Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (19 page)

“It was like a church,” you say. “All that glass and iron, those domes, and I would lie there beneath it, safe from the eyes of Heaven, as we are now safe from the eyes of Heaven.”

Until, piercing each the others flesh, they run

Together, and incorporate, becoming one.

I know that I should be afraid, but there is no fear in me, and as that tendril twines about my left thigh (and I am surprised to find its touch is unexpectedly warm), I open myself to it. Which is only opening myself to
you
, and I have done that so many times past counting. And there is a kindly smile on the clay and ooze pretending to be your lips as it enters me, as I welcome that entry. The pain is so small and brief as to hardly bear mentioning here. The busy tendrils, their work complete, withdraw, slipping nosily back inside the prickly mass in your hands.

Here, while young Proserpine, among the maids,

Diverts herself in these delicious shades;

While like a child with busy speed and cart

She gathers lilies here, and vi’lets there;

While first to fill her little lap she strives,

Hell’s grizzly monarch at the shade arrives...

You come apart as readily as you came together, and the marsh eagerly, jealously, takes you back, reabsorbing all that it has generously leant in order for its guardian spirit and most secret daughter to be, however impermanently, corporeal. And, too, it takes back that thing you held, and I do not wonder if you were this night my lover, or if my lover were the marsh, or that if it were, instead, the tentacles or tendrils of your peculiar oblation. For I know, now, it was
all
these at once, and any division drawn between them must be entirely arbitrary.

And the sun rises, and shining through the drapes it rouses me from all dreams, and I lie still in the bed we no longer share. For a long while, I watch the pattern the morning light makes on the walls, and then my hand strays to my sex, which is no longer precisely what it once was. The swelling lips of my vagina, the purple-red arils embedded in the walls of my cunt that anyone might mistake only for the seeds of the pomegranate that damned Persephone. Only that is blood they leak, not juice, when pressed with a thumbnail. The fruit of our union, and I lie here thinking of your great-grandfather’s ruined greenhouse, and what might have visited you there. Slipping a finger into myself, past those maturing seeds, I see your face, and think on all the fenny, verdant ages yet to come.

1.

There is only a passing, brief glint of panic when the process has reached the point that cognitive integrity is finally, and almost irrevocably, compromised. During all the interminable months of psychological prep and antemorphic therapy, Ttisa was repeatedly trained for this moment, against this moment, and both the
shhakizsa
midwives and her human counselors have taught her meditation techniques for making the transition with as little trauma as possible. But, most importantly, as her mind and the mind of the surrogate suddenly bleed one into the other, a carefully constructed series of posthypnotic images is triggered. And Ttisa finds herself staring down from suborbit at a living planet that might be Earth, and a muddy, winding river that might be the Mississippi, or perhaps the Nile, or the Ganges, or no river that has ever flowed any where but across the floodplains of her imagination. She sees that the river has reached the sea, as rivers do, and here is the place where sediment-laden freshwater collides with the brine, where an opaque torrent the color of almonds interfaces with blue-green saltwater. The confluence, and there is nothing here to tear, for gravity drags all rivers oceanward, just as it drags all raindrops from the sky, and then hauls water vapor up again.

The confluence
, she thinks.
The meeting of the waters. Encontro das Aguas.
And so the surrogate echoes,
The confluence, the meeting of the waters.
It continues, then, finding thoughts that are no longer only Ttisa’s thoughts, before she has had time to find them herself.
Or it is only one river meeting another
, they each think
almost
in unison.
In Brazil, they call it Encontro das Aguas, where the Rio Negro joins with the upper Amazon. Brown water and black water
, but then, linked thus, they come to the next bead on this chain. Ttisa sits at a table, and having just added cream to a cup of coffee, she watches while the cold white swirls like a tiny galaxy, its spiral arms starting to blend with the steaming void.
Soon
, they think (for now there is near-perfect synchronization)
the coffee will be cooler, or the milk will be warmer. The milk will he darker; or the coffee will have brightened. It can hardly matter which.

Across the breakfast table, a teacher that Ttisa never actually had says, “Now, Ttisa, tell me, where, exactly, does the galaxy begin and intergalactic space end? Likewise, where does each of this galaxy’s constituent solar systems begin and end?”

And the new coconsciousness that is neither precisely Ttisa nor her
shhakizsa
surrogate, but which fully accommodates them both, begins to answer. It very nearly offers the teacher facts and theories from dutifully recollected lectures on the heliopause and solar winds, hydrogen walls and the interstellar medium. But then it stops itself and glances back down at the muted caramel-colored liquid inside the cup, and the mind can no longer distinguish milk from coffee, nor coffee from milk. Strictly speaking, both have ceased to exist in the creation of a third and novel substance.

“In any objective sense, the question you’ve asked is meaningless,” the woman seated at the table across from the teacher construct replies. The woman wears the face that Ttisa once wore, when Ttisa was only herself. It speaks with the same voice Ttisa spoke with, and the coconscious entity immediately recognizes the face’s residual utility as a cushion avatar—a useful tool, so long as that likeness is not mistaken for anything possessed of singularity.

“Well said,” the teacher smiles. “You’re doing much better than anticipated. Shall we continue?”

The avatar thoughtfully sips her coffee, and then she nods to the teacher. “Please,” she replies, and the teacher returns her nod and glances back down at his notes, displayed in the flickering tabletop.

“You’re doing so well, in fact, there’s quite a bit here we can skip over—heterogeneous mixtures, including suspensions and colloids, for example.”

“Which brings us to compounds,” the avatar says.

“Indeed, it does.”

From its vantage point in geospace, the new mind goes back to watching the nameless river as it empties into that unknown marine gulf, and it marvels at the memory of the taste of milk and coffee, simultaneously familiar and exotic. There is a line of dark clouds moving in from the northwest, and soon they will hide the landscape below from view. Lightning sparks and arcs, belying the violence inside those thunderheads, and Ttisa shivers, despite the temperature of the amnion, which is identical to her own. Here, there is a slip, a misstep, and in
this
instant, she
is
almost Ttisa again. Identity and discreteness threaten to reassert themselves, dissolving the compound back into its constituent parts; there is a second (and stronger) flare of panic before the surrogate can react.

Without hesitation, it points to the next bead on the chain. And the teacher looks up from his notes and clears his throat.

“We might call it binary fusion,” he says, “taking care to distinguish this bonding process from the binary
fission
commonly witnessed in the prokaryotic organisms of the Sol system. Nothing here of either partner is split away, but only combined to create a third, which mentally subsumes the parents, in a sense, even though the end product does retain two functionally independent bodies.”

“Am I dying?” Ttisa asks him. The man scowls and furrows his eyebrows, but she continues. “Is it like Theodore said? Is the surrogate devouring me alive?”

“You already have the requisite knowledge to answer those questions for yourself,” the teacher tells her. “I’m not here to cater to a lazy pupil.”

The confluence
, her surrogate whispers wordlessly, in silent tones as soothing as the sight of that primeval, earthly river, flowing fifty kilometers below.
The meeting of the welters.
Encontro das Aguas,
as they say in Brazil.

“
Encontro das Aguas
,” she says, and sips her coffee. The teacher smiles, satisfied, and, once again, there is only a single mind, and once again, the face and voice of the woman at the table is only an avatar to ease the crossing, and nothing that is being lost.

2.

Four months earlier, Ttisa Fitzgerald opens her eyes again, because Theodore is still talking to her. Talking at her. Ttisa wants to sleep, not talk. Lately, it seems that
all
she wants to do is sleep, and she knows it’s mostly a side effect of the drugs and dendrimer serums, her antemorphic regimen combined with the demands of her psych conditioning schedule. The doctors told her to expect the grogginess, but it still annoys her. Right now, Theodore is also annoying her. He’s sitting naked on the bed next to her, talking. He’s turned away from her, facing the wall, which is currently displaying a realtime image of the north polar region of the planet below. Seventy years before Ttisa was born, a team of Mars-based astronomers christened The Planet Iota Draconis c. If she were not so tired, and beginning to feel nauseous again, she might find the sight moving—the vast boreal icecaps hiding an arctic sea, a wide desert of frozen water which, even from orbit, is more blue than white. The light of an alien star reflected off a swirl of high-latitude clouds. The network of lights marking the ancient
shhakizsa
city, waiting to receive her in only a few more weeks. It is all surely still as wondrous as the day her transport dropped out of sublight, more than thirty parsecs from Earth, and Ttisa first laid eyes on this new world circling a third-magnitude star. But she’s sleepy. And nauseous. And her head is beginning to ache.

“Maybe it would be easier,” Theodore says, “if you expected me to stay. It would be easier, I think, if you’d not seemed so... indifferent... when I said I wanted to rotate back next quarter.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Ttisa tells him, because she doesn’t, and she’s too tired and feels too bad to make something up.

“Do you really think you’ll even remember me, after?” he asks ruefully, and yes, she says, trying harder than she wants to sound reassuring.

“Of course, I’ll remember you, Theo,” and she’s said this a hundred times now, if she’s said it once. “No memories are lost. None at all.”

“And you believe that?”

“I believe the data, yes.”

She asks the ship to extinguish the lights in the room, and, immediately, they dim and wink out. Then Ttisa closes her eyes again, because even the soft glow from the image on the wall is painful.

“Memory isn’t the same as feeling,” Theodore says.

“No, it isn’t,” she agrees.

“Even if you
do
remember me, there’s no reason to think that you’ll still want to be with me.”

“There’s no guarantee,” she admits. Passing across her lips, the words seem unnaturally heavy, and she imagines them tumbling off her chin and scattering across the sheets. “Rut you’ve known that for months now.”

“You didn’t even ask me to stay,” Theodore says.

“It would have been selfish of me to do something like that. It would have been greedy and hypocritical.”

Theodore makes a doubtful sort of noise, a scoffing noise. “It
might
have helped me believe that you haven’t stopped caring about me, about us,” he says.

“Yes, it might have,” she says, her heavy, tumbling words sounding impatient with him. “But it would also have been cruel, and I’m
trying
, Theo—”

“You think
this
is kindness?” he asks, interrupting her, and if Ttisa’s words have begun to seem heavy, Theo’s fall like lead weights. “It would have been kinder if you’d
told
me to go. It would have been kinder if you’d told me we were done and gotten it over.”

Neither of them says anything more for a moment, and Ttisa opens her eyes partway, squinting, and trying not to flinch. Theodore is silhouetted against the monitor, the lines of his muscular body eclipsing the planet on the wall. He’s five years younger than her, and was born Theodora, but that was simple enough to fix when he was still a teenager and started figuring out that the inside wasn’t suited to the outside. He was born on one of the Mars colonies, in the shadow of Ascraeus Mons, and has never set foot on Earth.

“I don’t want it to be like this,” she says, hardly speaking above a whisper. “I’ve tried so hard, to make sure that it wouldn’t go this way.”

“You might have asked me to stay,” he replies, and she sighs, wishing she’d managed to get to sleep before Theo came back to their quarters after finishing his shift in Telemetry and Comms. He wouldn’t have awakened her. He never does. “If you had, perhaps I would be more convinced of your sincerity.”

“Theo,
you
said that you wanted to go home, remember? I assumed, when you said that, you were telling me the truth. If you
were
, it would have been wrong of me to try to manipulate you into staying out here with me. I couldn’t do that.” The words topple from her lips and roll across the bed; even she doesn’t find them particularly convincing.

“When I dream, I see all the others,” he says, losing her for a second or two. “I dream of them all the time now. I dream of you, with the in.”

“You’ve never
seen
the others, Theo. Neither of us has seen the others.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t dream about them, almost every time I sleep.
Ton
could wind up like that, Ttisa, and you know it.”

“It’s been almost a decade,” she tells him. “Almost ten years since the last attempt, and the advances since then...” but she trails off, feeling sicker and wondering if she’s going to vomit.