The Dying Cycle, Ch. 1, Original Work
Jan. 22nd, 2011 07:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiThis is an original science-fantasy novel, set in the same universe as my novel, Perdita, and my in-process film, The Hour before Morning. I do hope someone will take a chance and read a bit despite its not being fic.
Summary/Teaser: Erik had no memory of his life before awaking five years ago in a dream called America. Now a man from another planet, who claims to be from his past, is telling him it isn't a dream at all. (M/M here and there.) Also on AO3
Many thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
louderandlouder for massive, massive beta work. Thanks, too, to sixish for giving me a fresh reader's insights, and thanks to my in-person writer's group for more fresh (and men's!) insights.
There is/will be quoting of copyrighted texts in this work. This chapter references Dune, Babylon 5, and the 1985 Star Trek novel, The Final Frontier. I disclaim ownership, give credit, and do not profit.
The Dying Cycle
Chapter 1: The Man from Another Dream
Again, he awoke or became aware of himself awake. Again, he'd lost his name. He'd had many once, when there had been ones to name him, but long ago he'd shed those names behind the misty veil.
The same scentless wind blew off the ocean; the same gray clouds swept high. Long ago, the air had been filled with creatures, black wings and claws and bulk; he couldn't remember their shape. Long ago, he had subdued them, or they had slipped into hibernation. Behind him, he knew, lay skeletons, and so he faced the wind. Behind him, a ghost passed, like a moth's white flapping just beyond his feet.
Talya? His depths disgorged the name and an after-glimpse of black-reed hair and bloodless skin.
A hand almost touched his shoulder, then was gone, and Matt said (again), "I hope you realize it's your fault that I've lost her."
I'm so tired of this, he thought.
Then he woke to the other dream.
***
"There's a hole in my mind." Erik ran a hand over his face and gazed at the shadowy square of the ceiling vent.
Matt, predictably, failed to make a Vorlon joke. He just lay leaden against Erik's shoulder.
A bit of Erik's hair scratched at his neck; he combed it away, dislodging Matt in the process. "My mind is full of American things like that: like English and science fiction and corporate protectionism. But these American things, they replace something that's gone. There's things like Babylon 5 in my native language. Stories, you know? But I can't remember it."
After a moment, Matt said, "Better not to." His accent was not quite Erik's, but both accents came from nowhere.
Erik leaned on his elbow to gaze at Matt, underfed as usual, which only enhanced his beauty. In the yellow streetlight (streetlight is green), Matt's pale skin glowed out of black hair and eyes, like a wax dummy--no, he wasn't beautiful at all. He wore the same old frown like it was carved into his wax. Erik kissed him, thinking it would be better to find another man, someone who didn't remind him of-- what?
"That's why I like you, Matt. When our minds buzz that way, I can almost remember the quote."
Matt turned away and clicked on the light. In the sudden, sharp yellow, the room was too big, like most rooms in America.
Erik said, "Do you remember once that I said something to you--I don't remember what--but it was in my native language, and you answered me?"
"Erik, stop the quiz about my past." His English remained stilted like that.
Erik ran a hand down his thigh. "Don't you get lonely?" The words were deliberately cruel and produced the desired result, a buzz of mind from Matt, a hand in Erik's brain like a hand on his penis.
With a rueful glance, Matt got out of bed.
Erik sat up. "I'm sorry. That was shitty of me. But I mean it: without you, I'd feel like the last of my kind." For reasons he couldn't express, his words hit the wrong chord, for him and Matt both.
Matt tugged on his jeans and reached for Erik's wallet. "I take a hundred."
Erik watched him throw on his flea market coat. He wanted to say, You feel it too. You come here for more than the money. But this scene was already several strokes too trite, so he held his peace and watched Matt round the bed and disappear into the hall. A moment later came the soft click of the front door. They should stick to sex. Sex and TV. In all of this dream--and maybe in all dreams--Matt was the one who made him most himself. Yet he and Matt didn't belong to each other. They just kept their eyes on each other to avoid seeing ghosts at their shoulders.
***
"Morning, Janice," Erik called as he swiped his key card and entered the faded plush of the front office of the Poe. It was only from the outside that the gray, windowless box reminded him of a prison. When he'd first hiked past its concrete mass, sunk in a tree-lined canyon as if hiding, he'd fantasized it was some sort of factory farm, an embarrassment to local, liberal sensibilities. The Pig Oubliette, he'd dubbed it.
"Morning, Erik." Voice tinny from the lab.
He stared at his desk without seeing it. Last night's dream itched at his mind: the beach, the ocean. When he dreamed of them, he invariably felt himself about to lose his grip on America. To anchor himself, he focused on the desk, strewn with months of notes on scratch paper. He and Janice were the only ones he knew who made a habit of taking notes by hand. Under the fluorescent lights, he took a stab at organizing them but gave up.
He glanced up at the closed circuit TV screen, envying the pines outside, sunning. Then, he booted up and started where he'd left off yesterday: the dynamics of intergenerational space travel. With half his brain, he reviewed the literature and filled in the blanks, troubleshooting closed eco-cycles. With the other half, more than usual, he thought it was weird how he knew all this. Maybe he'd studied it before he lost his memory. But he was so far ahead of the current publications that, if he had, he must have been one of the greatest minds in the field. And he wasn't.
A great mind worked from the soul. Thoughts rose like a rhapsody (he didn't know how he knew this either). Erik, however, might as well have been transcribing a unit he'd learned in high school. He just knew it, like his times tables. He didn't even care about it much. It was a competency he had, and he sold it the same way Matt sold his body.
***
When he'd been going an hour or so, Janice came in, graying wisps of blonde bangs plastered to her brow. She wiped the sweat from her forehead and sat down at Xiang's desk.
"You look like crap, J."
"Tyler got wiped."
That frightened him. When you went to work for a criminal organization, you naturally took on certain risks. Getting hauled in under WIPO for IP violation was the sword hanging over all their heads. Still, no one had been arrested in a year and a half. Tyler, though, had just transferred to the Poe three weeks ago, green and cocky. Erik didn't know him well enough to worry much about him, but the Commons was his livelihood, and that he worried about. "For what?"
"Those MIT molecular circuits."
"How they catch him?"
Janice rubbed at her face again. "Same as usual. He sent part of it over the internet."
"Did he use RaLEd?"
"No, thank God. He didn't code it at all; he just used plain English. Can you believe it? I feel like shit leaving him to the wolves."
"You need to protect security of the program."
"He's going to get a million dollars and five years for this. Stupid idiot."
"A million?"
"Well, maybe I'm exaggerating. Hundreds of thousands? Does it matter when you make 30K?" Janice looked old today, eyes pinched to dark points in her glistening face. "Look, I'm going to take off. Xiang's not feeling well, and I don't have the stamina to deal with her and Tyler and this place."
"Sure."
She stood. "Sorry. You can take off too if you want. It's not like we're on a timeline."
Erik grinned. "It's already the 21st century, Janice." A weak, old joke about too little, too late, which possibly wasn't a joke at all.
"Yeah. I'll be in tomorrow morning."
***
Alone in the Poe: Xiang out sick, Janice home with her, Tyler probably going to prison, a thought which made Erik queasy. Erik would not get wiped, for the simple reason that he didn't need to use other people's intellectual property, not at this stage anyway. Then again, if the Commons got busted, he could go down with the rest. But if he did to prison again, he would zap out right away. This particular dream allowed that. He'd just close his eyes and picture his safe spot: the brush just below the curve in the road by the 20 mph sign. And he'd wish himself there. It would hurt, but he could do it. And then he'd set up with some other group in some other state or country.
He checked out and went for a walk: a still mid-morning in the April sun, the clean scent of dust and grass, gravel crunching beneath his feet. Freedom. He loved Baydell Road, where the Pig Oubliette nestled (12864 Baydell): high and open, a mix of mansions and vineyards, liberally hidden by oaks and, higher, by redwoods. From chaparral embankments, the views cascaded down across town, all the way to the ocean, forty miles off. Chickadees peeped and flitted in the brush. In town he seldom heard them: too many cats, he'd read.
He wondered sometimes if this was where he came from. Had he grown up hiding in the woods between house lots before so many meadows had gone over to vineyards? Had that road been his first taste of asphalt? His first memory was zapping to Baydell. Had he chosen it because it was home?
He walked up two miles, loving the sun like an insect crawling out of the north-facing moss. He knew he wasn't born to sun. At the edge of the redwoods, a Steller's Jay crooned, the most beautiful bird in this region, with its dark blue body and black topknot. But it belonged to the shadows, and it told him to turn back. In the oak-sprinkled sun once again, he reflected, as usual, that it would be nice to live here, but the Commons didn't pay him nearly enough for that. Besides, the press of neighbors consoled him.
A truck slowed behind him, and he tensed as always, anticipating a threat.
"Enrique, what's up, my man?" Octavio stuck his out his pickup window. "Need a ride?"
"Hey. No thanks. Just out for a walk." His Spanish was getting rusty. Once upon a time, he'd known it better than English.
"This is my nephew, Rafael." The young man in the passenger's seat gave a half-hearted, teen smile. "He's just come up from Riverside to help out with the new tasting room for Angiolieri's. Rafael, Enrique's family are Indians from Guatemala."
They exchanged pleasant nothings for a couple of minutes, and when the pickup drove off, Erik sighed, feeling the perpetual push-pull between craving everyday words with others and wondering if it would go too far. People wanted befriend him. And he couldn't let himself be befriended; sooner or later, friends got torn apart.
America was a strange dream. Once he'd overcome the prison part, he'd found it agreeable--in the microcosm anyway. In the macrocosm, this planet's situation scared him. He wondered why his brain set it up that way: a perfectly nice apartment and job, a road to walk on and people to talk to, stuck on a planet whirling rapidly toward ecological ruin, with a populace almost entirely oblivious to the need for an escape plan. (That made him feel good about working for the Commons; at least the Commons understood.) These emotional incongruities evidenced his theory that the dream was not all of his making. That and Matt. Matt wasn't part of the dream, not of this dream.
***
He pondered biking to the Domino in search of Matt. But it made him feel needy, so he ran errands instead, then went home and lounged on his deck (he'd picked this apartment for the afternoon sun). He spun through the pages of an old Star Trek novel from Janice's collection: The Final Frontier, not Star Trek V, but an earlier novel about the now de-canonized first mission of the Enterprise. He preferred this version; it had Romulans.
Funny how pleasant an afternoon it was. He thought suddenly of Tyler's fall and how little it mattered to him. As he reflected on his disregard for other people, guilt brushed over his content like a gray watercolor wash. Of course, Tyler might just be a figment. Then again, he might be real. They could be sharing the same dream. Feeling darker despite the sun, Erik went in to make an early dinner of fish and chips. He hated the expense of fish, which ought to be a staple.
He'd just sprayed the pan when a man appeared behind him.
***
Erik jumped, which was silly. In the randomness of dreaming, logically nothing should be a surprise. But then, dreams did not run on logic.
The man collapsed. His knees smacked the linoleum, hands gripping his head, and he kept on wilting till his head touched the floor. His breaths came in gasps as if he'd been plucked drowning from a lake.
In the stunned moments that Erik stood by, it dawned on him what had happened. The man had zapped. Erik knew the procedure: you imagined a place and appeared there in agony--though for this man the agony seemed upped a notch. In his place, Erik would already have been steady enough to stand up, though still blinking back the pain.
He knelt by the man. "Can you move?"
The man made some gesture toward rising but instead doubled over again and vomited. That had happened to Erik once or twice too. With soothing noises and back rubbing and a certain amount of hauling, Erik got him up and into the living room, where he tumbled onto the couch.
Erik left him there and cleaned up the kitchen floor. When he came back with a glass of water, the man was out cold. Flipping through the possibilities, Erik considered waking him, letting him sleep, calling 911, driving him to the emergency room. Let him sleep, he concluded. The pain didn't really go away till you slept, and the whole ordeal made you sleepy.
He sat on the coffee table and studied him. Red jacket, so intricately patterned it seemed to shimmer. Everything else dulled in comparison. Racially, he was white or mostly white. Short hair, curly and graying, framed a craggy face; he wore black trousers and not very formidable boots. He was... he was the Romulan Primus from the Star Trek novel, but older and less attractive, and not Romulan.
He's a figment. I've conjured him out of a 1985 paperback cover.
He fetched the book to compare. No, it wasn't the same face, not even close.
He went back to his cooking. Maybe it was the smell of catfish that woke his guest. Erik, on alert, caught sight of his first stirrings, shut off the range, and was perched again on the coffee table by the time the man sat up and stared at him out of big, brown (Romulan) eyes. He stared as if Erik were the Mona Lisa.
"Are you okay?" asked Erik.
"It is you." The man set warm hands on either side of Erik's face. Funny how Erik let him do that without the slightest qualm. "My gods, you're alive. Are you--?" He broke off, staring hard into Erik's face.
Erik took the man's hands and drew them into his own. "You--" He was about to say, "You zapped here," when he got stuck trying to think of the word for "zapped." It was only then he realized that they were speaking his native language. Two dreams had collided: the new world and the old. Erik thought back to before he'd learned English and fallen in love with "zapping." When he'd first realized he had the power, he'd called it... "You flashed here."
"Flashed?"
"You just appeared from somewhere else."
The man stared. "I walked, you mean."
"No, you didn't walk. You were just there. But it's all right; I'm not shocked. I can do it too."
A moment's more staring. "Of course, you do it too. It's called Walking." This time Erik heard the capital. "Ishan, do you know who I am?"
"Ishan?"
The man's jaw dropped. He covered his eyes with his hand, a universal gesture of warding off a headache. Then, creaking like an old man, he stood, stumbled but righted himself and went to lean against the window.
"You know me from before," said Erik. "That's it, no?"
"From before? Before..."
"Before I woke up in this dream, in America."
The man frowned. "Do you remember anything?"
"No. Except I think some of the dreams are older--the dreams within this dream, I mean. And the language, of course. And some science but nothing about me personally." It would be natural at this juncture to ask for information, but all at once Erik realized he didn't want to. He didn't want to know why, underneath the man's frown, he could sense relief.
At length, the man said, "You seem very calm about it."
Erik shrugged.
The man's whole manner slumped, as if his body had become a sigh. He looked out the window. After a couple of seconds, he groped backward to sit on the back of the couch in the little space between it and the window, still gazing out. "Class 1 planet?"
"Yes. Its biodiversity rivals the Kiri planets, but it's also in a state of biospheric collapse." He joined the dream man at the window, facing out over rooftops to the wooded hills across the valley, softened by a hazy (sooty) sky.
"What's causing it?"
"The collapse?" Erik shrugged. "The same old things." The bitterness in his voice surprised him and exposed the strangeness of his reference to the "Kiri planets." He'd said it without thinking, and the man had absorbed it easily as if he'd said, "It reminds me of San Francisco." But now that he thought about it he had as little idea what the Kiri planets were as he had of the origins of his bitterness.
The man massaged his temples.
"Could you handle dinner?" asked Eric. "I've made fish."
"Out of thin air?" The man smiled, but Erik didn't. Dreams where fish appeared from thin air often ended in water. "Thanks," he added. "I could handle fish."
"It just needs a bit more frying."
To Erik's mild irritation, the man did not follow him to the kitchen but stayed welded to the window. It had occurred to Erik some minutes before, without his wanting to articulate it, that he didn't want to ask the man's name. He didn't like the name the man had given him either. It savored of the bad dreams.
***
When they sat down at the kitchen table, the man said as a sort of grace, "Our time brief." Erik understood it, but it was not his native language, nor English or any other Earth language he could place. The man's eyes widened when he tasted the catfish. "It's very good. As good as the bottom feeders from Lo Renna." He ate a couple bites in silence, then turned his expansive eyes on Ishan--Erik. "I'm glad you're alive."
Erik wasn't sure how to respond. After a moment, he said, "Am I? Alive?"
"Yes," said the man as if the question were perfectly reasonable.
That comforted Erik. This was one of the few times he'd met someone else who seemed to inhabit his world. He put down the sudden urge to phone Matt, who never answered anyway.
The man set aside his fork. He'd scarcely eaten, most likely still queasy from the zapping. "I suppose I should explain some things."
"I suppose," said Erik with reluctance.
The man glanced away, ashamed: Erik read the feeling as surely as he sometimes snuck into Matt's dreams. "You don't remember what happened. You don't remember me."
"No. You seem familiar though--or not familiar exactly but comfortable, as if you'd always been here."
The man nodded. "My name is Ghanior." He hesitated, watching Erik closely. "Does that chime anything?"
"I'm not sure." It wasn't expected exactly, yet the name didn't feel foreign either.
"You and I belong to a... a group of people who Walk through Jana."
Walk through...
Jana.
The word struck fear into Ishan. It was to be shunned, like a rattlesnake, except a rattlesnake you could skirt around, whereas Jana...
The man--Ghanior--sat forward. "You remember Jana?"
"No." Erik took a sip of his wine: pinot grigio, he reminded himself, to go with catfish. It had always been the details that kept the world around him from escaping. "But I think... I think it's what brings the dreams. It's why I dream so many dreams, and other people don't."
"I think that's probably true," said Ghanior slowly. "Jana is a dimension through which one can pass and, thus, travel point-to-point instantaneously regardless of distance." He rattled it off as a textbook definition.
"Traveling without moving." Erik got a nasty image of a deformed squid of a Guild navigator from the David Lynch movie and wondered vaguely if he was going to turn into one.
"In essence," said Ghanior, oblivious to the reference.
"And you just think yourself there."
"The mind is the navigational conduit, yes." More textbook-speak and Guild navigating. "Of course, this has to occur within a quantum matrix generated by a device." He pulled up his left sleeve to reveal a tattoo just like Erik's: on the inside of his wrist, a box with curlicues and lines and dots, not at all artistic. Erik had often told himself that the tattoo was evidence of his Indian heritage, but his heart always whispered he was lying.
He got up and cleared the table, filled the soapy tub in his sink, placed the dishes in it methodically, plates first, glasses, silverware. "But when you think yourself somewhere--" He didn't want to continue but he couldn't stop himself. "You don't just pass through. Through Jana. You get... sucked in."
Ghanior watched him from the table. "Occasionally. One can Walk through Jana without perceiving it at all--or the body can stay in one place and the mind can spend time in Jana itself, constructing mental images, like a virtual reality."
"But the body doesn't stay in one place," snapped Erik. "Or the place is... the body gets stuck in Jana."
"You did for a while," said Ghanior. "It was atypical. It's over now."
"Why?" Erik's voice was small.
"We don't know. As far as our science can tell us, bodies shouldn't be able to survive in Jana for any measurable time, but yours did."
"No, why do we Walk in Jana?" He said it like a child asking why his dog had to be put down. He hated that tone of voice, but he could not unmake it. The silenced stretched long enough that he looked up from the dishes.
Ghanior gave a stiff shrug. "There are a lot of reasons. Even from the beginning of the project. Some wanted to explore the pure science; some hoped it would open up new avenues of space travel. The official reason was to find the Pilgrim."
"Who's that?"
"Just a person who was lost in Jana in an early accident."
Erik nodded, feeling he'd known that. The apprehension in his heart had known it. "Her body didn't survive."
"Not in a form that could return to real space. But yours did. She doesn't matter, Ishan: the Pilgrim. We found her years ago, within the first year of exploration. She'd become an inhabitant of Jana. She'd--"
"Changed."
"Yes. Nowadays, the speed of travel is the main draw. It has obvious applications: in war, in espionage--"
"In anything worthwhile?"
"Emergency response."
Erik laughed. Not in response to the emergency response. It was an odd, delayed laugh, as if he'd gotten the joke too late.
Ghanior came into the kitchen and stood a little apart from him. He was still unstable; Erik could see the sway in his step. "Can I help with the dishes?"
Erik gave him a towel and watched him dry a plate and set it back in the rack. "I think you've done this before."
"So?"
"So we wash dishes on... where we come from?"
"On Perdita, yes. Is that surprising?"
"Perdita?"
"Doing dishes."
"Our planet. It's called Perdita?"
Ghanior stopped drying. "Do you remember?"
Erik laughed again. "It's Latin. Well, it's Spanish too, but it's Latin pronounced like that, with the stress on the first syllable. It means 'lost.' It's the lost planet. And I knew it; I knew I knew it. That's why I paid so much damn attention when I saw The Winter's Tale."
After a moment, Ghanior said, "Those are languages from this planet? That's--"
"Weird."
"It is. It's a weird coincidence. The name comes from the old Dabunè, 'Berdida.' It means, 'world of the stars.'"
Erik clunked a cup onto the rack too hard. "If you say so. But it is the lost planet, no?"
"It was cut off from communication with other worlds for about two thousand years," Ghanior conceded. "Before our time."
Erik smiled at him. "Pay one token to the dream theory."
"It's not a dream."
Erik went back to the dishes.
"I know you think it is, but it's not."
"It's Jana," said Erik quietly. "Once you're in, there's no way out."
With a quick step, Ghanior seized him by the shoulders and turned him so they stood face to face. "This is not Jana. This is real space. You're awake in real space. You just Walked to an unspecified planet. But you're all right. You're sane, and you're safe." The sudden roughness surprised Erik. It seemed out of character for the Ghanior he'd known--and didn't remember knowing.
His cooling hands dripped water on the linoleum, silver orbs tumbling in slow motion. It was like a movie scene designed to express psychological warping. The molasses flow of time gave him ample opportunity to feel Ghanior waver, unsure what to do next. Erik grew conscious of wanting to hold him, to feel those slender hands against his back. But the impulse was futile, and he put it to sleep.
"Will you take me home?" he asked.
"Yes. That's why I'm here. Unfortunately, it's not that easy."
***
They took a walk around the block. Erik offered to drive them up to Baydell, where they could park and walk, but Ghanior begged off from a hike. The sun sank over the rooftops, and the sidewalks radiated warmth like gentle sleepers. Erik wondered if he was crazy to want to leave this town behind.
"So you're stuck here with me?"
"Not stuck exactly," said Ghanior. "More stopped for the moment."
Erik chuckled. Somehow he'd seen it coming: "You just can't Walk back."
"Not right now. There are two factors preventing me. The first is my health." He made a helpless gesture. "I've Walked twice in twenty hours. I need to recover before I Walk again. And there we come to the second reason. What is that kiosk?"
"Phone booth--a communication station. But I doubt it works."
"Why?"
Erik shrugged. "It's obsolete. The second reason?"
"When I do Walk, I'll have to be at my peak capacity. If you can't remember where you're going, I'll need to guide you: that takes additional strength. And then, well, there's the peculiarity of this situation."
Erik smiled again, trying to remember the last time he'd been conscious of a situation that wasn't peculiar.
"This isn't an ordinary Walk," said Ghanior.
"That's why I lost my memory."
That seemed so obvious that it surprised Erik when Ghanior hesitated. "It could be. You see, usually when one Walks, it has to be what we call a 'clear image.' That's a very strong impression of a place or a person. It's got to be something one knows. This Walk, your Walk, was different. It moved along a current external to your direction. The current, moreover, seems to push toward this location: like swimming, it's easier to go downstream."
Figured. It was always upstream, uphill, the very idea of finding home. "So this current sucked me up."
"It would seem so." He hesitated. "You haven't met another Walker, have you?"
"No."
Ghanior sighed. "Still, he may be here somewhere. He could have lost his memory, too, and not known where to find you."
"Matt." Erik couldn't believe he'd been so stupid. No, he been too methodically blind to be stupid. He hadn't wanted Matt involved with this. He wanted to keep Matt separate, to himself. "I know a man who knows Perditan."
"Tapanayn."
Yes, he recognized the name of the language. "He never told me he lost his memory, but I wager he has. He never talks about his past."
"What does he look like?"
Erik described him.
After just a bare-bones sketch, Ghanior said, "That's him; that's Mei. Gods are helped."
Erik knew the idiom meant "thank God" though he didn't know why. "Wait. He doesn't have this tattoo, like you and I. The Walking device." He indicated his wrist.
"He has the same device; it's just not color-coded the same way."
A rush of cool, evening air flicked past like truth. "Are you close to him?" asked Erik. An odd question, it shouldn't be the first on anyone's list, and yet it mattered.
"Not awfully. But he has family back home." That answer both hurt and comforted Erik for reasons he couldn't analyze.
"He said he... in a dream, a dream dream, a night dream, he said he and his lover had come to find me, and that's how he lost her. I thought it was just a dream, but it's real, no?"
"It's real." He could feel Ghanior's eyes. "You've only seen him in a dream?"
"No, I see him all the time. He just told me that in a dream. He doesn't like to talk about his personal life."
Ghanior digested this. "Mei and Asoiya were the first to follow this current to you. Asoiya got slammed. We weren't sure if Mei had survived."
Erik tried to picture being "slammed" by Jana. It hurt so much to zap (Walk) successfully that the notion of slamming conjured liquefied brains. "I think he knows she died," he said. "I think he felt it."
"She's not dead."
Erik stared at him.
"She got slammed: some force pushed her back out into real space just as she initiated her Walk."
Several emotions fled through Erik in an instant: relief, fear, anger, loneliness. For a moment, he just watched the sidewalk, but the even-spaced cracks in the pavement always made him feel like he was trapped in some digital game. He thought of Matt's grief and said, "Why didn't she try again?"
"She did. She kept getting slammed. The current was weakening, like a door shutting out the light as it swings shut."
"But you got through?"
"I came by ship--well, more like a life capsule. It allowed us to use a stronger jae shift to punch a hole back through. I was chosen largely for political reasons. The ship is a new development, pioneered by my government."
Yes, you would be chosen for political reasons, wouldn't you? thought Erik bitterly. "I've got to tell Matt his lover's alive."
***
At Ishan's request, Ghanior remained at the apartment while Ishan went to see Mei. While part of him felt a duty to go along, the larger part was just as glad to let it be. Laran's words kept coming back to him:
"You're the last one who should go," she'd said.
"Too bad. My government's chosen me." He'd been out of patience by then.
"He might try to kill you."
"He didn't before."
But she'd been right, of course--and he'd downplayed that risk while in session with the Ministries. With them, he'd emphasized the value of learning to navigate these currents and dismissed Ishan as almost certainly dead, though part of Ghanior had hoped he wasn't.
He fingered the knuckle-gun on his belt, contemplated whether to bio-code it. If he did, no one else would be able to fire it, which might be hindrance if he were unconscious and needed someone else to defend him. But it seemed unlikely there would be anyone to defend him in any case if Ishan lost his mind. He set the code.
For a time, he sat in the center room, a single yellow lamp and the pervasive smoky smell of this land only slightly distressing his headache. The analgesic pill Ishan had given him was starting to help. He looked out the window at the lights of the town, the quiet foreignness of the room reminding him of his first days in Ash'tor, a guest of Lastri'nom. He wondered what planet this was, ran through possibilities but nothing fit. This planet's technology was not unlike Perdita's: manual door (wood if he guessed right), electric light bulbs, no computerized household maintenance as far as he could tell. It made the layout easy to understand and oddly rustic at the same time (not at all like home on R'Aej; he forced the thought away).
The Ishan he had last seen been terrified, raving that death was the only escape from Jana. What had shaken him sane? The loss of his memory? His belief (defense?) that this was all a dream? Perhaps, for his own safety, Ghanior shouldn't break that belief. But the reflection was idle: Ghanior lacked the capacity to sustain that kind of lie.
Presently, he hauled himself up and wandered the rooms, seeking Ishan in them. The hodgepodge of furniture and appliances suggested shopping on the cheap. Worn paper books crammed shelves; Ghanior pulled a few out and stared fruitlessly at their script. Though the kitchenware, too, was old and mismatched, the kitchen itself was both scrubbed and cluttered in a manner that suggested frequent use.
He dredged up what memories he could of the Ishan from his childhood. That Ishan, too, had read liberally. But it seemed to Ghanior that his aesthetic sense had been finer. He'd had that big, crimson sitting cushion; everyone rushed to claim it when they visited. But perhaps he was simply poorer now.
A scattering of pictures adorned the walls (none in the bedroom). Ghanior spent some time before each and judged their selection to have been cautious. All were color photographs of landscapes: forest, open woodland, meadow. From what he'd seen of this region, the scenery looked local. Though competently framed, the views did not capture the imagination. They were no more than snapshots of the world outside the door. They were the photographs of a Walker who feared Walking. They presented no dangerous place. If he should accidentally direct himself to one of these locations, he could easily find his way home, even without Walking. And if he found himself stranded in Jana, he had no food here for creating visions. If anything, imaging these concrete scenes might direct him out again.
The implications saddened Ghanior and made him aware of his headache mounting. Focusing his eyes brought back the pain, so he decided to give up for the night and sleep.
Since he and Ishan hadn't discussed sleeping arrangements, he rummaged in the closets for bedding. He found a pillow and blankets, mass produced, and collapsed on the couch--then realized the lamp at the other end of the room was still on and had no remote control. He got up, turned it off, and stumbled back to the couch, knocking his shin against a low table.
When he closed his eyes in the dark, the pain in his head receded. The memory of R'Aej came back, but it was weaker, a memory of a broad, open bed with its temp-controlled blanket. He clamped his mind back on the present: different bed, different house. Different planet. New work, new corner turned.
He'd found Ishan alive. It was a mercy. He said a prayer of thanks to Tamehe'lem, felt it rather. The Messenger of God and he had never needed words. Ishan was here and calm and sane, more or less. And he lived.
"I didn't kill him."
Summary/Teaser: Erik had no memory of his life before awaking five years ago in a dream called America. Now a man from another planet, who claims to be from his past, is telling him it isn't a dream at all. (M/M here and there.) Also on AO3
Many thanks to
louderandlouder for massive, massive beta work. Thanks, too, to sixish for giving me a fresh reader's insights, and thanks to my in-person writer's group for more fresh (and men's!) insights.There is/will be quoting of copyrighted texts in this work. This chapter references Dune, Babylon 5, and the 1985 Star Trek novel, The Final Frontier. I disclaim ownership, give credit, and do not profit.
The Dying Cycle
Chapter 1: The Man from Another Dream
Again, he awoke or became aware of himself awake. Again, he'd lost his name. He'd had many once, when there had been ones to name him, but long ago he'd shed those names behind the misty veil.
The same scentless wind blew off the ocean; the same gray clouds swept high. Long ago, the air had been filled with creatures, black wings and claws and bulk; he couldn't remember their shape. Long ago, he had subdued them, or they had slipped into hibernation. Behind him, he knew, lay skeletons, and so he faced the wind. Behind him, a ghost passed, like a moth's white flapping just beyond his feet.
Talya? His depths disgorged the name and an after-glimpse of black-reed hair and bloodless skin.
A hand almost touched his shoulder, then was gone, and Matt said (again), "I hope you realize it's your fault that I've lost her."
I'm so tired of this, he thought.
Then he woke to the other dream.
***
"There's a hole in my mind." Erik ran a hand over his face and gazed at the shadowy square of the ceiling vent.
Matt, predictably, failed to make a Vorlon joke. He just lay leaden against Erik's shoulder.
A bit of Erik's hair scratched at his neck; he combed it away, dislodging Matt in the process. "My mind is full of American things like that: like English and science fiction and corporate protectionism. But these American things, they replace something that's gone. There's things like Babylon 5 in my native language. Stories, you know? But I can't remember it."
After a moment, Matt said, "Better not to." His accent was not quite Erik's, but both accents came from nowhere.
Erik leaned on his elbow to gaze at Matt, underfed as usual, which only enhanced his beauty. In the yellow streetlight (streetlight is green), Matt's pale skin glowed out of black hair and eyes, like a wax dummy--no, he wasn't beautiful at all. He wore the same old frown like it was carved into his wax. Erik kissed him, thinking it would be better to find another man, someone who didn't remind him of-- what?
"That's why I like you, Matt. When our minds buzz that way, I can almost remember the quote."
Matt turned away and clicked on the light. In the sudden, sharp yellow, the room was too big, like most rooms in America.
Erik said, "Do you remember once that I said something to you--I don't remember what--but it was in my native language, and you answered me?"
"Erik, stop the quiz about my past." His English remained stilted like that.
Erik ran a hand down his thigh. "Don't you get lonely?" The words were deliberately cruel and produced the desired result, a buzz of mind from Matt, a hand in Erik's brain like a hand on his penis.
With a rueful glance, Matt got out of bed.
Erik sat up. "I'm sorry. That was shitty of me. But I mean it: without you, I'd feel like the last of my kind." For reasons he couldn't express, his words hit the wrong chord, for him and Matt both.
Matt tugged on his jeans and reached for Erik's wallet. "I take a hundred."
Erik watched him throw on his flea market coat. He wanted to say, You feel it too. You come here for more than the money. But this scene was already several strokes too trite, so he held his peace and watched Matt round the bed and disappear into the hall. A moment later came the soft click of the front door. They should stick to sex. Sex and TV. In all of this dream--and maybe in all dreams--Matt was the one who made him most himself. Yet he and Matt didn't belong to each other. They just kept their eyes on each other to avoid seeing ghosts at their shoulders.
***
"Morning, Janice," Erik called as he swiped his key card and entered the faded plush of the front office of the Poe. It was only from the outside that the gray, windowless box reminded him of a prison. When he'd first hiked past its concrete mass, sunk in a tree-lined canyon as if hiding, he'd fantasized it was some sort of factory farm, an embarrassment to local, liberal sensibilities. The Pig Oubliette, he'd dubbed it.
"Morning, Erik." Voice tinny from the lab.
He stared at his desk without seeing it. Last night's dream itched at his mind: the beach, the ocean. When he dreamed of them, he invariably felt himself about to lose his grip on America. To anchor himself, he focused on the desk, strewn with months of notes on scratch paper. He and Janice were the only ones he knew who made a habit of taking notes by hand. Under the fluorescent lights, he took a stab at organizing them but gave up.
He glanced up at the closed circuit TV screen, envying the pines outside, sunning. Then, he booted up and started where he'd left off yesterday: the dynamics of intergenerational space travel. With half his brain, he reviewed the literature and filled in the blanks, troubleshooting closed eco-cycles. With the other half, more than usual, he thought it was weird how he knew all this. Maybe he'd studied it before he lost his memory. But he was so far ahead of the current publications that, if he had, he must have been one of the greatest minds in the field. And he wasn't.
A great mind worked from the soul. Thoughts rose like a rhapsody (he didn't know how he knew this either). Erik, however, might as well have been transcribing a unit he'd learned in high school. He just knew it, like his times tables. He didn't even care about it much. It was a competency he had, and he sold it the same way Matt sold his body.
***
When he'd been going an hour or so, Janice came in, graying wisps of blonde bangs plastered to her brow. She wiped the sweat from her forehead and sat down at Xiang's desk.
"You look like crap, J."
"Tyler got wiped."
That frightened him. When you went to work for a criminal organization, you naturally took on certain risks. Getting hauled in under WIPO for IP violation was the sword hanging over all their heads. Still, no one had been arrested in a year and a half. Tyler, though, had just transferred to the Poe three weeks ago, green and cocky. Erik didn't know him well enough to worry much about him, but the Commons was his livelihood, and that he worried about. "For what?"
"Those MIT molecular circuits."
"How they catch him?"
Janice rubbed at her face again. "Same as usual. He sent part of it over the internet."
"Did he use RaLEd?"
"No, thank God. He didn't code it at all; he just used plain English. Can you believe it? I feel like shit leaving him to the wolves."
"You need to protect security of the program."
"He's going to get a million dollars and five years for this. Stupid idiot."
"A million?"
"Well, maybe I'm exaggerating. Hundreds of thousands? Does it matter when you make 30K?" Janice looked old today, eyes pinched to dark points in her glistening face. "Look, I'm going to take off. Xiang's not feeling well, and I don't have the stamina to deal with her and Tyler and this place."
"Sure."
She stood. "Sorry. You can take off too if you want. It's not like we're on a timeline."
Erik grinned. "It's already the 21st century, Janice." A weak, old joke about too little, too late, which possibly wasn't a joke at all.
"Yeah. I'll be in tomorrow morning."
***
Alone in the Poe: Xiang out sick, Janice home with her, Tyler probably going to prison, a thought which made Erik queasy. Erik would not get wiped, for the simple reason that he didn't need to use other people's intellectual property, not at this stage anyway. Then again, if the Commons got busted, he could go down with the rest. But if he did to prison again, he would zap out right away. This particular dream allowed that. He'd just close his eyes and picture his safe spot: the brush just below the curve in the road by the 20 mph sign. And he'd wish himself there. It would hurt, but he could do it. And then he'd set up with some other group in some other state or country.
He checked out and went for a walk: a still mid-morning in the April sun, the clean scent of dust and grass, gravel crunching beneath his feet. Freedom. He loved Baydell Road, where the Pig Oubliette nestled (12864 Baydell): high and open, a mix of mansions and vineyards, liberally hidden by oaks and, higher, by redwoods. From chaparral embankments, the views cascaded down across town, all the way to the ocean, forty miles off. Chickadees peeped and flitted in the brush. In town he seldom heard them: too many cats, he'd read.
He wondered sometimes if this was where he came from. Had he grown up hiding in the woods between house lots before so many meadows had gone over to vineyards? Had that road been his first taste of asphalt? His first memory was zapping to Baydell. Had he chosen it because it was home?
He walked up two miles, loving the sun like an insect crawling out of the north-facing moss. He knew he wasn't born to sun. At the edge of the redwoods, a Steller's Jay crooned, the most beautiful bird in this region, with its dark blue body and black topknot. But it belonged to the shadows, and it told him to turn back. In the oak-sprinkled sun once again, he reflected, as usual, that it would be nice to live here, but the Commons didn't pay him nearly enough for that. Besides, the press of neighbors consoled him.
A truck slowed behind him, and he tensed as always, anticipating a threat.
"Enrique, what's up, my man?" Octavio stuck his out his pickup window. "Need a ride?"
"Hey. No thanks. Just out for a walk." His Spanish was getting rusty. Once upon a time, he'd known it better than English.
"This is my nephew, Rafael." The young man in the passenger's seat gave a half-hearted, teen smile. "He's just come up from Riverside to help out with the new tasting room for Angiolieri's. Rafael, Enrique's family are Indians from Guatemala."
They exchanged pleasant nothings for a couple of minutes, and when the pickup drove off, Erik sighed, feeling the perpetual push-pull between craving everyday words with others and wondering if it would go too far. People wanted befriend him. And he couldn't let himself be befriended; sooner or later, friends got torn apart.
America was a strange dream. Once he'd overcome the prison part, he'd found it agreeable--in the microcosm anyway. In the macrocosm, this planet's situation scared him. He wondered why his brain set it up that way: a perfectly nice apartment and job, a road to walk on and people to talk to, stuck on a planet whirling rapidly toward ecological ruin, with a populace almost entirely oblivious to the need for an escape plan. (That made him feel good about working for the Commons; at least the Commons understood.) These emotional incongruities evidenced his theory that the dream was not all of his making. That and Matt. Matt wasn't part of the dream, not of this dream.
***
He pondered biking to the Domino in search of Matt. But it made him feel needy, so he ran errands instead, then went home and lounged on his deck (he'd picked this apartment for the afternoon sun). He spun through the pages of an old Star Trek novel from Janice's collection: The Final Frontier, not Star Trek V, but an earlier novel about the now de-canonized first mission of the Enterprise. He preferred this version; it had Romulans.
Funny how pleasant an afternoon it was. He thought suddenly of Tyler's fall and how little it mattered to him. As he reflected on his disregard for other people, guilt brushed over his content like a gray watercolor wash. Of course, Tyler might just be a figment. Then again, he might be real. They could be sharing the same dream. Feeling darker despite the sun, Erik went in to make an early dinner of fish and chips. He hated the expense of fish, which ought to be a staple.
He'd just sprayed the pan when a man appeared behind him.
***
Erik jumped, which was silly. In the randomness of dreaming, logically nothing should be a surprise. But then, dreams did not run on logic.
The man collapsed. His knees smacked the linoleum, hands gripping his head, and he kept on wilting till his head touched the floor. His breaths came in gasps as if he'd been plucked drowning from a lake.
In the stunned moments that Erik stood by, it dawned on him what had happened. The man had zapped. Erik knew the procedure: you imagined a place and appeared there in agony--though for this man the agony seemed upped a notch. In his place, Erik would already have been steady enough to stand up, though still blinking back the pain.
He knelt by the man. "Can you move?"
The man made some gesture toward rising but instead doubled over again and vomited. That had happened to Erik once or twice too. With soothing noises and back rubbing and a certain amount of hauling, Erik got him up and into the living room, where he tumbled onto the couch.
Erik left him there and cleaned up the kitchen floor. When he came back with a glass of water, the man was out cold. Flipping through the possibilities, Erik considered waking him, letting him sleep, calling 911, driving him to the emergency room. Let him sleep, he concluded. The pain didn't really go away till you slept, and the whole ordeal made you sleepy.
He sat on the coffee table and studied him. Red jacket, so intricately patterned it seemed to shimmer. Everything else dulled in comparison. Racially, he was white or mostly white. Short hair, curly and graying, framed a craggy face; he wore black trousers and not very formidable boots. He was... he was the Romulan Primus from the Star Trek novel, but older and less attractive, and not Romulan.
He's a figment. I've conjured him out of a 1985 paperback cover.
He fetched the book to compare. No, it wasn't the same face, not even close.
He went back to his cooking. Maybe it was the smell of catfish that woke his guest. Erik, on alert, caught sight of his first stirrings, shut off the range, and was perched again on the coffee table by the time the man sat up and stared at him out of big, brown (Romulan) eyes. He stared as if Erik were the Mona Lisa.
"Are you okay?" asked Erik.
"It is you." The man set warm hands on either side of Erik's face. Funny how Erik let him do that without the slightest qualm. "My gods, you're alive. Are you--?" He broke off, staring hard into Erik's face.
Erik took the man's hands and drew them into his own. "You--" He was about to say, "You zapped here," when he got stuck trying to think of the word for "zapped." It was only then he realized that they were speaking his native language. Two dreams had collided: the new world and the old. Erik thought back to before he'd learned English and fallen in love with "zapping." When he'd first realized he had the power, he'd called it... "You flashed here."
"Flashed?"
"You just appeared from somewhere else."
The man stared. "I walked, you mean."
"No, you didn't walk. You were just there. But it's all right; I'm not shocked. I can do it too."
A moment's more staring. "Of course, you do it too. It's called Walking." This time Erik heard the capital. "Ishan, do you know who I am?"
"Ishan?"
The man's jaw dropped. He covered his eyes with his hand, a universal gesture of warding off a headache. Then, creaking like an old man, he stood, stumbled but righted himself and went to lean against the window.
"You know me from before," said Erik. "That's it, no?"
"From before? Before..."
"Before I woke up in this dream, in America."
The man frowned. "Do you remember anything?"
"No. Except I think some of the dreams are older--the dreams within this dream, I mean. And the language, of course. And some science but nothing about me personally." It would be natural at this juncture to ask for information, but all at once Erik realized he didn't want to. He didn't want to know why, underneath the man's frown, he could sense relief.
At length, the man said, "You seem very calm about it."
Erik shrugged.
The man's whole manner slumped, as if his body had become a sigh. He looked out the window. After a couple of seconds, he groped backward to sit on the back of the couch in the little space between it and the window, still gazing out. "Class 1 planet?"
"Yes. Its biodiversity rivals the Kiri planets, but it's also in a state of biospheric collapse." He joined the dream man at the window, facing out over rooftops to the wooded hills across the valley, softened by a hazy (sooty) sky.
"What's causing it?"
"The collapse?" Erik shrugged. "The same old things." The bitterness in his voice surprised him and exposed the strangeness of his reference to the "Kiri planets." He'd said it without thinking, and the man had absorbed it easily as if he'd said, "It reminds me of San Francisco." But now that he thought about it he had as little idea what the Kiri planets were as he had of the origins of his bitterness.
The man massaged his temples.
"Could you handle dinner?" asked Eric. "I've made fish."
"Out of thin air?" The man smiled, but Erik didn't. Dreams where fish appeared from thin air often ended in water. "Thanks," he added. "I could handle fish."
"It just needs a bit more frying."
To Erik's mild irritation, the man did not follow him to the kitchen but stayed welded to the window. It had occurred to Erik some minutes before, without his wanting to articulate it, that he didn't want to ask the man's name. He didn't like the name the man had given him either. It savored of the bad dreams.
***
When they sat down at the kitchen table, the man said as a sort of grace, "Our time brief." Erik understood it, but it was not his native language, nor English or any other Earth language he could place. The man's eyes widened when he tasted the catfish. "It's very good. As good as the bottom feeders from Lo Renna." He ate a couple bites in silence, then turned his expansive eyes on Ishan--Erik. "I'm glad you're alive."
Erik wasn't sure how to respond. After a moment, he said, "Am I? Alive?"
"Yes," said the man as if the question were perfectly reasonable.
That comforted Erik. This was one of the few times he'd met someone else who seemed to inhabit his world. He put down the sudden urge to phone Matt, who never answered anyway.
The man set aside his fork. He'd scarcely eaten, most likely still queasy from the zapping. "I suppose I should explain some things."
"I suppose," said Erik with reluctance.
The man glanced away, ashamed: Erik read the feeling as surely as he sometimes snuck into Matt's dreams. "You don't remember what happened. You don't remember me."
"No. You seem familiar though--or not familiar exactly but comfortable, as if you'd always been here."
The man nodded. "My name is Ghanior." He hesitated, watching Erik closely. "Does that chime anything?"
"I'm not sure." It wasn't expected exactly, yet the name didn't feel foreign either.
"You and I belong to a... a group of people who Walk through Jana."
Walk through...
Jana.
The word struck fear into Ishan. It was to be shunned, like a rattlesnake, except a rattlesnake you could skirt around, whereas Jana...
The man--Ghanior--sat forward. "You remember Jana?"
"No." Erik took a sip of his wine: pinot grigio, he reminded himself, to go with catfish. It had always been the details that kept the world around him from escaping. "But I think... I think it's what brings the dreams. It's why I dream so many dreams, and other people don't."
"I think that's probably true," said Ghanior slowly. "Jana is a dimension through which one can pass and, thus, travel point-to-point instantaneously regardless of distance." He rattled it off as a textbook definition.
"Traveling without moving." Erik got a nasty image of a deformed squid of a Guild navigator from the David Lynch movie and wondered vaguely if he was going to turn into one.
"In essence," said Ghanior, oblivious to the reference.
"And you just think yourself there."
"The mind is the navigational conduit, yes." More textbook-speak and Guild navigating. "Of course, this has to occur within a quantum matrix generated by a device." He pulled up his left sleeve to reveal a tattoo just like Erik's: on the inside of his wrist, a box with curlicues and lines and dots, not at all artistic. Erik had often told himself that the tattoo was evidence of his Indian heritage, but his heart always whispered he was lying.
He got up and cleared the table, filled the soapy tub in his sink, placed the dishes in it methodically, plates first, glasses, silverware. "But when you think yourself somewhere--" He didn't want to continue but he couldn't stop himself. "You don't just pass through. Through Jana. You get... sucked in."
Ghanior watched him from the table. "Occasionally. One can Walk through Jana without perceiving it at all--or the body can stay in one place and the mind can spend time in Jana itself, constructing mental images, like a virtual reality."
"But the body doesn't stay in one place," snapped Erik. "Or the place is... the body gets stuck in Jana."
"You did for a while," said Ghanior. "It was atypical. It's over now."
"Why?" Erik's voice was small.
"We don't know. As far as our science can tell us, bodies shouldn't be able to survive in Jana for any measurable time, but yours did."
"No, why do we Walk in Jana?" He said it like a child asking why his dog had to be put down. He hated that tone of voice, but he could not unmake it. The silenced stretched long enough that he looked up from the dishes.
Ghanior gave a stiff shrug. "There are a lot of reasons. Even from the beginning of the project. Some wanted to explore the pure science; some hoped it would open up new avenues of space travel. The official reason was to find the Pilgrim."
"Who's that?"
"Just a person who was lost in Jana in an early accident."
Erik nodded, feeling he'd known that. The apprehension in his heart had known it. "Her body didn't survive."
"Not in a form that could return to real space. But yours did. She doesn't matter, Ishan: the Pilgrim. We found her years ago, within the first year of exploration. She'd become an inhabitant of Jana. She'd--"
"Changed."
"Yes. Nowadays, the speed of travel is the main draw. It has obvious applications: in war, in espionage--"
"In anything worthwhile?"
"Emergency response."
Erik laughed. Not in response to the emergency response. It was an odd, delayed laugh, as if he'd gotten the joke too late.
Ghanior came into the kitchen and stood a little apart from him. He was still unstable; Erik could see the sway in his step. "Can I help with the dishes?"
Erik gave him a towel and watched him dry a plate and set it back in the rack. "I think you've done this before."
"So?"
"So we wash dishes on... where we come from?"
"On Perdita, yes. Is that surprising?"
"Perdita?"
"Doing dishes."
"Our planet. It's called Perdita?"
Ghanior stopped drying. "Do you remember?"
Erik laughed again. "It's Latin. Well, it's Spanish too, but it's Latin pronounced like that, with the stress on the first syllable. It means 'lost.' It's the lost planet. And I knew it; I knew I knew it. That's why I paid so much damn attention when I saw The Winter's Tale."
After a moment, Ghanior said, "Those are languages from this planet? That's--"
"Weird."
"It is. It's a weird coincidence. The name comes from the old Dabunè, 'Berdida.' It means, 'world of the stars.'"
Erik clunked a cup onto the rack too hard. "If you say so. But it is the lost planet, no?"
"It was cut off from communication with other worlds for about two thousand years," Ghanior conceded. "Before our time."
Erik smiled at him. "Pay one token to the dream theory."
"It's not a dream."
Erik went back to the dishes.
"I know you think it is, but it's not."
"It's Jana," said Erik quietly. "Once you're in, there's no way out."
With a quick step, Ghanior seized him by the shoulders and turned him so they stood face to face. "This is not Jana. This is real space. You're awake in real space. You just Walked to an unspecified planet. But you're all right. You're sane, and you're safe." The sudden roughness surprised Erik. It seemed out of character for the Ghanior he'd known--and didn't remember knowing.
His cooling hands dripped water on the linoleum, silver orbs tumbling in slow motion. It was like a movie scene designed to express psychological warping. The molasses flow of time gave him ample opportunity to feel Ghanior waver, unsure what to do next. Erik grew conscious of wanting to hold him, to feel those slender hands against his back. But the impulse was futile, and he put it to sleep.
"Will you take me home?" he asked.
"Yes. That's why I'm here. Unfortunately, it's not that easy."
***
They took a walk around the block. Erik offered to drive them up to Baydell, where they could park and walk, but Ghanior begged off from a hike. The sun sank over the rooftops, and the sidewalks radiated warmth like gentle sleepers. Erik wondered if he was crazy to want to leave this town behind.
"So you're stuck here with me?"
"Not stuck exactly," said Ghanior. "More stopped for the moment."
Erik chuckled. Somehow he'd seen it coming: "You just can't Walk back."
"Not right now. There are two factors preventing me. The first is my health." He made a helpless gesture. "I've Walked twice in twenty hours. I need to recover before I Walk again. And there we come to the second reason. What is that kiosk?"
"Phone booth--a communication station. But I doubt it works."
"Why?"
Erik shrugged. "It's obsolete. The second reason?"
"When I do Walk, I'll have to be at my peak capacity. If you can't remember where you're going, I'll need to guide you: that takes additional strength. And then, well, there's the peculiarity of this situation."
Erik smiled again, trying to remember the last time he'd been conscious of a situation that wasn't peculiar.
"This isn't an ordinary Walk," said Ghanior.
"That's why I lost my memory."
That seemed so obvious that it surprised Erik when Ghanior hesitated. "It could be. You see, usually when one Walks, it has to be what we call a 'clear image.' That's a very strong impression of a place or a person. It's got to be something one knows. This Walk, your Walk, was different. It moved along a current external to your direction. The current, moreover, seems to push toward this location: like swimming, it's easier to go downstream."
Figured. It was always upstream, uphill, the very idea of finding home. "So this current sucked me up."
"It would seem so." He hesitated. "You haven't met another Walker, have you?"
"No."
Ghanior sighed. "Still, he may be here somewhere. He could have lost his memory, too, and not known where to find you."
"Matt." Erik couldn't believe he'd been so stupid. No, he been too methodically blind to be stupid. He hadn't wanted Matt involved with this. He wanted to keep Matt separate, to himself. "I know a man who knows Perditan."
"Tapanayn."
Yes, he recognized the name of the language. "He never told me he lost his memory, but I wager he has. He never talks about his past."
"What does he look like?"
Erik described him.
After just a bare-bones sketch, Ghanior said, "That's him; that's Mei. Gods are helped."
Erik knew the idiom meant "thank God" though he didn't know why. "Wait. He doesn't have this tattoo, like you and I. The Walking device." He indicated his wrist.
"He has the same device; it's just not color-coded the same way."
A rush of cool, evening air flicked past like truth. "Are you close to him?" asked Erik. An odd question, it shouldn't be the first on anyone's list, and yet it mattered.
"Not awfully. But he has family back home." That answer both hurt and comforted Erik for reasons he couldn't analyze.
"He said he... in a dream, a dream dream, a night dream, he said he and his lover had come to find me, and that's how he lost her. I thought it was just a dream, but it's real, no?"
"It's real." He could feel Ghanior's eyes. "You've only seen him in a dream?"
"No, I see him all the time. He just told me that in a dream. He doesn't like to talk about his personal life."
Ghanior digested this. "Mei and Asoiya were the first to follow this current to you. Asoiya got slammed. We weren't sure if Mei had survived."
Erik tried to picture being "slammed" by Jana. It hurt so much to zap (Walk) successfully that the notion of slamming conjured liquefied brains. "I think he knows she died," he said. "I think he felt it."
"She's not dead."
Erik stared at him.
"She got slammed: some force pushed her back out into real space just as she initiated her Walk."
Several emotions fled through Erik in an instant: relief, fear, anger, loneliness. For a moment, he just watched the sidewalk, but the even-spaced cracks in the pavement always made him feel like he was trapped in some digital game. He thought of Matt's grief and said, "Why didn't she try again?"
"She did. She kept getting slammed. The current was weakening, like a door shutting out the light as it swings shut."
"But you got through?"
"I came by ship--well, more like a life capsule. It allowed us to use a stronger jae shift to punch a hole back through. I was chosen largely for political reasons. The ship is a new development, pioneered by my government."
Yes, you would be chosen for political reasons, wouldn't you? thought Erik bitterly. "I've got to tell Matt his lover's alive."
***
At Ishan's request, Ghanior remained at the apartment while Ishan went to see Mei. While part of him felt a duty to go along, the larger part was just as glad to let it be. Laran's words kept coming back to him:
"You're the last one who should go," she'd said.
"Too bad. My government's chosen me." He'd been out of patience by then.
"He might try to kill you."
"He didn't before."
But she'd been right, of course--and he'd downplayed that risk while in session with the Ministries. With them, he'd emphasized the value of learning to navigate these currents and dismissed Ishan as almost certainly dead, though part of Ghanior had hoped he wasn't.
He fingered the knuckle-gun on his belt, contemplated whether to bio-code it. If he did, no one else would be able to fire it, which might be hindrance if he were unconscious and needed someone else to defend him. But it seemed unlikely there would be anyone to defend him in any case if Ishan lost his mind. He set the code.
For a time, he sat in the center room, a single yellow lamp and the pervasive smoky smell of this land only slightly distressing his headache. The analgesic pill Ishan had given him was starting to help. He looked out the window at the lights of the town, the quiet foreignness of the room reminding him of his first days in Ash'tor, a guest of Lastri'nom. He wondered what planet this was, ran through possibilities but nothing fit. This planet's technology was not unlike Perdita's: manual door (wood if he guessed right), electric light bulbs, no computerized household maintenance as far as he could tell. It made the layout easy to understand and oddly rustic at the same time (not at all like home on R'Aej; he forced the thought away).
The Ishan he had last seen been terrified, raving that death was the only escape from Jana. What had shaken him sane? The loss of his memory? His belief (defense?) that this was all a dream? Perhaps, for his own safety, Ghanior shouldn't break that belief. But the reflection was idle: Ghanior lacked the capacity to sustain that kind of lie.
Presently, he hauled himself up and wandered the rooms, seeking Ishan in them. The hodgepodge of furniture and appliances suggested shopping on the cheap. Worn paper books crammed shelves; Ghanior pulled a few out and stared fruitlessly at their script. Though the kitchenware, too, was old and mismatched, the kitchen itself was both scrubbed and cluttered in a manner that suggested frequent use.
He dredged up what memories he could of the Ishan from his childhood. That Ishan, too, had read liberally. But it seemed to Ghanior that his aesthetic sense had been finer. He'd had that big, crimson sitting cushion; everyone rushed to claim it when they visited. But perhaps he was simply poorer now.
A scattering of pictures adorned the walls (none in the bedroom). Ghanior spent some time before each and judged their selection to have been cautious. All were color photographs of landscapes: forest, open woodland, meadow. From what he'd seen of this region, the scenery looked local. Though competently framed, the views did not capture the imagination. They were no more than snapshots of the world outside the door. They were the photographs of a Walker who feared Walking. They presented no dangerous place. If he should accidentally direct himself to one of these locations, he could easily find his way home, even without Walking. And if he found himself stranded in Jana, he had no food here for creating visions. If anything, imaging these concrete scenes might direct him out again.
The implications saddened Ghanior and made him aware of his headache mounting. Focusing his eyes brought back the pain, so he decided to give up for the night and sleep.
Since he and Ishan hadn't discussed sleeping arrangements, he rummaged in the closets for bedding. He found a pillow and blankets, mass produced, and collapsed on the couch--then realized the lamp at the other end of the room was still on and had no remote control. He got up, turned it off, and stumbled back to the couch, knocking his shin against a low table.
When he closed his eyes in the dark, the pain in his head receded. The memory of R'Aej came back, but it was weaker, a memory of a broad, open bed with its temp-controlled blanket. He clamped his mind back on the present: different bed, different house. Different planet. New work, new corner turned.
He'd found Ishan alive. It was a mercy. He said a prayer of thanks to Tamehe'lem, felt it rather. The Messenger of God and he had never needed words. Ishan was here and calm and sane, more or less. And he lived.
"I didn't kill him."
