* * *
Gerta sits at the kitchen table and sips a cup of blackberry tea. Though quite deft with her dainty hooves, she drinks it through a straw made of reed. I savor crumb cake while she tells of a new village springing up half a day away and ponders the rumors of a great desert waste west of the Hinterland, and of a wide water beyond.
“They call it Pass Iffick,” Gerta pronounces the words with a wavering carefulness, as if still unaccustomed to a human voicebox or to the new palate that allows her to speak. “They say the water tastes of salt.”
“An ocean.” My fork chases the last bits of buttery cake around the delicate china plate. “I learned about oceans in school, and there is a whole wing of the Spectra Museum dedicated to their study.”
“No!” she bleats. “It’s true?”
I nod. “Man has explored the deeps, but not the greatest depths.”
“Pshaw!” Gerta waves a hoof in disbelief. “Next you will be telling me Man has been to the heavens.”
“And beyond.”
She props a foreleg on the table, leans her chin on her hoof. “What wonders you must see, living in the city.”
I smile. “But there they do not believe the wonders I see here.”
“But so many of them have visited the forest! Surely they have told others?”
I clear away the dishes, pour Gerta another cup of tea, and stir in a generous dollop of honey. “Professor Shinnegal — does he often bring people from the city?”
Gerta sips the tea. “He seeks people who aren’t there. He gives them maps, but each must choose to follow. Your map brought you here.” Her warm brown eyes study me. “But you do not have to stay.”
“Why do people return to the city?”
“Some find the quiet too frightening, too humbling. They cannot connect with themselves. They choose separateness. Some go mad.” When she shakes her head, her ears flop.
They cannot accept what they know to be true, so they go mad trying to say it isn’t. I know that kind of insanity.
“They must be about business that eats their time but never their discontent. Who can be happy thus?” Gerta bleats a sudden laugh. “Listen to me! I am a goat. All my kids are grown, so I pour my words into any willing ear.”
“Jaysha!” Bertrand bursts into the kitchen, and Liam ducks his head through the door. Twigs and leaves populate the dwarf’s red hair. A fiery weal marks his cheek. “Men with strange weapons set upon us near the clearing. They wore this.”
He hands me a sleeve made of silver-bronze fabric, thin but strong, its colors changing until it echoes the kitchen and my palm. Only the patch near the shoulder remains distinct: three twined circles encasing the portent-filled initials that mark my father’s company—D.I.E.
“We ran around a bit to lose ‘em” — Bertrand is still catching his breath — “and met up again by the bridge over the brook.”
“They are looking for you, Jaysha,” Liam whinnies low. A bloody cut streaks along his powerful neck and down his chest. “Do you want to be found?”
No. I do not. Yet I cannot bring trouble to this house. “Lead me to the clearing.”
Liam gently noses the bandage still wrapping my head. “I will carry you.”
We bear as our only weapons Bertrand’s blunted pitchfork, my flute, and Gerta’s nutcakes.
All sign of my wrecked craft is gone. The clearing is empty but for a flutter of white. Bertrand kicks aside the rock that anchors it, then stabs at it with the pitchfork and lifts a piece of synthetic paper, folded into a square, addressed to me.
Even as I open the letter, the tall woman encased in a rosy glow steps from the trees, followed by Sam and a handful of ordinary folk clothed in garments the colors of the forest. Behind them emerges a small herd of horned horses, a horse with bandages still swaddling the base of the wings grafted to his back, two lion-eagle hybrids with reptilian tails, and a clan of dwarves aswarm with firefly-people — Professor Shinnegal’s neighbors, the flitter-witted fairies.
The rose woman approaches. “Jaysha Don’Ayghel, do you wish to remain?”
Looking past her, I see Sam’s somber face. He does not help me — no nod of the head, no quirk of the brows — but I see in his eyes a guardedness, as if he wants to say something but is afraid. Of what?
I look down at the letter. My father’s strong handwriting commands me return to Spectra for proper care. Mother worries. Doctors think I may have done permanent harm this time.
“Sam?”
After a small hesitation, he steps nearer.
“Have I been here before?”
His shoulders ease a little. “Almost. You crashed on the edge of the city last year. The story was that you were ill and lost control of your craft.”
“But that’s not true.”
He shakes his head.
I touch my forehead. “This purple patch. It’s smaller every time Gerta changes the bandage.”
“Because you’re healing, dear,” she assures me, but Sam replies, “It’s the replacement fluid that keeps the biologic alloys healthy. It’s like blood, produced by the living metals we used to reconstruct the bones crushed in the accident.”
“The metals heal themselves?”
“Just like human tissue.”
Disconnected images flicker through my mind, as halting as the earliest black-and-white moving pictures stored in the museum’s vault. I remember. My father has a research contract with the Spectra Judiciary. About making more human-like police bots. And repairing the human officers injured in the line of duty. I remember the crash.
Liam shifts his hooves. I lean forward to rest my head against his neck. His mane tickles my cheek. I struggle to keep my eyes open.
“Jaysha?” Sam shakes my shoulder.
“I was at the museum, studying. Student intern with Professor Shinnegal. Curator’s assistant.”
Sam nods. “And your field?”
“Ancient cultures. Customs, religions, mythologies.”
“Aye, ye did.” Bertrand gestures with his pitchfork. “He said ye knew more than the so-called scholars.”
Sam’s callused hand cradles my face. “Stay with me, Jaysha. Stay awake. After the museum closed one evening, you went to the research center. At your father’s company. What happened there?”
“Dissecting. Centaurs.”
“Went a little crazy, remember?”
I nod my head against Liam’s coarse hide. He is warm, and smells dusty.
I remember the impossibility of what I saw — a storybook creature, cut open, spread gruesomely on a sterile table — and how poised my father seemed, telling me to be calm, to go home. It was just an experiment, a spliced half-man, half-horse clone rendered from genetic material gathered from the museum and an old DNA databank. It was nothing but a test of the process by which biologic alloys could be put to a variety of uses — not just the production of new human body parts or even new species, but also the generation of a constant energy source.
Just imagine, he said, if energy and tissue could perpetually reproduce itself!
Then he put guards at my apartment — just in case I experienced another “episode” — and sent them with me to the university and the museum. My friends were forbidden to be alone with me. I lost them or Father paid them off, I am not sure which. Then the university expelled me for cheating — an unsupported claim — which meant the museum would no longer employ me. Working at the Hotel Aspyrion was bland, routine, numbing. Soon even Father’s guards were gone. I was alone.
That’s when the selves arrived, one by one, haunting me. Yes, I remember going mad, and I remember the moment sanity returned. I tried to escape to the only place where being forgotten was my own decision.
“Jaysha,” the rose woman asks once more, “do you wish to remain?”
Yes.
“Jaysha!”
All these people saying my name—
I hear gasps, hear the hard pound of boots and the distinct click of weapons ready to fi
re. I raise my head. The woodland creatures huddle around Liam and face outward.
My father strides across the clearing. He wears a pristine grey suit: collarless, double-breasted, fastened with jewel-like buttons, and tailored to his trim form. Flanking him is a quartet of men in medical smocks, masks over their mouths and noses. They carry small white boxes. Behind them, two other men carry a stretcher with long white straps that buckle together in the middle.
They bring unwanted guests. My abandoned selves rush toward me.
Professor Shinnegal steps in front of them, and everyone stops. Every one.
His arm fully extended upward — he is much shorter than my father — he waggles the tree carving before my father’s face. “Recognize this, Mr. Don’Ayghel?”
Father swats the figure aside.
“It sat on Jaysha’s desk in the Spectra Museum. Before you took it away and accused her of delusions when she went looking for it. Remember?”
Again, Father pushes it away, annoyance on his aristocratic face. “Jaysha, who is this little man?”
Sam lifts me from Liam’s back, then steadies me with an arm around my shoulders.
I ask, “Are you not even a little surprised, Father, to see so many fantastical beings gathered in one place? And alive?”
He looks around, smiling. “What beings?”
His men chuckle, even the ones in the chameleon armor, their positions betrayed by their boots, goggles, and weapons that remain black, though their bodies reflect the colors of the woodlanders.
He reaches out a hand as if to summon me to him. “It’s the new injury, coming so soon after the last accident.”
“Then why the guns, Father? Am I dangerous? Is the professor’s carving a bomb? Is Sam a human weapon? What about this?” I draw the flute from where it hangs inside my shirt.
Bertrand rumbles dryly, “Nay, lass, it’s Gerta’s nutcakes. They make fine rocks to hurl at men’s heads.”
The woodlanders laugh, and Father’s troops tense.
“Why are you here, Father?”
“You are living proof that biologic alloys work.”
I had hoped he might say something else — I miss you, or I love you — but that is the mad fancy. That is the dream.
He flicks a hand, and the men in smocks move forward.
Sam tightens his arm around me.
The fairies are a flickering, parti-colored swarm, surrounding the doctors, pestering the guards. Little bloody bites appear on the men’s necks, faces, and hands, and my father disappears behind a cloud of light.
Sam lifts me onto Liam’s back once more, then turns Gerta toward the forest and gives her a push. “The trees!”
Guns fire, animals scream. A unicorn, bleeding along his flank, skewers one man’s hand, and then, with his iridescent horn, flicks the guard’s fallen weapon into the undergrowth. The winged horse lumbers upward on his still-healing grafts, then soars above the clearing and intercepts an approaching troop carrier, his rear hooves cracking the shields before he tumbles down, barely righting himself in time. Centaurs and satyrs run to meet another small carrier landing on the perimeter of the clearing. They attack before the troops can exit the craft, but bows and arrows are little use against body armor and superior weapons.
Hot bursts of gunfire whine overhead and around us, but Liam does not waver from his stand behind a thicket. Gerta stamps her hooves and mutters. I am helpless, and I hate it.
Then I remember the elephant flute. Its imprint, stark white and bright red, is pressed into my palm. I know the frequencies may not mesh, but I tap the bone behind my right ear, turning on my crano-aural transceiver, then put the flute to my lips.
I play the melodies Sam taught me, bright airs and melancholy ballads, all my breath behind them until the volume inside my head pounds against my skull, pulses behind the wound. Still I play. The flute feels warm, alive to my touch.
The mercenaries falter. Their weapons tip downward. They clutch their heads, fall to their knees, and pound frantically at their transceivers. It is enough to give the woodlanders the advantage, and they take it. In moments the troops are disarmed or dead, the medical men bound and shunted aside.
My selves disintegrate and disappear.
Suit torn and face bloody, Father stands swaying in the center of the clearing while Sam binds his arms behind his back.
I lower the flute, turn off my transceiver, and touch Liam’s neck. His great head nods once, and we emerge from the thicket. My head aches, and I struggle to keep my spine straight, my chin up. Liam halts before Father, who glares up at me with a look of mingled hatred and despair.
“I died, didn’t I?” Truth jolts through me — memories of bright lights, constant pain, voices blurred past understanding. “I was dead, and you used me as an experiment.”
He looks away.
“How much of me is real?”
My father sneers. “Ask Sam.”
Sam steps forward. “Jaysha—”
Tears sting my eyes. “Why?”
“I thought I was doing good. You woke up. You didn’t remember. I thought you were fine.” He runs a hand through his hair. “But you kept wandering toward the Hinterland, and we kept bringing you back. Mr. Don’Ayghel had us reset your memory — had us insert new alloy — but you seemed to fracture a little more each time. I couldn’t do it anymore.”
Reaching up, he takes my hand. “Forgive me?”
I withdraw from his clasp. “Liam, take me home.”