The Sheri S. Tepper eBook Collection

  ‘I really don’t know what forms he may have taken, Aghrehond. You’ll have to accept that I honestly know nothing about it.’

  ‘Accept, of course. One accepts. One raises one’s fists to the heavens and cries woe, but one accepts. We had considered some putative hatred you might have felt, and had accepted that. We had considered that you might, in your re-growing, so to speak, have found someone else, younger and more charming than is Makr Avehl. We had considered—oh, I will not weary you with the catalogue of considerations. This single thing we had not considered. That you had forgotten. Oh, to be forgotten! Like a lost shoe, missing even its mate, in the corner of some vast closet of time!’

  Despite herself, she laughed. ‘It’s hard for me to believe I’ve met you before, Aghrehond. You would be very hard to forget.’

  ‘There! You see! It is as I told the Prime Minister. Him, you might forget. What is he after all but a very powerful, magical, charming and very handsome man. But I, Aghrehond, I am unique!’

  ‘Yes, but you see, that very fact proves my point. I didn’t remember, not even you. Therefore, Makr Avehl must accept the fact that I don’t remember him, either.’

  ‘Oh, he accepts, pretty lady. I accept. His sister, Ellat, who loved you like a daughter almost, she accepts. The Kavi of the Cave of Light shake their heads and write the whole thing down in their chronicles, adding to their lectionaries, and even they accept. So? What good is it, this acceptance? What are we to do with it?’

  She shook her head, confused. ‘Do with it?’

  ‘Well, yes. What are we to do with this acceptance? Go away and forget you? Stay here and annoy you? It is much of a problem, this acceptance. Believe me!’ He wiped his brow, on which small beads of perspiration glittered, wringing his hands over his head and around his large ears, as though to assure himself head and ears were in their proper shape.

  ‘What form did he take?’ Marianne asked, suddenly curious. ‘Makr Avehl, I mean.’

  ‘Whatever it was, you may be assured it was appropriate to the occasion.’

  ‘But what was it?’

  He shook his head. ‘My master says I talk too much. This is true, by the way, my only failing. It comes from having a hyperactive imagination and, for that reason, must be tolerated. My imagination is often very helpful.’

  He wouldn’t say more than that. However, that conversation had done what Makr Avehl’s piteous looks had not. It had made Marianne curious about what had happened, and curiosity is a powerful stimulant. Even Marianne would have admitted that her curiosity about Makr Avehl as a sexual man had definitely been stirred.

  Just before he left, Makr Avehl fished in his pocket and brought forth a length of chain, heavy gold links from which a dangling crystal hung in a pendant of gold, sparkling even in the dim light.

  ‘Will you wear this, please?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Call it a talisman. As I mentioned, a gift from my sister, Ellat.’

  ‘If it isn’t … isn’t meant as any kind of tie…’

  He laughed, a harsh, ugly sound. ‘An engagement present, perhaps? Like a ring? Hardly, Marianne. Ellat sent it because she is fond … was fond of you. The other you. You see, she remembers.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured. ‘I didn’t mean…’

  ‘Wear it to give pleasure to someone you do not remember. And because it’s a pretty thing.’ He patted her gently on one shoulder, almost an avuncular caress. She had no idea what that casual contact cost him in self control. He sighed. ‘And I will get myself off to keep from distressing you further. So it must be, I think, with victims of amnesia. They do not remember, and all their loved ones undoubtedly gather around insisting that they do. “Do you remember that time we…” they ask. “Remember old so-and-so, who…” And of course the poor victims do not remember …

  ‘Perhaps the relatives and friends believe the victim is only pretending not to remember, or that he would remember if he put his mind to it. I detect in myself a desire to shake you and demand that you do remember. Perhaps it is the same with the very old who forget everyone around them, mixing the generations, calling their grandchildren by the names of people long dead.’

  ‘But it doesn’t seem like that to me. I don’t have any missing parts in my life at all. I can account for every day, every hour!’ She stepped back from him, wearying of the argument. She wanted him to go.

  ‘Lucky Marianne. For me it now seems that my whole life is missing. May I write to you here?’

  ‘Temporarily. I’ll be leaving home shortly. I’m taking a job!’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘With the government. Out west.’

  ‘What is “out west,” in your lexicon?’

  ‘Well, it happens to be Colorado. The State of. A lot of the federal bureaus have offices there, the Department of Agriculture among them.’

  ‘It is very mountainous there, I believe. Like Alphenlicht.’

  ‘Mountainous, yes, but only down the middle. The east side is very flat.’

  ‘And what will you do there?’

  ‘I will be working for the Department of Agriculture as a consultant, a minor functionary. My speciality is livestock. I’m supposed to be able to teach people how to make money at raising stock of various kinds.’

  He laughed. ‘I’m sorry, Marianne. But it is so incongruous. I can see you among horses, yes, and dogs. But I balk at sheep and cows.’

  ‘And goats and pigs,’ she said firmly. ‘Also chickens, turkeys, and perhaps llamas and buffalo. There is a growing market for both llamas and buffalo. Perhaps I will send you a pair of young llamas to use as pack animals on your treks in the mountains of Alphenlicht.’

  ‘Perhaps you would bring them.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ She smiled. It was not a promise, but neither was it a rejection.

  ‘You will be living where?’

  ‘Denver, for now. Or one of the suburbs. I’ll take an apartment temporarily. I’ll look for an old house to remodel. I’ve got this thing for houses, preferably old ones.’ She stopped for a moment, aware of a memory tugging at her that she couldn’t quite place. She shrugged mentally and went on. ’I’ve always wanted to remodel one for myself.’

  Makr Avehl started to speak, then shut his mouth. She had already remodeled an old house in that other life, but she wouldn’t know that. He remembered the Italianate Victorian house just opposite the University campus, the rosy brick, the oak leaves unfurling like tiny hands outside the window. The place where his Marianne had lived. It was a ruin, now, gutted. Someone was tearing it down to build an apartment building on the site. He didn’t mention it.

  ‘Will you write and give me your address?’

  ‘If you like. When I have one.’

  ‘Farewell, pretty lady,’ said Aghrehond, irrepressibly. ‘Do not let us become strangers again.’

  She saw them go with strangely mixed feelings. Half was regret. Half was an ebullient joy, a jerk of release, like a spring let go. She was flung into anticipation. All the ties to her childhood dream life were gone. Now, once and for all, she could be herself.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ said Ellat, her forehead wrinkled in concentration, ‘is how you can remember everything and she remembers nothing!’

  Makr Avehl shook his head, took another sip of his morning coffee, and rose to walk to the window where he looked down across the fields that surrounded the Residence to the bordering woods of Alphenlicht and the road that joined that tiny country to the outer world. ‘I’ve tried to figure it out myself,’ he said. ‘Most simply, I am the same person. She is not. My Marianne was driven by powerful emotions. Rage. Fear. Both combined. She went out of the dream-world into another world, the world of her own past.’

  ‘According to Nalavi and many of the other Kavi, that would have caused an alternative world.’

  ‘Well, it didn’t. My Marianne went back in her own world, but she went as a disembodied intelligence. She didn’t chang
e anything. She entered into her own young self and guided it on exactly the same path. She set some signs or symbols, but then she let everything go on just as it had, up until she was about twelve or thirteen. At that point, she changed her past.’

  ‘Which, according to Nalavi, would have created an alternative world,’ she said patiently again. ‘Because it changed our pasts as well.’

  ‘It may have done, but only temporarily. It didn’t actually change anything in Marianne’s world, except as it directly affected her and her immediate family. In other words, whatever Harvey Zahmani was in Marianne’s total world, it wasn’t particularly important – that is, important to her, but not to the world at large. We know that because whatever alternative world may have started when he was crippled gradually converged with the old timeline and by the time Marianne reached twenty-one or -two, there was only one timeline. If we were able to look into the future of that original timeline, we would probably find that Harvey Zahmani was killed or crippled in that one as well, although perhaps at a later time. The theory of convergence would indicate that as a likelihood. Knowing Madame, it wouldn’t have been much later.’

  ‘Theory of convergence,’ she mused. ‘You mean the tendency of timelines to knit together again when they are not very far apart.’

  ‘Yes. I don’t understand the logic or mathematics of it, but seemingly there is no room for an infinite number of alternative universes. They split, then converge. At any given time, only so many different ones exist. Like a river finding a new channel in flood, but still staying in the same flood plain and returning to the same channel eventually. When two people remember a specific event having happened differently, it may well be the result of a brief split and reconvergence. The event may actually have happened two ways. When a person remembers something having happened before, it may have done, on a slightly out of sync line.’

  ‘Confusing,’ she mused with a smile. ‘And terrible for you, my dear.’

  He sighed. ‘We were anchored at both ends of this particular split, so to speak, so we remember the divergence. I was never there in the years she was growing up. I only came in at the end. Nothing in what she did interrupted my timeline at all. At most I would have this tiny loop, only a few days long.’

  ‘Wasn’t your Marianne anchored at both ends?’

  ‘If she’d chosen to go on, yes. But she didn’t.’ He pounded his fist on the window sill, almost shouting. ‘She went—went somewhere. She simply wiped herself out of young Marianne’s life after Harvey was dealt with. This left only one Marianne, which is partly why the timeline grew together again. I have a feeling the divergence was very brief and that only a few of us are able to remember it.’

  ‘My question,’ Ellat said, giving him a hard look, ‘is whether Tabiti Delubovoska remembers it. Does she remember trying to capture Marianne in that previous sequence?’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I hope not. I hope all she remembers is going there for a brief visit when Marianne was twelve.’

  ‘And if she does remember? Then what?’

  What indeed? Vengeance? Or simply a carrying out of the original plan, whatever that was. However he rationalized it, he could not convince himself Marianne was out of danger.

  ‘You ought to go to the Cave of Light, Makr Avehl.’

  ‘I already have,’ he murmured. Though none of the Kavi attendant upon the Cave of Light had ventured to tell him what the symbols meant.

  ‘Well?’ she demanded. ‘What did it say?’

  ‘It showed me a woman washing clothes,’ he answered. ‘A pack of dogs. That would be the momentary gods, I’m sure of that. It showed me a palace; a dungeon. And a map.’

  ‘You consulted the lectionary?’

  ‘Would you like me to recite the possible symbolic meanings of a woman washing clothes? Guilt. Ritual cleanliness. Labor. Redemption. There are twenty-three meanings for that symbol alone, not counting sub-categories. Would you care to know how many there are for a map?’

  ‘Never mind, Makr Avehl. You’re saying it wasn’t helpful.’

  ‘I asked the Cave if I should follow Marianne to her new home, to court her, Ellat, assuming there could be anything between us at all.’ He fell silent, thinking of the shadow of the woman he had seen in the girl’s eyes. He sighed. ‘Assuming there could be anything – but I got a woman washing clothes. And a map.’

  ‘A map portends a journey.’

  ‘Which was the only hopeful meaning the session produced, believe me. Though whether it portends a journey there or a journey returning after I am refused, no one will say.’ He turned a scowling face toward the morning. ‘I continue to be worried about her, Ellat. Damn it. Something is very wrong in this new world the old Marianne has created, willy-nilly, but I can’t get at it!’

  ‘You left her the bracelet?’

  ‘Of course I did.’

  ‘If she wears it, we will know of it the minute she is in danger. That is, if she goes on wearing it. Perhaps she will even be wise enough to call for our help.’

  ‘My Marianne might have asked for our help, yes. She had suffered. She had suspicion. She knew the world to be chaotic. She tried to protect herself against it. This Marianne? She has not suffered. Her childhood was virtually free of trauma, and she has convinced herself that all the pain was merely imaginary. She is not suspicious. She has found the world almost entirely predictable and safe.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Ellat in a particular tone of voice.

  He took gloomy satisfaction in knowing she was not as worried as he was.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Marianne spent the first week of her new job in a delirium of independence, the second week in a slough of homesickness, the third in a somewhat reasoned approach to the near future.

  She looked for an old house, but there were few on the market. She had forgotten that young cities had a paucity of old homes – at least of old homes not already remodeled or wrecked in favor of urban renewal.

  She reluctantly gave up the idea of owning her own place and found a pleasant apartment within walking distance of downtown, the upper floor of an old house owned by Mr and Mrs Apple, Patricia and Robin. Pat and Bobby. The four large rooms were freshly painted and carpeted. Cloud-haired mama had given Marianne a generous check to use in buying furniture. She bought Mexican rugs and chunky chairs covered in bright cottons and pictures full of swirling color and one Escher print of a fish, rising to the surface of a pond amid floating leaves and reflections of sky.

  She settled into work, finding it one-fifth interesting, two-fifths routine, and two-fifths utter, implacable bureaucratic bumpf. Each helpful act had to be embalmed in forms and buried in files, until she found herself feeling apprehensive about being helpful because of the amount of sheer boredom involved in making records of it.

  She met a pleasant young co-worker, went out with him, told him she would not go to bed with him, and was not asked out again. She met another pleasant young co-worker who told her that knowing her almost made him regret he was gay. She met no one else.

  ‘So this is living my own life,’ she snarled at herself in the mirror, fighting with her hair, which on this morning had decided to emulate Medusa and slither everywhere but where Marianne wanted it to go. ‘Not exactly what I had imagined.’

  What had she imagined?

  Meaningful work. Definitely. A certain amount of elegance. That, too. A certain amount of romance? Probably.

  ‘What’s a beautiful girl like you doing sitting home?’ asked Pat Apple, who had knocked at the door while Marianne was struggling with her hair.

  Marianne only flushed, finding it hard to formulate an answer. ‘I guess I haven’t been here long enough to meet anyone, really, Pat.’

  ‘How about at the office?’

  ‘Mostly older and married. Only a couple of young ones. One of whom is a lech and the other of whom is gay. What can I tell you?’

  ‘There are a lot of eligible men who run around in the group Robin and I do t
hings with. Come to a few parties with us. Maybe you’ll meet someone.’

  Pat and Robin were at least two decades older than Marianne. She had little faith in the invitation, but considerable respect for the kindness that had prompted it.

  ‘I’ll think about it, Pat. Thanks anyhow.’

  ‘Not why I came up. This package came for you while you were at work, so I signed for it.’

  It was an anonymous little package without a postmark. Marianne turned it in her hands, not liking the feel of it. Deep within her something stirred, a vertiginous feeling, as though some organ had come loose from its moorings and swayed. She gulped.

  ‘Well open it, for heaven’s sake. How can you just look at it like that?’

  ‘It might be a bomb,’ Marianne said with a weak, unconvincing laugh. She felt nauseated.

  ‘You know someone who’d send you a bomb?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘Well then?’

  She opened it. The cardboard of the box seemed to leave a greasy residue on her skin. Inside was crumpled, grayish tissue paper, and wrapped in that a carving made from a dark, almost grainless wood.

  ‘What’s that supposed to be? And who sent it?’

  ‘It looks like a demon, doesn’t it?’ Marianne commented, disgusted by the anonymous gift or by the vagrant sickness that had gripped her. ‘Some kind of goblin or troll, maybe. I don’t know who sent it. There’s no card and no return address.’

  ‘Well, it’s a nasty-looking thing. You’ll probably get a card from somebody, telling you they bought it in Borneo or Tibet or someplace.’ Pat lumbered up from Marianne’s couch and departed, calling, ‘You think about coming out with Robin and me, you hear?’

  Behind her, Marianne stared at the hideous carving, aware that it had been done with great artistry, for the tiny, wicked eyes seemed to stay fixed on her face no matter where she moved the carving itself. She set it on the mantel, facing the wall, wanting to throw it out but unable to do so without knowing where it had come from. She sat down, huddling around herself, protecting her core without knowing she did it.