Keeping It Real (24 page)

briefly, in spirit.'

'I'm an atheist,' she informed him. 'Machine and soulless. Thanatopia is only hearsay to me and

until I get proof about it, I'm devoutly with the scientists. What you see is what you get.'

'Stupid. But whatever your opinion on the matter, it will make no difference,' Dar said, his voice

louder and more musical, almost at an ordinary pitch. 'You and I should be in a coherent state for the

duration. That is a physical phenomenon you can measure, if you wish. It is best established through

some kind of mutual empathy.'

"That's not
going to be easy, considering.' Lila had to bite back a retort to his insult - stupid! He

didn't
know how hard it was to be

against
the Otopian tide-turn back to major religion every time the media came up with some new

revelation about
Thanatopia.

Dar, thankfully, could not hear her thoughts. 'Do not
tax me with your talk. If you want to save Zal,

you must learn to speak correctly.'

'What
do you mean?' Even Lila's Al-self couldn't
entirely keep a smother on her strongest
feelings.

She was annoyed.

'To save me, you must
speak correctly
.
Listen carefully . . .'

She gave him a sarcastic look. 'You're going to say it
only once?'

"Thank you for your cultural quip. It is not lost on me. But you are wasting time. Listen to the elf with

two chest
drains, because it
is hard for him to talk.'

He had to pause and rest then, and Lila felt another wash of shame. She didn't much like being herself

in this hour. She wanted to punish Dar for bringing her to these feelings, and for all her nightmares of the

past, the pain and the hospital, her metal body and her weakness, her foolish pursuit of Zal. And she felt

absurdly thankful, that they were both here and alive. She listened to the drip of blood and Dar's

laboured breathing and looked at
the damage she had done to him. 'I'm listening.'

'Doctor,' he began. 'It is like this. Speaking is action. A spoken judgement, such as your statement that

our empathy could not
be easy, is a sword and shield between us. It makes success much less likely.

Your speech is peppered with casual assault.' He had to pause again.

'It's just
the way we talk in Otopia,' Lila began defensively. 'It doesn't mean . . .'

'You see?' he said, pausing often to take gurgling breaths. T accused you of aggression, and you have

given me aggression back. You had to. You felt
that? When speech is careless and labels people, instead

of simply stating what was done, when speech is used as a weapon, there is nothing we can do but fight.

It is not simply the way you talk in Otopia. Speech defines the world. But be aware that in Alfheim these

matters take on even greater weight, because our magic is tied to sounds, and no sounds are more

powerful than those of words, except
music. Music unpolluted by words is the strongest of all. But you

are not a musician, and neither am I. We will confine ourselves to the inadequacy of words for this

connection
.
I will tell you something of my heart: when you hit me with the quarterstaff I took no offence

at it
.
It is not a matter I hold against you personally. But I believe from the

way you speak about
me that
this is not
the way you feel about my attack on you in Sathanor
.
'

'You're bloody right
it isn't,' Lila said with a venom even she did not expect
.
'You tried to kill me in

cold blood. And then you spent
days torturing me by forcing me awake to ask me those
poin
t
less

fucking questions. You never showed me any feeling at all, except cruelty, and you were always . . .' She

had been going to say smiling, but after her recent reassessment she didn't want to say it now. She bit her

tongue. The faint ECG trace she still had on Dar through her hand sensors showed flickering reactions in

the beat of his heart. His face didn't change, but his body reacted to what she'd said strongly. She said

without thinking, 'I'm sorry.'

'Sorry is useless,' he said. 'You hurt me. Sorry does not
make it
better. Sorry is for you, not
me. But

truly. What I did I did in order to save you from certain death. That
must
be difficult to believe.'

'Gwil said that,' Lila informed him.

'In that
then she has the right,' Dar whispered, forced to cough and trying to do it
gently, but
failing. His

eyes rolled up in his head briefly. Lila waited until he came back to himself and carried on. 'I had to

continue your interrogation to convince those with me that
I was of their party. All of them are agents

loyal to the Lady in Sathanor and until now I have always maintained a position of allegiance to her as my

cover. If I had had to kill you, I would have, because as their leader they must not doubt me. Surely they

must never suspect I am secretly loyal to the Resistance
.
As it was, I decided that
I could both save your

life and impress them with my commitment to their ways by demon-strating more cruelty when I delivered

you home in pieces instead of executing you. Though we knew perfectly well that
you had no information

this was a plan they all agreed to easily. Their corruption is mighty indeed and so was mine that
day. You

wear the mark of that deed for ever. As do I, although my scars are not visible to the eye, for which I

must
be grateful. And I am grateful to you, for saving my life now, with so little pain. It
is, as you guess,

much more than I deserve.'

Lila had never felt
more sober. In explaining his part of her maiming he was describing a job. There

was nothing personal about it, though that didn't make it any less awful. He was describing
her
job, in

actual fact, because they were the same. 'Making it hard to keep hating you here.'

"That
was the general direction I was heading in,' he said, in an

almost
human cadence, and then he reverted to elf normal, all careful diction and no contractions. 'But
it

is the truth.'

T know,' Lila said, curious. 'I can feel it
in your electro-readouts.'

'Then we are in synchrony,' Dar said. 'It is time to rebuild me. We will begin with my heart. Please

remove the drain.'

'Technically it's too early,' she said. 'But you're in charge
.
Before I do, care to brief me on the

procedure?'

'Forgive me, I thought
it
obvious. You will raise your chi and place it in your hand over my heart,

whilst concentrating on your own heart. I will muster my energy and do the same. We will visualise the

heart as whole and healthy. We will open our spirit fusion to the aetheric limbs of Lyrien and allow . . .'

He saw her doubt and scepticism and accepted it. 'Just do it,' he said. 'Please.'

'Don't we need circles or candles or crystals or . . .'

'Of course not,' he said, betraying pain and impatience
.
'You are alive. It will suffice. Your hand.'

'I don't even know what
chi
is,' she started to protest, but
relied on her Al-self to find some instructive

materials
.
She removed the drain carefully, sealing the wound between his ribs with one of her own

emergency stick-ons because she had no idea what
the elf version of the same was. He didn't
seem to

mind.
Chi
was, her Al-library said, the life force or spirit energy of living things
.
There was a lot
of

argument
about its role in the aetheric dimensions (perhaps it was the same as aether itself and perhaps it

was a special form, the human verdict
was not sure) and whether or not it was metaphysical, or

imaginary. It was nonetheless proven to be an effective concept...

'Breathe with me,' Dar said. 'Put
your heart
in your hand. That's all.'

'Okay, okay.' Lila closed her eyes and tried to feel anything other than pointless and mundane. Her

Al-self decided to help her with a gentle, cheerful piece of music she'd always liked. It was childish, and

twinkly, and something she used to play years and years ago, in the summertime at
home. The effect, as

these things often have, was instantaneous. The words ran through her mind -
surely no grea
t
er king

has ever lived, no one wi
t
h
t
he loving kindness, s
t
reng
t
h and courage, of King Raam.
Lila's

awareness of her surroundings fell away. How she loved to hear the song! How she longed to touch

those old days and be with Dad and Mom again, with Maxine, Julia and Okie.

She put out her right hand as the soft notes burred in harmony and

pleasure through her mind
.
She held onto the feeling of how much she had once been loved.

Dar's
andalune
hand surrounded hers. A current
shot
through her arm and out of the palm of her

hand and down into the body underneath it. She could feel it
and her sensors could too - pure

electromagnetic energy in a strange pattern, at frequencies she wouldn't have expected from a simple

human body. Her metal amplified it.

Then she felt Dar's heart
pull
on hers, like a weary horse lagging behind is pulled forward by the

stronger one in the front
of the traces. Readouts behind her closed eyelids showed her pulse slow down

to his pace and then respond to the demand of this strange healing, accelerat
-
ing them both with her

leading this time. She remembered to think of Dar's heart, the four chambers, shaped almost identically to

a human's, just larger. She saw the strange energy field in her hand snap into the shape she imagined. She

felt
Dar's heart
in her hand. And then she felt
Dar's heart
in her heart.

Lila began to understand the nature of magic then. She saw that it was aetheric energy shaped by the

shape of the maker, and that the maker was more than a thought
or a mood or a word or a body. It
was

all those things at
once. Her breath and Dar's breath, their hearts in one another's hearts, sharing space

and time for a moment, the stronger becoming weaker, the weaker stronger until equilibrium. Then both

gained strength as another force, utterly unknown to her, came pouring in through Dar's
andalune
self.

The power of this was colossal, like being suddenly plugged into the mains. For the rest
of their time

together she knew nothing at all, washed away in its force and the reckless vitality, thinking that
maybe

she could sense the whole of the forest, and the rain, the land and the sky, the water and air . . . that she

was Dar and he was the strangest, strangest creature under the sun, drawing power from the life that ran

and jumped, warm and animal, through the trees, across the sky.

When they parted it was a natural movement that they both made at once, because they were one and

there was no impulse one had that
the other did not.

Recklessly, giddy with success, slightly wired on desire and the euphoria of such a strangely tender

intimacy, Lila carried on, Dar carried on, to the lungs and the ribs and the bones of his arms, where Lila

felt
his bone become her powerful metal skeleton and her finely

crafted alloys become living tissue. The circuit
between them fluctu-ated as it encountered their profound

differences, energy from Lyrien and from Lila's reactor matching each other like for like until the

resonances eased and the conjoined will of Lila and Dar brought
all patterns into phase.

Then, without warning, she felt the two of them and their separated natures wound inexorably into a

single form. The current of electrical and aetheric energies escalated suddenly, jolting Lila from bliss to

alarm. In her mind's eye she saw a fuse burning, a flash of coming light
. . .

'It's okay,' she heard Dar say calmly in the centre of her head. 'Take your hand away from me.'

She moved with the reflexive speed of fear and the connection broke abruptly. Lila felt that she had

been flung from heaven, and the landing was nasty. From her warm, cosy, beautiful place of strength and

exhilaration she found herself kneeling on the bloody floor with her head resting on the side of a hard

bed. Sweat
was pouring off her and she'd expended enough kilowatts to run a small town in the last few

seconds
.
She was shaking but even though she was exhausted there was a peculiar Tightness to her that

she couldn't
remember feeling in years. Belatedly she realised there was no discomfort
in her body. Not

one bit.

'Fuck me,' Dar said with perfect
Bay City intonation
.

Lila could feel the bed shaking
.
She realised he was laughing. It
was an infectious sound. She found

herself joining in, not
nervously either.

'Oh god!' she said, and seemed to be referring to herself as she slid onto the planking. She had