Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

“But it’s true,” said Gligor. “It wasn’t Wendy’s fault—but I’m so tired, Dr. Silverthorn. Can I go to my room?”

Dr. Silverthorn nodded and helped Gligor to the door, all the time regarding me with icy revulsion.

“I’m going to recommend that you all be forbidden to see each other. But I’ll let Dr. Harrow handle you, Wendy,” was all he said as they left.

“Didn’t you hear anything I told you the other day, Wendy?”

Dr. Harrow paused in front of my window, eyeing with disapproval the cigarette ashes blown into the corner in a small gray heap. She fixed me with a probing stare. “Don’t you understand what’s going on, why we need to be careful while they’re here?” She motioned toward the outdoors, where Dr. Leslie led a group of Governors and their accompanying janissaries on a tour of the grounds.

I sat on the bed, playing with the wires she had carefully arranged on the frayed counterpane in preparation for our session. “Yes,” I replied.

She continued to watch me closely. “I don’t think you do, really,” she said at last, then sighed. She glanced at the door. It had been fixed with a new lock. “Anna’s resilient, though. She’ll be fine.”

I shook my head indifferently. I hadn’t asked after Anna because I knew she would be fine. Empaths were always fine.

Dr. Harrow’s gray eyes narrowed. “You don’t really care, do you? None of you really care at all about each other.”

I yawned. Fruitless to point out that our lack of emotive response was due to the expertise of the staff of the Human Engineering Laboratory. My main concern had been that Dr. Harrow would learn that Anna had somehow tapped in to the same memory that had haunted Dr. Harrow’s dreams for most of her life, and that as punishment she would not permit me to continue with the empatherapy—or, worse, that Dr. Harrow would perversely choose to continue it with Anna. But Dr. Harrow had shown up once again with the NET , and wheeled the splintering cot from its closet, and otherwise behaved as though we were going to proceed as planned.

“Are we ready to start?” I asked.

She sighed again, pushed her hair behind her ears, and removed her pince-nez. “Yes, I suppose so.”

And though her hands were steady as she initialized the BEAM , I could smell the dreamy odor of absinthium on her breath, and fear like a potent longing in her sweat.

“ Emma,” he whispers at the transom window. “Let me in.”

The quilts piled on me muffle his voice. He calls again, louder, until I groan and sit up in bed, rubbing my eyes and glaring at the top of his head as he peeks through the narrow glass.

From the bottom of the door echoes faint scratching, Molly’s whine. A thump. More scratching: Aidan crouched outside the room, growling through choked laughter. I drape a quilt around me and lean forward to unlatch the door.

Molly flops onto the floor, snorting when she bumps her nose and then drooling apologetically. Behind her stumbles Aidan, shivering in his worn kimono with its tattered sleeves and belt stolen from one of my old dresses. I giggle, gesturing for him to shut the door before Father hears us in his room below.

“ It’s fucking freezing in this place,” Aidan exclaims, pinning me to the bed and pulling the quilts over our heads. “Oh, come on, dog.” Grunting, he hauls her up beside us. “My room is like Antarctica. Tierra del Fuego. The Balkhash steppes.” He punctuates his words with kisses, elbowing Molly as she tries to slobber our faces. I squirm away and straighten my nightshirt.

“ Hush. You’ll wake Father.”

Aidan rolls his eyes and stretches against the wall. “Spare me.” Through the rents in his kimono I can see his skin, dusky in the moonlight. No one has skin like Aidan’s, except for me: not white but the palest gray, almost blue, and fine and smooth as an eggshell. People stare at us in the street, especially at Aidan. At the Academy girls stop talking when he passes, and fix me with narrowed eyes and lips pursed to mouth a question never asked.

Aidan yawns remorselessly as a cat. Aidan is the beauty: Aidan whose gray eyes flicker green whereas mine muddy to blue in sunlight; Aidan whose long legs wrap around me and shame my own; Aidan whose hair is the purest gold, where mine is dull bronze.

“ Molly. Here. “He grabs her into his lap, groaning at her weight, and pulls me to him as well, until we huddle in the middle of the bed. Our heads knock and he points with his chin to the mirror.

“‘ Did you never see the picture of We Three?’” he warbles. Then, shoving Molly to the floor, he takes my shoulders and pulls the quilt from me.

“‘ My father had a daughter loved a man

As it might be perhaps, were I a woman,

I should your lordship.’ ”

He recites softly, in his own voice: not the deeper drone he affected when we had been paired in the play at the Academy that winter. I start to slide from bed but he holds me tighter, twisting me to face him until our foreheads touch and I know that the mirror behind us reflects a moon-lapped Rorschach and, at our feet, our snuffling mournful fool.

“‘ But died thy sister of her love, my boy?’”I whisper later, my lips brushing his neck where the hair, unfashionably long, waves to form a perfect S.

“‘ I am all the daughters of my father’s house, And all the brothers too; and yet I know not.’”

He silences me with a kiss. Later he whispers nonsense, my name, rhyming words from our made-up language; then a long and heated silence.

Afterward he sleeps, but I lie long awake, stroking his hair and watching the rise and fall of his slender chest. In the coldest hour he awakens and stares at me, eyes wide and black, and turning on his side he moans, then begins to cry as though his heart will break. I clench my teeth and stare at the ceiling, trying not to blink, trying not to hear or feel him next to me, his pale gray skin, his eyes: my beautiful brother in the dark.

After this session Dr. Harrow’s red eyes met mine when I first came to, but she left quickly, advising me not to leave my chamber until she summoned me later. I fell soundly asleep until late afternoon, when the rush of autumn rain against the high casements finally woke me. For a long time I lay in bed staring up at a long fine crack that traversed the ceiling. To me it appeared like the arm of some ghastly tree overtaking the room. It finally drove me downstairs, despite Dr. Harrow’s warning to stay in the Home Room.

I paced the long glass-roofed corridor that led to the pre-Columbian annex, brooding. I almost wished that Justice would see me and stop me, send me to my room, and arrange for my medication to be changed or schedule me for tests that might reduce this strange unease. But today the Aides would be meeting with Margalis Tast’annin and his staff. HEL ’s senior personnel would be in their private quarters upstairs having tea, and the other empaths would be playing at furtive pastimes where they could not be easily monitored. I paused to pluck a hibiscus blossom from a terracotta vase and arranged it behind one ear. Then I went on, until I reached the ancient elevator with its folding arabesques.

The second floor was off limits to empaths, but Anna had memorized a dead patient’s release code and she and I occasionally crept up here to tap sleeping research subjects. No Aides patrolled these rooms. Servers checked the monitors and recorded all responses. Their creaking wheels and the monotonous click of their datachambers were the only sounds that stirred the drowsy air. At the end of each twelve-hour shift, doctors would flit in and out of the bedrooms, unhooking oneironauts and helping them stumble to other rooms where they could fall into yet another, though dreamless, sleep. I tapped the pirated code into the first security server I saw, then waited for it to read my retina imprint and finally grant the access code that slid open the false paneled wall.