Living in Threes

by Judith Tarr

  The force field hummed and crackled behind them. The temple stood open in front, with its gaudily painted façade and its court full of sunlight and shadow.

  Meritre guided them all now. Through her memory Meru saw workers and scaffolding and heard the sounds of hammering, and saw a shadow kneeling in the corridor off to the right: slight, brown-skinned, with a smoothly shaven skull above a fine-boned face. He had a brush in his hand and a palette beside him, dotted with vivid colors.

  He faded as Meru drew closer. The passage was empty.

  She had no fear of shadows, but she shivered. It was deeply strange to live in three times at once.

  Strange, and wonderful. She paused where the painted writing ended, and drew out the filter she had brought. Vekaa and Yoshi had already activated theirs, a slight but visible blurring of their features.

  The scent of old stone and sunlit dust vanished. Meru breathed air scoured clean of any contaminant, down to the smallest virus.

  She was glad of that safety, but sorry, too. So much of Egypt was in the air, in its smells and tastes. She missed it.

  She would get it back. She walked down the passage, tracing Meredith’s steps, and Meritre’s before them.

  She imagined that she could hear them walking with her, the sound of their feet magnified inside the square sandstone walls. She looked back, just as the light from above cut off, and one much harsher shot its glare down at her.

  Consensus had found them.

  Sanity would have stopped her there and made her wait docilely to be arrested. She was long past that. She spun and ran.

  The other two were close on her heels. They could never outrun the Guards, and there was no exit, nothing below but, if her memory was true and not delusion, the princess’ tomb.

  She had come to find the tomb. She would find it. After that, nothing mattered.

  Chapter 25

  It was a long way down. Lights came on when the light from above gave out, soft and pale, just bright enough to guide Meru’s feet.

  The Guards seemed to have given up the chase. Why should they bother? She had to come out in the end, and they would be waiting.

  Meru half wished the others would stop, too—but only half. The rest of her was glad to have them with her. It was unexpectedly cold down here, and dark, and dimmer than it should be. Even through the filter, the air felt heavy.

  “Breath of the dead,” Meritre said.

  Meru had not needed to hear that. She pushed onward, grimly.

  When it seemed that there would never be any end to that tunnel in the earth, it ended. Meru would not have been surprised to run into a blank wall, as Meredith’s people had.

  That was long gone. The stasis field was old, nearly as old as Meredith’s time: it had an actual keypad, and physical controls.

  Meru made no move to touch them. There was the ka statue, as bright and beautiful as the day it was set in its niche. There was the chamber, the ceiling of painted stars, the sarcophagus with its mask of the princess.

  And there were the flowers, withered and faded, laid like a coverlet over the coffin. The rest, the banks of them that Meredith had seen with the camera, had disappeared. Scattered to the stars? It would seem so.

  Meru drew out the one her mother had left for her. It lay in its own tiny stasis field, just as dry and just as withered as the ones in the tomb. “This is it,” she said to Vekaa. “This is what you’ve been looking for.”

  She could still be wrong—hopelessly and catastrophically. She did not think so. Which was maybe arrogant of her. She was too tired to care.

  He had instruments with him, not many, but enough to gather samples without breaking stasis. He had the web, too, with all its resources—and the Guards, when he called them down.

  Officially they were all under arrest. In the circumstances, that meant little. Meru was glad this time to be taken off to Containment, because it meant a bath and clean clothes and real food, and a bed in which she could sleep like the dead.

  When she woke, the sun’s angle had hardly changed at all, but the web gave her a new date. She had slept straight into the next day.

  The starwing was there, curled up next to her. Meritre and Meredith were awake inside her. When she searched the web for Vekaa, she found him nearby, in a lab, deeply engrossed in his work.

  Yoshi was in the room, lying in a bed by the opposite wall, sound asleep. As she listened, she could hear his gentle snore.

  “So I was right,” she said to his oblivious back.

  “You were right,” Lyra said. She was sitting at the foot of Meru’s bed, surrounded by the shimmer of the web. “Your mother guided you well.”

  It was not only her mother, Meru thought. Not at all. But she nodded. She did not have to feign the welling of tears. “Don’t punish my uncle and my friend,” she said. “I kidnapped them. I made them use my uncle’s clearances. It’s not their fault.”

  Lyra’s brows lifted. “Really?”

  “It’s not,” Meru said. “It’s all me. I’m the one you need to punish.”

  “We owe you a great debt,” said Lyra.

  “I owe you an apology,” Meru said, “and probably a prison sentence.”

  “You think so?” Lyra asked.

  “I broke too many laws to count,” said Meru.

  “So you did,” said Lyra. “You also found the source of the virus. The tomb in which it originated was one of the very first experiments in stasis, nearly four thousand years ago. At some point, perhaps several points, materials were removed from the tomb and preserved in their own, much smaller stasis fields.”

  “Flowers,” Meru said.

  “Flowers,” Lyra agreed, “taken as remembrances and sold to collectors among the worlds. It was a fashion for a whole season, a craze that ran from end to end of human space. One of them, it seems, carried a fragment of the virus. But now we have the key. We have some hope of stopping it.”

  “I would hope for more,” said Meru.

  “So do we all,” said Lyra.

  She flickered and went out.

  In a way Meru was disappointed. She had known better than to think that anyone could find a cure in a day. But she had dreamed that there was one, and Vekaa found it.

  “Dreams can be true,” Meritre said from the end of another plague, thousands and thousands of years ago.

  “Then I’ll try to keep on dreaming,” said Meru, “and hoping, too. That they find the cure. That I haven’t lost the stars. For me or for my friend.”

  “They owe you both for saving the world,” Meredith said. “You can remind them that if they send you to starpilots’ school, you’ll be someone else’s problem.”

  Meru laughed painfully. “That might actually work,” she said.

  “Can’t hurt to try,” said Meredith.

  Certainly it could not hurt worse than anything else Meru had done or felt since her mother’s message shook her out of her safe and comfortable world. She would try, she thought. She would do her best to succeed. After all, as Meredith said, she had saved the world.

  Chapter 26

  So that was what saving the world felt like. It felt empty.

  Maybe it wasn’t the flowers. Maybe it was all my fault. I might be carrying it right now, a string of molecules that would drift around the planet, replicating harmlessly, until one day it mutated. Then it mutated again and again, till one of the mutations turned toxic. After that, nobody could stop it.

  Consensus would find a cure, now it knew exactly what it was dealing with. The epidemic would end; people would stop dying. Earth would be safe again.

  I told myself Meru would be safe, too. She’d talk her way out of Containment and into starpilots’ school, and get Yoshi out, too, and they’d end up sailing living ships across the stars. Meanwhile, on the other end of time, Meritre would sing the princess into her tomb, help her mother deliver the little brother or sister they all waited for with such fear and hope, marry her scribe and go on to live a long—for ancient Egypt—and hap
py life.

  I could see their whole lives ahead of them, but when I looked at my own, I couldn’t see past next week.

  Maybe I was wrong, and all the huddling and whispering wasn’t about Mom after all. Maybe I’d misheard. Maybe I was completely delusional.

  Suppose I wasn’t. Suppose Mom really wasn’t going to make it. Dad and Aunt Jessie and Kelly had to figure out what to do with me.

  They all had their own lives. Nobody wanted me. All I wanted was Mom.

  I tried to call Mom, but she wasn’t answering. Her voicemail was full.

  I called Cat, and didn’t even get to voicemail. Out of service area, the snide little voice buzzed in my ear. I started to punch a text, couldn’t even get the words to make sense. I threw the phone across the room and pulled the covers up over my head.

  There were still people inside it. Meritre and Meru didn’t invite me to a pity party. They were just there, being me, the same way I couldn’t help but be them.

  Nobody ever said reincarnation was like that. You either got hypnotized and discovered you were Attila the Hun, or had weird memories that turned out to be from past lives. Remembering future lives, or being able to talk to yourself on either end, was straight off the edge.

  “Meredith?”

  Aunt Jessie usually sounds cranky when she’s trying to be sympathetic. When she actually sounds sympathetic, that’s not good at all.

  I must have fallen asleep. I’d kicked the covers off and they were all twisted up at the foot of the bed. For a while I couldn’t remember what day it was, or when I’d gone to bed.

  It must be morning. I vaguely remembered it being dark, and now there was light through the blinds. The little tortie cat was curled up in her usual spot next to my pillow.

  I rubbed the crusties out of my eyes. Aunt Jessie was wearing slacks and a blouse instead of dig clothes. “Is it Friday?” I asked.

  She shook her head. Now she looked, as well as sounded, cranky. It didn’t make me feel any better. “Meredith, I have something to tell you. If you’d rather have a shower and breakfast first—”

  I sat up. My stomach had dropped around my ankles. “It’s Mom, isn’t it? Is she—”

  “She went into a coma last night,” Aunt Jessie said. “Your dad and Kelly left early this morning. You and I are flying out at noon. I’ll help you pack.”

  I stared at her. What was swelling up in me didn’t feel like anger. It felt like nothing I’d ever felt before. “What about the site? What about the tomb? You can’t just leave it like that. You have to—”

  “Meredith,” she said. Sympathetic was bad, but quiet was worse. It cut me off in mid-rant. “Don’t worry about it. It’s all taken care of.”

  “What do you mean? Why didn’t you wake me up? Why didn’t you tell me? I could have gone with Dad and Kelly. What if we don’t get there in time?”

  Aunt Jessie’s face looked made of wax. “They already had tickets for the day after tomorrow—they were able to get them changed. I got us the first flights we could get together. You needed to sleep, and there wasn’t anything you could do. Now hurry up and get dressed while I pack your suitcase. We’re leaving in an hour.”

  “It’s already packed,” I said.

  She nodded. She didn’t seem at all surprised. “Do what you need to get ready, then come down for breakfast. You’re going to need it. We have a long trip ahead of us.”

  It took us most of two days to get to Florida. I don’t remember much of it. When we were on the ground, Aunt Jessie was on the phone, checking in with the doctors and then with Dad and Kelly after they got there. In between those calls, she talked to Gwyn, whom she’d left in charge of the site, and Sayyid, who was keeping an eye on the passage and the tomb.

  I didn’t touch my own phone, much. When people called, I couldn’t seem to find any words. After a while my friends said, “We’ll see you when you get here.” And left me alone.

  Cat had got into the hospice. All she could tell me was what Aunt Jessie and Dad and Kelly had. And the other thing, the thing that mostly went without saying: I’m here. I’ll always be here. No matter what happens.

  I talked to Dad once, but somehow I felt better talking to Kelly. Maybe because she was almost a stranger, and a doctor, she knew how to put things so I didn’t get them all messed up.

  She didn’t try to pretend that everything was going to be just fine. Not that even doctors can really predict, or miracles can’t happen, but we all knew. This was it.

  The Triple was useless. Meritre could pray if she wanted to. Meru was busy dealing with her own mother’s death.

  It did kind of help on those endless plane rides and those equally endless hours of waiting in airports, to either sit on the roof with Meritre and drink beer and eat Egyptian food, or roam the far-future web with Meru. Sometimes when I tried to sleep, I’d hear Meritre’s cat purring, or else it was the starwing.

  I missed the little cat from Luxor. I wondered if I’d ever see her again.

  Sometimes I’d feel Bonnie close by. That was the one thing I looked forward to. If I was home, I could see Bonnie. I could bury my face in her mane and let go and cry till there were no tears left.

  Mom was still alive when we got there. In the two weeks since I left, she’d gone from thin but apparently healthy to a stick figure in a hospice bed.

  The hospice was nice. It was a house by the river, and the rooms were cool and quiet. Palm trees grew all around it; hibiscus bloomed along the walls and in the yard. There were orange and grapefruit trees, and a lemon tree beside the back door.

  Mom’s room looked down the river. She must have loved that while she was awake.

  A big bouquet of roses sat on the table beside her bed. Cat’s stepmom had acres of rosebushes, and these were some of Mom’s favorites: all shades of lavender and yellow and white. They filled the room with a beautiful smell.

  It almost covered the smell of cancer, that Meritre would call the smell of death.

  Meritre was four thousand years dead. She was still alive inside me. But then I was dead compared to Meru.

  How final is death, if you can come back and live a whole other life?

  Final enough, I answered myself, for the people who love you in the life you’re in. If Mom came back, she wouldn’t be Mom any more. This was all I had of her, and all I’d ever get.

  Cat had gone to the barn for morning chores. Aunt Jessie and Dad and Kelly were in the conference room talking to doctors. I was alone with Mom and the monitors.

  Nothing in there was keeping her alive; she didn’t want that. She had a little oxygen was all, and an IV with pain meds, to keep her comfortable.

  That was how the nurses put it. “To keep her comfortable.” By that they meant, so she wouldn’t be in too much agony before she died.

  Her hand felt like twigs wrapped in a thin leather glove. It was cold. I tried to warm it, but it was past that.

  Maybe she knew I was there. People in a coma could hear, Kelly’d told me. That was why there was music playing, Mom’s favorites: Beatles and show tunes and indie rock and medieval greatest hits.

  Meritre was in the temple with the choir, while priests moved through a long and complicated ritual. Aweret wasn’t the only person in that family with a wonderful voice. Meritre’s made the small hairs lift on the back of my neck, it was so clear and high and perfect.

  I couldn’t even sing on key. But I could whisper the words in Mom’s ear while the music mix shifted over to Anonymous 4. It all fit as if it was meant to: the voices, the words, the worlds and times all wound together—so far apart and yet so close.

  Eight thousand years. Three lives, one soul. And all the lives and souls that we belonged to, or that belonged to us.

  “In every world I am with you,” I whispered while Meritre sang inside me and those four beautiful, almost supernatural voices echoed her in the still, dim room. On the other side of time I felt Meru, just being there, being part of us, and the starwing adding its weird sweet harmony. />
  “The cat slipping soft and supple through the door,

  two friends meeting by the river,

  sunrise and moonset and the paths of stars in the water—

  in all of those, I am with you. I speak to you.

  “I am the world and the world is in me.

  All that I am, I am for you.

  We are one, we who love.

  There is no death; there is no ending.

  We are one.

  We are all one, we who were, who are,

  who live in eternity.”

  I felt her go. Maybe my voice helped her, or showed her the way. Maybe she could hear that other voice, the one that was me, too, thousands of years ago, but still alive, still present, still here; and the voice that hadn’t been born yet, that wouldn’t be born for thousands of years.

  One thing I know. She knew I was there. It could have been death making the signals misfire and the muscles twitch, but I felt her fingers tighten on mine.

  They held for a handful of heartbeats. Then she was gone.

  Chapter 27

  I’ve read the books. I know what I’m supposed to feel. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. See? I’ve got it memorized.

  The bargaining part? If magic was real, that would work.

  If magic was real, miracles would be, too. Mom would still be here.

  Meanwhile, I settled right in the middle of anger, curled up and let it keep me warm. It was cold out there in the dark, no matter how many people came with cards and casseroles and bouquets of flowers.

  They had tears. I couldn’t find any. Dad and Aunt Jessie took care of things. Kelly took care of me, which I should probably have resented a lot, but I had too much else to be mad at.

  That was a long night. People kept trying to make me go home, but I wouldn’t. When morning came, the man from the mortuary came, too, to take Mom away.

  Meritre’s princess was still marinating in, basically, baking soda. Meru’s mom was a vial of DNA and a bubble of ashes that they’d finally decided to scatter from a starship. My mom fit in the middle. DNA, no. Ashes, in a couple of days, yes.