The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “When the job was finished, I was pregnant,” Lammiela said. “Laurance’s sperm had fertilized my new ova. I don’t know if it was a natural consequence of the rituals they used.” Her muscles tightened with the memories. Tendons stood out on the backs of her hands. “They kept me conscious through it all. Pain is their price. They slew the male essence. I saw it, screaming before me. Laurance, burning.”

  It had cost most of her haut to do it. Dealings with the Bound inevitably involved loss of status.

  “I still see him sometimes,” she said.

  “Who?” Elam asked.

  “Your father, Laurance.” Her eyes narrowed. “They didn’t kill him well enough, you see. They told me they did, but he’s still around.” Her eyes darted, as if expecting to find Laurance hiding behind a diorama.

  Elam felt a chill, a sharp feeling at the back of his neck, as if someone with long, long nails were stroking him there. “But you’re him, Lammiela. He’s not someone else.”

  “Do you really know so much about identity, Elam?” She sighed, relaxing. “You’re right, of course. Still, was it I who stood in the Colonnade at Hrlad?” She pointed at a hologram of a long line of rock plinths, the full galaxy rising beyond them. “I’m not sure I remember it, not as if I had been there. It was legend, you know. A bedtime story. But Hrlad is real. So is Laurance. You look like him, you know. You have your father’s eyes.”

  She stared at him coldly, and he, for the first time, thought that Reqata might have spoken truly. Perhaps his mother did indeed hate him.

  “I made my choice,” she said. “I can never go back. The Bound won’t let me. I am a woman, and a mother.”

  Lammiela did not live in the city where most of the Incarnate made their home. She lived on a mountainside, bleak and alone, the rigid, curving walls of her house holding off the snow. She moved her dwelling periodically, from seashore to desert to mountain. She had no adytum, with its body, to lug with her. Elam, somehow, remembered deep forest when he was growing up, interspersed with sunny meadows. The vision wasn’t clear. Nothing was clear.

  After this most recent death, Elam had once again awakened in his adytum. He’d felt the fluid flowing through his lungs, and the darkness pressing down on his open eyes. Fire had burned through his veins, but there was no air to scream with. Then he had awakened again, normally, on a pallet in the light.

  “Mother,” he said, looking off at a broad-spectrum hologram of Sirius which spilled vicious white light across the corner of the room, too bright to look at directly without filters. “Am I truly your only child?”

  Lammiela’s face was still. “Most things are secrets for the first part of their existence, and forgotten thereafter. I suppose there must be a time in the middle when they are known. Who told you?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes. It was thrown at you as a weapon, wasn’t it?”

  Elam sighed. “Yes. Reqata.”

  “Ah, yes. I should have guessed. Dear Reqata. Does she love you, Elam?”

  The question took him aback. “She says she does.”

  “I’m sure she means it then. I wonder what it is about you that she loves. Is that where the discussion ended then? With the question?”

  “Yes. We were interrupted.” Elam described the dragon’s attack.

  “Ah, how convenient. Reqata was always a master of timing. Who was it, do you suppose?” She looked out of the circular window at the mountain tundra, the land falling away to a vast ice field, just the rocky peaks of mountains thrusting through it. “No one gains haut anonymously.”

  “No one recognized the style. Or, if they did, they did not admit it.” The scene was wrong, Elam thought. It should have been trees: smooth-trunked beeches, heavy oaks. The sun had slanted through them as if the leaves themselves generated the light.

  “So why are you here, Elam? Are you looking for the tank in which that creature was grown? You may search for it if you like. Go ahead.”

  “No!” Elam said. “I want to find my sister.” And he turned away and ran through the rooms of the house, past the endless vistas of stars that the rest of the human race had comfortably forgotten. Lammiela silently followed, effortlessly sliding through the complex displays, as Elam stumbled, now falling into an image of a kilometer-high cliff carved with human figures, now into a display of ceremonial masks with lolling tongues. He suddenly remembered running through these rooms, their spaces much larger then, pursued by a small, violent figure that left no place to hide.

  In a domed room he stopped at a wall covered with racks of dark metal drawers. He pushed a spot and one slid open. Inside was a small animal, no bigger than a cat, dried as if left out in the sun. It was recognizably the dragon, curled around itself, its crystalline teeth just visible through its pulled-back lips.

  Lammiela looked down at it. “You two never got along. You would have thought that you would … but I guess that was a foolish assumption. You tormented her with that thing, that … monster. It gave her screaming nightmares. Once, you propped it by her bed so that she would see it when she woke up. For three nights after that she didn’t sleep.” She slid the drawer shut.

  “Who was she?” Elam demanded, taking her shoulders. She met his gaze. “It’s no longer something that will just be forgotten.”

  She weakly raised a hand to her forehead, but Elam wasn’t fooled. His mother had dealt with dangers that could have killed her a dozen times over. He tightened his grip on her shoulders. “Your sister’s name was Orfea. Lovely name, don’t you think? I think Laurance picked it out.”

  Elam could remember no sister. “Was she older or younger?”

  “Neither. You were split from one ovum, identical twins. One was given an androgen bath and became you, Elam. The other was female: Orfea. God, how you grew to hate each other! It frightened me. And you were both so talented. I still have some of her essence around, I think.”

  “I … what happened to her? Where is she?”

  “That was the one thing that consoled me, all these years. The fact that you didn’t remember. I think that was what allowed you to survive.”

  “What? Tell me!”

  Lammiela took only one step back, but it seemed that she receded much farther. “She was murdered. She was just a young girl. So young.”

  Elam looked at her, afraid of the answer. He didn’t remember what had happened, and he could still see hatred in his mother’s eyes. “Did they ever find out who did it?” he asked softly.

  She seemed surprised by the question. “Oh, there was never any doubt. She was killed by a young friend of yours. He is now your servant. Abias.”

  * * *

  “I have to say that it was in extremely poor taste,” Reqata said, not for the first time. “Death is a fine performance, but there’s no reason to perform it at a dinner party. Particularly in my presence.”

  She got up from the bed and stretched. This torso was wide, and well muscled. Once again, the rib cage was high, the breasts small. Elam wondered if, in the secrecy of her adytum, Reqata was male. He had never seen her in any other than a female body.

  “Just out of curiosity,” Elam said. “Could you tell who the dragon was?” He ran his hand over the welts on his side, marks of Reqata’s fierce love.

  She glanced back at him, eyelids half lowered over wide, violet eyes. She gauged if her answer would affect her haut. “Now that was a good trick, Elam. If I hadn’t been looking right at you, I would have guessed that it was you behind those glass fangs.”

  She walked emphatically across the room, the slap of her bare feet echoing from the walls, and stood, challengingly, on the curve of Elam’s adytum. Dawn had not yet come, and light was provided by hanging globes of a blue tint that Elam found unpleasant. He had never found a way to adjust or replace them.

  “Oh Elam,” she said. “If you are working on something, I approve. How you fought! You didn’t want to die. You kept struggling until there was nothing left of you but bones. That dragon crunched them
like candy canes.” She shuddered, her face flushed. “It was wonderful.”

  Elam stretched and rolled out of the bed. As his weight left it, it rose off the floor, to vanish into the darkness overhead. The huge room had no other furniture.

  “What do you know about my sister?” he asked.

  Reqata lounged back on the adytum, curling her legs. “I know she existed, I know she’s dead. More than you did, apparently.” She ran her hands up her sides, cupping her breasts. “You know, the first stories I heard of you don’t match you. You were more like me then. Death was your art, certainly, but it wasn’t your own death.”

  “As you say,” Elam said, stalking towards her, “I don’t remember.”

  “How could you have forgotten?” She rested her hands on the rough stone of the adytum. “This is where you are, Elam. If I ripped this open, I could kill you. Really kill you. Dead.”

  “Want to try it?” He leaned over her. She rested back, lips parted, and dug her fingernails in a circle around his nipple.

  “It could be exciting. Then I could see who you really were.”

  He felt the sweet bite of her nails through his skin. If he had only one body, he reflected, perhaps he could never have made love to Reqata. He couldn’t have lasted.

  He pushed himself forward onto her, and they made love on his adytum, above his real body as it slumbered.

  * * *

  Abias’s kingdom was brightly lit, to Elam’s surprise. He had expected a mysterious darkness. Hallways stretched in all directions, leading to chambers of silent machines and tanks filled with organs and bodies. As he stepped off the stairs, Elam realized that he had never before been down to these lower levels, even though it was as much a part of his house as any other. But this was Abias’s domain. This was where the magic was done.

  His bumblebee lay on a table, its dead nervous system scooped out. Dozens of tiny mechanisms crawled over it, straightening its spars, laying fragile wing material between the ribs. Elam pictured them crawling over his own body, straightening out his ribs, coring out his spinal column, resectioning his eyes.

  Elam touched a panel and a prism rose up out of the floor. In it was himself, calmly asleep. Elam always kept several standard, unmodified versions of his own body ready. That was the form in which he usually died. Elam examined the face of his clone. He had never inhabited this one, and it looked strange in consequence. No emotions had ever played over those slack features, no lines of care had ever formed on the forehead or around the eyes. The face was an infant turned physically adult.

  The elaborate shape of Abias appeared in a passage and made its way towards him, segmented legs gleaming. Elam felt a moment of fear. He imagined those limbs seizing his mysterious, faceless sister, Orfea, rending her, their shine dulled with her blood, sizzling smoke rising … he fought the images down. Abias had been a man then, if he’d been anything. He’d lost his body as a consequence of that murder.

  Abias regarded him. As a Bound, and a cyborg to boot, Abias had no haut. He had no character to express, needed no gestures to show who he was. His faceless eyes were unreadable. Had he been trying to kill Elam? He had the skills and resources to have created the zeppelin, grown the dragon. But why? If he wanted to kill Elam, the real Elam, the adytum lay in his power. Those powerful limbs could rip the chamber open and drag the sleeping Elam out into the light. Elam’s consciousness, in a clone somewhere else, wouldn’t know what had happened, but would suddenly cease to exist.

  “Is the new body ready?” Elam said abruptly.

  Abias moved quietly away. After a moment’s hesitation, Elam followed, deeper into the lower levels. They passed a prism where a baby with golden skin slept, growing towards the day that Elam could inhabit it, and witness Reqata’s El’lie art work. It would replace the body destroyed by the dragon. Lying on a pallet was a short, heavy-boned body with a rounded jaw and beetle brows.

  “It was a matter of genetic regression, based on the markers in the cytoplasmic mitochondria,” Abias said, almost to himself. “The mitochondrial DNA is the timer, since it comes only from the female ancestor. The nucleic genetic material is completely scrambled. But much of it stretches back far enough. And of course we have stored orang and chimp genes as well. If you back and fill—”

  “That’s enough, Abias,” Elam said impatiently. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “No, of course not. It doesn’t matter. But this is your Neanderthal.”

  Elam looked down at the face that was his own, a few hundred thousand years back into the past. “How long have I known you, Abias?”

  “Since we were children,” Abias said softly. “Don’t you remember?”

  “You know I don’t remember. How could I have lived with you for so long otherwise? You killed my sister.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Lammiela told me that you killed Orfea.”

  “Ah,” Abias said. “I didn’t kill her, Elam.” He paused. “You don’t remember her.”

  “No. As far as I’m concerned, I have always been alone.”

  “Perhaps you always have been.”

  Elam considered this. “Are you claiming that Reqata and my mother are lying? That there never was an Orfea?”

  Abias lowered all of his limbs until he was solid on the floor. “I think you should be more worried about who is trying to kill you. These attempts are not accidents.”

  “I know. Perhaps you.”

  “That’s not even worth answering.”

  “But who would want to go around killing me repeatedly in my clones?”

  “From the information we have now,” Abias said, “it could be anyone. It could even be Orfea.”

  “Orfea?” Elam stared at him. “Didn’t you just claim she never existed?”

  “I did not. I said I didn’t kill her. I didn’t. Orfea did not die that day.” His eyes closed and he was immobile. “Only I did.”

  * * *

  It was a land that was familiar, but as Elam stalked it in his new body, he did not know whether it was familiar to him, Elam, or to the Neanderthal he now was. It was covered with a dark forest, broken by clearings, crossed by clear, icy streams scattered with rocks. The air was cold and damp, a living air. His body was wrapped in fur. It was not fur from an animal he had killed himself, but something Abias had mysteriously generated, in the same way he had generated the fur Elam had worn when he died in the Michigan winter. For all he knew, it was some bizarre variant of his own scalp hair.

  Since this was just an exploratory journey, the creation of below-conscious reflexes, Elam retained his own memories. They sat oddly in his head. This brain perceived things more directly, seeing each beam of sunlight through the forest canopy as a separate entity, with its own characteristics and personality, owing little to the sun from which it ultimately came.

  A stream had cut a deep ravine, revealing ruins. The Neanderthal wandered among the walls, which stood knee deep in the water, and peered thoughtfully at their bricks. He felt as if he were looking at the ruins of the incomprehensibly distant future, not the past at all. He imagined wading mammoths pushing their way through, knocking the walls over in their search for food. At the thought of a mammoth his hands itched to feel the haft of a spear, though he could certainly not kill such a beast by himself. He needed the help of his fellows, and they did not exist. He walked the earth alone.

  Something grunted in a pool that had once been a basement. He sloshed over to it, and gazed down at the frog. It sat on the remains of a windowsill, pulsing its throat. Elam reached down … and thought of the dying frog, shuddering its life out in his hand. He tied it down, limbs outspread, and played the hot cutting beam over it. It screamed and begged as the smoke from its guts rose up into the clear sky.

  Elam jerked his hand back from the frog, which, startled, dove into the water and swam away. He turned and climbed the other side of the ravine. He was frightened by the savagery of the thought that had possessed him. When he pulled himself over the edg
e he found himself in an area of open rolling hills, the forest having retreated to the colder, northern slopes.

  The past seemed closer here, as if he had indeed lived it.

  He had hated Orfea. The feeling came to him like the memory of a shaman’s rituals, fearsome and complex. It seemed that the hate had always been with him. That form, with his shape and gestures, loomed before him.

  The memories were fragmentary, more terrifying than reassuring, like sharp pieces of colored glass. He saw the face of a boy he knew to be Abias, dark-eyed, curly-haired, intent. He bent over an injured animal, one of Elam’s victims, his eyes shiny with tears. Young, he already possessed a good measure of that ancient knowledge the Bound remembered. In this case the animal was beyond healing. With a calmly dismissive gesture, Abias broke its neck.

  The leaves in the forest moved of their own will, whispering to each other of the coming of the breeze, which moved its cool fingers across the back of Elam’s neck.

  He remembered Orfea, a slender girl with dark hair, but he never saw her clearly. Her image appeared only in reflections, side images, glimpses of an arm or a strand of hair. And he saw himself, a slender boy with dark hair, twin to Orfea. He watched himself as he tied a cat down to a piece of wood, spreading it out as it yowled. There was a fine downy hair on his back, and he could count the vertebrae as they moved under his smooth, young skin. The arm sawed with its knife and the cat screamed and spat.

  The children wandered the forest, investigating what they had found in the roots of a tree. It was some sort of vast lens, mostly under the ground, with only one of its faces coming out into the air. They brushed the twigs and leaves from it and peered in, wondering at its ancient functions. Elam saw Orfea’s face reflected in it, solemn eyes examining him, wondering at him. A beam of hot sunlight played on the lens, awakening lights deep within it, vague images of times and places now vanished. Midges darted in the sun, and Orfea’s skin produced a smooth and heavy odor, one of the perfumes she mixed for herself: her art, as death was Elam’s. Elam looked down at her hand, splayed on the smooth glass, then across at his, already rougher, stronger, with the hints of dark, dried blood around the fingernails.