The Wild (25 page)

'Oh, Danlo, Danlo!' Suddenly, she cried out these three words as she lay on the floor of her meditation room. Her fists were clenched, and her whole body trembled as with terrible cold. Her eyes were tightly closed as she whispered, 'No, no – I can't!'

'Shhh, be quiet now,' Danlo said. He sat beside her massaging her temples, touching her eyelids. 'Just remember.'

Gradually, the tremors tearing through Tamara's body subsided. She fell still and utterly silent as she descended down through memories that Danlo could only guess at. Except for her slow, deep breathing, she might have been dead. Once, for a few moments, her breathing stopped altogether, and then despite himself, Danlo began to worry. He placed his hand between her breasts; he worried that her heart was now beating as slowly as the heart of a hibernating snow hare. For a long time he sat this way, feeling the faint thumping of blood beneath his hand. He listened to the sound of the sea beating in waves against the beach outside the house. He listened for the beating of his own heart and his own memories, and he was sure that Tamara had never told him anything about the first years of her life. If this almost-dead Tamara was now remembering anything at all, it could only be memories that the Entity had imprinted in her. He wondered what strange memories these might be. He was willing to share any of her memories, no matter how false or painful, but the great ocean of remembrance is a private universe in which it is almost impossible for anyone other than the remembrancer herself to live. Danlo was not a god, and so he could not look into the image storm that must be boiling through her mind. According to his criteria and almost impossible ideals, he was not even a full man, let alone what he conceived of as a true human being, and so all he could do was to sit and watch and wait for Tamara to reach her moment.

Tamara, Tamara – you were never really born, he thought. What must it be like to remember your birth?

Sometime in that long and timeless night, as Danlo kept watch over Tamara, there came the moment that he had been waiting for. Without warning, Tamara began to whisper, 'Yes, yes, yes, yes!' Only her lips moved; she kept her eyes shut, and the rest of her body was as motionless as a corpse. She repeated this word again and again. Danlo supposed that she was remembering the truth about herself and finally making sense of her memories. And then, suddenly, she screamed. Her arms pulled up over her face, and her fingers clawed the air as her mouth opened in agony. She shook her head from side to side with such violence that Danlo was afraid that she might dislocate her neck. This terrible scream broke long and deep from her chest, and it seemed to go on and on forever. Although Danlo tried to keep Tamara from banging her head on the floor or injuring him with her long fingernails, a terrible power had come into her. The sudden strength running through her arms and body shocked him. In a convulsion of muscle and nerves, Tamara came awake and threw Danlo off her. She sprang to her feet sweating and shaking and still screaming as if some invisible hand had grabbed her body and plunged her into a cauldron of molten iron. When Danlo came closer to help her, she shook her head to warn him away. But Danlo misinterpreted this motion as only that of an uncontrollable frenzy. He tried to touch her face, to cool her momentary madness. And then, with all the ferocity and merciless precision of a warrior-poet, she drove the heel of her hand into the soft space beneath his ribs, beneath his heart. The force of the blow knocked him to the floor. He lay against the hard wooden tiles gasping for breath. Tamara stopped screaming then. She stood looking down at him, and her eyes were wide open and full of light.

'No, no,' she said softly, almost to herself.

She looked around the room, drinking in the sight of the floor cushions, the hanging plants, the shatterwood beams glistening above her head. There was an apprehension about her, a terrible awareness as if she were seeing herself in these familiar objects and reliving the first time that she had opened her eyes upon this room. And in this moment of awakening, she must have known that there was something other about the whole house, something more. It must have been as if the doorways connecting the rooms of this mysterious house were like doorways to other dwellings in other places, faraway in space and time. There was starlight in Tamara's lovely eyes, and memories, and sadness, too, for suddenly she shook her head back and forth and murmured, 'Oh, no!' She looked at Danlo, who was now up on one knee as he fought to breathe and stand up to face her. And then she ran from the house. She fled outside, down to the ocean where the starry sky opened like a million doors upon the many-roomed mansion of the universe.

When Danlo finally found her, the sun had just risen above the mountains. From half a mile away he saw her standing down on the beach where the twelve flat rocks led out through the shallows to Cathedral Rock. It was a clear and windy day, and the spray from the breakers sparkled in the early light. The whole of the world seemed to be sparkling: Danlo's diamond-hulled ship, and the golden dune sands, and Tamara's beautiful hair which was flowing in the wind like a magic robe. The skin of Tamara's body sparkled like white marble, for she had taken off her clothes, and she waded naked in the deepening waters. Her breasts and belly and golden pubes were dripping wet as if one of the waves had surged up over her. Danlo ran down the dunes and over the hardpack, but when he reached the ocean's edge, he approached her warily. He stood in the rising tide at arm's length from her. The water was so cold that it instantly penetrated the insulation of his boots and shocked his bones. 'Please ... come out of the water,' he said. 'It is too cold.'

Tamara reached down into the ocean and scooped up a handful of water. She splashed her face with it and said, 'But I'm not at all cold.'

For a while, Danlo watched her playing in the water. In truth, she evinced no sign of cold. She seemed completely at ease, as if she had reincarnated as a seal or a hot-blooded whale. Apparently, her madness had left her. She seemed totally aware of the world around her, of herself, of him.

'Tamara,' he asked finally, 'what did you remember?'

She looked at him quickly, and her eyes were hot with anger. 'I think you must know,' she said.

'I ... almost know. But how can I know, truly?'

'You've known for quite a while, haven't you?'

'Yes,' he finally admitted.

'Oh, Danlo – why didn't you tell me?'

'Some things cannot be told. They can only be lived. Or ... remembered.'

'My birth,' she said. 'My real birth. And then before -before my awakening in the other house.'

'Do you ... remember this time?'

Tamara looked up the beach in the direction of the house that was an exact replica of the other house somewhere on this Earth. She said, 'I really remember too much, you know. Too much – but not quite enough.'

'But do you know ... how you came to be, then?'

'I remember certain things,' she said. She turned her sad, but lively eyes to look at him across three feet of churning water. 'But there's too much I'm beginning to understand only now.'

'Please ... tell me.'

'But some things can't be told,' she reminded him. 'My life. My whole, beautiful, short, short life.'

'Please tell me about your blessed life,' he said.

In truth, her life was no more blessed or beautiful than any other life, although its entire span was much less than that of any other adult human being. It is a mystery of life that it always seems too short, for the mayflies of Old Earth as well as for the golden-winged Scutari seneschals who sometimes live a thousand years. Time, for all living things, is always strange, and Tamara could not quite understand how she had lived so deeply in so little time. In truth, there were three times in her life. The first time was the longest, though the least remembered. In this time of her quickening, she grew from a fertilized egg to a woman in only forty days. In the blue lagoon near her house on the tropical island – in a nutrient pool that the engineers of Fostora would have called an amritsar tank – the microscopic assemblers of the Solid State Entity accelerated the development of her body and mind. This was a time of floating in dense salt water and absorbing the sugars, lipids, and amino acids vital to her growth. As with the womb-state of a naturally-born human being, this should have been a time of love and peace and oceanic bliss. But the cells of her body were dividing explosively and unnaturally, like a barely controlled cancer, and she was growing much too quickly to know a moment of peace. And as for love, where was such a blessed thing to be found in an amritsar tank of cellular-sized robots and organic chemicals which the Entity had dumped into a few million litres of salt water? During this long and lonely time when the cells of her body knew no connection with any other living thing, it might have been best if she had remained unconscious. Much of the time, of course, she dwelt in this dark state of unknowing, but at other times she dreamed. And sometimes, when her eyes opened on the bright light streaming down through the lagoon's blue waters, she was almost aware of certain talents, sensibilities, knowledge, memories and purposes that the Entity implanted in her explosively developing brain. Sometimes, in those rare moments of insight that fall upon people like shooting stars, she was almost aware of who she was and why the Entity had called her into life. But she was not quite a human being, not yet, and any awareness of herself as Tamara Ten Ashtoreth of Neverness would have to wait until the Entity imprinted her with the memories of the real Tamara.

This imprinting occurred during the third time in her life, when she had been brought up to the house near the lagoon. In some ways, this was the strangest and most wonderful time she had known. It was a time of love and miracles. In less than a full day, the Entity had imprinted her with all of Tamara's memories, or rather, with the memories of Tamara that She had read from Danlo's mind. Because of the strangeness of this quickened consciousness – because of the time dilations as immense as those of a black hole – it was as if she had lived an entire lifetime in a day. It didn't matter to her that her memory of Danlo's deep blue eyes and his soulful flute-playing and all her other memories had never originated with her. It didn't matter to her – then – that she remembered a life that she had never really lived. For when she had awakened in the fireroom remembering this lost life of glass jars and salt water that the Entity had fabricated, her love for Danlo had been reborn. This was the miracle of her life, of her real life, of all the time she had spent with Danlo since coming to this familiar house above the dunes on this cold and windy northern beach. It was the miracle of love. She truly loved Danlo; in a way, she had been created only for him, to love only him, and she sensed this as one of her deepest purposes. The whole of her life almost seemed one long and secret plot to bring them together so that they might kiss and embrace and create something marvellous out of love. It didn't matter that this third time of her life was a merging of the unreal and the real. To her, the time of her imprinting and the time of love were all as one time: continuous, glorious and golden. This time was time, all the time of her life, and she hoped it would go on and on forever. That is, she had hoped this until her dreams began and Danlo insisted that she try to relive her birth.

All living things, even the strangest and most alien, have a moment of birth. It is the moment of separation from the egg, from the brood-pod, from the silken cocoon, from the mother – or from an amritsar tank full of assemblers and salt water. It is a time of light and pain, and for Tamara this terrifying time was the second of the times into which her life could be divided. Lying on the floor of the meditation room, with the vase of pink rhododendrons, with thirty-three candles and Danlo's dark blue eyes burning above her – deep in the attitude of recurrence, she had remembered emerging from the amritsar tank many days earlier and walking up to the house near the lagoon. She had remembered the salt water dripping from her new and naked body; she had remembered her sense of wonder that she had a body, that she was really she, whoever she really was. With perfect clarity she had remembered and relived the terrible pain of incarnation, and now, standing naked near Danlo in the deadly cold ocean, she was remembering it still.

'It was so strange,' she told him. Now the tide was rising higher, washing in waves against her thighs. The sun was a little higher, too, and the gulls were taking their morning flights, screaming above the rocks and the crashing surf. From far away came the barking of seals and the cold wind. The whole beach was alive with sound, and Tamara had to speak with much force so that Danlo could hear her voice clearly. 'Life is strange, isn't it? Simply being – and being aware. And it's even stranger to be aware of being aware, and you can't imagine what it's like to have all this terribly beautiful awareness come into you all at once. There was a moment, Danlo. I was not, and then I was. Oh, I didn't know who I was, not then, but I knew that I was I. I suppose in most people, this sense of the self crystallizing out of pure consciousness takes years. But for me, it happened in a flash. It was like a star coming alive with fire. It was like light bursting inside me. In a way, I was this light, this clear and beautiful light that let me see myself as I am. I remember seeing myself as I stepped out of the tank. My bare skin, the drops of water – the beautiful sun falling over my skin like burning drops of light. It was all so new. And I was so ignorant at first. I knew almost nothing. But in a way, everything. I had no concept that my skin was made up of cells, the cells of atoms. I had no words for these things. But I knew that I had cells, I could feel them living inside me, almost burning. And deeper inside, the atoms, vibrating like the strings of a gosharp – there was this immense sound inside me that I somehow knew was uniquely my own. I knew that I was these cells, these atoms. I knew that the atoms of my body were somehow different to the atoms of the water or the sand or any other thing. Because I could control it all. This part of the world encapsulated by my skin, I could will to move or not move. I can't tell you what a sense of power I felt when I realized all this, it was like grasping a bolt of lightning in my hands. As soon as I left the water and stood on the beach and started walking up toward the house, I wanted to jump back in the tank, even though I knew I couldn't do that, I must never do that. It all hurt, you know. The sand was as hot as fire, and it burned my feet. The sunlight hurt my eyes. Just looking at myself hurt – the sun was burning my skin red, and I could feel how fragile the cells of my body really were. Oh, Danlo, why does it all have to hurt so much? It's all so terribly beautiful, and it all hurts so much that I could die. But I can't die, I can never die, and that's the strangest thing of all.'