That’s a beautiful story, says Evan, brushing away tears.
You should tell the end of it, though, says Cuinn, the part where Tara was so clever and figures things out.
That’s actually easier to write about, I say. Besides what Tara told us later, you overheard the whole thing.
Cuinn nods. I knew that she knew, but I couldn’t let her know because she’d wonder how I knew. And every time I met Claris, she’d give me the evil eye.
We should’ve been honest with Tara, says Daniel. From the beginning.
Tara goes back to the RR-2 Labs. RootRiot was developed and marketed in secret when she was living on Volparnu. Since Tenzain Merkht controlled all her visible assets, it was good to have a few invisible ones in numbered Eirelantran accounts. But today it’s not the money that matters. It’s the research and production facilities that seem tailor-made to this crisis.
Claris and Clive are waiting for Tara. Cuinn’s been sent to the factory to check on production. It’s because they are keeping secrets from Cuinn which are not secret to Cuinn at all. Lady Claris stands. “How did it go?”
“As well as can be expected.” Tara doesn’t want to admit how difficult it was. Tara never admits anything, especially not to Claris, whom she has known for years and always despised.
Tara doesn’t even like her now, now that she knows Claris is a tree.
And in a way, this is Claris’ fault. If Claris had told the truth to her, how different it would have been. Claris could have told her the truth years ago, and then maybe she would never have gone to study on Earth. Instead, Claris waited, and then slipped secrets to St. John. She told the truth to St. John not knowing – how could any of them have known? – that Traeger was running him, that Traeger was a telepath, that the minute St. John went in for a headache treatment, CenGov would know everything.
It’s Claris’ fault she is haunted by the faces of those people in the sick wards today, Claris’ fault that CenGov is trying to eradicate the Cu’endhari.
It’s Claris’ fault that St. John is gone, and Clive is here.
She misses St. John. No, she corrects herself. That man never existed. There’s a new St. John now. She met him the first time Johannon tried to convince her to come back to work for CenGov. Now every time they meet, Johannon tries to say that it was all a misunderstanding, that all the unpleasantness was intended for Rivers, a known terrorist. Of course, she doesn’t believe it. Tara does not have a trusting nature, and in her life, nothing has ever been the way it seemed on the surface.
Especially not men. If St. John was still here, she would have never gotten messed up with Patrick, so she can blame Claris for that, too.
“There was some resistance,” Tara says. “It was strange that the people with the most to lose were the most willing to die.”
Claris looks angry about something. “You’ve got the forestry department on it, right?” she snaps.
“The priority trees should be treated within days. They’re anticipating weeks for the rest. Fortunately, the factories can produce the fungicide Cuinn developed. We’re putting it directly into the RootRiot, to stimulate root regeneration.”
There’s something scratching at the back of Tara’s brain, scraping like a squirrel’s claws shred bark. She keeps remembering one face in particular, an old man. He had visitors streaming in and out of his room – he was well-loved, apparently one of the old village grandfathers. His strong blue eyes met hers, and he wouldn’t admit to a damn thing. In the end, she couldn’t help him. He kept looking at an old portrait and saying, as if it explained everything, “That’s my wife. She’s been gone for years.”
His eyes. Suddenly, it clicks into place. “The people that cooperated. Those were your people, weren’t they?”
“Probably,” said Claris. “The Cu’endhari arm of PLANT would love to just come clean in the media.”
“That isn’t what I meant. I didn’t mean your political followers. I meant that they all had green eyes.”
Claris looks back at her sharply. Claris’ sharp eyes are green.
“You’re a dryad. You have green eyes – and so do all your people, don’t they? In your energy form, you glow green. And the dryad trees are the ones with green roses and green fruit. But the ones that didn’t cooperate all had blue eyes. Blue eyes, blue fruit, blue roses. They must be the mothmen.”
There’s silence for a heartbeat. “Dryads don’t interfere with mothmen,” says Claris. “If they want to keep secrets, that’s up to them.”
“Like your people, they’ve walked among humans for years. But they really are among us. They have children. My god, they have children.”
Clive snorts in sudden understanding. “And that’s why the Gyre only causes visions in Dolparessans. It’s that easy. They didn’t need genius St. John to figure that out.”
“I take it from your answer that you have no authority among them,” says Tara, addressing Claris. “Then I will talk to them directly. Who are their leaders?”
“If they want you to know, they’ll come to you.”
“People are dying, Claris.”
“Maybe they’d rather die.”
“I won’t let them die, not…” Tara’s lips part slightly, and her eyes grow distant. She’s just realized something, and it shakes her heart like a dried gourd, like loose bits will rattle when she walks. “What about the Atlas Tree?” she says. “Who is he?”
Claris jumps up, grabbing the edge of her chair and hurling it into the wall. “You fucking bitch!” she screams. “You stupid fucking cunt! You think you’re so smart, but you can’t see what’s in front of your face. Maybe if you weren’t such a heartless, manipulative little whore…”
Claris runs out and slams the door.
“Be honest,” says Tara. “Don’t hide your feelings.”
Clive starts to laugh. “Damned if I know what that was all about. Do you?”
Don’t stop there, says Davy. I want to find out how it ends.
Everybody laughs.
I wonder if that’s why we’re writing this. Does I and I know how it ends?
He can’t know absolutely. He can only sense probable vectors, says Cuinn. Probable directions of growth. That’s what nau’gshtamine does. That’s why Gyre works.
And why Gyre doesn’t work. I’m finally getting back to Wynne’s story. It starts with a conversation between Tara and Cuinn.
“It’s like she knows what we’re going to do before we do it.” Tara pokes at the ice in her drink. “Like she’s reading our minds.” Poke. “You don’t think it’s Traeger, do you?” Poke.
“No,” Cuinn replies. “He doesn’t have the range. And some of the incidents – well, it wasn’t just our plans that were exploited. It was other things. Like General Panic knew whether the commodities market would rise or fall. Or like she had privy information about the actions of the Cybaeran Council.”
“She could have had spies in Cybae. Or someone on the council was on the take. But the market thing…”
“I had Roger run a statistical analysis.”
“Roger?”
“The AI at RR-2. I named it. Aren’t AI’s supposed to have names?”
“No, that’s only in the movids.”
“Every initiative that General Panic has undertaken this year succeeded. All but two – and both involved Clive Rivers.”
“You don’t say.”
“But it’s weird, Tara. It didn’t exactly turn out to Rivers’ advantage either. His cell had planned to raid the science station a few weeks ago. Somehow General Panic knew about it because she had two battalions of troops brought in when Dalgherdia was in shadow. But here’s the thing – Clive’s transport broke down. Ten trained operatives, and they had to get a tow back to Dalgherdia City.”
Tara giggles. Poke. “Clive has such bad luck. I’ll bet Panic had some explaining to do to the President.”
“The other was a commodities deal. Get this – Clive’s group contracted with some pirates to jack a shipment of Lidrium. It was a significant shipment – enough to buy a small planet. Well, who buys up all the Lidrium on the market but General Panic?”
“But why? Lidrium isn’t used by CenGov. Clive needs it because he got those souped-up ships from Fomalhaut. He said he’d never let CenGov have a technological advantage again, but if you ask me, those ships are more trouble than they’re worth.” Poke poke.
“What do you think would happen to the price of Lidrium if an enormous shipment were suddenly taken off the market?”
“You think she knew Clive was jacking that ship? She wanted to make a killing in the market?”
Cuinn nods. “But she couldn’t predict that Clive’s communications man would get into a bar fight with the pirate captain the night before this was all supposed to go down.”
“There’s no way her informant could have known that.”
“It can’t be an informant. It would have to be a network of informants, the best in the galaxy. And some of them would have to be psychic.”
Cuinn stops up short, and Tara throws the ice in her drink across the room. They get it at the same time. “Gyre doesn’t work that way,” she says. “It brings grandiose visions that are hard to interpret. I’ve taken it hundreds of times, and never once got a lottery number.”
“Maybe it’s not Gyre,” Cuinn muses. “Traeger got hold of all your research. Maybe they’ve developed something else?”
“Without nau’gshtamine? I doubt it.”
“With nau’gshtamine then. Another derivative.”
“The only place to get nau’gshtamine is Dolparessa. Which means they would have to have a contact here.”
“We need to stop this conversation,” says Cuinn. “I’ll take care of it. Rather, I and I will take care of it.”
“What?”
“Any plans we make, any conclusions we draw – all are logical and reasonable. Time doesn’t go in a straight line, Tara. It branches. Nau’gshtamine is the product of a consciousness that senses patterns of energy and branches in those directions. So anything that runs according to pattern – logical, reasonable, probable, can be predicted.”
“You’re saying that if they are using a nau’gshtamine-based substance, they’ll predict anything we do. Unless it’s totally random. But if it’s totally random, how can we possibly win?”
“How could Rivers possibly lose?” says Cuinn. “Through a completely human quality. Dumb luck.”
It’s boring, says Tommy. Where’s the sex?
There’s no sex in this story, I say. I and I kept Wynne from meeting Tara for years.
Sucks to be you, pal, says Cillian.
Wynne shrugs. But remember, I got laid the first night she met me. How many of us can say that?
Cillian did, says Cuinn. Cillian, Callum, Suibhne, Chase, Wynne, Lorcan and Dermot.
Me too, Blackjack protests.
I’m not counting that, because you were pretending to be Whirljack.
Wait, says Lugh. Other than Dermot, that’s the killer, the pervert, the madman, the junkie, the player, and the psycho. I’m not sure I like the implications of that.
Lorcan laughs. That’s because Tara is a real piece of work.
Cuinn jumps back in before Cillian has a chance to punch out Lorcan. Davy, Tarlach and Hurley got laid within a matter of days, he says. I think that’s pretty successful. Daniel, Patrick, Jamey, Driscoll and Lugh took several weeks to several months. The rest of us losers took years. The worst was…
I know, said Evan, I know.
Actually, it was Sloane.
You forgot Ross, says Tarlach. Tarlach hates it when we forget about Ross.
Ross is in a category by himself, says Cuinn. Ross barely folded up the wings, and he was flat on his back.
It was Tara’s idea, inspired by the incident with Owen. Now that she knew I and I could grow branches at will, now that she knew He could work undercover, she could see all kinds of applications. That difficult business on Dumati, for example. Dumati was one of the few places she could get cercrotic acid, and she needed cercrotic acid to make cercrotic mulch, and she needed cercrotic mulch to make RootRiot. She had been after Ailann to use alchemy to produce what she needed, but he was reticent. She said that he of all people should understand how important this was, but she was fighting against years of Cu’enashti culture. She was fighting against the Cantor’s third lesson. If it was a small miracle, Ailann would certainly do it. But Tara needed an industrial supply.
Well, if he wouldn’t just make it for her, then he’d have to get it through human means. She explained her plan one night when she was nested in Patrick’s arms. I and I must have thought it was a good idea, for the next morning, a new man was there.
He was tall, but not too tall, well-built, but not overly muscular, intelligent, but not intellectual. His clothing was tailored, stylish, with a bit of flair, but not flashy, even a bit on the conservative side. He was a very handsome man, but it wasn’t the sort of handsomeness that breaks hearts. It was a handsomeness that opens doors, the expected handsomeness of those born to success. He was the sort of man who wore leadership like one of his fitted suit coats; the sort of man who inspires easy confidence. If you read the short biography, “Born to privileged circumstances, attended the best university, inherited his family’s company and grew it 300%,” you would exactly picture Ross Adare.
Tara was obviously impressed, because he hadn’t even had time to introduce himself before she had that look, that grin. “Let’s take this one for a test spin,” she said, pulling him down on the bed.
His performance was perfect, strong, yet sensitive, a healthy, tempered passion lacking the quirky shadows which make sex so embarrassingly interesting. He wasn’t the sort of man for whom women would crawl through dirty alleyways, meeting in dark cafés for intimate assignations. He was the sort of man a woman would marry, and stay faithful to, and hang on her arm like a jewel, introducing him at all the best parties as “my husband,” the words ripe and delicious in her mouth.
“I’m loathe to let you go,” she said. “You’re like a brand new hovercar, and I want to ride you for a while. Unfortunately, this is important.”
It was important. It was no longer just a matter of her profits. RootRiot was a wonder drug to the nau’gsh, triggering root growth under the most difficult conditions. It was probably RootRiot that saved most of the Cu’endhari from the blight which led to the war with Earth. She’d seen for herself what it did for Jamey when they took him down from that cross.
Not that it didn’t make a profit. Tara has a genius for product development. After observing the effects on Jamey, she came out with a whole line of bath salts, and when she found out that the Cu’endhari were using it as a mixer, a very popular line of sport drinks. There was scarcely a street corner on Dolparessa without a billboard featuring a smiling man in a bicycle race. “Don’t wilt when it counts!” the ad reads. Of course, every nau’gsh in a male body knows the subtext refers to the drink’s reputation of enhancing all sorts of performances.
In short, RootRiot improved Cu’endhari life in many ways, some of them critical. CenGov knew this, and had been negotiating to buy Dumati from the Taseans. Since Dumati was on the edge of the Domha’vei, Skarsia had a much better claim, but the Taseans were still irate over the original Dumati land trade. Over 700 years ago, they had bought the planetoid, believing it rich in rare minerals. It wasn’t. It was all iron and calcium-rich gabbro and anorthosite – nothing spectacular at all. The Tasean government immediately accused the 4th Matriarch of knowing this, saying that she would never sell a useful planetoid in her own system. Of course, they might have thought of that before buying – Taseans aren’t renowned for their logic.
Actually, although she would’ve had no real ethical objection to it, the 4th Matriarch hadn’t intended to defraud the Taseans. She had never conducted a proper survey of Dumati. At the time, she was still engaged in the War of the Sexes, and was hoping to use the Tasean presence as a wedge against the heroes of Volparnu. But shortly thereafter, she found a much better strategy – the power grid. The discovery of the Arya Archon made the plan obsolete.
The only unusual thing about Dumati was an uncommonly high concentration of the mineral cercrosite, which had few industrial uses. That is, until Tara came across an old article by Pauly and Derminnin about the nutrient bump mystery. When analyzing the nutrient bump beneath the nau’gsh, they found trace amounts of cercrotic acid – there and no place else on Dolparessa. Tara was able to get her hands on some quite inexpensively, and added it to mulch she used in her poison garden. She was amazed at the initial results. Unfortunately, not having access to lab equipment, it was several years later – when she was able to open the RR-2 labs – before she understood why it worked. Roger (the AI) discovered that cercrotic acid super-sensitizes the ability of roots to absorb nutrients from the soil. But long before then, she managed, through trial and error, to combine it with several root growth stimulants and come up with a formula that worked miracles.
The Taseans saw the sudden demand for cercrotic acid as a poetic irony, and would’ve held it over Skarsia forever. Taseans are the kind of people who hold a grudge. But their economy was in trouble, and they had to sell whatever they could.
Ross did something very clever. He posed as a third party – Big Tree Enterprises – and bid against both CenGov and RootRiot Inc. for the purchase of Dumati. He drove the price up high, high enough to be painful, but not high enough to be unprofitable. He pushed it up high enough for RootRiot to reasonably withdraw their offer. The minute they did, CenGov folded. They had no interest in Dumati other than keeping it out of Tara’s hands.
Unfortunately, Dumati, being pretty much a dump, had only a small, cramped mining base. Just after Ross signed the contract, he ran into General Panic in the base’s only decent restaurant. She’d seen Ross before, at the negotiations, and something had been bothering her. Now, she glanced at him across the room, and their eyes met. She’d seen those eyes before.
He was ambushed on his way to the shuttle. “You tricked me,” she said. “I should kill you for that. But I’ve seen how much use it is to kill you – Mickey.”
And for all that, says Cillian, we still went to war with the fucking Taseans. We shoulda just taken goddamn Dumati. There’s no way they had the chops to defend an outpost outside of their system.
We would have done better to avoid that war entirely, says Mickey. Not that I blame you, Cillian – you did what you had to do. But if we had been paying attention, we would’ve seen the signs long before it got to that point.
I did see it, says Ross, quietly.
What? says Cillian. What do you mean you fucking saw it?
Wars are about two things, says Ross. Revenge and economics. It was very clear to me that Dumati had both motivations. They were nurturing all kinds of resentments at those negotiations, blaming everyone else for their problems. And in all honesty, they had some deep-rooted problems, and no one else was helping them.
You could’ve fucking said something, says Cillian.
Ross raises an eyebrow. Oh?
Most of the time, silence is an absence of sound. Jamey’s like that. He doesn’t speak, but you can still feel that he’s there, warm and alive. But sometimes, silence is an active force, like the world filling up with snow. It’s the heavy weight of everything that can’t be said, that nobody dares to say. The Great Silence was like that.
For two years, Ross was like that. And nobody said a damn thing about it. We were all glad of it. It made life easier for us. Nobody said a damn thing until crazy Suibhne exposed all the rot running through our roots.
Cuinn clears his throat. It’s always better to avoid war whenever possible, he says. And it’s not something we’ve succeeded at doing. We’ve fought four wars in a little over a decade. Four wars and a traumatic, but ultimately unsuccessful coup d’état. Now when you count assassination attempts…
Would you please stop with the statistics, says Tommy. It’s depressing.
I’m starting to realize that this isn’t a very happy narrative, I say.
But it is, says Sloane.
We are dumbfounded. Sloane’s life was nothing but pain. Sloane’s pain did not even cease with his death. I and I could not change back into the mothman in front of Tara. Nor could he dare to repair the badly damaged body once declared dead. He had to remain dormant, a consciousness attached to a corpse. Unfortunately, when Tara’s uncle ordered it to be disposed of in a commoner’s charnel ground, Tara had Slone posthumously granted a lordship and sat a three-day wake with the corpse for fear that her uncle’s men would desecrate it. The image of the Tenzina of Volparnu strung out on speed and guarding a dead servant whom she’d appointed a peer was so outrageous, it drew unwanted attention to the assassination attempt. In order to save Merkht from a potentially fatal inquiry, the Matriarch gave Tara permission to return to Dolparessa under the condition that she take no further action against her husband. Tara took Sloane’s body home with her, where it was then subjected to an elaborate mummification process and finally placed into a sarcophagus. And then, a night some three weeks after his death, I and I was finally able to dissolve his mortal remains. Soon after, Tara’s cousin, Evan the bard, arrived to welcome her, just in time to witness the empty sarcophagus interred into the gigantic effigy in the center of the garden.
I’m really glad that the one time I died, I was just blown to bits instantly. Slone has never had an easy time of it.
Sloane shakes his head. It is a happy story. It’s a happy story because Tara wants it to be.
She awakens to find him in her arms. It’s where she last saw him, over a decade ago. It was when he was dying.
“Slone,” she says, barely audible. It had been so long that she believed he would never come back to her. She thought that maybe Ash would keep him from her forever. Last night, one year from the anniversary of the disclosure, she had said to Ailann, “You have so many emanations – it’s been a year, and I haven’t even slept with all of my husbands.” She assumed that he would ignore it. She is shocked to find that he actually took the hint.
And now that it’s happened, she’s not sure what to do. She touches Sloane gently, as if he were glass. “If only I had known the truth,” she says. “I had so many regrets.” It’s stupid. A stupid thing to say. There’s nothing she can say that will make this any better. She kisses him to keep herself from talking.
This hurts far more then when Daniel came to her. She didn’t wrong Daniel. For everything that happened to him, she had never given him less than her whole heart.
She understands Ash enough now to know that Sloane would have waited a thousand years, died a thousand deaths, and it would have meant nothing. But to watch in silence as she took another lover – she might better have chopped him into a pile of kindling and thrown in a match.
She understands now that there were only two choices for Sloane: immolation, or a life of being tormented every day just to be near her. Her woman’s heart is moved by it, by the grand and utter romance of Ash’s human emanations. But in her mind she also knows a different truth: Ash can’t exist without her. Without her, he has no way of developing a perspective on the universe. It’s a trade-off. The Cu’enmerengi solve the problem by truncating their sensory perceptions. It’s why they can’t be Archon; it’s why their alchemy is so weak. The Arya solve the problem by never trying to squeeze a nau’gsh sensorium into an animal body. The Cu’enashti solution is to bind themselves to a human they use as a focal point.
The Cu’enashti have developed an enormous bag of tricks to keep the attentions of the Chosen, including the production of as many emanations as they need to get it right. The Cu’enashti are the galaxy’s greatest manipulators. And Ash is no different. Ash is worse. There is no end to Ash’s ambitions; he fell in love with Tara’s destiny. Ash wants to found a new race, an empire of animal and plant. Ash wants to conquer the galaxy. Ash wants to be God.
Tara knows all this, but it doesn’t change the fact that each of Ash’s emanations is a wholly human man who is desperately in love with her. And this man waited for a dozen years, then spent another two years swallowing his broken heart, and then he died protecting her. And then Ash cast him aside as a failure.
Ash is only sending him to her now because she forced the issue. Sometimes she hates Ash.
But she loves Ash more than anything, more than she could have imagined possible. He’s her lover, her friend, her angel, her tree, her lord, her universe, her God. Maybe it’s wrong to say he’s ambitious. Maybe it’s wrong to impugn human motivations to him.
In the end, Ash has never done anything without putting her in the center of it, and she can’t say that about any human. Maybe that’s not the same thing as human love, but it will do.
Sloane is looking at her with those eyes she thought were the kindest she’d ever seen. She sees now how sad they were. And she sees now how the sorrow is joy and the joy is sorrow. They are the same eyes that Ash always has.
She wants it to go away, his sorrow and her regret. “I want it to be different,” she says. “I want to have been lovers.”
“Then it’s different,” Sloane says. It’s that easy. “The first day that you came to the stables. There was a look that passed between us.”
“I remember that.”
“Then tell me what you want to happen next.”
“I was planning on taking a lover. I was thinking of Johannon, but I really don’t care much for him. And now I notice how handsome you are, and act on impulse. I whisper into your ear to come to my room that night.”
“And what happens then?”
“You knock at my window, and I let you in. I start to unbutton your shirt. But then I see your eyes in the moonlight and…” her voice catches.
Sloane understands. If she does what she should’ve done, then he has to do what he should’ve done. “Before you can finish, I take your hand and press it to my heart. And then I say, ‘I don’t know how to begin to tell you this. But I’m your tree. You asked me to become a man for you, and I did. His name was Daniel.’”
We can taste it now, the pain of all those years burning off like a morning fog in the sun’s rays.
There’s a moment of perfect peace. Then Lorcan breaks it. We agree that reality is better than illusion, and then you let her rewrite reality, he says. Sloane’s suffering is negated at her whim. But it isn’t true.
It is, Sloane insists.
It’s true because it should be true, says Dermot. What she wanted to happen is more important than what really did.
It’s a matter of agency, says Ailann to Lorcan. What we imagine is worthless. But what she imagines makes us what we are. If her imagination created Sloane in the first place, why can’t she change his story?
You’re all fools, Lorcan snaps.
Then you’re the biggest fool of all, Cillian retorts.
Do I deny it? Lorcan smiles; it’s like slicing open a wound.
Hurley looks at him, his wide eyes the saddest blue. Hurley knows that when I and I dreams Lorcan, the dreams are of blood and mud and the space behind and between things, the spaces where things get lost or hidden.
Tarlach sees it too. Let me help you, he says.
But Lorcan is the one Tarlach can’t reach. Fuck off, Sigmund. There is no help for me. There is no help for any of us.
When he comes for her, she knows which one he is. He smells like the forest, but he also smells of decay, not the fading decay of autumn, but the wet rot that sets in right before springtime. It’s a Skarsian smell. Dolparessa always smells the same.
Her jaw is purple, almost swollen shut. Blood has dripped onto her collar. The enemy commander pulls his gun. The enemy commander turns to glass.
That night, Tara removes his coat, his shirt. He’s a small man, thin, every muscle compact. He’s very beautiful, but his beauty is made of ice. His eyes are the blue of a winter sky, and they are not kind. His eyes are like Cillian’s – when Cillian is looking away from her.
She kisses his neck, his lips. “What’s your name?”
“Lorcan.” He’s indifferent.
Oh, but it’s a feigned indifference, hiding a desperate passion. The reverse of Clive, whose feigned passion hid a desperate indifference.
He thrusts her back onto the bed. His movements are sharp and hard. It’s different from the way we experience all the others. I can’t quite feel what he feels. It’s like we are behind a glass wall.
When he’s finished, he pushes her away. “Do you think it makes any difference?” he hisses. “Nothing is enough to stop this ache, nothing. I hate you. Sometimes I wish you were dead, so that I could just end it all.”
Most of us are too stunned to even react. Blackjack hides his face. Callum is furious.
But Tara doesn’t look afraid. She looks ashamed. She knows that Lorcan is the product of her betrayal. “Kill me then,” she says. “Dying by your hand would be the best death.”
Lorcan thinks she is testing him the way she tested Suibhne. But he looks at her and sees calm sincerity. He places his hands around her throat. I and I does not stop him. He could. He could kill her. He could even kill her and bring her back.
Cillian did that once. She carelessly tripped an enemy laser trap. The beam severed her head cleanly from her spine. Cillian repaired it before there was even a break in consciousness. Tara rubbed the back of her neck in annoyance where she’d felt the snap and kept on walking. Cillian never told her what had happened. Lorcan wasn’t there, but he remembers. It’s a rare occasion when Cillian’s nerves are shaken.
What is death anyway? The results of entropy on a consciousness that is no longer attached to a physical matrix. What would happen to I and I if the Atlas Tree were destroyed? Is death the same in a universe where entropy is reversed? Is I and I a tree that developed intelligence, or an intelligence that developed a tree?
Lorcan removes his hands. Tomorrow there will be bruises in the shape of his fingers on her long, pale neck. He begins to sob, dry, heaving sobs. Tara pulls him to her, stroking his thick, dark hair. He doesn’t want to be comforted, but he is. This is what he gets for all his suffering, only this. And it’s enough. It’s so unfair that it’s enough.
“I hate you,” he sobs, knowing that he might as well curse the sun and the rain.
She sleeps fitfully. She’s been five days without us. At this point, she can’t stand to be alone. Also, a part of her knows that tomorrow, they face the enormous job of cleaning up the mess the Taseans have made of Eirelantra. “Ash,” she moans in her sleep.
“I’m here,” he says, pulling her closer. She’s beautiful, everything he knows of beauty. It’s a lead weight pressed against him. He wishes he could force her to love him forever, but that’s the one bit of magic we do not have. He touches her face where it was bruised, where he healed it earlier. He thinks about the bruise, the pattern of a hand which was not his.
He closes his eyes, remembering the confrontation, shattered glass turning to spattered blood, blood stains on the emergency lighting which start to bubble a bit with the heat. He thinks about how good it felt to watch them die.
Inside his head, Evan looks ready to throw up. So much for peaceful trees, says Cillian. Cillian’s a killer, but he’s not a psychopath. He was born from the need to kill, but he was also born to protect Tara. Lorcan was born in the moment the sun vanished, when our roots were cut out from under us, in the third long fall into the Sea of Illusion. Lorcan is a psychopath, but he’s discovering that it just isn’t in him to kill. The best he can do is goad others into doing it for him.
Tara presses closer to him. Lorcan is the kind of man mothers warn their daughters against. Tara is the kind of woman who will write to him in prison. She is the kind of woman who will drive the getaway car. She is the kind of woman who murmurs “I love you,” to him and means it.
She does mean it. Lorcan is tormented by joy, tormented by feelings of tenderness when he dreams of murder. He sees the bruises on her neck, and he’s afraid of himself.
He feels that little push at the back of his heart. He can go now. He can go back where it’s warm. But when he’s back inside, none of us, not even Cillian, not even Suibhne, know what to do to make it better.