Chapter 22 Dying and Not Dying

The Lamb opens her eyes; they are covered in a film of what could be tears, or blood. For a moment the world looks red. She sits up and rubs her eyes clear. Silt on her fingertips. Is her blood even red in this body? She can't remember the specifications. The Clave, which has been blaring noises of alert and alarm at her, falls silent. The Lamb tries several times to speak, but what she's seen is impossible to explain.

"You seemed dead," the Clave says hesitantly. "I assumed you were doing it on purpose, so I tried the other location we were given. You were sufficiently nonviable that this polity's border patrol counted you as inert and not in need of a visa interview. We've found 'Miya."

"I'm not dead," the Lamb allows. She feels a little dead. Everything still hurts, as if her entire body shut down while she processed. This body, which had felt large and oversized at first, and then maybe, briefly, just about right, now feels small and cramped. She moves a hand and marvels at its particularity. "I… didn't do it entirely on purpose, but I'm glad it was helpful for immigration. What is 'Miya doing?"

"Lake therapy," the Clave says.

The dropship lands this time, though still at a safe distance; the Lamb walks the rest of the way. There is a small lake lying in the middle of a broad grassland, in lieu of a couch. From the heart of that placid water rises something that looks at first like a silvery tower, which only gradually resolves into a pillar of water falling upward into the sky, like an upside-down waterfall. Sitting cross-legged on the grass at the lakeshore is 'Miya, who looks exactly as she did in the first act of The Broken Bough, with the same injuries: her face is bloodied, the wounds still fresh; her beard is patchy, as if fistfuls have been ripped away, and her hair has been torn loose from its knot, floating free and ragged around her face except where it's matted with blood. Three of her fingers are missing, and those wounds, too, are so fresh that the Lamb looks for the fingers on the ground. But there is nothing there except grass: grass that is desolate of most of the small life it ought to host, the insects, the worms, the microbes in the soil. This regreened earth is still so empty. So much of it is fa?ade.

"Did you take this appearance because you knew I was coming from Fern?" the Lamb asks, as soon as she's close enough to speak without shouting.

"Fuck you,"'Miya says. It's mildly said, not vehement, but she is not smiling. Her lips are too swollen to smile. "It has nothing to do with you at all."

"It's a bit on the nose," the Lamb remarks. "If you're trying to convey that you're not over it."

"I am trying to explain to the spirit of this lake that we carry trauma in our bodies,"'Miya says. "Kindly do not interfere with the therapeutic process by mocking it."

"Sorry to the lake," the Lamb says. She sketches it a salute. "I didn't realize it had a spirit."

"Everything has a spirit now,"'Miya says. "Installing them is part of the regreening. But intelligence requires therapy, by definition, and a lake spirit that has been failing to balance its reengineered ecosystem for four hundred years needs more therapy than most."

"Well, I'm sorry to interrupt," the Lamb says, not sounding sorry at all. "But this is a homicide investigation. If the lake has waited thirteen gigasecs for therapy, it can give me a kilosec to talk to you."

'Miya waves at the lake, which continues to be a lake. There is no visible sign of a lake spirit. The upside-down waterfall at its centre continues to pour up into the sky; the Lamb looks up and focuses her satellites to see the water falling away into space, the stream separating into shivering globules.

"Ask your questions,"'Miya says. "This is a good presentation to be interrogated in, don't you think?" She waves the hand with the missing fingers at the Lamb.

"Is it true you don't speak to Fern anymore?" the Lamb asks. She already knows the answer to this question; she just wants to destabilize 'Miya a little. It doesn't seem to work; the maintainer shrugs. The Lamb tries again, looking for a sore spot. "Fern is of the opinion that she isn't morally culpable for the actions of her past lives."

This time she seems to have found it. 'Miya's face betrays nothing, but there is a very slight, almost imperceptible stiffening in her body. "Well of course Fern is of this bloody opinion,"'Miya says. "It's a self-serving opinion."

"What I don't understand is why you fixate on this incident," the Lamb says. "Surely there is much violence and trauma across your past lives. I've recently accessed mine and… everything hurts. If we really are to believe that we are personally culpable for all of it—"

"Is culpability to depend on convenience, then?"'Miya seems more amused than angry. "When we access these memories, it changes us; it makes us part of a continuity, and the price of all the knowledge and experience we recover is that we also have to deal with the things we did, and the things that were done to us. I don't dwell on this incident, as you say, because of the violence alone; as you say, many violent things have happened to me, many violent things have been done by me, in many lives. I keep coming back to this incident because Fern and I went on to have a relationship across time—because we've been enemies and friends and lovers and colleagues—and today more than ever, now that we are two of the last three incarnate, awake humans on Earth. Sorry, four now. Our history matters. This day, the day where I looked like this, continues to define that relation because Fern denies its relevance. I can't let it go because she can't let it be."

"So you're making an argument less for culpability than for memory," the Lamb muses. This one is conveniently verbose, she thinks. "I see. What are your feelings about the Contingencies?"

"What about them?"'Miya shrugs. Her swollen lips barely seem to move when she talks. "They—you—are one of thousands of gambits and stratagems and projects attempted by uncountable polities, nations, corporations, affinity groups, and individuals. Our regreening project is another such, just more organized and better funded. The old world is an overturned cup, dice rolling into the future… I can see that your own primary-tier specializations concern work like mine; all this was supposed to be your work, but you were never called on because you were superseded."

Now she attacks, the Lamb thinks. Next she will appeal to shared purpose, to sentiment.

"Your contingency never arose because we were dealing with it already. You understand?"'Miya doesn't wait for an acknowledgement. The Lamb can feel her, reaching out and rummaging about in her lives; it feels rude and invasive. "You and we are far from the only attempts to guide the future of this planet. There are and were so many: seed banks and gene banks, satellite archives and invisible libraries, memorials and long-cycle art projects, secret immortals a dime a dozen. If we fail, if our regreening falls apart—and I am starting to think it will, the day after we all finally burn out and go join the diaspora, whether that's tomorrow or whether we put in another ten thousand years—if we leave and all this work is for nothing and all the spirits die out and the green fades again, I guarantee it will only be a matter of time before someone else takes it from the top. You might not know, being so recently awakened, that there's only us out there, our people, human and other refugees from Earth. This is our universe, Earth's universe, the brane defined by our consciousness, rooted in us and the way we think and the songs we sing. All our worlds are this world, in some sense, no matter how far we go, even the most vacuum-hardened fritillary with stellar wings; we can never let it go. We're here because we don't let things go. The regreening, the healing and preservation of the old Earth, is a dream a lot of people share. People understand that our history matters."

"How do you think the Contingencies were killed?" the Lamb asks doggedly.

"I suspect a neurosis among the caretakers,"'Miya says immediately, as if she'd already been thinking about it, unlike Fern, who seemed to find the deaths almost beneath notice. "Like the spirits of the trees and the lakes and the seas and the soil, the caretakers struggle with wear and tear, with cruft, with regrets, with intrusive thoughts, with the inner voice that shouts about failure, always failure. I suspect the caretakers do not even know that they are doing it: to some extent they must be imitating each other, mimicking the sorrows they cannot allow themselves to be aware of, much less accept or express."

"You suggest that the Clave Eight murdered two of its own Contingencies and then woke another to investigate the deaths?" the Lamb demands.

"Every caretaker is a gestalt, divided against itself,"'Miya says. "It is possible, likely even, that a dissociative caretaker could both do a thing and wish it undone."

The Lamb considers this. Perhaps, she thinks. But she doesn't want to give the maintainer the satisfaction of an open acknowledgement. Instead, she asks for a favour. "I was denied a visa when I attempted to meet with Embi. Would you be able to contact her and convey that I asked for a meeting somewhere outside the territory of the Landoffrey Hombre?"

"I'll tell Embi to meet you at your Bunker,"'Miya says. "Be patient."

The dropship returns the Lamb to the valley of her Bunker. Her sensorium begins to shudder and tremble as soon as she sets foot on this familiar territory, here on the only ground of this earth she's trod twice, and intensifies when the dropship leaves her behind.

"I want some time to think, without interruption, until Embi gets here," she says to the Clave's birds. The birds seem less real than the ash; so much so that she cannot see them clearly, cannot identify them through that obscuring grey veil, cannot assign them a species; they are merely sigils of life, avian and undifferentiated. The Lamb doesn't share 'Miya's suspicions of the Clave; she knows this would prove both impolitic and unstrategic if 'Miya turns out to be correct. The birds squawk and leave her. Perhaps they were only birds.

The ash has grown more subtle. Instead of strobing, it insinuates itself, rising up from the soil around her feet if she looks down, as if the earth were vomiting up generations of ash. She kneels to sift it in her hands. It feels real, gritty. When she cups a handful and runs a thumb across it, larger fragments roll and reveal themselves. Hematite nodules. No, bone. She hesitates at the conflicting readings, then turns her hand, watching the ash drift in the wind. It's so real she has to rub her palms together to clean them.

She climbs back uphill to the Bunker, ash streaming downhill and dividing around her ankles. She doesn't want to enter it again. She looks at the dark open door and feels only revulsion. She could have died in there, been reconstituted into sludge without ever waking up. Ash streams out of the door as if gravity lay sideways, as if dripping from the lip of a pit. It falls sideways for an arm's length before it begins to curve downward to feed into the ashfall she's been wading through. It looks like a rendering failure, she thinks. Even her hallucinations aren't working properly. Its ugliness makes her gut feel hollowed out, like the memory of hunger. She gives the door a wide berth, circling around to the side of the Bunker and climbing up to the roof instead.

Her Bunker is simple on the outside: a large, irregular cube of concrete partially embedded in the hillside, reinforced and expanded over the ages in materials that she has no reference for. The roof is flat except for some extrusions that were once satellite dishes and are now semiglobular nubs of some kind of ceramic. She sits on one, feet splayed for balance, and waits for Embi.

The Lamb has a lot to think about. She waits a kilosec, then ten kilosecs, then a hundred. She doesn't grow hungry or thirsty, she doesn't need to piss or shit. The sun and the moon chase each other overhead. Dew forms on her lips and eyelashes in the mornings, then evaporates later in the day unless she licks it off first. She barely moves. Her body hurts for other reasons, but not from stiffness or muscle pain. In that sense it is more like a machine that she pilots than an animal that she is. A couple of megasecs go by. Very little happens. It rains once. A big event. She enjoys the water sluicing along the corrugations of her surfaces, until her sensorium flickers and she sees it as ash falling from the sky. Then she does move, to brush it from her face. She tastes it: analysis claims it is not ash, but the dessicated fragments of dead grey goo. Tiny hungry machines that once ate the rind off the earth, everything that was and wasn't nailed down: every animal, every building, every forest, every blade of grass, every microbe. Each mountain gnawed down, all the topsoil chewed up, at least half the subsoil lost, in some places leaving teethmarks on the bedrock. Did that happen at some point in the history whose record she still hasn't read, or is it only a nightmare of the caretakers? No, this dead goo is just water. She slaps herself lightly until her sensorium reverts. The rainwater is cold; it washes away the ashes.

Not a single bird, natural or unnatural, approaches during her penance. The Clave doesn't bother her. They must think she's thinking, analysing—in truth she is only waiting. She's not even thinking about the case. She's preoccupied with her recovering memories, their clarity, their expanse. Some memories she can remember from multiple perspectives; Lambajihva and Vidyucchika sitting across from each other in a train car, at a kitchen table. Leveret and Annelid sitting across from each other in a jungle clearing. Others are stray memories that she can't connect to anything else: Who is this old man in a devil mask? Whose memories are these? Is this another wrong question?

Then Embi is there, on the roof with her, and the Lamb is not sure if she missed her approach for being so deep in memory, or whether Embi simply appeared next to her all of a sudden. The Lamb is not sure Embi is really there. There is no body, no person, nothing to be seen in the real. There is only a faint sense of presence, a thickness of dataflow at the low levels of representation. There is only a ghost. Until Embi speaks, the Lamb bides her time, just in case it is another hallucination.

—Any progress, Embi asks. The absence of her voice sounds just like it did in the play. The ghost seems less faint once she's spoken. There is a sense of swirling movement in the air, or perhaps only in the data, all around the Lamb, extending far out into the valley.

"I'm pretty sure 'Miya did it," the Lamb says, startling herself. She hadn't realized that she thought this. Her secondary-tier specializations have been processing this whole time, growing in her, metastasizing, eating up her useless green and healing parts. "It's not about the Contingencies or even about Fern; it's about you." The Lamb gropes inside herself for revelation even as she speaks it. "She loves you—no, it's more than that. You've all been lovers at various points in time. It's not just that. 'Miya wants to be your project, your obsession, your object. But she's never been, has she?"

Embi conveys a shrug.—I don't understand the difference between that and being lovers. Are you saying I don't love intensely enough? I've spent entire lifetimes focused on her.

"To 'Miya, lives as discrete units or selves are a lesser thing," the Lamb says. "She thinks of herself as a continuity, a superself, a thread through time."

—We all think that way, Embi says.—Sometimes.

The Lamb looks sideways at Embi, or at where the voice seems to be coming from. Her presence is like an itch, a heat that suggests a direction, sometimes a dangerous proximity, as if Embi was pacing or stalking closer, but there is no shimmer in the air, no refraction of the light. "We?" the Lamb says, remembering the end of the play. "Your new compact?"

—I am also, Embi says.

"The Rake is a part of you now?"

—Or I am one of their faces in time. Self is porous.

"Ah, marriage," the Lamb says. "I've been remembering some things from before Rakesfall, back when they invented that sort of thing." Suddenly she feels as old as Embi, older even, her barely grasped history stretching out, dizzying, like an abrupt cliff's edge.

—Be careful of integrating memories from different regimes of poetics, Embi says.—Translations are sometimes strange. Explain your theory. If it's 'Miya killing the sleeping Contingencies, why?

"She resents the Earth as the object of your attentions, I imagine," the Lamb says. "No, I'll be more specific than that. She resents the regreening project. It was your initiative, part of your greater project of reclamation from when you broke the compact more than four hundred gigasecs ago. You had to learn how to be like the Rake, in time; to become a guardian, a protector, with a life bigger than individual, forgetful mayfly lives. In doing so, you brought your companions with you—Fern, 'Miya, others who worked on the regreening. You made yourselves more than human. But for you, Embi, love is a transient interpersonal relation, a small art of the body, of the particular, transient, individual life. You have no time for it in the greater life, the grand project, the life of lives. There, the only thing you care about is the work, your obsession, and the only connections that matter to you are these grand alliances across time… even this, I think, was almost a stable, if dysfunctional relationship, until you finally spoke to the Rake and made your new compact. 'Miya must have expected that this would be the culmination of a long arc of history, that your project would be complete now, that you would be free to finally look up and see who'd been waiting this whole time, so patiently. But that's not what happened. Instead, you and the Rake became entangled, and you only became even more remote, even more inaccessible."

—That's not true, Embi sighs. It sounds like more than one voice when she speaks, sometimes. The Lamb can almost see her hand on her face.—It is true, perhaps, but hold your tongue—

"She loves you too much to take it out on you," the Lamb continues remorselessly. "She enjoys holding victimhood over Fern's head too much to direct her resentment that way and give up the moral high ground. So she took it out on the only other humans left on the planet who had committed to a project like yours: the Contingencies. To her, they… we are like herself. Dedicated, uselessly waiting, never to be called upon. Left behind. She may also be sabotaging her own work. One thing 'Miya and Fern have in common: you made followers out of them. You made them carriers of your guilt to ease your own burden, and they could not bear it. The reason they can never resolve their ancient conflict is because you cast them as anvil and hammer."

—Stop, Embi says.—Stop saying these things.

The Lamb feels a hand over her mouth, except there is no hand. Perhaps it exists only in some other realm of representation that she can't access. A symbolic hand, but she feels its weight. She tries to shrug it off, but it intensifies; she feels another hand gripping her by the antlers; other hands on her shoulders; other, other hands at her wrists and ankles. She is shoved to her knees, then pushed flat on the Bunker's roof, her face turned to a side, a symbolic knee in the small of her back. She tries to speak, but cannot; the sensation of a hand, now covering her whole face, is so strong, even though she can see no hand. She can see, but it's as if she can't. She senses the obstruction. She reminds herself that she breathes from the vents in her neck, not with her face, but atavistic panic reigns. She struggles, but the hands that do not exist are far stronger than her posthuman body. She tries to send out a distress call to the Clave, help me, help me, little bird, but the caretaker does not answer.

—Who are you to lecture us on integrity, Embi says.—Who are you to talk to us about love? And she peels the Lamb apart. She can feel the moment when the threads snap, when the tendons break, when the psychic corpuses that braid together her selves and memories give way.—Look at you, Embi says.—You're a tangled mess of yourself. You are a haunting; you've infected this whole world with your nightmares of ash. What gives you the right to call our work into question? Didn't I already put you down once? What made you think you're good enough for my sister?

Embi peels Vidyucchika out of the Lamb gently, like a muslin gown pulled through a silver ring, balls her up very small in the palm of one invisible hand, and throws her out into deep space. She turns back to the Lamb and rips out muscle and bone, organs of meat and ceramic and metal, tossing each handful off the roof where they splat on dry earth, or bounce and roll down the slope to the valley below. She snaps the antlers off and tugs the ears till they are long and dangling. She holds up the pithed lambskin and shakes it out, and she nails it to the akashic record as a warning.