Winterlong (6 page)

“Hush. You’ll wake Father.”

Aidan rolls his eyes and stretches against the wall. “Spare me.” Through the rents in his kimono I can see his skin, dusky in the moonlight. No one has skin like Aidan’s, except for me: not white but the palest gray, almost blue, and fine and smooth as an eggshell. People stare at us in the street, especially at Aidan. At the Academy girls stop talking when he passes, and fix me with narrowed eyes and lips pursed to mouth a question never asked.

Aidan yawns remorselessly as a cat. Aidan is the beauty: Aidan whose gray eyes flicker green whereas mine muddy to blue in sunlight; Aidan whose long legs wrap around me and shame my own; Aidan whose hair is the purest gold, where mine is dull bronze.

“Molly. Here. “He grabs her into his lap, groaning at her weight, and pulls me to him as well, until we huddle in the middle of the bed. Our heads knock and he points with his chin to the mirror.

“‘Did you never see the picture of
We Three
?’” he warbles. Then, shoving Molly to the floor, he takes my shoulders and pulls the quilt from me.

“‘My father had a daughter loved a man

As it might be perhaps, were I a woman,

I should your lordship.’
”

He recites softly, in his own voice: not the deeper drone he affected when we had been paired in the play at the Academy that winter. I start to slide from bed but he holds me tighter, twisting me to face him until our foreheads touch and I know that the mirror behind us reflects a moon-lapped Rorschach and, at our feet, our snuffling mournful fool.

“‘But died thy sister of her love, my boy?’”
I whisper later, my lips brushing his neck where the hair, unfashionably long, waves to form a perfect S.

“‘I am all the daughters of my father’s house, And all the brothers too; and yet I know not.’”

He silences me with a kiss. Later he whispers nonsense, my name, rhyming words from our made-up language; then a long and heated silence.

Afterward he sleeps, but I lie long awake, stroking his hair and watching the rise and fall of his slender chest. In the coldest hour he awakens and stares at me, eyes wide and black, and turning on his side he moans, then begins to cry as though his heart will break. I clench my teeth and stare at the ceiling, trying not to blink, trying not to hear or feel him next to me, his pale gray skin, his eyes: my beautiful brother in the dark.

After this session Dr. Harrow’s red eyes met mine when I first came to, but she left quickly, advising me not to leave my chamber until she summoned me later. I fell soundly asleep until late afternoon, when the rush of autumn rain against the high casements finally woke me. For a long time I lay in bed staring up at a long fine crack that traversed the ceiling. To me it appeared like the arm of some ghastly tree overtaking the room. It finally drove me downstairs, despite Dr. Harrow’s warning to stay in the Home Room.

I paced the long glass-roofed corridor that led to the pre-Columbian annex, brooding. I almost wished that Justice would see me and stop me, send me to my room, and arrange for my medication to be changed or schedule me for tests that might reduce this strange unease. But today the Aides would be meeting with Margalis Tast’annin and his staff.
HEL
’s senior personnel would be in their private quarters upstairs having tea, and the other empaths would be playing at furtive pastimes where they could not be easily monitored. I paused to pluck a hibiscus blossom from a terracotta vase and arranged it behind one ear. Then I went on, until I reached the ancient elevator with its folding arabesques.

The second floor was off limits to empaths, but Anna had memorized a dead patient’s release code and she and I occasionally crept up here to tap sleeping research subjects. No Aides patrolled these rooms. Servers checked the monitors and recorded all responses. Their creaking wheels and the monotonous click of their datachambers were the only sounds that stirred the drowsy air. At the end of each twelve-hour shift, doctors would flit in and out of the bedrooms, unhooking oneironauts and helping them stumble to other rooms where they could fall into yet another, though dreamless, sleep. I tapped the pirated code into the first security server I saw, then waited for it to read my retina imprint and finally grant the access code that slid open the false paneled wall.

Here stretched the sleeplabs: chambers swathed in yellowed challis and moth-eaten linens, huge canopied beds where masked oneironauts (most of them unfortunate survivors of the previous Ascendant autocracy, or captives taken during the Archipelago Conflict) turned and sighed as their monitors clicked in draped alcoves. The oneironauts’ skin shone glassy white. Beneath the masks their eyes were bruised a tender green from enforced somnolence. I held my breath as long as I could: the air seethed with dreams. I hurried down the hall to a room with door ajar and an arched window columned with white drapes. A woman I did not recognize sprawled across a cherry four-poster. Her demure homespun shift, yolk-yellow and embroidered with a five-digit number, was curiously at odds with the mask that rakishly covered her eyes. I slipped inside, locking the door behind me. Then I turned to the bed.

The research subject’s hair formed a dark filigree against the disheveled linen sheets. I bowed to kiss her on the mouth, waiting to be certain she would not wake. Then I dipped my tongue between her lips and drew back, closing my eyes to unravel strands of desire and clouded abandon, pixie fancies. All faded in a moment: dreams, after all, are dreams. I reached to remove the wires connecting her to the monitors, adjusted the settings, and hooked her into the
NET
. I did the same for myself with extra wires, relaying through the
BEAM
to the transmitter. I smoothed the sheets, lay beside her, and closed my eyes.

A silvery dome shot with sunlight. Clouds mist the dome with a scent of filters and stale air. In the distance I hear the click of solex panels rotating as the
NASNA
station moves silently through the atmosphere. Turning, I can see a line of stunted gray-green trees planted in a straight line. We walk there, the oneironaut’s will bending so easily to mine that I scarcely sense her: she is another engineered breeze.

The trees draw nearer. I stare at them until they shift, stark lichened branches blurring into limbs bowed with green and gentle leaves. Now they are great and verdant trees that would never grow within a station. I sense the oneironaut’s faint puzzlement at this change, but in another moment we are beneath their heavy welcoming boughs.

I place my hand against the rough bark and stare into the heart of the greenery. Within the emerald shadows something stirs. Sunlit shards of leaf and twig align themselves into hands. Shadows shift to form a pair of slanted beryl eyes. There: crouched among the boughs like a dappled cat, his curls crowned with a ring of leaves, his lips parted to show small white teeth. He smiles at me.

Before he draws me any closer I withdraw, snapping the wires from my face. The tree shivers into white sheets and the shrouded body of the woman beside me.

My pounding heart slowed as I drew myself up on my elbows to watch her, carefully peeling the mask from her face. Beneath lids mapped with fine blue veins her eyes rolled, tracking something unseen. Suddenly they steadied. Her mouth relaxed into a smile, then into an expression of such bliss that without thinking I kissed her and tasted a burst of ecstatic, halcyon joy.

And reeled back as she suddenly clawed at my chest, her mouth twisted to shout; but no sound came. Bliss exploded into terror. Her eyes opened and she stared, not at me but at something that loomed before her. Her eyes grew wide and horrified, the pupils dilating as she grabbed at my face, tore the hibiscus blossom from my hair, and choked a scream, a shout I muffled with a pillow.

I whirled and reset the monitors, switched the
NET
’s settings, and fled. In the hallway I hesitated and looked back. The woman pummeled the air before her blindly; she had not seen me. I turned and ran until I reached the stairway leading to the floors below, and slipped away unseen.

Downstairs all was silent. Servers creaked past, bringing tea trays to doctors in their quarters. I hurried to the conservatory, where I inquired after the Aide Justice. The server directed me to a chamber where Justice stood recording the results of an evoked potential scan.

“Wendy!” Surprise melted into dismay. “What are you doing here?”

I shut the door and stepped to the window, tugging the heavy velvet drapes until they fell and the chamber darkened. “I want you to span me,” I said.

He shook his head, nervously fingered his long blond braid. “What? Why—” I grabbed his hand as he tried to turn up the lights, and he nodded slowly, then dimmed the screen he had been working on. “Where is Dr. Harrow?”

“I want you to do it.” I tightened my grip. “I think I have entered a fugue state.”

He smiled, shaking his head. “That’s impossible, Wendy. You’d have no way of knowing it—you’d be catatonic, or—” He shrugged, then glanced uneasily at the door. “What’s going on? You know I can’t do that alone, especially now.”

“But you know how,” I said, stroking his hand. “You are a student of their arts, you can do it as easily as Dr. Harrow.” I leaned forward until my forehead rested against his, and kissed him on the mouth. His expression changed to fear as he trembled and tried to move away. Sexual contact between staff and experimental personnel was forbidden and punishable by execution of the Aides in question, since empaths were believed incapable of initiating such contact. I pinned both of his hands to the table, until he nodded and motioned with his head toward the
PET
unit.

“Sit down,” he said. I latched the door, then sat in the wing chair beside the bank of monitors.

In a few minutes I heard the dull hum of the scanners as he improvised the link for my reading. I waited until my brain’s familiar patterns emerged on the screen.

“See?” Relief brightened his voice, and he tilted the monitor so that I could see it more clearly. “All normal. Maybe she got your dosage wrong. Perhaps Dr. Silverthorn can suggest a …”

His words trickled into silence. I shut my eyes and drew up the image of the tree, beryl eyes and outstretched hand, then opened my eyes to see the
PET
scan showing intrusive activity in my temporal lobe: brain waves evident of an emergent secondary personality.

“That’s impossible,” said Justice. “You have no
MP
s, no independent emotions … What the hell
is
that?” He traced the patterns with an unsteady hand, then turned to stare at me. “What did you do, Wendy?”

I shook my head, crouching into the chair’s corner, and removed the wires. The last image shimmered on the screen like a cerebral ghost. “Take them,” I said, holding out the wires. “Don’t tell anyone.”

He let me pass without a word. Only when my hand grasped the doorknob did he touch me on the shoulder.

“Where did it come from?” He faltered. “What is it, Wendy?”

I stared past him at the monitor with its pulsing shadows.

“Not me,” I said at last. “The Boy in the Tree.”

They found the sleep researcher at shift-change that evening, hanging by the swag that had decorated her canopied bed. Anna told me about it at dinner.

“Her monitors registered an emergent
MP
.” She licked her lips like a kitten. “Do you think we could get into the morgue?”

I yawned and shook my head. “Are you crazy?” Anna giggled and rubbed my neck. “Isn’t everybody?”

Several Aides entered the dining room, scanning warily before they started tapping empties on the shoulder and gesturing to the door. I looked up to see Justice, his face white and pinched as he stood behind me.

“Margalis Tast’annin has ordered evacuation of all senior staff to the provisional capital. They’re bringing in new personnel for reevaluation of the Harrow Project. You’re to go to your chambers,” he announced. “Dr. Harrow says you are not to talk to anyone until Tast’annin has seen you individually.” He swallowed and avoided my eyes, then stared directly at me for the first time. “I told her that I hadn’t seen you, Wendy, but would make certain you knew—”

I nodded and looked away. In a moment he was gone, and I started upstairs.

“I saw Dr. Leslie before,” Anna commented before she walked outside toward her cottage. “He smiled at me and waved.” She hesitated, biting her lip thoughtfully. “Maybe he will play with me this time,” she announced before turning down the rain-spattered path.

Dr. Harrow was standing at the high window in the Home Room when I arrived. In her hand she held a drooping hibiscus flower.

“Shut the door,” she ordered. I did so. “Now lock it and sit down.”

She had broken the hibiscus. Her fingers looked bruised from its stain: jaundiced yellow, ulcerous purple. As I stared she flung the flower into my lap.

“They know it was you in the sleeplabs,” she said. “Dr. Silverthorn matched your retina print with the masterfile. How could you have thought you’d get away with it?” She sank onto the bed, her eyes dull with fatigue.

The rain had hung back for several hours. Now it hammered the windows again, its steady tattoo punctuated by the rattle of hailstones.

“I did not mean to kill her.” I smoothed my robe, flicking the broken blossom onto the floor.

She ground the hibiscus beneath her heel, then picked it up and threw it out the window. “Her face,” she said, as if replying to a question. “Like my brother Aidan’s.”

I stared at her blankly.

“When I found him,” she went on, turning to me with glittering eyes. “On the tree.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dr. Harrow.”

Her lips tightened against her teeth when she faced me. A drop of blood welled against her lower lip. I longed to lean forward to taste it, but did not dare. “She was right, you know. You steal our dreams …”

“That’s impossible.” I crossed my arms, shivering a little from the damp breeze. I hesitated. “You told me that is impossible. Unscientific. Unprofessional thinking.”