The Dying Cycle, Ch. 2, Original Work
Jun. 25th, 2011 10:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiI've been putting off posting this for way too long, waiting to get it fully polished, but it's as polished as it will be for a while. Doubtless I'll go back and re-edit in times to come. For those who've been primarily reading my X-Men posts, no relation between Eriks.
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
The Dying Cycle
Chapter 1 plus notes
Chapter 2: Three Walkers
Erik stayed out till midnight. Matt wasn't at home, wasn't at the Domino, wasn't out in the woods behind Kingsley School. It went without saying he wasn't answering his phone. Erik made the rounds three times, then waited up by his apartment another hour. Finally, he bummed a piece of paper off a SmartMart clerk and left a note telling him Asoiya was alive. The fact that Matt had never told Erik her name, even in his dreams, should sell the authenticity of it, if Matt remembered her name... which he would.
Erik pushed the note through his mail slot and went home. The idea that Asoiya had survived depressed him. He recognized envy as an old pattern with his life, even in the absence of all but five years of memory. Or was "jealousy" a better word? He'd just lost Matt, and it made him bitter. Was that so reprehensible?
At home, he found Ghanior asleep on the couch. He didn't stir as Erik came in, which seemed a bad sign. Ghanior ought to be a light sleeper, especially in a strange place. A memory stirred, no, not a concrete memory, more a realization.
I know this because we used to be roommates. No, we had other roommates. We were never roommates.
It was all made up anyway; it had to be. That thought alone made it manageable.
Erik sat on the coffee table and watched the night-lit outline of Ghanior's face. The low light softened the years and resurrected his beauty. And that was bad too. Erik went to bed.
***
Matt plucked Erik's note off his door with a touch of annoyance. If Erik read minds half as well as he pretended, he'd know when Matt needed space. He tossed the note on the counter and cranked up the heat. He was glad A.J. liked having sex outdoors, but the reedy turf had soaked him through. Without clear memory, he had a sense that he had long lived in cold exile, far from the gentler damp of home.
He changed into his sweatpants and white cardigan, the one A.J. called very early '80s. After that, he stretched out some of the kinks, then sat by the floorboard heater and faced Erik's latest intrusion:
Dear Matt,
A man named Ghanior has come from our home planet to find us. He is a friend. Asoiya is alive. Ghanior is going to help us get home, so hopefully youcan will see her again soon.
Erik
For half a heartbeat, the world bloomed, like a firecracker, like a tiger lily; angels sang a "Hallelujah Chorus." But it was too much to believe. It had to be a joke--or a mistake. Mistake more likely than joke: even Erik wasn't that cruel. Matt crumpled the note.
And only then did the bizarreness of his response come home to him. A man named Ghanior from his home planet? It sounded like one of Ishan's B movies. Yet Matt had understood it all. The name "Ghanior" had an old, familiar shape, and Asoiya, of course, was so basic to his being it seemed impossible he'd ever forgotten her name. Yet even now, he couldn't remember her face. What was the matter with him?
Did he really believe he was from another planet?
He did. That didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was Asoiya. Yet he could not entrap himself in the hope that she still lived, not now that he'd learned to persist in this abyss where her absence was as inescapable as the absence of the sun at midnight. She was gone; hope promised only agony.
***
Erik awoke to pounding on the door. He glanced at the clock radio: 3:12 a.m. By the time he'd stumbled to the entrada, Ghanior was standing like a woozy ghost in the dark. Erik clicked on the hall light and let Matt in.
If he'd walked in on this scene knowing only what he'd known yesterday, he might have assumed Matt was on drugs. His eyes pulled toward Erik like sunflowers.
"There's one thing I need," said Matt with surprising calm. "Did you take her name from my dream?"
Erik closed the door. "No. I got it from him."
Matt took a step toward Ghanior. "I know you."
Ghanior looked at Erik. "What did he say?"
"He said he knows you. Matt, he doesn't speak English. Use the other language, damn it; stop pretending you don't know it."
For a moment, Matt's mouth wobbled, like a shy little girl asked to speak in class. "Are you my father?" Matt asked finally in Perditan--Tapanayn.
"No," said Ghanior with an air of surprise.
"You're my uncle."
At that, Erik got a telepathic hit off Ghanior. It was sharp and pained, no different from Matt's mind when Erik jabbed him. No different. Identical. Were all minds--?
"I'm a friend of your mother's. Ghanior. Do you remember?"
Matt got the hit too; his staring proved it. After playing chicken several seconds, he said, "You're lying."
"I am not lying," said Ghanior with small, incredulous laugh.
Matt looked between them. "Where is she?" Asoiya, not his mother.
"Last I saw her, she was back on Perdita. She wasn't able to Walk here."
"But she's alive?"
"Yes."
Matt shuffled past them and fell in a lump on the couch, on Ghanior's bedding. He gazed at the ceiling.
Erik put the kettle on. That was unlikely to have bad consequences. When he got back with chamomile (which he disliked but seemed best for the time of night), Ghanior was explaining. Erik, having heard it before, just handed out the tea and watched. Matt seemed crumpled: a wilted, underfed youth in worn jeans, like Case from Neuromancer--better looking than Case but working hard to bring himself down to it. Erik wondered if hopping back into the matrix (the Neuro-matrix, not the Neo matrix) would fix him. Ghanior managed to look genteel despite undone red jacket and untucked black shirt. Both men were implacable, both a million miles away.
No. I'm the one a million miles away, observing through some interdimensional portal through which I can see but am unseen.
Only Erik drank the tea. No, that wasn't true: Ghanior sipped it too and said, "Ishan, could I have another Blockit?"
Erik got up and got him an ibuprofin: how funny that his brain recognized a brand name from some distribution arm of the Pharmaceutical Consortium on an alien planet he didn't remember. A sign of dreams.
"Thanks," said Ghanior.
"So when can I get back to her?" said Matt. Through his fog, Erik realized it was at least the third time he'd asked some version of that.
"We can get started tomorrow. My tracker says my ship's just six kilometers from here." He didn't mean Earth kilometers but near enough.
"We should start now," said Matt.
"I need more sleep," said Ghanior. He ought to have thrown off the headache by now.
"Go home, Matt," said Erik, sensing protest on the horizon. "You heard what Ghanior said. He can't help us Walk back anyway until he's stronger. That's not going to happen this very instant. So just go home and rejoice that she's alive."
Matt nodded as if that actually sank in. But as he was heading for the door, he turned back. "You will need a long time to heal to Walk, Ghanior, no? So maybe this is faster: take your ship back through real space."
"The ship's designed for Jana," said Ghanior. "And even if it could ripple through real space, we'd need to fix this planet's position relative to the rest of the Continuation. But according to my ship, its stars don't chart. It's a very long way from home."
***
At home, by the heater again, Matt tried some futile breathing exercises while he reviewed what his vestiges of memory took to be the facts: he and Erik and Ghanior did, indeed, come from the same place (not the same planet, as Erik had put it, but connected planets, connected family). While he and Erik had both lost their memories, Matt's loss was less encompassing. Already he could feel details bleeding back, perhaps because Asoiya could not remain buried.
Ghanior believed she was alive; his mind didn't lie about that. Matt still couldn't make himself seize that hope. His life--he was certain--had been a litany of hopes dashed. That Asoiya, too, should be taken from him seemed as inevitable as the flow of a tragedy up to its final act. (He understood all of a sudden why, of all the movies Erik had shown him, he always found the tragedies truest.)
None of that changed the fact that he would give his last breath to find her. He wondered only why he'd bothered to keep breathing, believing her gone. It spoke of the congenital flaw, the crack in his brain. His lineage had been defective; he knew that without remembering how.
But if it lay in their power to sew up the wound of their separation, they would obviously do so. They would defy the defect--Asoiya and himself--just as they always had.
***
No dreams (night dreams). That wasn't uncommon if Erik added up all the nights in a week, but it always felt uncommon, like a safe place to catch your breath when you've been running and running with a stitch in your side.
Over English muffins, Ghanior took another Advil (generic Advil, generic Blockit, "take two aspirin..."). He washed it down and made a face. "What do you call this?" He held up the Tardis mug.
"Coffee."
"It's execrable."
"Try more agave nectar."
They had both gravitated to the bedroom to eat, where the sun shown through the eastern window. Both sun suckers, they sat cross-legged on the bed, breakfast on the TV tray. The execrable coffee smell stabilized the dream. Ghanior massaged his head.
"What's wrong with you?" asked Erik.
Ghanior jumped a little, then seemed to catch the gist of the question. "Jana."
"Yeah, but it's more than that. I've Walked through Jana, and it doesn't hit me that hard."
"My luck, I suppose." As Ghanior sipped his coffee, it occurred to Erik that he hadn't commented on anything Erik fed him--no, he'd commented on the fish. Hadn't he? "I used to be a dancer. Do you remember that?"
Erik shook his head.
"Nor I, except through the sea mist of the very long ago. I used to be a really good dancer. And then, within the first year I was Walking, I suffered a massive neural disruption. I was hospitalized; I was operated on. The Ashtorian military did a good job, really cutting edge: I retained higher cognitive function with negligible debility and lost no emotional functionality and no major motor function."
"But it upset your balance."
"They were never able to correct that--or they've always assured me it's not worth going back in and disrupting something else, which I accept."
An orange line of sun was creeping up Erik's knee. It seemed alive, like a slug, almost stationary till you looked away. But when you looked back, it had gotten away from you. "And it makes Walking more painful."
"For three years after my surgery, I couldn't Walk at all. That was a tech problem though. You see, I'd been Walking on a prototype jae generator open link, and it didn't sync properly with my brain. Eventually, they fitted me with a first-gen portable." He flashed his tattooed wrist. "It synced better, so I could Walk again, but the damage was done. Since my brain has been extensively rewired, so to speak, it has less give to absorb the shocks of Walking, pardon some mixed metaphors."
Erik didn't want to pardon the metaphors. He wanted Jana concrete; concrete was safer. But he couldn't say that sort of thing without sounding like an idiot--or a madman, and he'd determined to try very hard to be coherent.
Ghanior poured a second cup of coffee. "As for you, you were in Jana Program ever--"
"Don't." In response to Ghanior's stare, he forced a smile. "Not now. It's all a bit much, all at once."
A clipped nod.
Erik searched for something safe. "So that blue box on your cup is--" The burring of his phone cut him off. Matt for the third time that morning. All of a sudden, you couldn't unglue him from his phone.
"I've waited as long as I wait," said Matt.
"All right. Come over." Erik clicked the phone shut, then flipped it open it again. "I'm going to call in sick." With Xiang out sick, it would make sense.
***
When Ghanior answered the door, Matt could feel his mind planed like a road cut through a hillside. No, rather, Ghanior's mind was like a fault stabilizer, meting out earthquakes in imperceptible tremors while the greater energies built and built in preparation for the inevitable break.
"Good morning, Mei."
Matt refused the name, but Ghanior's mind refused to hear him, the tremor unfelt.
"Are we going soon?" said Matt in words because no one listened to real speaking.
"Ishan's getting his coat."
Ghanior was Matt's uncle, however much he denied it. He could sense ties to Mama uniting them.
"Okay, let's go." Erik emerged, flipping the collar of his jacket.
Matt followed Ghanior out the door, feeling him an enemy, for all it was clear that he didn't intend to be.
***
Ghanior had a tracking device in his arm. Or that was Erik's first impression, which turned out to be wrong. What he had, imbedded in his right wrist to keep it well away from the Jana tech in his left, was an on-off switch that activated the iPhone fused to his brain. Something less than an iPhone actually: it had nothing resembling internet access (even on its home turf). Ghanior said that magnitude of direct neural input proved risky for the human brain. Some used it anyway; he didn't, not with his "cross-wiring." Instead, he had a tracking device and some other basic functions.
Erik followed its instructions up Baydell Road. He pulled the car over where Ghanior told him, right by the 20 mph sign.
"Fuck me," he laughed. "This is where I landed."
"Well, yes, of course it is," said Ghanior. "It's the output point for the current. So you do remember your arrival?"
Erik stood at the edge of the asphalt, staring down the canyon at the expanse of woods and vineyards, the sun unraveling the last lacy strips of morning fog. He savored the moment, wanting never to go back. "I remember being here, not knowing how I got here."
"Mei?"
"Mm?" Matt shook himself out of his thoughts. "I landed here too. I remember the same." He started down the hillside, retracing that years-old path.
Ghanior followed. After a couple of halting steps, he skidded down swiftly on his backside, so undignified that Erik felt a gentle pity. A couple of meters down and the ship was in view, not that there was much to view. It looked like an old lunar lander but without the comic little legs, about the size of an upended minivan.
"I hate to say it, but this is obvious as hell," said Erik.
Ghanior glanced back at him. "What is?"
"Your ship." Erik waved at it. "Do you have a cloaking device for this thing?"
"A what--? you mean a diffraction shield?"
"Yeah," said Erik, recognizing the term.
"Not standard, but it should be possible to implement one. We should have thought of it really. Is this a high surveillance planet?"
Now they stood next to the ship, it was taller than they were. Ghanior fiddled with some unlocking procedure of mysterious mechanism.
"Middling," said Erik. "What it is is a very populous planet and with a high enough degree of vagrancy that, if there's a structure around, some homeless person will find it."
Ghanior smiled. "Ah. Those things."
That stumped Erik for a second, till he realized it was a reference to their conversation yesterday: why biospheric collapse? Same old things.
With a very science fictiony click and whir, a side of the capsule slid open. Once they were inside, Erik wondered why they'd bothered. There were four seats and a lot of control panels (with real, physical buttons, like something from the 1950s). It was gray and sunless until Ghanior clicked on a light. Then, it was dull white-lit like a high cloud cover. The three of them sat.
"What now?" asked Matt.
"Now," said Ghanior. "I need to learn the language."
"How long will we be here by your plan?" asked Matt with a certain horror.
Ghanior opened a compartment and pulled out a comical object that looked like a wire basket. "This is a new device that has been approved outside of Ranlax just in the past year. It writes language pathways directly into the brain."
Erik was at a loss to pinpoint the source of his anxiety. Part of him wanted to laugh at the geekery, but on balance he felt much as if he'd been told he needed a root canal.
"So it won't be years," said Matt. "But how long?"
"Long enough that I'll need to communicate with the locals; hopefully not so long as to make it worthwhile to learn the language the conventional way. That's all I can tell you right now, Mei." He flipped some switches (real switches) and the capsule hummed to life. The door whirred shut, giving Erik instant claustrophobia; he kept his breathing carefully steady. With some hard-to-follow gestures, Ghanior conjured a holographic screen in the air. It, at least, was pretty--and 3D, a topography in the folds of which Ghanior's hands periodically disappeared. Like--no, a little too like being sucked into Charybdis. He looked away from the whirlpool.
Ghanior held out the basket to Erik. "First we'll need a copy of the language from your brain."
"No." Erik kept his hands in his lap, unwilling to even touch the thing. "You don't want to copy my mind. I don't want you to. Why don't you use Matt's? Look at him: he's border-itching to do anything to get us out of here."
Ghanior glanced at Matt. "Ishan, I can't use him; he's not human."
Erik played that sentence over a time or two. "He's not?"
"He's Pey."
"He's what? Matt, did you know about this?"
Matt gave him a bewildered look. His eyes, it had often struck Erik, were unnaturally big, his skin unnaturally white.
"So you're telling me he's an alien?"
Ghanior sighed, the basket slumping into his lap. "You two really have forgotten everything." He massaged his forehead. "The Pey are engineered from humans. Yes, Mei's neural pathways are very similar to human, but this language-transfer process needs the tightest possible match. Besides which, Pey have less language ability than humans, so even if a copy of his brain would do, it wouldn't be the best option."
"Engineered to do what?" asked Erik.
"Oh, for gods' sake, it was six thousand years ago. It doesn't matter. Ishan, I just need to copy your language knowledge, not your mind, just the rote language."
"Let me out," said Erik.
No one moved.
"Just let me out for a second. I need to be outside."
Ghanior flipped a few (real) switches, and Erik climbed out onto the tan-pebbled earth among skinny, water-starved Douglas firs. Vaguely, he thought, "Oja," aware it was a place on Perdita, a place that maybe looked like this. He crunched down the hillside a little farther, until he spied someone's back fence in the distance. Then he sat on the hard, solid earth, a very slight breeze tickling his skin.
After maybe five minutes, Ghanior joined him.
"You have no subtlety," said Erik, not entirely sure what he meant but quelling the urge to follow it up with, and you never did.
"Very likely," said Ghanior.
"I don't want to do this. I can't explain it, but it's a bad idea."
After a moment, Ghanior said, "If we don't do this, then I will be fairly useless. You and Mei will have to negotiate any assistance from the locals. It's not reasonable."
He wants to hang out with other people, Erik realized. It was such a basic drive, one so powerful and human, that he almost smiled. "What assistance to do we need from the locals anyway? Their technology is centuries behind this."
Ghanior shook his head. "How can I answer that? All we have are questions now. Why this planet? Why did a current bring us here? What's our astral position? We can't answer these questions without exploring the world. In addition to which, we'll need food and supplies. I realize you could translate for me, but--"
"No, you're right. The thing is sooner or later someone will try to talk to you, and if you can't speak English, they may assume you're an illegal immigrant and try to deport you, and since they won't be able to figure out what country you're from, they'll probably just stick you in prison while they work on it and then forget you're there. So you need to be able to communicate, and you need a false ID that will sell you as a legal resident. And to be a legal resident, you should have some English proficiency. So..."
They sat in silence for a while. At length, Ghanior said, "I'm sorry. The device truly does just draw from your language center, not your memories or feelings. See how you remember Tapanayn without remembering Perdita? These are different processes."
A thought occurred belatedly. "What about your brain? You've had a lot of reconstructive surgery. Is this device going to be safe for you?"
"The neurologists didn't anticipate any problems." His voice was too flat.
"But you're at a higher risk?"
"This entire mission is high risk," Ghanior snapped. "Being a Walker is high risk. We were all assigned from childhood to live lives that are high risk. Don't--just please be still about it."
Erik stood, breathing slowly to cool his temper. What did he do to me that makes me so quick to anger? (What did I do that makes him so quick?) He peered at the fence in the distance, wondering whose land they were trespassing on. It had to be someone's; in dreams one was always a trespasser. He whirled at a step behind them: Matt standing next to Ghanior, who sat with his head on his knees.
"You both forget," said Matt, "we need logical steps. Ghanior, this is high risk, you say, and you might be hurt. So you should make the shield first. That way, the ship will be safe even without you."
From Ghanior's knees came a little laugh. "That actually makes a lot of sense." He got up. "I'll take a look and let you know if I need supplies."
***
Matt watched Ghanior disappear into the ship. Ghanior had said he was Pey. It was as if he had been alone and nameless and a mind had called his name.
They had been Pey, he and Asoiya, and a ship that looked not unlike Ghanior's had taken them away from Home. He couldn't remember the name of Home, but he remembered giant, palmate leaves glowing almost golden with the sun at their backs. There, they had been Pey, but they had been outcast Pey.
What that mean? What did it mean to be Pey? Pey had true speech, mind over word. Pey never existed alone; they had been bad Pey, he and Asoiya. They had joined to each other too late. Before her, he had been alone. And now again... he was bad Pey.
When they were still little, the ship had come, and then they were among humans but not human. They exchanged one hostile land for another. Then, that land for America. And Ghanior would pluck them from America and return them to a hostile land. All lands exuded hostility, except...
Except in Jana?
He felt eyes upon him and turned to see Erik, his companion without togetherness, his exemplar of the absence.
***
At a first assessment, Ghanior told them he should be able to generate a shield using systems already onboard ship. That was good news, since it seemed unlikely that Radio Shack would carry much in the way of cloaking technology. (If anything, the Commons might.) But Ghanior did send Erik and Matt off to pick up lunch.
It pleased Erik and needled him to be alone in his car with Matt. Matt stared out the window, plainly thinking of Asoiya.
"Do you remember her?" asked Erik, turning off Baydell and onto the highway.
Matt stirred as if waking. "I remember the feel."
"How did she feel?"
Matt considered. "She's red and white--and glows like a light bulb. She glows and is red and white, like a Christmas ball."
That seemed the most words he'd ever heard Matt say. He pictured Matt (a chibi Matt) with a candy-striped ball in his hand, face illuminated with childlike wonder. A black and white boy holding red upon white.
He drove for a couple of blocks, then asked tentatively, "Matt, will you still fuck me?"
"Why wouldn't I?" His voice was neutral, uninterested. After a moment, he said, "I remember: we were very small, and Mother told me to take Asoiya up the hill. So I carried her up. It was very green, greener than here, jungle green." He paused. "It was so Far could die."
"Far?" He got no response. "That's someone you remember?"
Matt shook his head. "I think, not my father."
"How old were you?"
"Three or four. I think, Asoiya was one."
"So you grew up with her--like a sister?"
"Naturally. She's my nn!" The last word wasn't a word exactly. It was half sound, half telepathic surge: fierce, indignant.
It meant... Erik couldn't remember.
He gripped the steering wheel and slammed on the brakes just as the stoplight turned red. From a distance, he felt the car lurch to a stop, but shade had spread over everything as if someone had thrown a black blanket over them. Not red and white, but dark, maybe purple: another presence waited in another dream. Someone honked. He hit the accelerator.
"Where you going?" said Matt.
"What? Fiesta."
"We just passed it."
So he took the next right and backtracked around the block.
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
The Dying Cycle
Chapter 1 plus notes
Chapter 2: Three Walkers
Erik stayed out till midnight. Matt wasn't at home, wasn't at the Domino, wasn't out in the woods behind Kingsley School. It went without saying he wasn't answering his phone. Erik made the rounds three times, then waited up by his apartment another hour. Finally, he bummed a piece of paper off a SmartMart clerk and left a note telling him Asoiya was alive. The fact that Matt had never told Erik her name, even in his dreams, should sell the authenticity of it, if Matt remembered her name... which he would.
Erik pushed the note through his mail slot and went home. The idea that Asoiya had survived depressed him. He recognized envy as an old pattern with his life, even in the absence of all but five years of memory. Or was "jealousy" a better word? He'd just lost Matt, and it made him bitter. Was that so reprehensible?
At home, he found Ghanior asleep on the couch. He didn't stir as Erik came in, which seemed a bad sign. Ghanior ought to be a light sleeper, especially in a strange place. A memory stirred, no, not a concrete memory, more a realization.
I know this because we used to be roommates. No, we had other roommates. We were never roommates.
It was all made up anyway; it had to be. That thought alone made it manageable.
Erik sat on the coffee table and watched the night-lit outline of Ghanior's face. The low light softened the years and resurrected his beauty. And that was bad too. Erik went to bed.
***
Matt plucked Erik's note off his door with a touch of annoyance. If Erik read minds half as well as he pretended, he'd know when Matt needed space. He tossed the note on the counter and cranked up the heat. He was glad A.J. liked having sex outdoors, but the reedy turf had soaked him through. Without clear memory, he had a sense that he had long lived in cold exile, far from the gentler damp of home.
He changed into his sweatpants and white cardigan, the one A.J. called very early '80s. After that, he stretched out some of the kinks, then sat by the floorboard heater and faced Erik's latest intrusion:
Dear Matt,
A man named Ghanior has come from our home planet to find us. He is a friend. Asoiya is alive. Ghanior is going to help us get home, so hopefully you
Erik
For half a heartbeat, the world bloomed, like a firecracker, like a tiger lily; angels sang a "Hallelujah Chorus." But it was too much to believe. It had to be a joke--or a mistake. Mistake more likely than joke: even Erik wasn't that cruel. Matt crumpled the note.
And only then did the bizarreness of his response come home to him. A man named Ghanior from his home planet? It sounded like one of Ishan's B movies. Yet Matt had understood it all. The name "Ghanior" had an old, familiar shape, and Asoiya, of course, was so basic to his being it seemed impossible he'd ever forgotten her name. Yet even now, he couldn't remember her face. What was the matter with him?
Did he really believe he was from another planet?
He did. That didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was Asoiya. Yet he could not entrap himself in the hope that she still lived, not now that he'd learned to persist in this abyss where her absence was as inescapable as the absence of the sun at midnight. She was gone; hope promised only agony.
***
Erik awoke to pounding on the door. He glanced at the clock radio: 3:12 a.m. By the time he'd stumbled to the entrada, Ghanior was standing like a woozy ghost in the dark. Erik clicked on the hall light and let Matt in.
If he'd walked in on this scene knowing only what he'd known yesterday, he might have assumed Matt was on drugs. His eyes pulled toward Erik like sunflowers.
"There's one thing I need," said Matt with surprising calm. "Did you take her name from my dream?"
Erik closed the door. "No. I got it from him."
Matt took a step toward Ghanior. "I know you."
Ghanior looked at Erik. "What did he say?"
"He said he knows you. Matt, he doesn't speak English. Use the other language, damn it; stop pretending you don't know it."
For a moment, Matt's mouth wobbled, like a shy little girl asked to speak in class. "Are you my father?" Matt asked finally in Perditan--Tapanayn.
"No," said Ghanior with an air of surprise.
"You're my uncle."
At that, Erik got a telepathic hit off Ghanior. It was sharp and pained, no different from Matt's mind when Erik jabbed him. No different. Identical. Were all minds--?
"I'm a friend of your mother's. Ghanior. Do you remember?"
Matt got the hit too; his staring proved it. After playing chicken several seconds, he said, "You're lying."
"I am not lying," said Ghanior with small, incredulous laugh.
Matt looked between them. "Where is she?" Asoiya, not his mother.
"Last I saw her, she was back on Perdita. She wasn't able to Walk here."
"But she's alive?"
"Yes."
Matt shuffled past them and fell in a lump on the couch, on Ghanior's bedding. He gazed at the ceiling.
Erik put the kettle on. That was unlikely to have bad consequences. When he got back with chamomile (which he disliked but seemed best for the time of night), Ghanior was explaining. Erik, having heard it before, just handed out the tea and watched. Matt seemed crumpled: a wilted, underfed youth in worn jeans, like Case from Neuromancer--better looking than Case but working hard to bring himself down to it. Erik wondered if hopping back into the matrix (the Neuro-matrix, not the Neo matrix) would fix him. Ghanior managed to look genteel despite undone red jacket and untucked black shirt. Both men were implacable, both a million miles away.
No. I'm the one a million miles away, observing through some interdimensional portal through which I can see but am unseen.
Only Erik drank the tea. No, that wasn't true: Ghanior sipped it too and said, "Ishan, could I have another Blockit?"
Erik got up and got him an ibuprofin: how funny that his brain recognized a brand name from some distribution arm of the Pharmaceutical Consortium on an alien planet he didn't remember. A sign of dreams.
"Thanks," said Ghanior.
"So when can I get back to her?" said Matt. Through his fog, Erik realized it was at least the third time he'd asked some version of that.
"We can get started tomorrow. My tracker says my ship's just six kilometers from here." He didn't mean Earth kilometers but near enough.
"We should start now," said Matt.
"I need more sleep," said Ghanior. He ought to have thrown off the headache by now.
"Go home, Matt," said Erik, sensing protest on the horizon. "You heard what Ghanior said. He can't help us Walk back anyway until he's stronger. That's not going to happen this very instant. So just go home and rejoice that she's alive."
Matt nodded as if that actually sank in. But as he was heading for the door, he turned back. "You will need a long time to heal to Walk, Ghanior, no? So maybe this is faster: take your ship back through real space."
"The ship's designed for Jana," said Ghanior. "And even if it could ripple through real space, we'd need to fix this planet's position relative to the rest of the Continuation. But according to my ship, its stars don't chart. It's a very long way from home."
***
At home, by the heater again, Matt tried some futile breathing exercises while he reviewed what his vestiges of memory took to be the facts: he and Erik and Ghanior did, indeed, come from the same place (not the same planet, as Erik had put it, but connected planets, connected family). While he and Erik had both lost their memories, Matt's loss was less encompassing. Already he could feel details bleeding back, perhaps because Asoiya could not remain buried.
Ghanior believed she was alive; his mind didn't lie about that. Matt still couldn't make himself seize that hope. His life--he was certain--had been a litany of hopes dashed. That Asoiya, too, should be taken from him seemed as inevitable as the flow of a tragedy up to its final act. (He understood all of a sudden why, of all the movies Erik had shown him, he always found the tragedies truest.)
None of that changed the fact that he would give his last breath to find her. He wondered only why he'd bothered to keep breathing, believing her gone. It spoke of the congenital flaw, the crack in his brain. His lineage had been defective; he knew that without remembering how.
But if it lay in their power to sew up the wound of their separation, they would obviously do so. They would defy the defect--Asoiya and himself--just as they always had.
***
No dreams (night dreams). That wasn't uncommon if Erik added up all the nights in a week, but it always felt uncommon, like a safe place to catch your breath when you've been running and running with a stitch in your side.
Over English muffins, Ghanior took another Advil (generic Advil, generic Blockit, "take two aspirin..."). He washed it down and made a face. "What do you call this?" He held up the Tardis mug.
"Coffee."
"It's execrable."
"Try more agave nectar."
They had both gravitated to the bedroom to eat, where the sun shown through the eastern window. Both sun suckers, they sat cross-legged on the bed, breakfast on the TV tray. The execrable coffee smell stabilized the dream. Ghanior massaged his head.
"What's wrong with you?" asked Erik.
Ghanior jumped a little, then seemed to catch the gist of the question. "Jana."
"Yeah, but it's more than that. I've Walked through Jana, and it doesn't hit me that hard."
"My luck, I suppose." As Ghanior sipped his coffee, it occurred to Erik that he hadn't commented on anything Erik fed him--no, he'd commented on the fish. Hadn't he? "I used to be a dancer. Do you remember that?"
Erik shook his head.
"Nor I, except through the sea mist of the very long ago. I used to be a really good dancer. And then, within the first year I was Walking, I suffered a massive neural disruption. I was hospitalized; I was operated on. The Ashtorian military did a good job, really cutting edge: I retained higher cognitive function with negligible debility and lost no emotional functionality and no major motor function."
"But it upset your balance."
"They were never able to correct that--or they've always assured me it's not worth going back in and disrupting something else, which I accept."
An orange line of sun was creeping up Erik's knee. It seemed alive, like a slug, almost stationary till you looked away. But when you looked back, it had gotten away from you. "And it makes Walking more painful."
"For three years after my surgery, I couldn't Walk at all. That was a tech problem though. You see, I'd been Walking on a prototype jae generator open link, and it didn't sync properly with my brain. Eventually, they fitted me with a first-gen portable." He flashed his tattooed wrist. "It synced better, so I could Walk again, but the damage was done. Since my brain has been extensively rewired, so to speak, it has less give to absorb the shocks of Walking, pardon some mixed metaphors."
Erik didn't want to pardon the metaphors. He wanted Jana concrete; concrete was safer. But he couldn't say that sort of thing without sounding like an idiot--or a madman, and he'd determined to try very hard to be coherent.
Ghanior poured a second cup of coffee. "As for you, you were in Jana Program ever--"
"Don't." In response to Ghanior's stare, he forced a smile. "Not now. It's all a bit much, all at once."
A clipped nod.
Erik searched for something safe. "So that blue box on your cup is--" The burring of his phone cut him off. Matt for the third time that morning. All of a sudden, you couldn't unglue him from his phone.
"I've waited as long as I wait," said Matt.
"All right. Come over." Erik clicked the phone shut, then flipped it open it again. "I'm going to call in sick." With Xiang out sick, it would make sense.
***
When Ghanior answered the door, Matt could feel his mind planed like a road cut through a hillside. No, rather, Ghanior's mind was like a fault stabilizer, meting out earthquakes in imperceptible tremors while the greater energies built and built in preparation for the inevitable break.
"Good morning, Mei."
Matt refused the name, but Ghanior's mind refused to hear him, the tremor unfelt.
"Are we going soon?" said Matt in words because no one listened to real speaking.
"Ishan's getting his coat."
Ghanior was Matt's uncle, however much he denied it. He could sense ties to Mama uniting them.
"Okay, let's go." Erik emerged, flipping the collar of his jacket.
Matt followed Ghanior out the door, feeling him an enemy, for all it was clear that he didn't intend to be.
***
Ghanior had a tracking device in his arm. Or that was Erik's first impression, which turned out to be wrong. What he had, imbedded in his right wrist to keep it well away from the Jana tech in his left, was an on-off switch that activated the iPhone fused to his brain. Something less than an iPhone actually: it had nothing resembling internet access (even on its home turf). Ghanior said that magnitude of direct neural input proved risky for the human brain. Some used it anyway; he didn't, not with his "cross-wiring." Instead, he had a tracking device and some other basic functions.
Erik followed its instructions up Baydell Road. He pulled the car over where Ghanior told him, right by the 20 mph sign.
"Fuck me," he laughed. "This is where I landed."
"Well, yes, of course it is," said Ghanior. "It's the output point for the current. So you do remember your arrival?"
Erik stood at the edge of the asphalt, staring down the canyon at the expanse of woods and vineyards, the sun unraveling the last lacy strips of morning fog. He savored the moment, wanting never to go back. "I remember being here, not knowing how I got here."
"Mei?"
"Mm?" Matt shook himself out of his thoughts. "I landed here too. I remember the same." He started down the hillside, retracing that years-old path.
Ghanior followed. After a couple of halting steps, he skidded down swiftly on his backside, so undignified that Erik felt a gentle pity. A couple of meters down and the ship was in view, not that there was much to view. It looked like an old lunar lander but without the comic little legs, about the size of an upended minivan.
"I hate to say it, but this is obvious as hell," said Erik.
Ghanior glanced back at him. "What is?"
"Your ship." Erik waved at it. "Do you have a cloaking device for this thing?"
"A what--? you mean a diffraction shield?"
"Yeah," said Erik, recognizing the term.
"Not standard, but it should be possible to implement one. We should have thought of it really. Is this a high surveillance planet?"
Now they stood next to the ship, it was taller than they were. Ghanior fiddled with some unlocking procedure of mysterious mechanism.
"Middling," said Erik. "What it is is a very populous planet and with a high enough degree of vagrancy that, if there's a structure around, some homeless person will find it."
Ghanior smiled. "Ah. Those things."
That stumped Erik for a second, till he realized it was a reference to their conversation yesterday: why biospheric collapse? Same old things.
With a very science fictiony click and whir, a side of the capsule slid open. Once they were inside, Erik wondered why they'd bothered. There were four seats and a lot of control panels (with real, physical buttons, like something from the 1950s). It was gray and sunless until Ghanior clicked on a light. Then, it was dull white-lit like a high cloud cover. The three of them sat.
"What now?" asked Matt.
"Now," said Ghanior. "I need to learn the language."
"How long will we be here by your plan?" asked Matt with a certain horror.
Ghanior opened a compartment and pulled out a comical object that looked like a wire basket. "This is a new device that has been approved outside of Ranlax just in the past year. It writes language pathways directly into the brain."
Erik was at a loss to pinpoint the source of his anxiety. Part of him wanted to laugh at the geekery, but on balance he felt much as if he'd been told he needed a root canal.
"So it won't be years," said Matt. "But how long?"
"Long enough that I'll need to communicate with the locals; hopefully not so long as to make it worthwhile to learn the language the conventional way. That's all I can tell you right now, Mei." He flipped some switches (real switches) and the capsule hummed to life. The door whirred shut, giving Erik instant claustrophobia; he kept his breathing carefully steady. With some hard-to-follow gestures, Ghanior conjured a holographic screen in the air. It, at least, was pretty--and 3D, a topography in the folds of which Ghanior's hands periodically disappeared. Like--no, a little too like being sucked into Charybdis. He looked away from the whirlpool.
Ghanior held out the basket to Erik. "First we'll need a copy of the language from your brain."
"No." Erik kept his hands in his lap, unwilling to even touch the thing. "You don't want to copy my mind. I don't want you to. Why don't you use Matt's? Look at him: he's border-itching to do anything to get us out of here."
Ghanior glanced at Matt. "Ishan, I can't use him; he's not human."
Erik played that sentence over a time or two. "He's not?"
"He's Pey."
"He's what? Matt, did you know about this?"
Matt gave him a bewildered look. His eyes, it had often struck Erik, were unnaturally big, his skin unnaturally white.
"So you're telling me he's an alien?"
Ghanior sighed, the basket slumping into his lap. "You two really have forgotten everything." He massaged his forehead. "The Pey are engineered from humans. Yes, Mei's neural pathways are very similar to human, but this language-transfer process needs the tightest possible match. Besides which, Pey have less language ability than humans, so even if a copy of his brain would do, it wouldn't be the best option."
"Engineered to do what?" asked Erik.
"Oh, for gods' sake, it was six thousand years ago. It doesn't matter. Ishan, I just need to copy your language knowledge, not your mind, just the rote language."
"Let me out," said Erik.
No one moved.
"Just let me out for a second. I need to be outside."
Ghanior flipped a few (real) switches, and Erik climbed out onto the tan-pebbled earth among skinny, water-starved Douglas firs. Vaguely, he thought, "Oja," aware it was a place on Perdita, a place that maybe looked like this. He crunched down the hillside a little farther, until he spied someone's back fence in the distance. Then he sat on the hard, solid earth, a very slight breeze tickling his skin.
After maybe five minutes, Ghanior joined him.
"You have no subtlety," said Erik, not entirely sure what he meant but quelling the urge to follow it up with, and you never did.
"Very likely," said Ghanior.
"I don't want to do this. I can't explain it, but it's a bad idea."
After a moment, Ghanior said, "If we don't do this, then I will be fairly useless. You and Mei will have to negotiate any assistance from the locals. It's not reasonable."
He wants to hang out with other people, Erik realized. It was such a basic drive, one so powerful and human, that he almost smiled. "What assistance to do we need from the locals anyway? Their technology is centuries behind this."
Ghanior shook his head. "How can I answer that? All we have are questions now. Why this planet? Why did a current bring us here? What's our astral position? We can't answer these questions without exploring the world. In addition to which, we'll need food and supplies. I realize you could translate for me, but--"
"No, you're right. The thing is sooner or later someone will try to talk to you, and if you can't speak English, they may assume you're an illegal immigrant and try to deport you, and since they won't be able to figure out what country you're from, they'll probably just stick you in prison while they work on it and then forget you're there. So you need to be able to communicate, and you need a false ID that will sell you as a legal resident. And to be a legal resident, you should have some English proficiency. So..."
They sat in silence for a while. At length, Ghanior said, "I'm sorry. The device truly does just draw from your language center, not your memories or feelings. See how you remember Tapanayn without remembering Perdita? These are different processes."
A thought occurred belatedly. "What about your brain? You've had a lot of reconstructive surgery. Is this device going to be safe for you?"
"The neurologists didn't anticipate any problems." His voice was too flat.
"But you're at a higher risk?"
"This entire mission is high risk," Ghanior snapped. "Being a Walker is high risk. We were all assigned from childhood to live lives that are high risk. Don't--just please be still about it."
Erik stood, breathing slowly to cool his temper. What did he do to me that makes me so quick to anger? (What did I do that makes him so quick?) He peered at the fence in the distance, wondering whose land they were trespassing on. It had to be someone's; in dreams one was always a trespasser. He whirled at a step behind them: Matt standing next to Ghanior, who sat with his head on his knees.
"You both forget," said Matt, "we need logical steps. Ghanior, this is high risk, you say, and you might be hurt. So you should make the shield first. That way, the ship will be safe even without you."
From Ghanior's knees came a little laugh. "That actually makes a lot of sense." He got up. "I'll take a look and let you know if I need supplies."
***
Matt watched Ghanior disappear into the ship. Ghanior had said he was Pey. It was as if he had been alone and nameless and a mind had called his name.
They had been Pey, he and Asoiya, and a ship that looked not unlike Ghanior's had taken them away from Home. He couldn't remember the name of Home, but he remembered giant, palmate leaves glowing almost golden with the sun at their backs. There, they had been Pey, but they had been outcast Pey.
What that mean? What did it mean to be Pey? Pey had true speech, mind over word. Pey never existed alone; they had been bad Pey, he and Asoiya. They had joined to each other too late. Before her, he had been alone. And now again... he was bad Pey.
When they were still little, the ship had come, and then they were among humans but not human. They exchanged one hostile land for another. Then, that land for America. And Ghanior would pluck them from America and return them to a hostile land. All lands exuded hostility, except...
Except in Jana?
He felt eyes upon him and turned to see Erik, his companion without togetherness, his exemplar of the absence.
***
At a first assessment, Ghanior told them he should be able to generate a shield using systems already onboard ship. That was good news, since it seemed unlikely that Radio Shack would carry much in the way of cloaking technology. (If anything, the Commons might.) But Ghanior did send Erik and Matt off to pick up lunch.
It pleased Erik and needled him to be alone in his car with Matt. Matt stared out the window, plainly thinking of Asoiya.
"Do you remember her?" asked Erik, turning off Baydell and onto the highway.
Matt stirred as if waking. "I remember the feel."
"How did she feel?"
Matt considered. "She's red and white--and glows like a light bulb. She glows and is red and white, like a Christmas ball."
That seemed the most words he'd ever heard Matt say. He pictured Matt (a chibi Matt) with a candy-striped ball in his hand, face illuminated with childlike wonder. A black and white boy holding red upon white.
He drove for a couple of blocks, then asked tentatively, "Matt, will you still fuck me?"
"Why wouldn't I?" His voice was neutral, uninterested. After a moment, he said, "I remember: we were very small, and Mother told me to take Asoiya up the hill. So I carried her up. It was very green, greener than here, jungle green." He paused. "It was so Far could die."
"Far?" He got no response. "That's someone you remember?"
Matt shook his head. "I think, not my father."
"How old were you?"
"Three or four. I think, Asoiya was one."
"So you grew up with her--like a sister?"
"Naturally. She's my nn!" The last word wasn't a word exactly. It was half sound, half telepathic surge: fierce, indignant.
It meant... Erik couldn't remember.
He gripped the steering wheel and slammed on the brakes just as the stoplight turned red. From a distance, he felt the car lurch to a stop, but shade had spread over everything as if someone had thrown a black blanket over them. Not red and white, but dark, maybe purple: another presence waited in another dream. Someone honked. He hit the accelerator.
"Where you going?" said Matt.
"What? Fiesta."
"We just passed it."
So he took the next right and backtracked around the block.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-30 03:29 am (UTC)