The Sheri S. Tepper eBook Collection

  She went home again. It was time to get on with her life, Time to take a job. Time to become herself.

  She waited, deciding among several job offers, spending a lot of time riding to use up recurrent spasms of nervous energy. She felt she should be doing something, fighting some battle, accomplishing some task she could not define even for herself. Something. Something quite remarkable.

  Until the afternoon she rode up to the house and found Papa and Mama on the terrace, entertaining a tall, spectacularly handsome man. She had seen his picture often in Alphenlicht. She recognized him with disbelief, wondering what had brought him here, accepting the introduction to him as she would to any total stranger.

  ‘And you are Marianne,’ said Makr Avehl.

  She, wondering what he was doing here, gave him her usual glowing smile, which he misinterpreted at once.

  During dinner they exchanged only pleasantries, slightly formally as was consistent with their just having met. Great-aunt Dagma gave them both a long, level look through her glasses but said nothing. Marianne felt herself flush under that look and resented it. When dinner was done, he asked her to walk with him in the garden.

  ‘Marianne,’ he said to her as soon as they were out of sight of the terrace, drawing her close to him. ‘Oh, by all that’s holy, my Marianne.’

  ‘What in hell!’ she exclaimed, breaking away from him and turning as though to flee, stopping only at his shout of half pain, half dismay. She was angrier than she could have thought possible. ‘I don’t know you,’ she grated at him. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  He stood there, trembling, unable to speak, staring at her, searching her face for the woman he remembered. In his own memory, he had left Marianne only days before—or rather, had been left by her – in a strange, sorcerous world she had helped to create. She had left him there, but he had found her again—except that he seemed to have found a different woman.

  The difference was there, in her face. This was not the gallant Marianne who played life’s deck even when it was stacked against her. This woman was no less lovely but far less tried. There was little or no pain in this one’s face. Perhaps this one had courage also, but it might well be of a different kind. Except for a shadow of guilt, this one had clear, untroubled eyes. They might have been sisters. Even twins. But not the same.

  ‘Accept my apology,’ he said from an agonized throat. ‘I truly thought – never mind what I thought. Forgive me. Pretend it didn’t happen.’ He turned away, then back to her as though he could not leave her and she responded to the pain in his face as she had not to his importunity. ‘Walk with me,’ he said at last in a voice aching with loss, needing to move before he froze into place, turned into ageless ice by this grief he felt.

  She wanted to refuse him but could not do so without being ungracious. He had obviously made a mistake. Perhaps he had known someone else by her name, someone with the family resemblance. He, himself, might have been her father’s son or younger brother. She had no wish to be rude, though she could not help being angry. The latter was understandable, but the former was beneath her. So Cloud-haired mama often said. So she thought. He was not being demanding. A little resentfully but graciously enough she turned to walk beside him on the path while he examined her face as though it had been a holy icon of his religion.

  ‘You really don’t remember?’ he asked in a voice pathetically pleading for such a big and powerful man. ‘You really don’t?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Your Excellency.’

  ‘There was—there was another Marianne. Your twin. You, in another world. She—I … I loved her very much.’

  She softened at his tone. It would have been impossible not to. One would not kick the victim of an accident, someone lying broken on the road. So, she could not kick at him emotionally when he was so obviously broken.

  ‘It’s odd you should speak of another Marianne,’ she murmured. ‘When I was a child, I sometimes thought there was another Marianne. Although I know now it was only hallucination, it seemed then I had a grown-up twin, in my head, somewhere. An older self. At one time I bothered myself a lot trying to figure out whether she was real.’

  ‘What if I told you she was?’

  Wary, she responded, ‘I don’t care. It wouldn’t have anything to do with me. I seem to remember that from the time I was about five until about twelve, there was a voice inside me, a kind of prompter. It may have been imaginary. At the time, it seemed to tell me things. Things that were going to happen.’ A sudden and unexpected memory assailed her. ‘It told me your name.’

  ‘Yes,’ he prompted.

  ‘It’s hard to … think of that time.’

  ‘The voice told you about your half brother, and Madame Delubovoska?’

  She looked at him in shock, suddenly awash in memory, long repressed. She gasped. It had not occurred to her he would know what the voice had said. How could anyone in this real world know what her own delusions had spoken of? She dithered, muttering, ‘Some things about them, yes. I’d rather not think about that, if you don’t mind.’

  The guilt that haunted her from time to time was manifest in her voice, and he reached out to her. ‘Let me verify what the voice told you.’

  ‘Your Excellency, I’ve dealt with that. I’ve forgotten it. I don’t want to hear.’

  ‘You must hear. There’s pain in your voice. Whatever happened, you feel involved. Your involvement bothers you. In this world, your act, whatever it was, does not seem to be self defense. It must seem to you to be almost gratuitous violence. Your generous nature would repudiate such violence. It would repulse you. What can I say to counter your revulsion if not to tell you what you did was justified?

  ‘In my world, that other world, the one you don’t remember, there was a girl named Marianne Zahmani. She called her mother Cloud-haired mama. Her mother died when she was thirteen years old. No one knew why. No one could find out why or how except that she seemed to have choked to death. About a year later, Marianne’s father died. Again, no one knew why or how. Both of them seemed to choke to death, but the doctors couldn’t find any reason for it. Marianne’s half brother was left as Marianne’s guardian and as executor of Marianne’s estate. My sister believes he may have tried to seduce her sexually when she was still only a child; certainly he did everything in his power to bend her to his will, to destroy her spirit. Finally, when he had diverted most of her inheritance for his own purposes, he decided to kill her.’

  ‘No,’ she snarled at him. It wasn’t fair for him to drag this dream stuff out into the light. ‘I don’t want to know…’

  ‘You have to know. He decided to kill her. He tried to kill her as he killed her mother and his own father, he and his aunt, Madame Delubovoska. They used—well, call it sorcery. I came along and spoiled things for them. So, they removed her from my influence. See – I do not say “you,” I say “her.”’ He paused, struggling with the word. He said it. He still could not accept it. ‘They took her into another world, a false dream world. I pursued her there, with Aghrehond, Marianne’s friend, Aghrehond. We helped her escape into still another world, one of her own. Madame and Harvey followed her there. So did my friend, so did I. She escaped again, back into her own past. Working with herself as a child, with you as a child, somehow she has changed things.’

  Marianne turned away, angry once again. He was bringing it all back, all the confusion and pain, giving it reality, status. ‘I’ll assume for one moment you knew some other Marianne though I don’t believe it. I’ll assume it for your sake, because you believe it. If this woman mixed into my life, she had no right to. I’ve thought it over and over. Doing that to a child is like molesting a baby. Childhoods should be sacrosanct. Children have a right to innocence, to discovery! Assume she reached back into her childhood, assume that. Well, it was my childhood she ruined. Destroyed.’ Her voice burned with the disinterment of a long-buried resentment. ‘She did it to me.’

  She heard her own
voice in disbelief. Did she really believe this nonsense? ‘That is, she – she did it to me if she existed. I don’t really believe she did.’

  He stared at her with a skeptical look. ‘Would you rather have seen your parents die?’

  ‘I have only your word for that. And hers. How do I know that’s true?’

  ‘You have my word,’ he said stiffly, almost angrily. ‘What Makr Avehl says is true is true.’

  ‘So you say. In this world it didn’t happen. Or perhaps it never happened. Perhaps the whole thing is illusion, a shared illusion between you and her. I don’t know. I don’t pretend to know. I don’t want to know.’

  ‘But she talked to you!’

  ‘Someone seemed to, yes, Makr Avehl. Then. The last thing she said to me was that you might come. And that she loved you.’ She told him this reluctantly, but in a sense he was owed at least this.

  ‘Love me. Oh, Marianne, to hear that you love me…’

  ‘No, no,’ she waved him away, hands out, voice hostile. ‘She. Not me. She. The other Marianne. A ghost. A dream we shared, perhaps. She doesn’t exist. I wish you could agree with me that she probably never did.’

  It took him some time to control himself, but he did. When he turned toward her again it was with a stern, calm face.

  ‘Tell me what happened to your half brother?’

  She told him what she had decided to remember. ‘An accident, that’s all. I think there was a pack of dogs and an accident.’

  ‘A pack of dogs?’

  ‘At the time I thought they were something else,’ she laughed. ‘I called them momentary gods. I was very confused as a child.’

  He shook his head, staring into the distance, not looking at her because it was too painful to do so, musing almost to himself. ‘So. She was thoughtful of you, Marianne. You didn’t actually have to do anything, did you? There is no need for you to feel guilt. She did it, not you. She had it all arranged through the momentary gods. When it was all over, how did you dismiss them?’

  ‘I’m sure they were imaginary. They dismissed themselves. Things we imagine as children disappear when we become older.’

  He became very pale, though she could not see it in the equally pallid light of the cloud-shifted moon. ‘Did she? The – my Marianne. Did she dismiss them?’

  ‘I have no idea. Funny. My Great-aunt Dagma had something to say about dismissing gods. I’ve forgotten what it was.’

  His voice was tense. She disliked the sound of it, the way it made her feel. Something inside her responded to his tension with a twanging discordancy of its own. ‘And what about Harvey’s aunt?’ he asked. ‘My cousin Madame Delubovoska? Have you seen her? Heard of her?’

  ‘Nothing. She called when she heard Harvey had been hurt. She sent flowers to the hospital. I remember Mama calling it “conventionalized concern.” She never came to see him.’

  ‘He was of no more use to her then. Which doesn’t mean she may not still be very interested in your family, Marianne. And in you.’

  ‘Why? She’s no kin to me. To Papa’s first wife and to Harvey, yes, not to me. What possible reason could she have to be concerned with me?’

  Makr Avehl could think of at least one very good reason, and he started to tell her but she wasn’t listening to him. She was wondering, at that moment, whether he and the other Marianne had been lovers. Her own prurient curiosity offended her, and she answered his comment with annoyance. Something about the family fortunes. ‘I know very little about Papa’s affairs,’ she said coldly. ‘It certainly isn’t something I should discuss with someone who is virtually a stranger.’

  He was silent for a long time. Their feet made parallel tracks across the grass, wet with evening dew. The scent of flowers blew into their faces. Behind them the lights of the house fell across the paved terraces in long, elegant fingers of colorless light.

  ‘If I tell you you are in danger, you will not believe me,’ he said at last, rather stiffly. ‘You are not the woman I loved, not the woman who loved me. And yet, you are.’ He stared at her. ‘Perhaps there is someone else in your life?’

  ‘No,’ she said, intrigued despite herself. She did not want to be taken for someone else, but how could she mind being sought as herself? Certainly any woman would find this man’s attentions flattering. ‘No, Makr Avehl, there isn’t anyone else. But I’m not the woman you loved or thought you loved, and you have to accept that. I’m really not.’

  She said it. He was facing her as she said it, his eyes fixed on hers. Her voice was clear and cold. And yet, somewhere behind her eyes a shadow slipped along, like the shadow of a lonely inhabitant in a house tenanted by others, peering through a half-curtained window at a world she could not reach.

  He gasped. There, in that shadow, had been something he had recognized. Gallantry in the tilt of a head. Courage in the slope of a shoulder. He tried to contrive some way to maintain his contact with her and with that lonely, embattled shadow. He spoke pleadingly.

  ‘In the normal way, I might simply try to become better acquainted with you, believing that you and she are not so unalike that I could not—’ he paused, struggling to find words she would not resent or think patronizing, ‘—could not show you something of myself you could consider … acceptable. I would take my time about it, as I tried to do before. But – but I erred before. Even though I knew my Marianne was in great danger, I didn’t warn her, didn’t guard her. She was shy of me, and I didn’t want to frighten her. Well, you are not shy, but even if you were, I would have to warn you. I believe you are still in danger from Madame Delubovoska.’

  ‘Me?’ She laughed, shaking her head, believing his sincerity though she totally disbelieved what he said. ‘Surely not!’

  ‘Yes. I believe you are in danger from her.’

  ‘You think Madame remembers what you say happened?’ She was intrigued by this thought. How many people in the world might remember that other Marianne? How many did it take to give a figment life?

  ‘I don’t know. Your parents don’t remember. They wouldn’t. My Marianne and you were virtually identical up until the time … the time your parents died in one life, lived in another. There was no dissonance, not for them. Probably only I and some of the other Kavi remember it at all. Because we knew that Marianne, and followed her to—to you.’

  ‘Kavi?’

  ‘Our people. Our class. In Alphenlicht. The rulers. The Magi.’

  ‘Our class.’

  ‘I include you, Marianne. Because of who your parents are.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I remember now. You are a Magus! I’d forgotten that. I visited Alphenlicht. It’s a pretty country. Like all the better parts of an older century. I have the feeling you should go back there and forget all the ghosts, Makr Avehl.’ She laughed, unconvincingly. ‘As I’m going to try to do. For the first eleven or twelve years of my life, I remember that every movement seemed to be foreordained. I don’t think I resented it then, but I’ve definitely resented it since. You are the last thing connected with that time. I suppose I’ve been subconsciously waiting to see whether you showed up before…’

  ‘Yes? Before what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Before being something completely of my own, I think.’

  ‘But not with me?’

  ‘That’s not an appropriate question.’ A part of her wanted to end the whole relationship, to say something final, but he was already too hurt to wound further without reason. ‘You’re a man I would love to know better under other circumstances, but I need to feel I have choices. I’ve not had many up until now.’

  ‘You wouldn’t consider staying close by me? Letting me protect you?’

  She gave him a critical glance, shaking her head. He knew better. ‘That’s no choice! It’s just more of the same. Having you beside me, directing me, is just like having that imaginary voice inside me, directing me! Listen to me! I’m talking as though all that time was real, even though I’ve known since I was fifteen it was all invention and fantasy.’

 
‘It wasn’t imaginary.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m not the kind of person to fall in love with phantasms.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. For an instant she wanted to comfort him. She still had angry feelings about him, but they seemed less substantial when directed at a real person than when she had merely imagined him. ‘Perhaps sometime I’ll visit you. I’ve been in Alphenlicht and liked it. Perhaps sometimes you will visit me. But I can’t – won’t – make commitments. Not now!’

  He sighed again, searching her face. A little wilful, that face. Wilfulness was easy to understand, however. She had only been exercising her will in recent years. And behind that façade, something more complex. Hidden. Why hidden? Was that other presence hiding from him?

  Sad and lost as he was, he had to accept what she told him. He started to bid her goodbye, then stopped himself. ‘Oh, by the way. I have a gift for you. From my sister, Ellat. She was very fond of … of Marianne. I forgot to bring it with me today. If you don’t mind, I’ll drop it off before leaving for home.’

  She assented. He was going. Let him do whatever he needed to do to put this behind him. Let him return briefly on the following afternoon. So—her independence was postponed for a day. She could bear it. She watched him go with a sense of a milestone being passed.

  He returned, as he had promised. Before going inside to make his farewells to her parents, Makr Avehl introduced her to Aghrehond. Or, reintroduced her, according to Aghrehond.

  ‘Oh, pretty lady, what a consternation and unhappiness you have put upon us. He, the Prime Minister, is cast down, but I—I am shattered.’

  ‘Why shattered, Aghrehond?’

  ‘That you should have forgotten the perils we shared.’ He regarded her with sad brown eyes, his chins quivering and his large stomach swaying from side to side in an excess of grief, like a bell, silently tolling. ‘We had considered everything but this. That you would hate my master for the forms he had taken…’