Beyond the Farthest Suns (9 page)

The five people pictured in the portraits sat in formal suits and gowns around a long table set with many empty plates and bottles of wine. Their raiment was of the same period and fashion as my own, the twenties or thirties of my century. They were in the middle of a toast, as I entered. The woman who had presided at my rebirth was not present, nor was anyone I recognized as Roderick.

“To our revivified lich, Robert Falucci,” the five said, lifting their empty glasses and smiling. They were really quite handsome people, the two women young and brown and supple, with graceful limbs and long fingers, the three men strong and well-muscled, if a little too pale. Veins and arteries showed through the translucent skin on the men's faces.

“Thank you,” I replied. “Pardon me, but I'm a little confused.”

“Welcome to Confusion,” the taller of the two women said, pushing her chair back to walk to my side. She took my arm and led me to an empty seat at the end of the table. Her skin radiated a gentle warmth and smelled sweetly musky. “Tonight, Musnt is presiding. I am Cant, and this is Shant, Wont, and Dont.”

I smiled. Were they joking with me? “Robert,” I said.

“We know,” Cant said. “Roderick warned us you would arrive.”

Musnt, at the head of the table, raised his glass again and with a gesture bade me to sit. Cant pushed my chair in for me and returned to her seat.

“I've been dead, I think,” I said in a low voice, as if ashamed.

“Gone but not forgotten,” Dont, the shorter woman, said, and hid a brief giggle behind a lace handkerchief.

“You brought me back?”

“The doctor brought you back,” Cant said with a helpful and eager expression.

“Against the wishes of Roderick's poor sister,” Musnt said. “Some of us believe that with her, and perhaps with you, he has gone too far.”

I turned away from his accusing gaze. “Is this Roderick's house?” I asked.

“Yes and no,” Musnt said. “We oversee his work and time. We are, so to speak, the bonds placed on the last remnants of the family Escher.”

“Roles we greatly enjoy,” Cant said. She was youthfully, tropically beautiful, and I hoped I attracted her as much as she did me.

“I think I've been gone a long time. How much has changed?” I asked.

The four around the table, all but Cant, looked at each other with expressions I might have found on children in a schoolyard: disdain for a new boy.

“A lot, really,” Musnt said, lifting knife and fork. Food appeared on Musnt's plate, a green salad and two whole raw zucchinis. Food appeared on my plate, the uneaten remains of my watercress sandwich. I looked up, dismayed. Then a zucchini appeared, and they all laughed. I smiled, but there was a salt edge to my happiness now.

I felt inferior. I certainly felt out of touch.

I did not remember Roderick having a sister.

After dinner, they retired to the drawing room, which was darkly paneled and decorated in queer rococo fashion, with many reptilian cherubs and even full-sized dog-headed angels, as well as double pillars in spiral embrace and thick gold-threaded canopies. The materials appeared to be lapis and black marble and ebony, and everywhere, the sourceless lights followed, and everywhere, the busy and ubiquitous fibers overlay all surfaces.

I heard the distant murmur of a brook, rushes of air, sounds from some invisible ghostly landscape, and the voices of the five, discussing the spices used in the vegetable soup. Wont then added,
“She
persists in calling our work a blanding of the stew.”

“Ah, but
she
is only half an Escher—” Wont said.

“Or a fading reflection of the truly penultimate Escher,” Shant added.

“She would do anything for her brother,” Cant said sympathetically.

“You've always favored Roderick,” Dont said with a sniff. “You sound like Dr. Ont.”

Cant turned and smiled at me. “We are judges, but not muses. I
am
the least critical.”

Musnt opened a heavy brocaded curtain figured with seashells and they looked out upon the overgrown garden. Orange and yellow clouds moved swiftly in a twilight azure sky. Musnt flung open the glass-paneled doors and we all strode onto a marble patio.

Cant put her arm through mine and hugged my elbow against her ribs. “How nice for you to arrive on a good day, with such a fine settling,” she said. “I trust the doctor remade you well?”

“She must have,” I said. “I feel young and well. A little … anxious, however.”

Cant smiled sweetly. “Poor man. They have brought back so many, and all have felt anxious. We're quite used to your anxiety. You will not disturb us.”

“We're Roderick's antitheticals,” Wont said, as if that might explain something, but it still told me nothing useful. Mired in a dense awkwardness and buried unease, I looked back at the house. It reached to the sky, a cathedral, Xanadu and the tower of Babel all in one. Towers met with buttresses in impossible ways, drawing my eye from multiple perspectives into hopeless directions.

“What did you do, in your life?” Musnt asked.

“I was a magician,” I said. “Cardino the Unbelievable.” The name seemed ridiculous, from this distance, in the middle of these marvels.

“We are
all
magicians,” Musnt said disdainfully. “How boring. Perhaps Roderick chose poorly.”

“I do not think so,” Cant said, and gave me another smile, this one eerily reassuring, an anxiolytic bowing curve of her smooth and plump lips. To my shock, nipples suddenly grew on her cheeks, surrounded by fine brown areolae. “If Robert wants, he can add another layer of critique to our efforts.”

“What could he possibly know, and besides, aren't we critical enough?” Shant asked.

“Hush,” Cant said. “He's our guest, and we're already showing him our dark side.”

“As antitheticals should,” Musnt said.

“I don't understand … What am I, here?” I asked, the salt taste in my mouth turning bitter.
“Why
am I here?”

“You're a lich,” Musnt said, staring away at nothing in particular. “As such, you have no rights. You can be an added amusement. A spice against our blanding, if you wish, but nothing more.”

“Please don't ask if you're in hell, not so soon,” Shant said with a twist of disgust. “It is
so
common.”

“Who is this Roderick?”

“He is our master and our slave,” Shant said. “We observe all he does, bring him his audience, and bind him like chains.”

“He is a seeker of sensation without consequence,” Cant said. “We, like his audience, are perfect for him, for we are of no consequence whatsoever.” Cant sighed. “I suppose he should come down and say hello.”

“Or you can find
him,
which is more likely,” Shant suggested.

I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it again, turning to look at the five on the patio. Finally, I said, “Are you real?”

Cant said, “If you mean embodied, no.”

“You're dreams,” I said.

“You asked if we like illusions,” Cant said shyly, touching my shoulder with her slender hand. “We can't help but like them. We are all of us tricks of mind and light, and cheap ones at that. Roderick, for the time being, is real, as is this house.”

“Where is Roderick?”

“Upstairs,” Shant said.

Wont chuckled at that. “That's very general, but we really don't know. You may find him, or he will find you. Take care you do not meet his sister first. She may not approve of you.”

At a noise from within the patio doors, I turned. I heard footsteps cross the stone floor, and looked back at Cant and the others to see their reactions. All, however, had vanished. I took a tentative step toward the doors, and was about to take another, when a tall and spectrally thin figure strode onto the patio, turned his head, and fixed me with a puzzled and then irritated glare.

“So soon? The doctor said it would take days more,” he said.

I studied the figure's visage with halting recognition. There were similarities; the high forehead, divided into two prominences of waxen pallor, the short sharp falcon nose, the sunken cheeks hollowed even more now as if by some wasting disease …

And the eyes. The figure's eyes burned like a flame on the taper of his thin, elongated body. The voice sounded like an echo from caverns at the center of a cold ferrous planet, metallic and sad, yet keeping some of the remembered strength of the original, and that I could not mistake.

“Roderick!”

The figure wore a tight-fitting pair of red pants and a black shirt with billowing sleeves buttoned to preposterously thick gloves like leathern mittens, while around his neck hung a heavy black collar or yoke as might be worn by an ox. At the ends of this yoke depended two brilliant silver chains threaded with thick white fiber. Around his legs twined more fibers, which seemed to grow from the floor, breaking and joining anew with his every step. He seemed to walk on faint embers. Threads grew also beneath his clothes and to his neck, forming fine webs around his mouth and eyes. Looking more closely, I saw that the threads intruded
into
his mouth and eyes.

Still his most arresting feature, the large and discerning eyes had assumed a blue and watery glaze, as if exposed to many brilliant suns, or visions too intense for healthy witness.

“You appear alert and well,” Roderick said, averting his gaze with a long blink, as if ashamed. His hair swept back from his forehead, still thin and fine, but white as snow, and tufted as if he had just awakened from damp and restless sleep. “The doctor has done her usual excellent work.”

“I feel well … But so many irritating … evasions! I have been treated like a … I have been called an amusement—”

Roderick raised his right hand, then stared at it with some surprise, and slowly, pulling back florid lips from prominent white teeth, as at the appearance of some vermin, peeled off the glove by tugging at one finger, then the next, until the hand rose naked and revealed. He curled and straightened the slender, bony fingers and thumb. A spot of blood bedewed the tip of each.

One drop fell to the floor and made a ruby puddle on the stone.

“Pardon me,” Roderick said, closing the naked hand tightly and pushing it into a pocket in his clinging pants. “I still emerge. You have come from a farther land than I—how ironic you seem the more healthy despite that journey!”

“I am renewed,” I said. Upon seeing Roderick, I began to feel my emotions return, fear mixing now with a leap of hope that some essential questions might be answered. “Have I truly died and been reborn?”

“You died a very young man—at the age of sixty,” Roderick said. “I took charge of your frozen remains from that ridiculous corporation twenty years later and secured you in the vaults of my own family. I had made the beginnings of my huge fortune by then and arranged such preparations very early, and so you were protected by many forces, legal and political. None interfered with our vaults. If not for me, you would long ago have been decanted and allowed to thaw and rot.”

“How long has it been?”

“Two hundred and fifty years.”

“And the others?—Wont, Cant, Musnt, Shant, Dont …”

Roderick's face grew stern, as if I had unexpectedly uttered a string of rude words. Then he shook his head and put his still-gloved hand on my shoulder.

“All the world's people lie in cool vaults now, or wear no form at all. People are born and die at will, ever and again. Death is conquered, disease a helpmeet and plaything. The necessities of life are not food but sensation. All is servant to the quest for stimulus. The expectant and all-devouring Nerve is our monarch, our King.”

I was suddenly dizzied by the vertigo of deep time, the precipitous awareness of having emerged from a long well or tunnel of insensate nullity leaving behind almost everyone and everything I had known. And perhaps Roderick, the friend I had once known, was no longer with me, either.

I felt as if the stones beneath me swayed.

“You alone, of all our friends, our family … are alive?” I asked.

“I alone keep my present shape, though not without some gaps,” Roderick said with a pale pride. “I am the last of the embodied and walkabout Eschers … I, and my sister. But she is
not well
.” His face creased into a mask of sorrow, a well-worn expression I could not entirely credit. “I have mourned her a thousand times already, and a thousand times she has returned to something like life. She feigns death, I think, to taunt me, and abhors my quest, but … I could ask for no one more obedient.”

“I don't remember you having a sister,” I said.

Roderick closed his eyes. “Come, this place is filled with unpleasant associations. I no longer eat. The thought of using my jaws to grind severed tissue … ugh!”

Roderick led me from the dining room, back to the foyer and a staircase which rose opposite the main door. The stairs branched midpoint to either side, leading to an upper floor. Roderick ascended the stairs with an eerie grace, halting and surveying his surroundings unpredictably, as if motivated not by human desires, but by the volition of a hunting insect or spider. His eyes studied the fiber-crusted walls, lids half-closed, head shaking at some association or memory conjured by stimuli invisible to me.

“You must find a place here,” Roderick said. “You are the last in the vault. All the others have long since been freed and either vapored or joined with some neural clan or another. I have kept you in reserve, dear Robert, because I value you most highly. You have a keen mind and quick fingers. I
need
you.”

“How may I be useful?”

“All this, the house and the lands around us, survive at the whim of King Nerve,” Roderick said. “We are entertainers, and our tenure wears thin. Audiences demand so much of us, and of everything around us. You are new and unexplored.”