The Mangrove Suite

by Tim Niederriter

  My back to the tree, I took a deep breath, and then delved into the haze of my mind. I let my instinct guide me down paths of light that distinguished between old memories and current feelings.

  I felt as though I descended through mist. A downward tug pulled at the pit of my stomach, and my view inhibited by branches and interconnected sinewy fibers of unconscious understanding. I felt as though I was in the depths of a swamp, surrounded by trees and fog, knee deep in muddy water.

  Discolored liquid lapped at the edges of my perspective, and a bitter tang filled my nose. I recognized the memory from the Green Valley, spring when the river overflowed its bank and filled the lowlands. Trees could drown in such deep water, but many had adapted to survive the season long ago. The whole scene was frozen, birds in flight silenced by the snapshot. If my brother was here, he could tell me the names of each species of insect and animal.

  But Luke wasn’t here. Luke had never been to the east where I lived. Where I stood in a park, not in a swamp. Why had I imagined my body in the memory? The mud on which I stood sucked down into shadow. My bare feet sank deeper in. This wasn’t how I had felt back then. I hadn’t stood paralyzed and sinking.

  What had I done? I pulled myself out of there. The thought got me pulling on my legs, but it did not free me. I grabbed a tree branch and hung on to the arm of the illusory tree. Yet the pull of the mud grew stronger, and gravity felt heavier. The force weighed on me unnaturally. I gasped in pain. This wasn’t just my mind. This was part of the illusion.

  I hadn’t even noticed my defenses getting breached. Who could have brought this memory out? It had only been a moment in reality, yet here I struggled not to sink. A giggle echoed in my ears from across the mire. I glanced up from the brackish water and found Yashelia standing on a tree branch across a clearing dressed as I remembered her from the Mangrove Suite. Pale hair streamed out over the swamp, carried by a silent breeze.

  “Rebecca had similar memories, filthy things that they are,” she said, “but soon you will both be clean of them.”

  I glared at her, grip slipping on the branch where I clung for the survival of not just my mind, but for Rebecca’s. Beside Yashelia another form materialized, a small woman looking as if she had simply stepped out of the air. She looked hazy and her clothes and face were indistinct, probably because I had never met her and my mind only rendered the vaguest shape.

  “Mistress,” said the woman, “the purifiers are close to the tree.”

  “Delay them.” The wound over Yashelia’s eye dripped ichor which ran down her face, and then fell into the water below her. “This man must be cleaned.”

  I grimaced. “Why are you doing this?” I said. “Why did you want Rain?”

  “Your memories will be gone in a moment if you let go.” Yashelia smiled. “Be a good little boy and you need never know.”

  I gritted my teeth. “But I want to know, and I’m not letting go until I do.”

  “Mistress,” said the hazy woman beside Yashelia, “we should hurry.”

  Yashelia’s eyes moved to the woman at her side. “Leave this to me. Confuse the troops.”

  “As you wish.” The woman faded completely back into the mist. Part of my mentality, the part that wasn’t stuck in a swamp of floodwaters, could still sense a faint presence of her nearby.

  Yashelia turned back to me. “Are you prepared to become clean?”

  I spat into the water between us.

  Her face pinched. Unnatural aeonic beauty warped into a ghoulish mask, and she glared at me. Then she was on a branch above me, hands reaching out to pry my fingers from where I hung on. Her hand wrapped around my wrist, then jerked on my arm. My palm tore and became bloody, and I fell into the water and mud of the flooded forest floor with a yelp.

  I struggled on the surface, fighting for air. A cogent thought arose from fear. Is this how it feels to be cleaned? Yashelia reached toward me and drove my head into the abyssal waters of the swamp.

  Colorless light spilled into my eyes even as oblivion claimed the memory of the forest. Thoughts seemed far off. Someone called to me, a woman, her voice distant and sharp. I fought through a storm of bright colors like binding strings that then tore and seeped away into light. The voice remained, though I could not understand her. My own language sounded foreign in my echoing head.

  Then I was no longer a body. I was a mind alone, free of the memory the illusionist had imprisoned me within. My projected mentality returned in its willowy, shifting state, my familiar presence on the network. I fought to open my eyes, to break the connection. I thought about a nest of hornets, my brother’s face, a van on a road, a girl in a shawl, a woman dancing on a stage in a marketplace. These are the things I’m going to lose. The cleaning isn’t over yet.

  The voice bit into my mind, lodging in my everything.

  “Elizabeth, is that you??”

  “It’s me. And Rain.”

  “You found me. I guess that means I can say goodbye.”

  Elizabeth sounded insistent. “Jeth, she’s not touching you anymore.”

  A second voice cut in, a familiar one but with a soft tone. “Rebecca you always made a good sensocycler.”

  “Jeth, open your eyes.”

  I pulled back from my memories. My eyes flew open. I stood beside the tree as I had before, but with a set of footprints in the leaves beside me, then leading off under the overhanging tree. I looked around the side of the tree.

  Ahead of me in that direction the park burned. Bright orange flames licked tree trunks and ignited fallen leaves. Here and there, purifiers in dark armor sprinted. Gunfire howled through the forest. Mentally, I felt Elizabeth and Rain were close, probably watching through my eyes right now. The spell must have broken. Where is Yashelia? Those footsteps must have been hers, but where is she now?

  My head pounded with an illusion hangover. I pressed my palm to the trunk of the great hunched tree to steady myself, cutting my finger on thorny growth from its side. Blood trickled down to my palm, but I was past caring.

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. My network connection reactivated. I confirmed the presence of Elizabeth and Rain in my mind and decided I’d have to wait to ask how Elizabeth had accessed Rebecca’s skills with her cleaned. To my left, where the tree stood, sank a great pit, walled with golden and glowing memory that flickered and flashed, a mind at my fingertips.

  I felt the mind within the tree, an enormous mind, one several times larger and more expansive than any I’d ever felt before. “It’s a mystery where the thoughts of aeons come from,” said Elizabeth in my head. “Don’t be too hasty.”

  “What else could it be? This tree, it contains a mind.”

  “I sense it, through you,” she said, “but be careful. A mind is a dangerous place.”

  “But if there’s any truth to finding Rebecca’s memories, I have to try and do something. Now. While I have the chance.”

  Before she could reply I walked to the edge of the great pit of memories, and leapt into the tree’s mind.

  I fell into the mind, projection plummeting past glowing banks of memories. A barrier of shimmering transparent matter raced toward me, to block my descent, but I armored myself in determination. I hit the barrier and it shattered. It tore at me, saddened me with an external emotion, and slowed my movement. More transparent, shining barriers raced to intercept me from all along the tunnel. Two overhead blocked the exit.

  They surrounded me completely about midway down the pit, then began to close in. Active barriers like this are tricky, and with my determination momentum lost, I had little chance to break them. Still, I lashed out with an arm like a whip. My blow rebounded from the barrier, leaving me with a shadow’s flicker of despair from Yashelia’s own mentality. Below me, green disks gathered in the pit. I suspected they were antibodies, but they looked so sickly and morose I doubted they would simply repel me if I let them connect.

  Antibodies could contain emotions, and if the despair I felt from my blows against
the barriers was any indication, Yashelia tried to sap the willpower and joy of anyone who entered her mind. The green disks ascended, floating leeches ready to bleed my mind dry. And there, I floated, already imprisoned by mental barriers.

  As the a antibodies drew closer a high-pitched squeal reached my ears ahead of them. I struggled against the barriers around me, mind throbbing with pain coupled with irritation added by the sound I realized must be a sensory barrier. It quickly began to disrupt my own thoughts. No sooner would I have one, then the whine pierced deeper and drove it from my attention. Antibodies pulsed in shades of sickening green all around my barrier cage.

  My efforts to break out seemed useless, and if I escaped, the antibodies would surely attack immediately. If I weakened my resolve in breaking out they might easily defeat me on the outside. Already, my thoughts were slower, and the inhibiting tone whining through my being could not be denied. With what little concentration I had, I peered through the transparent barriers, looking up and down the memories stacked all the way up the walls of the pit.

  Not one of these memory banks looked large enough to hold a human mentality, so if Rebecca was here, I would not find her within any of them. I peered down, sharpening my senses and focusing all my attention on the depths. Some distance below, the pit opened into a glowing cavern of network information. That could be it. She must keep memories there, and when she needs them, her ichor carries them through her body. This could be why aeons can’t be detected on the network unless they choose to be. Their minds are protected in these trees.

  Antibodies closed in on my cage. The barriers hemming me in from above parted to allow an antibody that had passed overhead to descend into my prison. I darted upward, but not fast enough to get my entire mentality free of the cage. The two barriers slammed on either side of me. I screamed in agony, racked with guilt and sorrow from sources outside myself. All that pain pressed in on me from both sides. Stricken by grief that I somehow knew I had caused myself, I almost sank back into the cage. Only one persistent thought allowed me to keep fighting.

  These feelings aren’t mine. I slipped free of the barriers looped around them, dodging swarms of antibodies as I went.

  I hoped my hunch to dive deeper was correct as I flew into the cavern. Memories played like moving paintings on the walls, images of lives and places I had never seen, the faces of men and women known by those who had been cleaned by Yashelia.

  Dozens of humanoid projections flickered before my mind’s eye, each one distinct but composed of many incongruous features. Scents of perfume and cooking meat and sewage warred with my senses. An uproar of chaotic sounds and voices filled my ears as I plunged deeper into the chamber. I reached out and felt the soft and stiff, the cold and warm with the fingertips of my mind. At last, I tasted a kiss on my lips, and this one sensation alone was familiar to me.

  This sensation belonged in not one memory within the tree, but in two. I had only kissed Rebecca once when I’d known her, and the taste of her fled through the shifting projections and gleaming antibodies. I chased the feeling. Antibodies brushed my consciousness, and I repelled them as quickly as I could, flinging them toward the roof of the cavern with dread building in my stomach every time I touched one.

  I raced after Rebecca’s kiss, my first kiss. A yawning gulf of morning light stretched out below me. An opening in the cavern revealed treetops far below, burning with a fresh dawn. The kiss led me into that forest once more. And then I felt myself inside my body, but not the body I had grown accustomed to over years of plenty and years of building thoughts for others.

  The body I inhabited was young and excited and pulsing with hormones. I stood in the morning of the Green Valley in autumn, cold light and misty air. Disoriented, my mind did not control the actions of this body. The past me turned and looked up the hill to a house with a roman columned porch and a white door, the house Rebecca’s family had moved into after a year of living in the Green Valley and finally moving up in status.

  I climbed the steps to her door, following the sense of her kiss. I opened the door with a slow turn of the knob to keep it quiet. My feet carried me through the house as quietly as young me could manage, careful not to wake the rest of the family. I made my way to the back door where a broad deck overlooked the backyard and a sharp decline. By the wooden railing of the deck, stood Rebecca.

  She turned toward me, shawl over her hair. I walked across the boards of the deck and met her by the side. She smiled at me. “Good morning, Jeth.”

  The blood of my younger self ran with as much nervousness as excitement. I reached out tentatively. Rebecca took my hand with hers. Her other hand pulled the shawl back from her dark hair. We leaned into each other, then fully embraced. Lips met in light and joy, freedom and truth, the kiss as Rebecca remembered.

  I found her.

  “You need to come with me,” I said from my mind as I watched the scene. “We need to leave.”

  Her voice spoke in my ear, “I’ve been lost. Jeth, help me find my way.”

  I reached into the scene and touched Rebecca’s young face. Then I drew back and found her presence following me, not the presence of the teenager, but one of the adult woman she became before being cleaned.

  We fled from the dreamed memory, from the cavern, from the pit, from the tree.

  I woke, startled and dazed. The forest burned and gunshots cracked through the air. I staggered back from the tree.

  “Elizabeth, can you help Rebecca find Rain?”

  “I’ll lead her.”

  I stepped back from the tree, still dazed from my deep mind delving. Thunder roared. A massive shadow moved over the clearing, darkening the already cloudy sky except for the flickering light veins that ran along its sides. Sudhatho’s light ship hovered above the overgrown park. I stared up at it and trembled.

  Unregistered Memory, Elizabeth Ashwood, The Mangrove Suite, Lotdel Tower

  Elizabeth sat on the floor, leaning against the side of the bed. Her heart hurt, and her breathing came in gasps. The intensity of the mental effort to bring Rebecca’s mind back to her body had more than drained her. The effort had hurt her.

  The woman lying on the bed, legs dangling over the side past Elizabeth, opened her eyes. Rebecca’s breath went in and out steadily. Rebecca slipped off the bed and crouched beside Elizabeth. “Are you alright?” she asked.

  Elizabeth gazed up at her face, eyes wide with recognition. “Hello, Rebecca.”

  A broad smile formed on Rebecca’s face. “You brought me here. Thank you.”

  Elizabeth managed to return to Rebecca’s smile weakly. “I did my best.”

  “It was enough. Can you walk?”

  “Maybe,” Elizabeth said. Jeth and Thomas are still in danger.

  “We have to hurry.”

  Rebecca offered Elizabeth her hand. She took it, and Rebecca helped her up. Elizabeth steadied herself on Rebecca’s arm. Her other palm pressed to her forehead. “We’re going after them. Aren’t we?”

  The burden of Rebecca’s memories of her time since her small taste of Yashelia’s ichor felt like heavy weights in the back of Elizabeth’s mind. Everything was so strange.

  Rebecca’s hand clasped Elizabeth’s wrist. “We need to get to the park as fast as we can.”

  Elizabeth nodded. “Thomas’ van,” she said. “We need to get it from the parking garage.”

  Rebecca helped Elizabeth out the door and toward the elevator. Elizabeth reached out with her senses and found Rebecca’s mind nearby. She did her best to shroud them from the senses of others but only had rudimentary knowledge of sensotecture. Managing it in real time was almost too much for her. They reached the bottom of the shaft in the parking garage under the tower, and the doors opened. The two of them walked out of the elevator and headed for the van.

  Elizabeth took the wheel, not trusting Rebecca to drive so soon after her restoration. And what about me? Elizabeth grimaced. I’ll have to do my best.

  Rebecca slammed the passenger door
. Elizabeth drove.

  Smoke

  The trees in the park burned with black smoke while the light ship hung in the air overhead. I clutched the shotgun and crept under the branches of Yashelia’s tree and found the armored body of a purifier in the foliage beyond. Blood ran from the blackened hole in the chest plate. If the only thing they’re fighting in this place is Yashelia, what killed this man?

  I had never heard of any aeon using a firearm, but the deadly placement of the shot made me sure it had not been friendly fire. I knelt and retrieved the pistol from the fallen purifier’s hip holster. The weapon felt heavy in my grip. I stuffed it into the pocket of my coat. Both hands on my shotgun, I scanned the dense foliage and billowing smoke for signs of others.

  Thomas. I have to find him, and then we have to get out of here.

  Shouting behind me made me turn. I looked down the barrel of my shotgun at a group of four purifiers as they approached the trunk of the tree in the clearing. They didn’t seem to see me. With as quiet a footstep as I could manage, I eased my back toward Yashelia’s thorny tree. My heartbeat quickened. I checked the network for an instant and found threads of illusion surrounding the minds of the purifiers. Despite the light ship above, the purifiers here did not appear to be winning.

  I walked out from behind the tree, gun ready, but trusting the squad before me would be too wrapped up in their illusions to attack. If Yashelia’s illusionist, the other woman I had seen in the swamp from my memory, was precise enough and intended them to see me, I could easily have been killed. One of the purifiers looked in my direction, face mask expressionless. Then he fell to his knees, dropping the rifle he had been holding.

  Yashelia emerged from the smoke behind them as droplets of cold rain pattered on the branches and leaves all around. I stared as she approached the purifiers who stood paralyzed before her. I aimed at her with my shotgun, but I knew from what I had felt inside Yashelia’s tree-mind, I did not need her blood to restore Rebecca. That was already done. If I found Thomas, that was all it would take.