HE BLED QUICKSILVER
1563 4D
Andrew gasped and reeled. All the space before him danced with forms of multicolored light, forms he couldn’t identify, forms that ate themselves and birthed themselves and kissed and devoured and secreted each other, flesh gears and orchids made of water, trailing infinite vinelike regresses in whorls and bars and immense gestures of dimension, all moving and twining and vanishing and rising again from emptiness.
“Come, this is what you call the control room.” Onnhasshakh said to Andrew and Jeddin, and the shifting forms consumed them all in a dance that left them sitting on a dark floor in a circle, their own faces and hands and bodies blearing and condensing into light and sureness. The vast dance settled into a soft throb of edges; Andrew looked around at a small room, bounded only by a few silhouetted pedestal tables, perched on an invisible pinnacle among velvet blackness and unending stars.
In the center of the circle of Onnhasshakh and Turiosten and the newcomer and Jeddin and Andrew, a red rose sprouted and bloomed from a wide patch of wet, seething black soil. “Take it,” Onnhasshakh said to Andrew. “Inhale its smell, and the ship will do what you wish.”
“But—" Turiosten began, and stopped. Andrew bent forward and took the stem of the rose. It came free in his hand, writhing to clasp his wrist; thorns grew and impaled his fingers with musk and lemon; he bled quicksilver that ran into hairline rivulets in the black earth before him. Drinking the pain with greed, he drew the rose to his nostrils, and sucked in its sweetness. A petal fell to his knee and vanished.
The stars and their sky climbed toward the zenith. Dizziness seized Andrew. A flash of light; darkness leaped up around them, and then began to sink once more. They rose in a shaft. A plaintive voice sang orange and green light at them, and then died softly away.
“The loading bay closed itself as we left,” Onnhasshakh said. “We are ascending the shaft of the spaceport approach.” The ship lifted into a russet sunset that cast warmth on Jeddin‘s white face. The aliens, already aglow with their own light, burned brighter. Arhnhashokha laughed little scrambling white blossoms.
“Is this the start of a new day, or the end of an old one?” Andrew asked, looking out at the pelts of the herding clouds grazing in a majestic sweep from a pale, throbbing, blue-brown sun to the opposite horizon. “I thought it was sunset. What’s wrong with the sun?”
“It can be sunrise, or sunset,” Jeddin said, “and the sun is in resonance, which is what the aliens call qaqanhialh. I wonder what Nazrelo and the others are doing?”
“Oh, morons,” Andrew muttered, “I forgot about them in all this.” He tried to get up, but the Turiosten figure held up a hand.
“Don’t,” she said. “Let Jeddin go. You are the guide now.” Jeddin stood, twisted like a silk veil in the wind, and vanished.
“Where shall I go?”
Onnhasshakh said to Andrew, “What do you long for?”
“Don’t ask me that. If I could, I’d go back to the farm before all this happened, I’d go back to the City with Leil, I’d undo all the nightmares.”
“Go, and look.”
“How?”
Onnhasshakh and Turiosten smiled at him, and he reached deep inside, and he found the farm where he and Leil had lived, and he took the ship down to hover, as tiny as a bee by its cup of nectar, near the shoulder of a Leil with sun-darkened skin. “We’re so small,” he said in wonder, looking out at the large form of his wife in their summer mountain valley. He raised the rose again to his nostrils, and sniffed, and the ship descended through soil and rock and emerged scurrying across the floor of the Poly Town bar he had loved so much; and Andrew, now the size of a pinfly, stared into the huge dead young eyes of his long-gone friend Gej Tonda, killed in the second fight they had had with the Astrans.
Flicking away like a spark, he toured the City; time thickened to stone. At last he brought the ship to the vast twilight sky again and looked out at the stars. “There, now,” he said, and clutched the rose’s stem in a spasm of yearning, and the stars unreeled.
“Where do you go?” Onnhasshakh.
“To find our old home,” Andrew said.
“Which one? You have many.”
“The stories called it Earth.”
“Ah, that. Which one are you seeking? The sapphire and emerald one? The earth of nova iron? Or the one that dances fire and snow? And in which sheaf of worldlines will you seek it?
“Isn’t there just one? That’s what they told us.”
“There is just one of everything. One root has many tendrils, and they are roots of more tendrils.”
Andrew stared at the schools of stars whirling away at his approach. “I’ll choose one. Time is no problem, is it?” He laughed and his two hands became a thousand fingers clutching a brambling thicket of roses in the darkness at his feet.
“Time is all that any problem is. Do you wish to return to your life?”
Andrew stilled his excited hands. “You mean the spaceport, and Leil dead, and Arlen dead too, and— But I still haven’t found Engel, and Janny‘s back there.”
“Nothing will stay the same. Nothing ever does, not even the past.”
“The past was better.”
“But it was the past, and it led to what happened. If you go back and rebuild it, it will change again. Do you understand the end of things, the end when you can no longer choose? What will happen to Engel and Janny when the new past flowers?”
“Why should that change? If I have Leil, does that mean I lose them?”
“Do you not know? The line of your world is a bridge finer than a hair and sharper than a blade. For every firm step you take on that bridge, a thousand steps into darkness vanish. For every holy thought you kindle, a thousand deadly thoughts burn in its fire. For every innocent breath you draw, a thousand destroying gales are stilled. Go and get Leil again, and you will see.”
Leil stood before him, and her face was glad, and he seized her in his arms. Before he could whisper a word in her scented hair, Arlen snatched her away, and she laughed.
“Leil, fight him,” Andrew urged.
“Arlen is mine,” she said, her voice breathless with excitement. “Goodbye, Andrew.”
He stood dumbfounded as she embraced Arlen; they twined in a passionate kiss.
Andrew turned to Onnhasshakh. “You created this for me. Take it away.”
Onnhasshakh shrugged. “No, it is your own making. You can return to the path or stay in your makings.”
Andrew tried again and again, until his heart wearied and his clenching hand shook and loosened on the stem.
Leil came to him, and he killed her in a fit of rage.
He came to Leil, and she took his mind and made him a biopuppet for her lover.
They had seven children: Engel, and Tauro and Tuanu the twins, and Cressi and lost Martela, and Maiji and finally Janny. Arlen burned their home, and all but Engel and Maiji and Janny died in the fire.
Arlen imprisoned him, drugged him, and went to burn the farm, but changed his mind when he saw Leil. He decided to pursue a relationship with her, finding ways to turn her against Andrew while Andrew struggled to recover his memory of what Arlen had done to him.
Their five children who survived the fire found them in the streets of the City, tore them to pieces, and ate them.
Exhausted after dozens of tries, he said, “Onnhasshakh, I will stay on my path.”
The alien smiled brilliance. “As you wish. The bridge awaits you.”
A tornado of meteor-light coalesced into Jeddin. He smiled at Andrew. “They’re asleep.”
“Who?” Andrew roused himself from the spell of Onnhasshakh‘s words.
“Nazrelo and the others. Just humans in innerspace, the way it always is. But one is stirring.”
A shudder made Andrew clench his teeth in an effort to hold still. “Am I dead?”
“Not at all. Let go of this room, let go of the flower, and you’ll see the ship in the plain world. Just a room inside a hull.”
Andrew tried it. The rose clung, thorns hooked in him, stem clutching; he pulled free, bleeding honey and citron from deep wounds; the ship bucked and he nearly fell over on his side. The room around him dimmed to shadowy walls and a door. Just inside the door, the dim forms of the two soldiers who had accompanied him and Jeddin now lay asleep on the floor, sprawled in awkward collapsed angles. Andrew dived into himself again, into the reeling uncertainty of space.
Onnhasshakh now held the rose in her glowing hand. As Andrew recovered his place in the circle, she passed it to him, saying, “Now. Make us a fresh line through the changing world.”
The rose grew, twined, its thorns again sealing it to him, until it spread huge blood-red petals to reveal a glowing patch of light. The light itself bloomed into the miniature head of a woman. Her olive-brown face carried etched lines of severity and power; the collar of her gray military coverall showed the tiny arrayed sigils of highest rank.
The woman stared at Andrew. Her eyes widened. In a commanding voice, she said from the heart of the rose, “Who are you? What are you doing on the alien vessel?”
