Transcendent (18 page)

Bale said, “Most human communication is symbolic.”

She struggled to regain her composure. “You mean language?”

“Language, art, music. Language is a legacy of our deepest past. With it we envisage past and future, build cities and starships—with language we won a Galaxy. But it is all symbolism. I encode my thoughts in symbols, I transmit them to you, you receive them, and decode them. You can see the limitations.”

She frowned. “Bandwidth problems. Difficulties of translation.”

“Yes. What I say to you can only be a fraction of what I think or feel. But there are modes of communication deeper and more ancient than language.”

Suddenly he snapped his fingers in her face, and she flinched.

“I apologize,” Bale said. “But you see the point. That message was crude, just a gesture of threat. But you reacted immediately, in the deeper roots of your being. And when I took your hand you felt something beneath words, didn’t you? We humans communicate on a tactile level. Even a cellular, even a chemical level . . .”

“It sounds scary,” Alia admitted.

“You don’t know the half of it,” said Denh.

“What do you mean?”

“Before you can communicate with others, you have to be able to communicate with yourself.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

“When will my treatment begin?”

“It already has,” called Bale’s great-aunt from the back of the room.

She looked around, feeling claustrophobic, helpless, exposed before these drab strangers.

Chapter 15

I lay down in the dark and took a pill.

After I lost Morag I was prescribed medication. There were medicines, I was told, that could target the sites in your head where traumatic memories are formed. Something to do with inhibiting the formation of certain proteins. If I only took the pill, I was told, I would still remember Morag and all that had happened, as if I stored a narrative in my head, but I wouldn’t
feel
it—not the same way, not so much that it would harm my functioning.

John had always pressed me hard to take the medication. For sure it’s what he would have done. But I had refused. Memories are what make up
me
—even bad memories, dreadful memories. What’s the point of “functioning” if I lose that? When I refused to allow Tom the same treatment I faced a battery of counselors who gravely advised me on the harm I was causing to my helpless son, the hurt I could help him avoid. I stuck to my guns. But sometimes, I admit, when I look back on Tom’s life since, I wonder if I made the right choice for him.

So I refused the “forget” pills. But I did learn that there are also such things as “remember” pills.

By getting glutamate or some such molecule to work more efficiently, there’s a medication that can sharpen memories, rather than dull them. It takes some analysis by various therapeutic machines to figure out what you need, and you have to put up with counseling about the damage that might be done to your personality by too much memory. But it’s over-the-counter stuff. When I found out all this I bought some pills, and put them aside, kept them in my bathroom bag. I’d carried them everywhere since, knowing they were there but not thinking about why I wanted them with me.

Now was the time. I popped my pills, and I lay in that bed, in that small hotel, in the middle of England, and I tried to remember.

Here I had been with Morag, that first night. We had gone to bed early, still full of the bonhomie and speeches, the food and champagne of the wedding. We made love.

But I remembered waking later, maybe three in the morning, the time your body is at its lowest, all your defenses down. She was awake, too, lying beside me, here in this hotel. The booze had worn off by then; I felt mildly hung over. But she was here. As we’d lived together for a year before anyhow I think we’d both imagined the marriage wouldn’t matter. But we’d made a commitment to each other. It did make a difference.

So we came together again, in this hotel, in the dark, right here. I remembered the scent of shampoo and spray on her hair, the softness of her skin, a slight saltiness when I kissed her cheeks—she’d done plenty of crying that day, as brides do. And around us the hotel breathed, centuries old, and beyond its walls the still more ancient pile of the old city thrust its stone roots deep into the ground. Immersed in my pharmaceutically sharpened memories, I remembered it all, as if it were real again. Maybe I cried. Probably. Maybe I slept.

I thought I heard somebody calling.

It was a woman, outside the hotel, calling from the street below, the line of the Roman road. The room felt cold, terribly cold. Listening to that voice, I hugged myself to stop my shivering.

I found myself outside the hotel.

It was nearly dawn, and a blue light leaked grudgingly into the sky, totally lacking warmth. That light was mirrored in a flood that blocked the street, between me and the city center. I was surrounded by the silhouettes of darkened houses. No traffic moved on the road, nobody was out there, nobody awake but me. The flood water rippled languidly, strewn with rubbish. The world seemed a drab, defeated place.

How had I got here? I couldn’t remember dressing, or coming down from my room. I was disoriented, overtired.

Looking along the road toward the city, I saw a shifting shadow—a curve of back, a leg, the faint sound of footsteps.

I turned north, up the road toward the city center. I walked along the middle of the road, trying to catch up with her. But those cobbles were big and smoothed with use and shiny with dew, and I had to watch every step I took in the uncertain light. I tired quickly, mentally as well as physically.

Then I came to that flood. As I approached it I could see water bubbling up out of the drains and around the rims of manhole covers. I vaguely remembered that somewhere near here the two rivers that ran through the city, the Ouse and the Fosse, came to a confluence, and the place was notorious for flooding. The water looked old and dirty, covered with a layer of dusty scum, and with bits of garbage floating in it. I couldn’t see how deep it got toward the center. You get used to these things; once towns like this had probably flooded once a decade, but now it was a rare year when it
didn’t
flood, and people got worn out with trying to fix things, and just accepted the change.

But the pond was in my way. I walked to the left and right, helpless. There was no obvious way around it. The side streets would lead me away from the direction to the city center, from the way I wanted to go, toward Morag. Everything was mixed up, made chaotic by the water intruding into the land; I was stranded in a strange landscape, a place where nothing worked anymore.

I couldn’t see Morag. Perhaps I had already lost her. I grew panicky.

Lawned gardens lined one side of the street. I decided to go that way. I made for an old, crumbling wall on the right-hand side of the road. It was too high to be easy to climb. I jumped up, and had to use my arms to haul my bulk up so my belly was resting on the wall. Then, with a lot of swinging, I got my right leg onto the lip of the wall, and then the left. I more or less fell down on the other side.

I landed heavily on my side on soft, moist grass, hard enough to knock the wind out of me. I lay there for a few seconds. I could feel dew, or flood water, soaking my face, my jacket, my trousers. There were high-water marks on the wall, and somebody had chiseled dates into the brick beside the higher of them:
2000. 2026. 2032.
And I saw a worm, a long earthworm, crawling around on the grass. Maybe the rising water had forced it out of the ground. It looked as bewildered as I did.

I got to my feet. The side of my body I’d landed on felt like one long bruise, and I was wet and cold. I felt very foolish, a fifty-two-year-old man standing in somebody else’s lawn in the dawn light. I had to get on, get out of there.

I stepped forward and walked straight into a tree. I stumbled back and crashed into more foliage. The tree was a fern, no taller than I was, and the foliage around me was bamboo. English gardens aren’t what they were. I pushed away, not sure which way I was facing. I had been turned around in the fall. I stumbled forward again, but tripped on a skinny mound of moist earth sticking out of the lawn. It might have been a termite mound. I felt stupid, befuddled, surrounded by clinging obstacles, and every step I took, everything I tried to do to make progress, just threw up more problems.

Right.
The wall had been on the right-hand side of the street, so I should keep the house to my right. I turned and pushed that way. The grass was long and clung to my shoes, and now my feet were soaked through. But I kept going, and I came to a gate that led me back to the road.

I had come far enough to have passed most of the pond in the road, but the water still lapped at my feet.

Ahead, the road rose to cross the river at a bridge. I could see somebody on the bridge, I thought, a pale face looking back at me. She was too far away; her face was just a blur, a coin at the bottom of a pond. I was sure it was her, though. I wanted to shout, but I was aware of the sleeping town all around me, and somehow I couldn’t. Anyhow it would do no good. I had to get to her; that was the thing.

The hell with it. I strode into the water. Soon I was wading. The water didn’t come much up my shins, but there was a lot of mud and garbage gathered in the bottom—maybe the road surface had collapsed here—and it sucked at my feet. Soon I was breathing hard, and my heart was hammering. At last I got out of the water. My feet and legs were soaked and muddy. I was exhausted.

I couldn’t have come more than half a kilometer from my hotel.

I could see the bridge, and the castle mound beyond with the tower on top, the relic of the old Norman castle, a gaunt silhouette against that blue sky. But she had gone from the bridge. Which way had she gone? Had she climbed the mound? If I could reach it maybe I could try to climb up after her.

The bridge was closed at its far end, for some reason. The rivers curled around both sides of the mound, and the water was high, frothing, blue-gray. The bank was eroded and lined with sandbags. Under the bridge itself the water reached almost to the top of the arches.

Maybe I should cross the bridge. Or maybe I should find some way around the other side of the mound. I couldn’t think my way through it.

I couldn’t see her anymore. I just stood there, bruised, my feet sodden, panting.

“Are you OK?”

The voice seemed loud. I turned. I was facing a young man, maybe twenty-five. He was walking his bicycle. Under a fleece jacket he wore some kind of blue uniform; maybe he was a hospital worker on shift.

He was composed as he looked me up and down. “You look as if you’ve had some trouble.” His accent was broad Yorkshire. I could see suspicion in his eyes. Not surprising; I must have looked strange.

I heard a crow calling. I looked up. I could see the bird wheeling over the tower on the mound. Suddenly the sky seemed brighter; high clouds were laced pink.

“Hey . . .”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“You’re American?”

“Yes.” I looked down at myself, at the filthy water leaking from my shoes. I tried to think of something to say, something that would normalize the situation. “Jet lag plays hell with your sleep patterns, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” he replied, doubtful. He turned away, continued walking his bicycle.

I looked up toward the mound. It just looked like a hill now, the castle a ruin, not the center of some kind of maze as it had seemed a moment ago. There was no sign of Morag, but I knew there wouldn’t be.

That young man was still looking back at me. If I didn’t want a police bot to be called out I should get out of there and clean myself up. I turned and faced that flood in the road. In the gathering light it didn’t look so daunting. I walked to the road’s centerline and just strode straight through the water. The road had given way; this pool must have been there a long time. But the water came no higher than my knees, and in a moment I was through it.

When I woke the sun was high. It was around noon local time. I didn’t remember how I had got there, got back into my hotel from the flooded road. The whole thing was like a dream.

But I was lying on my bed, not in it, and though I’d kicked off my shoes my trousers were muddy, my sweater smeared with green grass stains, and debris had rubbed off onto the bed’s top sheet. The management wouldn’t be pleased with me.

Something had happened, however.

A corner of the big wall softscreen was flashing. A message was waiting for me from John.

I showered first, made a coffee, ate a cookie from the minibar. Then I sat in my armchair, faced the wall, and called John. Towering over me on the wall, he was furious—two-dimensional, badly colored, but furious. “Lethe,” he said.

I was struck by his use of that word, but now wasn’t the time to talk about a stranger on a plane. “Lethe to you,” I snapped back. “What’s eating you?”

“You are.” It turned out Shelley Magwood had called him last night.

I felt cold, wondering how much she had told him. “She shouldn’t have done that.”

“Why the hell not? She was concerned, asswipe, not that you deserve it. And wasn’t she right to be?” He tapped a screen before him, out of my sight.

A corner of my wall filled up with an image, grainy, badly lit. But you could see the castle mound, the flooded street, a figure standing there in muddy water up to his ankles. John had used his contacts to hack into the town’s security cameras. He shouted now, “You call this a responsible way to behave? For this I paid a small fortune to send you to Europe? Are you crazy?”

“If you listened to what Shelley told you,” I said stonily, “you’ll understand that this is about me and Morag. It’s got nothing to do with you. You have to let me work this out my own way, John.”

“Oh, do I?”

I studied him, growing curious. I’d rarely seen him so angry. “What’s eating you? Why are you taking this so personally?”

“I’m not.”

Despite his denial, I could see something was going on here. If I had felt lobotomized last night, today I was sharp. Was he angry I just hadn’t told him about my haunting by Morag first? Or was there something more? “You’re hiding something.
Is it to do with Morag?
Damn it, John, she was my wife. If you know something you have to tell me.”