The Marriage of the Living Dark

We’re leaving here, Daniel. I’ve had a spaceship built”

Daniel stared at Li Yuan a moment, astonished by the news, then he looked down.

“I don’t want to. Not now she’s dead.”

“She?’ Li Yuan’s eyes were suddenly concerned. “There was someone you loved?”

Daniel nodded.

“And you’re certain that she’s dead?”

“As good as.”

“And if she isn’t?”

But Daniel shook his head. “You saw what happened.” “Maybe. And yet there were survivors. You came out” “I knew my way.”

Li Yuan stared at him a moment longer, then he turned and snapped his fingers.

At once a messenger came across and, kneeling, bowed before him. “Chieh Hsia?’ “Go at once and find out whether there were any more survivors from the rebel headquarters. Any women, particularly.” He turned, looking to Daniel. “Her name?”

Daniel sighed, then shook his head.

“Her name, Daniel.”

“Hannah.”

Li Yuan turned back to his messenger. “You heard. Now go.

And return as soon as you have news.”

There were eight of them in all, sat in a ragged circle about a fire that had been built beneath the ruins of the eastern gate, their figures hunched forward, hands stretched towards the comfort of the flames, rough blankets thrown about their shoulders.

As Daniel stepped up onto the brow of the slope and looked down on them, he felt a tightness in his stomach and knew it was fear. Fear that, having allowed himself to hope, that hope would now be dashed. He had never known fear before. Never needed to. Before now it had been him alone, and he’d had nothing to lose, but now...

Daniel closed his eyes, trying to block it out, but it was impossible. Once one started feeling there was no stopping it It was not a tap one could turn on and off.

She’s dead, he told himself yet again. She couldn’t hove got out. But his heart didn’t believe that. His heart wanted the impossible. He looked from figure to figure, trying to make something of their stooped and dejected shapes. Three of them had their backs to him, but that one there ... One of them lifted her head. Her, definitely a her despite the shortness of the hair. Hair that had been burned from her head, or so it seemed. He knew her. “Siri...”

The disappointment was immense. And yet he ought to have been pleased. Pleased that at least someone had survived that carnage. But if Siri’s death had meant that Hannah lived ...

Daniel swallowed bitterly. The very idea of it was appalling, and yet he could not deny it If he could have made a deal with the gods, it would have been that, and he’d have made it without a moment’s thought. Love. The sheer brutality of love.

He trudged down, despondent now. Most of them had their heads down, from weariness or injury, yet as he came closer, Siri saw him and half rose, recognition in her face.

Her smile almost broke Daniel’s heart

“Daniel...”

Hearing the name, one of those with their backs to him half-turned. He barely noticed them, preoccupied as he was with Siri. Then he stopped dead, his mouth falling open. As the blanket slipped from her shoulders, he took a step towards her.

“Hannah...?”

Her face was black, her clothes scorched and soiled, but those eyes were unmistakable. There was a movement of her lips - charred lips that oozed blood through the cracks - then stumbled towards him, her face creased with pain. “Hannah.’”

He gripped her to him, grimacing as he did so, all of his hurt and fear and pain transformed suddenly. For a moment longer he simply held her, then, moving back, he stared into her face, putting his hand up to wipe away the tears that now streaked her fire-blackened face.

“Ifs gone,” she said, the effort of making the words clearly hurting her. “Ifs all gone.”

“I know.”

“No,” she said, the pain in her eyes so deep it seared him.

“My work, Daniel. It’s all gone. Burned.”

He stared at her, smiling now, then kissed her brow, her neck, her blackened cheeks. “No, my love. You brought it out with you.”

“But I saw it burning. I tried to save it, but...” ‘Ifs all in here,” he said, touching her brow with his fingertips. “As long as you’re alive, it too survives. Every last word of it” Her eyes widened. But this time as she made to speak Daniel placed a finger gently to her lips, careful not to hurt her.

“Hush now, my love. Hush. There will be time for words later. Now come. The King of America would like to meet you.”

CHAPTER-20

room a thousand years wide

It was a different place.

The same and yet different. In small ways different Small ways that made Kim think that perhaps it was his room, and that intruders had come and not so much taken things as replaced them. Realigned them.

The workroom and its contents were so familiar, yet so far from his own room - his own space and time - that even to think of the distance he had travelled made his mind reel And yet it was no distance at aft.

Across the room from where Kim sat, in a chair identical in every way to his own chair back in his own reality, his other self busied himself gathering together papers that would explain to Kim just how the trick had finally been done. Kim’s eyes went to that strange distortion of himself. To his otherness, as he had come to think of him. This other Kim was marginally taller than him - an inch or two, he’d judge - and broader at the hips and shoulders, too. Not knowing what the reason for this was, Kim nonetheless felt a momentary twinge of envy.

And suppressed it

Buried it...

Kim smiled. That was the trouble with this kind of acute self-consciousness. Others could fool themselves - couldpretend they had not felt what they had felt - but he could not. He was much too self-aware. “Well...” the other said, looking across at him finally. “I think that”s all.

You can read them later. And the journal of

course.”

Kim sat forward. “Journal?”

“This.” The other walked across and handed Kim a bound leather notebook and a file of papers. It was the closest they had come since that first joining of hands, and as the other made to draw his hand away, Kim reached out and held it, examining the ring that rested on the knuckle of the forefinger. A gold ring, but with a band of jet embedded in it, as if a caf s-eye had been distorted topographically.

Kim released the hand. There was an embarrassed pause, then he asked. “Look, what do I call you? I mean, we can’t...” “... both be Kim?” His other self frowned, his eyes briefly studying the ring, as if it were the first time he had seen it “No, I guess we can’t. Call me K.” Kim gave a brief laugh. “It sounds Kafkaesque.” “You’ve read Kafka?” K. stopped, then: “Silly question.” “No,” Kim said, serious suddenly. “Ask, even if it seems pointless. If s clear that we don’t map. Not exactly. If s like this room... like our physical selves. If we’re to work together, if 11 help us enormously if we know where we’re similar ...” “... and where we’re not” “Yes.” Kim grinned. “So what now?” “What do you want to see?” Kim answered almost without thought “Her.” K. stared at him a long time. Silence. A strange, almost eerie silence, then a sigh. “Well?” Kim prompted. “Don’t you?” K. nodded, but it was the vaguest of nods. Kim stared at K. a while, puzzled by his reaction, as much as by his general air of sobriety. He had never met anyone quite so sombre. But sensing that this was something that would be explained in time, he changed tack. “Am I the only one you’ve been in touch with?” “So far.”

“So far? But I thought. . .” Kim looked down at the cover of the journal. “I thought you’d been to a number of worlds.”

“I’ve been travelling for six months now,” K. answered. “But you are the first I’ve come across.”

“The first you.”

K. nodded, his eyes looking inward. “You see, we inhabit a very narrow spectrum of possibility, you and I. Perhaps thaf s why the Edderiminaru chose us.” “The who?”

“Master Tuan and his merry band of men. Thaf s their real name. Or an abbreviation of it, should I say. In its full form if s a description. A very full description, so I understand.”

Kim nodded. “They’re giant spiders ...”

“Yes. I know.”

There was a momenf s eye contact; an exchange of understanding so deep, so profound that, released from it, Kim felt giddy. He knows me ...

That fact, so obvious and yet so unexpected, was perhaps the most frightening thing of all. Even Jelka did not know him one tenth as well as this stranger did.

This stranger who was himself. Or all but.

“If s strange, isn’t it?” K. said, coming across and sitting on the edge of the desk beside him.

Kim shivered, then asked what was on his mind. “Your physique...” “This?” K. stood, turning about, as if to let Kim study him, as he’d studied the ring. “Vanity, I’m afraid. If s a special drug treatment I concocted.” Kim frowned. “Why?”

“To see if I could ... be normal, that is.”

“Normal?”

“Physically.”

“Ah .. .” Kim looked away. In recent years he had barely thought about it, but there had been a time when it had worried him. To be thought of as some stunted, large-eyed dwarf all the time - it was hard not to let that affect you.Even so, he had never once thought of actually doing something about it That seemed such a waste of his talent when there was so much else that needed to be done. Vanity. Kim looked up again. “I’m surprised.”

“Yes. I knew you would be. But then you don’t know me as well as I know you.”

“Clearly not.”

“Then perhaps you should get to know me a little better before we decide whaf s to be done.” K. nodded towards the journals. “I tried to be as candid as I could. You see, I knew you’d read them. Or someone like you.”

Kim opened the journal to the first page and began to read:

“To be truthful, I did not know what to expect. My death, perhaps; the soft tissues of my body imploding under vacuum conditions, flesh and bone freezing even as they shattered; cold sculptures, drifting for eternity. But no. I did not die. There was no searing cold, no pain beyond enduring. Passing through that burning hoop I stepped out into a place I knew. Or had known, in another life.

The day. Its stench so awful that I almost gagged. And dark. A darkness unimaginable. That, too, I had blocked off in memory. It was like being blind. And yet, all about me, I could hear the scufflings of a thousand unseen creatures.

Why here? I asked, wishing even as I did that I had brought some kind of tight to pierce the sfygian gloom.

A wish at once fulfilled, for even as I turned, the darkness just behind me split, a shaft of burning, shimmering light spilling out across those dead lands.

The Gateway! And there before it the pool’And finally - there at the pool’s far edge - myself, a stick-like creature of sinew and bone, sat back upon its heels, both hands shielding those obscenely bulging eyes against the blinding light, the mouth gaping, an expression of pure awe on the emaciated face. I knew the moment. Knew that in that one instant the vision had been imprinted w me; the seed of light sown deep in the rich, dark earth of my psyche - the same seed that would one day drive me up and out until I finally reached the stars. Back I’d gone. Back in time. But why?

It did not see me there. Did not, or maybe could not, it was so bright. Yet the three who came down from the Above -Lehmann, Berdichev and Wyatt - he did see. Oh yes, he saw them and trembled, thinking them gods, gaping as the unrelenting tight glittered off the glass of their tall, domed helmets and the silvered metal of their contamination suits.

The child’s screech - my screech, I guess it was - surprised me. It was a raw, high-pitched sound that seemed almost to have been torn from deep within the stick-like creature. Yet even as it faded, two shots rang out, the sound of their concussions deafening in that enclosed space. I stared, shocked, at the smoking gun in Berdichev’s hand.

Horrified, I took a step towards myself. ‘No-oh!’ But already things were losing substance. Even as the life-blood pumped from my other self, even as the three men turned, surprised, to stare at me, so the world about me - the three men, the Gate, the Qay itself- shimmered like a film that has had every other frame removed.

And then, with a suddenness that literally took my breath, I was back here, in this room, the image of the burning hoop fading in the air.” Kim looked up thoughtfully, giving a little nod to the air, then read on, devouring the pages.

After a while he sat back, rubbing at his eyes. He was beginning to understand, to see what K. had meant about the narrowness of the spectrum in which they existed. Gates. The gate by the pool had been the first, but there had been endless gates in his life. In this existence he had passed through all of them unscathed, or relatively so, yet in another life ... No, he corrected himself, in other lives.

In other lives he’d failed. In some he had not even begun. Oh yes, he saw it clearly now. Endless worlds in which he had not existed. Worlds where he had not met and married Jelka and so had not conceived Sampsa or Mileja. Worlds where DeVore had triumphed because he, Kim Ward, had not been there to counter him. Or was that the truth? Had he really made a difference?He looked back down, reading on, the hairs rising on the back of his neck. It was almost two hours before he looked up again. K. was sitting just across from him. Kim blinked, surprised. He had not even noticed him return. “So?” K. asked. “What do you think?”

What did he think? The accounts that had followed the first were all equally graphic. And always, without fail, he’d died. It was as if his life had been a maze and at any point along the way he might have made the wrong turn and come upon a dead end. His end. His death.

His tutor, T’ai Cho, who in this life had loved him and cherished him, yes and saved him many a time - particularly that time after the fight with Janko when Director Andersen would have trashed him without a second thought - in other worlds had gassed him, unable to see the light of intelligence that burned within him.

And even when he’d made it through - to Rehab and beyond - it was to die in stupid, silly ways, in accidents, or at the hands of overzealous guards. Or, in the worst case, at the hands of Marshal Karr - executed on Li Yuan’s palace steps as an uncaring Jelka looked on with dispassionate eyes. To have survived at all was a miracle of kinds.

So what did he think?

“I think someone must have trod these paths before us. To find us, I mean.”

“Master Tuan?”

“He certainly implied as much.”

K. blinked, surprised. “Did he?”

“You mean he hasn’t spoken to you?”

“Yes, but not of that Not of seeking and finding us.” Kim sat back. “I remember him telling me something once, about that time after the attack on SimFic’s labs, when he found me and looked after me. He told me that he’d first dreamed of me, and then, how he had later followed the dream, step for step, and how it had come true, almost though if he were still dreaming. And yet it was real. It really had come to pass, almost as if there were but a single path to follow. But now... well, now we are in a hall of mirrors, and who is to say which path is the right path, and which dream the reality?” “Then maybe thaf s our purpose, Kim. To make things singular again. To unify the universes, so that there’s only one. Maybe it was never meant to be like this, fragmented like the veins of a leaf into a thousand million pathways. Maybe we’re meant to be the glue that bonds it all together again.” “And maybe not” “Maybe not And yet I feel certain that we have some purpose.” Kim glanced at the open pages of the journal, then met K’s eyes once more. “Can I finish reading this?”

“Of course. But look, I’m being a very poor host. You must be hungry. Can I get you supper?”

“Supper?” And then he remembered. Jelka. Jelka would be worried if she went down to his workroom and found him gone. She would think ... What would she think? That he had gone without telling her? Well, so he had, only ... Only what?

“Okay,” he said. “But then I must get back.” He said it as if it were a simple thing, as if he only had to catch a train, perhaps, or go through a door and walk down a hallway, whereas the truth was he would have to trust to that device again - to pass through a wheel of burning fire into another universe entirely. It hit him. Until that moment he had been sleepwalking. Drifting. But suddenly ... Kim held on to the desk. K stared at him, concerned. “Are you all right?” “Yes. Yes, I ...” He laughed, dismissing it “I felt giddy, thaf s all. I felt...” “... like a ghost of yourself?”

Kim nodded. “All those other worlds. Their very existence seems to drain you. To rob you of your essential solidity.”

K. smiled; a faint smile, but the first he’d given Kim. “If s okay. I call it the Existentiality Effect It wears off, after a while.” “Does it?” Kim paused then. “For a moment then, I felt like a painted figure on a canvas. I felt...”

The same gap. The same words. I fdt... And then a gap. Because what he felt wasn’t like anything he’d felt before. Was something there were no words for. Kim felt...

As if I were both here and not here.

Which was impossible, and yet the physical truth. “You need to eat,” K. said, getting up. “There’s something very real about eating.”

“Yes ... yes, I guess there is.”

“Then come. There’s some stew on the hob.”

There was a moment before he knew. A moment when he had all of the pieces he needed, but hadn’t yet connected them. The ring. The abnormal, almost psychotic moroseness. That driven quality in the eyes.

And that single word he’d uttered when K. had asked him what he wanted to see. Her. By which he’d meant his mother. But K. had not meant her. No, he had meant her - Jelka.

Kim stood there in the kitchen, staring open-mouthed at the picture on the wall, struck by the significance of the black frame that surrounded that familiar face, filled with a sudden, gut-wrenching understanding. “Aiya...”

K turned and saw at once where Kim was looking. “She didn’t make it back,” he said, continuing to ladle the steaming lamb stew into a bowl. “It was the virus. You know, Golden Dreams. She was too weak. Her and Mileja both. There was nothing we could do.”

He came across and offered Kim the bowl. “Do you want bread with that?”

Kim shook his head. For a moment longer he stood there, stunned, trying to imagine how he would have felt had Jelka died that time; how he’d have coped, that was, if he’d have coped at all, for he could not imagine a life without her there at the still centre of it all. There like a rock to which his soul was anchored.