The Drowned Life (13 page)

The indigo figure stepped away from the body and sloughed its long cloak. Once free of the garment, the two wings that had been folded against its back lifted and opened wide. They were sleek, half the creature's height, pointed at the lower tips and ribbed with delicate bone work beneath the slick flesh. Its entire manlike form suggested equal parts reptile and mineral. From down the mountain came the death cry of some creature, from off in the grove came the sorrowful call of the pale night bird, and beneath them both could be heard, in the distance, the persistent pounding of the sea. The visitor crouched, and with great power, leaped into the air. The wings spread out, caught the island wind, and carried him, with powerful thrusts, into the night sky. He flew, silhouetted before the bright presence of the ringed planet from pole to pole, higher and higher, as the figure of John Gaghn receded to a pinpoint, became part of the island, then the ocean, then the night. Hours later, the winged visitor pierced the outer membrane of the planet's atmosphere and was born into space.

 

The Aieu, people of the jump-bone animal, blended flawlessly with the white trees in the lace forest. A dozen of them—hairless, perfectly pale, crouching still as stone gargoyles among the branches—silently watched the movements of the dark giant. Its wings, its horns, told them it would be a formidable opponent, and they wondered how their enemies had created it. After it had passed beneath them, the elder of their party motioned for the swiftest of them to go quickly and warn the queen of an assassin's approach. The small fellow nodded, and then, on clawed feet, took off, running through the branches, leaping soundlessly from tree to tree, in the direction of the hive. Those who remained behind spread
out and followed the intruder, their leader all the while plotting a strategy of offense for the time his force would be at full strength.

Zadiiz, the powder-blue queen, sat in her throne at the center of the hive, the children of the Aieu gathered around her feet. Nearly too feeble with age to walk, let alone run and climb, she could no longer lead the war parties or the hunt as she once had. She was not required to do anything at all as her subjects owed their very existence to her, but she wanted to remain useful for as long as she could, both to pass the time and to set an example. She instructed the young ones on everything from the proper way to employ the deadly jump-bone against a foe to the nature of existence itself, as she saw it. On this day, it was the latter. In her weak voice, quivering with age, she explained:

“Look around you, my dears. All of you, everything you see, the white forest, the gray sky, your distant past, and whatever future we have left, everything is a dream I am dreaming. As I speak to you, I am really asleep in a great vessel, in the clutch of a cradle that freezes the body but not the dream, flying through the darkness above, amid the stars, to a far place where I will eventually awake to be with my life companion, John Gaghn.”

The children looked into her orange eyes and nodded, although they could hardly understand. One of the brighter ones spoke up: “And what will become of us when you awaken?”

Zadiiz could only speak the truth. “I'm not sure,” she said, “but I'll do everything I can to keep you safe inside my memory. You'll know if I've done this when, if I appear to die, you are still alive.” Upon the mention of her own death, the children gasped, but she went on to allay their fears. “I won't have really died, I'll merely have emerged into another dream, or I'll truly have awakened, the vessel having reached its destination.” She could see she had confused them and frightened them a little. “Go and think on this for now, and we'll discuss it more tomorrow.” The small, dazed faces,
which, at one time, back on the plateau of the red grass lands of her own planet, she might have considered ugly, now were precious to her. The children came forward and lightly touched her arms, her legs, her face, before leaving the hive. She watched them scamper out and take to the branches that surrounded her palace in the treetops, and then sat back and tried to understand, for herself, what she had said.

John had warned her that the dreams would come and they would be deep and sometimes terrible, and there were parts of this one she believed herself presently imprisoned in that were, but there was also beauty and the reciprocal love between the Aieu and herself. How many more dream lives would she need to experience, she wondered, before waking? This one began with her opening her eyes, staring up into the pale faces of a hunting party of the people of the jump-bone animal. Later, when she'd come to learn their language, they told her that even though many of them thought her dead when they'd found her lying on the flat stone next to the pool, their herb witch listened closely, placing her ear to the blue queen's ear and could hear, though very weak, the faint murmur of thoughts still alive in her head. Then, slowly, by employing a treatment of their most powerful natural drugs and constantly moving her limbs, they'd brought her around to consciousness.

Zadiiz was roused from her reverie by the approach of one of her subjects. He was agitated and began spouting in the Aieu gibberish before he'd even reached her side. “An intruder, an assassin,” he was shouting, waving his needle-sharp jump-bone in the air. She shook her head and put both hands up, palms facing outward to indicate he should slow down. He took a deep breath and bowed, placing his weapon on the floor at her feet. “What is this intruder?” she asked, feeling so weary she could hardly concentrate on his description.

He put the two longest fingers of each of his three-fingered
hands, pointing atop his wrinkled forehead. She understood and nodded. He then made as blank an expression as he could with his face, closing his eyes, turning his mouth into a perfect “O.” She nodded. When he saw she was following him, he held his right hand up as high as he could and then leaped up to show the stranger's height. Last, he said, “Thula,” which meant “deadly.” In response, she made a fist, and he responded by lifting his weapon and exiting out upon the treetops to summon the forces of the Aieu.

As old and tired as she was, there still burned within her a spark of envy for those who now swarmed away from the hive to meet the threat of this new enemy. She lit her pipe, ran her hand across the old crone stubble on her chin, and, with a vague smile, found in her memory an image of herself when she could still run and climb and fight. It hadn't taken her long, once the Aieu had brought her around, before she was back on her feet and practicing competing with the best hunters and wrestlers her rescuers had among them. She'd taken to the treetops as though she'd been born in the lace forest, and a few days after they'd demonstrated for her the jump-bone-throwing technique, she was more accurate and deadly with it than those who were still young before the jump-bone animal had been hunted to extinction.

But it was in the war against the Fire Hand that she'd proven herself a general of keen strategic insight and unfailing courage. Utilizing the advantage of the treetops, and employing stealth and speed to defeat an enemy of greater number, she'd helped the Aieu turn back the bloodthirsty hordes that had spilled down over the high lip of the crater and flooded the forest. It was this victory that had elevated her to the status of royalty among them. She drew on her pipe, savoring the rush of imagery from the past. As the smoke twined up toward the center of the hive, a distant battle cry sounded from the forest, and in the confusion of her advanced age, she believed it to be her own.

The victory shouts of the Aieu warriors woke her as they led their prisoner into the hive. The giant indigo creature, wings bound with woven white vine around its chest, hands tied together at the wrists in front, a choker around its muscular neck, strode compliantly forward, surrounded by its captors, who brandished jump-bones above their heads.

“Bring him into the light,” commanded Zadiiz, and they prodded the thing forward to stand in the glow of the two torches that flanked her throne. When she beheld the huge indigo form, she marveled at the effectiveness of her battle training on the Aieu, for it didn't seem possible that even all who lived in the treetop complex surrounding the hive could together subdue such a monster. “Good work,” she said to her people. Then her gaze came to rest on the emotionless, shell mask of a face with its simple holes for eyes and mouth, and the sight of it startled her. It shared, in its blank expression, the look of another face she could not help but remember.

It was in the dream that had preceded her waking into the lace forest and the people of the jump-bone animal, the first of her sleeping lives that John Gaghn had promised after he'd closed her in the cradle. In this one, she'd lived alone in a cave on a barren piece of rock, floating through deep space. She spent her time watching the stars, noting, here and there, at great distances, the slow explosions of galaxies, like the blossoming of flowers, and listening to endlessly varied music made by light piercing the darkness. A very long time passed, and she remembered the weight of her loneliness. Then one day, a figure appeared in the distance, heading for her, and slowly it revealed itself to be a large silver globe. Smoke issued from its back and it buzzed horribly, interfering with the natural song of the universe.

The vessel rolled down onto the deep sand beside the entrance to her cave. Moments later, a door opened in the side of it and out
stepped a man made of metal. The starlight reflected on his shiny surface and he gave off a faint glow. At first she was frightened to behold something so peculiar, but the metal man, whose immobile face was cast in an expression of infinite patience, spoke to her in a friendly voice. He told her his name was 49 and asked if he could stay with her until he managed to fix his craft. Zadiiz was delighted to have the company, and assured him he could.

She offered him some of the spotted mushrooms that grew on the inner walls of the cave, her only sustenance. They tasted to her like the flesh of the hurrurati. 49 refused, explaining that he was a machine and did not eat. Zadiiz didn't understand the idea of a robot, and so he explained that he had been made by a great scientist named Onsing, and that all of his parts were metal. He told her, “I have intelligence, I even have emotion, but I was made to fulfill the need of my inventor, whereas beings like you were made to fulfill your own desires.”

“What is your master's need?” asked Zadiiz.

“Onsing has passed on into death,” said 49, “but some time ago, while he still lived, he discovered through intensive calculation, using a mathematical system of his own devising and entering those results into a computer that not only rendered answers as to what was possible but also what could, given an infinite amount of time, be probable, that his sworn enemies, the Ketubans, would some day create a mischievous creature that could very likely manipulate the fate of the universe.”

Zadiiz simply stared at 49 for a very long time. “Explain ‘infinite' and ‘probable,'” she finally said.

The robot explained.

“Explain ‘fate,'” she said.

“Fate,” said 49, and a whirring sound could be heard issuing from his head as he stared at the ground. Sparks shot from his ears. “Well, it is the series of events beginning at the beginning of every
thing that will eventually dictate what must be. And all you would need to do to change the universe would be to undo one thing that must be and everything would change.”

“Why must it be?” she asked.

“Because it must,” said the robot. “So, to prevent this, Onsing created a machine of one thousand parts that could, once its start button was pressed, send out, in all directions, a wave across the universe that would eventually find this creature and melt it. When he had finished the machine, he hoped to always keep it running so that it could forever prevent the Ketubans from undermining fate.”

“And did he?” asked Zadiiz.

“Poor Onsing never had a chance to start his machine, because it was destroyed by the evil Ketubans, loathsome creatures, like steaming piles of organic waste with tentacles and too many legs. They used their psychic power to automatically disassemble the machine, and all of its individual parts flew away in as many different directions as there were pieces. Onsing, too determined to give up, but knowing he would not live long enough to rebuild the machine or find all of the parts scattered across the universe, created one thousand robots like me to go out into space and fetch them back. Nine hundred and ninety-nine of the robots have found their parts, and they have assembled all of the machine but for one tiny gear that is still missing. That is my part to find, and they wait for my success. Once I find it, I will return with it. It will be fitted into the machine. The robot that has been designed to press the start button on the machine will fulfill its task and the fate of the universe will be protected.”

“How long have you searched?” asked Zadiiz.

“Too long,” said 49.

Eventually, Zadiiz grew weary, as she always did when eating the mushrooms, and fell asleep. When she awoke, she found that
49 was gone from the cave. She ran outside only to discover that his sphere of a vessel was also gone. Some time later, she realized that the metal gear that had hung around her neck was missing, and the thought of having to live the rest of that lonely dream life without even the amulet's small connection to John Gaghn sent her into shock. Her mind closed in on itself, shut down, went blank. When she awoke, she was surrounded by the pale faces of the people of the jump-bone animal.

She surfaced from her memory, again surrounded by the Aieus' pale faces; this time in the hot and crowded hive. They'd been waiting in expectant silence for her to pronounce the fate of the assassin they'd brought before her. Zadiiz realized she'd had a lapse of awareness, and now tried to focus on the situation before her. She looked the horned figure up and down, avoiding another glimpse at the face. She wondered who could have sent this thing. Because of its unknown nature, its obvious power and size, she could not allow it to live. She was about to order that the creature be drowned in the white pool when she noticed the fingers on its left hand open slightly. Something fell from between them but did not continue on to the floor. It was caught and suspended by a lanyard looped through one of its small openings.