
“He’s right,” Chanthavy said. “We should conserve our strength now the worst is past. You, Vairya, and Meili can come back in six hours. Eskil and I will stay here.”
“That’s not fair. You’ve done as
much as—”
“That’s an order, Doctor.” She looked at Vairya. “Take him away. Or let him take you away, if that’s easier.”
“Aye, aye,” Vairya muttered, slumping further into Reuben’s side. He was still grinning, dreamy and joyous.
“Let’s find you a mat to sleep on,” Reuben said, amused.
“I own a bed, in a house, with a garden.”
“Right now that doesn’t narrow it down much. Take a mat.”
“I don’t want to sleep on a mat,” Vairya said. “I want to walk through my city, see my people, sleep in my own bed, and wake up with you.” He sagged against Reuben a little more, looping his arms loosely around Reuben’s waist and murmured, “‘A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, a Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread— and Thou.’”
“A sip of wine would knock you out right now,” Reuben said, grinning through his own exhaustion. He’d forgotten how infectious happiness could be, and Vairya’s sleepy delight filled him with a slow, warm content, made him want to tease and flirt and kiss Vairya’s soft, sly mouth. “Eskil, are you still by the transporter?”
“About to head down and join you,” Eskil said. He’d been moving the injured and helping shift supplies for hours. “Why?”
“Any chance you could find out where Vairya lives and bounce us there?”
“We’ve got most of the city net back online now. Let me see what I can find.”
Vairya was putting more and more of his weight on Reuben, his breathing slowing.
“Before he sleeps,” Reuben prompted.
“‘Perchance to dream,’” Vairya sighed and brushed a loose kiss against Reuben’s jaw.
“A lot of that area is still diamond,” Eskil said. “You sure?”
“There’s no place like home,” Vairya said solemnly.
“I’m sure,” Reuben said, and couldn’t keep the fondness out of his voice.
Eskil chuckled, and the world blurred and paled around them. They came out of the transport into a dark room, where the only light came from an outside light shining through the glassy walls.
In Heaven and Earth Page 10
