Nefertity lowered her hand to touch its head. “Is this all that remains?” she asked Hobi. “The others like you—they are dead?”
“Oh, no! These are just— rasas. Regenerated corpses. You know,” he added lamely.
“Regenerated corpses,” the nemosyne repeated slowly. She looked past the rasa at the others in the darkness. “All of them? Dead? But that is a terrible thing to have done! Why have they come to me?”
Hobi shrugged. “Well, no—I mean, they’re not really dead, not anymore—” He looked at the floor, ashamed. “I’m not sure why they’re here, really.”
The nemosyne drew her hand back from the rasa. Her voice was cold. “What happened, then? Was it more bombs? Or the nuclear tides? What happened?”
Hobi felt hot, in spite of the dank room. “I don’t know,” he muttered. “No one knows.”
“Europe? Africa? The L-5 colonies?” The boy shook his head and shrugged. “All of it gone? You remember nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“Where are we now?”
“Araboth. Araboth—it had another name once, that’s what Nasrani said. Texas.”
“Araboth.” Motes of light glittered in front of her face. “Texas. Not Chicago?”
The boy looked away, defeated. “I never heard of Chicago.”
“Mother,” the rasa interrupted, and tugged at her hand. “Tell us again. Stories. The Frankenstein monster.”
“Little Red-Hood,” whispered another.
“Amelia Earhart.”
“The Woman in the Moon.”
“Stories,” the nemosyne said slowly. She turned and walked to the center of the room. A slithering sound as the pallid forms followed her, staying just outside her nimbus of shimmering light. “I have been telling my stories to corpses.”
Her eyes flashed as she pointed again at Hobi. “You have forgotten all the rest of it. The cities, the space stations. The wars, the gynocides, the Bibliochlasm?”
Hobi bit his lip. Her words frightened him. These were forbidden things, things that had to do with the First Days, the lost days; things to do with Outside.
“Yes,” he admitted. He glanced about the room, trying to see where the door was, praying for Nasrani to appear, or for the nemosyne to be distracted long enough for him to escape. “Yes. We have forgotten all of it.”
Nefertity nodded. Her body pulsed a deeper blue now, and her voice had grown louder. “But there are women and men perhaps who might want to remember? Who might have need of me?”
Hobi swallowed nervously. “I don’t think so. I mean, it might be better if you just stayed here. At least until Nasrani comes back. He would know.”
“Please, Mother,” the rasa beseeched her. In the darkness its eyes were wide, almost childlike. “More stories. Please. We waited, we waited.”
The nemosyne gazed down at the rasa, at the other white soft figures crouched in the shadows. Her jadeite eyes glittered, and she nodded as she extended her arms.
“Yes,” she said, beckoning them to her. “Yes: come closer.”
The first rasa looked back at the others, then slowly they dragged themselves forward, until all huddled in a semicircle at the nemosyne’s feet.
“Yes,” whispered Nefertity. There was a loud humming; when she spoke again it was in a clear high voice, the voice Hobi had heard when first he entered the chamber. “Let the dead listen to me, and learn, and remember if no one else will—”
And she began to recite.
“I was, being human, born alone;
I am, being woman, hard beset;
I live by squeezing from a stone
The little nourishment I get.
In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile…
“Now I will tell you the story of ‘The Dreaming Child,’ by Isak Dinesen, the Baroness Blixen…”
As she spoke a single great sigh rippled through the dim chamber, soft and comforted as a child’s. But as Hobi gazed up at her it seemed to him that the nemosyne’s features looked less lovely than they had before; that within her crystal body her adamantine heart did not burn as steadily as when she had slept, and dreamed that Sister Loretta Riding was alive.
Chapter 7
IF YOU HAVE GHOSTS
If you have ghosts
then you have everything.
SAJUR PANGGANG WAS ON Principalities when he heard the news of Shiyung’s murder.
“The margravine Shiyung,” a moujik guard told him, his face swollen from weeping. “How can this be, Your Grace, I cannot understand it….”
The Architect Imperator turned away, so that the guard would not see his expression. “The Prophets tell us that there is little we can truly understand, my brother,” he said softly, his mouth twisting into a smile. “Only the Architects can understand all, only the Architects….”
He left the guard sniveling on his watch and wandered along the Mulla Nasrudin Promenade. The stench of the medifacs was nearly overwhelming here, but the Architect Imperator seemed not to notice. He crossed the promenade heedless of the clots of offal beneath his feet, the clouds of mucid steam that belched from the grates beneath his velvet-soled boots. Those moujiks who saw him, in his black suit with his turban of office slightly askew, pressed their fists to their heads and bowed, and afterward marveled that the most powerful of the Imperators had been so moved by the margravine’s death that he ventured thus onto the hellish rim of Principalities, that his grief took him to the immensity of the Lahatiel Gate itself.
The truth was, the Architect Imperator had awakened some hours after his son’s departure, to a scene of quiet domestic wreckage—broken glass, empty bottles, the replicant Khum’s confusion at being left without commands. He had spent several minutes wandering around the house, not, as one might expect, checking the progress of the Architects but looking for a particular robe he had worn ten years before during Æstival Tide, a robe his wife Angelika had given him for the festival. He finally found it in the chamber that had been Angelika’s dressing room, the robe wrapped in tissue paper scented faintly of lavender. He put it on, smoothing the sumptuous folds of forest-green jacquard and striking poses in front of a tall mirror. He was mindful that the color made his pallor stand out rather too severely, and that in his present state—unshaven, hair awry, a streak of blood on his chin where he had rubbed it with his cut hand—he looked more than a trifle deranged. Then he set out for the gravator that would take him down to Principalities.
Beneath the Lahatiel Gate he finally paused. Hundreds of feet above him the barricade gleamed a blinding argent. Scaffolds swayed precariously where a few unfortunate moujiks still worked, polishing the steel ribs and spars in preparation for the timoria. But it was not the sight of the Gate that had drawn Sajur Panggang here, but what lay beneath it.
“Your Grace.”
Another moujik guard. This one obviously had not yet heard of Shiyung’s death. An obsequious smile creased his flat face, and he bowed so low that his stained violet sash trailed the ground. “Your servants are honored—”
“Yes, yes, thank you.” The Architect Imperator gave him a small smile and waggled his fingers. He looked distractedly about the cavernous space, and began walking toward a barred doorway to one side of the Gate. The guard’s face fell. He hurried after the slender man, pulling at his sash in dismay.
“Your Grace! It is not safe within there, it is too near the festival, it is starting to wake—”