Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

Here stretched the sleeplabs: chambers swathed in yellowed challis and moth-eaten linens, huge canopied beds where masked oneironauts (most of them unfortunate survivors of the previous Ascendant autocracy, or captives taken during the Archipelago Conflict) turned and sighed as their monitors clicked in draped alcoves. The oneironauts’ skin shone glassy white. Beneath the masks their eyes were bruised a tender green from enforced somnolence. I held my breath as long as I could: the air seethed with dreams. I hurried down the hall to a room with door ajar and an arched window columned with white drapes. A woman I did not recognize sprawled across a cherry four-poster. Her demure homespun shift, yolk-yellow and embroidered with a five-digit number, was curiously at odds with the mask that rakishly covered her eyes. I slipped inside, locking the door behind me. Then I turned to the bed.

The research subject’s hair formed a dark filigree against the disheveled linen sheets. I bowed to kiss her on the mouth, waiting to be certain she would not wake. Then I dipped my tongue between her lips and drew back, closing my eyes to unravel strands of desire and clouded abandon, pixie fancies. All faded in a moment: dreams, after all, are dreams. I reached to remove the wires connecting her to the monitors, adjusted the settings, and hooked her into the NET . I did the same for myself with extra wires, relaying through the BEAM to the transmitter. I smoothed the sheets, lay beside her, and closed my eyes.

A silvery dome shot with sunlight. Clouds mist the dome with a scent of filters and stale air. In the distance I hear the click of solex panels rotating as the NASNA station moves silently through the atmosphere. Turning, I can see a line of stunted gray-green trees planted in a straight line. We walk there, the oneironaut’s will bending so easily to mine that I scarcely sense her: she is another engineered breeze.

The trees draw nearer. I stare at them until they shift, stark lichened branches blurring into limbs bowed with green and gentle leaves. Now they are great and verdant trees that would never grow within a station. I sense the oneironaut’s faint puzzlement at this change, but in another moment we are beneath their heavy welcoming boughs.

I place my hand against the rough bark and stare into the heart of the greenery. Within the emerald shadows something stirs. Sunlit shards of leaf and twig align themselves into hands. Shadows shift to form a pair of slanted beryl eyes. There: crouched among the boughs like a dappled cat, his curls crowned with a ring of leaves, his lips parted to show small white teeth. He smiles at me.

Before he draws me any closer I withdraw, snapping the wires from my face. The tree shivers into white sheets and the shrouded body of the woman beside me.

My pounding heart slowed as I drew myself up on my elbows to watch her, carefully peeling the mask from her face. Beneath lids mapped with fine blue veins her eyes rolled, tracking something unseen. Suddenly they steadied. Her mouth relaxed into a smile, then into an expression of such bliss that without thinking I kissed her and tasted a burst of ecstatic, halcyon joy.

And reeled back as she suddenly clawed at my chest, her mouth twisted to shout; but no sound came. Bliss exploded into terror. Her eyes opened and she stared, not at me but at something that loomed before her. Her eyes grew wide and horrified, the pupils dilating as she grabbed at my face, tore the hibiscus blossom from my hair, and choked a scream, a shout I muffled with a pillow.

I whirled and reset the monitors, switched the NET ’s settings, and fled. In the hallway I hesitated and looked back. The woman pummeled the air before her blindly; she had not seen me. I turned and ran until I reached the stairway leading to the floors below, and slipped away unseen.

Downstairs all was silent. Servers creaked past, bringing tea trays to doctors in their quarters. I hurried to the conservatory, where I inquired after the Aide Justice. The server directed me to a chamber where Justice stood recording the results of an evoked potential scan.

“Wendy!” Surprise melted into dismay. “What are you doing here?”

I shut the door and stepped to the window, tugging the heavy velvet drapes until they fell and the chamber darkened. “I want you to span me,” I said.

He shook his head, nervously fingered his long blond braid. “What? Why—” I grabbed his hand as he tried to turn up the lights, and he nodded slowly, then dimmed the screen he had been working on. “Where is Dr. Harrow?”

“I want you to do it.” I tightened my grip. “I think I have entered a fugue state.”

He smiled, shaking his head. “That’s impossible, Wendy. You’d have no way of knowing it—you’d be catatonic, or—” He shrugged, then glanced uneasily at the door. “What’s going on? You know I can’t do that alone, especially now.”

“But you know how,” I said, stroking his hand. “You are a student of their arts, you can do it as easily as Dr. Harrow.” I leaned forward until my forehead rested against his, and kissed him on the mouth. His expression changed to fear as he trembled and tried to move away. Sexual contact between staff and experimental personnel was forbidden and punishable by execution of the Aides in question, since empaths were believed incapable of initiating such contact. I pinned both of his hands to the table, until he nodded and motioned with his head toward the PET unit.

“Sit down,” he said. I latched the door, then sat in the wing chair beside the bank of monitors.

In a few minutes I heard the dull hum of the scanners as he improvised the link for my reading. I waited until my brain’s familiar patterns emerged on the screen.

“See?” Relief brightened his voice, and he tilted the monitor so that I could see it more clearly. “All normal. Maybe she got your dosage wrong. Perhaps Dr. Silverthorn can suggest a …”

His words trickled into silence. I shut my eyes and drew up the image of the tree, beryl eyes and outstretched hand, then opened my eyes to see the PET scan showing intrusive activity in my temporal lobe: brain waves evident of an emergent secondary personality.

“That’s impossible,” said Justice. “You have no MP s, no independent emotions … What the hell is that?” He traced the patterns with an unsteady hand, then turned to stare at me. “What did you do, Wendy?”

I shook my head, crouching into the chair’s corner, and removed the wires. The last image shimmered on the screen like a cerebral ghost. “Take them,” I said, holding out the wires. “Don’t tell anyone.”

He let me pass without a word. Only when my hand grasped the doorknob did he touch me on the shoulder.

“Where did it come from?” He faltered. “What is it, Wendy?”

I stared past him at the monitor with its pulsing shadows.

“Not me,” I said at last. “The Boy in the Tree.”

They found the sleep researcher at shift-change that evening, hanging by the swag that had decorated her canopied bed. Anna told me about it at dinner.

“Her monitors registered an emergent MP .” She licked her lips like a kitten. “Do you think we could get into the morgue?”

I yawned and shook my head. “Are you crazy?” Anna giggled and rubbed my neck. “Isn’t everybody?”

Several Aides entered the dining room, scanning warily before they started tapping empties on the shoulder and gesturing to the door. I looked up to see Justice, his face white and pinched as he stood behind me.

“Margalis Tast’annin has ordered evacuation of all senior staff to the provisional capital. They’re bringing in new personnel for reevaluation of the Harrow Project. You’re to go to your chambers,” he announced. “Dr. Harrow says you are not to talk to anyone until Tast’annin has seen you individually.” He swallowed and avoided my eyes, then stared directly at me for the first time. “I told her that I hadn’t seen you, Wendy, but would make certain you knew—”