Beyond the Farthest Suns Read online

  A slender spike of alarm rose in me, then faded back into my euphoria at simply being alive and free of pain. It did not matter that everything in this place seemed nightmarish or out of balance. All would be explained, I told myself.

  Roderick would explain.

  If anyone besides me could have survived into this puzzling and perhaps far future, it was the resourceful and clever friend of my youth, the only Roderick of my acquaintance: Roderick Escher. I could imagine no other.

  I let go of the door and stepped out on a stone pathway, then turned to look back at the building where I had been reborn. It was small and square, simply and solidly constructed of smooth pieces of yellow-gray stone, without ornament, like a dignified tomb. Frost covered the stones, and ice rime caked the soil around the building, yet the interior had not been noticeably cooler.

  I squared my shoulders, examined my hands one more time, flexed the fingers, and spread them at arm’s length. I then swiped both of my hands before my face, as if to pass an imaginary coin, and smiled at the ease of movement. That established, I set out on the path through the trees of the ruined garden, toward the encrusted and cancerous-looking house.

  The trees and thistles consented to my passage, seeming to listen to my footfalls with silent reservation. I did not so much feel watched as measured, as if all the numbers of my life, my new body, were being recorded and analyzed. I noticed as I approached the barren trunks, or the dry, lifeless wall of some past hedge, that all the branches and dry leaves were gripped by tiny strands of white fiber. Spiders, mites, I hypothesized, but saw no evidence of anything moving.

  When I stumbled and kicked aside a clod of dry dirt, I saw the soil was laden with even thicker white fibers, some of which released sparkles like buried stars where tiny rocks had cut or scratched them.

  As I walked, I dug with my toe into more patches, and wherever I investigated, strands underlay the topsoil like fine human hairs, a few inches beneath the dusty gray surface. I bent down to feel them. They broke under my fingers and the severed ends sparkled, but then reassembled.

  The closer I approached, the house on the hill appeared even more diseased and outlandish. Among its many peculiarities, one struck me forcibly: with the exception of the ground floor, there were no windows. All the walls and towers rose in blind disregard of each other and of the desolation beyond. Moreover, as I approached the broad verandah and the stone steps leading to a large bronze door, I noticed that the house itself was layered with tiny white threads, some of which had been cut and sparkled faintly. What might have seemed cheerful—a house pricked along its intricate surfaces and lines by a myriad of stars, as if portrayed on a Christmas card—became instead flatly dreadful, dreadful in my inner estimation, yet flatly so because of my artificial and inappropriate calm.

  Another wave of concern swept outward from my core, and was just as swiftly damped. Part of me wants to feel fear, but I don’t. Something in me desires to turn around and find peace again…

  A lich would feel this way … Still half-dead.

  From the porch, the house did not appear solid. Fine cracks spread through the stones, and to one side—the northern side, to judge from the angle of the sun—a long crack reached from the foundation to the top of the first floor, where it climbed the side of a short, stubby tower. I could easily imagine the stones crumbling. Perhaps all that held the house together were the white threads covering it like the fine webs of a silkworm or tent caterpillar.

  I walked up the steps, my feet kicking aside dust and windblown fragments of desiccated leaves and twigs. The bronze door rose over my head, splotched with black and green. In its center panel, a bas relief of two hands had been cast. These hands reached out to clasp each other, desire apparent in the tension and arc of the phalanges and strain of tendons—yet the beseeching fingers did not touch.

  I could not equate any of this with the Roderick I had known for so many years, beginning in university. I remembered a thin but energetic man, tall and handsome in an ascetic way, his hair flyaway fine and combed back from a high forehead, double-lobed with a crease between, above his nose, that gave him an air of intense concern and concentration. Roderick’s most remarkable feature had always been his eyes, set low and deep beneath straight brows, eyes great and absorbing, sympathetic and sad and yet enlivened by a twist and glitter of sensuous humor.

  The Roderick I remembered had always been excessively neat, and concerned about money and possessions, and would have never allowed such an estate to go to ruin … Or lived in such a twisted and forbidding house.

  Perhaps, then, I was going to meet another of the same name, not my friend. Perhaps my frozen body had become an item of curiosity among strangers, and resurrection could be accomplished by whimsical dilettantes. Why would the doctor suddenly abandon me, if I had any importance?

  The bronze door swung open silently. Along its edges and hinges, the fine white threads parted and sparkled. The door seemed surrounded by tiny embers, which faded to orange and died, silent and unexplained.

  Within, a rich darkness gradually filled with a dour luminosity, and I stepped into a long hallway. The hallway twisted along its length, corkscrewing until wall became floor, and then wall again, and finally ceiling. Smells of food and sounds of tableware and clinking glasses came through doors at the end of the twisted hall.

  I followed the smells and the sounds. I had expected to have to scramble up the sloping floor, to crawl down the twisted hall, but up and down redefined themselves, and I simply walked along what remained, to my senses, the floor, making a dizzy rotation, to a dining room at the very end. Doors swung open at my approach. I expected at any moment to meet my friend Roderick—expected and hoped, but was disappointed.

  The five people pictured in the portraits sat in formal suits and gowns around a long table set with many empty plates and bottles of wine. Their raiment was of the same period and fashion as my own, the twenties or thirties of my century. They were in the middle of a toast, as I entered. The woman who had presided at my rebirth was not present, nor was anyone I recognized as Roderick.

  “To our revivified lich, Robert Falucci,” the five said, lifting their empty glasses and smiling. They were really quite handsome people, the two women young and brown and supple, with graceful limbs and long fingers, the three men strong and well-muscled, if a little too pale. Veins and arteries showed through the translucent skin on the men’s faces.

  “Thank you,” I replied. “Pardon me, but I’m a little confused.”

  “Welcome to Confusion,” the taller of the two women said, pushing her chair back to walk to my side. She took my arm and led me to an empty seat at the end of the table. Her skin radiated a gentle warmth and smelled sweetly musky. “Tonight, Musnt is presiding. I am Cant, and this is Shant, Wont, and Dont.”

  I smiled. Were they joking with me? “Robert,” I said.

  “We know,” Cant said. “Roderick warned us you would arrive.”

  Musnt, at the head of the table, raised his glass again and with a gesture bade me to sit. Cant pushed my chair in for me and returned to her seat.

  “I’ve been dead, I think,” I said in a low voice, as if ashamed.

  “Gone but not forgotten,” Dont, the shorter woman, said, and hid a brief giggle behind a lace handkerchief.

  “You brought me back?”

  “The doctor brought you back,” Cant said with a helpful and eager expression.

  “Against the wishes of Roderick’s poor sister,” Musnt said. “Some of us believe that with her, and perhaps with you, he has gone too far.”

  I turned away from his accusing gaze. “Is this Roderick’s house?” I asked.

  “Yes and no,” Musnt said. “We oversee his work and time. We are, so to speak, the bonds placed on the last remnants of the family Escher.”

  “Roles we greatly enjoy,” Cant said. She was youthfully, tropically beaut
iful, and I hoped I attracted her as much as she did me.

  “I think I’ve been gone a long time. How much has changed?” I asked.

  The four around the table, all but Cant, looked at each other with expressions I might have found on children in a schoolyard: disdain for a new boy.

  “A lot, really,” Musnt said, lifting knife and fork. Food appeared on Musnt’s plate, a green salad and two whole raw zucchinis. Food appeared on my plate, the uneaten remains of my watercress sandwich. I looked up, dismayed. Then a zucchini appeared, and they all laughed. I smiled, but there was a salt edge to my happiness now.

  I felt inferior. I certainly felt out of touch.

  I did not remember Roderick having a sister.

  After dinner, they retired to the drawing room, which was darkly paneled and decorated in queer rococo fashion, with many reptilian cherubs and even full-sized dog-headed angels, as well as double pillars in spiral embrace and thick gold-threaded canopies. The materials appeared to be lapis and black marble and ebony, and everywhere, the sourceless lights followed, and everywhere, the busy and ubiquitous fibers overlay all surfaces.

  I heard the distant murmur of a brook, rushes of air, sounds from some invisible ghostly landscape, and the voices of the five, discussing the spices used in the vegetable soup. Wont then added, “She persists in calling our work a blanding of the stew.”

  “Ah, but she is only half an Escher—” Wont said.

  “Or a fading reflection of the truly penultimate Escher,” Shant added.

  “She would do anything for her brother,” Cant said sympathetically.

  “You’ve always favored Roderick,” Dont said with a sniff. “You sound like Dr. Ont.”

  Cant turned and smiled at me. “We are judges, but not muses. I am the least critical.”

  Musnt opened a heavy brocaded curtain figured with seashells and they looked out upon the overgrown garden. Orange and yellow clouds moved swiftly in a twilight azure sky. Musnt flung open the glass-paneled doors and we all strode onto a marble patio.

  Cant put her arm through mine and hugged my elbow against her ribs. “How nice for you to arrive on a good day, with such a fine settling,” she said. “I trust the doctor remade you well?”

  “She must have,” I said. “I feel young and well. A little … anxious, however.”

  Cant smiled sweetly. “Poor man. They have brought back so many, and all have felt anxious. We’re quite used to your anxiety. You will not disturb us.”

  “We’re Roderick’s antitheticals,” Wont said, as if that might explain something, but it still told me nothing useful. Mired in a dense awkwardness and buried unease, I looked back at the house. It reached to the sky, a cathedral, Xanadu and the tower of Babel all in one. Towers met with buttresses in impossible ways, drawing my eye from multiple perspectives into hopeless directions.

  “What did you do, in your life?” Musnt asked.

  “I was a magician,” I said. “Cardino the Unbelievable.” The name seemed ridiculous, from this distance, in the middle of these marvels.

  “We are all magicians,” Musnt said disdainfully. “How boring. Perhaps Roderick chose poorly.”

  “I do not think so,” Cant said, and gave me another smile, this one eerily reassuring, an anxiolytic bowing curve of her smooth and plump lips. To my shock, nipples suddenly grew on her cheeks, surrounded by fine brown areolae. “If Robert wants, he can add another layer of critique to our efforts.”

  “What could he possibly know, and besides, aren’t we critical enough?” Shant asked.

  “Hush,” Cant said. “He’s our guest, and we’re already showing him our dark side.”

  “As antitheticals should,” Musnt said.

  “I don’t understand … What am I, here?” I asked, the salt taste in my mouth turning bitter. “Why am I here?”

  “You’re a lich,” Musnt said, staring away at nothing in particular. “As such, you have no rights. You can be an added amusement. A spice against our blanding, if you wish, but nothing more.”

  “Please don’t ask if you’re in hell, not so soon,” Shant said with a twist of disgust. “It is so common.”

  “Who is this Roderick?”

  “He is our master and our slave,” Shant said. “We observe all he does, bring him his audience, and bind him like chains.”

  “He is a seeker of sensation without consequence,” Cant said. “We, like his audience, are perfect for him, for we are of no consequence whatsoever.” Cant sighed. “I suppose he should come down and say hello.”

  “Or you can find him, which is more likely,” Shant suggested.

  I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it again, turning to look at the five on the patio. Finally, I said, “Are you real?”

  Cant said, “If you mean embodied, no.”

  “You’re dreams,” I said.

  “You asked if we like illusions,” Cant said shyly, touching my shoulder with her slender hand. “We can’t help but like them. We are all of us tricks of mind and light, and cheap ones at that. Roderick, for the time being, is real, as is this house.”

  “Where is Roderick?”

  “Upstairs,” Shant said.

  Wont chuckled at that. “That’s very general, but we really don’t know. You may find him, or he will find you. Take care you do not meet his sister first. She may not approve of you.”

  At a noise from within the patio doors, I turned. I heard footsteps cross the stone floor, and looked back at Cant and the others to see their reactions. All, however, had vanished. I took a tentative step toward the doors, and was about to take another, when a tall and spectrally thin figure strode onto the patio, turned his head, and fixed me with a puzzled and then irritated glare.

  “So soon? The doctor said it would take days more,” he said.

  I studied the figure’s visage with halting recognition. There were similarities; the high forehead, divided into two prominences of waxen pallor, the short sharp falcon nose, the sunken cheeks hollowed even more now as if by some wasting disease …

  And the eyes. The figure’s eyes burned like a flame on the taper of his thin, elongated body. The voice sounded like an echo from caverns at the center of a cold ferrous planet, metallic and sad, yet keeping some of the remembered strength of the original, and that I could not mistake.

  “Roderick!”

  The figure wore a tight-fitting pair of red pants and a black shirt with billowing sleeves buttoned to preposterously thick gloves like leathern mittens, while around his neck hung a heavy black collar or yoke as might be worn by an ox. At the ends of this yoke depended two brilliant silver chains threaded with thick white fiber. Around his legs twined more fibers, which seemed to grow from the floor, breaking and joining anew with his every step. He seemed to walk on faint embers. Threads grew also beneath his clothes and to his neck, forming fine webs around his mouth and eyes. Looking more closely, I saw that the threads intruded into his mouth and eyes.

  Still his most arresting feature, the large and discerning eyes had assumed a blue and watery glaze, as if exposed to many brilliant suns, or visions too intense for healthy witness.

  “You appear alert and well,” Roderick said, averting his gaze with a long blink, as if ashamed. His hair swept back from his forehead, still thin and fine, but white as snow, and tufted as if he had just awakened from damp and restless sleep. “The doctor has done her usual excellent work.”

  “I feel well … But so many irritating … evasions! I have been treated like a … I have been called an amusement—”

  Roderick raised his right hand, then stared at it with some surprise, and slowly, pulling back florid lips from prominent white teeth, as at the appearance of some vermin, peeled off the glove by tugging at one finger, then the next, until the hand rose naked and revealed. He curled and straightened the slender, bony fingers and thumb. A spot of blood bed
ewed the tip of each.

  One drop fell to the floor and made a ruby puddle on the stone.

  “Pardon me,” Roderick said, closing the naked hand tightly and pushing it into a pocket in his clinging pants. “I still emerge. You have come from a farther land than I—how ironic you seem the more healthy despite that journey!”

  “I am renewed,” I said. Upon seeing Roderick, I began to feel my emotions return, fear mixing now with a leap of hope that some essential questions might be answered. “Have I truly died and been reborn?”

  “You died a very young man—at the age of sixty,” Roderick said. “I took charge of your frozen remains from that ridiculous corporation twenty years later and secured you in the vaults of my own family. I had made the beginnings of my huge fortune by then and arranged such preparations very early, and so you were protected by many forces, legal and political. None interfered with our vaults. If not for me, you would long ago have been decanted and allowed to thaw and rot.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “Two hundred and fifty years.”

  “And the others?—Wont, Cant, Musnt, Shant, Dont …”

  Roderick’s face grew stern, as if I had unexpectedly uttered a string of rude words. Then he shook his head and put his still-gloved hand on my shoulder.

  “All the world’s people lie in cool vaults now, or wear no form at all. People are born and die at will, ever and again. Death is conquered, disease a helpmeet and plaything. The necessities of life are not food but sensation. All is servant to the quest for stimulus. The expectant and all-devouring Nerve is our monarch, our King.”

  I was suddenly dizzied by the vertigo of deep time, the precipitous awareness of having emerged from a long well or tunnel of insensate nullity leaving behind almost everyone and everything I had known. And perhaps Roderick, the friend I had once known, was no longer with me, either.

  I felt as if the stones beneath me swayed.

  “You alone, of all our friends, our family … are alive?” I asked.