Keeping It Real Read online

  “Stupid. But whatever your opinion on the matter, it will make no difference,” Dar said, his voice louder and more musical, almost at an ordinary pitch. “You and I should be in a coherent state for the duration. That is a physical phenomenon you can measure, if you wish. It is best established through some kind of mutual empathy.”

  “That’s not going to be easy, considering.” Lila had to bite back a retort to his insult—stupid! He didn’t know how hard it was to be against the Otopian tide-turn back to major religion every time the media came up with some new revelation about Thanatopia.

  Dar, thankfully, could not hear her thoughts. “Do not tax me with your talk. If you want to save Zal, you must learn to speak correctly.”

  “What do you mean?” Even Lila’s Al-self couldn’t entirely keep a smother on her strongest feelings. She was annoyed.

  “To save me, you must speak correctly. Listen carefully…”

  She gave him a sarcastic look. “You’re going to say it only once?”

  “Thank you for your cultural quip. It is not lost on me. But you are wasting time. Listen to the elf with two chest drains, because it is hard for him to talk.”

  He had to pause and rest then, and Lila felt another wash of shame. She didn’t much like being herself in this hour. She wanted to punish Dar for bringing her to these feelings, and for all her nightmares of the past, the pain and the hospital, her metal body and her weakness, her foolish pursuit of Zal. And she felt absurdly thankful, that they were both here and alive. She listened to the drip of blood and Dar’s laboured breathing and looked at the damage she had done to him. “I’m listening.”

  “Doctor,” he began. “It is like this. Speaking is action. A spoken judgement, such as your statement that our empathy could not be easy, is a sword and shield between us. It makes success much less likely. Your speech is peppered with casual assault.” He had to pause again.

  “It’s just the way we talk in Otopia,” Lila began defensively. “It doesn’t mean…”

  “You see?” he said, pausing often to take gurgling breaths. “I accused you of aggression, and you have given me aggression back. You had to. You felt that? When speech is careless and labels people, instead of simply stating what was done, when speech is used as a weapon, there is nothing we can do but fight. It is not simply the way you talk in Otopia. Speech defines the world. But be aware that in Alfheim these matters take on even greater weight, because our magic is tied to sounds, and no sounds are more powerful than those of words, except music. Music unpolluted by words is the strongest of all. But you are not a musician, and neither am I. We will confine ourselves to the inadequacy of words for this connection. I will tell you something of my heart: when you hit me with the quarterstaff I took no offence at it. It is not a matter I hold against you personally. But I believe from the way you speak about me that this is not the way you feel about my attack on you in Sathanor.”

  “You’re bloody right it isn’t,” Lila said with a venom even she did not expect. “You tried to kill me in cold blood. And then you spent days torturing me by forcing me awake to ask me those pointless fucking questions. You never showed me any feeling at all, except cruelty, and you were always…” She had been going to say smiling, but after her recent reassessment she didn’t want to say it now. She bit her tongue. The faint ECG trace she still had on Dar through her hand sensors showed flickering reactions in the beat of his heart. His face didn’t change, but his body reacted to what she’d said strongly. She said without thinking, “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry is useless,” he said. “You hurt me. Sorry does not make it better. Sorry is for you, not me. But truly. What I did I did in order to save you from certain death. That must be difficult to believe.”

  “Gwil said that,” Lila informed him.

  “In that then she has the right,” Dar whispered, forced to cough and trying to do it gently, but failing. His eyes rolled up in his head briefly. Lila waited until he came back to himself and carried on. “I had to continue your interrogation to convince those with me that I was of their party. All of them are agents loyal to the Lady in Sathanor and until now I have always maintained a position of allegiance to her as my cover. If I had had to kill you, I would have, because as their leader they must not doubt me. Surely they must never suspect I am secretly loyal to the Resistance. As it was, I decided that I could both save your life and impress them with my commitment to their ways by demonstrating more cruelty when I delivered you home in pieces instead of executing you. Though we knew perfectly well that you had no information this was a plan they all agreed to easily. Their corruption is mighty indeed and so was mine that day. You wear the mark of that deed for ever. As do I, although my scars are not visible to the eye, for which I must be grateful. And I am grateful to you, for saving my life now, with so little pain. It is, as you guess, much more than I deserve.”

  Lila had never felt more sober. In explaining his part of her maiming he was describing a job. There was nothing personal about it, though that didn’t make it any less awful. He was describing her job, in actual fact, because they were the same. “Making it hard to keep hating you here.”

  “That was the general direction I was heading in,” he said, in an almost human cadence, and then he reverted to elf normal, all careful diction and no contractions. “But it is the truth.”

  “I know,” Lila said, curious. “I can feel it in your electro-readouts.”

  “Then we are in synchrony,” Dar said. “It is time to rebuild me. We will begin with my heart. Please remove the drain.”

  “Technically it’s too early,” she said. “But you’re in charge. Before I do, care to brief me on the procedure?”

  “Forgive me, I thought it obvious. You will raise your chi and place it in your hand over my heart, whilst concentrating on your own heart. I will muster my energy and do the same. We will visualise the heart as whole and healthy. We will open our spirit fusion to the aetheric limbs of Lyrien and allow…” He saw her doubt and scepticism and accepted it. “Just do it,” he said. “Please.”

  “Don’t we need circles or candles or crystals or…”

  “Of course not,” he said, betraying pain and impatience. “You are alive. It will suffice. Your hand.”

  “I don’t even know what chi is,” she started to protest, but relied on her Al-self to find some instructive materials. She removed the drain carefully, sealing the wound between his ribs with one of her own emergency stick-ons because she had no idea what the elf version of the same was. He didn’t seem to mind. Chi was, her Al-library said, the life force or spirit energy of living things. There was a lot of argument about its role in the aetheric dimensions (perhaps it was the same as aether itself and perhaps it was a special form, the human verdict was not sure) and whether or not it was metaphysical, or imaginary. It was nonetheless proven to be an effective concept…

  “Breathe with me,” Dar said. “Put your heart in your hand. That’s all.”

  “Okay, okay.” Lila closed her eyes and tried to feel anything other than pointless and mundane. Her Al-self decided to help her with a gentle, cheerful piece of music she’d always liked. It was childish, and twinkly, and something she used to play years and years ago, in the summertime at home. The effect, as these things often have, was instantaneous. The words ran through her mind—surely no greater king has ever lived, no one with the loving kindness,’strength and courage, of King Raam. Lila’s awareness of her surroundings fell away. How she loved to hear the song! How she longed to touch those old days and be with Dad and Mom again, with Maxine, Julia and Okie.

  She put out her right hand as the soft notes burred in harmony and pleasure through her mind. She held onto the feeling of how much she had once been loved.

  Dar’s andalune hand surrounded hers. A current shot through her arm and out of the palm of her hand and down into the body underneath it. She could feel it and her sensors could too—pure electromagnetic energy in a strange pattern, at frequencies she
wouldn’t have expected from a simple human body. Her metal amplified it.

  Then she felt Dar’s heart pull on hers, like a weary horse lagging behind is pulled forward by the stronger one in the front of the traces. Readouts behind her closed eyelids showed her pulse slow down to his pace and then respond to the demand of this strange healing, accelerating them both with her leading this time. She remembered to think of Dar’s heart, the four chambers, shaped almost identically to a human’s, just larger. She saw the strange energy field in her hand snap into the shape she imagined. She felt Dar’s heart in her hand. And then she felt Dar’s heart in her heart.

  Lila began to understand the nature of magic then. She saw that it was aetheric energy shaped by the shape of the maker, and that the maker was more than a thought or a mood or a word or a body. It was all those things at once. Her breath and Dar’s breath, their hearts in one another’s hearts, sharing space and time for a moment, the stronger becoming weaker, the weaker stronger until equilibrium. Then both gained strength as another force, utterly unknown to her, came pouring in through Dar’s andalune self.

  The power of this was colossal, like being suddenly plugged into the mains. For the rest of their time together she knew nothing at all, washed away in its force and the reckless vitality, thinking that maybe she could sense the whole of the forest, and the rain, the land and the sky, the water and air… that she was Dar and he was the strangest, strangest creature under the sun, drawing power from the life that ran and jumped, warm and animal, through the trees, across the sky.

  When they parted it was a natural movement that they both made at once, because they were one and there was no impulse one had that the other did not.

  Recklessly, giddy with success, slightly wired on desire and the euphoria of such a strangely tender intimacy, Lila carried on, Dar carried on, to the lungs and the ribs and the bones of his arms, where Lila felt his bone become her powerful metal skeleton and her finely crafted alloys become living tissue. The circuit between them fluctuated as it encountered their profound differences, energy from Lyrien and from Lila’s reactor matching each other like for like until the resonances eased and the conjoined will of Lila and Dar brought all patterns into phase.

  Then, without warning, she felt the two of them and their separated natures wound inexorably into a single form. The current of electrical and aetheric energies escalated suddenly, jolting Lila from bliss to alarm. In her mind’s eye she saw a fuse burning, a flash of coming light …

  “It’s okay,” she heard Dar say calmly in the centre of her head. “Take your hand away from me.”

  She moved with the reflexive speed of fear and the connection broke abruptly. Lila felt that she had been flung from heaven, and the landing was nasty. From her warm, cosy, beautiful place of strength and exhilaration she found herself kneeling on the bloody floor with her head resting on the side of a hard bed. Sweat was pouring off her and she’d expended enough kilowatts to run a small town in the last few seconds. She was shaking but even though she was exhausted there was a peculiar Tightness to her that she couldn’t remember feeling in years. Belatedly she realised there was no discomfort in her body. Not one bit.

  “Fuck me,” Dar said with perfect Bay City intonation.

  Lila could feel the bed shaking. She realised he was laughing. It was an infectious sound. She found herself joining in, not nervously either.

  “Oh god!” she said, and seemed to be referring to herself as she slid onto the planking. She had forgotten what it felt to be this tired and this full of pleasant, whooshy, relaxed feelings. “Elf sex must be amazing.”

  “In my limited experience it possesses all the thrills and boredoms of any other activity,” Dar said. “For one thing most elves do not run on tokamaks, unless I have mistaken them. But I do not wish to belittle your experience, nor mine. It was as unusual for me as for you.”

  “No,” Lila said from the floor. “I get it. In fact, I don’t think you need to explain anything like that to me ever again.” And she didn’t need to ask how he was either. She knew that. He was fine. Exhausted, but fine. “That bioluminescent drawing-on-the-source-of-life thing really takes it out of you, doesn’t it?” she said.

  “Knocks off a year of your life every trip,” he said in another flip revert to the Otopian style. “But who’s counting?”

  “Is there time to…?” But before she could finish the sentence Lila was asleep.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “They’re coming. Get up.”

  Lila woke to find Dar shaking her and a peculiar zap running the length of her arm where he touched her, which she belatedly processed and recognised as a kind of bite or nip from his aetheric self. She got up from the floor and ran a full upgrade at the same time, so that when she had made it to her feet she was awake, alert and feeling fine. Dar pushed handfuls of wet plastic tubing and first aid at her.

  “I don’t know how to pack these. You must carry them. They shouldn’t know you’ve been here.”

  Lila took them and saw that they had been flushed reasonably clean. The floorboards were drying from a scrub, but they were stained. She worked as fast as she could to put everything together and back in its place. She caught Dar staring openly as her leg compartments opened and closed with soft whirring and clicks, a silvery blur of motion that made her hands look slow, a whisper of sound like leaves stirring in a light breeze. He was fascinated and there was no trace of his earlier repulsion towards her on his face. She smiled. “Want me to sand the floor for you?”

  “No. There is no time, even for you. If you are ready then we must go.” He stood by the door, tall and straight in new, clean clothes, a variety of bladed weapons stored across his back alongside the sweeping curves of a bow and two quivers full of arrows. Their fletchings were of various hues of brown, grey and green, notched and nocked in varying ways her master-at-arms system identified as being intended for a wide variety of purposes besides simple killing.

  She found herself glancing at Dar’s face uncertainly. His eyes, now the colour of noon sky and nothing like the midnight of earlier, were clear and full of the need for urgent action. She glanced at his skin—it was pale, like daylight through flat, thin cloud.

  “Ready,” she said.

  He looked at her for a long moment. “Mmn, not quite.” He went to another cupboard and pulled out some clothing. “Your armour will reflect too much light, though I do not know if this will fit.”

  “It’s done,” Lila said and he turned, frowning, as she changed the surface of her metallic body parts to partial camouflage. Microscopic scales in the metal structure turned to reflect exact wavelengths of light, each different, to produce perfect reproductions of flat colour, very similar to those of her surroundings. It was a step down from full camo, which resulted in complete invisibility for her metal parts and the disconcerting sight of her head and torso floating around unsupported. She took a long shirt off him and put that over her khaki underwear.

  Dar almost grinned. He put the rest of the clothes back. “Your hair will need some mud before long, I regret to say. It is a very un-elven colour.”

  “Not yours?” She found she was teasing him easily, as though they had been the best of friends for some time.

  “Mine is close enough to mud,” he said, listening for a moment or two before opening the door.

  Outside, the forest still dripped, although the rain had stopped some time ago. It was so lush and green that Lila paused to look at it, to smell it, to feel the peculiar intensity with which things got on with growing. Leaves showed her that plants here were the same as those in Otopia, but here they were bigger and more healthy looking. When she listened and tuned out her own and Dar’s sound, she could hear everything growing; a susurration of slow but immeasurable power. It was disconcerting. In a way that no Otopian forest could have been, this one was alive. It wasn’t intelligent, nor even particularly aware—she didn’t feel watched—its biology simply dwarfed hers in scale and appetite. It thrived
, and her flesh body responded to that with joy.

  They travelled fast, like Zal used to, running at an exhilarating pace through the trees and across open clearings, along the banks of streams, across rivers, through dry gorges choked with old glacial rocks and up moorland hillsides where the heathers grew higher than their knees. All the time they ascended and, when Dar stopped to point out the views, Lila could see more and more of Lyrien, a beautiful green map, rolling out from her feet like the most sumptuous of carpets.

  Lila marvelled at Dar’s recovery, and her own. She had never felt better. With the sweat running down her face they came to a rocky outcrop which Dar called the Star Rocks. This tower of stone stood out from the surrounding land which had eroded around its harder substance. It held the two of them balanced on a finger of granite five thousand feet above the lowlands and Lila could see back into Lyrien and forwards, to Lilirien and Sathanor, hidden by clouds.

  “Sathanor is a valley landscape within a ring of mountains,” Dar told her. “The place you last came to here is a village set against the foot of those mountains, where the pass into Sathanor begins. You can see it from here, right on the eastern edge of the range. Those lakes mark where the river runs out. You remember their shores? I saw you walking there, taking the rowboats out on the last day of that conference.”

  Lila nodded. She did remember. It had been sunny and warm, the lake still as a mirror, all the boats graceful and smooth as everyone took turns at pretending to be good with oars. She had no idea that Dar had been there then. He could have been anyone. She hadn’t been able to tell who was what, there were so many strange faces, and anyway, all the elves looked the same to her then.

  “We cannot go that way. We will cross the land as directly as we can from here. Quickly, we must get down from here.” He led the way back, across steeply sloping grassland and into the line of trees which crept as far as they were able up the knoll. Lila looked back as she descended and saw the heat trace of three human-sized bodies far back across the hills they had covered.