SHORT STORY: SEPTEMBER BELLS
This is part of Solomon’s Choice. Sol has just successful done some deeply unwise gene splicing on himself, and for eighteen seconds, he saw magic.
This doesn’t happen. Pure humans cannot access magic at all; he’s done something no one in the history of all five worlds has ever accomplished. Unfortunately, it came with a price, and he collapsed in his lab.
This is what happened after.
The dreams are the same. Merged, always, with memories congealing and woven thick, tightening into the weft and warp of me.
Present reality was ascetic. I was an orphan, and the Fey’s creche was all the world I’d known. Windowless, underground, surrounded by unhappy peers and unhappier adults who had to take care of us and distribute goods.
Dreams are odd, though. In my dreams, I am in a world that did not exist by the time I came along. I dream of a South Africa I have never seen, lush and green with occasional rains, with flowers in the best season and arid land the rest, with animals creeping near, and the blooming of the September Bells outside my window.
In dreams and life, I knew darkness, scarcity, pain, bullying—I never gave the right answer, or asked the right questions. I looked wrong, or stood wrong, and was familiar with the pinch of alone, the scrape of torn knees and the throb of black eyes.
I didn’t know how to be not alone, how to exist befriended. From the very beginning, it was clear that I was broken.
(“Sol! Solomon! Wake up! Fuck!”)
Our creche’s walls were supposed to be the arms of the Earth, holding us safe, but something went wrong that day. As I sat upon my bunk, hidden behind the blanket I’d hung, I heard a thrumming, throbbing sound—some strangeness I’d never encountered before, and even at that tender age, I desperately needed to know the cause.
I remember that day… sliding the heavy, wooden bed away from the wall, digging into the packed soil with my hands for I had no tools, feeling the thrum against my fingertips and bare feet. When the opening crumbled wide, gaping like a wound in our miserable bedroom, what could I do but go inside?
It was complete darkness, cool, strangely damp; faded and unfamiliar scents wafted around me, beckoning toward the back of this cave.
And there, glowing bright, startling in its clarity, was a single red handprint.
(“On his side! He’s aspirating!”)
I think I was six? Possibly seven. We did not celebrate birthdays, though we memorized our natal date for legality and identification. I had my soulstone, and so did each of my peers, which should mean six or seven; though I will never understand how an irreplaceable and utterly crucial item could be so readily handled to children. If one lost their stone, one did not get a replacement. There would be no job. No food. A slow and humiliating death.
I digress.
(“Breathe, damn you!”)
So vivid, in my dream. Whatever this place was, it was new to me. I loved the discovery. Something in that glowing red hand shimmered, seemed to beckon me, to call to me.
Behind me, I heard voices. The others were coming, and (in my child-mind) would break everything just to hurt me. I had to hurry if I was going to learn.
Before the red handprint stretched a strange gap, a deep, narrow ditch I nearly tumbled into; the cold air wafted up from it, impossibly damp, reeking with something that, perhaps, grew down in the dark. It was there, but it was not wide. I could reach over it.
(“We’re losing him!”)
And someone shoved me from behind.
I remember.
I flailed to save myself. Instead of a mere touch, instead of fingertips on paint, my whole hand smacked into that shape, fingers spread as if to leave my own parietal hand print, and then…
Oh, then…
A pounding in my chest, like someone kicking me with heavy boots. A strange taste in my mouth, metallic and venomous, sour. I thought—
(“Hit him again!”)
A bang inside me and I went down, somehow not falling into the trench, feeling sharp like fangs poked through my chest to cool obscenely in the air. I thought I was going to die.
The widening horror of internal swelling, the shock of pain with every heat beat, the inability to scream or breathe or do anything but fall—
And oh, the sounds.
Pops, cracks, wet and tearing, like a balloon of skin and tinder of bone, and arterial spray painted my mouth with iron and calcium chips painted my face with wounds. The sound, I will never forget the sound—
(“Back off. He’s stable. We got it. We got it.”)
And again, memory and dream merge, melt, turn to indiscrete slime, because I was not conscious to see what became of my classmates, to see their open chest cavities side-lit by the power the Fey now brought in (too late, too late, they’d come too late), could not have seen anyway because of the bone shards in my eyes.
Dreams of September Bells, outside my window.
Reality of alien eyes, faces of terror, perfect and symmetrical and other, leaning over me and complaining bitterly that they had to deal with What a mess and They actually survived? and Shit, how are we going to report this?
Memories of hospital, of shouts in the hall. Of Tom in the bed next to me, who’d suffered my fate, but somehow also survived. His moans kept me awake. We two survived, only us, only us, all the rest of our peers exploded as if their hearts became bombs, and I don’t know why, and no one knows why, but we were infected.
We are infected, and whatever it is, the Fey cannot cure it, and our hearts suffer, struggle, both of us victim to the vagaries of cardiac trouble from childhood on, and gripped with the fear that one day we, too, will gape open wide, our chests inside-out with rude ribcages.
Why did we live?
(“Bleu! Report! What the fuck happened?”)
In the end, the Association—
(“He’s stable. I don’t know what set it off.”)
(“Figure it out. We need more. He’s barely made progress on the—”)
The Association came, and took on our care, and gave us a home. No one else tried. They paid for our treatment. They gave us a chance. They gave me a way to prove I deserved to live, even if broken.
(“He’s stirring. Put him the fuck under so he doesn’t set it off again.”)
Voices fade; thoughts shift. New memories mutate to become hopes and dreams: I see me, holding my newborn son, singing to him, and the world outside is green and beautiful and not all damned, and he has everything ahead of him, every chance, and nothing else could ever matter more—
#
Beeping. The damned gene machine is—no, that’s not the same beeping. That is a heart monitor.
My eyes are glued. I cannot seem to open them, or raise a hand, or speak. This is weaker than I’ve ever been. But I am alive. Somehow. Alive.
Vaguely, I grow aware of the prickling, crawling feeling of magical fluid flowing through my veins—of something they’re pumping into me to undo some of the damage, to pull me back from the brink. They’ve done this before. The first time, I was fourteen, newly part of the Association, and fortunate enough to rank medical care.
Tom was there, then, at my side, yelling at doctors to do things. He was there again for my second attack, at nineteen. And my third, at twenty-eight. And my fourth, at thirty-one. My fifth—nine years ago—I was thirty-seven, and Jason found me on the floor of our little domicile.
He was three years old. I know there must be some psychological damage from that, but he’s never been willing to speak of it. At three, he went and found his soulstone in my belongings. At three, he used it to summon help, and saved my life.
He’s insisted forever that he is fine. Maybe so. He is remarkable. I must be hopeful about this because I lack the means to treat that kind of wound.
“Well?” barks Tom.
Murmured replies, quiet, and though I cannot make out the words, the voice is so smooth, so beautiful, that it shivers through me in a near-sexual manner.
Fey. They sound serious.
“Not good enough,” snaps Tom.
I was there for his cardiac events, too. It is terrifying to be on the other end, watching one’s brown friend go gray, watching the monitored symbols jump and jag and produce warnings I cannot read. To know one’s friend’s fate is in the hands of another.
“Oh,” adds the other voice, “just so you know, he is awake.”
Steps, heavy and sharp, and I try again to open my eyes. My mouth will open, but my throat seems glued, as well.
“Sol,” says Tom, too close, low, his breath brushing my face. “Is it true?”
Is what true?
I manage a grunt. Manage a very small, slow wriggle, as if trying out my body for the first time.
His breath is quick in my face, expectant, too fast.
“Muh,” I manage.
“Is. It. True.”
Is he… talking about my experiment? Of course he is. Oh, gods, the summons—“Time… izit.”
“Fuck the time,” he says. “Is it true?”
A tiny thrill splashes through me, and I wish I could share the good parts with him—to let him see what I saw, to give him wonder. “Yeh.”
His breath quickens more. “How?” That was loud.
My eyes finally open, snapping the imagined glue, and I chuckle once, breathy. “You want a genetics lesson first thing in the morning?” It wasn’t a good joke, but I liked it.
His expression does not seem to register this was a joke. He stares at me, pale, eyes so wide the white shows all around his dark irises, and he whispers. “Eighteen seconds, you said.”
His volume dropped, which is wise. We are in a Fey facility. I must be subtle. “Yes.” The S is still difficult—my tongue wants to stick to my palate—but works.
His jaw moves, as though he’s chewing his tongue. “You nearly bought it this time. You know that, right?”
“Mm.” Speaking of—“What time is it? The summons.”
“Handled. I handled it. They know you had an incident. They’ll wait.”
That… that doesn’t sound right. How could it be handled that quickly if it were all so dire? “What, did they need me awake and aware before punishing me to death?” I blurt, my already unreliable filter failing me completely.
He stares a moment. “I have to go. Listen: stay alive. What you’ve done…” He shakes his head. “What you’ve managed….”
“It changes everything. I know. But it didn’t last.”
“It will. You’ll figure it out.”
So he says—though it occurs to me now that since I was rendered inoperable before putting everything away, that eyeball is likely quite rotted by now. Ew. “Need more samples,” I mumble.
“Yeah. Sure. Get better. Do whatever they say. I have to go.” And he hesitates so slightly, so briefly, a pause in his usual unceasing motion, a beat in which he performs the body language and facial expression I know means he lies: “Council stuff.” He pats my hand. Turns to go.
I haven’t processed the lie yet. “Jason?”
“Hasn’t been told. Figured it would fuck up his work, you know? I’ll be back.” And without looking back at me, Tom goes.
Council stuff. I’m certain he lied. Why? I know Tom. Why would he lie to me?
You’re being an idiot, I tell myself. Always misreading him. Besides, my vision is fucked. I’ll be lucky if my brain survives what happened. I must focus on getting better.
Could the Council really have been… handled? Could the executioner’s ax have been put back? Could I truly be there for my son?
Hope is a dangerous thing, intoxicating; it changes perception, shifts reality, makes one feel entirely different about a situation which has not changed. Yet I welcome it. For once, and rarely, I feel it is earned.