No Life But This (18 page)

‘What have you done?’ she whispered, terrified. She had finally understood what I’d been clumsily trying to say.
She rejected the thought the moment the implications struck her, and she pushed me away, pacing up and down in agitation. ‘No. No, this – I’ve got to be misunderstanding something.’

I shook my head, silently pleading with her to believe me.

‘Otto, look at me. Are you trying to tell me that suddenly you’re Xavier?’

‘
Can’t you see me?
’ I said, reaching for her hand.

She snatched her hand away
paced into the centre of the floor, holding her head in dismay. ‘Oh, this is insane. What have I done to you?’

‘
Nothing,’
I signed. ‘
It’s just me.’

‘Then where’s Otto, suddenly?’ she demanded. I reached for her. ‘No! What’s going on? I need to talk to Otto. Otto!’

I grabbed her hand anyway. Signing was far too slow, and whispering wasn’t intense enough. ‘
He’s fine. I’m fine, we’re fine. But
now you don’t have to worry,’
 I told her. ‘
I’m here for you.’
I reached for her neck, her shoulders, all the places I knew she wanted to be touched. ‘
Just kiss me,’
I begged. ‘
Kiss me, and you’ll see me. You know you will.’

‘Oh, god, I gotta get you to a doctor,’ she groaned. She headed back for the door.

I – or, Xavier, really – slammed her against the wall. I was not going to let her run away
from me again, not now. She was always running away. I’d made that mistake before. I wasn’t letting her go again. ‘
Don’t. Please, what’s a doctor going to do? Pump me full of drugs? I feel
great
. I feel better than I’ve ever felt in my life.’

‘And who’s telling me this? You, or Xavier?’

‘
There’s no difference,’
I insisted. ‘
You loved me, you loved him. And I’m here! Whoever I am, it’s me. Rose.’
I had to make her understand. ‘
I know you’re broken. You’re torn apart from what those vampires have done to you, and I watch it every day, and I
need
 to help you. And I can’t. I couldn’t. You have no idea what it’s like, wanting to touch you every single second of every single day. But now I can. I’m here! Please!
’ Xavier’s broken heart screamed out, and I sobbed. ‘
Please don’t leave me again.’

Rose was tortured. The expressions on my face were Xavier’s, not Otto’s. There were times she’d dreamed about what it would be like if a young Xavier could come back to her. But it was a fantasy, not something she’d actually wanted in any real sense. She would never have wanted to trade Otto’s life for it. She reached up to touch my cheek. ‘But Otto. Otto, you gentle soul. It’s not real. It was
one thing when you knew it wasn’t, but this is madness.’

‘I don’t care,’ I whispered. ‘Not real, not right, not going to last. I don’t care about any of it anymore. I love you.’

‘Otto, it’s another symptom. It’s got to be. You could be dying …’

‘Good!’ I hissed. ‘
Let
me die! I’d rather die like this with you beside me than live another god damned wrong life!’

Rose’s eyes went wide. ‘Oh, god,
it is you, isn’t it.’ she said, suddenly horrified. She remembered something Xavier had said to her, the first time he’d finally spoken to her properly after she came out of stasis.
I split in two inside,
he had said.
Like I’d failed to take the life I was meant to have, and someone else’s life came and stole all those years. There was me, father, grandfather, businessman. And then this angry,
wounded teenage boy surged up from out of nowhere.
She sagged against the wall, overwhelmed, and I held her up, like I used to do when we were young. She was always so weak, so damaged. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

I let my head droop, cheek to cheek. ‘Just hold me, Rose,’ I whispered into her ear. ‘I don’t care who you think I am. I just don’t want to be all alone anymore.’

‘Oh, god, don’t do
this to me.’ Rose said, both tortured and annoyed. I was tempting her beyond all sense. I laughed, and it sounded strange. It was strange to her, too. My expressions were Xavier’s, but my laugh was Otto’s. She shrugged me off and made me look at her. ‘You’re not well,’ she said firmly.

‘This body is dying, I know that,’ I whispered. ‘It’s okay.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ she said.

I didn’t
have a reply. I stared at her, pleading silently, and Rose’s eyes slowly softened. ‘Okay, sit down,’ she said, and pulled me to the bed. She sat down beside me and put her hand carefully in mine. ‘How much of you is still Otto? Can you show me what happened?’

It was a difficult memory to find. Most of my Xavier memories were carefully reinforced by Rose’s own, but my Otto memories were all my
own, and sort of buried under my new persona. I found it, though, and gave it all to her quickly. How Rose couldn’t save him, and the blood soaked through so quickly, dropping me into the old man’s pain. How he wanted to die, and I dragged him back, and got more than I bargained for. Rose probed for more, but I took my hand away. ‘That’s it,’ I whispered.

‘That’s not it,’ Rose said.

‘Yes it
is,’ I said firmly.

‘So, what, you just took Otto over?’

‘He invited me,’ I whispered. I reached up to touch her cheek. ‘Otto loves you, too. I couldn’t have you in that old man’s body, and your friend couldn’t have you without me. Don’t send me away again,’ I begged. ‘I’ve missed you so much.’

Rose bowed her head. She wouldn’t let herself say it, but her thoughts were clear enough.
‘I’ve missed
you, too.’

‘
So stop thinking about right and wrong and real. Just kiss me.’

‘But Otto …’

‘Kiss me,’ I whispered. ‘You can take me to the doctor tomorrow, and we’ll worry about this perishable form then. Kiss me.’ She was very worried. ‘Rose, please. All I want to do is hold you. Just hold you. I’ve been aching to hold you,’ I breathed. ‘No one knows you better than I do. No one ever will. Just
close your eyes, and it’ll be me. Completely me.’

She hesitated.

‘Know that I love you, always,’ I whispered.

That did it. I’d known it would. She winced as if I’d twisted a knife. I reached down to kiss her, and she didn’t even have a moment when she thought to turn away. I clung to her like I’d been missing her for a lifetime. Always. That was Rose and Xavier all over. Love you. All ways.

She curled up beside me as if we’d never been apart, exhausted from the day’s exertions. We’d been in stasis just that morning. Very quickly, she was asleep. I knew it by the way her mind suddenly grew around me, roaring silently with colour. Oh, yes, god, give me this. Give me this every night of my life. I almost didn’t care how short that life might be.

(Pretty short at the rate
you’re going.)

‘
Don’t ruin this,’
I told 42, told myself. ‘
I haven’t shared anyone’s dreams since you died.’

(I miss those sometimes.)

I actually wasn’t sure which part of my head had said that, if it was ‘her’ or ‘me’. Whoever it was, 42’s mocking voice stopped, and I was left with nothing but Rose. It didn’t take long before my eyes closed and mind was caught up, whisked away, drowned in
the ocean of her subconscious. I hadn’t realized how tired I was. It felt like the day had lasted over seventy years. Whatever my dreams would have been, they were completely subsumed by her. I spent half the night immersed in her, wild bursts of colour and strange insights. It gave me solace. But sometime during the night, we rolled away from each other. My subconscious seized on the moment of solitude.

I was in a garden. Rose’s garden, from UniCorp estates, but Rose’s internal briars tangled over everything. I knew I was in a dangerous place.

‘It’s not fair that you’re dying.’

It was Xavier. He was standing in the middle of a clearing on the path where Rose used to meet him. He was young – not more than eighteen. I barely recognized his face compared to the old man. But I’d seen enough of
Rose’s portraits. I knew full well who it was.

‘
You didn’t ask,’
I told him. ‘
You were screaming a little too loud to have heard me even if you had.’

He sighed. ‘It wouldn’t have mattered. You think the old man isn’t dying?’

‘He’s got years ahead of him. I may not have more than a month … even a week.’

‘Suppose I’ll have to make the best of the time I’ve got.’

I felt bad about it, though.
‘Rose is confused.’

‘I’m confused,’ he admitted.

‘Are you regretting your choice? Is this body not to your liking?’

‘It’s not to yours,’ he told me pointedly. I sat down heavily on a bench. The briar roses twisted in the breeze, creeping closer to me. Their scent was the musty scent of the plankton. ‘Do you regret it?’

I thought about this. Everything I’d thought I was had fallen away, like
rotting apples off a neglected tree. My ethics, my sense of self, my serenity, my acceptance. I’d worked so hard for so long to own who I was, to accept my life as mine. Now I’d abandoned it to wear the life of someone who had essentially died half a century ago. I’d put on Xavier like Mr Zellwegger’s old castoffs.

But I had Rose. And she wanted me. And strangely, even Xavier’s personality running
around in my head felt comforting. Like with 42.

I wasn’t alone.

As if thinking of her had summoned her, she was sitting on my other side.
(He’s not helping, 86,)
she told me.

‘I’m giving him what he wants,’ Xavier told her. ‘The chance to be who he wants to be.’

42 ignored him.
(How much room do you have in this brain?)
she asked me. (
How many of us can you keep alive? Me, him. You’ll be
keeping Rose too, at this rate. What’s going to happen to
you
?)

‘Maybe I’ll go away. Maybe that’s how I’ll die. I’ll let my body keep walking around, but I won’t be in it.’

(You don’t think it’ll be so easy. You don’t really think you can avoid death by leaving before you have to face it?)

‘
I’ve already faced it once!’
I stared at her. Her face held no guilt.
‘Why should I have to do it again?
Tell me why!’

42 cocked her head at me. She looked so young to me, suddenly. Thirteen. She never would grow up. (
You facing death was never my idea.)

And as happens in dreams, the entire memory came unbidden in a millisecond in my mind.

42 had been screaming down in the driveway. I had wrestled out of bed and to my window at the lab. 42 was down there, wrestling with two UniCorp security. I
pelted down the stairs in a flurry of panic. ‘
I’ll take her!
’ I signed furiously. ‘
Let her go!’

The security didn’t understand me, of course, but the two lab techs and the nurse who had come out to deal with the fuss glanced at me. ‘We’ll handle this, 86,’ the nurse told me. ‘Go back to bed.’

I backed off a bit. That was a direct order, and we were really supposed to obey the nurses and lab
techs. I was only thirteen, and none of us had really learned to fight yet. Apart from 42.

‘Get your burning hands off me, you over-zealous, trumped-up ratbag! You dare! You
dare!’
She was screaming blue murder, and lights were going on all over the lab as the rest of the EPs peered out in bewilderment.

‘We found her at the u
Night
ed,’ one of the UniCorp security was saying to the nurse. ‘Don’t
know how she snuck in. When last call came at two, she jumped up onto the stage and turned the music back on. All the other patrons started cheering. She nearly started a riot.’

I could barely hear them over 42’s shouts. ‘Let me go! Get
off!’
42 twisted and managed to get her hand on the security guard who was holding her. He’d been holding her by her shirt wrists, clearly to avoid exactly this.
He grunted with pain the moment she touched him, and looked tempted to hit her. He pushed her over his knee instead, shoving her bodily to the ground, and began wrestling with half of a pair of handcuffs which had already been put on one wrist. She’d fought so hard they hadn’t managed to get the other one on. They couldn’t touch her skin.

‘She’s been gone three days,’ said the nurse. ‘Is this
the first disturbance she’s caused?’

‘God, no!’ said the one who was wrestling with her. ‘Shut up, bitch!’

42 was screaming. I couldn’t take it anymore. ‘Stop!’ I squawked.

The sound was strange enough that everyone turned to stare at me, apart from 42, who kept struggling, but at least stopped screaming. ‘What the coit?’ said the security guard.

‘
I’ll take her,’
I signed to the nurse.

‘86,
I told you to go back to your room—’

I touched the back of her hand. ‘
I said I’ll take her!’
I told her with as much compulsion as I could muster. She swayed, more stunned by my action than influenced by it. I’d probably overdone it; I didn’t have as much control in those days. I knelt down and touched 42’s cheek. ‘
Just shut up for ten minutes and I’ll get you out of this.’

‘
Don’t,’
she was
thinking. ‘
Not you.’
But she didn’t fight.

I very calmly pushed the security guard off her and pulled her up beside me. Then I held my hand out for the key. ‘Now wait just a damn minute,’ said the other guard.

But the one who had been fighting 42 tried to bat my hand away, as I’d known he would. The moment he did, he found himself reaching for the key. I don’t know if I’d influenced him enough
to actually give it to me, but I snatched it from his hand before he’d had time to shake me off. I unlocked the cuff and pushed 42 towards the lab. ‘
Go!’
I handed the cuff back to the guard politely. ‘
Thank you,’
 I signed, then I ran after 42 before the lab techs had time to drag her back to her room.

I pushed past them and grabbed 42’s arm. ‘
I’ve got this,’
I signed, and ran.

42 ran with me,
but she stopped at the entry to my room. She was pale and sweating, and there were deep bruise-like shadows under her eyes. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I should go to my room.’

I took hold of her wrists and led her in with me, all the while telling her, ‘
Don’t. You’ve been gone for days, I worried about you. 11’s started getting sick, and 50’s getting dangerous and 99 is in hysterics. I’m all alone, here.’
I’d never been all alone before. 42 and I were best friends, peas in a pod, inseparable. The only two who could both send and receive without limits, without draining our energies, without going mad. We were the same mind in two bodies; she the voice, the strength, the shield; I the soul, the peace, the poet. But she’d been distancing herself since she started getting sick. First she’d pulled
away from me, for weeks. Then she’d disappeared completely, and I’d been going crazy.

She’d just needed to get away.

I didn’t want her to go.

We were both scared.

We’d fallen back into our dual equilibrium immediately, the perfectly shared mind. She realized it and tried to pull away again, but I wouldn’t let her. There were grass stains on her clothes and she stank of nicohol from the dance
club, but I didn’t care. It was such a relief to have my voice back. And she was in pain.

Nothing. It was nothing, she just needed to sleep.

She meant for me to let her go to her room, but I wouldn’t let her. I pulled her to my bed again – we often shared a bed. Contact was important for us, because it was the way we communicated, and there was nothing sexual about it. We were kids, for one.
For another, there were cameras everywhere. Privacy was not a luxury we were afforded at EP laboratories. 42 and I been sleeping beside and against each other since we were old enough to crawl. I was suddenly desperately afraid to be alone.

She didn’t want me to be afraid, but I couldn’t help it. So many of us had died. We had lost half a dozen of the simple ones. 17, 78 and 39 had already failed,
too. It seemed as if it was the ones with our gift who died fastest.

‘
It’s because we’re the least human,’
she told me.

‘
But we aren’t different physically. They’ve checked. We’re just susceptible to allergies and, well, blue.’

She had a different take on it. Human or not, whatever they called us. The UniCorp scientists had tried to play god, and we were the unholy result.

‘
You don’t really
believe in god.’

‘
God is an invention, the same way we are. God is bound to be flawed. Human beings can make nothing that isn’t flawed. It was nature who made man – and it took nature millennia. Human beings make some kind of biological sense. We are made from unholy alliances, the scientific mating of man and alien beast, an abomination that nature could never have created without several billion
years of evolution, and probably not even then.’

‘
You’ve been listening to the evangelists.’

No, she hadn’t. She’d found her own religion in the last few days. A religion of broken things. For the last three days she’d been breaking things all around ComUnity to prove it – hoverskiff windows and parking meters, credit machines, and even people’s faces when they tried to stop her. Everything
was broken. It was human nature that was flawed, and we were the result of it. Of course we were deteriorating. ‘
Whatever made them think they knew better than nature? We were bound to die from the moment they’d spliced us together. We have to pay for the sins of our
“
fathers
”
.’

I told her not to think that way, but she wasn’t listening. She felt very hot against me.

Without knowing how, I
knew she was dying. She pulled away. ‘I’m not!’ she said with finality. Then she winced and folded in on herself, as if in pain. ‘Get the nurse!’ she whispered to me. ‘Please, just get the nurse!’

I ran to the door to find the nurse on duty, but she was still outside placating the UniCorp security. I stabbed the emergency button – which was silent apart from the tiny beep in the cells of all
the nurses within call distance – and ran back to 42.

My real self told me to wake up. I didn’t want to see this part again. But all my skills at lucid dreaming were clearly part of the bits of my brain which had already gone down the vacuum drift. I was trapped experiencing it all again as I ran down the corridor, too slow already to stop what was happening.

42 was lying on the floor, blood
streaming from her eyes and ears. I knew the moment I saw it that she’d only told me to call the nurse to get me out of the room. She’d hoped to be gone by the time I came back. But she wasn’t so lucky. Death didn’t come as quickly as she’d hoped.

I couldn’t make myself wake up, but I couldn’t live it again. I tore away from my dream self, and watched instead. Watched helplessly as the two figures
on the floor twitched, and the young boy became drenched in the blood of his best friend. At least I wasn’t experiencing it again. The electrical cascade as the oxygen left her brain, flashing her life before her, before me, pouring her, entire, into my brain. And then the darkness. The death. But I remembered. I wished I could forget.

‘
Don’t make me do this again!’

I was in blackness now. Cold,
glittering blackness, like the false night sky above the Crystal Village. 42 was behind me, her warm hand on my shoulder.
(You shouldn’t have done it the first time.)

‘
What did you want me to do? Let you die alone?’

(Yes.)

I whirled, knocking her hand away. ‘
Not fair!’

42 cocked her head at me. So young.
(You suddenly think life should be fair? What’s fair about us? What’s fair about this?)

‘
I died once. I shouldn’t have to do it again! Not so soon!’

(That’s hardly my fault.)

I reached for her, hoping to hit her or hug her, I wasn’t sure which. It didn’t matter. She was out of my reach.

(But you couldn’t let me go.)

‘You ran away,’
I accused her.
‘You were going to leave without me. You left me
alone!’

(What choice did I have? I didn’t ask to die.)
She fell to the ground again
before me, blood pouring from her ears, seizing violently. Just like last time. My arms went out, but I couldn’t reach her. Instead, briar roses burst from her flesh, piercing me. The briars swirled around me, gripping us, pulling us. Pain stabbed me, a harsh lance of terror as the briars dragged me into the same icy death I had known once before. But this time I fought it, desperate not to leave,
to hold on to what I had – Rose and life and everything.