Shuteye for the Timebroker (36 page)

Her belly still cradled her last meal.

Tansy’s mind fell into a stuporous equanimity. So much inexplicable strangeness attendant on her dashed self-extinction afforded no purchase for fear or speculation.

Blue smote her eye like a revelation. Even this much color after an eternity of none precluded instant identification of shape. She quickened her pace, bringing more of the object into her sphere.

One bare leg, then another. Enamel blue like cloisonne, solidly planted on the nothingness. Then golden limbs somehow intermingled with the blue. Then two forms nestled together.

A naked blue man stood upright. Large-muscled, well-formed.

Legs wrapped around his waist and locked at the small of his back, a nude golden woman clung to his neck. Heavy ripe curves.

Facing Tansy, the man cupped the gold woman’s buttocks. The pair were joined in coitus, but unmoving. Still: not statues, but flesh, however oddly toned.

Their faces indiscernible, because pressed against, melted, into the flesh of each other’s shoulder.

Tansy stopped.

Sound as of ripping cloth, and the male and female faces pulled away from their epidermal interknittedness, whole and unbloody. The man’s eyes opened, lips parting for speech.

Tansy’s parents had died in an auto accident when she was eight years old. Yet here was her father, whole and youthful, recognizable as if in an old photo, despite the transmogrification of his skin.

“Tansy, you’re here.”

“Am I dead, then?”

The hairy back of her father’s head flanked her mother’s face on the left. Had they turned, or had Tansy moved around them without volition?

“I don’t know, dear. Are we?”

Her mother’s loving eyes and immemorial smile eased somewhat Tansy’s sheer horrified confusion, gentled the whole mad experience.

“What—what is this place?”

“A land for becoming.”

“Becoming what?”

Her father grinned in the old manner. “Whatever you have in you to become.”

“Nothing. I’ve nothing inside me. I’m empty. Always have been.”

“Is that so? What about your last meal?”

Tansy placed a hand on her stomach. Was it larger? Something seemed to stir within her, behind and below her belly.

“I don’t understand. That pie? What could that do for me? One meal changes nothing.”

“If you say so …”

“Don’t mock me! How can I possibly accomplish something in this place when I couldn’t do anything right in the other world?”

Golden laugh lines crinkled. “By following your destiny all the way to its end, then beyond.”

“Will you help me, Mother?”

“No. We can’t. But your brother can.”

“Brother? I don’t have any brother.”

Even her father’s teeth were blue. “He was to be your older sibling. But he couldn’t stay. He died when he was born—or was born when he died. He’s here now. His name is Mercator.”

“Where is he? How do I find him?”

“Just keep on.”

Heads lowered into shoulders, blue melding seamlessly into gold, gold into blue.

The pair dwindled, shrinking rapidly, verging toward microscopic invisibility.

“Mother! Father! Don’t leave me!”

Empty bubble of personal space. Neither cold nor warm. Faint saline lilt to the air. Nothing for it but to trudge onward.

Time and space played hide-and-seek.

The marketplace was empty this early in the morning. Shabby stalls shielding goods behind rope-lashed canvas fronts. Cobbles wet with morning dew. Organic trash, rinds and crusts and shells. The smell of human urine from a puddle in the corner of two walls. A dog appeared, red from tail-tip to snout, like a new brick. Sniffed the puddle, then lifted its leg to add its commentary.

Tansy dropped, suddenly exhausted, to the cobbles. Rested her back against the timbered side of a stall. Head sagged forward, chin into chest. Eyes closed.

Sounds of the marketplace coming alive around her. Shuffling feet, bantering among merchants, children playing tag, crockery clinking, cartwheels trundling.

No one accosted her. Something like a sun rose higher in something like a sky, its heat evidenced across her slumped form.

“Tansy. It’s me, your brother.”

Eyelids snapping open.

A handsome man in his thirties, red all over like the dog. Crimson eidolon. Bare-chested, loincloth around his middle, sandals laced up his legs. Smiling. Hand extended to help her to her feet.

Siblings almost the same height. Eyes on the same level. Searching his face for resemblance to her own. Uncertainty. Yet a sense of having encountered him somewhere before.

“Sorry I’m late. I was busy with another. But you must be famished! Let’s get you something to eat. Then we can go home.”

“Home?”

“Your home here.”

The young girl who served them bowls of hot porridge was colored the same as Mercator. So were all the teeming inhabitants of this low-built, diffuse city. A tableau of devils.

Spoon poised halfway to her lips, Tansy noted her own unchanged flesh, anomalous in this strange city.

“Won’t I stand out here?”

“No one will mind. But perhaps it’s best if you stay mostly indoors. You can be useful without leaving home.”

“All right.”

There was always something to sew. Humble garments and bedclothes in need of repair, dropped off by a steady stream of citizens, all incarnadined, tracking dust and unintelligible allusions to the life of the city into the adobe apartments to which Mercator had brought her.

Tansy developed callouses on her thumb and index finger after the first few weeks. The coarse thread and crude needles, the heavy fabrics, the misshapen buttons. Piles of unwashed garments redolent of their wearers’ body odors. These were the constants of her days. Along with the shifting infall of roseate sunlight through the glassless window, the parched heat, the simple meals of bread and olives, eggs and beans, honey and crisped locusts, delivered by Mercator.

Her brother?

If so, in name and attitude only. They hadn’t been raised together, in any life she recalled. Had no long-term bonds or familially inculcated taboos delimiting their relationship.

Naturally she thought of having him sexually: during their meals, or when he slept on his mat of woven river reeds next to hers. But never made any advance, for fear of rebuff. Nor did Mercator ever exhibit toward her any such impulses.

And her belly. That got bigger every day.

But how? She had never. Not anywhere, any when.

One day a new patron, a bearded merchant with a withered arm, came with robes to mend. Having gone through months of similar visits, Tansy thought nothing much of the man at first. But after he left, his image troubled her. When Mercator returned to their apartments at eventide, from whatever errands occupied him during the daylight, with small piquant tomatoes and salted fish for supper, Tansy inquired about the man.

“He was your lover in another life. You wronged him. Now you must mend his clothes.”

A momentary stasis blanked her mind. “All—all of these men and women and children who have come—”

“Yes, of course. The entire city, in fact. You were intimate with them all, down the millennia. Didn’t you know?”

“I—did I hurt them all?”

“And they you. It was inevitable.”

“And their redress to me?”

“Yet to come. Or already obtained. Or otherwise obviated.”

Tansy had a hard time falling asleep. Her mind turned over Mercator’s words ceaselessly. But also her gravid, unbalanced body contributed its own discomforts.

One day every week Mercator took her out of their quarters for a stroll through the city, always ending at a favorite park, ripe with shade, where clownfish swam through the pod-strewn boughs of acacia trees. There, a peace descended on Tansy and she could momentarily forget her expiatory drudgery.

The twinges came one morning. Hardly commensurate with the enormous swell of her belly. Not what she had expected from all she had heard. More like imagined sexual tremors than splitting pains.

“Mercator, help me. I think it’s my time—”

“Of course. Step into the tub.”

A stone trough occupied one corner of their two rooms. Bamboo pipes brought rainwater down in a gravity feed from a tank on the roof.

Naked, Tansy climbed awkwardly into the tub. Her own pink flesh looked alien to her now. Seismic tremors propagated outward from her center. She drew her legs up, knees to chest. Mercator kneeled by the trough and stroked her brow, murmuring wordless assistance.

A slithering, rippling ex-vagination brought an orgasmic sense of release and relief. The water in the trough crimsoned with afterbirth. Her swollen midriff deflated.

The blue and gold eel stretched nearly as long as Tansy was tall. Thick around as her wrist. Its black eyes gleamed with intelligence. Twisting lithely in its limited compass, it tested its newborn muscles, visibly exulting in its power and gracefulness.

“Your child. You must take good care of him and fulfill his every wish. By doing so, you will come to where you need to be.”

The eel reared six inches of its head out of the water.

“Mother,” it piped, in a lilting voice like the notes of a flute, “I am so happy to meet you again at last.”

The sharp pebbles and grit beneath her feet scored shallow cuts in her bare soles. The pitch-smeared canvas bag dragged on its single shoulder strap, slapping against her hip with every step, sloshing out irreplaceable driblets of water. She changed the bag from one side to another at intervals, but this resulted only in distributing the pain evenly. Her throat was parched.

Mercator held her hand as they walked, but could not assume the burden of carrying her child.

Not that she had ever asked him to.

Tansy had named the eel Plum Sun for his two-toned skin.

“How much farther? I feel as if we’ve been walking for years.”

“Not too many more miles. But I fear the last few are the hardest. And I’ll have to leave you, Sister.”

“Must you really?”

“It’s ordained. And I could not help you in what comes next.”

Tansy recalled the dull, laborious months in their tiny apartment, which now seemed like paradise. “Will I ever see you again?”

“You already have.”

The foothills gave way to a crumbling talus slope that formed the skirts of the cloud-piercing mountain, bold and brutish as a soldier. But the mountain showed some charity. Cold rivulets clear as diamonds afforded a chance to wash her abused feet, slake her thirst, and replenish Plum Sun’s carrier. Overhead, a small school of sharks and pilot fish moved through the skies.

“Thank you, Mother. All your exertions on my behalf will be repaid a thousandfold.”

Tansy set one scarred foot upon the slope, then another. Mercator remained behind.

“This is where we must part?”

“Yes.”

“Good-bye, Uncle. I appreciated your companionship.”

“Farewell, Plum Sun. Farewell, Sister.”

A hundred yards up the precipitous slope, bent almost double to maintain her balance, Tansy looked back.

Some trick of distance or atmosphere made Mercator resemble a squat bearded gnome in shabby clothes.

The razored crags and ledges by which Tansy ascended the upper reaches of the mountains tormented her hands as much as the rubble of the endless plain had gashed her feet. The weight of Plum Sun in his sodden pouch threatened to loosen her every handhold. Her bare toes scrabbled at minute ridges.

Once, falling, she was saved by a pod of dolphins. The creatures buoyed her up till she could regain her grip.

After that incident, Tansy redoubled her vigilance and efforts. But she knew she was drawing on a shallow well.

“Wake up, Mother. Please, wake up.”

Tansy sat with her back against a large cold boulder. The carrier holding Plum Sun rested on its oblate bottom upright by her side. Out of the bag protruded the blue-and-gold head of the eel. Somehow its limited expression conveyed encouragement.

Tansy brought her hand up to her face and smeared blood across her visage in an attempt to clear the cobwebs from her vision.

“Are we—are we where we need to be?”

“Almost. The Fountain of Flames is just ahead.”

Weariness like lead in her bones. Struggling to her feet. Trudging ahead up a mild slope. Through a tall defile whose tight blank walls resembled the chute through which cattle were led to slaughter. Fossils embedded in the walls mocked her persistence. The distinctive shadow of a circling manta ray overhead came and went.

A broad plateau of roughly an acre in extent. Pillared in the middle on a rude slate hearth: a thick whistling column of green fire, sourceless, inexhaustible, braided of a thousand viridescent shades. Around the Fountain of Flames, the tumbled columns of some long-extinct fane.