Projections by S. E. Porter

Author:S. E. Porter [Porter, S. E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Catherine the Dead

Hello, Angus, my abhorred one, my baleful companion. I see you’ve arrived on a certain riverbank, beside a certain watermill; I see you’ve met old friends there. My face has risen clearly inside your mind: no mere flash, but an undeniable person. To you that face must seem novel, an epiphany, even if it carries a disagreeable stink of déjà vu.

But you don’t yet understand that I have never left you. Not for one moment of all your myriad lives. While you ate, vomited, wandered, murdered, I was there, unnoticed but intimate, my watchful death infusing your every wretched rebirth.

You will understand soon enough.

I could not eliminate my consciousness completely, though I assure you I tried. My first swoon had been deeper, and it had excluded reality far more effectively. Perhaps in my decades of vigilance I had lost the knack.

No; the best I could manage was a sort of twilight fog, and the abnegation of all responsibility and all will of my own. I still felt the regular torture of Asterion’s umbrastring, for example, though I tried to sink away from it into my own shadows. When Gus went to reclaim the final beamer child from Margo I sagged limp and indifferent above him, mesmerized by my own flicker, and did not watch the agony on her face. My scream went on, of course, but it was now as insensate, as uncaring, as the shriek of tearing metal. Did Margo suffer? Well, she was hardly alone in that respect.

And when Gus crafted the first adult beamer—a youth of nineteen, as he had been when he murdered me—and endowed it with a real, substantial body made of Flynn’s reassembled cells, I saw it stand and run fingers through its hair. I saw it dimly, as when dream and reality mingle and every image is indeterminate, uncertain in its provenance, a figment of the threshold. Why, I even seemed to see momentarily through its eyes, to feel that silky hair parting around its fingers, to sway with its uncertain balance! How odd that was, but not odd enough to muster my awareness. And then I rolled over, figuratively speaking, and went back to sleep, or tried. Also figuratively speaking.

I was oblivious enough that I can only report much of what occurred next by inference. I imagine, for example, that Asterion grew increasingly sullen when he and Gus met to drain me, but I did not actually observe his shifting moods. I imagine Sky came, wheedling for a chance to maul me. Margo, too—she must have waited for the next iteration of her child-Angus, at first with casual bitterness, since Gus had brought her the creatures as reliably as clockwork. She must have grown puzzled when enough of Nautilus’s hazy time had passed, wondering what was taking so long—for I imagine, as well, that Gus did not favor her with an explanation or even a visit. She must at last have come to him, and learned that her loneliness was henceforth absolute.

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