by Paula Guran
Familiar in more than one sense . . .
Familiar, because I’d seen her before; once in the flesh, more times than I could count in dreams. But also familiar, because for the first time I realized who she reminded me of. It was the way she was sitting, the angle of her face, slightly away, chin slightly lifted. Nobody could ever call the skinny girl a beauty, but at that angle the resemblance was unmistakable.
I can’t remember how I got off the stage or back to the green room, but I remember sitting in a corner refusing tea and wine, and my friend the director bounding up to me like a friendly dog and yapping at me—wonderful, amazing, all the superlatives, except that he actually meant them; and especially the Triumph, my God, I never realized a human being could play like that. I frowned at him. I couldn’t remember having played the Triumph overture—the Procopius, yes, but everything after that was just a blur. I muttered something or other and told him I’d like to be left in peace, please. He wasn’t offended. Of course, he said, and made sure nobody spoke to me.
She was here; well, why was I surprised? Naturally, the enemy would bring their secret weapon. I had enough confidence in the Scherian authorities to assume that they knew what she could do and had taken the necessary measures to make sure she didn’t do it to anybody who mattered—except that I’d been up there on stage, with her staring at me. A moment of panic; then I was able to reassure myself. I could remember every memory I’d acquired during my time with the old man and his son—
Presumably. But how the hell would I know?
No: be logical. I could remember things that would get their necks stretched in two minutes flat; therefore, she hadn’t been at me. Quick mental geometry: how far was the stage from the eighth row of the auditorium? I didn’t actually know, and for me, distance isn’t really a problem, I can see through a man’s head at any distance where I can clearly make out his face. But maybe the girl had problems with distance, maybe she was short-sighted. She had that slight squint, which would fit. And her mother . . .
I caught myself thinking that before I realized the implications; her mother was short-sighted too, when I knew her, twenty years ago.
Except that I’d met her mother, whom I’d never seen before (and I never forget a face), and the other woman had died twenty years ago, in childbirth.
I remember, I was alone in the green room by that stage, though presumably there was a half-company of guards outside in the corridor. I closed my eyes and tried to think. But my father and mother never showed any signs, perish the thought.
And then I reflected; be all that as it may, the reason she’s here is to hurt you, of that you can be certain. And that takes priority over all other considerations. Doesn’t it?
About twenty. Any age between nineteen and twenty-three. I’ve always been hopeless at guessing women’s ages.
I slept badly—nightmares—and awoke to find that I’d been awarded an extra thousand angels, the Order of the Headless Spear, and full Scherian citizenship by a grateful Council. Well, I thought, that’s nice.
My friend the director was in meetings all morning, but he made time to come and see me.
“That girl,” I said, before he could sit down. “The one with the delegation. Have you any idea who she is?”
He nodded grimly. “We objected,” he said, “but they insisted. It was a deal-breaker. But she’s not allowed in to any of the sessions.”
“She’s here to kill me,” I said.
He blinked. I could tell he believed me. “She couldn’t get past the guards,” he said.
I sighed. “You don’t understand how it works,” I told him. “She could get past an army. And you’d have fifty thousand soldiers who couldn’t remember their own names.”
He hadn’t thought of that. “What can we do?”
I shrugged. “No idea,” I said.
He frowned. Then he looked up. “We can poison her,” he said.
He wasn’t joking. “You can’t.” I’d spoken very quickly. “You’d start a war.”
“There’s poisons and poisons,” he replied, and I felt cold all over. “All right, maybe not kill her. But a really bad stomach upset—”
In spite of everything I couldn’t help laughing, at the thought of it.
“Trust me,” he went on, “I’ve had a dicky tummy for years, while it’s happening you simply can’t think about anything else. A really bad dose of the shits will neutralize any power on Earth. We’ve got a man at Intelligence who specializes in that sort of thing. Leave it with me, it’ll be just fine.”
He dosed the lot of them, for good measure. My guess is, he dressed it up in a dish of the notorious Scherian pork terrine, a national delicacy that’ll do for anybody who hasn’t been brought up on it since childhood. The rest of the delegation was up and about after a day or so. The girl (my friend reported cheerfully) had taken it particularly hard, probably because she was so thin and delicate, and would be confined to the shithouse for at least a week.
Woe to the conquered, I thought. Less extreme than killing her, as effective, considerably less humane.
Except that it did kill her. The delegation withdrew from the negotiations for a whole day without any explanation, then announced that one of their advisers, a young woman, had contracted food poisoning and sadly passed away. It would have been her wish, they said, that the negotiations proceed; so they proceeded.
There was a bleak little funeral, which I insisted on attending, though I had no right to do so—except, possibly, that the body they were burying was my daughter, and of course I couldn’t tell anyone that. My daughter, killed on my orders, for the single reason that she took after her father. Possibly. No way of proving it, naturally. And that which can’t be proven can’t be regarded as true.
But I saw them set up a long wooden box on a trestle, stack logs all round it, splash around some oil and apply fire. There was that unmistakable roast-pork smell, which they try and mask with scenty stuff, but it never really works. The old man and his son were there, of course. They kept looking at me. It occurred to me, later, that I could’ve wiped their heads there and then, and been rid of them. Later. At the time, I was preoccupied with other things.
They postponed the war, bless them; it would happen one day, inevitably as the leaves fall from the trees, but it wouldn’t be soon. There was another concert, followed by a reception. I stood in a corner, trying to be invisible. Sure enough, the old man and his son headed straight for me.
You haven’t told anyone. It was a statement of fact, which I confirmed. I pointed out that they’d sent men to kill me, driven me from my own country, and put a fortune on my head. They acknowledged as much, and warned me to keep my mouth shut and never, ever go home. They managed to make me feel as if it were all my fault. But they didn’t mention the skinny girl, and neither did I.
The head of the delegation, who was also the provisional head of the provisional government (call him the provisional dictator) made a point of congratulating me on my performance and issuing a standing invitation to perform in the City, any time I felt like it. Clearly the old man and his son were as good at keeping secrets as me.
Then they went home; and I was mortally afraid that I’d lose my guards—they were picked men from the Prefect’s Battalion, and there were probably other things they should have been doing. But my friend the director made out a case for me being a national treasure—I was eligible, apparently, now I was a citizen—which entitled me to maximum security, in case I was stolen, defaced, vandalized, or damaged. He made loads of jokes about it afterwards, which I managed to take in good part. I went back to work, to full houses and embarrassing applause; I didn’t mind. I was playing better than ever, and enjoying every minute of it. As for money—I can honestly say I lost interest in it, the way fish aren’t particularly interested in the sea.
I moved; from the center of town out to the northern suburbs, where you could look out of your window and see meadows and woods. I never had time to do more than look at
them. On the rare occasions when I was at home, I was totally occupied in learning and practicing new pieces, or rehearsing with orchestras in the massive barn I’d had built in the grounds. People talked about me; they found it strange that I never did anything besides work, no time for pleasures, no wine, no women. I never tried to explain to anyone, understandably enough.
It was late one night. I’d been up since dawn, going through a new concerto I’d commissioned from a promising young composer. A wonderful thing; the more I played it, the more I found in it, and it struck me that if I hadn’t existed, if I’d never been born and never lived a life that brought me to that place at that time in exactly that way, it might never have been written. The young man, almost obscenely talented, was only interested in the money, which he said he needed really badly, for his sister’s dowry or his mother’s operation, or whatever. I paid him double, because the concerto was so good, even though I knew the money would shorten his life (which it did: dead of liver failure at age twenty-six) and cheat the world of what he might have written. What can you do?
I’d reached the point where I couldn’t play any more, so I packed up my flute and locked it away, made myself a last bowl of tea, and shuffled off to bed. I fell asleep straight away, and slipped into one of the old nightmares. Disappointing, because I hadn’t been getting them since the delegation went home. I woke up in a sweat, and saw that the lamp was lit, and there was someone in the room with me.
She was eating an apple. I saw the lamplight reflected in her eyes. “Hello,” she said.
I found it hard to breathe. “Are you going to kill me?” I asked.
“Silly,” she said. “You’d be dead already.”
I tried to sit up, but she frowned at me, so I stayed where I was. “You know who I am,” she said.
“Yes,” I replied. “I—” Words are useless. “I helped you once.”
That made her laugh. She put down the apple on the bed, by my feet. “So I’m told,” she said. “But I don’t believe it. You’re my father.”
I nodded. “I guessed,” I said.
“Because I have the same talent as you.” She picked something up off the bed. It was a knife. One of mine, actually.
“How did you get past the guards?”
She smiled. “I feel sorry for them,” she said. “But I guess they signed on of their own free will. They were in the way.”
“You wiped their minds.”
“Yes.”
I was waiting for the tactical officer inside my head to suggest something, but nothing came. “That was a horrible thing to do.”
“You’ve done worse.”
“To save my life,” I said. “I never tried to harm you.”
“You had them put something nasty in my food,” she replied, as though correcting an obvious flaw in my logic. “It didn’t kill me, but it made me very ill. So I suggested how would it be if we told everybody I died, then he’d assume he’d succeeded, and I’d be safe. So that’s what we did.” She took another bite from the apple. “I gather you came to my funeral. Did you cry?”
“No.”
She nodded. “I told them I wanted to stay behind, after they went home. I’ve got a few jobs to do while I’m here, and then I’ll head back.” She paused, as if waiting for something. “Why haven’t you tried to get inside my head?”
“I wish you no harm,” I told her.
“That’s a good one.” She took another bite from the apple, then threw the core into the corner of the room. “You never mean any harm, do you? You didn’t mean to blind your sister. Except you did. You held the branch back on purpose.”
“How do you know that?”
She shrugged. “I know everything about you,” she said. “More than you do.”
“You’ve been inside my head.”
Then she really laughed. She made a noise like a donkey. “You have no idea, have you? How much trouble you’ve caused. Well, of course you haven’t, you saw to that. You ran away.”
“People were trying to kill me.”
“I don’t mean that, stupid.” She took a deep breath, then let it go slowly. “You know what,” she said. “Once I made you a promise. I think I’ll break it. Well? If I do, will you forgive me?”
I looked at her. “You never promised me anything.”
“It’s rude to call someone a liar. Well? Are you going to forgive me or not?”
I shrugged. “Does it matter?”
“Fine.” She sat up straight, put down the knife, and folded her hands in her lap. “I made you a promise, about five years ago. You don’t remember, do you?”
I shook my head.
“I came to see you,” she said. “You don’t remember, but I do. You were living in a nice suite of rooms next door but two to the Old Theatre. There was a marble staircase, and a big oak door with a shutter in it. You had a servant, I think he was Cimbrian. You made him wear a white tunic with brass buttons.” She paused and grinned at me. “Remember?”
“I remember.”
“The big door opened into a sort of hall,” she went on, “with a marble floor, white and red, in a chessboard pattern. There were three couches and a brass table. Oh, yes, and a sort of palm tree thing in a big clay pot. And you had a parrot, in a cage.”
“Go on,” I said.
“You were sitting on one of the couches, and you had a barber to shave you. He was a tall man with red hair, left-handed. His name was Euja, I know, because you said, Thank you, Euja, that’s all for today. Remember?”
“Yes.”
She nodded approvingly. “You told me to sit down and you rang a bell, for tea. It came in a red-and-white porcelain pot, and there was a dragon on the bottom of the bowl. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“You waited till the servant had poured the tea, then you asked me politely what you could do for me. You must’ve thought I was a customer. I was fifteen. I told you, I’m your daughter.”
I stared at her—her eyes, not the side of her head. “Go on.”
“I told you things about my mother, things I’d heard from the people who brought me up. They were servants from my mother’s family. They died when I was six, in the plague, and the woman’s sister had me then. But I told you things, about her, and you realized I was telling the truth.”
“Go on.”
She smiled at me. “I told you how poor we were, because all the money my mother’s father left for me had gone. I knew you were rich. I asked you for money.”
My mouth was dry. “What did I say?”
She frowned. “You looked at me for a long time. Then you asked how I’d found you. I said, I’d heard about you; how you could go inside people’s heads and take away memories. That’s how I knew. I could do it too. Of course,” she went on, “I couldn’t be sure until I told you the secret things, about my mother. You recognized them all, and then I was certain. But I made sure.”
“You looked—”
“In your head, yes. I saw my mother’s bedroom, just as my nurse described it. And anyway, I recognized you, from her memories. You were much younger then, of course. But your voice was the same.”
My feet and knees had gone cold. “So,” I said, “you asked me for money. What did I say?”
She was silent for a long time. “You said you wouldn’t give me anything, but I could earn four thousand angels. If I’d do a simple job for you. Then you took a piece of paper from the brass table and wrote out a draft and showed it to me.”
“I wanted you to take away a memory,” I said. “Well?”
“Of course. What other possible use could I be?”
I closed my eyes. “What did you take from me?”
I heard her say, “This.”
I remembered it all, very clearly. I remembered hearing my younger sister crying, upstairs in the loft. I remember hearing my mother yelling at my father, the usual hateful stuff. Not again, I thought. I’d just come in from putting the chickens away; it was raining, and I was still wearing a
coat, the big homespun that my uncle had left behind when he came to visit. I wanted to get to the fire—I was wet and cold—but that would mean going through the main room, which was where my mother and father were fighting. I decided I’d have to stay where I was until they stopped.
Then they came out past the chimney corner; I could see them, but they hadn’t seen me. My father staggered a little; I knew what that meant, he’d been drinking, and when he was drunk he did stupid things. I saw him reach in the corner for his stick, a heavy blackthorn cudgel I knew only too well. He took a step forward, and I knew he was about to hit my mother. She screamed at him, you’re stupid, you’re so stupid, I should have listened to my family, they said you were useless and you are. He swung at her, aiming for her head. Long practice made her duck and swerve, and he hit her on the arm. She tried to back away, but her foot caught in the rucked-up rug and she tripped forward, toward him. He was about to hit her again, and my inner tactician told me that this time he’d get her, because she was off-balance and couldn’t get out of the way. I suddenly remembered that in my right hand was the knife I’d taken with me to cut the twine on the neck of the feed sack. I stepped forward, in between them, and whether my father walked into the knife or whether I stabbed him, I simply don’t know.
My mother was staring at him. I’d let go of the knife; it was still stuck in him. He opened his mouth, but all that came out was blood. She grabbed the knife and pulled it out, and then he fell over, crushing the little table. Nobody falls like that unless they’re dead.
